Work

New Freeview website is live

October 6th, 2008

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!

Freeview

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Together London Limited

August 17th, 2008

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/

Together London

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Information architecture and data visualisation

June 25th, 2008

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

MooWheel

MSNBC Spectra Visual Newsreader

MSNBC Spectra Visual Newsreader

Reclam Literatur Doner

Literatur Doener

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

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Hungry Browser goes Limited

June 24th, 2008

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.

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Amazon.co.uk redesign to (not quite) Web standards

May 19th, 2008

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.co.uk

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.

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