[ Posted September 27th, 2008 in Uncategorized ]
In this issue
Swimming Upstream
What We’ve Been Doing
Upcoming Events
Cool Sites
Swimming Upstream, by David More
A common lament of designers and usability consultants is "if only you’d come to us earlier". In establishing Optimal Experience this year, we saw the opportunity to work further upstream, before the client closed off options or used up resources that would have made for a better result.
So, we’re excited to be working with a major Australian government department as it prepares for a ground-breaking new web initiative. Last week, we held a three-hour scoping workshop with 30 stakeholders to help crystallise a shared vision - a fistful of ideas that will grow as planning, design, writing and development follow in the next few months.
This project is challenging. It is a national initiative calling for cooperation within and across Australia’s three layers of government as well as its commercial and community sectors. But the biggest challenge of all is a commitment to deliver ‘easy’, ‘user-friendly’, ‘central’ public access to a broad range of government programs. Those simple words tie the project’s success to the quality of the user experience - to results, not gestures or promises. That’s why we’re excited, and why the workshop was abuzz.
Some of those 30 stakeholders represented other programs with their own funding, plans, schedules, and their own websites. One of the big issues is to unravel all the interdependencies. That calls for lots of discussion, and we need consensus and cooperation despite the differing perceptions, assumptions and priorities. Yet at this early stage there’s nothing to use as a common reference point. A few words, but no detailed requirements and certainly no design to point to and pore over.
We knew that this workshop needed to provide a mechanism for stakeholders and the project team to develop a common vision for the site and a common understanding of the issues and factors influencing decision-making. This is essential for creating the conditions for confident, effective project planning and decision-making; in particular for the strategic technology and content issues that will govern the project schedule.
So to facilitate the discussion, we prepared a range of site concepts beforehand to focus the workshop discussions at a practical, concrete level as much as possible. This minimised the need for participants to digest unfamiliar, complex, abstract information at short notice; helped ‘ground’ the discussion in reality rather than through hypothetical situations; and enhanced the group’s ability to make confident decisions. Participants left the workshop with a shared view of the end goal (and at least an inkling of the tasks that lie in front of them). We are now revising the site concept to create a common reference for project stakeholders and a starting-point for requirements and user-centred design activities.
The site concept captures only the essentials for purposeful communication as the project takes shape, without encroaching on the freedom necessary for innovation. This concept is really just a place-holder - it’s not there to restrict the ongoing development of promising options by imposing unnecessary detail too early.
The value of this approach is allows us to scope the project in a much more meaningful way, focusing on the ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘who’, not just the ‘what’. We can consider the editorial function, the breadth and depth of content, the means of access, the technical effort and the overall governance. It allows us to look traditional software development approaches, and ensure that the relationships, guidelines and processes are in place to support the project in delivering on its promises.
Last week four of us attended the OZ-IA conference in Sydney. Sam presented two sessions, Automated tree testing - faster, better, smarter and IA in the Cayman Islands (where he spoke about some of the global trends in information architecture). The caliber of the conference was really high, and if you are working in information architecture in the Asia Pacific area, you should definitely attend in 2009.
Steve’s latest bad joke: "So I was behind a elderly woman at the ATM the other day, and she seem to be having a bit of trouble with the machine. She asked me if I could help check her balance. So I pushed her over."
We are running our Top tips for creating usable forms workshop in Auckland on October the 14th. In this workshop you’ll learn what it takes to create bulletproof forms to help you capture important information about your users. You’ll learn practical tips to ensure that the user’s experience with your forms is intuitive and satisfying. There are still a few spaces available so email Michelle today to register!
Susan Wolfe of Optimal Experience is coming to Auckland on the 22nd of October to run a User experience vision & teams workshop. (Some of you may remember that we ran this workshop with Sarah Bloomer in February this year). This one day workshop explores user experience strategy and vision, from targetting just the online experience, or extending it to the whole organisation, enabling a company to create a single, consistent face to its customers. Email Michelle to secure your place!
Gerry Gaffney is back in November to his Interaction design workshop in Wellington. This day-long course is a practical introduction for people wanting to learn about the fundamentals of interaction design. The course will be "hands-on", with a series of fun and frantic group exercises to help ensure that participants have an opportunity to investigate and learn the techniques covered. By the end of the course, based on a fictitious project, participants will have considered the user requirements, created personas, conducted task analysis, and designed paper-based mock-ups. Email Michelle to register.
The clever guys at Bolt Peters have recently released a free tool to help people recruit participants of research studies from their own website called Ethnio. It’s cool, it’s free and we think we’re in love.
The Adobe Developer Centre ran a great series called Creating graphically effective form design back in early 2007, that I’ve only just discovered. It’s particularly relevant if you are responsible for designing paper-based forms.
A couple of interesting/funny videos for you:
- Herding cats from EDS (thanks Ale via Richard!)
- The Waldo Ultimatum (thanks Dave!)
- Redesigning the Stop Sign: What if there were no stop signs and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? So scary. So true. (thanks Dave!)
- The Story of the Ribbon: the fascinating story behind the new Office 2007 "ribbon" interface for the MIX 2008 conference
Quick Links…
Optimal Usability - New Zealand
Optimal Experience - Australia
Optimal Workshop - Products
Training
More About Us
Until next time!
Warm regards,
Trent Mankelow
Please send any suggestions, comments or questions to
trent.mankelow@
More information can be found on our website at:
http://www.optimalusability.
You can call us on 0800 USABLE (0800 872-253)









