About Ben Allen

Hi! As you’ve probably worked out by now this is a blog written by me, Ben Allen. This blog aims to be part of a conversation on the topics I care for. Namely – user centered design & the web.

About me

I am:

• British but living in Chicago, IL
• North American Account Manager at HeathWallace – a company dedicated to creating usable & accessible web interfaces
• A huge fan of Chicago – the place, the people, the restaurants (but sadly not the winter)
• Alumni of University of St. Andrews School of Computer Science

I am on:

• Twitter @benjaminallen – I post work related articles or cool Chicago goings on here
• Linked In – I use it as a social network for business colleagues & clients (I’m sure I can use LinkedIn in a better way and avoid this video coming true)
• Facebook – I connect with people who I go out with regularly or people I grew up with. I don’t connect with business folk – don’t take any offence!
• Flickr – lots of lovely pics of friends and family
• FriendFeed – where lots of stuff about me is aggregated into one convenient place

About this blog

Test, learn, grow – that, selfishly, is what I want to do but it’s also what I would encourage everyone in the web business to do – learn by doing. There is no better substitute, in my humble opinion. You can learn more about test, learn, grow in my first proper blog post.

Inspriation

I’ve been inspired by many people:

• my boss Dave Wallace
• my university Computer Science sidekick Andrew McCarthy
• work mentors Rew Islam, Alex Sandrey, Peter Pearce
• Chicago partner in crime John Walsh

Setting up the blog, sorting out principles, goals etc. has largely been inspired by Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is an awesome author and blogger. Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik was quite literally the first blog I had read with great content, presented in a style that was understandable and meaningful to me. This experience changed my perception of blogs as a medium (I’m sure loads of good quality blogs were out there before Avinash but alas I lead a sheltered life).

Another shout out has to go to Jakob Nielsen. Without reading Jakob’s excellent book and his alertbox articles I would have never been interested in web usability or human computer interface design (and I’d probably be a less annoyed web snob).

Legal-ish bit

This blog conveys the point of view of Ben Allen, not the view of past, present or future employers. Phew – glad we got that out there!