This may mark the beginning of Gov.uk’s decline. The top-listed priorities are the very antithesis of starting with user needs. Instead from now on it’s going to be about growth, shiny new technology, having a native app, and literally pivoting to video.
It’ll be interesting to see if they try to maintain their existing design principles while simultaneously abandoning them.
Personas are often toothless, but these accessibility personas from gov.uk are more practical and useful than most:
Each profile has a different simulation of their persona’s condition and runs the assistive technology they use to help them.
You can use these profiles to experience the web from the perspective of the personas and gain more understanding of accessibility issues.
I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.
This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.
The primary goals of this strategy are to inform decision-making and enhance the success of accessibility-related activities within the GOV.UK Design System team.
Interestingly, accessibility concerns are put into two categories: theoretical and evidenced (with the evidenced concerns being prioritised):
- Theoretical: A question or statement regarding the accessibility of an implementation within the Design System without evidence of real-world impact.
- Evidenced: Sharing new research, data or evidence showing that an implementation within the Design System could cause barriers for disabled people.
Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session — with Jessica
Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.
It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.
This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!
Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.
Seamus Sands, James Kelly, and Antóin Mac Gabhann—amazing fiddlers, and it turns out they all use thesession.org!
February is a tough month at the best of times. A February during The Situation is particularly grim.
At least in December you get Christmas, whose vibes can even carry you through most of January. But by the time February rolls around, it’s all grim winteriness with no respite in sight.
In the middle of February, Jessica caught the ’rona. On the bright side, this wasn’t the worst timing: if this had happened in December, our Christmas travel plans to visit family would’ve been ruined. On the not-so-bright side, catching a novel coronavirus is no fun.
Still, the vaccines did their job. Jessica felt pretty crap for a couple of days but was on the road to recovery before too long.
Amazingly, I did not catch the ’rona. We slept in separate rooms, but still, we were spending most of our days together in the same small flat. Given the virulence of The Omicron Variant, I’m counting my blessings.
But just in case I got any ideas about having some kind of superhuman immune system, right after Jessica had COVID-19, I proceeded to get gastroenteritis. I’ll spare you the details, but let me just say it was not pretty.
Amazingly, Jessica did not catch it. I guess two years of practicing intense hand-washing pays off when a stomach bug comes a-calling.
So all in all, not a great February, even by February’s already low standards.
The one bright spot that I get to enjoy every February is my birthday, just as the month is finishing up. Last year I spent my birthday—the big five oh—in lockdown. But two years ago, right before the world shut down, I had a lovely birthday weekend in Galway. This year, as The Situation began to unwind and de-escalate, I thought it would be good to reprieve that birthday trip.
We went to Galway. We ate wonderful food at Aniar. We listened to some great trad music. We drink some pints. It was good.
But it was hard to enjoy the trip knowing what was happening elsewhere in Europe. I’d blame February for being a bastard again, but in this case the bastard is clearly Vladimar Putin. Fucker.
Just as it’s hard to switch off for a birthday break, it’s equally challenging to go back to work and continue as usual. It feels very strange to be spending the days working on stuff that clearly, in the grand scheme of things, is utterly trivial.
I take some consolation in the fact that everyone else feels this way too, and everyone is united in solidarity with Ukraine. (There are some people in my social media timelines who also feel the need to point out that other countries have been invaded and bombed too. I know it’s not their intention but there’s a strong “all lives matter” vibe to that kind of whataboutism. Hush.)
Anyway. February’s gone. It’s March. Things still feel very grim indeed. But perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a hint of Spring in the air. Winter will not last forever.
Ellie.
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
This looks interesting: a free one-day Barcamp-like event online all about design systems for the public sector, organised by the Gov.uk design system team:
If you work on public sector services and work with design systems, you’re welcome to attend. We even have some tickets for people who do not work in the public sector. If you love design systems, we’re happy to have you!
Not-my-cat making itself at home in the garden.
Using progressive enhancement means your users will be able to do what they need to do if any part of the stack fails.
What a terrific short guide to sensible web development!
- Start with HTML
- Using interactive elements
- Adding the extras
- Building more complex services
- Testing your service
- Do not assume users turn off CSS or JavaScript
- Case studies and related guides
Every day I’ve been recording myself playing a tune and then posting the videos here on my site.
It seems like just yesterday that I wrote about hitting the landmark of 100 tunes. But that was itself 100 days ago. I know this because today I posted my 200th tune.
I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to keep up a 200 day streak. I could keep going, but I think I’m going to take a break. I’ll keep recording and posting tunes, but I’m no longer going to give myself the deadline of doing it every single day. I’ll record and post a tune when I feel like it.
It’ll be interesting to see how the frequency changes now. Maybe I’ll still feel like recording a tune most days. Or maybe it’ll become a rare occurrence.
If you want to peruse the 200 tunes recorded so far, you can find them here on my website and in a playlist on YouTube. I also posted some videos to Instagram, but I haven’t been doing that from the start.
I’m quite chuffed with the overall output (even if some of the individual recordings are distinctly sub-par). Recording 200 tunes sounds like a big task by itself, but if you break it down to recording just one tune a day, it becomes so much more manageable. You can stand anything for ten seconds. As I said when I reached the 100 tune mark:
Recording one tune isn’t too much hassle. There are days when it’s frustrating and I have to do multiple takes, but overall it’s not too taxing. But now, when I look at the cumulative result, I’m very happy that I didn’t skip any days.
There was a side effect to recording a short video every day. I created a timeline for my hair. I’ve documented the day-by-day growth of my hair from 200 days ago to today. A self has been inadvertently quantified.
Playing The Kerfunten (jig) by @CuilAodhaHammy on mandolin:
We got a headstart on the lockdown. A week before the UK government finally stopped dilly-dallying (at the expense of tens of thousands of lives), Clearleft became a remote-only company. At the beginning of this stay-at-home time, I started recording a tune a day. I wasn’t sure how long I’d keep it up, but I’ve managed to keep it going the whole time.
Yesterday I recorded my 100th tune.
It’s funny how small efforts can build up into a satisfying corpus. It’s not like I’m attempting anything ambitious, like Matthias, who is doing 100 days of writing. Recording one tune isn’t too much hassle. There are days when it’s frustrating and I have to do multiple takes, but overall it’s not too taxing. But now, when I look at the cumulative result, I’m very happy that I didn’t skip any days.
One hundred is a nice round number, so this could be a good time to stop. I could quit while I’m ahead. But I think I’ll keep going. Again, despite what the official line might be from the UK government (who have lost all trust), I reckon I’ll be staying at home for a while yet. As long as I’m here, I may as well keep playing. I have plenty more tunes to play.
At some point, the daily streak will end. But even then, I think I’ll continue to record tunes like this, even if it becomes more sporadic.
If you like these tunes, as well as being here on my own site, they’re all in a YouTube set. So …like’n’subscribe, or something?
I was chatting with Rachel at work the other day about conversational forms, and I mentioned that I kicked that whole thing off with the mad libs style form on Huffduffer. Here’s the research that Luke later did on whether this style of form could increase conversion.
It’s the afternoon of day two of An Event Apart in Seattle. The mighty green one, Luke Wroblewski, is here to deliver a talk called Mobile Planet:
With 3.5 billion active smartphones on Earth, we’re now faced with the challenges and opportunities of designing planet-scale software. Through a data-informed, big-picture walk-through of our mobile planet, Luke will dig into how people use computing devices today and how the design of our products needs to adapt to this reality. He’ll cover key issues like app on-boarding and performance in enough detail to give you clear ways to improve first time and subsequent use of your mobile apps and sites.
Luke has been working on figuring out hardware and software for years. He looks at a lot of data. The more we understand how people use technology in their daily lives, the better we can design for them.
Earth is the third planet from the sun, and the only place that we know of that harbours life. Our population is at about 7.7 billion people. There are about 5.6 billion people in our addressable market (people over 14 years old). There are already 5 billion mobile subscribers in there. That’s interesting, but which of those devices are modern smartphones? There are about 3.6 billion active smartphones. Compare that to about 1.3 billion active personal computers—the vast majority of them Windows devices (about 1.2 billion). Over the next four or five years, we’ll have about 5 billion smartphone users and a global population of 8 billion.
The point is that we can reach a significant proportion of the human species. The diversity of our species makes it challenging to design for everyone.
Let’s take a closer look at these 3.6 billion active smartphones. About 25% of them are iOS devices. 75% of them are Android. Bear in mind that these are active devices—what’s actually being used. That’s different to shipping devices. Apple ships 15% of smartphone, and Android ships 85%, but the iOS devices tend to have longer lifespans (around 2 years for Android; around 4 years for iOS).
The UK has 82% smartphone penetration. Compare that to India, where it’s 27%. There’s room to grow.
Everywhere you look, the growth of these devices has led to a shift of digital things overtaking analogue. Shopping, advertising, music, you name it. We’ve seen enough of these transitions happen, that we should be prepared for it.
So there are lots of smartphones, with basically two major operating systems. But how are people using these devices?
In the US, adults spend about 2.3 - 3.5 hours per day on their mobile devices. Let’s call it an even 3 hours. That’s a lot of time. Where does that time come from? Interestingly, as time spent on mobile devices has surged, time spent on other media has only slowly declined. So mobile is additive. It’s contributing to more time spent on the internet rather than taking it away from existing screen time.
Next question: what the hell are people doing during those 3 hours per day on smartphones? Native apps get about 169 minutes of time compared to only 11 minutes on the web. There are about 2 million native apps on Apple, and about 2 million native apps on Android. But although people have a lot of apps, people only use about half them. Remember folks, downloads does not equal usage. Most apps don’t make it past the first opening. Only a third make it past being opened ten times.
Because people spend so much time and energy on these apps, and given the abysmal abandonment, people start freaking out about “engagement.” So what do they reach for? Push notifications. Either that or onboarding.
Push notifications. The worst. I mean, they do succeed in getting your attention: push notifications do increase the amount of time spent in your app …but there’s a human cost.
Let’s look at app onboarding. Take Flickr, for example. It walks through some of the features and benefits of the service. But it doesn’t actually help you much. It’s a list of marketing slogans. So why do people reach for onboarding?
If you just drop people into an interface and talk to them about it, they’ll say things like “I don’t know what to do. I’m lost.” The Intuit team heard this from people using their app. They reached for onboarding to solve the problem. They created guided tutorials and intro tours. Turns out that nobody would read these screens and everyone would try to skip them. What the hell, people!?
So they try in-context help, with a cute cartoon robot to explain the features. Or they scribble Einstein’s equations over the interface. Test this. People respond with “Please make it stop.”
They decided to try something simpler: one tip that calls out a good first step. That worked.
Vevo used to have an intro tour. Most people were swiping through without reading. They experimented with not running the tour. They got a 10% increase in log-ins and a 6% increase in sign-ups.
Vevo got rid of their tour, but left the sign-in/registration step. You can’t remove that, right?
Well, Hotel Tonight experimented with not doing registration. Signing up was confusing people—it’s Hotels Tonight, not Accounts Today. When they got rid of accounts, they saw a 15% increase in conversions.
Ruthlessly edit.
Google Photos used to have an in-depth on-boarding experience. First they got rid of the animation. Then the start-up screen. Then the animated tutorial. Each time they removed something, conversion went up. All that was left from the original onboarding was a half screen with one option to turn on auto-backup.
Get to your product value as fast as possible. Of course that requires you to know what your core value is. And that’s not easy to figure out.
Google Maps went through a similar reduction, removing intro screens and explanations. Now they just drop you into the map.
It’s not “get rid of everything”. It’s “get rid of everything that gets in the way of the core user action.”
Going back to the Intuit example, that’s exactly what they did in the end. That one initial tip was for the core action.
But it’s worth discussing how to present this kind of thing. If you have to overlay a tooltip for an important UI feature, maybe that UI feature should have a clearer affordance. People treat overlays as annoyances. People ignore or dismiss overlays when they’re focused on a task. It’s like an instinct to get rid of them. So if you put something useful or valuable there, it’s gone.
The core part of your application should feel like the core part of your application. It’s tough because stakeholders want to make things “pop.” We throw contrast, colour, and animation at things. But when something sticks out from the UI, people ignore it. Integrate the core action into the product UI. When elements feel foreign to a product UI, they are at best ignored, or at worst dismissed.
These is why cohesive design matters. It’s not about consistency. It’s about feeling integrated. In many cases, consistency can be counter-productive.
Some principles for successful onboarding:
Luke talked a lot about what’s happening in mobile apps, and mentioned that the mobile web only gets 11 minutes to the native’s 169. But let’s dive into this, because people sometimes think that a “mobile strategy” comes down to picking between these two. 50% of those 169 minutes are spent in your most used app (Facebook). 78% of the time is spent in the top 5 apps. Now the mobile web doesn’t look so bad. It turns out you can get people to a mobile web experience much, much faster than to a native one. The audience size is much, much, much higher on the web (although people will do more in a dedicated native app). So strategically both are useful—the web can attract people to native.
Back to our planet, and those 3 hours of usage on smartphones every day. People unlock their phones around 80 times a day. The average time people sleep is about 8 hours. So for every 12 waking minutes, you’re unlocking your phone. Given this frequency, it’s unsurprising that most sessions are very short—most under 30 seconds.
Given that, if things are slow, you’re going to really, really, really hate it. Waiting for slow pages to load is what really pisses people off.
The cognitive load and stress of waiting for slow pages is worse than waiting in line in a store, or watching a horror movie. That’s an industry that’s all about stressing people out by design! But experiencing mobile delays is more stressful! Probably because people aren’t watching horror movies every 12 minutes.
Because mobile delays are such a big deal, many mobile apps reach for loading spinners. But Luke saw that adding a spinner to his product increased complaints of slow loading times. Of course! The spinner is explicitly telling people, “Hey, we’re slow.”
So the switched to skeleton screens. This should feel like something is always happening. Focus on the progress, not the progress indicator. Occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time.
A lot of people have implemented skeleton screen, but without the progressive loading. Swapping out a skeleton screen to a completely different UI all at once doesn’t help. The skeleton screens should represent the real content.
This is a lot of work; figuring how to prioritise what to load first. Luke isn’t talking about the techical side here, but the user’s experience. Investing in getting this right makes a lot of sense.
Let’s look a little closer at this number: people interacting with their phones 80 times a day. The average user touches the device 2,617 times a day. A power user touches the device over 5,000 times a day. Most touches are within one app.
90% of the touches are dealing with one thumb. Young people tend to operate with one hand. For older people, it’s more like 60%.
This is why your interface targets need to work for the thumb.
On phones, 90% of the time you’re dealing with portrait mode. Things at the top of the screen on larger devices are hard to reach. Core actions gravitate to the bottom of the screen.
Opera Touch is a new browser designed specifically for one-handed use. The Palm Pre’s WebOS was also about one-hand usage. Now that’s how iOS and Android work: swiping up from the bottom.
So mobile usage is:
What’s next? What do we need to be aware of so we don’t get caught with our pants down?
We can use the product lifecycle chart to figure this out. There’s an emergent phase, then a growth phase, then consolidation in a mature market, and then that gets disrupted and becomes a declining market.
Small screens get used more frequently, but for shorter periods of time than large screens. Wrist and voice computers are figuring out what their core offerings are.
In the emergent category, it’s all about exploration. We have no idea how things will turn out. We just don’t know. But we do know that we are now designing for lots and lots of different devices.
For today, though, focusing on mobile is still a pretty good idea.
To summarise:
The translation and the translator.