The World Cup of User Experience

Football is often viewed as the great social unifier.

If you’re in an awkward situation, just bring out the football talk. During the World Cup in particular, almost everyone has an opinion.

So, it may come as a surprise to you that the writer of this blog despises the beautiful game!

In an attempt to endear myself more towards this event where grown men run up and down a field in silly uniforms, I decided to do a little research into the applications out there and see which ones are dominating the market in terms of great UX, usability and graphics.

1.)    Best All-rounder  - World Cup Brazil 2014 
2.)    Best Betting-related app – Oddschecker
3.)    Best for Managing your Sweepstake – Shuffl.com
4.)    Best Football Manager - Football Manager Handheld 2014 SEGA
5.)    Best for Fantasy Football – Fantasy iTeam

Let me know which ones you’re obsessed with!

Which UI’s do you really like?  Which ones do you think could use some improvements?

Please let me know what you think by emailing me.

Card Sorting: A Deeper Look

For those of you who have spoken with us lot at IC Creative before, you will know that I look after the Usability / UX Research side of things. It’s always interesting for me to learn more about the field and I do like to find things out as I go along.

Coming from a very unmathematical / unscientific educational upbringing, my mind does boggle sometimes at the different methods and tools you guys use to elicit statistics and other user data.

Every now and then I’ll come across a really good article which gives me a bit more of an insight into what it is the professionals do on a day to day basis. This article has recently been written by Jessica Miller, Usability Tester at WalkMe in San Francisco, who writes extensively on usability topics.  In it, she discusses the pros and cons of card sorting – the troubles she has found with it, and a useful insight into how you could overcome the complexity and conundrums which can arise from this exercise.

This may be of use to anyone like me who just likes to learn about these things, or anyone out there who comes up against the same issues with reading card sorting data which she does.

She begins: I’ve mentioned usability card sorting in the past, briefly as one of the more popular prototyping and visualising approaches for designing UX. But, I’ve never really talked that deeply about it, and given its popularity, it’s time I remedied that…. read more here!

 

To discuss this or anything UX related, please contact Sam Emmett.