Aaaaarrrnng it’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I offer embarrassment and my usual excuses. I’ve been busy getting Lushai off the ground in Auckland and it’s actually been a pretty good first year for us here. In some areas Lushai Auckland has grown slowly where I had hoped it would grow fast but in other areas it has surpassed my expectations for what we could achieve in a first year. In particular we have been able to get projects of a quality I aspired to but suspected weren’t realistic for a new office in a new city.

I’m working on creating a bit more space to do some writing and blogging about all that but as a filler I thought I would brain dump a few takeaways about my recent experience as a mentor for New zealand’s contribution to the Global Service Jam.

Service Design has taken up more and more of my time over the last couple of years, and is a pretty natural extension of how I was working as a user experience designer. But for some reason being in New Zealand has bought a tighter focus onto this area of my practice.

Most recently I participated as a mentor in the The Global Service Jam, a first for me. The Global Service Jam is (in their own words):

A service Jam is a cooperative gathering of people interested in a design-based approach to creativity and problem solving, and of course in service design. It is there to encourage experimentation and innovation – participants come together without a team, without an idea and are given a subject or theme to incorporate in their new-to-the-world design while meeting new people.

The Global Service Jam is a community of Jams taking place internationally over the same weekend. All the Jams share the same starting themes, and publish their local results over a central platform. The theme for participants in the Global Service Jam will be announced at 5:00PM (local time) on the Friday, and results must be shared by 3:00pm (local time) on the Sunday.

Each local group has freedom to structure and manage the Jam to fit their local situation and needs (eg you can make your own version of the logo, see below). A few rules are in place for Organisers and Participants; if you want your Jam to be part of the Global event, you will need to follow these. Besides these rules, we hope that local teams will follow many of our recommendations so that we share a common experience and everyone can work on a level playing field.

I had actually just come off a fairly intense 3 month service design project for Chorus (which I’ll write about at a later date) and was up till 3am the previous morning pulling together my final deliverable so I have to admit the prospect of a 48 hour service design marathon weekend filled me with fatigue. But the energy of the Jam organisers and participants apparently has magical restorative powers as the time it kicked of I was feeling very engaged and energised.

My Role as a Mentor

Upon reflection I think I need to prepare more for my role as a mentor next time. The service Jam was an extremely unknown entity to me and I wasn’t sure going in how I was going to tackle it. I don’t think I contributed as much to this Jam as I could have as a consequence. Next time I plan to create a detailed plan of attack and set clear expectations for myself and the participants.

At this stage my ‘notes to self’ about what i’ll do next time as a mentor are as follows:

• Keep the focus on the process, and intervene quite proactively if participants are getting bogged down in the execution of their idea at the expense of experiencing a full service design process.
• Intervene with ideas directly if teams have gotten stuck to the point where they are no longer enjoying the event, but otherwise addressing the causes of the slow downs, such as fatigue, narrowing too quickly, or loosing focus on the big picture.
• Encourage participants to try ideas out as early as possible and not get bogged down in debates about theoretical ideas. Encourage them to make something that realises their ideas in a prototype they can use to demonstrate and test their concepts out on.
• As an extension of the last point, try to get them to avoid running mental models that run on unexpressed assumptions they don’t realise aren’t shared.

I’m sure I’ll revise and add to these as the experience filters through my brain over the next few months.

The relative freshness of Service design as a discipline in New Zealand means I found myself in the awkward position of ‘mentoring’ service design practitioners who were more experienced than I was. But gracefully, they allowed themselves to be mentored without even the slightest sign of a smirk or raised eyebrow, which is a credit to them as professionals and not something you can always count on in the fragile ego forest that is design.

Go! Fail! Repeat!

Seeing teams simultaneously and rapidly churn through a d.school type design process was an amazing learning experience. Seeing the same process filtered simultaneously (and extremely rapidly) through different personalities was like mainlining the learnings from months of multiple projects in just a weekend. I came away with my head brimming with possible ways to work and tackle problems. As the literature always promises I definitely felt like I learnt more than I taught. Much, much more.

Prototype! Prototype! Etc!

I’ve been moving towards a more prototype orientated process over recent years, but the service jam weekend super charged this for me. Seeing people bring their ideas to life by building mockups, storyboards, and role-playing and then quickly iterate on failures was revelationary.

One of the more impressive prototypes was a brown paper bus to test the ideas of public transport optimised for growing community connections. It started as a few chairs in a row and by the end of the weekend was fully enclosed bus with a simulated (through the magic of tape and iPads) swipe in video entry system.

Actually, it originally started out as a mobile photo booth, which shows how far an idea can evolve over the course of a weekend.

It was fascinating to watch the team role play their journey and experiment with different levels of prototype fidelity. Watching this team grow enthusiastic about an idea, then experience the idea through the prototype, declare it a failure (‘That was horrible’ is how one of them expressed it), take the learnings from that idea and develop a whole new idea, then prototype that idea again and again until they had it working was an amazing experience. You can see the finished idea here: The Social Bus

I’m definitely on board for the next one, as a mentor if they will have me or as a participant otherwise. There are rumours it will be in Wellington:

Great times at #gsjakl. Time for a #gsjwlg in 2014! Prediction: 2 x as many people at next service design jam.

— Sam Ng (@snowmansam) March 3, 2013

So maybe I can nag Lushai Wellington into joining me in the next one …

I’m writing a slightly more involved post about Semi-permanent for the Lushai blog at the moment but here is a brain dump of a couple of my (more bitchy) takeaways and notes that won’t be part of that post.

The advertising and fashion guys at Semi-permanent (they were all guys in this case) didn’t actually seem to have that many really great ideas but what they did have was the ability to make their ideas happen. The ability to convince people their ideas were great and the conviction to see the ideas through to the end. Although a lot of the designers talked about how important working hard and being creative was if you want to be successful I think this confidence and conviction is possibly more important, particularly if your goal is to be commercially successful.

There must be some middle ground though between the self confidence required to put your ideas out there (instead of endless tinkering and self-doubt) and the self critique required to make your work actually good (as opposed to being easily satisfied with generic work). It’s genuinely tricky to do though since both over confidence and under confidence and the are the product of personality rather than any strategic plan.

I was also surprised at the casual sexism on display with the advertising and fashion speakers, but it didn’t seem to bother very many actual woman so maybe I was being over-sensitive. It did seem sort weirdly old fashioned though for people so obsessed with being Zeitgeisty. Almost as if they existed outside the conversations, debates and thinking that go on in the world around them.

For the record, my favorite speakers were Alex Trochut and Kelly Anderson. Both for the intimidatingly high quality of their work and their ability to talk intelligently about it. They found that great balance between instinct and intellect. They understand design (as much as you can understand such an amorphous thing) and their position as designers and applied that to their work. At the same time they managed to be imaginative and creative. They were able to talk about their actual work as opposed to just talking about how good their work was. A lot of designers know how to make it sounds like they are talking intelligently about their work (‘exploring the spaces between …’ is always a good one) but it was nice to actually see it for real for a change.

My notebook follows, which may clarify some of the things I have been taking about:

Starting a new agency is, it turns out, a lot of work. But it also been a lot of fun. Now we are facing the strange proposition of deliberately not doing chargeable work for a short period in order to set ourselves up a bit more. And also thinking about hiring, a daunting prospect.

In the meantime I need to think about this blog. I want to keep a blog going outside of Lushai but we will be blogging there as well (once we get our shit together). So what goes where, that’s the question.

I think probably this will become more of a blog about my personal experiences & opinions as a designer, and Lushai will be more focused on design ideas and learnings we have from our business that may be useful to our clients and peers. We’ll see. I’m not sure if anyone reads this anyway …I should get some analytics set up. My old blog sometimes had as many as 5 or 7 readers!

In the meantime, we have cards! Fancy.

I’m in Auckland and my agency is a living breathing boy. Although with Just myself in Auckland and Lulu is Wellington Lushai is a bit thin on the ground at the minute. We are not idle however, I’m working (my arse off) on a project with another agency for Vodafone and Lulu is working with a number of clients down in Wellington. Lushai Auckland is fully booked for the next few months, which is great but means I haven’t had time to take a breath and deal at all with all the mental backflips and twists that moving a young family to another country entails.

Right now Lushai is occupying itself with Client work but we are going to have a big planning session when I’m down in Wellington for Webstock next month and we have some big plans. After that I’ll be able to talk more about it and a re-envigerated Lushai should begin to emerge.

In the mean time this blog will be a little light on posts, although if I can get a spare evening or weekend I’ll inflict a post on you about why I think the golden ratio is (probably) bullshit. Until that time then …

I’m in the process of wrapping up my London life before I start the long haul back to New Zealand on Friday. In the process of packing up our home I found some more notebooks with what I hope is some more valuable insight to share with you all.

Some of these I made some time ago so I’m a bit rusty on what they refer to, but to start, these are my notes from a meeting with a fairly senior person in a large bank when I asked him to explain the strategy behind a piece of software I had been asked to design for.

Fairly self explanatory I think. But just in case it’s not I seem to have expanded on it on the next page.

So to sum up, there is a blob, and some arrows …. a king of some kind … stick figures running around … speaks for itself really. Are those knives?

I also found these little guys who I’m guessing I had intended to use to illustrate … a thing of some kind …

At some point it looks like I added a bit of detail to these guys as follows

Looking at them now they seem to be representing some fairly unpleasant values, but I honestly can’t remember what they were for.

Anyway, as a semi-final London hurrah, the rest of the meeting notes I photographed before binning my London notebooks. Something of value in there for designers I’m sure. The more experienced among you may be able to spot the subtle signs that indicate I had lost focus a little in some of them.

For stationary nerds I love the Muji B5 notebooks with the brown covers. I love them so much in fact that I’ve bought a huge stack of them to ship back to New Zealand.

I’ve now finished my last day of work in the UK. I will be faffing around in London & Liverpool for a few weeks and then at the end of November heading home to the motherland New Zealand to start something new in Auckland. Things are still pretty fresh but even though we haven’t dotted all the things that require dots or crossed over the things that need to be crossed it’s probably close enough to done to announce the new plan.

I’m becoming a partner in Lulu Pachau’s company Lushai. I’ll be operating the Auckland ‘office’ and Lulu the Wellington one although I expect a fair bit of crossover. I’ll write a bit more about this in the future once we have nailed things down a bit more. In the mean time if you need some UX work done in Auckland, you know where to find me.

It isn’t very often these days I get to do straight illustration or any kind of non UX old school design. So it’s always a treat when I get to do a new drawing for Yeastie Boys. I’ve intentionally gone for a slightly obscure representation and I’m roughly happy with it but I have to admit it’s possible I may have overshot. Any idea at all what it is? Answers on a postcard.

This is not a troll for compliments in case you were wondering. I write my own compliments then send them to myself from a secret email address so I can act surprised in front of my wife when they arrive.

A lot of Apple insiders and industry analysts have used the genuinely sad occasion of the death of Steve Jobs to try and extract positive lessons from how he did business and how he oversaw the designs of Apple’s products . This may be slightly cynical but is also from a sincere desire that these lessons are not lost as the technology industry comes under the sway of a slightly greyer group of CEOs.

Confusingly, many of the lessons seem completely self contradictory as writers and analysts see their own beliefs validated through the success of Apple. This is normal, we all do this, seeing what we want to see, projecting evidence of what we emotionally want to be true onto every success and failure. But it makes it hard for us on the outside of Apple to learn from their success when every expert we rely on to understand these lessons claims the same insights that they were claiming before they analysed Apple’s success.

To address this I have quickly jotted down the actual 5 most important lessons we can learn from Steve Jobs. What makes my list more authoritative that the previously published ones is that I have owned an apple product, have access to the internet, have the typing skills to assemble my list and a blog I can publish it on. The list follows:

1. Shininess is not just skin deep

The reflective qualities of both Apple product materials and marketing visuals are not a decorative throwaway or an unintended artifice of manufacturing. Apple’s own research discovered (and later filed patents on) the effect highly reflective surfaces (both actual and rendered) have on user perception, consumer behaviour and actual technological performance. This is why they have persisted with the reflective floor visual style in their marketing materials even as it has fallen out of fashion over the last 5 years. This is why their computers have transitioned to highly reflective screens even on professional machines and against the protestations of their small group of power users. In short, they discovered that the higher the level of reflectiveness the higher the ‘technologicalitiness’ of the device. And not just the perceived technologicalitiness but the actual scientifically measurable amount of technologicalitiness that is in inherent in the designiness of any consumer product. This is true because I have created a graph illustrating the effect:

2. Protect your neck

Steve Job’s decision to wear polonecks at first seems a strange anomaly when viewed in the context of the superior grasp of formal aesthetics displayed in the apple product line. However he was utilising a phenomenon that was once common knowledge but has recently fallen out of popular conciseness. The phenomenon is this: The majority of physic power is lost through the neck. A quick reference to the historical fashion of subjected vs ruling civilisations will validate the rise and fall of this piece of strategic knowledge. It is also mentioned on the internet.

3. Black cloth deflects telekinesis

Apple could chose any colour under the sun for the little cloths they put over their prototypes. They chose black. As well as being slimming the colour’s abilities to deflect destructive telekinetic attacks from Microsoft and Google are well documented I would imagine. This may sounds slightly grasping but I ask you this: What colour are Steve’s polonecks?

4. Put little bumps on the bottom

My computer has little bumps on the bottom to stop it from sliding around and scratching the base. That must be a thing I assume.

5. Don’t trust people with little hands

Look at all the Apple product videos. Every engineer and designer presenting has hands in a pleasing proportion to the rest of their body. This is no coincidence, research may have shown that people with unusually large hands design ridiculous products with controls the size of Duplo blocks, while people with tiny squirrel hands have a propensity to steal. Maybe. I don’t know.

I was really impressed by the slideshare ‘Truth or Dare’ that Jason Mesut posted recently from his Euro IA talk (which I wasn’t able to attend unfortunately). I didn’t agree with all of it, but the gist of it is really thoughtful and timely, and is very close to my own thinking. This isn’t really one of the critiques he asked people to post but his talk has prompted me to brain dump a few thoughts about the London UX scene & design in general. Some of these are responses to Jason’s talk, most of them are just general thoughts I’ve been meaning to get of my chest for a while.

On User Experience Orthodoxy

The ease in which we fall into orthodoxy is suprising considering we are supposed to be problem solvers and thinkers. But we definitely have a tendency to grasp the end expression of an idea instead of the reasoning behind it. If an idea has been expressed in a book or by a design leader it seems to takes on an immediate authority. And if it can be expressed in a pithy quote then forget about it, tweets are fired off, it’s an unassailable law of physics.

An example: I often encounter the use of quotes to add weight to an idea. One told to me recently was ‘The definition of complexity is one control that does two things’. Often, yeah, designing one control to do two things does introduce unwanted complexity, the user has to learn two different ways to manipulate it to get different results. But sometimes the alternative of adding two controls to an interaction can introduce complexity by forcing a user to identify which control they need as well as then needing to figure out how to use it. For example a keyboard with one button for each alphanumeric function (one control, one function) is appropriate as one design solution, a track pad that can be manipulated in many ways (one control, many functions) is appropriate for another.

The point is, one control to perform two functions is not complex by default. It’s certainly not the definition of complexity. In one context it can be unnecessarily complex, in another not (Who decided that complexity was always negative anyway? Surely there is such a thing as an appropriately complex tool?). We’ve confused a specific (and valid) solution with a general and absolute rule. But worst of all we’ve gone on to make it irritating by making it a catchy quote. Actually the fact that an idea is expressed through a quote is really only a fault if you have the same collection of personality defects that I have. The form of a quote (although making it more likely it will be circulated out of context) is incidental to the fact that the quote has been removed from it’s original reasoning (and an excellent example of how the more a thing irritates me, the more likely I am to be guilty of it myself). The fault is in our confusion of a specific solution with general truisms.

This is compounded by the way we tend to latch on to these ideas as absolutes. We treat the rule as true until proven otherwise which in’t appropriate for a design idea I think. Any design idea that involves the words ‘never’ or ‘always’ should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. Always. See what I did there? Comedy gold.

On Fear Marketing & Our Amazing Ability to Tell the Future

When we feel very confident about an idea we tend to think of those who question that idea as not understanding the issue as well as we do. In our case this often manifests as the feeling they don’t ‘get’ the world we live in and the word we are all going to be living in in the near future. We (inadvertently I think, through the strength of our certainty, our confidence in our own insight) fall into the old marketing position of trading on people’s fears that we know something they don’t, their fears of being irrelevant and not understanding the changing word we are designing for.

This whole mobile thing is a good example of that. There seems to be a feeling that if you are not mobile first you are Beta Max. You are the CEO who gets his secretary to turn his long hand notes into emails, you are Microsoft predicting the internet won’t catch on. While we are already riding hover boards & feeding rubbish into our Deloreans. Mobile first is probably a bad example, it is actually a pretty engaging idea, it may be right, it might not be, I really don’t know. The thing is we trade a lot on our understanding of what users want, and also want they are going to want in the future. But we of all people should know that the future doesn’t always deliver what we expect it to. And although I think its essential to think ahead we need to make sure we are not absolutists in our declarations and dismissals. Scaring people to get them to engage with our ideas is really effective but it’s also self defeating as it closes down discussion. And fear makes people less likely to critically engage with an idea, to risk looking like they ‘don’t get it’. I think the confidence with which we think we know what the near future will bring, and the absolutism with which we express that certainty (and by extension with which we dismiss other, particularly older ideas) is unwarranted by our actual ability to peer forwards through the mists of time.

On UX Eating Itself

We need to chill out a bit about how people use the term UX and who is and isn’t a true UX person. People in my office talk about ‘putting some UX on it’ when they format their XL sheets, if you get stressed when someone gets UI designer and UX designer confused, you would shit yourself where I work. The important thing is to talk about what we do and how we work, express our role by explaining our value & not relying on the correct use of this term we just made up anyway. We can’t stop people calling themselves UX specialists when we don’t think they should be, we probably can’t stop people advertising for a UX designer when they want a CSS specialist.

Maybe it’s more productive to instead make sure we don’t rely too much on these terms, I’m not sure we will ever be able to control their use. We feel like some of us have earnt the title of UX practioners and that now people who haven’t earnt it are just running with it, living of our hard work at reputation building and destroying the value of that work. We played the small clubs, they went on X-factor and told a story about cancer. But we didn’t earn the title of User Experience professional ,we just gave it to ourselves. It’s a title not a qualification. We would be better off focusing on the quality of our own work and effectively communicating how we add value I think, people who are chancing it may be undermining the term User Experience but that doesn’t necessarily mean the are undermining our value as practitioners.

Mmmmm … Well, maybe. I’m still thinking about that one but that’s how it feels to me at the moment.

Somewhat defensively, On Contractors

The rates for contractors quite rightly stress out agencies who need contractors and even agencies who need permanent UX talent. It makes it unaffordable. But this isn’t unique to UX. I have a suspicion that it is financial services that is to blame. The rates they pay are so much higher than other industries that it distorts the whole London design scene. And not just design either, it steals talent and pushes up rates in every industry, offering questionable value to the greater economy outside of finance and making life more difficult for any other economic model.

But if you are making bucket loads of money as an agency by working for financial institutions, that same distortion is what is allowing you to charge so much. And especially when you are able to charge high rates at least partially on the strength of the experience of your contractors it seems strange to complain about it. Contractors charge the most they think they can get just like agencies do, and aren’t likely to charge less than they can get because it is better for an agency any more than an agency is about to pay contractors more because they are sympathetic to their desire for longer holidays. That’s not being greedy on the contractor’s part or mean spirited on the agencies’ part. Unless you’re working for Oxfam, that’s just business.

Most good senior contractors are only partially motivated by money anyway. I’ve taken on contracts for lesser amounts because of the promise of interesting work (I’ve also chosen a project because of it’s higher rates when two contracts have been very close in other factors, especially since I’ve had a baby). I am sympathetic though to how frustrating it must be to have to deal with just how high banking has pushed the rates for senior contractors. They are offering hundreds more a day and particularly if your own clients aren’t in Financial Services how do you compete with that? I think Jason Mesut is on the right track by talking to contractors about the quality of projects he works on and the other non monetary benefits of a project. Most designers I know will jump at the opportunity to do good work.

As Jason notes contracting’s limited time engagements and high rates can mean long holidays and lots of cash, which is massively appealing. But there are still lots of really good people who want permanent positions if you can find them. Declaration of interest: I’m a contractor. In my case its the freedom, cash, diversity of work and opportunity to work directly with companies on great projects that I like. I also genuinely feel there are many projects where I can often offer a client more through a direct relationship with them than I can through working though an agency. And for a client, however high a contractor’s rates may be it’s till much cheaper (and sometimes better value) than engaging an agency.

But this isn’t the problem really, I know for a fact that RMA pay reasonable contracting rates & have good relationships with their contractors. I think what really annoys people is inexperienced contractors asking for high rates. This risks the preputation damage to us as practitioners I mentioned before and frankly, it is just plain annoying. But again, if they can get those rates they would be foolish not to take them, although there is a strong argument that they are doing themselves a disservice in the long term by not placing themselves in situations where they can learn from more senior practitioners. My attitude to that is the same as my attitude towards the use of the term User Experience consultant, I try not to worry about it and instead focus on my own work. And yeah if you’re an agency, explain to them the long term development benefits of taking on a more junior role with it’s associated lesser salary. Or if you don’t think they are worth it, just don’t hire them.

Shortly I’m going to be opening up my own design practise, so check back with me in a year and see if I have developed an distaste for high contracting rates. Entirely possible.

Finally, On UX Celebrities

I’m fine with speaking and writing by non practising UX celebrity types. It’s harder to judge with UX speakers but I know that most web/graphic design webcelebrities usually aren’t the best designers. However they are often the best communicators, and often good thinkers as well. I’m glad there is a movement to encourage more skilled practice based designers who aren’t that interested in self promotion to share, we are definitely missing that. But if a speaker or writer has ideas that are valuable to me and can express them in a meaningful way then I am ok with the fact that they might not be the best real life practitioner.

This post is too long. I really should have saved these up and done them as 5 different blog posts. Then I could have published them a couple of weeks apart and put my feet up for a bit. Nevermind. Well done for making it to the end.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Guardians UX drop in yesterday afternoon. We learnt how content is organised for the website (everything is tagged basically then sections can be created pulling in content based on their tags, e.g. music & photography), how the UX team (or duo) work and where digital and UX is placed in the organisation. We also got to peek at the upcoming Guardian Android and Windows phone apps, got to sit in a pod in the middle of the building where every morning editorial staff sit on large low comfy couches and discuss each days issue and got an inside look on the design process behind their ‘9/11 Your Memories’ interactive feature from developer and journalist Jonathan Richards (what an intriguing combination of skills). I’m not going to do a ‘My Holiday’ type essay on it (although looking at what I just wrote I guess I just did) as the Guardian’s head of UX Martin Belam has a good run down of what was discussed here: UX drop-in at the Guardian. But there were a few things that might slip through available notes that I thought were interesting enough to quickly share:

Location

The Guardian is not produced in a grey and smokey news sweatshop as I sometimes imagine, but is actually on 3 floors of a rather plush building (Kings Place) that has a lovely outlook over Regents Canal. Frustratingly they have access to good coffee beans (Union) in the cafe downstairs that are then butchered by mediocre barristers into very average coffee.

Satisficing

A couple of interesting experiences came out of their initial designs for the 9/11 piece which invites people to submit what they were doing when they first heard about the attack on New York and Washington. In a facebook page inviting people to submit these experiences through a link to their interactive feature many people recorded their experiences on the comment field of that post. A classic example of satisficing behaviour and something to think about when creating pathways to controlled experiences.

Attention Misdirection

The other piece of user behaviour they discovered was on a section that asked people to pinpoint on a map where they were when they first learnt of the attack. The interface had a greyed out submit button in the conventional location next to the input box users entered their location into. It became active once the user had identified a location. However because the map updated dynamically as the user typed in their location users attention was diverted from the button and many users missed the change of state from unavailable to available. Some users consequently couldn’t proceed as they hadn’t realised the submit button was now active. There are many possible ways to solve this problem, they responded by moving the button to the location shown in the map where the users attention was directed, asking them to confirm that was the correct location.

Users This Week

The thing I saw at the drop in that I liked the most was Karen Loasby’s experiment with trying to talk to 3 users a week. Specifically her technique of writing up how many users they had talked to so far that week on a prominent whiteboard, causing nagging guilt when the number was low. In a busy organisation where reaching out to users needs to be very self directed this is an excellent idea for ensuring that you keep trying to test your ideas against reality when it is so easy to just let it go.

Danger Will Robinson

Any journalists can potentially enter any piece of HTML or Javascript into the Guardian CMS. So they can communicate using private APIs or custom code as well as just photographs, drawings and words. Even though this is risky security wise they value openness and innovation enough to tolerate a certain amount of risk in order to give their journalists the ability to communicate in unconventional ways. I wonder what the demographics are of the journalists who engage in the possibilities of that opportunity.

As You Were

Very interesting overall, particularly the idea of the Guardian being an open organisation and how that manifests in terms of their UX design, CMS and how they handle data. I thoroughly recommend you jump in if they hold another UX drop in. They are recruiting for UX people by the way if you are interested. Applications are here: UX and Information Architect

By far the highlight of the trip was the proximity of the Guardian building to my home, which meant I could meet my wife for lunch and had the rare treat of being able to smell my new daughter’s head during my lunch break. Lovely.