Pat’s Point of View

Last week I took part in Full Code Press, in which the team I was part of had to design and built a website for a not-for-profit client in the space of just 24 hours, competing against a similar team from New Zealand.

It was an intriguing prospect that didn’t fail to deliver some eventful moments, as well as a lot of frenzied activity. We didn’t win but that doesn’t matter I don’t think any of us were doing it for that reason.
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Sadly, I’ve had to pull out of presenting at the inaugural UX Australia conference. My talk, entitled “Watching eyeballs: A multi-faceted case study of eyetracking in UXD”, has been getting a lot of attention and would have been quite interesting for all involved. The reason? my source of content has disappeared since I can’t make use of any projects being conducted at News Digital Media*.

My design research workshop is still going ahead though, which is great news.

* My contract ends before the conference, and thus I will no longer be an NDM employee. So there’s a little blogosphere bombshell for you, I am on the market! :)

Several months ago I talked about the enhancements I made to the Chakra Jewellery Designs website to help improve SEO, and it’s now time to examine the results of the work by checking search engine rankings again.

The table below shows the current rankings for the same keyword phrases selected before. The numbers in brackets show the previously recorded ranking.

So there is clear improvement in some areas. And the number of leads coming in from search engines on certain keywords has increased considerably.

However there are still some areas for improvement, in particularly around the “chakra crystals” phrase and anything related to locality (ie Sydney, Australia or Bondi). And the Page Rank has gone from 3 to 2, so that’s something I will have to investigate further.

It has been pointed out to me that I may have left this re-assessment a bit too long, and that I may have missed the main affect of the improvements when it was its greatest. In other words, the rankings might have improved a lot more at first, but then slipped back down to where they are now. I’m not too worried about this, if it’s indeed correct, because we’re not after short-term gains but long-term benefit.

From here, the plan is to continue to get good quality incoming links. For example, a recent piece in body+soul magazine was great, hopefully the first of many!

I’m very happy indeed to announce that my Research methods for user experience design workshop has been added to the UX Australia program (workshops held Wednesday 26th of August in Canberra).

I’ve revised key aspects of the workshop, leveraging the experiences from some recent projects as examples, and allocated a full day. I’m looking forward to this!

What’s it all about

User experience design, and user-centred design (UCD) in general, requires an understanding of users and their needs and designing with those needs in mind, balanced by factors such as business objectives and technical constraints. Without a solid understanding of these inputs into the process, design is blind.

“Design research” is the process of uncovering and understanding those needs, whether it be direct user research or other means of gathering requirements. Yet, even some experienced web designers, developers and UX practitioners don’t feel well-equipped to take on the research aspects of their projects.

In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of design research from the ‘user experience’ perspective. Specifically, the workshop will be conducted in the context of organising and designing information systems such as websites, intranets and software applications.

This workshop will introduce design research, explain the fundamental principles and teach some simple techniques. The aim is to give the audience a heads-up on the subject and point them in the right direction so they can integrate research into their own work or just better collaborate with design researchers.

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The new website for this year’s Redkite Colour Ball has just gone live. The new design was created by Enso and I stitched it onto the existing back end.

“Ultra Violet” is the theme for this year’s ball on Saturday 4th July at Harbours Edge in Darling Harbour. There’ll be a great band and celebrity MC, hosting silent auctions and all sorts of fun events. Afterwards there’s going to be an after party at The Loft.

Tickets cost $160 each and there are great discounts for groups as well as a special early bird prize. Buy a ticket, it’s a worthy cause!

Helping Redkite support children, young people and their families through cancer

You can also join the Redkite Colour Ball Facebook group and hopefully follow them on Twitter soon.