user experience

Articles

  • 21st February 2011

    Contactability as Probability

    Contactability as Probability Mobile devices allow diverse groups of people from all along our social graph to contact us wherever we are, but offer only rudimentary ways for us to control our contactability (toggling between available or unavailable). As mobile devices play a bigger and bigger role in our lives, I believe we'll need to add more control/granularity to this experience. In this sketch I propose a more probabilistic way to manage contactability - a kind of semi-permeable barrier with rules we can tweak and change to suit our lifestyles. Contactability as probability.
  • 26th October 2009

    Alchemy is a Risky Strategy

    This is a brief prelude to a series of articles I'm writing on the ongoing management of web sites and services; some friendly advice on being very honest with yourself or your client when an idea is just, well, bad.
  • 29th April 2009

    Winning Bigger Web Projects

    Barcamp Belfast was a lot of fun. I gave a talk on winning larger web projects to a really engaged, interested audience. It was fantastic.
  • 29th March 2007

    The Stuff of Dreams

    If you haven't seen Jeff Han's Multitouch Interface then you really, really should.

Photographs

  • Out of Context
  • Personality, Saying Goodbye
  • Being Really Specific When it Matters
  • Irrelevant, Verbose, Unnecessary
  • Clutter
  • Information via URL
  • More Tags
  • Tags
  • Allaying Fears
  • Prioritised, Factual Information
  • Personality, Encouragement
  • Saying Hello, Flickr
  • Allaying Fears, Common Tasks
  • The Elevator Pitch
  • Welcome, Familiarity
  • Copy is the Interface
  • Without Copy - We're Lost
  • The Classic Breadcrumb
  • Long, Machine Generated URLs
  • Personality via URL
  • Personality via URL
  • Where am I in this process?
  • Personality, Tasks
  • Chunky, Meaningful Buttons
  • Honesty
  • RSS Feeds
  • The Collective: "Our name is" not "This is"
  • Saying Goodbye
  • When is a story not a story?
  • Simple, Factual Convention

Projects

Barracuda FX

Image thumbnail for Barracuda FX User experience design of a foreign exchange trading application.

Leckey

Image thumbnail for Leckey An online strategy, and then a fresh new website for this maker of equipment for people with special needs.

NI Environment Agency

Image thumbnail for NI Environment Agency A comprehensive online strategy to help better protect, promote and conserve Northern Ireland's environment.

Carte Blanche Greetings

Image thumbnail for Carte Blanche Greetings A series of projects and engagements for some of the UK's best-love gift and greeting brands.

BBC Irish Portal

Image thumbnail for BBC Irish Portal BBC Irish is a home for the Irish language and Irish culture on the BBC website.
A small photo of The Author with some lovely tea by way of a witty footer
Paul May is a designer and UX consultant from Dublin, Ireland; he is currently a student at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Feel free to directly (or you can use the contact form). You can also get him on twitter or flickr. Paul enjoys writing in the third person.