The notion that people’s attention span is shorter when reading on the Web is well known. The number of possible distractions and other things that you could be doing right now is far greater than if you were reading a book on a secluded beach. Catering for short attention spans Because people are seemingly in [...]
Last week I conducted my first ethnographic study as part of a university group project. Our task was to go into people’s homes and learn about how they share and store photos, whether that’s in digital or physical form. While other members of my group surveyed young couples and families, I went and talked to [...]
Of the most commonly available methods for visualising data, radar graphs seem to be the least used. When I asked for examples on UXExchange, there were very few that people could think of. So what makes people avoid them and why are they so rare? Under the radar When you look at a radar graph, [...]
When I founded Thunderbolt over nine years ago, the web was a very different place. There was no Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Nine years is a huge amount of time on the web and most sites don’t manage to last half of that, especially smaller ones. So how did we manage to [...]
Recently Facebook made a minor change to their inbox message page which has improved its usability considerably. It’s a great example of how small adjustments to an interface can make a huge difference. Perhaps you won’t have noticed it, so let’s first take a look at what the message toolbar used to look like: Looks [...]
Last year, the University of Nottingham extended the campus I have all my lectures on and added a number of new buildings. These look funky and modern, but whoever designed them seems to have forgotten one key detail: no-one can use the doors. What would you expect to do to open these doors? I go [...]