Hello world.

• Sep 20, 2018

  6 Conversational UI Principles

  Conversational user interfaces (CUI) are big right now, and they deserve to be: they’re focused, simple, and widely-understood by users. Whether your CUI is backed by a simple script or a full-blown natural language processor and AI — here are some basic guidelines to follow for happy users and successful...
• Jul 31, 2018

  Don’t Join the Dark Side

  People check their smartphones a lot. One reason for this is that, in some way, it’s a kind of ‘gamble’. You check your phone and maybe there are no notifications or maybe there’s a ‘red blob’. Maybe someone’s liked your Facebook post or someone’s ‘faved’ your Instagram picture of your...
• Mar 13, 2018

  Brands are bulls**t

  I don’t mean ‘brand’ in the sense of ‘visual identity’: a good logo, wordmark or tagline is a great idea. I mean ‘brand’ in the modern sense, a wooly definition that’s come to be commonplace over the past 10 years or so. ‘Brand’ has come to allude to the company,...
• Nov 14, 2016

  We have failed

  And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’. In this post I’m going to argue that we, as a generation of designers and developers, have failed. Failed spectacularly. Failed to make interfaces that are usable, failed to make software that is intuitive, and failed to make products that normal people can understand....
• Jul 3, 2016

  I went to Paris, here are some words

  Thanks to a complicated series of events and (possibly) mistaken identity, I found myself in Paris this week for three days. A large global bank were under the false impression that I could help fix their doomed business models and funded the entire trip. I went to Viva Technology —...
• Nov 3, 2015

  Five success criteria for your startup

  I have been lucky enough to see “under the hood” of 100s of startup companies — mostly early-stage web technology companies — and I’ve spotted some patterns. That is to say, startups that I’ve seen succeed often adhere to many of these criteria. These aren’t “hard and fast” rules, but...