Note — — 152 words

Media — Web

Scotsman screenshot

It’s no wonder newspaper websites are in trouble. Their latest scheme is to “lock” content by turning it into squiggles unless you watch at least 6 seconds of an advert. Needless to say, this is a horrible experience, and only makes it all the more likely that I’ll turn away from certain websites.

I’m afraid to say that I know I’m going to have a dreadful time any time I try to read anything on the Scotsman or any other Johnston Press website. Every time, I am bombarded with a cacophony of offensive adverts, which grind my computer to a halt. And when they deign to show me the content I came for, more often than not it’s badly written, and clearly a rush-job by a stressed-out writer being made to churn out any old crap in the name of volume.

Why would I bother following a link to the Scotsman website again?

Linknote — — 131 words

Technology — User experience

The sound of silence: What we’re not saying about Siri and her AI gal pals

Why are digital assistants almost always given female-sounding voices?

While stakeholder preference might sound like a perfectly good reason at first, it hides an ugly reality. To make this clear, let me tell you a story about a talented young woman who I managed. She designed voice features for our clients’ prototypes. Although she created a voice that was meant to be genderless, the client kept referring to the voice in feminine terms. In other words, he heard what he expected to hear.

…BMW learned the hard way that female voices aren’t always the right route to take when German drivers of its 5 Series vehicles complained about “taking directions from a woman.” Yes, really.

Linknote — — 191 words

Business — Digital

Platforms, agile, trust, teams and werewolves

> Sometimes you go to conferences or meetups and they feel like a bit of a chore. You end up listening to a lot of PR spin from people who only want to share the best good news they’ve got. They’re usually under pressure to show their best side, and to sell their own success. We get why that happens, but it can be a dull experience if you’re in the audience.

This point from Giles Turnbull at Public Digital chimes with something that has been on my mind a bit recently.

People often talk about “failing fast” or being “unafraid to fail”. But those same people are often suspiciously unwilling to speak about their failures.

In a way that is understandable. But it would be good to hear more people genuinely opening up about the things that have gone wrong. Don’t just constantly trumpet the things that are going great (or the things that aren’t going great, but you *say* they are). If it’s true that you learn from failure, help others by sharing that — as well as your success stories.

Linknote — — 175 words

Current affairs — Technology

Broadband speed map reveals Britain’s new digital divide

It turns out that it is not just rural areas that are suffering due to BT/Openreach’s inability install broadband infrastructure fit for the 2010s, never mind the future.

The UK’s status as a fibre laggard has been the subject of intense debate within the telecoms industry, with only 4 per cent of residential and small business premises connected to full-fibre networks capable of delivering ultrafast speeds, compared with 80 per cent of units in Portugal.

It transpires that some of the slowest postcodes are within our largest cities, including London and Edinburgh.

With rural areas and second cities saying they have been left behind in the race to install ultrafast broadband networks, it is surprising to see that areas of London, including Kensington, Millwall on the Isle of Dogs and Rotherhithe, have clusters of postcodes with average speeds below the minimum required by the government. Central Manchester is a broadband blackspot, as is the Baltic Triangle in the heart of Liverpool, according to the postcode-level data.

Linknote — — 98 words

Media — Music — Technology — User experience

Annoying online ads cost business

Results from a study of users of Pandora has quantified the effect of shoving adverts in users’ faces. As part of the experiment, a section of users were served fewer ads than normal, and another section were served more ads than normal.

…after 1.5 years of being exposed to the experimental conditions, people did use the service more, the fewer ads they were served. At the end of the experiment:

  • The low-ad group listened for 1.7% more hours weekly than the control group.
  • The high-ad group listened for 2.8% fewer hours weekly than the control group.

Linknote — — 111 words

Digital — Media

Guardian Media Group digital revenues outstrip print for first time

The company’s annual report, which covers the 12 months to April 2018, shows the Guardian website attracted an average of 155m monthly unique browsers, up from 140m the year before, with an increased focus on retaining regular readers rather than chasing traffic by going viral on social networks.

Digital revenues — which include reader contributions and online advertising income — grew 15% to £108.6m, as income from the print newspaper and events business fell by 10% to £107.5m.

Could it be that — shock horror — focusing on quality rather than vapid clickbait is the sustainable business model journalism was looking for all along?

Linknote — — 173 words

Human-centred approaches — Web

Four modes of seeking information and how to design for them

This is an old article, but some good brain food for those information architects out there. A good primer on some different ways people try to find content.

In my work on intranets and complex websites, I noticed a range of situations where people didn’t necessarily know what they needed to know. Additionally, when I opened my browser history to look for examples from recently-visited sites, I noticed that the majority of my own time was spent trying to find things that I had already discovered. These two modes didn’t fit into the concepts of known-item and exploratory information seeking. I call these “don’t know what you need to know” and re-finding.

I spent a while letting this rattle around my head, talking with IAs and designers, and realized that most only thought in terms of known-item searching. When discussing the other types of tasks, they’d ask with a horrified look, “So how do you design for that?”

Linknote — — 136 words

Human-centred approaches — Society — Technology

Thermostats, locks and lights: digital tools of domestic abuse

How smart devices are being used by perpetrators of domestic abuse.

We are becoming increasingly aware of some of the darker side of technology. Perhaps this is a challenge to designers and technologists — to ensure that their products can’t be used in this sort of way.

The people who called into the help hotlines and domestic violence shelters said they felt as if they were going crazy.

One woman had turned on her air-conditioner, but said it then switched off without her touching it. Another said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another told an abuse help line that she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there.