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A big thank you to everyone who came by our table to say hello. Hopefully you had a chance to speak with Sarah English or Shannah Segal about the user experience challenges you’re faced with, or usability of your website or app. If you didn’t, feel free to pose questions to our team via Twitter, Linked-In or Facebook. Or you could give us an old-fashioned phone call – so retro, we know. We’re a long time

From all of us at Usability Matters – thank you for making our first 10 years such a wonderful experience!  

Most of the time, Usability Matters is part of a client’s multi-vendor ecology. It is great to be one of several specialists working on particular aspects of a digital product. However, sometimes, this means that the client is left to balance conflicting advice from several trusted sources. This was the case recently on a project with a major health-focussed non-profit. The project owner was forced to balance input f

Most of the UX design focus for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s mobile website was about navigating to content, revealing details and acting on it. But, there was one trickier bit of interaction that we wanted to include: an ability to filter the list of concerts by conductor, featured artist or principal instrument. Unlike large retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, Sears and eBay, we weren’t dealing with

One of the essentials of mobile design is getting local. For the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s mobile website, local means things like: Where is the concert? How do I get there by transit, car or on foot? If driving, where can I park? Where can I go for dinner or drinks before or after the concert? Most TSO concerts are at their home venue, Roy Thompson Hall in downtown Toronto, but each season also includes sev

As outlined in the first post in this series, the vision for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s mobile website was tightly task-focused. With that vision in hand, we proposed an information architecture that was neither too broad, nor too deep: 6 main categories and a depth of 3 or 4 levels felt comfortable. Trickier however was devising a navigation design that felt equally comfortable. Several approaches were c

Recognizing that an increasing number of visitors were coming to their website using mobile devices, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) was keen to create a mobile website to better meet concert goers’ needs – and so were we. While the website is currently under development, Usability Matters and the TSO are excited to share some of the design insights from our efforts to date. To ensure we achieved an

One of my absolute favourite books as a child was Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day. It’s one of the series of children’s books Scarry wrote and illustrated about a fictional town called Busytown. I adored Scarry’s illustrations: the architecturally-correct drawings of buildings, the cutaways showing the plumbing and sewer systems, the fascinating mechanical devices, all depicted in minute detail and careful

Zerofootprint, an organization that seeks to achieve massive reductions in carbon emissions, and a client of Usability Matters, has launched the Zerofootprint Challenge for students and schools. “Is your school green? Prove it.” A few months ago, students from Simcoe County came to Zerofootprint to learn about climate change. Zerofootprint gave them a hands-on assignment – to measure the carbon footprint