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To say that fashion websites are a bit out of my comfort zone is a definite understatement. For all that I’ve occasionally been accused of being stylish (rarely, I might add, and mostly in the overcoat department), understanding the fashion audience is a difficult intuitive leap for someone whose usual choices revolve around two questions: a) will it fit and b) is it available in black?

My client was Gerry Quinton — a corset-maker, seamstress and tailor extraordinaire. I’d also built her previous website, but her work had shifted in a new direction since then and the site was in need of a complete overhaul.

I found there’s an additional dimension when it comes to working with an artistic client — someone with the very precise ideas of colour and form that come with doing their job — but with little experience of applying their three dimensional skills to the two dimensional web.

We went through several iterations before we hit on one with potential, and that came about because of a picture we found that perfectly encapsulated the mood my client wanted to capture for people visiting her website — a sense of magic, ethereal beauty and longing.

This helped us develop a central style for the website which we were both relatively happy with. But as with most websites, without content, it was difficult to see the full potential.

The fashion industry is heavily image-based, and my client needed the right images (and the right words) to properly realise the website. This took time to collate — my client had a good, solid set of images from previous photoshoots but some of them were not high resolution enough for what we had in mind. As she’d recently moved to Chicago and her photographer contacts were in London, we had to wait for a return visit to get the beautiful photographs of her latest work that made the website complete.

In the meantime we worked on the text. Often a neglected art, my client instead refined it again and again — taking successive round of feedback from me, from friends in the industry, from a business course she attended, and from her business partner.

When you’re developing a website like this, the photographs tell perhaps 90 per cent of the story — but the last ten per cent that is text is the hardest fought — and so it should be. It’s the closer, the deal clincher, it takes a website visitor from being merely interested to being an investor.

It was designed using an adapted WordPress template. If the website is likely to be subject to a considerable amount of updating, wordpress is my free CMS of choice, mostly due to it’s high level of usability for those without coding experience.

So without further ado, here’s the website itself — morudesigns.com.

On a computer (rather than a tablet or phone), the images are greyscale at first. On hover they burst into full-coloured life, hopefully compelling exploration.

Each individual picture has a personalised explanation, and an encouragement to explore customisation options and contact the designer:

Gerry can easily update pictures, galleries, and text. Very few elements are hard-coded. She also writes a blog — a place to put explorations of her corsetry methods — often derived from very close study of historical garment making — and her travels in the name of good corsetry.

I’m still working on mobile optimisation, but hopefully that should be ready in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, feel free to enjoy the site on tablet and computer!

Now I’m afraid this does mark a departure away from government consultations. I hope to get back to work like that at a later time, but now is not it (at least. if the government is cooperative — consultations these days are in general too specific, deliberately so, to be meaningful). Added to this is that the task is simply too huge for a one-woman show. To do it properly it needs to be a team effort — many hands would make lighter work of sourcing the right consultations and laws,  writing the summaries and designing them for optimum reading efficiency.

But back to design. My first big job was to create the right signs, decor and wayfinding for our Service Design conference. Our building has wonderful spaces — huge tall rooms clad with Scandinavian pine, and airy glass partitions. We’d not yet taken full advantage of these and I wanted to create something striking. So we took the existing branding and ran with it.

Do you know how difficult it is to find perforated hardboard in this day and age? Well, now you do. Thanks to Simon for putting the frame together and spray-painting it for us in time!

And if anyone wants shop display pegs for their garage, I still have a box of 100 under my desk.

PNG Digital did the printing and put the display up, displaying (hoho!) no end of patience to get the result we wanted! That’s all cut vinyl on the windows and cut paper adhesive on the walls. The detail these guys put into the job was nothing short of amazing.

In the end the only thing that didn’t work out was the idea of having guiding lines on the floor. The electrical tape we thought would do the job was too see-through on concrete, and didn’t give the solid colour we needed to complete the look. But everything turned out alright on the night:

Anyway, I’m now living in Lancaster in the UK’s frozen North (winter is coming), and I have a job as an actual designer! How exciting. I’ll update you on some of the projects I’ve been working on in due course, but right now I want to tell you about another thing I’m doing.

If you’re not a huge nerd like what I am, you may not even know what a hack day is. It may conjure strange images of darkened rooms (true), and shady people (occasionally also true), attempting to crack secret databases wide open (also true) in some sort of semi-illegal manner (hah! wrong!).

Sadly for those of you who crave danger, they’re completely above board. In the case of #hack4good, which must be my favourite ‘cos my last post a year ago was about them too, they’re dedicated to solving some of the world’s most difficult problems. Last year for me it was refugee camps — sadly still with us and growing in number every day — and this year was a real doozy. Climate change.

Whew. Talk about a big ask. As with any other problem, though, it’s easier to look at it you break it down a bit. The challenge I joined was called Learn, Pledge, Challenge. Their idea was threefold (as you can probably tell).

• Point 1) People in general don’t know enough about climate change — so we need a way to teach them (Learn)
• Point 2) We need to get really serious about this. So let’s have people make solemn promises — though ones they can actually keep. (Pledge)
• Point 3) People also don’t have any idea what practical things they can individually do to help climate change. So lets Challenge them to find something they can do and stick to, and donate to charity while they’re at it.

All very worthy. But, as we thought about it, maybe a bit *too* worthy. After all, when people get fired up about thing like a lot of people did over the ALS Icebucket challenge, then generally, the learning comes after the fact (I’m sure some people who donated still don’t know anything about ALS), and the promising bit.. well it isn’t any fun unless you a) involve your friends and b) are doing something ridiculous.

So we changed it — to a challenge and forfeit game. It’s currently called We Promise, but we think that’s probably still a bit worthy, so we’re going to change it. To what? Well, watch this space. First, watch this video I made:

And here’s the website we made — We Promise —  in 48 and a bit hours straight — and some screenshots of my prototype designs. What do you think? The judges seemed to think it was a bit of all right — we got into the Grand Final! How exciting. We didn’t win, but it was one hell of an experience. And the team who brought me in — Tom, Marvin and Greg — were all amazing coders. And James, our scientific advisor, has a great grasp of climate change psychology which really helps with crafting the user experience.

As people affected by disasters could have limited access to technology — even basic stuff like something to write with — I really got to exercise my Information Design muscles.

Limiting the scope to the refugee camp at Al Zataari in Jordan, we came up with a three step solution:

1) A paper form incorporating easy to understand symbols and a map for reporting, regardless of literacy level. Simple colouring in model does not require access to pens or paper — dirt would technically do!

2) A concept for a mobile app that could read the completed form using photography and scanning technology, and then store the data on a remote server.

3) A reporting tool that generates heat maps of the problems reported, to help aid workers prioritise jobs and identify recurring patterns.

Thanks to Florian, Nafisa, Chris and Nick for the team camaraderie!

Paper prototype

User journey — before and after

The answer is (depending on the type of infographic):

• A man
• of above average numeracy
• with a doctoral-level degree
• between 45 and 54 years old.

Apart from this singularly unhelpful caricature, this is what else I found.

1. If you want to be clear, use written percentages.

Not ratios. Certainly not graphics. If you have a number that can be expressed as a percentage, do that. They came away as by far the most clearly understood means of representation in this experiment. 77% of the time, where a percentage was the correct answer, you lovely people answered correctly. For graphics, you only answered correctly 69% of the time.

69% isn’t that bad, you might say, and no, it’s not. So I might recommend that if you are using graphics (and who doesn’t, these days), then perhaps you should back them up with other figures so people know what they’re looking at. The evidence? When the question asked my survey participants to compare a graphic with another graphic, they only got the answer right 63% of the time.

This is, of course, if you want to appeal to both genders. If you just want to appeal to men, use ratios. They got them right 82% of the time.

2. Girls can’t do maths (until they get a doctorate)

I feel terrible saying this. Especially as I’m a girl who hasn’t got a doctorate. Who really likes maths. Even if I’m not very good at it.

It was genuinely the most surprising result I had and one that I feel needs immediate attention because girls maths teaching must be completely messed up. There is a small amount of encouragement in that ladies over the age of 45 seem worst affected, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t in trouble.

Across the board, regardless of any of the variables measured — numeracy levels, education, age — girls doing the test never got a look in. They consistently answered more questions incorrectly. For questions involving graphics, women got 66% right. Men got 75%. For ratios, women got 68% correct, for men it was 82%. The only one close was percentages — 76% for women compared with 80% for men.

Sadly my survey wasn’t detailed enough to get at any more useful nuggets of information — like which girls had taken maths at A‑level and beyond, so I’m not able to pry any further into this with my results alone. But can somebody else do this? Please? It needs more research, as people like to say.

3. Having qualifications doesn’t make a blind bit of difference (unless you’re a doctor)

The results say that people who didn’t go to university, undergraduates and masters degree students have essentially no differences when it comes to the mathematical understanding needed to properly interpret these kinds of graphics. The number of correct answers for people with any of these levels of qualification hovers around the 73% mark.

Having a doctorate on the otherhand, does.  Understanding positively leaps to the dizzying height of 82%. It even levels the playing fields for women. How about that?

Turn to page 2 for the boring science-ish bits and access to the data.

The first highlights the discrepencies in the number of local authorities offering cheaper bus fares to disadvantaged groups: people who are young and unemployed, compared with people who are disabled and older people.

The second diagram looks at bus use versus car use, and highlights the similarities between bus use in the young and the old, and the massive increase in car use (and decline in bus use) in mid-thirties and middle age.

No Smoking Day is a tricky prospect. It doesn’t have the freedom of other no smoking campaigns to berate and bully smokers into becoming non-smokers — quite the opposite. The mandate of No Smoking Day is to support smokers to quit — if and when they want to. So our online game had to be non-judgemental and non-scary, but still effective.

The results speak for themselves — we had 30,000 plays in two weeks.

The design process

I wanted the mechanism to be simple and intuitive. When the initial designs came back they involved intro and outro screens, multiple clicks to get where you wanted to be, in other words, distractions.

I did away with as much of that as possible. Keeping it clean, simple, and easy to use were the top priorities.

We had a very tight budget, and had to use the creative assets that had already been produced — we couldn’t afford to make any more.

I crowdsourced what people would want to spend their money on if they had any to spare, dividing them into four categories: technology, luxuries, holidays, and ticketed items and made them into the underlying database for the game.

We also wanted players to be able to grasp the amount of money they would save, so deciding the time scales for the game was important — the amount you might save in a day may not feel worth it, over 5 years may seem like an unattainable goal. So we display a range of options — from the small but achievable ‘what would happen if I gave up smoking for a week’ to the major accomplishment — and potential major savings of a whole year without smoking.

The other considerations were mostly technical — it had to work on all devices, of all sizes. And Absolutely No Flash. Our designers were stars at getting in all the necessary tweaks for the smallest screens and inconvenient interfaces.

What I learned

I learned that communicating what you want from a game mechanism — even one as simple as this — is a challenge.

We needed a certain level of randomisation to make the game interesting, and this took a while to achieve. We also wanted people to share their results, and figuring out the timing for when certain options display on screen took a fair amount of time.

I think next time, I’ll ask for more face to face meetings. There’s only so far you can go with static mockups and telephone calls!