Running away with my thoughts 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 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
Beatnic font 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... More
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 various social networking features of the Blackberry – including using it as a phone, presumably.... More
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. More
What is a hashtag? [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
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 them within the enterprise. Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open... More
How would a butterfly inspire your next design? 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
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 way down various corridors recently. Technology for setting up meetings is getting pretty sophisticated these... More
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 their personal development, training and career development. Alongside e-learning, personal development planning and a personalised... More