Author: Simon
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Learning Technologies 2018
In 2015, I attended the Learning Technologies show at Olympia, London, to try to better understand what was happening in an area adjacent my world of intranets, and what could be learned to improve the already award-winning Barclays Global Curriculum project. What I found was less adjacent, and more parallel. It felt like I was in…
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Intranet Now 2016
Photo courtesy of Intranet Now Two weeks after the intranet heavyweights Gerry McGovern and James Robertson headlined Interact’s Interaction conference, Wedge Black and Brian Lamb took a different approach with Intranet Now. The event zipped along with shorter-form talks between 7 and 22 minutes, and the only opportunities for questions during the afternoon World Café and…
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GOV.UK’s Design Principles are big news for intranets
This week, the UK’s Government Digital Service unveiled a list of ten Design Principles. These are intended for for people building digital services under the GOV.UK domain, but I hope they will prove significant for absolutely anyone creating websites, intranets or other digital services, especially for those of us in-house. The principles are: Start with…
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Book Review: Designing Intranets by James Robertson
I’ve just posted this review onto Amazon (permalink) and it makes sense to publish it here too. A great value distillation of years spent designing and understanding intranets, James Robertson has packed his book with real-world intranet screenshots and experiences. It’s the kind of book that’s handy to have prominently displayed on your desk or…
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Pebble, Rock, Stone
This is a blog post that has lived with me for several years, and this version originates from August 2010. Computing has gone mobile, it has moved over more than half a century from room-filling beasts, through so-called mini computers, to the desktop PC and other static devices, through the laptop and onto the mobile…
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Happy 0th Birthday to Me
How nice for My Offers to think of me on my birthday, but I’m sure I remember 30+ birthdays, and really don’t fancy being born again. Thinking what’s going on behind the scenes, they have mislaid or lost my year of birth (not sure how that can happen) and their email-generating script hasn’t been set…
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Is anyone policing your out-of-office comments?
How does your organisation represent itself in its emails? Do you have a brand document that declares in minutiae the absolute font, size, colour and wording of signatures? Do you leave it to managers or individuals? I’ve lost count of the number of job titles I’ve given myself over the years. Certainly, consistency is good…
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Tactile Phones – forget about touch and haptics
What do you really need from a phone? How do you really use it? This is something I photoshopped a while back and forgot about, but it seems quite relevant just ahead of the 3G iPhone arriving in shops. Pic 1 is of the LG KF700, another phone trying something different, in this case a…
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The gold rush to new extensions – Gandi Bar
Like many others, I’ve got mixed feelings about the “relaxing” of top-level domain names. There are great potential domain extensions like .movie, .book, .sony, .apple and many more. Some leave me puzzled, would I prefer myrestaurant.ldn or myrestaurant.london? Some will leave me baffled at their arrogance, ignorance or avarice. No doubt, there will be lots…
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Form design – simple mistake
For good or bad, or probably just being plain nosey, I find myself attacking a questionnaire on my radio listening habits. It’s a long and fiddly one, and just when I find myself getting towards the end, I get thrown by this: A cold viewing, I suspect, would make absolute sense. However, I’ve just been…
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