Doing ethical research with vulnerable users

(This post has been sitting in draft for a few months. Today I was tagged in a discussion about researching with vulnerable/distressed people and I just pressed publish. The post started out as an email I sent to the UK GDS User Research mailing list on the topic of doing user research with vulnerable people.) […]

Fixing fn button controls on your POP_OS laptop post-update 18.10

I’ve been using my XPS 13 developer machine more and more over the past few months after recently installing POP_OS (Ubuntu based with a very nice and usable Gnome 3 theme). Last week I updated to POP_OS 18.10, which brought lots of changes. One of those unexpected changes was the function (F buttons) stopped controlling […]

Adventures with impersonal recruitment agents

Adventures with impersonal recruitment agents: No, “Hello Bernard, how are you?”. “No, nice to meet you.” Opening line: “Good afternoon, Your profile looks well aligned to some requirements I have.” Translates to: “You look like a 2×4 plank. I need a 2×4 wooden plank.” — Bernard Tyers (@bernardtyers) August 29, 2018

Slack and government

Anyone working in, or following digital services in (any) government, is probably aware of the use of Slack 1)https://www.slack.com/ as an ephemeral instant messaging service by people working in digital services. If they’re aware of that, then they’re also probably aware of the Freedom Of Information request recently submitted to the UK governments Cabinet Office, […]

City Uni talk: User-centred government links

Hi everyone! Thank very much for your time yesterday. I really enjoyed visiting City Uni again. I mentioned a lot of different websites and links. If anyone wanted to read more about those thing,  here are some links to the things I mentioned. Home Office Digital Data and Technology If you’re interested in reading more […]

Léonie Watson talking web APIs at Paris Web

Paris Web 2016 I attended Paris Web 2016 last week (more on that later) where Belén Barros Pena and I spoke about our DIY Mobile Usability Testing project. Léonie Watson and Charles McCathieNevile both working with W3C Standards spoke about HTML 5.1 and web APIs. I had a quick chat with Léonie afterwards (in a […]

Pink is for ladies, red is for men.

These “pink taxis” are for Muslim women who do not want to get into taxis with men. They are driven by women, for women passengers only. “Our society is conservative and our women do not want to ride with men alone at night or when they arrive at the airport at two or three in […]