The web – integration not destination By Nic Price on 6 December 2010 — 1 min read 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 how they want and need it. The web can be the fabric. It can be... More
Find, Understand, Share, Extend By Nic Price on 11 November 2010 — 1 min read 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 a “vision statement”. Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. Somewhat ambitious, sure. A little... More
Running away with my thoughts By Nic Price on 16 September 2010 — 1 min read Just wondering if Twitter is changing the way I think. Even just thinking that sentence through as I type it, I wonder if I might tweet it, and subconsciously estimate the character count. (54 if you include the full stop, which I may not) I think of my best tweets when I’m running. Well, they... More
Re-cycling difficulties in London By Nic Price on 3 September 2010 — 1 min read Serco staff struggle to cope with the overflow bike parking near Waterloo Station by London’s South Bank. They were having to free up some docking stations so people could check their bikes in. The surplus bikes are then loaded on to a lorry and distributed to empty or depleted cycle hire locations around the capital.... More
Don’t let distance get in the way of your user research By Nic Price on 1 July 2010 — 1 min read 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.... More
Traffic lights and inclusive design By Nic Price on 10 June 2010 — 3 mins read 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. More
What is a hashtag? By Nic Price on 27 May 2010 — 1 min read [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... More
How would a butterfly inspire your next design? By Nic Price on 22 July 2009 — 1 min read 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... More
Enterprising times – a case for search best bets By Nic Price on 2 October 2008 — 2 mins read Reading the e-Consultancy interview with Lou Rosenfeld on the importance of site search analytics, I was reminded of when I was product manager of intranet (or enterprise) search at the BBC. It was back in 2002. People complained that search was broken, but we had neither quantitative nor qualitative data to analyse. After consulting with... More
Keeping up to date with East Dulwich on the internet: Part 4 – Delicious RSS feeds By Nic Price on 25 November 2007 — 2 mins read This series of short articles explains some simple and free ways to use the internet to keep tabs on the subjects you’re interested in. I’m using East Dulwich as the example subject. Previously: Part 1 – Google Alerts, Part 2 – Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 – Twitter tracking. This article is about following Delicious bookmark... More