Web Directions Podcast

The release of Apple’s iPhone brings new opportunities for web sites and web apps on handheld devices, though not without its share of challenges and best practices. Tim and Pete will look at the best examples out in the wild and share their experience creating iphone.news.com.au - one of Australia’s largest news sites, news.com.au, tailored to the iPhone. Pete has been designing web sites for about 9 years. Having previously worked as the Head of Design at Fairfax Digital and Creative Director at Daemon, he is now working at News Digital Media as the Group Interface Designer. Recently he has been designing truelocal.com.au, careerone.com.au & iphone.news.com.au. He works directly with site owners and execs to help inform requirements and push product design boundaries. He is daily knee deep in photoshop concepts and html/css code. Tim Lucas, aka toolmantim, is a software developer and web technologist known in the Aussie web community for his involvement in events such as Work at Jelly, Webjam and the

With so many social networks blooming, all with different participants and methods of interaction, it can be hard to determine where to invest your energy, time and $$. The session will provide ideas and a "background briefing" to help you answer the question: - why is social media important to my organisation? - what is the ROI for social media? - how can I evaluate which approaches are right for me/my organisation? - what sort of activities can/should I undertake in these spaces? This is not a technical session and although we will briefly touch on some popular sites, the focus will be on how you and your organisation can effectively and authentically engage participants in the social media world. Grant has worked for over a decade in web and media roles, more recently focusing on social media and networking opportunities for non-profits. Grant recently founded Zumio, a consulting business with an emphasis on online strategy development. Since starting Zumio earlier this year Grant has advised a numbe

The hype around Web 2.0 continues to increase to the point of absurdity. We hear all about a rich web of data, but what can we learn from these trends to actually apply to our designs? You’ll take a tour through the past, present, and future of the web to answer these questions and more: - What can we learn from the rich history of data visualization to inform our designs today? - How can we do amazing work while battle the constant constraints we find ourselves up against? - How do we really incorporate users into our practice of user experience? Jeffrey Veen is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and user experience consultant. As a consultant, Jeffrey has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and more. Jeff also led the creation of Measure Map, the well-received blog analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006. After five years with Adaptive Path, where he was a founding partner, Jeff moved to Google, where

The world is abuzz with social computing: Facebook, My Space, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs, wikis and other spaces powered by Web 2.0 technology. It’s a social revolution, empowering individuals to communicate, share what they know online, and help others locate information that is important to them in both their private and working lives. Some see all this as a big waste of corporate time, but is it? Is there value in handing over control of collaboration and sharing knowledge to individuals, rather than hoarding it in records systems, knowledge systems, and thousands of network dive folders? Is there a way you can harness this social revolution to help improve our organisation’s knowledge management practices? Is there actually a solid business value proposition for social computing? Matthew will look at knowledge management in modern organisations, and how you can benefit by learning from the principles of social computing and Web 2.0 technologies. Matthew will look at case studies in government tha

Government has huge amounts of information but how can this be effectively managed and delivered through the web? This session will ‘lift the lid’ on web mapping technology and identify some of the key issues that must be addressed to achieve a successful outcome. The NSW government SIX Viewer web mapping portal will be used as a case study to demonstrate how terabytes of data can be integrated and delivered via the Internet. David is the national lead for spatial (location based) solutions for the consulting group Ajilon Australia. He has over 15 years experience with spatial technology working extensively within Government and the mining industry. Focussed on leveraging the web to support the integration of spatial information within mainstream IT, he has led the development of a number of high profile web mapping sites including the NSW government SIX Viewer web mapping portal. David believes that the increasing demand and awareness of the benefits of locational information will result in spatial tech

Web Usability is far more complex than user testing and interaction design alone. And while interface design is an important consideration, there’s more to a usable site than what’s on the surface. We all know the importance of accessibility and web standards, so let’s take that knowledge one step further and into the realm of usability. In this session Lisa Herrod will redefine the common definition of usability by introducing a greater focus on accessibility and web standards. By taking a more holistic approach you will soon see why usability is more than skin deep. Lisa Herrod is the Principal Usability Consultant at Scenario Seven. The primary focus of her work is web usability, which she believes incorporates much more than just user testing. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, Lisa takes an holistic approach to web usability incorporating user research, accessibility, interaction design and web standards development. Having started in the web during the last century, Lisa is occasionally caught ma

Whoever you are, if you’re writing JavaScript, there’s some aspect of your development that you would love to change if you had the chance. But the reality is you’ll never find yourself working in this ideal environment: dealing with legacy browsers, platforms and content management systems will be your constant as a developer. Patrick Lee is going to show you some tools and techniques that will help you make your peace with this fact. This session will explore how you can find ways to do the cool stuff you really want to do with JavaScript whilst working in the real world. And you won’t even have to sell your soul in the process. Patrick was involved with entrepreneurial web pursuits before joining News Digital Media in what now seems like the distant past. When tasked with deciding his job title he jokingly suggested JavaScript Ninja. The title stuck and that’s now what the business cards say. Patrick spent some time being an engineer when he really wanted to be a philosopher. Somehow the little script

This session will look at the government collaborative tool Govdex, how it is currently used by agencies, what it provides, and how you can use it for your projects. GovDex is managed by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) in the Department of Finance & Deregulation. AGIMO is working with agencies to measure how GovDex can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their information technology investments, and to thereby generate a savings dividend to the Australian economy. GovDex is a key enabler to a whole of government approach to IT service development and deployment, featuring collaborative workspace, governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms. Ralph Douglas manages GovDex on behalf of AGIMO and previously worked as a Policy/Budget Analyst within the Budget Group at the Department of Finance and Deregulation. He has developed website content for s

Mapping and other mashups have taken the web world by storm - driving innovation in business and government alike. While much of the focus has been on the actual mashup applications, without the data to mashup, we have no mashups. Government, from local to Federal level, collect and manage a significant amount of data, across a very broad range of areas. But giving access to this data to web application developers has technical, policy and legal challenges. In this presentation, Jenny Telford of the ABS looks at these issues from their experience of opening up data from the Australian Census. Jenny Telford is currently the Director of Census Products and Services at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Jenny has worked in the government sector for over ten years in roles focused on the delivery of data and information through the internet and other channels. The ABS is one of the largest information providers in the country and freely provides data through the website on a range of social, economic a

Those initial stages of converting your company to web standards are much like trying to score that first kiss with the princess. You seduce them with the business benefits of web-standards development, and the rest of the arguments we have all read, written, and preached to anyone who will listen. But getting corporate web standards in place is just a sign that the real relationship is about to begin. The honeymoon is over, and now it’s time to figure out what has gone wrong and why the prince and princess now seem to be constantly bickering - when they were meant to live happily ever after. Scott draws on his experiences leading the development of eight large media web sites for News Digital Media to examine the ideals of web standards and how they translate within a large organisation. Learn how to make web standards work for you, when rules must be broken and how to deliver a final product that meets deadlines and still keeps project teams happy. Scott has had over 6 years experience developing websit

It’s no secret that just as the web has revolutionised business, the media, and many other parts of our lives, it is also revolutionising how governments and citizens interact, and how government provide services. But how to do it well is still something of a black art. In this keynote presentation, the lead of the W3C’s eGovernment initiative, José Manuel Alonso, looks at the opportunities the web provides governments, the challenges, old and new, the web poses, and the role of the W3C in helping to develop underlying, interoperable technologies with which to build these services. José’s presentation will cover best practices and methodologies for providing eGovernment services, and look at case studies of how governments and communities are connecting via the web around the world. José is the eGovernment Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium. Prior to joining the W3C, he was the Manager for the W3C Spain Office for three years and also served as the Advisory Committee Representative for CTIC (host of

Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet - can you achieve them consistently in your own projects? In this closing keynote, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve each and every one of them by learning to communicate through design. See why it’s important to build only what’s absolutely essential, apply instructive design, create error-proof interactions, surface commonly-used features, and more in this informative session that will change the way you work and enable your users to walk away from your software feeling productive, respected, and smart. Robert Hoekman, Jr., is the founder of Miskeeto, a product development and web design consultancy focused on socially-conscious projects that improve the world. He’s a passionate and outspoken interaction designer, writer, and user-experience evangelist who has written dozens of ar

The web is packed with information and knowledge, but too often our efforts to understand what’s important or relevant are stymied by antiquated methods of presentation. At the same time, more and more libraries, widgets and services are being released to help us present information visually. Problem solved? Not really. In this session Jeremy Yuille from ACID looks at information visualisation from a user experience perspective, overviewing new and old examples and how they can help (or hinder) the experience of using the web. You’ll see what kinds of amazing things you can do within the browser platform these days. More importantly you’ll learn why (and when) you’d want to use visualisation at all. Jeremy Yuille is a senior lecturer in Communication Design, digital media artist and interaction designer specializing in interactive audio visual systems. He has a background in Architecture, web design, music, and a masters exploring interactive sound designfrom RMIT’s Spatial Information Architecture Labora

Historically the mobile web has been a terrible experience, but things are starting to change. Really! We are now at the point that the mobile web is becoming easier to access, both on-deck & off-deck, there’s useful & tailored services out there, and killing some time on the train home doesn’t cost more than your weekly train ticket. We’ll check out the latest and greatest in the world of mobile web and what makes them different from the others. We will also cover the important things to keep in mind for making a better mobile web customer experience. Oliver draws on a background in psychology, experience in usability and understanding of mobile technology to identify key issues for client business strategy, and customers, and to recommend & design solutions through his consultancy Ideal Interfaces. He has consulted to clients such as Hutchison, Optus, Telstra, ninemsn, Orange, Holden, and Motorola. He has a wide range of experience evaluating and improving the end-to-end customer experience with mobile

So you’ve designed a fantastic website for your client, tested in all the major browsers and everything looks great. Now they want to send an email newsletter to all their customers, using the new design. No problem right? Just need to test in Outlook 07, and 06. Yahoo and Hotmail too, of course. Oh, and Gmail, Lotus Notes, AOL... Of course, the design may not work that well for an email anyway, and isn’t there some kind of anti-spam laws? Like it or not, HTML email is here to stay and the responsibility for doing it right belongs to web designers. Learn how to plan, design and build an email newsletter that will provide a great user experience to the recipients, and great value to your clients. Mathew is the community manager at Freshview, the team behind the popular email newsletter web apps, Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. In past lives he was a web designer for the Australian Stock Exchange and Priceline Europe among others. He runs Designers Inhouse, the list for web designers in non-design firms, a

Getting your company to adopt a user-centred design approach can be an uphill struggle. The first stage typically is to get them to agree to incorporate usability testing in to the development process, at a stage early enough to actually implement any design recommendations. The second stage is to convince them to do more ethnographic style research to understand the larger context of the task that the site is trying to support. The biggest challenge comes last - how to help the business owners make the mental leap between the in-depth findings from the research and the implications and opportunities it presents to your core business strategy and product roadmap. This is the challenge that the User Experience team at News Digital Media have been addressing. In this presentation, Jackie will discuss this issue in more depth and present examples of ‘design tools’ the team have been experimenting with to try and bridge this gap and help the business develop more user-centric strategies. Jackie graduated with

In our efforts to better understand the end users of the sites & applications we design, we generate a great deal of data. That data is useless to us until it has been analyzing and interpreted. This presentation looks at some of the methods & techniques we can use to make sense of user research data in a meaningful & rigorous way. The presentation will look at some of the common types of quantitative data collected during user research, and the statistical analysis methods we can employ to make the most of our data-gathering efforts. The session covers practical examples such as task completion rates, time-to-completion, page view comparison, as well as some basic concepts in statistics. Founder & Principal Consultant at Meld, Steve has over 13 years’ experience in the design and delivery of e-business services. Steve is a well-known practitioner in the area of experience strategy and architecture, writing articles for industry publications and presenting at local conferences. During his career Steve has

We all know that great content is a core part of the website user experience. So why is it so hard to find content that isn’t dull, lifeless and uninteresting - blah, blah, blah? Web content can be vibrant, interesting and fun. It can draw you in, fill your head and make you learn without having to think. And it’s not really hard to write. Three simple tricks can turn poor content into a great experience - remember that readers care more about themselves than you; write in real words with authentic voice; play show and tell. This presentation will discuss these principles, with plenty of funny and not-so-funny examples. You’ll go away with practical steps to make your writing kick-ass. And you won’t even have to think. Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect, mentor, writer and trainer. She has 8 years experience working in-house and as a consultant doing strategic and tactical design. She has designed large intranets & websites, ecommerce & search systems, business applications, design patter

These days people expect more from a website than a handy set of tools and a pretty interface - they want an experience. From the moment somebody enters your site they’ll be judging you on everything from the way the site looks to the tone of your error messages. And they won’t just be judging you against other sites. They will be judging you on every customer experience they have ever had, from the rude man at the train station to the lovely hotel clerk that checked them in on holiday. So in order to compete, we need to up our game and look at experiences both on and off-line. In this session Andy Budd will look at the 9 key factors that go into designing the perfect customer experience. By taking examples from the world around us, Andy will discuss how we can turn utilitarian experiences into something wonderful. Andy Budd is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. As the user experience lead at Clearleft, Andy spends his time helping clients improve their customers

We’ve always had metaphors to understand and design for the Web. The original conception of the Web was as a library of documents. Our building blocks were derived from spatial ideas: "breadcrumbs", "visits" and "homepages" were used to understand the medium. Website-as-application was a new and novel metaphor in the late 1990s. The spatial concept of navigation was replaced by concepts derived from tools: buttons performed actions on data. These metaphors inspire separate but complementary models of the Web. But the Web in 2008 has some entirely new qualities: more than ever it’s an ecology of separate but highly interconnected services. Its fiercely competitive, rapid development means differentiating innovations are quickly copied and spread. Attention from users is scarce. The fittest websites survive. In this world, what metaphors can be most successfully wielded? Matt takes as a starting point interaction and product design, with ideas from cybernetics and Getting Things Done. He offers as a metapho