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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…)

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…)

Wow! It’s been a while since I’ve penned a blog post; but this isn’t down to laziness or lethargy! I’ve been really busy here at Channel 4 working on our video propisition. A week ago we launched our  online 30 day catch-up service, but that isn’t where it ends. Ever since Project Kangaroo, the video on demand collaboration between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, was canned by the Competition Commission we have been working on our own solution for getting of our archive content online; and I’ve been doing all the IA/UX work on it!

It’s been a really interesting and exciting project to work on, making a user-friendly video proposal that will fit into the current Channel 4 site without too much impact, while making sure video is simple to find and watch. I think that the solution we’re implementing meets those goals. One challenge was making sure that Video home page did not get too catch-up centric and promoted archive material adequately. While the main user goal is catch-up, our current 4oD service shows us that archive material is becoming more and more popular.

But there’s a problem when you come to design a particular aspect of the online video user experience: advertising.

(more…)

Fitt's Law - size and position!

Hick's Law - 7 plus/minus 2!

Ok, so I’m not saying that we need to know the maths, but the underlying principles are important! Fitts’ Law tells us that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target, so the size of a link area and it’s position on the page (and relative to other elements) is important.  Hick’s Law says that the time it takes for a person to make a decision is a result of the possible choices he or she has. More choices mean a longer decision process – which gives us the 7 plus/minus 2 rule.

These are two of the fundamental rules that I use in user experience architecture. I’d recommend Tog’s (Bruce Tognazzini’s) First Principles of Interaction Design for some more.