My friend Leisa wrote a post about participation culture recently. This is a subject she and I talk about quite often, mostly because she is a serious blogger and I am a little reserved about the whole thing. She is not the only one who talks about it and in her post Leisa references a Jakob Nielsen alertbox which talks about encouraging participation. I am with her when she says that: These are...
We were watching Planet Earth last night (brilliant TV) and they were showing a sequence with a humpback whale mother and calf. The mother was supporting the calf close to the surface so that it could breath. “Imagine being born into an atmosphere* that you can’t breath!” – I said. “If it were up to usability consultants there would be no whales!” – came...
So here is quite an interesting article about the use of robots to replace humans in the workplace. “Just give it electricity, and a robot can work for long hours, even doing repetitive work, and you don’t have to worry about labor laws,” Sudo said. I can see the appeal from the business perspective but my first personal reaction was negative. It’s bad enough to be greeted...
This article came up on my RSS feed from the IET this morning. The headline is “Workplace pressures deter female techies from having children”. As a woman who used to be a ‘proper’ engineer and has always worked in some form of technical environment I think about these sorts of things from time to time. According to the article “of the 31% of women respondents with...
I spend a lot of my time watching people. Mostly I do this as part of some user research piece or the other but often it is because I am just nosy and like to see how people go about doing things. I also eavesdrop. Apologies to all but in my defence, I do pick up on the odd interesting tit-bit of information or the occasionaly interesting anecdote. I was visiting my mother recently and she wanted...
A friend sent me a link to this article about user research at the coal-face of survival! It describes field research on ovens in use in refugee camps in Sudan. “Before we left for Sudan, we had little idea of what the cooking conditions were like; even some of the aid workers in Khartoum and Washington, DC, did not know things essential to the design of an appropriate stove, such as the...
Ivanka Majic works in technology. She was Head of Design for Ubuntu, service managed Digital Marketplace through to beta, was acting director of digital for the Labour Party. She lives and works in Brighton where she works with the council’s digital first team, does a bit of teaching at Sussex University, and works with her husband on projects like restaurantsbrighton.co.uk and the BRAVOs. She has also started a podcast with her friend Michael which you can listen to at grandpodcast.com.