User-testing does not result in brilliant design. That requires brilliant designers. User testing guarantees that whatever level of design a company has been able to achieve will actually work. Bruce Tognazzini – comparing the iphone and the kindle. And he goes on to say that: There are no trade-offs here. Human/machine interaction is a subset [...]
I suspect that the airline congratulates itself on its customer insight and, for all I know, acts on it to improve the service. But while they clearly have a lot of customer research, they have deprived themselves of the opportunity to get insight.
Tom Steinberg offers six tips on how to set up organisations like his own mySociety. I find the last two the most immediately appealing: 5. If you aren’t pissing off at least some people all the time, you’ve probably been captured by the establishment. 6. Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% [...]
Having just discovered Directgov’s mobile internet site, I had a look around. Very sensibly they don’t attempt to replicate the range of content on their main site and have tried to focus on a limited set of content that might be particularly useful to people on the move. But in going down that route, Directgov [...]
The requirements are pretty clear: an obsessive attention to the detail of how your service works, and the ability to fix glitches quickly and easily. It really shouldn’t be hard, but far too often it clearly is.
Back in February, I wrote about the battle between the big endians and the little endians, between those who see service design as an engineering problem and those who see it as a customer agility problem. Like most battles, it should be an unnecessary one.
Frequently Asked Questions on websites tend to have a lot in common with the question and answer briefing notes which civil servants have been writing since time immemorial. In both cases, the temptation to write questions which happen to have straightforward answers, rather than the questions which any real people have ever actually asked, is [...]
Once you have got your customers into a self-service channel, it’s quite a good idea to try to keep them there. Sometimes things go wrong, sometimes systems are down, sometimes users do unexpected things. So you need error messages. Ideally ones which tell the user what is wrong, what they need to do to fix [...]
Twenty years ago, I had a problem to solve. A museum was creating a database of the objects it held and needed to be able to produce reports in catalogue number order. The difficulty was that different numbering systems had been used at different times and catalogues with different numbering systems had been amalgamated without [...]
It’s not just Amazon which is feeling the need for a new look. In quick succession come redesigns from BBC News and the FCO. Simon Dickson likes the design, but is disappointed by the limited innovation. There are some obvious little glitches in the FCO site. There is a big Morello logo for their content [...]