Has the Web helped or hindered in dealing with COVID-19? That sounds like a crazy question. Surely, unequivocally, the Web has helped. Just like print opened up the world to new ideas, right? “During the first century after Gutenberg’s invention, print did as much to perpetuate b … | Continue reading
A specific strength of the Toyota culture is to come up with innovative ways to visualize problems. This is a particularly critical skill when it comes to digital because digital is a reduced sense environment. It’s very hard to get a ‘feel’ for digital problems. Usually, everyth … | Continue reading
The Top Tasks data helped focus the conversation in Toyota about quality and reliability. In a company that is obsessed by quality, it became natural to ask: What is a quality digital experience? How do you measure digital quality? To get the answer to these questions, Toyota wen … | Continue reading
I remember once hearing about how Toyota launched in the US. The US car manufacturers were certain it was going to fail because it had a very thinly dispersed dealer and service network. What these manufacturers missed was that Toyota didn’t need a dealer or service center every … | Continue reading
A company I helped found launched an online community back in the late Nineties. We got substantial funding and at one stage had more than 50 people working on designing and promoting it. We opened up lots of forums and discussion boards. What we learned very quickly was that wit … | Continue reading
One of the core reasons why we don’t have a lot more quality Web design is the organizational excuse that we’re different, our audiences are different, we’re exceptional. The argument of exceptionalism is lazy. It is a primitive urge. The exceptionalists hate evidence and love gu … | Continue reading
Website design is still more amateur than professional. Most websites would not pass a basic quality control test. There is nothing more basic on the Web than the speed at which a page downloads. Fast downloading pages have passed the first mark of quality. Slow downloading pages … | Continue reading
Here’s the classification we tested in round two: WHO, Government Guidance, Education, Training Mental, Physical Wellbeing Vaccine, Immunity, Treatment Research, Statistics Virus Survival, Spread, Mutation Avoiding Infection Symptoms, Diagnosis News End Date, New Outbreaks At Ris … | Continue reading
Over 800 healthcare providers, academics, and members of the public sorted COVID-19 top tasks into groups. We analyzed the groups and came up with the following hypothetical classification: Symptoms, Diagnosis, SpreadMental & Physical WellbeingWHO, Government Guidance, Education, … | Continue reading
Design with people. Not for people. Before we are German, Irish or Canadian, we are human. And humans think the same way. Dream the same way. Organize the same way. There are mental maps out there in humanity. We just need to discover them. With the Web, we have the platform and … | Continue reading
A link is a promise. A menu is a selection of promises. Without the link there is no Web. Links make the Web. From links we build the Web. Links. So often forgotten in the design process. So often neglected. Why? Because the rewards always go to the “creatives”. Those who create … | Continue reading
It’s never been more important for people to have speedy access to the right information. Until we have a vaccine, information is our vaccine. Until we have a vaccine, testing is our vaccine. Even when we have a vaccine, we will still need to provide lots of quality information. … | Continue reading
“Democracy improves as more people participate,” Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan, wrote for The New York Times in 2019. “And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation—as long as the focus is on finding common ground and creating consensu … | Continue reading
Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Germany have been successful at containing COVID-19 because they test relentlessly, get results back quickly, and use the data from the testing to trace and isolate. Until we have a vaccine, data is our vaccine. We need the right data … | Continue reading
In digital, I’m forever copying and pasting, and saving as. In digital, it’s so easy to create copies. Sometimes, when I’m writing and I’m not happy with a sentence, I’ll delete the whole sentence and start again, even though it might have been better to work on the original sent … | Continue reading
The coronavirus is indicative of a sick Earth, a stressed and stretched Nature. In our pockets, in our hands, beside our ears, lie devices that contain the stories of how and why the Earth is so sick, of how we have in the last forty years, partaken of a mad and frenzied party of … | Continue reading
Sometimes I wonder how I can tie my shoelaces. I think how stupid I am. I used to think that Amazon was this amazing model for the future. That customer obsessed was a way all organizations should be. There were these nagging doubts that I simply ignored. Okay, Amazon treats its … | Continue reading
There are many ways that digital can create pollution. Let’s start by looking at how much data we use and what pollution it causes. Analysis by Cisco indicates that an average US citizen is using 140 gigabytes (GB) of data a month. What sort of pollution is that causing? That’s n … | Continue reading
It is often assumed that online meetings are better for the environment than physical meetings. That is not always the case. A one-hour audio call consumes about 36 MB of data per person. A one-hour standard-definition video call consumes about 270 MB per person. A one-hour high- … | Continue reading
I saw my first intranets around 1997. They suffered from terrible governance, zero management interest, resulting in an aimlessness and purposelessness. Usability was appalling, tools were like torture instruments. And the content? If content rotted and smelled as it got older, t … | Continue reading
If we could design without the packaging, we would have a major impact on waste reduction. To save our planet we must firstly radically reduce the amount of packaging we create and consume. Under certain circumstances, e-commerce could be better for the environment than driving t … | Continue reading
Digital is physical. Every byte is supported by an atom. Every single action in digital costs the Earth energy. Turn the electricity off and you turn digital off. Digital is demanding an increasing share of the Earth’s energy and resources and is a major contributor to the genera … | Continue reading
When the means of communications change, societies change, though not always in the ways intended or expected. The printing press revolutionized society, though some of the change was backwards rather than forwards. “There is no evidence that, except in religion, printing hastene … | Continue reading
If we printed out one zettabyte of data as books, we could give every one of the 7.7 billion people on this planet 129,870 of these books. They’d have almost 13 billion words to read. An average reader can read 1,000 words in about five minutes. It would therefore take 752 years … | Continue reading
The problem with physical is often not enough space. The problem with digital is too much space. When new communication technologies expand the capacity to create more communication, people invariably create more communication. With the invention of the printing press, publishing … | Continue reading
The earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it is believed that life began to emerge about 800 million years later. Humans evolved from apes around three million years ago, with modern humans emerging only about 200,000 years ago. The evolution of computers is generally des … | Continue reading
In the United States, tractors built during the 1980s and 1990s are in big demand. “Tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software,” Adam Belz wrote for the St … | Continue reading
It’s not that difficult to create or to add something. To remove what needs to be removed, to see what is unnecessary, what is getting in the way, that is such an unappreciated and deep skill. Not just that, to remove requires bravery. The old logic goes: ‘This thing is here. It … | Continue reading
Most of my career has been based on a simple idea: If we became more customer-centric instead of organization-centric, then things would be better for everyone. I still believe in the basic concept but have slowly and painfully come to realize that when customer centricity become … | Continue reading
I still have occasional nightmares where after I have given a presentation on how to improve customer experience by focusing on what matters most to customers, two marketers walk up to me. One looks me in the eye and says: “What about branding?” The other smirks and says: “What a … | Continue reading
Kids! Get inside! Enough of that fresh air and frolicking around playing some useless chase. Inside now! Don’t you know you haven’t done your PlayStation yet? Five hours every day. Why do I have to keep hammering on about it? I’ve been telling you this since you were toddlers: En … | Continue reading
“Don’t be evil” has been the Google tagline, mission statement, guiding philosophy from practically day one of its existence. In 2018, it quietly dropped the “don’t” from the tagline. Google was entering a new phase of sucking up personal data and sucking up giganormous profits. … | Continue reading
A database-driven website is a bit like having a seven-seater car. If there’s only two in your household do you really need it? Perhaps a simpler, more energy-efficient static website is better? I used to make these sorts of arguments a lot about 15 years ago, and then for whatev … | Continue reading
I’ve been asking people to send me examples of where digital government is working well. I’ve been getting lots of great examples but some maybe not so good. One suggestion was a link for a website in a language I don’t speak. When I clicked on the link I was confronted with one … | Continue reading
Web analytics are highly susceptible to error, manipulation and misinterpretation. They should never be depended on as the sole source of insight. “Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in … | Continue reading
People have been trained by the likes of Amazon and Google to expect that things will be made fast and easy for them. However, often when they interact with government they find that things are slow and difficult. The thought that government is complex is corrosive to democracy. … | Continue reading
The greatest brands tell the biggest lies. Although not all branding is bad, the art of modern branding is indeed very often the art of manipulation and propaganda. For many years, Coca Cola has been the world’s most valuable brand. Think about that for a moment. Here is a compan … | Continue reading
The greatest brands tell the biggest lies. Although not all branding is bad, the art of modern branding is indeed very often the art of manipulation and propaganda. For many years, Coca Cola has been the world’s most valuable brand. Think about that for a moment. Here is a compan … | Continue reading
The number of UX professionals I meet who don’t regularly undertake user research is disturbing. In fact, in many organizations, digital teams rarely interact with customers. Failing to maintain closeness to the customer is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to digital des … | Continue reading
The number of UX professionals I meet who don’t regularly undertake user research is disturbing. In fact, in many organizations, digital teams rarely interact with customers. Failing to maintain closeness to the customer is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to digital des … | Continue reading
The number of people you need to observe in order to identify the primary problems with your website or app depends on the quality of your website or app to a significant extent. If your app is of very low quality and an immature environment, then very few people are required—typ … | Continue reading
The number of people you need to observe in order to identify the primary problems with your website or app depends on the quality of your website or app to a significant extent. If your app is of very low quality and an immature environment, then very few people are required—typ … | Continue reading
My old landline phone gave out (yes, I still have one), and when I lifted it off my desk, I had to remove two wire connections. As I did that, I had a strong impulse to push the old wires off the back of my desk and let them fall (my desk faces a wall).… Read More » | Continue reading
My old landline phone gave out (yes, I still have one), and when I lifted it off my desk, I had to remove two wire connections. As I did that, I had a strong impulse to push the old wires off the back of my desk and let them fall (my desk faces a wall).… Read More » | Continue reading
Digital is mainly garbage. 90% of data is never accessed again 90 days after it is first stored. 80% of downloaded apps are never used again after 90 days. 90% of data has been created in the last two years. Over the years, we found that we had to delete 90% of a typical website… … | Continue reading
Digital is mainly garbage. 90% of data is never accessed again 90 days after it is first stored. 80% of downloaded apps are never used again after 90 days. 90% of data has been created in the last two years. Over the years, we found that we had to delete 90% of a typical website… … | Continue reading
In the grand delusion that is Brexit, the grandest delusion of all is the Brexiteers’ fawning adoration of the Technology God. According to Brexiteers, the Technology God will banish all problems, particularly those associated with the border on the island of Ireland. Grand Boffo … | Continue reading
In the grand delusion that is Brexit, the grandest delusion of all is the Brexiteers’ fawning adoration of the Technology God. According to Brexiteers, the Technology God will banish all problems, particularly those associated with the border on the island of Ireland. Grand Boffo … | Continue reading