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For the last few months, I have been doing contract work at Sid Lee, a big advertising agency located in Montreal. Sid Lee has a very impressive client list including Adidas, Cirque du Soleil, MGM and SAQ. Their main offering is Commercial Creativity^TM which includes branding, Web design, print, architecture, product design, etc.

The bulk of the mandate have been creating the information architecture and interaction design for various Web, email and mobile projects for clients including Toursime Montréal, STM, Red Bull, Créa (Infopresse), etc. The role at Sid Lee is being the usability go-to guy for designers and copywriters.

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“There has to be a better way”. That’s what I tell myself everytime I use Photoshop, a software I’ve been working with for the last 10 years.

Even tough I probably correspond to one of Adobe’s personas, Photoshop feels awkward and misadapted to my needs. A lot of people are very good with the software but, I suspect that this is more adaptation than efficient user interface.

Let’s look at how the interaction design of the layer set, which made Photoshop’s popularity, could be improved.

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The new Facebook design was launched early last week to some positive and negative reviews. Facebook had been working on the new design for the last year. The analysis required to roll out such changes must have been extremely complex because the changes go far beyond the aesthetics. The user experience is drastically impacted.

A lot of people have been building their profiles just the way they want it (with the right applications, information, etc); such changes will obviously create resistance among Facebook’s user base. Let’s try to understand how the new design came to be.

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Let’s look at how a heuristic or expert evaluation — comparing a Web page against a list of globally accepted usability standards — could help improve the homepage of RDS.ca, a popular sports news site. Heuristic evaluations are very practical because they allow designers to take a step back from their designs and find quick ways to improve and optimize.

The goal with these kind of evaluations is not to critique but to help improve the user experience. RDS.ca does several things right: content is properly categorized and archived, sections are color-coded, the Website can either be searched or browsed, the navigation is straightforward, etc. However, there’s still room for improvement.

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