Mike Laurie's posts

For a while I’ve been troubled by the effect that language can have on the group design process. When we began to come up with ideas and solutions for ITV’s online news proposition, we used terminology to share our individual understanding and to communicate different solutions between us - we would use the words “feed” and “stream” interchangeably, as were phrases like “topic landing page” and “dynamically generated index page”. You could say that this is a natural symptom of having multiple humans from different backgrounds with different mindsets working together on the same shared problem. We want very different people working together, this is good. But what we want less of is the misunderstandings, confusion and antagonistic recollections. We want more group flow, enthusiasm, cohesion and personal investment so that we can use less energy for more benefit.

One of my favourite talks of SXSW this year was ‘Rebuilding LEGO’ by Prof. David Robertson of The Wharton School, Pennsylvania where he teaches innovation and product development. The talk was a cautionary tale of how dangerous innovation can be if it isn’t managed.

FLICKR CREDIT - kalexanderson

There's a popular technique in interaction design known as Progressive Disclosure. You can see this in wizard-style interfaces that show you a single question at a time. The theory is that it's better to show one single thing at a time than to show a big wall of stuff that makes you run away.

Did you see Black Mirror on Channel 4 recently? It's a bleak and paranoid set of 3 parables of a future with unintended consquences. Created by Charlie Brooker, all three are available to watch now on 4OD.

In December 2009 I wrote this thing about TV Apps and how great it would be to have an app ecosystem for Connected TVs. Now there are habsolutely loads of them - Samsung, Boxee, the ill-fated GoogleTV (RIP), the embryonic YouView and even Apple (somewhat vicariously through iOS) are all trying to pull off the App Store model. Unfortunately, it's all  a bit shit at the moment.

Unfortunately, right now we're still not seeing a single platform successful enough to make this really exciting for designers and developers. In advance of such a happening, I'd like to provoke some debate about things that might be important when designing apps for the TV. 

I'd love to know your thoughts on these and welcome any additions.

When working in a team on a design or a vision, it’s pretty likely that lots and lots of assumptions will be made. They can be anthropological - “people will act as ambassadors”, “our users will share this” or “people will want to submit their stories, ideas, photos or limericks to our hub”. They can be economic – “This won’t cost much” or mechanical – “Yeah, of course our CMS can do that”.

Assumptions are seductive because they propel the project forward, they allow us to just bat away risk and move forward, like a juggernaut, unstoppable. They are exhilarating because it feels like you’re calling the shots, living on the edge or flying by the seat of your pants.

I’ve worked on some seriously massive failures in my time.

The things I consider massive failures haven’t failed because of the usual things people worry about - being late, looking shoddy, being a bit slow, being unstable, lacking finesse etc. In fact, I've never worked on anything that's failed for these reasons.

They failed because nobody used them.

A news program has opinions, news items (which might contain locations, types of events etc), issues, methods of finding out more. A news story itself might be part of a bigger feature, which has related stories, or they may be stories that are part of a larger story. 

There's a bit in the original film Karate Kid, when Daniel, almost crippled by blows to his leg, assumes the iconic Crane Kick stance and kicks his opponents chin in and knocks him out cold. Brilliant. 

That's basically what Facebook's could do to Google in two really sweet moves. Admittedly, performing those two moves could take a couple of years to pull off, but bear with me for a moment.

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to attend The Guardian’sAcvtivate2010 Summit, which is dedicated to looking at how the Internet is changing the world. The focus seemed to be very much on global good. Props need to go to Robin Hough, Head of Media Events and his team for packing in some of the most fascinating and inspiring speakers into a single day. Although it was fairly exhausting, it was worth being exhausted for.

Here are a few themes that stood out for me.