The new Freeview website is now live and is looking so much better than it was previously. I was part of the team that assisted in the redevelopment of the site and was in charge of developing the Information Architecture for the new site. Hopefully the new visual design and structure will be welcomed with positive feedback!

I have recently been in discussions with Together London about collaborating with them on forthcoming web projects. The idea behind the company is to put together a team of highly-skilled individuals who work together in a flexible and more efficient way. By being more agile, cutting out a lot of the inefficiencies that occur in larger agencies we can deliver higher quality projects, more quickly and cheaply.

URL: http://www.togetherlondon.com/

I came across these interesting data visualisation projects whilst working on the IA for the redesign of the Freeview website. There are some great ideas here involving the presentation and manipulation of data objects. As IA is very much about communicating ideas to clients and teams I am hoping to use some similar presentation techniques on future conceptual IA.

MooWheel

MSNBC Spectra Visual Newsreader

Reclam Literatur Doner

For more info about cool data visualisation experiments and projects check out: visualcomplexity.com

So after a year’s break from working for myself, I have taken the leap and re-established Hungry Browser. I left Crayon in April 2008 and re-started my Freelance career in the form of Information architecture and User experience consultancy. I’ve set up a Hungry Browser as a UK limited company with the view to have more control over my scedule and work/life balance. All is going well so far with great demand for IA and User experience skills.

I was reading one of the free London papers on the way home from work the other evening and stumbled upon an article about recycling. It detailed a poor 74 year old man who had put his rubbish bins out only to return to them the next morning to find they hadn’t been taking away and a note had been left on his bin.

On closer inspection of the note it seemed that because he had left 1 teabag in the bin that it had been branded as “contaminated”. Now I am a stickler for the rules as much as the next guy, but refusing to take away a whole week’s rubbish due to 1 tea bag is just pathetic.

This leads on to a similar story in which an old lady who struggled to lift her heavy bins out for the dustmen was greated by a ’sorry we can’t take them away’ response from one of the dustmen. The reason this time was because they were too heavy and against EU legislation with regards to the health and safety.

It seems to me that the government is completely out of touch with the real world and when it comes to common sense, there is none.

The UK Government plans to build 3 million houses by 2020. Part of this is the proposal is to build an ‘Eco Town’ between Elsenham & Henham. This will constitute 5,000 new houses being built on a Greenfield site. Currently the population of Elsenham is about 1500. So even with a low estimation of 2 people per new house, this would increase the population from 1500 to 11500.

A blow for village history, character and the environment

To cut a long story short this will ruin the scenery, history, atmosphere and environment of both Henham and Elsenham. The current infrastructure of roads and railway can’t cope with the present population (I travel to London every day and the train is already operating at capacity a.k.a overcrowded).

There is an online government petition where you can sign up with an email address (that won’t be spammed) to show your support against this proposal.

Sign the petition

There are currently 558 signatures on the petition, please show your support and sign up here: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/kenmcneil/

Thanks!

NB. You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.

Update 18 June 2008

There are now 714 signatures on the petition, that is nearly 200 additional signatures over the last 7 days which is great news!

Current pictures of Elsenham/Ugley Green

For reference, currently Elsenham/Henham and Ugley Green look like this, with your help we can keep it this way!

Over the past few months Amazon have been tweaking their existing site to improve the design and user experience. They have done a good job, but I couldn’t help but notice that they have only gone half the way to using Web standards in their redesign efforts. Here’s a little (non-exhaustive) summary of what they are missing:

• The HTML isn’t really that semantic, if you remove the style sheet the content doesn’t really flow that well – a(ccessibility barrier to non-graphical browsers)
• No DOCTYPE to inform browsers of what version of HTML they are using
• A huge amount of page specific CSS and JavaScript, could this have been moved into an external file to be reused elsewhere?
• They are STILL using tables for content and page layout – very inflexible, non-semantic and harder to update, increases code to content ratio (lowers SEO – although Amazon are all over SEO)
• Page design doesn’t scale well when you increase the font size
• No use of access keys or tab indexes so a user can’t tab logically through the navigation
• No use of skip to content or skip navigation links

Amazon still provides a great online shopping experience, but you have thought that if they had gone to the trouble of redesigning their site they would have taken a few lessons out of Yahoo’s book and gone down the full Web standards route.

Am back in the office in London after a few days in Newquay surfing and now freelancing as an IA at a company called The Grand Union. I am supposed to be here initially for about a month. Am settling in, head down (being the new guy and all that) and I guess we’ll see how things progress next week. Only downside again is being given a PC to work on, am sure I will end up getting just as pissed off here using Visio as I did at Dare, maybe I will be able to get a Mac, we’ll see!

For the past 2 weeks I have been freelancing as an Information Architect over at Dare Digital in central London (the last time I was here was 2 years ago as a Web Developer).

I’ve been working on some interesting projects for Vodafone, Sony UK and Barclaycard. It is a nice break from a year of working pretty much solely on BT. I would say the only frustrating thing is I have had to work on a PC, which has felt clunky, unprofessional and at times rather retarded. But on the upside I have learned how to use MS Visio and can now add that to my CV.

It’s been quite strange working as part of a new team as opposed to being full time back at Crayon (where I used to walk around acting like I owned the place with my 1.5 hour gym lunches). You have to tone down your personality for the first few days, as not to walk in and end up offending people or acting too over confident (it is a fine balance). But they are a nice bunch and I have had a good time seeing how a different agency (much bigger than my previous one) works and “does” IA.

This weekend I have earned some much needed down time and hopefully the good weather will continue. The next few weeks look potentially busy with possible work offers on the table from: Dare, Grand Union, Sapient and the Glass Partnership. Just need to balance that with getting some decent surf time in and its all good!

Just updated my installation of WordPress (the blogging platform that powers this site) to WordPress version 2.5. There’s some great new features including bulk image uploads, a new admin interface, customisable dashboard, media library and lots more! Hopefully it will inspire me to update this site a little more over the coming months.