A remote change for user research?

I recently had a chance of carrying out remote research and usability testing for a keyword research service based here in London. This experience led me to many interesting insights that I decided to share with the user experience community.
Remote research is an extremely appealing proposition for the myriad of fast, innovative, small and medium firms marketing their online services and web applications to an international audience. But it could also be used by large corporate organisations to carry out more frequent user research programs.

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User Centred at a Glance

Tag clouds have never been particularly useful… they give ‘at a glance’ view of the content of a website, but they have very little potential for wayfinding… try even finding the link to your own bookmarks in a Del.icio.us tag cloud – presenting categories and subcategories is more effective.

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iPhone virtual keyboard leads to poor user experience

Eventually, there is sound evidence validating my first impressions of the virtual keyboard of the iPhone:
Although iPhone users were able to text as quickly as QWERTY-keyboard owners, iPhone typists made more than twice as many errors. Even worse, many of these errors were left uncorrected, apparently due to (lack of) familiarity with the magnifying glass [...]

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Why doing user research first is right

I have found an interesting column from Donald Norman about how the role of user research in the software/web development process, though I have to say that I find the premise of his quite contentiious. I agree with him when he says that lengthy, time-consuming field work must take place before the project starts, but even with the ball running and in a limited time frame it is possible to know a lot about the users.

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Why Forrester got it wrong on User Experience?

Features and patterns should never be the primary focus of a User-centred Experience Design process. We should rather research on user most frequent tasks before jumping into designing RIAs (Rich-Internet Applications). In a nutshell, before looking at your patterns library, get to know users and tasks!

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UX Trends in the 2007 UPA Salary

I just found a fresh UPA 2007 salary survey out in my mailbox… there are a couple of interesting thoughts that I would like to share with you.

First of all, the survey has a quite a large sample: 1523 people answered to the survey, with the vast majority in US (999) and then the other [...]

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