Monthly Archives: February 2012

The terminology of usability.

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In this article I want to look at terminology and the way usability professionals portray themselves to clients and the general public. There is a growing trend coming from the web design side to refer to everything as UX – short for User eXperience – the most common one being people referring to UX design and calling themselves UX designers. This is an oxymoron. You can’t design what someone experiences. You can test what they experience, which is what UX was about originally.

UX, the way I and many long term usability professionals use it, is all about understanding how users experience the product (web site, app, desktop application, controls on a microwave etc.) so that the results can be fed back into areas such as IxD (Interaction Design), IA (Information Architecture) and visual design in order to refine the existing design of the system and make it more usable to improve the UX of the person who will end up using it. Continue reading →

The usability of living shop bought herbs

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I know, this is somewhat off the norm even for me. Regardless, I do believe some corrections to popularly held beliefs are in order and it would be reasonable to consider this a discoverability issue, handily.

Ok, so you’ve just bought a potted herb from some random supermarket and plonked it on the windowsill in your kitchen. So far all the advice I’ve heard from TV chefs, cookery books & magazines and friends is that these plants have been very poorly looked after by the supermarket supply chain and will only last a few days, so you want to use it up fairly quickly. A stance not entirely dismissed by the fact they normally have a Best Before date on the plastic sleeve they usually arrive in. Well, I’m here to dispel that myth. Continue reading →

Publish and be damned (apparently).

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I’ve just been distinctly annoyed by the habit of companies refusing to make pricing available on their website, asking you to “call them” so they can “discuss your needs” with them. Now, there are clearly some areas of business where this is necessary, mostly where the product will be built to your specification and the cost will vary as a result or where it’s a service offering where the cost depends on the amount of time spent carrying out the work. However, there are many situations where it’s an off-the-shelf product where the company in question are nothing more than a reseller of a boxed product … and they still refuse to make pricing easy to come by.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus on those unaltered off-the-shelf products where pricing is simple and easy to make available without effort. Even when pricing may be tiered depending on the volume of business you give them per purchase or per quarter in total volume, they still know how much they’re going to charge you and if they can work it out to generate an invoice, why are they unable to place such basic information on a website? Continue reading →