We often talk about dark patterns of user interfaces and how as User Experience practitioners you really should design a world that does no evil and rejects these dark ideals.
But it really doesn’t help when you get situations every day around you. When even the labelling on the food you eat is subject to the similar dirty tricks.
Now I eat a good deal of salmon, I try and get it as fresh as I can, but sadly sometimes that’s only out of a can. The other day we encountered this issue with Safcol Salmon.
There seems to be this idea of late promoting that all you need to design a user experience is a single developmental / design platform. As if this platform is all that is required, the UX nirvana, the ulitmate UX tool.
This is a little like saying that your experience with a cup of coffee is directly reliant on the brand coffee making equipment and tools that where used to brew the cup. With no consideration to given to the farmer, buyer, roaster, and the barista and the like.
To often we see focus groups being used as the core evaluation and research tool within a web design project. Why!?
Focus groups are in the main used to evaluate and get recommendations from customers on the proof of concepts or prototypes. They have a strength in gathering people’s judgements, emotions and possible interactive scenarios from the group as a whole.
If you don’t know I have no love for focus groups, I have yet to see them produce any results that have not been tainted or saturated in biases. To the extent that they were just unusable. With the research or evaluation having to be conducted by some other technique later on in the project. Often at an extra expense.
