Insights

Usability testing is a useful tool in the developer's toolbox, but needs to be done consistently and fairly in order to make sure that everyone's expectations are met.

There are some amazing tools available for developers on the web, from pretty-printing your code to validating it, from colour palettes for visual impairments to tools for testing APIs. Here are some of my favourites. Stack Overflow This is the go-to site for questions and answers about coding. It has questions and answers on just about every programming language that you can think of - PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and more. And every environment you can think of - Windows, iOS, Android, and so on. And every mark-up and styling language - HTML, XML, CSS, and Sass. Stack Overflow has an awesome community of people willing to help complete strangers, which I think is amazing. I have learnt so much from reading Stack Overflow, and I haven't asked that many questions on there, because many of the common questions have already been asked and answered. User Experience This is the equivalent site to Stack Overflow for asking user experience questions (usability an...

The season of advent is well underway over at 24 ways , with a daily article on an aspect of web development. One title that leaped out at me was What the heck is Inclusive Design? by Heydon Pickering, who is the accessibility editor for Smashing Magazine and works with The Paciello Group as an accessibility and UX consultant. He is the author of a book on  Inclusive Design Patterns  which should probably be on your wish list. Inclusive design is a new name for the idea that web accessibility and good user experience benefits everyone, including (but not limited to) people with recognised and registered disabilities. Good readability and well organised content is good for dyslexic users, but also for busy people who don't have time to trawl through your unreadable and badly-organised website. In short, inclusive design means designing things for people who aren’t you, in your situation. In my experience, mainstream UX isn’t very good at that. By bolting accessibility onto m...

Sometimes prototyping can seem like a big investment of time, but I find it is always worth it. In this article on User Experience Prototyping , Paul Boag, who has been in the field of user experience for over a decade, writes about the benefits of prototyping. When most people think of prototyping they are thinking about mocking up a user interface. There is no doubt that prototyping can help in this area. Organisations use prototyping to define and test experiences using all kinds of interfaces. Interfaces from mobile apps to enterprise systems. He identifies three key benefits of prototypes: they are inspiring , and allow people to understand what is being proposed, because they show stakeholders what it will look like; they ensure a common vision - it is much easier to agree to something and come away with a shared understanding of it if you have actually seen what it will look like; they are testable - you can actually do usability testing with them and fix any usability issues b...

Design can elicit many different emotions. Many designers aim for surprise and delight, but those are not the only emotions you might want to elicit. If you are designing a site or an app for a charity or a campaign group, you might want to elicit compassion and a willingness to act - whether that is volunteering or donating. You might even want to elicit anger. Ages ago, the BBC published a series on user experience, and one of the things they talked about was BERTs - Bipolar Emotional Response Tests - which had a chart with a series of contrasted emotions (happy versus sad, angry versus calm, and so on) where testers were asked to respond to a design by marking on the chart how it made them feel. Their responses were then averaged out to provide an emotional profile of the website. A wheel of emotions This interview with Sherine Kazam offers a wheel of emotions and how they relate to each other (identified by Robert Plutchik in 1980). It's a more nuanced model, though I am not...