Pat’s Point of View

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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This afternoon I presented my topic at Open Publish 2007, in Sydney. It was quite a good turn out, but still a nice small audience.

My topic covered two central topics:

• Ethnographic techniques for ‘needs analysis’ and user research, and
• The application of these techniques for ‘Whatever 2.0′ solutions

This was well received and I enjoyed talking on this subject to this audience. Hopefully, being the last presentation of the day, I didn’t bore folks too much. There were also lots of other interesting presentations and altogether it created a great little conference. There’s definitely some good thinking in the publishing (and content management) space; not at all matching the external perception of the publishing industry.

My slides are up on SlideShare.

See what people are blogging about: open publish, user research

Popularity: 35% [?]

Last night I presented my talk on intranets at the Sydney Web Standards Group meeting. I spoke about the topic of two of my recent posts, namely web developers have the power and intranets: the beast we love to hate. In a nutshell, I covered these points:

1. So what is an intranet anyway? Not an internal website, but rather a core business tool. A place to get things done.
2. Why do we love to hate intranets? There are downsides to intranets, but the reasons I hear from designers and developers tend to be more like they’re boring, they’re not sexy, they’re low profile.
3. What can we do about this? Two things; sharing skills between intranet people and web people, and selling the benefits of working on intranets.
4. Cross-pollination of skills: educating the web community about what a good intranet is and how to create them; learning from the intranet managers and CKOs of the world.
5. Selling the benefits of intranets: there are many upsides to intranets including the freedom to experiment, a ‘captive audience’, more functionality and most of all the greater satisfaction of empowering users in a way which effects their working day in a tangible way.
6. Showing off some of the small innovations being made in good intranets, including web 2.0 features, tailored business ‘apps’, and collaboration tools such as integrated staff directories.
7. So what does this have to do with web standards? The obvious connection is that with the increase in interactive functionality, those who are conscious of standards based web developers have a role to play to keep it all in check, but the not so obvious connection is the role developers can have in driving intranet innovation. As with web standards, accessibility and usability, building good intranets could become an enthusiast [let's be honest the word should really be 'zealot' :)] topic; pushed into focus by the sheer force of will of designers and developers who simply choose to care.

I’ve also posted the slides [PDF 2.4MB] if you’re interested.My slides are now on SlideShare.

I think it all went well and I got some really positive feedback. I was expecting a fairly underwhelmed, if not outright hostile, reception to the topic, so it was great to see that by and large the audience was interested.

Some of the discussions afterwards were also really interesting. For example:

• The challenge of exposing the good work we might do on intranets, and to a lesser extent sharing ideas. I didn’t want to turn the night into a big ad for Step Two, but the ILF, intranet peers and Intranet Innovation Awards are all ways of increasing exposure in this regard.
• How developers can achieve a lot through tinkering and getting stuck into tasks such as improving the code behind an intranet. Without the know-how which web developers bring to the party, inadequacies in the performance/appearance/functionality of the intranet are too often tackled by the ‘5 year IT plan’ mentality which usually involves implementing a very expensive CMS to solve the problem (both ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ and ‘cracking a peanut with a sledgehammer’). Someone who knows how to write good mark-up can improve the templates in a fraction of the time it takes for a corporate platform decision to be made.
• Another selling point for web developers regarding intranets is the transferability of their skills. Opening their eyes to the possibilities of good intranets also opens their opportunities in terms of areas they can move into, and indeed take change of. As we become more complacent about ‘just another website’ then perhaps this will be a big factor. In a market that is becoming increasingly more competitive (even commoditised) web developers and designers and devigners might look to intranets as their next horizon, especially considering much of the skills required are in common (it’s just the paradigm shift they need to worry about).

It would be wrong of me to discuss the evening without mentioning Shane’s talk on developers and designers getting along. He posed many interesting questions which have been floating around for a while but we still don’t have answers for. What exactly does it mean to be a designer and where (if at all) does the line exist between development and design? Do you need to know how the thing will be implemented (or at least an idea of what’s possible) in order to design? Would be a good topic for a panel session.

See what people are blogging about: intranet, web standards, Enterprise 2.0, devigners

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Yes, this is an unashamed rip-off of Jessica Hagy. Well it’s kinda more like an homage to her witty, insightful and very clever musings. I can, however, only ever hope to mimic her use of graphs and diagrams, rather than what she uses them to communicate.

The inspiration for this particular graph is the popularist rollercoaster which the web design industry can often be. Usability, user experience and then user-centred design; a succession of buzzwords that stirred clients and designers alike in to furious fits of corrective work. There’s no debating that at the heart of this movement was a genuine need for a shift in focus for many businesses and website owners (getting them out of the bottom left on the above graph). However, I’m sure we’ve all seen this bandwagon pick up speed at a frightening rate and career out of control. The net effect is that the herd mentality is now “we must do usability”. Blame the pundits for scaring us and blowing things out of proportion :)

For all the success stories (top right) there are still many examples of well-meaning and well executed projects that fall flat on their faces. Despite a user-centred approach, success does not always follow. A successful website (or business) does not necessarily require a devoted focus on user (or customer) goals, behaviours or attitudes. You mean we’re all deluded? Well, to use that old IA chestnut, “it depends”.

Think about how many products and services are a success even though when you take a long hard look (sometimes not even that long) you can’t find any evidence that users were considered at all. Remember the Motorola Razr? That phone is awful to use, nobody I know who has one likes it. But they still bought it, and I even know someone who bought another one after he broke the first one! As the old saying goes “there’s no accounting for taste”, but there’s also the fact that people don’t always behave logically. We buy and use things that suck, willingly and repeatedly (bottom right).

There are other more sneaky examples too, electrical and computer appliances are pretty much built as cheaply as possible as part of a strategy to shorten product lifecycles and increase replacement and upsell. This pretty much flies in the face of what consumers want, but overall that industry is a massive success. In this case we have little choice, and the manufacturers know this. There’s no need for user-centred design here, just marketing.

And the door swings the other way too. Massive amounts of time and money are invested into user-centred design projects to improve things like electricity bills, banner ads. But in the end none of that matters, the chance of success is low (top left). This is where usability versus usefulness can come into play (although it could be argued that it’s not really UCD if both are not taken into account).

All in all, this topic is an interesting antithesis to the usability hype. The fact that there are so many examples you could place in the bottom right (MySpace and YouTube would have to be the poster children of this corner) would seem to indicate that a balance of user-centred-ness along with everything else will give good results. Maybe even better results than a user-centred focus. This discussion could quickly wander into usability ROI, and none of us want to go there do we.

For my parting comment, I’d like to say I really like these graphs as communication tools, since you can easily map out several different factors and spark a discussion. Coming up with examples to plot on the graph can also be quite a challenge, as some of my examples illustrate…feel free to offer suggestions.

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The second Webjam went off last night in Sydney. A healthy crowd attended as always.

Without a doubt the highlight was Andre, who when faced with technical difficulties, said “F**k it, I’ll just dance” and proceeded to groove away for the remainder of his three minutes. Classic.

Bugger, I forgot to grab a t-shirt.

See what people are blogging about: Webjam 2, social conference

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Last week I attended the Web Essentials 2005 conference (WE05) in Sydney, and I must say I really enjoyed it.

It impressed and inspired me to see designers, geeks, suits and a whole bunch of other web people coming together in the name of web standards, with a desire and enthusiasm to learn how to do things properly!

I felt good about the industry that I work in, and started genuinely looking forward to the future. Working in ad agencies for the past few years had really eroded that feeling in me. I feel better now.

It was great to hear such entertaining and motivating presentations by people such as Jeffery Veen, Douglas Bowman, Tantek �elik and Molly Holzschlag. I was proud to be a “web designer”…and you don’t often get that! :)

Other great stuff was presented by Eric Meyer, Kelly Goto (finally bought her book) and Derek Featherstone. (Is it just me or are all these guys from the US? hmmm)

I can’t wait to force colleagues and “those that still need to be converted” to listen to the podcasts. So many people working in the web have no idea about or interest in new exciting stuff such as Technorati, Microformats and Flickr.

Anyway, back to the task of getting a job.

P

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