Monthly Archives: February 2009

Quiz: which of these search results pages perform best?

Here’s another press release turned quiz from Maxymiser. Which one of the designs below do you think got the highest number of clickthroughs to an item detail page? And which one do you think got the highest number of ‘call … Continue reading

An Augmented Reality demo you can try at home

Got a webcam? Want to try a cute augmented reality demo/toy on your PC (Or Mac)? Then visit the Toyota IQ Reality site. Although the wow factor of this demo will wear off after a few minutes, it’s worth bearing … Continue reading

Hilarious usability rant on The Onion

This did the rounds last week, but if you didn’t see it, here is The Onion’s hilariously sweary usability rant about a fictitious (though familiar looking) new product from Sony. Using a feedreader? Click through to see the clip → … Continue reading

Karl Sabino on the ROI of well designed error messages

A nice UX ROI tidbit from Karl Sabino over on the Think blog: Once the analytics were up and running, we could quickly see which pages occurred before and after the error page. This let us identify the user journeys … Continue reading

What retro 1970s robots can teach us about our business practices.

Back in the 1970s when Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy, researchers hit upon a performance problem. Their robots were designed to take in every detail of their surroundings and perform complex mathematical calculations to deduce what they could see. … Continue reading

Should the recession change how we “sell” User Experience?

Credit: George Underwood, 2006 User experience is a many faced beast. From one perspective, it’s all about differentiation, brand image and loyalty-building. While this argument is compelling, it involves a a big gap between money in → value out. Lord … Continue reading

How Obama’s team used A/B testing to improve fund raising

This isn’t breaking news, but it’s an interesting enough tidbit to deserve being shared around. Back in November ’08, Chris Goward of Wider Funnel noticed that Obama’s team used Google Website Optimizer to run an A/B test on barackobama.com. Unsurprisingly … Continue reading

User experience research skirmishes – are you guilty?

If you are a User Experience (UX) consultant, or a client who often outsources to UX consultancies, then this post is for you. It’s about UX skirmishes. In case you don’t know, a skirmish is a military tactic where the … Continue reading

Yahoo’s homepage in screengrabs from 1996 to 2009

Can’t see the embedded flash above? [view low res | view high res] I like the way you can see the recurring pattern of a pristine design getting gradually tweaked and cluttered until it hits tipping point, then it gets … Continue reading