I worked for the UX department at Sainsbury’s between 2020-2024, and was peripherally involved in the evolution of their design system over that time. While I was there, I wrote the following document (which I have abridged here).
Elon’s not the only one. But otherwise presented without comment. HT to Mother Frunker.
As a designer, using Notion is a great opportunity to critique a complex interface. Yes, it’s unfair on the XDs at Notion (if indeed there are any, and I have my doubts…) for all the reasons that I’d hate some outsider dumping on my stuff without them knowing the constraints I was under. But it’s…
The latest versions of Chrome have been showing a “dial” icon for a while, accompanied by a completely unnecessary corruption of the favicons in the tabs: Hover over it, and a tool tip says “Tab active again“. You can only see the icon (and thereby read that message) by clicking on the tab. And that…
There’s a belief close to dogma in UX design and product management: that examining data will reveal something that will improve the UX or the product in some way. Some even refuse to do any design until they have done “research” or have access to web analytics, customer feedback, or some such. There is nothing…
…th all this. It seems Docker can use up your disk in some circumstances. I freed up about 20Gb with this command, and it’s been OK since: /usr/bin/docker system prune –all –volumes –-force Configure Discourse General stuff Once Discourse has built (it looks like it’s spewing errors, even when it’s done), go to your new web URL for the server and with luck you can register it all OK. If you don’t get the setup email, try running /var/discourse/di…
I am suspicious of designers who use the first person in the explanations of their designs. Why should we care what they personally like or want? What makes their opinion any better than anyone else’s? Those who state an idea about a design on the basis of even a handful of data points, a thought…
A recent conversation I had about UX research centred on whether such research is to help designers predict eventual outcomes of design interventions, or whether its role is to “de-risk” UX or business ideas. They were keen to frame research as a way of lowering risk to the business. This applied both to design validation…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping out with our corporate blog, a Medium publication. Medium is utterly awful for the purpose of corporate blogging. Disclaimer: Some of the things described here are so molar-crushingly bad that I suspect they are in fact not true. Perhaps it’s the lack of any detailed documentation…
On my LinkedIn profile, I say the following: I predict the future. Not flying cars or robot pets, but whether any given design intervention will raise, lower or have no effect on your KPI. I do this through researched hypotheses and experimentation to become progressively less wrong. By understanding people’s behaviour and what motivates them…
It’s unfortunately true that whenever you research a list of “pain points” from customer feedback, those pain points will mysteriously turn out to be mostly – if not entirely – previously known to the business. And they’ve probably known about them for a surprisingly long time. That sound you hear is the researchers’ crests falling…
Apropos of nothing much, I was reading this rather controversial bit of research from Baymard today. It’s pretty good, as most Baymard pieces are (although why should I care what percentage of sites do what?), and it contains this example of what it says is bad practice:
The use of “toggle” switch UI in place of check boxes has been growing in popularity over recent years, and is approaching a convention in some contexts (particularly mobile). But there is a problem with them that designers should bear in mind:
What is design? How do we make the most of research? These are two questions that seem at first unrelated, but are in fact strongly connected. The following thoughts came from trying to make sure research activity is used, appreciated, and understood. Along the way, it revealed an approach to design that may help solve…
I see that Matt Edgar, Head of Design at the NHS, has announced the withdrawal of the NHS Common User Interface (CUI). The reason given is that the CUI had not “changed with the times” following the closure of NHS Connecting for Health in 2013.
Having left Tes Global, I have had a period of garden leave. Spinning out from the immediate world of design to concentrate on other things including, but not limited to, my family, reading, typing up a travel diary of a busking tour around Europe that I did during my gap year, and weight lifting. Meanwhile,…
It seems sensible to say that not involving engineers early on in the project discovery process is risky. And at the very least it’s demoralising for the engineers. The primary advantage of getting engineers involved at the start is seen as lowering risk by allowing them to advise on feasibility, make early decisions about the…
Ever since Amazon removed their navigation from their checkout screen, it has been said that transactions (or other critical tasks the business would prefer the customer to complete) should not have “distracting” navigational elements on the screen. This is because those elements could take people away from the task at hand and erode conversion. Not…
The state of copy writing on most websites appears to me mostly to be good in terms of tone, but rubbish in terms of length and structure. I also notice that just about all “style guides” for tone of voice don’t address this issue either. It’s not very hard to explain the concept of precis,…
Why is it that so far no web application platform, framework or content management “solution” seems to care about the UX of the applications they are responsible for creating? Systems such as React, node.js, Zend, Drupal, Rails, etc. allow for the debugging of code, the optimisation of resources, ease of configuration and deployment. But they…
The reasons why confirmation dialogues are inferior to “undo” (perhaps better termed “delayed triggering”) are pretty clear, well understood, and accepted by anyone who has taken the time to read something about HCI. Undo has also featured in usability heuristics since time immemorial.
While reviewing a site last week, I noticed the following behaviour in a faceted search UI: Search for something as free text (eg “cups”); get a big list of cups and related items. Use filters to narrow down the list by selecting a search facet (eg “plastic”) Select another facet (eg “colour”). I then see there is no…
At the trainspotting end of the UX spectrum of activity lie articles like this, from Information Architects Inc., which for some reason I find myself reading. While IA’s article is far too long and badly needs editing, the following occurs to me:
Having re-designed the UI for MailOnline’s content publishing systems (currently producing close to 1,000 stories daily), my work there is now done. I’ve always been interested in how organisations work, and it was a great experience doing UX at the world’s biggest news site. I worked daily with journalists and editors of all kinds to understand how…
In a further instalment of Google-bashing, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about Google Contacts on Android:
This is a post about decentralised systems. Bear with me. I was reading this about an Internet primer in FHM magazine in 1995. The writer is about the same age as I was when the article was published. The tone of the piece is familiar. Back then, the Internet was seen as a minority interest, like drag racing…
I’ve been using Gmail for years, yet I still sometimes have to think quite hard about which menu to use for lesser-used things. While I can see the logic in having a “More” menu where such things can go, I can’t understand why they can’t just all go in there. Why is an additional menu needed, and with…
This is a sensitive topic: I’m often aware that comments I make on blogs aren’t published if they contradict the point the blogger is making. Usually I just let it go. It’s their blog, they can choose to defend their opinions or not. But sometimes I think it’s worth publishing my thoughts here if they don’t…
Maciej Ceglowski (founder of Pinboard and overall Polish hero) says “Brevity is for the weak” – and he certainly has no problem producing very long and probably rather unread screeds. But they’re worth reading I think. I read this over the weekend. And because I believe in the power of précis, I’ll save you the…
Designing and building software is at least as complex and demanding of intellectual labour as the building of ships, large buildings or suspension bridges. If the number of failed software projects is anything to go by, perhaps it’s is even more difficult than these. In modern history at least, the underlying assumption when performing complex…
I feel the need for some cathartic adjustment of one of the more annoying interfaces I have to look at most days: the Outlook Meeting Invitation. Outlook’s current offering is full of annoyingly confusing clutter. So here – more for my benefit than yours – is my re-take. The current UI is mostly irrelevant noise:
Appprops of the work I’m doing on the MailOnline CMS, I think the following is a thing. And I’m going to call it a theory: The probability of reading a warning dialogue decreases by the square of the number of other warning dialogues you have seen before in that session.
A few months ago, the New York Times wrote about “Scoop”, their new publishing system. Scoop, they point out, is more than just a means of facilitating their editorial processes. They see it as “…central to our ambitions to innovate on all platforms”. They also point out that the capabilities, ease of use, and competitive edge of content management systems is an increasingly important part of media publishing in the digital age. The fact that Goo…
I was interested to read this article the other day about using web analytics. While pretty inconclusive (it’s a PR piece after all), it got me thinking. Are web analytics useful in UX design?
On this day in 2004, I wrote my first post here on Webtorque.org As with all things Internet, 10 years seems more like 50. Tim O’Reilly had just started popularising the term “Web 2.0“, and the digerati were people who did things like blogs – before Twitter came along and made everyone do it, sort of. For me, this was all glued together, in the UK at least, by NTK, in which I once got a name check for an unbelievably obscure joke involving The Sa…
… Tim Hi Jonathan, Thanks for expressing your opinion on this. As you may be aware, we addressed this today….
I often complain that infoviz for web stats is poor if you’re not an analyst by trade. Now that I’m working for one of the most popular websites in the world, I should at least come up with a device that could be used to answer the fundamental questions we have when looking at real-time analysis of a news article: Is this article doing well? Is it likely to do better or worse from now on? Should we replace this article with another one? Obviously…
… Mon I came across this article when researching about data led designs, which has been a big focus of mine in the last year. Enjoyed your article. I would be interested in hearing more about your experience and recommendations with building testing strategy, team and a strong testing culture in the company. What are the do’s and don’ts when setting up a UX design team? Perhaps next article? Thanks, Mon…
… Gosh, WordPress 3.9 sure broke a lot of things on my blog so I’ve had to replace the theme and disable a few plugins. This is test post. …
(This post implements my new year’s resolution of sub-titling my sections so as to make me look like I know what I’m talking about.) At MailOnline, we have no development process. Well, that’s not entirely true, we use Programmer Anarchy. The developers decide for themselves which “table” they want to work on, and can then leave to join another table at any time. A table is roughly aligned to one or more projects. But the main thing as far as I’m…
The story – now passed into minor Internet legend – of Marissa Mayer’s testing of 41 shades of blue in 2009 (and the resignation of Google’s Visual Design Lead, partially because of this) has been referred to again this week. The Guardian reports that Google UK’s managing director Dan Cobley says that the winning shade of blue made Google £200 million. The story touches on several interesting topics. The first is the idea that Google, and potenti…
Regardless of whether you see uncontrollable mass surveillance by both governments and corporations as being a problem, the fact is that it is happening. This raises questions about lots of things in life that previous generations never had to deal with, if only because the extent and methods of surveillance are also largely unknown to (and even beyond the understanding of) most people. From what we know right now, US and European government agen…
Sometimes, what seems the obvious way of dealing with a problem may not be the best solution. For example, it turns out that if you remove traffic controls from busy city centres and rely on peoples’ instinct for self-preservation, you may get better road safety than if you imposed traditional control interventions (see also “shared spaces“). There may be a lesson here in the design of online account registration and log in for web sites. Most UX…
Harry Brignull’s “Dark Pattern Library” pops up from time to time on various news feeds (today on Business Insider, for their mutual SEO benefit). We hired Harry when I was at Hotels.com to do some customer research work in 2009. I recall we got along OK. The fact that he later included us in his Library was somewhat surprising, but I suppose not altogether shocking. We were at the time showing headline prices exclusive of taxes and fees (scroll …
The question of “fat finger” mistakes on touch screens came up in conversation the other day, together with the idea of making targets large to avoid this. At first, it seems sensible to make hit areas for controls on mobile devices as large as possible. But it was pointed out that, counter-intuitively, smaller hit areas can decrease fat finger errors. That is true to an extent, but as with all things HCI, it’s only a part of the picture. So I th…
Last week, my attention was drawn to the fact that people in Bulgaria were protesting on the streets against the appointment of Delyan Peevski as the chief of Bulgaria’s National Security Agency. Peevsky controls the larger part of Bulgaria’s media, has no prior experience with national security, and has also been linked to organised crime. What’s happening in Bulgaria isn’t disconnected, isolated or irrelevant to other European countries. Just a…
When multiple designers work on multiple assets or across multiple projects, it gets very difficult to manage files over time. Which files are the latest versions? Which files are even relevant any more? Which files contain things that may be affected by the contents of other files? Yet with a few short-term exceptions, I have yet to see any reliable method of version control and general asset management in use in either agency or in-house digita…
There’s some debate about the utility of “high-fidelity wireframes” at work at the moment. It’s a reasonably common topic in the UX chattersphere too, so I thought I’d expand on it here. Firstly, to avoid some potential misunderstandings – let’s make some assumptions about the domain we’re in: 1. There are two main roles on the UX team: visual designer and non-visual designer (the latter is my currently preferred internal term for what is often e…
… Kaoru I do think that the fact that Scoble posted himself naked in the shower waring them is a big minus point. I mean really big. I want an Oculus Rift. But that’s because I still want the future to be Snow Crash….
… Dom Collier Good luck! mdja Good luck! I imagine key skills include the ability to write TWO WORDS out of EVERY TEN in capital letters. Ben Good luck Jonathan!…
A long time ago, I allowed myself a cheeky dig at one of my heroes of old, Nicolas Negroponte. The news this week about Blockbuster UK made me think of him, and how they outlived his prediction by almost a decade. But the prediction business is hard, and if Blockbuster took twice as long to go as he thought it would (albeit enjoying something of a peak in the year he thought it would have died), then so what. Incidentally, I predict News Internat…
I dislike pie charts. I may even dislike people who use them. But even worse than a pie chart is a quite recent device that doesn’t (I don’t think) have a name. These are the circles that appear mostly in newspapers and magazines to illustrate some quantitative comparison – here’s an example of what I mean. This technique has perhaps been legitimised by the likes of David McCandless, who appears obsessed by both circles and the using of areas to …
I’ve been lurking, and recently posting, on Edd Dumbill‘s Google+ “community” discussion about “big data” since he set it up a few weeks ago (dunno if it’s a public group – G+ is opaque about these things – and I’m too lazy to find out). Dumbill works for O’Reilly Media, and helped popularise the term “big data” to describe a rather nebulous phenomenon of corporations and other entities using (some would say abusing) very large amounts data so as…
Data visualisation (“dataviz” or more broadly, “infoviz”) appears to serve two main purposes. The first is to show data to people who are not analysts or experts. This is so that they can understand some or all of something that has already been identified in that data. The assumption here is that raw tables, or perhaps bunches of charts or diagrams, don’t easily reveal what’s going on. An example of this would be Tufte’s favourite graphic, which…
… “The Search for Heart River” is going to be the title of my new book. It’s a journey through endless examples of people posting ‘shop jobs, and the people who try to work out if they’re fake or not. It ends with a some inconclusive rubbish about human nature. Hey, if Malcolm Gladwell can make a career out of it, I think I can too. …
I was having a look at the state of Japanese web design today (we’re doing some customer research there at the moment) and saw this towards the bottom of the home page of the Yomiuri Shinbun site. For those who don’t know, the Yomiuri is the world’s largest newspaper by circulation. I would imagine their website is also read by Japanese from a wide variety of demographics. At first glance, the object looks like an oddly-arranged table of news sto…
A while ago, I noticed a startling report from Statcounter had fired up interest in the mainstream media about Google Chrome beating Microsoft Internet Explorer in the “browser wars”. Statcounter claimed their research showed most Internet users now using Chrome. The report was echoed far and wide, seemingly by journalists who had no ability (or interest) in checking the claim. This weekend, I also read in the Sunday Times (yes, sorry, Murdoch pa…
Until iOS came along on Apple’s touch screen devices, having a windowing operating system was de rigour for any sophisticated computing experience. Nobody really asked why – it just seemed good. Have a video playing in one window, your email in another, have your spreadsheet in another one and, I dunno, move them all around with your mouse. For fun. What’s not to like? Until iOS, the idea of a major market player releasing an operating system tha…
I was having a look today at this question posted on Quora: “What are the most unexpected things people have learned from A/B tests?“. The writer clearly expects answers on specific tests, but a couple of people have referred to the surprising behaviour of people who run or react to the tests themselves. I think it is notable that people conducting A/B or MVT very often don’t seem to understand what to do with the results they get. Results are of…
On the few occasions I’ve told myself the situation calls for a Gantt chart – or more accurately the use of MS Project to plan tasks and dependencies such that I end up with a Gantt chart – I’ve almost always been disappointed. In retrospect, the complexity of the project, or my lack of skill in using MSP, has meant the plan ended up not being able to predict much of what actually happened. At hotels.com, we don’t do project plans in UX/Product b…
… thedragnet Or put another way, what a cock….
… Jonathan Let the record show that Mike Freer MP (Finchley and Golders Green) never bothered to reply to my letter. No surprise really….
So, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited say they will only let you link to their site if you have good things to say about them. From their “linking policy” on their site: “a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, bus…
ACTA is now dead in Europe. But let’s not forget the people involved in the most remarkable attempt to pass the most evil legislation in Europe that I have ever had the displeasure to follow. Party politics is full of venal characters, but ACTA certainly sorted the wheat from the chaff. First, here are my local MEPs who voted against ACTA, along with the vast majority of the assembly. Well done to them. I have thanked them for performing their du…
I’ve been using Ubuntu Precise Pangolin’s HUD feature, which is now included with Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. You may recall I went a little crazy about this feature when it came out of beta. So after a few months of using it, what are my experiences? Firstly, it’s clear that the HUD needs a speedy machine. My first use of the system was disappointing because I’d hit the HUD key (more on which later) only to have to wait about 350ms before anything h…
A recent post on 37Signals’s blog is interesting. Jason wants somebody to help them with customer conversion and retention. One of the reasons why I like 37Signals is that they truly subscribe to the model laid out by the Cluetrain Mainfesto. 37Signals have without doubt turned their organisation “inside out”, as the Manifesto predicts modern firms will. They have even taken this one step further with the publication of Getting Real – The smarter…
Yes! Break out the bubbly and scream! The first actual innovation in WIMP interface design since about 1985 has finally made it into the mainstream! As of this week, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) is shipping to desktops with the HUD!! The HUD seen here allowing command execution in the GIMP I cannot be too enthusiastic about this development. For years I have wanted somebody to give this idea a go, and now my favourite Linux distribution is…
The other day, I was interested to see the comments on this Google+ post by BoingBoing contributor and general Internet person Sean Bonner. Somebody called Steven G appeared to be complaining about Sean’s lack of attribution. Naively, I assumed he meant the creators of the work, and posted a reply along those lines. But I quickly realised by his reply to me that this wasn’t what he meant at all. He didn’t appear to care (or even know) about thing…
At hotels.com we’re pretty test-driven. We’re testing stuff all the time on the site with multi-variate or A/B tests of various kinds. But as I always point out, doing tests (or indeed any kind of quantitative or qualitative research) is easy. It’s what you do with the results that count. So when I see a test proposal, I always ask myself “what if?” What if the result is X, what would that tell us? And if it is Y or Z? Could we use that informati…
… Jonathan Since I wrote this, the Folding Plug has done a pivot! They couldn’t get it past the 240V regulations, so they’ve turned it into a USB charger. Very nice. I take it all back (well, part from the fact that it still illustrates my point). https://www.themu.co.uk/ (and in tin-foil-hat HTTPS too!)…
(If you’ve come to this from Twitter, I’m just testing my new Twitter WP plugin with this article) Shortly after I wrote up some thoughts on test-driven UX, I happened to notice “Bridging User Research into Design” over on UX Matters. In the article, 11 of the great and the good offer their thoughts on essentially the same thing as I was thinking about in my post: how to use research to create something you think is better than if you hadn’t done…
At Hotels.com we’ve been doing multi-variate testing (“MVT”, or sometimes “A/B testing” if you’re variant challenged) for a while. This means we typically build a number of different designs, then let them duke it out on the live site to see which one performs the best. Recently, however, I’ve been increasingly aware that while we have a very powerful tool in MVT, power is nothing without control. When you can test anything you want, things can s…
(I posted this to Google+ a couple of weeks ago, but I may as well post it here too) Each time I engage in any activity that involves the legislature, I come away feeling soiled. Despite numerous independent and well-respected studies that said term extension in sound recordings would not achieve anything most people would call positive, the EU have voted to extend it. The thing that really depresses me about this is not that I spent hours sendin…
Quantitative research and design make uneasy bedfellows at the best of times, but a recent Microsoft blog post shows just how uneasy this relationship can become. Trying to do design for a massive corporation in which design comes a distant third behind the business model and engineering is plainly maddening. Note first they need to defend themselves against the engineers: “…telemetry data indicates these add-ons and alternatives are mostly used …
For personal reference, and in case it helps somebody else, here’s a summary of how we built our single-storey rear extension on our 1900 mid-terraced house in North London, completed March 2010 (some photos are here). We’d not undertaken any building work before, other than having a replacement kitchen done a few years previously. Because of this, we proceeded with caution as you will see. What follows is a summary, but feel free to ask question…
Robert Scoble has an interesting interview with Chandu Thota about The Dealmap (recently bought by Google). Although I completely take Thota’s point about APIs and 3rd parties, what strikes me is the apparently automatic assumption that using a map (and the now nearly ubiquitous Google API mashup) is the best way to show his data. It’s as if we are now locked into the idea that if we want to use information visualisation to discover things that e…
To what extent should a designer specialise? Can somebody perform UX/IA design as well as graphic design as well as the craft of markup and styling? And does that increase their effectiveness? Is it in fact only possibly to span two of these areas? And what does “effectiveness” mean in this context? That last question makes me think that in fact it’s probably all just boring old capitalist economics. If you look at the history of other industries…
If you put something up on the web, you need to give it a date stamp. Not doing so makes you look like Squidoo. So I’m shocked (no, actually, I am quite surprised!) that parliament.uk thinks it’s acceptable to leave them off. Maybe it means they just don’t care about things like accuracy. I guess it’s easier than simply saying so on their home page. “This is the website of the UK parliament. We don’t care about our content or whether or not you f…
I see that Stephen Few has now encountered the work of David McCandless and, as I expected, has rather a lot to say about how bad it is. He’s not alone in thinking that McCandless’s work as minimally informative, often unclear, and sometimes downright misleading. Like Few, I have yet to see McCandless create an effective data visualisation. What I find more interesting though is why so many people think such statistical graphics are worthwhile. A…
At the 2011 FOSDEM conference in Brussels on Feb 5, 2011, Eben Moglen gave talk called Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever. “Well we can go back to mesh networking. We’ve got to go back to mesh networking. We’ve got to understand how we can assist people, using the ordinary devices already available to them, or cheaply available to them, to build networking that resists centralized control.” So it’s happening. And in …
It’s not often you get a radical change in the WIMP model, but the mighty Christian Giordano has tried just that with the introduction of “overlay scrollbars” in Ubuntu 11.04. Unfortunately, I think this is what might be called a “misfire”. The main problem is that in hiding the thumb of the scroll bar by default, you are immediately up against Fitts’s Law because the reduced size of the target will slow its acquisition. That’s an HCI fail – and …
… axel bb poo…
Saying that hoards of my friends like Wired’s website is just a lie. Or at least implying that they do is disingenuous as I’m pretty sure that none of them have liked it. And is that huge number just made up? Who cares? This sort of casual fakery (which Facebook thinks nothing of, regardless of how underhand) is I suppose just part of Internet life now, but it’s annoying at best, and in aggregate, morally corroding. It’s almost as bad as neglecti…
… Only just noticed the new UI. Good to see they’ve preserved the Spinal Tap joke on the volume control. (Compare with the previous design) …
It has become a shibboleth of the UX and Agile communities that “collaborative design” is the best way of designing things. Or if not the best way, it is at least better than leaving people to come up with solutions on their own. Regular readers of Webtorque will know that if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s to question things that appear to be received wisdom. The usually unchallenged assertion that collaboration in design is always good is …
I’ve been wondering whether using Chernoff faces might be a good variation of the “advanced search” pattern in the context of finding a hotel to stay in. Choosing the right hotel requires a number of quite complicated things to be considered. But which things you place the most emphasis on depends very much on the context of why you are booking a hotel in a given location or time. If price is the only consideration you have, then you’re lucky. Th…
Over at Louder Than War, there’s a good old argument going on. It’s mainly between Alec Empire (who opposes the Pirate Party and free culture by the sounds of it) and some others who are representing the “progressive” view. As I read Alec’s views, I can’t help thinking that while Atari Teenage Riot is a great name for a band, if most people heard them they’d find it quite hard work being entertained. Personally, I’ve always liked Alec and his wor…
I’ve had a bit of a realisation about the way I come up with design ideas that I’d not considered before (see below), but first, an important aside. Many people in my field mistake the activity of discovering and refining their own design processes as being a signal that they should recommend these processes noisily to everyone else. However, just because I think that a certain technique or principle works for me, it doesn’t mean that it will wor…
Several months ago, we made some changes to the search results of hotels.com, and among these was the creation of a “pinned header”. As you scroll down through the list of results, a portion of the page header stays with you. Here’s the UI before scrolling. And here it is with the header pinning (linking to screenshots for archival purposes). The rationale for this change was that the business wanted us to shout as loudly as possible about our lo…
Mick Karn, once bassist with Japan – pop history’s most underrated band (albeit with one of the worst names ever) – died this week. I remember reading an interview with him years ago in which he was asked about his unique style of bass playing. He said he didn’t know how to play it in any other way. I can understand that statement, if only because in my own microscopically insignificant way, I often used to wonder the same thing when I played the…
Ah, synchronicity. No, not the 80’s album by The Police, but the fact that I was recently thinking about “back” buttons and software states in the design of our forthcoming Android and iPhone app. And so was Aza Raskin. Raskin suggests an improvement to the much-improvable experience of using the Apple iPhone’s ultra-simple, yet rather confusing “home” button. To cure what he says is a big problem on the phone (albeit not one I have myself notice…
What I know about Internet protocols can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering about them. Wikileaks’s recent call for mirrors (link may be down, obviously) got me thinking about the general possibility of a web site mirroring protocol that would make automatic the distribution and discovery of content beyond the reach of censorship. It strikes me that there are already a clutch of open protocols that …
I think I’ve been a user experience designer for about 10 years now. I say “I think”, because I regularly read descriptions of methods of working and relationships between people in multi-disciplined web and software development teams that I don’t recognise. It is of course with great interest that I like to find out about these, but I often get the impression that either the proponents of these methods must be working in situations fundamentally…
With my Kindle’s free worldwide 3G connection (which I’m hoping to make some use of when I’m travelling to the Americas next month), I thought I’d investigate options for reading RSS feeds. Being the geek I am, I liked the sound of Daniel Choi’s kindle-feeds, a neat little Ruby script that gets RSS feeds from the sites you want, then formats them as single file for the Kindle. The Kindle 3 also comes with the ability to email files to your Kindle…
… mdja It’s still a significant difference in offering. Actually the figures themselves give by far the clearest (and most compelling) indication of the offer. (530 vs 510 or less). Jonathan Yes, it’s (I think) about 4% more. There are probably many other ways you might be able to impress this offer on people without implying that they’d get double the value. What, for example, can you buy with 20 Euro? Something fairly decent I would imagine….
So I bought a Kindle the other day, and have been thinking whether I should have bought an iPad instead. But the more I use the Kindle, the more that seems like an irrelevant question, despite all the debates that rage around it. For example, somebody I know recently mused that “… in some way the Kindle is like a crippled iPad: only monochrome, poor browser, etc.” His point was that if you look at the technology, the Kindle appears to exhibit a r…
Last year, our fearless team of interaction designers, creative designers and interface engineers (about 20 of us at the time) took the decision to embrace Scrum, the “agile” methodology for project management. We were all given training courses to attend, and I myself volunteered (along with several others) to become a certified Scrum Master. As we began on sprints, attended sprint planning and reviews, and got together for sprint retrospectives…
Lately I’ve been rather depressed about the state of user experience design. Both my own (management overheads, inability to sweat the details, lack of self-belief…) and that of the wider community. So it didn’t help that one Cameron Chapman delivered a further kick in the teeth the other day with 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies. This is a truly awful article and a good example of some of the things I feel are eroding the field of UX …
… Somebody called Ryan Carson recently caused a stink in the UX world by saying that people like me are useless. It appears he holds this view because people like us don’t do HTML and CSS. When you’re bored or under-appreciated, it’s easy to think that the grass is greener. All I can say to Mr Carson is: be careful what you wish for. …
I had a bit of a Seth Godin moment a while ago. I have been meaning to air it in public for a while. I don’t have such moments very often, so please indulge me. Working as I do in a large e-commerce company, I am constantly bombarded with information generally intended to make my team better at what we do. Third party research, industry reports, news, internal research, customer analytics, charts, trends, observations, suggestions, the insight of…
… Phil Grisier Two years later, incremental search *is* the norm. JBB Yes, albeit mostly in the form of “auto-suggest” and not really the full strength version described by Raskin. But still, happy days, eh?…
Examples of good functional design in the digital space (as opposed to good ways of making existing ideas look nicer), are so damn hard to find these days. It follows that good designers are also very rare. So thank heaven for Aza Raskin, scion of the late great Jeff Raskin, designer of Firefox mobile, and Creative Lead for Firefox. Aza consistently produces real, solidly innovative, and actually useful designs that solve problems. Here he is wit…
… mdja Isn’t the Friend Finder just what was there before they called it the Friend Finder? Jonathan Yes, I think so. They’re just giving it another airing….
Every time I decide to pen a rant about some user experience issue or other, I feel a bit guilty. Guilty because I know it’s hard to be positive, easy to be cynical, and makes me look nasty. But I’m going to justify this one on the grounds that if countless hoards of designers are bleating about how good something is even if it’s objectively full of holes, I have a duty to counter-balance the situation by pointing out this fact. Apple’s dominance…
David McCandless is an interesting person doing interesting things. Interesting to me, that is, because his work exemplifies something I find deeply mysterious in the way people regard information visualisation. His pursuit of “beauty” seems to be a licence to override clarity, truth, and even common sense. Yet he is widely lauded (here he is writing on the Guardian’s Data Blog). In this, he is surely the anti-Tufte. McCandless’s current pièce de…
… eikoku kopistropi Nothing like the smell of a new book. Jonathan Addict!…
… May a Great Repeal Bill rise up and destroy the malignant hoards of government anti-privacy legislation! This looks promising indeed! And even as we speak…! …
“Radicalise” is a term that I’ve heard some people use about defining moments in people’s political lives. It was longer ago than I care to remember, and I was very young when I heard LKJ’s “Reggae Fi Peach.” Today it’s all come back. [Adobe Flash movie was here] “Oy people of England, Great injustices are committed upon this land, How long will ye permit them to carry on? Is England becoming a Fascist state? The answer lies at your own gate; And…
We now have HMG’s Digital Economy Act in the wild. Conceived (by and?) on behalf of the music and film industries, drafted in ignorance of many technical realities, and rushed through the legislative process without any effective parliamentary scrutiny. So perhaps it’s not surprising that avoiding the Act’s provisions on copyright infringement turns out to be trivial. All that is required for consumers to immunise themselves from the Act is for t…
It looks like my wife will be stranded in Japan this week following the Icelandic volcano eruption. I thought I’d better look at her travel insurance provider’s website (a company I’d not heard of called Holiday Extras), prior to playing the inevitable game of IVR over the phone. Frankly, I wasn’t holding out much hope for any actual customer service from the site (it’s Sunday in the UK after all), but I was pleasantly surprised to see their CEO …
Everyone as boring as me on the subject of copyright, community and contemporary culture (OMG it alliterates!) has something to say about the Great Paywall of Murdoch. It’s coming to an interface near you in June, we are told. So naturally, I have been ruminating on this too. My thoughts were crystallised when I read Roy Greenslade’s article in the Evening Standard today (which only recently become a free paper in London – an irony there). Greens…
So, a new “visual language” (AKA design directions) from the Beeb! Most of their blog post is about visual design and grids, so I’ll leave comment on that to others, but I couldn’t ignore the following: “We want to create a modern British design aesthetic” And people at the Beeb wonder why they’re seen as arrogant! He he, only jokin’. However, there are a couple of interesting IA/UX things here. Firstly: “We’re moving away from left hand navigati…
Scrum is now officially my thing (850K PDF), having just taken my certification exam after the training I had a couple of months ago. A score of 80% or above is considered mastery. My result was: 92% (1.1Mb large image) I would have got more, were it not for my failure to read one of the questions properly. Q13: “True or False? The product owner must be present during at least the first half of sprint planning.” I read as “The product owner must …
I’ve just noticed this on my favourite law news site. Law news is so much more interesting and thought-provoking than other kinds of news, and this piece certainly got me thinking. Widespread adoption of IPv6 is generally regarded as being part of the next stage of Internet development. The ability to assign unique address to literally anything and anyone on earth obviously opens up a large number of possibilities. But this makes the French rulin…
Here’s a fascinating incident. In a nutshell: net news site readwriteweb.com posts a news article about some Facebook business development with AOL. Nothing remarkable about that. But then something strange starts to happen. Hundreds of people start posting comments complaining about how their beloved Facebook has changed and they can’t log in … to readwriteweb.com. The article has since been updated to point out to people that they’re not on Fac…
Lovemoney.com has a free personal finance dashboard that I thought I’d have a look at. It’s really an early beta, and they’ve been soliciting feedback and generally being very receptive. So, I’ve just sent them the following email. By the way, I’ve decided that OpenOffice Presentation, with which I did the mockup, is rubbish. Apologies in advance. Hi. Sorry about this. You need to stop using a stupid piechart on the dashboard. See the attached f…
… Peter Douglas I think the game the iPad will change is the biggest game of all in the “computer” world. The iPad will be what Jobs envisioned thirty years ago, the computer as appliance. There will certainly be one on our kitchen wall, for recipes, family calendar, phone numbers and addresses, notes, shopping lists, tv guides, music, Skype……
(Apologies to Mike Elgan for the headline on this one) Those in the UK who want to use Google Power Meter can do so using a wireless doobrie from AlertMe Energy. Nothing wrong with that, but words fail me at the staggeringly bad information visualisation on their site. I hardly know where to begin with this: You’d think that people involved in making us aware of energy consumption would have some clue about how to actually present the data. But l…
On January 5th, 2010, The Independent published a photo as a backdrop to a feature inviting readers to submit pictures of the snow and cold weather. But they never asked the photographer if they could use his work. Newspapers and magazines have of course from time immemorial sometimes used work without either attributing, asking or paying the creators. There are a number of reasons for this, and cock-up is certainly one of them. Were it, say, 197…
… Sometimes I agonise over putting one more link on a page. How many is too many in a given context? But clearly these people have no such worries: Money Saving Expert has 235 links on its forum pages HIS Travel has 341 links on its home page Both sites are major (if not actually leading) sites in their respective markets. Wow. Happy new 2010 by the way, and may we all survive the cold. …
Angela Epstein is unbelievably pleased to have been able to “bag poll [sic] position” in getting a national identity card. While she is apparently aware that the cards are “hotly disputed”, she says “everyone is entitled to their view”. Epstein (the Jewish surname not without some grim irony here) may think that ID cards are to be debated at the level of the colour of soft furnishings or who should win The X Factor, but amid all the blinkered adm…
… mdja Joost died? eikoku kopistropi The de-indexing wars commenced in 2009. I love it. Where will it go? Nobody knows – but I’m not sure it’s got legs. Jonathan Oops – Joost demise link was wrong (I linked to the Mashable article from the announcement last summer). Now amended to the news of their Adconian firesale….
It’s now clear that the government wants to control people’s use of the Internet, ostensibly on behalf of the media industry, but more likely in the longer term because (to paraphrase William Burroughs) control always needs more control. For a while now I’ve been thinking whether it might be time to tunnel my Internet traffic over a VPN to somewhere that’s not on my ISP’s network. That way, I absolve my ISP from having to monitor that traffic (be…
… eikoku kopistropi Can I infringe your copyright and use this letter also? Jonathan No infringement necessary: in a rare demonstration of orderly rights management, I hereby grant you non-exclusive use of the the letter in full together with any derivative works, and without attribution. I suppose I should also disclaim any and all liability too. This hereby constitutes the entire agreement in all jurisdictions worldwide….
Robert Clayton Miller‘s 10/GUI desktop multi-touch idea wafted out of the ether towards me last week, and I’ve been giving it some thought after watching the video a few times. 10/GUI is unusual in that Miller describes himself as a graphic designer. Unlike people such as as Jeff Han, he is not approaching the issues from a traditional HCI-led, computer scientific, or industrial design perspective. I think that’s a good thing in some ways. Multi-…
A couple of weeks ago, Lorenzo Wood posted a great example of one of the reasons why I find the use of office printers fascinating. I am amazed, amused, informed and utterly baffled by this in pretty much equal measure, all the time. A trip to the printer is almost as good as a trip to the kitchen or (if I were a smoker) a fag in the car park. In almost every office I’ve ever worked, the printers and the areas around them are generally populated …
For no apparent reason, I suddenly remembered Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary today, which he promulgated almost 9 years ago this October. I recall at the time that there were a number of people hailing it as the first true user experience documentation standard, and I saw no reason to disagree with them. Yet after a couple of years, I hadn’t really heard of anyone using it for real. Indeed, when it came to visual languages and UX, it was…
… eikoku kopistropi Don’t know if you know about this lot http://www.laquadrature.net/fr Apparently Lily Allen no brains has stopped blogging due to the backlash. Hopefully she’ll stop singing next … Jonathan Yes (http://idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com/) – and she said she will stop singing too! http://www.nme.com/news/lily-allen/47490 Jonathan News just in on French presidential wholesale piracy….
… Jonathan Incidentally, it’s worth reading the comments on her post. eikoku kopistropi I hope you have posted this on her blog. Jonathan No – you need a MySpace login. Too much work. eikoku kopistropi Too right! Jonathan Ah – but THIS is fantastic. Puts my pathetic “mashup” to shame. eikoku kopistropi RESPECT!…
I’ve had an unusually frustrating day with Microsoft office, so I’m venting. Coincidentally, here’s a little titbit trawled from the oceans of Slashdot this evening – some anecdotal evidence of the way Microsoft do usability “research”: I’ve participated in usability testing at MSFT (Score:5, Interesting) … as a developer. They basically have labs with one-way mirror. User is left alone in a sound-proof room and given a set of tasks to perform. E…
I feel that the end is surely coming for The Pirate Bay now. The recent outage, although only 3 hours long, brought about the action of a Swedish court order against TPB’s upstream ISP, will probably turn out so be one of the first of an increasing number of cuts. Still, I like their Churchillian parody response though: “We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, …
I’m not sure if I’ve blogged this idea before or not, but here’s a mini-thread that came up on Slashdot today. It’s about of the ignorance that a lot of people have about data security that I thought illustrated my thoughts quite well: >> You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication. I think you don’t understand the concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy”. It’s not a technical idea meaning “this data is secure”…
… I enjoy Seth Godin’s blog, but I do take it with a pinch of salt. I might have to increase the salt content a bit to get over this claim though. Still, just goes to show it’s always worth checkin’ the facts… Here’s the video (9.6Mb mpeg, no sound) – Seth likes videos. …
Regular readers of Webtorque will recall that I put forward a theory of statistical information some months ago, which probably needed to be read in the style of the Monty Python sketch of a similar vein. Today, I have another theory about the visual presentation of statistical information, and it is a theory that is this: The value of a statistic decreases exponentially to the amount of non-statistical information included with it. This is there…
A couple of years ago, I was obliged to find out about the user experience of Verified by Visa and the Mastercard SecureCode systems for inclusion on our site. it was plain to me from the outset that the designers of 3-D Secure (the protocal on which these are based) had not a clue about what real people are like, or how true security works. Cory Doctorow put it best when he described the credit card companies as “phishing their own customers.” S…
Today’s news from Tinsel Town is that the heirs of J R R Tolkien and the charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, are seeking more than $220 million in “compensation” from New Line Cinema as a cut from the huge profits from the Lord of the Rings films. The family say have a right to this money because it was promised to them in the contract the author signed in 1969 with United Artists. The moral, social and (at these sums) economic impact of all th…
Whether or not you think that “user-centred design” is generally a good way of designing a web site, most would agree that before doing any real design work, you first need to listen. Ideally, you should listen to the people who will be using your site. At the very least, you should listen to some or other form of research that can give you ideas about suitable design directions to follow. When it comes to design, selflessness is the goal. Alan C…
About a year ago, I decided to turn off pagination on this blog. If you scroll down, you will see at least the introduction to every post I’ve ever made – approaching 700 now. The reason I did this was to have some counter evidence to give people when they tell me that long pages are bad because they have “load” problems. My supposition was that assuming you used well-designed markup and CSS, you could have an almost infinitely long page and nobo…
Earlier last week, the mighty Joshua Kaufman brought my attention to Jakob Nielsen’s latest alertbox about removing masks from password fields. This sparked some interesting debate, and it got me thinking again about passwords and security in general. It has often seemed to me that the first mistake people tend to make in applying security is they think more is more. But to paraphrase Burroughs: without analysis of the threat, security can never …
While I’m obviously rather late on the uptake here, I recently (and rather reluctantly) upgraded to Office 2007 on my work laptop. The “ribbon” UI is now sapping my will to live – I had to resort of Googling to work out where the “Links” dialogue had gone in Word, and many functions in Excel seem to have just disappeared. But one thing suddenly jumped out and grabbed me the other day as I was using Outlook. Finally, after about 15 years of total …
With the Kindle DX — Amazon’s new large-screen e-reader – the debate about the delivery of information via printed paper compared to that of digital is starting to pick up even more. Earlier, I’d wondered about reasons to prefer dead tree media that weren’t based on just aesthetics. I see that in reviewing the new Kindle, and much to their credit, Slate has avoided misty-eyed discussions of ink-stained fingers or the timeless aroma of newsprint. …
“To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.” Ray Bradbury (90) doesn’t explain why he doesn’t like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the “it’s in the air somewhere” remark. Whenever anyone discusses the merits of books over digital literature, somebody always says something about how nothing can beat the feeling of a nice …
What, exactly, do otherwise intelligent Americans find so objectionable about the effective use of swearing? Here’s Seth Godin, marketing guru and otherwise all-round sharp cookie, upholding the grand US tradition of wondering more than seems even remotely reasonable about somebody who likes to put swear words in their books. Who cares? You may as well fret about somebody who puts too much sugar in their tea. File under Impenetrable Cultural Myst…
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long, long time: if you’re going to put information about something on the web, PUT A DATE ON IT. It’s not hard – it can be automated, fun even. As it is, I have to ignore stuff like this because I don’t know if it was posted yesterday, last year, or 10 years ago. What was the author thinking? For all I know, the article is completely irrelevant. Breathtaking. Somebody is now going to point out that there i…
I’m watching the keynote from Google I/O the other day and it’s impressive stuff, technically at least. I can count on the fingers of one hand the occasions I’ve wanted (or needed) to collaborate on the same document in real-time with anyone, but I shall curb my natural cynicism. The mere fact that they are releasing a large part of Wave as “open source” (no mention of actual licence as yet I don’t think) makes it all an order of magnitude more e…
I’ve just been mailed by a company called Zetetic about their mobile password storage application called Strip. Zetetic are interesting in that they are a small, cutting-edge software development house specialising in RoR and .NET. They appear to be principally a consultancy, but also develop and and sell their own applications. This is very similar to that other noo-tech (and intensely American) poster child, 37Signals. Have a look at Zetetic’s …
First, let me say that I have nothing to hide. Well – I wouldn’t want random strangers looking at my bank statements. Medical records would also be private (although I’m sure I’d put a brave face on any public revelations). Where my kids are is also off-limits. I won’t tell you how much tax I pay (other than it’s too much), or how much I earn, what party I actually vote for, my sexual predilections, my membership of various clubs and societies, w…
… Swedish artist Montt Mardié has made an anthem for the Pirate Bay. Rather nice. I’ve never met a Swede I didn’t like. …
… I know people love to hate Slashdot, but I’ve always had a soft spot for their experiments. …
Just so wrong – and you have to dismiss it with a mouse click as well. Possibly an even worse violation of the principle of avoiding user distraction than Windows networking trumpeting its wireless connections. Why should I care? It’s so hard living through the dawn of interaction design. All I can hope for is that we will see a day when people who are responsible for design decisions like this are burnt alive on a pyre of unsold copies of Acroba…
The campaign starts here. The word “Internet” needs to be capitalised. It needs to be capitalised out of respect for its importance and the fact that it’s a proper noun. We don’t write about “the pacific” or “oxford” or reading “the times newspaper.” We should not write about “the internet” for the same reason. I’ve always capitalised the word “Internet” because if it wasn’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have a career, a house, a car, or a life. T…
I remember an English teacher asking us what, in our opinion, was the most useless thing we would have to learn at school. I replied that I thought it was the capital cities of the world. What possible advantage could you have over anything with the knowledge that the capital of Peru is Lima? I was somewhat surprised that he agreed with me – although I later found it would be a trick question. He was making the point that education itself is usel…
So, jail terms for the Pirates of Pirate Bay. “Judge Tomas Norstrom told reporters that the court took into account that the site was “commercially driven” when it made the ruling.” Commercially driven? What then, your honour, is the difference between Google, and The Pirate Bay? Yes, you could outlaw all trackers, but that’s not going to happen. The fact is that the verdict – as the defendants have always pointed out – is merely theatre. The mus…
It’s that time again, when my fragile designs need to be encased in a sturdy barrel of documentation and set off down the rapids of implementation. All I can do is hope that they end up at the bottom in one piece. If there’s one thing that’s constant about documentation, it’s the maddening inconstancy of its form. This seems to be due to the inconstancy of the development process itself, which is something now gradually being accepted via things …
… Come Together – and I put a donk on it (3.2Mb mp3). Wonder what the rights position is on this? Donk your own. …
Regular readers of Webtorque will know that I’ve droned on about tag clouds several times. Here I go again, but this time, it’s final. I promise. It comes of a brief discussion about our opinions about tag clouds at work this week, which was a good opportunity to summarise what I thought about them – and over a nice cheese sandwich, as it happened. Tag clouds are good at doing a very specific task very well, but are also hideously misused to the …
In January of 2008, a new property website called Zoopla! started up. With property prices going ever skyward, it wasn’t exactly a surprising launch, but Zoopla! itself was surprising. Like all very good ideas on the web, it was simple and well executed, yet allowed for good, often complex, effects to happen: list every house in the UK and allow their owners to “claim” them, declare their intention to sell, and tune the price with extra data agai…
Headphones are wonderful things, and I’ve been amazed at what I’ve been hearing through them recently. In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to sit down and re-visit Grace Jones’s version of Sting’s Demolition Man (mp3, 5.6Mb). Leaving aside its merits as a pop song, I think it’s one of the greatest feats of studio sound production ever achieved. Here’s why (warning: what follows is dancing about architecture). 0:00 – The intro. Possibly the first hum…
… eikoku This is age – an inability to listen to “new music” – I think in part due to being too busy to get exposed to new stuff. Jonathan Perhaps, but who can blame me when this kind of crap is in the charts?…
… Join the blackout. …
… Cripes – looks a bit serious! As of 9:00pm GMT 31st Jan 2009 …
Quoting a single statistic to support an argument is rarely very impressive, regardless whether the numbers themselves are right or wrong. I would say that most statistics are nothing without context. Context is the air that statistics breathe and the engine which powers them to make a point. Yet far too many people simply pluck them off a tree and offer them up as withered, emasculated and pale. Here’s an example: the famous statement, “Half the…
Peter Morville has put together a list of twenty user experience deliverables with links to relevant resources and examples. This is certainly interesting, and Morville is an interesting cove, not least because he’s been on the scene for so long. However, I can’t help reflecting on the fact that he is a consultant. Seen in that light, the “deliverables” culture he presents takes on a rather different hue, and I wonder how many of his admirers ful…
… “Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.” — Charles McCabe So take that, “programme managers” …
Let’s hope the march of paid lobbyists and other industry schills in Europe will be stopped by these clear and concise arguments against extending copyright in sound recordings. It’s rare that politicians don’t take the side of big business, but when the pandering to greed and the destruction of the public domain is this blatant, perhaps common sense will prevail. The European Commission is due to vote soon on the issue. (Thanks Ben – Link) Write…
I’ve blogged before about how I think calendars are to dates what pie charts are to numbers, but recently I’ve been thinking a bit more about this issue. The background to this was a discussion I had several months ago around the pros and cons of using calendars for date range selection, for example in booking a hotel. As with many design issues, this is one heavily encrusted with tradition and gripped by the dead hand of the “design pattern.” In…
… Whoo – it works! Get it here! With the illegal shell script I’d been attempting to use previously (circled) – now it can be told. …
From BoingBoing today (guest blogger Clay Shirky!): Mark Hurst, the user experience expert [at MeetUp.com], talks about Tesla — “time elapsed since labs attended” — a measure of how long it’s been since a company’s decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service. Measured in days, Meetup approaches a Tesla of 1. Coincidentally, last week I suggested that we should have a company policy to allow all emplo…
Phew. I’ve just got out from a large amount of IRC and email about this and this bug on Wikimedia. As of about midnight this evening, it’s boiled down to what seems like (at worst) some over-zealous censorship by the IWF which has now been corrected. I spent a while hanging out on Be Internet’s new IRC channel watching a couple of people discussing the issues. One of the chatters was kicking up a fuss about it, while just about all the others tho…
… Matt You’re quite right. I beleive we’ll look back at this period as some sort of privacy explosion. Currently we seem to be in some sort of boundary testing phase and Facebook is the perfect environment. mdja Here’s some semi-related password related comedy for the new year :) http://adactio.com/journal/1538…
… mdja i guess they haven’t looked out of the window… it says ‘maybe’ when clearly the answer is ‘no’ Jonathan Well, in their defence it is about *future* weather, so maybe it’s about “maybe” at some (unspecified) future point? A bit like a stopped watch is always exactly right twice a day……
Ever since Minority Report brought gesture-based interfaces into the public eye, there are been periodic demonstrations of their evolution in the real world. Here’s where MIT’s John Underkoffler, one of the consultants who were used by the producers of Minority Report, has got to with his g-speak “spatial operating interface” (SOE): As with most of the demonstrations of gesture-based and multi-touch interfaces, they are high on wow factor but rat…
The Pirate’s Dilemma – How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism – Matt Mason, Free Press 2008 The subject of politics, as they say in college, is history with the work taken out, and history is politics with the brains taken out. While I wanted this book to be an analysis of the political, if not economic strata of Internet-age capitalism, it is in fact little more than a pleasant wind through the recent history of “underground” music, with so…
… mdja Spot on. mdja So google’s now allowing people to vote on search results… is this the end? Jonathan Possibly disastrous, but I would hope that in Google’s case, the voting is simply supplementing their other methods of determining rank. (BTW not seen it yet – they’re multi-variant testing I think)…
… Tim Don’t worry. Apparently, blogging is “dead”. (I’m pretty sure “writing” isn’t though.) :) mdja Blogging isn’t dead, just blog reading….
… Jonathan Just noticed that the above comment is referral spam, but I’ve let it through as it’s pretty ironic given the subject matter of this post!…
… DJ Hi JJB They made the entire UX team at ebay UK (and Germany I think) redundant soon after you posted that. http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/10/06/ebay-uk-puts-staff-on-notice-as-the-us-mothership-cuts-jobs-and-spends-big/ Typical! DJ…
… Matt Awesome idea….
Another day, another… hardly a week goes by without… if I had a fiver for…. I’ve lost count of how… The latest incident of data loss really, really plumbs the depths. I’ve started to pay less attention to the detail of such cases recently because it’s plain they’re simply endemic, human failings and not something we can somehow cure by tinkering around the edges. But I’ve just been reading this, which says: “The portable drive contains the names,…
… mdja I can’t access the link, shame, I was keen to see the original source material….
Apple have threatened iTunes-listening Britons with the closure of their iTunes store. I think this is unlikely to happen, but if it does then the P2P networks will get rather more traffic, thereby providing even more proof that the publishing industry just doesn’t understand what’s happening. Every time they try to throw their weight around like this, it make them weaker and the darknet (1Mb Word file) stronger. Be that as it may, now might also…
Southern Electric are total muppets. Accessing their site using FF3 under Linux shows nothing but the Flash background (I hardly ever find sites that are completely broken these days). Not only that, when I try to update my profile, they tell me to choose a “proper” surname! Could there be a less effective wording for an “invalid character” message? When it comes to something as sensitive as people’s names, if you can’t parse characters in them, …
For no particular reason, I’ve been editing the Wikipedia entry for Megatripolis this week, mainly tidying it up a bit. I added something about pHreak a while ago, but in the course of editing this time, I found this photo, taken in about 1996, of the pHreak BBS being demonstrated at the club. Ahh, nostalgia! I think (but I’m not sure) that the person on the left is Bob Blake, who was involved with pHreak shortly before I took over – but I may be…
… Jonathan Hm. Looks like Don Norman wrote something similar on this subject a while back….
… Francois Jordaan Thanks for the tip re: Aza’s demo. I liked it….
… Tim “Incidentally, my favourite change is the fact that they’ve finally got delicious.com and not that damn domain I could never remember.” I though that was just *me* :)…
Michael Forrest has his new album out today. I’m downloading it now, and I commend you to do the same. It reminds me of artists as diverse as Cobra Killer through ATR to Momus and Barry Adamson. This is definitely going out on my ShowCenter. I’m always interested in the way artists choose to distribute their work – in may cases more so than the work itself. Forrest is notable not least by adding some weight to a casual observation I made about a …
… At least I assume it is: …
… Eikoku Not to mention Brussels working towards redrafting the Copyright Directives minimum term for sound recordings to circa 95 years (currently 50) inspite of one member state’s own report (aka the UK) that this would disadvantage our economy….
I’ve recently read We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, having attended one of his talks a couple of months ago. I thought I’d record my thoughts on it. Books about the socio-political or cultural effects of the Internet are rolling fast off the presses right now. I’m now feeling a little less like the pallid geek I once was. The penny has dropped, even in the hallows of Downing Street (Leadbeater was a Labour advisor under Tony Blair for a while), th…
… Eikoku Downloaded big buck bunny but real player, wmp etc won’t play it in synch. You had any luck? Jonathan Video formats are, as I have sometimes mentioned, one of the bigger SNAFUs of the 21st century – have you tried playing it with VLC?…
One thing that bothers me about “design patterns” is that they don’t always seem to be the best method of solving a design problem. In many cases, patterns are patterns simply because they are popular. This of course is a phenomenon not limited to design (music, for example, is another case in point). However, it becomes particularly frustrating for designers when a sub-optimal pattern then gets in the way of better designs because the pattern be…
… It’s out! Not seen it yet, but I’ll be downloading as soon as I get out of the bath. In case you’ve not been following – Big Buck Bunny is a feature-length 3D animation – and this is what makes it special. Do them a favour and download it (preferably by BitTorrent if you can). …
… Jonathan Vuk Milicic of Faviki.com has replied to me and says they want to implement OpenID and will do so… later. When they do, I’m in. It looks like an interesting site they have….
In my dreams, I like to think that if I ever made a lot of money I would be like Joi Ito. He must rank as one of the most worthwhile people on the planet, and somebody that I’d love to meet. Today, he writes an astute post about the “mobile Internet” and why nothing very interesting is happening in that space, nor will it ever while the current closed systems exist. Incidentally, he recently re-vamped his blog, so even if you have no interest in …
… What a beautiful mess. Your mission is to work out how to unsubscribe from one of the mailing lists in the “Newsletter Subscription” section. A lot of work went in to avoiding having check boxes in this design. …
… Server upgraded, Webtorque will be looking rather sqiff for a while until I work out the WordPress theme that I heavily hacked up and forgot to note any changes to… Enjoy. [LATER] Pretty much done now. Wish I could work out a way of removing that pesky horizontal line beneath the header image. …
… Webtorque will be down this weekend for maintenance while I try to upgrade the server. It went wrong the first time, so here’s hoping. My Tiscali hell is also continuing though, so the downtime may be longer than it needs to be. Think of it as a rest. …
… Jonathan Hm. Since I wrote this, Britannica seems to have re-designed into some multi-media Encarta-alike. It’s a slightly better experience I suppose. Still won’t be buying a subscription though. 英国 You can’t see the Britannica page to see what’s going on unfortunately. Jonathan Really? I can. It’s a huge great “rich application” which crashes most browsers, mind you….
My ongoing experience with Tiscali’s appalling broadband offering has made me research the overall broadband industry in the UK. The picture is now becoming alarmingly ugly. Something has to happen to avert a disaster, and that something may be local networks. But before I elaborate on the solution (although not a new idea), let me outline the problem. There seem to be several horsemen of the information apocalypse riding over the horizon towards…
My god this is awful. The entire weekend my net connection with Tiscali has been so slow that YouTube, podcasts, BBC news and even Gmail have been pretty much unusable. I tried running a speed test just now and it timed out! I now realise why I’ve always found broadband hell stories so boring – it was because I was living in a HomeChoice bubble! Broadband (DSL at least) has seriously crashed and burned in the four years we’ve been on our HomeChoi…
For the past two weeks, and coincidentally at exactly the same time as my family have been away, I have had no Internet access, and very little TV reception at home. I count myself as a pretty intense Internet user (although I watch very little TV), so was interested to see what would happen without any connectivity. This was not by choice of course, but due to a problem with my Tiscali (formerly Homechoice) set top box, which for some reason Tis…
I don’t watch nearly enough films, but my attention has been drawn to two animations recently. Both are free. Firstly, the Blender project has brought out a new film (I wanted to embed it here but it breaks the page). It has a CC licence, and looks like an impressive bit of 3D animation (all the models and source files are also provided on the CD). Secondly, there is the incredible new production from Paul Robertson: Kings of Power 4 Billion %. I…
… JamesR We have the same problem of people lazily putting waste in the wrong bin at my office. The dilemma is coming up with a solution. Is it because the labels that tell you which bin is which are not clear enough or is it really just a case of sheer carelessness and lack of consideration for others?…
A friend of mine recently said they thought ID cards could be useful. They said they thought one day they might forget to take their passport to the airport or on the Eurostar. It struck me that I’d not blogged about my thoughts on this (and hey, what’s a blog for if it’s not for idle pontification?). ID cards will no doubt be very useful – in the same way as DRM is useful, or restrictive EULA contracts are useful. What matters is the consequence…
I ‘ve had a login on Plaxo for about two years now and have only received a couple of invites from people I know, but I’ve had a several in the last couple of months. Maybe it’ll be the next Facebook? I won’t be there if Plaxo does explode though. Plaxo is so far my only OpenID casualty. Since trying to convert my account to using OpenID, I’m now in exile from the system. Previously, this wasn’t a problem, but today I had an invite from the might…
At last, people are openly acknowledging that persona development, or at least the dogma that comes with it, is weird. I’ve been rude about Alan Cooper before, but this is another chance to stick the boot in. I blame Cooper for coming up with the wonderful idea of personas. They’re great for summarising research. They help people – anyone really – get closer to design solutions when things get complicated. In my opinion, however, the problem spac…
Having recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, I see the system menu hasn’t changed. Other than a couple of minor tweaks to the contents, it’s the same as it was in Feisty Fawn. This is pity, because I find I’m often wasting time looking in the wrong menu for things. The system consists of two sub-sections. Here they are in Gutsy: Preferences and Administration. However, I’ve never been able to work out the rationale for what appears in each. T…
With various digital media building up on my little hard drive, I thought I’d get one of those media streaming boxes so that I can watch or listen it all in my living room downstairs. TED talks, podcasts of various kinds, camcoder movies – ah lovely. I knew video formats were going to be a bit problematic, but I had no real idea of the sheer jungle of codecs, containers, incompatabilities and various other weirdness that’s out there. It would be …
Regular readers will know that I had a free mobile phone last year, thanks to a 100% cashback deal. This year however, I’ve not been so lucky. After hearing nothing from Phones 2 U Direct.Co.Uk Ltd after my first cashback claim in September, I served them a court order to get a response. They replied to the court, admitting they owed me the money. That was over three weeks ago, and I’ve still heard nothing. Now I see that they’ve gone under. They…
… Webtorque will be moving servers soon (maybe this week… maybe next). I’d be delighted if anyone actually notices, but we may be down for a day or so while I get the web server back up. There’s a chance I might delete everything in the process – indeed sometimes I want to do that anyway, but a sugary sentimentality prevents me. …
… Tim Good luck JJ!…
… Lorenzo Wood You’re preaching to the converted. As far as phones are concerned, Android looks promising….
… Tom Reeves A great story. It makes my modest comment inadequate. I really like the blog. And Magnatune is a favorite site of mine. Michel Sounds very nice! :-) That’s what I call a pleasant surprise! :)))…
… 英国 Yeah – I’m not so sure Netcasty is from Deutschland – I can think of a few other places more like. And I think that the guy in the English Viking hat is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall no less … 英国 and here’s Hugh http://singstargame.com/en-gb/User/Profile/?user=228 英国 and here’s a lot more from Netcasty: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=netcasty…
Yahoo! has a “dashboard” to let you track the progress of the various candidates in the US presidential race (at http://news.yahoo.com/election/2008/dashboard). Since I’m currently working on a dashboard myself, I thought I’d have a go at improving it from the point of view of information design. Firstly though, a critique of the current Yahoo! design, in order of importance: The division between Democrats and Republicans seems unnecessary. Since…
I used to think I had a handle on the state of spam and malware. I chuckled at the obfuscated spam content, marvelled at the botnets, and secretly admired the general ingenuity of those skript kidz and their r00tkits. But I didn’t know the half of it until I read this (670K PDF – thanks to Francois for sending it to me) “Professional Paranoid” Peter Gutmann, of the Department of Computer Science in Auckland, lists a deluge of flat-out evil busine…
… “cookingforfun (http://www.grouprecipes.com/people/cookingforfun) wants to be your cooking buddy. You can login to accept or decline (http://www.grouprecipes.com/profile/).” Is it me, or is this getting a bit silly? …
Well, sort of. The recent sale loss of my data by the Revenue prompted me to change my bank account this weekend. Not that I think I really needed to after the fiasco at HMRC, but I thought some rate tarting was in order. Alliance & Leicester have two interesting things in their online banking interface: a “unique image and phrase combination” and a fake logout (no, really). The former is quite interesting. You are given a picture to which you at…
I see this news from France last week. It’s an interesting innovation in the copyfight, but it’ll be a flop. With margins already wafer-thin, ISPs will be reluctant to ban their customers, and those that do will be removing people who will be clever enough to get round the bans. However, it’s measures like this that might eventually mean the Darknet moves off ISP-controlled networks. Keep an eye on wireless: Consume.net is dead, but others like i…
Only just discovered Vimeo.com. I like the overall design very much. It’s pushing the the stereotypical “web 2.0” conventions on rather well: desaturated colours, rounded corners, etc., but it’s very well thought out – everything is there for a reason. I also note some interesting things going on: no scroll bars (just up/down arrows), no “handles” for users – it’s Facebook-style real names. It’s also the first site I’ve been on in ages which hand…
Will Wikipedia survive the constant sniping its been getting about quality, style and everything else? In the last few weeks, I’ve observed (nay, been involved with) two issues relating to their conflict of interest policy. To save the blushes, I won’t divulge who was involved, but the first incident started when a PR operative at a medium-sized company decided that because a rival company had an entry in Wikipedia, they should have one too. The …
… One of the things I like about Facebook is spotting odd coincidences. Here are two friends, one living in Tokyo, the other in London, neither of whom know each other from Adam – but their status messages make nice bookends. …
With the advent of Thermo “some time next year” things are at last hotting up in the RIA design space. Regular readers of this blog (if there are any such people) will know that I have been wondering for a long time in a somewhat Pooh-bearish way about the future of “The Designer” in the “The Development Process.” While this is hardly a topic unique to this blog, my particular angle on it can be summed up by the following idea. Designers (by whic…
When I’m murdered in my bed by a gang of bored teenagers, I’ll try to remember to blame the RIAA as I expire. Some issues are too big to arrive at any useful perspective until you have thought and experienced a great many ideas relating to them. For a long while now, I have tried to fathom what it is about my concern, not to say alarm, about the increasingly draconian imposition of copyright law and the erosion of fair use that has come with it. …
… I am usually completely unsuccessful in hiding my glee at the demise of music publishers, and this post is no exception. I have been hoping for the last few years that what started as a trickle would become a flood. And now with Radiohead and even (gasp!) Madonna, it surely has. I think the penny is dropping. If you are an artist, you now have a choice to become an artist and a business, or an artist and a slave. …
… Jonathan Interesting news I see today, that relates to this….
I’ve been thinking about “info graphics” again, and what a tricky area this is. It’s doubly so because a large part of what I do for a living is information design. There is essentially an “emperor’s new clothes” problem prevalent in the production of information graphics. To me, the vast majority of subjects that I see addressed by such graphics (in particular, complex ones) would be better expressed in words – either spoken or written. I recent…
… I was in Spain last week, on the Vodafone ES network, and dialled a wrongly-constructed number. The call didn’t connect (just went dead, no ringing) and I got this message. That number at the bottom is the number I was calling, properly formatted. If the system knows how to format the number – why not just dial it and not pester me? The notion of “service design” can’t come on these companies too soon if you ask me. …
… 英国 But I thought you were just sending a poster or something like that. How did you go from poster sender to participant? Jonathan Part of the punishment for being accepted to display a poster is to present it at the conference….
I was thinking about how much I like using OpenID. I’m registered with myopenid.com, who could do with ironing out some kinks in their user experience, but it’s good enough. One thing struck me after reading Tomas Baekdal’s excellent blog post on the subject of privacy policies. I summarised this in my comment on his post, but to cut to the chase: “… statement of intent is all very well, [but] the practical reality of the situation is that data l…
… Jonathan Sort of apropos of this – there’s been quite a bit of buzz about Tenori-on recently, which reminds me a bit of Eno’s Koan Project. But what happened to that and the company that made it? I can’t seem to find much on the web about it….
… Eikoku This ain’t got the punters rioting like the police post. Jonathan Maybe because it mentions HTML 3.2?…
Max Hole is President, Asia Pacific Region and Executive Vice-President, Marketing and A&R for Universal Music Group International. He has some soothing words for anyone who thinks the internets might be a bit worrying for music publishers. When he’s using words like “… record companies … sign and encourage great music by great artists. This will never change”, you know they’re in trouble. At least, in trouble in the long term. One thing that’s t…
My six year-old son went on a trip to the park today with his holiday playgroup. There were various activities there, and among them it seems the Met were hosting some kind of “meet the Police” event. Part of this appears to have involved his fingerprint being taken. What the hell is this about? He describes it as being something the policemen did “for fun” – but I’m not laughing. I don’t know (and I need to ask the teachers who were at the event…
The UK government has rejected calls to extend the length of copyright on sound recordings beyond 50 years. This is the first time any government in the history of the world has refused to extend copyright, and it’s great news. 50 years is of course far, far too long, but at least the madness of extending it has been averted for now. To quote Doctorow in the Boing Boing today: “Extending copyright dooms nearly every author’s life’s work to obscur…
I submitted an idea for a talk at this year’s Euro IA in Barcelona a few weeks ago (just met the deadline). The anonymous review process has now taken place and the results are out: they’d like me to do it as a poster. While I would have preferred a talk to be able to do it justice, I am of course grateful to have been accepted. So, it’s off to Barcelona in September with my rolled-up poster under my arm. Let’s see if anyone understands what they…
… I’ve been told that comments aren’t working. I think this might be related to a relatively recent upgrade to WordPress that might have broken the theme I’m running (I’m hoping it’s not to do with the very low version of PHP the server’s running). I’m going to see if I can fix this, but if you have been dying to tell me something, then jonathan at webtorque dot org will do you. …
I’m not obsessed with tag clouds, really I’m not, but I think they are the single most useful, yet criminally misunderstood and mis-applied UI device out there. I’ve written about tag clouds before, but this time I’m turning up the heat. Controversy time: writing about “best practice” for tag clouds in terms of what fonts to use and other minutiae is the hallmark of the usability nerd. The other hallmark is forgetting – in this case utterly – to …
If you want to know what company directors think about how the government in this country works, look no further than this flabbergasting statement by Paul Birch of Revolver Records: “I … think allowing indiscriminate criticism of the RIAA is inappropriate for a Government funded institution” At least in terms of editorial integrity, if you are being funded by the government it should be case that it would be wholly appropriate – if not actually …
… CrazyLeaf You have some very interesting points here, but the fact remains that this is a prototype that’s going to be exploited a lot in the following years. Thus some good (innovation) has to come out of it. Jonathan In other words, it’s a solution waiting for a problem :-) Nothing wrong with that of course – and certainly not the only example of such….
… Michel The logo for London 2012 is terribly awful… More on 456 Berea Street and a lot of other sites… :-/…
The project I’ve been working on for the last ten months is now winding down for me, so I’m getting involved with some new stuff. One of these couldn’t be more different from the rather rigorous approaches I’ve been taking since last year. Having attended a “workshop” for this project recently, I can’t help feeling I’ll be firing off shots in the war against intelligence. But perhaps that’s the rule, and not the exception. Certainly, looking at t…
Until yesterday, I’d not tried Any Questions Answered (AQA) – the old-school (as in not P2P) SMS-based answer service. For a mere £1, they will answer any question you have. I’d heard good things about them. Their website allows you to ask one free question, so I did: “Since 1950, how many people have been shot by the police in mainland Britain (excluding N Ireland) who were not later found to be innocent?” I was attempting to ask a straight ques…
Here’s an idea for a Euro IA submission I was thinking about (eh Barcelooona!) to fulfil one of my annual HR objectives: the one that says I need to ramp up my public profile to attain the status of European Experience Emperor. Some prodding about seems to indicate that people do see this as a problem worth addressing, so I’ve finished filling out the submissions form today. Just got under the deadline too, which closes today. See what you think:…