Pat’s Point of View

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]

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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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!

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.

I’m pleased, and more than a little nervous, to announce I’ll be on the Australian team for Full Code Press; a friendly international competition whereby teams will design and build a website for a charitable organisation in just 24 hours. And this year we’ll be in full view of CeBIT attendees!

This will be interesting from the point of view of user experience practice, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

Wish us luck!

There is a difference between your target audience (who you want to reach) and your user-base (who actually uses your website). At least that’s the mental model I’ve always used when approaching web design. Let me explain, using a nifty Venn diagram:

The following notation goes with the diagram:

A = population of all web users
B = your target audience
C = your user-base (users of your website)
D = target audience using your website (B∩C if you’re a math geek)
E = target audience not using your website (B \ C)
F = users who are not in your target (C \ B)

This model provides a good platform for discussing strategies and tactics for a website. For example;

• If F is big you might be targeting the wrong people. Or your content is attractive to people other than who you want to attract.
• You generally want to shrink E and F and grow D, such that B and C become much more aligned. That is, the people using your website match your target audience.
• To shrink E (the people in your target audience who don’t use your website) you don’t have to spend money on marketing! You can create good content that attracts them, or to put it another way, “use SEO”.
• And, following on from that, if the content and functionality are well crafted you won’t grow F.

This last point is an interesting one, and it’s something that isn’t necessarily clear to some in this industry.

Case in point, I was recently involved in a conversation where a website owner told me her organisation didn’t know who their audience is. Not just their users (C), but their target audience (B)! The distinction between the two, as “my model” above describes, is that people actually using your website are at most a subset of who you’re targeting (at worst they’re completely different).

The fact that these two groups are different isn’t uncommon, nor is it unusual to not have a good idea of who the people using your website are (you might have analytics that tell you what they do but still not know anything about them). But it’s kinda scary to not even know who you’re targeting—who you’re trying to communicate with—other than “people who use the web”. This is wrong on so many levels! How are we supposed to create useful content for that? How are we supposed to design an effective user experience for “anyone”?

So, I guess it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise after that, when there seemed to be no recognition that there are people out there not using the site who could be. This gap between users and target audience is full of your potential customers (E). These are the people who you can “win”. So how do you do it? I thought it was logical, you create something those people want. Quite literally, if you build it (good content), they will come.

I was told that trying to gain more users (grow E) wouldn’t happen because there was no budget for marketing. OK, but wow about just creating better content?! Do a bit of research, find out what that untapped vein are interested in. I may be delusional but if you have to spend big on marketing to trick people to use your website, there’s nothing worth using on that website. OK maybe that’s a bit harsh but you catch my drift. Marketing can help, for sure, but it’s not the only answer nor is it the most direct solution.

Thoughts?

A few people asked why I only blogged about day one of the conference, and the simple answer is I didn’t get around to it. I’m desperately trying to make my weekends computer-free and spend quality time with family. I failed in that I did spend quite a bit of time in front of a monitor but I wasn’t online :)

Anyway back to the conference. The second day was as good as the first, with some great content being presented. Jeff Veen, as always, was entertaining and insightful. Daniel Burka was honest and enthusiastic in his depiction of design mistakes at Digg. Ruth Ellison offered a great discussion on real-world accessibility, showing her depth of experience in the subject, and showing that there are some things we don’t have answers to—you just need to do your best. Laurel Papworth made me think really new things about the commercialisation of social networking. Diana Mounter also offered an honest and practical discussion regarding whether to use a CMS or do a custom build (although I strongly suggest that the core problem in her case was a poorly chosen CMS).

Then there was the closing discussion from Mark Pesce, as thought provoking as ever. But you know what, I’m glad he’s stepping aside to let someone else take the reigns of chief thought provoker for WDS. Not only because he makes my brain hurt sometimes, but also because I think the local techies can’t take much more anti-establishment provocation (my how they love to get anarchisticly excited and dump all over Telstra, Microsoft and any other “evil empire”). And even more so because I suspect Mark is getting over it too. As he said, it’s time for people to take some responsibility for the things they demand; everyone wants free broadband, but very few want to actually make it happen.

Looking forward to next year.

[8:15am] Web Directions South is here again for another year. And I have to reiterate my comments from last year, this is the best conference in Australia—in the web industry anyway. John, Maxine and the other organisers must be congratulated on yet another fine performance. And the first speaker hasn’t even taken to the stage yet.

The level of professionalism and attention to detail impresses me, as does the excellent swag. You may well call me a cheap date and accuse me of being distracted by the bells and whistles, but I think this stuff matters. I think the atmosphere created for this conference makes not only for an enjoyable time for attendees, but also makes us as a community look and feel legitimate and professional. Nothing could be better for shaking off the last scraps of that image of our industry as being a bunch of nerds and cowboys flying by the seat of their pants, cowering over a computer monitor in some garage come office.

Of course you have to have great content too, and only time will tell if they have nailed that also.

[1:30pm] This morning was a great start to the conference. I must admit I wasn’t blown away by the opening keynote by Lynne D Johnson. The future of print and online media, where they might converge and where they won’t, is fairly interesting but I don’t know if I left that session with any greater understanding of any of the debate. That aside, I found it interesting how people equate user contributions and the “wisdom of crowds” with a more “pure” truth, and that big bad media organisations can’t be trusted to report the truth. Having seen the comments made by ‘the average Joe’ on news articles and other types of content, I’m not really convinced that’s the answer. There are lots of idiots out there. I think there’s still a big role for good journalism and the authoritative voice of established media organisations. How they continue to deliver that to their audience may change, but I’d rather listen to that than any fool with a keyboard.

Next I listened to Accessibility Beyond Compliance by Derek Featherstone. This was a great session, Derek is always very knowledgeable and entertaining, and I was pleased that a presentation such as this was included in the conference. All too often accessibility is seen (by those who don’t just dismiss it entirely) as either something that the code takes care of or an all of nothing proposition, but neither of these are true. Derek showed excellent examples of how true accessibility requires special attention in terms of how and where we provides users with feedback as well as showing that accessibility can be delivered within the one site—no text-only or special accessible versions here.

Next up was From Disordered to Managed Usability in an Agile Environment presented by Teale Shapcott. I was pleasantly surprised by this enlightened and practical discussion of user experience practice within an agile web application development methodology. Teale gave us good insight into how SunCorp operate as well as some good tips for those trying to sort out their own project methodologies, but one thing that seemed to be missing was user research. She mentioned using personas to get the team to think about the needs of users when writing, prioritising and estimating “story cards” but where do these personas come from? Are there parallel processes in place to research user needs and maintain these personas?

[8:05pm] After a very nice lunch it was off to Context in Mobile Design by Gabriel White. The thing that sparked my interest was how social context—such as knowing where your friends or colleagues are and what their status is—effects how we might choose to communication or interact with them, be it via IM, SMS, twitter or a phone call.

I stuck around for Elegant Web Typography presented by Jeff Croft. I must admit I already knew about a lot of what Jeff discussed, but it was an entertaining and informative session nonetheless. Some of his comments were a little at odds with modern views on accessibility, for example the use of absolute font sizes as opposed to relative, but overall there were plenty of good tips on creating better web design through elegant use of typography.

After a coffee break, we all regrouped for Predicting the Past by August de Los Reyes. I must admit this lightning paced presentation lost me a few times (I guess it was the trailing end of three-thirty-itis) and some of the videos really weren’t much more than Microsoft marketing. Or perhaps I’m just not much for this future gazing stuff…although I did prefer the Nokia design concept that Steve Baty showed us at OZ-IA. But, people that I hold in high regard have a lot of respect for August, so I’m quite willing to assume he was talking good stuff and that I just wasn’t that receptive this afternoon.

I decided not to hang around for drinks but rather to take advantage of this rare glimpse of the sun on the way home, and head off to spend a bit of time with Jenn and Grace. All in all it was a great first day, although I was a little put off by not being able to get an internet connection to work. Probably for the best anyway :)

I’m running a survey and I’d like your help.

Best practice design of websites, and other digital media, involves a set of skills known broadly as Information Architecture (IA) which generally means making designs user friendly. IA is also known to people doing this work, by such terms as User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Interaction Design (IxD) or simply “usability”.

A significant amount of this sort of work is performed by agencies—whether they be advertising agencies, digital agencies or communication agencies. As a practitioner and educator in the field of IA, I am interested in learning how people go about practicing it, in particular how agencies “do IA”. This is to both confirm and challenge my own understanding of the way agencies work and how IA fits into their processes, who it gets done by and how it might be possible to give agencies the skills they need to perform better in this regard.

To this end, I’ve launched an online survey to get some answers straight from the people who work in agencies (or used to). The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete and I’ll give away, to one lucky person who completes the survey, a copy of the acclaimed best-selling book by Steve Krug Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. I recommend this book for anyone considering doing anything to do with IA or usability, so it’s only fitting to offer it as an incentive.

You’ll find the survey at: http://www.gurtle.com/survey/index.php?sid=61824

If you don’t work in an agency, you can still help me out by forwarding this to your clients, peers and friends who do work in agencies. I may run a more general survey in the future, but for now I’m focused on agency folks.

The survey will run until the end of September, so there should be plenty of time for word to get around.

I’ll share the results of the survey (aggregated not raw data), either here on this blog or through conferences in and around the IA community. Stay tuned.

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)?