Author: Karl A L Smith

Banking change management UCD insights There has been massive change management taking place across all sectors of British banking over the last three years. Much of this is driven by buy outs and mergers, some by efficiencies and a little more recently through questioning the nature and controls around risk management. However simply changing the Read More

Subsistence, Resolution, Gain or Advantage UX? What do clients require, what are clients getting and can they tell the difference in the level of ux or do they just not call again? There is a major problem with user experience as it evolves, many practitioners are not underwriting their output with recent ux research but are Read More

Doing user experience The first step in user experience needs to be the recognition that every problem is different and will require a separate solution. Because if they are not, then every business is the same which they are clearly not. In effect there is no quick fix or standard solution method but rather there Read More

Setting the scene for user experience to work I have over the last few months had several rants about people claiming to be involved in user experience who are not regardless of their job titles. I came across a great blog post by Whitney Hess (I don’t want to steal her traffic so here is Read More

Acronym’s are exclusive I always wondered about an activity involved in making things easier to do and understand, using an acronym like UX, it seems quite exclusive to me. What I do I tend to work as User Experience Architect, I’m going to break this down a bit to the Who, What, How (-When and Read More

User centred design (UCD) User centred design (UCD) is a project approach that puts the intended users (audience) of a product or piece of technology at the centre of its research, design and development. It does this by talking directly to the user at key points in the project to make sure the product or Read More

Definition of User Experience (UX) User experience (UX) is about how a person feels, appropriates, attributes and the emotions engendered when thinking about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human interaction and ownership. It also includes a person’s perceptions (driven from a subject expert/specific Read More

2011/03/28 – Published I have just been confirmed as a Fellow of the British Computer Society.  Thanks to all my supporters. Additionally I have joined BCS ELITE Group (Effective Leadership in Information Technology) in order to progress the professional agenda of user experience. BCS ELITE Group   Read More

Clients don’t understand their customers, they just think they do! The most common problem with UX is based upon a limitation on research set by the clients themselves and the perception that they know ‘their users/customers’. Clients will often reduce or not pay for UX research, but this is like leaving out a building foundation because Read More

2011/03/28 – Published Visual cognition principles are vital to user acceptance Pre-accepted and trusted visual standards are vital to user acceptance and experience as they encourage adoption of technology systems. This is vital so that users don’t need to learn new or counter intuitive interaction behaviours. Context of visual cognition in computing terms Just as the creators Read More