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I sometimes get asked about our name, why Analytic Design Group. People get confused and think maybe it has to do with site analytics. I will admit it is a little awkward, especially that confusion between analytics and Analytic. Every now and then someone tells me I need to rebrand, the name is just no good, they say.

"I hate Facebook, Facebook is stupid." This quip came from a 17 year old who was responding to the question of whether he thought it was good to be 'Facebook official' or not.

The City of Vancouver finally launched their redesigned website. I say finally as it was at about a two year long project and it was something that was long overdue.

Full disclosure: Analytic Design Group did the in-depth usability and accessibility assessment on both the mockups for the redesign as well as a prototype.

Within UX enterprise, reports are sent to our clients on a regular bases. In many businesses, it is the final deliverable where most time is spent with the composition and typographic details of the document. Documents such as RFPs, summary reports, task list, focus group ‘homework’ are still part of your brand and should be treated as important as those final presentations.

Several years ago (2003 - 2005) when I was an Information Architect at Creo (a once-upon-a-time tech darling in BC that got bought out by Kodak) I learned a very valuable lesson about the weight that data and evidence carried over my in-depth knowledge of the content and IA (information architecture) of the site.

I have been doing a fair amount of speaking at various groups and conferences lately and have noticed that while I am telling the story of some deep-dive research there are always some people in the audience who are shaking their head or giving a bit of a tsk tsk when I talk about the unexamined assumptions some of our clients have made.

There is talk of innovation everywhere. Governments and business are talking about ways to close the innovation gap, to stimulate the economy and growth through innovation. Within this talk there is a great deal of focus on development: developing new apps, developing new technologies, developing a culture of innovation.

“The power of the grid is to lift the designer outside of the protective capriciousness of the "self" by providing an existing set of possibilities, a set of rules.” Ellen Lupton 

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Companies spend a lot of money developing a navigation structure but often do not spend much time testing it with users. We know it’s important to test our navigation structures, especially on content-rich websites but testing often gets shortened, pushed to the end of a project or eliminated all together.