Posts from 2008

It is of course customary at this time of year to review the twelve months past in a lengthy and uninteresting blog post. So I’ll condense it to a paragraph. In 2008, I watched Cardiff City in a Cup Final, saw My Bloody Valentine live, met some marvellous people, was published in A List Apart, [...]

Thrilled to see my article Getting real about Agile design published on A List Apart today. Hopefully it’ll stimulate some lively discussion about a subject that I feel has often been treated rather shallowly. If you have any thoughts on the article I’d love to hear them in the “Join the discussion” section (but please [...]

Users hate redesigns, or so we’re told. To be fair, the evidence does seem to support the argument: the last year or so has given us some clear examples of user backlash. Facebook: Right now, the largest anti-redesign group has 1,656,258 members. I’m with them in spirit: I think the Facebook redesign is weak, although [...]

Our tiny brains are reaching social saturation point. Any heavy email receiver, Twitter user or RSS subscriber will tell you that there comes a point whereby the flow of inbound information is more than we can handle. The result is a flood which can often only be stemmed by giving up and hitting that reset [...]

Yesterday the ‘New Xbox Experience’ (NXE) upgrade was finally rolled out to all Xbox Live users. The old system (created by AKQA and known as the “blades”) was more dated than bad, but the market has shifted during its five-year lifespan. Online is now the default platform for many, casual gaming is the new black, [...]

I know, I know, it’s still five weeks away, but these things take a lot of forethought. My travel arrangements to The Lizard are already made, but the main plans revolve around the parties. As well as the Clearleft bash (mercifully an afternoon thing), I’m going to the BBC Backstage party to catch up with [...]

Some things aren’t meant to be measured. It’s bad enough that people read so much into their blog stats, follower numbers etc, but now we have more evil forces like Twitterank. The number of people willing to surrender their privacy to its password anti-pattern is even more astonishing given its payoff: a dimensionless, reference-free number. [...]

Until recently, I equated politics with duty: something that I must participate in, but that was never elevated above a choice between deeply unsatisfactory options. I find most politics ideologically empty, and it is almost a truism to say that we know very little about how President Obama will govern. However, I do believe that [...]