Posts By Paul Canning

Mugging the rich bastard lawyers

Cross posted from Online Journalism Blog, where I’ve been updating all day – find any further updates here. If the famous media gaggers, the libel law firm Carter-Ruck, scourge of Private Eye, thought they’d scored another famous victory (these guys are big on bragging) suppressing news they hadn’t reckoned with social media. #trafigura is asRead… Read more »

‘Common look and feel’, rationalisation and egov success

Public Sector Forums (PSF)’s Ian Cuddy reports that Worcestershire’s councils have gone with a ‘common look and feel’ policy (aka ‘standardised’). In the Twitter conversation it’s been pointed out that the common design fails some standards and a link to a policy document explaining what they’ve done in detail hasn’t yet been found (Cuddy isRead… Read more »

Text still rules

This is a really excellent reminder of a web basic, which is unfortunately often forgotten as websites add and add and add and in the process become bloated. “Think of your Web audience as lazy, selfish and ruthless,” said Michael Gold, West Gold Editorial principal quoting usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s apt description of today’s impatient,Read… Read more »

PayPal still thinks Africa is the ‘dark continent’

Image via Wikipedia I just got an email from a friend in Austria. Inspired by a post on LGBT Asylum News he wanted to make a donation to the Sex Workers Outreach Program (SWOP) in Nairobi. The people there are wonderful, and intelligent, and courageous and open-minded people indeed, and they deserve our help andRead… Read more »

Bad user testing beats no user testing

Jakob Nielsen has noted that it’s now twenty years since he started what he calls the ‘discount usability movement’. This might be egging it a wee bit, I’m not sure there is such a ‘movement’ apart from that which Nielsen promotes. It’s true that major companies use discount usability tactics – I noted before howRead… Read more »

Council homepages: what’s wrong with ‘interesting development’?

There’s been a great flurry of interest in local government webbie circles because a few councils have gone down the Google route of deliberately reducing homepage content and pushing search as the way to find what you’re looking for, what you want to do, what your task is. Lancashire’s Kevin Rainsbury told the lively threadRead… Read more »