I recently changed energy providers. Not an especially interesting revelation I admit: why would anyone else care whose logo is at the top of my electricity and gas bills? But I'd say that the reason for changing provider is interesting, because this is the first time I can recall consciously having made a purchase decision based on the quality of user-experience on a website.

It isn't that long ago that the user-experience of a company's website was no more than incidental to the overall customer experience, and an optional part of the customer's relationship with the business. These days it clearly makes sound financial sense for almost any business to encourage its customers to self-manage online, and now regular contact with the website has become an absolute requirement of that relationship.

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There is a problem that I think most designers encounter at some time or another, and I have unilaterally decided to call it Design by Homeopathy. You deliver a strong design - something memorable,hopefully, and with a bit of character. You take this design and give it to a client, who wants to dilute it with a large quantity of blandness. Maybe there are some overall guiding requirements from higher up in the organisation, or requirements from internal stakeholders, but your exciting design is getting seriously watered down. But you bite the bullet and mix in the blandness, and take the result and give to the client again. Again it gets diluted with more blandness. This can happen any number of times, but that's OK, because the blandness 'remembers' the initial great design.

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It has recently been brought to my attention that very, very occasionally I inadvertently say something interesting in this blog. Therefore, in an attempt to both disguise and dilute any such accidental points of value, I thought I might start to post about some of my DiY projects. Seems like a nice counterpoint to all the virtual stuff, blogging about some tangible things I've made in real life. So, to kick off, shelves!

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I've recently been reading a fairly lightweight, factual book on our Kindle. It's probably been about six months since I've done this, as my wife has had sole custody of the thing for an age, apparently reading Agatha Christie's entire back-catalogue. Anyway, as when I first bought the thing, I have been marvelling at what a nice user-experience it provides. So light, so easy to read, so comfortable to have my thumb by the next-page button and so romp through any given book, never seems to need charging, and so on. It would be fair to say that, as far as I was concerned, the user-experience lacked nothing.

Having recently finished making a vast set of built-in bookshelves for our living room, I have finally got around to unpacking all of our books from their hiding place in the loft. To be fair, we have only been living here for two-and-a-half years...! One of the books unpacked was a rather nice hardcover version of the same book I'm reading on the Kindle. I now seem to recall buying it, nearly new, from a bootsale shortly after it came out. This seemed to be a good excuse to try out a back-to-back comparison, so that night I read the next 3 chapters from the book instead.

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I haven't written a new post for this blog since April 16th. This is because I've decided to spend a few months in a state of near-delirium due to sleep loss, punctuated by brief periods covered in someone elses puke / wee / poo. As a result of this undertaking I now have...

• Unusually patterned clothing;
• A great idea for 'Vomoflage' - an entire range of clothes pre-patterned with white splodges so that no-one can tell when your tiny-person has had an upsurge on you;
• More wrinkles;
• More grey hairs;
• Bags under my eyes I can actually keep things in;
• No sense of humour;
• More scar tissue, as a direct result trying to use anything sharp and/or heavy whilst sleep-deprived.

On the plus side, she looks pretty damn cool with this tiger!

That is all.

I have recently acquired a new gadget, an apparently simple device for the conversion of breast milk into kinetic energy, sound and poo. What has become apparent over the past three weeks is how poorly designed this device is from a usability perspective.

Commonly cited requirements for a thing to be considered usable often include that it is simple, learnable, memorable, self-explanatory (intuitive), makes use of existing conventions, not prone to error, satisfying to use, and even that it is beautiful. So where does it all go wrong for my new milk-processing machine?

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It has recently come to my attention that my previous post could have given the impression that I was referring to the type of false simplicity found in such devices as software 'wizards'. As an addendum to the previous post, I feel I should clarify this point. In such cases, information and choices are hidden from the user with the intention of making a task easier. Often the net result is that (a) the user does not get exactly what they wanted, and (b) there is the ever-present feeling that the very things that have been hidden in order to 'simplify' the process might be what you were looking for all along!

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When designing a user path through a specific process (and by that I mean the completion of a task such as buying something, doing a search, completing a form etc), it is always going to be tricky to find the correct balance point between a speedy process with a few quite complex stages, and a slower, simpler process that holds the user's hand through many steps.

The reason this has sprung to mind is the infuriation of Tiny Pregnant Wife yesterday when she got to the point of clicking 'yes - buy it' at the checkout of a very well known online store, only to realise that the postal address was wrong. What I surmise to have happened is that she added our postcode, clicked 'find my address', and then left the default choice of house number selected. And what I believe to be the cause is good old fashioned confusion - there were too many things going on, on the page, and she missed that bit of the process. Fair enough.

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One of my favourite automotive whinges is the seemingly ever-increasing size and weight of new cars. With a few notable exceptions (the Mazda 2 and Chevrolet Corvette spring to mind), each new car is always slightly bigger and slightly heavier than the car it replaces. And as modern cars have become more similar in pace, construction and appearance, the differentiating factors (outside of brand image) have focussed almost exclusively on comfort, space, safety and refinement. I'm not necessarily talking about high-end stuff here: that tends to play by different rules. I'm talking about everything from a Ford Ka up to a BMW 5 Series.

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Things are looking quite busy over the coming weeks at work, which is great, given how variable the demand for creative design can be from our client base. I find it can be quite helpful, creatively, to have a stack of jobs lined up into the forseeable future - for some reason it seems to help my mind stay in the mode it needs to be in to draw things worth seeing. Trying to be creative can feel like trying to be lucky, or trying to be well after catching a cold, so anything that helps you remain in that special place is good, as far as I'm concerned.

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