Pat’s Point of View

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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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I’m very happy indeed to be speaking at OzCHI this year. My short paper on mentoring and collaboration in information architecture was accepted after the blind peer review process, to my surprise. It’s the same topic I presented at OZ-IA, but thanks for the feedback I received from that experience I hope to improve it substantially.

All this week I’ve been working hard to become nationally accredited in workplace training and assessment, which will no doubt also allow me to improve my presentation. Although I’ll only have about 15 minutes, so I don’t think there will be any audience activities :)

So I get another trip to Adelaide, which I visited a few times for work last year. I’m looking forward to it, although I’m not keen on being away from home (felt my baby kick for the first time yesterday!). However, it’s a lot better than if I had to go overseas.

See what people are blogging about: OzCHI 2007, mentoring, collaborative IA

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Well what a second day! If I worried that the quality of the first day couldn’t be maintained, I needn’t have. Even the one complaint I had from yesterday (the temperature: in the big room it was freezing, in the little rooms it was warm) had been rectified.

And I thought there was a great line-up of speakers today, possibly better than yesterday. We started with Scott Berkun talking about innovation, or indeed talking about not talking about innovation. This was a great topic considering the myriad of start-ups, mash-ups and ‘new’ ideas that dominate the web industry, and Scott is an excellent speaker.

I followed this with George Oates and her presentation that focussed on Flickr and its history and underlying concepts. Very cool, made me want to have my own start-up and just begin experimenting.

During lunch I spoke to the guys at Gekko Images about Expression Media, and I have to admit I’m pretty sold on it. I’ve tried it in the past and I think it has the right combination of simplicity and functionality to suit the work I do.

After lunch, Lisa Herrod and Stephen Cox gave us two whole user-centred sessions. I particularly liked Stephen’s talk about using ethnographic research methods within a commercial organisation such as News Digital Media. He is the master :)

To finish off the day, and the conference, was Mark Pesce’s presentation on…well, on lots of things but most importantly the destruction of the ‘hierarchy’ by the ‘network’. This was more than just a keynote, this was a real reality check. Eye-opening, inspiring and scary in equal parts. I’m sure many people in that auditorium will do just as he suggested, and question why they are doing the jobs they are on Tuesday.

All in all, lost of things to think about over this long weekend (yay!)

See what people are blogging about: wds07

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Day one of the Web Directions South conference made me feel good about going to conferences again. Not since the UPA conference in Austin had I been to a conference like this; congrats must be paid to John, Maxine and all the organisers.

The venue is great and the schedule is well spaced: a nice 9:00 start, morning and afternoon breaks of good length, lunch and sessions of a decent length. The exhibitions were well placed without being intrusive. The legendary WDS bag was also a welcome change from the normal conference fare.

This is the equal of—if not better than—any of the big conferences I’ve been to around the world.

And the speakers weren’t half bad either. I enjoyed the opening keynote by Rashmi Sinha. Slideshare is a fantastic app and Rashmi has a great perspective on…everything. I walked away with a new understanding of the various social media networks that proliferate the web. I also had a good chat to her over lunch (and if you’re reading this Rashmi, can you tell me why Slideshare mucks up our logo when I upload my slides? :)

I also really liked the talk that Andy Clarke gave on what comics can teach us about laying out web pages. Very cool.

Quite the serendipitous pleasure was the ‘Mobile 2.0′ talk by Brian Fling. Great stories and the case study of creating a simple but useful iPhone app with CSS3 was fantastic.

And to add to the day, the breaks were a great opportunity to mingle (yes I did say that). Despite my increasing distance from ‘web development’, there is still plenty to talk about and keep me interested. Hopefully next year we can inject a bit more UX material (although to be honest quite a few speakers were talking indirectly about user experience).

Bring on day two.

See what people are blogging about: wds07, slideshare, iPhone

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Another day, another eight sessions! There were some good discussions today, both in and out of the sessions.

I received a heap of feedback on my presentation, all positive. The use of collaboration in web design and information architecture struck a chord with the audience and it was universally acknowledged as best practice. Almost as equally the topic of mentoring was intriguing to most people I talked to.

Some of the comments thrown my way, and discussions which ensued, included:

“Very open and honest”

“How much of the mentor’s time is taken up?”

“Just how much longer did the project take?”

“I liked that it was specific, not just theory”

“Delays between sessions could be beneficial, gets them to get on with it”

“I realised I’ve been doing that for ages but I didn’t know it!”

“What is the long-term future of UX teams within government agencies?”

“How sustainable is it? Have the mentorees become mentors and champions of UCD?”

“How do you get clients to go along with it [mentoring]?”

“How comfortable was the team with collaboration?”

“It’s unusual that the organisation would want to build up the skills of the team”

“Yeah but the problem is that once you train them up, they will leave and get an IA job”

I’ll roll these ideas into the next time I present on this topic, or indeed the next round of mentoring I do.

(Thanks to JJ for the photo.)

See what people are blogging about: ozia2007

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