'user experience' posts
The 25th anniversary of South by South West (SXSW) was an awe-inspiring spectacle. Officially, 19,364 people attended the interactive week, the first time the interactive portion has outsold the music. Over the 5-day conference I went to 20-odd talks and heard from speakers like Steve Krug, Jared Spool, Dan Ariely, Robert Hockman Jr, Seth Priebatsch and TOMS shoe creator Blake Mycoskie.
The main themes were centred around location awareness, twitter, gamification, social networking, metrics and beer. Underlining it all was the mega theme of user experience. Read more »
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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Following on from Dan’s article last month, this month we’ve invited Steven Bruce from Public Trust to share his thoughts on what it takes to deliver world-class customer experience. Steven is Head of Customer Strategy at Public Trust, which is transforming its business to become more customer centric. Steven has previously held roles in strategy, marketing and customer experience at organisations such as ANZ National Bank and Westpac. His work has also been show cased in case studies as world best practice by the Washington DC-based Corporate Executive Board.
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Last week I was responding to a Request for Information from an organisation that wanted to create a "world-class, high quality website". It got me thinking – what does it mean to be world-class? The phrase is in danger of being used so often that it becomes meaningless. So this month we’ve invited Dan Szuc to share some of his thoughts on what it takes to be "world-class".
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In May I was lucky enough to attend UX London. I thought I’d share some of the notes I took from four of the sessions I attended. (More speaker slides are available.)
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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 Richard Kerr and Trent Mankelow
Recently I used an airline’s touch-screen kiosk to check-in, and made the mistake of touching the No button on the ‘dangerous goods’ screen. I’d anticipated that the question would be worded something like ‘Are you carrying any dangerous goods?’, like it would be if I was physically checking in. Unfortunately it wasn’t worded that way, and pressing No kicked me out of the system. An airline representative, who had been hovering nearby, moved in and cancelled the process. He then took us through the whole process again, this time doing every step for me. How embarrassing.
This got me thinking. Shouldn’t a successful self-service kiosk interaction be one where I can do it myself? Read more »