Tales of the City Library

A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference about Social Media in Scotland, and there was a great case study presented by Liz McGettigan of City of Edinburgh Council. Liz runs the Council's Library department, and has embraced using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to keep libraries at the heart of their communities. Their Twitter account, @TalesOfOneCity keeps followers up to date with events happening in libraries all over the city, and their Facebook page does too.

It's so refreshing to see a public sector organisation embracing these new technologies. It's also great to see institutions that could be seen as 'old media' showing just how much they can use 'new media' to keep relevant. It was interesting to know that they were partly driven by the fact that they knew their website wasn't interactive enough, but that it would take a long time to get that right by going through the official channels. So they adapted channels that others are already using to give themselves the platform they needed. Obviously, it's best when your website and your social networking activity all give out a coherent message and integrate well, but I can understand why they took that route - they needed to make their social networking activity a success first, in order to make the argument for a redevelopment of the site!

I would love it if Glasgow City Council followed their lead! Know of any other Councils using social networking well?

By Kate Wooding
Published: 22 July 2010
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Random, Random, Random

Like a lot of people we listen to music on Spotify and recently we've been subjected to the exact same advert approximately 15 times a day.

The advert in question is from the Scottish Government to promote safer driving on country roads, the advert begins by playing various short clips of music before a voiceover begins: "My tunes are always on shuffle..." It then goes on to compare the randomness of the "tunes" with what a driver might encounter on a country road such as a deer, tractor etc before going on to say  "it's totally random!" Unsurprisingly this has been more than a little wearing, despite highlighting a serious issue, the word "random" had become a byword for chronic irritation. Until today!

By "random" I stumbled on to this – a site with nothing but "random" photos with absolutely no information about them. A lot of the pictures are family snaps, many of them not very well taken, but as a whole, the site features an amazing selection of weird and wonderful photos from all over the world.

For best results click on the "random" button at the bottom of the page and don't blame me if you get slightly addicted.

P.S the advert came on twice while I was typing this!

By Chris Reilly
Published: 19 March 2010
2 Comments

10 years of tictoc

We're all grown up from our humble beginnings back in 1999 when the Power Mac G4 was the talk of the creative town and email was still somewhat unheard of! Now we're in double figures (as my Granny used to say!) so can start staying up after 9 oclock and all the talk is in weird jargon like UX and tweeting!

We had a few half lager shandies on Friday night and some haggis neeps n tatties to mark this momentous occasion and have created a nice widget on the tictoc homepage to celebrate these past hectic years!

Have a laugh at some of the pics from Friday night and feel free to post any comments or memories you feel we'd appreciate (happy ones please!)

By Melanie Russell
Published: 1 September 2009
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UX Camp London

Photos by Adam Charnock

This weekend saw the first, and most definitely not the last, UX Camp London at the eBay / Gumtree office in Richmond.

I was lucky enough to have acquired one of the 40ish tickets that were available for the one day event for user experience designers.

It was an early start to say the least, having booked myself on the first train out of Glasgow Central, the 4.25AM west-coast service to Euston. I had sprung for a First Class seat with the intention of making myself comfortable and having a pleasant nap through the trip. Unfortunately it seems that Virgin have designed their seats to cause near constant pain in either your neck or back, with a handy lever that lets you switch from one to the other. The sleep I did manage wasn't the most rejuvenating, but I'm glad I got it.

When I arrived at the riverside venue it looked like most people were already working their way through a pastry or coffee and chatting excitedly about the day ahead. I spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd, and was glad to catch up with a number of people who I had met at the UX London conference earlier in the year.

Before things got started there was an opportunity to take a look at the Wall of Deliverables, an idea pinched from this year's IA Summit. Before the event we had been asked to bring along our favourite UX deliverables. There was to be an open vote throughout the day and at the end the one with the most votes would win a prize. I took along a print out and URLs to an HTML wireframe and an interactive prototype. Alas, I didn't win, but I did manage to get a couple of votes.

Just after 10AM, Cennydd Bowles (one of the unorganisers) introduced himself and described what would be happening over the course of the day. After describing the barcamp type structure of the day he directed the group to the schedule wall, where each attendee could note down the topic of a presentation they had prepared, or a discussion they'd like to have. The schedule filled up quickly and people moved to the rooms that had been made available for our use.

Over the course of the morning and afternoon I moved from presentation to workshop to presentation. Some of the highlights being:

• Are we nearly there yet? A closer look at user journeys - Cath Jones
• What I’ve learned about UX freelancing - Leisa Reichelt
• Using questionnaires effectively in UX
• Saying no is part of our job; what happens when you keep saying ‘OK’ - Simon Doggett
• Design Games 101; better ways for collaboration, facilitation and ideations - Andy Budd

One of the best sessions was an ad hoc workshop on design games by Andy Budd from Clearleft. I've been running prototyping workshops with our clients for a few months now. They usually focus on introducing clients to the design process and design thinking. We present issues we've discovered through user research and play design games to try and solve them.

One game I've wanted to introduce into our work is design the box, where you give your client a blank box and ask them to imagine this is the packaging for their business or website. The idea is that you can leverage people's in-built understanding of packaging and merchandising to get at concepts to guide experience design. Andy's workshop was great hands-on fun, and I was quite chuffed at the box our team knocked out for Gumtree, see the photo above of me trying to explain why we chose the things we put on our box.

While the presentations were informative and inspiring the chat between sessions was equally enjoyable. I caught up with UX people from companies like Rightmove, Skype and Just Giving, freelancers and masters students. 

If there's one thing that stands out about the UX community it's a collective desire to share and collaborate with other people in the industry and in general. Leisa enapsulated the reason she shares so much on her blog brilliantly when she said that everything about her work that she shares with the world comes back in some positive way.

So, please enjoy my slides, and until the next UX Camp London, we'll keep on researching, designing and sharing.

By Andy Bright
Published: 24 August 2009
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Glasgow UX book club at tictoc

Over the last year User Experience (UX) book clubs have been springing up across the world. Initially kicked-off by uxbookclub.org, the events are meetings where people interested in experience design can share their views on some of the discipline's best books.

There are currently 4 regular book club meetings in the UK: London, Bristol, Brighton and since earlier this year Glasgow.

The August meeting is being held here at tictoc, and promises to be the most popular to date. The book up for discussion is the much-lauded Don't make me think by Steve Krug. Steve's book is a common sense approach to web usability, stepping back from the concept of expensive usability lab studies and giving real-world advice on implementing user-centered design on a budget.

If you're interested in coming along to the meeting take a look at the run-down and book a place on the event page. Even if you can't get a copy of the book in time don't let that put you off. You'll be able to learn something from the discussion and get a feel for whether the book club is something you'd like to come to in the future.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 24 August 2009
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Handbags at dawn!

On my way to a morning meeting I unexpectedly passed Mimi Berry's shop on Cheshire Street, just off Brick Lane. Mimi has a beautiful collection of designer bags and purses, which she also sells online at www.mimiberry.co.uk. (Yes, tictoc designed the site, glad you like it!). It just so happens they have a sale on right now, so I had to pop back later on to say hi, and suss out the bags.

Personally, I'm coveting the Domino - strokey strokey soft in perfect dove grey. What are your favourites girls?

By Jo Kerr
Published: 24 July 2009
2 Comments

The art of blogging

People keep talking about how you should have a blog on your company website, but they hardly ever explain why. So here goes:

1. Blogs can give your company a bit more personality, provide a behind-the-scenes peek, make you seem more individual to your web visitors.
2. You get a chance to air thoughts/opinions or talk about subjects that either aren't directly related to your company, or that you might not be quite ready to bill as the 'company line' - it depends how far you want to take your blog into the realm of the 'personal view'.
3. Most importantly, blogs can be very good at driving traffic to your website. Especially if they are quoted by other bloggers, who then link back to them - search engines think sites that are well-linked are more trusted, and so you'll come higher up the rankings.
4. Because you should update them fairly regularly, they help keep your site fresh. New content encourages repeat visitors.
5. They give visitors to your site a chance to interact, by commenting on what you've written. Sometimes the arguments that go on in the comments are more interesting than the blog post itself!
   

Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself if you're thinking about having a company blog:

• Whose blog is it? At tictoc any of the staff can add to the blog - some companies keep it as a personal view from one of their staff, usually someone at the top.
  
• What's it for? Sometimes it's about issues that are relevant to your company, sometimes it's about a whole load of other stuff that has no direct relevance to what your company does. Sometimes it's a mixture of both.
• Who's going to make sure you blog regularly? There's no point having one if it's rarely updated. Make a commitment, and give someone the time and responsibility to make it happen.

And here are some other things to bear in mind:

• If you use a blogsite for your blog (i.e. blogger or wordpress) your own company site will not get any of the benefit of having a blog. All that traffic will be driven to another site - it won't help your own rankings at all. It's not difficult to get a blog built in to the Content Management System of your own site.
  
• Do be a bit careful about the content on your blog. Don't be defamatory, be careful if you're going to be provocative - remember, this reflects on your company, and technically your company could be liable for what's said on it.
• Know how you're going to deal with comments. Not all comments will be supportive, and you should make a decision about whether to allow comments or not. If you do and someone makes a comment you're not happy with, make sure you respond to it (calmly) rather than ignoring it.

By Melanie Russell
Published: 17 October 2008
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The ups and downs of selling online

Recently e-consultancy has done a couple of stories about selling online and I thought I'd pull out some of the most relevant stats for you, and point you towards the original articles.

The first stat that I thought was interesting was that online sales are generally estimated to make up 7-15% of a brand's sales. e-consultancy was averaging it at 10%. Although that may work very well for high street brands, we think the story's very different for small independent retailers - if you're in a niche market and online suddenly opens you up to customers without a geographic boundary, you can suddenly reach a whole lot more people. We know that one of our clients is currently taking more than 50% of their sales online.

Interestingly, a number of the brands that e-consultancy originally noted (Feb 08) weren't selling online still have no plans to go online in Sep 08. Whether that is because they figured they'd already lost the battle (I can see that Morrison's and Somerfield may feel that Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's have already beaten them and pilfered all their potential online customers) or because their sales are such high-volume and low-value (though with Asda's George going online, Primark and H&M have more to lose) that they figure it's not worth it, I am surprised that such big brands are still unable to take advantage of online selling.

And then finally e-consultancy summed it all up in a lovely little article that pulled together the drawbacks of not selling online - apart from the loss of a revenue stream that most retailers would be very pleased to have in today's economic climate. Two in particular stick out for me - the obvious one that without online you're limiting your customers to buying from specific geographic locations where you have stores, and to your trading hours - online neatly leaps these two hurdles. And the second one is that you are immediately losing out to your competitors - who can bid on your brand name in an effort to snaffle your customers, or where your customers choose to shop from them because your brand isn't available online. Very few brands have such customer loyalty, or such brand exclusivity, that a customer would refuse to buy elsewhere. Online makes is so easy to search for particular products and compare prices that brands who aren't online are definitely losing out on sales.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 29 September 2008
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Wall of Websites

The developers were feeling that there was something missing from the room and so we decided to print homepage screen shots of our websites. We started with just the most recent projects, but quite liked the result so ended up printing most of the sites from the last two years, over 80 screen-shots!

We've reached such a height up the wall that not even Tomek could stretch to and so we will be continuing to wallpaper around the room as new sites are launched.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 22 August 2008
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