Old Tin Roof

A little bit of me, and everything else

Shouldn’t we be supporting British?

British Telecom’s lat­est radio and tele­vi­sion advert for their prod­uct BT Infin­ity fea­tures a lovely song called Cor­ner, by a ‘ris­ing US star’; Allie Moss. I wouldn’t have known about the musi­cian if today I’d not heard the full radio advert which is pro­mot­ing a spe­cial per­for­mance she’s putting on soon.

Grrrr…

A part of me was slightly ran­kled enough to tweet that I was unim­pressed that BT were sup­port­ing a ris­ing US artist, when I would have thought it more appro­pri­ate to sup­port ris­ing British tal­ent.  After all, BT stands for British Tele­com, right?

A good friend Rich Knowles, who works for BT, joined in the dis­cus­sion (that I’d only had with myself at this point) and men­tioned that the tune was “a ‘good’ song. And BT works in over 170+ coun­tries” (I’ll get to his Daily Mail com­ment in a moment.)

I already thought the tune was good (if not a lit­tle rem­i­nis­cent of recent tech­nol­ogy adverts like Sony, O2, Orange, Voda­fone, and T-Mobile have used), so the point about being a ‘good’ song was cool.

What I find hard to under­stand is why, when specif­i­cally tar­get­ing a UK audi­ence, BT chose to use a for­eign artist. Surely there are plenty of British musi­cians pro­duc­ing great qual­ity tunes that could have suited the advert just as equally?

It’s not about race or creed

At this point I’ve got to rebut Rich’s com­ment about being ‘Daily Mail’ about it (and Rich if you read this, please don’t take this bit per­son­ally, you just touched a nerve, I still love you mate!).

It seems we’ve slipped into a era where any pos­si­ble chance there is to make some­one feel bad about their opin­ion when it comes to the men­tion of ‘Johnny For­eigner’, that any­one who wants to improve British pride or see British tal­ent get pushed to the front at every oppor­tu­nity is branded some kind of right-wing, BNP sup­port­ing, Daily Mail reader (of which I am none, thank you very much!).

How did it get to be like this?  When did it become such a bad thing being proud of our nation? Have we got to a point where the thought of being proud of your nation has been cap­tured by the nut­ters like Nick Grif­fin, or the Daily “we’re not racist, but it’s the immi­grants fault” Mail, so we’re fright­ened to say so?

More impor­tantly how do we go about re-capturing it and mak­ing it some­thing worth­while again?

I’m not the first to fly the flag on St. George’s day (another note about that will be com­ing soon), but I do like being British, sup­port­ing British where I can, and hope­fully see­ing the coun­try doing well enough to feel proud.

Yes, BT is a global com­pany, but it started as British Tele­com. If they can’t push their ad agen­cies to use British tal­ent when tar­get­ing the Brits, then why should any other global com­pany care when they’re ped­dling their wares here?

Ninja business card throwing

I had to share this. These are some amaz­ing busi­ness card ninja like skills! And, yes, I know it’s a viral ad, but it’s worth shar­ing the good ones… (via Mike D)

User experience or computer experience?

This note was sparked by a con­ver­sa­tion I had ear­lier this month regard­ing entry of dates in forms, and by John Gruber’s recent link to a wall of shame that shows which online stores that require a spe­cific form of entry for credit card num­bers in web forms.

It took 5 times?

A few years ago, I was for­tu­nate to see a usabil­ity lab that was try­ing to deter­mine drop out rates on a group of spe­cific e-commerce forms.  The biggest rev­e­la­tion I had at the time was pro­vided by watch­ing a gen­tle­man cus­tomer try 5 times (unsuc­cess­fully) to enter his date of birth into a form, in the way that the form required.

The form had a small amount of help text show­ing that he should enter it as dd/mm/yyyy, but the error mes­sage just asked for a ‘valid date’.  The gen­tle­man pro­fessed to not be very com­puter savvy, but it really high­lighted to me how we often force users to fit in with our model of how a form should behave.

Show­ing our cleverness

For a while I accepted that we needed to val­i­date the date so that it could be stored in a data­base, or manip­u­lated by some piece of code.  More recently I’ve seen a cou­ple of imple­men­ta­tions of on-the-fly date for­mat­ting (in JS) that take the entered date, in what ever for­mat, and rewrite it in the for­mat we want.  So a date entered as ‘23rd March 1997′ would get changed to ’23/03/1997′ (in UK date format).

Although I can under­stand that we’d need to do this at some point to make it easy to store, do we really need to do it in front of the user?  Is it not a bit like say­ing ‘OK thanks for enter­ing a valid date but we wanted you to type it like this, so we’re just going to change it for you and show you even if it makes you think you got it wrong’?

Surely with improve­ments in mod­ern devel­op­ment prac­tices we should be val­i­dat­ing against valid dates client side (using per­haps your favourite JS library of choice), then per­form­ing the con­ver­sion on the server side, before stor­ing it or using it as we wish?

I think I need to inves­ti­gate this a bit further…