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Blogs: Al Barker

Head of User Experience

Al is a gifted user experience expert, who instills the principles of a User-Centred Design process in all SiftGroup projects.

Leading a dynamic team of UX Consultants, Art Director, User Interface Developers and QA Testing, they collectivly ensure the cohesive, consistent and high quality delivery of simple, usable and highly creative digital designs.

He has worked on numerous high profile projects for the United Nations, Orange, RNID, UEFA, Drinkaware and the BBC amongst others.

Al is a devoted surfer, a keen mountaineer, amateur photographer, occasional guitarist and admits to being a closet University Challenge fan.

Blog posts from this blogger

  • Thursday 10th November 2011
    World Usability Day 2011
    Today is World Usability Day. This is rather timely for us, as it follows the recent anniversary of SiftGroups adapting its approach and bringing on board a whole raft of new talent, turning the business into a truly user-centred design agency.
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  • Thursday 1st September 2011
    There’s no usability best practice, just good practice
    There are no one set of usability or UX best practice guidelines that fit all websites. Every website or online community that works with SiftGroups has its own unique set of usability challenges that we seek to address. Conventions  Best practice implies there are a finite set of guidelines that can be imposed on any website to make it easy to use. There aren’t. But there are conventions of usability that can form the foundations of good practice and they can create a consistent and usable experience, regardless of industry sector or website function. 
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  • Monday 9th May 2011
    Donations – let the people pay!
    It's a simple concept, so why make it difficult? As a general rule in life, if you want someone to do something for you for, make it easy for them - especially you want them to give you money.
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  • Thursday 10th March 2011
    How a blog can save your budget
    Traditionally, when a charity has wanted to execute a campaign online, it’s followed a familiar process. A simplified version runs something along the lines of: work out your message and call-to-action and then hand it over to ‘experts’ to deliver. And, indeed, this is still very much the best way if you want the best content, the best creative and the most effective means of ‘cut through’.
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