Your place in the pecking order

There is a natural pecking order in life some people are at the top some people are at the bottom and some people are in the middle. All these people are important, they are all part of the chain.

One of the most valuable things you can identify is where in the chain you actually are not where you think you are. You need to be honest when you are identifying where you are. It’s all about how people perceive you. When you know how people perceive you, you can work on that perception and enhance it just don’t do it to quickly or you will be taking your audience to a place they aren’t ready to go yet.

Look at scribefire (the firefox plugin that im writing this post with) In my opinion they have got this wrong. They think that they are bigger than they are. Scribefire is the only firefox plugin that takes me to its home page and tells me about all of the new features in the latest release.

So where did they get this idea from? Well whenever you update firefox you get pointed at the firefox release notes.

So whats the diffrence? Firefox is bigger than scribefire MUCH bigger in every way. I probably spend 70% of my time at a computer with firefox open so I’m interested in what’s new. But scribefire I probably spend 3% of my time using scribefire.

So what I’m saying is that scribefire have got it wrong they are using the behavior of a giant and it’s not right for them to do it. The only way that it would be right is if all plugins commanly took you to the release notes upon release of a new version but that would be the worst experience in the world. Scribefire arn’t there yet. I’m sure that they guy’s that make scribefire think it’s the biggest think in the world and put all their life and soul in to making it great (which it is) but they are probably just a bit to
close to it to judge it’s importance.

Filed under: Rambalings , firefox, plugins, scribefire

Your place in the pecking order

There is a natural pecking order in life some people are at the top some people are at the bottom and some people are in the middle. All these people are important, they are all part of the chain.

One of the most valuable things you can identify is where in the chain you actually are not where you think you are. You need to be honest when you are identifying where you are. It’s all about how people perceive you. When you know how people perceive you, you can work on that perception and enhance it just don’t do it to quickly or you will be taking your audience to a place they aren’t ready to go yet.

Look at scribefire (the firefox plugin that im writing this post with) In my opinion they have got this wrong. They think that they are bigger than they are. Scribefire is the only firefox plugin that takes me to its home page and tells me about all of the new features in the latest release.

So where did they get this idea from? Well whenever you update firefox you get pointed at the firefox release notes.

So whats the diffrence? Firefox is bigger than scribefire MUCH bigger in every way. I probably spend 70% of my time at a computer with firefox open so I’m interested in what’s new. But scribefire I probably spend 3% of my time using scribefire.

So what I’m saying is that scribefire have got it wrong they are using the behavior of a giant and it’s not right for them to do it. The only way that it would be right is if all plugins commanly took you to the release notes upon release of a new version but that would be the worst experience in the world. Scribefire arn’t there yet. I’m sure that they guy’s that make scribefire think it’s the biggest think in the world and put all their life and soul in to making it great (which it is) but they are probably just a bit to
close to it to judge it’s importance.

Filed under: Business, Rambalings , Business, Design, firefox, UX

How not to handle opt out’s in email marketing

Today I received what I think was the normal weekly email from the airline Monarch. This time I thought rather than just ignoring it I would opt out of their marketing campaign and free my inbox of some unwanted email.

So I scrolled down to the bottom of the mail and clicked on the unsubscribe link, which took me to the Monarch website and asked me to sign in to change my preferences. This was the first thing that annoyed me I just wanted to unsubscribe not change my preferences. Anyway I didn’t know I had an account so tried my usual username and password and that didn’t work so I went through the trial and error process of putting everything I could think of in until it finally let me in. I used the trial and error process rather than requesting a new password because by this point I had already lost confidence in the site, and though that the password retrieval process would take longer than guessing.

So I finally got in and then expecting to be greeted with a screen that would allow me to unsubscribe. Oh no, I was just dumped on my account page telling me that I was already unsubscribed so just to be sure I clicked through and found out that I was indeed unsubscribed and had some vague recollection of unsubscribing a couple of months ago.

So thats half an hour of my life wasted and still receiving spam from Monarch. Thanks Monarch I have now lost all confidence in you holding my data if you can’t do something simple like check that I would like to receive email before you send it to me.

Here’s what IMHO Monarch should have done.

Customer. I want to opt out of you email marketing.

Monarch. Oh, okay we are sorry to hear about that. Please get in touch with us if you change your mind.

Customer. Thanks, I will.

Simple as that and it stops negative PR from blog posts like this.

Filed under: Business, Web Design , email marketing, interaction design, marketing, PR, UX

Using wordpress to register users

I have been using wordpress recently as a CMS and it works really well. You get posts and pages, you can choose to have a post as the home page or a page as the home page. Having a post as a home page is nice when you have a client who continually wants to update content.

I’m working on a site at the moment that requires people to login. Rather than building a login system from scratch I investigated using the built in wordpress registration. This is what I found.

The login process is really nice all the user has to do is enter their username and email address.

They then get an email with a password. This email comes from wordpress which would need changing but shouldn’t be so hard.

They can then login. This was the first big problem and ultimately lead to me not pursuing what I thought would be a  quick solution. You don’t want the user to know that they are registering for a wordpress site right? The page that they get once they are logged in is definitely a wordpress site. I’m sure that you could hack it in to shape but I don’t have time at the moment to see how it works. 

Ultimately I’m sure that it would be possible to use the wordpress login functionality for a site but you probably need to be very familiar with wordpress.

Filed under: Web Design , wordpress

Streatham Festival

I have just finished the brochure and website (which I worked on with Ben he did the back end. I did the front end) for the Streatham Festival that will take place during the week of the July 5th – July 13th. It looks like its going to be a great festival with a packed lineup.

It was a really nice project to work on and I think the results achieved justified the late nights and weekends it took to get it all done.

Thanks to all involved it was lots of fun, see you at the festival.

Filed under: Projects , Design, Print, Projects

Brighton’s cool for web types

Everything is happening at once here in Brighton at the moment. Every time I bump in to someone they have exciting things going on or planned.

We moved in to The Werks just after Christmas which is great it feels like I’m back at art school the level of creativity is so high. It’s such an inspiring place to work.

There’s always something going on. Ben did a talk on Geek Habits which he really undersold the usefulness of and I would now like to send every new client on a talk like that. Just last Friday we had a brilliant talk from Cindi Li at the geek social (which was very well organised by Rosie who had been there all day I dont know where she gets her energy from) where she did a show and tell of her work. Every Friday there is open Cowerking. Where freelancers and nomadic workers drop in and work for the day. Matt Weston and the guys over at wired sussex are setting up a startup school with the title school assembly. Danny Hope is setting up with the help of others UX Brighton which looks like it’s going to be really cool an in my opinion is well overdue.

All this activity has prompted me in to action. I have also decided that it’s time I stopped just turning up to stuff and did something myself so I’m setting up the Brighton Critique Circuit a series of groups focused on front end design, interaction design and usability where people can get help advice and support on current projects from other members of the group. This should serve as a good vessel for distributing knowledge around the community, and generally raise the bar around Brighton. I have posted it on the UX Brighton wiki for the time being as this seems like the logical place for things like this to sit.

All in all Brighton is a hub of creative activity at the moment and in my opinion the only place to be if you are involved in the web. 

There’s much more than I have covered going on in Brighton than the stuff that I have covered here just check out the upcoming page for Brighton.

Oh just a small note I have started using the hashtag #thewerks when twittering  

 

 

Filed under: Business, Rambalings, Web Design , Brighton, Coworking, The Werks, UX Brighton, Web

Convincing non belivers

I was chatting to Danny this morning about a problem he was asked to solve convincing a senior manager that Information Architecture (IA) is a good idea. Off the cuff I came up with this solution. He thought was worthy of a post so here it is.

You should use this tactic when you are working with somone who has a big personality and just thinks that things that you do are crap. It’s sort of cruel ’cos your going to humiliate them to a certain extent, or at least thats the point. To point out the obvious which is that Information Architecture is the most important thing in a web project (probably there are probably other things that are more important like getting paid so don’t embarrass them to much)

1. Get a load of fridge magnets / letters its important that they are simple fridge magnets, as they have a lot of connotations with children and will help to simplify the point and bring it right down to ground level.
2. Put all of the fridge magnets in a bin do this in front of the audience to build up the drama, you should make a lot of noise as you put them in the bin.
3. Withhold one of the magnets, this is important.
4. Ask the subject to look for the magnet that you have, don’t leave it so long that they have a chance to find out that the letter isn’t there, otherwise they will get hung up on the fact that you cheated and the whole point of the exercise will be lost.
5. Stop them and tip the magnets on to the floor.
6. Ask them to arrange the magnets in a way the they would find it easy to find individual ones. Your making them do a card sort here so they can’t argue that they don’t want to pay for this.
7. Then ask them to find the same magnet / letter.

Hopefully you should have justified IA by now if they don’t get it by that time then your in trouble ‘cos you just had a man in a suite crawling around on the floor arranging the alphabet.

The staging of this will be important. You need to ask them to follow your instructions and get them to play along. It may be a good idea to do this in relative private there is a chance that they could be embarrassed by playing with kids toys.

Filed under: Information Architecture

Mass deleting contacts from basecamp

Here’s a nice little post on how to delete all of you contacts from basecamp.

http://forum.37signals.com/highrise/forums/10/topics/733

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Filed under: 37 Signals, Business, admin, howto

Restarting the Local DNS server

Heres a quick note on how to restart the local DNS server.

1. ssh in to the server
2. at the $ prompt type “sudo /etc/init.d/named restart”
3. all done

Thats it simple as that you need know no more apart from the fact that you obviously have all of the usual attributes stop and start. Okay thats how to do it on linux but on Mac OS X you will want to do the following;

1. open the terminal
2. at the $ type “sudo lookupd -flushcache”
3. all done

Filed under: Tech, howto

Are bookmarks really worth it

Using del.ico.us is fine but I tend to keep things in there and forget about them. Which poses the question do I really need it if it’s not been used for a while. I collect a lot of things which I don’t really need just in case I need them at some point.

What works really well us using a combination of Google and my browsers history for bookmarks. It’s not quite as good as del.ico.us because some times I cant find things but the things that I use often I don’t get from my bookmarks I know the URL or how to find them in Google or my browser auto completes them. So is there a better way of working that makes use of this kind of system?

I found rememble which looks good but wont really replace del.ico.us and is so new that it doesn’t work well with Firefox yet.

I suppose the point that I am making here is that I need some kind of service that is a combination of all of these things. Something that tells me when and where I was when I bookmarked this item that would make it much easier to find things in the future. In the mean time I guess that I can just stick to using del.ico.us which means that I will have to try and remember what i have tagged certain things.

As I write this I’m thinking of something that Google could do with bookmarks just like del.ico.us but with all the data that they have on search terms they could better understand what is on a page and help me to tag similar items.

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Filed under: Rambalings