Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Bringing together a fantastic panel of industry leading guests, including:

• Jakob Nielsen, Principal of Nielsen Norman Group
• Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress
• Todd Purgason, Creative Director of Juxt Interactive
• Nick Finck, Web Analyst and Information Architect for Digital Web
• Eric Jordan, President and Creative Director of 2advanced

…Scene360 have asked a series of questions and raised issues to see what the hype is about tools and technologies, where we are at present time, and where we may be in the future.

The full article, titled Web Special: Past, Present and Future… creating for the web is a very useful read which tackles questions such as:

• What are common accessibility or/and usability errors found on websites? Do you care about issues from W3C (w3.org)
• Flash technology is popular. Adobe confirmed it with buying Macromedia. We see web studios, Group94 and HiReS!, dedicating a big percentage of projects in Flash. Are Flash sites just a trend and overall useless? Or do you consider there is room for Flash as there is with CSS, and yes, there are well-constructed sites with usability?
• Name a site that you consider an exceptional example (Paul Rouke comment – in relation to Flash). Explain briefly why.
• There is a lot of talk about “Function vs. Form”, which most of the time is actually related to “Visual Design vs. Backend Programming”. This topic has been known to cause frustration and controversy among designers and developers. What is good, what is not?—conflicting opinions that not always contribute to improving the Web. What can we do to unite these professions of different personalities, yet working in the same industry, if not together?
• Blogs are a phenomenon. Almost everyone has one, and it is simple to set up through open-source software. Blogs have influenced the growing use of standardized structured sites. What is your view on this phenomenon?
• What technology trends do you think will be used in the future?
• Because we don’t like concluding an interview with just a typical question: “What the future will hold?” Please highlight three issues or thoughts about the Web that is disregarded or you feel important to share with our readers.

In all I felt this extensive article was a great read and I expect it to circulate the net quite quickly.

The recent annual report by IMRG says that e-commerce sales are growing faster than ever before, and predicts online sales in the UK will reach £78bn a year by 2010.

For those businesses beginning to truly harness the potential of their online sales channel, by investing resources into the likes of usability and information architecture, to provide their exisiting and new customers with a user centred design and shopping experience, are much more likely to both survive in and excel in the online arena as it matures over the next few years.

More information can be found on this online eretail report summary by E-consultancy.

A very worthwhile and interesting user interface gallery has recently been promoted by Thomas Baekdal, a Change Advocate and an Information Architect.

The gallery is the work of Chris Messina of Citizen Agency, and 1 quote summarises why this gallery is useful for myself and I expect other user experience and interface designers:

“Reuse, recycle, but don’t reinvent the wheel unless necessary”

by Brian Christiansen at UI Engineering.

E-commerce Design Patterns

Following on from this quote, the term e-commerce design patterns, defined as follows by Mike Baxter, the director of Sales Logiq:

“E-Commerce Design Patterns are a distillation and summary of best practice, that can be applied quickly and effectively to create a variety of specific design solutions”

This area of user experience and usability is one in which I will be posting about in much more detail during the coming months. This is a result of my 6 years experience as lead user experience designer at Littlewoods Shop Direct, designing key e-commerce pages such as homepages, category pages, product detail pages, shopping baskets and personal account areas, along with complete checkout redesign projects, one of which I have produced a an e-commerce conversion case study for checkout case study over at PRWD. This experience from 2000-2006 has provided me with extensive awareness and knowledge of how large blue chip companies are (or not) adopting e-commerce design patterns, and I look forward to sharing these insights here for you to read and comment on.