User Experience

Daniele Fiandaca’s opinion piece (NMA 04 Feb) raised the question of whether digital agencies were focussed on aesthetics at the expense of user experience.  I am delighted to see this issue being discussed because over recent years user experience (UX) has become “un-sexy” and the column inches that were dedicated to the subject back in the early 2000’s when it was new and exciting are all but forgotten. Read more…

Facebook turned six recently and celebrated the milestone by giving its homepage yet another makeover, this time to “improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features”. Six years is a long time on the interweb but, even still, Facebook has made impressive and significant gains in that time. It currently sits at number four on the list of biggest names on the web (behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively) and with over 350 million users (and growing fast) it is poised to very soon become number three. It’s become the “face”, as it were, of the social media space, if not the brain. Read more…

Sanitary napkin jokes aside, there’s plenty of excitement about Apple’s newly announced iPad. The hyperbole is flowing thick and fast : “magical, revolutionary, unbelievable”, not surprisingly most of it is coming from the Apple camp. Admittedly, it’s a cool device and you know it will be well-designed, well-built and easy to use…it’s from Apple after all. I want to like it, I really do, but as with many Apple products once you get past the initial ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and look at the practical user experience, the flaws start to emerge. Read more…

By Marty Carroll

Well, is this finally it? Is 2010 really the year of mobile? Each year since 2001 has been heralded as the year when the mobile internet would become a pervasive reality. After so many false dawns is there more reason to be optimistic this year?At Foviance we think there is. We’re pretty excited about it and here’s why: Read more…

If you are one of the world’s 450 million mobile internet users, you’ll already know that are two primary methods of accessing online content from your mobile phone, smartphone or other wireless device – mobile websites and mobile applications. Read more…

It’s coming up to 9 months since I got an eReader and in that time barely a month has gone by without a new development in either the eBook or eReader space. I have been watching these developments with interest – recent events to note are the UK Kindle release and the growing dominance of applications (apps) to both sell and display eBooks. Read more…

There has been a new parking barrier set up near to where I live, which was very expensive to install yet has a significant design fault. When queuing up for a ticket, I would notice people in their cars sitting and waiting for a considerable amount of time in regards to collecting a parking ticket and for the barrier to open. The driver and the passengers were also as astonished as myself for their prolonged waiting time, which was down to one simple fault. Read more…

The big news this week, is the event at Google headquarters to demonstrate their much hyped operating system on Thursday, which promises to be the first major confrontation in the new browser war which was triggered by the release of Google Chrome earlier this year.

The relationship between the major players in the online world has always been described in overtly bellicose terms, but in the continuing fight for online supremacy, the battle ground has shifted from the traditional Battle of the Browser, to a fully-fledged global World Wide Web War. Google is making a bold move in challenging Microsoft’s OS dominance, but the old war horse still has some fight left, as evidenced by Microsoft moving in on Google’s search dominance with Bing and their deal with Yahoo. Read more…