I feel as if, technology-wise, we’ve gone full circle. I remember the days computers became more powerful, able to store more data, and allowing us to do more things. It became safer, or more convenient, to store our precious things electronically. Things like photos, music, scanned certificates, movies, work, and so on. Storing these things physically at home would be ‘less safe’. Electronically, you can copy it and back it up. But as we begin hoarding things – like years of photos and music – our the act of backing things up get more tiresome. So we neglect it. And with one simple virus, blue screen of death or hard disk fatality, all we treasured dearly – and thought was safely stored away – can be gone. Just because we can dump it en masse onto numerous USB sticks doesn’t mean it’s more protected. Often on the contrary.
Physically storing things like photo albums and CDs on a shelf at home suddenly seems a lot safer – at least they aren’t under constant attack by viruses, technical errors and other security threats. I mean, it’s not as if your home is being attacked by burglars or arsenists daily. Losing our main PC and almost our laptop has taught us over-dependency on our gadgets is a dangerous thing …
Apparently there was an incredible meteor shower a few weeks ago. I heard about it on the Twitter grapevine but then forgot about it. Nevertheless, this landed in my inbox (captured brilliantly by Jeff Sullivan) and I probably wouldn’t have had as good a view as this anyway! Just serves to remind us that this world we live in, crafted beautifully by an awesome God, is really inspiring.
Working in the digital sphere and working with / pushing the boundaries of web technologies, one thing we often forget is that there are limits to what people can do on your website, for many particular types of sites. For these types of sites, you can’t expect your site to replace all other touchpoints with your users, but merely complement and enhance them. My wife, flicking through her IKEA catalogue mentioned “now I can see things more clearly”. What she meant was although the website’s great at helping her find products (good site navigational / organisational / labelling systems are in place) and inspire her by presenting different room styles, her experience then needs to go to the next stage further with offline interactions with the company.
To see products in more detail users will need to go in-store or at least pick up a catalogue. Catalogues are a different type of beast to websites. Websites are limited by a certain screen size / real estate and location-based restrictions whereas a catalogue, designed well, can be a leisurely browse over a cup of tea, or on a train-journey. And as more and more of what we do is online, from work to home-management, then I find that there’s more and more that I want to do offline. This particularly includes reading of articles or sanity checking my own work.
It’s so much harder to concentrate on something when staring at a screen. When it’s printed out, you can conveniently read it where you like, at your own pace, hold it at a comfortable height, you can mark it up and you can write all over it. These tasks are still, to some extent, not being adequately replaced by computers – though they may try. The more and more we do online, the more enjoyable things we do offline have become, and companies have to remember not to neglect this space but to take advantage of it and continue the experience through.
Particularly true to shopping for furniture and cars, to name but two.
I’m a firm believer that all that happens, happens for a reason and that there are always lessons or positives to be gleaned from all situations. One thing that swine flu has brought back is the importance of personal hygiene but also that work is not more important than our lives. It’s only now when a flu that can kill us – and all those we infect – appears that we put health, family, and consideration for others back above getting into the office at all costs.
Of course, the relative efficiency of working from home these days helps ‘ease the pain’. A recent survey even found the majority or significantly more people (can’t remember which!) now rate money as not the most important thing in their lives. For me, that’s definately a good fall-out from swine flu and, to a slightly lesser extent, the credit crunch. The effect of the credit crunch was probably more about getting us to seriously consider our purchases, on their own individual merit, now that we don’t have endless streams of credit and sky-rocketting house prices to sustain our consumer habits. These lessons will stand us in good stead for the years to come … until we forget them again. No doubt other ‘crises’ or ‘turning points’ will appear to remind us again. Fish Flu perhaps?
Apparently when you give praise to your kids, it’s good to tell them exactly what character trait you are praising them for. This will help them identify good character traits and practice them. My aunt told me this and gave me a card from charactercity.hk listing all these traits.
There is no over-arching editorial direction for this blog I'm afraid. There'll be a lot of web references on here, things to do with user experience and information architecture, odd / funny stuff from the web or my inbox, and entries around the general theme of 'life'.
Apologies in advance for some posts appearing unlovingly formatted (i.e. one huge paragraph). This is because I'll be posting a lot via email through my phone which lacks (as far as I can see) paragraphing functionality.
By the way, comments have been disabled. I've been getting comment-spammed ... and I can't take it anymore.
