Keeping up with the COVID-19 situation is a challenge. As the state-of-play changes on an hourly basis and new restrictions keep coming in, there is no time for businesses to adjust and spend the time they would normally have to develop the services their users need.

Our move to a virtual existence during these interesting times has revealed a number of unexpected things.

It feels all a bit strange at the moment doesn’t it? All this talk of staying at home, businesses closing and work standing still.

The information architecture of your website is its underlying foundations. It is the structuring, organisation and labelling of website content to enable users, who arrive at the home page, to meet their goals and complete tasks as quickly and easily as possible.

The number one piece of advice we can give anyone embarking on a user research project, is for you and your colleagues to watch it live, as it happens.

Knowledge comes in different types. When conducting UX research, the type of knowledge you are trying to tap into is important as it will determine:

You’ve just launched your new website. Congratulations! You followed all the UX best practice, engaged with users throughout the development process and have ended up with a beautiful, shiny, user-centred result.

When building a new website or redeveloping your existing one there are a number of milestone where you should be involving your users.

User experience (UX) is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the overall experience of a person using a product, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use”.

We had to have a plumber round the other day. Watching him at work (and pestering him with plenty of annoying questions) it quickly became apparent how much of his knowledge was subconscious. Decades of grovelling around under sinks and fiddling with boilers had ingrained these skills and expertise so deep in his brain that he often couldn’t articulate precisely what he was doing.