I’ve been pointed towards Bikeoff a couple of times now. ‘An initiative of the Design Against Crime Research Centre’, and based at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, it’s a laudable venture, and I’m looking forward to reading into it in much more detail. Bikeoff TV in particular looks like a nice Google maps / Flash video project.
However, at least superficially, I really do have to slate the design - especially given the extensive list of design personnel listed on the about page. Here’s what I think’s wrong:
Table-based design - in this day and age there really is NO reason to be laying out a website using tables. Tables are for tabular data. End of story.
The bubbles around the chunks of content does work alongside the colour-coding to make it easier to separate bits of information - but it still feels cluttered.
As used (in)famously and stubbornly by Jakob Nielsen, that hyperlink blue is the blue that browsers colour link text by default. In this case, Bikeoff just hasn’t got round to styling its links in the CSS. It looks pretty bad.
I really dig those business / tech / web / software gurus at 37signals. I like their products (I use Backpack and Basecamp daily) and I like their blog (Signal vs Noise is one of my favourite RSS subs).
About three months ago I embarked on one of 37signals’ workplace experiments: the 4-day work week. At London College of Fashion, I’m lucky enough to be able to take advantage of a flexible working scheme, whereby an employee can work his 40 weekly hours around the 5 available working days. I’ve been working 4-day weeks, 10-hour days, from 8.30am to 6.30pm.
It’s awesome, because it means:
Your work becomes something you knuckle down to for a 4-day burst. You can approach it as a block of time and separate it from your 3 days off, and you start to think of your job less as something that basically dominates your life, and more as a temporary activity that you’re going to focus on and get satisfaction from.
Long weekends. Sundays are so much more spacious with a free Monday to follow; alternatively, they can be truly guilt-free if you used your Friday for domestic admin. 4-day weekend trips now don’t require taking annual leave.
More time for freelance web projects - this may seem self-defeating if it means I’m doing more work, but really it’s about the ratio of focussed, proactive working vs wasted, bored time ‘at work’.
More time for biking.
Well, great, but from LCF’s point of view, am I getting as much done? Yes, here’s why:
Longer days mean more hours to really get your teeth into a project. My most productive work arises not from grazing on different bits of tasks but from focussing on a single task exclusively until completion.
I’m on average fresher and more energised (or at least more committed) during 4 days than I am during 5. I can see the carrot of the weekend dangling clearer than the 5-dayers, I’m incentivised.
I get early nights during the work part of my week and save parties for the weekend - hey, I’ve got the time!
Jason Fried makes a useful point though - that by adopting this schedule you’re not necessarily talking about cramming as much work into a shorter time. In fact, you’re looking for better, smarter, but shorter working.
I made it down to a couple of screenings at the Bicycle Film Festival this weekend. On Friday night, I was at the Barbican (officially the worst sign-posted location in central London) to see Les Ninjas du Japon, a documentary about a Japanese road racing team competing in the Tour du Faso, a stage race held annually in Burkina Faso.
The bike race is the scene for a wild culture clash: the calm, pale-skinned Japanese battling extreme heat, potholes and herds of farm animals on the rural roads of West Africa. Director Giovanni Giommi cuts back and forth between French-speaking Burkina Faso and the cyclists’ home towns in Japan, drawing out the riders’ hopes and dreams one minute, the next returning to the race, and the lives of the ordinary Burkinabé drawn into the race as spectators, drivers, commentators or soigneurs.
Prior to the main screening, the organisers presented Natali Fabrizio’s short ‘Pantani e “Le Tour de France”‘, a trippy but totally awesome 9 minutes that cut flickery motorbike-cam video of Marco Pantani racing against Indurain in the 1994 Tour, to a pounding house soundtrack. I felt compelled to follow this up with a late-night glut of Pantani vids on YouTube.
Update 8/10/08:
On Sunday afternoon I returned to BFF08 to catch a bonus screening of Road to Roubaix, directed by David Deal and David Cooper. The film is a documentary about the Paris-Roubaix one-day road race, that has taken place every April since 1896 on the cobbled roads of northern France and Belgium.
The opening minutes were a real buzz - lots of gritty black and white footage of tough guys riding through clouds of mud and dust, the whites of their eyes standing out from faces caked in dirt and sweat. An early highlight was the interview with Lance Armstrong, who described the 200km route - the Queen of the Classics, which he has famously never entered - as ‘insane’.
However the 75 minutes included too many talking heads offering similar viewpoints. An hour in, we pretty much got the message that the race was hard. Road to Roubaix was less successful where I hear (not having seen it) that Jørgen Leth’s 1977 documentary A Sunday in Hell was in a class of its own: namely, in offering an up-close analysis of the actual riding of the race, the changing fortunes, the bursts of speed, the grappling for position, the sheer, brutal Darwinism of the event.
A quick shout out to Jotta (formerly Fifzine), the creative arts portfolio website that has recently relaunched. I like the new design: it’s certainly more navigable, and the lightbox widget seems to work well. Generally though I think Jotta are OK because they’ve featured one of my photographs on the home page!
However… I could do with more ways to browse other profiles - that big ‘advanced search’ box in Explore feels at odds with the idea of browsing freely. This is something we in the University of the Arts London web team thought a lot about when designing Showtime. We modelled the site on FFFound, because we liked the way you can casually browse without having to think of search criteria or narrow your search in advance.
I’d also like to see Jotta plugging in to some APIs - Flickr and Linkedin for example - to lift it above being ‘just another (closed) network’…
I’m wallowing in the half-comatose mix of exhaustion and elation that follows a long day in the saddle. Early this morning I was up to ride the Southern Sportive, a 155km route starting and finishing at Petersfield in the South Downs. It was a good, tough event that for me nicely rounded off a season.
The organisers set three time targets:
Gold - 5hrs 40mins
Silver - 6hrs 19mins
Bronze - 7hrs
(Check the full ride stats for a more detailed breakdown.) I made gold, and was chuffed with my time of 5hrs 34. In the end I was lucky, because at around 75km the large pack of riders I was in took a wrong turn and headed way off track. We lost ten minutes, but this could have been worse were it not for a few boys up front with GPS. In the event we nearly had a pile-up as the map-readers applied the brakes.
My form today was strong, but could have been better. I felt good on the hills - packs that I was struggling to keep with on the flats were falling away on the climbs. This I attribute to my north-London hill training sessions and low weight (11st 6 on the day). For my benefit next year, I think the main element missing in my training over the past two months has been long rides of 5hrs +. The last time I rode longer than 5hrs was 3 August. Early this year, when I was training for the Dragon Ride, I rode long every weekend, not doing much by way of high-intensity training. At 180km, the Dragon was tough, but I finished strongly. Today I rode faster, but lacked strength between 100-130km, and if it hadn’t been for a couple of riders who dragged me through the final 25km I might not have made gold.
I think in advance of next year I’m going to start a new cycling blog. Online cycling communities frequently seem to be poorly-designed, hard-to-search, forum-based sites that I get fed up with quickly. Plus, a cycling blog that follows a five-month euro-sportive training plan should be interesting for other riders, right?
As a cyclist who regularly fritters away his surplus cash on cycle ‘accessories’, I quite like Wiggle - or at least when they’re cheaper than top-dog Chain Reaction Cycles. Recently, however, their wasteful packaging has put me right off. Check this out:
Wiggle package arrives. Cue oohs and aahs around the office.
The package looks empty, but wait...
The true scandal revealed.
Four replacement Campagnolo Veloce brake blocks in a box that could have contained 400 of them. Run out of Jiffy bags Wiggle?
On the train back from a workshop in Brighton for dConstruct, a programme of events and a conference hosted by design agency Clearleft. The theme of this year’s dConstruct is “Designing the Social Web” - and my workshop was Wireframing 2.0: Designing for Definition.
Wireframing isn’t a design technique I’ve personally used before (although I get the idea), so I was keen to learn more. Or rather, from what I’d been reading online about designers debunking old-style ‘grey box’ wireframing in these days of AJAX and complex, multi-state user interactions, I was keen to know what methodology I should be adopting in its place.
Rich Rutter and James Box from Clearleft presented the differences between wireframing and the approach they preferred - interactive prototyping. Prototyping is essentially building a clickable website, using HTML, CSS and Javascript (mainly in the shape of jQuery or another Javascript library), that closely resembles the layout of the final design, but with the minimum of visual adornment. A key stage in the web design process, prototypes follow on from the early stages of brainstorming and basic sketches (Clearleft’s mantra is ‘Identify > List > Cluster > Sketch’).
Prototyping expressly dispenses with the model of:
visual design (in Photoshop and pdf)
development
user testing
delivery
Naturally, flat visual layouts are often reshuffled and reconfigured during development; testing, again, frequently throws up surprises. The logical way to build a website is through a series of iterative prototypes, that puts user experience (or ‘UX’) at the core, instead of shoehorning it in later; users can feel the way the site behaves, and feed back on their experience of it, before any visual design decisions are made. Prototyping also ideally draws input from both designers and developers, as opposed to having a rather cagey back-and-forth relationship between the two.
So - I’m sold. Hand me the stickies. I’m particularly chuffed that Clearleft have provided a zip file of the prototyping code framework they presented. If you’re a UX-er you’ll be interested in their Polypage tool, developed in collaboration with Rails developers New Bamboo, that allows prototypers to manipulate user states (e.g. logged in vs logged out) by adding classes to their HTML elements.
Not many of my friends have signed up on Dopplr, the ‘online service for intelligent business travellers’. This is a shame, because I think it’s a great website. Well, it certainly feels like a great website. The one thing Dopplr does really well is convince me that I should spend more time on the site, just doing… something. Only after spending hours exploring am I beginning to get the real value of the application.
Dopplr is beautifully designed, socially networked, functional. It appeals to me on the same level as Facebook, in the way it allows me to organise my travels, experiences and friends. Basically, you add trips, go on them, then write tips in your journal for fellow travellers. Photos you upload to Flickr that you took during the trip are automatically added to the trip page (as above). You can also connect with people travelling to the same places in advance, and then browse their trips and journals. Naturally, it’s better when you share trips with more people.
Personally, I’m not so keen on the ritzy ‘Mr and Mrs Smith‘ hotel recommendations - but then I guess the site is targeted at business. It never felt like a business site until I read the about page info though. I think Dopplr would link up perfectly with Lonely Planet. If you had a site that combined that tripadvisor Facebook app ‘Cities I’ve Visited’ with tips from the LP Thorn Tree forum with geotagged Flickr photos - well that would be a website.
I’ve really enjoyed browsing the archives of amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman, who from 1938 until the ’60s toured his native USA and the cities of the world. Cushman worked in business finance and law, but always took his Contax II A camera with him on his travels, documenting the architecture and people he encountered. Indiana University has scanned Cushman’s entire collection and put it online.
From what I’ve read lately, I expected itv.com’s online video service to be a bit rubbish. I wasn’t prepared for it to be spectacularly bad.
I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the Tour de France since it started on July 5th. Considering it’s the world’s biggest (and best - bike bias acknowledged) annual sporting event, TV coverage is woeful: a 1-hour slot on ITV 4 every evening. But - wait a second - how convenient! You can catch up online on itv.com!
Here are a couple of screen grabs that sum up my experience of watching the Tour on itv.com:
Great!
Just great.
Over the past week of viewing on a Mac (which is supported) in 2 different locations (thus ruling out bandwidth or bad internet connection as possible faults) I’ve encountered a grim catalogue of errors:
player hangs or freezes during playback
selected video doesn’t play on request (this is not about buffering, I know what buffering is)
videos are ‘not available’ for some unexplained reason
the selection of Tour videos goes from e.g. 7 (we’re currently on Stage 9) to 2, and now at time of writing, 3 - again with no explanation
Not to mention incomprehensible error messages, bad player controls and navigation, and having to watch the same advertisement up to 8 times in an hour of playback. And what’s with Silverlight by the way? Having to download and install it before viewing is like some nightmare flashback to Real Player days.
The Tour de France videos must be among the most popular programmes on ITV Catch Up at present. If it was any good, this would be an effective way to promote this service to viewers who perhaps wouldn’t normally use it (from the looks of it most visitors are catching up on Corrie). But it isn’t any good, it’s awful.
Hey ITV! Spend some money and sort it out!
For anyone hunting for a decent way to watch Le Tour online, try www.letour.fr. Here’s a decent video service with daily short clips summarising the day’s action, albeit without Phil Liggett. This content is re-purposed by a number of other news sites (like this one, which plays back using Jeroen Wijering’s very excellent and now ubiquitous FLV Player).
