Cennydd Bowles on user experience.

Archive for March, 2007

Spring forward, fall back

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Moving to London this week. I’ve not been as sentimental about leaving as I thought I might. If all goes to plan I’ll be living close enough to St Pancras to head back up from time to time.

My biggest concern is temporary loss of WiFi. Geek, moi? Hence possible slow blog progress for a little while. A bit like when the Apollo missions went round the dark side of the moon and lost radio contact.

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Spring miscellany

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

1. It’s definitely spring today. Happy happy joy joy.
2. It’s also Pi Day – go forth and multiply (by 3.14159)!
3. The most interesting eyetracking finding ever: men stare at crotches.

Even animals’ crotches too, apparently. Take that, F-shaped content! More on BoingBoing.

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Twitter at ATP, anyone?

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

And people ask what’s so good about Twitter…

I had another Twitter-related thought recently, namely to encourage ATP attendees to sign up and use it. In a similar way to SxSW / FOWA / any other geek conference you care to mention, we can use it as a realtime virtual community, saying things like:

Not exactly as important as Leisa’s recent experience, but still a useful ambient communication option. Don’t really know how to approach it, but I think it’s something I’ll try to spearhead. This is, of course, assuming that the mobile reception in Minehead is better than at Camber Sands…

Posted in music, web | No Comments »

Sony announce "Home"

Friday, March 9th, 2007

Well well. The console wars just got a lot more interesting. Sony have announced “Home”, a Second Life-esque virtual world to meet other gamers, download extra content (presumably via micropayments), and generally immerse oneself into the world of PS3. It looks extremely nifty and is probably the first genuinely exciting thing Sony have done in years.

I’ll be particularly interested to see how they tackle the constraint-freedom axis. While customisation and flexibility are obviously Good Things, complete freedom a la Second Life can feel rather unstructured and even aimless, even to an enthusiast like me (another post to follow on this). So I expect Sony will tighten things up a bit, with pre-packaged content, gestures and so on, rather than rely on ground-up community creation. Of course, if they go too far it just becomes another nasty walled garden that people will try to work around rather than in. Tricky.

One more thing though: isn’t it great that there’s finally something to excite us about the PS3? The Wii is still fresh and infinitely more interesting, but I do have concerns over whether it’s able to handle really meaty games. But that too is a post for another time, specifically after I’ve bought one and the fading-novelty test applies.

Note to self: Never turn on your laptop ‘to kill some time’ when you can’t sleep.

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Posted in games, user experience | No Comments »

Two new songs

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

Took a day’s holiday today to record some songs.

They’re part of my 7plusorminus2 project, about which a full post will appear when I’ve finished everything. As with pretty much everything I do, these are released under a Creative Commons licence, in lieu of full copyright. Feel free to download and share: see the licence for more info.

Hope you like them.

Posted in music, personal | No Comments »

Intimate design

Monday, March 5th, 2007

Slightly delicate one this. A good 50% of the adult population will at some time have experienced the design difficulties of condoms. Given the use context (dark, possible alcohol influence, other tasks foremost in the user’s mind), there’s definite scope for improving the, um, experience.

Step forward XYZ Design of South Africa, with their condom applicator. Cue awards and hopefully a small step to help AIDS prevention.


Full coverage here (arf). Note the brand name: Pronto. I’d have chosen something more flattering. Perhaps Largo. Smutty jokes aside though, a really good piece of design.

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Posted in design | No Comments »

Relocation, relocation, relocation

Sunday, March 4th, 2007

Well, it’s been a while, and finally I have some news. From April I will be moving to London to take up an IA position with uSwitch.com.

Obviously I’m delighted – it seems like a great company with a good understanding of UCD and some big plans for the future. I’m also looking forward to being a Londoner, although it’s taken me many years to warm to the idea. I still have research to do – a place to live, learning where to go, and so on. But I have the first step already covered (see left).

As for Nottingham, I’ll miss it, but it’s time to move on. Invites for my leaving do (6 April) have been sent out by email – if you’d like to join us, check your Inbox or email me for details.

Aside from the job hunt, I must confess I’ve been putting Final Fantasy XII above blogging right now. It’s as impressive as it is hard. Honestly, FF games really haven’t ever been all that difficult (I just re-completed VIII in about 25 hours) so I suppose it’s good to see the challenge ramped up a bit. But, equally, I play games to relax and it’s doing quite the opposite. If I die to Elder Wrym again I may end up throwing the damn thing out of the window. And yes, yes, my characters are clearly too low in level (average 23), but I know I can beat it. Once I do that, the celebrations can really begin.

Posted in games, personal, user experience | 2 Comments »

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