The event was the first of its kind in Bristol and you would never have guessed it was the first event organised by the guys – the only hitch was me falling of my bike in the rain on the way home (it looks worse than it was).

I volunteered for the day but still managed to catch some great sessions. I enjoyed the format of all the sessions which were workshop based with some presentation rather just pure presentations or round tables. Highlights were…

The Sketching for UX designers workshop from Eva-Lotta Lamm from which I’ve added  Ed Emberley’s: Make a World to my Amazon wishlist (although perhaps not the new version at £84).

An insightful session from Leisa Reichelt on Strategic User Experience which encouraged businesses to clearly identify their business strategy before expecting digital to miraculously solve everything. Leisa suggested a clear elevator pitch sentence structure, as proposed by Marty Neumeier:

“Our brand is the …… that …… ”

Have a clearly defined statement of that ilk allows all later decisions and discussions to be framed in that light. I’m going to be getting hold of this ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands following the session.

The last main session I attended was from Bristol’s own Fergus Roche on How to Run a User-Centred Requirements-Gathering Workshop.  Having done a fair bit of teaching in the past a lot of it was fairly familiar (but very useful to be refreshed on) and the final section on planning poker was excellent. I’ve used this for estimating project timings before but Ferg added the extra element of not basing the units on time but on effort. Effort can then be translated back into timing at a later point. Nice.

The day finished with several short  talks from Ian Fenn, Sam Menter, Steve Cable and Mark Skinner which were short, sweet and interesting – perfect after a long day of thinking and listening.

Well done to the organisers and I’ll definitely be signing up to volunteer again for the next one.

Around 6% of visitors to the site were on a mobile device of some sort (this included iPads). Of those visitors:

• 49% were using an iPhone or iPod Touch
• 36% were using an iPad
• 11% were using an  Android device
• 2% were on a Blackberry and
• 2% were on a SymbianOS

So 85% were using Apple products.

It’s a fairly obvious conclusion, but these stats have further reinforced this for me – make sure any Flash occurances on your site have excellent non-Flash versions as well. In the past HTML versions of Flash apps could be something of an afterthought to make sure the site remained accessible. I think this has become less of an issue as HTML has become more powerful and dynamic through AJAX, JQuery and HTML5.  However if you have Flash anywhere it’s worth checking the user experience on a device without Flash.

Similarly,  rollover interactions such as fly-out navigation can cause problems.  Make sure your site has no critical information hidden in rollover states because gestural devices won’t see them. Fly-out navigation can work fine on tablets if well built, so test them out to make sure they work consistently and reliably.

You might be tempted to think about apps and mobile stylesheets – but make sure your standard site works well on iPhone and iPad browsers first.

While not so well known outside of Wales, Principality are known by almost everyone in Wales and are probably bigger than you might think. Their old site was well past it’s sell by date with inconsistencies in the structure, navigation and importantly the presentation of their products.

Myself and Nikki Hinds at e3 in Bristol oversaw the delivery of the new site all the way through from pitch to the final go live. We went through a fairly standard UX process of research and requirements gathering followed by prototyping which was presented back to the client.

As I’ve found time and time again the prototype proved invaluable for gaining buy in and understanding across the organisation. This proved important as legal review and approval was required throughout the whole project.

Sitecore drives the site with Sitecore OMS (Online Marketing Suite) being implemented and coming online soon. OMS allows us to serve up differing content to different users depending on what they’ve shown interest in. So if a user has looked at several fixed rate mortgages and then moves to another area of the site then they could be served up content (on certain areas) related to mortgages. The system will be used in conjunction with IP lookup to present Principality in slightly different ways depending on whether you are in or out of Wales. Or as Chris Bangs put it – show dragon/ don’t show dragon.

While it could be used in very sophisticated ways, the conceptual setup of OMS has proved to be quite involved. If you imagine setting up mail rules in outlook ‘put emails from Joe in folder X’ then it’s akin to that but more complex by an order of magnitude.

In essence there are scores attached to pages (or areas or actions etc) which score against profiles ‘mortgage first time buyer’ or ‘interested in tax free savings’. The dynamic content areas elsewhere on the site then render content depending on rules you specify around these profiles. So if the mortgage first time buyers profile has more points than the tax free savings profile then display this mortgage product on this part of this page. The more profiles and the more dynamic content areas the more complex it gets – exponentially.

Aside from OMS the new site has a very clear structure and hierarchy which is considerably easier to navigate. The layout of content is much simplified and highly consistent across the site.

All in all the new site has brought their business on in leaps and bounds – people starting online applications has increased greatly and there are quite a lot of new developments to come over the next few months.

The site is built in wordpress and moving all my old blog content from Blogger.com to the new site proved to be quite a headache. Originally I tried using a plugin called  Blogger Importer which from the title you would think was perfect – but no joy. I eventually moved it in two stages by importing the content from blogger to an account on wordpress.com and then using a plugin called WordPress Importer I managed to get the content from there into the new site.

WordPress importer moved the content over but many of the Blogger  tags were converted into categories. Installing and running a plugin called Categories to Tags Converter which thankfully took the legwork out of changing  gazillion categories back to tags. Some of the images seem to have come out at different sizes and there are a few other things not quite right but almost all of the content and comments have made it over.

While they do list some free prototyping tools my experience of them are not great. It’s definitely worth spending the money on Axure or something similar. At some point in the past I tried Serena Composer but it was not that easy to pick up quickly and fairly heavy duty for most projects.

From their categories my favourites which I use most are:

Wireframing and prototyping – a pencil obviously but also Axure (although I am wondering about digging out an old copy of Dreamweaver to see if that’s worth thinking about for prototyping with sometimes)

Annotation tools – protonotes as it can be integrated with Axure and doesn’t need any browser plugins.

Lorem generator – personally I think Lorem should be removed from all ux and design as much as possible. It saves time early on, but it always catches up with you at some stage.

Screengrabbing - I’m a Fireshot fan

Usability testing – I haven’t used it much so far but Loop11 is well worth a try.

I’m always looking for new ways to do things and am going to give Realizer an app prototyper a try soon.

Then with any luck you get the spreadsheet back with nicely collated feedback that you then have to interpret. Inevitably there are some points which need further clarification and emails and calls follow.

What normally happens is your spreadsheet gets ignored and you’ll get some emails containing feedback with various people copied in and discussions begin… which gets very confusing and you’ll probably end up having a long call or meeting to sort it all out. All very time consuming indeed.

I’ve been trialling a way of allowing feedback to be put straight into a prototype. Protonotes is a simple system to put post-it notes onto html pages. No plug-ins or software needs to be installed. Some clever people have a found a way to integrate this easily with axure prototypes.

There’s a little app which inserts the appropriate protonotes code into the header of the prototype. You then get the protonotes feedback bar at the top of the prototype – you can also alter the settings of this.

I’ve only used it a couple of times so far, but it’s proved a much more engaging and effective way of gathering feedback.

I clicked through three or four reviews thinking “their film reviews are the shortest I’ve ever read – too short in fact”. Only after about the fourth page did I spot the big red link “Read The Full Empire Review »” immediately below the star rating.

Truth be told I they’ve noticed this problem and have tried to address it by making the link bigger and brighter – which unfortunately makes it look more like part of the advert and so probably makes the problem worse.

A few simple steps would improve this loads
- don’t put an ad just below this critical link
- don’t make the link so shouty as it just looks like an ad

Ad

Not ad

My role was research, requirements gathering, strategy and design of the layouts and so on. We went through a fairly standard process of requirements gathering and definition, sitemaps, sketch layout followed by wireframes in Axure. I built a light prototype in Axure and this pretty much served as the functional definition meaning that only a small amount of follow up functional definition was required.

Key to the site were the flash based story animations. For the prototype I used simplified placeholders to represent these with the key user journeys to clarify where the stories were to take users.

Through production there were some compromises and things which weren’t quite as I’d have liked them, but overall it’s a great site to have been involved in. Best of all IWM invited us to the private viewing in London with many Victoria and George Cross winners present which was mighty humbling.

Well done to Rich, the usual e3 suspects and Wendy. If you get the chance the gallery is well worth visiting – the stories are absolutely inspiring, humbling and extraordinary.

Today I actually managed to read some stuff on the internet at lunchtime. This caught me eye… Google could run virtual ads on actual billboards in Google streetview.

“In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads.”

Is this how the Matrix starts?

It’s top of the list as well, I’m sure that’s a good omen and nothing to do with Amnesty and the letter A.

See the quite long short list here: http://www.nmaawards.co.uk/Shortlist.aspx