Pat’s Point of View

If you’re interested in online marketing, you should check out Digital Beach brought to you by AIMIA, to be held on the 19th of October in Byron Bay:

Get away from the stifling buzz and escape to the tranquillity of Byron Bay as we assemble the creatives who can give your thinking the refresher it needs at AIMIA’s Digital Beach on the 19th October at the Byron Bay Beach Resort…This one day AIMIA event will couple your understanding of the digital consumer with the brand necessities in the digital environment, encouraging innovative creativity hence innovative campaigns.

There’s a great line-up of speakers, including an old friend of mine Kieran Ots (from Leo Burnett) as well as Tom Hutton (from Y & R Interactive) who is a good friend of my wife.

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I have no doubt there seem to be two types of people. There are those who ask “why not?” and those who as “why?”. The former make an attempt to find a constraint, and if they don’t find any, go right ahead with whatever they’re considering doing. This tactic might be employed when deciding whether to buy a pair of shoes, whether to go on a holiday or whether to take the plunge off a Mexican cliff (admittedly this is a rather obscure reference).

The other people, of which I am definitely one, attempt to justify everything with a ‘good’ reason. This can be incredibly frustrating and it usually sends me into a downward spiral of continual consideration of available options. Pessimism seems to go hand in hand with asking “why”. Even when something is well deserved, it can be difficult to find a good enough reason.

I think it would be so liberating to be a “why not” person. It’s like the presumption of innocence on which our legal system is built (yes, apparently). You just need to make an attempt at finding a suitable reason not to buy that pair of shoes…nothing? ok then go right ahead. Compare this to trying to find a truly good reason to buy them.

It has occurred to me that my standards for a reason to be considered good enough are impossibly high, and that it’s not because I am a “why” person that I am terrible at making decisions. I suspect that even if I was a “why not” person I would find it impossibly easy to find constraints (errr, yep I definitely do do that). Quite the nutter.

Potentially tricky situations include “why buy new shoes when you can mend those seven year old shoes?”, “why have two things when one will almost do?” and “why paint those walls different colours when they could all be the same?”. On the other hand, hair-trigger reasons not to do something include “even though you have a few spares you should probably stick with all ten fingers”, “you know you will never hear the end of it” and “you’ll look really stupid if anybody is watching”.

If these sound familiar (ie you’ve heard these lines from those voices inside your head) then it may be easier to buy one of those magic 8 balls. Ignorance is bliss.

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It’s official, I’ll be one of the happy campers presenting at this year’s OZ-IA conference in September (22nd and 23rd to be exact).

My presentation is called “There’s no I in team” – a case study in collaborative information architecture and will, as the name suggests, focus on doing IA in a collaborative team environment.

It’s great to have an IA conference of our very own, without having to travel to foreign lands. And we have such a great line-up of local experts, I think it’s shaping up to be a great two days.

Now I just need to work out what to talk about (shhh, don’t tell Eric).

See what people are blogging about: OZ-IA

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Today I ran the first of my series of Information Architecture Fundamentals workshops. It was a good day, with a nice small group so we had lots of good discussion.

And it was a really great group of people too, with similar situations and levels of experience. Everybody worked in public sector, either health or education. And because these weren’t absolute beginners, I could dispense with some of the material in the course and discuss stuff that was a bit more advanced.

The feedback from attendees was really positive, with high praise for the lunch (oh and they thought I was pretty good too). The most frequent comments were that the group discussion was great, giving them a chance to hear other people’s perspective. The scope and level of detail was also appreciated. This is good since I deliberately tried to keep the focus on ‘big picture’ and properly defining the problem space, rather than jumping into the details of specific techniques, which IA training tends to do.

Next step Canberra, and there are plenty of places so I might see you there.

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Over the weekend just gone, Sydney played host to FullCodePress, an epic battle between web design teams from Australia and New Zealand. The two teams had the task of designing and building a complete website for a non-profit client within 24 hours.

On Saturday, Jenn and I volunteered to help by taking photos and video. We saw the action between about hours 5 thru 9, so things were well underway and the different cultures of the two teams were quite evident; the Aussies were more noisy and chaotic, and the Kiwis more quiet and focused.

There wasn’t a lot of ‘action’ to be seen during the time we were there, as everyone had pretty much hunkered down and were getting on with work, and hadn’t yet reached the ’silly season’ that would surely come later on. So my strategy was to try and grab team members as they popped out of their respective rooms (for coffee or facilities breaks) and had little interviews. This seemed to work quite well, especially with the New Zealand team whom otherwise didn’t say much. And to their credit, their approach seems to have served them well.

Some of my footage ended up in Overview of the Kiwi Plan, Team Status Update, and Kiwi Coffee Break. Thanks must be directed to Lachlan Hunt who did a brilliant job of editing all the video and making some sense of what we shot!

Congratulations to both teams, they did a great job, made no less easier under those circumstances. Keep an eye out for round two, to be held in the not too distant future.

To see all the photos, check out www.flickr.com/photos/fullcodepress/. For all the video, visit www.youtube.com/fullcodepress/. And finally to see the results, visit aussie.fullcodepress.mbcomms.net.au and kiwi.fullcodepress.mbcomms.net.au.

See what people are blogging about: FullCodePress

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This afternoon I presented my topic at Open Publish 2007, in Sydney. It was quite a good turn out, but still a nice small audience.

My topic covered two central topics:

• Ethnographic techniques for ‘needs analysis’ and user research, and
• The application of these techniques for ‘Whatever 2.0′ solutions

This was well received and I enjoyed talking on this subject to this audience. Hopefully, being the last presentation of the day, I didn’t bore folks too much. There were also lots of other interesting presentations and altogether it created a great little conference. There’s definitely some good thinking in the publishing (and content management) space; not at all matching the external perception of the publishing industry.

My slides are up on SlideShare.

See what people are blogging about: open publish, user research

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Over the next few months I’ll be running two public workshops on information architecture fundamentals. Here’s the blurb:

One-day workshop run by Patrick Kennedy of Step Two Designs. This workshop will present an introduction to information architecture (IA), the core methodology for organising and designing information-rich websites and intranets. Fundamental principles will be covered, along with a hands-on exploration of practical techniques. A must for all web teams.

The first workshop will be in Sydney on August 24th followed by Canberra on 26th October.

For further information and to register, visit www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/070824/ [Sydney] and www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/071026/ [Canberra].

This should be a good opportunity for me to brush up on my presentation skills and hopefully send my audience away with some knowledge and skills to help them produce better websites, intranets, software or whatever their particular thing is.

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Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path says—to paraphrase—that usability is a minimum requirement, not a suitable end-goal. Here’s a snippet:

…Legibility and visibility are the bare minimum of requirements for a successful piece of writing or a photograph. Any person who focused most of their efforts on legibility or visibility would probably have almost no chance of being a successful artist…No one tells their kids to aim for a C- and then expects them to get an A.

So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a different place in my pants to put them on. (Admittedly, I do give my 2 year old daughter a gold star for this but then she’s 2.) Usability is not a strategy for design success…Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure…

The comments people have left regarding this post show that many of them took offence to what they thought Todd was saying.

Firstly, I think this points to quite a deep insecurity among ‘usability’ people. Secondly, I agree with Todd’s post, in so much as I have come across many organisations who have it in their head that they have to “do usability” and then everything will be alright. And I wrote about this in my post User-centred doesn’t equal success.

Among the comments are Todd’s efforts to better explain himself. I feel for him since I think I’m quite similar at times, blurting out quite a bald statement and having to explain myself. But honestly you would think readers of the AP blog (especially experienced practitioners) would be able to get what he was saying. Would anyone working at AP suggest usability isn’t something that should be taken seriously? Of course not, the point is that it’s not sufficient on it’s own. It should be a ‘given’, with the goal being to create something useful.

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