Methods & Tools

How to stop Post-it notes from curling

Taken from Rapid Problem Solving with Post-it notes by David Straker (1997). Despite its age this book contains some really useful techniques for stakeholder workshops, such as group sorting activities, trees, and maps.

My Barcamp Presentation: “What You Need To Know About Eye Tracking”

When you see an Eye Tracking heatmap for the first time, you are probably so busy saying “wow!” that you forget to critically evaluate what you are seeing. This talk is intended to give you a set of questions to … Continue reading

Some Fun Eye-Tracking Heatmaps

Earlier this month, Carsten Schmitt & Poppy James of

UX for videogame design: Gameplay Research

When you’re designing a website, the range of things a user can do at any one time is fairly limited – you have quite a clear idea of the paths most users will take and this makes your life relatively … Continue reading

UK Research Buyers Guide: theresearchbuyersguide.com

Theresearchbuyersguide.com looks like a potentially useful site for UX researchers: Though it’s it’s intended for buyers of generalist market research, there are some useful links on here, such as a list of viewing facilities in the UK (i.e. posh places … Continue reading

Open-Source Video Note Taking Utility from IBM

There are certain kinds of user research that require extreme video analysis, where you literally have to transcribe every utterance, gesture and movement, and a single hour of footage can take almost a day to analyse. You can imagine this … Continue reading

The origin of Ctrl-Alt-Delete

This did the rounds a few years ago, but it’s worth sharing again. it’s an interview with Dave Bradley who invented Ctrl-Alt-Delete. “…I was just trying to solve a development problem we had. Brand new hardware, brand new software, you’re … Continue reading

The Importance of Analytics in User Experience

If you stop and think about it, web analytics is pretty damn amazing. Unlike any other time in the history of commerce, it’s possible for business owners to track and measure every tiny detail of thousands of customers’ behaviour without … Continue reading

How Mailchimp turned to Mechanical Turk for their User Research

Mailchimp (the email marketing webapp people) have written about a really interesting piece of user research they ran using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Within the Mailchimp webapp, you can upload an image as the banner for your email templates. To make … Continue reading

1000 Greyscale Silk icons for use in wireframing

I really like Mark James’s Silk Icons. Not only are they completely free, but they are pleasingly neutral and sit well on almost any page. At Madgex, our design team has been using them in our Axure wireframes. The only … Continue reading