October 2012 Archives

Got that Friday feeling? If so, get ready to put your feet up for the weekend with my regular round-up of the links and essays I’ve found interesting around the web this week talking about UX, design, journalism, product development, and — for one week only — the demise of CEEFAX.

Last week I helped host Zebra People’s UX People, a day long conference featuring talks and practical workshops. Here is what I took away from a very thought-provoking talk by Cennydd Bowles about “What comes after UX?”

Last week I helped host Zebra People’s UX People. Here are my notes from the third talk of the day - Mel McVeigh sharing some lessons from building a digital product development and user experience team at a very analogue publishing business.

This week some of my ex-colleagues at the Guardian unveiled the latest update to their public beta of a responsive redesign - using a version of Guardian Egyptian that has been hinted for the web.

Last week I helped host Zebra People’s UX People, a day long conference featuring talks and practical workshops from the likes of Cennydd Bowles, Christopher Lee Ball and Louise Oakham. These are my notes from a session where Jonty Sharples insisted designers must “test or be damned.”

With the ultimate demise of CEEFAX due this week, I’m reminded that I was once a passionate advocate that BBC URLs should have a re-direct mapping from CEEFAX page numbers, so that bbc.co.uk/300 would go to the BBC Sport homepage, and bbc.co.uk/302 would be the football homepage.

If you follow the London IA twitter account, have recently visited the website, or are a fan of the Facebook page, you’ll have seen this message: “London IA is still on its holidays. As of now no plans to come back to work. So. ‘On Holiday until Further Notice’”

I felt a great disturbance on the internet last week, as if the voices of a million publisher suddenly cried out in terror. I think it was caused when people heard the figure that on their way to becoming digital only, Newsweek had lost 51% of their print circulation in the space of just five years. I eagerly awaited an article comparing that catastrophic loss of print sales with figures for newspapers in the UK. But I didn’t spot one, so I put my datajournalism hard-hat on and crunched the numbers myself.

Last week I helped host UX People, a day long conference featuring talks and practical workshops from the likes of Cennydd Bowles, Jonty Sharples and Oli Shaw. Here are my notes on Christopher Lee Ball talking about an LBi project for Virgin Atlantic.

Maybe the time has come for football’s black power salute moment. However uncomfortable it will be.

And so Friday rolls around again. Here is my weekly round-up of long(-ish) reads from the worlds of UX, journalism, publishing, and 80s synth-pop.

You might have seen lots of people on Twitter lavishing praise on the web display of Pitchfork’s Bat For Lashes feature today. But not me.

Today I was part of a panel session at a4uexpo in London talking about “Engaging Facebook through EDGErank, Content Optimisation and Killer Apps” alongside Kelvin Newman and Jeremy Waite.

On Friday I was involved in a Twitter conversation with Guardian journalists Sean Ingle and Sid Lowe about the value of comments underneath football stories on newspaper websites.

Well this seems to have come around rather quickly - but then I didn’t publish last week’s “Friday reading #23” until Monday, which kind of explains that. Anyway, the internet did good this week - lots of very long reads await you...

Erm...Friday reading on a Monday? How does that work? Well, why not just look at it as a few bonus reads for your commute during the week? Anyway, here is a round-up of some things that caught my eye over the last ten days or so whilst noodling around the web. You can grab it all as one Readlist, optimised for iOS, Kindle, or the ereader of your choice...

If you subscribe to this blog via RSS or the email updates, you’ve probably been inundated with a flood of blog posts as I wrote up all the talks I saw at EuroIA in Rome. And probably didn’t get a chance to read them all. Never fear - now you can catch up with the whole lot, including my talk about “Responsive IA” in one handy, free, ebook.

This is an essay version of the talk I gave at EuroIA 2012 in Rome, looking at responsive design and touchscreen devices have changed the approach I take to my IA work.