Tags: rating

Every week of June sees me at a web event, but in a different capacity each time.

At the end of the first full week in June, I went to CSS Day in Amsterdam as an attendee. It was thought-provoking, as always. And it was great to catch up with my front-of-the-front-end friends.

Last week I went to Pixel Pioneers in Bristol as a speaker. Fortunately I was on first so I was able to get the speaking done with and enjoy the rest of the talks. It was a lovely little event and there was yet more catching up with old friends and making new ones.

This week is the big one. UX London is happening this week. This time I’m not there as an attendee or a speaker. I’m there as the curator and host.

On the one hand, I’m a bag of nerves. I’ve been preparing for this all year and now it’s finally happening. I keep thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong.

On the other hand, I’m ridiculously excited. I know I should probably express some modesty, but looking at the line-up I’ve assembled, I feel an enormous sense of pride. I’m genuinely thrilled at the prospect of all those great talks and workshops.

Nervous and excited. Those are the two wolves inside me right now.

If you’re going to be at UX London, I hope that you’re equally excited (and not nervous). There are actually still some last-minute tickets available if you haven’t managed to get one yet.

See you there!

Exploring the future of… Design teams | Clearleft

I’ll be moderating this online panel next week with Emma Boulton, Holly Habstritt Gaal, Jean Laleuf, and Lola Oyelayo-Pearson.

There are still some spots available—it’s free to register. The discussion won’t be made public; the Chatham House Rule applies.

I’m looking forward to it! Come along if you’re interested in the future of design teams.

What will the near-future look like for design teams? Join us as we explore how processes, team structures and culture might change as our industry matures and grows.

The rise of research ops — a view from the inside | Clearleft

I moderated this panel in London last week, all about the growing field of research ops—I genuinely love moderating panels. Here, Richard recounts some of the thought nuggets I prised from the mind casings of the panelists.

Badging API Explainer

Here’s an intriguing proposal that would allow web apps to indicate activity in an icon (like an unread count) in the same way that native apps can.

This is an interesting one because, in this case, it’s not just browsers that would have to implement it, but operating systems as well.

Starability - Accessible rating system demo

Accessible star ratings (progressively enhanced from radio buttons) with lots of animation options. The code is on Github.

Nosedive is the first episode of season three of Black Mirror.

It’s fairly light-hearted by the standards of Black Mirror, but all the more chilling for that. It depicts a dysutopia where people rate one another for points that unlock preferential treatment. It’s like a twisted version of the whuffie from Cory Doctorow’s Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Cory himself points out that reputation economies are a terrible idea.

Nosedive has become a handy shortcut for pointing to the dangers of social media (in the same way that Minority Report was a handy shortcut for gestural interfaces and Her is a handy shortcut for voice interfaces).

“Social media is bad, m’kay?” is an understandable but, I think, fairly shallow reading of Nosedive. The problem isn’t with the apps, it’s with the system. A world in which we desperately need to keep our score up if we want to have any hope of advancing? That’s a nightmare scenario.

The thing is …that system exists today. Credit scores are literally a means of applying a numeric value to human beings.

Nosedive depicts a world where your score determines which seats you get in a restaurant, or which model of car you can rent. Meanwhile, in our world, your score determines whether or not you can get a mortgage.

Nosedive depicts a world in which you know your own score. Meanwhile, in our world, good luck with that:

It is very difficult for a consumer to know in advance whether they have a high enough credit score to be accepted for credit with a given lender. This situation is due to the complexity and structure of credit scoring, which differs from one lender to another.

Lenders need not reveal their credit score head, nor need they reveal the minimum credit score required for the applicant to be accepted. Owing only to this lack of information to the consumer, it is impossible for him or her to know in advance if they will pass a lender’s credit scoring requirements.

Black Mirror has a good track record of exposing what’s unsavoury about our current time and place. On the surface, Nosedive seems to be an exposé on the dangers of going to far with the presentation of self in everyday life. Scratch a little deeper though, and it reveals an even more uncomfortable truth: that we’re living in a world driven by systems even worse than what’s depicted in this dystopia.

How about this for a nightmare scenario:

Two years ago Douglas Rushkoff had an unpleasant encounter outside his Brooklyn home. Taking out the rubbish on Christmas Eve, he was mugged — held at knife-point by an assailant who took his money, his phone and his bank cards. Shaken, he went back indoors and sent an email to his local residents’ group to warn them about what had happened.

“I got two emails back within the hour,” he says. “Not from people asking if I was OK, but complaining that I’d posted the exact spot where the mugging had taken place — because it might adversely affect their property values.”

Social Cooling

If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior. Big Data is supercharging this effect.

Some interesting ideas, but the tone is so alarming as to render the message meaningless.

As our weaknesses are mapped, we are becoming too transparent. This is breeding a society where self-censorship and risk-aversion are the new normal.

I stopped reading at the point where the danger was compared to climate change.

PWAs: The Panel (Progressive Web App Summit 2016) - YouTube

Here’s the video of the panel I moderated yesterday at the Progressive Web App Dev Summit. I had to get a bit Paxman at times with some of the more media-trained panelists.

I’m about to have a crazy few days that will see me bouncing between Brighton and Amsterdam.

It starts tomorrow. I’m flying to Amsterdam in the morning and speaking at this Icons event in the afternoon about digital preservation and long-term thinking.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be opening up the inaugural HTML Special which is a new addition the CSS Day conference. Each talk on Thursday will cover one HTML element. I am honoured to speaking about the A element. Here’s the talk description:

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…

Enquire within upon everything.

I’ve been working all out to get this talk done and I finally wrapped it up today. Right now, I feel pretty happy with it, but I bet I’ll change that opinion in the next 48 hours. I’m pretty sure that this will be one of those talks that people will either love or hate, kind of like my 2008 dConstruct talk, The System Of The World.

After CSS Day, I’ll be heading back to Brighton on Saturday, June 18th to play a Salter Cane gig in The Greys pub. If you’re around, you should definitely come along—not only is it free, but there will be some excellent support courtesy of Jon London, and Lucas and King.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be speaking at DrupalCamp Brighton, opening up day two of the event. I won’t be able to stick around long afterwards though, because I need to skidaddle to the airport to go back to Amsterdam!

Google are having their Progressive Web App Dev Summit there on Monday on Tuesday. I’ll be moderating a panel on the second day, so I’ll need to pay close attention to all the talks. I’ll be grilling representatives from Google, Samsung, Opera, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Considering my recent rants about some very bad decisions on the part of Google’s Chrome team, it’s very brave of them to ask me to be there, much less moderate a panel in public.

You can still register for the event, by the way. Like the Salter Cane gig, it’s free. But if you can’t make it along, I’d still like to know what you think I should be asking the panelists about.

Got a burning question for browser/device makers? Write it down, post it somewhere on the web with a link back to this post, and then send me a web mention (there’s a form for you to paste in the URL at the bottom of this post).

Less than Zero

I have to admit, my initial reaction to the idea of providing free access to some websites for people in developing countries was “well, it’s better than no access at all, right?” …but the more I think about it, the more I realise how short-sighted that is. The power of the internet stems from being a stupid network and anything that compromises that—even with the best of intentions—is an attack on its fundamental principles.

On the surface, it sounds great for carriers to exempt popular apps from data charges. But it’s anti-competitive, patronizing, and counter-productive.

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

I don’t understand the maths, but the logic is fascinating.