The most recent guardian technology podcast opened with these headlines!
"On this week's podcast, we're looking closely at why a 32x32 pixel digital icon designed for the UK Government's Information Commissioner's Office cost £585 of public funds!"
There are a handful of people who follow me on Twitter who continually moan about the way I use the service. Some complain when I tweet about what I've eaten, who I've met or what I've done that day. Others complain when I use Gowalla or Foursquare to announce my location or post a stream of consciousness on a topic that is currently bugging me.
At Clearleft we're an incredibly business focussed agency. So we work closely with our stakeholders to understand their business needs, and then turn these into Key Performance Indicators to track. In the vast majority of cases, our clients KPIs increase after working with us. However on the rare occasion that things go in the other direction, we take it as a matter of professional pride to rectify the matter.
In 1884 Thomas Marks opened his first market stall in Leeds. Over the next few years he opened 20 other stalls around the UK. In 1894, Thomas Spencer invested in the business and retail chain Marks & Spencer was born. From it's humble beginnings M&S�as it was colloquially called�became one of the UK's biggest success stories and was the first retailer to make a pre-tax profit of over �1 billion. Companies like WH Smith, Woolworth's and AMSTRAD all started the same way, so it would seem that in order to make it big, you should start small. Can the same thing be said of the Web?
In a fantastically timed bit of linkbait, Ryan Carson called bullshit on the title of "UX Professional" while attending the dConstruct conference we organise in Brighton. At the conference we announced that we were hiring a Senior User Experience Designer so it would be easy to put two and two together and assume that he was calling us out. However I actually understand where he's coming from. I don't agree with him mind, but I do understand.
A few nights ago I attended a UX-Bri session where one of the speakers floated the idea of doing free usability testing in order to win projects. I asked about the moral implications of this and was surprised by the response. While the audience largely disagreed with the idea of speculative design work, it seemed that speculative UX work was somehow more acceptable.