My soup

“ It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it. ”

“ The most important thing that 2011 taught me about web design is that physical context of use can no longer be assumed by platform, only intentional context can. For the past couple of years, we have gotten into the habit of presuming that mobile means on-the-go, desktop denotes a desk, and tablet is on the toilet. But increasingly the lines are blurring on where devices are being used and how they’re being used in unison. This year I have learned to see devices as location agnostic and instead associate them with purpose—I want to check (mobile), I want to manage (desktop), I want to immerse (tablet). This shift away from objective context toward subjective context will reshape the way we design experiences across and between devices, to better support user goals and ultimately mimic analog tools woven into our physical spaces. ”

“ The trick when faced with a raft of public negative user feedback like the BBC has at the moment is picking out the signal from the noise. My maxim is always to fix anything that is actually “broken” - i.e. non-functional - but otherwise do no knee-jerk changes in response. If possible you should do some considered follow-up research amongst the users you were hoping to please, and check that you have pleased them. And, when you have a massive audience, you have to remember to design for the 80%, and to factor in the views and behaviour of the silent majority. ”

“ With mobile first, the end result is an experience focused on the key tasks users want to accomplish without the extraneous detours and general interface debris that litter many of today’s websites. ”

“ When you consider the amount of useless navigation, content fluff, and irrelevant promotions that litter a typical web experience, you realize why the mobile diet can be good for both businesses and customers. Once people use the mobile version, it’s not uncommon for them to pine for the desktop version to be “that simple. ”

“ Consider the social networking service Facebook. There are more than 250 million active users (http://bkaprt.com/mf/27) accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. These users are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users. ”

“ Fourteen percent of Twitter’s members use the mobile web experience compared to 8% using the native iPhone app and 7% using the Blackberry native app. ”

“ But in general, the trend seems to be toward making Facebook the connective tissue between you, the websites and apps you use, and your friends. ”

“ Public anger at bankers is easy to rouse, but no effective voice has yet turned that inchoate fury in a political direction. While Labour plays safe and sober, the government redirects indignation against benefit scroungers, rioters, Gypsies or any handy scapegoats. These are dysfunctional political times, when opinion polls show disproportionate wrath at the worse off and worse behaved while grand larceny from above goes unchallenged. ”

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Globalisation is an unstoppable force, driven in part by technology and in part by people. In thrusting people together – physically or virtually, or through mass travel and migration – people are aware of, mix with and compete with those of a different faith.

There are then two responses. One is to make sense of this interaction by establishing ways and means of living together, learning from each other and coexisting in mutual respect. The other is to react against the changes such a process brings and use religious faith as a badge of identity in opposition to those of another faith.

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User research often throws up problems beyond the scope of designing websites and applications. Awkward things like corporate focus, content freshness, customer service relationships and database quality problems.

All affect the user’s experience, yet addressing the business processes responsible is rarely seen as part of user experience design. Which is a shame because failing to address business issues can undo all our design work.

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“ Experience strategies are clearly articulated touchstones to guide product teams in all the decisions they make about technology and features. An experience strategy defines a product requirement from the perspective of the user, and what they want to accomplish, achieve, do. ”

“ You can keep trying to fix your own inbox, but the problem is actually with everyone else using email. ”