April 2011 Archives

I’ve had some great feedback in recent weeks from people on how much they’ve been enjoying the currybetdotnet blog, and lots of questions about how I manage to keep it up. Well, one of the ways I keep up my enthusiasm for blogging is to periodically take a break from it - and I’m well overdue one of my “blogging holidays”, so you can expect this to be the last post for a while.

This week I’ve been publishing the notes I made in Warsaw as I attended the Polish IA Summit. In the last of my notes, here is my take on Peter Boersma’s closing session.

There was a lovely blog post by Khoi Vinh this week, about the way he thinks blogging and commenting on blogs has changed over recent years. He rightly points out that you can’t extrapolate behaviour across the web from one set of anecdotal evidence. However, his main points, that long-form blogging increasingly feels like a niche activity, and that there seems to be less conversation in the comments on his blog, are how I feel too.

This week I’ve been publishing the notes I made in Warsaw as I attended the Polish IA Summit. Today I’ve got my notes on a brilliant session by Claire Rowland and Chris Browne looking at the design implications of ubicomp.

One of the things I was pleased to hear get a mention in Denver at the IA Summit was the value of community management. Johanna Kollmann gave a great talk entitled “We love change. Change is scary”, that explored why humans are initially uncomfortable with change, and recommended good community management as a way to deal with it

This week I’ve been publishing the notes I made in Warsaw as I attended the Polish IA Summit. Today I’ve got my thoughts on 3 sessions which featured eye-tracking, designing for older users, and redesigning playmobile.pl.

The main reason for going over to Denver for the IA Summit was that Matthew Solle, Eric Reiss, Joe Sokohl and I were doing a very informal panel session on “UX communities: Starting from the beginning”. Matthew has blogged his round-up of the main points, and here is mine.

Looking to keep myself entertained on the flight over to Denver for the IA Summit, I thought I’d try out The Atavist.

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I was giving the opening keynote session at the Polish IA Summit, and this week I’m posting my notes from the rest of the sessions I saw in Warsaw. Today I’ve got my notes from the opening session of day two - “Designing the search experience (Not your mom’s SEO)” by Marianne Sweeny

For a while on this blog I had a Venn diagram in the top right-hand corner, which was there to remind me that I was supposed to be writing about stuff in the intersection between IA, digital media and journalism. That is where the professional communities that I belong to collide. So, it was uncomfortable to be sitting in Denver at the IA Summit last week, listening to one of my group of peers laughing loudly at the output of the other.

I’ just come back from Poland, where I was giving the opening keynote session at the Polish IA Summit, and this week I’m posting my notes from the rest of the sessions I saw in Warsaw. Today I’d like to focus on the talks by Krzysztof Trzewiczek and Tomasz Kopacz, about opening up state data and the future of IT respectively.

In Jared Spool’s presentation at the IA Summit, he talked about the “Holy Grail” being a UXer who can code. He didn’t mean someone who could just do both, but someone who could do both really well. Jared posited that in the near future, al UXers will need to know code.

Echoing the rather unfortunate incident that turned the “Parents” magazine masthead into “Penis”, I found myself last week looking at this effort from the Financial Times for some time pondering whether it was about suicide or divorce, before noticing the obscured “Sp” in “How to spend it”.

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I was giving the opening keynote session at the Polish IA Summit. This is the first of a series of posts about the sessions I saw there, looking at two presentations that featured designing for or with children.

Today I delivered the opening keynote address at the Polish IA Summit in Warsaw, entitled “Come as you are”. It is the story of how I’ve come to spend 13 years building digital products, and how I’ve observed and been part of the changes and development in the UX and IA disciplines over that time. It finishes with what I consider to be the five key lessons about computers and people from my career as an IA practitioner. Here they are...

This morning I gave the opening keynote talk at the Polish IA Summit in Warsaw. Here is a linklog special of some of the things I referenced in the talk.

At the last Hacks/Hackers London, Martin Moore and Ben Bradshaw of the Media Standards Trust were presenting their “Manifesto for transparent digital journalism”. Here are my notes from the session.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about a trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. As well as The Guardian’s reporting having an effect in Cairo via Twitter, we were reporting what was being posted from there - and there was a good debate after Chris spoke about the verification standards that you could put to information collected this way, and how it should then presented to our audience via live blogging and other means.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about his recent trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. It turned out to be a timely visit, as Chris arrived shortly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak, with the press in the country facing an uncertain, but presumably freer future. During it, he discussed how Egyptians themselves see the role played by social media in the events.

A (probably futile) attempt to gather all the 2011 IA Summit slides into one handy reference point.

In preparation for today’s panel session at the IA Summit about UX communities, Matthew Solle and I have been blogging our thoughts about London IA, and what has made it a success, and what has been a failure. The final two themes I wanted to address were the idea of physical spaces and community, and the necessary role of “outsiders”.