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I have made the bold (and not completely painless) move to wordpress. All these posts have moved and any new posts will appear at nairnrobertson.com

Great list of free UX tools

Here's a great of free UX tools from UXforthemasses that's worth sharing.

While they do list some free prototyping tools my experience of them are not great. It's definitely worth spending the money on Axure or something similar. At some point in the past I tried Serena Composer but it was not that easy to pick up quickly and fairly heavy duty for most projects.

From their categories my favourites which I use most are:

Wireframing and prototyping - a pencil obviously but also Axure (although I am wondering about digging out an old copy of Dreamweaver to see if that's worth thinking about for prototyping with sometimes)

Annotation tools - protonotes as it can be integrated with Axure and doesn't need any browser plugins.

Lorem generator - personally I think Lorem should be removed from all ux and design as much as possible. It saves time early on, but it always catches up with you at some stage.

Screengrabbing - I'm a Fireshot fan

Usability testing - I haven't used it much so far but Loop11 is well worth a try.

I'm always looking for new ways to do things and am going to give Realizer an app prototyper a try soon.

Effective feedback with Protonotes with Axure

Often gathering feedback from a variety of client stakeholders can be a time consuming process. You send over wireframes or a prototype with an accompanying spreadsheet to help the client collate and de-dupe their feedback.

Then with any luck you get the spreadsheet back with nicely collated feedback that you then have to interpret. Inevitably there are some points which need further clarification and emails and calls follow.

What normally happens is your spreadsheet gets ignored and you'll get some emails containing feedback with various people copied in and discussions begin... which gets very confusing and you'll probably end up having a long call or meeting to sort it all out. All very time consuming indeed.

I've been trialling a way of allowing feedback to be put straight into a prototype. Protonotes is a simple system to put post-it notes onto html pages. No plug-ins or software needs to be installed. Some clever people have a found a way to integrate this easily with axure prototypes.


There's a little app which inserts the appropriate protonotes code into the header of the prototype. You then get the protonotes feedback bar at the top of the prototype - you can also alter the settings of this.

I've only used it a couple of times so far, but it's proved a much more engaging and effective way of gathering feedback.

30 seconds of usability testing...

And Empire online would spot something on their movie review pages which will be frustrating visitors to their reviews pages.

I clicked through three or four reviews thinking "their film reviews are the shortest I've ever read - too short in fact". Only after about the fourth page did I spot the big red link "Read The Full Empire Review »" immediately below the star rating.


Truth be told I they've noticed this problem and have tried to address it by making the link bigger and brighter - which unfortunately makes it look more like part of the advert and so probably makes the problem worse.

A few simple steps would improve this loads
- don't put an ad just below this critical link
- don't make the link so shouty as it just looks like an ad

Ad

Not ad

Nice Imperial War Museum site

We just recently launched a small but lovely site for the Imperial War Museum. The site supports a new gallery at IWM London created to showcase and celebrate winners of the Victoria and George Cross. The new gallery, paid for by a £5million donation from Lord Ashcroft contains the world's largest collection of VCs.

My role was research, requirements gathering, strategy and design of the layouts and so on. We went through a fairly standard process of requirements gathering and definition, sitemaps, sketch layout followed by wireframes in Axure. I built a light prototype in Axure and this pretty much served as the functional definition meaning that only a small amount of follow up functional definition was required.


Key to the site were the flash based story animations. For the prototype I used simplified placeholders to represent these with the key user journeys to clarify where the stories were to take users.

Through production there were some compromises and things which weren't quite as I'd have liked them, but overall it's a great site to have been involved in. Best of all IWM invited us to the private viewing in London with many Victoria and George Cross winners present which was mighty humbling.


Well done to Rich, the usual e3 suspects and Wendy. If you get the chance the gallery is well worth visiting - the stories are absolutely inspiring, humbling and extraordinary.

Nice finger tools prototype

Very nice new way of using touchscreens - the number of common tools is less than the number of fingers.

Long time no see

I have not blogged for sometime. I have been insanely busy on two major projects. I have become a husband and moved house. So all in all I've tended to use twitter now that I've been time poor.

Today I actually managed to read some stuff on the internet at lunchtime. This caught me eye... Google could run virtual ads on actual billboards in Google streetview.

"In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads."

Is this how the Matrix starts?