I’ve been sponsored to attend the User Experience conference in Canberra on the 27th – 28th of August. The money is coming from FatDUX , a user experience and strategy agency in Copenhagen. The founders of the Ducks are senior practitioners with a background in advertising. It’ll be interesting to see how they’ve brought brand thinking into UX design, which is kind of what I’m doing at the moment at Cru Digital.
Below is a helpful list of dos and don’ts by FatDUX:
Here are 10 rules that will enhance the user experience of any website or online application:
1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.*
* Shamelessly stolen from George Orwell’s famous Rules for Writers
