BlobFisk.com

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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