I am feverishly fascinated by the acceptance of technology and how humans choose to embrace it, and in recent months have found myself becoming more excited by dozens of discussions I have engaged in about the subject. I can’t help feel we have been approaching the foot of a mountain of that will fundamentally improve the way we think of how we use products and interfaces.

I think as an average consumer of a digital diet it is very difficult to ever bridge the gap between the short term understanding of what is achievable, and what remains as the world of The Jetsons.

The Interaction Problem

In Minority Report (2002), the protagonist John Anderton interacts with his devices using an array of super slick arm slinging gestures; probably one of the most widely recognisable and futuristic ideas in the film.

It was very easy to think how that would easily translate into a reality. In fact I was so inspired by the film, within a year the product had designed and prototyped for my A-Level Design & Technology project included my own attempts to bridge the human-digital divide.

This was my first real attempt to conceptualise a solution to these interaction inadequacies, and despite my youthful optimism eventually being dashed by Dick Powell (who quite understandably understood the leaps needed to reach that point better than an 18 year old DT student) I still believed that somehow we still fundamentally were failing to address the gap.

But within a few years my dreams were starting to be realised and in 2006, new gesture based technologies were publicly demonstrated by Jeff Han in his infamous TED talk. These concepts were not new. It was just a case of them being incorporated into products. And Jeff’s demonstration was by no means a full realising of the dream of Anderton’s world and digital immersion. A year later, much of what we’d seen in that demonstration suddenly was bought into focus by the first truly successful touchscreen product, the iPhone.

By this time I studying for my degree in Industrial Design and was aware of projects going on within my own university department that aimed to exploit physical interaction in the modelling of virtual products and environments by human gesticulation. It looked like momentum was building.

Touch screen kiosks been around for years, and were used on millions of Point of Sale (POS) units, but until this point designers and technologists had failed to deliver a pleasurable or easy experience (problems included lack of sensitivity and lack of accurate response). Once the fallacy that you had to use a stylus to interact with a screen was exposed, the sluices were opened and a torrent of consumer-acceptable touch based devices washed in. The technology had reached it’s teenage.

I think this taught me that until the point that somebody can demonstrate actively a simple, cost-effective, well resolved product, most people say it will never work.

And it’s the never short sightedness that always frustrates me.

The reality is that just because we as consumers cannot see how a new technology could ever be useful and not just a gimmick, we often tend to dismiss that technology as ever having any practical use. But thankfully there are plenty of intelligent, curious people out there who do spot the opportunities and deliver new configurations that turn the very crude carbon dust of ideas into glistening gemstones. 

I can’t but help thinking that however big the jump appeared to be, the advent of the useful touchscreen is just the precursor to a far wider revolution, and in recent months, the first true signs of additional new and more important directions have been emerging and this is why.

Firstly, there always are fundamental misconceptions about the immediate future of technology interaction.

I base this on nothing other than anecdotal evidence, but I get the strong impression that most people haven’t got a clue that technologies like augmented reality (AR) are currently so utterly basic that they are practically useless or simple novelties and they will in the not too distant future have a much stronger impact when we broaden our minds.

At a demonstration I went to over a year ago, I was shown a range of ways that AR was being used today. One is the typical ‘reality overlay’ where we superimpose information on the world. This seems great in principle, until you actually try it. You end up with cluttered, jittery overlays that fail to actually filter any discernibly useful information, and in no way seamlessly integrate with any environment. You have to carry a device in front of your face and interact with the data via touch, which obscures your view further.

I think most people believe that AR will one day improve, and the way this will happen is that we will have contact lenses or retina-implants that overlay this information to us. Problem solved? I say no.

I recently came across a video talk where the speaker discussed how naive this long-held belief of what AR is (please can you tell me if you know who it was, and send a link!). To demonstrate, he gave the example of Terminator. In the movie, the Terminator sees various pieces of information presented in front of his eyes. He can read these pieces of information as he surveys his environment and his robotic mind uses this it to label his environment and condition.

But if you think about this, it’s absolutely crazily inefficient. Why on earth would a robot project information into one medium (effectively a transparent screen), only to have to read that back in and reinterpret it using visual sensors? That’s exactly like printing out every email to read it rather than ever using the computer’s display. That’s exactly what a QR code does - and that’s why they are currently a gimmicky half-resolved technology.

He then goes on to demonstrate how if you don’t restrict the AR to a purely visual process, a whole glut of improvements to the experience are available to you.

His is example is this. If you are using a GPS device while driving or walking, you fail to absorb your environment as quickly or as well as you might had you memorised a map-based route in your head, or followed road signs.

I know this myself because if I walk a route with GPS, often I can’t recall that route without double checking because I failed to survey the environment as well as I would have done if I’d navigated using more traditional methods. My visual senses prioritise the output of the GPS device.

The speaker proposes a device you hold in your hand down by your side, which physically leans in the direction you should be travelling rather than giving audible or visual instructions. In this way you can be fully alert to your surrounding and benefit from 100% availability of the senses that you would consider crucial to traditional navigation.

Now this is just an idea, and again demonstrates it’s own naivety. What happens if you need to carry something with both hands? What happens if you have a disability that affords you no feeling in your hands? What happens if your immediate route is incredibly complex?

But it does suddenly suggest we are incredibly blinkered. Revisiting our Minority Report example, many people still think this is way forward for interacting with computers. I think there is definite hints of usefulness, but I also think it will never be a primary method of interaction and we’ve simply stumbled upon an easily imaginable implementation.

It has been shown that this sort of interaction is incredibly tiring for humans and that anything more than short bursts become difficult for the user to sustain. The same applies to desktop based touchscreens. Clearly the success of the Kinect and Wii demonstrate that these full-body recognition technologies do have value, but I’m not convinced we’ll ever use them in isolation like Anderton does in the film.

The Oven Clock Problem

On Christmas day I watched stand up comedian Michael Macintyre lament the complexities of updating his oven clock. Who ever sets it, and for those that do, who ever tackles it first when daylight savings kick in?

This is a fundamental problem. Everyone owns an oven, and everyone has the same problem. For most of us the oven clock is hassle to update and despite the two-button setting mechanism which is used almost universally for setting clocks (chosen for it’s minimum number of mechanical parts) it remains a completely appalling system.

I’m going to suggest to you a far better approach to setting the clock, probably the closest-to-perfect solution, and then I’m going to shoot my suggestion down and give a much better solution.

I think a much better way for a human to set a digital oven clock is by voice. To have to option to control the whole oven by voice is also desirable, but here I shall just discuss this one function.

The reason setting it mechanically is odd is two fold. Firstly, this is a digital device, so why are we interacting with it mechanically at all? Surely this is at odds with the benefits of a digital clock - a device which removes all mechanics in order to demonstrate the full time in the single most easily read way, not limited by the laws of physics upon solid materials.

Secondly, it’s tricky. If you understand the process to setting the clock, it’s simple. You can apply the same logic to every clock you own. But it is nowhere near intuitive. Give a clock like this to a child with no experience of such a system and no instructions and you may as well give them a Rubic’s Cube to solve.

To approach your oven and say, “Oven, set the clock time to ten past eight” is almost infinitely more sensible, human and understandable.

In fact, this approach generally is far more sensible with a whole gamut of tasks we carry out daily.

I have found this out myself already with the use of Siri. Yes, a cliche I suppose, but I really think voice control is an interface that people can too easily dismiss as a gimmick, especially if you naively believe it should be the only interface to an object.

But I can’t tell you how useful it has become for me setting reminders, timers and how frustrating it is I can’t control other aspects of the device already.

Convergence & Obsolescence

The truth is, as Siri-like technology matures, it will become ever more invaluable, and we will see it and it’s kind spread into thousands more device types in the coming years.

Yes, it feels like a novelty right now, but that’s one absolute hallmark of a great technology waiting fulfil it’s potential. Think of the first time you saw a camera on a phone. The photos were so grainy and impossible to access, how possibly could that ever be useful? Who’s absolute first thought at seeing one of the devices was that with a few just years of development, we would be recording HD footage that rivals traditional compact cameras? I’m not sure too many consumers did.

And if you perhaps think we’re at the pinnacle with this particular example, you are probably once more underestimating the possibilities. I can’t see any reason why in a handful more years that the compact camera becomes entirely obsolete as the cellphone device converge with the camera device so much so that it puts some well known firms out of business.

If you think about it, why would you ever want to carry two or more devices? It’s bizarre. Many people will argue that it can’t work. You will never get the quality right in both devices enough for that idealistic convergence, but I argue differently. I think our desire to keep these two products apart is based on our traditional experiences. Of all the arguments I think for against convergence, I can easily dismiss each:

“If I lose my camera, I lose my phone and I couldn’t risk that”

The physical loss of a device is getting less and less important month by month. Already my own experiences have shown me that the separation of content from hardware means that you can almost instantly replace a device with no loss of data. I would argue the loss of a device will in future be even more distressing to a user, but not because of the loss of data, but entirely because of our greater product dependency. Content reacquisition will be much simpler and far less worrying.

“I won’t have all the functionality and quality of my compact”

I simply do not believe this. High quality lenses, adapters for lenses, cases, software - it all permits a single device to do all the things a traditional camera will do, plus incorporate all the luxuries a modern communications device like a smart phone does (GPS, meta data, graphics processing etc).

If you think of the arguments for using pretty much any non-digital medium is that the digital medium simply doesn’t reproduce the same way, then it is simply a matter of time before that void is admonished.

Anyone can argue that vinyl is better than digital music for a plethora of reasons, but actually the only current reason that stands is physicality. I guarantee every other aspect could be reproduced to perfection with digital techniques (if not now, in the near future). Even random idiosyncrasies (including limiting parameters that ensure an exact result) can be reproduced if enough care it taken. Maybe not right now, but I believe it can be achieved with such authenticity that a human cannot tell.

This is not an argument for doing away with these originals (which I love), but it is an argument against those who say digital cannot create an identical replacement.

“I like the separation”

When convergence is done properly, this is a non issue. Web browser plus cell phone? Until 2007 that was like someone had superglued Ceefax to a Nokia 3210. When you see the elegant solution, it will change your mind.

In fact, I’d present my opinion that Apple, the current king in converging technologies, will in the next few years kill off the iPod as a true standalone device completely. I also believe that they will also kill off DVD drives entirely within 12 months as web based distribution becomes universal, and that they launch a TV based system that will eventually provide convergence for every box you currently place under your TV set. Instead a range of multi-faceted devices will emerge.

And this convergence is why I believer they will never build a Apple branded standalone camera even though they incorporate that technology in most of their products. It is completely at odds with a converging approach.

“It’ll be too expensive to buy a unit that incorporates both”

It’s already possible to buy these phones quite readily, and traditional economics shows the standard model for costs means the price will drop as saturation occurs. The first DVD burner I saw in the UK cost £420 at PC World just a few years ago. Within twelve months the bottom had fallen out of the market. High end costing products cost that and will always exist because they contain the newest features and technologies. Over time they simply become absorbed into normality, just like electric windows in cars.

The Oven Clock Revisited

Coming back to my oven clock example though, I have yet to challenge my own suggestion of voice control to set the time. I still believe this a much better suggestion than our current mechanical system, but why is it not perfect?

Firstly, if you are mute, you cannot use this method. It is therefore no more universal.

Many consumers dismiss universality as an idealistic madness, but a perfect product should be universal. People think this means sacrifices and trade-offs, but it doesn’t. The web has shown you can build incredibly usable products when care is applied without sacrificing quality or endangering the 95th percentile’s experience.

To take the iPhone as the example once more, the most heavy duty of the accessibility controls are entirely hidden from the average user and yet could be considered exceptional in the field.

Why I believe touch screen technology it is still in it’s infancy is because haptic (touch) feedback is still so poor, even non-existent. The key reason for this is the physical limitation of materials being able to deliver localised physical responses, and this is why aural control is far more accessible and likely to be available more widely in the immediate future.

However to think such responses are impossible is again blinkered. The development of smart materials will I believe soon show us that creating surfaces with entirely amorphous, controllable physicality will occur in the coming years and this will again revolutionise and enhance the interface. It might take five years, it might take seventy, but it will occur.

So what do I propose as the ultimate solution for the oven clock? Well it’s simple really and you may have already worked it out. Voice control is likely overkill in the first instance; instead really, the clock should automatically be set. Using the Anthorn (ex-Rugby) transmitter and some basic technology this would be so ridiculously simple to implement, and it’s bizarre that it isn’t done as standard when you really think about it.

For generations oven makers have been churning out ovens with clocks added as afterthoughts, but which fundamental parts of the product which when you think about it is a careless attitude. Why should a consumer be forced to learn how to set up this part of the machine, repeatedly? Surely in these cases, it would almost be better just leave the clock off, and save the parts cost. Or supply a cheap standalone mechanical clock if they really feel it too much effort to address it with the same care as the rest of the functional experience of the product as a whole.

What It May Mean For Web Professionals

What I’m saying is that I think we currently apply too many interfaces with big limitations and as technology is now maturing, we’re about to see a huge shift in the possibilities and the blurring of the line between the physical and digital environment.

As a professional web designer, I think the reason for my fascination in the immediate future of the interface is that I believe that as an industry we soon will need a far greater understanding of the physicality of what we build in our designs as it’s going to become important.

We already are going through a revolution in understanding the impact of a touch or gesture based control of our websites and applications, as well as their place on an ever fragmented range of screen sizes and resolutions.

This is just the start, and I believe that within a decade or so it is very likely that the fundamental level the web will integrate with all sorts of senses through all sorts of interfaces is going to generate yet a further explosion in the fragmentation of our discipline.

It’s a wide, umbrella like statement, and perhaps a little idealistic, but I really cannot see any other way the world will progress.

But despite all this, it’s all just speculation really, and as a consumer I am really just as blind as everyone else as to what the future really holds. It does excite me though.

Comments (2)

Sometime, about two months ago, I sent a link out to a couple of people whose opinions I value highly when it comes to design and interaction.

I had asked them for feedback on a nearly complete website. It was so nearly complete that it was perhaps just a click or two away from going live.

That website was my new company portfolio, on which I had been working heavily upon for perhaps four months, through the dark nights of autumn and winter. A huge amount of time had been invested to produce the site that would eventually replace the one I had built in 2006, a site which I had constructed six months before I even decided that web design was going to be my full time career.

I received two emails back. I deliberately had asked my confidants to be blunt and honest (the only worthwhile feedback) and within 12 hours, the entire site was consigned to the trash can.

This should have been traumatic. I had sweated detail after detail. I had included references so subtle that not even a super sleuth could have deciphered all the little tics and nods. The man hours lost, coffees quaffed and headaches endured all suddenly had been worthless. The fact was that the website on the end of that link was bad. Very, very bad.

That’s not to say the site I completed in January didn’t have considerable merits. The code was all HTML5, the CSS was packed full of ‘3’. There were embedded fonts when embedded fonts were still a mystery to most of us, and it was all sitting atop a frothy-light PHP framework that I’d handcoded from scratch. The underlying quality couldn’t have been higher.

About six or seven days ago I launched HiggsDesign.com. I didn’t really tell anyone; it sort of leaked out a few days after, and once a few people knew about it and had said nice things, it seemed the right time to acknowledge it. In fact the whole process of making it public was quite cathartic; like a weight lifting off my shoulders, after perhaps the longest, least pleasant web-design journey I have ever embarked upon.

To put this into context, I realised I needed a new portfolio a very long while ago. I started as a sole trader immediately after I graduated in 2006, then in 2008 the business became limited, and in 2009 I VAT registered the company. Still the website remained identical, and rarely updated.

Ever since I began trading, I’ve used my own name, my own domain and the old website that I knocked together at around the same time I wrote my dissertation.

But for a long time I had yearned for a better representation online. I wanted to drop the ‘Andy’ bit from my monikor for a long while, as I felt it limited what work the company could attract. Not that getting work through the door has been a problem - in fact probably my biggest issue over the past two years has been finding the time to work on personal projects for lack of time to myself. I’ve worked pretty hard, but it’s mainly through personal recommendations that I’ve earned my salt, rarely through freak visitations to my website.

I started the redesign around this time last year. A full 12 months ago now. I iterated quite a bit, but the same core elements remained. I struggled a lot to understand what I wanted, and spent much time debating very minute little details, putting off the big choices. When I think about it now, I was treading water furiously.

The thing is that I’ve since realised is that I was a terrible, terrible client. Of course, I’d read all those articles about making your own website being the hardest thing to do, but surely it wasn’t this difficult last time around?

I genuinely grew more and more frustrated with the project. I’d spend my weekends sat in my favourite coffee shop knocking back mochas and trying to hammer out something that would soothe this itch for resolve. It seemed like the project would never end.

I had quickly formed-up the most important pages in my mind, or at least the most interesting ones. The homepage, the folio and the contact page were all done, one by one they appeared in my browser window.

By the time I had weened myself off perfecting silly little details and moving onto the other serious pages like the about page, those other pages had stood stagnant for what seemed like months.

I struggled to get the tone right. Was this my portfolio, or the business’ portfolio? We, or I?

The battle continued.

In January I went away for a week to Austria with Tim and Stacey for some time snowboarding. The macbook came with me too, and I felt I finally had reached a stage where I was polishing the brass tacks. A good 10 months in the making, here was the final, glorious result. I was pretty much ready to launch, I thought.

When I received the first of the two replies to the emails I had sent, I wasn’t surprised. There seemed to be a lot of criticism. I took it pretty well I thought. Perhaps even a little too easily. I mean, I often challenge my clients when they request changes to the work I present to them (it improves the end result by a mile), and often defend my corner. With this, I didn’t feel like I could argue back. I agreed with everything that was said.

The observations were all true. The navigation was muddled. The copy was repetitive and inconsistent. The styling was over the top, and what was meant to be elegant had become kitsch. I’d really screwed up.

I felt nothing. By all accounts I should have had my heckles up, been annoyed, upset, angry, or at least felt something. But I realised by the time that I had read the second email, that this was a profound mistake with the project . It took a few hours to digest my emotionless stage and why I wasn’t surprised or angry, but I quickly realised that I had simply deluded myself that spending time on it meant that the end result would be good. By this stage, in my heart of hearts, I now knew that the whole thing needed to be reset.

I will say, I don’t believe this was in anyway ordinary. I had commissioned myself to work on a hyper-personal project that needed to resolve a number of incredibly complex business issues I had accrued over a four year period.

My mistake most likely had been working in pure isolation. Bar the odd look-in, I was the only person who had ever seen the site, and perhaps those who had seen it hadn’t had the heart to criticise earlier when they saw I had been working so vigourously at it.

The thing is, I have built up fantastic methods for working with my clients over the years. It allows me to get inside their business or organisation and produce website that they are truly pleased with. I work with them closely and we plan, iterate and resolve. But here, I had used none of these tools. I don’t think I planned anything really.

The whole thing had formed like some organic mutant. The core had been fired months ago, but some of the most important elements had been relegated to final-minute half-assed compromises in order to get the thing complete before I lost the remainder of my sanity.

So after thinking about my lack of emotional attachment (and taking that as a warning sign that something was totally awry) I consigned it all to the trash and started over.

That was two months ago. I quickly started over, and this time I took input from day one. My coffee people have still been doing a roaring trade, but for the past eight weeks or so my vigour has been tempered by planning the whole thing out before I moved to code.

Some things have changed since then - of course they have - but that initial plan, plus the assistance of some trusted council, really focussed the objectives of the project and I progressed quickly and efficiently.

Of course things could always do with improvement. Before I launched the new site, I felt the thing lacked the beauty and complexity of the original version, but I don’t have to dwell long to think of every mistake and wrong turn that made up that last attempt. This is so much better.

Perhaps the most salient of all lessons learned from this experience was that I shall never attempt my own projects again without taking feedback and criticism from the start. Where in my professional relationships with clients I actively consult anyone and everyone, I managed to isolate myself here in some trance-like way, and it proves that that method had nothing but a detrimental effect on the project.

I am not dispondant about the time i spent working on the dead site, nor do I regret building it. Of any project I have worked on in the past four years, it is the single greatest leap forward in my knowledge of the use of the technologies we work with. The underlying framework of that site became the underlying framework of the new site. The HTML5 and structure have become foundation stones for a whole construct of new techniques that I have become expert in. It has had a truly profound impact on all my work over the past two months.

Today marks the 6th year since I posted the first message on this blog. Since then my career has progressed a long way, and oddly enough, this project has taken up a large part of that time. But I’m so pleased with the result, and the affirmation I have had has only strengthened my resolve to continue building websites and improving my techniques.

Comments (0)

A couple of days ago Si (@Si) and I spent a few hours in a mobile workshop with Dan Rubin (@danrubin).

During the break Si and I discussed a few updates we’d like to make on our Formula One season calendar, F1Calendar.com, and try out some of the new stuff we’d learnt. Over the past day or so, I’ve spent a little time making some minor (purely iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad) improvements for those who want to use them.

However we struck a problem when saving the site to the homescreen. I’d noticed that by default, Apple handhelds use the full page title to label the icon it creates - very good for search engines, bad for users of the iPhone. As a user, it can be very fiddly to shorten it down.

I couldn’t find anything on Google (though I didn’t look too hard), but it occurred to me that back in the bad old days, it was entirely normal to see horrific animations going on in the title bar, and wondered if a bit of JS couldn’t do the job of shortening it down for mobile users - and indeed it can.

One line of code that sniffs the user agent can alter the page title. It doesn’t affect desktop browsing users or people on other mobile devices, but just is a nice touch for the users of Apple touch devices.

<script type="text/javascript">
  if( navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || 
      navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i) || 
      navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i)
    ) {
         document.title = "F1 Calendar";
      }
</script>

Schimples. (There was an earlier error in this code - some extra parenthesis - this has now been rectified.)

I’ve guessed the iPad string there; if that’s wrong let me know, but the other two will work for sure. A nice touch for any site you imagine will be used this way.

And so now, when you visit F1 Calendar on your iPhone, not only will you get a better handheld experience than before, you’ll also have a nice, short title to use immediately, whilst it won’t compromise the search engine performance.

Try adding F1Calendar.com to your homescreen and see the result.

Update: You might want to use this alternative version for a more robust future-proof version (basing the search on the browser rather than the device). It depends on your application. (Thanks Edd)

<script type="text/javascript">
  if( navigator.userAgent.match(/Mobile/i) && 
      navigator.userAgent.match(/Safari/i)
    ) {
         document.title = "F1 Calendar";
      }
</script>

Comments (7)

I think I need to establish early on here that attending a web conference was a new experience for me entirely - well not entirely - I once attended a bee-keeping conference. Yes, you did read that right, and no, it didn’t have many similarities.

For me, @media is pretty synonymous (if not the definition) of ‘a UK web conference’. I was the first I ever knew of, and pretty much has therefore remained top dog in my mind ever since.

A major reason why I never made it to @media previously was cost. As start-up self-employed, it can be hard to budget the hundreds of pounds for tickets (and the rest) which other larger organisations spend without so much as a moment of hesitation. But when I saw this year’s lineup, and combined with a change in the circumstances of the business in the last two years (e.g. the limited status) it made it far easier to finally say yes. And so I went.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that there is a general agreement that 2005 was a ‘buzz’ year, and since then the industry has perhaps has slowed down a little (not loads, but a little). One of the problems I’ve found when contemplating my attendance previously has been the potential problem of paying to attend talks on subjects you felt had been discussed to death and just wouldn’t be worth the investment of your own time.

And so it’s with pleasure I can say I wasn’t disappointed that I waited. From amongst the well-weathered attendees that I spoke to, the consensus seemed to be that this year has been one of the best to date.

I don’t want to sound utterly gushing in praise, but over the two days, I met some fantastic people and enjoyed every talks I sat through. Admittedly some were more useful to me than others, but absolutely nothing disinterested me.

Day One took a strong design perspective, and the speaker lineup comprised of Malarkey, Jon Hicks, Dan Rubin, Colly, Mark Boulton and Jason Santa-Maria. Of all these, I’ve only ever seen Jon talk before, and I was pleased to see that although he was talking icons, it was a significantly different and improved version of the very enjoyable talk he did at Geek In The Park 2008.

Andy’s piece really was beneficial to the understanding of his most recently aired views on IE6, process and CSS envelope-pushing. I had a wide variety of half-formed views on this bucket of ideas already, and I came out with a greater sense of clarity.

Simon provided some really nice insights into working practices at Erskine and I scribbled quite a few notes here. I wasn’t sure I’d call it a toolbox like he did, but there were loads of really useful pointers on things like content auditing, audience grouping and then some genuine physical tools for getting the job done.

If there was one real gem in Dan Rubin’s enjoyable presentation (and there were a few others), it was the demonstration of the Offset Filter in Photoshop. However I lived without it before I don’t know - it automates the worst part of image tile-making and so I am eternally grateful.

Mark delivered insights into typography on the web, and although I felt the climbing analogy was a bit tenuous, the demonstration of typographical imbalance and an explanation of potential pit falls over the coming months was good food for thought before people rush out and just start implementing every font under the sun into their websites.

Rounding off the talks for the day, Jason delivered a beautifully designed presentation as you might well expect from the man with the wonderful blog posts. It left me creatively yearning, and with an urge to just get going on something of my own. Genuinely inspiring.

If day one encouraged you to break down walls and start implementing all this stuff, day two could have been a list of reasons why you couldn’t implement any of it yet. Despite my cynicism, it turned out that was not the case.

Douglas Crockford opened with his witty observations on the work methods of developers. It could have been dry, but I really enjoyed the humour and it set a good tone for the rest of the day.

Molly (and sidekick Bruce), replete with arseless chaps and cowboy hat) answered some really useful questions about HTML 5 and where we’re at with it now. I was surprised to see how far some of the implementations actually go already and would recommend that you keep an eye out for the HTML5 doctor project launching in the next week or so. The whole event did feel like we’d all accidently turned up to a Opera away day though :)

You could tell that Chris Wilson from Microsoft was being eyed with a degree of suspicion before his talk, and although of course there were the inevitable clashes of doctrine, he came bearing apologies (which were more for amusement than genuine recourse, but which were accepted well) and a very useful perspective on to the state of IE now and going forward.

Andy Budd’s guerilla usability testing proved very useful and really filled a gap in my practical knowledge of these things. I’m now feeling geared up to start directly applying some of the methodology he suggested and might seek out one or two of the book recommendations too.

Robin’s discussion of accessibility in today’s web was an eye opener. I’ve never seen a first hand demonstration of JAWs, and came away with what I felt were some really useful insights and bringing me a bit closer to the realities of access on the web in 2009. I’m really pleased there was some decent accessibility stuff provided to supplement everything else that had gone so far.

And then Jeremy Keith’s hot topics, which was a good amalgam of all the things that had already been discussed so far, but interspersed with beautifully dry contempt of the whole internet by Douglas and a fantastic piece of facial hair modelled for the full hour and a bit by Jon Hicks.

I couldn’t complete this without mentioning the other major aspect of a conference like this, but I really did meet some great people, and spent much time chatting and discussing things with really interesting folks including Natalie and Paul from ClearLeft, Chris Mills, José, James Smith, David from Beggars, Remy, Marco and Andy from RNIB, Aussie Sheila and everybody else who I ended up chatting too. There’s a stack of business cards here which need filing.

Naturally I also spent much time with Owen and Paul doing our utmost to present the acceptable side of the Multipack too, and between us all, I would think many of the restaurants and bars can remain confident of their own futures based on their performance over the past couple of days alone. And what brilliant sunny days they were too.

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It’s been a long annoyance of mine that Wordpress insists on writing paths directly into the database, so when switching from staging or production to live you have to alter these paths.

However, if you also find this an irritation, a quick way to solve it is to define a couple of constants in the wp-config.php file. You simply define the url and home addresses as below, and as long as you are running a server that supports the server variable HTTP_HOST (e.g. Apache) the switch should be automatic and override the settings in the control panel.


// WordPress address on settings page
define(’WP_SITEURL’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);
// Blog address on settings page
define(’WP_HOME’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);


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Ok, so this is a little deeper than what I usually pen on this blog, but as the economic screw continues to tighten, it’s of course of interest to speculate what this means for the web, our industry and it’s immediate future.

I’ve been saying for quite some time (if I’ve put a couple of pints down my neck) that I believed that the web bubble would burst once more. Perhaps not anywhere like as seriously as back in the early noughties, the big businesses may have matured a bit, but certainly in my view there is scope for a temporary collapse in certain areas.

What I really mean by this is the vast amount of web start up ‘ideas’ that until recently been getting investment. Not businesses building the web (development firms), and not web businesses already with dedicated audiences (MySpace, Digg etc), but specifically all those new venture capital funded ‘ideas’ that were, and to some extent still are, appearing like dew each and every morning.

In the past year or two, there has seemed to be an increasing, eventually endless, well of funds. It’s been overflowing and allowing pretty much any web-based idea to be transformed into a product. Especially if it was ‘social’. Perfect times for innovators - if it sounds good, throw some pennies at it and let it flow. If it doesn’t take off, no worries, the next idea might be the big one. New Money web-types were more than happy to step in and become VCs themselves - investing their time, knowledge and well earned cash into more of the same.

It wasn’t just the big web powerhouses chucking out products (although Google was doing this too), but large numbers of these products were developed ‘in-house’ by small teams or individuals, and the sheer number was mainly down to the vast number of small web designer/developer/agencies that were sponsoring their own internal products to fill niches.

The result was a saturation and a mass of overlap. Most people realised you couldn’t build the next Facebook, but you could try and capitalise on the digital renaissance, and an ever more savvy and curious-minded web community. You can plainly see the successes and failures of this gold rush. For many developers, If there wasn’t an application out there that did exactly what you wanted, you just prototyped it over the weekend, slapped a beta star on it and put it out there for the masses.

You could say that it was hopelessly optimistic, but at the same time the climate was good and it really didn’t matter if your idea sank because ultimately the only thing at stake was a bit of time, and that wasn’t a problem as it was all being bankrolled by some venture capitalist or your primary business - probably making websites.

Diversity has meant so many ideas have flooded the web in the past few years (what will probably be looked back upon as the 2.0 boom time) but clearly there were too many ideas that were simply not viable as full on businesses. If you can name ten, twenty, thirty successful web apps, you eventually would have to stop. But if you flick to the homepage of something like feedmyapp (a site I randomly selected from Google), there are more applications in the first category alone than most web-users could name (and the first category is Accountancy).

Of course there will always be some amount of duplication on the web - after all Facebook wasn’t the only social networking app ever developed - but it became one of the miracle heroes of 2.0 - and suddenly had a disproportionate share of the market. The thing is, this energy and belief that any Tom, Dick or Mark Zuckerberg could create a world-dominating, popular web app soon appealed to every developer in the world. And with ten-figure numbers acquisition numbers being banded around (even if it wasn’t real money), it just whipped the hysteria up further.

I think it would be fair to say that had the Google/YouTube, AOL/Bebo or Last.fm/CBS deals been on the table now rather than a year ago, they might not all have turned out the way they did. Who would have thought one year ago that Yahoo!, packed to the gunnels with some of the best developers in the business, would be begging Microsoft for a takeover and saying goodbye to their CEO Jerry Yang in fairly ungracious circumstances?

Clearly the impact of the downturn is already being felt in these big organisations, and I really wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a decline in the number of ‘throw-away’ web apps being produced in the coming weeks and months. Google doesn’t seem to be relentlessly pursuing hundreds of new developments, but rather is spending time refining what it’s got - solid products that seemed to resonate, such as free alternatives to office applications. While experimentation will continue and more fundamental ideas are likely to be pursued, the amount of hours developers will be pumping into personal projects in the near future are probably going to wane significantly in both big and small organisations.

I can imagine one day we may well get back to the lofty web-app factory days of early 2008, but it’s hard to imagine in the current climate that businesses and VCs will be wanting (or able) to invest the money in web apps that might or might not succeed.

And this comes to one of my biggest questions - Facebook. Seemingly a giant of the web industry, this monolith network feels to me like the interest surrounding it has probably peaked. That’s not to say thousands of people are not still signing up daily, but for those who work in the web I think most people would agree the initial excitement has passed somewhat. Recent developments such as the restructuring of the design and attempts to allow ‘externalising’ have perhaps been the first signals of change of direction that could, in my view, be the tipping point.

I’m not saying we’re going to see it collapse or go away - there is simply too much invested for that to happen - but I can’t help wonder where exactly all their money is coming from. Mark Zuckerberg is mosquito-like in his attempts to dodge questions on the state of their finances, and I can’t help but think the valuation on the company might have been somewhat over-inflated by the ‘buzz’ factor that seems now to be wearing off a little.

Then when last week Pownce made the announcement that a terminal decision had been made about it’s future it probably came as a surprise (maybe not a shock) to the wider web community. Dedicated users were clearly at a loss, but in reality there must have been a hundred other relatively unknown applications along the same lines that have already failed. Pownce may have initially done well because of it’s endorsement from certain members of the web elite, but it is entirely representative of the 99% of web apps that you won’t remember this time next year, that is if you ever heard of them in the first place. That’s not a criticism of Pownce, it just illustrates one high profile casualty. Just because you build something well, dedicate hours and hours to it, run it with enthusiasm, create a burgeoning community and look good, it doesn’t mean it’s invincible or will even generate enough to sustain itself.

On the flip side, I wonder whether MySpace will be a winner in these uncertain times. Murdoch’s injection of cash seems to have kept the profile high, and it’s proper move into music seems to have increased it’s credibility and longevity somehow - something Facebook hasn’t successfully achieved so far. Amazon also seems to be going from strength to strength. Cheaper music seems to be the key to the consumer heart, and stepping into the UK with MP3 prices that now significantly undercut iTunes seems like a savvy and well-timed move. In line with their ever-cheapening products for ever-more demanding developers, they look to me one of the stronger ones going into the recession.

With bleak expectations on the social/webapp front, my other ideas maybe seemingly contradictory regarding the other place where big money is involved - e-commerce.

When the going gets tough, especially in retail, businesses will start turning to balance sheets and trying to cut costs. My guess is that following January we will see a number of rather surprising big store closures, and in many cases, a retraction to smaller, pared down, web-based commerce.

High street businesses such as WHSmith and JJB Sports are well known to be struggling, and Woolworths have already bit the dust. Predictions in the papers in the past few days have said that this weekend people will have been visiting all these usual high street colossuses, but then heading home to buy what they saw online at two-thirds the price. This probably doesn’t sound that huge - people having been buying online in significant numbers for years now - but I wonder if this won’t be another major win for e-commerce providers. I really wouldn’t be surprised if internet sales are significantly up this Christmas (as a proportion of overall sales) as retailers struggle to sell goods in stores where the prices are traditionally higher.

And this is why I think the web industry as a whole may not suffer quite as badly as others. That’s the same view I had six months ago, but now I have slightly different reasons for making the judgement. I think although there maybe a collapse in the VC funded market for hundreds of little applications all doing minutely different things, the amount of work available to the web industry may well now receive a shot in the arm by yet another consumer and retailer lurch towards the internet as a place where goods and running costs are lower, and the inevitable scramble for the remaining traditional highstreet based companies to catch the magical web zephyr, and for existing web retailers to get more aggressive.

Of course, I maybe entirely wrong; it has happened before (twice perhaps I think - once was a spelling error). However, I would like to remain optimistic that friends, colleagues and I will be able to get through this period without having to endure the worst of an economic slump. I’m not so ignorant that I don’t think things will get worse, but as it stands I don’t believe we are quite as badly placed as perhaps those who are in other business sectors, and if anything am curious and intrigued by the whole odd situation that the world currently finds itself in.

Now go and have a lie down - you’ll probably need it if you read all of that. Opinions welcome…

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I’ve made it a habit in recent times to steer clear of mentioning actual clients in actual blog posts, but as so much time and effort has gone into the complete re-skin and slew of new features, it’s only fair to give this one a bit of a nudge.

RateMyPlacement is one of my big ongoing and often more intensive projects, and today/just now, we proudly launch version two. Hence why I’m still sitting on the edge of a cup of very black Spanish coffee, six hours after I drank it, and it’s just gone midnight.

For those familiar with the concept, this paragraph is needless, but for everyone else, RateMyPlacement is a place for students looking for, and who have returned from, internships and placements. It allows users to rank and share their experiences with future ‘placementeers’ and is a resource peddled across universities and placement offices around the country.

There are a few bolts to be tightened and edges to be deburred, but on the whole it’s there.

One interesting day follows another - tomorrow I’m in Cheltenham teaching GCSE kids how to design a good logo.

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