Long time no post – again. I’ve been busy pack­ing up my life and mov­ing from Bris­tol to sunny Corn­wall, where I will study the final year of my degree. Not a bad place to be as you can see in these pho­tos of my new home. I took this oppor­tun­ity and sor­ted out all the things that needed sort­ing and that I never had the time for. Now all my boxes, books, folders, hard drives and whatever else was on my to-do list for a long time are clean and tidy and everything is pre­pared for a new start in Falmouth.

I am cur­rently sit­ting on my lovely bal­cony most of the time, enjoy­ing the sun and the sea views while try­ing to get a few things done. There are a few web pro­jects I’m cur­rently work­ing on and I’m try­ing to make a start on my final year read­ing as well. I’m plan­ning to have my per­sonal web­site redesigned before the start of term too, so I can fully con­cen­trate on my final year work.

So this is just a short update to say that I’m still alive, I’m keep­ing busy and I’m enjoy­ing my life. Fol­low me on Twit­ter for all the latest updates.

It’s been just over two weeks since I launched the User Centred Design poster. The responses have been over­whelm­ing. I want to say thanks to the nearly 8000 vis­it­ors and more than 300 people who showed their appre­ci­ation through the face­book like but­ton and the count­less retweets. A big thanks to every­one who sent me their feed­back and of course thank you to all those who sent a dona­tion. It’s great to know that my poster will be put to use in design stu­dios, UX and UCD depart­ments in the UK, Spain, the Neth­er­lands, Ger­many, Switzer­land and the United States to raise aware­ness, edu­cate and stim­u­late dis­cus­sion about User Centred Design.

Many people have blogged about the poster. A par­tic­u­lar post that caught my eye can be found on michaeljpastor’s Amp­lify. He writes

The other aspect to it that I love is his public-broadcating-like pledge but­ton placed dead cen­ter on the ini­tial view. And hence my bur­ied lead — I think this is the future of “cap­it­al­ism” in the inform­a­tion age (it won’t replace it entirely, but will broaden it).

I agree with him. Embra­cing gen­er­os­ity and vol­un­tary fin­an­cial acknow­ledge­ment of good con­tent is cer­tainly some­thing that will trans­form the future of cap­it­al­ism, espe­cially in an age where the old model of cap­it­al­ism looks like a big fail whale and Open Source mod­els seem more attract­ive than ever. On that note — if you’re in Bris­tol later this month — be sure to check out Clay Shirky at the Water­shed.

I have released the poster under a CC license for exactly this reason. I want people to share, use and build upon the work. I believe that this is driv­ing innov­a­tion a lot more effect­ively than cling­ing to some obscure pat­ents or copy­rights. Juan J. Martín Beltrán has sent me an e-mail with his amend­ments to the poster. He has actu­ally trans­lated the entire poster into Span­ish! He did this because he believes this would make it easier to under­stand for the Span­ish com­munity. I agree and think this is abso­lutely amaz­ing. As soon as I have some spare time, I’ll type­set it prop­erly and make it avail­able for down­load­ing. Great work, Juanjo!

A some­what amus­ing ques­tion that was asked a lot is “Did you mis­spell the word centered on pur­pose?”. Yes I actu­ally did. Because I live in the UK, I used Brit­ish spelling through­out the poster and the web­site. In Brit­ish Eng­lish, the word centred is spelled like this. Read this rather funny blog post by Jacob Cass, he explains it all. If you like, feel free to send me a ver­sion using US Eng­lish spelling.

I have received some great and encour­aging feed­back and those of you who’ve been to the site more than once (10% accord­ing to the stats) might have noticed some minor changes. First of all Nick Dymond, a Team Rub­ber col­league, poin­ted out some access­ib­il­ity issues and poin­ted me to the WAVE tool­bar and the WCAG Con­trast checker, two very use­ful Fire­fox addons for test­ing the access­ib­il­ity of your web­site. One of the issues with the web­site was low con­trast res­ult­ing from the light blue back­ground and the white text. Thanks to Wouter Walmink and oth­ers who poin­ted this out. In the poster design I actu­ally con­sidered issues regard­ing low vis­ion and col­our blind­ness, the web­site how­ever is a dif­fer­ent story. The col­ours used in the print ver­sion don’t simply trans­late to web design. Using the con­trast checker, I found out more details about the ideal ratio of back­ground col­our to text col­our. Although the tool doesn’t con­sider images, it gave me a good idea how much con­trast was needed to make the design more legible. It’s still not per­fect (the ‘per­fect’ con­trast would be black and white any­way) but the amend­ments I made now are a big improve­ment and a good compromise.

Another amend­ment worth pay­ing atten­tion to is in the cred­its. Eva-Lotta informed me that the ice­berg meta­phor ori­gin­ally stems from her col­league at Skype, the won­der­ful Steve ‘Buzz’ Pearce. He used the meta­phor in his and Andy Clarke’s great talk ‘Brand Exper­i­ence vs User Exper­i­ence’ at FOWD Lon­don 2008. I highly recom­mend check­ing it out on Slideshare.

If you were con­sid­er­ing to get a copy of the poster and haven’t done it yet, the prints you can get from now on are A1 off­set litho prin­ted on 135gsm coated paper with glossy UV var­nish. They are beau­ti­ful. I’ll send them out rolled in a postal tube. The poster is actu­ally designed to work well as a fol­ded give-away like pamph­let meas­ur­ing 210 x 210mm but it obvi­ously works equally well as a poster on your wall.

Thanks again to every­one who con­trib­uted! I really appre­ci­ate it.

I’ve learnt a lot in the last three semesters which I spent abroad in Switzer­land and Ger­many as well as in the UK, study­ing, intern­ing and work­ing in dif­fer­ent fields of the cre­at­ive industries.

A digital media mod­ule which I under­took in Zurich ignited a pas­sion for usab­il­ity and exper­i­ence design. Work­ing in the pub­lish­ing industry in Munich gave me an insight into how old and new media work together (or some­times not) and taught me tra­di­tional, ana­logue user inter­ac­tion devices such as typo­graphy, lay­out or visual storytelling. When I returned to Bris­tol I was lucky enough to work with City ID, a renowned inform­a­tion design stu­dio whose work I’ve admired since I first came to this city. They are a multi-disciplinary team of inform­a­tion design­ers, plan­ners, urb­an­ists, inter­ac­tion design­ers, car­to­graph­ers and product design­ers. That’s an incred­ible mix of cre­ativ­ity, know­ledge and stra­tegic think­ing which I had the oppor­tun­ity to feed from.

I had the chance to dip in and out of dif­fer­ent inter­est­ing pro­jects, pick­ing up use­ful know­ledge and inspir­ing ideas to take and research fur­ther. When I was offered the oppor­tun­ity to under­take a per­sonal project–which would make a good port­fo­lio piece and some­thing to take home after the experience–I decided to com­bine what inspired me in Zurich and what I had learned at City ID and cre­ate an edu­ca­tional poster out of it.

The vis­it­ing lec­turer who taught on the digital media mod­ule in Zurich is a user exper­i­ence designer at Skype and she’s not only very know­ledgable but also very cre­at­ive (check out her recent present­a­tion on sketch­notes). Her lec­ture about the UX design pro­cess was based on the model of an ice­berg. The visual part of a design is only the tip of it, the actual pro­cess lies under­neath the sur­face. I took this model and star­ted read­ing into Jesse James Garret’s ideas and mod­els described in his book “The Ele­ments of User Exper­i­ence”. Talk­ing to the inter­ac­tion design­ers and inform­a­tion plan­ners at City ID and read­ing through many of the great books in their lib­rary made me real­ise that there are a lot of mod­els and ways to describe this pro­cess all under­pinned with a myriad of prin­ciples, meth­ods and techniques–but they all come down to a cyc­lical nature. A user centred design pro­cess is an iter­at­ive cycle where every step is eval­u­ated against ini­tially iden­ti­fied require­ments of the users and then changed and improved until these require­ments are met. For every stage of this pro­cess there are vari­ous prin­ciples and tech­niques that can be employed to move onto the next stage. At City ID I learnt that it is cru­cial to con­sider how a user inter­acts with your product. They design ori­ent­a­tion and way­find­ing solu­tions for cit­ies around the world and the aim is to cre­ate an iden­tity or sense of place through the exper­i­ence that people have with the sys­tem. It is import­ant to go through the inform­a­tion require­ments at every stage of a user’s jour­ney to make sure that people get exactly the inform­a­tion they need at any given point fol­low­ing the prin­ciple of pro­gress­ive disclosure.

Inter­est­ingly this also applies to web­design or even edit­or­ial design. Work­ing at the magazine in Munich, I exper­i­enced how a reader’s “jour­ney” is care­fully planned and how visual cues, nar­rat­ives, con­ven­tions as well as break­ing with con­ven­tions impact on the reader’s exper­i­ence. A user centred design pro­cess is a uni­ver­sal prin­ciple and the key to an effect­ive, effi­cient, enga­ging and intu­it­ive product, inter­face or ser­vice in any field of design.

I’m very grate­ful that I had the oppor­tun­ity to learn all this so far and to visu­al­ise the res­ults of my learn­ing. I’ve only just star­ted to unravel the world of usab­il­ity and exper­i­ence design and I’m sure that I will learn a lot more in years to come. After I’ve fin­ished my degree next year, I’d love to study either Inform­a­tion Design or User Exper­i­ence Design at MA level.

I’ve set up a micros­ite to give you more inform­a­tion on the UCD poster pro­ject. You can down­load the poster for free as PDF or JPEG. You can also get a prin­ted copy in A1 when you con­trib­ute a dona­tion towards the cost of print­ing. What’s left over goes towards my edu­ca­tion. The poster is released under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons license, so feel free to share it, use it or improve it as long as it’s non-commercial and with attribution.

Thanks again to Eva-Lotta for the insight­ful work­shops in Zurich and City ID for the exper­i­ence and oppor­tun­ity. You’ve star­ted something.