Has anyone heard those new ads on the radio? “How can you tell the difference between someone just hanging about and a terrorist casing a place?” (Ok, so I am paraphrasing a little here but that is the gist of it!) I don’t like it. Is creating a paranoid population really the best use of taxpayers money? What next, KGB-style citizen informers? I think this is one of my most...
These days I work in a User Research department. Ah, user research, I hear you say, that’s about usability! Well, yes, but that isn’t all it is. Here is a post from Leisa at Disambiguity in which she illustrates very clearly the way I see things. Creating something that people will use is a little more involved than worrying about whether or not they can use it. Creating a compelling...
One of my favourite Seth Godin posts is a very old one about the branding of Global Warming.
To summarise: Global sounds nice, Warming also sounds nice.
What if it were called Atmospheric Cancer or Pollution Death?
So, on that note: Reuse, reduce, recycle!
Apparently Apple came last and Lenovo came first (replacing Nokia) on a Green Peace list of companies who are nice to the environment. Apple are quick to state that on a different list they come higher. I say well done Lenovo! Apple, we can all try harder, don’t be all tit for tat, it’s the wrong subject for that. p.s. Lenovo, it would be good if you could change your country selector...
I think we can safely say that I am quite comfortable with the interweb. For me it really is a utility without which I complain. So, I don’t think it comes as a terrible surprise that I am often taken aback by people’s concerns about using something like flickr. “I don’t want pictures of my family where the whole world can see them!” One of my friends goes as far as...
I was doing a little bit of user testing on a website for a very large multi-national quite a few weeks ago, just to inform a pitch, and one of the headlines for my findings was that the current site undermines the brand. More recently I was watching someone else present those findings to a board – we won the pitch btw – and at that headline there were some rather vociferous...
I have been staying with The Voice for the last few weeks. His broadband connection hasn’t been working for the last 2 weeks. The inadequacies of Tiscali and Sky Broadband notwithstanding – between them they seem to think that a 4 week interruption to service is acceptable – is it only me who sees internet connectivity as a basic utility? The Voice maintains that I am...
I signed up for a free iSip trial.
It seems to be helping me get round the fact that my direct line simply refuses to be fixed!
Yay!
Doing what I do people often send me links to things and invitations to ‘try stuff out’. In this instance my ‘industry insider’ Dr Beton (to his friends) invited me to sign up to jaxtr. I am sorry to say jaxtr – I don’t really get it. I signed up. I sent out a couple of invites but then had a look round. I can’t even see the contact details of the person...
The Voice of BBC Long Melford sent me a link to the Howies site. Check it out. It is one of those brands that is all connected up and is lovely and fluffy and you sort of want to buy from them even if you aren’t into ‘sk8r’ gear. Like Innocent smoothies with their ‘Banana phone’ etc. Or little things like Google telling you that you are looking at ‘1 – 20...
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.