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Understanding user-centred design workshop

Stu Church from Pure Usability ran a full day workshop talking and demonstrating the benefits of a user-centred approach to JISC funded projects. Here are my notes:

  • Project issues include the need to address user-centred design for searching, showing resources and supporting user-contributions to collections.
  • A user-centred process is the key to success and can be applied at all stages of a project (never too late to start!)
  • Benefits include improved credibility, reputation, visits and user happiness
  • ISO 9241-210 – Human-centred design for for interactive systems
  • Key elements include user goals & needs, user research and evaluation
  • Start with your business goals and then see what you can do to make the user experience as great as it can be
  • Have a snappy sentence that you can always refer to about the ‘UX vision’, a great recent example from Mark Boulton ‘A make new mantra: A statement of design intent‘ which for CERN is to “create wonder”
  • Identify user requirements and user stories
  • Rapidly design, prototype an refine
  • Evaluate to get insights and measure performance
  • You can do loads yourself without a professional to get quite far – then get pro’s for the harder pinch-points
  • So what are you waiting for?!

 

 

 

 

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Make expressionengine links work

In Expressionengine, if you want to make a custom field work as a URL / link instead of plain text,  under channel preferences for the required channel ensure ‘Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links?’ is set to NO.

Otherwise the link on the page will add the URL of the page you are currently on e.g example.com/url-of-custom-field which of course won’ t work.

This catches me out often enough that I need to document it here.

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Running report: Forest of Dean Half Marathon 2012

Yesterday, 1st April 2012 I competed and successfully completed my first ever half marathon.

I felt good throughout the race and each step past eleven miles was the furthest i’ve ever run.

My time was 2hr 2mins and 35 sec (the winner was 1hr 14min) and my running partner Stephen managed 1hr 59mins 25 sec – not too shabby !

Having run several pretty tough cross-country races including the Slaughterford 9, I wonder what challenge we’ll attempt next?……

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Github confusion

Every now and then I find a useful plugin on Github to use on a project. However sometimes when I grab the plugin it won’t work with the expressionengine CMS and I could never figure out why, until now.

It might just be me but when I see the plugin folder on github (illustrated below A) I assumed this was what I needed. Grabbing the files and then installing them caused the plugin area of the control panel to fail and return me to the github page – i then delete the plugin from the server in order to get the plugin area to work again.

I completely overlooked the ‘zip’ button which gives me the correct folders/files and work…. (illustrated below B).

Problem solved,

View the github page in full

Screengrab of github page

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Podcast 5by5: David Sleight

In Big Web Show Episode No. 66, Jeffrey Zeldman interviews veteran web designer and publishing creative director David Sleight about how traditional publishers can transition to creating successful digital experiences, and the (mostly conceptual) obstacles they will have to overcome to do so.

Topics discussed in this episode include: why publishers alternately blame technology and treat it as a savior; the downside for magazine publishers of Apple’s new retina display; why content thieves may be your best customers in waiting; content-focused responsive design versus printed page emulation; and much more.

Around half way through the episode there is some interesting comments about the need for ‘digital and interactive experiences rather than simply porting the existing model to digital’.

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Learning Studio celebrates Year One

I have been following the Learning studio with interest and they just hit the one year mark, congratulations.

It’s hard to believe but the Learning Studio opened its doors to the campus last March. In that time we’ve seen over a thousand camera and equipment check-outs, are averaging 900 room reservations a month, and have offered dozens of workshops and training sessions for students and faculty.

Year One: A Glimpse from Learning Studio on Vimeo.