Bookmarks folders just don’t do it for me anymore. Increasingly, I find myself dragging URLs from my browser into different clusters of web shortcuts on my desktop. There, they serve as temporary repositories for information relevant to some research project. For example, I currently have three such Read More...

By Paul J. Sherman Published: September 24, 2007 Perhaps you’ve done contextual inquiries to discover your users’ requirements and understand their workflows. You may have carried out participatory design sessions, usability tested your design, then iterated and improved it. But do you know Read More...

By Mike Hughes Published: September 24, 2007 Two questions any writer must deal with are: “What do I write about?” and “How much do I say about it?” Essentially, these questions deal with the scope and the depth of a document. Technical communicators have a tendency to want to Read More...

Oz-IA ran over the weekend in Sydney and it was a fantastic event. There were some really interesting presentations, and while I didn’t get to all of them, without doubt the most interesting for me was User Research in Virtual Worlds, a presentation I Read More...

Gee, aren’t floors great? All flat and clean and smooth, they do a faultless job of preventing us from plunging headlong into the voids beneath them — a particularly useful trick in multi-story buildings. It’s interesting to reflect Read More...

We’ve all been sent this e-mail… If Google had a black screen, taking into account the huge number of page views it receives, an estimated 750 mega watts/hour per year (sic) would be saved. With this in mind, Google has created a black version of its search engine called Blackle , which functions in Read More...

By Steve Baty Published: September 10, 2007 If you’ve read some of my previous columns on UXmatters , you could be forgiven for thinking my entire working life is spent largely surrounded in a sea of quantitative data. This is, rather surprisingly even to me, not nearly close to the truth. Looking Read More...

By Sam Ng Published: September 10, 2007 Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve Read More...

You know what, I really hate CAPTCHA. The other day I was speculatively signing up for a Facebook account (I’m not particularly interested in being on Facebook, I just wanted to have a nose around its code), but signing up was a tricky process. Read More...

Users rule the experience. Advertisers pay for the experience. And trust me, your internal constituents are not afraid to remind each other. Read More...

I wouldn’t call myself a conference junkie by any means, I’d be lucky to attend one or two a year. And I certainly don’t think of myself as the eternal student, but when I gave it some thought a few minutes ago, I realised that I’ve Read More...