Graham Odds

Artificial Intelligence

AI in Government – Addressing bias in AI-assisted services

As the government progresses from prototype to production to ongoing operation with AI-assisted services for UK citizens, how can it minimise the risk of replicating structural biases? In this blog post, I’ll explore key elements of what’s involved in ensuring that services are as representative, fair and impartial as possible.

Graham Odds · 27^th Aug · 4 min read

Artificial Intelligence

AI in Government – Balancing productivity gains with accountability

I reflect on recent discussions with civil servants and our own research to consider how AI might increase productivity and offer new capabilities. At the same time, I’ll explore the necessary checks and balances on how far AI should be applied in delivering services to UK citizens.

Graham Odds · 20^th Aug · 5 min read

Artificial Intelligence

AI in Government – the central role of data

Data is important to every element of the safe and successful harnessing of AI. For the government, data challenges are not new, nor are they insurmountable. In this post, I’ll look at some of those challenges across the data lifecycle, and share insights from our recent work and conversations with government about practical ways forward.

Graham Odds · 8^th Aug · 3 min read

Artificial Intelligence

AI in Government – from prototype to production

Government departments are not alone in struggling to move artificial intelligence (AI) prototypes into production. Here, I reflect on some of the reasons for this and share some insights from our client work which I think point towards how the government can harness AI with greater confidence.

Graham Odds · 2^nd Aug · 4 min read

People

B-ing a force for good

Scott Logic has become a certified B Corp! So I wanted to share why that’s important for our business and what it means to me personally as someone who has been in the organisation for a long time.

Graham Odds · 25^th Oct 2023 · 4 min read

People

Environmental Impact – The supplier problem

Those involved in managing organisations' environmental impact often point to the 'supply chain challenge', that is, the difficulty of measuring the GHG emissions associated with suppliers' goods and services. But most businesses are themselves also suppliers, so if we're all waiting for our suppliers to answer the question before we can, then we're stuck in a deadlock. This post shares our first (probably imperfect) stab at trying to progress this issue.

Graham Odds · 20^th Jul 2023 · 4 min read

People

A more inclusive future. Together.

So many companies – including Scott Logic – have created ‘one-size-fits-all’ working practices and cultures that are based on a range of assumptions about what ‘fits', while excluding swathes of people. I’m determined that we tackle this issue, and in this blog post I share our journey so far towards being as inclusive an employer as possible.

Graham Odds · 4^th Jan 2022 · 3 min read

Tech · Video

APIs: Making GaaP a reality

With APIs, Open Standards and modern tooling, the vision of GaaP is more readily achievable than ever before, but it requires a different understanding of the role of government — from master and commander to convener and enabler. In this talk, I bring to life why I believe APIs are key to establishing digital foundations that will enable us to better serve citizens' personalised needs at scale.

Graham Odds · 1^st Mar 2021

Tech · Video

Panel: APIs as a value generator

Our panel of experts — Jacqui Leggetter (Head of Integration (Deputy Director) at DWP), Kevin Dearing (Head of API Ecosystems at NatWest Group) and Benny Boye Johansen (Head of OpenAPI at Saxo Bank) — share success stories, lessons learnt and practical advice based on their experiences of using APIs as a strategic enabler and value generator.

Graham Odds · 22^nd Jan 2021

UX Design

The No-Excuses Guide to Innovation with APIs

Nothing is preventing your organisation from innovating today in order to keep pace with user expectations, because properly using APIs helps you escape from the bonds of your legacy estate.

Graham Odds · 13^th Nov 2020 · 4 min read

UX Design · Video

The oft-untapped business potential of APIs

Genuine digital transformation is not possible unless Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are embraced and understood across a whole organisation, rather than just within technical teams. In this webinar, I tried to start taking non-technical folk on that journey.

Graham Odds · 12^th Oct 2020

UX Design

Let machines talk to machines

While APIs are nothing new, their technical nature means that their purposes and capabilities are rarely understood or championed by non-technical people in organisations, despite their huge significance in our digital world...

Graham Odds · 6^th Oct 2020 · 1 min read

Resources

White Paper: Open your eyes to APIs

This white paper is designed to help you better understand the potential of the humble Application Programming Interface (API) in unlocking genuine digital transformation.

Graham Odds · 1^st Oct 2020 · 1 min read

UX Design

Open your eyes to APIs

APIs "done properly" can be a significant strategic enabler, or even a whole new business proposition. This piece highlights some examples of this in action.

Graham Odds · 10^th Sep 2020 · 3 min read

UX Design · Video

Think workflow, not app

This webinar explored the potential of desktop container technologies to cultivate an integrated desktop ecosystem, and shares some techniques for taking a workflow-focused approach to software design.

Graham Odds · 20^th Aug 2020

UX Design

Service Design in Government 2019

We had a stand at the recent Service Design in Government conference and took the opportunity to gain some insight into the community, using LEGO! Here's what we did, why and the results.

Graham Odds · 22^nd Mar 2019 · 3 min read

UX Design

Interaction18

Last week, designers from across the globe gathered for the annual Interaction conference. Here are some of my thoughts and takeaways from the event.

Graham Odds · 14^th Feb 2018 · 4 min read

UX Design

Change, Presented Two Ways

Inspired by a recent dot chart visualisation focusing on the change of a value in different circumstances, this blog post presents the same data visualised using a slopegraph and compares and contrasts the two forms.

Graham Odds · 29^th Jun 2017 · 3 min read

UX Design · Video

Towards a responsive desktop

Why don't we adopt responsive design on the desktop? In this talk I demonstrate the power and fresh challenge of applying responsive design to desktop productivity applications.

Graham Odds · 13^th Jun 2017

UX Design · Video

Let's have a conversation

A talk from NUX5 where I explore conversational UIs and conversational commerce.

Graham Odds · 7^th Oct 2016

UX Design

Do You Need A Conversational UI?

Despite all the excitement around chatbots, conversational UIs and conversational commerce, you need to take a step back and consider whether they could be appropriate for your services. This post weighs up the potential against the current reality and highlights aspects to consider.

Graham Odds · 5^th Sep 2016 · 5 min read

UX Design

The Catch 22 of Conversational UIs

This blog post highlights an awkward problem in one of the key building blocks of an automated conversational UI and suggests a few strategies for how to deal with it.

Graham Odds · 16^th Jun 2016 · 3 min read

UX Design · Video

Make Banking Talk

Conversational Commerce drastically re-imagines the way services are delivered to customers by moving interactions with them into chat, messaging or other natural language interfaces such as voice. The following video captures some of our initial thoughts on how this might apply to financial services.

Graham Odds · 18^th May 2016

UX Design

Recommended Reading For Designers

I am often asked for recommended reading on design by people from all sorts of different backgrounds. My answers vary wildly depending on the person asking and the angle or topic I think might be most relevant to them. However, there are certain books that come up quite often so here are a rounded collection of recommendations. It may surprise some that only a handful of these books are actually about design but I strongly believe that you can learn as much, if not more, from outside the world of design. After all, analysing, understanding and repurposing are some of the most powerful skills for designers to hone.

Graham Odds · 17^th Dec 2015 · 4 min read

Resources

White Paper: Making Technology Disappear

Creating omni-channel experiences in enterprise is more often than not a challenge in terms of strategy and mindset rather than technology. This white paper outlines a twinned design and technical approach that ensures focus is squarely on users and the contexts within they use a system.

Graham Odds, Colin Eberhardt · 8^th May 2015 · 1 min read

UX Design

The Science behind Data Visualisation

An outline of principles that will help you design more compelling data visualisations, from the respective strengths of various means for visually encoding values to the most appropriate patterns for conveying relationships.

Graham Odds · 9^th Aug 2013 · 1 min read

UX Design

UX Scotland 2013

Last week I spoke at and attended UX Scotland 2013, a new user experience design conference organised by Software Acumen. Over the course of 2 days, 31 sessions and roughly 130 delegates ensured that Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh was filled with ideas, discussion and enthusiasm. Overall, the conference was a definite success and I'm delighted to hear Software Acumen are already planning to repeat it next year.

Graham Odds · 24^th Jun 2013 · 3 min read

Tech

Illusions in CSS

In an attempt to see how powerful pure CSS can be these days I decided to try implementing some of my favourite visual illusions without any JavaScript. Not only was this good fun, I gained quite a few insights into the current state of CSS.

Graham Odds · 7^th Mar 2013 · 3 min read

UX Design

When adaptive design goes wrong...

Some thoughts and concerns about adaptive systems, emphasising the necessity to seriously question any assumptions they operate under so that the benefits they might bring to the user experience of a product outweigh any frustrations or negativity.

Graham Odds · 20^th Dec 2012 · 3 min read

Tech

Toob - London Underground travel app

Toob is a London Underground travel app for Windows 8 that I am designing and developing for CodeProject's App Innovation Contest. It is currently a work in progress but I have written an article introducing the application and going through some useful technical information for anyone interested in writing HTML5 applications for Windows 8.

Graham Odds · 4^th Oct 2012 · 1 min read

UX Design

Pretty pictures don't always tell the whole truth

A critical appraisal of my 'If Broad Habitats In The UK Were Clustered...' visualisation, highlighting some of its shortcomings and issues in the underlying data source that the 'pretty picture' does a good job of masking.

Graham Odds · 12^th Jul 2012 · 3 min read

Tech

If broad habitats in the UK were clustered...

Intrigued by Mark Easton's question on Twitter, 'How much of Britain is built on?', and inspired by the associated article, The Great Urban Myth of Britain, I wanted to put the UK NEA's statement that '6.8% of the UK's land area is now classified as urban' into some kind of context that actually made sense to me.

Graham Odds · 6^th Jul 2012 · 1 min read

UX Design

How to undermine a good design: a case study

This article considers a recent change to the BBC Weather site as an example of how overuse of information visualisation techniques and inconsistent design decisions can undermine what is otherwise an excellent content-first experience.

Graham Odds · 14^th Jun 2012 · 4 min read

UX Design

UX London 2012

Last week I attended the UX London 2012 conference. This was my first public foray into the world of User Experience and it proved to be both educational and thought-provoking.

Graham Odds · 26^th Apr 2012 · 4 min read

UX Design

Infographics - info = graphics

This article presents a concern I have regarding the development of infographics and shows an example of the kind of critical thinking I believe the world of infographics is unfortunately all too often missing.

Graham Odds · 9^th Feb 2012 · 4 min read

Tech

Change is afoot in the lands of Flash and Flex

Adobe has recently made a number of rather muddled announcements around Flash and Flex that have caused confusion and concern in the development community.

Graham Odds · 14^th Nov 2011 · 4 min read

UX Design

A Critique of Radar Charts

This article presents a critique of radar charts, a chart type commonly used to display multivariate data, higlighting how they are poorly designed to effectively communicate information in the underlying data, and presents a number of more effective alternatives.

Graham Odds · 23^rd Sep 2011 · 9 min read

UX Design

Flash On The Beach 2011

Yesterday I spoke at the Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton as part of the Elevator Pitch session. I think the session went really well, with a great mixture of topics so (hopefully) everyone was suitably entertained.

Graham Odds · 15^th Sep 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Static Initialisation in Flex

For reasons best ignored I recently investigated the different ways in which static initialisation code can be run in Flex.

Graham Odds · 29^th Jul 2011 · 2 min read

Tech

Flash On The Beach 2011

Yesterday I received the exciting news that I will be speaking at the fantastic Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton this September. As Europe's biggest annual Flash conference it brings together leading minds from all over the industry and focuses on design and development in equal share.

Graham Odds · 12^th Jul 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide...

A look at the three big web technologies at the moment.

Graham Odds · 6^th May 2011 · 1 min read

Resources

White Paper: Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide...

When meeting current and prospective clients the subject of web technology choice often arises. There has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty out there, even before Microsoft's perceived change of stance with respect to Silverlight emerged.

Colin Eberhardt, Graham Odds, Chris Price · 5^th May 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Updating Flex Sparkline to Flex 4

In a previous post I presented a library of sparkline implementations for Flex 3.

Graham Odds · 19^th Apr 2011 · 3 min read

Tech

Presentation Model (or MVVM) with Mate

This post introduces the Presentation Model (or MVVM) architectural pattern as one approach for creating "better" large-scale Flex applications.

Graham Odds · 31^st Jan 2011 · 11 min read

Tech

Flex Charts vs Silverlight Charts - a test of Performance

This post follows on from the comparison of two Silverlight chart libraries.

Graham Odds · 16^th Nov 2010 · 4 min read

Tech

Logging to Server from Flex

An issue that can crop up with Flex applications is the lack of any log information to match up against users' bug reports.

Graham Odds · 6^th Aug 2010 · 3 min read

UX Design

Stephen Few Data Visualisation Workshop

Last week I attended a series of information visualisation workshops run by Stephen Few.

Graham Odds · 28^th Jun 2010 · 7 min read

UX Design

Contextual cues in user interface design

Contextual cues are frequently used in user interface design to communicate functionality and behaviour to the user, removing the need for the user to guess.

Graham Odds · 19^th May 2010 · 5 min read

Tech

Flex Sparkline

Sparklines are described by their inventor, Edward Tufte, as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics".

Graham Odds · 8^th Feb 2010 · 2 min read

Tech

Microsoft apply for "Sparkline in the grid" patent

Microsoft have recently submitted US patent application 20090282325, entitled Sparklines in the Grid.

Graham Odds · 25^th Nov 2009 · 2 min read

Tech

Missing values in Flex charts

An oddness in default behaviour that can throw those new to Flex Charting is that segments in charts that should correspond to a data point are missing.

Graham Odds · 14^th Apr 2009 · 2 min read

Tech

Custom data tips in stacked Flex charts

The number of frustrating decisions in Flex's charting API is minimal, but high up on my list is a strange decision that prevents developers from accessing information that is frequently desirable for custom data tips in stacked area, bar and column charts.

Graham Odds · 24^th Mar 2009 · 2 min read

Tech

Save Flex chart as image

The ability to allow a user to save a Flex chart, or in fact any Flex UI component, as an image has popped up on my radar several times over the last few years.

Graham Odds · 4^th Mar 2009 · 1 min read

Scott Logic / Altogether Smarter

Graham Odds

A more inclusive future. Together.

APIs: Making GaaP a reality

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