Chat platforms and apps like WhatsApp, Twitch, Discord, Slack, Messenger and SnapChat have already flooded the market, with continuous exponential growth across the globe. To date, WhatsApp (a mobile messaging app) alone has a whopping 1.5 billion monthly active users!
I am excited to announce Peak Usability has now been renamed PeakXD (short for Peak eXperience Design). Why?
When I started Peak Usability 15 years ago I actually named it UX consulting but no one knew what UX meant (User eXperience for those of you who don't work in the industry). Back then most people’s understanding of user centred design went as far as ‘usability’. And let’s face it, in 2003 there were a lot of really bad websites offering poor user experiences due largely to usability issues. User experience is so much more than usability and people understand that now.
Anyone working in or for government in the digital space should be aware of the wide range of standards, guidelines and methods such as Australia’s Digital Service Standard, UK’s Digital Service Standard and USA’s usability.gov and Web design standards. These standards and frameworks provide excellent resources for providing customer centric websites and systems. One of the common themes across these standards is the importance of having a multidisciplinary team including product managers, business analysts, user researchers, designers and technical roles. However, little is mentioned in these standards about how these multidisciplinary teams should actually work together. Having worked in or for government and many large organisations over 17 years I have learnt hard way about the importance of engaging stakeholders. In this article, I want to outline some of the methods we typically use to take stakeholders on the journey. This article is relevant for anyone working in large organisations as well as in or for government.
Content is one of the main touchpoints between the user and the business. It is a core and critical part of the user experience. Content strategy and UX share similar goals and challenges. Content strategy forms a foundation layer for UX activities, and UX activities (especially research and testing) serve to strengthen and improve content, thereby in turn improving the user experience. This article explores some of the key overlapping themes between UX and Content Strategy.
You’re probably all familiar with customer journey maps as a user research output and/or design tool. But their usefulness can also extend to the research process, especially when you are trying to understand user decision-making. That is, the journey map can be a useful visual tool for both participant and moderator in a one-on-one interview.
Journey maps can be used to map out users’ behaviour and delve into the beliefs, attitudes and emotions that underpin this behaviour. When coupled with some research techniques grounded in cognitive psychology, you have a very sound and rigorous approach to understanding your user’s decision-making.
As UX researchers, whether we are working on some early exploratory user research, or working on a quick and ‘lean’ usability testing project, due diligence in analysis is a necessary part of our trade. But have you ever experienced ‘paralysis by analysis’ or felt overwhelmed by the amount of data collected? You may have just spent a month conducting contextual enquiries with your user base, and now face the seemingly impossible task of pulling it all together. Or you may be working in an Agile / Lean UX environment and have just finished 4-6 test sessions and now need to quickly work out what the key insights are – due tomorrow. How do you get a handle on all this information and distil it into some meaningful insights?
Here at Peak our preferred usability evaluation method is to conduct testing of a site or system with real representative users. In this article we explore the pros and cons of expert reviews versus usability testing and draw on a recent project which had some unexpected outcomes which triggered this article.
The main issues which had a dramatic effect on data quality and the user experience of the 2016 Australian census were largely related to the design of the delivery and distribution process, offline support and technical issues but we can still learn a lot from the #censusfail both in terms of process and UX design.
Responsive disclosure is an effective design pattern to reduce the cognitive load on users who are completing a form or process. Learn in this article about how to implement it successfully.
In Part 2 of our UX of university websites article, we focus on university website users’ usability issues. Find out what issues current and prospective students had when using university websites.
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