One of my clients died the other day from very tragic circumstances. The problem is, he was a friend as well. I suppose I’ve been lucky in that my family and friends have not come to abrupt ends like that, up until now of course. It’s strange because you here about the different stages [...]

Well, it’s time to move again. I’ve been here 5 years and now it’s time to move the career up a notch. I’ve had plenty of changes in my life from being a sound engineer to a preacher,TV producer and now a Usability Analyst. I must say that out of all of them I find [...]

I have been thinking…and that’s never a good thing! As Usability Professionals we must be careful of the “I”. When asked by a developer, “What do you think?” we need to be careful the first words out of our mouths aren’t “I”. It’s so easy to say what we think and then backing it up [...]

Product Development Planning – Requirements Planning Phase The UCD Phases for this stage are: Build a User Profile Setting Usability Goals Building a User Profile – Task Analysis Purpose First and foremost, you must know whom you are designing for. One of the very first steps in creating a usable product is to create user profiles for each unique group [...]

I have been working on the UCD process to fit into the development lifecycle used at a major software company I was working for that were not involving any type of usability testing into their development stages. (Shock Horror!) Over the next few weeks I’m going to refine it and out it up here for anyone [...]

I’m just reading through the Google News Alerts I get that cover Usability and User Experience news. Most of the news is updates from major businesses telling the world that they’ve redesigned their web sites for maximum “User-Friendliness” !!? WTF! USER FRIENDLINESS! What’s the go with that?! Well I ventured onto a couple of user [...]

 Yeah, it’s been a while…..well ok it’s been ages since my last post. I’ve bought a house got my son through 16 to 17…woohoo! (One more to go). Got a dog, bought a 5 string bass and a headless 80’s bass. Watched plenty of movies and did some reading…oh and of course worked my ass [...]

All done! Ok, so I left a bit out! Sheesh. Well, I ran the usability test on the mobile application using a very chunky device that I was told is being used by the customer. All I can say is poor old storeman having to cart around that huge unit all day! I put the call [...]

 TEST DATA! Give me test data! I’m heard screaming in my cubicle. Ok, what we have here is our first mobile application to review. Which is an application that keeps track of stock items and transfers of stock and Bin locations (Bins are containers that hold stock). This is a connected application, which means it needs to [...]

Well, I’ve got the PDA and after only a few attempts got a working version of the application too. I love gadgets so doing a usability study on the User Interface of a PDA was going to be fun, fun, fun. OK, (rubbing his hands together) let’s get going. The first thing I do is create [...]