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Are our Social Network friends really true friends?
December 15, 2011 Author: James Christie
Imagine that you are found dead on the street and the police have no way of identifying who you are. There is no paperwork on your body – and no way of contacting your next of kin. The only thing they have is a mobile phone – a handset which gives them access to your online social networks. Organising a funeral at very short notice, the authorities – on the same day as your cremation – invite all your followers from Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn.
But if all these followers turned up to see your coffin lowered into…
...Read the full postMust Have Xmas Toy Predictions for Christmas 2011 – Using Social Media
November 25, 2011 Author: Kristian Bannister
Can we use social media to predict what will be the best selling toy of Christmas 2011?
It’s no surprise that Christmas time is big business for toy manufacturers and retailers. In-demand Christmas toys have resulted in parents queuing up all-night outside shops to secure the likes of Teletubbies, Furbies and Buzz Lightyears. It’s no surprise then, that retailers often use forecasting techniques to predict what kind of demand there will be for the latest toys to hit the shelves. Toy store, Hamleys, made…
...Read the full postDesign Distractions and Designing the Wider Web
November 11, 2011 Author: Luke Hay
This is my final post in the series about UX Brighton 2011 and is an overview of the last two talks which both looked at different aspects of the future of design
Giles Colborne started his talk on how distraction affects design by accusing designers of killing their users. His evidence of this was the recent Blackberry outage which led to a big drop in traffic accidents as drivers were not being distracted by their devices. He went on to say that tablets and mobile devices are the worst offenders for distractions and, as sales of mobile devices have…
...Read the full postAgeism, Measuring the ROI of Design & Games Led Innovation
November 10, 2011 Author: Luke Hay
This is my third post in the series about UX Brighton 2011 and is an overview of three talks ranging from age discrimination to how to justify investment in design and how to encourage large businesses to think more creatively.
After lunch Simon Johnson spoke about the aging question, dignity through design, which highlighted not only the short-sightedness in overlooking user testing older people when designing but also the danger of grouping all ‘older’ users together. We’ve recently finished some user testing with users in the 50+ age bracket here at No Pork Pies so this talk was particularly interesting…
...Read the full postCross-channel User Experiences and Domain Driven Design
November 9, 2011 Author: Luke Hay
This is my second post in the series about UX Brighton 2011 and looks at two of the talks that touched on information architecture and how systems need to be more in line with human thinking than traditional IA taxonomy methods.
Andrea Resmini gave an interesting talk on Designing cross-channel user experiences and how the boundaries are blurring between the physical and the digital. His talk started by showing the difference between multi-channel and cross-channel communication. He argued that simply having a mobile version of your website is not enough to give a true cross-channel experience and that looking…
...Read the full postConnecting Anthropology and User Experience
November 8, 2011 Author: Luke Hay
Last week I attended UX Brighton 2011. After the success of their first conference last year the UX Brighton team had a lot to live up to. Fortunately this year’s conference was even bigger and better than UX Brighton 2010. I’ve split my thoughts on the conference into a series of four blog posts starting off with the first talk of the conference by Professor Robin Dunbar on Connecting anthropology and User Experience.
Various studies show that people have a cognitive limit of about 150 when it comes to their relationships with other people. This is the case for the…
...Read the full postWayne Rooney and the Worst Celebrity Adverts
November 4, 2011 Author: Kristian Bannister
While most people quickly reach for the remote when adverts come on TV, millions flock to YouTube every day to watch them. It could be argued that viral advertising has hit saturation point, with a lot of the same ideas being used over and over again.
When sport stars get involved, it usually involves super-human feats being performed with casual ease. Famous sports virals include Ronaldinho hammering consecutives volleys against the crossbar, Federer’s William Tell impersonation, and Beckham chipping footballs into bins 60 yards away; most of which are clearly made possible by in-camera…
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