January 2005 Archives

Just dropped my tax return off at Euston Tower. It closes at 20:00 and there were queues of people snaking around the building. Kind of a funny atmosphere, a bit festive, a bit like first day at school...

This whole anti-terrorist thing is really getting out of control

(thanks boingboing)

It's two o'clock and I've been shuffling around the office in my socks. I've stepped into my open-back Birkies a few times and joy oh joy, my legs are not acheing :-)

This is great, I can actually function normally...

I'm guessing when you read this you'll be quite a lot older and no doubt these ramblings will be served up in some as yet unimagined way. In any case there's been a lot going on recently that I haven't recorded.

Last Saturday (22nd January) you went to your first ballet class. It was surprisingly fun--I joined in and did the tippytoes thing and the armflappy thing and so on. At first you seemed a little uncertain, but by the end of the class, you were doing the butterfly with the other girls. As you may have noticed, your Mom and I are not pushy parents (before other readers get the wrong idea). The ballet thing happened quite unexpectedly. Someone left a leaflet in your box at nursery and we took up its offer of a free evaluation class.

Since then you've been pretty sick. lots of vomiting both night and day, but luckily you also slept under grown-up bedding for the first time this week (you wont remember this but I sorted out your "big girl bed" a couple of months ago) so once you had vommed on all the sleeping bags we still had backup. The washing machine has been running solid all week.

Anyway, I thought I'd put a specific diary entry in here--which I haven't done in quite some time--as it feels like I haven't seen you for three weeks:-(

You see, your Mom and Dad have to work to make some coldharddinari to buy food and toys and trips to the zoo. Sometimes in this process, your Dad has to travel a bit. Mom does too, you may remember the weeks spent with Granma Ruth in Devon or the trips up to stay with Eve, Thomas and Holly in Manchester. These generally coincided with your Mom heading off to Sri-Lanka or Hong-Kong.

Unfortunately for him, your Dad gets to travel to far less exotic places like Guildford or Salisbury. For the last three weeks (and for another nine) your Papa has to leave the house at Seven and doesn't get back home until 19:30. Seeing as you are just opening your eyes at Seven, and are in bed with stories milk and Mummy at 19:30 this means that for these few months, our interaction is limited to week-ends and ten minutes of semi-consciousness during the week. Believe me, your Dad is not happy about this at all and is looking for a satisfactory work-around.

So today is Friday, and I'm already counting the minutes until I see you next. Have fun with Sophia today, and stop fighting over her toys (pretty please). Je t'aime immensément ma p'tite puce, à très bientôt:-)

So I'm contracting at a place that requires a bit more polish in the old dress code than I'm used to, so I've been dusting off my lovely old leather shoes. I've got a gorgeous pair of French ones that still look great but have a hole in the sole (soul) and getting them fixed requires sending them back to France (the soles are tripple-welt and the taps are forged and seamlessly fitted with steel screws--these are some very serious items of footware).

Anyway, in an effort to make those ones last a few more months, I dusted off a lovely pair i picked up at Church's a few years ago. They were still like new and I seemed to remember that they didn't fit terribly well and never really wore them in. So to cut a long story short, I brazenly wore the damn things last Thursday (the day I became 42 years old) and by the end of the day, both my ankles were raw flesh and my socks were filled with blood (which may have explained why I couldn't keep my mind on the gig I was at that evening).

Since then, I've compounded the problem. I have to wear formal shoes to work, so even with two plasters on each ankle it's agony. My bloody commute includes about 45 minutes of brisk walking and a further 30 of standing still (tube). The picture above was taken a few days into this process, my ankles are swelling up like I'm pregnant and parts of my calf are developing welts, scarring and bruising. I just cannot believe a pair of shoes could do so much damage.

So today i've instituted a one-man dress-down Friday and am walking to the bank in my Birkenstocks:-)

Most good user experience is taken for granted, as is powerful information architecture. Recently I've been noticing hidden usability design features that don't stand out until you put the objet out of its primary context. Most recently I've been studying the little stirring device that South West Trains put in your tea, but today let's look at my car radio.

Ever since I first got the Jeep I've been noticing little compromises to the user experience that Chrysler chooses to make to ensure the process of making right-hand-drive models (for us drive-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road users) doesn't bump up the price on what is supposed to be a cheap car for its class.

The first thing I noticed is that the position of the hand-brake and the forward drink holders are inverted. If you sit in the passenger seat, dropping your right arm to your side naturally puts your right hand on the brake handle--good ergonomics. Equally, if the front passenger is negotiating a full cup of coffee, the drinks holders are just far enough away that he doesn't risk brushing or snagging his cup against an item of clothing. This is also good ergonomic planning, as is the fact that by having the cups on the right hand-side of the center console, bottles don't bump into the passenger's elbow when he's changing gears.

Except that I want to change gears, not my passenger.

The ergonomics of the center console are just plain wrong for the right-hand drive version and my user experience is one of spilling drinks, elbowing bottles and having to reach further to put the hand-brake on. I won't go into the fact the gear stick and gearbox are designed to mesh smoothly into place if operated with your right hand from the left seat...

So what of the radio.

The more I use it, the more I admire the design. It's a fairly complex device. It offers a large menu of features to select from and several distinct physical movements are needed to operate it.

First off it has all the sound controls: volume, bass, treble, and front to rear fading. It has a CD player. This means the user needs to load and unload cds. It also means shuffling tracks, fast-forwarding to tracks, skipping or repeating tracks. It has a tape player. This presents all the same functions as the CD player with the extra tape-flip and realtime fast-forward and rewind (which you need to use a lot in order to play "Bobby Bingo" over and over again). Finally, it has a multiband radio with tuning, traffic advisory, regional station scan and all those other little clever things that I haven't worked out yet because I can't be bothered to read the instructions.

So if you were designing this from scratch with a quality user experience in mind, how many buttons do think you would need and were would you put them?

This is such a good exercise for web designers. To succeed with the information architecture, they will need to:

• Understand the complete user environment (position of other car controls, ambient lighting etc)
• Understand the goals the user will attempt to reach (fast-forward to "Old Macdonald" without moving far from steering wheel)
• Be able to clearly understand and rate the importance to the user of each task and its associated set of controls.
• Design a front-end that is up-to-date and sexy without compromising any of the UX requirements

When I started this piece was going to show how the team that designed my radio cracked it, but this may be more interesting if I just give you the parameters they had to work to. The radio's fascia needs to fit into a bounding rectangle of approximately 50mm by 200mm positioned in the middle off the vehicle's centre console.

Designs on a postcard please:-)

So how did I miss this piece in the Guardian?

You know, I put that calendar up there on the right because I could. I mean when I moved to Movabletype, the calendar seemed fun and possibly useful.

I'm beginning to think it's not a terribly useful navigation device, but have you ever noticed the patterns? There's a relationship between how you feel, how often and when you post, and the actual pattern of orange dots on the calendar. Not sure what this means, but I like it:-)

I used to spend a lot of time explaining to clients how powerful website personalisation was going to be for them and researching the technologies to do it. I remember one day, the people at Broadvision (a personalision software company) invited me to a seminar on the topic and showered me and a bunch of other agency folk with quality baked goods and average coffee.

Anyways, I was reminded of this last week when someone at work said something that sounded exactly like an old Broadvision pitch and we all laughed and got to thinking about what happened to all those amazing self-adjusting sites we going to build. In the end, they just didn't happen.

That was this Friday, and I just got my newsletter from OK/Cancel today. Tom Chi asks

There was a period in the history of the web when personalization was going to transform everything -- making the buying experience vastly more inviting for customers and lucrative for business. I'm not really sure what happened.

He's spot on as ever. Read Getting Personal

Collaborative media creation and consulting: Conceive and create the Pea Harvest blog. Russell Davies comments on the Birds Eye pea blog:

I'll admit I clicked on the link with trepidation, corporate blogs are not always the best, but this is lovely. I think a lot of the charm is it's not trying to be more than it should, it's a blog about the pea harvest and pea tasting and it's just that, it's not pasted over with agency copywriting or big brand gags, it's just a look behind the scenes, using regular blogger tools, movable type, flickr, youtube, odeo. It'll never reach an audience of billions but it's not supposed to. Really nice work.

The primary objective for the project was to allow Birds Eye to show that even though it may be a large corporation, it is built on strong human qualities. Colin's voice is now a trusted source of information and Birds Eye has taken the first step in a programme to build on dialogue, accessibility and transparency. Colin is currently taking a break, but will start posting about his sustainability programme soon.

As ever, Tim says it best:

The blog itself should become a projection of the bizarre mind of Isaac Mostovicz: karate expert, diamanteer, talmudic scholar, luxury marketer...

Isaac believes that embracing paradox can enable deep transformation. He's written about 100,000 words on the topic so far, which I'll be editing and extracting over the months to come--confusion will reign!

Any suggestions for links, topics and functionality tweaks on a postcard please. Big hat tip to Glasshouse associate Dug Falby.

Redesign and restructure bioinformatics extranet application. Lead team of scientists, programmers and marketers through a complete user experience architecture process resulting in an entirely new system design.

Note Acoustique Ecophon a multi-language Movabletype integration and information architecture project for client Fredrik Wackå

Redesign and restructure the main Flora website. Conceive information model based on customer insight. Develop information model into an information architecture designed to support the growth of the website and the inclusion of future advertising initiatives.

The website introduction explains it best:

Oxford Strategic Marketing, in partnership with Hunter Miller, has commissioned independent research to explore the critical issues facing senior marketers in their first 100 Days. The report will be available in January 2006 to download, and the critical issues will continue to be debated below. To keep abreast of the debate, subscribe to our rss-feed.

A couple more pure CSS application skins over at TruePlayaz and Lemonjelly and you know what, you learn something everyday--who'd a thunk you could get a dot-ky tld?

In the spirit of releasing early and often, experimentalpragmatics.org went live last night well before the design is actually finished. Dug can't pretend to understand the concepts of relevance and utterance interpretation, but he's happy to be able to help another non-profit onto the internet.

Dug has completed another pure CSS ringtone shop interface for those wonderful guys at YR Media. We're now rapidly aproaching the point where the ringtone shops could be assembled into an unorthodox (because these are targeted at Firefox and IE6) CSS Zen Garden. More on that thought later...

A project to unify the IFA-facing web services of UK financial services giant Friends Provident. This was a challenging project requiring as much diplomacy as design. The new designs should go live in Ocotber 2005

Dug has developed both communications and user-experience solutions for a number of large finacial services institutions including:

• AMP Bank
• Standard Chartered Bank
• New York Stock Exchange
• OM Group
• Friends Provident
• Chase Leasing
• Flemings JP Morgan

Dug has just finished up materials for client Cognima's "3GSM 2005": tradeshow presence. This year, Dug developed a new stand design incorporating plasma screens into the stand walls and a new edition of Music to Replicate Data By, a series of music compilations launched in 2003.

Design of all CSS ringtone shop interface. The microsite is linked to from the skint.net website.

Motion graphics production.

Twenty minutes of ambient video communication for Saudi petrochem leader SABIC's tradeshow stand at K2004 in Cologne. Films convey key brand messages (sample). Client: Bisqit Design

With the Twocultureclash shop, Dug worked closely with YR Media's Mark Panay to really push the white-label application.

Mark's semantic markup allowed Dug to build a design around CSS selectors acting on most parts of the site without need for specific class definitions.

For client YR Media, Dug designed a set of skins for the company's white label graphics and ringtones store.

An impossible brief: a set of website templates that could repair themselves and shield the user from design mistakes.

Dug has worked with Cognima for a number of years. Over this period, he has developed

• A complete corporate identity programme
  • Brand mark
  • Brand guideline
  • Print requirements (letterhead, cards)
  • Website template system
  • Promotionals (T-shirts, mugs, mousemats)
  • Office signage and place-holding
  • Bilingual Japanese/English design
• Travelling exhibition stand design
• A collection of limited-edition music CDs

The Lecture List was launched in May 2004. Over the twelve-month design and development phase, Dug was responsible for the entire user experience, from functionality specification through to application design, human interaction and control of the final coding of the site's interface.

Web designer: Lorenzo Sprenger

Some links to matrix solution sites:

• web.usna.navy.mil
• lar5.com
• jjorg.chem.unc.edu
• jeays.net
• www.schubart.net

The client asked for interactive ideas that would allow millions of people around the world to experience the 007 lifestyle.

Dug spent two years developing assets and strategies for Glidrose Publications Limited, the owners of the James Bond intellectual property. One of Dug's favourite projects is the Ian Fleming Encyclopedia.

The site contains every word written by Ian Fleming, organised in a flexible, resilient and easy-to-use database. Designed for academics as well as amateurs, the search-and-comparison facilities will be cross-referenced with relevant course data provided by rss feed from university publishing resources.

While Dug produced mock-ups of search-and-compare web pages to add the film resources of Danjaq, LLC. and MGM to the site, the IP owners are still in legal consultation and this element of the project is temporarily on hold.

Designed standards-compliant version of the Guardian Unlimited website to satisfy accessibility/usability requirements of UK educational charity (The Lecture List).

White label design templates to merge AMP bank financial services into M&S ‘Unicorn' financial product.

Web designer: Daniel Harman

Dug ran an audit of the client's publishing methodologies and described a creative position. This enabled the new Discovery Health website to gain credibility among viewers and establish the channel it supported as a free-standing editorial offering.

Accessibilty consulting for interesource.com on a brief from US legal giant Lawtel.

Dug designed skins for a number of the applications pages.

As part of the brief, Dug also developed a methodology for the internal team to follow to protecting usability / accessibility during both the initial design and final implementation phases of the project.

Dug directed the design of the UK version of street.com

He paid particular attention to UK journalistic idiom so that the site was truly native as opposed to a ‘port' of the US offering.

Dug designed the xhtml templates for the magazine which allowed multicolumn layout to function correctly at all seven browser font-size settings.

Dug has been developing advanced CSS-based design techniques since 1997. Donkey is the developmental test-bed for these techniques.

(Read ALA article for position-based n-column layout)

The brief was for an interactive campaign that would engage an adult audience with Shrek and encourage DVD purchases.

Dug consulted on accessibility / usability for Gibraltar-based gambling site.

I'm currently hunting down the pages and pages of work I did on the new James Bond logos, brand position and editorial strategy (including the design of a Bond magazine contract title)

Dug designed and specified an Ian-Fleming-based online lifestyle shop.

Corporate site design. First attempt at creating Javascript objects that generate fluid transitional and typographic effects.

For Blueberry interactive, Dug designed an interface for Gemstar's VideoPlus online user guide.

Dug was asked by Strawberry Frog's Brian Elliot to help out on the OM Group virtual stock exchange project.

The Dutch advertising agency had worked as a team with the client's business analysts, the Boston Consulting Group, to establish the feasibility in business terms of running a web-based virtual stock exchange.

Missing from the equation was a team member with expertise of large, complex, web-based projects who was able to act as a bridge between the offline advertising team and the technical team at OM Group.

Dug's advertising experience, coupled with his managing of pan-European data-distribution projects for Offworld Industries made him an ideal candidate for the job. Dug ran a creative and technology audit which he presented to the board of OM Group in Stockholm.

Dug is unusual in that if the project demands it, he can act as a technology consultant as well as a creative director. He has consulted on xml-based publishing initiatives for The Discovery Channel, Cataloguing for GE and Acer Computers among others.

Dug designed a site for Irish streetwear designer Electronic Sheep.

Dug designed white-label templates for the Vauxhall SkiNet microsite (system was implemented by IBM UK). The system used a design infrastructure established by Dug as part of the Ski Club of Great Britain's European information-distribution system.

Dug designed site for luxury country-house hotel

Dug designed online shop for multimedia publisher Primal

Designed search and retrieve interfaces for three large trade associations.

Dug created the PIM components to be reused by all three companies. Each component was built from a neutral palette that allowed juxtaposition with each company's web interface. Dug also designed the three web interfaces (but the PIM is the really cool part).

Dug designed the award-winning Ski Club site for four years.

Dug designed this independent Jazz label's online shop and listening booths.

Shopping service. First magazine that allowed visitor to purchase directly items featured in the editorial. Dug designed the launch issue and the shopping interface.

Have been playing with Flickr and it's bloody brilliant :-) Have slowly started uploading pics (several v. integrated ways provided) and came across this shot of Clem playing with Kihlo's monster teeth:

Fantastic:-)

OK, I do seem to be posting a lot of links to Gail's Openbrackets but this one cracked me up...

In fact, I’d say that we spend more time looking for decent porn then we do actually watching it.
— B Jan 5, 4:26pm

I think by now we no longer need confirmation that the blog is an accredited part of the communications mix. I'm guessing 2005 will see more mainstream blog awareness in the UK and who knows, by the end of the year we might be catching up with the US.

This article from Clickz just landed in my inbox. It includes a nice quote from JupiterResearch Senior Analyst Gary Stein:

A corporate blog strategy that focuses only on the creation of corporate-run blogs and the running of ads on external blogs is only half-right," Stein said. "Companies need to remember that there are most likely already discussions happening about them in the consumer-generated content space. Before using blogs to talk, they need to make sure they've got their listening operation in place.

How nice, a lighter touch :-)

I've just discovered that James (Cherkoff) is in Sri Lanka and he's OK. He normally checks in with a nudge to get a move on the day he's back after Christmas, but this year, silence--Turns out Liz and James arrived just as the wave was hitting. They were in a restaurant high up on a hill when it happened.

Nicki's sister lost a relative in Thailand, positive ID from dental records:-(

Just came across this and I can sooo empathise.

I remember being utterly amazed when I bought my first TV after twenty years of using hand-me-downs. They had got the channel-tuning-thing automated and even the programme recording bit was within my intellectual capacity.

Mr Sony clearly never sleeps:-)

Jay Allen has just posted a link to the new Six Apart Guide to fighting comment spam over at Movabletype.

Boy I've just worked myself into a lather over at Barnett's blog. Some chap in Canada has been going ballistic along the lines of his copyright is being infringed and his ad revenue swindled.

Alex asked the questions:

• When is it ok, is it ok to render content dynamically/statically created by another author on another site/service?
• What is fair use, what is not?
• Is it ok to take snippets of others' content and republish (as I have done above)..if so, how much is content is too much...10%, 50%, 80%, 100%?
• If you do use a snippet, should you link to original source? (personally I think this should ALWAYS be the case)

For me, Squeezer is a proxy, plain and simple. There just isn't just cause to go after them with a mallet (especially since their service's life will probably be quite short). I commented:

I reckon once content is available online it should be treated as largely in the public domain.

It's no sin to chase audience and ad revenue by repurposing other people's content, but generally, readers want a relationship with a site, and these are best provided by active independent publishers who keep it fresh by keeping it coming.

I think Barnabas Kendall's "Why Skweezer is good for Content Publishers" is a bit ingenuous in places. In any case, he puts his finger on the real issue:

> After all, certain sites (Bloglines for example)
> detect and offer alternative content to mobile
> browsers. In a perfect Internet, this would
> obviate Skweezer entirely.

As handsets improve (and they are--quickly) and websites become more semantic and more media neutral (and I think the rush is now officially on) services like Squeezer will become obsolete. I think we're looking at a couple of years, so not really anything to get your knickers in a twist about.

Besides, I've not yet found an aggregated or repurposed site that I favoured over its original. Or, in other words, while it's no sin, repurposing probably isn't the best way to build an audience.

Finally, I won't say Jim Elve is a psycho, but he's not so much way off the mark as missing the point entirely. For now, Skweezer is a proxy service. Period. Same as websitegarage and the modem proxy you get with your copy of Analog. As a hosted service that isn't a registered charity, of course they whack some ads at the bottom of the page.

I think this exposes a sidecar issue: Google adsense will be rubbish until it adopts standards. Google, read my lips, The IFRAME tag is NOT STANDARD it is a deprecated MSIE extension grrr

If Google let us store the adwords in page memory so they could easily be manipulated, Jim's ads would still be on his page.

The lather I mentioned in the first paragraph is really down to Google's implementation. Adsense is everywhere. It's important, so why not implement it correctly?

More bat than gmail, Dug is proud to anounce he can be reached at dug@postmanpat.com (is there a dangling modifier in there somewhere?)

And now, welcome to Skypecasting

One reason I found the Internet so exciting when it first approached me to give a job, was its collaborative nature.

I mean, it wasn't a case of hey let's agree to work together. It was more let's make a new thing that can't exist unless we all work together. The exchange of human-readable data on a network was new to me. Until then, everything I had come across was both proprietary and binary (well, not exactly, as I was on Decnet in the early eighties, which I guess was largely proprietory but academic-fuelled and not entirely binary). Essentially, there was no looking at the source of something you found useful, exciting or interesting.

Part of this new "view source" culture was the way the servers on the Internet were open. SMTP servers were open relays for mail messages, freely forwarding mail, news servers (NNTP), name servers (DNS) twenty flavours of authentication or directory servers were often freely usable and accessible. The idea was simple--we all give a little and get a lot back.

So why the nostalgia whinge? I do understand the cost of delivering billions of naked ladies to Thirteen-year-old boys the world over made the NNTP servers restrict service and of course the Viagra-peddling scum forced the closing of the open SMTP relay, it's just that I've had a frustrating week trying to configure various networks (with unusual requirements) and have come across some seriously uncollaborative behaviour.

• From Tuesday 24th August 2004 Demon's customer cacheing DNS servers (158.152.1.43 and .58) will no longer respond to queries unless they come from a Demon Customer IP address
• BT ADLS service does not include an SMTP server -- This is just amazing, you can connect to the BT network via a BT phone line, using a BT broadband userid and password, but they still refuse to authenticate you if your email address isn't a BT address. I can't see how this is even legal. I spent an hour on the phone bollocking them but to no avail. I mean, you're hardware-authenticated because of the ADSL line, you could then be software-authenticated by the mail server--hell I even offered to do it over SSL but no, this is one baby BT wants thrown out with the bath water. They are essentially forcing the punter who may not be aware of available premium-rate SMTP relaying services to switch their business to BT:-(
• I would of course never dream of putting Technorati Totty Emperatrix Katerina Fake in a list about non-collaborative Internet practices, but I will include her here as a note on her site adds to these particlar blues:

  Sad, but true. All my archives from 1999-2004, prior to when I turned off comments in July 2004, have been taken offline so I don't have to spend hours clearing out comment spam with horrifying subject matter. I'm sorry.

• Finally, in the spirit of the age, Google is spending money fighting click fraud -- Gosh, a whole new angle to white-collar crime.