Recent posts in my The Guardian Category

This week the Guardian started looking for a replacement Head of User Experience.

There was an interesting post on the eConsultancy blog from Graham Charlton yesterday about the forthcoming changes that mean websites are being obliged to obtain consent for the use of cookies.

There has been quite some hoo-ha on the web suggesting that Facebook “Social Reader” apps are dying, based on a piece written by BuzzFeed’s John Herrman - “Facebook social readers are all collapsing”. I worked on the Guardian’s app - here’s my take on it.

Live tweeting the demise of the Titanic in real-tile seemed acceptable, yet a few months back the Guardian was severely criticised for taking a similar approach to tweeting the events of 9/11. Here are some thoughts on why that earned criticism and why it was right for the tweeting to be halted.

A recent look at how tracking cookies work by the Guardian has had me joining in the comments explaining my position on ad-blocking. I’ve never run ad-blocking software or extensions in my browser, and I never will. Here’s why...

The title says it all - after three-and-a-bit years I’m going to be leaving the Guardian

If you subscribe to the theory that you should “release early, release often”, and that you want to “fail fast” and learn from those failings, then you end up in a world where you should be regularly testing variations of your digital product on your audience. If you don’t go about it the right way, this can be a bruising experience for all concerned. Today I wanted to outline some thoughts prompted by a recent trial of threaded comments on the guardian.co.uk site that I was involved in.

For almost as long as I’ve been a user experience practitioner, the issue of how UX deliverables interact with an Agile project has been a vexed one. At the Guardian we’ve been trying a new technique based on a very old optical illusion - the red/blue anaglyph 3D technique - with startling results.

It has been a busy couple of weeks on the Guardian Beta site. Over the last few days we’ve launched or started testing several new products. Here are some of the details.

Since we launched it back in September I’ve been constantly monitoring Twitter for feedback and reaction to the Guardian’s Facebook app. One of my favourite tweets asked this question: “I wonder how much referral traffic The Guardian has lost from Facebook since they implemented their 'Social Reader' agreement..” Yesterday we answered that question in a talk by our director of digital development Tanya Cordrey.

A quick update on three things I've been involved with recently at the Guardian.

I’ve featured in a couple of interviews published over the last few days about the Guardian’s Facebook app and my ideas on UX recruitment.

A couple of weeks ago I was part of a panel session talking about social media optimisation at news:rewired. I was talking about the Guardian’s Facebook app, and the rest of the panel consisted of Darren Waters from MSN, the BBC’s Chris Hamilton, and Nate Lanxon of Wired. Here are some points that came out of the Q&A that followed the talks.

François Nel’s talk about media business models at news:rewired drew a massive contrast between the fortunes, financially, of the Mail and the Guardian, and sparked a discussion about the Guardian’s digital strategy which made for some uncomfortable listening for those of us in the audience involved in trying to implement it. Here are my notes from that session - including a big disclaimer reminding you that this is a personal blog...

Last week the Guardian held one of our regular hack days, where the developers (and other people in the tech department) get to spend two days putting aside their regular work, and instead concentrate on a project of their choosing. Here is what I made.

A flurry of activity around the Guardian last week as we tried out some new things on our Beta site, and had a two day hack day.

The release of 60 new apps that employ Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” has sparked another round of internet debate about the value of the functionality. Here’s my take.

I’ve been wholeheartedly behind the Guardian’s digital literacy campaign. But how do we stop looking like nerdy zealots - who who would give up programming contractor rates for a teaching salary?

Over the holidays the Guardian published the second ebook collection that I have edited them. Following on from “Who’s Who: The Resurrection of the Doctor”, I’ve tackled “Facebook: The rise and rise of a social media giant”. Here are some notes on the editing process of the book.

Last night we threw open the Guardian’s door for “UXmas” - a chance to meet people from the UX and design teams, hear a couple of talks, and eat some mince pies before retiring to the pub.

I’ve only joined in the Carnival of journalism once this year, back in March, when I wrote “News innovation isn't just about writing code, it is about how we use that code to tell stories.” I'll be much more involved in December though, as I’m helping to host it on the Guardian’s Developer blog.

The Guardian has just published the latest in our Guardian Shorts ebook series - “Who’s Who: Ressurection of the Doctor”. I edited the collection. And just as every episode of Doctor Who these days has a behind-the-scenes “Doctor Who Confidential” to go with it, here is the story behind the editing of the book.

At the weekend the Guardian became the first major publisher to experiment with Scroll, a new tool from a New York based start-up which promises to allow users to build magazine-style layouts for the web without having to know any code at all. Benji Lanyado put together a version of the weekend’s lead travel section article using it, and we published that in our new Guardian beta section, as well as publishing the more conventional version.

I’ve just about recovered from last week’s Guardian Hack Day, where at one point I found myself desperately trying to live blog the event, finish my own hack, and get Guardian Beta launched.

Yesterday I was at the Enterprise Search Europe conference in London, and helped wrap up the day by taking part in a panel entitled “The future of search”. Here’s a brief round-up of what I said - including the quote above, which I may well adopt as my new motto: “The future is unevenly distributed...and I’m at the shiny end.”

We’ve had a lot of products launch over the last few weeks at the Guardian, including Android and Windows phone apps and our Facebook app, but none have been as high profile as our iPad launch. With a design team of Mark Porter, Andy Brockie, Barry Ainslie and John-Henry Barac, you wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than beautiful, and using it has changed the way that I consume news.

It is just over twenty days since we released the Guardian Facebook app. I’ve been engaged with a lot of conversations with people about it on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, and I thought I might put down a few thoughts on the app, and some of the reaction to it.

This is the essay version of the talk I gave yesterday at the EuroIA Summit in Prague.

This week I braved the potential troll hordes of the interwebs with a piece for Comment Is Free about the trolling phenomena, commissioned as part of our coverage of the prison sentence given to Sean Duffy for some unsavoury internet posts mocking the deaths of teenagers. Given the subject matter and the potential audience, I think I got off quite lightly in the comments, especially after it ended up with the headline “All you trolls out there – come out and explain yourself”.

I spotted an interesting blog post via Twitter this morning: “Guardian Shorts: The Guardian regurgitates articles on Kindle”, written by Jeroen Kraan on his “My Digital Newsroom” blog. On Twitter he described them as “Not really worth buying, but good effort”. Here are my thoughts.

We’ve got a shiny brand new Guardian Android app in the Android market place. It is one of several product launches we’ve got planned over the next few weeks, which makes for an exciting (but busy) time. I’m particularly pleased with the Android app though as it is the first big product launch where Karen Loasby has led the UX since she joined me earlier in the year.

This is the essay version of a talk I gave this morning at the Content Strategy Forum in London - “Taking content strategy to people who already think they have one”. It covers how the Guardian has shifted from traditional to digital publishing, and talks about our CMS, our metadata, our API, and gives my advice for those entering the content strategy field when dealing with traditional publishers.

Since helping redesign the front page and sitting with the team for a few days, I’ve been acting as a kind of unofficial pseudo-techie-in-residence in the “You tell us” open thread on Comment is free. They are mostly a good-natured bunch. Unusually today, an information architecture question cropped up in the thread

We had our first “UX drop-in” at the Guardian yesterday, and judging by the waiting list to get tickets and the reaction on the day, it won’t be the last. It was quite a simple format - get a ticket, turn up at the Guardian on the day, there will be some short talks, the chance to play with some forthcoming products like our Android app, and some free beer.

There are a couple of opportunities open at the moment to visit the user experience team at the Guardian. We are having a “drop-in” open day, and there are vacancies.

Last night I spoke at a London Content Strategy meetup entitled “Perspectives on Content Strategy”. Normally I’d publish my slides and an essay version of the talk, but this one was a little different. I’m presenting “Taking content strategy to people who already think they have one” at the Content Strategy Forum in London next month, and this was a first run for some of the material.

This week at the Guardian we launched something like 3 million album pages, allowing users to rate, review and buy just about anything that has ever been released. Well, provided it has a MusicBrainz ID anyway.

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

There has been some debate on Twitter and on the Fleet Street Blues blog about a new page that appeared on the Guardian website last week: “Six ways you can support the Guardian”. The focus has been on the choice of the word “support”, rather than using something more nakedly commercial than “subscribe” or “buy”.

Chris Elliott, Readers’ Editor at The Guardian, recently addressed the issue of our coverage of the Sarah Palin email release in his Open Door column. The project raised some interesting questions about the information architecture of how we publish this kind of crowd-sourcing exercise on the Guardian website.

Sometimes you can end up just as proud of some small changes to a website as you are of the big projects. We’ve made a couple of tweaks to the Guardian website recently which fall into that category.

Over the last few months we’ve been holding a series of talks at The Guardian for staff around the theme of “digital”. Recently it was the turn of Benji Lanyado, who has made a name for himself as the Guardian’s travel writer who goes on #TwiTrips. He arrives in a city, and then relies on people tweeting him with tips and directions to find hidden gems and the things that the locals recommend.

Last week I spoke at the 26th meeting of LIKE, the London Information and Knowledge Exchange. With the title “Information Architects: The Secret librarians of the internet”, the talk was based on both “Come as you are” and “Tags are magic!”, giving an overview of how I became an Information Architect, and some detail on how we tag up our content for the Guardian website.

Today at the UPA Conference in Atlanta I gave a presentation entitled “Changing the Guardian through guerilla usability testing”. Here is an essay version of the talk.

This week, in the run-up to Glastonbury, at The Guardian we have begun publishing the latest incarnation of our artist tag pages. These gives us an automated page for every artist playing at the festival, which mixes together our own content with content drawn from the rest of the web. It is an extension of the work that we did earlier in the year based upon the SxSW festival, and on some even longer-standing prototypes that our development team built in the middle of 2010 as a proof of concept. And this blog post is about why I am so pleased with them.

This is part four of a five part essay based on my Polish IA Summit keynote talk “Come as you are”, looking at how I do my work at The Guardian.

I’m not sure we made enough of this when we launched it the other week - the 1821 vintage edition of the Guardian website. Using a bit of CSS wizardry, some of our tech and design team quickly turned out an approximation of The Manchester Guardian’s first front page - but filled with today’s live news from the website.

“It is ironic that you have to print the website out” someone said to me at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam at the weekend, and the Guardian’s 190th anniversary exhibition asks questions about how we preserve our digital products.

I think this might be what happens if you buy lentils, muesli and a pair of sandals from Sainsbury’s in a single shop...

On Saturday I spent the day in the Guardian’s offices as a guest at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. As a preamble to the actual brain-storming and designing, there were talks from Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, interactive technologist Alastair Dant, and the BBC’s Jonathan Austin. Here are my notes.

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.

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.

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”.

A rare foray into print for me today, where I’m quoted in a Media Guardian article looking at live blogging news on the web. Guardian Blogs Editor Matt Wells wrote the piece, and he asked me a few questions about my views on live blogging to get those quotes. Here they are.

A couple of weeks ago at The Guardian our SEO Editorial Executive Chris Moran gave a talk about SEO to an assembled bunch of people from around the business. He said: “A lot of the opinions people have about SEO are based upon prejudice and a lack of understanding about how search engines work.”. Here are my notes from his talk.

The Guardian has a large presence over at SXSW at the moment, indeed I’ve seen it tweeted that if the BBC had sent a team as big, the Daily Mail would have an aneurism. One of the things that appeals to us is that the event features three areas where the paper has very strong coverage: music, film and technology. Rather than only sending journalists, this year we’ve also sent some of our technical development team.

Last week I attended an event at the Royal Statistical Society looking at data and news sourcing, and one of the panel sessions was about crowd-sourcing using the internet. My Guardian colleague and 2010 Reporter of the year Paul Lewis was one of those appearing, and he has been at the centre of a couple of investigations that have used Twitter extensively as a component of the research and reporting.