All posts by Alastair Campbell

24th January 2012 by Alastair Campbell | User Experience

For World Usability Day I provided 8 tips (tweets) on Information Architecture “truisms”. Things on how to structure a site, how to prevent poor navigation experiences, and why you would want to avoid buckets! These are things I’d want everyone on a team to know before starting a typical website project. .

20th October 2010 by Alastair Campbell | Nomensa thinks

Many of us have been in a situation where you put a design in front of a client and cursed the feedback (afterwards). Even with the best preparation, the best design, the sort of feedback you get can vary wildly and it often feels like you have to go back to the drawing board.

If you toil away in private and plonk the design down in front of them with a "Wadda ya think?", things are likely to go down hill, here’s why.

18th August 2010 by Alastair Campbell | News flash

The BBC joined the HTML5 discussions recently when Erik Huggers’ posted on the BBC Internet Blog: HTML5, open standards, and the BBC. People have been asking the BBC throw its weight behind HTML5, and its use of Flash seems to show reticence, is that justified?

30th April 2010 by Alastair Campbell | User Experience

Imagine 40 people from around the world suddenly scouring your site for bugs,and reporting them to a central system that you monitor and approve / reject. That was my experience recently with uTest, who provide the platform and the community for this crowd-sourced QA service. uTest claim it covers several types of testing, from functional to usability, but how does it compare to traditional usability testing and quality assurance (QA)?

17th March 2010 by Alastair Campbell | Web Design

Choosing a type of layout is one of those things in web design where flames are regularly thrown, so I’m putting on my best heat resistant suit and wading in. At Nomensa we have always used liquid layouts, as we looked at in part 1, liquid layouts have their advantages and disadvantages.

This post explains why our policy on layouts has changed.

5th February 2010 by Alastair Campbell | Web Design

This is the first of two articles aimed at explaining screen resolution and liquid layouts for non-developers / designers. As part of that I’ll cover what the fold is, why it shouldn’t matter, but often does. With the next article I’ll release a little presentation anyone can use to explain these concepts.

30th June 2006 by Alastair Campbell | Web Accessibility

Screen readers are an invaluable tool for those whose vision is not sufficient to use a monitor. There is a reasonable selection of screen reading tools for the PC; however, the options on the Apple Mac have historically been restricted.

13th October 2005 by Alastair Campbell | Web Accessibility

This article outlines which aspects of accessibility can be checked at each stage of development, with a focus on where automated tools should fit in. Some knowledge of web accessibility is assumed. If this subject is new to you, please read an introductory article on web accessibility. The target audience is people who manage medium to large web site projects.