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.”

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”. Read 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. Read 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. Read more…

Sanitary napkin jokes aside, there’s plenty of excitement about Apple’s newly announced iPad. The hyperbole is flowing thick and fast : “magical, revolutionary, unbelievable”, not surprisingly most of it is coming from the Apple camp. Admittedly, it’s a cool device and you know it will be well-designed, well-built and easy to use…it’s from Apple after all. I want to like it, I really do, but as with many Apple products once you get past the initial ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and look at the practical user experience, the flaws start to emerge. Read more…

The big news this week, is the event at Google headquarters to demonstrate their much hyped operating system on Thursday, which promises to be the first major confrontation in the new browser war which was triggered by the release of Google Chrome earlier this year.

The relationship between the major players in the online world has always been described in overtly bellicose terms, but in the continuing fight for online supremacy, the battle ground has shifted from the traditional Battle of the Browser, to a fully-fledged global World Wide Web War. Google is making a bold move in challenging Microsoft’s OS dominance, but the old war horse still has some fight left, as evidenced by Microsoft moving in on Google’s search dominance with Bing and their deal with Yahoo. Read more…

I’m not a religious type (for the record I’m an atheist) but I’m a firm believer, pardon the oxymoron, in respecting the beliefs of others. Specifics aside, most major religions have certain common themes, not least of which is the concept of Judgement Day, End of Days, the Apocalypse, the Rapture, or whatever. Basically a cosmic “everybody out of the pool” moment. The basic premise of the Rapture is that the Chosen will ascend to Heaven and the rest of us filthy sinners will linger for eternity in a literal Hell on Earth. Read more…

Recently I got back in touch with an old friend who had been trying to contact me via an email address I’d not used in years. This got me thinking about my online presence and just how many log ins I’ve created over the years: Read more…

“Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it.” — Lore Sjöberg. Read more…