Tag Archives: websites

Useful London-based UX Social Network sites

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wordridden/2993726470/

This is for the benefit of those who are interested to know more about the UX community here in the UK, although these resources are mostly London-based, with spillover membership from Brighton folks.

They’ve been extremely valuable for me as a budding UX practitioner.

http://london-ia.ning.com/ or Google “london ia ning”

Many, if not most, UX practitioners use this Ning site as their social network. If there was ever a one-stop community for London/UK-based HCI/UX practitioners, this is it.

Other groups (more job spam, less discussion)

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/london_usability/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/london-ia/
These two Yahoo groups are also popular for general posts. If you want a constant feed of employment opportunities (internships, job openings, volunteer opportunities, events, training, etc.), sign-up here.

IXDA.org

Not quite London-based, but has a lot of useful and practical discussions every single day. Members are mostly States-side, but is becoming increasingly international (UK esp.). Experts like Dan Saffer and Jared Spool regularly post content, which helps regulate a lot of discussions informally. Extremely useful and highly recommended.

UPA UK Chapter, http://www.ukupa.org.uk/

I think it’s worth becoming a member. Monthly events, free to members (free booze and snacks, good speaker content).

UX Book Club, http://uxbookclub.org/doku.php?id=london

You get to trash-talk your usability textbooks and classics here. Last month, we shot holes through Buxton’s Sketching book. This month, we’re doing Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. A good way to meet people because it’s more intimate and you talk about something in common.

Pretty much the same people end up going to these events because the UX community here is quite small. Plus, there are lots of current and ex-UCLIC students, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming.

Any that I may have missed out?

Vimeo encourages sign-up through comments subtly


I was watching Don Norman’s talk from UX Week ’08, and I’m not a member on Vimeo or anything, but the blurb at the comments section below was really nicely done. It really is encouraging me to be part of this, and this is an interesting example of “persuasive technology”.

For one, it’s almost static. There’s no “wizard of oz”-guy behind the system trying to get potential recruits to interact with the site.

Then, it’s partly contextual – because the video is a conference talk, it makes it even more appropriate to contribute to the conversation (I don’t know if they did that on purpose).

Thirdly, it’s placed appropriately in the comments section, although it doesn’t even say it’s a comments section. How did I know it? Well, I just assumed it. Most of us have gotten to a point of getting used to seeing comments as a trail below the main content. It just got picked up by Vimeo and used very subtly but very aptly.

Although it didn’t sign up immediately (because I wasn’t intending to participate in the conversation), I think someone who was interested in taking part in the conversation would, and that’s the point – making it easier for users to accomplish their goals – cordially, contextually, and effectively.

World Usability Day, talks at LBi

Today is World Usability Day. I attended an event hosted by UPA at LBi, on Baker Street. The usual light refreshments were served, and the talks were interesting – on the topic on transportation. There was another event going on at System Concepts where talks addressed the topic of Global Positioning Systems, which had a more ergonomic slant.

In conjunction with the UPA event, Aquent launched a directory for User Experience practitioners. I picked up a copy and there were a lot of interesting articles contributed by UPA professionals and other practitioners. The topics seemed to be cover a lot of trends that have been impacting the usability industry lately, such as the poor economic situation, advancing mobile devices, and employable skills. There’s a lot of subjectivity with a lot of usability topics, but the articles are mostly relevant and useful, if not timely. You might be able to get a copy from Human Factors International, UPA, or Aquent as they were the main sponsors.

I couldn’t remember all the names of the speakers featured today. Scott Weiss from Human Factors International opened up the session with a brief introduction to the transportation topic by sharing his own gripes about the TfL website and how challenging it was from a usability perspective for him to get from his home to the UPA event. He made an interesting point that the exemplar bus service routes displayed prominently on bus stands should be reproduced on their online variants for the same visual clarity. It was meant to be lighthearted, but it caused a bit of stir in the crowd as it was only scratching at the surface of both the merits and the pitfalls of the complex government-linked organization and its services.

Nevertheless, it got us thinking about transportation.

The next speaker then got us thinking about online airline ticketing websites, and how that has fundamentally changed the way people travel. A bit of historical backdrop reveals how the early ticketing websites were a far cry from the large computers that were used in traditional ticketing systems – surfacing from three months’ worth of three guys hacking away at computers in a garage, and ended up being sold for millions of dollars. There were references to EasyJet’s online ticketing system, which led to the next talk about a prototype future ticketing system, presented by Peter Otto from Flow Interactive.

The exciting part about this “EasyJet 2.0” system was about how it also deals with users’ questions of “I want to go somewhere but I’m not sure when” and “I’m not sure where I want to go” – rather than the buyer’s method of dealing with flight tickets. EasyJet 2.0 identifies pricing options for tickets on various dates in the year, giving users some idea of planning for a trip.

Also, for the case where users wasn’t sure where they wanted to go – they could browse major destinations from their home starting point, based on a specific budget. This was produced on a slick visual interface using charts and maps, that showed immediately which slots in the month were most cost-effective, and which places were best to visit at a certain price.

There’s an interactive page that shows how the whole thing works.

I’ll be attending the last UPA event for the year in a few weeks, hopefully.

The New Whitehouse.gov

Change has come to America… and to the Whitehouse website too. It’s been, er, Web 2.0ized. Clean, frugal lines, punchy and concise content, navigatable – I like it. And of course, it has a blog. If this was a branding exercise, it’d definitely be on the ball (or “spot on”, as the Brits like to say).

Interestingly, the “main” navigation isn’t along sidebars, but at the top menu bar and bottom footer – keeping the body fairly open for content – divided mostly into a 3-column layout or 2-column layout (with a right sidebar). Even content on the whitehouse blog is kept terse. The first post gets an average readability score of 11.3, which is slightly above what a teenager would be comfortable reading. Firefox showed up multiple RSS feeds, which was a bit confusing, but the blog does have an RSS feed.

Comments are closed for now, but it would be interesting to see how the site will evolve.

Accessibility could be improved, I guess. There’s a link for “Accessibility” in super tiny font at the bottom. This opens a page that explains the government’s stand on accessibility, but it doesn’t have the common characteristics of a page designed for accessibility (large fonts, condensed text).

Navigational fonts could be a little bigger, at the bottom.