Sensorydrive - Stuart Church's blog about user experience

We are Apple!

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

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

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”.

NHS IT systems fail due to lack of User-Centred Design?

stuartchurch — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:49:30 +0000

Very interesting report at Contractor UK about Richard Granger, the former Director of IT at the NHS. He is, apparently, “ashamed” of some of the NHS IT systems and quite damning of some their contractors. Of particular note is the comment that one system:

isn’t useable (sic) because they have been building a system with Fujitsu without listening to what the end users want.

I kind of assumed that User-Centred Design would be at the forefront of NHS IT directives (I can’t imagine a situation where understanding the context of use is more important than in the high-pressure, on-the-go, constantly-interrupted environment of the NHS). However, this seems to be far from the truth.

Read the whole report: Granger ‘ashamed’ of NHS IT systems

Links for week ending 20 April 2007

stuartchurch — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 19:30:53 +0000

Frog Design show us how to measure emotional responses.
Jensen Harris has us in Fitts.
The Single Usability Metric.
Jakob says breadcrumbs rock.
Gerry McGovern on simplicity in web design.
Bloug on how IAs should best communicate with IT managers (one of the perennial problems for our profession).
LukeW comes up trumps again with his Designing for Web2.0 and Best practice for web form design presentations.
Adobe’s Apollo – one of the futures for the web? And Finetune’s Apollo desktop as taster.

Stephen Anderson’s great Slideshare on Creating Pleasurable Interfaces.