An interesting look at squatter laws from across the pond, and how some entreprenuers and frustrated commercial property owners have found a way to make money while helping out less fortunate full-time workers. Everybody wins, except the squatters.

In London, "Guardians" Live in Empty Office Buildings

By Art Patnaude, Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2014

LONDON—Nicole Vloeimans, a 31-year-old worker at an NGO, lives in the very center of this expensive city. She has a 755-square-foot floor to herself. She pays £389 a month, about $635.

"I don't really know what to do with the space," says Ms. Vloeimans. "I don't have that much furniture."

There are some hitches. No parties are allowed. She needs permission to go on vacation. There is a hole in the kitchen ceiling. She had to paint over a swath of graffiti. The four-week notice to move out can come any time.

But so great is the demand for a reasonable flat that Londoners like Ms. Vloeimans are lining up to live in empty office buildings.

London's housing market is soaring. The average price for a home in the capital was £396,646 in November, Land Registry data show. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in central London was £1,368 in the 12 months ending in September, according to data from the U.K. government's Valuation Office Agency.

The boom has attracted growing throngs to a cheaper option: being a guardian.

Ms. Vloeimans's home is an abandoned office building once inhabited by squatters ("WE CALL IT EVOLUTION, U CALL IT A CRIME" reads graffiti in her kitchen). Squatters were evicted from her building last January. In exchange for the discounted rent, Ms. Vloeimans is meant to keep them from coming back.

The need for guardians is in part a consequence of Britain's peculiar laws on squatting. It isn't a crime to squat in an empty nonresidential building. It is a crime to remove a squatter without a lengthy civil-eviction court procedure.

So developers looking to rehab—or tear down—a building will fill it with guardians to keep the squatters away before work begins. The presence of guardians is often enough to deter squatters, because it is illegal to squat in an occupied building.

John Durkin, 55, lives in an old police station overlooking the River Thames. The condominiums next door sell to celebrities for around £2 million. He pays £450 a month.

"It's like being 17 years old, and your father tells you that he has a flat in London. 'And if you don't tell your mother, I'll let you keep it,' " said Mr. Durkin, a psychologist.

The living room has Wi-Fi and a stunning view, but his bedroom overlooking the train tracks has no electricity, meaning no heating. "I'm OK with a cold nose," he said.

Squatters were kicked out of an old brick building near Liverpool Street Station, one of London's main train hubs, in August. The front door opens to warped flooring, one dusty table, stained chairs, drums, a keyboard and amplifiers. A brown couch with yellow stuffing sprouting from its back sits against the front windows.

"They've done it up nice. You should have seen it before," said Arthur Duke, owner of Live-In Guardians, which supplies guardians for building owners. This place, at £250 a month, sits far below the usual properties he takes on.

Becoming a guardian isn't easy. "Demand is just out of control," said Mr. Duke. Live-In Guardians has about 2,000 people on its waiting list—by far the biggest backlog he has had since starting the business in 2009, he said. When a new property comes along, says Mr. Duke, 50 people will come to the open house.

Hip neighborhoods go fast. "If we put a property up on the website in Hackney, it's gone in five minutes," said Zoe Oakes of Ad Hoc, one of the largest guardian firms in London.

Guardian companies, which have guardians' fees as a source of revenue, tout themselves as cheaper alternatives to traditional security firms. Guardians need to be employed full time and can be subject to background checks.

In the city's gentrifying East End sits an "unremarkable three-story brick clad building" for light industry firms, according to a 2011 document of design plans. The building is set to be torn down. Meantime, guardians live there.

Oreste Noda, 46, is a Cuban percussionist. After moving into the building two years ago, his massive apartment became a hub for jam sessions.

"People would just come up from the street and be like, 'Man, this is great, what's the name of this club?' " said Michael Angelov, who lives in the same building. "I'd have to tell them it isn't a club, it's a home."

Mr. Angelov, a 31-year-old filmmaker, lives with his girlfriend in what he reckons was a media company's office. It is clean and has hardwood floors, nice desks and sofas.

His two bedrooms have glass walls. When friends stay over, "they're a bit like, 'What's this?' " he said. "But when it's just me and my girlfriend, it's fun."

For London's young professionals, guarding is a respectable alternative to squatting. Sam Golden, 24, who works in public relations, says he learned about property guardians from a longtime squatter—who was griping about capitalists edging in on squatters' turf (NewzGuyz doesn't really see why this detail is necessary, other than possibly an attempt to use guilt-by-association against anticapitalists).

Mr. Golden signed up with Guardians of London. Squatting "was on the fringes of the law, which is not viable for young professionals," he said. Now he lives in a once-empty building, one tube stop away from Wembley Stadium.

Other than having to take two days off work to clean the place, which included clearing a dead pigeon off one of the two pool tables, "it worked out perfectly."

Guardians do occasionally have to do some guarding. Once, the front door of a building in the southern city of Brighton managed by Oaksure Property Protection was smashed. Guardian Andrew Faley, 26, heard the sound and went down at 5 a.m. to check it out. He called it in to Oaksure's owners, and the door was fixed, he said.

Mark Ovenden, 50, has five oak-paneled rooms overlooking a central-London park. The bedroom is "about as big as any flat in Paris," said Mr. Ovenden, who lived in the French capital for six years. In the office Mr. Ovenden, a freelance television producer, has a wall-size world map detailing locations of major oil wells—a perk left over from an oil brokerage.

Getting around parts of the building without electricity requires light from his iPhone's flash. His two bathroom sinks lack hot water. And like all guardians, Mr. Ovenden is well aware that his time in the large, centrally located apartment for a discounted rent is fleeting. "I know we'll get moved out eventually. I'm prepared to make some sacrifices."

BIAS DETECTOR:

The value you bring to any project as a designer or user experience professional isn’t only your ability to execute a series of tasks. Good clients will recognize and appreciate the guidance, recommendations and opinions that come with your experience. It’s up to you to be forthcoming and to position yourself as a valuable thinker from the start.

It’s also up to you to base your recommendations on more than subjective opinion. This is especially true in the rapidly evolving world of mobile, where clients typically require as much education as they do execution.

Project-specific research provides the dual benefit of enhancing your general knowledge while improving your ability to make (and sell) decisions as the project progresses. In my experience, gaining that critical buy-in is much easier when recommendations are based on research conducted for the project.

In this post, I’ll refer to specific mobile research projects I’ve conducted and build a case for audience surveys, participatory discovery sessions and review of analytics data.

Practicality Vs. Personality

A paper from Carleton University (PDF) suggests that consumers simply have jobs to do and seek to employ the best product or service to do it. Applying this thinking to how users interact with mobile websites places more importance on “What do I need to find/do” than on anything related to their demographic. Mobile Web users have jobs to do that aren’t driven by age, gender, education, income, etc. This “practicality” is key to how I approach research.

“The jobs that customers are trying to get done cannot be deciphered from purchased databases, but rather from watching, participating, writing and thinking.” (Source of quote and image: Finding the Right Job For Your Product)

Fitting Research And Analysis Into Your Process

Mobile research is a considerable value-add that should be baked into your services to the client from the start. It enables you to make better decisions and to inform your client of what their audience expects from a mobile experience.

I recently finished guiding Loyalist College through a research phase that included a mobile component. The project is currently in production and is slated to launch early this year.

In this case, I faced unique challenges when selling the value of the proposed research to my client. Loyalist had already conducted research, but the research was more focused on uncovering general best practices and on clarifying the psychographics and demographics of its customers.

I suggested adding a more practical, goal-oriented research component (which was ultimately accepted) as a way to help us build a better product. Most of your clients probably understand well who their customers are but lack a solid grasp of what those customers want from a mobile experience.

Audience Research

The best way to determine what users expect to find and do in the mobile channel is to ask.

There are a few ways to approach this.

Participatory Discovery Sessions

The Loyalist College project included two sessions in which members of the target audience were asked, quite simply, what they expected to find and do, and how these tasks might best be performed on a mobile device. I also asked how many of the participants use a smartphone as their primary computing device. The data collection method in a session like this is as follows:

1. Ask participants to contribute approximately 10 things they expect to find and/or do when using their mobile device in the context of the products or services provided by your client. Each item should be written on a sticky note.
2. Collect the sticky notes and arrange them visibly, like on a wall or table.
3. Ask participants to review all suggestions and place a star or mark on the three responses that they think are most important.
4. Discuss the starred responses with the group to seek additional information.

Surveys

I’m working with 3M Canada on a consumer-facing mobile project that consists of multiple phases of research. In partnership with a research firm, we’re using surveys to learn more about how a very specific, targeted set of customers use their smartphones and what the probability is that they’d be interested in using the application we intend to build. We’ll use the results of this survey to define the features that will ultimately make it easier for users to do their job.

Building and distributing surveys are easy using a tool such as Fluid Surveys or Survey Monkey. If the budget is available, my advice is to seek the assistance of a research firm that can help you accurately craft the survey and find the most relevant set of participants. For a project with a tighter budget, you could certainly create, distribute and analyze a survey using a tool such as Fluid Surveys or Survey Monkey.

In my experience, once you’ve defined the purpose of the research initiative, the following are important to consider:

• Keep the questions focused and simple. Every question should tie back to the goal of the research and be focused on the expectations and habits of mobile users as they relate to the project. Keeping the questions simple lowers or eliminates any barriers to respond.
• Avoid open-ended questions. Whenever possible, pose questions that require respondents to answer yes or no, via multiple choice, or by rating on a scale. Data of this nature is much easier to analyze and allows you to build recommendations based on objective responses, rather than have to attempt to further interpret subjective feedback.
• Use incentives. A survey that I deployed for a project for the Golf Association of Ontario received over 5,000 responses. Our client was kind enough to offer an incentive of entering participants into a draw.
• Define your audience well. Soliciting responses from a general audience can be difficult, and the results are not always accurate. My suggestion is to work with your client to identify an audience (staff, customers, etc.) and to send the survey directly via an email list or other targeted communication channel.

Analytics Review

Slicing and reviewing analytics data from an existing Web presence can be an effective way to determine what mobile users are doing with the content and features available. For the Loyalist College project, I was interested in a simple report of the most popular content accessed from mobile devices.

Keep in mind, especially when using Google Analytics, that mobile phones and tablets are lumped together in the default “Mobile” group. Because mobile and tablet use cases are typically very different, I like to segment phones explicitly as part of the analysis. Here’s how:

1. Create a new custom advanced segment by selecting the arrow on the “Audience Overview” landing page.
   
2. Name the new segment (something like “Phones”).
   
3. In the “Technology” section, choose to include mobile traffic and exclude tablet traffic.
   

You can now analyze the data and create reports for phones only.

I recently used this approach in a large project for the Middlesex-London Health Unit. Part of our plan was to consider mobile as the cornerstone of a large Web redesign project and to treat the mobile experience as a priority from the start, rather than an afterthought. With access to the client’s analytics account, I was able to slice the data and reveal the following:

• On average, the website received 250 mobile visits per day.
• The most popular content for mobile users was a health-related game, information on immunization clinics and career opportunities.

Armed with information such as this, I was in a much better position not only to recommend how the content should be prioritized for mobile users but also to demonstrate the general importance of including mobile as a foundational element of the website redesign project.

I took a similar approach with the Loyalist project. In addition to identifying the number of mobile visitors and the content priorities of those users, I was able to communicate to my client that visits from mobile devices had doubled from 2012 to 2013.

Identifying Themes

Researching the expectations of mobile users has little value until the research is put to use. I like to include a step between research and execution in which I summarize the findings via a series of “themes.” Themes are a familiar concept that simplify the process of grouping findings together, while encompassing a number of tactics to be implemented in the project.

The research that I conducted for the Loyalist project revealed the importance of a centralized events calendar, especially on mobile. Using this data, I created a theme called “Events Matter” and outlined the results of the research and what the new mobile experience would do to capitalize on this theme. It’s important to be specific here and let your client know exactly what you think should be done to capitalize on the results of the research.

The themes can be used to create planning materials, like a creative brief, flowcharts or a scope of work document. Recently, I’ve found myself forgoing these components in favor of building visual concepts directly from the themes and spending more time in rapid iteration, as opposed to drawn-out planning.

Closing Thoughts

Mobile is causing the way we interact with the Web to change at an unforgiving pace, a shift that requires guidance from well-informed professionals like you. Your responsibility is not only to produce great work but to educate and guide your clients through something that most of them can’t keep up with.

Selling research as part of your process will be more effective if you can show clients specific examples of how you’ve used research in the past. My advice is to bake research into your next project as a value-add for the client. You can keep it simple by taking the following steps:

1. Conduct an analytics review, and use the data to support at least one key decision in the project.
2. Create a brief survey, and ask the client to provide access to it from their existing website. Again, use the results of the survey to support one key decision.

Continually build your research practice from project to project by going deeper with your analytics reviews, adding more survey questions, integrating discovery sessions and building complete themes that guide the project in a meaningful way.

Research is a fantastic, accessible way to increase your perceived value while helping to shape the future of the Web and ensuring that the software and websites we build keep pace with users’ ever-advancing expectations. Businesses value proof and, in my experience, appreciate a conversation that starts with explaining a body of proof before presenting a set of specific recommendations.

(al, ea, il)

© Jonathan Kochis for Smashing Magazine, 2014.

Today, Adobe have both announced and shipped, new versions of its flagship Creative Cloud applications. In this update you’ll find dozens of new features.

Last year thousands of designers dropped Creative Suite/Cloud in search of cheaper, more targetted tools, and many have found real gems amongst the various app stores — Bohemian coding’s Sketch is well thought of, and there is a lot of industry anticipation for Macaw. However the low entry cost of these products is also their achille’s heel; dropping $25 on an app does not commit you to it in the long term, and smaller software houses traditionally struggle to retain a loyal userbase.

Adobe by comparison are continuing to innovate within their established product range, and as a result professionals are continuing to take up Creative Cloud subscriptions; there are currently more than 1.4 million CC members.

Adobe lay claim to 50 separate feature updates in 2013 and today’s is the fourth major update to Creative Cloud since the switch from the Creative Suite licensing model. Skeptics should note that Adobe have kept their word by continually driving innovation in the products, as well as the frequent bug fixes and performance enhancements that arrive more regularly for subscribers.

In addition to application evolution Adobe continue to develop services: last year there were 180 billion pages views for Typekit, and that’s set to increase in 2014; today’s update includes tying Illustrator and InDesign into Typekit, allowing you to add Typekit fonts to print projects and PDFs — a significant boon for companies trying to maintain consistent branding over multiple media formats.

By far the biggest news relates to the central application in Adobe’s armoury, Photoshop. Photoshop is one of the most widely recognized — or at least, named-checked — applications in the world. Despite the many inroads made by budget alternatives, and superb browser-based applications like Typecast, the majority of websites still start life in a PSD.

There are three large Photoshop innovations that are being introduced with this CC update. The first, and arguably the most important for web designers are the new linked Smart Objects. Essentially, linked Smart Objects are assets created in other Creative Cloud applications, that are linked in your files — design a logo in Illustrator, link it to your site design in Photoshop, then anytime you make a change in Illustrator the change is immediately reflected in Photoshop. It’s not an essential piece of kit, but it sure is nice, and I can see it becoming one of those little techniques that we quickly come to rely on.

Additionally, Photoshop CC now has a Perspective Warp tool. This staggering piece of technology allows you to completely change the perspective of elements in an image by simply drawing a 3D box around an object and changing the perspective of the box. The bit in Blade Runner, when Deckard uses a computer to zoom into a photo, panning around corners and zooming into a part of the image that the camera seemingly couldn’t have captured; he was probably using Photoshop’s Perspective Warp.

The big news — certainly as far as Adobe are concerned — is that Photoshop CC now allows you to print in 3D. Using the existing 3D features in Photoshop you can now create 3D designs and print straight to a 3D printer, alternately if you don’t have one, send them to shapeways.com for printing. Adobe are pitching this feature as a finishing tool for 3D models, and it’s not designed to compete with full-blown 3D modelling tools like Maya. The expectation is that 3D modellers will work in their traditional tools, then import into Photoshop to clean up their meshes. It seems like an exciting development for industrial designers, but I can’t see too many screen designers taking much interest.

Given Photoshop’s size, it seems questionable to pack yet another primary use into the tool. 3D print finishing is substantial enough a job to warrant a separate application, especially as CC subscriptions would provide free access to the new application. When quizzed on this, Andy Lauta from Adobe explained that because so many creatives use Photoshop already, it was the natural home for the new functionality — which I took to mean Adobe were concerned that an entirely new application would have limited take-up.

One lesser feature, but one certain to be welcomed by everyone, is that Photoshop is now powered by the next generation Mercury Graphics Engine, giving substantially more performance whether you’re printing in 3D, or cropping a bitmap.

Adobe have also reset the 30 day trials for Creative Cloud, so if you’re tempted to try these features out, you can download the applications and start playing today.

Are you a Creative Cloud subscriber? Are you excited by Photoshop’s new 3D printing feature? Let us know in the comments.

Video Course: Website Wireframing with HTML5 & CSS3 – only $14!

Goo Technologies, the leader in HTML5 high-end graphics for games and interactive visualizations on the web and the company behind the Goo Engine, today announced that it is partnering with Ludei, an HTML5 app and game development platform.