Blog page 6

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.

How to calculate reading time, like Medium

Published on , in Design and development,

Recently, I took a leaf out of Medium’s book and decided to add the estimated reading time to my blog posts. This was so that people could decide whether they had enough time to commit to the post before reading it.

The task was pretty simple. It was only 7 lines of JavaScript. I wrote it and implemented it in a single train journey to Leeds.

When I tweeted about it, I got a request to write an explanation of the code. So here it goes!

What is ‘normal’ anyway?

Published on , in Wellbeing,

I want to be normal. How many people have muttered these words during times of turmoil? How many people have wanted to trade their noisy racing thoughts, for a brain that was more peaceful? A brain that was numb and void of opinion.

I know I have.

As I sit here, staring at the blank page, I can already feel my anxieties rising. As I begin to write, I find myself trying to imagine how anybody reading this will perceive my words.

Type. Delete. Type. Delete.