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Showing posts from 2014

On disruption and communication 2

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Brighton Sea front frosted 2 I didn't anticipate quite so many examples   to my December blog post  on disruption and communication  so soon.  As a follow up I'd like to briefly mention some of these,  ranging from at best inconvenient and stressful experiences  to the frightening and life taking. Taking the first and the seeming inability of the British rail system to cope with our seasons. They suffer with trust and respect as a lot of the people using the system for holiday travel are also regular commuters. Indeed my Facebook feed has a number of people complaining that they have to put up with this all year round.  With the scenes at Finsbury Park and the snow closing  Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and Leeds Bradford International airport , it's got to have a knock on with passenger trust and with the relatively trivial nature of the impact there isn't much opportunity for the companies involved to show respect. Apart from maybe top execs giving up thei

15below

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I don't usual write about my workplace directly on social media or this blog. But today I'm just going to briefly touch on some of what makes it a good place to work for me. Basically for me a good work place always boils down to two things 1) the people and 2) a general sense of inquisitiveness. Working Late by Thomas Høyrup Christensen I work for 15below a software development company that specialises in the travel industry. It's fair to say we are probably market leaders in the kind of workflow driven notifications that we do. We have internal tools that started for a particular business need and are now side projects such as Gallifrey, what I love watching here is how is allows people to play with techniques that aren't always useful in the day job - such as click once deployment in github We also have internal tools, which are part of say our build chain, that get open sourced - such as the aptly named  Build.Tools  or fixes to how packaging works in

On disruption and communication

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Beach Snowman Xmas cards available As the festive season gets into full swing, I am glad that I am not reliant on using mass public transport before I can relax and enjoy myself this year. Especially after reading the news this morning - predicting rail disruption caused by  floods in the mild weather .  For around the past decade my day job has involved helping travel companies in passenger communications; as distilled into these top tips of  The 3 Big Ideas In Managing Passenger Disruption  or in  Managing Travel Disruption  that looks at more crisis orientated passenger communications. [edit: these links are now dead, more up-to-date take on  Disruption management: Your opportunity to impress  or  Travel Disruption Management: Tech Opportunities in the Travel Industry ] But from the small journeys that I have taken in the past week, whether by bus or train, one takeaway has been that small delays can be frustrating when you don't know the reason or trust the information

On innovation systems and careers

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fishbowl jump by Kay Kim A few days ago Timehop popped up a link to Brighton: The UK's Silicon Valley or Just a Feeder City for London? that was written a year ago and the situation has changed that much (although 15below could be another name to go with Brandwatch! ;-)) The story laid out was quite familiar, very few of my friends at university stayed in the area though and I moved out for 4 years getting experience in ... you guessed it in London! It also chimes in with the effects of innovation systems talked about in the book Get off the Grass: Kickstarting New Zealand’s Innovation Economy by Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan. In Chapter 3 of Get off the Grass the authors tell the story of the origin of Silicon Valley and how agglomeration had made it successful, this area previously had an industry manufacturing valves that had powered electrical circuits before transistors. The story of Silicon Valley nicely illustrates the three key aspects of the agglomeration pr

On buying behaviours and usability

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This week I have been purchasing the photos from the running events that I've taken part in this year. One thing that I like, about getting several sets at the same time, is that it allows me to look at the user experience I come away with from each photo solution. So here I'm going to briefly compare two sites and think about any lessons I could draw for the travel industry, since that's where I work. The first experience I just wanted to discuss two different sites that left me quite different feelings. The first looked like a user forum from about 10 years ago. The search on race number takes you to page dominated by the search tool and other screen furniture about the gallery. This is followed by thumbnails of the matching photos. Clicking on any of these photos then takes you to the screen below, with various purchasing options including confusingly "All my images". There are some Google ads, which when looking at a friends images had an amusing

On empathy and solutions

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Recently I've been thinking about e mpathy in product development and how often in commercial software development that you are not the user. One area that I see a lot of people focus on is separating the problem from a potential solution in requirements.  Empathy Map by Oliver Quinlan User stories especially attempt to do this, unfortunately I don't think that the "As a ..." format as practiced is helpful, from my experience it's too easy to make it a justification exercise for a solution, it doesn't really help promote empathy or show that the user has really been taken into account. (Your mileage may vary and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who thinks that the "As A ..." user story format is the best available) In Innovation is not magic   Aly and Fernanda make the point "Innovators can get excited about things they can do and can become dazzled by the splendor of  their own creation. When someone has an idea,

On Unsubscribe and UX

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Recently I have been doing some spring cleaning and unsubscribe from various newsletters that I've collected over the past year. One thing that has struck me is the very different user experiences that you get from such a simple task. So I thought I'd quickly run through the good, the bad and the ugly ... London Gatwick airport's page says a simple "your request has been processed", what does this mean? how are my expectations being managed? (they aren't). Which newsletter was this again? Oops, how do I sign back up I didn't mean to click on that! This page looks particularly lazy, possibly not even a web page with any formatting. What makes this worse is that it is from a third party mail list management service ... it doesn't look like the whole user journey is considered equally. Next up was Sweatshop with the confusing "been taken into account" ... 5 days later I was still receiving emails. That is a minor irritation but it cr

BRIEFING: ThoughtWorks' QTB on Big Data

Some notes from this quarter's technology briefing from Thoughtworks. This session's topic was "Big Data". I was pleased that the topic was chosen as I am interest in Big Data and travel , especially how it can be used by my clients and to enhance the product that I work on. Caitlin McDonald from twitter has also created a Storify story from tweets during the event (with the added bonus is that I am in the background to someone's photo) Session The main speaker was David Elliman with Ashok Subramanian - David has also written a blog post called The Big in Big Data Misses the Point that presents some of the content covered or see the full presentation in English or German . The session started y looking at the origin of "information explosion" and how in the 1940s people were starting to get worried about the miles of shelf space would be needed by 2000 to store all the books produced. This was contrasted with the explosion of multimedia informat

SUMMIT: SITA's Air Transport IT Summit 2014

It's been a couple of weeks now but I thought I'd share some thoughts from this year's SITA Air Transport IT Summit 2014. From my personal perspective the interesting bits were around mobile and passenger communications. From the SITA survey results it looks like everything going self-service, with kiosks due to make a resurgence as a more intelligent touch point than the current check-in and boarding pass generators. A key target for investment over the next 3 years is predicted to be baggage services, which was good to hear since that's what we'd thought at 15below towers in creating our customer conference presentations. Given the infrastructure changes over the past few years I'm quite excited about how the passenger experience can be improved in this area - having had to wait 16hours for my bag to turn up with minimal contact or updates I would certainly appreciate that! After baggage, disruption management will be next, which does surprise me a bit

On Starting Out and Responsible Engineers

"How do you learn how to use a code base?" a very simple question from a junior developer that has prompted a lot of thought. To be honest it's been a while since I was last at that point and it's so long ago I can't remember learning a new code base. But my advice was to learn and study the code, run it change it, see where it breaks. Do the same with other open source projects to deliberately learn how to learn code bases. Also do this outside of work, where there isn't the same pressure to deliver or perform.  Apparently that wasn't a great answer as I got the reply, "What if you've got a life?", so a little motivation was in order :-) I've written about this before and point 3 from a W.S. Humphrey quote in my previous blog post on motivation and management was " the training and support to enable the work to be properly done". There are various training courses and sites available for teaching specific skills or technolog