Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The night before last – and in the night – Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website. Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault. This would not beRead… Read more »

Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The night before last – and in the night – Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website. Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault. This would not beRead… Read more »

Cash-for-clunkers has a major form usability #fail

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Jakob Nielsen points me to an astonishing statistic from the cash-for-clunkers programme currently being hailed as a great success by the White House. From the New York Times: The government is tripling the size of the work force assigned to handle the applications. In many cases, the administration saysRead… Read more »

Gongs, Sir TBL and speeding up freeing up the data

Image by Getty Images via Daylife The gongs have been handed out for the Queen’s Birthday and, scanning through, I couldn’t see one for a webbie or a tekkie. This seemed particularly odd looking at the ones locally for Cambridge – home of the ‘Silicon Fen‘ – and the business related ones didn’t include anyRead… Read more »