News

There's a new face around Pure Usability's office at the Watershed! We're delighted to welcome Ben Bywater as our new user experience consultant.

Ben has spent the last 3 years working for Flow Interactive in London, where he practiced a wide range of research and design methodologies, including consumer ethnography, user surveys, depth interviews, personas, scenarios, prototyping, product testing, card sorting and collaborative workshops. Prior to that he worked in the Communications Group of the Countryside Agency where he managed relationships with organisations like Timberland and the National Lottery. He also has an MSc in Human Computer Interaction from the University of Bath.

We've got a pile of interesting projects ready for Ben to sink his teeth into, and we're really looking forward to doing some great work with him.

The redesign of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) website has been nominated for an award at the CorpComms Awards 2007.

Pure Usability, working with the Institute of Learning and Research Technology, played a pivotal role in the user-centred redesign of the NDA site. Their contribution focused on three main areas that were critical in allowing the NDA to provide a much more positive experience for their community of users. These were:

• Evaluation of internal stakeholder requirements
• User requirements research & analysis
• Designing the core Information Architecture for the site to meet requirements

The NDA site has been nominated as the best corporate not-for-profit website. The awards take place a the Grosvenor Hotel in London on November 28th 2007.

Pure Usability will be running a series of one-day public training workshop at the Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, starting on July 26th 2007. The workshop – Understanding User Centred Design – is designed to provide a practical, hands-on overview of the User-Centred Design (UCD) process and the range of different methods that can be used to enhance the usability and user experience of a websites and web applications.

We've finally got round to completely overhauling the Pure Usability website. The old site was getting extremely long in the tooth and didn't really explain what Pure Usability was about any more. But, as anyone involved in web design will know, it's the toughest job in the world to re-design your own site!