'design' posts
Regular readers of our newsletter and attendees at our breakfast briefings will have noticed that we’re passionate about Service Design here at Optimal Usability and want to be the go-to guys for Service Design in New Zealand.
UX Australia’s Service Design 2011 one day conference offered us a chance to take the temperature of Service Design in Australia and see if we Kiwis measure up. In short I think we more than measure up, but nevertheless there were some interesting learnings to take home from some great presentations which I’d like to share with you. Read more »
A design project can be a lot like climbing a mountain; it is hard work and takes a lot of time and effort. As an Interaction Designer here at Optimal Usability I am exposed to incredibly smart people every day who work in a wide variety of industries, and all too often I hear examples of where they have climbed mountains only to feel a sense of disappointment after reaching the top and realising that the view would have been better from a different mountain.
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We are getting more and more requests to help clients make sense of their Google Analytics data. Google Analytics is a powerful tool but in our experience there are some common misunderstandings about what it can and can’t do. Read more »
In June, I had a 3-month sabbatical from Optimal Usability and went to work for a US-based user experience consultancy called User Centric. As well as interacting with the smart people from User Centric I also spoke with IDEO, Adaptive Path, Chicago Institute of Design, Paypal, McDonalds, Salesforce.com and SAP. Read more »
I read this week that the Web is now 18 years old. It has gone through the awkwardness of adolescence and reached adulthood. However, there is a lot more maturing still to be done.
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By Trent Mankelow
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This time last year we ran a series of talks on How to Create Government Websites That Don’t Suck. We hit a nerve, and the slides have subsequently been viewed over 6,000 times.
This year we have decided to take a different angle. We want to talk about government websites that inspire and delight us, in other words, government websites that rock. The breakfast briefing is happening on the 23rd of June in Wellington, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share a half-dozen of the websites that we’ve researched.
Pay Car Tax (online service, UK) Read more »
by Trent Mankelow
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At Optimal Usability our vision is to help transform our clients into providers of world-class customer experiences. But it turns out that it’s really hard to transform organisations. So lately I’ve been reading up on ‘big D’ Design, how organisations can build design into their DNA, and I thought I’d share a few ideas that have stood out.
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By Blake Lough
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After two years of work we can finally talk about one of the most exciting projects we have had the privilege to work on. As many of you will have seen, in January Air New Zealand released details of its new long haul travel product. Although most of the focus has been on its new Economy Skycouch seating, this actually only represents one piece of a very large puzzle in offering a new long haul experience that Air New Zealand hopes will put it at least two years ahead of its competition. Read more »
The overall goal of the E-government Strategy is for New Zealand to “be a world leader in using IT to realise its economic, social, environmental, and cultural goals, to the benefit of all its people.”
Optimal Usability › Edit — WordPress
We certainly spend taxpayer money pursuing this goal. Last year 64% of public sector agencies expected to spend money on a new/upgraded website in 2008/09, and 53% expected to spend money on new/upgraded online services.
However, despite spending all this money New Zealand is falling behind in public sector innovation. Read more »
By Dave O’Brien
Suppose you’re designing (or redesigning) the overall structure of a website. You’ve come up with a new structure – depending on the coffee, you may have come up with two or three. But are they good? Which one is best? And are they better than the old structure? Until recently, there wasn’t a quick way to find out, short of building the site and testing it after the fact. Read more »