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Debré Barrett

Debré Barrett is a User Experience Consultant at Flow Interactive. She advises clients on usability, user-centred design and communication strategy. She has a journalism degree from Rhodes, and spent many years as an online news journalist in South Africa and the UK. Before returning to SA in 2007, she spent four years making websites at the BBC. She runs a food blog at www.feedmemama.com and sometimes blogs on www.fronttoback.org

RECENT POSTS

• 3 sales techniques I learned at a school market day

  Behavioural economics, persuasive design: I knew the theory, but could I put it into practice at my daughter's 'Cake and Candy day'?Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling upon Happiness are two of the best books about using the quirks of the human brain to help you market and sell. We always keep these basic ideas in mind when designing websites and social networks. But there's nothing like the evidence of your own eyes to ram home a concept. ...

• Why Wikipedia’s appeal for money is in the wrong place

  You’ll have noticed Jimmy Wales looking ruggedly handsome at the top of every Wikipedia page. But have you clicked? Probably not, because the promo is in the wrong place. Here’s why…Web users are goal-driven. The big brains of web design have known this for a long time, and you only have to observe your own online behaviour to understand exactly what it means.Let’s say a friend calls you up and says, “I’ve just been diagnosed with Mortimer’s disease.” She ...

• Project war rooms: making the design process visible

  You’ve seen a war room in the movies – frowning generals sticking coloured pins onto a map. That stuff really happened, and for a good reason: when you’re invading another country, everyone has to know exactly what’s going on. Losing bits of important paper under your desk could cost lives.London's Churchill War Rooms , from where the British cabinet ran its WWII operations.A Flow project war room.Software projects are never quite that serious. But there are good reasons why you ...

• Web forms: Get them right and make more money

  A web form is like a solid wall between you and your customer. The customer wants to buy your product. You want to sell your product. But in between there’s the form… and everyone hates filling in forms.Making your forms easier-to-use can have a dramatic effect on your company’s bottom line. Jared Spool has written about a form redesign that increased a company’s annual revenue by $300-million. At Flow Interactive we have seen as much as a 125% increase in ...

• South Africans don’t know the meaning of the word ‘design’

  What is design? Most people will answer that question by pointing to a designed object – the iPhone, for example. Now that’s good design! The Mini Cooper. London’s famous map of the Tube. Anything ever built by Norman Foster. That’s design, right?Wrong. Design is not the object, but the process that created that object. It’s a process that is part creativity, part method. A process that takes a lot of time, many failed attempts and a great deal of thinking. ...