I recently completed the Designing a Feminist Chatbot course on FutureLearn. As a starter course it has a lot going for it, covering areas such as different chatbot uses, how chatbots can become biased, user centred design (UCD) principles, persona creation, conversation design, storyboarding and prototyping. Having studied UCD at degree level and worked on…
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This week’s dataset was from European Institute for Gender Equality and shows the proportion of seats held by women in European parliaments and governments. Another great dataviz learning experience and on the whole I’m OK with the finished product this week, I know I still have a big journey ahead of me to create some…
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I’ve been meaning to take part in Makeover Monday for some time as a way to improve my data storytelling skills. This weekly learning event has been running for a year or so and I love its simple but effective format: a data vizualisation and accompanying dataset is released at the start of each week…
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Towards the end of 2020 our Head of Learning Design asked me to do a short presentation to her design team about where I thought the main disruptions to the Learning & Development technology market would come from in the year ahead. Usually we would look at startups, niche suppliers or parallel industries to identify…
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You don’t need to be on the product design team to have an interest in user experience. Putting the user first is part of all of our jobs in software and product development, as important as putting the customer first is to a business or service. User centered design (UCD) is the beating heart of…
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Adaptive learning uses competence, behavioural and demographic data to tailor a digital learning experience around each learners unique needs. There’s a lot of hype around this area which might have you thinking its all about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but that’s not the case and there are two types of adaptive learning approaches: AI-based and Rule-based.…
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I recently moved teams and role following a company restructure and merger, which led me to reflect on my last three years. One of the reasons I had taken the role was to gain more experience in agile product development. I’d worked in open source product development for over a decade, and on a number of agile projects,…
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I spent two days last week at the Learning Technologies 2017 exhibition, working on the LEO stand (below). This annual event is split over two floors, with a paid conference upstairs and free exhibition downstairs. The stand was really busy for both days and the whole team came away absolutely exhausted, but I did manage…
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There has been lots in the news this past year about social media bias and echo chambers, which started gaining prominence when algorithms started meddling in your news feed. The major web companies collect a huge amount of data about you and in doing so are building a detailed profile comprising demographic data, likes and purchases and other…
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This post was edited on 09 May 2017 to add some clarity around authenticating with the Strava API. In 2016 I made a commitment to myself to record every cycle ride I made. As both a leisure cyclist and cycle commuter, I was keen to know how far I rode in a year, what was…
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