User experience = customer experience = customer service
Posted by: Martin Pim-Keirle
I recently changed energy providers. Not an especially interesting revelation I admit: why would anyone else care whose logo is at the top of my electricity and gas bills? But I'd say that the reason for changing provider is interesting, because this is the first time I can recall consciously having made a purchase decision based on the quality of user-experience on a website.
It isn't that long ago that the user-experience of a company's website was no more than incidental to the overall customer experience, and an optional part of the customer's relationship with the business. These days it clearly makes sound financial sense for almost any business to encourage its customers to self-manage online, and now regular contact with the website has become an absolute requirement of that relationship.
The Great Auros Mince Pie User Experience Test
Posted by: Martin Pim-Keirle
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or pies, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Our test subjects, ready and waiting.
In a move that is in no way intended to be interpreted as light-hearted Christmas fun, we at Auros have decided to once and for all answer the pressing question of which mince pies offer the best User Experience. Not since the infamous Mince Pie Inquisition of 1643 (which resulted in the deaths of 13 bakers, sentenced to execution by being soaked overnight in brandy, wrapped in all-butter shortcrust pastry, and baked in a hot oven for 30 minutes), has such a thorough test of the pie-maker’s art taken place.
Risking diabetes and obesity, our small band of dedicated fatties Mince Pie User Experience Analysis Executives set out to perform a series of rigorous tests that would stretch their waistbands dedication to the scientific process to breaking point.
When the best user experience isn’t the best user experience
Posted by: Martin Pim-Keirle
I've recently been reading a fairly lightweight, factual book on our Kindle. It's probably been about six months since I've done this, as my wife has had sole custody of the thing for an age, apparently reading Agatha Christie's entire back-catalogue. Anyway, as when I first bought the thing, I have been marvelling at what a nice user-experience it provides. So light, so easy to read, so comfortable to have my thumb by the next-page button and so romp through any given book, never seems to need charging, and so on. It would be fair to say that, as far as I was concerned, the user-experience lacked nothing.
Having recently finished making a vast set of built-in bookshelves for our living room, I have finally got around to unpacking all of our books from their hiding place in the loft. To be fair, we have only been living here for two-and-a-half years...! One of the books unpacked was a rather nice hardcover version of the same book I'm reading on the Kindle. I now seem to recall buying it, nearly new, from a bootsale shortly after it came out. This seemed to be a good excuse to try out a back-to-back comparison, so that night I read the next 3 chapters from the book instead.
Creating a new icon
Tags: Design, Development, Usability, UX
Posted by: Martin Pim-Keirle
What do you do when you need to convey some information using iconography, and no pre-existing design pattern seems to fit? This was a challenge we recently faced whilst modifying the user interface on a piece of software.
The section of the UI (user interface) was a nested collection of tick-boxes. That is to say, there are parent tick-boxes, and a little [+] symbol on the left of each to click, whereupon the child-items appear, and some of these may also have child-items and so on. What we needed was a way of indicating to the user when a child-item of a tick-box was selected, even though the parent item was not. And given that some of the categories ran up to 5 levels deep, we couldn't simply rely on the user opening out the tree of items to check what was or wasn't ticked.
