Tools & digital
Why I’m Building Free Tools at Blackburn Studio
Small digital problems still waste time. I’m building focused tools to remove some of that friction and make common digital jobs easier.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been adding practical tools to the Blackburn Studio website. They are deliberately focused. Each one exists to solve a common digital job without adding more complexity than the job itself needs.
That is the thinking behind the Web Image Resizer, QR Code Generator and PDF Reducer. None of them is meant to become a huge software platform. They are there because small digital problems can still get in the way of real work.
Small problems still waste time
A lot of the frustrations we run into with technology are not particularly complicated. You need to create a QR code for a flyer. A PDF is too large to email. An image is the wrong size for a website. A form rejects information that your phone has filled in automatically.
None of those things should require much thought, but they interrupt what you were actually trying to do.
You stop, search for a solution, open a few websites and often find yourself dealing with advertising, account creation, subscriptions, upload limits or an interface that is far more complicated than the job you were trying to complete.
Five minutes later, you are still trying to solve something that should have taken thirty seconds.
That is where the tools come from
Blackburn Studio is not changing direction to become a software company. The tools are an extension of the same approach I take when working on websites and other digital projects.
If something keeps getting in the way, I don’t just accept that it has to be so hard. Quite often, there’s a simpler way to get the job done.
If it is a problem I keep seeing, and I can build a useful solution without making people jump through unnecessary hoops, it makes sense to build it once and make it available.
The QR Code Generator is deliberately straightforward. Enter what you need, create the code and use it. The PDF Reducer helps with another common problem, making a PDF smaller when it is simply too large to send or upload. The Web Image Resizer brings the same approach to preparing images for websites and digital content.
They are small tools, but that is exactly what they are supposed to be.
Good digital work should make things easier
This thinking goes beyond standalone tools.
Recently, while testing the Blackburn Studio enquiry form on my phone, I used the iPhone’s Contact AutoFill to enter my mobile number. The phone entered a valid Australian number, but without the leading zero.
Technically, the number did not match the format the form expected, so it was rejected. From the customer’s point of view, though, they had done exactly what they were supposed to do. Their phone had entered their saved number, and the website told them it was wrong.
The better solution was not to tell the customer to fix it. It was to fix the website.
The form now recognises common ways Australian phone numbers are entered and handles the formatting itself. It is a small change, but these small pieces of friction add up.
A good digital experience should work with the way people actually behave, not require them to understand the technical rules behind it.
Building things because they are useful
I do not want to build tools simply so there is a long list of them on a website. I would rather build something when there is a genuine problem it can solve.
Some will be very small. Others may grow into more substantial services.
One area I am exploring is a website health check: a practical way to identify common problems with performance, search visibility, usability and some of the technical foundations of a website.
The goal is not to produce a complicated report full of technical jargon. It is to answer a much more useful question:
Is there anything here that is making this harder than it needs to be?
That might mean harder for a customer to use, harder for Google to understand, harder for the business owner to maintain, or simply slower than it should be.
What should I build next?
Some of the most useful ideas come from small annoyances that people have simply learned to put up with.
So I would genuinely like to know: what is one small digital task that wastes more of your time than it should?
It could be working with files, images, documents, websites, social media or something completely different. If enough people are running into the same problem, it might be something worth fixing.