Last Thursday was the World Usability Day: events in 40 countries all over the world happened to promote UX and design thinking. In Geneva, a full-day event was organized by Telono, a well-known local company specialized in UX and user testing. The first part of the day was a training, but I has the chance to be invited to the Afterwork. Nicolas Nova, from Near Future Laboratory, first presented Ethnography and interaction design: how to get to know users to come up with better designs. Then Florian Egger, founder of Telono, presented slides about multi-channel customer experience. Both conferences were very interesting (thank you for that!) and I especially agree with two ideas:

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Oups, forgot my password again. This is no surprise: we have more and more accounts on more and more websites. Some accounts we have created a while ago, and all of sudden the website remembers us we do have an existing account with them. Right. But what was my password again? All websites offer a standard Forgotten password link, but what happens next vary, with some websites offering a much better service than others. This morning I found a very nicely done Forgotten-password process and interface while browsing laredoute.com.

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When it comes to e-commerce, best practices are well-known and studied, and most websites now apply them. But, more important than a one-click purchase, attractive product pictures, clear delivery options and fees, there is something that you can’t afford to fail. The purchase process simply has to work. From A to Z. This morning, I tried to purchase several T-shirts on a famous clothes store in France: etam.com. Here is a 3-steps failures story that made me, in the end, abandon my shopping, a 80 euros shortfall for the brand.

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Mobile and tablets made appear a lot of new resolutions. Though, we still need to improve interfaces for « normal » desktop and laptop computers. In order to design for an optimal resolution, I rely on W3C Schools screen resolutions statistics. And in order to always keep in mind how many people I am potentially degrading the experience for if I design bigger, I sticked the following table close to my sight.

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This summer I attended Scott Klemmer’s (University of San Diego, California) Human-Computer Interaction Class on Coursera.org. Coursera is one of these new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) website, where students from around the world can attend classes given by prestigious lecturers and universities, for free. I love the concept, and was happy to take this class. After 10 weeks of lectures and assignments, I was awarded a Statement of Accomplishment. A good way of learning furthermore!

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Leaving work yesterday evening, I bumped into a new advertising billboard ad for Mc Donald’s. Or was it? At first sight, before even knowing that it represented a picto of French fries, I had a feeling that it was McDonald’s. If you look at this ad carefully though, you’ll notice there is no brand, no name, no address… not many clues about what it is about.

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