The year in cities

Following the lead of lots of other people, here's my 2005 in cities, and then 2006 so far.

2005

• Geneva, Switzerland
• Glasgow, Scotland
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• Dundee, Scotland
• London, England
• Budapest, Hungary
• Dubrovnik, Croatia
• Savannah, US
• Washington D.C., US
• Charleston, U.S.

(Probably a number of others I can't remember)

2006

• Geneva, Switzerland
• Glasgow, Scotland
• London, England

Ethnography...sitting and watching

I realy liked the following comment from a colleague recently. I had been along to Microsoft in SOHO to see Louise Ferguson speak on "Ethnography and how it can inform design", and was asked:

"What's ethnography?...Isn't it just a posh word for sitting around watching people do things?"

Well, that's my pomposity well and truly pricked!

Technorati tags: ethnography | usability | london

ASP and valid XHTML output

I hadn't realised until the other day that there are issues with ASP outputting valid XHTML strict. Apparently ASP 2.0 can do it, but 1.0 has a couple of interesting quirks that can cause issues that are rather tough to work around. Owing to time constraints, I'm considering switching our doctype to Transitional just to allow for the fact that ASP is throwing up a input of type hidden, and giving a form element a name attribute owing to our use of viewstate - a real kluge, but easier than the full-blown solution (extending the HtmlForm Control), or trying to find another way to maintain the viewstate. Ho-hum.

Another cool Flickr mashup

Check out Retrievr - it works best if you draw blocks of colour rather than trying to draw "things". Great fun, and a nice way of thinking about object recognition and visual search.

No time to blog...

I don't seem to have had very much time to blog recently, which is a shame, as there has been much that I have wanted to blog about concerning planning, requirements elicitation, devising KPIs and metrics for non-financial benefits, as well as thoughts on how not to launch a knowledge management initiative.

Today, however, I was (among many other things) setting up Macromedia FLEX 1.5 on my laptop in anticipation of a training session with aquent next week. To quote another Macromedia Product name, it was generally a "breeze" to install, and I'm looking forward to some declarative user interface work - if data binding is as easy as it appears, I reckon that early stage prototyping could be done within FLEX, allowing for some relatively agile techniques in development and user acceptance. If I get anywhere with it fast, I'll post some progress reports.

In the meantime, I'd best get on with other more pressing things!

UPA membership

I got my usability professionals association (UOA) membership through the other day, so am now looking for meetings to attend in aand around London with other UPA members. Any UPA members let me know who you are and I'll say hello at some stage.

Technorati tags: membership | usability | upa

BE afraid...advertising nonsense

A few weeks ago, I read a scintillating article (which I have unfortunately no record of) with an advertising guru, where he spelled out the lazy archetypes of advertising - the only one of which I can remember is the "literal metaphor" of which the Guiness Fish on a Bicycle ("a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle") is an example.

Last night I was reminded of another lazy archetype that was not mentioned in the article; crossing London Bridge Station, I saw the new poster for "Billy Elliot" which used his initials to spell out a series of "BE" statements (I can't remember which, but I don't think "BE annoyed" was one of them!). This is lazy advertising at its worst in my opinion: there are so many companies (including one for which I used to work) with "BE" initials who go down this unimaginative, uninspiring path. It always reminds me of the Birthday card (which apparently draws on a quote from Kurt Vonnegut):

"To be is to do"--Socrates.

"To do is to be"--Jean-Paul Sartre.

"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra.

I can only remember "be afraid, be very afraid" ("The Fly") ever striking me as a good piece of "BE" marketing, and you'll notice that the initials of "The Fly" are not - by chance - "BE". Does anyone else have any pet peeves on this front?

Technorati tags: advertising | marketing | annoyances

Comments Spam

Owing to the large volume of comments spam I am receiving at the moment, I have switched some options to restrict comment posting to "registered users". If you have a valid comment, and are unable to post using the comments, send me an email instead and I'll maybe put it on the site as a posting.

Mitigating Development Risks

I am involved in a project at the moment, where we are looking to develop an online application using (for us) a new technology. The company has an outsourced technical team (not first-language English speakers) who will be doing the development, but none of them have experience of this technology.

I've been looking at mitigating the experience risk by getting them trained up, ensuring that they have the tools to practice with the development environment (and budgeting in some time to do so), and making sure that they may have access to some expert resource during development, but I am not entirely happy that the risk is completely under control. Does anyone have any other suggestions for reducing this kind of risk(s)? And, yes, I have looked at the avoiding it all together option!

Technorati tags: project | risk | development | programming | outsourcing

Zimba: an ajax communication client

Via Jon Udell, here’s gmail on steroids: zimbra. Zimbra is a beta, but looks like it does all the things I wish gmail would let me do – online calendaring and contact management (which, to be fair, gmail handles OK already) all integrated into the one interface, much like Outlook. Nice to see as a next-generation online tool; personally I hope the guys at 37signals hook basecamp into it, then I’d be really happy! I also liked the little googlemaps mash-up for showing location. Makes you wonder what Google will do to push this on a bit further - will they develop gmail as an online client some more and try to match some of this zimbra functionality?

CMS Projects - same old story

While visiting an immense project today, the following exchange was held between someone based at the project, another colleague, and myself (this exchange is not verbatim):

"Sorry, did I hear you say you used Documentum for Document Management?" (me)

"Yes, but not everyone uses it. It isn't really that user-friendly: when you start, the next page takes a minute, a minute-and-a-half to load up, and then you are presented with a list of options that no-one understands. Oh, and that means no-one uses it - everyone gets trained, and the system can do some really good things, but it's then two months before you use it again and you've forgotten everything. So we also had some document managers, but since everyone gives them the stuff to put in, they're swamped. So the system doesn't have that much information on it." (project colleague)

My colleague and I looked at each other, as she has been looking for a killer internal argument for usability to convince others. This isn't a criticism of Documentum - a great tool in the right hands - more an expression of my continued surprise at how little thought is typically put into human "engagement" in DMS and CMS projects, not just "usability" issues, but also ongoing training and workflow analysis. No matter how many projects you work on for different companies, you always hear the same old story - it would be nice to see someone doing it the right way from the start for a change.

Technorati tags: project | cms | documentum

Ajax Links

While looking for something else focused on rich internet applications, I came across the following link to A Venture Forth’s list of the top ten Ajax apps. The Periodic table is very nice!
NB: True to my promise, I used the Blogger Word plug-in to post this & it seemed to work fine.

Technorati tags: ajax | ria | blog

theguardian Re-design

The wonky title is deliberate, since - as part of its Europe-focused (?) re-design - The Guardian has gone all compressed and lower-case. I can't really comment too much as I have yet to swing by the news-stand and grab a copy in the flesh (apologies for the mixed metaphor), but, via Tom Coates, here is Dan Hill's cogent view on the branding exercise. I particularly like the use of Flickr annotations...

Laziness

I've not been too experimental with my blog recently (or particularly assiduous in writing posts), so I am going to endeavour to add technorati tags to relevant posts, think about actually re-designing the blog ("re"-design is a bit of a joke, as I didn't put too much effort into look-and-feel in the first place!), and fiddle about with posting direct from MS Word. If anyone has any suggestions for other stuff I should be doing (like updating my XFN network, for instance), just let me know!

Technorati tags: blog | resolution

Brand crises

I was just reminded of a presentation I gave last year on the role of online communication in crisis communication by the following quote from an article called "Brand Rehab: How Companies Can Restore a Tarnished Image" from the Knowledge at Wharton newsletter:

"The rise of the Internet poses new problems for post-scandal communications, adds Blythe. "Blogging can kill you. Before, when we had a problem, it was addressed in the public media. Now the Internet is many times faster, more unforgiving and out of control." Increasingly, Blythe's firm is helping companies monitor statements about them on the Internet and generate their own blogs."

The internet can make you or break you - today's brands have to react to threats in "internet time".

Technorati tags: brand | crisis | communications

Grumbles

I've recently had feedback complaining that I haven't written anything in a while - for which I apologise, only citing the pressures of moving and starting a new job. Real life sometimes gets in the way of blogging, I suppose.
Something which caught my eye today was an article in the Evening Standard pointing out that The Guardian is changing its format to a more tabloid, Berliner style, is changing its font (Guardian Egypt or somesuch), and is even changing its title typeface. As an arch-liberal Grauniad [sic] reader myself, I am slightly trepidatious, but also wonder whether the current British broadsheet transfer to tabloid style (think The Times, Independent) is anyway influenced by the Web, which is less columnar, and, from my perspective, not "broad" in a layout sense. It's just a thought, but I'm probably wrong and it has more to do with printing efficiencies or the logistics of delivery and display!
I don't remember such an upheaval in British print since colour newspapers first went live in the 80s (am I hallucinating, or wasn't the short-lived European the first, or maybe it was Today?). There must be some underlying force for this all to be happening in a short space of time - I can't believe that copycat activity is the only motivator.

Rich Wiki Editing

While I love the collaborative authoring aspects of Wikis, I've always thought that wiki markup, while nicely concise, acted as a barrier to their uptake in "the real world". Via socialtext, I've come across Wikiwyg, a JavaScript-driven wysiwyg editor for wikis (designed to integrate into existing wiki s). I just tried out the demo, and while double-clicking to reveal in-context editing is a bit counter-intuitive, it works really nicely.

2:1 Words of Wisdom

My colleague, Karl Pickering, repeated a real gem of an expression again today, while talking about establishing a new brand:

"You don't get a second chance at a first impression."

I like the simplicity of this statement as well as it's 2:1 ratio, which reminds me of my favourite phrase for project planning, the carpenter's proverb:

"Measure twice, cut once."

I'd love to hear some more 2:1 phrases I can bandy about in business meetings (and yes, I have thought of "birds in the hand")...

Back to the Smoke

After a few months of independent consultancy work, I've moved back to London to start a new job (which I can't say too much about for the time being, but it's very interesting). I'm not likely to post all that much over the next few weeks as I can foresee myself being exceedingly busy.

However, one thing that has struck me recently is the following: even in companies that approach project management in a formal, controlled manner, the approach to requirements gathering - the crucial portion of a project - often tends to the ad-hoc to say the very least. I'm considering taking a more controlled look at requirements gathering myself, and have already made some headway into developing my own approach, but when is everyone going to realise that taking a little extra time at the beginning of a project pays dividends in the end whether in terms of time, cost or quality?

Inspiration, reputation and perspiration

A reminder from The Times Career supplement (back-to-back articles, pps 3-4, 21/07/2005) that it takes effort to be inspired as well as to build (or in this case, restore) a reputation. A short article ("Ideas plucked from a blue sky") on innovation strategy pointed out - quoting Saj Parwani, MD of ?What If! - "Innovation is a science," in other words it requires time, study and effort. A similar tack was taken with the ten tips for "Polish a tarnished image". They're both short, simple articles, but well worth a once-over.