Rachael Rainbow and I had a fascinating day out at the Digital Communications for Charities conference back in January, where I gave a talk on ‘Effective fundraising through better user experience’. The focus of the conference was online fundraising for charities and it was really refreshing for us to get the client-side perspective on this.

There were some excellent talks throughout the conference.

Not so long ago, Eleanor Rudge and I headed up to the British Museum for a conference on 'Designing for disability', organised by the Museums Association.

The aim of the day's talks was to

Yes, it's that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all... Social networking for your Gran Spotted by Gavin This is from a research project created by Middlesex University.

The BBC's new home page has recently come out of beta and is available for all to see. It's great to see an organisation like the BBC moving forward with this approach but I think it raises some questions:

1. It's interesting to note which elements are customisable and which are not, most notably the large banner area near the top right hand corner of the page.

2. Whilst you can choose which news feeds you view, you can't sort them in any meaningful way - I'd like to see this in a future release.

3.

I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’

Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk:

This followed an email from Tim about the playful user interface at etsy, for instance the colour browser which is particularly interesting to us, as Tim wrote a prototype for a similar thing for the MoMA.Guide a year or so ago. So it reminded me that when I was on holiday I was thinking we needed to start have a discussion on the current developments in user interface technology. Not only in terms of original methods of existing navigation, but also what people are doing to reinvent the way we interact with electronic media.

Click the link below the video to continue reading.

The nice people that made the reactable have released the engine behind the table under the GPL.

As a multitouch interface used by musical artists including the legendary Bob Moog and Björk on her Volta world tour (Live Videos on Youtube Later with Jools Holland and at the Coachella Fest