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.

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.

Over the last 18 years we’ve had the pleasure of working with a diverse range of clients, from eCommerce to financial services to charities to government bodies.

A successful website relies on more than just the people in the digital team. Marketing, product, policy and many other departments will have a role to play.

There are times we are asked to test websites just after launch in order to “validate“ the design.

There are many different ways to approach usability testing these days… lab-based testing, online surveys, field research and self-videoing testing to name just a few. While all have their place in the UX world, you need to consider carefully which methodology you choose. Pick incorrectly and you are likely to end up with low-quality insights and wasted time and money.

You’ve just completed a research project and have a shiny set of recommendations. You’d like to think that is the hard work done. However, in many organisations the implementation of these recommendations is often the harder part of the battle.

Before Steve Jobs revealed the original iPhone back in the summer of 2007, no one considered interacting with a phone without buttons. Now we don’t think twice about it.

Within the UX world, more and more technologies are emerging that measure users’ physiology to gain a deeper understanding of their thoughts and emotions. These include measuring heart rates, sweat gland activity and even brainwaves. One example is facial recognition software. By people in the know it is described as the ‘systematic analysis of facial expressions’. To everyone else it means using a computer to understand someone’s emotions by reading their expressions.