James Royal-Lawson - Beantin

Beantin

The hidden curves of the Gartner hype cycle

The hidden curves of the Gartner hype cycle

The traditional Gartner Hype Cycle curve only represents the outcome of 20% of innovations, the paths of the rest are largely hidden from view.

Making your design suck less with bridging roles

Making your design suck less with bridging roles

The rise and fall of web design, and how fostering broader skill sets and adopting bridging roles can set things right.

An unexpected code-breaking challenge

An unexpected code-breaking challenge

I used the Scandinavian Airlines app to check my family in to our flights. Unexpectedly, it turned into a code-breaking challenge!

Users by time of day

Users by time of day

How to (re)create a Users by time of day chart with Google Analytics 4 and Looker Studio

Digital design is conflicted

Extended article

Digital design is conflicted

In digital design, we are conflicted between thinking fast and slow, and between caring and causing harm.

My top tips for being self-employed

My top tips for being self-employed

In 2006, I made the move to being self-employed. 17 years later, I'm still an independent consultant.

Packets of Findus "Fish and Crisp" frozen fillets of fish

"AI saves me a day a week"

AI makes you more efficient. Helps you work faster. But does that come with a hidden cost?

Final call

The experience of a delayed flight highlights the wider impact of poor service design

The journey to a new website

The journey to a new website

The story of migrating beantin.se to beantin.net during the summer of 2023

Loops, arcs, terrain, and domain - 4 elements of service design

Extended article

Loops, arcs, terrain, and domain - 4 elements of service design

In this article, I build on Stephen Anderson’s thoughts about customer journeys and how we work with them as designers. I expand on the ALT-X model Stephen (and Erika Flowers) presented, and suggest some adjustments, from an economics viewpoint. Inspiration Most of the time, I don’t need much

Hiring a less experienced designer may be cost-effective and productive

Consultant service

Hiring a less experienced designer may be cost-effective and productive

We need to fix the problem of junior UX designers and product designers being closed out through unrealistic expectations about their experience.

I suspect you might be a bot

I suspect you might be a bot

I opened up a customer service chat with Yorkshire Water. I’m not a fan of ringing up companies and talking to them. I guess that’s largely a result of decades of mental scarring from so many frustrating menu systems, dodgy hold music, being cut off mid sentence, and

The future of design is words and data

The future of design is words and data

Sometimes, when you view a collection of objects you notice qualities, characteristics and connections that wouldn’t have been noticed if each object had been viewed individually. Daniel Harvey, Pamela Pavliscak, Sarah Doody and Andrea Resmini were amongst the speakers at Interact London 2016. Four individually fascinating and excellently delivered

Transitions and Animations and All That Jazz

Transitions and Animations and All That Jazz

How to we successfully design and implement movement into our websites and digital products? Today I’ve been fortunate enough to have a design problem on my to do list. I need to work out how to visualise that something triggered by the user is ongoing. This means I had

The kettle that never boils

The kettle that never boils

In the race for new products and features, sometimes we lose sight of why something exists in the first place. This week our electric kettle died. As a tea drinker, this is a code red situation. A replacement needs to be sorted quick. My other options for boiling water were,

Why did Buffer's social referral traffic vanish?

Why did Buffer's social referral traffic vanish?

Buffer say that they lost nearly half of their social referral traffic in the last year. I’m going to do one of those annoying things and not answer the question I pose in the title. I don’t have access to Buffer’s data so I can’t give

The UX divide

Various drafts of this post have been with me for years. The title has evolved over time as my “answers” to the problem have swung back and forth. The problem itself has undergone several incarnations as I’ve learnt new things and my experiences challenged its definition. But one thing

Your customers are laughing at you

Your customers are laughing at you

Michael McIntyre was one of the artists who performed at the 5th Channel 4 Comedy Gala in London, May 2014. In his 9 minute comedy routine 6 minute comedy routine (the full 9 minute version has been edited down to 6), in effect, presents the results from his own usability

Iterating design ideas for SL’s travel planner

Iterating design ideas for SL’s travel planner

Stockholm Public Transport (Commonly known as SL) launched a new, responsive, website in May 2014. As is often the case with redesigned sites, it has received a fair amount of criticism. The travel planner in particular has come in for a bit of a bashing, but it’s also received

Optimal page title length after March 2014

Google on March 13th 2014 made a few changes to the appearance of their search result pages (SERPs). One of the most talked about changes was their decision to drop underlined links, but one of the biggest impact changes from an SEO perspective is the reduced space available for page

Source code survival guide for Web Managers

Not everyone needs to code, but everyone who works with the web benefits from knowing a few things about what goes on under the surface. Web editors benefit from knowing how certain HTML formatting works so they can, if need be, manually adjust or correct the content on the page.