Chris Holmes

Chris's bio

Chris Holmes has over 9 years of experience coordinating and conducting user-centred design of complex web products for government and business. He specialises in conceptual and functional design, and has a particularly interest in computer gaming usability and information visualisation.

“Usability as a methodology and the industry has progressed significantly in the last decade and it is no longer simply a question of whether or not an interface ‘works’ or not. These days our thinking must be vastly more expansive and lateral as we move further away from the tightly-focussed macro lens of mere usability to the holistic wide-angle lens of the whole customer experience and the ways in which technology can influence and shape it.”

I was asked to field test Apple’s iPad presumably as penance for mouthing off about how impractical and uncomfortable I predicted it would be to use. While I haven’t changed my mind about the iPad, I’m also pleased to say that I was wrong about many details. So just like Jacob Nielsen recently did, I can now reveal my first usability findings for the iPad.

For the record, I started writing this article on the iPad which I was given to test-drive for the weekend, but its not currently very easy to get any copy off the device when typing in Pages, I had to give up and resort to my laptop. (more…)

Of all the idioms, my favourite is the Law of Unintended Consequences (LOUC) – which basically states that when solving a problem, no matter how thorough your thinking and planning, there will always be outcomes that cannot be anticipated or conceived. It is sometimes known as the Streisand Effect, where the attempt to prevent the publication of an article or photo of little or no interest suddenly makes it vastly more interesting and appealing than it ever would have been if no one had made a fuss. (more…)

Anyone else miss this? In January this year Google announced that hackers had managed to steal information from their computers, but they were pretty vague on the details of what was actually stolen. It has recently been revealed that the hackers managed to get their hands on something pretty significant: Google’s password system, called Gaia, which controls access by millions of users worldwide to all of Google’s web services, including email. (more…)

For a long time now, fans and foes of Twitter have speculated on how the site will make money. Well, for those of you who haven’t yet heard, you might want to brace yourself as Twitter has finally unveiled its plan  to make money, and it will be through (drum roll please) advertising! (more…)

Alexander Dowling’s Budget speech on Wednesday night turned the mawkish “WTF” of my previous post on tax breaks for the UK gaming industry to a resounding “FTW!” as the Government accepted proposals put forward by the trade association for the UK gaming industry, TIGA, which will introduce support mechanisms similar to those in the film industry to the gaming industry. (more…)

Gordon Brown’s recent leetspeek (mp3 podcast) leading up to the Global Investment Conference (GIC) has sparked renewed calls for tax breaks for the UK computer gaming industry. The PM stated that the UK games industry was “the most important in Europe”, and that UK developers are “by far the biggest producers of computer games in Europe”, going on to promise that there would be “new commitments of investment off the back of [the GIC] conference”. Interesting words, encouraging perhaps for some, but is it just more talk? Considering The Digital Britain report was full of high praise for the industry but so far has yielded few tangible initiatives, and a previous request from the industry for tax breaks failed to get a mention in the Chancellor’s December 2009 pre-Budget report, one could be forgiven for (quite skeptically) thinking “the cake is a lie”. (more…)

We’ve previously mentioned the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust browser case, and this week sees the initial limited roll-out of Microsoft’s “web browser choice screen” for European users. In a nutshell, the European Commission ruled that bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system was a big no-no and forced Microsoft to give users the choice of which browser they wanted to use. (more…)

Facebook turned six recently and celebrated the milestone by giving its homepage yet another makeover, this time to “improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features”. Six years is a long time on the interweb but, even still, Facebook has made impressive and significant gains in that time. It currently sits at number four on the list of biggest names on the web (behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively) and with over 350 million users (and growing fast) it is poised to very soon become number three. It’s become the “face”, as it were, of the social media space, if not the brain. (more…)