Lots of friends, colleagues and clients have expressed bafflement at the lead story on the front page of New Media Age last week. NMA suggested very explicitly (but inaccurately) that Hearst is retreating from its web strategy. We’ve been working with Hearst on strategy and design for over a year now and we knew this wasn’t the case. As planned, Hearst is simply going to be folding some old print title websites into the women’s 35+ digital brand Allaboutyou.com, soon to go onto a new platform with complete redesign.

(And, by the way, we’re currently helping Hearst Digital implement the UK’s second manifestation of social media software Pluck - and it might be the first if we can get in ahead of The Guardian).

Meanwhile, we’ll leave Natmags/Hearst CEO Duncan Edwards to put the record straight. This is his letter to NMA, published this week:

“Your front page story ‘Hearst to shut down four websites in digital u-turn’ (NMA 28.02.08) is inaccurate and confused…
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We use the traffic ranking tool Alexa to keep an eye on what’s happening on the web; it’s a good measure of the speed with which social media is transforming web habits and economics. But most of its users know that Alexa’s a relative measure, so if a chart’s showing downward movement it doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is falling.

Alexa measures traffic by encouraging people to download its tracking tool to their browser, and then monitors their usage. Most Alexa users know that it indicates a site’s share of reach, rank and page views by revealing what proportion of the Alexa sample has visited the site, and that there’s no clear indication of absolute numbers. Also, Alexa clients tend to be skewed towards techies and other early adopters so it doesn’t necessarily give an accurate view of market share across internet users as a whole.

To test Alexa accuracy and find out what its results might indicate in absolute terms, I decided to do a quick and dirty experiment with a sample of one.

I took a fairly big site for which I know absolute results (no names) and plotted it against the Alexa graph. Here’s the result for the last six months:
I could match the charts for the first three months or the last three months but not for both. There seems to be a step change between them.

This is the first chart, showing a nice correlation for the first three months…

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It’s hard to think of the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission as a champion for design thinking. But I bumped into my old friend Rachel Abrams the other day, and she was brandishing a copy of Taxi 07 - Roads Forward, a policy document she helped produce for the TLC (ha!). Taxi 07 is an object lesson in using design thinking and great storytelling to change public policy.

We’ve been using storyboards, cartoons, diagrams and collage for many years to explain to clients what we’ve learned about their businesses, to analyse the complex interdependencies between services and products, processes, brand, customers and marketplace and to show what future alternatives might look like. Rachel and her co-editors, working for the Design Trust for Public Space and the TLC, have now applied this kind of system view and powerful visual explanations to changing a vital part of the New York transport system.

Taxi 07 gets right to the guts of the Medallion Taxi Fleet in grainy photos of New Jersey ‘hack’ garages where they hack production Crown Victorias into cabs, cartoon narratives illustrating passenger problems and driver issues and diagrams of typical journeys, but it also tells the story from the customer’s point of view and this, said the TLC (worryingly!) was a first.

The book also explodes some urban myths, like the scarcity of cabs being down to shift changes, and also shows that some myths are true, for almost no trips originate north of Central Park - you just can’t get a cab up there.

The document ends with a call for a comprehensive taxi service design process that looks at the entire system of activities and relationships involved in service delivery: the cab, communications with customers, owning and operating taxis and regulation. If you want to know simply everything there is to know about the public and private world of the New York taxi cab, or just want to see a really good way to tell a multi-faceted story, download your copy here.

Magazines are dead! Long live the magazine! was a gem of a conference organised by Simon Esterson and Jeremy Leslie, and it turned into something of a reunion. Simon was the art director of my book, Magazine Design and Luke Hayman, who also spoke at the conference, was the designer. All three of us haven’t been together since working on the book in 1990. Luke’s now a partner at Pentagram New York and he showed the wonderful editorial design produced by the team at New Yorker magazine where he used to be art director.

The book’s long out of print but Simon and I have a plan to put the text (and a lot more images) onto a wiki and invite some people to revise the history. We’ll then publish in book and web. We need an intern to help us though, so if there’s any interested design history graduates out there, speak up.

Russell Davies wrote a very nice review of the conference (held last Friday, at St Brides) at his blog, with comments on the wonders of arseblog (one of the subjects of my talk, and our inspiration for footballitaliano.tv).

PS. One thing I learned: judging by what Tony Chambers showed, Wallpaper’s worth buying again!