UX is negotiation By Andrew on 17th November 2018 — 12 mins read If you were to say that someone was a good UX practitioner, you could mean a great many things. For example, you could be thinking of their ability to run a workshop, an interview or a testing session. You could be thinking of their prototyping, visual or interaction design skills. You might be thinking of... More
Too much design By Andrew on 22nd March 2018 — 2 mins read I am having to re-mortgage at the moment. Always a fun mixture of gah! and arghhh! It has been interesting though. Some of it easier than expected, some unnecessarily painful. The most interesting moments were the phone calls I had with two different Mortgage Advisors. One was a very human and rambly conversation. The other... More
Cognitive fusion and Experiential avoidance By Andrew on 14th December 2017 — 1 min read When faced with stress, we tend to go one of two ways: 1. We lock in to our current approach, becoming rigid and inflexible, or 2. We do whatever we can to avoid whatever is causing the stress, if necessary at great cost to ourselves or others When design collaboration becomes stressful, this plays out... More
The UX of Authentication By Andrew on 22nd November 2017 — 2 mins read I’m working on an authentication / authorisation type project at the moment. Thought I’d try to learn from the master by watching this talk. Here are some key take-aways: No-one talks about authentication or gives it the focus it deserves. We don’t teach it. We don’t hear talks about it. Yet it is in almost... More
Always complain By Andrew on 5th November 2017 — 2 mins read I’ve had a terrible time with EE customer services recently. Too boring to share the details, but it involved lots of calls to various call centres – and not one person helped me, until I made an official complaint. At this point someone started calling us back – and finally I spoke to someone who... More
Why I like argumentative people By Andrew on 8th June 2017 — 1 min read Some people are argumentative by nature. In a room full of agreeing people, they’re the ones looking for a way to disagree. Their default position is ‘no, it won’t work like that’. Their hat is black. I like these people! For a start, it is usually easy to know where you are with them. They... More
Re-drawing the collaboration diagram By Andrew on 19th May 2017 — 1 min read I’m sure you’ll have seen this diagram before. Classic Venn diagram showing the mixture of technical (feasibility), business (viability) and user interests (desirability) It shows the balance of interests required for great design. Without this balance we’re in for trouble: Skewing too much towards… …might yield screens that… Technical interests look like the database Business... More
Automate everything? By Andrew on 20th April 2017 — 3 mins read Re-reading Frank Chimero’s excellent article, The Web’s Grain, I was struck by this simple point he makes: "...the less you have to do, the less say you have" A simple view of this could see us equating quite a few different things: more convenience = less stuff to do as a user = less control... More
How to handle disagreements By Andrew on 14th April 2017 — 2 mins read I had an disagreement with a colleague the other day. It started quietly… **Me**: "What happened to the <design element I liked>?" **Colleague**: "Oh, we lost that. That came out." **Me**: "Really. Why?" **Colleague**: "It was causing confusion, the users we've been talking to preferred something simpler" I had delegated this last round of research... More
Designing modal interactions By Andrew on 31st March 2017 — 4 mins read For me, a ‘modal interaction’ is one that facilities a single, focused type of interplay between human and computer. It’s a moment where you’re doing just one thing, without any distraction. As soon as you use the word ‘modal’, you might start thinking of ‘modal dialogues’ or ‘modal windows’ – which ask the user a... More
