Pat’s Point of View

I’ve been doing a bit of site design lately and one thing that I’ve rediscovered (other than the value of having a good graphic designerproblem with having people who think they are designers) is how good Macromedia Fireworks is.

I only have version 4 (don’t ask) but it is just brilliant for designing web pages. You have good drawing tools, good colour and effects control, and the ability to slice it up and export individual parts. And it keeps everything as vectors and objects.

I have long been an advocate of the CSS quick-prototyping method, and it’s great in some situations, but prototyping in Fireworks is a joy, particularly for graphics intensive designs.

And that is also it’s biggest problem, since it’s so easy to create graphics laden designs that one must use caution, esspecially if you’re a standards geek :)

My efforts should be online soon.

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I’ve just launched a new website for Step Two: www.intranetleadership.com.au.

The site will be used to promote and coordinate the forum, an initiative aiming to bring together intranet professionals so they can share problems, ideas and generally network among themselves. As the site says:

Successful intranet teams have key skills in a variety of disciplines: strategy, project management, content management, communications, content writing, information architecture, usability, influencing, and stakeholder management to name a few.

The challenge for intranet teams, however, is that learning is usually on the job. While attending conferences can contribute to professional development, they offer limited skill building and practical insights. Beyond this, intranet team members often have few opportunities to connect with their peers in other organisations and cannot, by definition, see other intranet sites.

That’s where the Intranet Leadership Forum comes in.

The Forum provides support to intranet teams. Joining the Forum will connect you with other intranet professionals who are tackling similar intranet projects and issues. You’ll be part of a community where you can share your experiences, helping to bridge gaps in knowledge and expertise.

You will have access to real-life solutions for your organisation’s intranet issues from peers who have already found the answers, saving your organisation time and money.

We’re quite excited about this concept, even if the website design is less than stunning :)

See what people are blogging about: intranet leadership forum, intranet, step two designs

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Have you noticed that QuickFlix sounds a lot like chick-flix? That’s because there’s no way of stopping your wife from ordering soppy, girly movies!

I need to find a VC to back my proposed DudeFlix, where one will find only man type movies. Action, sci-fi, adventure, action, documentaries, motor-sports, action and oh yeah, wrestling. No more bloody Anne of Green Bloody Gables or I Heart bloody something-or-other.

DudeFlix; his movies, his way.

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Today is World Usability Day, and it was quite a successful day here in Sydney. I lent a hand to do my part on the day, but it was thanks to the hard work of the organising committee that it went so smoothly.

Most of the usual suspects were present, and it was great to chat to everybody. Highlights for me included Daniel Woo’s talk Stand up and speak out when it isn’t usable (especially his stories regarding teaching engineers and programmers to consider the user—something that wasn’t really mentioned when I studied engineering) and Oliver Weidlich’s Mobile phones - people who use them and usability which offered a valuable real-life perspective on user experience in the world of mobile computing.

I also quite enjoyed Shane Morris‘ Designing the User Experience for Office 2007, especially the walk down memory lane looking at past versions of Word.

I hope to get more involved next year. At this point something I would be excited about doing is to shift the focus of WUD to target the "in-house" staff in the corporate sector, those usability/web-design/intranet specialists who don’t usually mix with those who frequent things like UPA, CHISIG, WSG, OZ-IA and IA Peers. Surely this is a huge untapped source of peers to have in our community (as well as potential members for the local UPA chapter!). I think this is more apt than trying to bring usability to the general public, after all isn’t the whole point that they don’t know or care about usability, things should just work?

On to bigger and better things next year!

See what people are blogging about: world usability day, wud, wud2006, world usability day sydney, upa

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We’ve finally bought some outdoor furniture for our balcony, so it doesn’t look so empty now.

It’s a lovely hardwood set, with two benches and two chairs, with cushions and a matching cantilever umbrella. Got it all from Bunnings for quite a good price (ps: don’t look at Domayne: way over priced!). Now we can actually sit outside and enjoy the summer.

Next item will be a BBQ to fill up the other end of the balcony, maybe a Webber Q if we can find somewhere that sells them.

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Who said users don’t matter?

On November 14, 2006, in towns and cities around the world, life will be a little easier. That’s when the second annual World Usability Day takes place—a global event promoting the value of usability: designing things that simply work better.

As part of this event, Sydney will host a number of free activities at the State Library of NSW. The focus will be to communicate ways of improving the user experience of products and services.

The program includes:

• The benefits of including usability when designing products and services;
• Microsoft’s usability strategy for Office 2007;
• Mobile phone usability and the opportunities for the future; and
• A demonstration of how vision impaired users experience the web and how it can be improved.
• This event also provides an opportunity to talk to professionals and learn more about developments in usability.

For more information, please visit: www.worldusabilityday.org/event/show/163

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I’ve just published another article, this time it’s Feed your enterprise with RSS in which I discuss the benefits of using news feeds.

Conceptually, ‘news feeds’ are quite simple, allowing content to be delivered over the internet. Web users are very familiar with the idea of feeds, but what about their use within an organisation?

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The life of a consultant is a much varied one. My work environment can be different from one day to the next; in an office one day, workshop the next; call centre here, corporate HQ there; noisy bunch, morgue-like quiet; heart of the city, God-knows-where.

Going from client to client, office to office, desk to desk, is like starting a new job every few weeks. You are in a different environment, you don’t know anyone and people look at you funny when you make ’school boy errors’ (look how was I supposed to know you had to hold down all three buttons to get hot water to come out, I mean come on people!). On top of this you need to get the job done efficiently. Luckily the process of learning your way around and learning about an organisation is closely aligned with needs analysis work. You have to get to know people and learn how it all ticks.

You get to travel a bit too—I’ve been to most Australian capital cities recently, but no overseas yet. Today I just happen to be in an outer suburb of Brisbane. This is interesting as you get to see the differences between cities (and states). Maybe it’s because of the time I spent overseas or because my impressions of other places in Australia were shaped by childhood experiences (and I didn’t pay much attention), but in the last year I have noticed many things during my interstate travel. For example, the accent. I used to dismiss Brits who said they could hear differences in the Australian accents of people from, say, Sydney and Perth. But I now believe there is a difference. Most recently, I’ve noticed the Brisbane (or perhaps Queensland) accent and a while back, the Adelaide accent.

The other thing I have noticed is the number of Kiwis over here. Again, maybe I just didn’t notice before, but since coming back from the UK it seems the level of immigration from New Zealand has shot up. Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s noticeable.

Anyway, I’m off to earn some more frequent flyer points.

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I spotted this recently in a client’s office; user instructions for an office chair, built right into the chair itself.

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