…I’ll see if I can get an answer on the blog.  My two year old daughter has managed to put two DVDs into the Mac Mini and I can’t get them out.  Tried all the usual suspects for ejecting - eject button, F12, Cmd-E, rebooting with mouse key pressed, disc utility, terminal and drutil tray [...]

Posted in Uncategorized, Work 4 Comments »

I set this website up in 2001 to record the overland trip Lindsey and I took to India. I wrote my diary entries (I’d not heard of the word “blog” at the time) onto my palm pilot and uploaded my notes in internet cafes when we found them. I called the site “dancingmago” [...]

Posted in Social networks, Web 2.0 No Comments »

Imagine the Vodaphone shop on the high-street is open for business, the phones are on display but there are no sales staff around.  You wait a few minutes, call out (thinking there might be someone “out back”) but nothing.  Nobody there.  It’s the same thing everyday, the shop is open for business but no-one to [...]

Posted in Customer Experience, Information Architecture, Mobile phones No Comments »

This is rather sad, I was thinking about this post in the shower this morning.  The past few weeks I’ve been going into the same Starbucks on the way to work.  After a few days the barista saw that I am a creature of habit and no sooner had I walked in was she preparing [...]

Posted in Customer Experience, Hong Kong, emotional design No Comments »

Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?
How do you make [...]

Posted in Banking, Customer Experience, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web design, interaction design No Comments »

Experience suggests that a project without a vision is like a rudderless ship.  A clear vision from the start  is essential to the success of a project.  It is like the corporate mission statement.  It is not the project objectives (objectives are generally SMART - you shouldn’t be looking to measure the vision), rather an [...]

Posted in Customer Experience, Methodology, Work, project management 1 Comment »

On Saturday I attended the Hong Kong BarCamp. This was the first Barcamp I have attended and it blew me away. Here were 200-odd people, brought together on their own volition to share and learn.

On-line communities are easy to subscribe to, requiring minimal effort to participate. Being physically present requires more [...]

Posted in Social networks, Work, innovation 1 Comment »

The <enter time period> ends and a retrospective is held.  The team writes on Post-It notes things that are important to them and they get stuck up on the wall.  And maybe they get grouped into similar topics or themes.  And then the team vote on them; the topic that has the most votes is [...]

Posted in Agile, Methodology, Work 3 Comments »

This appeared as a headline in my iGoogle world news tab today.
A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.
Now I care little about American politics and even [...]

Posted in Social networks, Web 2.0 2 Comments »