tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48799103102273503772024-03-05T11:09:34.837+00:00Thought Into DesignUser Experience articles and informationAlan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-41838812315753337972017-11-09T10:42:00.002+00:002017-11-09T10:42:28.663+00:00Using Flask on dreamhost problems
We're updating our website here at Thought Into Design to reflect our firmer move into education. We wanted a site that discussed the kinds of things we're offering so that people know.
But a new design meant uploading a new site! And we had problems with Dreamhost and thought to document them here in case they're any use to anyone else.
Matt Carrier has a great page on setting flask up at Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-60867265479183679632017-08-11T11:50:00.000+01:002017-08-11T11:50:45.443+01:00Research trip to Singapore
We've just returned from a long research trip where we attended the Speciality Fine Foods Asia event in the Suntec Convention Centre in Singapore. We learned a lot of great things about the food and drinks market in Singapore (and south-east Asia!) and are developing the markets in the region for user research and UX design.
We're also planning some workshops in south-east Asia where we'll be Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-12200969563929059282017-08-10T17:19:00.004+01:002017-08-10T17:19:35.045+01:00International research & conferences
I've been invited to give the plenary talk at the PSITE conference in Tacloban, Philippines. It is a real honour to present an outline of user research and user experience design to such an important group of IT educators and I hope I can reward them with a fantastic talk.
The conference is 19–21 October 2017 and I'll be there with my company, Thought Into Design, the whole time.
We're also Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-81724819986831644022017-02-25T12:25:00.000+00:002017-02-25T12:25:00.671+00:00Statistics Routines
In addition to work on SigmaSwiftStatistics, we're writing some statistics libraries for other languages.
We're a bit sneaky, because we find this a great way to get familiar with languages old and new, but it also provides a useful service for everyone else.
Currently, we're writing some routines in Ada to complement the Swift ones. You can get the Ada code here. We'll be creating a Prolog Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-64717903695040943202017-02-19T20:14:00.002+00:002017-02-19T20:19:00.026+00:00Consulting at the Department for International Trade
Thought Into Design Ltd is heavily involved with some research activities at the Department for International Trade (DIT). We're very excited to be collaborating with DIT on a range of research projects. We've already undertaken some usability testing and we're hoping to add our skills and knowledge to all the rest that the DIT has available.
This is coming very soon after our stint at helping Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-66081425661824219592017-02-18T11:13:00.000+00:002017-02-18T11:13:34.049+00:00Trying out Swift
Lately, at Thought Into Design, we've been trying out Swift. This was partially so that we could write apps for iOS and OSX (or is that MacOS now?) but it is also good to learn the foibles of a new language's syntax.
Our most recent work has myself (Alan) contributing towards an open source statistics library called SigmaSwiftStatistics. It's been great fun so far and we've contributed a few Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-33962434325519659992015-02-13T02:35:00.000+00:002015-02-16T09:19:06.992+00:00Fast prime numbers in Python
I spent some time recently on Project Euler and got side-tracked by the efficient calculation of prime numbers. After using a brute force method (iterating through a range of numbers and trying to find their factors), I read around and found a nice page at http://rebrained.com/?p=458, I found a good Stack Overflow page at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068372/Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-1335728725663735762013-08-23T12:34:00.001+01:002013-08-23T12:34:52.800+01:00Crowd-sourcing research
One idea I had a few years ago was to use the various crowd-sourcing websites as a source of willing and cheaply-paid participants for UX research.
Wait, you fool! You cannot do an hour-long usability session like that!
Well, the keyword is reductionism. UX research is discovering brain and behaviour. It's psychology. And a few psychologists have already been using crowd-source sites as Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-48529006971809936962013-07-09T14:04:00.000+01:002013-07-09T14:04:41.952+01:00Will UX exhaust itself?
When I first started in the field (originally doing usability along with some design), it was easy to make an impact. Just think of all those nasty 1990s websites with fundamental flaws that could remedied with a wave of a good developers hand? It was like that.
But now, the whole world is getting on-board with user experience and the upshot is that everyone is a little more savvy than they Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-68331194782943683702013-05-19T10:22:00.004+01:002013-05-19T10:22:43.930+01:00Excel for serious data analysis?!
Let's all laugh at Excel - sure, I do. When doing data analysis, it's
good for data entry but I'd hate to rely on it for anything serious.
But a while ago, I came across a good use case for it. I'm sure R
could do the same thing fairly well if needed, but here's a nice quick
and dirty method of exploring data sets with lots of variables.
What's the problem with lots of variables? Data Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-45711976694948328062013-02-24T21:18:00.003+00:002013-02-24T21:18:51.140+00:00Perfect job description and ugly companies
Picture this: You're searching for the perfect employee and your job description rocks. Everything is perfect -- or is it? Is your JD scoring the perfect candidate? Or have you scored an own-goal?
As a freelancer, I spend a lot of time browsing job adverts. Many are fairly anonymous, standard-text type affairs, but a bit of close reading can usually get some useful information even from these. Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-34617068753748546002013-01-29T18:30:00.001+00:002013-01-29T18:33:08.511+00:00SEO: Scraping synonyms from Wikipedia
Here's a Python script for scraping synonyms from Wikipedia. You provide the core keywords, and Python (plus the BeautifulSoup module) will get the synonyms.
The last article I wrote about getting SEO keywords from Wikipedia seemed interesting to people. The method was, however, manual, which takes time and effort to complete for more than a couple of keywords.
If you want to hurry things up Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-64512758277547313862013-01-15T16:08:00.004+00:002013-01-15T16:09:30.587+00:00Some SEO tips keywords
Here's a quick tip to get keywords to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) using Wikipedia - for free! Enter your term into Wikipedia. If it's a brand name, enter the product type (e.g., "handbags').
Click on 'Toolbox' to the left and then 'What links here', and you'll be shown a new page that details all inbound links to that page within Wikipedia.
Then, under 'Filters', 'hide' both Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-54802447243105077402013-01-13T16:28:00.000+00:002013-01-13T16:28:39.007+00:00Prolog and UX Planning
Summary: Prolog is a logical programming language that can help craft perfect sitemaps and workflows by ensuring solutions meet all business and technical constraints. Here, I'll chat a little about Prolog and how it might be used, with more detailed information coming in future.
Part of Thought Into Design's work is natural language interfaces. Among the many tools we use is a language called Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-40801129548170077332013-01-13T14:02:00.001+00:002013-01-13T14:05:03.614+00:00Twitter Bootstrap for Responsive UX Design
Summary: We redesigned a website to be responsive using Twitter Bootstrap and JQuery to create design documentation. Bootstrap proved to be an effective tool for conventional interactions but less use with more complex stuff.
One task we've done lately has been to redesign the Thought Into Design site. It's quite boring and uncommunicative and the analytics suggest that there engagement Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-70739321911738819382012-12-17T16:55:00.000+00:002012-12-17T16:55:51.636+00:00Wireframing with LibreOffice
Given the mass of excellent wireframing tools, does FOSS software offer a cheap and ethical alternative? In this article, LibreOffice's Draw component gets tested for real work.
I'll admit it: I'm not sure whether I should be using OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice or whatever. For this, I used LibreOffice.
My relationship with this monster package goes back some time. I recall using Star Office Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-62972995751547243412012-09-19T11:15:00.000+01:002012-09-19T11:15:21.597+01:00Inkscape for UX design
I know that suggesting an open source tool like Inkscape for a design where Illustrator is thoroughly embedded comes across somewhat like recommending a typewriter to a blogger for writing but having used it lately, I'm quite impressed.
This is a part of a series about UX design with open source tools but just a quick overview rather than a detailed review. There are many reviews out thereAlan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-92216183671600505362012-09-08T08:04:00.001+01:002012-09-08T08:04:06.718+01:00DuckDuckGo Sugar and Gold
Just in case you don't know, there's a search engine called Duck Duck Go (apologies to Gabriel and team if the spelling is incorrect!). I've been using it for a while now and even had a rap with the founder Gabriel Weinberg about this time last year (my Ph.D. thesis was on search engine usability).
One reason I liked it enormously was that it returned results with a very high precision. In Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-34909810087492695402012-09-02T22:16:00.001+01:002012-09-02T22:16:33.105+01:00UI InterfacesUI Interfaces, a set on Flickr.A regular update of my latest user interface designs. These come from various sources.Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-8299045894174360362012-08-31T08:53:00.003+01:002012-08-31T08:53:43.149+01:00The Web's visual language
Current interactions are far more complex than they used to be and will probably get even more tricky. However, the interaction language we use is finding it hard to cope.
This redesign I've been doing for Analytics SEO is coming on well but one thing about this and many previous designs has been nagging me.
When I first used the Web in 1994-5, interactions were simple. Links were (generally) Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-1689221573654967832012-08-30T17:46:00.000+01:002012-08-30T17:49:09.610+01:00Cognitive modelling
Introduction: This article is one I wrote some time ago about modelling cognition and never released. It's incomplete but might be useful to spur thought and conversation. I suspect that it's more about mental models - my concept of cognitive models were more functional and evidence-based.
What is this and is it useful to practical usability work?
Yes it is useful indeed. Most current work in Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-92048444935544205262012-08-29T15:11:00.000+01:002012-08-29T15:35:36.219+01:00Be good, always help
In some work for the Analytics SEO re-design, one of colleagues liked the idea of giving users some information from a drop down.
Okay, let's step back a bit. You know that on many sites in the top (and often right) there are links to various user account functions: things like the user name and avatar, link to my account, log / sign out, and so on. Well, DropBox put all of these into an Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-58385419311921882072012-08-29T09:24:00.000+01:002012-08-29T09:24:15.262+01:00Keyword Suggestions tool for SEO and market research
Part of my role at Analytics SEO is doing research. It sounds like an excuse to goof off and spend time messing around with natural language processing techniques, search engines and the like. And to be fair it is!
One of the first pieces of research I did was looking into the keyword suggestions offered by search engines. You know when you type something in and a drop-down appears below Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-16683280491828927512012-08-26T10:22:00.000+01:002012-08-26T10:22:18.539+01:00Pencil by Evolus - Review of a Wireframing Tool
Most UX designers I know are always questing for the next best wireframing tool. It's not like Balsamiq, Fireworks, Axure of whatever are bad; but UX designers, as a whole, spend an awful lot of time creating wireframes. Programmers: it's like the time you invest in learning a great editor or IDE. Yeah, the real work is done in our heads but creating an electronic representation is a core part Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879910310227350377.post-68088622257710722082012-08-11T07:33:00.000+01:002012-08-11T07:33:09.749+01:00User Experience with Open Source Tools
This must be my third week using open source tools for user experience and, to be honest, the experience has been okay. The tools are mostly extremely capable - the most impressive tools were for statistics (R and PSPP) and Pencil, a rapid wireframing program.
My work has lately been data analysis: I've been comparing a tool from my company against competitors. Coming from a background in Alan James Salmonihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11125423498292897241noreply@blogger.com0