“It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary ‘features’ aimed at idiots”. Charlie Brooker lays into the Samsung E900 in The Guardian. It’s funny, harsh, but probably true.
37signals talk about how you have to be careful with the above ingredients - they are probably not central to what your project needs to do.
“Poor usability is the main reason behind the limited adoption of Google’s services such as Gmail and Google Talk, according to Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo.” Computing.co.uk discusses how removing features encourages user adoption.
We’re looking for an ambitious junior designer and/or coder, who wants to work within a brand and user-centered design consultancy (that’s us). They will need at least one or more of the following characteristics…
We’re interested in employing someone for initially a month’s work. If you’re this person, please contact us.
At long last we have launched the Skills Match section on the NHS Alchemy website. Skills Match is a carefully designed questionnaire that helps young people think about the kind of role they could play in the NHS. The results suggests three possibilities - from doctor to manager to the emergency services. Give it a whirl, and see what you could or might have been…
NHS Alchemy was built with our partner Zebra Crossing Creative Media.
An ongoing discussion I have had with various clients and friends is why people feel comfortable being rude and hostile on the web - in email, comments and forums - when in the ‘real world’ they would act differently. Boing Boing have an article that links to a New York Times story on the subject, and includes a great comic and other references.
Yahoo! Pipes, a truly innovative, but complex, web application was launched recently and has gained a lot of attention on the web. Read/WriteWeb has a great article exploring the ideas behind it - and the way the web can be seen as a database.
We’re helping in the launch of the new book China Road by Rob Gifford, published by Random House. The website is at a very very early stage (more coming soon). Rob was NPR’s China Correspondent and the book is a description of a road trip around the less well known fringes, both geographically and culturally, of China. Photography for the book is by Patrick Fraser.
Google Earth is being used to help people survive sectarian violence in Baghdad. Advice websites have been set up by Iraqis to help others avoid the death squads. One of the tips they are giving is for people to draw up maps of their local area using the detailed imagery on Google Earth to plan escape routes and routes to block. It’s another example of the central role technology and the web is playing in the conflict. One of the best known websites, the Iraq League - which is run from the UK - also advises that people can use Google Earth to work out the most likely approach of their attackers. It begins by advising against being taken in the first place as “if they arrest you, you will be killed or tortured”. Of course, the insurgents are probably also using Google Earth to pick out their targets.
Small, cleverly made and grandiose Web 2.0 ‘propaganda’ video that captures the excitement of the internet past and present.
It snowed in London yesterday - the heaviest fall for 7 years and the city looked all the more beautiful for it. Here’s a scene from Hampstead Heath on the way to the FoxLand office.
We were in Geneva this week seeing one of our clients, Current BioData. Being half Swiss it gave Andrew the chance to stock up on some of his favourite things. Consequently all the chocolate and cheese in Geneva has now gone. Sorry.
The art of writing news headlines is changing due to SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. There will be less ‘Gotcha‘-style headlines and more literal lines like ‘British Navy sink Argentine warship’ that search engines can understand. This exposes a deep difference between print and television’s strong visual/design element and the string reliance on text on the web. The visual element of news would be a shame to lose on the web after it’s long history offline. It will be interesting to see the future of search in terms of video and photography, and a better understanding of meta-data so it can rely less on the blunt instrument of headlines and pure content text.
After five years of ups and downs, Microsoft has finally released Windows Vista, its’ new operating system. Released simultaneously, Office has been revamped with a radical new interface. We haven’t had a chance to significantly use either yet, but we’ll be interested in improvements (or degradations) in usability, elegance and style. Reviews have been mixed so far, to say the least, but our initial experiences have been positive - especially in terms of the ‘richer’ feel of the interface, including system-wide text anti-aliasing (at last). Many of the criticisms have been aimed at the perceived sense that Microsoft is playing catch-up to Apple’s Mac OS X, while this is true, it is also a good thing. In many areas, such as security, visual experience, ease-of-use and stability, OS X has been far better than Windows for a while. The launch of Vista means that finally there is some competition for Apple. Competition, that is, in terms of user experience. In terms of sales and impact to the way the vast majority of people will interact with their computers, Vista has already won.
The decision to use different fonts is often hard to comprehend for non-designers, in fact users often do not consciously recognise the difference between fonts whether they be Georgia or Times, Arial or Verdana. Of course fonts are important in indicating certain characteristics of your message, yourself or your brand - however unconsciously understood. This study from Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) on the effect of typeface on the perception of email investigates what happens when you choose Comic Sans (unsurprisingly… do not use!), Calibri (use!) or Gigi for an email.
