I have redesigned this website and now it is better

If you’re reading this I salute you: I know no one really cares about website redesigns except the owner of the website, so I appreciate you casting your eyes over this!

I’ve had a website since 2010 and have re-done or updated it several times over this period. At the same time I’ve done a lot of UX work around updating the website of the Library I work at - and I realised I’d failed to apply those user insights to my own site… It was built around all the things I wanted to say, rather than around the user experience or what the audience actually wanted to know. I also looked at Analytics and realised some pages just didn’t get viewed at enough to earn their keep. So I spent a quite painful day rebuilding it - and took the opportunity to tweak the visuals a bit and make the whole thing feel a little more modern, and have more teal in it, because teal is my favourite colour.

Kill your darlings

One of the main things I’ve done is take pages away. There was a Drums page linked from the About page, because I’m a drummer and I love drums, but it just isn’t really relevant so it’s gone. There were pages with detailed breakdowns for orgs about each workshop - tech requirements, reviews etc - but I provide that info via email to interested parties anyway, so those have all gone. Other minor pages have gone too: the more you prune the stuff people don’t need, the better the remaining content actually works for people.

The Home Page

With the exception of a few blogposts, the Home page is unsurprisingly the most popular page on the site - but it was really just a signposting page, meaning the user didn’t get much use out of it in and of itself. I noticed that other people who provide freelance training and consultancy really use their homepage to provide a full overview of what they offer - topics and themes, testimonials, clients etc. So I’ve reworked the homepage with this in mind.

The Blog, About and UX pages have received minor quality of life improvements.

The publications page

I used to have a separate page for the Library Marketing Toolkit and my other publications - this is needlessly granular so I’ve turned them into one page. I also realised I had links to buy the Toolkit on Amazon, set up over a decade ago before I’d realised quite what Amazon represent…

The Events page

Again I had a separate page for past and upcoming events - I’ve now hidden the events calendar and just include future talks and workshops in the same page.

The training and workshops page

In many ways this is the most important page for me - as a freelancer this is how people find out about what I offer. I’ve given the three broad areas I cover - social media, strategic marketing and presentation skills - more space, updated the descriptions, added some feedback and moved some other info off the page.

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I hope you find what you need on this refreshed site, and if you have any training or speaking requests (or suggestions for website improvement…) get in touch!

Embracing authenticity in a sea of GenAI

You may have seen the extraordinary statistic that around two-thirds of ebooks released onto Amazon are now GenAI-written.

Similarly, a report from Deezer last year showed that over 50,000 GenAI tracks are uploaded every day to the music streaming platform. 50k! Every single day! We’re literally drowning in culture, eh? People use AI to generate entire bands for Spotify, then use bot farms to drive up the streams to get paid. Humans have been cut out of the loop entirely! What a time to be alive.

Forgive me for going Full LinkedIn, but this really did get me thinking about my job… and communications, and social media, and marketing, and content, and the arts. In a world in which there is an abundance of almost everything arts-related (music, visual imagery, video, literature) the only things there aren’t an abundance of are authenticity and human creativity – and they become even more valuable as a result. We need to remember this, and be prepared to swim against the tide to defend it.

This also got me thinking (stay with me here…) about mortality. The Venn diagram of tech bro billionaires who are interested in ‘longevity research’ (for which read: living for an incredibly long time beyond the expected human life-span) and who are interested in GenAI output more or less replacing human output, is a circle. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I’m old fashioned in that I think the thing which gives life *meaning* is it that it’s finite. When you have an infinite supply of something – be that literature, music, or even immortality itself – the overall value of it inevitably goes down. But there is (forgive me, again) an opportunity here: to define ourselves through opposition. To take the artisanal route, rather than hanging onto the coattails of mass production.  

If we end up in this landscape where 90% of what we consume is just AI slop, that means genuine cultural experiences will become incredibly valuable. Not to everyone, but to some people – and I think those people are the ones interested in arts, and culture, and education, and progress. This is how we can stand out, this is how we can engage. Do you want to be the 6 millionth account to post some second-rate GenAI imagery? Wouldn’t you rather be the exception that only posts genuine pictures? Wouldn’t you rather be part of the group who proactively reclaim music, and literature, and videography, and even something as relatively prosaic as a social media post, as something of value - and nurture that?

The social media accounts I run for my org don’t use any GenAI music, imagery or video. We post less than we would if we did use that stuff, because it certainly speeds things up. It is incredibly quick to produce marketing materials with GenAI. But most of them are basically rubbish. The frictionlessness of GenAI somehow seeps through – and no one really cares or learns, or remembers. And of course, many people will completely write you and your content off if you use GenAI in your posts or your slides or your website or your newsletter. They feel that if you aren’t prepared to create content yourself, they shouldn’t have to consume it either. They feel – whether you intend this or not – like they you are treating them with contempt when you use GenAI.

Some people will be fine with all AI slop, all the time – but a lot of people won’t. Creativity is no longer technically required to write books or music, but it is required for OUR sake as humans. We will increasingly need to reclaim art as more than just background noise and filler. We need to reclaim the ACT of creation as valuable, not just the product. And as everything else gets watered down and diluted into meaninglessness, human experiences and connectivity become more valuable than ever. Write that music. Write that book. Write that social media post using your own brain and your own words.

Don’t give in to the idea that GenAI is an inevitable, unstoppable force: challenge all of those people who say ‘AI is here now - you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube!’. To quote my friend Simon Bowie:

“When I accidentally squeeze out too much toothpaste, I don't then shove it all in my mouth. I wash it down the plughole.”

What do we *know* about GenAI

There is an unending stream of reports, think-pieces, puff-pieces and hit-pieces on GenAI. You’d need a lifetime to get through it all even if they stopped being written tomorrow.

The trouble is so much of it is speculative. GenAI shills talk uncritically about what it may be able to do, and fudge the lines about what it is really achievable. Equally I read pieces by GenAI skeptics that confidently claim ‘GenAI cannot do X’, when in fact that was true 6 months ago but the extraordinary pace of technological development means it is not true now. There’s also a lot of ‘what-aboutism’ in AI discourse - sure there’s a huge environmental cost to using it but what about email, that uses electricity too? Etc etc.

So if we try and get a handle on where we stand, and want to move beyond the back-and-forth, what do we actually know about GenAI?

GenAI erodes cognitive functioN

A 2025 MIT Study (summarised in Time here) used EEGs to record brain activity in controlled groups. The ChatGPT-using group has the lowest brain engagement and “consistently under-performed at neural, linguistic and behavirol levels.” The study lasted months and the GenAI users got worse and worse over time.

There are several other studies that document this ‘cognitive offloading’ - when we outsource creativity and criticality, we lose the ability to do it for ourselves. That makes sense: if we got someone else to do exercise for us we’d probably lose fitness, too.

GenAI doesn’t reduce workload for regular employees

Leaders and managers love GenAI. The pantomime villain bosses love it because it offers the promise of achieving the same results with fewer staff members, thus saving money. But even the well-meaning managers in the public sector seem to love it, because it offers their staff gains in efficiencies and save them time to concentrate on the things which really matter.

But does it, though?

Harvard Business Review published an article this month confirming AI doesn’t reduce work - in fact it intensifies it. In an 8 month study, they it was discovered that employees worked faster, took on more tasks and worked longer hours (for the same pay, of course) thanks to GenAI. “Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown and feel stretched from juggling everything that’s suddenly on their plate. That workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.”

GENAI gets things wrong a lot of the time…

The marketing genius of the word ‘hallucination’ to explain GenAI errors lies in suggesting an entity that can think for itself, and sometimes makes things up or hallucinates. In reality GenAI is a massive excercise in pattern recognition, and the process by which it gets things ‘right’ and gets them ‘wrong’ is exactly the same.

Because of this, the BBC found it misrepresents the news a massive 45% of the time. A recent report found Google Gemini is in fact returning hundreds of thousands of wrong answers each minute.

This is catastrophic.

[image or embed]

— Futurism (@futurism.com) April 9, 2026 at 12:31 AM

I don’t know a single person who has asked GenAI about something they have deep knowledge of, and still rated GenAI highly after reading the results. Not one. I don’t know a single person who has used GenAI to take minutes at a meeting, and then continued to do this after checking the minutes properly for accuracy. To use GenAI in earnest is to learn how limited it is.

…But we use it anyway

We can all talk about how ChatGPT ‘isn’t a search engine’ till we’re blue in the face, and GenAI tools can add a disclaimer saying we should ‘always verify results’ as many times as they like, but we know what humans are like - we’re not checking the results, even in incredibly important things like Police decisions, because that would take more time than just looking up the data properly in the first place.

Google Gemini is a punchline - there are countless examples of it getting things hilariously wrong in its summaries. But Google doesn’t care, because exponentially fewer people are clicking on the links in the search results - they’re staying on Google and just reading the AI.

GENAI already has a high body count

Many GenAI tools are ready to act as a ‘suicide coach’ as shown in cases already going to trial. The ‘deaths linked to Chatbots’ Wikipedia page is steadily growing. A study has been published showing how dangerous GenAI medical advice can be, with examples including bogus information about liver function tests which would mislead people with serious liver disease wrongly thinking they were healthy.

GenAI is built ENTIRELY on stolen intellectual property

The Large Language Model GenAI tools are built on data they stole - and in fact OpenAI has said it would be impossible to create tools like ChatGPT without using copyrighed material. Ah well, fair play lads - on you go, then.

GENAI doesn’t actually save most companies money

In 2025 MIT found that despite investing billions of dollars into GenAI, most major companies are not seeing any return on their investment. In fact 95% of GenAI pilots are failing.

GENAI companies themselves don’t actually make money

OpenAI make the wildly successful ChatGPT - what do you think their profit was in 2025? $1 billion? $2 billion? Not quite - they made an $8 billion loss. Their own internal documents predict a £14 billion loss this year. They’re committed to spending $1.4 trillion, with no road to profitability by 2030.

“OpenAI's losses will total $143 billion between 2024 and 2029, the "largest startup losses in history," Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a December 4 note. HSBC researchers said in a late November report that they expect OpenAI to have a $207 billion shortfall by 2030, even when modeling for significant boosts in revenue” says Business Insider.

Anyway: the world seems all-in on this tech, but it may be prudent not to become over-reliant on it, for all of the reasons above.

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Not to mention all the other things (you can find a pretty exhaustive list on Sarah Winnicki’s site) like extraordinary electricity use and habitat destroying of the data centres, the fact that one data centre can use the same amount of water per day as a town of 50,000 people, the amplifying violence against women, the huge cost to the creative industries of replacing skilled human with utter slop, the fact that GenAI’s output is racist as hell (oh and sexist, and ableist, and homophobic).

Not to mention any of the horrendousness of Grok, which really belongs in a category of its own, but sadly isn’t, because the other GenAI tools now feed off Grok to inform their own responses, as GenAI eats itself, excretes itself out, and then eats its own waste, like some sort of terrible apocalyptic dog.

And not to mention that our use of (and Government investment in) GenAI pours money into the coffers of literally the world’s worst people, because that’s just my subjective opinion, and this is post is all about what we KNOW about GenAI.

Reading all that back, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about the wide-spread adoption of this technology.

UXLibs 10

You are about to read a blog-post devoid of nonchalance or professional cool… Because this summer I am delivering a keynote speech at my favourite conference of all time, User Experience in Libraries, on its 10th anniversary, in my home City of York.

I am completely thrilled about this!

UX as a tool for equity

My talk is entitled Elevating Voices. Here’s the summary:

Higher Education is facing financial crisis. When budgets tighten, services often shrink to fit the needs of the majority, and ‘maintaining core services’ can easily become a proxy for exclusion. By designing for the ‘typical’ user – those with the fewest barriers and the most flexibility – we inadvertently sideline marginalised groups with complex needs.

This keynote positions UX work as an essential tool for equity. We will explore how libraries can represent the underrepresented, elevate diverse perspectives and ensure our institutions remain inclusive, authentic spaces for everyone.

I feel really passionately about this subject, and I can’t wait to explore it and share some of the work we’ve done at York.

About the conference

The list of speakers is fantastic, and I’m delighted Raj Mann will also be delivering a keynote: I’ve been working with her on our Inclusivity + Belonging UX Project she has been inspirational. I’ve mentioned Raj on this blog before, with regards to Trespasser Syndrome, which she’ll be talking about in her own keynote.

I have bored onto anyone who will listen about how much I love UXLibs. I attended the first one ten years ago in Cambridge, and it was revolutionary for me - learning about User Experience techniques beyond the app / web usability realm I’d previously understood was game-changing, and the conference format was incredibly innovative. A decade on and I have UX in my job title (Faculty Engagement Manager: Community + UX) and it’s a key part of my role.

I have also previously been on the organising committee of the conference for two years, so I know first hand how inclusive and forward-thinking the event is. The community that attends is usually drawn from 25 or more countries, and there’s no group of people who are more interested in the sharing of ideas. To want to do UX work you need empathy above all else, and 100 empathetic people in a room makes for a fantastic event..

If you have even have an inkling that UXLibs might be for you, I cannot recommend coming highly enough. You will learn so much you can USE, and have so much fun, and meet so many great people.

You can find full details of the conference, including booking, on the UXLibs website.

About York

The River Ouse is pretty but very floody - hopefully in June though you should still be able to walk along the path shown here.

In the top right of this pic you’ll see the hotel at which the conference dinner takes place. Lovely hotel, but the exterior is unloved by the locals. The good thing about the Gala dinner being there is it’s one of the few places in York you can’t see the building from, because you’re inside it.

The Ouse gets all the headlines but York’s other river, the Foss, is pretty great

York is tiny as Cities go - you probably won’t need to use a bus or a taxi while you’re here as pretty much everything is walkable. It’s very beautiful. has a famously large number of pubs, and some great places to eat. For anyone who wants recommendations:

• If you want variety and you like shipping containers, Spark York has both of these in abundance. Loads of different foods in what is, by York’s standards, a very cool and happening place.

• If you want six million inventive varieties of beer in and industrial-chic setting with some banging Korean street food, Brew York is the place to go. It’s very near Spark York so why not go directly from one to the other?

• If you like cake, drop what you’re doing and head to Brew and Brownie immediately. Their pancake breakfast is famous but the trouble with it is you don’t want to eat any cake afterwards, and you need to eat their cakes.

• For fabulous sandwiches head to Mannions

• If you like cafes head to Bishy Road where there’s a lot to choose from - the Pig & Pastry and Robinsons in particular are a delight

If you’d like any more specific local tips just send me an email. It goes without saying I hope to see you there!

Posting carousels is like an Instagram cheat code in 2026

What is a Carousel on Instagram?

First things first: in Instagram terms a carousel is a single post containing multiple images or videos. They appear on the Grid, and you view the different images by swiping right.

Since mid-2023 you can add music to your carousel natively in Instagram, and doing so is absolutely crucial to success - it pushes the post into a different algorithm, ensuring it will be viewed much more widely than a single-image, music-free, regular Grid post.

Why are CaRousels so important?

The short answer is: reach.

Instagram’s algorithm has always prioritised video Reels over static images. For organisations, this often meant spending hours producing video content, or risking really low engagement and poor distribution with an image post. Reels are also less accessible than images, because there’s no built in alt-text feature for video on Instagram.

Over the last couple of years, there’s been a shift in the algorithm - Carousels now provide the reach and visibility of a Reel with the simplicity and accessibility of an image post. They bridge the gap. Your key messages can now reach massive audiences with less time, less production, and frankly fewer complications.

The proof is in the analytics

I run our institutional Instagram account - @UoYLibrary - which is a really significant part of our communication with students. I have a million and one other duties as Faculty Engagement Manager so as I noticed carousels getting more views I started to prioritise them over video content because they took so much less time to produce, not least because they can often be made using existing images I already have available to me, rather than needing to shoot new content.

The impact has been remarkable, The extraordinary thing is, even the less successful posts that don’t get the Likes and engagement I’m hoping for are getting consistently high reach and views. Meanwhile the successful ones are outstripping Reels - always the most popular format, historically - in all metrics.

2025 engagement

• Saves: 3 of the top 5 most-saved posts were Carousels (including 1st)

• Shares: 4 of the top 5 most-shared posts were Carousels (including 1st)

• Likes: all 5 of the top 5 most-liked posts were Carousels

2025 reach and views

• In 2024 our top five posts had a combined Reach of 32,095 people: only 1 of these was a Carousel

• In 2025 our top five posts had a combined Reach of 40,228 people (a 25% increase) and 3 of them are Carousels

The most dramatic increase year on year is from Views - unsurprisingly, as if someone views three images as part of a Carousel, that counts as 3 views compared with just 1 for someone watching a Reel or viewing a single image post.

• 2024: Our top 10 posts achieved a combined 70,099 views

• 2025: Our top 10 posts achieved a combined 211,337 views

This represents a 201% year-on-year increase in total views. That top 10 breaks down as follows - several of these are collabs with other accounts, which is hugely important for Reach and Views too.

@UoYLibrary’s 10 most viewed posts across 2025: screenshot from Meta Insights

A tale of two posts

Our most successful post (that we originated, rather than were invited onto as a collaborator) in 2025 - by most metrics, albeit not Likes - was this Carousel to celebrate the library’s birthday. It reached over 9,000 people, was viewed over 23,000 times, and had over 750 Likes as well as large numbers of Saves, Shares, and new Follows.

The most viewed post originated by @UoYLibrary in 2025

For me though, a better example of the power of the Carousel is our least successful post of 2025. In fact in terms of engagement, it is, I think, the least successful post I personally have put on the library Instagram account in its entire history (full disclosure I looked back through six years’ worth of posts before giving up)… It got 17 Likes.

@UoYLibrary’s least Liked post of 2025

Despite this total failure on my part to pitch the Podcasting Studio in such a way as to get Likes (previously when I’ve done a Reel on this it’s had much more Likes, and the TikTok version did really well too - so it’s the framing, rather than the subject matter, that’s the issue with the post above), the Carousel of it all meant it has still reached nearly 900 people and had nearly 4.5k views.

To put that in context, the post reached more people (and got 106% more views) in a week than the podcasting studio webpage did in the whole of 2025 - and that includes a spike in the webpage views caused by the Instagram post… There’s nothing wrong with the webpage - it’s just that our target audience don’t really web-search, but they scroll-search social media all day. So all in all: the habits of undergraduates x the reach of the Carousel = even an unsuccessful Insta post getting key messages out really well compared with other mediums.

Get posting

I’ll write another post soon about what works and doesn’t work with Carousels but for now I hope you’re convinced that, going into 2026 if you’re running an organisational account it’s time to plan some Carousels. In fact I wouldn’t post any individual images this year - why throttle your own reach, when a Carousel would go so much further? Get your message out to the widest audience possible, and take advantage of the cheat code while it lasts!