It's been a long, hard slog but well worth the effort for Marie, who was formally presented with a BA (Hons) in Photography on Monday at Portsmouth Guildhall. The sun made a rare appearance just for the photos and we think you'll agree that she looks fantastic.

As well as her degree, Marie has exhibited and sold pieces of her coursework recently, proving what a great creative talent she is.

Congratulations Marie!

  UX Media has moved to bigger and better premises this month as we bring in more members of the team and improved facilities to house the new services we'll be offering in the near future.

Don't worry, we're not far away so you won't get lost finding us. In fact we're still in the same street. Drop in for a coffee, biscuit and a chat when you get a moment. We'd love to see you.

You'll find us at Lodge One, Dolphin Lane, Southampton, SO14 2HN.

Get directions to UX Media

IT Pro have highlight a survey conducted by paypoint.net which suggests that four-fiths of user are more likely to trust a site with a simple, clear payment facility regardless of the level of security implemented on the site.

This is a big thumbs of for usability and the ROI gained by ensuring you have a usable checkout process but there needs to be an education process with users to help them recognise a secure shopping process. Mastercard and VISA are helping to ensure this with thier 'SecureCode' and 'Verified by VISA' schemes but with the overhead of making users remember yet another username and password.

Watch this space, with the integration of payment gateways such as google checkout we may be able to offer users a simple and secure website which increase ROI and keep customers safe. If only google would allow you to integrate thier service directly into a bespoke website.

Kieron will be working with us to create a sustainable technical infrastructure for UX Media, as well as taking on responsibility for solution architecture and technical resource within the company.

With a background in Microsoft .Net and other solutions, Kieron has worked closely with companies in the telecommunications, aerospace and IPTV industries, to provide maintainable and extensible business orientated solutions for a variety of business needs.

We'll be introducing all our clients to Kieron over the next few weeks so feel free to put him to the test with a few challenging questions when you meet him!

The fully functional, accessible site has been designed by Armadillo Jam, with technical direction and development by UX Media. The site aims to deliver tailored and engaging revision and exam material for students and teachers, promoting creative, independent thinking.

Bright Red Publishing works with the best authors, editors, designers and printers to provide a high-quality and reliable service, including a full ecommerce system.

Marie comes from a creative background and has a superb grasp of visual design in the digital field, as well as a thorough understanding of the way businesses need to move forward with their online offerings in the credit crunch era.

Marie will eventually look after some of UX Media's highest profile clients and is looking forward to the challenges ahead.

"I'm so excited about the way UX Media is helping businesses to focus on the user experience of their services and develop forward-thinking strategies to ensure that customers get everything they need from the world of web 2.0 without sacrificing usability.

"I think we'll be going back to content based solutions over the next 12 months, as budgets become stricter and objectives for online services tighten up. It'll be all about evolution instead of revolution."

Contact Marie on 023 8022 2254 or email marie.hastings@ux-media.co.uk to talk about the services UX Media can provide.

Park Life is a monthly newsletter bringing the news and views from Bourne Leisure's range of parks, to Owners of quality holiday homes throughout the country.

May 2008 sees the start of phase 2 of the Carnival UK Group's intranet redevelopment project.

Among overall improvements to the usability of the site's DotNetNuke content management system, UX Media will be working to create a more news-based approach to the homepage, a Friends and Family email alert system, integrated phonebook and Flash organisation chart and multi-view events calendar.

Look out for more updates soon.

UXM Director, Matt Goddard, aimed to open the eyes of local business owners to the under-serviced market of web users with accessibility issues last month, with a presentation to 20 members of Wired Wessex.

As well as revealing some startling facts about the issues faced by visually and mobility impaired users, Matt provided an overview of how businesses can improve their digital services to meet the needs of a wider audience.

His talk covered elements such as:

• What is accessibility?
• Why bother to address it?
• How to measure accessibility
• How to improve your existing website
• How to commission a new website
• Common accessibility myths

Following the presentation, Wired Wessex's Alexander Hay interviewed Matt about his views on user experience, the future of the web and thoughts on ubiquitous computing.

Read the full Wired Wessex interview

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"Contrary to popular opinion, and also contrary to quasi-judicial claims in some places, PDF documents can be no less accessible than HTML. While this may be a shocking revelation, it is nonetheless true. This article will explain how PDF does and does not support accessibility."

A List Apart: Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility

They also provide information invaluable information on the issue faced by people with visual, cognitive and motor disabilities.

IBM accessibility centre developer guidelines

An excellent essays on the features available through FireFox's Web developer toolbar to asses how accessible your website is.

In the article they introduce a rapid approach for demonstrating (selling?) user testing.

On the whole it's a interesting approach and I can certainly see the benefits from an educational stand point but my over riding worry would be that in this high speed world people would start using their approach as a replacement for real user testing.

In their conclusion Marty and Twidale do point out the dangers of their approach and I'm heartened to see that they recognised the treat to traditional user testing.

n.b. At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, their approach might work well for early stage user testing and could be considered for preserving usability budgets for later stage testing. A way of integrating more user testing into the process perhaps?

Update: This article has now been published in UsabilityNews

Within a software development team, most talk of creating a good "User Experience" usually relates to creating an intuitive user interface. In the traditional sense this means;

• The layout of the buttons,
• The ability for the application to remember contextual information,
• Or the intuitive nature of a web site navigation system,

but these interfaces, although important as the "face" of the application, are actually only a small part of what makes up the product.

Beyond the User Interface

A software application, like an iceberg, has a great deal of it's complexity in the underlying structure of the program, the object model, where there are countless different members (interfaces, methods, and properties, delegates etc.) which transfer and transform data between objects and to and from the database.

While not as visible or as glamorous as the UI these are all interfaces that have users, your colleagues, whose needs must be satisfied.

On one level these "users" could be considered the most important users to satisfy because the culmination of their efforts make up the finished application, the ability for them to produce good software and the trade-offs they make in order to create the software will have a big influence on it's character.

With this in mind the environment and the mind-set a developer works in is crucial to their ability to produce a good overall user experience. Every effort should be taken to ensure that they are focused on creating a good quality product, not in compensating for an awkward development environment or in acquiring the contextual information, from obscure code, that they need to complete their task.

Creating the right environment for UX to flourish

Every developer should be encouraged to develop this mindset; one way is to ensure that you create code that enables your colleagues to interface with it easily.

The simplest and most effective way of doing this is by naming your classes and members appropriately.

As a rough guide;

• Your objects should be named clearly.
• Your objects and their members should be named so that their intention is obvious.
• Your members should exist harmoniously within scope of the class they inhabit, as well as the overall application.

When the ambiguity is taken out of the development activity, the amount of tacit knowledge needed to complete a task is diminished and the communication between team members is simplified but it's in the subsequent phases of the project when this clarity pays real dividends. Creating an object model that is clear and expressive reduce the amount of background information that has to be re-learnt and understood before starting a development task, allowing the developer to become productive quicker.

I intend to discuss this topic further, the theme that every opportunity should be taken to reinforce a user centric mind set is, I believe, critical to the development of good products. Only by cementing the "user" in all it's forms as an integral part of the development process will the team truly understand what is needed to create a successful User Experience.

As an example he cites public internet terminals, an initiative which has spectacularly failed to take off (Even narrow focused terminals such as reward point terminal in supermarkets are being remove as quickly as possible).

In his article Andy offer 4 point on testing for usefulness.

• Limits of self-reporting : Users can be poor at predicting their own behaviour. We often see participants in usability studies claiming that they would love a new product only to see the product fail in the marketplace, or expressing disdain for a new product only to see it succeed. Take what users say with a grain of salt.
• Analyse based on context of study: Most lab-based usability studies give us the opportunity to see users' first 60-90 minutes interacting with a new product or service. First reactions are important, but they are not everything. Poor initial reaction means only that - that users coming cold to the product are not receptive. In practice, it could be either that the product simply cannot succeed, or it could be that users need more background to make them appreciate the product's value. (Think what a marketing team could do with information like that.)
• Consider different kinds of studies: Some products look remarkably different in the lab than in the real world. Some products require long start-up periods. For example, voice recognition products require an initial training period followed by a month or so in which the user intensively corrects the software. An hour in a test lab may tell you about the obstacles in the training process, but not much about the ultimate usefulness of such a product. Other products rely on 'network effects'. For example, one person with a video-calling phone on his own isn't going to find it very interesting; but a large group of sports fans may come to think of it as indispensable. Design your studies accordingly - longer-term studies for products that require it, and group studies for network effects
• Beware puppy love: Some features make users fall in love at first sight, but not every love lasts. Clippy, the infamous talking paper clip in Microsoft Office products (serving as a painfully eager help system), is typically adored by naïve users the first time they see it, and desperately despised within a week or two, once users become aware how intrusive it can be. If you had conducted a standard user test before Clippy shipped, it probably would have predicted great success; but now you can type "hate Clippy" in Google to see how a user interface can inspire genuine passion.