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I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• Classification schemes and when to use them
  When you do information architecture work you’ll realize that most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. One of the challenges for an IA project is figuring out what way works best for your audience, your content and your project’s goals.
• The Differences Between Good Designers and Great Designers
  Four years ago Cameron Moll gave a presentation on 9 skills that separate good designers and great designers. It’s a great talk and if you have the chance I suggest you at least check out the PDF slidedeck. I think the points he makes in the presentation are still relevant today and go a long way in educating us in how designers should be approaching their interactive designs.
• The Art & Science of Evidence-Based Design
  Last year, I gave a presentation at MeshU that took a behind the scenes look at how we arrive at design decisions. I've since taken clients through variations of this presentation, which is always evolving because it corresponds to such a perennial and fundamental question in our field.
• Web Savvy Typography
  Typographic styles and conventions are ever changing. Periodically you need to replenish your knowledge and stay current about trends and activities in web typography. What is the best font family to use when styling a website? Should you use pixels, ems, or percents to size fonts? What is the best font color to use? How do you make titles and headlines that look good and improve your search engine optimization? How wide should a text column be? How should you use words in italics? Read further to learn about these guidelines and more for creating web savvy typography.
• Making sense of the data: Collaborative data analysis
  I've often said that most of the value in doing user research is in spending time with users — observing them, listening to them. This act, especially if done by everyone on the design team, can be unexpectedly enlightening. Insights are abundant. But it's data, right? Now that the team has done this observing, what do you know? What are you going to do with what you know? How do you figure that out?
• How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell – The Oatmeal
• Eight interaction design and architecture videos
  The disciplines of interaction design and architecture share a number of common traits—such as a focus on solving problems for people and encouraging people to interact with products and environments in new and exciting ways—and each discipline can learn much from the other.<br />
  These eight videos highlight the work of people who see and celebrate the connections between interaction design and architecture.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• 10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris
  10×10 is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
• Making Users Buy Online – The Importance of Building …
  With online sales rising to 9.8% of the total retail sales in the UK in 2008* and 12.6% of businesses selling online (Office of National Statistics), the role of company websites is still enhancing often becoming a central part of the offered customer experience.
• Design the stakeholder experience | Front to back
  To get the stakeholders on track for a successful UX project, use your skills and design the stakeholder experience.
• Video: The right way to wireframe
• Improve conversions by connecting with your audience
  Lots of people design sites based on what they would like to see. However, what makes sense to a designer may not make sense to their target audience. If designers seek to create a conversion-friendly web experience we’re going to have to learn about our audience and what makes them tick.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

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!

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.

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