Bradley Howard's Blog

New BBC Homepage review

Dec 5, 2011 at 4:41pm

So, the new BBC Homepage has now been rolled out for all users as the default landing page for bbc.co.uk.

The BBC have a huge usability challenge. The site covers everything from the most popular news website in the UK to CBeebies, from the excellent iPlayer to detailed microsites on most scientific explorations.

There’s a huge amount of content on the site, and sections of the site aimed at toddlers who can’t read to silver surfers.

In my opinion, the new homepage addresses the usability challenge very well. I like the 3 tabs along the bottom as different ways to browse content (Most Popular, What’s On and Explore).

The new toolbar at the top is very Mac/ Google-esque, providing the most common links throughout the entire BBC web estate. At the moment you can see the style of the toolbar changes across this site, and I expect this to become common over the coming months.

Finally, there’s the scrolling features area at the top of the site. Very iPhone-ey (no pun intended). Great on a touch screen but with a mouse it’s quite fiddly. It’s the same as the new version of Chrome, with the ‘Apps’ and the ‘Most Visited’ sliding navigation. Great on a phone, poor with a mouse.

Next year will see an explosion of touch screen PCs once Windows 8 is released. Earlier this year I considered buying a touch screen PC for home, but human hands (and especially my children’s hands) are too greasy to consider using on a flat surface. We bought a standard PC in the end and it still annoys me how many fingerprints appear on the [non-touch] screen.

I was in a meeting yesterday with a few people, one of them with an iPad. One of the guys turned to the iPad user and said “You use the letters ‘e’, ‘u’ and ‘s’ a lot, judging by the state of your screen”. The iPad user replied with “Interesting you say that, because my boss’ name is Sue”.

Back to desktop touch screens – I don’t think we’re ready for touch screen’s yet. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist – I’m faster typing and navigating with a mouse and keyboard than colleagues with an iPad.

In summary, I like the design of the new BBC homepage. It solves a huge challenge really well, by consolidating a huge site into a number of easy to use components and promoting some of them nicely. Now I need to use it with clean hands and a touch screen.

tags:

BBC, children, site review, usability,

0 Comments

5 child safety online tips

Oct 24, 2011 at 12:07pm

I remember that when I started studying Computer Science at University (in those days it was a Polytechnic), in the first lecture we were told that at any social gathering we shouldn't tell anyone we were studying Computer Science because the conversation would either stop immediately, or follow the route of "ah, that's interesting, do you know how I can fix my [insert electrical item here]?"

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how I help my kids stay safe online.

I'll start these tips with the viewpoint that the Internet is 99.9% a good thing for kids. I think it's better than television, which is a passive, brain-switch-off experience. It's a type of entertainment as much as educational experience for children (and adults) which should be embraced.

My kids range between five and nine years old although I think this advice is useful for any children up to about twelve. Here are my top tips:

Keep the family computer in a visible place. I don't agree with kids (under twelve) having a PC in their bedroom, or for that matter, a laptop which can move around the house. We have a family computer on the corner of our living room and kitchen, so we can always glance across and see what the kids are doing.
Enable fast escalation. Our kids can approach my wife or I at any time and say "Why is this happening?" on the computer and we'll always try to help. Like anything with children, if they feel they might be told off, they won't talk to an adult, so whatever happens online we'll always make them aware it's not their fault.
We use free Family filtering software - the Windows Live Family Safety filter. Each of the kids has their own user accounts and we have another one for guests. Family Safety provides time limits (which we enable for weekday mornings) as well as stopping some sites. For our five year old, it's on maximum control setting and for the nine year old it's set to block anything adult and allow most other sites. At the moment none of the kids are allowed Facebook, although we do allow YouTube because they like listening to music and you'd be surprised how young kids don't realise that YouTube contains videos that aren't music related.
Using the family filtering software we regularly check their accounts (it takes seconds) and make it very clear that we check what they've been doing online.
Stay aware of latest scams, websites and general web trends and behaviour. This is easier for our household because of my job, but my wife is still aware of most online 'problem areas'.

Even with all these tips, my wife phoned me at work last week to say one of the girls had asked her to look at a website she'd been using. On the site, which is a Flash games-based website aimed at young girls, there is a chat functionality, and someone on the site had been chatting to our daughter and been totally vulgar.

My wife took a number of screenshots, of which part of the chat window is shown above. I contacted the website to make them aware of the incident and haven't heard anything back from them.

I started off with these tips saying how the Internet is 99.9% a good thing for kids. Our experience highlighted that you need to be extremely vigilant of that 0.1% element.

tags:

children, education, tips, web security,

0 Comments

How to speed up X-rays

Oct 10, 2011 at 7:19pm

Regular readers here will know that I enjoy looking at (and dramatically over simplify!) existing social or economic issues that could be solved with better technology, and here's another one that struck our family this weekend.

Anyone with more than two children close in age will know how they always compete for seats in a car. If you aren't in this category, just take my word for it. Even Usain Bolt couldn't run quicker than my kids from my front door to the car when we leave for a family outing.

On Sunday afternoon we all left for a swimming lesson and 30 seconds later, the kids had piled into the car and one of them shut the door on my five year old's arm. One very loud scream later and I ran to open the car door. No exaggeration – her hand was trapped outside the car and the door was completely closed.

Fifteen minutes later we were in the local A&E department and a short while after that, she’d had her arm x-rayed.

X-rays have changed over the last few years. They are now completely electronic, which makes them almost instant to take and process, and then the doctor examines them on their computer monitor a few minutes later.

The doctor took a look and said that there wasn’t a break, just some bruising. He said that if she is still in pain in the next few days, to take her to our GP.

Today at school she started complaining of some pain in her arm and the school called Mrs H who then took my daughter to the local GP as instructed yesterday. The GP said that he can’t access the X-rays for 7 days. And now my technology solutioning begins…

Disclaimer: I worked with the NHS for four years in my first job. I know that the amount of data they process is huge, and there are very few companies who have a ‘customers’ or ‘user’ base as large as the NHS, so I know there are some limitations, but here goes:

X-rays should be hosted by a Flickr-style web site that all health workers can access securely. The data storage required is immense – but that data is all stored by the separate hospitals at the moment for X-rays! So consolidate it on to a Flickr-style platform. For data throughput comparisons, YouTube currently processes over 600 videos per minutes (over 25 hours of content) and there are over 6,600 Flickr photos uploaded per minute.

If that solution sounds too farfetched (and remember, Flickr was created in 2004), it should at least be possible for a GP to get a digital copy of an X-ray emailed across within 8 working hours from a hospital – not 7 working days.

Once again I offer you the opportunity for me to over-simplify any other social or economic issue and provide a 21st century technology solution!

tags:

NHS, children, healthcare, technology,

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Amazing technology in the living room

Jan 21, 2011 at 1:59pm

Last weekend we bought an Xbox Kinect at home. I have a personality trait whereby I get really excited about technology only for it to rapidly degrade after a few days. So I decided not to write this review any sooner for fear of it being written with a bit too much passion and not enough objectivity.

A week after plugging in the Kinect controller, I can report that's it's still AMAZING. The technology still feels futuristic. Picking up an iPhone with it's two year old pinching and stretch controls feels ancient. Using a mouse or a keyboard feels archaic.

Gesturing is the way forward.

The kids (ranging from 4 to 9 years old) love it and find it intuitive. Adults find it intuitive, although I've yet to see an adult that doesn't sit (or for that matter, stand) with their jaws open finding it difficult to appreciate that the television is responding to body movements.

Many reviewers compare the Kinect to the Wii, because they are the two consoles where players need to be active or stand up to play most games. The comparison is ridiculous. The graphics and playability on the Xbox Kinect games are as polished, clear and fast as the rest of the Xbox titles compared to the Wii which feels like it's still using the graphics chips from an 1980s Atari console.

However the part that most of our visitors like the most about the Kinect is being able to control the main Xbox menu, by sweeping icons to the left and right and selecting them on the screen just like in Minority Report.

To select a menu, the user puts your left arm at 45 degrees down becomes second nature in much the same way as a right mouse click on a PC felt odd a decade ago but is now automatic.

If a different user stands up Kinect will recognise them if they have a profile on the box using face recognition.

Microsoft have got the Kinect completely right. Installing it on my old Xbox (the original white one) was painfree. I've never opened a manual for it. The kids got it. Adults get it. Gestures are the way of the future.

I also bought a new family PC for the home as well after the last one died. For a while, we considered getting a Dell with a touch screen for two reasons. One is that it looks nice without complex wires, and the second is that its a large touch screen. However I've never seen the point of a touch screen on a PC - why do you want to press the X to close a window and get a fingerprint on the screen when it's quicker and cleaner to press Alt+F4 (and you still think the 45 degree arm salute is unobvious?!) or move and then press the mouse.

I don't get PCs with touch screens, but if you could gesture with your hand to quickly close a window, or click your fingers to open a favourite application, that is the future.

The Kinect is an amazing piece of technology, and the fact it costs about £150 and sits in your living room is testament to consumer power forcing companies to create such viable mass consumer devices. I just can't wait until I'm controlling everything in the house with gestures.

tags:

Microsoft, PC, Wii, XBox, children, kinect, technology, usability,

2 Comments

Google the answer engine, not 'just' the search engine

Nov 21, 2010 at 3:47pm

I watched my nine year old son doing some homework this week on the computer and noticed for the first time that Google didn't just point him in the right direction to answer a question, it actually provided the answer.

He didn't think anything of it. He thinks that Google is there to provide answers, and is an absolutely reliable source of those answers. He doesn't question the validity of the source any more than I would have questioned Encyclopaedia Britannica when I was his age. I found that it was a further leap for Google-kind than even, two years ago.

The question was "Who watched the ancient olympics?"

He actually typed in "who watch the ancient olympics?" which actually brought the answer closer to the top of the results than the grammatically correct question. That's a separate issue I'll have to deal with and it was difficult to ascertain whether he typed in the incorrect grammar to obtain the best results rather than a genuine mistake.

Education is changing at an amazingly quick rate. My son's [state funded, primary] school has an interactive projector in every classroom, and is aiming that within two years will have a laptop per child.

Children are being taught to use Google to search for answers.

In Richard Watson's book, Future Minds, he describes how it took less than a generation to go from reading long form (e.g. a paper article on Ancient Olympics) to consuming bite sized snippets on a screen. I don't have a major problem with this leap, except for the fact that we need to understand and accept that general knowledge will deteriorate because children will only know exactly what they've searched for, rather than anything broader.

Reading the paper article, or even one of the search results' full articles would have taught my son that the games used to be one day long, then five days long, the different events, and even that in boxing, the boxers would wear hard leather straps with metal over their knuckles - ouch.

Image courtesy of Arkntina

tags:

Olympics, children, content, education, future, google, search, seo, trends,

1 Comment

The award for the most user friendly website

Apr 13, 2010 at 7:24pm

My kids are under 10 years old. As they've been growing up, I find their use of the web interesting.

If there is an award for the ultimate way to design a website for the masses, it should go to BBC CBeebies. For those of you who don't know (because either you don't have kids, or your kids are a little older than mine), CBeebies is aimed at under six year olds.

The CBeebies website amazes me because it enables under six year olds to navigate their website as quickly as adults navigate their favourite sites.

My kids were all able to use the website well before they could read letters. They simply go to the top right corner of Internet Explorer, can type 'CBeebies' very quickly, and then they click the top result. Once they are on the website, there is an index page of their favourite shows. Most of the icons have a clear voice over as well.

Watching a three year old navigate the web with such ease is amazing to watch. It's a cliche to say that the new generation will be web-literate, but as far as my kids are concerned, it looks like a pretty sure thing.

tags:

BBC, IA , children, digital media, usability, website production,

0 Comments

Tags

New BBC Homepage review

5 child safety online tips

How to speed up X-rays

Amazing technology in the living room

Google the answer engine, not 'just' the search engine

The award for the most user friendly website

Bradley Howard

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