Last Friday, our kitchen was more crowded with baked goods than usual.
Sugar for dogs: our charity morning bake sale
April 17, 2013 | 0 comments
iQ Blog / we write about design and business (and sometimes we make puns)
iQ out and about
April 16, 2013 | 0 comments
We’re lucky to have been invited to speak at some exciting conferences over the coming months. If you’ll be there, say hello – we always love to chat.
UX Alliance Masterclass – Friday, 19 April, Madrid
This Friday Laurence Veale will be tackling the topic of the changing eCommerce user experience.
eCommerce is changing – it is moving from online to mobile to offline and this presents challenges for high street brands. But it also brings massive opportunities for them and for “traditional” UX agencies. Laurence will show some of the new user experience trends in eCommerce, what brands are doing well and how UX companies can leverage their existing skills to address these new opportunities. Find out more about the Masterclass here.
If you won’t be at the event, we’ll be sharing Laurence’s presentation online after Friday, so you’ll have a chance to catch it later. Continue Reading →
dScout + wine: A user research tool in the real world
April 8, 2013 | 0 comments
A diary study is a great research method for uncovering user attitudes and behaviours in their own environments over time. They work like this:
- A research participant keeps a diary during a set amount of time.
- They make an entry every time they have a specific interaction (based on the thing you’re researching). That entry can be a photo, piece of writing or video.
- You get the diary at the end of the set time period.
Mobile in bricks ‘n mortar: example
March 26, 2013 | 1 Comment
Mobile has been credited as the killer of the high street with the “showrooming” phenomenon causing chaos in shopping aisles. A tad overblown, perhaps, but what it does is position mobile as an online medium rather than one that can augment the offline experience while customers are in or close to a physical store.
Below, one way Tesco in Ireland and presumably the UK are bridging this gap.
In store and want Wi-Fi? Then use your clubcard details or sign-up.
A nice approach to begin joining the dots between online and offline via mobile.
It may not be enough to ward off showrooming, but every little helps.
Join Wi-Fi
Our next webinar | Video & Motion Graphics in Digital Design
March 26, 2013
Video & Motion Graphics in Digital Design
With increasing online accessibility, web designers are free to use richer content media than ever before. In this webinar, Owen Derby, our creative director, will examine the changing role of video and motion graphics in digital design.
Video and motion graphics are powerful media that resonate with users, telling stories in ways that images and text cannot. Owen will discuss how to leverage the appropriate media to optimise online engagement and conversion rates. He shows us how web content can elicit novel and immersive user experiences that significantly influence behaviour, when design and multimedia are fully integrated. Owen will be at hand to answer any questions you may have after his presentation.
Owen heads up our graphic design team and is the creative inspiration that keeps our work fresh, strong and user-focused. His passion for design has taken shape over 11 years working in all areas of design from motion graphics to multimedia, digital publishing to advertising.
Time & Date: Thursday , 11 April 2013 – 11am – 12pm BST
Listen back to a recording of the webinar here.
Styles for automatically-created Table of Contents in Omnigraffle
January 3, 2013
Have you ever pulled your hair out trying to create a Table of Contents in Omnigraffle?
Want a way to do this automatically and also pick different styles to use?
Back in 2010 Matthijs Collard of UNITiD created a great script for Creating a Table of Contents in OmniGraffle with AppleScript. Over the years this script has been used by many in the UX community, including the team here at iQ, and it has saved people so many hours of frustrating work. We’re all still waiting for the mythical Omnigraffle 6 to include this functionality but in the meantime, here’s an extension to that script that enables a selection of styles for your Table of Contents (ToC).
What we did
Recently a couple of my colleagues asked me to review a document they had produced in Omnigraffle that had over 120 pages in it. I noticed that whilst the rest of the document looked great with the content broken out into clear sections the ToC automatically generated didn’t really help to orient the user without any form of hierarchy or emphasis.
So I wondered if I could play around with the scripts a bit to make something that fitted the needs of the project better. I ended up creating four new ToC styles to suit different needs and preferences.
The 12 pubs of Christmas app
December 6, 2012
You may or may not be doing a 12 pubs of Christmas this year with your friends, coworkers, random strangers . . . Not to be outdone, our annual 12 pubs of Christmas endeavor has its very own project manager, in the ever-managerial Hugh John O’Reilly, who built the iQ Content 12 pubs mobile app (so much better than paper) to accompany us on our journey:
