5 posts
We love working on Skype in the classroom and we're always looking for ways to enhance the service for our users. Recently, we released functionality that enabled teachers to login with their Facebook or Twitter credentials, as well as their Skype ID, but sometimes the challenge isn't about new functionality, but raising awareness and simply telling the story of Skype in the classroom.
One of the fundamental principles we lived by throughout the process of redesigning the ITV News website was that we needed to ground what were doing in the real needs of users. Cath explained our approach in an excellent post a few weeks ago.
All too often on content management projects a very significant group of users are taken for granted: those who will create and manage the content. On this project, we were detemined that we would really try to understand the editorial experience in depth, and provide tools that fit the journalists’ requirements.
We started with a fascinating and intense day in the ITN newsroom with Jason Mills and his team. We were allowed to attend the morning editorial conference and busy journalists tolerated our interruptions and stupid questions throughout the day. Finally, we were allowed to have a nose around in the studio and then watch the ITV Evening News transmission from the gallery.
Alastair Stewart in the ITV News Studio
A selection of thoughts, notes and scribbles from yesterday's She Says event. We headed along to Google Campus to witness and contribute to this year's event 'Where Actions and Ideas Collide.'
I went along to SCAMP 2012 yesterday and what a fantastic event it was. Friendly, inspiring, smart - there were some great speakers and just as interesting attendees. I particularly liked the format. The curators of SCAMP deliberately selected speakers who wouldn't just stand up and talk to some slides. Clare Reddington brought a lucky dip of props - the audience members picked one and then she spoke about it in relation to her work. Nange Magro presented a prototype of a dress which can be controlled with brainwaves. Salena Godden floored us with her fiery poetry performance. Mixing up talks with performances, conversations and audience participation gave the day a really nice rhythm and flow. One other conferences could learn from.
BUT. This is not what I want to talk about right now. There was one thing yesterday which irked me. Where were all the men in the audience? There must have been about 5 men there, 4 of whom were speaking. What's with this? No need to come because it's just for the ladies?
For a while I've been thinking about the process of design in two very different ways.
I’ve been thinking of what agencies do for their clients and how they are paid to think about problems on behalf of the client. Agencies design for people outside of their building and they tinker around at the edges of a problem space unhindered by the day-to-day firefighting that's endemic among large corporations - They can see the wood for the trees.
