Blog page 5

I’ve stopped calling myself vegan

Published on , in Wellbeing,

My new years resolution for 2017 was to move on from vegetarian and to become a legitimate vegan.

Now, 12 months later, my new years resolution for 2018 is to no longer call myself a vegan at all.

Own your Alpha

Published on , in Strategy and leadership,

In Government our digital services get assessed at each stage of their journey. From Discovery into Alpha. Alpha through Beta. And Beta into Live.

Every service that ends up on GOVUK will have to go through this. Each one assessed against the service standard for Government.

A panel of trained assessors will conduct the assessment. Each panel member from a different discipline within digital. The panel will cover the team setup. Their design and research, and their chosen technology stack.

From my time as an assessor, I’ve noticed teams don’t always conduct Alphas correctly.

Semantics and accessibility

Published on , in Design and development,

As designers, we always like to put our stamp on things. We like to make things fancy and show off our full range of talents. Then when it comes to coding them up, we abuse our design!

We float things right. We use absolute positioning. We style links to look like buttons. We use fancy hover states and chuck in break tags in to create whitespace.

Then, we marvel at how pretty our designs look. After all, as long as it looks good, that’s all that matters. Right?

Well, not exactly.

Accessibility is not an edge case

Published on , in Inclusion and advocacy,

There’s a common misconception that people using assistive technologies are an edge case. That they fall into that 1% where people disable Javascript. But, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’m going to show you why it’s important to make your website accessible.

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Published on , in Design and development,

On my iPhone, I don’t have automatic updates turned on. I’m that guy that likes to read the release notes. Or, at least, I was.

Release notes used to be interesting. They’d tell you what the developers had been up to. What features they were adding, or removing. But, the most important thing they brought was the ability to make an informed decision. They gave you the chance to decide whether you actually wanted to install it or not.

Companies such as Slack and Monzo have fun with their release notes. They’re proud to show you the new features they’ve been working hard on. But these two companies are becoming part of a minority. A small group of companies that actually bother to write anything.

Design is not art

Published on , in Design and development,

Design and art go hand in hand. But they’re not the same thing.

When I was younger, I identified as a graphic designer. I’d design logos and flyers for nightclubs in Newcastle. When you’re doing this kind of thing, the lines between art and design blur a lot. And, I have to be honest, I didn’t know the difference.

I’d combine art with principles such as the golden ratio, irradiation phenomenon and overshoot.

I’d pick typefaces to best represent the brand of the company I was designing for. There was some science to it, but it was still open to opinion. Somebody could still decide they didn’t like my work. And clients often did.

Death of the notes box

Published on , in Design and development,

As a designer, it’s not my job to design the things people want. It’s my job to design the things they need.

When you work in Government, you see a lot of legacy systems. These are ancient beasts, built off the back of corporate I.T contracts decades ago.

They’re clunky, and we’re unable to make changes. UX wasn’t even a thing back then. The interfaces range from what looks like Teletext to an Excel spreadsheet. The font size is about 6px, because any screen resolution over 640px was unheard of when they were built.

There’s a lot these systems have to answer for. But one of my biggest gripes is the culture of ‘note-box enthusiasts’ these systems have created.

Error messages are not funny

Published on , in Design and development,

I’m at that age now where all my friends are into having babies. Because of this, I ended up browsing kidly.co.uk. It’s an eCommerce site aimed at gifts for 0-4-year-olds. They do a great job of selling themselves as a ‘by people for people’ kind of company. There are fluffy images of the team looking happy. The about us section is full of references to parenting so that people can relate.

I get this type of marketing. It’s smart. It bypasses your brain’s neocortex and buries itself deep into your emotional core. If you relate to these people, and they seem like you, you’re more likely to buy from them. It’s genius.

I don’t have a problem with this type of marketing, until it begins to encroach on the user experience.

Some thoughts on primary buttons

Published on , in Design and development,

I’ve recently been ranting a lot about primary buttons. But people often don’t understand what they are.

In my early days as a designer, I thought it just meant adding class="btn-primary" to my markup to make it pretty and blue, and this is a common mistake.

A lot of people make this mistake and litter the Internet with bad design which is confusing for the people that have to use it. Some of my early contributions are still out there causing a nuisance. Sorry.

Hear no, see no, techno

Published on , in Inclusion and advocacy,

Last week I attended Camp Digital, in the beautiful Town Hall of Manchester.

It was your usual digital conference. Your usual crowd. But, today I saw a talk that has changed the way I think about websites and service design forever.