Pat’s Point of View

I’m happy to announce I’ll be running a half-day workshop entitled Research methods for information architecture at this year’s OZ-IA conference (actually the workshop is on Thursday the 18th of September).

This is an important part of successful IA, and I intend to give practical insight into some key techniques that will allow IA practitioners, or other disciplines doing some IA, to gain valuable insight into their audience. Here’s my blurb:

Information architecture (IA) is a form of user-centred design (UCD) which requires an understanding of users and their needs and designing with those needs in mind – balanced by factors such as business objectives and available or necessary content. 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, many experienced web designers, developers and IA practitioners don’t feel well-equipped to take on design research in their projects.

In this half-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of design research from the perspective of IA. 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.

You can register for the conference at www.oz-ia.org/2008/register.shtml and don’t forget to quote the discount code PK0265!

Popularity: 4% [?]

I eagerly await more details on how Singularity will actually work. Here’s what their [quite nicely designed] website says:

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world.

On October 24-26, join 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities for three days of talks at this seminal web event.

Attend from home or from a real-world local conference hub near you. Catch up with old friends (you can find them from your existing social networks) and meet new ones. And you don’t even have to take time off work.

Sounds interesting. Even though the list of speakers is fairly geeky, and I use that term with the utmost respect, I anticipate there being some good user experience design discussions.

Could this be a better way forward for traditional conferences, rather than going down the path of an un-conference (something which I’m not that fond of)?

Popularity: 10% [?]

It’s on again, Web Directions South will hit Sydney in September.

From past experience, particularly last year, I’d say WDS is the best web industry conference held in Australia—and I’m not just saying that to win an iPhone :)

There’s a great line-up and a healthy dose of user experience discussion for what is a general web gathering. It’s definitely a sign that usability and the like have been embraced by your average web designer and developer. In particular I’m looking forward to, and recommend to you, sessions by Ruth Ellison, Donna Spencer, Jeff Veen and Mark Pesce (I mean who wouldn’t after last year’s closing keynote?).

If you need more convincing, check out the executive summary what might get your boss to send you.

See what people are blogging about: web directions south

Popularity: 11% [?]

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This afternoon I presented my session at WebDU on the topic of information architecture for designers and developers. In the particular case of WebDU, these designers and developers mostly specialise in Flex and Flash.

I’m fairly happy with how it came together in the end, hopefully I gave the audience some insight into the field of IA, and user experience in general. Apologies for the messy looking slides on SlideShare, when it was converted from Powerpoint all the embedded fonts had to be replaced with Arial!

Other than my contribution, there was of course a whole conference, and a great conference it was. My initial impressions were that it’s a great location (level 2 of the Darling Harbour Conference centre) which is nicely laid out and spacious. The over all feel is pretty slick, and they gave out some excellent swag, I know it’s quite trivial but a great t-shirt, conference bag (with good stuff inside including a selection of relevant magazines from sponsors) put the finishing touch on an event such as this. Much better than the wads of marketing crap you usually get.

The conference proceedings book is a good idea, with the slides (or at least initial summary slides in my case) from each session, and information on speakers and the conference in general. Sadly there was no agenda for quick reference to the sessions, when and where. There was an A4 sheet with this info on it, but not in the bags or proceedings book. I still think having this in the back of the name tag lanyard is the best approach.

A rather novel thing they did was have trading cards with the avatars for each conference organiser. At first I thought they might have had a card for each presenter too, which sent me into a mini panic at the thought of people trading my face around the place thinking who the heck is this guy? :) It’s a good networking idea and builds a sense of fun around the event, after all it’s not some stuffy academic conference, these are people who make cool websites and apps, it should be fun.

And of course there was the crucial, especially for this audience, free wifi. I used to roll my eyes upon hearing geeks whinging “aww man, no wireless!” but I must admit I now expect it of any conference or seminar. I hate people typing and surfing during sessions, but in between or if you need to get a bit of work done during the course of the day (like I did) then having internet access is crucial.

(At first my laptop didn’t see the free network, and this made me think that it could be a neat little business opportunity for buildings within range of conference centres that don’t offer free wifi, setup a Meraki mesh for a cheap rate…or free)

While there were some interesting topics being presented on the first day, and I was pleased to see the current state of the art in terms of RIA and interactive interface development, I had to take a bit of time out to put some finishing touches on my presentation.

So there are certainly some cool things being wheeled out of Adobe and the like, with the possibility for highly advanced and integrated web apps and desktop apps. Adobe’s AIR in particular is looking pretty good. But of course, as a user experience person, I can see there being many opportunities for all this technology to become a usability nightmare. The ball is definitely in our court, though, so far as we need to work out how we can be part of this new generation and create consistent and useful experiences across browser, desktop, device and all the different usage scenarios that that entails.

See what people are blogging about: webdu, RIA, information architecture

Popularity: 18% [?]

I’m quite looking forward to taking part in this year’s WebDU conference in June. I’ll be presenting Demystifying Information Architecture which will be aimed at web designers and developers who have more than likely heard of this IA thing, but perhaps aren’t entirely sure what it is or how to go about doing it properly.

In some ways I’ll be continuing my efforts to engage with developers, a process I first started with my WSG presentation Intranets–why you should care. That was fairly well received but this time I will have to combat the stigma of ‘those bloody usability people’ instead of the intranet stigma.

If you’re a web designer, developer or producer/manager, what is it you’d like to know about IA and usability? How could I demystify it for you?

If the website and my initial contact with the organisers are anything to go by, then it should be a pretty fun two days. And I’m pretty chuffed with my animated avatar!

Popularity: 21% [?]

My dance card has been filled for the first half of this year, with two iterations of my newly updated Information Architecture Essentials workshop series. The dates and locations are:

• 9 April 2008 – Mercure Hotel, Sydney
• 18 June 2008 – Rydges South Bank, Brisbane

Here’s the blurb:

In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of information architecture (IA), the core methodology for organising and designing websites and intranets.

Key skills such as card sorting will be taught, and this workshop is designed to build in-house information architecture skills. A must for all web or intranet teams.

Since the last public workshop, I was invited to run essentially the same workshop for IBM Global Services at their annual 'Summer School' in Melbourne. This was a fantastic event to be a part of, even if the Melbourne weather in January was intolerably hot! I’ve made a few improvements to the workshop since then.

Whilst the workshop has been refreshed, it still aims to introduce the fundamentals of IA and user-centred design, and get people ready to go off and explore topics further. If you’ve attended one of the previous workshops, there’s no need to attend the new version.

See what people are blogging about: information architecture, workshop, training, step two designs

Popularity: 29% [?]

Apparently there were a few sore heads this morning, but I was fine (yes it’s boring but safe). The second conference day got straight into it with plenty of paper presentations, including two by Floyd Mueller, who was without a doubt the most entertaining speaker of the conference.

There were some interesting topics presented today, but I did feel there was a lot of repetition in the choice of papers (is it just me or is everyone in HCI looking into gesture recognition?). In particular I liked the talk on stories with emotion and conflict by Georg Strøm, as this use of narrative is something I’ve been trying to include in my UX work for some time. Compared to use cases and other techniques typically used in software development, stories and narrative are much more useful—from my point of view anyway. I also thought the on-going discussion about the level of formality in diagrams was interesting, and this ran across several presentations, the common factor being Beryl Plimmer it would seem.

Then it was my turn. My quick 15 minutes on mentoring was well appreciated, judging by the feedback I got, but I found it really hard to keep to the time limit. And this was the case, even thought I cut the presentation down to focus on just one aspect of the paper, across about ten slides. Hopefully I was able to affect the audience somehow, and sell the idea of mentoring to those who might not have considered it. And of course I hope I didn’t bore anyone to sleep. My slides are, as always, up on SlideShare.

More on the usability side, I think discussions by Vince Bruno and Jessica Enders were interesting, and caused a fair bit of discussion. I found Vince’s talk, on his research into usability practitioners in Australia, interesting because he seemed so surprised by what he found. For example, of course we focus a lot on having users involved in research and design activities, it’s user-centred design! Practitioners I spoke to appreciated his honesty and the openness with which he approached his research.

Jessica’s talk on her research into the usability of ‘zebra striping’ in tabulated information was a great effort. Practitioners definitely need to get more involved in this kind of work, helping bridge the gap between academy and industry. This has inspired me to look at how I can do some research into a very practical problem such as Jessica has, and come up with some answers which will help the practice of user experience and related fields.

Overall it was a conference that possibly had less to offer me in terms of picking up new knowledge, but the chance to catch up with peers and stay connected with current academic research is always welcome. I’ll definitely aim to present again next year, hopefully something unique and thought-provoking.

However, from my point of view, it’s hard not to find fault with the conference. I said it last year, and I’ll say it again now, there’s a lot to be desired regarding presentations from academics. There is some really interesting material in the work they’ve done, but their presentations don’t expose this. In most cases, authors failed to engage their audience and didn’t effectively communicate the fruits of their hard work. They seemed to be following a rigid format (presumably the ‘traditional’ presentation adopted in academia) and in many cases did not structure the presentation for the allocated time. Granted, this was hard when you only have 15 or even 25 minutes, but presentations are not the place to discuss every single detail of your work, that’s what the papers are for. Trying to plumb the depths of the technical details behind your thesis, or present tables of data in this environment, does you no favours. If anything, you confuse the audience and dissuade them from reading the paper, but certainly you come off looking ill-prepared and it probably heightens your nerves.

I would like to see less presentations, each allocated a bit more time, and perhaps teaming up paper authors with practitioners or communications students, to put together an effective presentation. For all I know, this is what one should expect from an academic conference and this is what the bulk of the audience wants, but is that a good enough reason to continue?

See what people are blogging about: ozchi2007, Adelaide, CHI, paper presentations

Popularity: 17% [?]

Adelaide put on some lovely weather for the first day of the conference—if a little hot for those of us with pale Celtic skin—and there was a good vibe in all the sessions.

One thing was obvious this year, there are quite a few international delegates that made their way to our distant country to attend OzCHI. And over all there was quite a diverse mix of discussions taking place. Although I didn’t really understand what was being said around some of the more academic topics :)

The things of interest for me included the talk on probes by Mark Rouncefield, measuring cognitive load using speech features by Natalie Ruiz, and the talk on the link between spatial ability and the use of site maps on websites by Chris Pilgrim (he found there is a link, which might sound obvious to experienced practitioners but it’s worth having some science to back that up).

Topping off the day was a great conference dinner at Adelaide Zoo. Under the ‘big top’ and surrounded by all sorts of dangerous critters, plenty of healthy discussion took place (and it wasn’t as nerdy as you might think). I think the quote of the night had to be Shane Morris saying “I’m going to make you a star!” once he found out someone at our table actually liked using Microsoft Expression, and was willing to admit it :)

See what people are blogging about: ozchi2007, Adelaide, chisig

Popularity: 15% [?]

Today I attended a pre-conference tutorial at OzCHI. The topic was Cultural Probes and it was run by Gerry Gaffney and John Murphy. It was very interesting and I can’t wait to use the technique on a real project.

I’ve blogged about the technique before, but in summary it’s a form of longitudinal user research for situations where you can’t normally go. For example, you might get your participants to keep a diary for a few weeks whilst they are renovating their house. Analysing what they give you back will give you very rich information about who they are, what they go through and what they think. (You’ll find a very good intro on Gerry’s Information & Design website)

I can see lots of situations where I could use this, along side other research techniques, to gain a much better understanding of an audience. Whilst the costs of producing the ‘kit’, and the participant incentives, might be higher than methods such as contextual enquiry, the amount of effort and person-hours required on the part of the design team are less (ie compared to direct observation). And of course the level of detail you get is much higher than techniques such as interviews or focus groups.

Anyway, off to finish my presentation for Friday.

See what people are blogging about: ozchi2007, cultural probes, UX

Popularity: 21% [?]

I spent the day today at World Usability Day in the Telstra Experience Center in Sydney. We had setup a little exhibition stand for Step Two, showing what we do and giving away some articles and information packs related to usability. It was an interesting experience and I have a few ideas for next year, to make the stand more effective.

The Experience Center is pretty nifty, if not completely finished. The testing and observation labs were well setup and the whole place was a pleasant place to spend some time. The auditorium was decked out with comfy chairs that had built-in power and networking sockets for laptops, although the foldaway desks were absent.

Throughout the day there were presentations in the auditorium, and demonstrations of usability testing and eye-tracking software. A tour of the facility was a big hit and so were the ‘door prizes’ and raffles which exhibitors and sponsors were giving away. Our own contribution, a cool little iPod Nano, was raffled towards the end of the day and won by Joanne from Objective Digital, with whom we shared out exhibition space.

I suspect the bad weather in the morning kept some people away, but there was a steady flow of people dropping in throughout the day. Overall it was a great success for the newly formed UPA Sydney chapter, and due reward must be paid to Susan Wolfe and the rest of the organising crew.

Immediately after the event I had to pack up and get to the airport for a flight to Albury, to do some user research. I flew Regional Express out of Sydney’s Terminal 2. It was not quite the experience I’m used to with business travel (Qantas’ CityFlyer was sorely missed, I can tell you) but I got here OK. I found out I am sharing a hotel with the boys from WheelsMOTOR magazine who are busy compiling the next Performance Car of the Year (PCOTY) awards. This made for an interesting discussion over breakfast, and pork seemed to be the order of the day, if you know what I mean.

See what people are blogging about: wud07, World Usability Day, Telstra Experience Center

Popularity: 24% [?]