Pat’s Point of View

A few people asked why I only blogged about day one of the conference, and the simple answer is I didn’t get around to it. I’m desperately trying to make my weekends computer-free and spend quality time with family. I failed in that I did spend quite a bit of time in front of a monitor but I wasn’t online :)

Anyway back to the conference. The second day was as good as the first, with some great content being presented. Jeff Veen, as always, was entertaining and insightful. Daniel Burka was honest and enthusiastic in his depiction of design mistakes at Digg. Ruth Ellison offered a great discussion on real-world accessibility, showing her depth of experience in the subject, and showing that there are some things we don’t have answers to—you just need to do your best. Laurel Papworth made me think really new things about the commercialisation of social networking. Diana Mounter also offered an honest and practical discussion regarding whether to use a CMS or do a custom build (although I strongly suggest that the core problem in her case was a poorly chosen CMS).

Then there was the closing discussion from Mark Pesce, as thought provoking as ever. But you know what, I’m glad he’s stepping aside to let someone else take the reigns of chief thought provoker for WDS. Not only because he makes my brain hurt sometimes, but also because I think the local techies can’t take much more anti-establishment provocation (my how they love to get anarchisticly excited and dump all over Telstra, Microsoft and any other “evil empire”). And even more so because I suspect Mark is getting over it too. As he said, it’s time for people to take some responsibility for the things they demand; everyone wants free broadband, but very few want to actually make it happen.

Looking forward to next year.

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[8:15am] Web Directions South is here again for another year. And I have to reiterate my comments from last year, this is the best conference in Australia—in the web industry anyway. John, Maxine and the other organisers must be congratulated on yet another fine performance. And the first speaker hasn’t even taken to the stage yet.

The level of professionalism and attention to detail impresses me, as does the excellent swag. You may well call me a cheap date and accuse me of being distracted by the bells and whistles, but I think this stuff matters. I think the atmosphere created for this conference makes not only for an enjoyable time for attendees, but also makes us as a community look and feel legitimate and professional. Nothing could be better for shaking off the last scraps of that image of our industry as being a bunch of nerds and cowboys flying by the seat of their pants, cowering over a computer monitor in some garage come office.

Of course you have to have great content too, and only time will tell if they have nailed that also.

[1:30pm] This morning was a great start to the conference. I must admit I wasn’t blown away by the opening keynote by Lynne D Johnson. The future of print and online media, where they might converge and where they won’t, is fairly interesting but I don’t know if I left that session with any greater understanding of any of the debate. That aside, I found it interesting how people equate user contributions and the “wisdom of crowds” with a more “pure” truth, and that big bad media organisations can’t be trusted to report the truth. Having seen the comments made by ‘the average Joe’ on news articles and other types of content, I’m not really convinced that’s the answer. There are lots of idiots out there. I think there’s still a big role for good journalism and the authoritative voice of established media organisations. How they continue to deliver that to their audience may change, but I’d rather listen to that than any fool with a keyboard.

Next I listened to Accessibility Beyond Compliance by Derek Featherstone. This was a great session, Derek is always very knowledgeable and entertaining, and I was pleased that a presentation such as this was included in the conference. All too often accessibility is seen (by those who don’t just dismiss it entirely) as either something that the code takes care of or an all of nothing proposition, but neither of these are true. Derek showed excellent examples of how true accessibility requires special attention in terms of how and where we provides users with feedback as well as showing that accessibility can be delivered within the one site—no text-only or special accessible versions here.

Next up was From Disordered to Managed Usability in an Agile Environment presented by Teale Shapcott. I was pleasantly surprised by this enlightened and practical discussion of user experience practice within an agile web application development methodology. Teale gave us good insight into how SunCorp operate as well as some good tips for those trying to sort out their own project methodologies, but one thing that seemed to be missing was user research. She mentioned using personas to get the team to think about the needs of users when writing, prioritising and estimating “story cards” but where do these personas come from? Are there parallel processes in place to research user needs and maintain these personas?

[8:05pm] After a very nice lunch it was off to Context in Mobile Design by Gabriel White. The thing that sparked my interest was how social context—such as knowing where your friends or colleagues are and what their status is—effects how we might choose to communication or interact with them, be it via IM, SMS, twitter or a phone call.

I stuck around for Elegant Web Typography presented by Jeff Croft. I must admit I already knew about a lot of what Jeff discussed, but it was an entertaining and informative session nonetheless. Some of his comments were a little at odds with modern views on accessibility, for example the use of absolute font sizes as opposed to relative, but overall there were plenty of good tips on creating better web design through elegant use of typography.

After a coffee break, we all regrouped for Predicting the Past by August de Los Reyes. I must admit this lightning paced presentation lost me a few times (I guess it was the trailing end of three-thirty-itis) and some of the videos really weren’t much more than Microsoft marketing. Or perhaps I’m just not much for this future gazing stuff…although I did prefer the Nokia design concept that Steve Baty showed us at OZ-IA. But, people that I hold in high regard have a lot of respect for August, so I’m quite willing to assume he was talking good stuff and that I just wasn’t that receptive this afternoon.

I decided not to hang around for drinks but rather to take advantage of this rare glimpse of the sun on the way home, and head off to spend a bit of time with Jenn and Grace. All in all it was a great first day, although I was a little put off by not being able to get an internet connection to work. Probably for the best anyway :)

See what people are blogging about: wds08, web directions south, conference, sydney

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In an effort to increase our profile, as well as share and discuss interesting tidbits, the News Digital Media USiT team have launched a blog: www.usit.com.au

USiT stands for User Standards and Innovative Technology and is the name we give to the user experience team here at NDM, so this new blog will soon be running over with good stuff on IA, UX, IxD and various other topics.

It’s early days but it would be great if would could collate and harness the vast amount of knowledge the team has, as well as the extensive knowledge network we bring to the table. Ultimately, I hope we can start to write our own content and push it out through this channel, instead of just aggregating links and other people’s posts.

But first order of the day will be a nice Wordpress theme :)

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I’m pleased to announce I’ll be running another pre-conference workshop, this time it’s Demystifying Information Architecture at OZCHI 2008 in sunny Cairns on the afternoon of December 9th.

There has been much confusion and misinformation regarding information architecture (IA) and its relationship with the longer established areas of user-centred design (UCD). Many experienced HCI people don’t feel well-equipped to take on the practical side of UCD in relation to web design. Likewise, web designers and developers are often in the dark regarding the principles behind what some “usability guy” tells them to do.

In this half-day tutorial, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of IA, which in essence is focussed on ensuring that information systems are structured in a way that makes sense to users. Specifically, the tutorial will be conducted in the context of organising and designing information systems such as websites, intranets and software applications.

This tutorial will introduce IA, explain the fundamental principles and teach some simple techniques. The aim is to give participants a heads-up on the subject and point them in the right direction so they can integrate IA into their own work or just better collaborate with those already practicing IA.

It will be short, sharp and focussed on just the essential bits of IA. So if you’re up that way in December, check it out.

The conference itself starts a few days later on the 10th of December. OZCHI is Australia’s leading forum for work in all areas of Human-Computer Interaction and CHISIG’s (www.chisig.org) annual non-profit conference. OZCHI attracts an international community of practitioners, researchers, academics and students from a wide range of disciplines including user experience designers, information architects, software engineers, human factors experts, information systems analysts, social scientists and managers. While OZCHI’08 represents aspects of the Australian Interaction Design community that have not been emphasized in recent conferences our organizing team is committed to serving the range of interests.

See what people are blogging about: IA, OZCHI, workshop, Cairns

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They say you learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes. Amen to that. They also say that you should be man (or woman) enough to admit your mistakes. So here I am, bearing my soul to the internet, saying I screwed up and have learnt valuable lessons.

Yesterday I ran my Research Methods for IA workshop for OZ-IA, and whilst I was actually quite happy with the content, the timing was off big-time. Luckily my gracious guests for the afternoon agreed with this summary, the feedback forms were overwhelmingly positive for the content, materials and myself…but the time allocated was totally inadequate. You see, I tried to cram a whole day into half a day.

Why did I do such an idiotic thing? Why did I break one of the fundamental rules of workshops (and lots of other things) and not keep it simple? Well there are lots of excuses I could give, like when I first planned the workshop it was for a full day, or that I’m so used to doing full-day workshops that my ‘internal rhythm’ was set to that, or that this is my first workshop I’ve designed entirely on my own from the ground up, or that I’ve been burning the candle from both ends lately and didn’t give this as much thought as it deserved. But they’re not the real reasons.

The real reason is that I try to pack too much in because I want to tell people everything. I was trying to be everything to everyone. And that’s not achievable.

Moving forward I know I need to do this workshop over a whole day. Given more time it would have gone brilliantly, and I need to make sure I do it that way from now on. But the reverse is also true, if I only have half a day then I need to tailor the content to half a day. I shall be ruthless for my next workshop, which is on a different topic, paring it right down and allowing plenty of time for activities and Q&A.

Another lesson I’ve learnt through doing this workshop is how much harder it is to do all this on your own. My previous workshops with Step Two were much easier, in that the groundwork had already been done and there were more hands to make light work of tasks such as printing, creating card sorting cards, shipping materials to the venue etc.

And I also learnt that I should take help from those around me, even if it means putting aside time when in the thick of it, to stop and talk it through and get advice. Particularly my long-suffering wife, who is an organisational master. I, being hopeless at organising things, should have consulted her when preparing for the workshop.

For my first time out of the gates on this particular horse, it could have gone better. Whilst this jockey didn’t exactly fall right off his mount, he did get dragged along a bit. But you know what they say, you need to get back in the saddle, and I’m certain that if I keep refining this workshop it will serve me well.

And I truly hope, so because I really like running workshops. I get to help others by passing on my knowledge and experience; it causes lovely warm fuzzy feelings.

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A while back, I was talking to a friend about the website for his small business, which includes an e-commerce element. The site isn’t working as well as it could for him, and we were talking about how we could increase inbound traffic and generally improve the effectiveness of his site.

I started telling him about how we could drive website sales, you know, the usual ‘e-tail’ things: promoting products, specials, discounts etc, as well as driving more and more traffic to the site through various social bookmarking/networking channels. But it became obvious he didn’t want to achieve huge sales. He didn’t want the whole enchilada.

And this made me think, how do you not go all the way? So much of what we do as designers, experience architects, marketers etc is to get the maximum return; make the website the best it can be, get the most traffic, get the most sales. But what if that’s not the objective?

Our methods and techniques are all based on the idea that the client wants to lead their field, in the case of e-tail, be the “next Amazon”. Do we even know how to aim lower than that?

Some would say that everything comes down to a cost-benefit balance, but you’re still aiming for the most benefit from the least cost. What if the aim is to sell more but not overdo it? With careful application of online marketing strategy, good UX and web design principles, we could easily generate more business than the business wants. The business could grow and hire staff to cope with the demand, and potentially become a thriving enterprise, but that’s not the aim in my friend’s case.

Sorry, no answers here, just ponderous thoughts.

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I’ve been using Wordle.net quite a bit lately for communicating research results, and I thought I’d give it a go for all my blog posts:

I was a little surprised, but pleasantly, to see the biggest words were “people” and “can”. Fairly high up there were “web”, “design”, “usability” and “information”, which is kinda good since I’d like to think that’s what I’ve been blogging about.

How did I do this? Well, I didn’t want to use a tag cloud plugin, so I used the Wordpress export feature to create an XML dump of all posts and pages, extracted the CDATA fields, stripped all the HTML tags using regex in HTML-kit, then pasted it into Wordle :)

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Here’s a Friday afternoon thought regarding a classic mistake in trying to get people to participate in a survey. When you tell people about your survey, make sure they can complete it!

Sounds simple, right? Well that’s because it is.

Some background perhaps. A common sight within organisations is the satisfaction survey, your HR department might call it something else but essentially they’re all the same. And like all satisfaction surveys—think of a motel or car rental company—it’s really a poor attempt at communicating with your audience, or giving the perception that you are communicating with them (but I digress). People know this, that you’re not really listening to them (the vague, clichéd questions are a dead giveaway) so you’re already off to a bad start if you choose to run such a survey. But you’re really going to struggle when you ask staff to complete a survey that doesn’t exist…yet.

I saw an example of this today, where an email—and a rather long winded email full of ‘management speak’—was sent to all staff in a large organisation, telling them about the flagship staff engagement activity for the year, an all-encompassing survey (!!). At the end there was a link to the online survey. At this point I was simply surprised it was an online survey and out of sheer excitment decided to click on the link. Error. Not a nice “survey not open please come back later” message, an HTTP 404 error.

Apparently I was meant to wait until the survey opened in a few days time and then go back to the email, click the link and complete the survey. Hmmm. Delete!

Survey completion rates are typically quite low. Without a tangible incentive they’re even lower. If it has anything to do with work, waaaay low. So you’ve got very little chance of getting a decent set of responses, but when the link doesn’t work at the point when people are the most likely to click on it, you’ve lost before you’re even begun.

Let’s not even discuss whether a survey is a good method for engaging with staff, the moral of the story is if you create a call to action make sure the people who you want to act are able to take action. This goes for surveys but also competitions, sales promotions and website launches.

(You may be thinking this post is rather ironic given my own recent attempts at surveying, but this is one mistake I definitely didn’t make :)

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I recently conducted a quick survey among my colleagues and peers in the UX field, regarding how to determine which research methods to use for a particular project. My objective was to try and work out the four qualities of any research method that need to be considered when putting together a plan for design research.

For example, interviews don’t allow as many people as focus groups but they can dig deeper into the thoughts of the participant, thus ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’ might be two such differentiating qualities.

I’ll be using this information for an ‘edutainment’ game I’m including in my upcoming OZ-IA workshop, whereby participants will select a set of research methods for a given scenario and limited by a ‘budget’ for each quality.

I got lots of useful replies from a small sample size. Fortunately—I got more than what I had literally asked for (my bad…a poorly worded email). Almost everyone gave me great insight into how they go about planning research, as well as some gentle rhetoric regarding the subtle complexities of the subject and how perhaps I was oversimplifying :) So, I stand duly chastised, planning a research programme is definitely more complex than choosing four qualities, but that’s what I needed for my workshop game. Lesson learned :)

The survey question was framed in terms of user research for web design, but I expected that I would get responses from a broader perspective than this, and my recipients did not disappoint (eg BA’s gave their views from the point of view of business requirements gathering).

My findings were numerous, starting with the fact that it’s hard to analyse responses when they are all wildly different; some people ranked, some gave low/med/high values and some simply discussed the relative importance of the qualities I had listed in my question. So I had to interpret some of the responses in order to collate them. I should have used a proper survey form, but I was under the influence of spontaneity. Another lesson learned :)

Without further delay, here are the results of the survey. These are the top ranked qualities, taking into account all the information I received from respondents:

I’m not so concerned with the order, but it was clear the top factors were the breadth, depth and amount of analysis required.

The cost directly associated with a method were not seen as a useful differentiator since they are all much the same in this regard. Similarly the facilitation time, or face-to-face contact time, was not seen as a crucial factor since it can be varied as needed on a case by case basis, regardless of the method employed. Difficultly, or the effort required, was seen as a crucial factor only by a few people, the rest didn’t see it as a sufficient differentiator (perhaps reflecting their own level of experience in the field).

Total cost (ie time and materials) was seen by many as a crucial factor in that a research undertaking might “live or die” on the basis of this alone, but it’s an aggregate of facilitation time, analysis time and material costs, which are already in the list. So I removed it from the final list.

Two other factors are worth a mention. Firstly, rigour was nominated by one respondent as a reasonably important factor. I took this to mean how easily the research method can be repeated with consistency across sessions. However, I grouped this with difficulty, or effort required, because I see it as a quality of the practitioner rather than the techniques themselves.

Secondly, the difference between qualitative and quantitative analysis was suggested as a key consideration. That is, some techniques will require more discourse analysis as opposed to data analysis. Excellent point, but probably too fine-grained for my purposes.

My conclusion is that I should use reach, coverage, analysis time and effort required as the differential qualities for my workshop game. Feel free to comment on this below.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my email, and for taking the time to make sense of it. Thanks also to James Breeze for reminding me to blog about this…I have been neglecting my blogging lately!

See what people are blogging about: design research, survey, user experience, user research, research

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