Tag Archives: work

Jobs I’ve had: Car auction driver

[Like many, I'm a firm believer that we learn by doing, and the benefit we gain from the variety of our experiences - both positive and negative - we bring to every new situation. So I thought I'd write about … Continue reading

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Arts spaces as workplaces – London’s Royal Festival Hall

Since I went freelance nearly four years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time working in – and a lot of time talking about – The Royal Festival Hall in London’s South Bank Centre. Today is the last day I’ll … Continue reading

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The web – integration not destination

If we really want to help people connect with each other, get stuff done, solve problems and make things, then the web is not the destination. We need to work harder to integrate the web in to people’s lives, when and … Continue reading

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Find, Understand, Share, Extend

Today is World Usability Day. The theme this year is communication. I’ve chosen to write about something which I find helps teams I work with communicate and explore what we design and put on the web. Back in 2005, Yahoo! Search announced … Continue reading

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Don’t let distance get in the way of your user research

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 … Continue reading

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Traffic lights and inclusive design

Why are there three separate lights in the standard traffic light setup? Why are they vertically arranged? In a nutshell: don’t rely on colour alone to convey meaning in your information design. Continue reading

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Social networking on intranets – have a problem to solve, and expect it to take time, says Jakob Nielsen

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 … Continue reading

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Be careful, sometimes the writing really is on the wall

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 … Continue reading

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Communities – start simple, don’t over-design

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 … Continue reading

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To do: switch on Labs features in Google Apps

I recently switched over from standard google mail, calendar etc. to make more use of and get my head round Google Apps. The first thing I noticed was that I’d lost some features I’d enabled on the standard gmail. I’d … Continue reading

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