Pat’s Point of View

Step Two have just launched the inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards:

The Intranet Innovation Awards are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets. The goal is to find these ideas (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider community.

Uniquely, these awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole.

Do you fancy your intranet? No? Don’t worry, most people don’t. But now you have something to aim for next year :)

See what people are blogging about: intranet, intranet innovation awards

Popularity: 5% [?]

Yesterday I made what seemed like my millionth trip to Canberra. Nothing really deserved it’s own post, so here are a few tidbits:

• There a hell of a lot of roundabouts (’traffic circles’ if you prefer) in Canberra. They are the ultimate in user self-governance. How democratic of Walter, although I suspect the prolific use of roundabouts has more to do with lowering the cost of road infrastructure by not having any traffic lights.
• Whilst the situation with cabs in Canberra is stupendously bad (if you’ve ever tried getting a cab at Canberra airport you know what I mean) it’s worth pointing out that the taxi drivers are pretty good. They’re tidy, polite, topical, they speak English, and they know their way around. Unlike most Sydney taxi drivers who don’t tick any of these boxes (who hasn’t had to give their cabbie directions to a well-known destination?). Dare I say it, this is likely because Canberra’s cab drivers aren’t fresh off the boat.
• I met a lady named Gwenda. It’s like her parents couldn’t decide between Gwen and Glenda. It’s annoying but not as bad as the thing where people create a new name by spelling an existing name incorrectly (eg Jorja, Kortny). I think there are more than enough names in the world without resorting to this kind of ‘creativity’. Either way, I think it’s rather cruel of parents to give their children such stupid names.

See what people are blogging about: Canberra, Canberra cabs, roundabout, business travel, stupid baby name

Popularity: 15% [?]

A discussion last week, during Bob Boiko’s Taming the Content Beast workshop, lead me to personify the various information management systems that currently muddy the waters for many an enterprise.

• Records management system—the collector of dead data:
  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, please use the disposal authority or it’ll rust”
• Document management system—the establishment:
  “We don’t care what’s in it, we just file it”
• Content management system—the cool new kid on the block:
  “It’s a wired world, dude”
• Digital asset management system—the art student:
  “I need a thumbnail of every version. Don’t constrain me with your rules, fascist!”
• File system—the ditzy blonde:
  “What file?”
• Knowledge management system—the voodoo witch doctor:
  “Me drain your brain now”

See what people are blogging about: information management, record management, document management, content management, knowledge management

Popularity: 39% [?]

I must be getting old, they’re done a re-make of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And it’s not even live action, dude. But they do have the voices of the likes of Patrick Stewart (the head bad guy).

Quite a nice Flash site they’ve built for the new movie, too.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Yes, this is an unashamed rip-off of Jessica Hagy. Well it’s kinda more like an homage to her witty, insightful and very clever musings. I can, however, only ever hope to mimic her use of graphs and diagrams, rather than what she uses them to communicate.

The inspiration for this particular graph is the popularist rollercoaster which the web design industry can often be. Usability, user experience and then user-centred design; a succession of buzzwords that stirred clients and designers alike in to furious fits of corrective work. There’s no debating that at the heart of this movement was a genuine need for a shift in focus for many businesses and website owners (getting them out of the bottom left on the above graph). However, I’m sure we’ve all seen this bandwagon pick up speed at a frightening rate and career out of control. The net effect is that the herd mentality is now “we must do usability”. Blame the pundits for scaring us and blowing things out of proportion :)

For all the success stories (top right) there are still many examples of well-meaning and well executed projects that fall flat on their faces. Despite a user-centred approach, success does not always follow. A successful website (or business) does not necessarily require a devoted focus on user (or customer) goals, behaviours or attitudes. You mean we’re all deluded? Well, to use that old IA chestnut, “it depends”.

Think about how many products and services are a success even though when you take a long hard look (sometimes not even that long) you can’t find any evidence that users were considered at all. Remember the Motorola Razr? That phone is awful to use, nobody I know who has one likes it. But they still bought it, and I even know someone who bought another one after he broke the first one! As the old saying goes “there’s no accounting for taste”, but there’s also the fact that people don’t always behave logically. We buy and use things that suck, willingly and repeatedly (bottom right).

There are other more sneaky examples too, electrical and computer appliances are pretty much built as cheaply as possible as part of a strategy to shorten product lifecycles and increase replacement and upsell. This pretty much flies in the face of what consumers want, but overall that industry is a massive success. In this case we have little choice, and the manufacturers know this. There’s no need for user-centred design here, just marketing.

And the door swings the other way too. Massive amounts of time and money are invested into user-centred design projects to improve things like electricity bills, banner ads. But in the end none of that matters, the chance of success is low (top left). This is where usability versus usefulness can come into play (although it could be argued that it’s not really UCD if both are not taken into account).

All in all, this topic is an interesting antithesis to the usability hype. The fact that there are so many examples you could place in the bottom right (MySpace and YouTube would have to be the poster children of this corner) would seem to indicate that a balance of user-centred-ness along with everything else will give good results. Maybe even better results than a user-centred focus. This discussion could quickly wander into usability ROI, and none of us want to go there do we.

For my parting comment, I’d like to say I really like these graphs as communication tools, since you can easily map out several different factors and spark a discussion. Coming up with examples to plot on the graph can also be quite a challenge, as some of my examples illustrate…feel free to offer suggestions.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Would you know how cost effective catching the bus is? I can now answer this question, after some simple experimentation.

My usual commute to work involves catching a very short walk, bus ride, then another short walk. All up a total travel time of 35 minutes (although with traffic it’s typically closer to 45 minutes).

However, today I decided to walk home. Yep I walked from Chippendale to Five Dock, a distance of 9.95 km. It took me 111 minutes. So that’s a difference of 76 minutes.

If I worked freelance I might get paid $550 a day, so in that 76 minutes each way I’m theoretically missing out on $174.17 per day.

I have a quarterly bus pass, which costs approximately $5.60 per working day. So that’s an ROI of 3110% per day, and a saving of 608 hours per year (based on a 240 day work year). How very Jakob Nielsen of me.

And that’s not even taking into account the wear and tear on my poor feet :)

See what people are blogging about: ROI, bus, walk

Popularity: 17% [?]

I don’t know what the operating temperating for Blu-Tac is, but posters on my office wall are starting to fall off. It’s bloody freezing in here!

The ancient air conditioner in our new office is intent on turning us into popsicles. I suppose it’s getting us back for saying nasty things about it when it stopped working altogether a while back. Brrr.

Popularity: 8% [?]

After a scorching weekend, you pretty much had to expect a good ol’ electrical storm in Sydney, and last night it hit in spectacular style. From the early evening we could see it drifting in from the south-west, from the excellent vantage point of our second storey windows.

By about 10pm it (’they’ is probably more applicable since there were several waves of storm fronts) was closing in and we had front row seats! It was the perfect opportunity to try out my new shutter-lock remote control for our camera (it’s an easy DIY project) and take some great photos of lightning.

I’ve wanted to do this for ages, since we have such a great view of the area to the west of our building and we often see some nice storm action. The only downside are the flood lights which light up the Police compound next door to us, they shine almost straight towards us and make bulb shots—and sleeping—quite tricky!

Unfortunately the photography had to stop just as the storm was getting on top of us, since I had an early flight to catch this morning. But the storm had other plans. Just as I put the camera away we experienced two of the loudest thunder claps I have ever heard, the lightning must have struck very close…maybe even our building.

Today the wild weather continued and on my return flight back into Sydney, there was some beautiful scenery above the clouds.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Recently I’ve been faced with having to present design ideas to a client, as part of strategic recommendations, prior to a user-centred design process having begun.

The reason behind this is to create some enthusiasm and gain buy-in for improvements to a website, to meet their strategic business goals. Without showing them some ideas—including examples of the end product from other sites—the feeling is that we wouldn’t get the go ahead to start a proper design process. This isn’t uncommon in the real world of doing business with clients.

However, I am not particularly comfortable with this approach for several reasons. Firstly, from experience I know that clients often see these suggestions and fall in love with them, demanding they go into production. No matter what you come back and say later, you can’t renege these ‘golden’ ideas. We have included in our recommendations that user research be conducted, with the view that these ideas may potentially be disqualified based on what we learn about the needs of the target audience. But it might be too late by then.

Secondly, the ideas being suggested at this point are not in any way based on the needs of the target audience. They are based on the ideas which some consultants think would be good. And we’re talking about fairly complex functionality; discussion tools, comparators, information sifting. (Can we spell ‘featuritis’?) We just don’t know if that’s what this particular audience wants or will use.

Obviously we could be on to a winner with these features, after all we are supposed to design new innovative solutions. Usability testing will probably reveal if the suggested functionality is not going to work. I’d just be happier if we started with some understanding of the audience needs, rather than the client’s business objectives.

I am probably particularly sensitive to this issue. In a former life I worked in technical development and engineering, then later in the world of marketing and graphic design. These are two worlds notorious for creating websites they would use rather than something their audience would use. In order to move away from that mentality I have become a bit of a zealot and tend to get all shirty when someone doesn’t do things right.

That said, the argument for showing our hand, so to speak, is compelling. If we don’t get the design work we can’t do anything at all. Like I said this isn’t new, I’ve seen it many times before but in the past I’ve just bitched and whined and put up with it. I expected more this time round.

So I’m wondering, does anyone have any suggestions for solving this chicken-and-egg? How do you find a balance between giving the client an idea of what could be possible without short-circuiting the user-centred design process? This is surely an important issue for those of us working in this field.

See what people are blogging about: user experience, user-centred design, design ideas

Popularity: 15% [?]

The second Webjam went off last night in Sydney. A healthy crowd attended as always.

Without a doubt the highlight was Andre, who when faced with technical difficulties, said “F**k it, I’ll just dance” and proceeded to groove away for the remainder of his three minutes. Classic.

Bugger, I forgot to grab a t-shirt.

See what people are blogging about: Webjam 2, social conference

Popularity: 34% [?]