Jamie McCue answers five UX questions, and asks you to stop burying the important stuff

Jamie McCue

Every day, for the next 3 days, I’m doing a brief Q&A with a UX pro, who’s taking part in our 10 minute speed sessions to fix your website UX. This is an amazing opportunity for you to get 10 minutes of free, one-on-one feedback on your website UX!

Today’s Q&A is with UX Designer and Product Manager Jamie McCue. Request a session with Jamie.

Tell me a little about your UX knowledge/practice:

My practice revolves around empathy, humility, understanding, and learning. For a product, a website, an app, or whatever-you’re-making to be a success it needs to meet and exceed the expectations of the person using it. To make this happen, I aim to learn everything about the business, their needs, and their problems. Equally important is learning about the customers (users) needs and desires. My design methodology is driven by context. Who will be looking at it? How will they use it? What do we want them to come away with? Often the most successful outcomes are the result of answering these questions.

Who have you worked with/for?

For the past 6 years I’ve worked with mostly small startups: 4 to be exact. 3 are pre-market products built from scratch with a heavy emphasis on user experience design. This entails learning the inside-outs of the business, the market, and the customers. I engage heavily in research and analysis, sketching and wireframing, prototyping, front-end development, and visual design. As these are design-centred startups I work closely with the business/engineering teams to ensure appropriate communication and collaboration occurs.

Which project are you most proud of?

I think Simplex, as we (a small team of developers) built a web application that saves companies thousands of dollars every month. The backend was complex, which necessitates that the front-end is simple and intuitive. Not only are there big financial savings for customers but the interface was designed to be easy for administrators to use. Knowing that we built tools to help businesses run more efficiently and save money at the same time makes me feel proud.

What do you consider the biggest problem with websites today?

I’d say general usability. I’ve come to expect things to be broken when browsing the web. A lot of websites aren’t mobile optimized, which makes them difficult to access on mobile devices. This creates an awkward and disjointed experience. Huge file sizes, un-optimized assets, bloated unnecessary code… are all rampant. Most business owners don’t know their sites suffer from these problems, because they trust in their web designer to make the best choices for their business. Unfortunately this is not always the case.

What quick fix could any website owner make to immediately improve his/her website?

Typically the most important information (e.g., contact details) is buried. As a potential customer, I want to know where you’re located, how to phone you, what your hours are, et cetera. Make this information easily accessible, front and centre.

Request a session with Jamie