Lloyds TSB launching new online banking service

I am very excited to see that the new Lloyds TSB online banking service that I worked on will finally be live to the public soon!

UX Team Field Trip: Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence

Lab49′s London-based UX team had a little outing last Wednesday to hear Edward Tufte talk at the Royal Geographical Society, about his thoughts on visual thinking and analytical design.

The talk was organised by Intelligence Squared, and you can view the video of highlights from Tufte’s talk on their website (if you pay that is).

My favourite point (as summarised by Intelligence Squared) is: “Data should be used to guide the design, rather than design being based on fashion or what the technology offers. Content-oriented design is necessary, as the point of information display is to assist analytical thinking.”

Some found his talk a little ‘rambling’ and complained that he was just reciting from his notes, however it’s worth noting that he is an academic, not a public speaker, so perhaps we should forgive him for such things! Any guru’s followers can often get weighed down with the minutiae of what they say, rather than focusing on the underlying principles they are attempting to communicate. It’s these key principles (such as the one mentioned above) that made the talk a success for me, as I think much of it reinforces my views on what good UX design should be. He had some very good examples and interesting graphics to illustrate his points (Minard’s the poster of Napoleon’s march on Moscow will end up on our wall!).

We failed, however, to get our copy of Tufte’s “The Visual display of Quantitative Information” signed by the author

5 million work hours, wasted

Apparently the Google Pacman game logo displayed on the site last Friday has cost approximately 5 MILLION work hours! Literally hours of fun.

Proves that plenty of people are still using the google.com website to search, and not just their browser add-ons/built-in search (Or maybe it just shows that the few people who still do, spread the word quickly!)

Did you play it? Did you? I bet you did…

Translate? Nope.

Every now and then you come across an error, prompt or alert message that makes you smile.

Here is a nice ‘translate page’ prompt from Google Chrome: