FAQs - not great for UX, whatever Nielsen says

At the end of last year, Nielsen Norman Group published an article talking up the website FAQ. I usually only post on positives and what I think is good advice, so didn't blog about this as I didn't agree. However, a couple of responses to this contentious article are well worth a read.

The fold still matters, says Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen's company have just released an interesting study on user attention and willingness to scroll. The bottom line: the top of the page is still critically important despite the wide range of browsing devices now in use.

UX Maturity - free breakfast briefing in Edinburgh in February

User Vision are running another of their great, free sessions next month. This time the topic is UX maturity in the organisation.

What user research when?

Christian Rohrer's graphing of user research techniques has been around for a while; he's just written a great article about it for Jakob Nielsen's useit.com.

Lou Rosenfeld, elephants and research silos

A lovely article in which Lou Rosenfeld tells a few stories and makes a very important point - bring together what you learn from different research techniques for maximum insight.

Why Currys made me think about the UX of our services

Sitting on the bus the other day, I picked up a copy of the free newspaper - the Metro. The outermost pages were an advert for the electrical retailer, Currys. It was a really nice ad; one that I took back to the office to share with the team.

Remote testing session at User Vision

I went along to another excellent breakfast briefing session put on by Edinburgh UX consultants User Vision. They've made the slides available on Slideshare too.

Writing copy for interfaces - microcopy

Nicole Fenton tells us a couple of stories that lead to some really great points and advice on labels, help and error messages for user interfaces. This is a transcript of a presentation, and it reads like a really nice, engaging article.

Gestalt principles primer for interaction design

If you design interfaces on any level, you need to know about Gestalt Principles. I'm sure any designer reading this will be in granny sucking eggs territory, so this one is for the project managers, the business reps and the tech developers...

Free remote usability testing taster

I've been a long time subscriber to the remote usability testing tool UserTesting.com. They've recently introduced a free taster service - "Peek" - which I recommend you try out.

Navigation resources

Jeff Sauro pulls together a collection of articles, software and other useful stuff relating to planning website and application structure and navigation.

Simplifying user research at the UK Government Digital Service

Head of User Research Lisa Reichelt has written an interesting blog post about how the complexity of problems can be paralysing. She says that when "...it depends..." comes up, it's potentially over complicating things.

IA & Content Strategy - my bluffers guide to open source developers

I gave a presentation today at the Edinburgh Open Source Breakfast session, a monthly developers meet up. I had 40 minutes on the topic of information architecture and content strategy so even squeezing in a bluffer's guide was a bit of a tall order.

What's with UX in Higher Ed? My presentation to IWMW 2014

Earlier this month, I presented at the UK Higher Education Web Managers Conference, IWMW. I talked about how user experience skills and techniques aren't as prevalent in higher education as they are in other sectors and why I thought this might be. The slides were quote and image heavy, so here is a transcript of what I said, interspersed with what my audience were tweeting as they listened.

UX activity in UK Higher Ed web teams

To help me prepare for a presentation I'm giving at this year's IWMW web managers conference I sent out a survey to web teams asking about the user experience (UX) research and design work they do, and how formally it was integrated into their role.

McGovern - how searching has changed

Content management specialist Gerry McGovern's latest article is a nice summary of how he sees search behaviour and how it's changed over the past few years.

Information Architecture's relationship with navigation design

A couple of good articles that talk about the relationship between website navigation design and information architecture (IA) and highlight what makes them distinct.

Ongoing CMS development - the NY Times

A really nice article from the developers of the New York Times' in-house content management system, Scoop. How they evolved it, why and how, and where they're heading next.

Email content management checklist

An excellent piece from Georgy Cohen for higher ed content strategy website meetcontent.com. If you're involved in regular email communications you should check your activity against her sound advice.

UX in Higher Ed - my talk at July's IWMW

I love the IWMW conferences (the annual event for UK higher education web professionals). Always come away with new ideas and food for thought. Always meet good people. But I've been thinking about what I don't get from the IWMW. And it's this thought that's prompted me to speak at this year's conference being held in Newcastle in July.