Posts by Chris

We’ve just finished a consultancy report for a client. They wanted us to help them make a decision: should they continue to develop an online business, or should they abandon it? (more…)

At the SCIP event last month, the group leader asked the community organisations if they had any specific problems they wanted addressing.

“Accessibility,” said one man. “What do you mean?” “You know, blind people, that kind of thing.”

Ian shifted in his chair, and then spoke. “Do you have a problem with the site? Are people coming to you, complaining that they can’t access it?”

They weren’t, and a conversation developed. What kind of people visit the site? For what? It’s a radio website, so would partially-sighted people be coming through the site, or through streaming players, or iTunes? Is there any evidence of people using screen readers to reach the site?

How useful is it to focus on blind people when we think about accessibility?

Not everyone sees things the way you do

For us, accessibility is a broader concept. It’s about all the different ways people might want to access your site. If you have events, will people want to view them on the move? Do you need some mobile pages?

Is there lots of good information on your site? Will people be wanting to print it out? If so, you should have good print stylesheets to make the printed pages look good and not waste paper.

I like to use a computer-based calendar. I don’t want to visit your website to find out about new events. Can I subscribe to your calendar?

And what about news? I like to read mine as email. Can I get news from your site through email?

This is accessibility. Making sure your site is accessible to all your users in the way they want to interact with it. And that means blind people with screen readers. But it also means a great deal more.

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We’ve been doing some interface design for Magic Studio, a multimedia tool used by schools.

In one task, the students have to decide how significant they think economic, social and environmental factors are for a variety of objects (in this case, buildings).

Ian’s been facing the problem of how to represent the results. Three separate screens? Live feedback? Perhaps the icons should be coloured or varied by size to convey their different axes?

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Ian and I were at a community IT event a couple of weeks ago. The aim was to connect design agencies with community groups who needed assistance with their online presence. It reminded me of how differently people see technology – annoyance, tool, magic or secret club.

Community groups are used to doing things themselves, and more than one of them had tumbled down the rabbit hole with a Dreamweaver book in hand. I wanted to make the point that it’s more important that they can articulate their needs and find willing helpers than it is to understand the technology details.

Ian took the opposite view – that people have inflated expectations of new media, and that if they expect to be running a publishing system they have to learn the language and workflow of the tools they’ll be using.

In a way it comes down to roles – you need someone who can draw the organisational big picture, and someone who understands how to format posts in Wordpress. In community organisations these roles often fall on the same person, and thinking about their online presence from such different vantage points can be difficult.

Ian took a call recently. It was a man who wanted an e-commerce website. He wanted to know how much it would cost. Ian asked him why he wanted a site at all.

This flummoxed the man. He’d called a few design agencies, and none had asked him this. In fact, they hadn’t asked him much before giving him a figure.

“What’s your competition?” I heard Ian say. “Have you done a competitive analysis?”

I was feeling sorry for our potential client. I wanted to give him a figure, but Ian was right. An ecommerce site is a shop. Behind the shop is a business, and it’s the business that matters. (more…)

How do academic writers refer to posts in an online forum? We had no idea (and admittedly, hadn’t given it any thought) until late last year when we started designing the Modern Languages Association’s Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

The MLA Handbook is the gold-standard reference for academic researchers in the US, but it lacked an online version. For the Seventh edition, our partners Semantico were commissioned to build one, and we designed the interface. The site has just gone live.

The book is a surprisingly interesting read, covering not just citation rules but style guidance, case studies and research technique. Strunk and White fans should check it out. The rest of you may be interested to read our short case study (forgive style errors).

Footsie, our idea to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, has been shortlisted for the Social Innovation Camp in December.

Please vote for it! Your votes will send it to the camp, where we’ll be able to spend a weekend knocking the idea into shape and working out where to take it next.

And where would that be? Maybe Unltd? Our plan is to get seed funding to work up the idea into a business plan and pitch. Then we’d start approaching businesses who might be interested in sponsoring the project. With four businesses involved, we’d have a set of beta testers and enough money to build the site.

But first we need your votes…

We’ve been talking to a couple of climate change organisations recently, and it’s inspired us to start thinking about how online environments can help individuals and organisations adapt.

What’s the goal here — to raise awareness? No — everyone knows we’re in an eighteen-wheeler heading for the cliff. We know this. We’re just too paralysed to steer. (For anyone who wants to understand how we got to this point, and how much worse the situation is than they realise, watch this gripping video). (more…)

Update: we were shortlisted for Social Innovation Camp.

Footsie will help larger businesses develop a carbon-reduction strategy through a game experience of pledges and prediction markets.

It’s a collaborative tool which will engage all staff in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating change strategies – all with a few minutes of engagement a week. (more…)

I’ve been talking about the BBC Innovation Lab for several days now, and I realised I still haven’t properly explained how it works. So now I will.

The first stage is soliciting applications in a short, structured, text-only format. No fancy visuals, no investment in eye-candy, no false promises.

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