beatnic - just wondering

We’ve been running some design research sessions which involve several scenarios, each of which uses a slightly different design version for a website.

Each scenario has its own starting page, each of which we put in a different tab in Firefox.

This means setting up all the tabs and start pages for each research session.

To save time, we set these up once.

We then select Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs… > {name the folder}. [Keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl+Shift+D]

These are then all available for each session via Bookmarks > {folder name} > Open All in Tabs.

Handy.

If you’re using tabs in Internet Explorer, the same functionality is available via Favorites > Add Tab Group to Favorites > {name the tab group}

The Tab Groups are then available via the “Favorites Center” [Alt+C on the keyboard].

A good reason not to move entirely to virtual money…

I thought the six coins could make up a shield by arranging the coins both horizontally, as with the landscape idea, as well as vertically, in a sort of jigsaw style. I liked the idea and symbolism of using the Royal Arms, where individually the coins could focus on specific elements and when placed together they reveal the complete Royal Arms.

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It’s easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.

Mathew Dent, winning designer of the new Royal Mint coins, explaining his brilliant thinking.

Generally I like the new look BBC homepage which officially went live last week after a couple of months in “beta”.

It’s got most of what I want: news, weather, listings - the iplayer link could be more visible.

Redesigns are rarely straightforward to get right. I’ve overseen a few in my time. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t - as they say.

It looks like the feedback from people who’ve commented on the BBC’s internet blog has been mainly positive.

One recurring theme in the feedback, however, and the one thing I would like to see changed, is the use of colour change when different “tabs” are selected.

It goes against human nature and breaks the Gestalt principle of grouping objects by similarity.

Below are four thumbnail images from today’s BBC homepage to illustrate. Click on the thumbnail to see the full size image.

When I click on a coloured tab, key elements around the page change colour, using the tab colour as their base.

Sub-consciously I infer a relationship between everything which switches to the new colour-scheme, when in fact there is no relationship.

Are you involved in intranet (in its broadest possible definition) content, design, management, publishing, thinking, consultancy, evaluation or strategy?

What’s on your reading list?

I’ll kick off with my blog subscriptions tagged “intranet” in google reader (view posts/subscribe to this list):

• Column Two - James Robertson in Australia, who is also behind the Intranet Innovation Awards.
• Currybetdotnet - Martin Belam, who I first met and worked with at the BBC when he helped us with our intranet search strategy back in 2002.
• Dilbert - keeps me sane.
• FastForward - stuff on so-called “Enterprise 2.0″.
• Globally local - locally global - Jane McConnell in France. Useful international and strategic perspectives. Annual global survey giving excellent insight and evidence if anyone needs to build a business case for an intranet.
• InfoDesign: Understanding by design - digest of design-related posts and articles (including interaction design, user experience design and information architecture) compiled by Peter J. Bogaards.
• Inside out - A relative newcomer to the intranet blogging scene and a must-read from Richard Dennison at BT.
• Intranet Blog - Toby Ward in Canada. Has worked with numerous companies and seen a lot of intranets - useful case studies and advice on avoiding common pitfalls.
• IBF Blog - Rotating bloggers on a monthly basis offering insight and analysis from research and evaluations of dozens of company intranets. [I wear an occasional Intranet Benchmarking Forum hat]
• Is this wisdom - Richard Hare on networking and sharing ideas.
• Learning Trends - Elliott Masie’s newsletter on the world of learning, work and technology.
• New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - killer content and the long neck.
• The Obvious? - Euan Semple, who started the BBC’s internal blogs, wikis, discussion forum, profile pages long before anyone was talking about Enterprise 2.0 or other such neologisms. Thought-provoking ideas and ruminations on social media, the internet, society and work.
• Signal vs. Noise - The blog from 37 signals makers of Basecamp and other useful, usable and desirable web apps.
• Webcredibles - Accessible writing on accessibility.

This gives me a manageable amount of info and insight and points to other conversations going on that are relevant too.

It’s difficult deciding what to tag “intranet” and what to tag “intranet-related” - as Richard Dennison asks what is an intranet after all?

I’ve tagged quite a lot, including the frequently updating news-based sources, as intranet-related to try to see the wood for the trees as it were.

Right, wrong, good, bad? Too introspective? What’s missing? What do you recommend?

Philippe Starck does his turn at TED.

Don’t look up, it’s a trap.

[Via Richard Sambrook]

I’ve had my Nokia N95 phone since June. I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s good for looking at websites, the camera is great despite the shutter lag, video quality good. It’s ok for having phone calls on. Battery life’s ok. I haven’t got the patience with the GPS, and sometimes I do wonder if it’s registered a key press…

There a couple of things I find virtually impossible to remember how to do…

1. Changing the “desktop icons”

   Well that’s what I call them. It’s the menu which lets you access six applications quickly from the phone’s desktop or start screen. I guess it’s because they’re called Active standby apps - not a name that I could easily have guessed.

   Here’s the path you’ll need to take to change them:

   Main Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Personalisation > Standby mode > Active Standby apps

   Phew! Now you can select which apps you want to create short-cuts for.

2. Deleting multiple text messages

   Deleting all your messages in your SMS inbox is different from previous Nokia models, which as far as I can remember had their own delete menu.

   With the N95 (and possibly across the N-series) you’ll need to use the Mark/Unmark feature.

   In your message inbox, highlight one of the text messages you want to delete, and select Options. Select Mark/Unmark then Mark all. This will be indicated on-screen by placing a tick next to each message that’s marked. You can now perform tasks on all the Marked messages, including delete.

And what’s the difference between a Tool and an Application? I’m sure there’s a logic in there somewhere, but I find it very confusing. To me they’re all tools and they’re all applications.

If you have web apps like travel booking systems or services like discussion forums running on your intranet you already have personalisation. Whether it’s any good is down to how well it’s designed and presented and how it feels to use.

For company intranet homepages I don’t think there’s any question that personalisation will become increasingly common. The likes of Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and even Facebook have raised people’s expectations in this area.

The risk is that companies confuse personalisation with customisation and jump on the bandwagon, rushing to provide all the latest functionality before considering what people really need.

So here are three definitions that should help when thinking about this:

Top-down content

Content that’s there because you work for Company X. Examples include share price information and company-wide announcements.

Personalised content

Content that is there because you’re you. You are in a particular role, in a particular department, at a particular level. How? Either the system knows who you are, or you’ve told it about yourself or a combination of the two.

Customised content

Content (and sometimes positioning and formatting) that you’ve chosen based on a particular set of options. You have subscribed to the latest news about design and have chosen to have the headlines appear in a list on the right hand side of the page. You’ve chosen a particular look and feel for the page.

There is absolutely no reason why the three types of content can’t share the same space. Good interaction and visual design is essential to ensure people can clearly distinguish between them.

If the content is relevant and well presented, intranet personalisation can help make the digital workspace more joined up and navigable, and it can help employees have a better understanding of their overall work environment.

See also: Gerry McGovern’s recent article Intranet personalization: does it work?

Do you have a lift at work? Does it have a male or female voice? Who decided that?

Does a lift in Belfast have a different accent to a lift in Manchester, Falmouth or Glasgow?

Should the automated announcements on trains change accent depending on which part of the country you’re in?

Don’t be put off by the name!

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking - inspiration, ideation and implementation - and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Netvibes is quite simply everything an intranet (homepage) needs to be.

As well as being a great way of managing all my stuff on the internet of course.

There’s talk over in the East Dulwich Forum that Channel Four’s Grand Designs has been filming in Landells Road in East Dulwich.

The episode is scheduled to go out on Wednesday 16th May.

And last night saw Kevin McCloud revisiting Peckham.

Every now and then I read something that seems to coincide with my life so perfectly I imagine there must be an Amélie-like character who has placed it in my path.

This is certainly true of John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life).

Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

At work we have a big simplicity theme going on at the moment which I’m closely involved in. The book is the perfect reference for this work.

On a personal note I found it covers themes which are incredibly important to me in the way I work and think as a technologist, designer and facilitator and also in my non-work life.

There are ten laws. If you’re really pushed for time the tenth law “The One” summarises them all:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The book is deliberately 100 pages long. Just knowing that when you’re reading it is reassuring and offers a feeling of simplicity in itself.

I must admit I enjoyed the book so much I broke the third law immediately by taking my time to ponder the content.

There’s a great explanation of how the iPod became more complex before it became simpler, like so many other things in life!

Maeda also covers Gestalt, one of my favourite subjects, and how it helps when designing and understanding design.

If you don’t want to buy the book, much of the information in the book is available on Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity blog, though I find the fact that the book packages the ideas and is itself simply designed means it works much better for me.

Just read this brilliant and incredibly timely (for me anyway!) post from the always passionate Kathy Sierra.

To avoid the Zone of Mediocrity, you must suspend disbelief.

You must be willing and able to turn off (temporarily) The Voice inside that says, “We’ll never get away with this. People will hate it.” That doesn’t necessarily mean The Voice is wrong, but until you can shut if off, you’re virtually guaranteed to stay with safer, incremental ideas. But remember–”safer” really isn’t safer anymore, unless you’re looking only to avoid criticism. Safe will keep you safely out of the spotlight. If that’s what you want (and sometimes that’s the best approach), then fine. But if not…

(side note: this is somewhat like The Inner Game approach or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any of the other approaches to creativity that get your logical “talking” mind out of the way so all the more useful but non-speaking parts of your brain can get on with the important things you’re trying to accomplish.)

And it’s not just suspending disbelief about what users (or critics) will say… you must also suspend disbelief about what your company will let you do. I first experienced this at Sun, where it was almost impossible to creatively brainstorm about ways to improve things without someone jumping in with, “Yeah, but they’d never let us do that.” End of discussion. End of chance to do something amazing. Every time I do an internal workshop, the partipants are far more negative than when some of those same people are in a public version of my passionate users workshop. By taking them outside their company and having them brainstorm or work on fictional or other people’s projects, their minds are free to move about. I’ve nearly quit doing in-house workshops because the “they’ll never let us do that” syndrome is so strong.

You can’t help users kick ass until your employer lets YOU kick ass.

[Source: Creating Passionate Users: Dilbert and the zone of mediocrity]

It reminded me of the city of Mediocritaxa - well worth a visit.

Vote for your favourite British design icon from 1900 onwards.

The Great British Design Quest is a vote to discover the public’s favourite British design icon. Organised by the Design Museum and The Culture Show, the vote opens with a shortlist of 25 and is narrowed down to a Top 10, Top 3 and a final winner.

I went for Harry Beck’s London Underground map in the end. Following that it would be the Routemaster Bus and the Mini.

It’s an aura thing.

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.

Researchers [from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada] found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage.

They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion.

[...]

The researchers also believe that these quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.

If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.

Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

Full article on BBC News.

Just wondering…

Was this intentional?

Does it bring in more business than if they’d placed their logo somewhere else?

Can you think of an example of something that exists in one size and one size only and is manufactured for one purpose?

I can’t. Yet.

Some suggestions talking to colleagues (and my uber-pedantic reasons why they don’t count):

Red Nose - they make them for cars too
Earrings - I reckon they do different sizes
Make Poverty History rubber wristband - I had a fabric one earlier in the year

Any more for any more?

With junk food giant visual design treatment.

Frightening food facts about what’s really on your plate. More info on the Food4Thought website.

More than one in three children do not know what chips are made of, a survey for the British Heart Foundation reveals.

A worrying 36% of 8-14 year-olds could not correctly identify the main ingredient as potato, despite chips being a firm favourite on most children’s plates.

Nearly one in ten of the 1,000 children questioned thought chips were mostly made of oil, while others suggested eggs, flour, and even apples.

From the accompanying press release.

Here’s something to mark World Usability Day.

Boots does a thing called Meal Deal which means for a fixed price you can get a sandwich, drink and snack/dessert.

There are two types of meal deal, one where the products are marked with a red circle and the slightly more expensive option which uses a green circle.

So you might expect the contents of this picture form a green meal deal, right?

Wrong :(

Move a little closer and you’ll see the green circle on the fruit ins’t a “Meal deal” green circle but a “Try me” green circle, with very small print saying “cannot be purchased as part of a green meal deal.”

I wonder if the packaging and labelling designers realised how much trouble they’d be causing by letting a bit of confusing information design through?

Yesterday I witnessed a 10 minute delay in a queue in a Boots store cause as a direct result of this. I wonder how many other times that’s happened.

Gestalt, not.

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.

In his latest alertbox, Jakob Nielsen explains how the concept of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) is no longer useful or valid and is evolving into what-you-get-is-what-you-see (WYGIWYS) or “results-oriented UI [user interface].”

He uses the user interface redesign for Microsoft’s Office 12 as an example of where this is happening. There’s been positive feedback in initial testing apparently.

You select from a range of examples roughly what you want your end result to be (letter, book, presentation) and then narrow down to more detailed options.

And rather than drilling down through drop-down lists, your options are presented to you in context (according to the task you’re aiming to complete) and visually.

I guess this works in office-type applications because it lets people focus on the content rather than the formatting.

But I don’t think it’s new, just new to office-type applications. Other software has been based on this concept for a while now.

And there are lots of online products and services offering this kind of contextualised option selection and refinement, first thanks to Flash and now with ajax it’s spreading like wildfire.

Isn’t results-oriented UI just user-centred design by another name?

… have really whetted my appetite for his long-hand interpretation coming soon.

To promote their tv series The New Ten Commandments, shown in February 2005, Channel Four commissioned this sulpture by Sokari Douglas Camp.

It’s called “The 11th Commandment”.

It represents the most popular new commandment as chosen by the British public: “Treat others as you would like to be treated” (see also British Humanist Assocation on the Golden Rule).

Looking for ideas for the sculpture, Douglas Camp wrapped herself and her children in the comfort and security of shawls. In the sculpture these have been transformed in to “Graffiti shawls” using the words of the commandment to protect and comfort the figures.

It’s currently on Peckham Rye Common (on the corner of East Dulwich Road and Peckham Rye) and will be going on tour to other London boroughs (Bexley, Islington, Hackney and Enfield) soon.

Visionary stupidity: in which Cordy Swope discusses how companies go wrong with product design and development.

My approach to design is as “consumer in context”. I leave the domain knowledge to the experts.

The article argues that without a good dose of ignorance and objectivity in the design process brands become myopic to the point of self-annihilation, citing Braun (which these days should be a major competitor in the MP3 player market, but will always be associated with male grooming products and kitchen utensils) and Smart (which should have stuck to their original car concept and not tried to diversify).

Naivety is a good thing. And the best strategy is always realised through hindsight!

3 things that cross over between my work and my life:

• A desire to understand how things work. (What goes on under the bonnet? What do they feel like to use? What’s the story behind the design?)
• Using technology to help connect people with each other and with information
• My love of language(s)

Not to be confused with “work-life balance”.

Yes, but how did I get here?

Yesterday I went to the Design Museum in London with some friends from work to see the design of information exhibition “YOU ARE HERE” (now in its last week).

It was full of amazing examples of how we convey complex information through models, signs and symbols, including navigation devices, orreries, maps, graphs, charts and timepieces. There were some interesting comparisons between how information is conveyed in different cultures.

But I felt it missed a trick by only showing the end results.

What I’d really like to learn is…

• Who was involved (not just the accredited designer)?
• What was discarded along the way?
• What was discovered along the way?
• What do the designs that nearly made it look like?
• How was the end result decided on and who by?
• What’s the story behind the design?