Hello. Matt here.

I moved house earlier this year and in doing so decided to abandon the television and embrace the future by using a Mac Mini instead. It’s only a matter of time before everyone is using IP TV – it’s going to be the next big shift in televised consumption. But my experiment has proved that I don’t think even this is as appealing as just having a computer do the job.

What do you need?

A computer unit (I opted for the small old-style Mac Mini, £250 off eBay)
A TV screen with a DVI input – or VGA with an adaptor on the computer (I had a fairly old DELL one)
A wireless keyboard and mouse (I went for the bog standard £16.99 set from Argos)
A remote (I had two Apple ones knocking around)
The Plex app to optimise things for TV (or Boxee or similar)
A browser (it’s got to be Chrome)

Now that’s all pretty basic stuff, but the interesting part for me is the remote/Plex vs mouse/keyboard/browser battle. Impressed by Plex, I originally set things up with the intention of using that as our main interface. It has the ability to intall plugins for iPlayer, 40d, TED talks and even Sky Go so the idea was to be able to have everything in one place and lean back and flip through the many programmes on offer. I taught my girlfriend how to use it and I even paid for a couple of remote apps for my iPhone.

Except it didn’t stick, within a month or two we were using the browser and mouse/keyboard combo for all our needs and this is what we’ve stuck to. So we’re not even trying to hide that we’ve got a computer in the lounge. It may not seem to be the ideal solution but despite having to read text from a distance, the freedom offered by the browser is much more appealing. Here’s the reasons I think we’ve switched back:

1. Plex isn’t quite the optimal solution. It looks great but it’s essentially just screen after screen of lists. Programmes can be nested pretty far down so it’s a bit of a hassle to find what you’re after. All those lists with no shortcuts and the only option to go up and down on a remote gets frustrating quite quickly. Compare this with the freedom of the browser: you can Google/search the programme you’re after; see thumbnails on something like iPlayer to help you identify the one you’re after; just scroll quickly through the page; open things in new tabs and have multiple pages/sites waiting to go; use ctrl+f to find text in a long list etc. There’s basically a solution for everyone.

2. Playback could break in Plex. It’s still a bit buggy and playback would sometimes just stall, meaning the only option would be to go back and restart it. Annoying if it happens more than a couple of times and especially so if you’ve settled down for a film. The native on-site players (for the likes of iPlayer) tend to be more reliable and if anything does go wrong, a refresh usually solves it.

3. Live TV. There’s no easy way to watch lots of live TV channels in Plex – a site like tvcatchup.com is just so much more straight-forward. You do have to put up with a 30 second ad each time you change channel but it’s a small price to pay.

4. The chance to get hold of anything. If you can’t find what you’re after with a browser it probably doesn’t exist. Hit up iTunes, Blinkbox or even torrent to get the film/TV series you’re after. You’ve then got the option to download and put in any player you want. Or of course you’ve got Youtube and the random journeys that happen when you start playing one video and get following the related content.

How has it changed our behaviour in comparison with having a standard TV? We both agree that we’re now watching less TV and more programmes as when the box goes on (and with the slight extra effort that entails) it’s because we’re aiming to watch something in particular. In fact the lack of an in-screen EPG and 30 second ads on tvcatchup mean we never just mindlessly flick channels looking for anything that will do. We’re purposely finding known or interesting stuff.

In conclusion the right interface can make all the difference in unlocking the power of a system. It’s not worth getting constrained in a linear channel of forwards and back/up and down when there’s a whole world of diverse content out there. And the future is this content: programme brands will soon be more important than station brands.

Our bookmarked sites for TV content

tvcatchup.com – despite the odd choice of name, this is for live TV
tvguide.co.uk – if you do want to catch any live TV, you’ll need to plan for it
skygo.com – if you’ve got access to a Sky subscription, decent for films
bbc.co.uk/iplayer and channel4.com/4od of course (and itv.com/itvplayer if you must)

So I used to do a podcast, which went by the name of WebGun with a fellow designer I met at the BBC called Chris (above). It was great fun and we managed 24 episodes over a couple of years. I loved doing it but it seems it has run its course now. We may start it up again, sometime in the future (in fact it would be nice to do the odd one just as and when we feel like it – even though no-one would listen). But here’s some things I learned doing it for anyone considering having a stab at the podcasting game:

It takes time to find your format. A great bit advice I found in a book on podcasting (that cost me an impressive £1 in a Waterstones closing down sale) was to not promote your podcast for five episodes or so. Focus on giving yourself space to find your voice first and work out what you’re doing. It’s a great tip and one I endorse. It’s also a good test of whether or not you want to do it – if you make it past five episodes you’re probably doing something right. While it saves you the embarrassment of launching episode one to great fanfare only to publicly pull the plug by episode four. In fact we kept tweaking our format throughout and I wasn’t properly happy with the structure until the last five episodes.

It takes even longer to find ‘fame’ (and it probably won’t happen at all). I first met my pals at The Football Ramble in 2009, thinking I’d discovered this brilliant brand new podcast. I remember asking them how they got the good press so quickly, only to have the answer they’d been doing it over two years and the publicity had only just started appearing. They’d had a few line-up changes in this time and had been doing the show every fortnight to minimal praise. The truth is behind every overnight success is lots of hard work. And when you’re competing with the likes of national broadcasters, as an independent it becomes even harder. Do it because you have fun. Fame/success in this field is a bonus by-product of that. Our biggest came in being Mixcloud’s 17th most popular podcast of 2010 – boom!

It’s tempting to bite off more than you can chew. Remember that editing takes time (and there’ll probably be a lot of that early on), as does uploading and maintaining and adding to a website. It’s a lot harder to talk broadcast-able sense for an hour than you may imagine. Unless you’re trained you should definitely be recording longer and editing down shorter. Less is certainly more. The process of doing the editing and uploading took me half to a full day’s work for each podcast. On top of this we were web designers and wanted to have an awesome site to go alongside our show. So we kept redesigning it and tried to write our own regular content (reviews, funny stuff, blogs etc) but it just wasn’t maintainable. If I was to do it again I’d keep the website minimal.

The internal mic in a Mac is actually pretty good. Don’t go out there spending time getting all the gear because you’re super keen at the beginning. We tried a couple of different cheap mics and they were nowhere near as good as the Mac’s built-in microphone. Where possible, use tools you already have.

Getting social media right is hard. Unless you don’t use Twitter or Facebook, don’t bother getting yourself a branded account (again, it’s the kind of thing you rush to register at the beginning). In my experience it’s hard to get the balance right between knowing what to post on your personal account and what on your podcast account and I think social media always works better when it comes from a person. And unless you can be tweeting a lot and regularly it’s not going to be a very compelling follow.

I attended a new conference last week. It went by the name of Devs Love Bacon (or Things Developers Love or just Bacon – they were still kinda playing around with the name). It was good fun and full of interesting talks as well as being on the right end of the tech spectrum for me (in that I shouldn’t really be going to developer conferences as my coding skills are limited and my area of knowledge is certainly design). This one had aims other than just learning about programming languages: at its heart it was more about creativity and thinking as the opening and closing keynotes attested to. And the fact I could dodge the heavy tech in talks about coffee, Lego and beer in one afternoon was very handy.

There were a couple of key things I took away from the two days. The first is that there was an emphasis placed on expertise with the phrase snob being banded about a bit. This was meant in a positive way and celebrated the fact that people were passionate about their hobbies as well as their jobs. It showed that it was important for people to have other things going on than squinting at screens and made for more entertaining and vibrant viewing. In fact it left me just wishing I was an expert in something as this pursuit of knowledge and understanding is certainly admirable. I fear it’s unlikely to happen as I tend to get interested in lots of things, which results in me getting excited about side project for a while and ultimately not finishing it off (so this made me think there should be a site for people who have interests in lots of things before realising I’d just invented newspapers/magazines).

The other major takeaway was covered somewhat by Samuel Mikel Bowles talk about design pairing and the idea of getting more designers to pair up with developers when working on things. He touched on a lot of the things I believe when it comes to getting stuff made: developers do it better. Open source, hacking and sharing are hard-wired into the developer mindset whilst designers are praised more on originality, working alone and hiding stuff from others. In the collaborative world of the internet, those methods just don’t make sense any more. In places I’ve previously worked the developers have been far more creative than the designers. Because they actually make stuff. Whilst designers will be worrying about perfections, devs can often be found hacking stuff together so it just barely works. They’re finding out by doing. Paraphrasing the ending keynote from Zach Holman: the imperfect hacked solution might just be the highest art.

And this is why I usually prefer to work with developers. That and it seems they like good food and beer.

I don’t play many computer games. In fact I haven’t played any on a computer or console for years. However with the rise of the iPhone, I’ve been lured back in. The reason I stopped was because big sessions of gaming were always followed by bouts of annoyance that I’d basically wasted an evening and wasn’t getting things done. However with the iPhone I can now play on journeys, public transport, waiting rooms, the toilet and not feel guilty – I’m using time where I wouldn’t otherwise be doing anything. Win!

So due to my long time out of the games scene I’m not sure whether something that was always pretty rubbish (the design of the menu screens) has now been broadly improved. I might just being seeing the exceptions but from my experience it’s still an overlooked part of games design. I’ll be taking the example of the massively popular FIFA 12, because I’ve been playing it a lot and if EA can’t get it right, what chance does anyone else have?

 Did you swipe?

The first thing that majorly bothered me was the Team Management screen, which is made to look touch-friendly and especially ‘swipeable’ with its carousel layout. When you put one big button-y item so clearly ‘in front’ of two others like that they are asking to be swiped to find more options. But no, nothing doing. Maybe that’s consistent behaviour on the site and just how things are laid out?

The shirt selection and trophies screens would beg to differ. They have a very similar layout except here you can spin the shirts around all you like and they move. With a touch screen, you’ve got the ability to give your users a fully tactile experience and in places, the makers of FIFA are clearly aware of that. Shame they don’t apply it consistently.

Moving dots

If that last one was an issue of affordance (making out the user can do an expected behaviour) then so is this other real annoyance. Something that happens on this game and Football Manager: they give you a pitch with dots for the players that you can drag and swap positions. But you can’t create your own formations. You can’t move your players to wherever you want on the pitch. Now I know it’s harder to enable this but this could be one of the most fun things to play with on a touch screen. It’s only a game so if I want to play the old 1-1-8 formation or mob the opposition playmaker, that should be my tactical downfall. Unfortunately I’m limited to the standard options and my team’s default/special one. And you don’t seem to be able to unlock other special ones. That’s the least a game can do – they love an ‘unlock’ moment.

Pick a number

There are two sections that are a special kind of mess: the transfers and salary screens. When trying to buy a player, you obviously have to choose how much you wish to pay so you enter a value. Except they give you free-reign to enter whatever you want with the keyboard. Quicker you may think? Except you have to remember how many zeroes are in a million and carefully count the tiny screen font to make sure you’ve entered that many or boom, you’ve just spent ten times your transfer budget. At least give us the commas in between the zeroes.

Perhaps more importantly, suddenly going into typing mode in an overlay jumps you out of the game illusion. Or at least momentarily puts you in some kind of big-money accounting simulation. Why not make setting the transfer fee or salary a case of spinning dials on a fruit machine? It’s a more apt metaphor for football’s finances.

With these three examples, while they hardly break or ruin the game, they do take you out of things momentarily and stop it from being the seamless experience that you hope for. Also they’re missed opportunities to have more fun. Let me swipe around, give me the ability to drag players all over the pitch and make dabbling in the transfer market an enjoyable thing rather than a chore. The whole thing is a game, don’t just make all the menus annoying barriers to the fun part of it.

Inconsistency is an annoying thing. And removing it is basically what design is about: standardising and creating expected patterns/behaviours. Here’s one that is particularly minor and has annoyed me for a while: short names for football teams.

In the top left of your TV screen when watching a match is the score featuring a short version of the team’s name. Now I’m sure when I was younger these used to always be the standard three-letter ones across all TV channels. I’m probably remembering wrong but it does seem that FIFA have created a three-letter code for all football-playing countries. So maybe it was just the big tournaments I’m thinking of.

Then I noticed a few years back that Sky seemed to introduce an even more abbreviated two-letter code for teams during an MU vs MC game. But then paying attention further it I realised they don’t do this at all, as the MU vs B’BURN game confirmed. Yep, that’s right, two letters for one team, five for another (and punctuation)! The inconsistency is rife. Similar massive differences can be spotted in L’POOL vs TH and AV vs EVER.

Getting over my annoyances, shortcodes for football teams would just be a plain useful thing. Not just consistency in the top left of your screen but for TV guides, shortened URLS, Twitter hashtags (Picklive started some work in this direction) and the like.

So I propose a standardised set of shortcodes for football teams. It’s been managed for the countries of the world in two letters. Although these are of a (pretty much) fixed number and not as many as all the football teams. So how about three or four letters? Any reason it couldn’t work?

I had a job interview last year where the interviewer stumped me on a fairly simple question (it didn’t help that he was doing the whole blunt/arrogant/aggressive technique thing but that’s not the point):

Which designer do you most admire/want to be?

I umm-ed and ahh-ed as I hadn’t prepared for this old chestnut. Had you asked me straight out of uni I would have hit back with a bunch of current, exciting names and enthused about them. But I couldn’t. Why? Because I had stopped thinking about that kind of thing back at uni.

There are very few ‘names’ that I know of in the web design world and that doesn’t bother me. I can’t say I really care who is behind a website. It’s more important that it works and is enjoyable to use. In this era of social media presences, it’s easy to be drawn into the idea of following celebrity designers but this would be a mistake.

I want to be visiting a website because it’s fun/intelligent/elegant/interesting etc – who produced it is pretty much irrelevant. If the designer has done their job, it should be the message that is being showcased. If it has the stamp of a designer all over it, then it’s probably a vanity project.

I genuinely think there’s a real problem of designers ‘being inspired by’ other designers. It’s second-hand thinking at best; copying at worst. If designers are being inspired by other designers they’re not doing their job. They’re not taking problems and processing them through their mind/skills to create a useful solution. We shouldn’t get our inspiration from other’s work, we should be getting it from the real world. We should be inspired by art, music, theatre, walking, running, driving, travelling, buying etc. i.e. by life. Not a narrow channel of inspiration that means the same ideas will be recycled repeatedly.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t go along to conferences and get inspired by others but you should do so because of the interesting stories they tell and processes they’ve been through. Not just judge them on a slideshow of cool work.

And sure musicians get asked which other musicians they admire but there’s a key difference here. Music (done properly) is an artform and the their music is their message. Designers don’t have a message, they have someone else’s. They provide the medium. And if the medium is shouting all over the message, they’re probably an illustrator.

As I stumbled on the first question, the interviewer wanted to pursue this line:

Which magazines or blogs do you read?

Again, I couldn’t answer this, as I stopped my subscription to Creative Review years ago and there’s no one blog I frequent. Again, why?

I stopped reading design mags because they dated so quickly and seemed to be fairly irrelevant after a couple of months. The work that they hail as being ground-breaking suddenly looks old hat. How worthwhile is that?

I don’t read any particular blog because to do so would be to follow only one point of view. I have a Twitter feed and follow enough other designers that the cream tends to rise and find its way to my stream. This way I’m reading something because it’s good, not because it’s by someone who is supposed to be good. The idea of liking one particular source seems so pre-web. Now it’s good content that wins, not just big brands.

I do read a lot though. And again, I think it’s important to read widely: fiction, non-fiction, classics, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, etc. Occasionally I’ll buy tabloids, who’s views I tend to strongly disagree with, to challenge myself and to try to understand what a large amount of the population are thinking.

So I tried to explain all this, rather than give a straight answer. Only at the last minute remembering that I did a podcast, which would have been a great thing to push as a USP. But I failed to sell that. And in at a stroke he’d changed my mind about this being a job I wanted to them being an employer who were thinking in a different direction to me.

Suffice to say, I’m not working there now.