I made a font based on my handwriting for use in my digital sketches and e-learning.

Here’s a sample:

It’s rough and ready, a little uneven on the baseline, and limited to A-Z caps and lower case, plus numbers 0-9 and a few other characters – but quite handy for keeping things looking sketchy. (At some point I’ll make a more comprehensive version.)

It’s in a zip file. You’ll need to unzip it and install it in your computer’s font directory.

• Download Beatnic 0.5.ttf

If you use it, let me know :-)

There’s an advertising campaign at the moment for Blackberry, the smartphone company, using the tag line “Closeness has nothing to do with distance.”

These days we can all carry our loved ones around in our pocket or handbag using the various social networking features of the Blackberry – including using it as a phone, presumably.

On several web projects recently, I’ve been conducting user research and usability testing with people in different locations (including other continents) using screen-sharing tools like WebEx and LiveMeeting. So even though we may be several thousand miles apart, we’re both looking at the same screen.

An important aspect of a user research session is building initial trust between the researcher and the respondent, so that the respondent feels comfortable and not too self-conscious. This involves an opening conversation, where I’ll introduce myself and explain the purpose of the research. I’ll then ask the respondent to tell me a bit about themselves, and gradually ask questions which narrow down towards the subject matter of the research session.

In person, you can pick up on all the cues available to you, and adjust your tone, proximity, style etc. to find a good mode for putting the other person at ease.

Using software such as LiveMeeting and talking over the telephone (or VOIP) you lose a lot of those cues.

So to try to help put the respondent more at ease, the first thing I’ll do during the introductions is share my web browser via LiveMeeting (or WebEx etc.) and show my profile page. This could be on the respondent’s company’s intranet, or my LinkedIn profile, or whichever seems the most appropriate.

Then I’ll encourage the respondent to do the same, or I’ll have a browser tab available with their profile page available to share if I can access it.

I find this really helps put people at ease and feel more able to “think out loud” when we move on to usability testing the prototype, web app or intranet site in question.

It’s never quite the same as being there in person, but it’s definitely an improvement to just being a disembodied voice at the end of the line.

Traffic Light Tree. Photo by Squirmelia on Flickr

I’ve been thinking a lot about traffic lights recently.

Why are there three lights? Why are they vertically arranged? And how can the answers help us understand inclusive information design?

We learn from an early age that red means stop and green means go. We also learn the convention is to have red at the top and green at the bottom.

According to a Stanford University research article, “Roughly 1 in 10 men are fully or partly colour blind.” Although colour-blindness affects men and women, men are 20 times more likely to be colour blind than women.

For people with the most common types of colour-blindness, it’s hard to distinguish between red, yellow and green.

At a road junction, someone with red-green colour-blindness can see whether the red or green light is lit because of the additional information provided by the vertical arrangement of the lights.

In the world of project management, a common usage of the traffic light metaphor is as a project reporting device, using red, amber and green (RAG) to denote the current status of a particular aspect of the project. Red usually means there’s a problem, while green is all systems go.

In project reporting it’s common to show a single spot of colour to denote a RAG status (See 1a below).

To someone with colour-blindness the information design has failed. Showing a single traffic light removes the contextual information required to determine whether it’s red or green (See 1b below). That’s quite a fundamental problem.

1a. RAG status shown as spots of colour

Once the colours become indistinguishable, it’s no longer possible to use the Gestalt principle of similarity to help us distinguish between the symbols.

One option is to reintroduce the full traffic light, with the RAG-status colour lit. Having three lights arranged vertically means that you don’t have to distinguish between red and green to know what the current status is. You just have to remember that top means stop. This option (not illustrated) would require some reworking of the grid to accommodate readable traffic lights, and would not make efficient use of the space available.

So what other options are there?

Adding the initial letter of the RAG status to the symbol enables us to see the differences (2a).

2a. RAG status shown as spots of colour containing initial letters.

However, the colour-blindness simulation (2b) shows it still requires some cognitive effort to read the letters.

Better still, use a different shape for each of the three RAG statuses, as well as the colour (3a and 3b).

3a. RAG status symbols shown as coloured shapes.

It’s easier to scan for triangles than the letter “R”, for example, to quickly identify the Red items.

Whichever you choose, it’s important to include a key in the diagram as well.

There’s a massive drive on at the moment to make public data available, and to use graphic design techniques to make sense of it all. A popular example is to overlay crime statistics on to a map. As data visualisation becomes ever more possible and ever more popular across digital and print media, the principle of inclusive design has never been more essential.

In a nutshell: to ensure your information design is inclusive, don’t rely on colour alone to convey meaning.

Tools and references:

• Vischeck – colour-blindness simulation tools for testing images and web-pages.

  [N.B. the simulations shown above were generated using Vishceck's online simulator, using the Protanope colour vision setting, a form of red-green colour-blindness.]

• Colour-blindness (Wikipedia article)
• Traffic lights (Wikipedia article)

[Encouraged by a friend after I wrote this explanation in Facebook, I'm posting it here and planning to start writing more than 140 characters again every so often]

A hashtag is a type of label (or metadata) that you can include as part of a message on sites like Twitter.

It then allows people to follow mentions of the term you’ve hashtagged, if they so desire.

One of the most common uses of hashtags I’ve seen (and used) is around a live event, for example a conference or a Grand Prix race.

It’s a hashtag because of the # sign used as a prefix. A hash, followed by a tag.

Screenshot of a hashtag on Twitter

Some software (such as Tweetdeck, a Twitter client) is programmed to look for hashtagged terms, and turn them in to hyperlinks to the latest posts which also use the same hashtag.

A recent example was the ironic use of the hashtag #nickcleggsfault – when Twitter users started blaming anything and everything that had gone wrong on the soon to be Deputy PM. You can see Twitter messages labelled #nickcleggsfault

You might have notice that at the start of the BBC’s TV programme Later with Jools Holland, the term #laterjools is shown on screen.

This is a way to share the “official” (or suggested) hashtag for that particular subject or event. You can see all #laterjools at http://hashtags.org/laterjools.

To make hashtags people often concatenate words to form one long term such as #thisisahashtag

You can’t put spaces in hashtags, and it’s best to avoid trying to use any punctuation.

Having no rules, and being an open system, leaves it open to abuse by spammers and marketers. You’ll sometimes find popular hashtags being hijacked with messages tempting you with links to increase your endowments.

Here are the findings from usability “guru” Jakob Nielsen’s report on Social Networking on Intranets…

• Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.
• Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.
• Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.
• Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0′s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.
• Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.

Nielsen talks a lot about integrating the social networking tools in to the rest of the intranet, where useful and possible. My team did a lot of work in this area a few years ago at the BBC.

That’s the question currently on the homepage of Ask Nature, a new web-based resource which catalogues the many ways we can learn from nature when we’re trying to solve problems. The project is run by the Biomimicry Institute.

The site was announced this morning at TED Global in Oxford.

Here’s an excerpt:

Anchors of bull kelp protect it from torque by being flexible.

“Kelp’s survival depends on flexibility and extensibility. Each alga can grow up to 20 to 45 m (22 to 49 yd) long and consists of a holdfast, stipe, float, and fronds. The holdfast uses a flexible network of root-like haptera or anchors to attach the kelp to the ocean floor. By being flexible, the haptera allow the kelp’s base to rotate slightly, thus providing some protection from the high torque created by waves.” (Biomimicry Guild unpublished report) [read Bull Kelp article]

Hot from the online edit suite… you can also watch Gordon Brown’s speech at TED Global. The comments make interesting reading.

Imagine my surprise the other day when I walked past a meeting room and read the words:

“How to tell the team the bad news“

Alright, that’s made up. But I have seen several rather over-revealing meeting titles on my way down various corridors recently.

Technology for setting up meetings is getting pretty sophisticated these days.

In one or two office buildings I’ve been in recently, there is a small touch-screen on the wall just outside each meeting room showing the subject of the meeting taking place therein.

It’s all linked to the everyone’s Outlook (Exchange) calendars. You invite your colleague/s, give the meeting a subject, then you invite the room as a “resource”. The subject – and the name of the organiser – then appears on the touchscreen as the meeting takes place.

So, as a friendly word of advice, be careful what you call your meetings. More common and less high tech is for people to print out their daily agenda and walk around with it for all to see.

While we’re on the subject (as it were), and for good measure, put as much meaning in to the meeting title as possible, without giving away all your company’s top-secret information.

A popular bug-bear is when a meeting request arrives with the subject “Catch-up and coffee with Bob” or something similar. Of course it makes perfect sense to the organiser, but once Bob’s accepted the meeting requets, it doesn’t provide Bob with many clues at a glance!

Social notworking

In 2002 we built something on the BBC’s intranet called “Learning Online”. I was working with an amazing team of forward-thinking and innovative people.

We designed Learning Online to be the intranet home for BBC employees to manage their personal development, training and career development.

Alongside e-learning, personal development planning and a personalised virtual induction, was a section called MyNetworks.

If you picture MyNetworks as an early prototype for Facebook groups you’ll have a pretty close approximation. But this was 2002, so the concept was still fairly alien to most people.

The idea behind MyNetworks was simple. Create spaces for groups of people who had something in common where they could have conversations, share “knowledge” as documents or images, and plan events.

We had a lot of interest from various people, who set up and “ran” their networks with varying degrees of success.

There was one consistent and recurring theme.

Where a lot of time was spent “designing” a network before involving its members, the network invariably failed.

Often people would put great effort in to the planning of how a network would be run, and how the information in the network would be organised. When the network was finally launched, nobody used it. And those who did found a perplexing empty suite of rooms.

It seems obvious to say it, but the idea of “if we build it they will come” really did not work in most cases.

The less “designed” the network, the greater chance of its success, through participation and involvement of its members using the online tools to support the network, but not to be the network.

Twitter is used in many different ways.

As @dulwichmum says, its nearest equivalent that people are familiar with is Facebook status updates.

Twitter updates, or “tweets” as they are sometimes called, are limited in length to 140 characters.

Apart from that, there are no rules about how to use Twitter.

Some people use it to share ideas, thoughts and links or to ask questions.

You can choose whether to make your updates public or private.

If you think someone is saying something interesting you can “follow” them, which subscribes you to their updates, which will appear on your Twitter homepage.

You can see who other people are following and who’s following them.

Well known people on Twitter include Stephen Fry, Imogen Heap, Andy Murray, Barack Obama (very quiet since he won the election).

Companies use Twitter to send out updates about their products and services and answer customers’ questions.

Even Tower Bridge has an account on Twitter, which sends out a tweet whenever the bridge is opening or closing.

There is a growing number of Twitter tools available to write, read and manage your updates, including apps for the iPhone.

One of the first and still one of the best applications I’ve seen is Twittervision – which overlays tweets from Twitter on a google map of the world, so you get to see where people are when they tweet something.

Thanks to Peter Bihr aka thewavingcat on Twitter I was able to sit in on some of Loic Lemeur‘s Leweb this week via Berlinbase.de, a livestreaming mashup of video and text updates.

One talk that caught my attention was by Robin Good who is MasterNewMedia.

He asked people about what learning really meant to them and played back recorded video of answers from learned learning afficionados in to the conference.

Good finished by listing 12 things we must all learn to do well. I just managed to scribble these down, so here they are:

1. live healthily
2. read and understand what you’re reading
3. learn – the system and the method
4. be creative, anybody can be
5. empathise
6. tell truth from fiction, especially in the “news”
7. predict consequences
8. value yourself
9. live a meaningful life
10. communicate effectively
11. ask good questions
12. have good fun