UX

Actually I've never been to a Mayo Clinic and to be honest I hope I never need to visit one. I am, however, a frequent visitor to the Mayo Clinic website. Over the last two years I've had the chance to work on design projects for a number of health-related websites and I often turn to the Mayo Clinic website for inspiration.

I’ve been following, with some interest, over the last few years the open data movement. For me it started with Hans Rosling’s 2006 TED talk: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen.

Last Fall, Karyn, Jessica and I attended the Gel Health Conference in New York. It was an amazing experience.

One of the main attributes of the design work we at ADGi do (and when I say design I mean interaction design and information architecture, not so much visual design) is that all of it is evidence-based. That is, all of it, and I really mean all of it, every interaction, every node in the site map, is driven out of user research and expert analysis.

It’s been a year full of wonderful (travel!, new job!) and some not so wonderful experiences – lots of false starts and surprises. Thankfully, things have turned out very well in the end, but the trend continues through December. As a last test for my endurance and patience, my husband got very sick with the H1N1 flu and was unable to help with any holiday preparations. None.

I am a search engine junky. Whenever I have a technical issue that I need to resolve, my first line of attack is to Google it. With an abundance of people sharing their knowledge and experiences on the Internet, I am confident that the answer to my question is out there somewhere.

Thanks to the brains behind today's search algorithms, searching for things we know is incredibly easy. It's what we don't know that is difficult to find.

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A usability study, is that like a focus group?

Clients sometimes ask this question when we start talking about doing usability testing on their website or product. The answer is “well sort of, but not really.”

You know those funny, interesting, inspirational, and distracting  links emailed from friends?  StumbleUpon takes this concept to the next level in terms of scale.

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Should you ditch your favourite search engine and move over to Bing? Probably not - and here is why, from a user experience point of view.