Hidden Gems

I’ve been working as a user experience consultant for large clients for about eighteen months. One thing bugs me more than anything else.

So much of the time, nothing gets done.

You start user experience consulting with lofty ideas about matching business goals against user needs to uncover a holy grail for your clients. And it feels like that at the start - doing research, interviewing stakeholders, sketching ideas, writing scenarios, creating prototypes, testing with real users, iterating, and packaging it up ready to build.

The kind of user experience design you read about in books.

But as the projects stacked up I couldn’t avoid noticing how much of my work went nowhere - or worse, limped along with pieces getting hacked off along the way. At first I shrugged it off. Probably blamed the client. Then I wondered whether my work was good enough. But I slowly saw that I hadn’t yet grasped the true nature of my job.

Which is that even the best user experience design is totally irrelevant if your client does nothing with it. 

It’s Always Easy to Do Nothing

There’s all sorts of reasons why clients do nothing. Here are a few.

Sometimes their priorities change. Mike Monteiro says never work on a project that isn’t the organisation’s top priority. That’s golden advice. 

Sometimes they can’t do what you propose - maybe they’re shackled to legacy IT systems, maybe they’re so heavily regulated your suggestions are illegal, maybe the employees simply don’t have the skills to make your plans real. 

An awful lot of the time, they do nothing because they don’t know what to do next. The project sounds fine when you’re presenting, but when you leave there’s a lot of head scratching. No one wants to admit they didn’t understand what the consultant said.

It may sound like I’m blaming clients. But I’m not.

Nothing Is My Responsibility

These days, when nothing happens, I take the blame. (Yes, sometimes clients may be at fault, but this is a more productive starting point).

Easy to say. But what does this really mean for a UX consultant?

It’s your responsibility to decide whether or not the client is serious about the project. Don’t take it on if they’re not (OK, this is totally impractical for me right now but a man can dream!).

It’s your responsibility to assess what capacities and appetites the client has before designing anything - if they’re using Sharepoint, it better work in Sharepoint; if they’re heavily regulated, run every iteration past the legal guys; if they lack core skills, convince them to hire or avoid that area entirely; and if they have no appetite to do new things, don’t do new things!

But most of all it’s your responsibility to make sure your client ‘gets’ your work. This kind of communication is really hard. We’re so close to projects we forget how complex they are. It means involving clients at every step. Continuing to explain things way past the point when you are bored with your own ideas. And spending more time on communicating the design than you expect to. Much, much more.

Since taking responsibility for nothing happening has everything gone smoothly? No, of course not. But several projects that once seemed doomed are now on the verge of success. And I sleep better.

This Is Not a Universal Truth of UX

This side of UX design - consulting for large organisations - is not for everyone. User experience design is a broad church. This verges on organisational change and the pace can be glacial.

More specialist designers and Agile UXers will be rolling their eyes right now. That’s fine. It’s a big world. You have your problems, I have mine. (In fact, we need each other, but that’s another story).

And many consultants don’t care. They get paid whether the project gets implemented or not, and there’s plenty more fish in the barrel.

I do care though. Partly because I’m selfish and I hate wasting my time. But mostly because I remember what it was like to be a client, baffled and confused by consultants. And I remember looking at their bills, and then at their work, and wondering why nothing was happening…

Say hello on @myddelton. A huge thank you to all my clients who’ve helped me understand what this job is all about. And the same to Leisa Reichelt and Mike Monteiro who basically said all of this already…

* Or is it?

My love affair with music died sometime after I gave up trying to be a musician, left Manchester and stopped living with DJs. Without a constant supply of personal recommendations I just got bored.

ThisIsMyJam totally changed that this year. Overnight I had a constant stream of amazing back music in my life.

In a world where too much is thrown at you to pay attention to, the focus on a single song at a time is not only refreshing, it’s the reason it works. Sometimes quality is simply the opposite of quantity.

And in an age where ‘social’ is a dirty word, ThisIsMyJam somehow resurrects the spirit of the mixtapes that I grew up with. Listening to other people’s choices is deep, while putting my own jams out there makes me feel like I’m 17 again…

2012: A Jam Odyssey

They saved the best until last though. It’s a hackday present from ThisIsMyJam and myself - the design is theirs, the content mine.

• Myddelton’s 2012 Jam Odyssey

Why can’t all web products be this wonderful?

These Are Your Jams

Of the 1016 jams people gave me in 2012, 199 made it into my Spotify favourites (Spotify link). Did I mention quality? 19.5% is some hit rate…

Shouts to Michelle Adams, Pete Williams, Lucy Hughes, Lisa Drake, Kate Saner, Sophie Scott, Karl Sabino, James Weiner and - of course - Hannah Donovan.

See what I’m listening to right now on ThisIsMyJam…

I don’t know about you, but no one taught me grammar at school.

It’s a massive shame, because grammar is really useful. These days I use it as a pattern library for writing. Like a stencil set, it gives you a collection of predetermined shapes to use when you’re floundering.

Which is helpful, because writing is hard.

Three of my favourite grammar patterns - statements, imperatives and gerunds - come direct from Ginny Redish’s incredible book Letting Go of the Words. It’s up there with Steve Krug. Seriously.

And don’t worry, this stuff’s easy. Trust me!

Statements Make Great Subheadings

Let’s start with the statement pattern. Subheadings are critical on the web and it’s easy to write great ones - avoid nouns and use statements:

• A statement says something. The subheading of this section, ‘Statements make better subheadings than nouns’, is a statement.
• Nouns say very little.  A noun doesn’t say anything, it just gives something a name. Noun equivalents for this subheading might be ‘Statements’, or ‘Statement subheadings’. Boring.

Look carefully at the subheadings you write. Most of them are nouns, guaranteed. Statements are harder to write but more compelling to read. They force you to commit to actually saying something.

And saying something is always a good thing when you’re writing.

Recommendations Start With A Verb

The classic research report is a list of insights and recommendations. I use two patterns here: all insights are written as statements (just like subheadings) and all recommendations start with a verb.

• Insights as statements
  ‘Doctors want practical information, not scientific advice’
  ‘Users are unlikely to register for the site’
  ‘The customer relationship is with the drug, not your company’
• Recommendations starting with verbs
  ‘Create materials that focus on practical information’
  ‘Remove the registration requirement’
  ‘Build individual sites for products, not a portal’

In fact, the recommendations start with a particular type of verb. This is the imperative pattern. If it can be spoken like the word of god, with an exclamation, it’s an imperative verb. Create! Remember! Fornicate!

(Incidentally, starting with a verb makes for good subheadings too).

Different Verb Types Add Depth

Sometimes you need two levels, like when you’re writing instructions. One level to describe the task (‘sending an email’) and the other to describe each step (‘open your email client’, ‘click on new mail’, etc).

This is where I use the gerund pattern. Gerund sounds fancy (it’s Latin!) but it’s just a normal verb which ends with ‘ing’.

You can always take an imperative verb (create, remember, fornicate) and turn it into a gerund verb (creating, remembering, fornicating). This gives two levels - tasks are gerunds (‘sending an email’, ‘logging into the site’, ‘resetting your password’) but instructions are imperatives (‘open your email’, ‘click the login button’, ‘enter your address’).

You’ve seen this all over the web.

Go Forth and Multiply

(See? The word of god loves an imperative or two).

I use these grammar patterns every single day. They are the lines and shapes, the boxes and arrows, of written language.

My favourite grammar pattern of all time is the active voice. It’s the best writing tip you will ever learn. Especially if you’ve had any kind of academic education which involved writing.

But it’s tricky to explain. When I’ve cracked it I’ll let you know…

Say hello on @myddelton. This is my second post about language and design - if you liked it you should read The ‘Can’ versus ‘Will’ Hack too. Oh, and buy the new edition of Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish.

There are a million ways you can hack your brain into better habits using language. Changing your words, grammar or how you write sentences will have a huge impact on your behaviour.

This post is about just one - the difference between ‘can’ and ‘will’.

There are two areas of user experience design where this can make a big difference - avoiding edge cases and getting things built.

Avoiding Edge Cases

If you listen carefully to the language of software developers, marketers in large companies, and even some designers, you often hear them talking about designs in terms of what people ‘can’ do with them:

• ‘The user can navigate this video using four different control sets’
• ‘People can send this page to a friend or share it on Facebook’
• ‘Users can get to this content by registering with the site’

This is design by wishful thinking. And it leads to wasting time on edge cases. When discussing whether users ‘can’ do something it’s difficult to rule anything out. Like your mum said, just because users can jump off a cliff doesn’t mean we should design for it…

The opposite? Make sure everyone talks about what users ‘will’ do:

• ‘Our primary persona will use the chapter navigation for this video’
• ‘Customers will rarely share content and will copy the URL if they do’
• ‘Users will not see this content because they will not register’

These are stronger claims and they are screaming out for evidence. As soon as you start talking like this, everyone in the room wants to see the research. Which is perfect, because we all want to be making design decisions as a result of research. Right?

So that’s my first language hack. Talk about the user, or persona, or customer, in terms of what they ‘will’ do.

Getting Things Built

I do lots of strategy work. It’s immensely frustrating because you do great work, come up with a beautiful solution and then tell the client how they ‘can’ implement your shiny ideas.

But guess what? Most strategy work sits on the shelf.

Lots of designers moan about clients at this point. But if designers talked more about what clients ‘will’ do, not what they ‘can’ do, we’d see more progress. Here are some starting points…

Clients will do things they can understand. It’s amazing how many designers, me included, provide work that makes no sense without the designer in the room. Communicating your work is as important as doing the work in the first place. (Honestly, I always forget this!).

Clients will do things that suit them. It’s up to designers to understand the client and offer appropriate solutions. There’s no future in understanding the solution and offering appropriate clients. Which means the best solution is not always the right solution. Seriously.

Clients will do things that are their idea. This is my favourite. Get your client involved in the whole design process, from watching user research to sketching design ideas. They will never stop you being a designer, but you’ll learn loads about what they want and you can trace their ideas in the final output. And they’ll glow with pride.

So my second language hack is to talk about what clients ‘will’ do, not what they ‘can’ do. Take responsibility for action!

Final Words

The difference between ‘can’ and ‘will’ is tiny. But it will make a huge difference when talking about design. Let me know how you get on.

Say hello on @myddelton. And yes, this post is an oversimplification to make a point - there are some instances where talking about what people ‘can’ do is a good thing. Just not mostly. 

America elected Barack Obama again today. It’s some achievement, considering how bad their economy is. But then Mitt Romney never looked like he could win. I was surprised he was the Republican candidate after losing the race to John McCain last time around.

There are plenty of people who are going to talk about the problems with Obama. The fact that he’s not really liberal. His drone attacks. His failure to address the economic problems of his first four years. His attempt to be bi-partisan which pretty much failed.

But I love him.

I love him because he’s a black man, leading the most diverse country on earth. I love him because he’s a great speaker. I love him because he stood up for gay rights. I love him because he’s a Democrat, whatever that means.

And I hate what stood against him.

I hate anyone who oppresses women, or supports anyone who oppresses women, or shares a platform with anyone who oppresses women. I respect your opinion about abortion, but it’s every woman’s right to choose. 

I hate rich, American capitalists who watch the stock market as an indicator of success. 

I hate people who talk about socialised medicine. I’ve met them, and they don’t even know what they are talking about. They can’t even define the thing. 

I hate people who hate gays, blacks, immigrants. Who hate non-believers. Who hate the people that their favourite talk show host hates.

I very, very rarely talk about hate, but in this situation it seems apt.

Symbolism, Not Real Change

Anyway, either way, it feels more like a symbolic victory than a real turning point. America’s political system seems to be, as far as I can tell from listening to American radio and speaking to friends who work there, fucked. Special interests rule. Senators and congresswomen are spending four, five, six hours a day raising money - literally calling up people themselves to ask for money - rather than legislating for the people. And the legislation reflects this reality. Acts that have no special interest get no time.

Obama and the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans for this. Apparently, if you’re on his email list, you got an email every day for six months in the run-up to the election asking you for money. Every single day. Now I know that mathematically that probably works out, but what the fuck is the experience of that? What happens when that stops, and the same old same old continues? How do you feel about politics when your political cycle is two years campaigning followed by two years of failing to get anything of any real meaning done? Seriously.

Apparently the Democrats raised, and spent, a billion dollars. To Romney’s $800 million. And another billion from the super PACs. So you could say that Obama bought the election. Is this a democracy?

The Real Change Is In The Demographics

The demographic changes are interesting though. For older people, 81% are white. For people a little younger than me, that drops to 61%. For the age group of 0-8, less than half of Americans are white. Less. Than. Half. That’s pretty staggering.

Latino voters are being added at a rate of 50,000 per month. That’s 50,000 new hispanic voters turning 18 every month. 600,000 each year. Two and a half million in a presidential term. That means that since George Bush Junior won that election in 2000 there are ten million new hispanic votes.

And they won’t necessarily vote Democrat. Like the Eritrean cab driver I had in Indianapolis, who shocked me by saying that he liked Obama, but not as much as he had liked Bush. (Indiana, incidentally, was one of only two states to go from Democrat to Republican last night).

When Politics Fails, Symbolism Is Enough

But let’s go back to the symbolic victory. A black man, with a black family and a hugely diverse crowd celebrating the diversity of America. You can argue all you want about the policies and the actions. But symbols matter too, and that is a fucking powerful symbol. More powerful than anything we have in the UK, where the dominant symbolism is all Eton and Oxford.

And the women. The women who carried the marginal states. The women who were told they had no control, not only over their pregnancies, but perhaps even over the possibility of pregnancies. Who were told that God wanted them to have the babies they conceived during rape. Mitt Romney, in what was a pretty gracious concession, even managed to thank those who had helped on his campaign ‘and their wives’. Jesus.

Even the symbolic victory rang true there. Obama, surrounded by Michelle and his daughters. Romney, commiserating with his sons, oh, and their wives.

As Mike Monteiro said, never ever underestimate the women.

Hillary up next?

This is my personal, non-American view of what happened last night. If you want to add anything, or berate me, reach out to @myddelton.

I read an article recently that blew my mind. It lamented that three principles of user-centred design – focusing on users, measuring the effect of your designs and using an iterative approach – were being ignored by most designers.

What blew my mind was it was written in 1985. 1985! I thought, from the way everyone talks about them, that these were modern ideas. Yet here were two academics describing the same problems we face today, right down to a passionate call for more prototyping, five years before the web was even invented.

How utterly depressing.

Which got me thinking. What if something else is going on? What if these are still problems because designers never wanted to do them in the first place? That despite all the talking and writing and speaking and podcasting and tweeting about user-centred design, when it comes down to it, designers avoid user-centred design like the plague.

It sounds crazy. So I wondered whether there could be any truth in it.

Why Don’t Designers Like UCD?

Let’s start with focusing on users. It’s a gospel that every user experience designer preaches, yet often when you speak to them, and dig around a bit, it turns out that everyone has a different excuse for why they don’t do actually do it very much. Often revolving around time, or money, or difficult clients.

To me the truth seems far more stark. Talking to users means taking their views into account when you design, and actually designers would rather not do that. It’s much easier to throw up your hands and say, well, there’s no budget for that, so let’s just do the best we can in the circumstances. Which turns out to be very close to, let me just design this as I think it should work.

And don’t get me started on measuring your designs. It seems designers love anything that means they can avoid measuring things. Whether it’s the pervasive idea that you only need to test with five random passers-by or yet another UX missionary saying that analytics can only tell us the what, not the why, designers latch on to anti-measurement ideas like a pitbull with lockjaw.*

Why? Because measuring the effect of designs risks that the numbers will show the designs don’t work. So if designers want to just design things like they think they should work, measurement is a threat.

See? There’s a theme developing. Designers avoid principles that clash with their own interest in just making things like they want to.

So finally to iterative design. Seen from the perspective of a designer who only wants to make things like he wants to make them, iterative design is the biggest threat of all. While talking to users and measuring the effect of designs have an indirect impact on your work, using an iterative approach means explicitly acknowledging that the designs are wrong before you start. And worse still, you probably have to listen to someone else telling you exactly what’s wrong with your work.

So the little fantasy world where your design is great, and perfect, and right, comes crashing down.

OK, So What Am I Saying?

Basically that a lot of designers want to design things as they want them to be, that these three principles of user-centred design are a direct threat to that vision, and so consciously or not they avoid using these principles.

Because let’s face it, designers are persuasive. When we want something to happen, or something to be included in a project, or a process, we’re good at getting it. Look at how much time and money has been wasted on pixel-perfect wireframes over the last decade!

Ergo, if user-centred design principles are missing from projects, it must be because designers don’t want them there in the first place.

* And we wonder why no one gives us a seat at the strategy table…

Let me know what you think on @myddelton. If you want to blow your mind with some history read Designing for Usability (1985) and Myth of the Intuitive (1990). Or just come to the London UX Bookclub.

I love dot voting. Although telling people to stick dots on their favourite concepts may sound more like playschool than work, it’s a great way to reach group consensus at the end of a workshop. I use it all the time.

But sometimes dot voting just doesn’t work.

Say you’re dealing with senior business people used to making complex decisions after considering lots of data. The simplicity of dot voting feels like a fraud to them, not empirical, not grounded in their world of numerical analysis.

Two modifications can make it work. First, allow them to score ideas against multiple criteria. Secondly, give them immediate feedback on scores to help inform the final dot vote. And all on a workshop timescale.

Is it possible? I think so. Welcome to dot voting in three dimensions.

Scoring Is Easy Enough…

The fundamental principle is to score each idea against multiple criteria.

My example had seven criteria – cost, effort, legal issues, user needs, differentiation, business goals and personal liking – each of which could be scored None / Low / Medium / High.

To capture the scores, make a simple, colourful and appealing scoresheet. After each idea is discussed, hand out the sheets, give people a minute and then collect them. It sounds fussy, but it works fine.

…But You Need The Magic Spreadsheet

12 people scoring 10 ideas and against 7 criteria is 840 datapoints! It’s hard to visualise the data quickly enough to use in the workshop.

This is where you need the magic spreadsheet:

• the first worksheet contains a matrix for entering all the scores for each of the ideas – the goal here is super easy data entry.
• the second worksheet averages scores into three groups – feasibility (cost, effort, legal issues), customer impact (user needs, differentiation) and business appetite (business goals, personal liking).
• the final worksheet is a chart showing each idea in three dimensions – feasibility (x-axis), customer impact (y-axis) and business appetite (bubble size).

You need two people, one to facilitate and the other to enter scores in the spreadsheet as you go. Once the data’s in, adjust the axes to fit the data range and you’re left with a striking visualisation of how ideas map to criteria.

People Love Talking About Pictures

The visualisation is the killer element. It prompts great discussion.

Are there any obvious winners? Should we focus on ideas with most impact, or biggest feasibility? Which ideas were written off altogether? Are there any interesting outliers? Is it what we expected to see? Where are all the ideas that are easy to do but also have a massive impact?

Only now, having (i) discussed the ideas (ii) scored the ideas and (iii) discussed the aggregated scores, is everyone ready for…the final dot vote.

Fine, But Why Would I Go To This Much Trouble?

There are many benefits to dot voting in three dimensions:

• generates confidence – it’s not scientific or objective, but it means looking at the problem from multiple angles and leads to a more rounded decision
• fosters understanding – group discussion allows raising of technical worries so specialist concerns (e.g IT and legal) get reflected in group scores
• contains feedback loops – discussions influence scoring, scoring influences prioritisation – which captures some of the magic of the Delphi method
• gives the group ownership – the facilitator doesn’t take part in the voting, so the group is wholly responsible for making the decisions
• harnesses visualisation – the abstract representation of scores focuses the group on characteristics that matter most to the business
• allows segmentation – run it with different groups and compare the results to see differences between, for example, marketing and IT viewpoints
• accommodates introverts – no matter how strident the discussion, each individual scores alone (although extroverts can still influence discussions).

There are pitfalls of course. You need a balanced group so scores aren’t skewed. You need good criteria and sensible dimensions. And you might have to kill your favourite ideas when the group throws them out!

The Final Analysis

Does this work any better than simple dot voting? Maybe, maybe not.

In my example there was an extremely strong correlation between ‘personal liking’ and final consensus. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering (a) we all know dot voting works and (b) cognitive psychology suggests that many ‘rational’ decisions are really just manifestations of our emotional responses.

But it’s a good tool for when people don’t trust a dot vote. And, if you like that kind of thing, the data visualisation reveal is pretty fun too…

Let me know what you think about this on @myddelton. Feel free to adapt my scoresheet or spreadsheet to use your preferred criteria, dimensions and labelling. These ideas owe a debt to @leisa and @petegale.

 .

In 2007, my DJ brother Gabriel asked me to build him a website. I didn’t know at the time, but it would turn out to be the best thing I ever did.

It took ages to build. I had to learn HTML, CSS and Expression Engine. Five years later Gabriel’s a full time DJ and I’m a user experience designer.

But the best thing about building your own site is the mistakes. Our biggest ones taught me unforgettable lessons about information architecture.

Names Are Not Just About Clarity

Our first mistake was naming. He plays music that people LOVE to dance to. Not shoe gazing indie – raucous, irreverent Jamaican dancehall crossed with UK club music. What do you call the section about their shows? 

Don’t call it Events (like we did). It’s clear, but it’s dull.

Events doesn’t sound like fun party music. Events doesn’t even sound like music. Events sounds like corporate functions in conference centres with delegates drinking terrible coffee and talking about ‘getting visibility’.

What should it be called? Parties. Raves. Jams. Gigs. Dances. Shows. Anything that communicates some excitement alongside the clarity. Your global navigation is on every page so what you choose to include, and the words you use, are a huge opportunity to tell your story. Use them wisely.

Not All Content Is Created Equal

Our second mistake was a classic. We structured the site to match our mental model by splitting the Music section into original productions, mash-ups, remixes, refixes, mixes, live shows and radio shows. Clear. Logical. Wrong.

Why? People only care about two categories. Good music. Bad music.

Only publish the good stuff. Don’t hide it in subsections. Put the very best on your homepage so people can get at it within two seconds of arriving.

Truthfully, very few organisations have enough high quality content to justify complicated hierarchies. Much better to publish a stellar subset and leave your users wanting more. Or you risk overwhelming them with choice.

Humans Beat Computers (Sometimes)

Our third mistake – and this one is an all time favourite pastime of mine – was getting carried away with the content model. We designed our events to have titles, venues, locations, prices, addresses, concessions, web links, booking offices, artists and plenty more. We were exceptionally proud of our design.

This pride was misplaced.

Within two minutes of entering the first event we realised we didn’t have all the right information. We made some fields optional, which broke the visual design by leaving gaps where content was previously. We hacked the code with if/else statements for millions of data combinations. And it still never worked properly.

In the end, three years later, the solution was stupidly simple.

For rapidly changing content where you can’t predict the shape of the data, just have a page that a human can edit by hand. We’re good at that.

Huge Mistakes Can Bring Huge Benefits

We saved the biggest mistake until last – last year Google killed the site for being infected with malware. We hadn’t updated Expression Engine for four years and deserved what we got, so we started over. (Losing a thousand pages overnight was easier and far more effective than a content audit!).

But this isn’t about Gabriel’s site anyway. It’s not even about information architecture. It’s really about how I learned to learn from my own mistakes.

Owning up to my bad decisions was horrible at first. It made me feel like I had given bad advice and often felt easier to argue back. The turning point was a conversation where Gabriel pointed out how much it took to maintain the site and I was practically shouting in denial. He, the client, was right.

Over time, I got better at admitting mistakes and started to relish finding flaws in my own thinking. Welcoming criticism is the hardest thing I’ve ever learned to do – and I’m still working on it – but nothing has improved my work quicker.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton. Thanks to Gabriel for putting up with me, @MagsHanley for encouraging us to share IA war stories and @Mike_FTW and @slowtext for their great podcast, Let’s Make Mistakes.

Before 2007, I lived in a vacuum. The internet was overwhelming me.

I bookmarked interesting websites and completely forget to check them again. I read life-changing articles that disappeared into the ether. I constantly felt like something important was evaporating behind the currently-open tab.

Google Reader changed everything for me in 2007. It remade the internet at a human scale by connecting me to real life designers and developers. In six months I learned HTML/CSS, discovered Don’t Make Me Think, found Avinash Kaushik and got a job running the websites for a government agency.

Three years later the iPhone, Twitter, Reeder and Instapaper did the same thing. Just in time, because 2011 was another crazy year.

It’s Play Or Get Played

Even with the right tools it’s never easy to stay ahead of the game. Twitter, Instapaper, Google+, Reeder, Flickr, even email – they’re all out to crush you.

All over the internet, people are panicking and making big statements about unplugging. As if that’s a solution! Far better to think intelligently about your own strategies for consuming and sharing infomation. If you want to start somewhere, try listening to Kip Voytek’s amazing insights on Radio Johnny.

My advice? Police your sources. Ruthlessly unfollow, unsubscribe and unread anything you find boring. Constantly tune your setup. Remember to start from scratch in a new area every now and then.

And your desire for completeness? It’s harmful. Let it go. 

There are hidden shortcuts. Each day I link to two things that I think are amazing on Twitter, so follow @myddelton and let me know what you think.

Podcasts have the power to transform mundane tasks into enjoyable activities. Why? Because unlike books, tv, videos or websites, you can do other things at the same time as listening to them. 

Exercising, cooking, cleaning, shopping, commuting or just lying awake with jet lag are all a million times better with a good podcast between your ears. But like most things online, sorting the great from the merely good is hard. 

Want a head start? Try listening to these, my all time favourite podcasts. 

Radiolab

Few things in this world are as good as Radiolab. Seriously. It believes ‘your ears are a portal to another world’. And it’s right.

You get sucked in by the sound. After the acoustic purity of BBC Radio 4 or the earsplitting compression of commercial radio, the sonics in Radiolab are mind-bending. Original music drifts in and out. Voices are stitched together. Scratches, gurgles and vortexes appear – and silence becomes a weapon.

But the secret of Radiolab is the storytelling. It takes the deepest, weirdest, scariest subjects – death, artificial intelligence, morality, animal rights, tumours – and tells beautiful, emotional, unforgettable tales about them.

Radiolab is the DJ Shadow, the Aphex Twin, the Miles Davis, of radio.

In Our Time

In Our Time has three British academics discussing a single topic over 50 minutes. Sounds dull, but it works thanks to the wide range of topics like:

• Philosophy - David Hume, Malthusiasnism, Free Will
• Science - the Moon, the Neutrino, the Age of the Universe
• Religion - Shintoism, John Wyclif and the Lollards, Islamic Law
• History - the Siege of Tenochtitlan, Custer’s Last Stand, the Iron Age
• Artistic works - Delacroix’s Liberty, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Bhagavad Gita

Melvin Bragg’s a great host too. He never gets out of his depth when cajoling, prompting, hurrying and even correcting the academics into covering the topic. And although he can be brusque, he usually extracts a compelling story.

Which, knowing academics, is a special skill.

Seminars About Long Term Thinking

There are multiple Stewart Brands. They show up in documentaries about Ayn Rand, ecological science, NASA, cybernetics and the Whole Earth Catalog. One even came up with ‘information wants to be free’. But my favourite Stewart Brand is the one who introduces the Seminars About Long Term Thinking. 

You might learn that some organisms are thousands of years old, that you can pick up any language in three months, that governments should use historians to predict the future, or that the South is falling prey to deviant globalisation.

Yes, the ideas are often a little crazy and yes, Kevin Kelly asks ridiculously long questions at the end. But conventional wisdom is rarely this thought-provoking.

The Straight Dope

Finally, when you’re not up for dealing with the big questions, you might prefer five minute answers to the little questions. Enter The Straight Dope:

• What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?
• Did firemen once use nets to rescue people from burning buildings?
• Are bananas about to become extinct?
• Whatever happened to that plan to grow square trees?
• Could I take down a T Rex with my Beretta 9mm pistol?

Funny stuff. Perfect for walking to the bus stop and learning something new.

Let me know which podcasts you love on @myddelton. Thanks to @sjors and @gabrielheatwave for the original recommendations.

…

Updates

Podcast recommendations from other readers include:

• Triangulation and Just Like Honey via @thompsonsimon
• The Big Ideas from The Guardian via @sjors
• The Zero and Lovelace shows from In Our Time via @lucy_luge
• This American Life via @nicprice and @katheaton

Keep them coming!