“London Shop Fronts” – Emily Webber

Emily Webber from the Government Digital Service delivered my favourite talk of the evening. It wasn’t about her work, but about her hobby, documenting quirky shop fronts around London.

London Shop Fronts website

She beautifully described the way that they document changes in London and in society — pointing out, for example, that most launderettes seem to have a design and typography style that dates from before washing machines were ubiquitous in the home. It is like whatever made a launderette look like one got frozen in time at the point they became less important.

She described her site as “a collection and obsession”, and half-joked “I’ve read a bit about collecting and I won’t go into the psychological problems it can indicate.” He typed as he shuffled past his thousands of CDs clogging up the living room that he never plays anymore.

Emily described them as the backdrop of the everyday, saying they define the area you are in. London has a rich history, and these shop fronts are the products of this history, sometimes showing multiple layers. She pointed out one photo in particular, of a shop front that started off as an off licence and which now features tiny little holes where the shop also runs mini cabs, a nail bar and a hairdressers.

Emily’s project reminded me of Katherine Green’s photo-record of some of the older shops that exist on Wood Street in Walthamstow, where I used to live. Katherine got some of the longest-serving shop owners on the street to pose in their businesses, nearly all of which represented a type of shop that is rapidly disappearing. In fact, in the 6 or so years since the project, at least two of the businesses have folded, and the characters that ran them have disappeared from the local community.

This shop has closed since Katherine’s Wood Street project

Mind you, we do still have a 99p store that also doubles up as a Bible and religious text shop, which has got to be pretty rare. And we have a Viking Store now.

Emily Webber’s London Shop Fronts site has apparently nearly 2,000 picture now, classified into specific types, and looks like the kind of place you could lose hours of internet time to.

This is one of a series of blog posts about 300 Seconds. You can download all of my notes — including four blog posts exclusive to the book — for free for your Kindle, iPhone/iPad or as a PDF.

“Being a Social Introvert” – Melinda Seckington

Melinda Seckington, who helps run a gazillion events and blogs at Miss Geeky, gave a very honest assessment of what it is like to be an introverted person who ends up doing lots of high profile things in social environments. I nodded sagely along to a lot of what she said, whilst simultaneously huddling into my laptop and taking furious notes so that nobody would speak to me.

Melinda says that because she does so many public things, people are surprised to hear her describe herself as a “massive introvert”. A lot of the time people confuse introvert/extrovert with shy/outgoing, when it is more about what helps you recharge and regain focus.

I don’t think anything has ever explained it better than this cartoon, but Melinda had a lovely analogy of the introvert as the “social caterpillar” at tech events. We might have a tendency to go into our cocoons, but our antenna are finely tuned and during an event we’ll be actively participating online. We’ll be the people active on Twitter because it allows us to take part in an event and be social without the pressure of actually meeting new people face-to-face. Like caterpillars we consume a lot, listening and analysing events as they go along.

Like, I don’t know, obsessively blogging them and then turning that into ebooks with cross-references back to other events we’ve attended.

And occasionally, Melinda said, we have our moment to fly, as she did by standing up and talking at 300 Seconds.

The lowest thing I have ever done at a conference in order to avoid having to make conversation between sessions so I can have my introversion recharge moment? Pretending to be on the phone to my mum whilst in the queue for food…

Next…

Next up on the blog I’ll have my last set of notes from 300 Seconds — Emily Webber’s brilliant talk about her collection of photographs of London Shop Fronts…

This is one of a series of blog posts about 300 Seconds. You can download all of my notes — including four blog posts exclusive to the book — for free for your Kindle, iPhone/iPad or as a PDF.

“Agile Development and User Experience – best friends or bitter enemies?” – Darci Dutcher

Darci Dutcher describes herself as an “Agile UXer” and works for the company behind Moonpig. She was addressing the age-old battle between good and evil UX and Agile. She said “I’ve been doing UX for my entire career, and I first encountered Agile in 2002. Let’s just say it didn’t go very well.” She described a somewhat common scenario, where a couple of books are plonked on a table, and a company bigwig declares “we are doing Agile now.”

Darci reminded us of the content of the introduction of Agile, that 80% of IT projects were ending in failure. To be clear, I have no doubt that Agile is one of the very best ways to write software, and that it suits developers very well. It can cause stress fractures elsewhere in the business though. And being reminded that Agile existed in 2002 made me feel old. And sad that it still seems so much hard work for businesses to implement and cope with.

She also reiterated the problems it causes UXers — “the patchwork quilt” scenario. If you are always designing the very minimum to ship every fortnight, you don’t necessarily get the overall coherence in design that you want from a product. UX teams can often be seen as a bottleneck by developers — there are a hundred devs at the Guardian who will testify to my ability to hold a project up whilst “drawing”. Frustratingly for UXers, subsequent important tweaks to designs and interactions often get de-prioritised in favour of adding more features.

But Darcy argues UXers and Agile developers can and should be best friends. The opportunity to test and iterate is so much more rewarding than spending months doing up front speculative design of something that might work. I’d much rather have real usage data telling me I’ve designed something wrong then fix it, than keep polishing a fictional Omnigraffle document of what we might one day have. As Darcy put it: “Learning is more important than getting it right the first time.”

Next…

My next set of notes will be Miss Geeky herself — Melinda Seckington — talking ahout the awkward social experience of being an introvert who ends up doing lots of high profile events. I bet you can’t possibly imagine why I liked the talk so much…

This is one of a series of blog posts about 300 Seconds. You can download all of my notes — including four blog posts exclusive to the book — for free for your Kindle, iPhone/iPad or as a PDF.

“Digital Democracies: the good, the bad and the OMFG LEAVE ME ALONEs” – Alex Blandford

Alex Blandford, who formerly worked in the digital team at the UK’s Parliament lamented to all too often “digital democracy” means “someone being a bit of a dick to their MP.” There is also a disconnect between the ambition of getting citizens more involved in representative democracy and the fact that something like the Pensions Bill is a really really dull long 94 pages that you need to be a professional to understand and interact with.

Alex suggested that MPs are overwhelmed by email, and that a lot of the tools built on the web to help users contact their MPs are effectively broken. Having worked on TheyWorkForYou a tiny little bit way back in the day, being able to contact MPs by email seems to have gone from a scarcity to a futility in a decade. Alex said some MPs have even changed their email addresses to avoid the deluge of messages and petitions coming out of tools like Change.org. And the email that gets through is carefully filtered by staff who see organised campaigns as just copy and paste with no legitimacy to it. A common attitude among researchers apparently is that “It’s just people on the internet”. Incredibly reminiscent of the Mail Online’s view that two critical messages on a BBC website is evidence of “viewer’s fury” but that thousands of complaints about Jan Moir articles are simply orchestrated Twitter campaigns which can be easily dismissed.

Twitter got a bit of a kicking from Alex as well. It is good for being funny, he said, but it isn’t good for engagement with elected MPs. “The amount of Twitter nasties you get,” he said “is just depressing.” I should add that I slightly disagree here about MPs and Twitter. Walthamstow’s MP Stella Creasy is absolutely aces at it. But Alex made a really good point that people shouldn’t think the quick click of digital democracy and online tools was the only route to their MPs — they still have surgeries which are by far the best way to get their ear, he said.

Next…

And for my next trick, my notes on Darci Dutcher talking about the struggles of getting UX to work with Agile…

This is one of a series of blog posts about 300 Seconds. You can download all of my notes — including four blog posts exclusive to the book — for free for your Kindle, iPhone/iPad or as a PDF.

“Going global with a social media campaign” – Charlotte Curle

Charlotte Curle of Standard Chartered was talking about a social media campaign she’d been involved with which used Liverpool FC to promote the bank’s charity which combats blindness. Each year Premier League teams are allowed a one-off change of sponsor on their shirts — I did not know this — and they opted to use it to back a campaign called “What’s your perfect match”, for example fish and chips or, in my case I guess, music and robots.

The social media campaign ran on 12 different localised Facebook pages, and people who entered had a chance to win limited edition signed shirts, or to bid for a limited number of them in an auction. Charlotte said Liverpool fans “really do not let you walk alone”, and the campaign reached over 10 million people on Twitter. Charlotte observed that football is a much sexier message for people to push than banking or blindness.

The KPIs they claim to have increased were a mix of the concrete — £23k raised by the auction and an increase in traffic to their donations page — and the social-media-wankspeak-abstract. I’ve no idea how a 1818% increase in “people talking about this” on social media actually translates into the real world, or how it compares to the immeasurable number of people actually physically talking about something following different types of campaigns.

I was reminded of a couple of sessions at the recent #FTMedia13 conference, where it was pointed out that big data and big numbers are great, but if you can only see the numbers from your own silo, you really can’t tell if you are doing well or not compared to your competitors.

Given that the 300 Seconds event was being held in Facebook’s London office, Charlotte rather bravely cited “Facebook’s rules” as one of the problems with the campaign. It was difficult as well, she said, to run the competition uniformly across the globe, as different countries have different regulatory rules around competitions, polls and prize draws. She also noted that football isn’t popular everywhere, and that they would have got more traction in India with a campaign based around cricket stars rather than Steven Gerrard.

Next…

300 Seconds might be primarily about promoting opportunities for women, but it isn’t a women-only club. My next notes will be on Alex Blandford’s talk about digital democracy…

This is one of a series of blog posts about 300 Seconds. You can download all of my notes — including four blog posts exclusive to the book — for free for your Kindle, iPhone/iPad or as a PDF.

“3 awesome things we’ve learnt from gov.uk design” – Lily Dart

Lily Dart works at dxw and she was talking about some of their work with Gov.uk. Giving a quick outline of the award-winning project, she said that they were making “decisions based on user-testing, which is very exciting.”

Her first point was about the value of legibility. She compared the font size of Gov.uk to the BBC News website, and it was one of the rare occasions where you see the BBC website being cited as an example of inferior accessibility design. Gov.uk is vastly more readable. Lily said that font size is often only thought of in terms of accessibility and minority user groups like those with visual impairment, but actually making things easy to read is good for everyone.

She also praised the use of whitespace — “nice big seemingly blank patches” — in the design to focus the user on what they should be paying attention to, and avoiding distracting them with something else. She joked about how frequently other clients, when faced with whitespace, will ask “what can we do to fill that hole up?” As an attitude it is an entertaining print throwback — whitespace used to cost extra paper, but now costs no extra money for pixels.

The font used is based on UK road signs, which Lily said is a “nice cultural reference touch”, but also practical, as it was designed to be extra readable at distance and in adverse weather conditions. I have to say when I look back at some of the tiny fixed font sizes I’ve used on web site designs in the past I shudder with the typographical and readability horror of it all.

Lily’s second lesson was a reminder that design can help or hinder, and she showed examples of how Gov.uk had progressed from their original alpha release by removing unnecessary images and confusing icons from the visual presentation. Lily said the overuse of elements that were meant to be helpful, like icons, actually ended up being less helpful than omitting them altogether. Aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean usable, she added.

Her final point was one that, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know is a subject close to my heart — “release first, refine later”.

Next…

My second set of notes will be from Charlotte Curle’s talk about running a global social media campaign for Standard Chartered that used their sponsorship of Liverpool FC to make a massive impact…

This is one of a series of blog posts about 300 Seconds. You can download all of my notes — including four blog posts exclusive to the book — for free for your Kindle, iPhone/iPad or as a PDF.

I know. I know. MVP stands for something else in the sporting context. But I can’t help chuckle about lean start-ups and agile development whenever I put my new son in this costume. Because, after all, babies are pretty much a minimum viable product — they have a rudimentary input/output system, and the analytics implementation is simply shocking. This is James Murray Belam, by the way, who shipped at the end of February. Happy and healthy and just beginning to iterate smiling.

“A new series of lightning talks delivered by me, you, any one. Talks that are interesting…but short. Our aim is to hear more about the personal and professional passions of our peers in the digital community. Be inspired. Learn something new. Meet. Chat. Engage. If you aren’t used to standing up in front of people, it’s a great place to practice your presentation skills in a safe and friendly environment. Or test out a new presentation you are working on. Maybe you do this all the time, but want to tell people about something new or exciting, or a new angle on a familiar topic. Grab an attendee ticket. Then come along to an event, grab a drink, listen, learn and be inspired.”

The event sprung out of a #teacamp a few weeks ago discussing how to better promote equality in tech, and providing more speaking opportunities for women seemed one avenue to achieve that. With a chance to practice speaking in public, and the ability to point to a track record of having done it at 300 Seconds, hopefully some of the contributors last night will go on to speak elsewhere.

At the start of last night’s event Hadley Beeman said it was about moving to a world where we hear from “the brilliance of the many, not just the few.” We don’t want to be exclusionary, she explained, this is not just for women, and indeed last night’s line-up featured a mixed gender line-up — albeit with the usual bias hugely reversed.

It is a topic I feel passionate about, and one that I believe makes our industry poorer for everybody involved, not just for people with a specific type of reproductive set-up. I think we make better products when we make them with a more representative mix of people contributing to their development, and I’d like to see conference line-ups that more accurately reflect the make-up of our profession and of our species. Sharon O’Dea called out Apps World Europe last night. The argument that of all of the people that could be found with something interesting and worthwhile to say about apps in the whole of Europe only one woman is worth listening to out of fifty people selected is unsustainable. I’m very proud of the rather more balanced gender mix in the line-up of EuroIA that we’ll shortly be announcing.

It is a complex issue though, with roots in the ways that technology and science education is gender-stereotyped at an early age, through to the culture and hiring practices of tech firms, and to the attitude of those putting together events. My closest colleague over the last decade always argues that she isn’t put off doing anything because of gender, she just doesn’t fancy doing it, and there is an argument to be made that a self-selecting bunch of people arrogant? confident enough to step up on stage to talk about their ideas isn’t the best selection mechanism for knowledge sharing anyway.

But since having a daughter myself I’ve become more and more concerned that her future career choices will be shaped not by what she wants to achieve, but by what is considered the “default” gender in certain industries like ours. By nature and nurture she is bound to end up on the geekier side of life, and at the age of 3 her favourite things currently include princesses and fairy tales and robots and Daleks and fighting pirates and dinosaurs.

I dread a future conversation if she ends up opting for a career in technology or the media which goes something like this:

Her: “Dad, I’ve noticed the tech/media world is pretty crappily sexist and it is pissing me off”
Me: “Yes, it has been this way for some time”
Her: “Oh. So what did you do to try and alter that?”
Me: *awkward pause* “Erm…well…y’know…I’m a man, so…erm…well it didn’t really…erm…”

Of course, the most obvious way for me to support something like 300 Seconds is to blog about it, so over the next couple of days I’ll have some blog posts and a free ebook compilation of my notes from the evening.

Avner Ronen of Boxee contentiously said that calling the TV “the first screen” was misleading, as the first screen was now in our pockets or lying on the coffee table. Some people see second screen activity as “a distraction”, but he preferred to think of it as multi-tasking. Great content will continue to be in demand, he said, and people will continue to value that, but how it gets to your screen is completely changing. This is because, he observed, a whole bunch of things are changing at the same time — not just distribution, but the funding of production via Kickstarter and the entry into the market of players like Netflix making original content.

Zeebox’s Anthony Rose explained that the way that current demand is created for consumption, through the roles of the scheduler and the construct of channels, was unbundling. He envisages a future where something like your smartphone becomes the gateway to great content, whether it is recommended by a reviewer, a broadcaster, a content producer like Endemol, a trusted blog, or based on what friends have been watching. You’ll be able to start watching on that screen if you are out and about, or, if you are at home, use the device to stream the content to your giant TV. You won’t know or care whether it is coming over the air or down the phone line.

When video was first on the web, he reminded us, it was crude and low quality in comparison the what we could get on our “proper” screens. Now, iPlayer has better compression rates than Freeview, and services like YouTube HD exist. I must confess that in an era of SmartTV and an ethernet cable going into the back of my TV at home, it felt incredibly archaic to be explaining to my three year old the other day that the bloody great big dish strapped to the side of our house picks up pictures. And in fact, a lot of the time now I’m — shhhhhhhh — watching things stored on a USB key plugged into the back of the screen.

VEVO’s Rio Caraeff described how mobile and IPTV was taking over viewing. When they launched in 2009 100% of their streams were to desktop through the browser. 18 months later 10% of streams were on mobile devices. Now, he said, in the last 6 months, over 51% of streams in the US had been to either a mobile or a TV. They’ve taken the interesting step of merging their mobile and their TV app product teams. They are still making distinct product lines, he said, but they need to be products that are aware of each other in order to provide a consistent experience.

Rio agreed with Anthony about the phone being the future. “I think your set-top box may end up being your phone,” he said. “We will look back and say that was quaint. I don’t think the future is plugging little boxes into a TV.”

Just as it was inevitable the panel would talk about mobile, so it was inevitable they would talk about data. Anthony Rose reminded us that people used to have precious little data about TV consumption — ratings figures are extrapolated from tiny panels. Now, he said, a whole new range of audience measurements were in play, whether it was Netflix knowing everything about the people who had watched “House Of Cards”, or measurements of the social chatter around particular programmes. He described it as “many more sources of ‘truth’ vying to create world views of what has been successful.”

One thing I’ve found amazing to watch during my digital career is how I went from using systems that were basically dumb terminals, to having everything on my PC, to using web-based services which are stored in the cloud and rendered using webfonts, making my browser effectively a dumb terminal again. TV is heading the same way. Or at least should be. Anthony Rose said it was almost obscene to think of people carting these giant electrical goods into landfill every three or four years because their SmartTV hardware was out of date, when all you needed was a big dumb monitor that you could constantly upgrade via software.

He laughed and described as “a short-term engineering problem” something that VEVO’s Rio Caraeff identified — the issue that currently content providers have to negotiate around 15 different protocols of getting content onto TV. Just as Apple or the telcos could be barriers to getting content onto phones, some of the TV hardware manufacturers were crippling their sets with their own proprietary interfaces and gate-keeping antics.

Rio said that we were yet to produce “native” programming for the current interactive age. There is nothing being made today that couldn’t have been put on screen in 1983, no shows that are aware that they are now part of a two-way communication medium. “No TV show knows it is raining in New York, or that it is dark in Abu Dhabi, or that it is me, personally, watching this episode.”

Anthony Rose said there had always been a dream of “participation TV” that went beyond just yelling at the TV. The beauty of tech, he said, was that it allows new ideas to flourish and people to create new forms of content. “Just looking up Wikipedia entries during a show isn’t the future of TV,” he said, “but it is the beginning of the future of TV.”

This is one of a series of blog posts about the 2013 FT Digital Media conference. You can download all of my posts about the event as a free ebook for Kindle, iBooks or as a PDF.

Jim Hilt from Barnes & Noble said that two distinct patterns had emerged in the ebook markets. One was about the type of person buying ereaders. The first wave of adoption had been amongst heavy readers, typically women who read 4 or 5 books a month in the crime or romance genre. A second wave of adoption now taking place was more mainstream readers, and the ebook was a supplement to their print consumption. These people were now purchasing more titles overall, split across print and digital.

The second pattern he saw was about the type of content they were consuming. Short-form content and subscription-based content were becoming more prominent in the revenue mix. Things, he said, that hadn’t necessarily previously had a physical manifestation on the shelves. Henrik Berggren of Readmill made the point that Amazon’s data had told them that people weren’t finishing long works that pushed them in the direction of creating Kindle Singles.

Richard Waters asked if there was really a business model around short-form, and Jim Hilt agreed that it cost a lot of money to enter a market with very little margin in it. Jane Friedman, CEO and Co-founder of Open Road Integrated Media was cautious about short-form, saying it took an awful lot of 99 cents to make any money. She felt that the media attention being paid to short-form would turn out to be a fad. She felt that the big shift wasn’t so much about the content, but about the way that publishers were able to market so much more accurately, and across a wider range of titles.

I did absent-mindedly find myself wondering during the session how much of a problem actually “not finishing” a work is? Do record companies fret if people don’t listen to all the tracks evenly on an album? If I switch off a film, does it matter if I’ve already paid to buy it or rent it? I’ve no idea, I guess it is no good for the author, but as the publisher? And is there a comparable idea of how many physical books get “abandoned”? Is digital really worse for this, or is it just because we can see the data?

A question remains as to whether people are going to stick with standalone ereader devices or move to something else. Gavin Sathianathan, representing blinkboxbooks, who are owned by Tesco, thought the next upgrade cycle was crucial for determining whether people were going to prefer reading on multi-function tablets rather than investing in a Kindle or a Nook or somesuch device. Pressed on the lacklustre performance of the Nook meanwhile, Jim Hilt admitted it was an uphill battle — Kindle is the “generic word” for ereader he said, as Hoover is for vacuum cleaner and Google is for search.

Gavin said there was no point trying to take Amazon on head on. Their business model was about migrating some of the 21m people in the UK who buy physical books but who have yet to buy an ebook, rather than trying to poach some of Amazon’s Kindle owners. I noted that nobody in the audience appeared to bat an eyelid at Tesco selling books, something that was at one point unheard of in supermarkets.

There was a bit of discussion around pricing, and whilst everyone seemed keen on the possibilities of “dynamic pricing”, Gavin said that things like the 20p ebook “isn’t valuing the written word in the right way.” He worried about the risk of devaluing the book in the eyes of the consumer, although as a typical consumer, I’d say it is more worrying to get caught treating your audience as idiots who can’t see that a massive chunk of the distribution and manufacturing costs have been taken out of your production chain.

I’d give the last quote to Jane though. She’d opened up by saying she’d spent her entire career as a champion of physical books, but she finished by saying that one of the things she loves about the book business these days is that there is “so much room to experiment”, when there had been so little experimentation over the previous twenty years.

Next…

Tomorrow I’ll have the last of my posts about the FT Digital Media conference, with notes from a session about the future of television…

This is one of a series of blog posts about the 2013 FT Digital Media conference. You can download all of my posts about the event as a free ebook for Kindle, iBooks or as a PDF.