chestnut-tree

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/ansip/blog/euvat_e...

Apparently these rules were agreed in 2008. Countries have obviously failed to communicate the impending changes. I liked this comment below the post:

"And so much for it being in place since 2008.

This is akin to the Vogons in Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy claiming that the plans for Earths destruction have been available for viewing on Alpha Centauri for 50 years."

This is a fairly recent change to the site and I agree it's obstructive and intensely irritating. Imagine if Flickr were to do something similar? Clearly Pinterest want to drive further registrations to their site, but this seems like such a rude and intrusive way of doing it.

Pinterest is an excellent source of visual inspiration and research often overlooked by many designers and developers. There are lots of excellent boards that collect examples of website, app and tablet designs. There is also a huge variety of illustration and graphic design examples of every style and colour imaginable. However, the new restrictions they've placed on viewing content mean that I no longer recommend Pinterest links.

http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cheat.pn...

However, the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) recommend against using placeholder text in form fields. They list 7 main reasons. This is taken from their website

1. Disappearing placeholder text strains users' short-term memory

2. Without labels, users cannot check their work before submitting a form

3. When error messages occur, people don’t know how to fix the problem

4. Placeholder text that disappears when the cursor is placed in a form field is irritating for users navigating with the keyboard

5. Fields with stuff in them are less noticeable.

6. Users may mistake a placeholder for data that was automatically filled in

7. Occasionally users have to delete placeholder text manually

Obviously, not all of these will apply to the Reddit sign-up form (or to your own website). It's worth reading the full NNG article to get a different but valid perspective based on their research:

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/form-design-placeholders/

One of the paintings on display was by the Victorian painter Arthur Boyd Hougton and called Itinerant Singers (painted 1860).

The painting shows a family of beggars singing in the street while most of the public ignore them (not so different from today perhaps?)

I suppose we read into these paintings what we want, but for me it is the look of despair in the faces of the family (especially the mother) that has always made me remember this painting.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LUIByNNCbOI/UWL76CayOjI/AAAAAAAAeM...

"UK micro-businesses that are below the current UK VAT registration threshold, and who register for the VAT Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS) may, until 30 June 2015, base their 'customer location' VAT taxation and accounting decisions on information provided to them by their payment service provider. This means the business need not require further information to be supplied by the customer."

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplying-dig...

Apparently, it's been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Some other up-and-coming phrases according to this Guardian opinion piece are:

  "I can't even"

  "all the feels"

Biometric passports with fingerprint data are common in many EU countries. The fingerprint is used to verify a person's identity, so in a way it's used as both a username and password.

Allowing the state to capture and store something very private to every individual is not without controversy. A few years ago, a German man called Michael Schwarz had his application for a passport rejected when he refused to have his fingerprints taken. He took the matter to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In October 2013, the ECJ ruled in favour of fingerprinting for passports. The ECJ agreed that fingerprinting was a privacy intrusion but that this was outweighed by the need for security and protection against fraud. Strictly speaking, the fingerprint data should only be held in the passport, not in a central database.

Whether you agree or not with fingerprint capture will probably be influenced by how much you trust the authorities in your country. And of course, many countries collect fingerprints from visitors entering their country.

Which European country is that? Battery cages are banned in the EU, but caged hens are still permitted as long as the space in the cage meets EU welfare standards.

It really depends on the recipe. Some cookbooks, for example, recommend that measurements be as accurate as possible for baking. However, I doubt the majority of the worlds population use scales to measure ingredients when they cook. In fact, great cuisines from around the world have developed perfectly well without the use of scales for measuring ingredients. Can you honestly say 250g of chopped carrots is preferable to two medium-sized carrots, chopped?

When you can sign in on your tablet/mobile/desktop/TV/thermostat/fridge and who knows what else - how hard can it possibly be to stitch together your spending and consumption habits with all the other data collected about you? In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if those joined-up journeys have already been compiled. It's pretty obvious that the information companies collect about you goes far, far beyond creating a simple "advertising profile".

Companies like Google and Facebook (and others) have no self-restraint when it comes to tracking you and they don't even do it anonymously. How do they get away with it? Because we happily let them.

One interesting fact I discovered a while ago that greatly surprised me: the percentage of public transport usage (as the main mode of travel) is higher in the UK than in Germany, France and the Netherlands. This finding came from a survey funded by the European Commission in 2010/2011.

  Country and % whose main mode of travel is public transport
  Czech Republic 37%
  Spain 30%
  UK 22%
  France 20%
  Germany 15%
  Ireland 14%
  Finland 13%
  Denmark 12%
  Netherlands 11%

While Google automates scanning of your emails in GMail, they don't tell you if that is the case with the other personal and private data they hold about you. Yet your activity across the web is arguably just as personal and private as your emails. That is why anonymising or disassociating your data from your identity is a legitimate concern, as are questions about whether your online activity is anonymous when viewed internally by Google.

Let me put it another way, if I ask you to give me your name, gender, date-of-birth and mobile phone number (as Google does), then proceed to record the searches you undertake as well as sites you visit and videos you watch, would you not expect me to tell you how long I keep that information for? Or whether it's anonymised before internal staff pore through it? Or whether it's aggregated in a way that isn't personally identifiable?

What Facebook and Google collect about you far exceeds a simple "advertising profile" of your likes. They know more about your online behaviour than you do. I've said this before, but Google omits basic facts in their privacy policy about the data they collect about you. Things like: how long they keep your data, whether the data is anonymised, whether your searches or activity are disassociated from your identity, and who sees your data inside the company. These are not minor or unreasonable questions to ask - they are exactly what you'd expect to find in a privacy policy (especially from a company that arguably tracks users more than anyone else online). Yet, Google does not answer any of these questions. Why do they get a free pass?

I don't see how telling users how long you retain their data (to take one example) is going to lengthen a privacy policy very much. But even if it does, it's poor practice to omit important privacy information just to keep a privacy policy a certain length. One could argue that the sheer length of a privacy policy is an indication of just how much data a company collects. (The less data they collect, the less they have to say in their privacy policy.)

I can see the value of interrogating your personal analytics. I guess how valuable that is depends on how much activity and content you have invested in these online services. And of course, some companies, as you say, would love for their online services to be your principal digital identity. (Which raises another question: do people want a single digital identity? Or do they prefer multiple, unconnected identities? Or even a single identity that isn't joined up with everthing they do online?)

"My question is how we enfranchise those individuals with the choice..."

A good question and I agree. For me, it's also about giving users the information to understand the implications of making that choice. This is particularly important (in my view) when your personal data is involved. That's one reason why I'm critical of Google. Privacy is important to me and they omit basic and (in my view) essential information about privacy in their privacy policy. This makes the privacy implications of using their services unclear. (And, yes, I realise this all comes down to levels of trust, the interpretation of privacy, the value of the service provided, and how much importance someone ascribes to privacy in the first place.)

We need to be more critical of companies that track us. We should be scrutinising their practices more closely, and yet the author asks us to drop our objections and consider the benefits of tracking. These companies aren't open about their data collection practices, so why should we be more open or trustworthy towards them? The information they collect about us gives them far, far more than just an advertising profile about our likes and interests, but they're not going to mention that are they?

Let's consider Google for example. If you have a Google account, Google has your name, date-of-birth, gender, and (possibly) mobile phone number. Couple that with the searches and sites you visit and that is some very personal and private information about you.

Yet, in their privacy policy [1], Google fails to mention:

- whether the data they collect about you is anonymised (and what they anonymise)

- how long they keep your data for

- whether the data they collect about you is disasscociated from your identity. This is important when you consider how personal and revealing your online activity can be when it's tied to your identity.

- who sees your data at Google. GMail automates scanning of your emails. Does this hold true for all the other data they hold about you? After all, your activity across the web is arguably just as personal and private.

Why does Google not provide this information in their privacy policy? Why are people ok with this? I challenge anyone to explain why, if you were collecting personal information from your users, you would purposely omit the information above from your privacy policy.

Google seems to view privacy in one dimension only: security. Yes, you can't have privacy without security, but security does not equal privacy.

Let's not forget that Google can track you across smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Their tracking reach now even extends to school kids with the introduction of Google Classroom. They are collecting an absolutely gargantuan volume of data.

WAKE UP! shouts Chris Messina in his article. Yes, let's wake up and stop giving these companies a free pass when it comes to matters of privacy and data collection.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/

I also browse the web with Javascript disabled (using Noscript), but have formed the opposite impression: more and more sites won't display their content (or display their content incorrectly) if Javascript is disabled. Most of the sites I'm looking at are not "web apps" or SPAs (single page apps), they are sites with text articles or links so they have no real reason to break without Javascript. (It's always annoying when you attempt to click a link only to find it won't work unless Javascript is enabled.)

The rise of Javascript frameworks is only fuelling this trend of Javascript-dependent web sites. I've said this before, but Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.

There are politicians and policymakers in the EU who would like to see that happen. However, every country in the EU has different VAT exemptions for goods and services - harmonising that across EU nations would be extremely difficult. Politicians will have an impossible task persuading the public that goods and services that were never subject to VAT will now be taxed.

What the EU should have proposed is a common VAT rate across the EU for digital goods. (This could still include exemptions or reduced rates for certain goods such as e-books.) I suspect this would have faced less opposition from member countries and it would eliminate much of the bureaucratic and administrative burden these new laws introduce.

I sometimes wonder if good visual and interaction design can succeed in the open source model. In software development, tasks can be parcelled out in a modular way to many developers. But this model doesn't work well for visual and interaction design. If you want all the parts of an Operating System or piece of software to feel consistent and cohesive, you need a more focused approach. And that means handing design tasks to a designated design team and entrusting them to make the UX decisions. But with open source projects, we all want a say in the UX (me included); thus the endless (and often bitter) discussions about how a piece of software should behave.

The model of open source code has influenced and inspired countless companies. But who can point to examples of visual and interaction design from open source software that has had a similar effect? I see the influence going much more the other way i.e. open source software often follows ideas or conventions from commercial companies. I'd love to see this change. But how?

https://www.behance.net/gallery/Apple-Store-Redesign/1411391...

http://ambercreative.co/experiments/apple-store/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29817520

I'm quite conservative when it comes to locks for the home and prefer the traditional mechanical lock and key. I like the Lockitron feature of recording when a lock is opened/closed but that could be integrated into a mechanical lock without requiring the lock itself to operate electronically.

I think this quote from the BBC article above sums up how I feel:

...what about wear and tear, asks Brian Morland of the History of Locks Museum in Bournemouth. He cannot foresee a time when mechanical locks won't be part of our daily life. "You drop a key in water and it's okay. If you drop an electronic key (or smartphone) it will cause endless problems."

The publishing market seems to vary quite a bit country-by-country judging by the comments here.

In the UK, we also had an agreement between publishers and booksellers called the Net Book Agreement [1] which set fixed book prices. The original defence of the agreement was that it subsidised important but less popular works. The Agreement was scrapped in 1997.

What effect did that have on the publishing market? For a start, discounts by online retailers and even supermarkets have altered people's expectations of book pricing. Most people simply don't expect to pay full price for new titles anymore. Many independent bookshops can't compete on price and have closed. However, the number (and variety) of books published hasn't declined - quite the opposite: new and revised titles have grown substantially according to the Guardian report below [2]. But some publishers feel there are too many titles being published and the volume isn't sustainable.

Books, magazines and newspapers are exempt from VAT in the UK. However, e-books are subject to full (UK) VAT rate of 20%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/uk-publishes-mo...

In the very first row of screens in the article, the Windows phone layout stands out as cleaner and simpler to me. The large type is an easy tap target, so the screen layout doesn't need row after row of horizontal lines to separate each setting (as in the iOS and Android screens).

The horizontal lines give iOS and Android the advantage of displaying controls directly on the settings screen (without having to take you to a separate page). Windows phone, in contrast, requires you to tap each setting to go to separate screen. In practice, I don't find this annoying since settings are not something I access on a regular basis. A separate screen for each setting can also provide a bit of explanatory text (which Windows phone generally provides).

However, I agree with the author that Windows phone settings could be better organised with section headings. The iOS settings are grouped, but seem a bit odd without headings.

I'm sure Apple, Google and Microsoft all study each other's mobile designs. I only hope that Microsoft doesn't end up steering Windows phone closer to the interaction behaviour of iOS or Android. For me, both the visual and interaction design for Windows phone is a refreshing change from iOS and Android (I realise I'm in the minority here).

That was actually a case from Germany, not the UK

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30011512

However, I agree with your broader point that there is hypocrisy from all sides in this debate.

Back in October 2013, the European Court of Justice ruled that collecting fingerprints was a privacy incursion but that the greater need for security outweighed the privacy concern.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHoq1l8vFNo (7 mins)

Google amasses absolutely gargantuan volumes of data about people's online behaviour. Yet, their privacy policy remains very poor [1].

If you have a Google account, Google has your name, date-of-birth, gender, and (possibly) mobile phone number. Couple that with the searches and sites you visit and that is incredibly personal information about you.

Yet, in their privacy policy, Google fails to mention:

- whether the data they collect about you is anonymised (and what they anonymise)

- how long they keep your data for

- whether the data they collect about you is disasscociated from your identity

- who sees your data at Google. GMail automates scanning of your emails. Does this hold true for all the other data they hold about you? After all, your activity across the web is arguably just as personal and private.

Google also states that you can delete your web history but fails to confirm if that data is wiped from Google's servers or merely from your dashboard.

It's depressing how easily Google gets a free pass on matters of privacy.

I challenge anyone to explain why you would purposely omit the information listed above. It is exactly what you would expect to find in a privacy policy, especially from a company that arguably tracks online behaviour more than anyone else.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/

  1. Functional without Javascript
  2. Functional in IE7+

And also http://youtu.be/CUkMCQR4TpY?t=19m21s

The essential point made is that for much of gov.uk, it isn't that difficult to make the site work without Javascript or work in IE7 either.

Purley personal opinion, but web design has become incredibly bloated with so much cruft added to web pages - be it unnecesary Javascript or excess CSS. Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.