Isotoma Limited

I spent the last 3 days at the UX London conference, organised by the good folks at Clearleft. Very impressive speaker lineup, and generally a well-run, successful conference. Admittedly, much of it is preaching to the converted, but a handful of eureka moments, and connecting with the UX community, makes it all worthwhile.

It’s hard to imagine conferences without Twitter now. Many talks were live-tweeted, which I never saw the point of but, judging from comments, certainly has an appreciative audience. I checked the #uxlondon search periodically to see what people were thinking. (Would’ve appreciated some controversy; all a bit polite.)

So I decided to summarise the 7 presentations and 4 workshops I attended in 11 tweets (read on):

Continue reading "UX London conference (concentrate)" »

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I mentioned on Twitter that I am disappointed in the redesign. Don’t get me wrong, it looks attractive and contemporary, and I’m by no means nostalgic for the old site (it was terrible). But the redesign didn’t do the things that I hoped it would, and also does several things that I don’t agree with.

My usage of the Radio 4 website (almost daily) is like this: when I’m stuck in one place, like washing dishes or ironing, I go to the website and try to find, as quickly as possible, something interesting to listen to. I’m not really loyal to any programmes in particular. I am aware that there are wonderful treasures buried in the site, but it’s usually a waste of time to click around. So I usually scan the homepage, especially Choice of the Day. Often I can’t find something that seems interesting, and I listen to the latest news broadcast. (I also have a similar use case when looking for podcasts to load onto my mp3 player.)

I was hoping for 2 things from the redesign:

1. Many more recommendations on the homepage than before
2. Generally better discovery features

Continue reading "BBC Radio 4 redesign: some thoughts" »

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I travel frequently between London and Isotoma’s York offices. Every time, I’m forced to endure the frustrating mess that is Thetrainline.com. A couple of months ago, when it had the temerity to run a customer survey, I vented:

The website has been a pain to use as long as it has existed, and the only reason you haven’t made any improvements is that customers are forced to use it in the absence of any real alternative. The moment that alternative comes along you won’t see me for dust.

Subsequently, The Trainline has rolled out some welcome usability improvements (not enough to call it a “new site” as they do in the interview on Econsultancy.) The homepage search form was greatly improved, and a clear, consistent accent colour on buttons and links helped a lot on other pages. Unfortunately, this is as far as it went, leaving their confusing, cumbersome, 12-screen journey unchanged.

The real alternative has finally arrived, in the form of National Express East Coast (note: not nationalexpress.com). Here’s why:

Continue reading "One less frustration for British rail travelers" »

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Natalie Downe of Clearleft has written a very useful presentation entitled CSS Systems, or, “Writing Maintainable CSS”. These are principles and patterns for writing HTML and CSS that makes it easier to hand over to other people to maintain, and generally more robust. It’s very relevant for agencies like us, and I was pleased to find that the system we developed internally (documented on the company wiki) correspond with hers about 99%. This blog post consists of comments, additions, qualifications, agreements and occasional disagreements with her presentation.

Continue reading "CSS Systems" »

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following on from this bright idea to use a spamming tool to create a blog from an Open University course feed, the OU asked us to build a plugin for WordPress MU that will automatically create a bunch of blogs from Open University feeds. We also built a WordPress widget, to implement another bright idea, that can then deliver the blog entries for a course in periodic chunks. So you can consume the course in your feed-reader at a pace that suits. This should be released soon, meanwhile, the testing is very educational.

Every day this week I've been mostly learning about James Clerk Maxwell.

Posted by Greg Gaughan at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)