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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

I am not ashamed, but I don’t feel proud to say this either: I listen to the “TRON: Legacy” soundtrack. It’s been a long time since I’ve had an album in regular rotation that features the Disney logo on the cover art. And it’s not an album I’d listen to while walking to work or doing the dishes—these days I’d opt for Bon Iver or The Black Keys. Daft Punk’s techno soundtrack is, for me, task-specific: I listen to it o

This post has been a long time coming, so apologies to those who have been anticipating it for some time. Some background: at Usability Matters we spend a large part of our time wireframing. When we were on Windows machines, we used Microsoft Visio for this, but we switched to Macs in the fall, are now using Omnigraffle to wireframe. Both Visio and Omnigraffle are extremely powerful tools, but they are both pretty pi