Insights

Last month, Cyber-Duck were involved with Talk UX, a brand new conference exploring new user experience concepts and ideas: from accessibility and design, to the digital afterlife. I travelled to Manchester for the event and left feeling inspired. I’ve summarised the main themes within this article.

The Cyber-Duck team worked closely with Cambridge English, part of the University of Cambridge, to present ‘Shop and Drop’. Applying innovative gamification techniques, we launched a fun game that helps international children improve their English language skills through play.

The Application Developers Alliance is an international organisation that “supports developers as creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs”. In 2015, their App Strategy Workshop series will see 15 events across 7 countries in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. I was invited to host the Putting the U in UX panel on 26th March in London.

I recently gave two lectures at the University of Hertfordshire for a Professional Issues in Computing module. The objective of the sessions was to provide the students with real-life examples from industry.

Last weekend, seven eager children came to our Elstree studio to take part in our first Kano computer workshop. From motherboards to Minecraft, the day was an educational success.

Google has announced the expansion of their mobile-friendly ranking signal’s role in the search algorithm. From the 21st of April, Google will not only label ‘mobile-friendly’ sites, but also use this factor to influence how high pages should rank in search results.

We’re delighted to announce another award win! This time, it was our finance team’s turn to pick up the gong at the Business Finance Awards. Against the stunning backdrop of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, they were announced as the Finance Team of the Year for 2015 in the Growing Business category.

Usability (or user) testing is a key part of the iterative design process. Testing digital products with real users will give you the best chance to meet their needs and achieve return on investment (ROI) for the company. But, you can only gain useful insights if the test is carefully planned and run. We test throughout our user-centred design process, and I’d like to share tips to help you make the most out of your usability testing tools.

We were thrilled to be invited to run a series of workshops in Monday’s The Future is Now event at Broadcasting House. Cyber-Duck was brought in to inspire and teach staff at the BBC with our work and experimentation with the technologies of tomorrow.