Weblog

Dr. Frankenstory gets his own Lab

2009-10-29T13:45:00+00:00

From the beginning of Frankenstory we wanted a way to showcase stories. Our first attempt was very predictable: a list of stories that we could add our favourites to. But something about it just didn’t feel right… Frankenstory is supposed to be fun, first and foremost; it’s not a competition. Or at least not in the usual sense.

Enter Nick, who had the rather marvellous idea of writing a blog from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstory. He busily invented a history for the good doctor…

The story of my success begins many years ago in the sleepy Alpine village of Yödelayoo where I was working as a humble librarian. One fateful day as I was dusting a big pile of Mills and Boons high on a rickety bookcase, the shelves gave way and I was buried in a veritable avalanche of romantic fiction and soppy chick-lit. When I regained consciousness, I awoke to find my face was buried in an open book –Genetic Experimentation for Dummies. What’s more, the concussion I suffered as I fell jolted a dormant part of my brain, leading me to instantly absorb all of the incredible information in this hefty scientific tome.

…set out a manifesto…

Hello dear friends, welcome to the Frankenlab, the place where I’ll be preserving some of your most interesting submissions for posterity in a glorious ‘Frankenstory Hall of Fame’. Think of it as a kind of taxidermy display for your stories where I lovingly stuff and mount some of your freakiest creations (before gluing googly eyes to them and using them to scare small children).

…and busied himself with exposing this new life of literary experimentation to the internet at large, using Frankenstories as illustration.

The result is Dr. Frankenstory’s Frankenlab. And I completely love it. It kills a whole flock of birds:

putting the often incredibly random Frankenstories in an entertaining, light-hearted, fun context,
minimising any feeling of elitism by putting the decision in the hands of the Doctor,
eliminating any pressure that may have been induced by a leader board,
yet still giving us some way to promote and reward our favourite stories.

The latest post went up last night: Djinn and Tonic.

Stories and Experience at TEDx Newcastle

2009-10-02T17:00:00+00:00

On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at TEDx Newcastle, kindly organised by the good folk at Codeworks. My talk was about the memory of experiences.

Unless we make underwear or the like, our products probably spend most of their existence in the memory of our customers. In Stories and Experience I run through what we can do to help ensure that the experiences we design become memorable stories after the fact.

Slides (on Slideshare)

Books

QIF Converter

2009-09-25T17:00:00+00:00

I’ve been using Wesabe for a few months now and I love it. I’m finding accumulating financial data quite addictive. Unfortunately, of the banks I use only my current account has any kind of export. I wrote a little script to parse my downloaded statement HTML into QIF files and over the weekend I decided to polish it a little and slap it on Heroku.

The result is my QIF Converter. It’s dead simple: you copy and paste from your online transaction into the textarea, specify how it’s formatted and hit convert. That’s pretty much it. If you want to import the transactions into your own financial planning app then you can just download the QIF file. If you’re using Wesabe and you have the downloader plugin installed you can just hit upload to Wesabe and you’re done. I’ve been using it to import the ridiculous PDF statements my bank insists on pensioning my old transactions into too. Bing!

Learning Ruby

2009-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

A friend of mine wants to learn to program. I recommended either Ruby or Python and petitioned the Lazyweb for good places to start. In case they’re of use to anyone else, here are the recommendations I got back:

Poignant Guide

Way out in front is the Poignant Guide. It’s by why. It starts with a cartoon strip. Awesome.

Tryruby

An in-browser console. Allows you to dip your toes in the water without having to get your systems all set up. Bonus for the terminal-shy.

Hackety Hack

Calling itself the “coder’s starter kit”, Hackety Hack seems to be a self-contained, multi-platform training course, including a console, tutorials, cheat sheets and a place to store your own little apps. It’s currently being re-worked but worth keeping an eye on.

The Barcamp PaperWiki experiment

2009-04-17T14:00:00+00:00

While in Iceland back in November Brian Suda and I (when not discussing ideas for sausage innuendo) had an idea for a kind of physical wiki. I had met a guy at Etech a few years ago who was experimenting with placing blank pieces of paper and pens in public spaces and seeing what conversation might develop; Brian was trying to work out how to make real-world travel guides more social. One of the ideas we came up with was this physical wiki - to act both as a social object and a way of sharing knowledge amongst strangers. When I found myself on the Barcamp London Planning Committee I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a prototype: PaperWiki v1.0b.

What is a PaperWiki?

Basically, it’s a load of bits of paper stuck on a wall and connected by bits of string.

Things are written on bits of paper and stuck on the wall. People can locate things spatially - grouping notes as they see fit - or connect related notes with bits of string. They can also write directly onto other peoples’ notes. Simple and fairly intuitive.

Setting up

Given the Barcamp context and the technical awareness of attendees I assumed that the “wiki” label would carry a fairly big hint for use. I added a note about the wiki with a link to the title to act as an example too though, just in case.

Seized by last-second doubt I also scattered a few sample questions about the space as well.

The experiment

The best and most surprising thing about the whole shebang was how easily people seemed to accept the idea. I was worried that it’d need a bit more explanation or worse still, might not use it at all.

That said, it turns out that when presented with a blank piece of paper geeks will create a Twitter clone. This isn’t a hard and fast rule - I’m not coining Stenhouse’s Law just yet - but it went down a storm. Introducing Papr.

And alongside Papr a PaperNet emerged, including its own protocol, pampp://…

…a link-shortner, Tinyprl…

…a Flickr clone, Plickr…

…and assorted other jokes…

Conclusions

Uumm, it’s not quite what I had in mind! By Sunday the jokes had overwhelmed the useful information… More Geocities than WikiSpaces. But it was still good fun and it seemed to serve its purpose as a social object so I think it was a success.

The photos that I managed to take are up in a Flickr set and there are a bunch more from other people floating around too.

Little Known Readability Research

2009-04-13T14:00:00+00:00

I just read Smashing Magazine’s 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography in Your Designs, which heavily references the Robert Bringhurst’s classic The Elements of Typographic Style. The advice is all good but there’s more recent supporting evidence to draw upon than this 1992 tome. Here are two good papers that I’ve been quoting:

Optimal Line Length

Users tend to read faster if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (2.5 inches or less) it may impede rapid reading. Finally, users tend to prefer lines that are moderately long (4 to 5 inches).

Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

Results show that the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text. Participants were also generally more satisfied with the text with margins. Leading was not shown to impact reading performance but did influence overall user preference.

Frankenstory

2009-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

As a kid, did you ever play that game where you write a few lines of a story, fold the paper over and then pass it on? Well, I did but I’d completely forgotten about it. Fortunately my friend Tone hadn’t…

The game’s called Exquisite Corpse or Consequences - depending on where you come from - and is ludicrously good fun. Tone grabbed his mate Suzie and with him acting as middle-man Suzie and I gave it a try over email:

Thomas the tank engine rolled into the station, just as he did at 6:43 every morning. The platform was quiet - it was still too early for the morning rush of commuters - and he coasted to a halt, perfectly in line with the lights at the end of the platform. But before he could open the doors to get the hell outta there, the roof came crashing down. “Man!” Shouted Rock Master Scott, “the roof is on fire!”… the Dynamic Three jubilant that their jail was finally burning yelled in unison “we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn!”. Scott smiled… they were free now. Together they fled into the forest, shooting furtive glances back the way they had come, desperately hoping no one had noticed their escape. No one had and before long they hit the main road back into town. From the safety of the thick undergrowth they peered left then right to see Killa Gorilla cooking dearest Kevin on a spitroast. Hooting and banging his chest, they knew they’d make dessert if they stepped out. With no way back they thought fast; “what would Jesus do?” or “what would Rambo do?”. Pulling out their machine guns they were home for tea.

The End

It was so much fun that we decided to make it as a little web app! Suzie as designer, me as developer (unusually) and Tone as wrangler. The result is Frankenstory, which is loads and loads of fun! Give it a try, let us what you think, and hopefully tell your friends.

Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map

2009-04-04T17:00:00+00:00

A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any plans. Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go… Which is great except that I discovered that my geography is patchy at best and I can’t place half the African countries on a map.

I decided that what I really needed was a map. A little scraping, some geolocation (with a manually added exception for Georgia to make sure it got pinned next to Russia and not South Carolina) and a Google Map later I had something working. Nothing too fancy but it’s already proved to be dead handy for me so I thought I’d put it live. And thus I present the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map.

Community, Trust and Music

2008-01-23T12:00:00+00:00

Trent Reznor was disheartened by fans not paying for the Saul Williams album but I think he proved that independent music can viably be given away. Selling 30,000 copies of a niche album in its first couple of month in the wild with zero promotion is pretty damned good in my book. I believe that they succeeded in making money despite a flawed execution. So here’s a manifesto, of sorts. A mix of ideology, marketing and psychology.

The premise is this:

People are basically good.
People are prepared to pay for things they value.
People fall in love with music.
Long term relationships are more important than short term profit.
Reciprocity is far more powerful than most give it credit for.

So you have an album. Great. Give the singles away. Let as many people hear it as is humanly possible. No one makes money from singles anyway so minimise distribution and manufacturing costs. Get it out there. Give it to podcasters, broadcasters, bloggers, Last.fm, Pandora, make it available for download on MySpace, Facebook, BitTorrent and the band website.

Where possible ask, but do not require, an email address. Email addresses are becoming part of our identities. They are valuable to us. We don’t like spam. If I choose to give you my email address then I’m demonstrating a degree of commitment to your cause. That’s valuable information and the first step on the trust ladder. Many won’t leave an address though. That’s not ideal but it’s okay. If they like the music they’ll be back. To help them find their way back leave clues. Put a URL instead of an album title and a short voice-over after the end of the track. The URL should point to a page dedicated to the track they’ve just listened to. Comments, discussion, sleeve notes from the artist, perhaps links to other artists that influenced the track, upcoming gig listings and releases. It’s a social object. Somewhere for people to get involved - like reading the gatefold in the company of a bunch of like-minded people. And include one more thing. A payment form.

If people like the track they should be able to pay for it. The song may be a grower. They may only stumble across it on a blog months after the release. Perhaps it gets used in a commercial or on Richard and Judy. Maybe their visiting friend from New York has it on her iPod. They should be able to pay whatever they feel it was worth to them. It may be nothing - that’s fine - your music isn’t for everyone. If they like it enough to pay be sure to ask them what they thought. Grab that feedback. You can use that to hone future releases plus it’s probably worth displaying a few of your favourite comments on the track’s page.

For those people who pay, try and offer them a little something by way of a thank you. Doing the right thing is fine but we’re conditioned to expect something for our money and we want everyone to leave happy. That ‘something’ might be a super-high-quality recording or some early demos or mixes. It’s a token to show that your appreciate their money.

Why do I think this will work? Because people are basically good. You’ve given them something that they value. Give them time to realise that they value it and then make it as easy for them to do the right thing as possible. But remember that there isn’t a single correct response - there are as many as you have fans. For some it might be emailing the track to all their friends, expanding your audience. For others it’ll be coming to your next gig, packing the place. Some will part with their hard earned cash in return for your baby. A few will do all these things and more.

Oh, and on a side note: do give away demos, sketches and whatever else on the band’s MySpace page, websites, whatever. Your early adopter fans get something exclusive and you get feedback from your core audience. Everyone’s a winner.

We know the music industry is broken. Download culture is too entrenched and no court case will change that. But society is changing too. We’re becoming more and more wired into the internet. We spend increasing amounts of time socialising online. We’ve seen sparks of what this can mean from Nizlopi, The Arctic Monkeys and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah but they were really just an extension of the old industry. Those acts used the online community to make the industry take notice but acts like Radiohead, Saul Williams and Jane Siberry are going a step further.

@media Ajax 2007

2007-09-05T16:48:00+00:00

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It's a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs.

In a lineup like that I clearly can't talk about nuts and bolts Javascript. Instead I'm taking a slightly unusual tack for me: revelations. Since Ajax came along my job has changed in ways I wouldn't have predicted. Technically I'm a flavour of designer yet after many years of specialising I've found myself having to skill up again.

To keep a handle on what the rest of the team produce I've become a testing fanatic;
I've had to go back and relearn how to program - not to necessarily produce back-end code but to understand what the real implications of my design decisions are;
I've been converted to Agile practices as a means of effective collaboration.

None of these things are traditionally within the remit of 'design' but they all feed into producing a successful app. To try and describe these changes and what I've done about them I will be presenting But I'm a Bloody Designer! on the first day, straight after the keynote by the Ajaxians.

So, the lineup's great, it's in London. @media Ajax: coming soon. Say hello if you decide to come...