A photo posted by The Friendly Agency (@friendlyagency) on Oct 28, 2015 at 6:17pm PDT Trends. Keywords: silos - as in, break down the silos. Recurrent slide theme: Venn diagrams. Geeks and designers do love a good Venn diagram!.

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2. Flinto Trn Twitter: Today We're Releasing Flinto For Mac 2017

The tool that we’re releasing is called Mixer. It’s a simple web app that allows people to join a group and then get randomly paired with another member of that group. A Code as Craft post about HHVM at Etsy will appear from him in the future, so keep checking back! Today we’d like to announce our re-release of Deployinator as an.

Prevalent tech toy: Courtesy of Web Directions, the Vanamco Device Lab - given out to teams who attended WD15. Otherwise, if anything, it would have to be coffee gear. The give aways at the end of the conference included two different Aeropress giveaways, a cold brewer and a Moccamaster. Having organised the Moccamaster, I can attest that this was not organised between sponsors;). Most-asked question at the after party (for me, at least.): 'So. What does ansarada actually DO? The short answer is: we make software:) The longer answer is - ansarada provides a virtual data room which makes arduous Mergers & Acquisition deals less stressful.

For more info see. A photo posted by @natnavarro on Oct 28, 2015 at 10:00pm PDT Cap Watkins – Design Everything “If this cat can ride bacon through space we can do anything.” Cap wasn't always a designer - as a kid wanted to be a doctor and that lasted for many years. He got more serious about literature after high school, oddly due to failing a subject and deciding he could do better. Naturally after he got a degree in creative writing he worked at Starbucks After some other jobs he moved into design freelancing and eventually went full time – learned a lot about user flows, A/B testing, user testing.

Worked on a secret project at amazon that he still can't disclose but it was the first time he'd really worked with other designers instead of being the lone designer in a company; and he had a great mentor. Worked at etsy then Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed does a curious range of products – there's the news and articles, but then they have apps for rating how cute pets are; and the Apple Watch app which is basically a Tamagotchi. How do you create a culture where design is valued? It is hard and can be frustrating.

Much like designing a product – there are going to be failures and setbacks; and the wins will often feel small. How do you start? Define your ideal state of the world. What would it look like if everything was great? A lot of people think it means “design makes all the decisions” but what does that really mean?

If it sucked for someone else to make all the decisions for you, it'll suck for them if you do it. Are there silos?

Do PM, Design and Engineering collaborate or do they just hand things off to each other with no real communication? Or do you have cross-discipline teams with autonomy over their area? Or separate teams that come together for collaborative sessions? Then start working as though you are already there. Paint the picture. New hires can start without any baggage and just work the new way that builds momentum. At Buzzfeed they use a very long Basecamp thread to capture early communications and ideas, then the ensuing discussion.

The roles tend to blur this way – devs and PMs asking design questions. People catch misunderstandings early. The designers created Solid, their atomic UI library – very much designed for designers who didn't know how to code, they “recreated CSS with class names” (.floatleft). Some of the designers taught themselves HTML and CSS with sites like Treehouse. They had the usual problem with JIRAs asking for things to be moved 3px “that JIRA is never getting fixed”. So they started labelling JIRAs as “design-tweak” and the designers would triage and fix design bugs. There's a rotation of designers and devs so they only do it occasionally; but it adds up.

This means every single designer has now touched production code! People do start getting nervous though – when roles blur or cross over, people ask questions about what that means for them. They worry about risks, eg. “the designers are changing production code.?” Change creates uncertainty – it's hard.

Acknowledge this and empathise! Make them partners, not opponents. When people like each other it's really easy! Build trust!maybe not with bears (animated gif of a guy putting his head in a bear's mouth) At Buzzfeed they also didn't have some organisational things like role definitions. Titles were all over the place and there wasn't any real understanding of what career progression looked like. After sorting that out with design, Cap ended up spearheading professional development in all tech areas. Something that wouldn't have happened if he insisted on staying his silo.

You have to let things go! Hanging on to things is stressful; and letting little things go builds trust. Let go of the 2 out of 10 and let the people who are passionate about it have those moments- — Alisa Lemberg (@DataByDesign) With a developer, he created the “number of fucks given” scale from 0 to 10. It was helpful to solve arguments they were having. The dev asked wait how much do we care?. one was 2/10 fucks given. one was 6/10 fucks given.so the 2/10 said “ok we'll do what you want to do!”.

Be patient – with yourself, with other teams, with progress you are making towards your ideal state. Leadership is not a role. Everyone is awesome and capable. If you are working with 5 people, make it the best 5 people working together ever. @cap cap@buzzfeed.com Alisa Lemberg - Building empathy through data It's not just building empathy with data it's building some empathy for data A story. Syrian father selling pens in the streets of with his sleeping daughter — Gissur Simonarson CN (@GissiSim) Story of Abdul, a father seen on twitter selling pens in the streets of Beirut while holding his daughter –. Alisa wondered – why this person, why this story?

Do those 7000 people donate to other causes and charities? The death of one man is a tragedy the death of millions is a statistic. (variably attributed) This is know as extension neglect.

People will suggest longer jail sentences for someone who killed three people, than someone who killed thirty. We just don't process things very well. We don't connect to a large number of people the same way we connect to one person. Empathy allows people to connect, understand and feel empowered to act on data. Most of us already know how to do it.

Case studies eBay Ebay came to Ideo asking why customers were churning. They didn't know why they were leaving or where they were going. They had great purchasing data – they knew about current customers.

What did they look at, what did they spend money on? But once the customer churned – stopped purchasing – the data was truncated. They also didn't have as much information about new customers – where did they come from? So they did interviews with actual eBay customers.

(slide: map of relationships just friends, true loves, etc) They had people map their relationship with eBay – place them on the map. Someone might say “just friends” in fact the friend you knew as a kid and have on facebook, but doesn't really know you very well. Not a close relationship.

They added qualitative data to the existing data set. Next challenge for Ideo was to inspire 30,000 eBay employees with the insights. How do you get people who aren't data scientists excited?

How can you help them work with data? They created an ebook explaining the segments and individuals within them. Separated the behaviour that described everyone who uses eBay, to everyone in a segment, to the individual. They eventually found that many “churned” users were actually still there, just not finding things they wanted to buy. Internally Ideo found eBay was watching customer videos a lot.

They were very keen to connect with real people. Twitter Looking at video in twitter feeds. How will people react to autoplay video?

There wasn't time to do an extremely deep behavioral investigation. They had stats on how many minutes people watched; but they used mini surveys to find out how interested they were in the content. There was anxiety about autoplay videos – would users like it?

They found people who had seen autoplay video before tended to be ok with it; but those who hadn't didn't like it as much. Experimental data from live users → What users are doing. Survey data from those same users → how they feel about what they are doing. Relevant qualitative research about video watching behavior → what is the larger context of their actions Take away notes & Try This At Home.

So how can make data easier to work with for our organisations?. Start by making data relatable.

present things with a story; have your engineering team take the same survey as users, then talk about the delta. Know what you want to do with your data before you start. What questions will be asking?. What answers do you need?. double check you can answer the right questions; scope can change and if you don't update the questions you ask you can be stuck without data. Empower the organisation to make decisions using your data. Ensure they will be comfortable interpreting the data and making decisions.

A lot of data just goes in the drawer. Break the silo to cross-validate insights. Get people from different teams to come to your sessions about data, get their insights. Alisa found if she looked official and organised things with a clipboard people would just sign up:).

The class names used on ’s blog are quite interesting. — Smashing Magazine (@smashingmag) You can use mixin-style relationships in your CSS, so the link between styles is not the name of the class; it's declared specifically within whatever class you wanted to write. You can define an API in your CSS for your components to use. So where could this go? Site-wide theming, publishing reusable components with CSS, non-JS platforms/environments.

Global scope relies on convention; modular CSS could give greater safety. For Glen if everything's a component it's easier to think about. @glenmaddern Dan Burka - Build for speed. A photo posted by Josephmark (@whoisjosephmark) on Oct 28, 2015 at 8:04pm PDT Dan has “a very weird job.” doing venture capital for Google but they have a design team! May be the only design team in VC. They feel design is critical in the way businesses succeed, so they do hands-on design work with the companies they are funding.

This gives a great 10,000 foot view of the industry. Asked a bunch of entrepeneurs in Britain “what does design meant to you?” Brand would come up quickly; then talk about look and feel; maybe they'd talk a bit about UI and UX but that would be about it. Then they'd ask “what keeps you up at night?” and they'd immediately relax and start talking about other things. Now they talk to people about how design can help them with the things that are keeping them up at night. This means they are talking about their craft with everyone involved; and showing people that “design” is not magic pixie dust. Big challenge to business right now: agile is not as quick as people think it is. You make your best guess, build it, launch it, measure results and iterate.

But you are starting with a bad idea. Then you take longer than you think to build it; now it's too expensive to abort; the measurements are inconclusive but you can't go back once something is in the wild.

Even when it's terrible, those ten super-passionate users will come after you with pitchforks if you take it away. Then most teams don't really iterate. So at Google Ventures they do five day design sprints – skip the slowest parts of the sprint. See gv.com/sprint for much more info. Case study – creating robots for service industry, eg. Hotel check in desks that fluctuate from “mellow” to “bonkers” at two big peak times per day. So they build a delivery robot to take items to rooms at times the front desk is bonkers.

They wanted to test the risks of rolling this out in a real hotel. So they assembled a sprint team: designer, engineer, robotocist, customer service ambassador from the hotel, plus their CEO and COO were also in the room for the week. Day one: they create a sense of urgency with time pressure. It makes people move faster. Get the right people to test – you don't want the homebody who never stays in a hotel; nor do you want the road warrior who never needs anything.

You want someone who stays in hotels 3-4 times a year. So they put an ad on Craigslist and link that to a screener.

They had to map out a huge amount of user experience touchpoints of having a robot deliver things – from a robot whizzing past you in the lobby; to how it deals with getting in and out of lifts; to how does a robot announce themselves at the door of the room? (it rings the room phone) Biggest opportunity.and. risk: How should the robot behave? They're confident it is safe but should it have personality?

If so what kind? Most people have not interacted with a real robot, but we kinda expect Wall-E but we don't have science-fiction level robots yet. They simply don't exist yet.

Then they do some notes, then sketching, then some three-pane interactions. Everyone works on their own in this stage; it's a quiet, focused room. Avoid narrowing ideas too quickly; don't let the loudest voice dominate. You want the best ideas out of everyone. Then they put up 10 options and quietly vote on them.

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No design by committee. Look up “dot voting jake nap”(sp?) for ideas about how to do weighted voting. People vote next to good, important ideas – this creates an instant heat map. Then they talk about why they voted; then do some “super voting”. Certain roles who are close to the customer or business get a bigger vote (yes including the CEO). This brought out important things to test – should the robot have a face?

Should it knock on the door? Should it make noises at all? What dialog should occur – what's written on the screen? Then a crazy idea – make the thing dance!

A simple, delightful end to the interaction. Day 4: prototype.

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Wait, there's no time left! Also a prototype has to be something you're willing to throw away immediately, no unhelpful attachment. So in this case they made a digital prototype – just keynote to get images onto the tablet that formed the robot's main interface. Don't worry about colours, typeface, etc – just do enough to suspect disblief. Then they divided their efforts – some people made fake screens; some made sound effects; some practiced manually driving the robot through the interactions. Then on the last day they did 5 customer interviews (in the hotel, with a pile of cameras, it was a bit weird and they really had to make the interviewees feel comfortable).

People loved the robot. They loved interacting, they loved the little dance, they were all ok with the robot bringing something to them. There were lots of upsides to a robot – eg. They did want to know what to call the robot. The risky ideas had paid off.

In just a week they'd tested things people felt were too expensive or risky to try out. Other things they've done 8 hour app prototype (just done in keynote and flinto) just do enough to make software feel like software.

They work with a huge range of companies in a huge range of industries. Gathering the right team is critical – have the expertise AND buy-in, in the room. Prototype like it's a prototype – throw it away and do the real engineering for production. Design sprints are pre measurement to gauge the chances of success before you build the real thing.

Get quick, credible research done – get data quickly, test with real people and see what works. Again Julia Clavien - Cognitive bias in software development. The healthy web pyramid vs the reality by — Melissa Kaulfuss (@MelissaKaulfuss) There is a problem where investors are pumping money into marketing companies more than they're getting back. Eventually the hundreds upon hundreds of ad companies must eat other or go bust. They will do all kinds of things on the way out more and more tracking.

Advertisers are tracking people even when people have ad blockers and surf incognito. Advertisers say micropayments are dead – yet we are making micropayments all the time, the cost of data goes to telcos. If a share of that went to publishers they probably wouldn't need the ads. We don't need to abandon ads, but we should go back to “dumb ads”. Remember ads that didn't track the user paid for everything for decades!

Enough about ads. What about fat assets things that are just oversized. The accidental 3 meg image displayed at a small size – you don't notice unless you happen to load it on a slow mobile connection. Or the hero image that is beautiful but hasn't been minified.

Or an animated gif run in a little promo spot in the footer. Chickenshit Minimalism – the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft. (see Maciej's full post of the same name) Not everything has to be minimal. Some information density is ok if you are trying to get work done with lots of data. You don't need acres of whitespace when you've made the key information too small to read. Then we have the tension between mobile and desktop – because the interface isn't sure if you are using a tiny pointer or you are “slapping the screen with a big fat meat stylus”. Heavy clouds It used to be hard to host a website at really large scale, as you had to source and maintain hardware.

Then Amazon offered cloud hosting suddenly you could rent massive space, although it might occasionally be unavailable (that's just a fact of life with hosted services). But devs love this stuff. We love complexity, it's a challenge. We use everything, kinda because we can.

So we get overkill. Layers and layers of complexity in cloud hosting, JS got faster so we started rendering everything in it. Giant tool chains & big stacks might mean you pay all your revenue to AWS — Courtney Hemphill (@chemphill) No matter what we say about web bloat, it never gets fixed. There are two futures Maciej can see: One is the Minecraft future, where everything's a bit blocky but you make stuff and have lots of fun with basic building blocks.

A playful and contributory web where you are expected to add something creative. The other is the Call of Duty future, where everything is beautifully produced by a team of experts. Everything looks the same despite all the investment. You have to play a very specific way and you don't get to choose a different way, you can only choose not to play at all. We should shake off the advertising overlords. We should lighten the load. We can choose to stand together.

We can choose a better future for the web. @baconmeteor Denise Jacobs – Hacking the creative brain Denise had an epiphany after writing “The CSS Detective Guide” – that creativity is a power we all have. A great moment of “criticism free creativity” where she went into the creative flow and really created something she loved. She decided to become a creativity evangelist and see if more people could reach this state, more often. What is the state of the creative nation? Our best tool for creativity is the brain but our working lives are not set up to maximise this!

We have difficult bosses, demanding clients, time pressures, distractions. We are mentally overwhelmed and oppressed – which stifles creativity. When we are in the creative flow we feel happy, powerful! We can achieve anything when it is happening. “Creativity is magical, but not magic.” - missed source The process Denise will talk about:. emancipate our creative brain. adjust.

practice disciplines. generate ideas & then execute them Emancipation We are under a mass hypnosis where we accept meetings, email, timesheets distractions! Habits to quit:.

Distractions are not just the norm, they are increasing. Multitasking is multi taxing. Our brain basically turns off and resets every time we switch tasks. We know that feeling of trying to get back into flow after an interruption – the brain takes a few seconds to switch back to the task. Zeigarnik effect: when you start a task and it gets interrupted, the brain keeps processing the old task AND the new one.

Repeat and layer that and you get tired. Communication addiction is a real thing – we get a little dopamine from checking messages, so we constantly refresh. Our inner critic – everyone has this. Everyone worries they aren't good enough, not as good as other people, won't achieve enough. If these thoughts dominate you when you try to work,. Identifying the inner critic: comparison with others; imposter syndrome (“they'll find out I'm a fraud); perfectionism (it has to be flawless); procrastination FEARS. Fears translate to signals, electrical signals in the brain.

F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real. (or Fuck Everything And Run). Distinguish danger from fear – danger is real but fear is a choice.

A photo posted by Joanne (@justjophotos) on Oct 29, 2015 at 5:44pm PDT How to hack fear:. say no to comparisons – you cannot compare your insides to others outsides.

the imposter syndrome paradox – you will only experience imposter syndrome when you are competent and skilled. Re-read this as many times as you need to. Break the perfectionism→procrastination loop. People procrastinate because it's not perfect. reassign your inner critic to other duties – pay attention to your critical voice when you are editing ideas. Ignore during ideation, listen during editing.

Amp up empathy for your inner critic – your inner critic is trying to save you from harm. Maintain perspective - “so what?” Just because you're thinking something doesn't mean it's true. Reframe failure and mistakes – Henry Ford's saying “Failure is the only opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”. Body hack: change your body language, change your mind. See Amy Cuddy's TED talk.

Adjust Adjust – train your brain to get into a creative state. Is creativity really all about left vs right brain? It's the combination: the left brain stacks up information but does not make connections, the right brain can do that but it needs the information to work with.

Creativity is whole-brain. Brain waves – if you are in beta state too long, you get into anxiety and stress.

Alpha is alert but relaxed, creative state (kids spend most of their time in this state). Theta is very high creativity but we mostly only do it asleep (dreaming). Delta is really low, deep dreamless sleep.

Gamma is the highest level – “aha moments”. Alpha brain waves are the gateway to creativity.

There's an exercise to enter alpha close your eyes, “look up” like you're remembering something, put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, breath slowly. This takes you into alpha. It is also why you get amazing ideas right before you go to sleep, but can't remember later Hacks to get into alpha:. breathe to refocus. be prone – literally, just lie down, that will put you into alpha. showers – yes, you really do get ideas in the shower.

space out, daydream. get physical – exercise! “Cross channel movement” helps the brain hemispheres sync with each other. Brain scans have backed this up – the science is clear!

Practice disciplines. Focus on meaningful tasks. Show up every day – do something creative every day.

Commit to it, give yourself a check-off chart to see if you've kept the streak going. Delegate – free up your own brain. Clean up your habit fields – you have habits attached to places. (see Jack Cheng article on A List Apart). Single-task – say no to distractions. Try something like rescuetime.com to give you a report on where you spent time.

Or try heyfocus.com (mac only) which will block sites you shouldn't be reading at certain times. Pomodoro technique – 30 minutes = 25 minutes uninterrupted time, 5 minutes off. Generate & execute ideas. Start the flow of ideas – start with what's already out there, steal like an artist! Copy, transform, combine.

Everything is a remix. Create constraints – they help you play within parameters, avoid analysis paralysis. Capture ideas – embrace disruption, write things down when they happen. Gather and curate your ideas (eg. Prototype, iterate. This all sets the stage for flow state. There is also a “flow afterglow” where you remain creative for some time afterwards; and it's easier to get back into flow.

Take this information and go be creative! Denise's upcoming book: Banish Your Inner Critic @denisejacobs Martin Charlier - Designing connected products Things we'll see more of, in some rough categories.

products with extended value proposition – where connectedness is an enhancement. Scales that track your progress. Digital business models going into the physical world – perhaps we might have a free device that displays ads. Services going physical – nespresso machines that can phone home, specific devices to order things from Amazon (no screen, less steps to order things). Device ecosystem – connected devices that also stand alone; product ranges where the battery is the delivery system for connectivity (Husquvarna do this).

So what does all this have to do with design? All of these categories require design it's what people will be working on. Are you creating a product or a tool? Products are complete solutions, tools are a piece that you use to solve a problem (like the Belkin connected power plug/socket). Ways to cast the future – write the future newspaper articles, or press release. Can the product be plausibly conveyed in simple terms, how will you pitch it? Sketch the box – what would persuade when people look at the boxed product?

What claims would you make and how would you back them up. How does it work?

Designers can help convey the connected model. Non-connected devices like a lightbulb is simple – one switch, on/off. A connected lightbulb suddenly needs multiple pieces like internet connection, apps, rules to run and evaluate and what happens when one of them (like internet connectivity) drops out? Do things still work?how can you explain all this clearly?

Or can you find a way to simplify it? Part of the Amazon method is to write not just the press release, but then FAQ, which can lead to development tasks.

If you can explore the ideas that people might need help with, perhaps you can design or build around them. Interusability: composition, consistency and continuity.

Example: two different connected thermostats. One has a very simple subset of possible settings on the physical device, leaving the richer features to the app; another has all the options on both. There are tradeoffs – eg. The fully mirrored device may have a more cluttered UI, but it will work without your phone. Consistency is a two-way street, where your app may not be consistent with itself across platforms as each OS has its own conventions to follow. Continuity – kindles syncing your progress through the same book across devices.

This can be quite hard to really get right, since you don't want delays in things like a light switch. Some apps like Instagram effectively lie – the “like” status happens instantly, even when it hasn't been sent back to the server. You could also be totally transparent about interim status, but it requires the user to understand processing time is occurring and accept that it's necessary. Build the right product before you build the product right. Paper+video protoyping: use video cut together of people interacting with paper prototypes. Fake up a video of how the video will work: example of Sketch-A-Move cars being moved with magnets under the table to show how they would work.

Stills composition with narration (example: ): quick sketches stitched into a video with someone narrating the flow. It's a quick way to think through the experience the user will go through when the device is purchased and set up. This can also set things like technical requirements without being limited in your thinking. All kinds of everyday devices – power tools, food processors – are becoming connected devices.

This means they can have new value, new features, bringing new design challenges. @marccharlier Brynn Evans - Beauty of ordinary design. I just uploaded slides from replaced videos with interactive examples on — Mike Riethmuller (@MikeRiethmuller) Craig Sharkie – Style with substance Javascript borrowed from many other languages at the beginning and has continued to do so today. JS is now borrowing ideas from CSS – media queries! With great power comes great responsibility.

Part 1 – the separation of concerns Structure, Behaviour, Presentation. HTML, JS, CSS. If you should be doing something in HTML, do it in HTML! If you are going to use a CSS feature in JS, minimise the amount.

For demonstration purposes, Sharkie will assign each concern to a beer (demonstration of three people opening one bottle, vs one person opening three bottles) the one becomes a bottleneck. Aaron, Sharkie, Adam, and Andy on stage, with beers — Meligy (@Meligy) Part 2 – Matchmedia Media queries are awesome. We have width, height, max-width, device-aspect-ratios lots of stuff that JS isn't very good at detecting.

But when you need to do more than set breakpoints for styling, you need something more. Matchmedia allows you to inject new content when it's required, but not send it down the pipe just to hide it with CSS. (obviously this would have accessibility impacts, so use with caution) The old way to do this with JS was debounced window resize events; the new way is to watch a matchmedia query. Window.matchMedia(mediaquery) Polyfill: Matchmedia doesn't really need to be debounced as it doesn't fire events the way resize sprays them (even when debounced!).

Matchmedia also gives you state – where CSS doesn't know what you just did or will do next, Matchmedia can. (demonstration of an animated bird – CSS makes it fly backwards, Matchmedia makes the bird turn around to fly back) @twalve Tom Loosemore - Enough lipstick on pigs First things to get out of the way.

the pig – not the cute pigs think of Napoleon the pig from Animal Farm. luck – we, the people in this room, are the luckiest people alive “We have it in our power to being the world over again.”- Thomas Paine But the key question is who is the “we”? The digital revolution is being done by the people in this room. If we're going to be inventing things, let's do things that matter!

In 2010, the UK Goverment opened the door to people from the internet. Francis Maude used a great deal of personal capital to get digital people into the civil service – this gets digital people into the heart of the government.

These people did not join to fix government websites – they joined to fix government. Because government needs fixing! There has been a growing gap between the expectation people have of web services, to the quality of services they are receiving from government.

So what was broken? Even when they weren't dreadful, government services never got any better. Much of this can be tracked back to the grindingly slow methodology of going from policy, through procurement and finally inflicting on users and then the stasis of operation. So what did GDS get right?.

They created a diverse, multi-talented team - “the unit of delivery is the team”. The did a quick prototype of the gov.uk website; then they iterated with quarterly updates eventually went live and won an award, leading to the headline “Boring website wins award!”. There were creative, smart, frustrated people in government already – who had just never had the place to become a great product manager. GDS gave him a space to do so.

They also brought some new talent in from outside. They changed the language – no requirements, resources, specifications. They talked about “users” and the needs they have. Designed with data – they put up a wallboard showing how many people were on gov.uk and what they were searching for (“slightly filtered.”). Devops – they had a baseline that had to be able to release any time and must always release once per day. They brought some humanity into process – there was a 400-question survey to get a small carer's allowance. Over the years more and more questions had accreted until people had just forgotten the real human reason for the allowance.

They massively simplified it. They simplified many processes; or in many cases assisted other teams to do so – registering to vote brought down to a five-minute process. Prisoner visit form was built mobile-first.and they simply never did a “desktop” version. They actually needed to put a speedbump into the process to set up lasting power of attorney – because it was such a serious decision, they'd made it too easy. Harder stuff – identity assurance, UK Gov Verify.

They set up design guides, a service standard, and importantly. They did stickers! They were trying to deal with the “square of despair” - policy, procurement, security myths, just making everything terribly unhappy. So what did they get wrong? You know in hindsight they had a huge opportunity and they weren't bold enough. They were digitising a paper-based government. They'd put lipstick on pigs.

They'd taken bad processes and made them prettier, a bit easier to use. But each service was an iron-clad silo. The siloed services each separately collected and stored data. They essentially ignored the existend of all the other silos. Users were left bouncing around getting different things from different silos; and giving up their details each time. New public infrastructure requires new public institutions. So Tom made a small team and asked them “What if we started again?”.with everything except democracy itself.

They did a great job and came up with many fantastic ideas, like APIs onto open, canonical government data. Nice idea: minimum viable data. Eg/ You don't need to know how old someone is, you just need to know if they are over 18. (Live demo of starting and updating a business through a unified service based on open data, using blockchain to guarantee integrity.) Whether this model is absolutely right is not certain, but it is certainly better than what we have now. Some government is going to get this right first. It could be Australia. We do have a PM who wants his party using Slack.

Have no poverty of ambition. Do stuff that matters and invent a future that matters! @tomskitomski Also check out @ausdto.