A quick Google pulls up a bucket full of results and even entire websites dedicated to answering this, a sure sign that UX is now accepted as a mainstream phrase rather than a bit of geek jargon. There’s even articles debating the death of UX, although that’s ridiculous in my opinion. Frankly that’s what you’ll get from most of these pages, opinions, some ridiculous, but many well-informed and well argued, and yet a clear definition remains intangible, a bit like the internet itself. This quote doesn’t make a lot of sense, (go to the site, it’s completely devoid of context) but that only serves to more clearly illustrate my point;

“User Experience is a focus, a thread that runs through all of our disciplines, and which no discipline owns or controls.”

It’s perhaps not a bad thing that UX is such tricky term to nail down, since we’re dealing with a discipline in it’s relative infancy and is continuing to grow and change as the digital landscape continues to expand. But it doesn’t help the non-digital-industry-types understand what it means, or more importantly, how it can help their website be more successful.

Sifting through the debates, the rants and the hyperbole is no easy task, but simply put, User Experience is planning for the end user or “the human side of human-computer interaction”

In a couple of weeks a few of us from Soak will be attending the UX Brighton 2010 conference, so further ideas will undoubtedly flow from then, however for now here’s a few more thoughts.

Even though the term “User Experience” is thrown around like it’s a unique area of expertise, it crosses over with other areas of web design; Information Architecture (IA), Accessibility and Usability, which are all part and parcel of any comprehensive design process.

User Experience should be considered at every stage of a website’s production, from inception through planning and design to development, launch and maintenance beyond. It’s not a bolt-on service, it’s an integral part of building a website.

UX results are difficult to measure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. A better user experience enhances the perception of the site and by extension the brand, another qualification that is pretty abstract but immeasurably useful in harnessing customer loyalty.

This encounter, nicely summarised on DesignWeek, has prompted a new frenzy of blogging and twittering on whether or not information graphics has become just another fashion trend.

Recently info-graphics has been on the rise, not just in the traditional, data analysis kind-of fashion, but as a means of self expression, firstly Nicholas Feltron’s much admired and copied annual statistical report which has almost inevitably led to Phil Gyford’s spoof take on personal data capture.
Whilst it’s definitely a trending style in design at the moment, but displaying information in a more accessible, a more designed way, is as old as the pen and paper.

The Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library I visited, co-incidentally, last weekend, showcased maps through the ages, comparing the way that artists have subverted the map’s primary function, of navigation, to promote political and social agendas and messages. It’s a clear lesson from history on the power of design to mis-inform.

Here’s my take, graphic design is at it’s purest, the communication of a message. The message for info-graphics is, most likely but not always, data, and making that data easy to read and understand. It’s the classic case of function over form, ie. anything that gets in the way of the user understanding the information should be sacrificed in favour of usability.

The design process involves making decisions about what to emphasise and what to leave out, and it’s vital that when visualizing data that the core message, what the numbers actually mean. That’s not to say, of course, that info-graphics can’t be beautiful, McCandless’ book ‘Information is Beautiful‘ has a prime position on my bookshelf, but that when artful styling starts to cloud the message then all hope is lost.

As a bonus for reading this whole article this tongue-in-cheek analysis of the Newsnight debate has appeared here, courtesy of mrlerone.

Firstly I want to see a better quality of typography. Good type embodies everything that being a graphic designer should be about, it communicates subtlety but powerfully, it enhances the overall mood and tone and it’s a little bit nerdy. Good typography requires attention to detail, a great trait for a designer. The Hootenanny promo newspaper by the graduates from Lincoln School of Art and Design shows a high quality of typographic skill.

Graduates often moan about leaving uni without many industry-orientated skills (I know I did), but I realize now how important it is to hone your creative skills while in a ‘safe’ non-commercial environment. I want to see more students taking the opportunity their final year affords to just go wild and try for the big idea, something unexpected and outrageous. Computer programs and working processes can be learnt on the job, but the confidence to be creative and original is something to be truly valued.

Enabling PHP5 on 1&1 hosting

Add the following line to the .htaccess file in your Web root:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

1&1 = 3

The problem only affected PHP pages, or .html pages with PHP contents enabled, where the friendly URL matched the file name. For instance, “someurl.com/monkey” would work for a page called monkey.html, would also work if redirected by mod_rewrite to a page called monkey1.php, but returned a default 404 page if the page was called monkey.php. This FAQ page looked promising, but didn’t solve our problem – there are two solutions, neither one perfect, but acceptable for small sites.

The first is to call your pages something other than the friendly URL, then use your .htaccess file to explicitly redirect each URL to its differently named page, such as:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^monkey$ /monkey-1.php

The second allows you to keep the file names as they are. The key (as devised by Steve) is to create a directory in the Web root named after each page – these directories can be empty or contain files, it doesn’t matter, they just have to exist.

Hopefully, this explanation will save a few people from tearing their hair out! Let us know if you have any other solutions to this odd problem.

With the axe poised to fall across key services, it’s a definite concern that there’ll be a collective tightening of belts in terms design and marketing spend. This blog from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones warns that the government is now looking to shut down “up to 75% of government websites” in a bid to save costs. However I think that the public sector should be looking to turn this into an opportunity to invite in new ideas, rather than just cut services in such a knee-jerk manner.

The drop in Corporation tax will be of help to small businesses, like us here at Soak, who seem to be the big winners of the budget. Hopefully this will drive a more open and competitive design market with companies (and the afore mentioned public sector bosses) looking for alternatives to the big London-based agencies to meet their needs.

According to a report by the DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport),

“The UK has the largest creative sector in the EU, and relative to
GDP probably the largest in the world.“

Coupled with the previous government’s pledges to create ‘Digital Britain’, a commitment which will hopefully be honoured by the new administration, means that there is plenty to be positive about, even if we as consumers can expect some tough times ahead.

The discussion that inspired this article can be found in full on here or the Design Council have rather handily posted a summary on their site here.

Building HTML5 apps with PhoneGap

“PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian with a unified JavaScript API.”

It’s not immediately obvious that the applications you create run in the native browser of the mobile device – once you realise this, things make much more sense. Rather than compiling your HTML/CSS/Javascript into an application, it creates an application package (still containing your HTML/CSS/Javascript) that you can then look at deploying and marketing through the Apple App Store and Android Market.

After a bit of research, the server-side team were getting to grips with PhoneGap. PhoneGap allows your JavaScript-savvy Web developer to call native functionality not normally accessible to a Web page running in a browser. This includes basic notifications and vibration, orientation, sms, telephony, and most exciting of all: geolocation and the iphone accelerometer.

Android apps

Rather than worry about your application becoming lost in the never-ending tide of iphone apps, you can open yourself to a wider audience, on the growing Android platform. Here’s a guide to getting PhoneGap working on Android (nb. the instructions in 10b seemed to apply, despite working with PhoneGap 0.9.1).

Once you have a PhoneGap application running on the Android Virtual Device and see the effects of changing the application HTML/CSS/Javascript, it becomes much easier to play around with your ideas, and build functioning applications.

Now, all we need is a shiny new Android, iPhone and iPad for testing!

But it did succeed in getting the whole country talking about the Olympics, and again splitting opinion seemed to be the aim with the recent introduction of the Olympic and Paralympic mascots by design agency Iris, which seemed to get their own post on just about every design blog around (so I’m not going to post anymore pictures of them), with several comparisons being drawn between the two amorphous shapes and the timely partnering of Clegg and Cameron. The two mascots seem to be the next step in 2012 embracing the digital space with their own microsite and individual twitter feeds and facebook fanpages. Early feedback seems to be adults don’t like them, but kids (ie. their target audience) love them.

Hopefully this is setting the tone for the way the Olympics will be appearing online, not as polarising daft-punk-inspired blobs, but as a multi-channel, all encompassing digital strategy. The 2012 website already boasts in impressive array of features, including  webcams of some of the venues (mostly shots of steel frames covered in tarpaulin at the moment), a timelined map of events, photos and information from all sites around the UK, as well as images, videos and blogs.

As the Games approaches I’d like to see the Olympic team continuing to feed this online hype and build momentum. The biggest danger is that people will simply get bored if 2012 is continually being shoved in their faces. It’s already been confirmed that YouTube will stream highlights of the Games around the world. We’ll have to wait and see how the organisers plan to capitalise on all the online media to make 2012 a bench-mark for the Olympics in the digital age.

The new Google Font Directory hosts a collection of Web fonts that can be used in your pages, effectively the same service Typekit offers, in conjunction with the Google Font API.

Last year, I trialled Typekit and posted a brief summary of its strengths and weaknesses as compared to existing stop-gap font replacement technologies sIFR and Cufon. The Google Font API shares some of the cons I listed in that article, with the crucial exception that all fonts within the Font Directory are entirely free to use.

It’s nice to see Typekit co-operating in the venture, though I do wonder how they plan to differentiate their pay-for service from Google’s free one, once the directory has matured and a few bugs I experienced while testing IE8 are ironed out. The API is incredibly easy to use, and the five-minute tutorial is well worth following.

I’m sticking with Cufon for now, but it’s massively encouraging to see Google putting their considerable weight behind this technology.

However it seems that the most active use of the digital space has been to satirise the whole campaign. Try as they might politicians just don’t have the charisma of say, Barack Obama, to really pull off an effective digital campaign, and given the UK’s proud tradition, think Spitting Image, of satirising politics, it’s not really that surprising that we’ve so gleefully embraced the opportunity to have a few laughs.

Clifford Singer’s website mydavidcameron.com has received a huge amount of publicity for its spoofing of the Conservative party’s poster campaigns. The site has received some 250,000 unique visitors and over 1,200 poster submissions, showing clearly not only how much people enjoy a good laugh, but how keen they are to get involved.

The sudden popularity of Nick Clegg after the first tv debate and the subsequent spin offensive by  some tabloid papers brought a swift and satirical response from the twitter community leading to the phrase #nickcleggsfault becoming a top trending topic and apparently accounting for  “a staggering 0.6% of all twitter traffic”.

And finally, just two days ago Gordon Brown was accidentally overhead by reporters describing a Labour supporter as a ‘bigoted woman’ sparking a media frenzy. Google currently has nearly 2 million results for ‘gordon brown bigoted woman’ and Youtube has  just under 600 videos. The spoofs have already started to appear with the return of Keyboard Cat.

The British have always had a tendency not to take things too seriously and it’s nice to see that tradition continuing into the internet age, but I worry that in the past where political satire was restricted to those with actual political views strong enough for them to go to the trouble of creating a poster or sketch show, it’s become a bit of a free-for-all.

The final spoof seems to be that while these virals start off as a political comment on the General Election, they turn into everyone trying to say something stupid or funny in a game of one-up-man-ship without any sort of relevance to the original statement, a problem Clifford Singer raised at the Progressive London conference in January.

Has all this satire served to raise politics up higher in the public consciousness, or has it served only to feed our apathy about government? All will be revealed next week when the voter numbers start rolling in.

Re-branding yourself is often acknowledged as one of the hardest tasks designer’s can undertake and so it proved with us. The biggest challenge was bringing a clean modern style to the brand, without losing the fluid, organic quality that had inspired the original design.

Early on the decision was made to use a smooth vector output for the logo rather than the hand-drawn quality we had used before. However all designing begins off screen, as shown by these initial (very rough) sketches.

The scamps soon became three iterations, each with their own good and bad points, but at this stage there was a clear favourite. This version, based on the font Tartine, had a nice smooth, organic feel to it, whilst offering a sort of retro charm that is very in vogue at the moment.

It still lacked a real sense of identity though and so we set about reshaping the letter-forms. We extended the ‘k’ to form a wave shape and drawing inspiration from the original Soak splat we introduced two dots above. A tricky re-working of the ‘a’ and we were almost there.

Of course the logo is just the central pivot of the brand, but from developing it we were able to identify the values we wanted to express the rest of the site; clean and modern, but with a slight quirkiness, aspirations we think we’ve just about managed to capture.