This week's best things
Branding cultural institutions, Spotify vandalism, design guidelines for cancel ux, is convenience making our lives more difficult, business continuity planning, and a bunch of books and TV.
A shorter edition this week because I am in Germany.
Branding a cultural institution
An article in the D&AD Annual looking at three (award-winning) museum rebrands; the V&A, Toledo Museum of Art, and the Royal Ontario Museum.
"Certainly, to suggest that the visitors to a museum as grand and historic as the V&A could represent a cross-section of British society is to romanticise the role of the museum as a civic meeting space for communities on a local, national and international scale. It also underestimates the challenges facing museums around the world when it comes to not only attracting diverse audiences but also making them feel welcome enough to visit more than once."
Confessions of a Spotify Vandal
I am enjoying the new development of the 'people who have gamed Spotify' genre of news (see also: the guy who created loads of music with AI tools, then created loads of bots to drive the listener numbers of that music).
This particular example is like the 2024 version of the keyword stuffing people used to do to game early versions of the search engine algorithms.
"A folk-pop mischief-maker who goes by Catbreath has collected hundreds of thousands of streams by giving his songs prankish titles like “Chill Music,” “Gym Bangers,” and “My Discover Weekly.”"
Andy Cush
Design Guidelines For Better “Cancel” UX. Do’s and don’ts on how to design Cancel, prevent accidental errors and avoid accessibility issues
Lots of good tips and resources from Smashing Magazine's Vitaly Friedman focusing on better 'cancel' UX.
It's often these small but vital 'pinchpoint' elements of your UX that have an outsized impact on perceptions of your products and experiences, and can in turn make or break how your users feel.
- Cancel is useful for multi-step dialogs as Back doesn’t undo actions.
- Cancel is useful when simply exiting the page doesn’t clear input.
- There is nothing more ambiguous than an X icon in a modal.
- X can mean Cancel, Close, Save, Ignore, Back, Delete, Reset.
- Explicit labels work well: “Save and Continue”, "Close and Dismiss”.
Vitaly Friedman
The big idea: is convenience making our lives more difficult?
A piece in the Guardian from psychotherapist, Dr Alex Curmi, about the downsides of convenience.
"In the technological world we have fashioned, we must sometimes make a conscious effort to act in opposition to our instincts. As a culture, we must remember – and remind our young people – that while convenience feels good in the moment, our capacity to adapt and overcome challenges is part of our evolutionary heritage too, and central to the adventure of life."
Alex Curmi
Business continuity planning: How to prepare for ransomware and destructive IT attacks
I had a call this week with the leader of an American cultural organisation.
We were talking about the things that kept them up at night when it came to digital, and cybersecurity was top of the list. Not so much trying to prevent an attack, but instead how to deal with the aftermath and continue to serve their communities - especially the piece around comms (both internally and externally).
As the British Library showed last autumn, this type of attack can knock your organisation totally offline for months and months.
So here's a detailed paper from DXC Technology about business continuity planning in response to ransomware and destructive IT attacks.
This stuff isn't super exciting but it's a clear case of 'hope for the best, plan for the worst' being the best approach.
The challenges of coping with cyber incidents and destructive IT attacks are:
- Lack of understanding of the potential impact of these threats on the organization, weak patch management and inadequate planning for the response
- Insufficient preparation to protect systems and to educate and train people to deal with these types of attacks
- Inadequate speed and technical ability to identify, assess and respond at the time of the incident
- Inability of an organization’s leadership to respond to the potentially catastrophic impact of this type of event, including how leaders communicate to, and manage the relationship with, customers, suppliers and regulatory bodies
Sandra Riddell, Lars Klinghammer
This week's consumption
I read Good Material by Dolly Alderton which is split 90/10 across two characters' perspectives. The 90% one is really quite annoying, I wanted to hear more from the 10% - I think that was the more interesting story to tell.
I've started reading The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
We rewatched season 1 of The Diplomat (Netflix), which is really really good.
We also watched Leave the World Behind which was immensely frustrating, too long, and a bit stupid.
I also went to see The Apprentice at the cinema, which was also too long but the two leads were very good and Jeremy Strong in particular was brilliant.