Mike Laurie's posts

I’m really enjoying the various incarnations of Weiden + Kennedy’s Lurpak campaign recently.

As well as a few nice TVCs, billboards and some recipe cards, they have created a nice little social thing called Bake Club.

Tim recently pointed me in the direction of a Facebook group called Secret London. It currently has 188k members. This isn’t entirely surprising until you realise that it was only created 2 weeks ago. The grou is for “… Londoners to inspire Londoners by sharing the secrets of the city”. There’s a very nice London-for-Londoners feel to it. Of course there’s a load of spam but the group’s creator Tiffany Philippou is working hard to keep it clean. Tiffany is now crowdsourcing the development and design of a new site from a temporary blog.

I’ve been thinking about why it has become so successful so quickly, especially considering the enormous glut of travel-related sites that exist. For me there are four things that make it work.

One response among designers and UX folk to Apple’s new iPad has been to criticise the effort required of users to command the haptic interface. Microsoft’s Surface had the same response, as did the interface that Tom Cruise used in Mission Impossible.

‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.

People are sharing stuff online more than ever before. The popularity of services such as bit.ly, ShareThis and even Twitter are evidence of this.

You often hear people bandy around an “80/20 rule” (see Pareto principle) where in a social environment, 20% of people will contribute 80% of the content, be it through forum or blog posts, new topics, videos etc. It’s horribly over-simplistic but it’s a tidy rule of thumb. It’s a good way to remember that you will only ever get a small number of folk actually contributing anything to a community. The theory being that if you can get the 20% then the 80% might follow. It’s been around for a long time and you can see patterns of this in anything that exhibits long tail behaviour. It’s supported by Forrester’s highly useful Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors, which is worth grokking if you have the time.

Signup forms are always a pain in the arse. For a long time, the volume of email addresses captured (as if they could get away) has been a pointless little metric. It allows brand managers to own something – “so we can write to them in the future”. But with open rates and click-throughs so terribly low for emails and the cost of sending bulk emails so high (remember when sending emails was free?!), we’ve seen implementations of single sign-on more and more common.

I came across a page on lifeblob.com via search results which required me to log in to view the content.

RRW have been trading on a rumour that Apple’s new iPhone is going to have NFC functionality in the coming Spring. About bloody time if you ask me. NFC (Near-Field Communication) will technically allow you to use your phone as not only an Oyster card, a passport or a debit card but will also allow you to read RFID chips so you can see how much is on your Oyster card, check the microchip of a lost pet against the Pet ID database or even take payment from other people. There’s a wealth of possibilities. Nokia already has devices on the market with NFC built in but has never managed to make it appeal to the public.

A reaction of many forward-thinking organisations in times of big change is to create an R&D department, a ‘lab’ or some kind of Skunk Works.

That way, the risk is isolated away where it can’t harm the rest of the organisation.

It makes sense. All the awesome ideas created or discovered by the privileged bright minds can bring them back to the colleagues they’ve left behind like it’s some kind of precious life-preserving root vegetable from a new land.

The Internet is a messy affair. When you think about how it works – pictures and text are broken into tiny little packets of data and are passed between switches and routers and they all find their way to the place they’re destined for, it’s nothing short of black magic and it’s a wonder that it even works at all. It’s all spread out, with bits poking out here and there, it’s been modified over years, hacked, built in layers, different parties have come up with new standards while old standards have been left for dead in the web’s gutter. It’s a right mess. A big beautiful mess riddled with imperfection.

It was never intended to be a nervous system for humanity.

Flickr credit: robbn1

After initially disliking the new retweet functionality on Twitter, I’ve grown to like it. It’srediculously easy to retweet someone else now. It’s literally 2 clicks, only 1 if you dare remove the overly protective ‘Are you sure you want to retweet this?’ confirmation that some twitter clients are keen on.

But that also means that people you follow are retweeting far more.

Before, retweets looked fairly discreet, they just had RT at the beginning within the tweet itself. Now though, if you choose to use the new ‘baked in’ retweet, the tweeted tweeter gets their avatar in your stream. This seems nice because it gives prominence to people that give good tweet. Thereby helping people to discover more people to follow. But then, some people aren’t as judicious with the retweet button.

Last week, the BBC Trust gingerly announced provisional approval of the BBC’s Project Canvas. 

The aim of Project Canvas is to define a set of standards for set-top boxes that will allow integration of web and TV. Although, it isn’t clear exactly what the standards will consist of and what Project Canvas’ vision of IPTV really is.