Pat’s Point of View

Lately I’ve been having fun (that’s a lie, it wasn’t fun at all) trying to get VOIP to work as our home phone. If you just read that sentence and are asking yourself “what’s a VOIP?”, then the rest of this post probably won’t be very useful to you. But so that you don’t leave here totally and utterly bewildered, VOIP stands for “voice over IP” and is a method of replacing a normal telephone line with calls made over the internet.

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Yesterday I was on my way to a training session in the city and I stopped off for a latte in a busy coffee shop. This particular coffee shop is at the end of a very busy building (the Queen Victoria Building) and on a street corner. It thus has entrances on both sides, creating an opportunity for impatient pedestrians to cut through. Doing so leads them past the take-away counter, where I was standing, waiting for my favourite hot beverage with another customer. It’s a narrow route, quite obviously part of the establishment and not a public thoroughfare.

A person then walked through, rather sheepishly, but intentionally; in one door and out the other, weaving between the few customers and staff in their path. Both the othe guy waiting and myself noticed this. The other guy saw the owner/manager of the coffee shop looking on and asked “does that happen often?”.
“All the time” replied the manager in a thick Italian-Australian accent.
“People try to walk through, saying ‘is it ok?’. I say, ‘sure mate, at least you ask’. Most of them don’t [even ask]”
“Is that right?” said the other customer, rather surprised.
The other staff nodded in agreement as the the manager said “It’s just rude…rude”.
“I say to them ‘it’s not a street, it’s money!’” he exclaimed whilst pointing both hands at the passageway.

We chuckled in agreement. His use of English might have been comical, but the manager summed up his frustration perfectly clearly with that last line.

I subscribe to many RSS feeds, mostly as a means of aggregating blog posts so I can read them more easily. There are over 100 feeds in my Google Reader account. Nothing unusual about that.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I hardly read any of them on a regular basis, I just don’t have time. Again this is nothing unusual.

The ones I do find myself reading quite regularly are grouped fairly precariously under the the label “Strategy”. Here are my top 5 (in alphabetical order):

• acidlabs (Stephen Collins)

  Stephen (or @trib as you might know him) is passionate, if nothing else. He writes on the topics of social media, government 2.0 and collaboration. His posts are enthusiastic, intelligent and well written. I might not share his opinions on some issues, but I do look forward to what he has to say. Stephen also sets a great example for anyone wishing to build a reputation and establish themselves as a thought leader in a certain field.

• Anecdote (Shawn Callahan & Mark Schenk)

  Shawn and Mark don’t blog as often as others in this list, but when they do it’s always a well considered and informative piece. The topics are quite diverse but mostly centre around stories (ie story telling for business) and collaboration. I’ve learnt a lot from reading their posts, and attending their “story listening” workshop, that has helped me during user research and stakeholder consultation.

• Column Two (James Robertson)

  James is my former employer, and I learnt a lot from him during my time at Step Two, and have continued to do so since then. James has his finger on many pulses, and is able to sift out the most useful bits of the tide of information that comes his way. Topics include intranets, content management, knowledge management and a whole bunch of things around these.

• Seth’s Blog (Seth Godin)

  Seth has a real talent for boiling things down to their essence and then stating, simply, the core lessons you should take away. I’ve found his words on business, marketing and customer service incredibly useful and often amusing. His style is frank and to the point, which makes his writing honest and sometimes confronting. But you know it’s real, informed and motivated by his desire for things to make sense and for us all to do things in ways which make sense. Probably my favourite of all.

• Trends in the Living Networks (Ross Dawson)

  Does this guy get around or what? I find that almost everywhere I look (or read to be more precise) Ross pops up, and says something really smart. I honestly don’t know how he has his finger in so many pies, and still has time to write great blog posts, and be a father to his brood of kids! I’ll admit, sometimes it goes over my head, but the breadth and depth of his knowledge is impressive. Equally impressive is his willingness to pass on this knowledge, adopting the very “now” practice of releasing his work to the public domain (for example Implementing Enterprise 2.0)

So there’s nothing (necessarily) about UX, user research, web design or anything on that practical level. I find these blogs worth reading because they’re insightful, multifaceted and inspiring. They keep me thinking about the big picture, not staring down at my toes worrying about low level, day-to-day details.

Yesterday (well it was yesterday when I started this post but it’s now two days ago) I ran my design research workshop at UX Australia. Very happy with the day, I had a great group of twelve people who were enthusiastic and at varying levels of knowledge regarding UX and design research, which made for many interesting discussions and many enlightened people.

Which is all good. As I said announced on the day, I’m happy if people leave at the end having learnt something (even if that something is “I already knew this stuff, but didn’t know it!”) or at least having some confirmation that what they knew was pretty much spot on.

And I’m happy to report that I too learnt a few things, for instance:

• Tableau is a statistical analysis software package, available at low(er) cost and easier to use than SPSS
• Many Eyes – data visualisation thanks to IBM
• Joint Interpretive Forum (JIF) – collaborative post video analysis method (anyone got a link to more info on this?)

As always, I was keen to get feedback from my participants. And here’s what they said they liked:

“Excellent for beginner level people in the field, like me. Took a lot of trepidation away”
“Good mix of theory and real examples”
“Keeping to [tea and lunch break] timings was appreciated”
“Having more in the handouts than was shown on-screen is good”
“Interactive structure”
“Ethnographic video”
“I liked how it gave a good overview of methodologies”
“[Patrick was] friendly and competent”
“Thorough notes and books on tables to browse”
“Activities were quite useful to match with different ideas”
“Storytelling, card sorting, diagrams”
“[Patrick was a] good communicator” (which made my wife laugh)
“[Patrick was] clear and warm, obviously very skilled”
“Links to reference materials”
“Very comprehensive”
“Videos worked really well”
“Recommendations/tips for implementation”
“Storytelling activity”
“[Patrick was] very experienced, lots of real-world examples”
“Detailed, well-written handouts”
“The process was very straightforward”
“Activities seemed a little rushed but were really helpful!”
“[Patrick was] very knowledgeable! Great willingness to share with us”
“Materials were great, chock full of examples and references we can re-use”
“Ethnographic interviews”
“[Methods for] displaying information/data”
“Anecdote Circle”
“Very competent”
“Able to associate techniques to other areas of research”
“Comprehensive”
“Content was good”
“Nice guy – friendly”
“I liked the videos”
“Structure of topics and the reflection using mind maps”
“Comprehensive”
“the videos were great”
“The storytelling activity”
“Activities; discussion with others was good, really helped get my head around things”
“[Patrick was] knowledgeable, approachable, open to going off-topic, clear and articulate”
“Clarity, comprehensiveness, referencing, practicality”
“Explanation of methods and how they work”

Storytelling (or “anecdote circle”) activity being referred to was a form of group research in which you allow participants to share their experiences about a particular topic through telling stories. It’s a great and relatively simple method of research that can elicit quite a lot rich detail, and using forms of narrative analysis you can then extract causal relationships, chronological relationships, tasks, trusted sources etc. Find out more at www.anecdote.com.au.

The video being referred to is “Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer” produced by Gabriel Biller and Kristy Scovel. It’s a great introduction to ethnography and the power and the challenges that come with the territory. It’s available online at: www.vimeo.com/1269848

And in the spirit of openess, honesty and transparency yadda yadda here’s what they said were the areas for improvement:

• “Activities to be longer”
• “Beginning was a bit quick…”
• “Long video was a bit long”
• “Less Powerpoint”
• “Needed more examples … and more interactive exercises”
• “Tried to fit too much in”
• “Time was not enough in the activities”
• “Slides were not readable sometimes”
• “For each technique, a worked example or short hands-on activity”
• “How some things relate to the practicality of interface design”
• “More small activities”
• “More video, eg examples in the field”

They’re all good points, and I’ll do some tweaking of the workshop to ensure I have more time for the good stuff and less of the other stuff. I’m looking forward to the next time!

Photo credit: Doc Baty

A club sandwich is one my favourite meals. When I go to a cafe or bistro and they have a club sandwich or BLT on the menu I will almost certainly order it; it’s my “usual”. For my wife it’s spaghetti bolognese. All over the world we have partaken in our usual fare and compared the results with all others that have come before. I don’t think this is uncommon, I think most people have at least one usual.

Nor is it surprising that we do the same thing with technology. Most people have their usual methods or key metrics for assessing how well, or how easy, products work. When you open up a new piece of software or a website you’ve not visited before, there are those little tests you perform to get a feel for it, give it a test drive, to get its measure quite quickly.

My wife’s “virtual” spaghetti bolognese for a new PC is opening Microsoft Word and seeing how long it takes to load.

James Robertson, says searching for “leave form” is one of his usuals for an intranet. Almost all intranets have a form or set of instructions for applying to leave, so how well the intranet search guides the user to this content is akin to taking its pulse.

When doing an expert review of a website, I usually start by disabling CSS and Javascript and taking a squiz at the raw underbelly of the site. Not conclusive nor exhaustive but just a habit I’ve gotten into.

These quick methods of assessment are not a replacement for formal QA testing or usability testing, but rather a short-cut that gets right to the heart of the matter and gives you a feel for the qualities of the technology in question.

What are some of your technology “usuals”?

[Photo credit: Puck777 on flickr]

[If I were to write for The Punch, this is what I'd write about.]

As a father of one daughter, and potentially another on the way, I’m concerned about the sexualisation of our youth. Music, movies, TV and celebrities are influencing our youth much more than ever before, with sexually explicit (or at least suggestive) messages.

Take for example the work of recent pop music sensation Lady Gaga. Here’s a line from her top 40 hit “LoveGame”:

I’m educated in sex, yes
and now I want it bad, want it bad

The chorus of that same song goes:

Don’t think too much, just bust that stick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick

I’m sorry, but what a tramp! Sure you could excuse this as using sex to sell records or to distract you from her lack of talent, but when you take into account that this kind of material is being beemed straight into our kids field of view, it’s a lot more serious.

Here’s another example from Gaga’s “Poker Face”:

And baby when it’s love, if it’s not rough it isn’t fun

What message do you think this sends girls and young women?

And there’s more, other masterpieces from this tart include “I Like It Rough”, “Shake Ur Kitty” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”. Seriously. I don’t mean to pick on this one individual, she’s nothing unique or original, she’s following in the footsteps of The Pussycat Dolls, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears etc. But this latest example is pushing the boundaries of suggestive and wandering into dangerous territory, in my opinion.

I’m no prude, if you’re into this sort of thing then I’m happy for you, but children shouldn’t be exposed to it. Whether she likes it or not Lady Gaga is a role model for young girls and they will hear these lyrics and see the slutty clothes she wears and think that this is the way they should be talking and behaving. And it’s going to get them into trouble.

Some would argue that everyone has to make up their own mind and choose to follow the lead of “celebrities”. Fair enough, but when you’re young it’s often only once it’s too late that you are able to make up your mind and choose to do the sensible thing. It makes me sick that even one young girl might get into a world of hurt because some no-talent pop star and her idiot record company think they’ll sell a ton of records by lathering on the dirty lyrics. These people are so desperate to be famous they will compromise everything, and jeopardise anyone, to get get it.

Compare this then to another current popular artist, Lilly Allen. Her lyrics are also quite explicit, but the tone is very different. Laden with sarcasm, Allen takes a swipe at modern pop culture with her own form of social commentary. Take this line from her hit single “The Fear”:

I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
Cuz everyone knows thats how you get famous
…
Life’s about film stars and less about mothers
It’s all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic
and that’s what makes my life so f***ing fantastic
…
And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and it’s not my fault its how I’m program to function

I quite like this song, because by my interpretation this is a much more positive message. It’s not ok to do whatever it takes to be famous, it’s not ok to just spend money and float through life with no purpose. The dry British sarcasm is subtle, but I think (ok, I hope) the audience can pick up on this.

Her latest single “Not Fair” is much more saucy, dealing with inequality within relationships:

There’s just one thing
that’s getting in the way
When we go up to bed
you’re just no good
Its such a shame
I look into your eyes
I want to get to know you
And then you make this noise
and its apparent it’s all over

It’s not fair
And I think you’re really mean
I think you’re really mean
I think you’re really mean
Oh you’re supposed to care
But you never make me scream
You never make me scream

Sure, it might be a bit of fun, but Miss Allen is standing up for the rights of women. The setting for the song is similar to that of Lady Gaga’s songs, young women engaging in sexual activity, but the attitudes of the two are light-years apart.

There’s no point trying to hide from the fact that young adults are going to do what young adults do, and that’s not what I’m suggesting. What I’m suggesting is that A) children shouldn’t be exposed to the same content as adults and young adults, and B) the messages we allow those in the media to send out need to be positive. For girls this means encouraging them to respect themselves and others, and to aspire to more than just buying clothes, flashing their undies and telling the boys they “want it bad”.

Let’s let kids be kids and stop those that would attempt to turn them into adults before they’re ready. I found this initiative recently, whilst reading about an unrelated topic. It’s a blog called Shaping Youth, a “forum about media and marketing’s influence on kids”, that aims to tackle the kinds of issues I raise here. I took some comfort in the knowledge that there are people out there trying to do something about the Lady Gaga’s of this world.

I like analogies, metaphors and similes. They can help transfer understanding from one domain, or concept, to another. Here’s an analogy that I think helps illustrate the pros and cons of a agile software development approach, using an explanation of a popular automotive safety feature: Anti-skid Braking System (ABS).

A common misconception is that a vehicle equipped with ABS will stop more quickly than a vehicle without ABS. This is incorrect. All else being equal, when stopping in a straight line, ABS will necessarily cause the vehicle to take longer to come to a stop, because of the very nature of ABS. When the driver of a vehicle fitted with ABS applies the brakes very hard, a computer will continuously turn the brakes on and off very quickly, such that the wheels continue to turn some of the time and thus do not skid (well, not as much). The driver maintains the ability to steer whilst braking, because he or she can steer during those moments when the brakes are off. Thus you can brake very hard but still steer your way around objects, maintaining control of the vehicle.

Without ABS, when the driver brakes very hard, the wheels would stop turning, causing the wheels to “lock up” and skid, making steering impossible. This is when maximum friction occurs, and hence when the maximum braking force is in effect. So you can stop most quickly without ABS, but you won’t be able to steer and will more than likely lose control of the vehicle and crash. All things considered, it’s better to sacrifice some braking force in order to have control of the vehicle. Hence the popularity of ABS.

I see striking similarities between this and the argument over agile software development methodology. Agile will not make the project go quicker! In fact it might take longer to finish the project (but when exactly you “finish” is contentious). Just as an ABS-equipped vehicle can steer while braking, a project using an agile approach will be—as the name suggests—more agile, maintaining the ability to control the direction of travel. Collectively, the project team can adjust their aim if they have wandered off on a tangent, say for example if the product strays from meeting core objectives. By bringing forward design and iterating quite quickly, the end result of the project can be kept in focus and development can be kept on target (incidentally this is where agile can be very beneficial for UCD and vice versa). Agile allows you to not crash head-long into failure!

However, what an agile approach will not do is shorten your project. It’s annoying when people talk about “adopting agile” in order to “deliver in shorter timeframes”. They’re confusing agility and speed. As far as I’m concerned the only thing being delivered earlier are the early design prototypes. The final deliverable is not necessarily completed any quicker than with a good old fashioned waterfall approach, because during the iterations the design will evolve and some stuff won’t be used (either because it’s taking us off target or because it doesn’t work). In return for your agility, you must accept that there may be wastage or re-work caused by each iteration and that you might not finish any sooner.

What say ye?

[Photo source: DervMan]

If only for my own sanity should I ever want to do this again, here are some useful tips for installing WordPress MU into a subdirectory on a webserver that already has a normal version of WordPress installed in the root. If that makes no sense to you then don’t worry, you probably don’t need to know:

1. Download ZIP file and unzip files into the subdirectory (eg “/mu/”)
2. Open “/mu/wp-blog-header.php”
3. Locate line 9: if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php')
&& !file_exists( dirname( dirname(__FILE__) ) . '/wp-config.php')) {
4. Edit this line to be: if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php') ) {
5. Continue normal installation by going to “/mu/index.php”

The reason for this? If the MU installer detects the wp-config.php file in the root directory it thinks it’s already installed, but it isn’t. What it’s finding is the wp-config.php for the existing single-user version of WordPress.

There you go.

Have you noticed that there is a disproportionately high number of really talented people who hail from Canberra? Within the rough boundaries of the “web industry” I know many luminaries who live in or came from our nation’s capital. But I wonder if this phenomenon exists more generally?

In that sense, Canberra is very similar to New Zealand. There seems to be a huge number of really talented people in (and from) New Zealand, which like Canberra, has a comparatively small population. This is definitely the case in terms of user experience and web design, but also across the board; I always seem to meet or heard about really talented Kiwis in all kinds of fields, from music to film to consulting.

Are there any other little goldmines of talent around the world? (Perhaps diamond-mine is a better metaphor, as density is the key)

I spent some time over the festive season working on some SEO enhancements to the Chakra Jewellery Design website. The first version of the site features heavy use of Adobe Flash, effectively make it a single page website with no actual content, as everything was hidden inside a Flash movie. Whilst this makes for an excellent aesthetic and brand manifestation, there are dire consequences for findability: search engines think there is nothing on the site. (Another issue was that of maintenance, with Flash requiring more time, specialist skills and resources than plain old HTML pages.)

Several options exist for improving the situation, including AdWords and other SEM tactics, but this is potentially costly and to be honest an “easier” and more logical solution exists. So our goal was to try and improve the natural search engine ranking for the site, but exposing the good content that already exists and some other tinkering.

What we did

The improvements fall into three basic categories:

1. Extracting content out of Flash
2. Improving relevance of ‘microcontent’
3. Adding supplementary content

(It’s worth pointing out at this stage that, yes, there are design and usability issues with the site, but one step at a time!)

The obvious first step was to get the existing content out of Flash and into standard HTML mark-up. This was relatively straightforward. The Flash movie was actually made up of separate sub movies for each section of the site, loaded into a framework as needed, so it was trivial to create a physical page for each section and plonk the sub-movie on to it. The copy and images were then extracted from each Flash movie and marked-up using standards compliant XHTML and CSS. Care was taken to tailor the mark-up for maximum SEO effect, including semantically correct use of tags and careful selection of ‘microcontent’ such as title tags, heading tags, alt attributes, image filenames and even CSS class and ID names.

To maintain the look and feel of the original website, all of this mark-up is hidden ‘underneath’ the Flash movie using SWFobject. In terms of the HTML, all the content is there, but using CSS and Javascript this is hidden on page load and replaced with the appropriate Flash movie. If browsers don’t have Flash and Javscript capabilities, the underlying HTML is served instead of the Flash. But most importantly, Google and other search engines will see the HTML and lap it up. The graphic above shows the Flash version of the home page (on the left) and the equivalent HTML version (on the right).

Quite a bit of research was undertaken to ensure this technique was SEO friendly, and whilst nothing is certain on the web, I’m fairly sure this is an appropriate method to use. The main opposition to the use of the SWFobject technique seems to be when it’s used to deceive search engines (and/or users) by spamming the page with certain content in the HTML, then showing something else in Flash. In this case the content in the HTML is functionally equivalent to that found in the Flash. There are some variations, but in essence what users see is what Google sees.

Each of these new pages was put into a sub-folder on the site which was given a name that supported our SEO objectives (eg custom jewellery, chakra stones, jewellery collection). In doing so, some tweaks were needed to the flash movies so they picked up variables from the right spot, but for the most part the Flash movies stayed as they were. As such the look and feel for most users will be the same as the old site, minus some niceties such as fade-in/fade-out transitions between sections of the site.

In terms of the additions to the site, the most obvious is the ‘super footer’ at the bottom of each page. This gives an overview of the site (and the business) on every page, a list of contact details as well as links to legal disclaimer and some credits for those responsible for the site. These not only improve SEO, but also provide users with vital information. Since we now have multiple pages on the site, a search engine may bring a visitor in to something other than the home page. In that case they can easily find out what the site is about, who runs it and where they are located. This last aspect is essential for online retail, it builds credibility and gives a human aspect to the site.

Further adding a human aspect to the site is the addition of some biographical information about the owner of the business on the About us page.

Other additions include:

• New contact us page
• New combined site map and 404 error page
• XML sitemap for Google and other search engines
• 301 redirects for old pages/files

Lessons learned

I wouldn’t call myself an SEO expert, but I know enough to know the site was in a poor state, and that these enhancements will have a positive impact on driving traffic to the site. It has been interesting putting SEO theory and guidelines into practice, especially when balancing this against UX principles. A key lesson learned is that it is a compromise and a bit of black magic; it’s hard to tell exactly what effect any change will have and thus SEO needs to be a continuous effort rather than a ‘set and forget’ affair. I’ll need to keep an eye on things and keep tweaking the site to find the best results.

On another note, I felt the pain of trying to maintain specific typographic standards on the web. The font used in the Flash movies is “Praxis”, not a font that most people would have on their computer. So for the HTML content (and the main navigation which is HTML sitting ‘on top of’ the Flash) I used CSS to specify that Praxis should be used if available, but then assigned a number of ‘similar’ fonts that are widespread across Windows and Mac computers, to be used when Praxis isn’t available. This maintains the intended look of the site under most circumstances.

(For the record, I’m not a big fan of this approach to web design—trying to enforce a pixel perfect design—but rather I prefer to design for the restrictions imposed by the current technology instead of trying to avoid them. Fonts and layout are the big issues in this regard, because offline designers try to implement designs that aren’t easily implemented online. Doing so requires copious amounts of time to be spent on what ultimately should not be a high priority. And that doesn’t mean the site needs to look bad, there are plenty of great looking websites that are also usable, findable, accessible and practical to build.)

Measuring results

In terms of establishing a baseline for measuring the improvements, the Google ranking for several search phrases were recorded for the old, Flash, version of the website (see table below). I will compare the rankings for these phrases in a few months time and hopefully see a big improvement. At the time of writing this post, Google is still caching the old site and who knows how long it will be before it gets re-indexed, but in the mean time I’ve setup 301 redirects from the old SWF files to the corresponding new pages.

Additionally, the Pagerank for the site is 3/10. I’m not sure if my SEO enhancements will do much to improve that, as Pagerank really relies on having good links to your site, but an improvement here may be a welcome side affect of the work we have done.

According to Google Analytics, the keywords leading visitors to the website (recorded at the same time as the above rankings) are as follows:

Next steps

It will be interesting to see how this changes with the SEO improvements.

Ultimately the site will probably be rebuilt using Flash in a tactical manner (eg animated elements in a page that add interest and novelty factor) rather than as the main technology. Doing this will allow SEO and further extensions to the site that are currently restricted by the use of Flash.

Going hand-in-hand with this should be improvements to design and usability of the site, as well as SEO enhancements to the content itself (ie re-writing) to better target the desired keyword phrases. Investing in more incoming links from related websites would also be on my list of improvements.