/ JOURNAL
Nothing’s too good for the workers
Britain’s post-war architecture, and especially its post-war social housing, is an enduring love. A period where architects, responding to huge social need, attempted to apply modern thinking to re-imagine ways of living to not just replace, but to better what had gone before.
It feels an era filled with huge ambition, experimentation and optimism, but also flawed thinking, mistakes and naivety. It constantly makes me think about the work we do as digital designers today, and the lessons we can learn — good and bad — from that period.
For every light-filled, thoughtful, human scale estate is a commoditised, shoddily-built estate thrown up by a council desperate to meet housing need whatever the compromises its residents would come to face.
Highgate Newtown Phase 1 in Camden, by Peter Tábori and Ken Adie is emphatically in the former camp. ‘The White Flats’ is a short film about estate made by its residents and directed and edited by Anna Price. It's human-centred social design as it can be.
It's a lovely, generous film too. So many films about modernist/brutalist estates have a middle class voyeur aspect to them: all exterior fetishisation rather than considering the lives being lived inside them.
Price's film is, like the estate, about its people first.
The White Flats from Anna Price on Vimeo.
Fun to find out that Anna Price is also the award-winning editor of ‘Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland’, my favourite thing on TV in the last year.
Error of Judgement
Every time I leave Birmingham or come back to it, close to New St station I walk past the scene of the pub bombings that killed 21, seriously injured 170, and the grotesque and repeated miscarriages of justice that saw the Birmingham Six jailed, and remain jailed, for 16 years.
I'm so glad that I filled in the many gaps in my understanding by finally reading Chris Mullins’ Error of Judgement. An incredible story of an incredible campaign, it's a tale of inhumanity as well as incompetence, institutional failings not just in the police, but the prison service and the judiciary too.
While the story ends with the six finally walking free at the Old Bailey, few of the police officers, prison officers or indeed judiciary receive the punishment their involvement deserved.
The lives of others were ruined, but very few careers.
If you really want to be depressed, read the post-trial careers of the prosecution and judges in the case of the Guildford Four in the same period.
Mullins' writing is always measured, even as he recounts the brutal beatings and abuse the six men endured, It's a necessarily tough read at points, but an inspiring one too. Just enough people harboured enough doubts and had the tenacity to keep asking questions.
The inspiration to read the book came from a combination of sources: the BBC’s extremely fun This Town; coverage by the excellent Birmingham Dispatch that is filling a vital gap in local news here; and my favourite book of the last 12 months: Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe's wonderful book on Northern Ireland, the IRA and a recent history that far more of us living in the UK should know.
Default apps 2023
A very end-of-year post, inspired by a Chris Coyier post, which in turn was inspired by mattcool.tech.
I’m an inveterate switcher, so I’ll doubtless have changed all of these by the time I hit publish.
📨 Mail: Apple's Mail, everywhere. As my interest in social media has waned I’ve spent more and more time in my inbox reading newsletters. While I like Mimestream and love Michael Leggett’s clever Simplify for Gmail, I just cannot bring myself to go all in on Google. So, Fastmail and Google, side by side in Mail it is. For now.
📮 Mail server: Google and Fastmail. I don’t think Gmail is close to being the best email service, but its overall utility as an account, means Gmail often tends to win out. However, Fastmail’s a superb service with good values, and its Masked Email is a genuinely useful thing.
🌍 Browser Arc on desktop, Safari on iOS. By default, I’m a Safari person: it’s overall minimalism and tight integration with Notes and Apple Pay makes it an easy choice. But Arc is where all the interesting ideas are right now and it’s just fun to use. As a company, The Browser Co’s cadence is incredible. What ‘working in the open’ done really well looks like. Can’t wait for Arc on iOS dropping really soon.
📝 Notes: Apple’s Notes. I’ve abandoned everything else for Notes. Over the years, it’s got smarter and more useful without losing that speed from ‘having a thought’ to ‘writing it down’. It’s where everything from recipes to drafts, from research notes to saved web pages go.
🗓️ Calendar: Fantastical The best native experience for me across Mac OS and iOS. It’s Apple’s Calendar but a tiny bit better, and that’s enough, even on a non-premium account.
📖 RSS: Feedbin in the browser, but mostly consumed via Silvio Rizzis’s Reeder. I never gave up on RSS, but more than ever it’s where I do most of my reading.
🎧 Music: Apple Music. It’s not close for me. I do miss the social currency of Spotify, but it's Music that does a better job of nudging me towards discovery rather than conservative nostalgia. Music’s consistent playlist structure for artists: ‘Essentials’, ‘Deep Cuts’, ‘Influences’, ‘Inspired by’ really works for me, and it’s doing ever more interesting things with its art direction. Simon Collison did a great job a while back of summarising the pros and cons.
🎧 Podcasts: Pocket Casts Noticeably better audio quality than Apple’s Podcasts, an unfussy layout, and it works well across Apple/Google ecosystems.
☑️ Tasks: Things. Extremely opinionated about workflow, wins on craft and polish.
💬 Messages: WhatsApp I think this is the year I finally went all in on WhatsApp because that’s where everyone else is. iMessage lost its place on my phone’s home screen some time ago. Fascinated at just how differently this has played out in Europe compared to the U.S.
Interviewing for research, 10 years on
In 2013, I wrote a little book called ‘Interviewing for research’ for Emma and Mark Boulton’s much loved publishing imprint, Five Simple Steps. 10 years on, it’s a moment for me to reflect on the process of writing and publishing it, and what changed for design and research in the intervening years.
Interviewing for Research is a pocket guide to running research interviews, written in a time where there were few user research-focused books available to people like me.
And by people like me, I mean user experience designers as we typically were then. Slogging away in design agencies, inside companies big and small, often swimming upstream in a prevailing culture of ‘Big Design Up Front’.
That changed pretty quickly shortly after this pocket guide came out when Erika Hall, Steve Portigal and others made huge contributions to our understanding in this field.
The book was designed selfishly to meet a need that I had: as a thing to flick through before a project starts, a prompt for how you might approach a particular piece of work. For people new to research, or to those who did research as part but not all of their role.
I didn’t write it because I thought I was the best user researcher out there. I wasn’t. But I cared a lot about user research and what it made possible, and I’d had enough of working with people, including designers, who didn’t. Or even worse, professed to, but didn’t.
Reading it back now, I can really hear in the writing just how close to the surface that frustration with user research as a kind of performative ‘project theatre’ was.
But, things have changed for the better in the intervening years. So let’s talk about why.
Well, from where I was sat, GOV.UK happened.
The work that Government Digital Service (GDS), and government departments in their wake, did transformed the way that design and research was practised.
Their approach was at the same time traditional in its understanding and application of design as a practise, rooted in graphic and communication design, and radical in its repositioning of content as an equal to design and lifting up both the visibility of user research as a discipline and its prominence in a design process.
Many of these ideas existed before GDS and GOV.UK, but it’s perhaps where they were popularised, thanks to GDS’ commitment to working in the open.
And in making these ideas mainstream, it made it easier for other practitioners, teams and, in particular, their organisations — whatever the sector — to adapt and to adopt.
In my current role, I often get asked what the difference is between working with the public sector versus the private sector, like these two things are monoliths. I think that framing is wrong: it’s more like modern vs traditional, agile vs waterfall, human centred vs technology driven.
The principles of how we practise modern user research, inside agile, inside larger organisations, so often came from the work that Leisa Reichelt and her team popularised, and shared openly, at GDS.
It was a step change from the kind of frustrations my book had been railing against. This was user research at the heart of a design process, not an optional extra. User research as an agile, iterative, learning process, not a one-off.
The maturing of user centred design means it’s less common these days to find a single UXer adjacent to, but not in, a delivery team. It’s more common for there to be more than one solitary voice for user centred design in a team. We’ve gained strength in numbers, and we’ve gained specialisation too.
There was a lot — a lot — of muddling through 10 years ago. The bar has risen significantly since then and modern user research isn’t just more robust now, but has a far better handle on ethics, inclusion and accessibility too.
I sometimes see less common purpose between what design teams and user research teams are trying to achieve — not so much at the delivery team level, but at a practice level and particularly in really large teams, where they can feel almost like rivals competing for an organisation’s attention.
I instinctively push against this — in part because of my own working history — but because I really do believe meaningful design work relies upon content and research as materials to design with, just as impactful research needs design to act upon it. User centred design is, I think, symbiotic.
A decade on, I hope that much of the subject matter of ‘Interviewing for research’ remains relevant today because I think talking to, listening to, observing, and understanding what people do remains at the heart of good design.
I think the conditions for good design — and good research — have rarely been better. And I think that’d give the me of 10 years ago a lot of heart and hope.
Books are funny, terrifying things. Unlike a blog post or a tweet, the feedback is never immediate. There’s no like button. Someone might have bought the book, but you don’t know when — if ever — they’ll read it.
So, I want to say thank you here to everyone who has ever got in touch over the years and said something nice about it, or told someone else to read it. In particular, I want to say thank you to Caroline Jarrett, John Waterworth, Adrian Howard, Ryan Sackett and Lesley Pinder who’ve done more of that than anyone, and made me blush repeatedly with their generosity about this little book over the years. Thank you.
Interviewing for research is available for free download.
My thanks to Matthew Solle, who kindly reviewed this post in draft.
Birds and elephants
Over the past few weeks, and as I promised myself, I took myself completely off social media while I thought a bit more intentionally about what I was getting from it right now and what I wanted to get from it in future.
To my surprise, I didn’t miss Twitter as it now is. I did miss Instagram, mostly because its primary use case for me these days is knowing what the independent shops near me are up to.
Inspired, as is often the case, by a Jeremy Keith post, I did decide to sign back into Mastodon (and only Mastodon), to find 2 million more users than 3 weeks before, and many more of the faces I know and love from elsewhere.
Whatever happens with Mastodon — and some of the familiar troubles are already evident — the spirit of the indie web feels alive and decentralised. I’m slowly getting my head what that decentralisation makes possible, but I’m already excited by Matt Mullenweg’s commitment to Tumblr adopting ActivityPub; federated alternatives to Instagram or YouTube cropping up; or a future where spinning up your own private Mastodon instance might be as relatively easy as switching between the large Mastodon instances is now.
The rise of services like Mastodon and the prospect of losing Twitter — or what Twitter once was — has made me appreciate the idea of being independent but inter-connected and to re-appraise the bits of the internet that I can truly call my own and the bits I’m renting, sometimes in exchange for money, sometimes with my data.
Through the work I do, I’m in the fortunate position of having a domain name, a website, my own email service and I need to value them more or certainly to value them over posting to third party spaces I have little control over or defaulting to using Gmail because everyone else does. These last few weeks have helped me see that more clearly.
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