Northern User Experience

I encountered this pop-up notice on a Flash-based T-Shirt editor application last night.

It reads

Loading Error
A loading error occured [sic]. This might negatively influence the use of the application. Please reload the application if this occurs.

Beside the spelling mistake, the euphemism for ‘the application might break’, it’s also not clear after which ‘this’ occurring one should reload the application. And will I lose my work so far?

I’ve been made aware of a Firefox extension for diagraming/GUI prototyping called Pencil. I’m going to take a look at it, to see how it compares to old stagers like Visio, and newer whizz-bang options like Axure, but I was wondering if anyone else has any experience or opinions on this tool?

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/

Thanks to everyone who came along to Sage yesterday, and nice to meet some new people too. Apologies for the misleading 8pm start time posted in a couple of places….

I really enjoyed the discussion on measuring user behaviours and metrics for usability: it was great to have some input from people (particuarly Steve & Mike) who’ve done some of this with web analytics, and get some extremely valid context and caution from Judith. The stuff about measuring usability improvements (KPIs, A-B testing, and cash!) was good too, as was the discussion on surveys.

Our next meeting is due to be on 3 September. I won’t be able to be there, unfortunately, but Judith offered to kick off a discussion on personas, and Manchester Digital Development Agency was suggested as a possible venue that definitely sounded worth investigating.

I saw this on Boxes and Arrows

“- Journey to the Center of Design – Jared Spool
There’s a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Is it time for user- centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Jared Spool gives and entertaining and enlightening key note address at the 2008 IA Summit.(published 05/01/08)(published 04/25/08)”

I think it raises an interesting discussion point, on the business value of User Centred Design.

For a starter, I’ve sold UCD as a way to reduce time-to-market. The theory being - ask the user what they want, then do it, then test it again. The business don’t have to decide “what they think” the user wants, which is when I found a lot of time wasted.

How do other people approach this?

This is the link: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-1