Still, the moleskine continues to fill up and I need someway of purging the ideas. So I’m going to dabble with an anonymous blog for a while and see how it goes.

In the meantime, here are my other pieces:

• Twitter
• Del.icio.us
• Last.Fm
• Ffffound
• Dopplr
• Pownce

Hasta luego.

After a blip, Sport Monthly has regained it’s place as the cream of sports-journalism. Here’s some of my personal favourites:

• Otto the strange: The champion who defied the Nazis
  The quite remarkable story of Otto Peltzer. Stuff of legend.
• Ready, Steady, Coe
  Awful title, but insightful article on Seb Coe. Didn’t realise he was Indian. I actually quite admire the guy.
• Nobody pounded the table anymore, nobody threw their cups
  Murakami is one of my favourite authors. So many echoes of his characters in this personal account of an ultramarathon.

• Open Source Food
  Doing the rounds, but I like the way this site is executed.
• Architecture goes algorithmic
  Compelling (even on YouTube). Music by Mogwai as well.
• Haunting composites of ‘evil’.
  Based on Einstein’s quote: ‘The world is not threatened by evil people but by those who allow evil things to happen.’ Great work.
• Penguin Classics Tumblr theme
  Good’un.
• Minotaur Shock
  Interesting interface. I’m seeing a lot of this kind of behaviour. Is this the influence of the iPhone? I’d miss my URLs.
• The Making of a Travel-Time Map of the Netherlands
  Super-talented Kars is now turning his hand to Processing and info viz. Great work mate.

Seeking Rhythm in Design

Rhythm is pervasive. Binding music, shaping our daily routine, fusing us as a collective. Whether it knits or disrupts an experience, look hard and you’ll find rhythm lurking at its core. This talk will examine rhythm, its role in design and seek to demonstrate that, despite it’s omnipresence, rhythm is a concept which is too often ignored.

If like me, you’re a Snap fan, please head on over to the panel picker and vote me up. Thanks.

Oh oh, it’s a passion, oh oh, you can feel it, yeah
Woh oh, it’s a passion, oh oh oh-oh oh-oh oh-oh

Great lyrics.

Silverback was built to scratch an itch: Guerilla usability testing should be quick and easy-to-run, so it always felt frustrating having to set-up a video camera when macs have a far more subtle equivalent built in to them.

That’s half the battle. But for me, the real strength of Silverback is putting usability testing in to the hands of lots more people. Formal usability testing certainly has its place — sometimes you need a level of fidelity that you’re only going to get from quantative analysis. But, more often than not, usability testing is sacrificed because it’s considered too expensive or arduous. Silverback tries to solve that problem by being available where and when you need it.

You really don’t need permission anymore. Grab the Silverback demo, borrow a friend and run a quick lo-fi test over lunch. Trust me, the results are far more effective than the theory.

Enough guff, this is already reading like a Silverback pitch when I actually wanted to talk about a particular form of low-cost usability testing called RITE. RITE stands for Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation method. From the title you can probably guess RITE fits with the Silverback philosophy. It’s certainly something we’re experimenting with at Clearleft.

Apart from a funky sounding acronym, RITE is also a form of discount usability testing which sets out to avoid one of the more typical frustrations with the standard approach: Seeing that blindingly obvious problem come up repeatedly during several sessions. Some issues really don’t need twelve more participants to hammer home the fact that there is a problem. “Moderator: Ahem, so let’s just pretend there is a Buy button…”

That’s where the iterative part comes in. Only rather than doing this after twelve participants have mentioned there is no Buy button, you iterate between sessions. You add the Buy button and get back to testing your product (as well as testing your fix).

Obviously there are some problems that can’t be remedied in this way. RITE deals with this by classifying problems into four discrete categories. Excuse the tawdry labels — they’re my own addition:

• Fix-now.
  Problems with an obvious cause and solution that can be remedied immediately. Labelling issues being the canonical example here. Obviously, there’s a skill in picking these, but these things are normally indisputable (and so they should be).
• Fix-later.
  Similar to Fix-now only the solution cannot be implemented within the timeframe of the current test.
• Flummoxers.
  Problems without obvious causes or solutions that need to be argued discussed post-test.
• Furballs (Sorry…’Curve balls’ doesn’t start with an F).
  Issues resulting from exterior forces…maybe the test script is screwy…or the participant is an ex-girlfriend and she decides to put a chair through your monitor.

Silverback’s great for capturing the flummoxers. Hit the plus button on your Apple remote during the test, and Silverback adds a marker in to the movie. This allows you to jump to these when you examine the videos later.

On a very rudimentary level, that’s the Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation method. Obviously, I’m just scratching the surface here. If you want to read more, I suggest you read this far more thorough account of this stuff in action.

It’s not for everyone. One of the drawbacks being that you need someone on-board who can make the changes to your prototype. Anyone attending mine and Richard’s workshop at dConstruct this year, will know this is something that is within reach of IAs these days. We plan to spend a large part of the day talking about the mechanics and benefits of high-fidelity prototypes. These kind of prototypes are perfect for RITE.

Be warned: Keynote’s still lacking when it comes to compressing PDFs so the filesize is a little on the chunky side (11MB).

I’ve also included my presenter notes with the intention that the PDF can standlone without the sound of my voice. The irony of me not having sight of these notes while giving the talk is not lost on me!

Download Designing Edenbee (11MB, PDF)

This is lovely for many reasons, but it’s the last line that gets me: Context over dogma.

What a beautiful way to put it.

And I’ve been beguiled by London again. This time after spending a few days at @media. I felt very privileged to be asked to speak at the event, especially as it was one of the first web conferences I ever attended back in 2004. The year Andy revealed his perineum.

My slot (ahem) fell under the ‘For Example’ category, designed to give insight in to how other people work. I chose to talk about the design of edenbee — a social network built to help individuals make positive steps towards improving their impact on the environment. I’m still pretty excited about this site and think it has enormous potential so it just seemed like a great opportunity to tell people why (and how).

Of course, I had technical issues. After taking the stage (after Tom & Claire’s fascinating and candid insight in to the BBC home page redesign), I didn’t stop to check whether the presenter display was dishing-up my accompanying notes. It wasn’t; And it was too late to stop. The adrenaline had dragged me too far.

Somehow I managed to fumble my way through the talk without any notes which, with a memory like mine, I consider at least a partial success. But I can’t help feeling frustrated that I missed some of the goodness I’d spent days preparing.

The intention was to cover some of the principles I feel are important when designing social ‘software’ (as well as give people a little insight in to the way Clearleft work with our clients). Loosely speaking, these were the merits of object-centered sociality, the limitations of reductionism within IA and also the challenges of designing for emergence. Easy really.

Well, kinda. It definitely ebbed towards the speculative as opposed to the practical but network theory just happens to be a little bit of a personal passion of mine at the moment. Hence, any opportunity to investigate it further is always going to be welcomed. I think I’ll write a separate post on the principles themselves. In fact, that’s why I started writing this. I seemed to have been side-tracked again.

Re-reading this, it all sounds a bit negative. That wasn’t the intention and actually, under the circumstances, I felt the talk was OK (I’d love to hear what other people think). Aside from the talk, I had a blast. Drunk far too much on the Thursday night and finally got to see Jeff Veen speak. Splendid stuff.

That’s it for now, save to say a big thank you to Patrick and the whole @media team for putting on another great event.

I made a Muxtape.

As the event gets nearer, I’m filled with equal parts excitement and trepidation. Excitement at the sheer numbers of friends and colleagues that are heading over; A combination of both over the fact that I’m making my speaking debut; And genuine anguish about leaving Sarah and Jemima for a whole week. It’s all very sentimental I know, but I’m getting old so I’m allowed. I’m sure the Shiner Bock will help.

There’s lots going on isn’t there? Wow. Andy’s proposed trip to the Rodeo looks like a laugh. Cindy’s taken the bowling in to a new stratosphere of cool. And then there’s the Great British Booze Up. And if you need to know more, Jeremy’s Adactio Austin can help. Apparently there’s a conference as well.

I’ll see where the tide takes me and look forward to meeting lots of new faces. Twitter seems to be the mode-of-communication-of-choice. I’m on there, so get in touch if you want to chew the fat.