Duncan Stephen

Linknote — 12 January 2018 — 166 words

Net promoter score considered harmful (and what UX professionals can do about it)

You have probably been asked in a customer satisfaction survey how likely you would be to recommend a company to a friend or colleague. This is used to measure the net promoter score, and it has become very popular.

Here, Jared Spool has comprehensively outlined why net promoter score is not as valuable as businesses hope.

As usual, the problem is that net promoter score is a tool that has been sold as a silver bullet — “This number is the one number you need to grow. It’s that simple and that profound.” And businesses looking for a silver bullet have lapped it up.

But of course, reality is much more complex than that. Net promoter score, when applied consistently by a business, probably does have some value. But it should be used as just one tool of many that you should be using to ensure you are meeting your customers’ needs.

Linknote — 11 January 2018 — 21 words

Society

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

This fascinating article explains why everything is so much harder than you might think.

Linknote — 10 January 2018 — 143 words

Human-centred approaches — Technology

Tech has a diversity problem — so this designer went to Kentucky

I am interested in how, despite the (theoretical) potential of technology improvements to make remote working easier, technology jobs still seem to cluster in particular areas.

Design firms and technology firms are heavily concentrated in cities on the west and east coasts, particularly in San Francisco, LA, and New York, limiting job opportunities to those who have the resources to move to, and live in, such expensive metropolises. And with so many designers living in urban centers, few have the perspective that comes from living in rural areas.

This can be viewed as yet another of the tech industry’s diversity problems.

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, has all of its employees working remotely. Automattic’s John Maeda is trying to engage young people “that fall outside the normal Silicon Valley culture”.

Linknote — 9 January 2018 — 104 words

Digital

The significance of the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has now stopped preserving all public tweets. In the words of Dan Cohen in this article, “The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have.”

I am amused at the idea of future historians having a highly detailed record of everything on Twitter up to the year Donald Trump got elected, and the year before Brexit is due to happen. What a cliffhanger.

Linknote — 8 January 2018 — 49 words

Digital — Technology

“Username or password incorrect” is bullshit

There’s a security best practice where sign ins aren’t supposed to say “password is incorrect”…

But, as this article points out, this is nonsense — because it is so trivial for anyone to find out whether a username is incorrect anyway.

Linknote — 3 January 2018 — 57 words

Business — Service design

Government Digital Service: Ten tips for getting the best from workshops

Workshops with our department colleagues give us a joint view of our challenges and a shared sense of ownership – but planning and running them is a real skill. To help with your next workshop, we’ve put together our top 10 tips from 6 months of intensive workshopping.

Linknote — 2 January 2018 — 80 words

Digital

The great emoji debate

The Economist considers whether the Unicode consortium is wasting its time trying to standardise emoji when it could be focusing on “more scholarly matters” such as adding characters from ancient scripts.

Given the popularity — almost the ubiquity — of emoji in modern-day popular culture, I would argue that standardising this form of communication is much more important than trying to digitise seldom-used or dead scripts. Even if that means standardising a frowning pile of poo.

Linknote — 30 December 2017 — 64 words

Technology

Google Maps’s moat

A brilliant analysis of recent improvements to Google Maps, and why Google is so far ahead of Apple.

Just two years after it started adding them, Google already had the majority of buildings in the US. And now after five years, it has my rural hometown — an area it still hasn’t Street View’d (after 10+ years of Street View).

Linknote — 29 December 2017 — 82 words

Society

Stephen Bush: On the Tube, I saw the father I’d never met – and was happy to find that I had nothing to say to him

An extraordinary piece of writing by Stephen Bush, about bumping into someone who didn’t know he was his father.

I’ve learned to enjoy the upsides of having an absent father. One is that you don’t have flaws like everyone else, merely kinks that the missing parent would have ironed out had he stuck around.