You will have noticed we missed another weekly blog post last week. Take it as a sign that we are really busy :)
UXurls
(contributed by Melissa)
You've seen popurls.com but now there's UXurls.com. It's an aggregation of everything UX from the last 24 hours, created by Harry Brignull, who says:
It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at the sites I’m reading.
This blog is not one of the 130 sites Harry has included, so you'll still need to come back and visit us :)
Rapid desirability testing
(contributed by Chris)
On UXmatters, Michael Hawley shares a case study where his team used the Product Reaction Cards developed by Microsoft Research to assess the "desirability" of design alternatives, from the user's point of view:
To test which approach would best align with our intended goals, we conducted a desirability test using product reaction cards. Starting with the full Microsoft list of cards, we revised the list to include only the adjectives we felt were important for this brand, after assessing our early user research. We narrowed the final list to 60 adjectives, but kept the 60/40 split between positive and negative terms Benedek and Miner had suggested.
We've used this technique, or a very similar approach, on many occasions. The Product Reaction Cards are quite versatile and can be used in many other situations also. For example, for producing a view of the desired future state of a system, which can be very interesting in comparison/contrast with that group of people's view of the current system.
In another recent project, users were asked to liken the website concepts to an image of a person. The images personified a variety of emotional responses, for instance a cool, young woman or an older, corporate gentleman. Overall, users felt one of the designs was quite young and feminine, which is what the project aimed to achieve.
Experience maps
(contributed by Angus)
We really like Gene Smith's experience maps, produced for a recent project:
[...] the research was much richer than anything we could capture in an alignment model. Hardcore gamers invest a lot of time--on forums, in stores, with friends--before buying a game. We wanted to show how these different experiences shaped their behaviour.
The solution we came up with was an experience map--a diagram that combines a persona with an abstracted story about the gamer's journey from researching games to purchasing, playing to sharing experiences about that game. The story includes the details on the different channels where gamers get their information along with supporting quotes form our research.
They are great diagrams, I imagine most UX practitioners would be very envious of such high quality deliverables!
Researchers plan to automate web image description
(contributed by Pat)
In what might help to improve website accessibility, the E-Access Bulletin reports that a new UK academic research network aims to enable computers to describe visual content on web pages:
The network is aiming to develop a web browser plug-in which would be able to analyse an image and describe it to a visually impaired user. It is one of a number of projects exploring computer vision and computer language programming to be undertaken by the new V&L Net – the Vision and Language Network of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
