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I saw this quote on the October edition of the Userfocus Usability newsletter, and it really resonated!

Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do, they don’t have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors. — Mike Kuniavsky.

I you haven’t read it, his book “Observing the User Experience” is a must read for any UX/Usability practitioner.

I’ve been posting a bit about the process of architecting the new online video on demand offering from Channel4. Well, it’s now live on channel4.com!

4od on Channel 4

I love this point in a project, when you see the fruits of your labour come to fruition and you get that sense of pride at looking at something that you’ve created and designed. It’s also interesting looking at the progression of ideas from the first sketchy wireframes to the clickable prototypes (which we tested with), the high fidelity designs to what is now live. While not everything that we had planned went in to this first release, we are really proud of what we’ve created here – I know that I am!

I hope you all enjoy the vast quantity and quality of content here – please feel free to let me know of good and bad things and things you think we can make better!

I recently gave a presentation about personas, and specifically how they can be used throughout a project lifecycle to ensure the highest quality. I thought I’d share that presentation with you. I’m a big fan of the approach to presentations advocated by Garr Reynolds in his book Presentation Zen. When I present my slides have no more than 1 – 3 words on them. That way people listen to what I’m saying. I also tell people that I am happy to share my slides and notes with anyone that would like them. My notes tend to be bullet points only, that way when I speak I’m not reading, I am working from my brain and it’s more of a conversation with the audience. This conversational tone is more engaging (I hope). Anyhow, on to the presentation!

Life before Personas

This is my vision for how life must have been for users before Personas came into widespread use. A barren desert with users wandering forlornly around the worlds of the internet and software. Stumbling around looking for an oasis of usability and accessibility!

It stuns me when I think that Personas really came into popular use after Cooper’s The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Things must have been (and were) pretty bad before that. Thankfully though, Personas are coming more and more into widespread use. There is still, however, some fear and reluctance towards their use.

Primarily this is down to the cost and time it can take to create them, and in some cases a failure to see the great benefits that they have. I think that we, as user experience professionals, need to be better at communicating their value and selling their uasefulness. Primarily we need to be able to demonstrate that the cost and time spent has far more value that just the Persona itself. (more…)

I stumbled upon this interesting tag cloud visualisation plugin for WordPress, called WP-Cumulus. It takes your WordPress tags (and/or categories) and turns them into a nice little visualisation, like this one which is using my tags and categories:

I like the way this looks and feels and it’s a little bit of fun to play around with for a while. But I have to ask the question, is it useful?
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Wireframe of the new programme video page (Click to enlarge)

I’ve been really enjoying the last couple of months at work! I enjoying working in general, but lately I’ve been engrossed in a really meaty and fun project – sculpting the user experience of our new video proposition, which I mentioned in my previous post, The Problem with Online Video.

I talked about the issue we had with pop-up players not sitting well with our advertising policies. We’ve refined the solution a little more to make it more usable. Now, users will be able to launch the pop-out directly from the video list. We can’t get around the fact that the user needs to make that decision before watching, but it’s a click less to get to playing video now.

With the introduction of archive video, rather than just the last 30 days catch-up video, we have been working hard on the findability of video. (more…)