8 posts tagged “user experience”

Just installed new firefox - it's GREAT. such a better UX & Design, small tweaks (like the BIG back arrows, adaptive text, add-in buttons) it's quite well done.  IT seems faster too.

Actually find myself reverting back to firefox from Safari because of this - haven't seen anyone else do a better analysis. Maybe I'll take a crack.

So I hosted an away day at the BBC for the entire User Experience & Design teams + a few extra's.  About 160 people in all. We had it at the Magic Circle, which I thought was quite appropriate - more and more User Experience seems to one part magic to two parts science; wrapped in artistry and a bit of luck.

I went 1st and ranted on my favorite points lately:
1 -  The fact that the BBC needs to sort out its digital content strategy.
2 - The fact that we (the BBC) have no real relationship as a brand with audiences in the post CBBC pre BBC News demographic (that's 11-24 for those of you who cares).
3 - A thing I call the public service platform, where I think the BBC should re-order a bunch of its digital works/technology/services to provide platforms for public & private organizations, including startups, to build businesses on top of its digital services.

You'll here a bunch more about the latter one as these three feed most of what I'm thinking about for us for the next year.

We had two external thinkers Mat Hunter, from Ideo (see photo) who was great, and Clive Grinyer from Cisco (formerly from Orange).  We talked a lot about the evolution of product & service development into design, a bit about how user centered design & a touch of naivety place designers (in the broadest sense of things) in a great place to design and develop products.  In essence, our disconnection from business or technology limitations makes us focus 1st on what the audience wants, 2nd on how they will use it - then we manage back the technical and business issues from there.

Interestingly we talked a lot about the issues facing the BBC, one of the  topics I sent people away to think about was "How can we make the BBC the most creative place to work? - which isnt' it now?"

- most of what we got back was the usual (though likely truer at the current bbc) more training, more tools, more time to be creative, more people...

But most interesting to me was that we heard, from people on the periphery of my team; more leadership, more clear decision making (they actually said  benevolent dictatorships!) and in private afterwards someone said to me, they want more people like me ! While flattered I feel like there's something here in general. People want a leader who makes decisions, quick, concise, and effective ones. They want clarity of purpose, and they want to be given the time, space  & resources to get on with executing that vision.

UX&D is very empowered these days - bit of a change management infection starting to spread... - I hope.

So I've given three BIG presentations this week. One to the entire future media team at the BBC about the future circa 2012. One today for a group of Sr. management consulting strategists - and one virtually to a group of lawyers about environmental film making.  I have to say, the the one made me the most nervous was the BBC one, it's always tough to present to 1000 of your peers when they HAVE to be there. I always find audiences who've paid a grand to see you are much more cooperative.

It went well, I'll post the presentation online someplace this weekend if you're interested post here and tell me.  I also went to a visionary - leadership conference hosted by Ad Network Tradedoubler. I have to say it was GREAT!

My favourite two speakers were Richard Eyre, who in addition to making lots of witty "Long Tail" references made some great connections between the ethos of Punk Rock and blogging/social networking.. Great stuff.

Then Ray Hammond, who I personally adore, jumped up and explained that he was from the future..  It's a fun schtick and I thought he had a few interesting things to say, particularly I LOVED his simple summary of the principals businesses and entrepreneurs (ok i'm paraphrasing) need to pay attention to in regards to the next 25 years

I The most important principals influencing our future - according to Ray Hammond

1 - world population explosion: 2030 = 8.2 billion, 2050 = 9-12 biillion

2 - climate change: extreme weather wreaks havoc on economy

3 - energy crisis: oil used in plastic and petrochemicals is 8% the remainder is burned for combustion. The 8% is worth, economically speak as much as the 92% !

4 - globalization: ethical/sustainable is a god thing. 2 billion new consumers protect economic opportunity!

5 - extend & prevent: medical technology, dna profiling, nano medicine.

6 - accelerating and exponential technology development . Moores law has shrunk from 18 to 12 months, 2030 computers 1 billion times more powerful..

7 - mobile, embedded, implanted, personalized virtual device, avatar, phone replacement. Your interface with the world.

8 - the bottom billion, who have NO access to the above. Source of future war & terrorism

Heady stuff!!! But thank God I'm back from the future, I need to go to bed - I'm exhausted from all this time travel.

This is a shameless cross-post from my friend and collegue James Cridland, link below:

There were a few quite formative books and films, which framed my vision for the future of Technology, Media and Entertainment. (Recruiters and an analysts now with the addition of Internet refer to this sector as TIME)   Three books in particular, Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net,

, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Larry Niven’s California Voodoo Game were prescient in many ways for the world we live in today, if you haven’t read one or all of them – you should.  Films included Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (which is still my all time favourite film) and Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report.  

At this years CES I saw the beginnings of the world outlined in these books and films, exciting, inspiring and terrifying all at the same time.  I think the press and certainly my friends were unanimous in what they considered the show’s biggest innovation – Panasonic’s 150” plasma television. No typo, this is one big television.  As I gazed in awe I could only think to myself, man I need a bigger house.

In all seriousness however, there was something far more interesting about screens and the CES show. They are simply everywhere!  The diaspora of plasma, LED and soon OLED (more on that later) means every company had a zillion displays of all different sizes, from the Samsung (I’ll blog about that some other time, the most beautiful almost jewellery like digital watch I’ve ever seen which has a Dick Tracy phone built-in which in combination with a handy Bluetooth headset caused me serious lust) watch and keychain photo screens (smallest was an inch square and ¼ inch thick!). Wifi enabled picture frames, every one of the Televisions at the very least has HPNA and many even have browser’s built in.  I was struck that the world which my former business partner, Schematic founder and likely the most famous UI designer alive Dale Herigstad helped imagine with Spielberg in Minority Report where screens are everywhere giant, connected and aware of your presence (this last part is still not there yet, but the rest is there) With OLED technology, demo’d all over the show, the organic diodes can be aerosoled and sprayed – paint-like on a wall – coming to a London studio apartment near you in 3-5 years.  The wall screen in Neuromancer is on the horizon.

What struck, however, was that while the screens have migrated all over the house and office, and they are getting bigger, smaller and network aware and even connected  - that the services and experience frameworks are quite nascent.  Microsoft, with it’s windows media center + extender technology seem to be one of the few standards in the space, Sony has a framework demonstrated in the new PS3, but really for a consumer to buy one of these devices, go home and instantly be able to access all of their movies, music, photos, etc. across all of the screens still requires at least an IT guy maybe two.  The focus has been on the device capability but not on the digital DNA/framework  - across manufacture and platform – to create a consistent simple intuitive experience.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past  - everyone trying to control and drive the user experience rather than creating a simple intuitive open framework to enable consumers to get what they want, when they want, where & how.

The future is almost here, but we have a lot of worked to go on its user experience.

There's a great interview in Rolling Stone with one of my favourite authors of all time, William Gibson (Neuromancer, coiner of the term Cyberspace and his newest Spook Country (which I'm reading now).  Here's a quote:

"Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag."

This essentially frames an argument/discussion I've been having for quite a while at the BBC. The web is no longer a place to be visited, a languid information ("super") highway akin to route 66 where you stop in for a donut or a soda every few miles at yahoo or ask for directions at Google.   I actually bought a copy of a wall sized "Map" of the internet in 1996 which I stillstill have to be framed one day.

The net today is a thing we can only take brief momentary snapshots of, like photos out of a moving vehicle - in fact that's really what widgets are are special cameras which allow us to capture some of the data running around the net into a single, momentary user experience.  

The world is moving to a dynamic, context driven, xml & atom feed universe where content is living breathing organic matter.. we cannot contain it we can simply offer a prism or a lens through which to momentarily view it.  Something often described as a widget...

I just started a new gig. Currently, I'm contract and we'll see where it goes. 

Acting Head of User Experience
BBC Future Media and Technology
(Non-Profit; 10,001 or more employees; Broadcast Media industry)
July 2007 — Present (1 month)
- To provide the creative and thought leadership to BBC's future media products and services across the different devices and platforms.
- To be responsible for delivering a consistent and audience focused experience across its products.
- Additional emphasis on the embedded media project, Web 2.0 and the researching/ finalising the public service/commercial user journeys on bbc.co.uk.

So far I barely know where the pencils are, but i'm moving 90 miles per hour and am keen to see where it goes.

I think there are several issues with internet based video on a tv and how to best consume it;:

1 content and market fragmentation. No one service or even platform has everything a consumer would want. This forces consumers to work hard to get what they would like which is a terrible thing to do.

2 the pc hdmi solution, because of its ability to access the MOST content (joost, amazon, vongo, viiv, cinemanow and oldskool slingbox has the most content, but with a keyboard, mouse, and remote has the worst sofa-based user experience. mactv is cooln but same issues.

3 the other devices are either constrained by content or user experience. But most have stronger usability due to single unit control.

- personally here in merry old england I have an alienware mediacenter pc, and a slingbox stashed at fixer's in la and damn the user experience. But it is frustrating and I spend a fortune on non-bio-degradable batteried (bluetooth keyboard and mouse)

Best