Category: User Experience
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Zoopla (Product Review)
I always like discovering new apps, playing with them and seeing what works for me and what doesn’t. I recently looked at some apps in the property finder’ space. Julie Zhuo has recently written up a good way to do a “product critique” which template I’ll apply to my app reviews. I recently used the iOS app from Zoopla, a…
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Why ‘single purpose’ apps are en vogue
As I’m currently investigating how to best simplify the ways in which user discover new content – as part of my day job as a product manager at Beamly – I have been thinking more about so-called ‘simple purpose apps’. The words ‘single purpose’ indicate that the apps focus on a singular user ‘job’ (I’ve written about ‘jobs’…
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How to do effective user interviews?
A few years ago I did a really useful online class on user interviews, which was instructed by Julie Blitzer. Julie is an experienced UX designer/strategist who shared some great learnings and tips on how to best do qualitative user interviews. This is the main thing that I learned from Julie’s session: Yes, you guessed it…
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Which principles do underpin game design?
Gamification is more than just creating some mechanisms around rewards and motivation. In his online lectures on gamification, Kevin Werbach – an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at Wharton School – explained about some of the design rules which underpin gamification and game design: Main learning point: It’s so easy to underplay the value of games…
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Using mental models to prevent “human error”
One of the last lectures of my online Human-Computer Interaction (‘HCI’) course by Scott Klemmer was all about “mental models” and their role within HCI. The proposition that people rely on mental models was first introduced by Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik who wrote that the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality that it uses to reason,…
As I learn ... 