templatedata

A useful resource: essential bookmarks for web designers and developers.

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The Interaction Design Group has launched a library of resources.

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Today I attended the first half of the "Human Centred Design Revolution Workshop" which showcased the talents of Jesse James Garrett.

For the benefit of others who may be interested, what follows is a brief summary of what he said.

Basically Garrett gave a walk through of his theories around user-centred design. Garrett has been on this track for a while now and a lot of what he said reinforced the ideas in his book, The Elements of User-Centred Design.

Garrett went to great pains to point out that this is not a 'theory' in that it provides answers, or guidelines or even pointers. It's a way of thinking that he believes need to infiltrate the whole development team in order for websites to address user needs well and thus produce a website that is a success, whatever the metrics you have applied to its measurement.

Garrett divides the development of a website into five planes three of which are then each divided into two sections - the web as software and the web as hypertext system. These two distinctions define the unique position of the web in terms of its cousins, software development and media. The web sits somewhere in between. People use it to consume media but they also interact with it and try to achieve tasks, like they do with software. Development then has to take these two things into account.

The five planes move from the conception stage where things are more abstract, to launch where things are definitely more concrete (if they're not you're in trouble!).

The planes are (moving from abstract to concrete):

- User needs / Site objectives- Functional specifications / Content requirements- Interaction design / Information architecture- Interface & navigation design/ Information design- Visual design

Having read his book and sat through the workshop I can conclude that the techniques used by Web Services at least, are user centred and we are on the right track. In further posts I hope to explore the ideas that came from this workshop in terms of how we can improve the way in which we do things at the Uni. If you want to explore Garrett's work further, I have the PowerPoint handouts from today's workshop, plus a print of his one-pager 'Elements of User Experience. The book is available in the University library and Garrett's website provides more information, of course.

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Via collegewebeditor, Ohio State University have undergone the dreaded redesign process and have just launched. Interestingly, they made use of a blog during the redesign process.

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This month Jakob Nielsen turns to search engines: 'mental models for search are getting firmer' he says. What does he mean? People now have a fair idea of how they want search engines to work. Basically it boils down to a text box, a search button and results. No fancy boolean searches, no metadata searches. To put it bluntly, they just expect search to work. Search engines like Google have enabled people to search simply and now that is what they expect of all search engines.

So, how does our search engine shape up? From the word-of-mouth reports I have received over a number of years, not very well. So how do we improve it? By taking this mental model of search that most people have and trying to make it work with our search engine. This would mean a simple, one text box search that allows for some specialised searching but that doesn't require specialised searching to achieve decent results. This may mean a bit of thought in terms of configuration but as long as the audience doesn't require thought to search, we should see some improvement. The search engine needs to do the 'thinking'.

Search engines like Google have led to a level of expectation and like it or not, if your search engine doesn't match up, it's going to perceived as being hard to use.

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What is important to note is that content almost always should lead design, and by design here I mean the “container” of the content.

Oh yes.

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Step Two's KM Column for this month explains "What is information architecture?"

Organising functionality and content into a structure that people are able to navigate intuitively doesn't happen by chance. Organisations must recognise the importance of information architecture or else they run the risk of creating great content and functionality that no one can ever find.

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One of the most difficult things to get people to do is to think about their online content at the same time as their 'offline' content. Commonly departments produce a brochure and as an afterthought, put it on the web, often in a format such as PDF. Now, there is nothing wrong with PDF per se, but when you have almost empty html pages of news and then a link to a PDF newsletter there is a problem.

So, what's the problem? Well, firstly, there is a lack of strategy when it comes to content. There is a focus on format rather than content itself.

What do I mean? Often departments have a newsletter they have distributed in print format for several years. They decide they would like it available on the web and they literally do this, they put the newsletter on the web, in its print format. What they should be doing is looking at the information in the newsletter and adapting it to the web. The content itself is what people are interested in.

Another example: brochures for prospective students. Departments produce their brochures and whack them on the web. The assumption is that prospective students are looking for a copy of the print brochure. No, prospective students are looking for information. They want to find it quickly, they want to be able to read it easily and they want to be able to print it out if required. A well structured website that delivers useful information is far more appealing than a 40 page PDF document full of print quality images. Not only is the latter difficult to access for some people, it is also often disconnected from the information that is available on the website.

So what needs to be done? Taking the example fo the prospective student brochure, before any information delivery is done a strategy for this delivery needs to be developed. Print and online information needs to be considered as part of a larger whole. Putting a little thought into how information is to be delivered will assist with a number of things:

• Producing the informationIf you integrate the processes for publishing print and online information you can alleviate a lot of the doubling up of effort that currently occurs.
• Unified branding strategiesA student recruitment drive needs to be integrated across online and offline material. This includes visual branding and points of contact.
• Giving users what they wantWhere do prospective students go for information about universities? Websites. Gone are the days when future students first point of contact was an information day or a brochure. The first point of research is a university's website (and we all know first impressions count). Future students still attend information days and pick up brochures but it's not their first or only source of information. You need to provide as much information as possible through the website and make sure that print publications are consistent with it.

The web has been around for a while now and it has matured to the stage where it can not be ignored as a publishing and publicising tool. In fact, one could argue that it is now the main publishing tool and this claim is made purely on user preference. Other media needs to work in tandem with it, not against it as is sometimes the case. Not intergrating your online and offline information, failing to strategise across all mediums would be a failure to address your audience's needs.