Window on the World 1 Aug 2011, 4:11 pm

Window to the World (CIID/Toyota) from CIID on Vimeo.

A nice visualisation of a near future car journey from Toyota.

Visual Designers Are Just As Important As UX Designers 19 Jul 2011, 3:27 am

As I explained in my previous post, user experience design is a multidisciplinary activity which includes psychology, user research, information architecture, interaction design, graphic design and a host of other disciplines. Due to the complexity of the field a user experience team will typically be made up of individuals with a range of different specialisms.

On larger teams you’ll find people who focus on one specific area, such as user research or information architecture. You may even find people who specialise in specific activities such as usability testing or wireframing. This level of specialism isn’t possible in smaller teams, so practitioners tend to group related activities together.

Conceptually I believe you can break design into tangible and abstract activities. Tangible design typically draws on the artistic skills of the designer and results in some kind of visually pleasing artefact. This is what most people imagine when they think of design and it covers graphic design, typography and visual identity.

However there is also a more abstract type of design which concerns itself with structure and function over form. The output from this type of design tends to be more conceptual in nature; wireframes, site-maps and the like. One type of design isn’t any more valuable or important than another, they’re just different.

When products and teams reach a certain size or level of complexity, one person can’t undertake all these roles. When this happens, natural divisions occur. So in small to mid sized teams it’s quite common to describe people who specialise in tangible design as visual designers, while those who focus on more abstract activities are known as user experience designers.

Now we all know that visual design is an undeniable part of the way people experience a product or service, so it may feel a little odd that user experience designers don’t actually design the entire experience. It may also be confusing that when user experience designers talk about “the UX” of a product, they are often referring to the more abstract essence of the product as described through wireframes, site maps and the like.

This ambiguity can lead many visual designers to misunderstand what user experience design is, especially if they’ve never worked alongside a dedicated user experience designer. This has also led a lot of visual designers to mistakenly believe that because the work they create results in some kind of user experience, that makes them a user experience designer. While this may be true in the purely philosophical sense, this isn’t what people mean when they talk about user experience designers (try applying for a senior UX position without understanding user research, IA and Interaction design and see how far you get).

The term user experience architect was coined in 1990 but the roots reach back to the 1940s and the fields of human factors and ergonomics. We’ve had dedicated user experience consultancies for the last 10 years, and internal divisions before that. We’ve got numerous professional conferences attended by people who have been working in UX for much of their professional life. In short, User experience design is a distinct and well understood discipline that stretches back many years and isn’t simply a new buzzword to describe “the right way to design”.

Over the last 12 months I’ve come across far too many visual designers describing themselves as user experience designers because they don’t fully understand the term. Instead they’ve seen a few articles that explain how UX is the new black and decided to rebrand themselves.

I’ve also come across many fantastic visual designers who feel pressured into becoming user experience designers because they think this is the only way to progress their careers. It seems that due to a lack of supply, user experience design has somehow come to represent a higher order of design, or design done right. At best this is nonsense and at worst this is actually damaging to peoples careers.

So here’s the truth. Good visual designers are just as hard to find as good user experience designers. They have exactly the same status in the industry and earn pretty much the same rates. So you don’t need to became a user experience designer in order to take your career to the next level. Instead, surround yourself with experts, hone your skills and take pride in your work. With so few good designers out there, don’t go throwing away much prized and hard earned skills under the mistaken belief that you must become a UX designer in order to grow, as that’s just not the case.

What’s in a name: The duality of user experience 6 Jul 2011, 7:24 pm

As somebody who has publically stated that they “don’t care about user experience” and is fed up of “defining the dammed thing” I find myself being drawn into discussions about the term far more often than I’d like.

Some designers think that user experience is just a made up name and that we’re all user experience designers really. Others think that User Experience is a term used by consultants to trick clients out of money and would prefer it we all just stuck to the title of web designer. Some feel that user experience is simply common sense design while others see it as a land grab to own the fun bit of the design process. This is all complete nonsense of course, which is why I keep getting drawn into an argument I don’t really want to have and one that isn’t especially beneficial to the industry.

It’s obviously nonsense to argue that the field of UX design doesn’t exist as there are hundreds of books and conferences devoted to the practice, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people with UX in their job title and an unfathomable number of blog posts about the subject.

I think one of the big problems is that user experience isn’t one thing; it’s several. On a basic level every item that has been designed creates an experience through use. So some people naturally assume that every act of design is in fact an act of user experience design. After all, if all design results in an experience, aren’t all designers’ user experience designers?

The answer of course is no. It’s entirely possible to design something without thinking about how it’ll be experienced. In fact I believe this is still the way most things are designed. Bad experiences are rarely the deliberate choice of the designer. Instead they are usually the unfortunate outcome of an ill-considered process.

So does this mean that to be a user experience designer all you need to do is think about the outcome? Well in the broadest sense of the term, possibly; but in the sense that it’s used by most web professionals, definitely not.

You see, as well as being a measure of the quality of an interaction, user experience design is also a field of practice. Or more specifically an umbrella term that covers several fields of practice including Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability, Interface Design, Information Design and several more I’m probably forgetting. All of these practices go into designing good user experiences, so are part of the user experience cannon.

As all of these are effectively aspects of good web design, I can see why experienced practitioners who have gained mastery over many of these fields no longer see the distinction or think it’s necessary. So for them, web design (or simply design) makes sense as a title. I understand this point of view and agree with it to an extent.
However there is a danger here that relates to the popular notion of the web designer and something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The popular notion of a web designer is that of a graphic designer— possibly with some technical skills—whose sole focus is designing the look and feel of a website. During the early days of the web this was very much the norm. Sites weren’t especially complicated and many of these advanced skills were yet to have been adopted or even invented.

Today, the vast majority of websites are still designed and built by talented generalists, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that some of the larger and more complex sites do require composite teams of specialists with a singular focus. Experts in information categorisation, human computer interaction or interface design. They also need people who specialise in specific programming languages, databases, security, or application architecture. The history of all human progress can be counted by the increased specialisation of individuals amongst a group, and I see this as a good thing.

So we have this strange dichotomy that the term webdesign can be used to describe both a novice and an expert, a neophyte and a master. This is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes in. If you’re not familiar with this concept it’s the observation that novices suffer from the illusion of superiority and tend to rate their skills much higher than experts because they don’t fully understand the breadth of the field they need to master. Or to use a much quoted aphorism, “they know what they know, but they don’t know what they don’t know”. By comparison, experts tend to know more, but are also more conscious about what they don’t know, hence making them less sure about their expertise.

I’m currently seeing this all the time when it comes to designers discovering User Experience for the first time. Many designers have started calling themselves user experience designers because they have discovered usability testing and wireframing. However these skills are simply the tip of the iceberg and do not a user experience designer make. Because of this I think it’s important for experts to hold mastery of complex skills aloft, rather than convince people that we’re all effectively doing the same thing, when many of us clearly are not. So it’s useful for us to separate skill sets and be able to tell people that what they are doing isn’t in fact user experience design, at least not yet.

Being able to define yourself and differentiate yourself is useful in other areas like recruitment and sales. For instance if you recruit for a Web Designer rather than a Senior User Experience Designer you will end up with a very different class of applicant with a very different range of skills.

Like all job titles, they are much more useful for people progressing through their careers than they are for people who have already reached the pinnacle. So just because you no longer see a need for a job title doesn’t mean that the others don’t or that the title or practice no longer exists and we’re all just interconnected balls of design energy. Sometimes hanging out a shingle is the only way to separate yourself from the person down the road selling inferior goods.

How Tower Bridge Changed My Relationship With Twitter 13 Jun 2011, 11:22 am

Like many geeks in the UK, the Tower Bridge Twitter account was one of the first Twitter Mashups I’d seen. It was also the point where I realised that Twitter was more than just a simple communication tool; it was a powerful and scriptable platform.

Talking publicly available data, local developer Tom Armitage created a Twitter Bot which automatically Tweeted whenever the bridge opened and a ship passed through. This was a rare occurrence in the city and something most people have never seen, so the account gave Londoners a new way of experiencing an iconic part of the city. As such over 4,000 people, from local developers to London Cabbies followed the account which had remained active for several years.

One of the things I loved about the account was that it spoke in the first person. By allowing an inanimate object to communicate with the real world, Tom had created an early example of a spime; an object which can be tracked through space and time. This little experiment inspired numerous other developers to experiment with the platform and became part of the Twitter story in the UK. As such I was saddened to find out that Twitter unilaterally decided to shut the account down. A sentiment shared by much of the London developer community.

It would seem that a company called Tower Bridge Exhibitions decided that they wanted the account for themselves so asked Twitter to hand it over. Rather than trying to contact Tom to discuss the claim, it appears that Twitter simply sent him a notification that the account was being pulled. This worries me for a number of reasons.

First and foremost it brings into stark relief the fact that we don’t own our online identities or the content we produce. We have few if any rights, and the companies behind these services can remove our accounts at will. I guess I’ve always felt a certain ownership over the services I use. After all, we’re all part of the reason for their success. So the fact that they can delete accounts at will is rather unsettling. It basically sends the message that you’d better play nicely or we’ll expunge you from history.

Secondly, it seems that social networks have an automatic presumption of guilt. So rather than attempting to contact users to discuss claims, the default response to an alleged copyright infringement is to send out a notification that action is being taken and put the onus on the user to respond quickly and defend themselves. This results in a disturbingly Kafkeresque approach to dispute resolution. A much better way would be to send multiple emails, set a deadline for response, put accounts on hold and then only hand over accounts once every attempt at resolution has been followed.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter and have always had very positive feelings about the company, their staff and the service they provide. However this latest incident has eroded some of my faith in their brand and they have taken one step closer to Facebook and Google in my eyes.

How to break into User Experience Design 10 Jun 2011, 5:18 pm

One of the most common things I’m asked is how people can break into the field of user experience design.

I’d love to be able to give a simple answer—like studying a particular course at University or starting as a UX apprentice and working your way up a series of clearly defined roles—but sadly that’s not the case.

There are Masters degrees out there, but the good ones are few and far between. With current courses failing to meet demand, there’s no way the education system will be able to cope in the next two to three years once User Experience practice has becomes the norm.

Even if you’re lucky enough to attend a good course, unless you had some level of prior experience, you’ll find it hard landing that first job. You see, User Experience is no different from the rest of our industry. There are few large companies willing to train people up so most employers need people with at least a couple of years experience in their chosen field, and preferably more.

For designers and developers it’s easy to gain experience though personal projects. This is why most of my peers came to prominence through their blogs, portfolio sites and side projects. They were blank canvases on which they could try out new skills and lean the tools of their trade. These day’s people are doing the same thing, but with start-ups and iPhone apps instead.

It’s easy for designers and developers to take on solo projects, but it’s much more difficult for budding user experience designers. After all I can’t imagine many UX Designers sitting around in the evening running usability tests, doing card sorts or designing complex sign-up processes just for the fun of it. By it’s nature, user experience design is a specialisation and one that forms part of a bigger process and a larger team.

The most successful user experience designers tend to come from a graphic design or front-end development background. As they’re already working on the parts of the project that come in contact with the user, it’s natural for some of them to be more in tune with UX problems. If they happen to work for a company without a dedicated UX person, it’ll often be left to them to solve.

That’s exactly the situation I found myself in. I worked for a company where I was the main designer and front-end developer. With nobody else to worry about the user I found myself running usability testing sessions, setting up card sorts, working out site maps and designing wireframes. The more UX work I did the less visual design and front end development I did, until one day I found myself doing User Experience design full time.

So if you are working for a small agency on in-house team and don’t have a UX person on staff, one way to break into the industry is to take these responsibilities on yourself push your company forward. As your company grows in its maturity, you will too.

Bizarrely it’s a lot more difficult to become a user experience designer in a company that already gets UX and has dedicated staff. That’s simply because the opportunities to dabble are much less. In those situations it’s worth letting your employers and colleagues know that you’re interested in moving into that field and offer to help out as much as possible. That could be helping to moderate usability testing sessions or helping your UX team design deliverables or prototype ideas.

If the day job doesn’t provide the opportunity to flex your UX muscles then you’re going to need to build your experience and portfolio through other means. One idea is to have a pet project. This is a little more difficult of you don’t have any back end skills, so it may be sensible to find a friendly developer to partner up with. Another idea could be to offer your services to one of the many ugly, badly conceived but nevertheless worthy open source projects out there. Lastly, I’d recommend going along to a hack day, Design Jam or Dev Fort style event. It will take time to get the requisite experience, but it may be the only way.

One of the most difficult problems is taking the leap and redefining yourself as a user experience person. Often your existing company won’t see you in that light, especially if they’ve always known you as a graphic designer or front-end developer. However until you’ve a couple of years of dedicated experience, you’ll find it very difficult picking up full time work.

If you’re young enough the best way to redefine yourself is to walk into the wilderness and simply call yourself a freelance user experience designer. You’ll find it difficult picking up work at first, but as you get better, more will come. Go to as many UX conferences and community events as you can. The sooner other people in the community start thinking of you as a user experience designer, the sooner you can start feeling like one yourself. There is a certain amount of re-invention going on here, but that’s going to be the only way for some people.

Of course you could think about doing a masters degree in some HCI related subject. Sadly most of the courses are 10 years out of date, so it’s less about what you’ll learn and more about the opportunities that will arise from the course. So take every opportunity to do practical work and fill out your portfolio. A year long Masters with a couple of obscure essays and a final project on machine learning won’t help you as much as a dissertation on sign-up techniques and 4 or 5 relevant side projects. It still won’t guarantee you a job, but it will probably put you a couple of years a head of where you would have been otherwise.

Sadly, until universities wake up to the need for modern courses in interaction design, until large companies and agencies set up dedicated training programs and until user experience becomes the de facto standard for web design, it’s going to be tough making the jump. But with demand for good people growing, and showing no sign of letting up, if you are interested in making the leap I’d encourage you to do so.

Where are the poster children for responsive design? 10 Jun 2011, 9:35 am

In my previous post I stated that while I didn’t think responsive design was the right approach for every mobile experience, it was appropriate for 90% of cases and should become the natural default option. Sadly the current default for most organisations is to build a suite of device specific mobile apps. While giving designers control over layout and companies the ability to make a bit of extra money through app store sales, this seems like an expensive, labour insensitive and somewhat wasteful approach. Especially when you consider the relatively small number of app consumers, compared to the number of people who access the web through mobile devices. For most online companies a mobile optimised website is going to be the smartest option in terms of reach and ROI.

I think one of the big problems with responsive design is that it’s a relatively new and unproven concept. Sure, a few companies and individuals have been building responsive versions of their personal projects like the sites for Ampersand and UX London. However few large companies have yet to cotton on, either because they’re enamoured by the idea of making it big in the app store, or simply aren’t aware of the approach.

We were talking about this in the studio the other day and likened the problem to the early days of CSS. Sure there were blogs by people like Jeremy and Myself, but there weren’t any big corporate sites using this technology. Until there was a canonical standards based site out there for us all to point too, it was going to be very difficult to convince clients of this new approach. Then along came the beautiful 85th PGA Championship Golf website.

Now we had a great looking commercial site we could use to prove to clients that web standards weren’t simply a techie fab, but were actually a viable way of building corporate websites. What we needed was the responsive equivalent. A large, internationally renowned company willing to forgo the conventional wisdom that every mobile experience starts with the app store and invest in what we see as the future of mobile interactivity. What’s more, we wanted to be the people to create it.

A few days ago we were delighted to see an early step in that direction.

The Financial Times decided to skip the app store mentality and launch a HTML5 version of their service, optimised for iPad and iPhone viewing. This is obviously still a little siloed and doesn’t quite live up to the dream of “the one web”, but it’s getting there. You could see how, with a few tweaks and a bit of responsive thinking, this application could be made to work across any and all devices with a modern browser. As such I think the folks at Assanka should be applauded for this work and hope that it is the start of a much bigger trend in responsive design.

Does (screen) size really matter? 7 Jun 2011, 12:50 pm

There’s an interesting debate happening in the world of mobile design at the moment. In one camp we have the “nativists” who believe that the best mobile experiences are tailored to a particular device. These are the people focused on creating platform specific mobile apps and mobile websites. Then we have the “universalists” who believe in the “one web”, a place where all content and services can be delivered to multiple devices through the same URL.

This division is causing me a bit of a quandary. The designer in me appreciates the slightly more constrained experience that platform specific design provides, but realises that we risk opening a pandoras box of ever more variations. I also see some benefits of the app store mentality (such as ratings and reviews) but worry that it provides too much control to a small number of parties and is inherently unscalable.

In contrast the standardista in me loves the simplicity of a single web, but finds it hard to reconcile with my own usage patterns. There are just certain things I don’t enjoy doing on a small screen like booking a flight or filling in my taxes. Basically anything which requires lots of data being presented at the same time, complex navigational structures and multi-step processes. There are obviously ways of breaking this information down to satisfy fat fingers and a small screen size, but that makes it difficult to reconcile with a single URL pointing to a single resource or piece of data.

It’s easy for people to dismiss small screen sizes as just a matter of dimensions. You just need to reflow the content and fit it into a smaller space. However I find the screen real estate has a direct relation to my enjoyment of an experience. For instance, I feel completely absorbed by some movies when watching them on a big screen, but feel distracted when viewing the same movie on a small screen. So there are certain films which I prefer to watch at the cinema but would hate to watch on a flight. Similarly there are certain programs which I enjoy on the small screen, but would never want to see projected.

Research suggests that this happens in the physical world as well. In one experiment, researchers set people a variety of tasks and the only variance was the hight of the room. It turns out that rooms with high ceilings encouraged more expansive and creative thinking, while low ceiling heights promoted focus and concentration. It would seem that size does matter.

The same thing happens to me when I use devices with different form factors. The extra real estate of my desktop means that I’m more comfortable doing creative, expansive and exploratory activities. On my phone, I’m much more comfortable doing targeted, focussed and linear tasks. Research in this field is obviously needed, but if different devices and form factors do encourage different behaviour, it seems reasonable to treat the services you design and the content we present differently.

That’s not to say that every service or piece of content needs to be designed for every individual device. I believe that the bulk of sites can and should be built using responsive design as a default. However I also understand that there is no “one size fits all” approach to mobile design and that some services need to be tailored to specific devices and form factors, be that mobile sites or native apps. After all, complex problems often have complex and messy solutions. That’s were good design comes in.

I don't care about User Experience 31 May 2011, 11:22 pm

A few months ago I tweeted that we no longer needed to sell User Experience and our job was now to focus on delivering good user experiences. A few people asked me to expand on my thinking, so this quick post is in reference to that.

I’ve been running a User Experience Agency now for nearly six years. When we started almost nobody I spoke to had heard of the term user experience, let alone understood what a user experience consultancy did. There were a handful of agencies offering “UX services” in the UK, but most were really usability companies. As such we rarely, if ever, came up against other agencies offering a similar service to our own. So I spent the first 3-4 years at Clearleft explaining to everybody who would listen what User Experience was and why it mattered. I had to justify why we could’t jump straight into design and why we needed to spend weeks planning out the user interface. After all, no other agencies wanted to waste time doing “wireframing”, so could’t we just skip that part.

It was both exciting and frustrating in equal measure. Exciting, when I saw the lightbulbs go on over people’s heads, as I explained how many of the problems they faced could be mitigated with some basic research and planning. Frustrating when I could’t change people’s outlook though the logic of my arguments and strength of will alone. I suspect many of you have shared this frustration with me on more than one occasion. As such I have to thank many of our earlier clients for taking an approach which was both new and somewhat alien to them.

Over the last 2 years I’ve seen a dramatic change in the marketplace. First off, people now “get” what user experience is. And I don’t just mean designers and developers. I can’t remember the last time I had to explain to a potential client what user experience was and why it differed to others peoples approach. These days pretty much all of our prospective clients understand what user experience is and appreciate its importance.

The early part of this transition actually took me by surprise, as I’d find myself launching into my “UX is like Architecture” spiel without realising the person on the end of the phone already got it. These days, most of my time is spent explaining the nuances of our approach to UX and how it differs, often in incredibly subtle ways, to the competition. At times I miss being the “Only UX in the Village”. In retrospect that point of differentiation was actually quite easy, and helped define our character as an agency. However that no longer matters anymore.

These days we’ve stopped selling UX and started simply doing it.

Sure, some agencies or individuals haven’t quite reached that inflexion point yet, but I can tell you that it’s on the way. Demand is far outstripping supply, so if you’re not there yet, you soon will be. User Experience is no longer a point of difference, it’s just the way all good websites are built these days.

As such I’m bought to mind Jeff Veen’s comments when he said “I don’t care about accessibility.” Similarly I’m starting to care less and less about User Experience, not because it isn’t important, but because it’s the natural output of the way all good design and development agencies work and think.

Of course there are still challenges ahead, but I think the challenges are related to craft and mastery rather than evangelism. I’d be interested to know what you think?

Cargo Cults, Artificial Reefs and the East London Tech City 16 May 2011, 4:26 pm

Back in November 2010, David Cameron announced plans to turn the Olympic Village in East London into a technology hub to rival Silicon Valley. These type of Grand Plans are great at generating headlines and creating a legacy for all those involved, but how likely are they to succeed? Are we going to inherit a shiny new creative centre in the aftermath of the 2012 Olympics, or will it become just another mediocre science park like the ones clinging to the sides of the M4?

It would seem that successive governments have tried to align themselves with the dream of Silicon Valley, with little success. Back in the late 70s and early 80s I grew up in a town called Bracknell which was supposed to be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley. It had great transport links, a large business park intended to attract high tech companies, and plenty of social housing for all the staff. Companies like 3M and Panasonic moved in to set up offices, but it never really became more than a administrative centre and distribution hub. In part because the economic and regulatory incentives were’t in place, and in part because it just wasn’t a very nice place to live.

Jump forward to the 90s and it seemed that every region of the UK with more than than a couple of web designers wanted to lay claim to the Silicon label, so we laughingly inherited places like Silicon Glenn, Silicon Fen and our very own Silicon Beach. However if a few large, homogenous tech companies fails to make an ecosystem, a dozen small web design agencies definitely doesn’t.

This time around the government has decided to target the start-up community. “Hey”, they must be saying to themselves, “Silicon Valley has start-ups like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Old Street also has a few start-ups. That must mean that Old Street is like Silicon Valley.” As they say this I picture them leaning back in their Chesterfields, hands clasped behind their heads, feeling awfully smug about the mental leap they’ve just made. Silicon Vally has become short-hand for any and all technology, just as Holliwood has become shorthand for the movie industry.

Of course, the idea that East London in any way resembles Silicon Valley shows a distinct lack of understanding about our industry. However it is incredibly flattering that the government are starting to wake up to the importance of the UK tech sector. In a recent report it was suggested that the UK Internet economy contributed 7.2% to the gross domestic product back in 2009, making it the fifth largest sector in the UK, and just two points behind the financial sector. While many other sectors have been struggling, the Internet has been booming.

The cynic in me may attribute this newfound interest in the web as simply a PR opportunity for the government. A way of aligning themselves with a booming part of our economy in the hope of getting some Halo effect. The more practical side of me hopes that the government are really starting to understand the value of the digital economy and invest appropriately. Sadly, while the plans for an East London Tech City are grand, I worry that they are missing the mark.

All Governments have the tendency to think big, and try to solve big problems with big initiatives. Governments also tend to think in a very linear way and don’t often engage in system thinking. As such, there is a certain amount of cargo cultism going on here. The Government understands that big companies like Google and Facebook have big offices in big science parks. So in order to encourage the next generation of UK start-ups they propose building big offices in big science parks. The problem is, I don’t believe that lack of 5,000 square foot offices in East London is necessarily the thing holding the Old Street start-up community back from global domination.

An East London Tech City may well encourage Google to expand or Facebook to set up a significant outpost in the UK. Especially if they get the kind of tax breaks other countries like the Republic of Ireland have giving in the past. However if these new offices are going to be anything less than administrative and sales centres, the large companies need a mass of highly skilled engineers and designers to populate them. At the moment our current education system is critically failing the technology industry, so the only place to find such people is amongst the very start-ups the government are trying to support. Some start-ups may end up being acquired for talent, but more will probably go out of business as their star developers get poached by Google for twice the market rate. As such, the short term effects of the Tech City could potentially be quite damaging. Like putting a large shark in a tank full of minnows and coming in the next morning, surprised to find that it’s eaten them all.

Rather than building a Cargo Cult technology park in order to summon down the great silvery gods from the sky (or in this case, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View), we need to take a more holistic view of the problem. Instead we need to look at the factors necessary to stimulate and grow an ecosystem. In short we need to create an artificial reef.

One of the fundamental things every marine biologist understands is the need for a nursery; a safe place for young animals to grow and learn, free from major predators. In the marine world this is often the mangrove forests. In the web world it should be the Universities, but is more often than not the small design agencies and in-house web teams. So one of the fundamental things the Government needs to do if they are serious about the digital economy is to protect and replenish these nurseries. So they need to invest in the creation of world class design and technology schools to rival those in the US, while at the same time raising the quality of courses across the board. They also need to make it easier for companies to take on Interns and office juniors, through funding and work experience programs.

When creating an artificial reef, it’s very easy to throw a few concrete blocks in the water in the hope of attracting marine life. However the wrong PH levels in the concrete and animals won’t touch it with a barge pole. Instead, you have to understand the types of habitat particular breeds of animals prefer, and create an environment to suite.

Building an industrial park on the Olympic Site is like building an artificial reef with the wrong PH levels. While some companies may be looking for large building in a big industrial park, that’s not the environment most start-ups are looking for.

Instead creative communities tend to form in areas with low cost, quirky offices in interesting parts of town. They have great independent coffee shops just around the corner, relaxed bars and nice restaurants by up and coming chefs. They have art galleries, independent cinemas and music venues; farmers markets, gastro pubs and small fashion retailers. The also have reasonable transport links and low rents. Places like Shoreditch, Bermondsey and now Dalston in London; Southpark, The Mission and DUMBO in the US.

The above description may sound like a cliché or a stereotype (and I am somewhat over egging the pudding here for effect), but if you want to manufacture a new creative hub on the site of the Olympic city you’d probably be better off funding art spaces and offering free rent to independent coffee shop owners than building a traditional enterprise park. Get your architects to create building of character out of brick and stone, rather than giant warehouse sheds. Focus on office space for small and medium sized companies as well as mega corps, and optimise for walking rather than driving. Take a leaf from Malmo council in Sweden, or the folks in Bristol and set up interesting incubators and arts spaces like Minc and the Watershed. Make sure there is high quality training to teach the new generation of technologists, while ensuring the start-up ideas can the funding and support they need.

In short, don’t try to build a scaled down Cargo Cult version of Silicon Valley. Instead create an environment where people can experiment and ideas can propagate. Not through enterprise parks and business centres but through bars and coffee shops. That’s where innovation really happens.

The app goldrush is over – it's time to apply some business sense 20 Apr 2011, 5:00 pm

The rise of smart devices like the iPhone and iPad has led to an application goldrush, with companies racing to stake their claims. In the early days we saw a few lucky pioneers strike gold with novelty apps. There were also a handful of independent developers and well-known brands that invested in user experience and captured the high end of the market.

However, as with most goldrushes, the obvious targets were depleted very quickly. Digital prospectors are arriving to find a very different market, one rife with competition and few obvious deposits to mine. Furthermore, our appetite for apps seems to be dwindling as we fall back on a few must-have staples.

Recent studies have shown that we tend to limit our use to a few core apps and the bulk of others are never opened. Also, smartphone use is still fairly low in the UK, making it difficult to gain scale. So despite newspapers and magazines hailing the iPad as the saviour of the publishing industry, and blue-chip companies rushing to create trophy offerings, does it really make business sense to jump on the app bandwagon?

For a lot of companies the answer is no. Good app design takes a level of time and investment that’s hard to justify commercially. Only the international brands have the mindshare and level of traffic they need to guarantee scale. Even then, most rush out poorly designed and undifferentiated products with no real user need. Who, for example, loves a particular generic high street brand enough to download its dedicated store finder when you can get the information from Google?

One common trend is to create near-carbon copies of your website. These apps are often paid-for in an attempt to claw back some revenue from previously free content. However, this is rarely successful because consumers are savvy and mobile usage patterns are quite specific. If you’re thinking of creating an app that’s almost identical to your web experience, why create it at all? Mobile browsers have come a long way and recent advances in HTML and CSS mean you can now create a mobile-optimised version of your site, which is likely to reach more people anyway, for a fraction of the price.

I’m not suggesting that companies shouldn’t commission apps, we just need to be careful about what we build and why. There’s still gold in them there hills, but it’s going to be a lot more difficult to find and a lot more expensive to extract. We need to view apps as a business rather than a faddish get-rich-quick scheme.

This article was originally published in New Media Age.