In the run up to the World Cup it’s good to see UKTV History (AKA UKTV War) doing its bit to ease Anglo-German tensions. Calls for restraint from the Football Supporters’ Federation and England coach Sven Goran-Eriksson have been heeded with nightly, back-to-back screenings of ‘The Nazis: a Warning from History’ and ‘The World at War’.
Watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares the other night I was struck by how he practices his own form of user-centred design. For anyone not familiar with the programme, top chef Gordon Ramsay has a week to try and turn around a failing restaurant whilst swearing … a lot.
On arrival the first thing Ramsay does is to evaluate the existing setup. He samples the food and the service and then goes behind the scenes to check the kitchen. Then it’s out into the field to investigate the competition and talk with people in the street and other restaurant goers. With customer data and a guerrilla competitor analysis Gordon produces a vision which unifies the customer experience and drives the transformation of the restaurant, all the time evaluating progress and making changes based on feedback.
Sound familiar? Gordon Ramsay is in the business of creating unique customer experiences and the best experiences need passion and just enough process to succeed (and maybe just the odd swear or two).
Can it be true? A live version of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds? To paraphrase the mighty metal martian warlords – oooohlaaaa!
Linotype have a great feature on their website. At the top of the page they display their tagline – ‘The Source of the Originals’ – in a font from their library. Every time you move to a different page in the site you see the tagline in a different font.
This is a great way of advertising their extensive font collection and of exposing visitors to fonts that they might not have considered or even seen. And for impulse buyers or the curious there’s a link directly to the font’s product listing. Excellent!
I found this whilst looking for information about ITV2 on Freeview. I love it. Simple, clean, clever and both a graphic and a logotype.
In educational technology circles the talk used to be about VLEs (virtual learning environments) that brought together content, assessment, discussion and personalisation. This was the future and would improve learning. There was lots of money floating about so everyone went out and bought or (in some cases) built a system. And then they realised that these systems needed to talk to other systems and that universities weren’t just about learning and thus the phrase managed learning environment (or MLE) was born. But no-one really seems to know what an MLE is? Unlike CRM or intranets there are no distinct products that will give you an MLE. IT departments tend to deal in products, rather than concepts and so I wonder if Jisc’s notion of an MLE is actually doing more harm than good.
David Brent is alive and well and living in Wales.
From BBC News
‘North Wales deputy chief constable Clive Wolfendale has been criticised for performing a rap to his force’s black police association.’
The full rap is hilarious and actually quite well executed, but you can imagine some PR person begging him not to do it.
A report from the BBC about fake universities on the web pointed me towards those venerable institutions (in descending order of believability) Shepperton University, The University of Dorchester (now offline) and GM (Greater Manchester) U.
A piece on The Today Programme this morning about the upcoming European Summit in Brussels revealed the unit that delegates use to measure the likely length of the conference – shirts! Three shirts; three days.
It makes perfect sense, of course, but it tickled me and, it would appear, the journalists at Radio 4 as shirt numbers came up on PM later in the day. I’ll have to remember this one next time I’m off to a conference.