Looking for bad user experience? I go DirectGov.
I’ve just moved home and so needed to update the address on my driving license. “Do it online – do it quicker,” says the DVLA website. Well all right, I reply. How naive of me.
Designing a better payslip
You know there’s something seriously wrong when your payslip is three pages long and comes with a two page explanatory leaflet. Payslips are often pretty cryptic but the one I received today was so bad it took me over half an hour to work it out. All I really care about is how much have I earned, how much am I getting and, most importantly, where did the rest go?
The only way I could decipher this mess was to draw a kind of bar chart and fill in the numbers. Once I finished I realised that I had inadvertently created a hugely more readable representation of the information contained in the payslip. So here’s a copy of the original payslip and my effort at an improved version.
csv2json: Convert CSV to JSON
I needed to convert some comma-separated data into JSON for a JavaScript project I’m working on. Surprisingly I couldn’t find anything online to do it so I knocked up this script. Hope someone finds it useful.
How @trendingtopics works
I made the @trendingtopics Twitter bot to keep me and others up to date on the (often) interesting topics that are being discussed most across the Twitterverse. This is a slightly technical explanation of how it all works.
Enabling multitouch on Synaptics trackpads
I’ve just discovered that my laptop touch pad has multitouch, it just needed to be enabled! There are two parts to this process and it will take a few minutes but it’s well worth it in my opinion. Read more »
Problem: accessing frame URLs across domains
I’ve got a problem and I need some help. I’m building a semantic webby type thing where the web page you are viewing will be augmented with a menu showing other relevant info gathered from elsewhere using a clever algorithm which is already built.
Interaction ‘09 Highlights
Four days of presentations, workshops & chats have drawn to a close. I’ve had a great time, learned a lot, met interesting people and leave full of ideas and enthusiasm. Full videos of every session will be posted up on the site in due course but in the meantime, here are some of my highlights.
More search terms instead of URLs
In August I posted about an emergent trend of sharing web addresses by quoting search terms rather than URLs. For instance the PM programme on BBC Radio 4 says “to find our blog, put pm blog into any search engine.” Since then I’ve noticed this pattern in a few other places.
Twitter Trending Topics 2.0
I’ve updated the code that runs @trendingtopics. It will now tweet sooner, avoid duplicate tweets, ignore hashtags and add links to Wikipedia and Google where appropriate. My aim for this update was to be a bit more intelligent in what to tweet and when. I also wanted to show a bit more about the topic without having to read through a stream of tweets on a Twitter search page. This update goes some way towards those goals but I’ll be tweaking it more over the next few days so please let me know what you think, either here on or Twitter.
Update: here’s a technical description of how it all works.
Akoha: “social reality” card game
Ever since I first heard about alternate reality games, I’ve been interested in the crossover of gaming ideas into the “real world”.
I came across a game called Akoha a few months ago that promises to use mission cards to encourage good deeds and interactions with new people. They recently made packs of cards available for a few dollars and mine arrived just before Christmas. However after looking at the concept in more detail I feel that they’ve misjudged people’s motivations for playing such a game and have therefore got the interaction model wrong. Read more »