Why is the user important?
As we may have mentioned a few times already, the digital communications team is committed to a user centred approach to our work: whether that be research, design, content or build. We have placed users at the heart…
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Webpages are becoming increasingly bloated
Average page weight increases 15% in 2014 Perhaps it should be the web industry’s new year’s resolution to lose weight in 2015, because the size of webpages has been increasing at an alarming rate in recent times.…
Avoiding bias in usability testing
Collaborative user testing: less bias, better research This great article outlines some of the dangers of conducting usability testing on your own product. When we are too close to our own work, it can be difficult to…
Declining importance of the homepage
The continued decline of the homepage While organisations (including ours) continue to focus on the homepage, Gerry McGovern provides the reminder that the true value of the website comes from other pages. Google is…
The effect of page load times
The real cost of slow time vs downtime The effect of page load times is becoming more of a talking point again. The effect of a slow-loading webpage is more than you may think. For instance, a one second delay has been…
Assumptions about mobile users
UX myth: Mobile users are distracted The rise of mobile has also given rise to myths about how people use it. The idea that mobile users are more distracted than users of any other devices does not hold water. For this…
Bugs and user experience
Fixing bugs — the next ‘big thing’ in e-commerce? I was surprised by some of the findings in this report from the Baymard Institute about bugs in e-commerce systems. We all know how damaging a buggy system can be. But…
Creating great microcopy
Interface writing: Code for humans Microcopy, or interface writing as Nicole Fenton calls it, is the small bits of text that make a user interface – the text used in buttons, notifications, links and so on. This is…
Why don’t we focus more on accessibility?
3% of users browse with IE9 and 14% of users have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former? Fiona Taylor Gorringe outlines some statistics on web usage, and how sometimes developers have skewed priorities when…
Why simplicity improves the user experience for all
The myth of the sophisticated user Our goal as designers is to make things as easy as possible for the user. When we set out to simplify content and convert jargon terms into plain English, we are sometimes told that…