Sensorydrive - Stuart Church's blog about user experience

The persuaders

stuartchurch — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:19:57 +0000

A really interesting walkthrough from Human Factors about persuasion design. It’s a bit of a kitchen sink approach, but still very illuminating…

World Usability Day in Bristol on 13th November

stuartchurch — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:46:07 +0000

In case you didn’t know, it’s World Usability Day next Thursday (13th November). The general theme is ‘Transportation’, but it’s really just an excuse to think about usability and how it affects our lives.

As part of WUD, Bristol Usability Group will be running a Usability Surgery. Myself, Joe Leech from cxpartners and Dave Ellender will be available at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol’s Harbourside from 1130 to 1600 to offer free usability and user experience advice, help and support. If you have a website that you think could be more user-friendly, want a job in user experience or just want to chat about the latest thinking in usability come along and talk to us! You can find out more details at bristolusability.org.uk and on Upcoming.

The surgery will be followed by drinks in the Watershed bar from 5.30pm. Hope to see you there!

Oh, and here’s Bill Gates doing his best to remove any traces of excitement from his voice as he talks about World Usability Day 2007…(!)

We are Apple!

stuartchurch — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:10:59 +0000

It’s amazing what a difference 24 years can make…

Via David Alison

Jaguar’s design philosophy

stuartchurch — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:20:12 +0000

An inspiring video that provides some insight into Jaguar’s design philosophy. It resonates in that it could apply equally well to the design of websites and applications as it could to a car.

Particularly relevant quotes are:

“the designers design what beauty is and the engineers have to be involved in that process early on so that they can appreciate what makes it beautiful so that they can go and execute it”

“we all know the power of a team that’s moving in one direction”

Resurrected

stuartchurch — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:44:01 +0000

This blog has been forlornly gathering cobwebs for a fair few months now. However, I’ve finally given it a bit of an overhaul by fixing some broken bits and turning it green, with the aim of starting to blog much more regularly.

One new feature of the site is the addition of a Flickr feed in the right-hand column (uploaded to Flickr using the stunningly useful Jing). Here, I’ll be posting screengrabs of interesting/cool/useful/diabolical websites and apps on a fairly ad hoc basis, with descriptions and annotations to explain what’s going on.

Right then … better get writing, hadn’t I?

How to bias your online poll results

stuartchurch — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:46:50 +0000

I’ve just stumbled across an old screenshot from the website of Channel 4’s shockingly bad Great Global Warming Swindle, which claimed that there was no link between greenhouse gases and global warming (and they have the audacity to put it in the science section of their site too!).

I think this is what psychologists call priming. And I seem to recall that – somewhat unsurprisingly – the majority of people voted “No”.