The Blog of Lucien Stals

For some reason, it took a little while for the Web Directions events to register on my radar. But once they had, I set my sites on getting to one of the conferences. But that goal has taken a little while to realise, and in fact I still haven’t made it to the Web Directions (North OR South) events. But I did finally get to go to the Web Directions User Experience event in Melbourne today.

Next week there is a Web Directions Government event in Canberra next week, but I’m not going to get to go to that one

So I have, for the time being, satisfied my Web Directions craving. Next year, I aim to make it to the big event in Sydney. The year after, I’ll be aiming For Web Directions North. That would be cool.

So the User Experience event today was pretty interesting with a wide range of speakers (wide range both in terms of quality, and the topics they were covering.), and a great venue (Melbourne Town Hall)

I’ll briefly give my impressions of each session I attended below, but my overall impressions of the event were positive.

Two things stood out for me:

* There was very little that was new to me. I’m not trying to be smug about it. I was expecting to be blown away a little more than I was, but I take this as a positive, as it serves to validate my own current thinking about web development. The first and last speakers (Andy Budd and Robert Hoekman, respectively) were the standout speakers of the day, and I got the most new information out of what they had to say.

* While the underlying message was singular (make the user feel good about what they do), the individual sessions all came at that message from very different points of view, and at times contradicted each other in how they advocated reaching that goal. I also thought it was interesting to compare some of what the speakers today were saying to the speakers of last nights WSG meeting. Again, there were direct contradictions in what people said, but the underlying message was the same.

It seems that everyone agrees that the user experience is king. It is the single most important thing. As web developers/designers, we are not developing me-ware. We are developing for our users.

But there appears to many divergent ideas about *how* you reach this goal. I say “divergent” deliberately. It’s not just different. Different views can be reconciled. I certainly got the impression that several of the speakers were talking in contradiction of one another in their approach.

Having said that, I found every one of the speakers to be interesting and informative and they all had a take home message worth listening to.

Sessions I attended were:

Andy Budd, Designing the experience curve.
Andy was the first speaker of the day and was the first one to introduce the recurrent theme of making the user feel good about what they do. He had a cute little version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which said a “functional” web site was at the bottom of the heap (it simply does what it’s supposed to do), and had a meaningful experience at the top (the user *wants* to use this thing).

Andy had a lot of other cute examples of things and the overall impression I got from this presentation was fun. One person practically accused him of being frivolous, but I think they were just being grumpy.

This was a great, inspirational talk that encouraged me to pay attention to detail. I sometimes wonder if I’m wasting my time on job when I put in nice touches that probably nobody will ever notice, but this guy made me think it’s all worth the effort.

Lisa Herrod, User testing for the rest of us.
Lisa suffered from an equipment failure and had to abandon her slides and just talk. Plain old fashioned talking. I think her presentation did not suffer from this at all, although we did all have to wait while they tried to figure out if they could get the equipment to work or not. Once it was decided that they could not get the projector to work, the presentation went well.

I’ll confess I felt a little deceived by the title of this talk. I had somehow expected it to be a bout non traditional approaches to usability testing, but it seemed to be pretty standard stuff.

Donna Spencer, Getting content right.
Self consciously excused her presentation for being heavy on the bullet point, explaining that they were necessary, then proceeded to read all of them verbatim (meaning she didn’t need them after all, except as a script). Only actually needed about 5 of the slides she used.

In spite of that glaring exception, she had a lot of interesting things to say. Once again the theme of making the user king was underpinning everything she said.

Curiously, a lot of what she had to say was almost directly contrary to what XXXX said last night in his WSG talk on internationalisation, a fact that at least once other audience member picked up on because he specifically asked her about that point in the questions session at the end. Regrettably, Donna didn’t have an answer to the internationalisation question.

Most of all, I took home the idea of building a persona for a site and making that persona part of the sites style guide.

Mathew Patterson, Designing for the inbox.
This was a curious presentation. Mathew was obviously nervous, and when he used a slide of some sexy women’s underwear to illustrate the idea of frilly bits, his first comment on the slide was about his mother. Hmmm.

He polled the audience to see how many thought HTML formatted email was evil, and over half of us did (including me). So he went on to spend almost half of the presentation trying to sell us on the idea of HTML formatted email. But the thing is, we all knew, from the title of the presentation, what it was about. No sales pitch needed.

And the joke about “who can remember 1998″ fell on largely deaf ears since half the audience were old enough to be this guys parents.

Having said all that, he did have some interesting things to say. I came away from it thinking that perhaps HTML emails are, if not evil, then at least inevitable. He made a great point: if you, the designer, doesn’t do the HTML email the boss is asking for, he’s just going to go ask his secretary to use Outlook and Publisher to do it instead.

The other point is that to get HTMl emails to look right, we have to abandon everything we think we know about modern web design and use tables instead.

Jeremy Yuille, Web visualization, do you see what I see?
Wow. What an interesting presentation. But was this guy academic, or what? He was the only person on the day to use words like: accrete, zeitgeist and meme.

I think he lost focus a few times, but he had some great examples of visualizations. It did seem to me that it was more about data visualization itself, and the fact that these visualizations ended up on the web was almost incidental. But many of the data sources were XML/RSS feeds, so I guess that made them webby.

More than anything else, this presentation made me think I should go do my PHD at the MIT Media labs.

Robert Hoekman Jr., The essential elements of great web applications.
For me, Robert was the best speaker of the day. In spite of having a very simple message, he remained entertaining, and informative, for the whole hour.

Once again, he reiterated the message that we need to make the users feel good about themselves (make them feel like lions). But he then went on to say not to worry about the users too much. Don’t design for the users, design for the task. Identify what it is the users want to do, and focus on that task.

He also said not to design for the system. This is something I know I’m often guilty of. I first think how I can implement something in the code, so I implicitly end up with a code centric solution. Robert says not to do that. Figure out what will be most natural for a user to do, and develop for that. Make the system bend to the users needs, don’t make the user bend to the system.

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