Note: cross-posted from the PlusNet Community site.

Myself, Sam & Matt went out to Sheffield city centre on Monday afternoon for a spot of user testing. It’s the first user test I’ve run in the wild, previous times have been with friends & family or work colleagues. It was an interesting afternoon and we certainly learned a lot. Read more »

I had a quick play with Google Lively this morning. I’m going to avoid the obvious what-the-hell-is-Google-doing-releasing-a-shit-imitation-of-Second-Life question that everybody else is asking and instead look at some of the usability issues I encountered. Read more »

Luke Wroblewksi’s new book on web form design, cunningly entitled Web Form Design, is an excellent work. It’s very easy to read (I breezed through chapters 2-6 last night) and full of screenshots and bullet-pointed, actionable design guidelines at the end of each chapter. Read more »

Today’s Gmail Labs announcement got me thinking about ways to allow users to customise a site. Greasemonkey is amazing but the problem is that the scripts are stored with the browser on the client-side. So if I install a script to enhance Gmail on my desktop, I will still get the unenhanced version when I log into Gmail on my laptop. But since the user script is just a bit of JavaScript, couldn’t Gmail allow me to install the user script on the server and then serve it back to me wherever I choose to access Gmail from? It’s only serving me the scripts I installed so it’s no more of a security risk than client-side Greasemonkey. Read more »

Facebook’s photo albums have the potential to be really, really good. As it is they’re just about passable. I’d like to present my vision for a proper, integrated photo sharing experience. If anyone from Facebook is listening, give me a call - I want to help you! Read more »

Thanks to everyone who came down to the Fat Cat this evening. I had a great time and I think others did too. Here are the slides from my Pecha Kucha presentation. Read more »

So it’s Monday again and… what it’s Tuesday? Where did Monday go? And I’ve got to do what by the end of the week? If being back at work after a bank holiday weekend of basking in the sun is making you feel a little stressed, here are some cool things to cheer you up.

• Festo AirJelly - a flying jellyfish airship thing. Very calming.
• Clock Sculpture - 150 separate hands that rotate to spell out the name of the current hour
• One Day Poem Pavillion - holes drilled in the ‘pavillion’ form patterns on the floor which spell out a different poem every hour
• Do web sites need to look exactly the same in everybrowser? - unambiguously answers one question
• Lip Dub Stars - turn up the volume for this one!

It’s become quite a common practice to ask for websites to ask for your email address twice on sign-up forms. Re-confirming your email address supposedly reduces the chance of typing it in wrong altough I’ve often wondered if it’s really worth the extra effort. In any case I, like many people, save time by copying & pasting the address from the first form field into the second form field.

The folks at the Travel Lodge clearly decided that people like me shouldn’t be allowed to use our best judgement in filling out their sign-up form and have disabled pasting into the email reconfirmation field! By adding onpaste="return false" to each of the <input> tags they effectively prevent anyone with JavaScript enabled from pasting content into the form fields.

It confused the hell out of me. And annoyed me. But it did force me to retype my email address.

I’m honoured and excited to be doing a presentation at the first GeekUp Sheffield next Wednesday. It’s a condensed version of a workshop I did at PlusNet last month about how usability affects every aspect of our lives. By making people think about usability in everyday life I hope to encourage developers and designers think about usability in their work too. The presentation format is Pecha Kucha (20 slides shown for 20 seconds each) which I have never done before. I’m preparing the slides now and finding it quite challenging!

So if you’re in Sheffield on 7th May, pop down to the Fat Cat on Alma Street for some geeky fun. It’s free but you’ll have to buy your own beer. Big thanks to Jag Gill for making it happen.

I’ll be going to Chinwag Live: Real World Usability next week courtesy of PlusNet. It’s a panel discussion about where usability is headed as a discipline. Not sure quite what to expect but they’ve got some good speakers so it should be interesting. I’ll be blogging it on the Community Site.

Update: Blog review now posted