ia play

the good life in a digital age

the new job

Lot’s of people are asking how the RNIB compares to the BBC.

My journey is much better for one thing, shorter and simpler. That has a surprisingly big impact on how happily the day goes. Judd Street is also a delight compared to White City- there’s coffee shops, restaurants, bookshops, and loads of parks. Favourite so far is St George’s Garden. Oh and the British Library and the Brunswick Centre are both just a stone’s throw away.

There’s something more office-y about the job. Office wear is smarter, people start and leave earlier, and weirdly quite a number of websites are blocked. That’s quite a change from having porn permissions at the BBC (to monitor the BBC’s websearch, of course).

I’m hands on again, in a very intense way at the moment. As the lone IA there’s lots to do. I thought I might miss the sense of community of a big UX team but the virtual community of other SharePoint and charity IAs has helped loads.

Pleasant surprises were the lack of locked down desktop and Firefox installed as standard.

Something I hadn’t thought about was the extent to which the BBC is a visual culture. At the RNIB  email is plain text as a matter of policy, sketching is rare in meetings and documents are printed in 14 point.

Which makes practicing IA a different kind of process and a topic I expect I’ll be returning to many times.

Written by Karen

October 10th, 2008 at 6:00 am

Posted in bbc,rnib,work