Web Design Education Sucks

Posted in Design on June 1, 2009 by Lucian Tucker

Lucian Tucker shares his thoughts on how web design is currently taught.

I learned a lot more about web design outside of a classroom than I did inside one. And the more I learned, the bigger a difference I noticed in knowledge between my teachers and other design students, and myself. While my teachers and fellow students knew basic and essential design skills, I couldn’t help but think about how much of what was being taught would be well outdated by the time we all graduated. It’s a serious issue that effects many design students without them knowing.

One Approach

Blame it on the teachers

It’s admittedly easy to lay blame solely on teachers, who often feed students outdated information; it’s understandably difficult to teach courses on a constantly evolving subject. Nevertheless, teachers are part of the problem.

A recent article by teacher and designer Leslie Jenson-Inman on A List Apart entitled “Elevate Web Design at the University Level” dives into this matter. In the article, Jenson-Inman quotes James Archer of Forty, saying,

The culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry. I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them.

Fix the teachers

But what’s the solution? Jenson-Inman suggests a focus on teachers and connecting them to local web professionals in their area. To support this, she references designer and speaker Aaron Walter who believes, “Departments need to create a culture of learning that requires faculty to stay abreast of new topics. Schools should make it a priority to send faculty to conferences and training programs to ensure they’re not falling behind.”

Hire different teachers

Jenson-Inman also suggests hiring a different breed of teachers: “We also need to let go of the idea that professors in these disciplines must hold a master’s degree. The reality is that many web professionals are self-taught. A person with solid experience and a proven track record should be considered an appropriate candidate to teach web design and development in higher education.”

A Better Approach

Fix the students and teachers

I wholeheartedly agree with both of those ideas, and believe they should be put into practice. However, I’d like to suggest a third approach for consideration—instead of focusing only on teachers, universities should devise approaches that focus on professors and their students simultaneously, inspiring growth in both.

Raise passionate students

Universities need to foster a passion for design in their students. Students should to be encouraged to study current design standards and best practices after class. This way, even if teachers are not up-to-date, the students will be. These savvy students could then pass on there wisdom by bringing up standards and best practices in class when critiquing others designs, thus naturally spreading the knowledge to teachers and students in the class. If we can ignite a passion for design in students—enough to get them actively studying the craft—the fervor will spread up to teachers, giving them a larger incentive to learn more.

But how do you get students to develop a passion for design? A daunting task, but I have three suggestions.

Make them intern

First, encourage students to intern. Personally, I think internships should be mandatory at every university, because learning in a classroom and learning on the job are two completely different things, both of which students need exposure to.

Besides giving them an opportunity to put textbook learning to practice, internships place students in an environment where they are surrounded by professionals passionate about their field. Not only does this position them for a more holistic learning experience, but it may also draw an increased enthusiasm from the students.

Encourage extracurricular learning

Second, universities need to encourage students to study after class. Like most, many design students think of homework as simple task, doing only what is required for an assignment and nothing more.

Teachers need to augment these “simple task” with out-of-class lessons that require students to review design related magazines, web sites, and books to be discussed later in class. The goal here is to condition students to learn outside the classroom and hopefully, if design is something they really want to do, they will continue reading aside from homework.

Bring professionals to universities

Third, universities need to bring professional designers onto campuses to talk with students about their experiences and answer questions.

A designer came to my school once my sophomore year of college, but no one really attended. However, after encouraging my department head to make it mandatory, he created a class for juniors that required them to attend talks every Friday by someone in the industry. Afterwards, students had to ask the speaker questions and write a short paper reflecting on the talk.

As a result, students that were not sure what they wanted to do in design became inspired, and those who knew what they wanted to do were motivated when someone in that particular profession came.

Another thing that made this mandatory class great was the fact it was open to all teachers and students on campus. While its great to have teachers attend conferences like Walter suggests, bringing professionals to universities for both students and teachers to enjoy simultaneously allows for growth in everyone.

Conclusion

These suggestions follow the “teach a man to fish” method. There is an old Chinese proverb that goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” We need to train students to fish for knowledge, not just make sure they are feed the most current information at the moment. Otherwise, we are doomed to remain in the same position we are currently in, since, like we all already know, the web is an ever-changing place.

160. Education, Education, Education

Posted in Classic shows on April 8, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: We speak to Aarron Walter about teaching web standards. Ryan Carson starts a series on web applications and Paul talks about remote user testing.

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Housekeeping

A couple of quick pieces of housekeeping to kick off with…

Huge thanks to Ryan Taylor, Paul Stanton and Sarah Parmenter who did a stellar job standing in for myself and Marcus on last week’s show. They were actually far too good and I have already started receiving requests that they become the permanent hosts! Anyway, if you didn’t hear last week’s show then make a point of downloading it.
My second piece of housekeeping is a quick plug for Bamboo Juice, a grass roots conference taking place in Cornwall on the 24th April. Myself and Jeremy Keith are just two of the speakers in what will be a packed day. It’s so good to see smaller conferences like this springing up outside of London and so I would encourage as many of you as possible to attend. Best of all its only £99 (£79 for Boagworld listeners!)

News

To be honest, what with SXSW and my week’s holiday I am feeling completely out of touch with the web design world. Fortunately, Mr Stanton is continually updating our twitter feed with juicy stories. I have therefore picked 4 that caught my eye.

How to create a great web design CV

Poor old Smashing Magazine. People do like to tease them (myself included), but they write some damn useful articles. A recent example that caught my eye was ‘How To Create A Great Web Design CV and Resume?‘.

This post is essentially two articles in one. It starts by asking 10 designers to design a hypothetical CV for a fictional individual. Each designer writes a short paragraph about their chosen approach and you get to look at some nice examples.

The second part of the post provides 10 useful tips for creating a great CV. Suggestions include…

Make it printable
Have a summary
Link to online projects
Show your personality
Keep it simple and understandable

For the complete list of tips read the whole post.

Its a good post, but I am not sure whether producing a ‘designed CV’ is entirely necessary for web designers. If I was hiring a print designer then I would expect a CV to look impressive. However, if I am recruiting a web designer I think I would be just as happy receiving a cleanly designed CV that links to a stunning portfolio website.

There are a lot of differences between designing for the web and print. It is possible to be good at one and not the other. Therefore, a printed CV doesn’t tell me much about a persons capability as a web designer. That said, a well designed CV isn’t going to hurt your cause!

Design: Make it Memorable

One tip that could have gone in the Smashing Magazine article, is to make your CV ‘memorable’ and not just ‘flashy’. This picks up on the theme of a post over at 37 Signals entitled Designers: Make it Memorable.

The post talks about the difference between making something visually appealing and actually memorable. Too many sites are impressive but fail to leave a lasting impression. At one point in the post the author writes…

I started to recall those amazing Flash Sites of the Day. You know those sites that get passed around via IM in your office on a slow day? Simply amazing design and programming. Problem is: I can’t for the life of me remember what those URLs were much less the company/product that was being featured! Isn’t that the point with those sites? That the impact should be profound so that you remember Product or Company X?

This is a lesson that all those involved in the web design process need to learn. Whether we are designers or website owners, we have a tendency towards thing that provide the wow factor. However, often it is the thing that makes us go wow we remember rather than the message being communicated.

Statistics and website owners

Our next article of the week is an ‘all too brief’ post on web stats entitled How to Sell Statistics to Clients.

The post focuses on a common problem – most website owners know they should be tracking website statistics, but don’t really know what they are looking for. In fact the author writes…

In my experience, the loudness or frequency of a person’s request for web statistics is inversely proportional to their understanding of them.

That has often been my experience too.

He goes on to identify three ways that we as web designers can help rectify this problem. These are:

Providing cheat sheets that help the client understand terms like ‘hits’ ‘page views’ and ‘unique users’.
Add web metrics training into the budget of your projects.
Provide summaries and reports for the client on key metrics such as conversion rates or sales.

To be honest this is a much bigger problem than can be covered in a short blog post. Too many website owners think that having Google Analytics will solve their statistics needs. However, having the data is not the same as understanding it. If this information is misread it can lead to bad decisions about the future development of a site.

Specialist vs. Generalist: Who Wins?

The final post this week is of interest to pretty much everybody who listens to this show. It asks which is better – the Specialist or the Generalist.

This is an important questions for both web designers and website owners. As web designers we need to know whether we should be specialising in a specific area of web design. It is important for our careers and our businesses.

As website owners we want to know whether the pain of dealing with multiple specialist suppliers is worth the increased expertise you would receive over a generalist.

It has to be said the article is written mainly from the web designers perspective. However, I think there are lessons to be learnt for all sides.

The post outlines the pros and cons of both approaches, but ultimately comes down on the fence when it says…

There are advantages to being in both groups, but I think the only way to be truly successful is by being a little of both. You can be a specialist, but in order to be able to develop a profitable business, you may need to be able to supplement your specialty services with some add-on services that may not be exactly in line with your focus.

Personally, I think it depends on how you define specialist. The type and level of specialisation can vary massively and the way you position yourself will define your success. For example, you may specialise in a certain discipline (e.g. Ruby on Rails development) or in a specific market (Higher Education).

Ultimately, whether you are a website owner seeking an agency or a web designer forging a career, it is all about balance.

As a web designer, if you specialise too much you will not find work. If you generalise you cannot differentiate yourself.

As a website owner you want a web designer who is enough of an expert to deliver an outstanding solution, but you do not want so many specialists that your project turns into a nightmare.

Interview: Aarron Walter on Interact

Paul: Hello, and so joining me today is Aarron Walter. Good to have you on the show, Aarron.

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

Paul: And the reason we have Aarron on the show is because he is going to talk about a new initiative.. is ‘initiative’ the right word, Aarron?

Aarron: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Let’s go with that. A new initiative from the web standards project, called Interact. Now, let’s kick off, Aarron, by maybe you telling our listeners a little bit about what Interact is.

Aarron: So, whilst Interact is an open curriculum framework, basically we’ve been recognising that the Web Standards Project has been around for a long time and we’ve done a lot of things to try to get standards into industry. And to a certain degree we’ve made some big triumphs in that respect, but there are still a lot of websites out there that aren’t following standards and people that are sort of behind. And we saw the Achilles heal as to why that’s not happening, as really, education. So, you know, our medium’s really young and it hasn’t really found it’s bearings with how we’re going to marry industry and education, so whilst Interact is a curriculum that has a series of courses that teach not only web standards, but best practices.

So there’s of course the stuff that you would expect from WaSP which is the front-end development courses that teach progressive enhancement and semantic markup and that sort of thing. But we have six learning tracks that include foundations; there’s a course in there that’s like an intro to internet concepts and how people can use the internet to teach themselves and use RSS, that sort of thing.

So there’s front end development, there’s a design track, there’s server side development, there’s user science and then there’s also professional practice. So what we’re trying to do is create a collection of courses that are very modular, to try to get these into schools. And we recognise that not every school is just going to take the entire curriculum and integrate that into their program. You know, if you’re a Computer Science program maybe you’ll take a course or two, if you’re a design program you’ll take a course or two, or even just grab the assignments or look at our competencies.

Each course is based on competencies, which are the things a student has to master before they can pass a course. And then the evaluation methods: So each course has assignments, it has exam questions, it has readings that come from Operas own web standards curriculum – we’ve been collaborating with them. It has textbooks, it has pretty much everything that an educator could need to teach a particular topic.

Paul: Okay, so is this something that is then aimed entirely at educators, or if somebody wanted to get into web design and they were trying to learn it in their spare time, could they just go to this and use it in isolation by themselves?

Aarron: To some degree, I guess they could, but Operas web standards curriculum is really learner-centric, so if you’re trying to teach yourself, that’s probably the place to go. But ours is very much focused on educators, because we feel like there’s a lot of great resources out there on the web if someone wants to teach themselves, but there’s not a lot of great stuff for educators to get stuff into their courses.

Paul: So, when you say ‘educators’, I mean what kind of level are we looking at here? Earlier you mentioned schools. Are we talking about school age, or are we talking about higher education? What are we covering here?

Aarron: I’d say our primary target is higher education, colleges, universities, even training programs to some degree. But we are also seeing some of our content in high schools as well and we’d like to see that more. Especially foundations courses like the web design one course or the internet fundamentals course. If students could go into college with a solid foundation, then they can start to focus more on "What can I do with these techniques?" than theory and concept.

Paul: So is this design to be fairly international or is it quite U.S centric in the way that it’s written.

Aarron: We want it to be very international and the people that have worked together on this are from lots of different places. We’ve got some folks in Europe, Canada and of course some folks in the U.S, so it is in an international group that’s coming together and we’re actually working with WaSPs ILG group – that’s the International Liaison Group. And we’re working on, this year one of our big goals is to try to get a lot of our content translated to different languages.

Paul: Okay, so there will be multiple language versions of all of this as well at some point?

Aarron: That’s the direction we’re heading, yes.

Paul: So, I mean, how did this come about in the sense of, you know, well, how did you get involved in it for a start and what was the motivation behind it?

Aarron: So, I’ve been teaching for the past ten years in different schools in the U.S and colleges and universities, but I’ve also been working in the industry as well. And I got on WaSPs mailing list, I just joined the mailing list and started to talk to some folks and then they invited me to join – it was a year ago, I guess it was at the very beginning of 2008 – and so I joined the education task force who created the Interact project. And basically there were ideas about the curriculum and I’d heard lots of people say "Yeah, what we really need is, you know, education’s way behind" and they’re happy to point fingers and "We need a curriculum", but it just never was really transpiring from anyone coming from the industry and so we kind of just decided we need to do this. And I’ve helped create curricula before as a faculty member at the Art Institute of Atlanta and so I had some ideas and we had a really great group of folks that are in the education task force – people that are educators and people that are experts from the industries. So, yeah.. actually South by South West was where this all started, which is pretty amazing, of course there are lots of great people there. So Glenda Sims, who’s one of the heads of WaSP these days introduced me to Chris Mills from Opera who was working on his project and we kind of had some drinks at the Geeks Club bowling event and we just kind of went crazy talking about these ideas. And Steph Troeth then Leslie Jensen-Inman and we all had these ideas, and then we just set a goal for ourselves in 2008 at South by South West and we said "In a years time, we’re gonna be back and we’re gonna have a curriculum." and that’s what we did. This year we launched our curriculum at South By.

Paul: That’s quite an impressive turnaround for the amount of information that’s in there. How did you draw everything together? Where did it all come from?

Aarron: Well, we met every week online and we talked and we established a course template, which really helped us. The stuff that we really needed to put in these foundation courses, we all know what needs to go in there. It’s just a matter of getting around the pedagogy or the educational part of it. So we developed a template for assignments, a template for a course and a template for learning modules which are basically like, you know, a teacher could teach a concept like let’s say, HTML forms in a weeks time. So we developed those templates and then from there we just assigned courses to different people and we used a wiki and we just met regularly and.. I gotta say, you don’t have to have a huge group to develop a curriculum.You just have to have a few people who really have their heart in it and.. we have some amazing folks, so..

Paul: So, what kind of response are you getting so far from H.E institutions? Are they interested in adopting it? If they are, how are they going to go about that, because, I mean, my impression is that it always takes forever to get a curriculum approved at a university or whatever. So I’m just interested in how that process is going.

Aarron: Yeah, education is.. one of it’s benefits is that it’s slow to move, so once it gets a solid foundation it keeps that solid, but you know, one of it’s drawbacks is that it’s slow to move. And so we’ve got some schools that are really excited about it and generally the folks that.. you know, it’s only been a couple of weeks that this has been live, we’ve got some folks that are really excited about it and those are folks that were kind of headed in the same direction themselves. So we’ve gotten some responses from schools in Europe and some schools in the United States that are interested in pulling some stuff in. And we have a school that’s looking at using a lot of our content right now. So we’re in the early stages of trying to get this out there. I think the easiest part is building the curriculum, because we know what needs to go in there. The hardest part is getting it into schools. So one of our strategies is to get the endorsements of folks in the industry, so we’ve gotten endorsements from Google, from Yahoo, from Adobe, from W3C, from Opera, from Mozilla – they’re all just super excited about what we’re doing and that sort of brand recognition can help us get our foot in the door with schools. And of course going out to conferences, we’ve got folks at the European Accessibility conference right now, talking about it, so we’re just trying to get out there and let people know.

Paul: Excellent. That sounds brilliant. I mean, I know that a lot of people that listen to the Boagworld podcast – there’s a large number of students that we’ve got listening and I often get complaints about this, that what they’re being taught at university bears no resemblance to what they’re hearing on this podcast. And I’m hoping that that’s because the podcast is right and the university is wrong and not the other way around. So if they’re listening to this and they’re getting really excited about it and, you know, they’ve gone to your website and they’re seeing the curriculum – I’ve got it on front of me now and it does look really exciting – how do they make this happen in their institution? What would you encourage them to do?

Aarron: So, this is the interesting thing – that so many of us have complained about a problem, but there aren’t a lot of people that will take that complaint and turn it into action. So if you’re a student or if you’re an educator what we need you to do is, there’s a page that’s called Advocate Standards (http://interact.webstandards.org/advocate/) – you can get to it from the homepage of http://interact.webstandards.org. It kind of just describes what standards are, why they’re relevant to you and we need people to share that information with their teachers, we need people to share just this website with their colleagues and show them the testimonials of the people who believe in this and want students to come out of schools with these skills. So we need people to act in a bottom-up sort of way, you know, grass roots. Take this to your classroom, take this to your teacher, take this department chair and just let him know. That’s the most powerful thing that people can do right now.

Paul: I mean, what I’m quite excited about from looking at this curriculum is that it contains a lot more than "Here’s how you code in X language" or whatever and even has got more in it than just design and user experience stuff. All this stuff about professional practices is very exciting too. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit about that?

Aarron: Yeah, so professional practice, we want people to not only get the concrete skills of "I can code a standard compliant page" or "I can construct a usable website", but we want people to be able to present their about their work and you know, be able to survive in a real career in the web. And so professional practices is going to have a series of courses to do that. We’ve got some pretty exciting ones that are coming up. There’s ‘writing for the web’ – it’s going to be a really cool one, that Alan Hussain from a List Apart is going to be creating. And we have a presentation course that’s coming down the line. So, we’ve got a number of those coming up.

Paul: That’s quite interesting, you just said something that I hadn’t grasped which is that there’s more to come here. That this isn’t the end of the line. It sounds like you’ve got lots more that you’re still developing. Is that right?

Aarron: Yeah. We call it a living curriculum, because you never write a curriculum and then you’re done. Especially in our industry, things change so fast. is what of course we’re going to be working on this year. Our design track is light right now and we want to try and address that ASAP, so we’ve got Dan Rubin and Ethan Marcott, are working together to create a foundation design course, that is specific to what web designers need to understand. And we also have Dan Mall is going to be helping us with a Flash course and Aral Balkan is also going to help us with some flash stuff too. We have a lot of stuff going on this year for new courses, so we hope next year at South By when we see everybody that we’ll have a brand new stack to add to Interact.

Paul: Excellent, so do you kind of envisage, from an institutional point of view that, like we were saying, it takes a long time for a curriculum to get approved and that part of the problem has always been that, by the time it’s approved it’s out of date, when it comes to the web. So is the idea that you’re going to get institutions to buy into the Interact curriculum in its evolving nature so that they always get the most up to date version of it. Is that the kind of plan? They’re not grasping one moment in time from it, if that makes sense?

Aarron: Yeah, exactly and we want to take some of the hard work out of being a teacher. I speak from experience, there’s so many things you have to keep track of and trying to keep pace with a lot of changing technologies and concepts, that’s hard on top of the umpteen other plates you’re spinning. So that’s exactly what’s going to happen, is that our courses, they’re not chiseled in stone, they’re published on the web, they’re in an expression engine and we’ll change those as they need to be changed. But that said, we need to strike a balance, because we can’t be chasing every new technology all the time, we have to evaluate and there has to be foundational concepts that remain steady. Separation of presentation and content, that’s steady foundation concept. But new technologies or techniques, they might change.

Paul: Okay, I mean, the whole area of education and web design is massively exciting and there’s so much going on at the moment in so many different fields. I mean, from your perspective, what else out there is really exciting you at the moment that you’re seeing.

Aarron: There’s so much, I just feel like last year that I just saw so many companies, organisations, individuals that, it seems that everyone just was pissed and they just walked out their house and they were headed in one direction until it was like everyone sort of meets up in one big mob. And so, what Opera’s doing, what Chris Mills has done with the 55 articles that he’s brought together and edited for Opera Web Standards Curriculum, that’s huge. Those are all rolled into WaSP Interact as our recommended reading, so that was fantastic. Yahoos Juku project, if you’ve heard of this it’s quite amazing. Nick Fogler, who’s the running Juku – Yahoo actually has a training program, where they bring students that are not employees, they’re not hiring them. They bring them in and they train them to be front end engineers over the course of a few months. And they’re doing it because they’re trying to solve this problem on their own. So, we’re talking with them about how they’re solving problems and looking to collaborate and discuss what we can learn from them. John Allsopp who runs Web Directions (the conference series), he brought myself and Chris Mills and Steph Troeth together with a number of other experts and we did Ed Directions, which was a day long workshop that taught teachers how to teach these concepts in their classroom. So there’s just so much stuff that’s happening right now and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Paul: Exciting stuff. It sounds like it’s a really good time and it’s great to have you on the show. How you manage to fit all of this in alongside earning a living too is quite beyond me, but it’s really good that so many people are volunteering and pitching in. That’s great. Okay, let’s get you back on the show, I guess in a years time and sees what’s changed. But thank you very much for coming in now and I will talk to you again soon. Thanks.

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

Thanks goes to Andrew Marquis for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

We have two emails this week dealing with two totally unrelated subjects.

Remote user testing

Our first email is from Steve. He writes…

Catching up on past podcasts, I listened to the episode on User Testing (#150). A method I’ve used that I haven’t heard tossed around much is remote user testing using a screen sharing program like GoToMeeting.

I used this for usability testing of our Intranet and it has several advantages:

No need for people to come to central testing facility, or you to go to them.

The user is at their own computer, so more comfortable.

Ability to record the entire session (screen and audio) so others can look at it later.

Tester can conduct testing while in his underwear only (I didn’t do this, but you could.)

What do you think of this method?

Sounds interesting although it would not be my preferred approach.

It’s easy to become a snob when it comes to usability testing and so let me make it entirely clear – any usability testing is better than none.

If you have no budget for user testing, test on friends and family. If time is tight, test on a colleague sitting nearby.

In the same way, if you are having trouble arranging sessions then use Steve’s approach. Something is always better than nothing.

That said, I do have some concerns with remote testing. These include…

It sets a minimum bar of technical competency. A user has to be able to connect to the system in order to participate. I know this would have been beyond the capabilities of some test subjects I have worked with.
It is less personal. Face to face usability testing puts users much more at their ease and allows you to build a relationship that facilitates honest feedback.
It does not allow you to read non-visual signals. Users will often pull a face or shift their positions when they are frustrated. As a facilitator you need to be able to see these signals and ask what they mean.
You are not seeing exactly what the user is seeing. You can only see their screen. You cannot see other distractions such as TV in the background. You cannot see the position of their keyboard and mouse. You have a limited field of view.

My preferred approach is to test in people’s homes. Not only are the users more relaxed, you also get a unique glimpse into their world. You see where they access the web, you learn about their home environment and even gain a better understanding of their character.

However, we do not always live in a perfect world and so would definitely use remote testing if better options were not available.

Finding a job

Our second email is a rather despondent one from Andrew…

I have one question, In the past you’ve talked about hiring new for staff, but as far as I can tell you’ve never discussed how to look for a job. I’m currently looking for a career in the industry, but I can’t get a resume to any company or even talk to someone of said company. Almost all the businesses I’ve approached (or at least tried to) either work from home, are no longer at that address, or no longer in business, and actually are just freelancers. And when I find a job posting online its for someone far more experienced then I am. I’m completely demoralized.

You have my sympathy Andrew and I have to say its a tough time to to break into any new sector including web design.

I am also probably not the best person to answer this question. I have been completely unemployable for some time now due to my ill defined skillset and opinionated character :)

So, I am going to try something different with this question. If you have some advice for Andrew, post a comment below. That way we can get the Boagworld community helping each other.

In the meantime here are a few random ideas from me…

Give up on the cold calling technique. Randomly contacting agencies is largely a waste of time. You have to get amazingly lucky to contact an agency who happens to be currently recruiting.
Try for an internship. Admittedly you will not get paid, but it is a foot in the door. You get a chance to improve your skills and also get to know the people in the industry within your area.
Be willing to move. There are jobs out there but they are often further a field.
Put yourself in a neat little box. Potential employers need to know what you do. Are you a designer, a coder or a server side developer? Companies don’t know what to do with people who know a bit about everything.
Start networking. The best place to find job opportunities is by attending conferences and meetups. Even if you cannot afford the conference itself, turn up at the parties and stand in the halls. Just get yourself out there.
Register with recruitment agencies. As an employer I hate recruitment agencies because they cost me money. However, we do still sometimes use them and it doesn’t cost you anything to be listed with them.
Ensure your website is perfect. The first thing I do when I look at a potential employee is check out their website. Their site has to be outstanding. It needs to look amazing, be well coded and rich with great content that demonstrates a passion for the web.

Hopefully that helps Andrew and keep an eye on the comments for more advice.

Series: Building A Better Web Application by Ryan Carson

Ryan Carson: Hi I am founder of Carsonified a small web company in Bath, England. I am an American as you can probably tell, as for living in England I have been here about nine years. So a little bit of history about us real quick so you know who I am. I have a computer science degree and I have been involved in building four web apps and we are building a fifth truvay.com which will be released later in 2009, and we have sold two of our webapps dropsend.com and heyamigo.net. So the stuff that I am going to share with you today are lessons I have learnt the hard way basically as we have built web apps.

So the first thing I want to talk about is the Admin area that you will build for your web app. What a lot of people don’t know is that the Admin area is really the key to good customer service. If you haven’t enabled really easy customer service then it makes it hard to actually please your customers when they have problems so the first one to make sure you build into your admin for your web app are one click refunds so if someone calls and complains and says hey I am having trouble this month I am really frustrated please help you want to be able to just go into the admin do a search for their email address, their name or their company or anything and bam one click and refund their last invoice and what this does is it gives you, it gives you the ability to just make them happy right away. With a lot of web apps these days on recurring billing you will probably be charging people 5,10,15, $20 a month so losing that amount of revenue in return for really making a customer happy is super important. So make that easy for yourself to refund that money.

The second thing I would make it easy to do is have one click password reset that automatically sends out email with the new password, so with Dropsend it was really hard to reset people’s passwords and that was the number one request people had problems with, they couldn’t remember their password. So if I was to do it again what I would do is I would actually build the admin so I could forward an email from somebody presuming they had sent it from the email address of the account, forward it into Dropsend or the admin and it would automatically know that what it needed to do is reset the password for that email and then it sends out a new one so literally you do not even have to visit the admin area to reset someone’s password you just forward an email that would be amazing, so that’s the way I would do it next time.

The next thing I would do is also doing a one-click resend invoice. So a lot of people they don’t understand they can go into their "My Account" area of a web app to see their past invoices and what they will do is they will just email you and say hey you know I need last month’s invoice. If it is hard for you to find that or send that it is going to make you less likely to help that person so I would do a search on the email address show a list of invoices bam one click and it emails them a pdf version of the invoice. That’s another, that leads me onto another area that I would like to talk about that is invoicing. If you are doing recurring billing sort of every month billing your customers make sure that you are not re-inventing the wheel I would recommend a web app called Spreedly.com and what it is basically it is a web service for recurring billing they have done all the hard work, written all the code, the code for the Dropsend recurring billing was at least I think 1200 lines of PHP and it was good solid code but it was really hard and painful to write. So I would recommend don’t re-invent the wheel use a service like Spreedly because it is making calls to an API if later you decide you don’t want to use a service like Spreedly any more that layer has been abstracted out so you could replace it with your own billing system or another one and it won’t kill you, but I would say hands down don’t rebuild reoccurring billing it is a real pain in the ass.

The last tip I would say about your admin area is make sure that it is easy to give your customers credits. you want to be able to login search for an email address and just give them, hey I want to give them five bucks towards next month, ten bucks just to make them happy and you will have lots of happy customers. So that is my five minutes of tips, thanks Paul for letting me be a part of this. Take care Bye.

10 ways to Battle Site Bureaucracy

Posted in Web strategy on February 17, 2009 by Paul Boag

Running a large institutional website is frustrating. Your site is often held back by internal politics and bureaucracy. Let me show you 10 ways to cut through the crap and get results.

My recent post ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ generated a huge number of comments both on my own blog and on Smashing Magazine. I seemed to tap into an undercurrent of frustration that exists within the industry.

However, although there was a lot of agreement about the points I raised, there was also resignation. There was a feeling that little could be done to overcome these problems because institutional websites are too entrenched in bureaucracy and politics.

Although I can sympathise with this position and have myself suffered from the problem, I am not one to give up! Over the last decade of working on these sites, I have developed a number of techniques which (sometimes) help to smooth their evolution. Hopefully they will help you too.

1. Educate and inform

At the heart of any technique for dealing with politics and bureaucracy has to be education.

Although there are occasions when people are just ‘trying to be difficult’, in most cases their objections are based on ignorance.

You cannot expect people to be as knowledgeable as you about the web. If you want people to make informed, sensible decisions you must educate them.

Education is also not just about giving them the background to a specific decision so they understand ‘why you are right’. It is about increasing your organisations general understanding of the web.

Run workshops, publish email newsletters, do anything that informs people about the latest web innovations. Increasingly I am invited into organisations to run short seminars on everything from accessibility to facebook! This kind of ongoing education means people are better informed when tough decisions need to be made.

2. Hold stakeholder interviews

One technique that we find very effective at Headscape are stakeholder interviews.

Stakeholder interviews involves meeting individually with anybody who has a ‘stake’ (interest) in the website. This is typically members of the marketing and IT teams, as well as departmental heads and senior management. However it should also include suppliers, customers and users of your website.

These one-to-one meetings provide two opportunities…

Requirements gathering – It is easy for website owners to live in isolated bubbles, separate from the rest of the organisation. These meetings provide an opportunity to understand the real needs and objectives of others within the business. It will highlight ways that your website can help, which you might not have previously considered.
To be inclusive – Stakeholder interviews offer a ‘political benefit’ as well. By meeting with people individually they feel included in the process. They feel their opinions are valued and listened to (which they should be!). People are much less likely to object if they have been consulted before a decision is reached.

People often complain about the website in stakeholder interviews. Allow them to do this and avoid becoming defensive. They will feel more favourably towards you and your website, if you listen to their concerns. We all like to be heard.

3. Avoid group committee meetings

The key to stakeholder interviews is their one-to-one nature. Group meetings can be very destructive. This is for a number of reasons…

The need to defend – In large organisations that have internal politics, everybody feels the need to defend their own ‘turf’. If somebody criticise the website, you are forced to defend it to ‘save face’ in front of others. Equally others feel the need to defend their own positions for the same reason.
A tendency to compromise - When two individuals in a group reach an impasse, the others try to find a compromise. This kind of ‘design on the fly’ inevitably leads to a bland solution. It will neither offend or inspire anybody. Unfortunately, to create a successful website you need to make tough choices that some will not like. A group approach does not lend itself to this.
A loss of control – It is easy for you to loss control in a group meeting. One-to-one meetings work better because you can divide and conquer. Only you know what the other stakeholders said. This puts you in charge and allows you to ‘cheery pick’ the feedback you receive. In a group meeting things can easily get out of hand and decisions are made without your buy-in.
The dominant individual - Every group has one or two dominant individuals. These are the people who bounce the rest of the group into agreeing with them, forcing their agenda through. A dominant individual drowns out quieter members, who become resentful later that nobody listened to them. Meeting with people individually prevents this because the dominant individuals cannot force their point of view on others or overwhelm quieter ones.

One cannot expect a larger organisation to run its website without some form of committee. However, there is no reason why that committee needs to meet as a group.

4. Target your influencers

Talking of dominant individuals, another successful tactic is to target influencers.

An influencer is somebody that others respect and follow. Their opinion is incredibly valuable and if you can sway them to your cause, others will fall into line. However, be careful not to confuse dominant people with influencers. A dominant person will ‘bully’ others into publicly agreeing with them. An influencer will fundamentally alter somebody’s attitude.

Identify who influences your decision makers and speak to them personally. This person might not even be a decision maker themselves, but they carry enough clout to make them worth your time.

When you meet with your influencers, really listen to what they have to say. They often have valuable insights which may change your strategy significantly. Do not go into a meeting with an influencer simply intent on pushing your own agenda. Instead try and shape your approach around their perspective.

If you get an influencer enthusiastic about your project it can make a huge difference.

5. Use third party experts

A variation on the influencers technique is to back up your ideas with third party expert opinion. This can be done in two ways…

Reference the work of a third party expert – For example, if you wish to discourage internal stakeholders from overwhelming users with options on the homepage, you might refer them to Steve Krug or Jakob Nielsen who have both written on the subject.
Hire a third party expert - I often find myself brought into companies simply to confirm what in-house staff have already been saying. Unfortunately, decision makers often doubt the opinion of their web team because they either undervalue them or feel they are pushing a hidden agenda. An independent expert can add creditability to your opinions.

Of course, for this approach to work the stakeholders need to respect the expert. There is no point referencing Steve Krug or hiring Jakob Nielsen, if the decision makers have never heard of them. It is often necessary to sell the credibility of your expert first.

6. Rely on evidence, not opinion

Sometimes it is better to avoid personal opinion entirely (even if that is the opinion of an expert). In such cases statistics can be your friend.

Nothing is more powerful for driving home a point than referring decision makers to Google Analytics. However web stats are not the only evidence you can draw upon. Others include…

Surveys and polls are an excellent way of getting feedback from your users that can then be presented to decision makers.
Twitter search and Google Alerts can be used to gauge how people view your site and brand. These can be powerful testimonials to present decision makers.
Heat maps can be used to take some of the subjectivity out of design.

Of course one of the most powerful evidence you can present is the results of usability testing.

7. Focus on the user

As website owners we know that a successful website is user focused. However, not all our decision makers will understand this and even those who do may get ‘distracted’ sometimes.

It is therefore important to constantly move our decision makers away from their own personal preferences and back on the needs of users.

User testing is one way of doing this. Being able to show decision makers how real users interact with your website is incredibly powerful. It helps them empathise with the needs of users rather than thinking only about their own agenda. Play them video clips of users interacting with your site or at the very least quote them the feedback of users.

However, even if you involve decision makers in user testing, they can still get caught up in their own agendas. One gentle way of preventing this is to word your questions carefully. When you need a decision makers response to something don’t ask…

What do you think?

Instead ask them…

How do you think users will respond to this?

This will keep them focused on the needs of users.

8. Control the feedback

As well as wording questions carefully there is also a need to control the feedback you receive. This is important if you want the decision makers to make considered decisions.

Take for example design sign off – never ask a decision marker if they like a design. It is too broad a question that will lead to a plethora of uninformed and ill considered responses. Instead ask them more specific questions such as…

Does the design conform to the brand guidelines?
Does the design meet the needs of our users?
Does the design emphasis the right content?
Does the design have a clear call to action?
Does the design fulfil our business objectives?

This prevents the decision maker from falling back on their gut reaction (i like it / I dislike it). It forces them to focus on the issues that define whether the design is successful or not and ignore personal preference for specific colours or layout.

Of course, sometimes you will not like the answer to these specific questions. When that happens you need to ask why.

9. Ask why

This is probably the most powerful of all the techniques I have listed here and yet by far the simplest.

When you face opposition to your plans, always ask why. Too often we switch to defensive mode and focus on better communicating our own position rather than understanding the opinion of the person opposing us. This is a mistake.

The question why is powerful for three reasons…

It informs – Often the objection raised initially is not the true underlying issue. By asking why you get to the root of the problem and that allows you to offer alternative solutions. Asking why ensures you have all the information required to deal with the issue.

It can confound – Most of us make decisions based on an intuitive leap. We do not always think through our decisions and so find it hard to articulate the underlying reason. By asking why you force people to stop and consider their logic. When they struggle to express the underlying reasons, they weaken their position.

It shows interest – By asking why you allow them to have their say. You demonstrate an interest in their opinion and establish empathy with their point of view.

Ultimately asking why avoids the disagreement from turning into an argument with entrenched position.

10. Avoid confrontation

I avoid confrontation at all costs. Going head-to-head with somebody especially in front of their colleagues achieves nothing. You can rarely get somebody to shift their position through confrontation.

Once a disagreement escalates into a confrontation, nobody can afford to ‘lose face’ by backing down. It becomes a matter of ego, where pride dictates the outcome. Your website will almost certainly be caught in the cross fire.

A better approach is to agree. The word yes can be immensely powerful. Whenever somebody suggests something to me, no matter how stupid, I will do the following…

Acknowledge and thank them for their input.
Say yes we could do that.
Go on to explain the consequences if we did.
Offer an alternative which could achieve the same aims.

In short I tend to go around problems rather than bashing my head against them. I always look to work with others rather than against them.

Conclusions

So there you go, 10 techniques for battling site bureaucracy. I do not claim these techniques are foolproof. Neither do I suggest they are always appropriate. However, they are useful techniques in your arsenal which you may want to call upon from time to time.

Finally, this is not a definitive list. I could have written more but then it wouldn’t have been a ‘top ten list!’ However, I would be interested to hear what works for you. Post your techniques in the comments.

10 things a web designer would never tell you

Posted in Design on February 5, 2009 by Paul Boag

These arty-farty web designers are always telling you how your site should look. Don’t listen to them! Don’t they know the customer is always right? Here are 10 things a ‘good web designer’ would never tell you about choosing the perfect design.

Working with web designers is a nightmare. You will never meet a more opinionated bunch of snobs. They are always going on about ‘white space’, ‘composition’ and how they went to art college (like that counts as a proper education!). When it comes to choosing the design of your site, they are the last people you should listen to.

What follows are 10 things you need to know about managing a web design project, that no web designer will ever tell you!

1. Always request speculative design up front

Before you pick which web designer to work with make sure they submit some designs for your site upfront. Whatever you do, don’t pay for this work. If they really want to work with you they will swallow the cost.

Some of them might start bleating about not doing ‘speculative design’ and that only designers desperate for work would do design for free. Personally I ignore this BS. If they are ‘so successful’ that they can’t spare the time to do unpaid work for me, then I don’t want to work with them.

What is great about speculative work is it is not constrained by ‘understanding the business’ or ‘user feedback’. Its all about creativity. Surely a good web designer can come up with great work out of thin air, even if they don’t know who the target audience is and have never spoken to the client. I want something that makes me go wow. Who cares if it ‘fulfils my business objectives.’ The more bells and whistles the better!

2. Don’t get hung up on end users

Web designers are always obsessing about the end users. They worry that users won’t like this or that they won’t understand that. Its pathetic.

People like to be told what to do and they will ultimately follow your lead. I once had a web designer complain because I wanted to collect users phone numbers on a sign up form for our newsletter. Apparently ‘users’ don’t like being asked for unnecessary personal information. Can you believe it! How the hell am I going to cold call these people if I don’t have their phone numbers. Sometimes you wonder how these idiots survive in business.

Instead of focus on user needs, focus on what you can squeeze out them. Times are tough these days and so you need to maximise your returns on every one of these sheep. You have to be tough in business.

3. Rely on your gut instinct, not testing

Talking of users – what is this obsession with user testing? Just sounds like a way for web designers to charge more money if you ask me.

After all you have probably been working in your job for years. You know all there is to know about your audience, right? Even if you did run user test sessions, stakeholder interviews or whatever other made up technique is the latest fashion, its not going to tell you stuff you do not already know.

Admittedly, these sessions occasionally turn up stuff you might not expect, but can you really trust the results? Surely your years of experience count for more than a few hours of testing.

Of course, the other problem is that user testing is massively expensive. I heard from a friend that it involves usability labs, videos, two way mirrors and ‘facilitators’ (whatever those are). That all sounds pricey to me!

Some web designers will tell you that they do it by going into user’s homes and talking with them in their own environment. They justify this by saying you learn more because the user is relaxed and you can see where they live. Personally, it doesn’t sound very professional and if it isn’t expensive, how could it possibly give good results?

4. Form a committee to provide feedback

Admittedly I maybe sounding a little arrogant, but I really am not. I think it is important to get the opinions of other people. I just think web designers are not the people you should be asking. They live in a techy bubble and do not understand what it is like to be an ordinary user like us.

I suggest forming a committee to approve any designs produced. After all web designers keep telling us that design is subjective. That means you shouldn’t rely on the opinion of just one person (especially if that person is a designer). What you need is a committee to thrash out what the site should look like.

Ideally you would call a meeting with the designer in the room and get them to produce something there and then under the direction of the committee. However, most designers tend to get ‘emotional’ when you suggest that. So instead I recommend giving them the freedom to produce something themselves and then discuss it as a group.

Now inevitably this will lead to disagreement. Some people will like the colour, others will hate it. This is natural. What you need to do is seek a compromise that will please everybody. If you can have the designer on hand to try out new ideas in the meeting this will really help. Before you know it you will have a design everybody can tolerate (although admittedly not everybody will like it).

5. Become obsessed with detail

“The devil is the detail they say. Nowhere is that more true than on a website. Unfortunately you cannot rely on a web designer to have that attention to detail. Its hardly their fault. They are ‘arty’ people after all and their brains just don’t work that way.

If you want your design to be ‘just so’ you will need to micro manage every aspect of the design process. Don’t be afraid to tell your designer exactly what you need them to do. Be as specific as possible. After all, they call themselves pixel pushers.

Also insist on consistency across all browsers. Web designers tend to be sloppy in this area. It might look great in Safari (apparently this is a browser – who knew!) but in Netscape 4 it looks awful. They will give you some rubbish about not all browsers being capable of rendering modern design. They will say that as long as it is usable on all browsers, that is what matters. The hell it is! You don’t put up with that kind of rubbish in print design, so why should you on the web?

6. Enforce corporate style guides to the letter

Your organisation has a corporate design guide for a reason and yet web designers think they can flaunt the rules. They will talk about the differences between print and the web. They will go on about colour on screen, web typography and dots per inch. However, the real reason they want to ignore your guidelines is because their egos will not allow them to work within limitations.

You must take a firm hand over this issue and stick to the letter of the law. Enforce pantone numbers and ensure they use corporate typefaces. They might mutter something about limited fonts on the web but this is just not true. I know for a fact that sites built in flash can use any font you want. With that in mind I always recommend that sites are built entirely with Adobe Flash.

Oh yes, and watch out for abuse of the logo. Most style guides say that the logo must have a certain number of millimetres around it to allow ample white space. I recommend taking a ruler and measuring the space around your monitor on screen. Better still, print out the design so you can be even more accurate.

7. Fit as much on the homepage as possible

Let’s take a moment to discuss the design of your homepage in particular.

Without a doubt the homepage is by far the most important page on your site. If I look at my own website statistics the majority of people who come to my site never get further than the homepage (I have no idea why this is the case!) This is a problem.

The solution is obvious when you also consider the importance of minimising the number of clicks a user has to make to reach content – Put as much content as possible on the homepage.

This also solves the problem of everybody within your organisation wanting homepage real estate. Instead of endlessly discussing whose content is most important, simply put it all on there.

Of course with so much content on the homepage people might complain their content is lost in the crowd. The best solution in such situations is to either make it bigger or animate it. I find flashing text particularly effective.

8. Ensure all content appears above the fold

Unfortunately you are limited in the amount of space available on the homepage. This is because all content has to sit above the fold.

The fold refers to the point where users have to start scrolling. As we know users do not scroll. In 1994 Jakob Nielsen found that only 10% of users would scroll when presented with a web page. 15 years on I see no reason why this would have changed.

Some designers will tell you that the fold is a myth. They will argue that it does not exist because different browsers, resolutions and toolbars all effect the vertical available space. All I know is that on my computer I have 470px of vertical space before I have to start scrolling. I am a fairly typical user and so you should ensure all content is within this area.

The only exception to this rule is if your boss has a different amount of vertical space. If he is going to be looking at the website I suggest designing for his browser. Alternatively simply print out the site for his approval.

9. You only need to test in Internet Explorer 6

Web designers like to claim they need to spend hours testing on every browser combination. However, in reality this is just another way to extract more money from you.

All you really need to do is build the site so it works on Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer is the most dominant browser having by far the largest market share. Although there are different versions of IE most companies run IE6. As corporate customers are the people with the real money you should concentrate your testing on their browser. Also surely if it works in IE6 it will work in IE7! You can trust Microsoft not to break the web.

If you want to be super cautious, add a message to your site telling users it is optimised for internet explorer. Users can then download that browser if they want to see your site.

10. SEO is more important than design

Getting the design of your website right is important. However it is no use if nobody sees it. Your number one priority has to be driving traffic to your site.

The best way to do this is through search engines. Fortunately there are a plethora of tricks and techniques to fool Google into ranking you highly. You can use hidden text, cloaking pages, redirects, doorway pages and keyword stuffing to force you up the ranking. Google kindly list these techniques in their Web Master Guidelines.

The problem with some of these techniques is that they undermine the design and content of your site. They can also affect the usability and accessibility. However, this is a sacrifice worth making in order to keep those new users rolling in.

Some web designers place a higher emphasis on repeat traffic. However, in my experience it is hard to get a user to return a second time. This is almost certainly because they have seen everything already. Why would they come back? Concentrate your efforts on creating a steady stream of new users.

Conclusions

If I could leave you with a single thought from this post it would be this – your web designer does not work with you, he works for you.

You need to take control of the design process. Its your site and you should get the design you want. The role of the designer is to implement your idea. Do not allow him to drag you down into endless discussions about ‘users needs’, ‘accessibility’ and ‘usability’. These are all distractions from the primary aim – to impress your boss and earn that next promotion.

This article was based on a presentation I gave at Bathcamp and is a sick twist version of content taken from my book ‘The Website Owners Manual‘

Video: Introduction to WCAG 2

Posted in Accessibility on January 26, 2009 by Paul Boag

I recently gave an internal presentation at Headscape about WCAG 2. A number of people expressed an interest in seeing it so I made a point to record it.

At the end the presentation I references a stripped down version of the guidelines found here.

I also refer to a quick reference guide to WCAG 2 that can be found here.

Apologises

Apologises for the poor audio quality of this video. Unfortunately the decision to record the presentation was made at the last minute and so we didn’t have a proper mic setup arranged. You can also tell it is not quite as slick as my normal presentations :)

~~I would also like to apologise for the lack of transcript of this video.~~ Again, it was not my initial intention to put this video online as this was an internal presentation containing my initial thoughts on WCAG 2. I am still learning a lot about the new guidelines and will publish a more considered article when I have a better understanding of the subject.

Feedback

On that subject, I would be interested to hear your feedback on the thoughts I present. Do you agree with my interpretation of the new guidelines? Have I misunderstood anything? Are there other elements I should have addressed? Your thoughts would be appreciated in the comments.

Update: We now have a transcript!

Thanks go to Anna Debenham who braved the horrendous audio to transcribe the presentation. If you cannot face the video we do at least now have a written version!

Paul: Ok, this has worked out a little bit weird because the idea initially with this presentation was that it was really about bringing us up to speed with WCAG2 now that WCAG2 has been released. But I made the mistake of mentioning it online and several people said “ooh, can you record that?” so now it’s a little bit of both, a little bit of a presentation to you guys and a little bit of a presentation that will go on the web.

Paul: So as you guys probably know, WCAG2 has now been released, and as accessibility is a big part of what we deliver and we talk a lot about accessibility, we need to be up to speed on it and we need to know what we’re doing. Obviously accessibility has become such a part of what we do day in and day out that we don’t necessarily think too much about it, it’s almost an intrinsic part of what we do, but with changes to WCAG2, or with the arrival of WCAG2, there have been differences, changes, things that have altered, so I want to make sure that everybody is up to speed with it. Feel free to butt in with questions, that’s absolutely fine.

Audience: Will the video be able to see the screen?

Paul: The video will be able to see the screen. Ok, so, WCAG2. Basically, WCAG1 came out in 1999 which is a good old time ago, in Internet terms that’s like forever, and there was a real need to make some changes and improve WCAG1. Let me just pop back and just explain.

The Journey to WCAG2

Paul: So, yeah, like I said, WCAG1 came out in 1999, it quickly dated as technology evolved, and some of the guidelines actually became harmful in a way. So you guys know that for example, we don’t always take note of what they say about Access Keys, we don’t always take note of what they say about “make sure you put text in an empty form field” and things like that. And WCAG1 was very much built with HTML in mind, and obviously the web is a lot broader than that and there are a lot more formats about. But unfortunately development of WCAG2 was very slow, and also fraught with controversy. I mean, famously with Joe Clarke who is an accessibility expert wrote on A List Apart “to hell with WCAG2″ because it basically had become a bit of a joke, because it was very generic; they were trying to write a set of guidelines that really made no effort to mention specific technology because they didn’t want it to date like WCAG1, but the result is it became unreadable and nobody could understand it.

WCAG2 Reborn

Paul: But, things did change. Major changes were made to the WCAG2 draft and things did improve dramatically. They really listened to the community, and the language in it now is much clearer. So what I want to do now is talk a little bit through what WCAG2 includes and what it doesn’t, and how we’re then going to go about implementing it and how it affects us.

Principles

Paul: Ok, so let’s look at the structure of WCAG2. Basically WCAG2 has 3 tiers to it that you need to know about. Tier number 1 is the idea of Principles. So this is kind of the most generic of the tiers, you know, it’s really kind of aimed at the kind of things you would tell a board of directors that doesn’t really understand anything technical, that doesn’t really understand accessibility at all. And there are 4 principles which are the foundations of web accessibility and these principles I’ll come onto a little bit later.

Guidelines

Paul: Underneath each of those principles are Guidelines. So, within each principle there are 3 or 4 guidelines or a number of guidelines that is different for each principle. But there are a total of 12 guidelines, and these are goals that you should be working towards in order to make your content more accessible to users.

Success Criteria

Paul: Under each guideline, there are Success Criteria. So now we’ve really hit the nitty-gritty, these are kind of specific, measurable goals that you’ve got to achieve. And this is how you judge whether your site is WCAG2 compliant, if you like. So, this is the really important level if that makes sense, but it’s organised within this hierarchy of guidelines and principles.

Techniques

Paul: Now, actually, there is kind of a 4th tier as well which is techniques. So you’re trying to, maybe as designers, you’re trying to conform to the Success Criteria, well there’s a whole load of different ways and different techniques that you can do that and you could read about those, and you could make up your own techniques if you wanted to, but there are some laid down that can help you get going.

Working with WCAG2

Paul: So those are the 3 levels that WCAG2 is built around. Now let’s dive into those a little bit. I had to think about how much detail I want to go into in this room. Obviously we don’t want to go into every technique that you could possibly apply and we don’t even want to go into necessarily every success criteria. That’s really for you guys to look through afterwards. What we are going to do is look at those guidelines and those principles, and hopefully help you to understand where WCAG2 stands over stuff.

Perceivable

Paul: Ok, so, the first… heh, totally illegible text, isn’t that great. Very accessible!

Audience: (laughter)

Paul: So the number 1 principle is Perceivable, and that’s 1 of your 4 principles that you’ve got here. And perceivable is basically talking about “information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways that they can perceive”

Audience: (laughter)

Paul: Unlike that! (points to presentation)

Audience: (laughter) Is the rest of the presentation like this?

Paul: Yes.

Audience: (more laughter)

Paul: You actually don’t need to read this anyway which is very useful. So, Perceivable is basically about “can you see it?”, that is it as far as the principle is concerned, and the answer is “no you can’t”. But perceivable then breaks down into a series of guidelines. So, let’s have a look at what these guidelines are. So basically, perceivable is broken down into 4 guidelines. And if we talk through each of those it should give you an idea.

Text Alternatives

Paul: The first one is text alternatives. So this is stuff we already know. “Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.” So this really applies to things like video, audio, forms that you create, and interestingly CAPTCHA is particularly mentioned here. And that is a particular accessibility problem that hasn’t been particularly well solved I don’t think.

Time Based Media

Paul: The next way that Perceivable works itself out is in time-based media. What we’re talking about here is that you need to provide an alternative for anything that is time-based. So here we’re talking about captions for video, sign-language maybe, media alternatives, but it also applies to live and pre-recorded video. So if you’re streaming stuff, then you need to think about this as well as with stuff that’s pre-recorded. Now, it does take into account the difference between “crap, how are we going to make streaming video accessible?”. If you read into the guidelines it does give some good advice there. So that’s not quite as scary as it first sounds.

Adaptable

Paul: Anything that we produce needs to be adaptable. In other words, content can be presented in different ways. For example, a simpler layout maybe for people with cognitive disabilities for example. Really, this boils down to things like using semantic markup, meaningful order in your HTML so that if the CSS is stripped away it still makes sense in the order that it is presented, and not relying on colour and other sensory elements to convey information.

Distinguishable

Paul: And then finally it’s got to be distinguishable. So it’s about making it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background and that kind of stuff. So we’re talking here about contrast, colour, and control over things like audio and video, that kind of stuff. So that’s where we’re at with perceivable.

Operable

Paul: Let’s move onto the next principle which is Operable. So, Operable is about user interface components and navigation, and making them easy to use so that somebody can use them whatever disability they may have. So this again breaks down into 4 different guidelines, the most obvious of which is Keyboard Access. So everything that we produce has to be accessible via a keyboard. So, for example, the Flash video that we’re currently creating for the Wiltshire Farm Foods home page needs to be keyboard operated, alright? Which I bet it isn’t at the moment! And to be fair, it’s part of production, I’m sure they’d put that in at the end if I hadn’t reminded them. That existed under WCAG1, so there’s nothing different there. So everything needs to be keyboard accessible.

Enough Time

Paul: You also need to provide enough time for people to take in the information that they’re being presented with. So giving the ability to pause, stop and control time based material is really important as well.

Seizures

Paul: You’ve got to take into account seizures, some people can have seizures triggered by animation and that kind of thing, so there are various limits that the guidelines lay down about flashing objects and stuff like that.

Navigable

Paul: And then finally it’s got to be navigable. So this includes things like skipping content, having descriptive page titles, tab order, links that make sense out of context, lot’s of headings, that kind of stuff. Is this all making sense?

Audience: Yes, apart from time-based media, I don’t understand that.

Paul: Time-based media, we’re talking about video and audio. So let’s say you had… one of our podcasts. So, there are certain things we need to ensure. One is that it is operable, in other words, a user can pause the podcast if we get annoying, or they want time to take in the information that we’ve said, but the other thing is that we also need to provide an alternative way of them getting it which is why we provide the show notes that we do and the transcripts and stuff like that.

Audience: Ok, well that kind of fits under Text Alternatives and giving it control so it’s under Operable… I just don’t get where it is under perceivable, as a perceivable thing, it has to be perceivable?

Paul: Yeah, basically.

Audience: Video, audio… all has to be perceivable then?

Paul: Yes. Some of these principles and certainly some of the guidelines do overlap to some degree. But when you draw down to the Success Criteria level, of how you actually apply these things, then there are more specific techniques. I think what they did is create a load of success criteria, and then kind of chunked them together in meaningful groups, but sometimes they’re not so meaningful. But it is a vast improvement on WCAG1 as far as being able to understand it.

Understandable

Paul: Ok, talking of understanding it, our next one is Understandable. So this is the next one of our 4 top-level principles, so everything you produce has to be understandable. So what does that mean? Well that results in 3 guidelines. It has to be Readable, Predictable and has to be able to provide Input Assistance. So how does that work itself out in practice?

Readable

Paul: With Readable, we’re talking about making content readable, text content mainly. So this works out in things like setting the language in your HTML, you know, setting what the language is in the header, avoiding using jargon, finally we’ve got a decent reason to go back to clients and say, you know, “you can’t use that kind of language, nobody understands it!”. Also things like abbreviations need to be explained, and also reading level as well, and that’s something I really want to get through to a lot of our clients because a lot of our clients, especially the public sector clients that we have, have this attitude of “well of course, people that look at our site are of post-graduate degree people, and they have excellent reading level”, but that doesn’t take into account things like people that speak English as a 2nd language, who can be very intelligent but not particularly good at reading, also people with Dyslexia can be incredibly intelligent but not particularly good at reading. So reading level is an important aspect of it.

Predictable

Paul: For it to be understandable it also needs to be predictable. So with this we’re talking about things like consistent navigation, and no uninitiated changes. And this is a particularly important one in our world of AJAX and JavaScript and all this cool stuff that we’re doing where we can often trigger events without asking the user’s permission first. When I say “asking for permission” I mean they haven’t clicked on link or they’ve not initiated it in any way. Users need to initiate these actions… and no pop-up windows without them clicking first to trigger a pop-up and being aware of what’s going to happen. It’s all about making it understandable and making them aware of what’s going on.

Input Assistance

Paul: The last guideline under Understandable is Input Assistance. So this is going into the realms of when we do forms, how do we handle errors, what kind of feedback do we give to the user, what labels – are things clearly marked up as labels, are they descriptive of the fields and the forms and that kind of stuff. We’re also talking about help, what additional help are you provided in terms of tool tip and contextual help and anything else that you care to mention. So that’s Understandable, that’s what that principle is driving at.

Robust

Paul: The final principle is Robust. “Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.” In other words, what we build has to work on everything.

Audience: What about AJAX?

Paul: I think that’s where we get into the realm of progressive enhancement, that it’s fine to use something like AJAX as long as, if the AJAX is taken away, it still operates. Or, you provide an alternative version, the guidelines do actually accept that you can do alternative versions of something. So Gmail is a good example of that, Gmail, it actually doesn’t work if AJAX is turned off but they do provide an HTML only version of it which does the same thing. I’m not a great fan of that because it’s twice as much stuff to maintain, and one version become out of date and all the rest of it. My preferred technique is to build it so it works normally, and then to layer on the JavaScript and AJAX on top of it to provide enhanced functionality, which is what we guys have been doing pretty much all along and we need to continue in doing that.

Compatibility

Paul: So that Robust principle actually only comes down to one guideline which is Compatible, so that’s about maximising compatibility with current… listen to the wording of this… Maximise compatibility with current and future user agents, so we also need to be looking forward as well and predicting the future which is always good. But that’s where it comes back to using solid, good code that is’nt reliant on lots of hacks in order to get it to work, and it goes back to the conversation that we’ve been having recently about browser testing, upgraded browser support and that kind of stuff as well. So Compatibility and Robustness is the last principle. The other thing I should have mentioned with Compatibility is this also includes things like validation, making sure that your code validates, and just generally other markup type stuff.

What, no AAA, AA, A?

Paul: Ok, another thing that might have occurred to you is AAA, AA, A.. Priority 1, 2 and 3. Priority 1, 2 and 3 are still there, there are still those levels of conformance, but I get a real sense from the tome of this document, and this is just my personal opinion, people watching this video who know a lot more about accessibility might jump all over me on this, but my sense is that they were playing down those 3 levels of conformance. To be honest, I think I’m pretty keen on that. I don’t think those levels of conformance have done a lot of good generally speaking, because I think it’s kind of developed a checkbox mentality amongst some of our clients “We must be AA compliant” or “We must be A compliant” and they’re not actually thinking about the needs of the users, they’re just ticking the boxes so they meet some quota that has been established somewhere. One of the things that’s quite interesting, and I’m not sure if it’s a change from WCAG1 or not, I couldn’t find the reference in WCAG1 but again someone will correct me no doubt, but conformance in WCAG2 seems to be on a page-by-page basis. So you’re no longer in a situation where you want to claim conformance so you’re claiming conformance for an entire site, but you’re rather conforming on a page-by-page basis. And this allows you to basically pick-and-mix the level of conformance you want to reach on any particular page which is much, much more sensible because there are some elements where you might be building a particularly complex application that really isn’t going to manage being AAA compliant, whereas the rest of the site is AAA, and this one page isn’t. So it’s giving you the ability to mix and match. In fact, in the guidelines it says “It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content. In other words they’re saying it’s just not possible to be AAA in some situations, so don’t even try.

Start With Basics

Paul: So how does this relate to what we do on a day-to-day basis? Well, I think the language we use with our clients pretty much will remain consistent with how it was with WCAG1 which is that we need to start of by encouraging all our clients to start with the absolute basics. A lot of people are put off of accessibility because of the enormity of it, of all the things they’ve got to do. And even to be single A compliant there is quite a lot to do if you’ve got a site that has never been built to be single A compliant before. So I think our attitude has got to be that you work towards this over time, it is an ongoing process, you don’t need to do it all in one big go and that you need to start with the absolute basics, the quick wins, the stuff… you know, it’s the 80/20 rule, 80% of the problems that people are going to encounter from an accessibility point of view is caused by 20% of the accessibility issues if that makes sense. So we can solve a small number of issues but have a big impact on the site. So we’ll start off with some real basic stuff. Things like putting in “alt” and “title” attributes, providing alternatives to media, things like video and audio, being aware of JavaScript and the problems that JavaScript can create if it’s not implemented correctly, providing resizable text so that the user has the ability to either increase or decrease the text size on sites, to build everything to be standards based because that makes it so much easier in future.

Audience: Aren’t we moving away from resizable text?

Paul: We’re moving away from the resizable interface where the whole thing scales up and down, but there’s no reason why we can’t keep the text itself rescaleable. The layers should be able to push up and down. It has to be said with resizeable text, it is becoming less of an issue. The reason it’s becoming less of an issue is because browsers now have this zoom functionality built into them. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet to be able to drop resizable text entirely is my current feeling… I’ve got mixed feelings about it. But the obvious aim we’re going for here is to be single A compliant.

Build Over Time

Paul: So all of this is about building accessibility over time. Taking the guidelines by themselves is not going to be enough, and taking this checkbox mentality that I talked about earlier is not going to be enough. Once you’ve done these quick fixes, the next step on from that is to start consulting with your community. We need to encourage our clients to start talking to their users and find out what accessibility concerns they have. I also think, which I think we’re quite poor at, that we need to start testing with real users some of the accessibility stuff that we do, and the big problem there is persuading clients to pay for that. It’s really hard to get clients to pay for that kind of testing but I do think that it’s a really useful thing to do, and there are organisations out there that provide people you can get in to do testing, or that you can send sites out and they test with them. So, testing with real disabled users is really worthwhile. I think it’s about identifying major issues and dealing with those first, just pragmatic kind of prioritisation of issues, something you do with usability. With usability you look for the quick wins and the showstoppers and those you deal with first, exactly the same with accessibility. Now, what the major showstoppers are for those navigating the site need to be dealt with. And over time you build towards AA and AAA compliance if you can. But you only do that maybe on some pages. The big concern clients have and the reason they get into this check-box mentality of saying “we’ve got to be double A or we’ve got to conform to the WCAG guidelines” is fear, a fear of litigation. Especially our bigger clients, they’re really worried they’re going to get serious issues. But I think it’s important to stress with clients that litigation doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t suddenly have come through the post a writ saying “you need to come into court about this accessibility issue on your site”. It doesn’t happen like that. What happens in reality is the user complains. And if the user is repeatedly not heard and not listened to, and not responded to and not cared about and rejected, they get angry enough to maybe approach someone like the RNIB who then take it on into litigation for them. That’s the reality of what happens.

Quick Response

Paul: So as a result, you can diffuse that by responding to complaints quickly. So as you’re building up over time with the accessibility policy, if someone does complain, you need to write back to them and you need to deal with that issue straight up. Ok, so that’s how the client should be dealing with all this and there’s loads more I could say on this but I don’t want it to go on forever.

Headscape’s Approach

Paul: Let’s briefly talk about Headscape and our approach and how we should be approaching the subject of accessibility.

Establish Approach With Client

Paul: Well first of all I think everything that we do in our approach should be in conjunction with the client. I don’t think necessarily we talk enough to the client about accessibility. Some clients are just so bamboozled by it that they want us to take control, others want a say in it and what to be reassured that we’re doing something about it. So I think there’s a dialogue that we need to make sure happens. And if a client just wants us to take control of it, that’s great. If they want to be involved in the process, then that’s great to but we need to engage with the client and talk to the client more about it.

Remain Pragmatic

Paul: The second thing and I think this is really important is that we need to remain pragmatic in our approach to accessibility. Everything I’ve been talking about before like building up accessibility gradually, about doing the quick wins first and the show stoppers and that kind of stuff, that’s all pragmatic. I don’t want us on one hand to ignore accessibility, and it needs to be an integral part of everything we do, but on the other hand you can become extremist about it. We could spend hours and hours trying to get something to work in every conceivable user agent in the world and we can worry about every type of disability to the point where it becomes like a paralysis that stops us actually doing anything. So there’s a real balance that we need to strike here. And we need to strike that with our clients and working with our clients.

Have a rationale

Paul: Now I think it’s worth saying that if we decide not to comply with a guideline for whatever reason, we need to have a rationale for that. So we might not conform even to single A compliance in certain situations, although to be honest I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but if we do decide not to conform, we need a damned good reason why not. In other words, we need to have thought about it. And the other thing about accessibility is that we always think about it at the end of the project. It’s too late by then, we’ve built everything. So it really needs to become an intrinsic part of everything that we do.

Responsibilities.

Paul: Let’s talk about the idea of responsibility here and whose responsibility accessibility is within Headscape. Basically I’m going to say, everybody. One of the absolute great things about WCAG2 is because it’s got this 3 tiered approach, it is “accessible” to everybody. It’s understandable by everybody. So therefore it can be everybody’s responsibility to keep an eye on accessibility. And so this is how I think it should split down.

Sales/Client – Principles

Paul: Marcus and Chris and the Client should be worried about principles. The Operable, the Perceivable, those basic top-level principles. And you should be looking at anything that goes out from the company and going “well is that really operable?” So you can take a very top-level approach to it. And I think as you talk to clients as well you take this very top-level approach to it. That’s the level you guys should be working at.

Guidelines – Project Managers

Paul: Project managers, I think you need to be looking and understanding from the guidelines point of view. So you need to go in and read what those guidelines are, and you need to be sure that you understand them. And as you look at any work that goes out from the company, you need to be thinking “does it conform to those guidelines?” You don’t necessarily care about the nitty-gritty of how those are measured, or the nitty-gritty of how they’re achieved, but has that guideline been met? That’s the level you need to be working at.

Success Criteria – Designers and Developers

Paul: Then when it comes to the designers and developers, you need to get right into these guidelines. And you need to understand the success criteria and how to apply the guideline and how to make them work in practice.

Check Everything

Paul: So basically, we need to be checking everything that goes out the company for accessibility. And I have to say I’m making the mistake of saying this on camera, but I think we’ve got a bit lax recently when it comes to accessibility. We reached a point where it was becoming quite intuitive to us, and we were doing it quite naturally, and then as a result of that, we stopped checking because it was the natural process of what we were doing, and then bad habits start to seep in again. So WCAG2 is a great opportunity for us to say “ok, we need to start reviewing everything we’re doing as it goes out again”. So I’d really, really encourage you to check everything.

Needs to be second nature

Paul: basically we need to get to the point where this is second nature to us, so that we’re doing this intuitively again, but not to the point where we’re no longer checking.

Audience: Clients often say “what’s the difference? If I just got for single A compliancy, what won’t my site be reaching?”

Paul: I have to say that I think I would stop talking about double A, triple A and single A compliancy. I don’t think there’s really any value any more in talking about that to the clients.

Audience: I think there is because having the page by page conformance is a really good thing and that we can now argue that yes, we can now make the majority of your site triple A compliant, but for a page full of videos, we can make it single A compliant.

Paul: Ok

Audience: Clients will continue to reference it in briefs. You can’t not talk about it.

Audience: I think it’s actually quite a strong thing.

Audience: is it a page by page compliance, or template by template compliance?

Paul: I think it has to be page by page because the content that goes into the page, into the template, could invalidate it. This is why I think it’s something that should be downplayed. I accept the clients will still talk to us about it, but clients still talk to us about doing speculative design, it doesn’t mean we do it. I think there’s an education thing there whereby we need to move clients away from being obsessed by double A, single A compliance, and to start thinking about accessibility policies. What is there accessibility policy and what is it that they are trying to achieve on their site? Our base mark is going to be single A, it’s always single A, and I think it should continue to be single A.

Audience: but if you don’t talk to them about it, you could argue that less caring clients would just say “well why would I do anything about it, bottom line?”

Paul: Yeah, I said you shouldn’t talk about single A, double A, triple A, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them about accessibility and the improvements that accessibility brings because for people that have got that sort of attitude you don’t want to talk about the disabled if they don’t care about the disabled, you talk about search engines, and that’s the best way to sell accessibility, by talking about search engine placement. That’s the reason you want to be accessible for people who have that kind of attitude. For those that care, and are talking about single A, double A and triple A, you need to say to them “well actually, conforming with any level, it’s great that you want to do accessibility, and certainly single A should be an absolute minimum, but we’d encourage you to start working up an accessibility policy and looking at your site as a whole and say could this area do more in your site, your accessibility policy should do real world testing with real users…” all kinds of things.

Audience: So you think that we should be encouraging large organisations that have accessibility policies themselves that refer to double A, triple A, to try and persuade them to kind of move away from that?

Paul: No, not necessarily, I wouldn’t go that far. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they’re a bad thing, I’m saying they’re not the be-all and end-all. And at the moment I feel like the vast majority of clients think they are the be-all and end-all. They’re obsessed with putting that little badge on the bottom of the page. And it’s not about putting badges on the page. The trouble with institutions that have these policies of single A, double A and triple A is that these policies are in place for the institution, not for the user. And that’s my problem with them. That’s why I think we should try to break that mentality with clients. And I accept that sometimes we’re going to lose, and that’s fine. Exactly the same goes when we were talking about browser support. I accept sometimes we’re going to lose that battle as well. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fight it.

Audience: I just wondered why WCAG2 still does it, because yes, you’re right basically, and accessibility requirements should be based on user requirements and not ticking boxes, so why is it still in there?

Paul: I think it’s in there because… my impression… I hate talking about accessibility on camera! You remember what happened last time in the podcast? It was just a nightmare! I think the reason it’s still in is because some of those success criteria are hard to meet. Some of them are damn difficult. When you start talking about streaming video, you’ve got some difficult challenges there that need to be met. So I think as a result, what the W3C is saying there is that we accept that some of these things are difficult to do. And we accept that you’re not always going to be able to do them, so we’re going to make them triple A. But come on guys, some of this stuff is dead simple and we should be doing it, that’s single A. That’s my impression of the mentality behind it, and that’s a great mentality, but it’s when someone changes that to being guidelines, which is what they are, to being rules, really instilled by Moses and presented to the people. You know it’s not that and I think that’s an important differentiation to make.

Where to Start

Paul: I know what you guys are like, especially designers. Ok I’m making sweeping generalisations here. But, if you guys go along to the WCAG website and you look at the WCAG2 guidelines, it’s horrible! It’s intimidating and it’s scary and it goes on for pages. And there’s a lot of text around it.

Audience: There’s no pictures? (laughter)

Paul: There’s no pictures! The design isn’t even very good. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken that page, I’ve literally all I’ve done is I’ve stripped out the explanation text in front of it, and the waffle at the end of it, and I’ve left you with just the set of guidelines so it looks like a slightly less intimidating list. Not much but slightly. So that’s up at http://www.headscape.co.uk/WCAG2 so if you go to that, you can get just the actual list of criteria. There’s also, on the WCAG2 website, there’s a thing where you can go and you can say my site uses tables, my site uses video, my site has this and that, and you untick the ones that it doesn’t have and it narrows down the list of success criteria to only show you the ones that you need to care about. So you might want to check that one out as well. Ok, so that’s basically all I have to say, are there any other questions before we wrap up?

Questions

Audience: Clients are going to ask us the 1 minute elevator pitch. What’s the difference between WCAG2 and WCAG1? What would you highlight as differences?

Paul: I think there’s a bigger acceptance of things in the world other than HTML, so things like Flash, PDFs, all that kind of stuff, there’s much more reference to that kind of thing. It’s much better written, much better organised. I think it’s more pragmatic. It’s a little bit more… I think it will last the test of time more. It’s hard to pin down exactly what I mean by that. There is actually a document out that talks about the specific differences between WCAG1 and WCAG2 if you wanted to get into that level of detail. And to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what that is yet because I haven’t looked at it in that much depth myself.

Audience: I think you and I do need a couple of the more detailed stuff, to get the guidelines, just one or two examples basically. Something that’s new between WCAG1 and WCAG2, and also some of the differences between single A, double A and triple A. The streaming video is an excellent example.

Paul: Just go along to http://www.headscape.co.uk/WCAG2 and you’ll be able to see those different levels.

Audience: It seems like, an almost unwritten principle, or unwritten in your list of principles. It’s technology agnostic.

Paul: WCAG2 started off as so technologically agnostic that it wasn’t understandable.

Audience: WCAG1, the first line is all about “it must be W3C technologies”.

Paul: Yeah, it will pretty much accommodate anything. You know, it talks in terms of audio and video. It doesn’t mention Flash for example specifically, at least I don’t think it does, but it refers to those kinds of things. It refers to documents that are not HTML. I’m saying this as much for the video as anything else, I’m still learning about it as well. So I think it’s going to be a learning process for a while for us to really get to grips with this, and truth be told we probably should have started a little sooner than this, but it’s not radically different from WCAG1. This is as much getting us back into the habit of thinking about accessibility as anything else really. Ok?

Audience: 1 more question. Are they new Keynote animations?

Paul: Yeah, they are new Keynote animations.

148. Recession Cheer

Posted in Classic shows on January 13, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this weeks show: Surviving the recession with Andy Budd, providing effective browser support and free boagworld consultancy.

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Housekeeping

Unfortunately we have a bit of housekeeping to get out of the way before we begin:

Boagworld Christmas Appeal – I really want to thank everybody who gave so generously to this year’s Christmas Appeal. You guys have raised over £2000 for Sarah and Simon’s work in India and they are both over the moon. This money will allow them to provide better facilities for the growing number of children they work with, and doubles the amount raised last year.
Transcribers – After such an amazing effort for the Christmas appeal I feel bad asking you for more. However, we really need people to help transcribe the podcast interviews. We believe it is important to make our show as accessible as possible and we need your help to do that. If you feel you could help or have questions about what is involved email Ryan Taylor at [email protected].
.net Magazine offer – Fortunately my next piece of housekeeping allows me to give something back to you guys. I know you love the offers and competitions we run from time to time and this is a particularly good one. .net magazine have been kind enough to offer boagworld listeners some massive discounts on their annual subscription. In case you haven’t heard of .net magazine it is the UKs premier web design magazine and has some truly phenomenal content each month. If you are based in the UK, you can now get the magazine for 50% off. That is only £9.75 every 3 months. In the USA the discount is even bigger at 54%. That means an entire years subscription is only £64.99. In the EU you pay £55 for a year and the rest of the world pays £67. Those are excellent prices for a really good magazine. To take advantage of these offers visit the special boagworld offer page.
Free consultancy – My final piece of housekeeping is a little competition we would like to run. We are always giving away other people’s stuff but never give away anything ourselves. To rectify this problem we are giving away a day of our time to a lucky winner. Myself and Marcus will provide a free days consultancy where we will dispense advice on ways you can take your website forward. If you are interested in entering, email myself by the end of January. Include your name, company (if you have one), URL and why you want our help. We will pick the most deserving case and contact them at the end of the month.

News and events

Obviously a lot has happened in the world of web design while we have been on our Christmas break. To make matters worse, I must confess to not following the news while we were away. I have therefore gone for the first four stories that caught my eye. Apologies for the lack of professionalism!

A roundup of 24 ways

Way back in show 146 I mentioned the return of the 24 Ways website. As I explained on that show 24 ways is an advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring a little Christmas cheer.

As I said before 24 Ways is without a doubt one of my favourite web design sites. However, it does have one fatal flaw – it releases one article every day throughout December and I just can’t keep up. December is always mad with clients wanting stuff wrapped up before Christmas and people taking holiday felt right and center. I simply do not have time to read everything they publish.

Fortunately their archive of articles are still all waiting for me on my return and make perfect reading as I struggle to return to work.

This year has a truly bumper crop that I cannot wait to get into. The top titles that have grabbed my attention are:

Sitewide Search On A Shoe String by Christian Heilmann
The IE6 Equation by Jeremy Keith (Deciding when to support IE using Algebra!)
The First Tool You Reach For by Kevin Yank (A look at CSS tables)
Making Modular Layout Systems by Jason Santa Maria (Gaining greater flexibility in laying out content)
Shiny Happy Buttons by John Allsopp (Styling HTML buttons without resorting to images)
Recession Tips For Web Designers by Jeffrey Zeldman
Contract Killer by Andy Clarke (Writing the perfect contract)

Most of these I have yet to read but they promise to keep me entertained and informed until next year.

WCAG 2.0. is official

Probably the most significant story while we have been away is the release of WCAG 2.0. WCAG 2 has taken an age to be released but has also come a long way from its controversial beginnings. When I read some of the initial drafts it was horribly complex and anything but accessible. However the final release is extremely well thought through and communicates complex concepts and ideas in an easy to understand manor.

I think what impresses me most about WCAG 2 is the way the guidelines are conveyed. It has four layers of guidance which include:

Principles – These are broad principles of accessibility which need to be understood by everybody. If you had to explain web accessibility to senior management you would probably talk in terms of these top level principles. They include the need for a website to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Guidelines – There are a total of 12 guidelines organised into the 4 overarching principles. These are ideal for website owners or project managers that need to understand more detail on how to achieve the broader principles but do not need to understand the technical detail.
Success Criteria – For each guideline, testable success criteria are provided that allow designers and developers to know specifically how to conform to a guideline. These are the equivalent of the WCAG 1 guidelines and are still organised into Priority 1, 2 and 3.
Techniques – Finally, designers and developers can also access techniques that may help them to fulfil the success criteria but are not in themselves mandatory.

It is a very logical approach and makes it easy for anybody to understand how to make their site accessible. With these guidelines now official it is important that you begin to learn about these guidelines now, even if you just start with the 4 broad principles.

Issuu Smart Look

From WCAG 2 to something that encourages website owners to ignore accessibility! I often find myself torn over whether to share something on this show or not. Part of me wants to teach and encourage best practice, but another part is more pragmatic and accepts that sometimes we have to compromise. The next item is an example of the latter.

Website owners love to post PDF, Word files, and Powerpoint presentations on their site. It is quick, easy and gets their content online with minimal fuss. However, it creates accessibility problems requiring users to have appropriate software or plug-ins. It also makes it hard for search engines to index their content and increases demands on bandwidth.

If you are a website owner and you do this – stop it!

That said, if you have no choice or you are a web designer being forced at gunpoint by your client, then there maybe some hope.

Document publishing site Issuu has released a promising Javascript tool called Smart Look that allows users to view PDFs, Word files and Powerpoint presentations in much the same way you would view an image using one of those Javascript overly script.

The best thing about the service is that it involves very few changes to your site. All you have to do is copy and paste some Javascript into each page. Your downloads will then be miraculously presented in the new format.

A List Apart discusses content

Finally, I wanted to mention two articles posted on A List Apart over the Christmas break. Both article tackle the subject of Content Strategy. Without a doubt content is the most ignored aspect of our websites and yet is also the most important. It is great to see the profile of content increasing and seeing sites like A List Apart promoting it.

However, I do have doubts about the way content specialists are promoting their work. This particularly shines through in the two recent List Apart articles. First, there is an obvious sense of frustration that people do not value their profession. This is entirely understandable. However, sometimes it comes across as them ‘justifying their own existence’ rather than emphasising the value of content. Second, and probably more significantly, they seem to be fracturing their profession into more and more specialist areas. Where once there was a content editor there are now content strategists, copywriters, editorial specialists, content analysts and more.

Although this specialisation is not out of line with the way the entire web design sector is moving (after all once upon a time a ‘web designer’ built your entire site) I don’t believe the majority of clients are ready for this complexity.

Everything I read in these two posts was excellent, but both struck me as expensive and complex. I still struggle to convince clients of the value of investing in content and I don’t feel these articles do anything to aid that cause. Of course, that wasn’t really their aim. However, what I need is a simple and coherent argument for investing in people to write good copy before we start breaking the skillset down even further.

That said, these are great articles and certainly worth reading, if for no other reason than to understand the importance and complexity of our content.

Feature: Effective Browser Support

Browser support should focus on usability and accessibility rather than pixel perfect design. Sites should render in all browsers, but provide advanced features and aesthetics to those which can support it. Read More

Interview: Andy Budd on how to recession proof your business

Paul: So here we are a new year and our first interview of the year and who else would we get on the show except Andy Budd? Hello Andy.

Andy: Hi Paul. How are you doing?

Paul: I’m doing very well. It’s been so long since we’ve had you on the show. Probably for good reason.

Andy: Are you running out of guests or something?

Paul: Yeah, we’re just having to repeat now, endlessly. There’s only three people that can string a sentence together, that’s the problem, of which I am not one of them.

Andy: Aww, you do yourself a disservice.

Paul: So we thought we’d pick a nice cheery subject. Me and Andy had a little chat earlier about what subject we would talk about today and we thought, "New year, new opportunities, exciting times, let’s talk about the recession and the economic downturn." So here we are. Everybody’s been going on so much at the moment that it’s all doom and gloom and I have to say, I don’t know about you, but you know I’m seeing with regularity on twitter people saying, "I’ve just been made redundant," and it’s a bit of a scary time, isn’t it really?

Andy: Um yeah I think it is. I think a lot of people at really good companies, really good people at Yahoo! and whatever have been made redundant in the last few weeks. Last.fm have been having redundancies as well and it’s like, "Oh wow, really smart people are being made redundant," so it is a bit of a worry for everybody I think.

Paul: The trouble is, everybody’s a bit cagey, aren’t they about their own situation and what’s going on so I thought, "Let’s talk a little bit, try and clear up some of the mystery around it," and I thought, "Let’s start by talking a little bit about our own experiences," you run a small agency, I run a small agency. I mean from our personal point of view at Headscape we have seen a little bit of a downturn. Not dramatic. You know I keep kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop and everything to dry up but certainly we’ve seen maybe a slight reduction in the value, the budget that people have and they seem to be taking longer to make a decision and thinking more carefully about what they’re doing. Is that similar to what you’re experiencing with Clearleft or is everything lovely with you guys?

Andy: No, I think that’s probably very similar here. I mean I know sort of before Christmas we really hadn’t experienced much of an effect at all, in fact kind of October, November, December, particularly October – November, was the busiest time we’ve ever had as a company. We were kind of really really rushed off our feet, but things have slowed down now. I guess the difficult question though is, "What have they slowed down?" I think in part it’s because of the recession, but partly it’s because people have been on holiday over Christmas and stuff so I think the real what we just need to see is what’s gonna happen over the next few months. Christmas is one big milestone because obviously a lot of companies their financial years end on the calendar year and they will start to get new budgets at the start of the new year. So what normally happens is January is usually quite quiet anyway and it starts to pick up toward the end of January when people have now got their budgets and they’re setting their schedules and their priorities for the coming year. Another kind of key point is March. You know March – April when a lot of other companies’ financial years kick in. So I think we need to kind of give it a couple of months, give it until March and then we’ll have a much better idea about the effect it’s had on clients’ budgets. But yeah, I would agree. I think people are just more cautious. I think all of this discussion about doom and gloom, frankly a lot of the reason why we are in the situation we are at the moment is because of media. The more people worry about this stuff, the more cautious people are going to be and it becomes a bit of a cyclic effect. But yeah, I’d say the same. I’d say clients are being a bit more cautious. We haven’t had too many issues with companies. We had one Icelandic bank that pulled out of a project in November which was quite amusing. They contacted us like a week before Iceland, kind of, you know, blew up. And we were like, "Yeah, we could have seen that coming," but apart from that it’s OK. Slackened off but it’s seeming to be OK at the moment.

Paul: So what about you? You’re talk about clients being cautious. What about you at Clearleft? Are you guys being a bit more cautious in what you’re doing? You know, your outgoings and that kind of thing?

Andy: I think we’ve always been reasonably cautious and I think that hopefully will set us in good stead for the next six to nine months. One of the things that we were really really conscious is running a good stable business and we’ve seen a lot of scare stories from the last .com boom with companies growing really really rapidly. They’d basically expand as much and as fast as they possibly could to fulfill the demand. That’s really great in the good times when people are throwing money and projects at you, but as soon as the projects dry up you’ve suddenly got a lot of mouths to feed, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true of Yahoo! but I think it’s probably true of some of the startups like Last.fm. You know, Last.fm have grown hugely over the course of the ten or twelve or eighteen months, and then all of a sudden when people start reigning in their budgets there’s not the work out there and they have to make people redundant. I think we’ve always tried to grow at a steady rate, you know we’ve been through boom times where we’ve been literally turning work down and we could have hired another couple of developers, couple of designers easily, but we chose not to because we didn’t want to get into that situation of the work drying up and not having any business. So yeah, we’ve been fairly careful how we’ve grown.

Paul: Do you think there’s, I mean, the kind of other side of the coin is to take the approach that perhaps Carsonified have done where they’ve actually been proactive in cutting their overheads by admittedly laying off staff in preparation for what is to come. I mean, you know I don’t kind of want to get personal about the guys at Carsonified but that’s certainly an approach that someone like Jason Calacanis would recommend. That actually before things get too bad you should shrink your business so that you’ve got you know, "a long runway," as he puts it, of money behind you over the long period. Is that and approach that you would consider? Well obviously you’re not going turn around and say, "We’re going to lay off all our staff now," but do you know what I mean?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely understand the question. The answer to that is, "Absolutely not," but it’s actually a two-part question. Um, you should, if you’re running your business well, you should ideally have a certain amount of money in the bank to cover operating costs. Now again, one of the things we were very clear of when we set up Clearleft is we would always have, would always aim to have six months of operating money in the bank. Now it’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s four months, sometimes it’s five or six. But that’s kind of what we try and aim to do. So before taking any money out of the company, before buying a nice car or giving ourselves a bonus we try and make sure that there’s enough money in the company that should we lose a couple of clients or should anything bad happen we can carry on paying people’s wages. I think in this industry, in the web design industry it’s all about people. We can’t build good products, you can’t build good services without having good people. So it’s the people that make the companies, it’s the people that make the industries, and I think as the boss, I think as an employee you have to put the good of your company and the good of your staff ahead of your own personal gain. So I think there are two ways of running a company. I think some people run a company almost like a general that commands their troops from the back of the battle front where they send all these people out ahead of them and they get picked off one by one until eventually you’re the only person left. I actually think as somebody running a company you have to take charge yourself and I would much prefer to lose, I would definitely cut my lifestyle and cut my wages before I would let anybody go in the company because you start slashing staff now and then when times are good you have a hiring problem or you get known as a company that will just sacrifice their staff. And I’m not speaking about any particular companies specifically but I think it’s important to realize that the wealth of your company is in the people that work for you. So yeah, I would always consider that as a last option, not a first option. Might not be good accounting sense. I’m sure if you’re just looking at sort of the figures, it might not be good from an accounting sense but people come and work with you and they stick with you through the good times and the bad and I think you’ve got to afford them every opportunity so that’s kind of my philosophy.

Paul: I think to some degree it could be good from an accounting sense as well. I mean it’s very easy to underestimate the cost of rehiring staff. By the time you take into account finding the people in the first place, that often involves going to the dreaded recruitment agency and the horrible costs and pain of that, you know if you don’t have a big network of people you can draw on. But also the cost in time of interviewing and all of that kind of stuff can really mount up so I guess to some degree it depends on how long this goes on, if it goes on at all. I mean we’re still waiting for something to happen. I can understand the whole philosophy about having a runway if you’re a startup company without regular revenue that’s dependant on venture capital or whatever but if your business is like an agency or if you’re a freelancer or something like that then hopefully you’re going to continue to have revenue coming in from work.

Andy: Well I think if you’re running your business responsibly you need to make sure that there’s always a runway. There’s some proverb or fable about making hay while the sun shines or whatever. You need to try to put a bit of a war chest, for want of a better word, in the bank or you’re getting good money because you know times, you know winter is coming and you need to kind of buckle down, but some people just go and as soon as they’ve got money they go and spend it on nice cars, nice apartment, holidays or whatever and as soon as things start to get tough then you’re in difficulty. But yet like I said I think you should always have a bit of money in the bank. You shouldn’t expand too quickly and I think if you end up hiring a large number of staff and then letting them go sort of shortly afterward it’s probably an indication of you probably shouldn’t have hired that many people so quickly in the first instance so it’s difficult. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way of doing this. Everyone’s got their own approach.

Paul: I mean of course a lot of the people listening to this show aren’t going to be running their own businesses anyway so that kind of comes on to another question about if you’re working somewhere at the moment what should you do? Are you better off just tucking your head down and hoping that things go well in the company you’re working for or should you look at maybe now is the time to start your own business. I mean there was an interesting article by Drew, isn’t there, about you know the myth of stability and that actually you’re almost more stable being in control of your own destiny as a freelancer cause at least you know what’s happening with your business in preference to being employed. So, what advice would you give for people perhaps worried about their job at the moment?

Andy: That’s a difficult thing. There’s always been this myth that if you go and work for a big company there’s stability but I think recent events have shown that’s not true. If you’re running your own company you obviously have a much better understanding of what’s going on and you’re much more able to control the near future. Obviously you can’t plan too far ahead because most web design companies only book up projects three to six months in advance. So you can only really plan financially up to a certain stage but I think it’s good running your own company to a certain extent because you have a bit of a master in your own domain. You know what’s going on. On the other hand there is a certain level of security of working with a company, at least in the UK, a large company particularly because if you do get made redundant you get a redundancy package. If you’re a good productive member of the community or productive member of the company there’s a good chance they’ll try to rehire you in a different role. So I don’t think there’s any certainties there.

Paul: Do you think it would be a ridiculously stupid time to go freelance?

Andy: I think it’s a difficult time to go freelance. I think the problem at the moment is that there’s a lot of people freelancing in the industry and there’s a lot of people who are just not very good. I hate to say that but I think there’s a lot of people who are getting by at the moment on a subsistent wage who are a bit too much of a jack of all trades and a master of none and are kind of operating in a slightly more bottom end of the market. So I think that one of the first things that’s going to happen with the economic shift is the bottom end of the market is going to get even tighter and you’re going to be finding it really difficult if you do a little bit of PHP and a little bit of HTML, a little bit of design, a little bit of this, and a little bit of CMS stuff. It’s going to be a lot more competitive. However, if you’re really good at one thing, if you’re a really awesome designer, if you’re a really awesome coder, if you’re a really great Rails developer, if you’re a great User Experience person, if you’ve got a real skill that you’re well known for there is always going to be a market for good people. There’ll be more people on the market. There’s people being made redundant from Yahoo! and other companies who are really really good at what they do so it’s gonna get more competitive so I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s a good opportunity for people to necessarily go freelance unless they’re really really talented and have a good existing stream of revenue and they know a lot of people but I think there’s opportunities in other areas in terms of setting up your own projects and doing startup and doing work outside the office. I think there’s interesting opportunities there.

Paul: So if there are people listening to this show that are going, "Crap! He’s just described me. I’m a freelancer that works on that kind of bottom end of the market." What should these guys be doing? How can they go about improving their position?

Andy: I think again while the industry was going at a rate of not to new, last year there was so much demand for people, companies, clients would hire anybody no matter what your skills were. I think now we’re in a situation where to really stand out you’ve got to be good at what you do. You’ve got to be highly skilled, and I think people need to see training as an investment. I think we’re really bad as an industry of investing in ourselves of investing in our own personal development. We’re all very happy to go spend £500 on an iPhone or £1000 on a new Mac but spending 500 quid on a training course, people go, "Well that’s just a waste of money," but I don’t think it is. I think you need to invest in your personal development and your professional development so I would say figure out what it is you’re really good at, figure out what it is you enjoy and then see if there are training courses go on or conferences you can attend that can help teach you those skills.

Paul: You missed a perfect opportunity there to pimp UX London, didn’t you there?

Andy: I guess so, yeah.

Paul: You’re just too nice. Tell us a bit about UX London, Andy.

Andy: A lot of what we do again, you know me and you know what the company’s like. A lot of what we do isn’t necessarily about our gain as individuals just purely from a financial point of view. We run conferences like dConstruct because we want everybody in industry to benefit. We want people to get better at what they do, to produce better websites and I think by doing that everyone benefits. And again UX London the whole purpose of UX London, it’s a conference we’re organizing in London in June it’s a very targeted conference. It’s much smaller numbers than dConstruct. It’s 160 people and it’s a real education-based event, to teach people how to be really good User Experience designers, User Experience developers, information architects and usability people. So we’ve got some of the best speakers in the industry coming over. We’ve got Don Norman who’s like the Godfather of User Experience, we’ve got Dan Saffer, we’ve got Peter Merholz, Jared Spool, Jeff Veen, we’ve really had an opportunity here to play fantasy league conference and put together the kind of event that we wish that we could have gone to five years ago. Particularly User Experience is a growing field and I think within the recession or within the looming economic crisis, companies are going to be spending less and less or are going to be able to spend less and less on acquiring new customers and where they’re going to need to spend their money is satisfying existing customers and making sure that the customers that they’ve got don’t go to other brands, other companies and are much better at converting and User Experience is one of the ways we can do this. So I definitely think if you’re interested in getting into the User Experience realm going to something like UX London would be a great opportunity. It’s essentially three days of workshops and practical hands-on stuff. I mean it’s not just a standard talking head kind of conference it really is getting in there and learning new skills. Not just UX London, there’s all kinds of conferences and events out there, there’s all kinds of training courses. There’s development training courses, there’s usability training courses, there’s designing courses, but pick something you’re really passionate about and get really really good at it and if you get really good at it people will find you. There is still a massive demand for Rails developers, there is still a massive demand for good visual designers and there’s still a massive demand for really good UX people and I think those three practices are going to get more and more important so yeah that’s what I’d say.

Paul: You said something there about if you get really good at something people will find you. Do you think that that’s actually going to remain true or are we going to have become more active at going out there and finding work? I mean to some extent people like you and me are we not a little bit spoiled because we’ve already built up this reputation, people are aware of us, because in my case because of the podcast, because of your book and the various things that you do. Is that all that you do to win business? Write a book or put on a podcast? There’s got to be more to it than that.

Andy: It doesn’t hurt, I can kind of say that but that’s the situation we’re in now obviously but the reason that we were able to do this, the reason that I was able to write a book and you were able to do the podcast was because five, six, seven years ago we just sat around writing blog posts about what we were passionate about, what we were interested in and the Internet has an amazing capacity for putting like-minded people in touch, whether it’s through your blog, whether it’s through your twitter stream, whether it’s through meeting people at conferences. I mean again, going to a conference is a great opportunity to network and meet people and I think there’s a community in the Web and you need to be a part of it. If you’re not part of it, if you’re just sitting on the fringes then you’re going find it a lot more difficult to pick up work, but if you throw yourself into this community and actively participate it’s not that difficult, if you’ve got a skill, if you’ve got a talent it’s not that difficult to make people aware of it. You do have to do a bit of promotion though, you do have to write some articles or contact a magazine and say, "Hey do you mind if I write something for your magazine?" Or go around to some of your favorite bloggers and leave messages on their blogs and write to them and say, "Hey look, I’m doing this, that and the other." I’m probably going to get inundated with responses now but we’re always on the lookout for really good people. Despite the number of people working in the industry we find it really difficult finding good visual designers we find it really difficult finding good Information Architects and we find it really difficult getting good front end coders. We see a lot of average people. There’s a scary number of really bad people out there, but finding good people is difficult and we’re not just falling over people in the street. I’m spending a lot of my time actively asking around and asking friends and contacts and doing searches on Google for people so if you make yourself available and you go out of your way to put yourself in that situation it can only be of benefit. I was talking to you before we started the podcast about something we’re doing at Clearleft is that we run an internship program and part of the purpose of this internship program is to get people that haven’t had that commercial experience, that maybe have just left University after doing a graduate degree or maybe are in the middle of a Master’s Degree or maybe are just transitioning to a different career area and maybe they were starting off doing more design and they want to get more codey or they were a coder and they want to do more information architecture and actually having the opportunity to go and work for a company for ten weeks is an amazing training opportunity, sorry if I sound like I’m promoting myself a bit too much but we had a really great guy come in over the Summer a guy called Amild who was from Sweden and he was part way through a University course and in the Summer he came over and he worked for us for ten weeks and he got to work on real-life projects he got to sit down and program with Natalie and argue semantics with Jeremy and be involved in every single part of the process and doing that, you get so much knowledge and training out of going and working hands on like ourselves or yourselves, much more so than you’d probably get doing little side projects over the course of a couple of years I mean I know we’ve had a couple of interns now and the amount of stuff that they know when they leave working with us is two or three times the amount they knew when they came in and actually ironically people come to Clearleft quite often a little bit cocky because they’ve heard about us and they know we’re good at CSS and Web Standards and they come in thinking, "Yeah, I do this," but when they sit down with someone like Natalie and she explains all this stuff their eyes and their universe ends up opening and it’s like, "Oh my God I didn’t know this stuff existed. I didn’t know people would go to so much effort to craft a nice, well designed, well put together website." So yeah we’re running an internship for Spring so if anyone listening out there wants to come work down in Brighton in the Clearleft offices for ten weeks and is really interested in good front end code and HTML and CSS then please go to clearleft.com/jobs and there’s some details of the internship there. We’ll be running it again during the Summer maybe May, June July time. At the moment we’re looking for a front end developer to be an intern. The last intern, the last before one intern we had was more of a User Experience person, we might be looking for design intern next we might be looking for a bit more of a generalist so I can’t really tell you what we’ll be looking for in the Summer, but at the moment yeah we’re looking for a front end developer to come and help us out.

Paul: I think as well, if I was in that position to have the guts to just approach random companies and I get people contact me regularly asking whether we do internships which we occasionally do and a lot of time I’m having to say no to people, I don’t mind them writing. Having the guts to approach a company to say, "I really like what you do, I’d love to work with you." I think that’s great. You’ve just got to go for it and put yourself out there whenever possible.

Andy: Absolutely. If you’re trying to get work, send your CVs around, drop people emails saying "Hey, I’m a freelancer. I’m doing this. I’m doing that, " and stay in touch. It’s really difficult for you as a business owner to keep in your head of who’s available, you don’t have a clue who’s available when and the people we end up working with, the freelancers we end up working with, you work with them once and you probably never let them go again because they’re usually really good. They’re usually awesome and once they start working with us, we stick by people. So it’s worth once you send your CV to someone, drop them a line every couple of months, every time you’ve updated a website or you’ve done something you think is particularly interesting and just keep on the radar and the more you keep doing that, the more you promote yourself the better it will be.

Paul: Of course that works very well if you’re a freelancer, this whole thing of getting involved in the community and building relationships and all of that. It’s great if you’re a freelancer where you’re working for someone like Clearleft or Headscape in that kind of relationship but what about people that are working directly for clients who aren’t part of the Web Design Community? They stand outside of that, have you got any advice for engaging with them, how to find out about what jobs are out there, how to get on those tendering lists and that kind of stuff?

Andy: Well you don’t need to be getting on tendering list I’d say because most organizations that have tendering lists have got a lot of hoops that you need to jump though, it’s very time consuming, there’s usually financial constraints about how big you are as a company, how many staff you’ve got, all that kind of malarkey which I’m sure you’re very familiar with. I think it’s really difficult as a freelancer. I think there’s a glass ceiling in the kind of scale and size of work you do. I think it’s tough. I think you end up doing smaller projects but lots of them, usually for not a huge amount of value and so it’s really difficult when somebody big comes along and says, "Show me the last big project you did," and it’s, "We haven’t really done any because I’m a freelancer and I’m working directly with clients," so the way you can get experience and exposure of working with larger clients is to go and be a freelancer with agencies and actually if you’re a freelancer it makes much more sense to try and approach two or three decent agencies that continuously pass you work than it is to constantly try and get small £1000, £2000 projects. Then also if you’re doing that you’ve got a lot of marketing to do, all of the accounting, the bill chasing, it’s a lot harder and like you say I think it’s gonna get a lot tougher at that end of the market so yeah I think being a freelancer you’re probably best off targeting agencies if you want a more stable income.

Paul: Here’s a tough question and I certainly don’t know the answer to this so I forgive you if you don’t either I mean we’re seeing people being made redundant at the moment, we’re also seeing people that have gone through years of University training going, "I’m gonna become a Web Designer," and they’re stepping out into probably the worst economic situation since the .com bust for web design. What are these guys supposed to do? How are they going to go about finding a job? Does this just come back to the networking issue again?

Andy: I think we’re in a really interesting position. We’re in a really tricky position for a lot of recent graduates. When me and you started doing websites, or when I started doing websites the designs I was producing were rubbish. It really was terrible. The markup was terrible, the design was terrible, but luckily every other website out there was also equally bad so we weren’t worse or better than anyone else we were just meh. As we’ve matured and as the web’s matured we’ve got better at what we do, we got better at the stuff we produce. I went to a local agency in Brighton that kind of supports the local digital markets had a portfolio clinic last year where they had people fresh out of University and the quality of the designs they were producing was about the same level of the quality of design I was producing when I came into the market, but the problem is the bar has now been set so much higher so it’s really really tough. If you go into a three year degree where you spend one semester learning Dreamweaver, one semester learning Flash, coming out built a really lovely Flash animation of a monkey riding a bike and thinking, "OK, I’m gonna get loads of work with my great Flash animation skills," you’re gonna be coming into quite a harsh marketplace. What you need to do is you need to train yourself. You need to up skill. You need to do as much work as possible. You need to get your skills up. You need to get your design up. You need to specialize and to be really good at one thing. Be really good at design. Be really good at HTML and then you’ve got a chance of getting a foot in the door. Internships are good, training are good, but you need to have innate skill and actually in a kind of a weird perverse way I think the shake out is possibly good for the industry because like the last industry shake out is a lot of people who probably shouldn’t have been working in this industry, who didn’t have the passion ended up losing their jobs and going on and working in another industry, but people that stuck with it are the people who are good at it and passionate about it, stayed with it and survived through it and so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. I think there’s a problem with education that is trying to convince kids that they can go through a three year Bachelor’s Degree and come out and get a job. I think the industries that are going to be hardest hit in this recession are obviously financial industries are kind of stuck, or kind of enterprise level applications that any people working at enterprise apps are going to find it tough. I think people that are working in particular vertical markets, if you’re just a company that just solely focuses on doing startup business, the startup funding is drying up. It’s not gone completely and there’s a big argument to say that actually in times of economic recession that’s the time you want to invest in innovation, you want to invest in startups because once you come out of that recession you’ve got a product that’s ready to go that has been developed for a lot less money because resources are much more prevalent. You can hire developers much cheaper now and if you can start building your ideas up now very very cheaply, come two years time you’ll be two years ahead of the competition and if you’ve got a really really good idea you’ll come out of the market ahead. But I think at the moment if you’re only focusing on developing sites as startups you’re going to have a problem, you need to have a diversified portfolio of clients. I think the other thing is if you’re focusing on getting the majority of your income from just one or two big companies and that is quite common particularly in the entertainment industry. I mean are these Flash games developers or Flash entertainment sites developers that will just work with one or two large media brands. If suddenly they start pulling back on their funding you lose one client that is worth thirty percent or forty percent of your revenue you’re gonna be stuck so I think as a freelancer coming out of the industry it would make sense to focus on where there is growth in the market where the market’s stable. I don’t think it’s in producing Flash games necessarily and I don’t think it is producing multi million dollar blue chip corporate websites I think it is in creating websites that show real return on investment and that is in usability and accessibility, that’s web standards that’s understanding the psychology of human behavior. It’s all those kind of things we’ve been talking about for the last couple of years are becoming even more important.

Paul: You said an interesting thing point though. You talked about innovation and I think that’s quite a good place to end though all of this situation is going to effect innovation and kind of the evolution of the Web, do you think these kinds of slow downs will affect the growth of the Web?

Andy: It’s obviously going to affect the growth of the web because by the very name of recession it means growth of the economy isn’t growing it’s receding so I don’t think it’s going to be a time of growing much I think companies, large companies particularly are going to be taking stock and focusing on what they do well, their core assets. However I think what happens is it provides space for smaller companies to grow so you’ve now got these big companies competing for the same market as you so you can come up with new innovative ideas. You can come into the market much quicker. You can do it much cheaper. You are much more able to spot gaps in the market or gaps in the experience curve you know you’ve got a lot of companies doing this. You’ve got people like TripIt who have seen that there’s a gap between buying tickets and managing your calendar so identifying a gap in the market, "Because the airlines aren’t helping manage your trip, we’ll help you manage it for you," I mean dot was doing exactly the same thing so I think if you’re smart, if you’re clever and good at what you can do and you can see opportunities, there will always be opportunities, big companies going out of business, people cutting back on their R&D, people cutting back on their spending gives you an opportunity because it means less competition in the marketplace, there’s more available talent, there’s more available attention which is a big thing. You can grab people’s attention doing something different. There’s opportunities for making people money, in times of recession people are going to want to save money so if you can come up with an app that helps people save money, helps them, obvious examples are big slew of apps at the moment revolving around either managing your finances or getting better deals on car insurance all this kind of stuff, anything that can actually make people better off or more efficient. Productivity apps I think are gonna thrive.

Paul: Thank you Andy! That was both good and depressing at the same time!

Andy: Oh thank you. I’m glad talking to me you find depressing. Cheers!

Paul: Actually it isn’t depressing. I’m very upbeat about the coming year. I feel that, "OK, we are in an economic slowdown but it does provide lots of opportunities." Even being made redundant has its upside. As somebody that was made redundant and then went in to set up Headscape I really know and understand that these things can be turned to good so I think yeah, I’m positive about the coming year although hopefully I won’t be made redundant from my own company because that would be embarrassing. So there we go. Thank you very much Andy! We’ll get you back on the show soon and Happy New Year!

Andy: Happy New Year to you too and to all the Boagworld listeners out there!

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

135. Libraries

Posted in Classic shows on September 17, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we talk with John Resig on javaScript libraries and address the question what is more important when we release an app: speed or quality?

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News and events

The complexity tax

Don’t you hate it when somebody beats you to the punch? I recently finished writing a report for our biggest client (Wiltshire Farm Foods). It talks a lot about the need to simplify and remove complexity. It is a lesson we should all learn and so I am in the process of turning extracts from the report into a blog post which we will cover in next weeks show.

However, it would appear I have been too slow and that Gerry McGovern has beaten me to it with an excellent post on the cost of complexity. However, where I focus on why simplicity is important, he addresses the underlying causes of complexity.

For me his post is summed up in the following quote…

Most organizations are producing far too much content. Too many emails, too many PowerPoints, too many reports, too many webpages. All this content creation activity keeps a lot of people busy.

If you are part of a large organisation or work on a substantial website you need to read this post.

10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums

What do you do if you have no marketing budget but have some free time to promote your site? Well, there are a number of guerilla marketing techniques you could use but contributing to forums is one of the most effective.

Sitepoint has posted an article explaining why forums are a great way of driving traffic to your site. It goes on to suggest 10 rules for doing so effectively. These include…

Build your profile
Follow the rules
Start by responding
Contribute your expertise
Don’t be a ‘me too’ poster
Don’t self promote
Explain yourself, but be brief
If you’re wrong, say so
Write intelligently and correctly
Negativity is a no-no

This is an excellent article and one that you should definitely read before using forums as a marketing tool. If you do not, you are in danger of damaging your brand, rather than driving traffic.

Accessibility in suit and tie

The life of the corporate web worker who cares about standards and accessibility can be a frustrating one; hampered by office politics and archaic content management systems. In an article on the Think Vitamin site, Bruce Lawson looks at what you can do to make sure your projects are as accessible for your users as possible.

Its a very pragmatic article, which I love. Bruce works from the premise that this is going to be tough and makes suggestions like "some accessibility is better than none". He also talks about the need for ‘buy-in from the top’ but goes on to provide practical tips about how to get that buy in. What is more, his arguments for accessibility were backed up with facts. For example…

Accessibility is good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Accessibility enhances usability for everyone. An April 2004 formal investigation into UK web accessibility (PDF) reported "all users, not just disabled people, would benefit greatly from the measures required to make sites accessible and usable by blind people".
Accessibility has many quantifiable business benefits (PDF). Legal and General, a British financial services company, redesigned its site with accessibility in mind and found:
- 40% traffic increase
- Doubled conversion rates
- Doubled online revenue
- 100% ROI in 5 months

Finally, he looks at how to get content providers onboard through education and getting them writing HTML rather than relying on the WYSIWYG editor.

UK Government Browser Guidelines

Our final story raises an interesting discussion; should you decide which browsers to support based on popularity or capability?

Apparently, the UK government believes we should test on the basis of popularity. In a draft document advising public sector websites, it suggests that if a browser appears in visitor logs as being below an arbitrary percentage of total “unique visitors”, then it should not be listed as being “fully supported”.

On the surface this appears very sensible. However, as Jon Hicks points out on his site, this can create problems. He writes…

It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources.

In other words we should be defining our list of supported browsers based on capability rather than popularity. This is the approach used by Yahoo! and it is one that I would fully support.

The Yahoo model supports all browsers through progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, without the need to test on every browser. Its a neat solution but one that the UK government guidelines specifically say they do not advocate…

These guidelines do not advocate specific development methodologies, for example graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. However, it is widely accepted that sites conforming to open web standards such as XHTML and CSS are more likely to work well across a wide range of browsers.

How come if they are widely accepted, do they not advocate them?

Fortunately there is an opportunity to change things before this is set in stone. I recommend reading the WaSP article on the recommendations and then sending some polite feedback to the powers that be.

Interview: John Resig on javaScript Libraries

Paul:Joining me today is John Resig, who is famous for jQuery and the work that he has been doing with jQuery. John, it is great to have you on the show.

John:Well, thanks for having me.

Paul:I have to say this at the beginning. I have to get this out of the way. I absolutely love working with jQuery, and it’s an absolute pleasure. I remember twittering just a few days ago that every time I start doing anything in jQuery it makes me smile, so that’s got to be a good sign.

John:Well that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.

Paul: What I wanted to do today is get you on the show and not just for me to suck up and say how great jQuery is, but to kind of look a little bit broader at the subject of JavaScript libraries. Because I have to say from a personal point of view my opinion has changed quite a lot about JavaScript libraries and I’m kind of interested in your perspective on things as somebody that’s actually created one. I think the place I want to start is for a long time I had the attitude that you shouldn’t use JavaScript or indeed any library and that you should know the underlying code yourself and all of this kind of thing. Let’s start with the question of how do you know if it’s appropriate to use a JavaScript library? When is it appropriate to use it? What’s your opinion on that?

John:Well, I guess my opinion is it’s always appropriate, and I mean the simple fact of the matter is that there’s two things. One is that when you’re developing, you’re trying to support, generally a large number of browsers simultaneously. This is the same as if you are doing CSS development, JavaScript development, you want to support a large enough market share and you want to make that development process easy. The problem is twofold that you’re going to be encountering weird browser bugs and the APIs, the different utilities the browsers provide, will be different. For example, Internet Explorer provides different ways of handling events from all the other browsers. So what libraries do is that they remove you away from dealing with browser bugs, which is huge. And at the same time they provide a simple interface that you can interact with that will just work ubiquitously.

Paul:Is there a problem there in the sense of, you know, somebody came along and they basically learned to write jQuery for example from scratch, but never learned the kind of underlying JavaScript? Is there a problem there, do people need to know JavaScript before they start using a library?

John:It depends on the library, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have to know JavaScript. In a lot of ways, at least in my experience with jQuery directly there’s a lot of people who have used jQuery who have never done any programming whatsoever. jQuery does embody a lot of advanced concepts but you don’t necessarily have to know them in order to make good use of jQuery. I know this sort of translates well into some of the other libraries but one point of concern you brought up was what if someone learns a library but doesn’t learn JavaScript? I used to be more concerned about that, if someone only knew a library and I guess from a purist perspective, that’s a bad thing. Fundamentally, you want people to be getting better at programming JavaScript, not this specific thing. However, I think the reality of it is, is that so many people are just using JavaScript or CSS or doing web design, they just want to get their job done. It’s not really a matter for them of becoming an excellent JavaScript programmer or awesome CSS user, you want to get from A to Z and finish their work in an effective manner that works everywhere. So I think it’s important to realize that this market, so to speak, exists. It’s a very large one. And that ignoring it completely will just leave users frustrated and going back to the simple cut and copy paste scripts that they used to use. So, I think what libraries are doing is they are instilling good standards, they are instilling good practices, even though the users don’t necessarily know about it. And then eventually what’s good is that since these libraries have these good practices that users can always open up a library and read about it and try to understand better what’s going on.

Paul:I guess that’s always been a little bit of my concern with relying heavily on a library is that if you come across something that’s a problem or a bug or something like that, you can’t fix it yourself because you don’t necessarily know your way around the library. What’s your response to people that say stuff like that?

John:Well by the same token if you encounter a problem with a browser you are far less capable of fixing that issue. There’s really no way about it other than that ultimately it would be good to have that knowledge, absolutely. I fully support people who want to do that and I’m writing a second book now encouraging people to do that, to dig into libraries, to learn more, to build their own. What’s important here is that you just don’t, you can’t force people to do it if they, one if they don’t want to or if they’re just not capable. There’s no reason I feel to force a designer, someone who’s a designer by trade to learn the fundamentals of object oriented programming, or functional programming. Theoretically that can help them some way in the future but what’s more important to them is doing good design and I think by helping people keep their focus where it should be. Obviously if a library is able to help programmers program better, that’s good as well. It’s all about helping people keeping their focus and making sure they aren’t down a rabbit hole getting sidetracked.

Paul:I think that’s the thing that really attracted me to jQuery is as a front-end interface designer was the fact that I could pick it up and run with it very easily. The conclusion I came to is, “OK. Well if I do by some chance find a major problem with it, there’s a massive community of very clever people out there that I can ask and I can get help from.” So, that kind of reassured me, I think. If then, we’ve kind of come to terms with the fact: “OK we want to use a library.” There are so many different ones out there. Run us through some of the different options available and the pros and cons and how do you go about picking which library is right for you?

John:Well it really depends a lot. There’s a coupe questions you need to answer. Probably the most important of which is you need to ask yourself, how do you want to write JavaScript? Because libraries end up augmenting or really changing the style of how you write JavaScript. So, finding a library that you like how it looks. It sounds very superficial, but you like how it looks, you like how the code feels is a great place to start. There’s obviously a lot of libraries to choose from. There’s a select group of libraries whose quality is generally above the others and the popularity of those libraries generally reflects the quality as well. Out of those I pick generally jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo UI, dojo, then also MooTools and sometimes XJS. What’s interesting is all those libraries are open source and they are all the most popular JavaScript libraries. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s just a matter of fact that in the web these open source frameworks are going to improve better and attract more users and generally have better community to surround them. So out of these libraries though you break down into a lot of different paradigms for development. I’ll try to summarize as best I can, but it really is not substitute for trying it out yourself. Looking and seeing some examples you can have a pretty good feel right away. So, Prototype and MooTools, they both extend the native objects of the language. They both try to improve the JavaScript language itself. So they add new methods to arrays, they make strings better, at the same time they provide things like object-oriented code
, and all the way out to doing things like events and AJAX. The normal things that you would expect. But at a very broad level they are trying to improve the overall quality of the language and of the experience. Then you have Dojo, Yahoo UI, and XJS and they are generally very modular, very package oriented and they have components you can easily snap in and out with nice ways of handling dependencies and it can end up being a very cleanly architected style of coding. They really support object-oriented code, and additionally events, AJAX, all the normal stuff you would expect. I would tend to group jQuery a little bit differently in that jQuery is more oriented toward improving the relationship between JavaScript and HTML and that it’s highly focused on searching through an HTML document, modifying some things, just getting in and getting out. Unobtrusive, and it doesn’t provide any language features, it doesn’t provide any object-oriented code writing features, it’s just hyper-focused at the task on hand.

Paul:It strikes me from my experience with jQuery that it’s very much a tool that’s primarily focused at helping front-end interface people implement the kind of functionality that they require from a usability point of view rather than necessarily doing, I mean would you build massive applications in something like jQuery?

John:It’s absolutely possible and people do it all the time. For example, T-Mobile’s T-Online in Germany, they built their entire user area so like their mail, their calendar, and everything using jQuery. So it’s absolutely used for very large projects. What I think is very interesting for jQuery at least is that while we don’t explicitly provide the object-oriented styles that most hardcore developers are used to we provide some very interesting alternatives especially they way it, like functional programming that I think actually end up suiting development very well. It’s very different, I will completely grant that, but it’s still very capable of scaling quite large.

Paul:So if people go out there and they have a kind of play around with these different libraries and try each of them out as you say to kind of find what fits their style of coding, once they’ve found something that kind of codes in the way they would like to, for example for me the similarities between jQuery and CSS made it a very natural fit, but what are the kind of things that you should look for from a functional perspective? What kind of things should be included in a JavaScript library? Does that make sense?

John:At the very core there should be a set of features. Of the libraries that I listed previously they all have methods for doing DOM traversal, so traversing through an HTML document, modifying an HTML document, events, so handling user interaction, animations and AJAX. All of them have some support for that to one degree or another. You can be fairly safe in knowing that if you pick a library you will have that base level. In my opinion those sets of features are probably the most important features and the ones that you end up using the most with your applications. Some people might say in their particular case that maybe animations aren’t as important, or maybe that they aren’t using AJAX, it really depends but for most of the time that set of features is fairly comprehensive. On top of that you really have to start to, once you’ve tried to use it, and once you’ve played around, there’s a whole set of secondary features that you kind of have to dig into, ones that aren’t immediately code-related. Things like the community around a library, the documentation for a library and even the health of the projects themselves.

Paul:What do you mean by that last one, the health of a project?

John:There’s a lot of things. In health, do they have an active development team? Are there developers? Are there multiple developers? It’s the famous hit by a bus; if a developer is hit by a bus will the project still continue? Is there a team will continue? Can you view the source code? Is there a repository where you can go? Is there a bug tracker where you can submit bugs? And finally is there a test suite, is what you’re going to be using going to be tested and analyzed to make sure it stays working. Another point that’s important to bring up is that a lot of browsers now are starting to integrate the test suites of these libraries into their test suite. So for example actually this is a lot of my work at Mozilla, was integrating the test suites of Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, MochiKit, a bunch of libraries into our test suite such that if we ever added a change that caused a regression to happen in a library we would catch it and we would fix it on our end. Obviously we would do this in a very smart way, we wouldn’t just blindly be like, “Oh something broke!” We would communicate to the library what the issue was or whatever and this has been very big because now you can, there’s an extra level of safety and security here, in that you’ll know that if you’re using a library like this that it’s going to continue to work going forward in these browsers. That’s an extra level of safety that your personal code can’t provide. I think that’s very interesting. I want to jump back here really quick to the other issues I mentioned.

Paul:Sorry, I distracted you there and we took you off topic.

John:It’s OK, it’s OK, of community and documentation. So community, it can be usually be pretty easy to determine the health of the community. All these libraries will have some sort of a mailing list or a forum that you can go to. Just hopping on there, seeing how many messages are posted, seeing what the typical response is like, how they treat new users, just stuff like that it can be really useful because if you’re just starting out, you know you’re going to have some pretty basic questions. Do they understand your problems? Do they help you out? Doing some searches on Google for example to see how many people are talking about it, or using a service like Technorati or something. Are people blogging about it? Is it positive? Are they having problems? The other thing is documentation. This is also pretty easy to tell. If you are starting out with a library, you’re probably going to start out by doing a quick test, running a simple application just to get a feel for it. When you’re doing that you’re immediately going to be in the documentation trying to figure out how things work. I think you’ll be able to determine pretty quickly if the documentation quality meets a standard that you, because if you aren’t, if the documentation just isn’t that good, you’ll immediately have problems and I guess you will have to resort to the mailing list or the forums or whatever. Secondary is, do they have good examples? Do they have books if you want to learn from a book? Do they have books that you can buy to learn from? So again there’s a whole lot of issues here but what a lot of it boils down to is looking at the libraries, looking at their style of code, does it seem alright with you? Then just doing a quick test with each of the libraries that you’ve picked out, building like a menu or just a basic form of interaction. How easy is it? How hard is it? Does it in fact mesh with you well? This is something you can do over the course of a single day and it definitely shouldn’t take you any longer th
an that. If it’s taking longer than that then you probably want to try a different library. Ultimately you should be trying to use these libraries to make your development simpler and easier. If it doesn’t improve your productivity, if it doesn’t improve the quality of your code then you probably shouldn’t be using it to begin with.

Paul:Tell us a little bit about the kind of plug-in architectures that exists around many JavaScript libraries. Certainly I know there’s a strong plug-in architecture with jQuery. Does the same kind of thing exist with other libraries?

John:It depends. What jQuery has is a little bit unique in that we provide a number of plug-in points that plug-ins can snap into and extend how jQuery works. So they can add in new CSS selector behavior, or they can add in new events or all sorts of intricate additions. Other libraries have things that aren’t quite of the same vane, in that they’ll have modules or packages that you can use. Also another thing that varies is how do the various projects treat these plug-ins? At least with jQuery there’s a dedicated plug-in repository that’s used that plug-ins are listed in that you can browse through, you can see ratings, comments, discussions and things like that. Currently no other framework has something similar to that to the best of my knowledge. It’s much looser, just people uploading, putting things to their websites or Google code or some such. So again, at least to me, what makes plug-ins, jQuery-style plug-ins important is that they are, that there’s extension points and that they are supported by jQuery fully.

Paul: The only thing that I think that I kind of struggle with a little bit about plug-ins, you know I love the idea that there are other people out there that can do the hard work for me in that they can develop something I was looking for, and I love the fact that I can go to jQuery, I can type in whatever I’m looking for and it will pull back stuff. I’m always a bit unsure mind about how reliable those plug-ins are, you know as you’ve been saying with the kind of, the core jQuery library that you’ve created I know there’s a big team of developers working on it, I know that it’s thoroughly tested, I know what browsers it’s tested against, all of that kind of stuff. Plug-ins are a bit more of an unknown entity. Is there any kind of advice that you can provide about judging whether a plug-in or module or whatever is reliable or not?

John:I mean you sort of have to use the same standards that you would use in looking at a library. Looking at, what you mentioned, is it tested? Is there good documentation? Are there, how many developers are working on it? Like for example in the jQuery project we started a sort of, sub-project called jQuery Glide in which we’ve taken a whole bunch of plug-ins and actually blessed them and proved them, given them themes, excellent documentation, examples, all this stuff and made them sort of official. We’re doing this more and more, trying to bring in more plug-ins, improve their quality and make sure that they’re up to our standards. There’s still tons and tons of plug-ins that are just excellent, but the issue comes down to that you have to sort of train your eye to look at, and be able to spot when something has good quality. The thing that’s easiest for a plug-in author or a library author to do is to just set up a page that has their code on it and has a basic example. At the very least every single library is going to have that. If you dig in and see that it has documentation, that it has tests, you begin to realize that that plug-in is a much higher quality, at the very least. I think it’s really starting to dig in to these side issues, that you begin to get a better picture of how, of the true nature and of the true health of a particular library.

Paul:Excellent! That’s really useful and I think it’s easy to just look at these libraries and indeed the plug-ins as well and ask, “Well do they have the basic functionality that I require?” But, like you say, looking at things like the community and documentation and things like that are equally important. It’s been very useful John. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. No doubt we will get you back in the future to talk about some of the specific things going on with jQuery and maybe this book that you’re writing as well, sounds very good. Thanks for your time.

John:Thanks for having me, Thank you.

Thanks to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Quality or Quickly?

What is more important, to reach market quickly or to launch with a quality product?

I received this question from Pete in South Africa…

I have been working on a small web application, which I hope to launch soon. My problem is that I am spending ages tweaking and improving it before launch. I fear that if I spend much longer on it somebody will beat me to market. What is more important, getting the product right or launching it quickly?

It is a good question and one with no single answer. It is certainly something we have been struggling with as we prepare to launch GetSignOff.

To read the rest of this blog click here.

133. Agile

Posted in Classic shows on September 3, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this weeks show we talk to Jackson Wilkinson about Agile and answer your questions on web design courses and showing off development work.

Podcast: Download (26.8MB)

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News and events

The Target accessibility settlement

Previous we reported that the retail chain Target was being taken to court over the inaccessibility of its site. Many hoped this would be a landmark case that would clarify whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applied to the web. As with the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK the wording is open to interpretation.

Well after 2 years of legal battle Target has agreed to pay $6 million in compensation and correct the accessibility problems on the site by February 2009.

Some are complaining that the case has failed to achieve all it could. They argue that although $6 million sounds like a lot of money it is small change for Target. What is more, they argue, Target has admitted no ‘wrongdoing’ and the case has done nothing to clarify the law.

These are legitimate points but I prefer to take a more positive view. This has been a significant embarrassment for Target and although $6 million is a small figure it is substantially more than they would have paid to address the problem from the start.

Finally, as Matt May points out on the WaSP website, this case may not clarify the law, but that does not matter. As web designers, our role should be to educate clients about the importance of accessibility rather than campaign for tighter legislation. In my opinion the benefits of accessibility are considerable and if presented correctly do not need laws to enforce them.

Long live IE8. Goodbye IE6?

This week saw the release of IE8 Beta 2 and I have to say that things are looking good. Quirksmode says it is shaping up nicely and Sitepoint has even asked whether web designers will switch from Firefox back to IE (the overwhelming answer was no!).

If you build websites and have yet to take a good look at IE8 then now is the time. I suggest you start with Microsoft’s own ‘readiness’ documentation for developers. This talks about all of the new functionality. You may also want to look at their separate documentation which lists the new CSS properties supported.

As IE8 teeters on the brink of release there is a growing movement to stop support IE6. With 37Signals, MobileMe and now even Facebook effectively dropping support for IE6 it would seem the tide is turning. There is even now a site dedicated to the demise of IE6. On it the author writes…

Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

Makes you think doesn’t it.

OS form elements

Paul Stanton sent me a link this week to a great tool for you designers out there.

When I am working on a design for a site in Photoshop, one pain in the ass is creating form elements. You have to open a browser, find the form element you want, screen grab it and then edit it to remove all of the background elements. Its not a big job but it is annoying.

If I had any sense I would keep a library of all these form elements. However, somehow I have never gotten around to it. Fortunately I don’t have to now as there is a great site which provides them all for me.

The site is called the Designers Toolbox and includes web form elements for IE, Firefox and Safari under both Windows and Mac. They can be downloaded in PSD format and even include browser windows at various resolutions.

Blogging software reviewed

Finally, it wouldn’t be boagworld if we didn’t plug at least one Smashing Magazine story each week. Damn them and their compelling content!

This week they have published a review of 10 blogging applications including…

WordPress
Movable Type
ExpressionEngine
Drupel
TextPattern
Joomla
b2evolution
Nucleus CMS
Serendipity
Mephisto

The subject of blogging software, or content management systems in general, is a controversial one. This post alone has generated 137 comments, mainly consisting of people promoting their own personal preference. People are passionate about the system they use and often it can be hard to get a balanced evaluation. This makes selecting a system that is right for you difficult.

This post does a fair job at providing some subjectivity to the discussion. It addresses the pros and cons of each system and indicates the kind of site the system would be best suited for.

It is not a comprehensive guide, but is useful if you want to see what is out there.

Interview: Jackson Wilkinson on Agile

Paul Boag: So I’m pleased to have joining me today Jackson Wilkinson. Good to have you on the show.

Jackson Wilkinson: How’s it going Paul.

Paul Boag: Very well indeed. Just for those people that don’t know of you can you kind of give people a little bit of background so that they kind of know the angle you’re coming at things.

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure. I’m a user experience strategist at Viget Labs which is outside of Washington DC in the US. We’re essentially a full service web consulting shop. As a company we do design and development mainly in Ruby on Rails. We also do sort of the pre-product, pre-development strategy, that’s a lot of what I am involved in. We also do marketing. So specifically I attack working on the web from that angle of improving and setting the user experience at a product level before hand and then usering it in to usually the design phase after that. I tend to dabble in a lot of things. I was formerly a developer and have also been a designer here and there and try to keep my hands dirty in a lot of different areas.

Paul Boag: Cool. So I mean the reason we’ve got you in to talk today is to talk a little bit about the idea of agile developement. Particularly how it kind of applies not to the developer side of things that a lot of other people have talked about but you know to the design side of things, to the design community. But before we get into that let’s take a step back and start off by explaining to those that don’t know what agile development is. Could you kind of give us a potted summary of agile development.

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure. I think the short form answer to that is that, agile is basically a process for software development, typically software development, that is the opposite of your typical waterfall process where you have this big planning stage up front. You decide what every screen’s gonna look like. You decide how every feature is going to act and so on an so forth. Instead the agile proccess focusses on short rapid bursts of development which are usually called iterations, and essentially you’ll work on your product for somewhere between two and four weeks at a time implementing little bits of functionality so that you have a completed product every two weeks or so. The idea is that you’re able to adapt to change. You know if you decide that requirements need to change two months into the project that’s not a big deal because it only affects this two to four week period of development. You don’t have to go back and redo everything that you’ve already done. I think that’s pretty much the short form version there.

Paul Boag: Okay. That’s good. So in what kind of projects is this normally used on? You mentioned software development but what other kind of things?

Jackson Wilkinson: Well the proving ground so far, agile’s pretty new in so far as development processes can be new. It’s proving ground has largely been on the web. So web apps and web products have really been the biggest place where agile has been used but that’s not to say that that’s the only place where it has been or where it could be. Many larger products, many end user pieces of software. Largley ones that affect developers or that affect designers have been used and have been developed in an agile way. Definitly if you’re thinking sort of the 80/20 rule the vast majority of agile development has sort of been on the web for web apps. That tends to push those boundaries anyway, that web industry.

Paul Boag: So this has been, this can be used on larger projects? It’s not limited to smaller more self contained things then?

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure it certainly can be used on larger projects. It really depends on the structure and the climate at the development shop where this is happening. If you’re a really large shop that has lots of beauracracy and lots of stake holders and your client needs to get approval from 5 different places then this notion of quickly changing rapid development, quickly developing specs and the rapid pace of development is probably not as conducive. But when you’re in an evironment that has senior level developers who have a lot of autonomy and everybody tends to trust each other to roll with the punches, or you just have a lot of trust in your entire team then an agile process can work on any kind of software. Whether it’s a two month project or a two year project.

Paul Boag: Interesting. I mean from what I’ve heard of agile development before it’s a technique that’s growing in popularity amongst developers. You seem to think that some of the elements of agile development can be applied to designer’s as well. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jackson Wilkinson: The main reason why I’ve been thinking about this lately and why a lot of others have been thinking about this lately is that certainly as developers work on web apps they interface with designers a lot. If you’ve got this notion of a two week iteration then, maybe an example of an iteration might be that you’re working on a sign up process or you’re working on a registration process for one iteration. Then you go on to, you know if you’re making a social network for quilters, then you’ll add in social networking features after that or something along those lines. If you’re only constraining your work to those two week batches then often times the designers will be basically in this position that they will be forced to hustle to meet the development schedule. That’s not necessarily conducive to the design process as we normally think about the design process. That’s kind of how I came to thinking on this topic and how a few others have as well. The challenge really is to take some of those elemental notions of the agile process and to try to shape the design process around them so you can best use them to your advantage. A lot of times that means if you’re a user experience type of person or an information architect you’re planning process probably won’t be 4 to 6 weeks long or even longer with lots of user interviews. Instead you’re focussing on the law of diminishing returns where you’re talking to a couple users and getting there feedback and doing a little work on some interfaces and testing them out and moving on from there or as a designer you’re working on 5 or 6 screens at a time. Sort of in the silo of what’s going to be happening on the next iteration and then those get implemented. As you see what’s worked you constantly are improving your interface and improving your design as you see these things implemented. You’re in fact taking feedback from what’s already happened and using that feedback either from internal users or external user tests or even just what the developer’s and your friends and other designers are saying about it as it gets implemented. You’re pushing that back into your own process to in fact build a better product for the next iteration and do a better job there.

Paul Boag: How does that work from a kind of, you know the broad overview point of view? You know, as somebody that’s designed interfaces for fairly large and complex sites that would go beyond the two or three week or whatever cycle. You do so many different things with the different templates that you produce. What you do on one set of screens may affect what you do on another set of screens further down the line. If you’re working on all the individual iterations or silo’s of work is there not a danger that problems get ignored because they’re outside of the current cycle of development? Is that making sense?

Jackson Wilkinson: Well that certainly makes sense. That’s a challenge that a lot of folks new to the actual process experience where your essentially thinking we’re done with this piece of the product we’re totally going to ignore it from now on. That’s really one misconception and mistake a lot of folks make. Instead you should be thinking that part of each iteration is going to be addressing observations and addressing things you’ve discovered about the work you’ve already done. You’re third iteration is probably largely based on developing new features or developing new parts of your application. At the same time you’re going back and making tweaks and making changes to the work that you did in your first and second iteration based on testing or things that you’ve discovered about it or changes you have to make based on things that you know now that you didn’t know then. That way it definitly keeps everything moving. It keeps the whole product getting better at the same time.

Paul Boag: But isn’t that end up requiring a lot of re-work? You know you kind of are constantly doing things over and over again?

Jackson Wilkinson: Ideally it doesn’t require that much re-work no more than you would spend that time in a waterfall process determining what exactly you want in the first place. Certainly the agile process kind of comes with this belief that mistakes aren’t necissarily a bad thing and that you kind of embrace the notion that you may be wrong but you embrace that notion thinking that you’re going to be quickly making decisions and quickly making your best judgements about something based on what you already know. The time that you’ve saved by quickly making those judgements will completely of set and hopeful you’ll still be in the black when you have make a couple of changes down the line.

Paul Boag: So it’s basically doing away with the laborous documentation and the specing up of a project at the beginning and okay you loose some of that when you have to then re-work stuff but overall you end up, as you say, in the black.

Jackson Wilkinson: That’s the idea. That’s the hope. It seems to work out pretty well for us. It doesn’t always work with every type of client or every type of project. If it’s a client who isn’t a really adaptable to change on a regular basis or something like that. The notion that you’re not going to have this big spec doc up front may be a little unsettling for them but hopefully on an agile team you have a client, whether it’s internal or external client, that is buying into your expertise and really trusts your process and knows that your going to end up with really what works best in the end.

Paul Boag: There are differences between how this process applies to a designer rather than a developer. Are there changes and tweaks that need to be made?

Jackson Wilkinson: Yeah. In the end changes and tweaks tend to happen pretty equally to both the development of the site and the design of the site. Essentially if you’re a designer who is taking responsibility for the entirety of the interface and you’re designing that inteface completely, then you’re going to basically be making changes that could affect the developers as well. That’s something that designers need to keep in mind. They need to work very closely with developers to understand what the changes that they’re suggesting imply and really you make changes based on the time available in this iteration and what really is going to be most effective to change in the time you have available to you.

Paul Boag: So you have to be quite strict about these time scales from the sound of it? You were saying there that you only make the changes that you can within the current iteration before you deadline runs out. Am I understanding that correctly?

Jackson Wilkinson: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges there is knowing what size changes you want to bite off of this project. So you’ll have this mountain of changes that you eventually want to make and a lot of the project management involved is figuring out what you’re going to place in the next iteration. Doing as much work as you can on those bits and then reassessing at the end and hopefully having a new product or a new potential release, even if it’s not quite ready for release, a potential release finished at the end of that end of that two week block to evaluate everything you know at that point.

Paul Boag: I mean I can imagine there’s a lot of people listening to this that may be a little bit nervous about the idea. They’ve come from a very kind of waterfall driven mentality, where you know you pass things from one person to another. On the other hand they concede the potential in it and are maybe interested in finding out a little bit more. Where do suggest people start if they want to experiment with agile development? How do you do begin?

Jackson Wilkinson: Well I think that capital A agile proponents would probably say that you really need to dive in. I’m not sure that I buy that. I’m more perhaps a post-agilist, in thinking that you really need to just do what works. What works for you might be different than what works for somebody else. If you’re really ingrained in a process that has a lot of aspects of waterfall, has a lot of upfront planning, then you know you still can do a lot of the agile things to dip your toe in. The first thing that I might suggest doing is that even if you have a long planning process upfront where you determine the full scope of work. You determine even many of the streams and many of the design elements that are going to be implemented. Still break those goals up into two to four week iterations. At that point you still have the comfort of the planning that you’ve done ahead. If you concentrate on creating a self-supporting product within two or three weeks then you’re half way along that train. You can see how that goes. You’ll probably find that after you’ve gone through a couple iterations you’re thinking about things you’d want to change back in the planning section. That then maybe that’s okay at that point. You’re realizing how this self driven process works. As you become more and more comfortable then take away some parts of the planning. Maybe put the visual design to be a piece of the iterative structure while you’re still maintaining the feature scoping and the wire framing up at the front end of the project. Dip your toe in it first and then your whole foot and then maybe eventually you’ll be in up to your waist.

Paul Boag: So mean there must be resources out there? Lets send people away from this interview with something constructive to do. Where should they be going to learn more about this? What’s the next step they can take?

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure. If you’re a designer there isn’t necissarily a lot that addresses agile in the design case right now. Most of the agile books and the agile resources that you’ll find tend to deal mostly with a strict development structure. Certainly if you’re simply interested in looking at things and what the agile process is in general then you can look for books that deal with extreme programming or agile. You’ll find countless numbers of them. I’ll certainly give a list to you Paul so you can put them on the website afterward. Beyond that there are a few websites that deal with the agile design process. Emily Chang wrote a post call the agile web design manifesto. It’s a couple years old now but most of the concepts still remain. Where you’re kind of marrying this notion of design with agile development. She offers some good suggestions and especially the comments that follow her post are super useful to look through. If you’re involvedin IXDA which is an interaction design group. There are numerous discussion’s on there mailing list about how agile processes fit in to. The whole notion of the message boards is probably a good source in this case. I’ll certainly be happy to forward along a list for everybody to check out.

Paul Boag: Excellent. Thank you very much for your time. That’s really interesting. We’ve kind of touched on agile development very lightly on a number of occasions but we haven’t really looked at it in any kind of depth I guess, or kind of broken down what it is and how it works. It’s great to have you on show. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to looking through that list.

Jackson Wilkinson: Yeah. Absolutely thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks goes to Curtis McHale for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Courses on web design

Jonathan asks: I am looking to get into web design and was wondering if there are any colleges or courses you could suggest. However, I do not have any A Levels.

I get questions like this fairly often, but tend to avoid them for two reasons. First, I went to college 15 years ago and so am out of touch with what is available (web design courses didn’t even exist!). Second, this is a country specific question, as nations have different educational systems.

However, because it is a popular question I will address it. There is certainly some generic advice I can give:

Look for practical courses – I did two courses between school and work. The first was a BTEC and the second a degree. Although the degree was supposed to be a more advanced course, the btec was far more useful. That was because it taught me hands on skills that I still use. My degree on the other hand was very academic and abstract. Where possible choose a vocational course.
Focus on web design – I receive a lot of CVs from people with computer science or art degrees. This tells me two things. First, when they selected their course they didn’t know specifically what career they wanted. Second, that if I hire them I have to train them. I would prefer somebody who specifically wants to be a web designer and already has a good grounding in the basics.
Consider an apprentice scheme – If you have not performed well in the education system, consider an apprentice scheme instead. You will learn considerably more working for a web design company than doing an academic course. You will also get paid at the same time! Even if you cannot find an apprentice course in your country there is nothing to stop you arranging this yourself. Find a friendly web design agency willing to take on a trainee and also attend a part time or evening course.
Learn business skills – Web design is not just about design and development. You need to understand business principles as well. You will be required to manage your time and potentially other people. Also, if you decide to become a freelancer you will need to understand sales, marketing, tax, invoicing and many other aspects of business management.

Showing off development work

Teifion asks: As a designer you can show off your work in a portfolio. As a programmer I cannot. What is the best way for developers to show off their work?

There is no doubt that it is harder for a developer to demonstrate his skills than a designer. However, it is not impossible. Let me suggest 4 approaches you could use:

Sandbox – Have an area of your site where you build prototypes of functionality. It is a chance for you to experiment and show off your skills. Even large organisations take this approach. For example Google Labs showcases development projects which are far from finished.
Blog – A blog gives you a chance to expose some of the code that lies behind your work. It also demonstrate your knowledge and techniques. Many developers shy away from documenting their work in this way. However, it is an effective promotional tool when seeking employment.
Case studies – If a blog feels too much like an ongoing commitment consider writing occasional case studies. This works especially well if you have commercial work to showcase. A case study should not only demonstrate your coding skills, but also your ability to interpret a brief and formulate a solution.
Screencasts – If writing fills you with dread, why not produce a series of screencasts. Screencasts allow you to show your code in action. You can demonstrate work and also show the process used to develop that approach.

You should not limit yourself to just one of the options above. Ideally look to combine approaches to effectively communicate your coding ability.

129. Conferences

Posted in Classic shows on August 6, 2008 by Paul Boag

This week’s show sees the return of Ryan and Stanton, holding the fort while Paul and Marcus sun themselves on holiday. .

We’ll be talking about taking your first steps into the world of conferences and answering your questions about font smoothing and browser emulators

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News and events

Release of Firefox 3.1 Alpha

Last Wednesday saw a new developer release from the Firefox team. Firefox 3.1 Alpha, or “Shiretoko” is now available for download. Shiretoko is built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform and introduces several new features for you to play with.

Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
- They don’t actually say what improvements, so I guess we’ll have to trust them with this one but from what i can gather, they’ve added a lot more CSS3 selectors like :nth-child, the CSS3 “word-wrap” property, CSS3 columns, text-shadow, box-shadow, border-image and more.
Text APIfor the <canvas> element.
- This is a quite detailed API for drawing vector text within the canvas element, and is sure to set the hearts ot typophiles beating just a little bit faster.
Support for using border images.
- The design community has been screaming for this for as long as I can remember, the ability to specify images as borders. The whole rounded-corner craze might be slightly out-of-style now, but I’m sure we’ll see some innovation with this feature very soon.
Support for JavaScript query selectors.
- Now I’m not completely down with the javaScript kids, so I apologise if i don’t get this quite right. But the query selectors seem to be a way to target specific selectors instead of having to filter a result set provided by the getElementsByTagName() call, you can now do the filtering before you execute the query.
Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar.
- When you start typing a URL, Firefox starts giving you options to choose from, you can now filter those results while you’re typing.
A new tab switching behaviour.
- Pressing Ctrl+Tab now gives you a filmstrip style overlay which lets you quickly navigate to your open tabs, and mimics the similar feature in most operating systems nowadays.

The alpha is available from the Mozilla Developer Center.

A List Aparts’ 2008 Survey

It’s that time of year again, the A List Apart team have unleashed their 2008 survey “for the people who make websites”. The survey gathers a massive amount of information, with around 33,000 people taking part last year and covers a wide range of questions covering all aspects of our beloved industry.

The survey covers everything from Age, Gender and Geography to Education, Employment, Vacation (holidays to the rest of us) and those oh-so-important salary details, how many hours worked and your methods of staying upto date with what’s happening in the industry. The data gathered is compiled into a comprehensive, yet easy to read report, and they also provide the raw (anonymous) data so you can do your own number crunching if you so wish.

You can also have a look at the 2007 survey results if you wish, and Paul and Marcus will no doubt be covering the results of this years survey when they’re published. So this is a call to arms really, help improve this survey by taking part at Alistapart.com. We took part, so should you!

The Future of Web Font Embedding

The last news item is a blog post by Richard Rutter on the future of web font embedding. With both Safari and Firefox supporting web fonts in their 3.1 releases, and development releases of Opera, it could be time to start playing with web fonts.

Richard starts by defining web fonts as using the @font-face rule to point to regular TrueType or OpenType font files on a web server, this is to clear up any confusion with Internet Explorer’s proprietary web font support with uses EOT font file, which is also a way to wrap the fonts in DRM, which i think might severely hamper any efforts to bring web fonts into the mainstream.

The font foundries and type designers seem to view web fonts as the death of their industry, insisting that their revenue streams will be destroyed by piracy and free font embedding, rather than seeing this as an opportunity to really boost their industry.

There’s nothing to say that the @font-face rule has to point to a locally hosted font file, The opportunity exists for the font providers to host the fonts themselves, and charge for their useage. This saves us, as designers, from having to install fonts on the machines we design on, and will undoubtedly allow us to choose from a much larger selection of fonts which can be switched quickly and easily.

Feature: A Year on the Conference Circuit

This week’s feature has stemmed from a listener who asked “which conference would I suggest for a first timer”? And “how difficult is it if you don’t actually know anyone there”? Having attended a couple of the big conferences this year I thought it would be useful to share my experiences.

Listeners feedback:

Font Smoothing

Steve Writes: I have been listening to your podcast. I really like it.

I jusr want to ask a question. On mac, the fonts seem to be all thicker than windows. What setting are u using? I’ve been using best for lcd. Today I changed to automatic, and the fonts were much thinner. It looks more alike with windows fonts.

Do you think this is a big problem for mac users? Since the fonts will look different. Which setting do you think is the best for web designer on macs?

The difference of Mac fonts compared to their Windows counterparts originates from Apple’s legacy in desktop publishing and graphic design, the fonts are rendered in a way which would give a closer approximation to how they would look when printed.

Mac’s use a specific font wrapper called dfont, this contains extra information to preserve certain features like font outlines and hinting which can then be rendered more accurately on-screen meaning that in general, fonts look better on a Mac, whichever smoothing method you choose.

If you’re a designer, I’d heavily recommend testing your design in as many different browsers as possible, but also on different operating systems as well. I work primarily on Windows Vista (don’t shoot me) and have a dualscreen setup, my second screen can be flipped over to my Mac where I can test in Safari, Firefox and Opera on Mac, I also run a Ubuntu system to test in. Rather than running a standalone IE6 build on vista, I run a full XP virtual machine with IE6 running natively as I just don’t trust the standalone builds.

One of the main things you’ll have to accept is that your design might not look identical on any combination of browser or operating system, and because you’re probably designing websites to be viewed by other people, I’d recommend keeping your font smoothing to the default setting of “automatic” which is most likely going to be the case for your target audience.

Browser Emulators

Andy Asks: Hey guys. Been listening (on and off) for a while now and love the show.

I was wondering if there is such a thing as a browser emulator, software that allows you to see your site as it would appear on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. If there is one, is it total crap and not really work.

The answer to your question is yes, there are several websites that can provide you with this type of service.

One of the more popular sites is Litmus which is an online emulator that validates your HTML and CSS as well as presenting you with a screenshot of your website loaded in up to 23 different browsers across various operating systems. It can also provide you with a report of any compatibility issues it has come across. However there is a fee to get any real use out of this service.

What Litmus does it actually does very well; however there are a couple of major draw backs I’ve found:

You can’t have an interactive experience – Not all issues can be seen from a screenshot and more often than not you need to just take your mouse and navigate around the site to find problems.
You can’t test javaScript – You can’t see javaScript animations from a screenshot.

As Paul said in the previous question, there’s no substitution for the real thing, which is having multiple setups with multiple browsers installed. However that’s not always a viable option especially for freelancers working from home who don’t have the budget (and space…) to have several machines and licenses for operating systems needed for testing, in which case sites like Litmus are invaluable.

My advice is if you can test on the real thing, do, if you can’t then take a look at Litmus.

Battling Bureaucracy

Posted in Talks on July 23, 2008 by Paul Boag

I was fortunate enough to be asked to run a workshop at this years Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) in Aberdeen. The topic was Battling Bureaucracy.

A large proportion of the work we do at Headscape is with the Higher Education sector and so I always try to attend IWMW. Last year I had the privilege to give a keynote talk on Social Participation in Student Recruitment. This year I wanted to do something different and so chose to do a workshop on a subject close to the hearts of most Institutional web teams, bureaucracy. The abstract for my workshop read as follows…

Why is it that so many web projects within public institutions are delivered late and fail to stay within budget? In this session we discuss the challenges faced by institutional Web site managers and look at specific techniques to address issues such as design by committee, scope creep and internal politics.

You can find the slides below, thanks to the nice people at slideshare. You can also download it as a 3.5mb PDF.

126. Scaling

Posted in Classic shows on July 14, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this weeks show we learn lessons from the botched iPhone launch here in the UK. We chat to Jeff Veen about the designer / developer relationship and Marcus talks about adding jingles to your website.

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Watch the behind the scenes video (Part 1)

Watch the behind the scenes video (Part 2)

News and Events

The Mobile Internet has reached critical mass

This week saw the release of a new report by Nielsen Mobile entitled “The Worldwide State of the Mobile Web“.

The gist of the report suggests that the mobile web is considerably more popular than many of us would believe. 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US and 12.9 percent in the UK, use the mobile web regularly. In the US this equates to 40 million users. A substantial number.

Interestingly the most common device used for accessing the mobile web is not a smartphone but rather the Motorola RAZR. This reenforces the answer I gave Wayne in last weeks show. I said we cannot design exclusively for devices such as the iPhone.

With people like the VP of Google stating that the future of the internet lies with mobile users, there can now be little doubt as to the direction things are moving. This is especially true now that we are seeing unlimited data plans.

Web Standards Curriculum

A regular complaint I hear from students is that they are concerned about the out of date techniques they are taught at school or college. With many institutions still teaching table based design it is a legitimate concern.

Fortunately they are not alone in this concern. Opera and Yahoo! have teamed up to produce a web standards curriculum. This curriculum teaches best practice in web design and is broken down into modules that can be taught either by themselves or part of existing lesson plans.

If you are a student or educator definitely check this out. Hopefully you can get it adopted at your institution. Even if you cannot, there is nothing to stop you working through the course yourself.

Working with designers

Although our next post reads slightly like a rant (I should know what a rant sounds like!) it nevertheless communicates some excellent advice.

It is a post aimed at clients and provides 12 tips for working with designers. Advice includes leaving preconceived notions at the door, be specific in your requirements and design for your customers and not yourself.

There is no doubt that many clients serious misunderstand the role of the designer. However if I was a client reading this, I might find the tone hard to swallow. Despite that I would encourage those of you who work with designers to read this article. My favourite quote is…

Just as writers are not just people who can type, designers are not just people who can use graphics programs.

Web form design patterns

Our final post this week is a survey Smashing Magazine have done on 100 popular sign up form. The idea of the survey is to give you a better understanding of what makes an effective sign up form.

Of course, just because other sites do things in a certain way, does not make that the best approach. You should never blindly follow the crowd. Nevertheless this is a fascinating read.

The post is split into two parts and contains information such as…

How the link to the sign-up form is titled
The placement of sign-up links
Whether the sign-up form is a single or multiple pages
How labels are aligned
How many fields are mandatory
What help and tooltips are provided
How validation is managed
How error messages are designed
Is it necessary to confirm the email address
Is it necessary to confirm the password

The list goes on.

If you are looking to justify design decisions you have made or need some help designing the perfect signup form, this is a great place to start.

Just a quick reminder that the news we feature on the show is only a fraction of what myself and Paul Stanton post on the website. To get a more comprehensive view on what is happening in the world of web design, make sure you subscribe to our news RSS feed.

Feature: Lessons to be learnt from O2

I am not sure whether you noticed but this last week saw the launch of the iPhone 3G. It would certainly have been hard to miss it.

I don’t want to add anymore to the endless discussion surrounding this launch. However, I would like to focus on a side issue. I want to look at how O2s website handled this momentous event and what we can learn from their mistakes.

Interview: Jeff Veen on working with developers

Paul: So I’m very excited to have Jeff Veen joining me today on the show. Good to talk to you Jeff!

Jeff: Oh, it’s absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me!

Paul: Well it’s really good to get you on the show. I’ve wanted you on for ages, but I haven’t had the guts to kind of approach you so I sent Ryan to talk to you instead. I feel vaguely like, you know, you get at school discos where you fancy a girl and you send your best friend over ’cause you don’t have the guts to do it yourself. Or is that just me?

Jeff: Well I’ll tell you, I’m happy to have this dance Paul. It’s great.

Paul: Right, well for those that don’t know you Jeff and don’t know your background can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in a situation where you ended up working for Google. You know, how did that come about happening? ‘Cause that’s what we’re going to talk about a little bit today is your experiences of being at Google.

Jeff: Well, I tell you I’d been working with developers, as kind of more on the design side for quite a long time. Do you remember hotwired.com from Wired Magazine?

Paul: Oh yes, definitely.

Jeff: Way back when, right? Like we launched that back in 1994 and that’s really when I got started on the web, was coming over to Wired, working on their online properties like Hotwired, Webmonkey, and HotBot search engine, you know stuff like that. So I was with them for quite a while, they went through an acquisition and brought us over to Lycos, that big search engine. And then from there I started a company called Adaptive Path. Adaptive Path is a user experience consulting group in San Francisco. It was seven of us, we were all friends from the industry. We really focused on research, design, information architecture, usability, stuff like that. And I did that for a number of years with them and then finally convinced my partners that doing a product would be something interesting for us to try. We had done consulting. We had done some events. So we were kind of looking for the next thing to try. So I put together a small team of developers and some other designers and we made a product called Measure Map. That was a web analytics tool aimed specifically at bloggers. And just as we were about to launch it, we had done a bunch of work on it, Google gave us a call and said, “We love what you’re doing. We want you to come over and bring that to Google.” So we went through an acquisition there and that’s really how I got to Google.

Paul: Ahh, I see. ‘Cause I remember very vividly Measure Map coming along and getting very excited about it and then it kind of disappeared.

Jeff: A little bit, yeah.

Paul: Yeah, ’cause you got swallowed into Google.

Jeff: Well Google was very clear that they had a lot of respect for the work that we had done around designing Measure Map and wanted us to apply that expertise to their big Google Analytics product which had recently, sort of. They had acquired a company called Urchin, which had kind of an enterprise analytics package and they had made it free, and that had brought it to a whole new audience that really, sort of, didn’t quite understand how analytics worked. So we brought some of the best practices of design into Google and redesigned Google Analytics to make it sort of, kind of maintain all the power that it had, but make it much more accessible to a broader audience. So that’s really what we spent our time doing at Google.

Paul: OK, so we saw Google Analytics and those changes that you made to Google Analytics appear a few months back, and you know, were very impressive. But I’m quite interested in what happened. How did that come about, and how did that process work? So you arrive at Google, you walk through the door of Google. Now, one presumes that there was an existing Analytics team already working. Is that right?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s right. There was probably about twenty developers or so that were working on the Analytics application. Almost entirely all, sort of back-end engineers. As you can imagine, something of that size and scope, it’s a pretty impressive technical feat. The amount of data that they’re tracking every day, really just continues to blow my mind how much scale they have over there. So there was really, really talented engineers that had been working with the product for quite some time. That product had been around for a number of years. I think they were in version six of the product. But, to their credit, the Director of Engineering, a guy named Paul Moret, really knew that he had to change that application for this new audience that he had, sort of had started to grow by being at Google. So he was really behind the idea of completely rethinking. “Like lets,” he said, “Let’s start from scratch. Right, we have a lot of users. We have a really powerful product that I want to completely rethink how this happens.” And so, yeah, we really just rolled up our sleeves and sat down with him and his team and really sort of became one team. Got in there and made a lot of change. One of the things I think that really helped us be successful there was that we had a pretty robust methodology for user research that really resonated with a lot of the engineers that we were working with. It was really sort of. It was like I said, pretty mature, had a lot of data behind it so we could really show a lot of the work and helped us really get over a lot of the perceived subjectivity of design. So, you know, you can imagine this team comes in. We are a bunch of relatively technical designers, but still designers. And we sit down with these very, very technical engineers and we kind of showed them a process of how we were going to talk to a lot of the existing audience, a lot of the new segments of the audience, take everything that they told us and kind of boil it down into a lot of actionable next steps. And a way of prioritizing what features and changes we wanted to make. And so rather than us kind of going off, doing a bunch of design work and presenting it to them, we really involved everybody, or as many people as we could, in the process of how to change that application at its very basic level. So I think the results of doing all of that with the technical team was that we built a lot of trust between us. So that we could take some of their fundamental assumptions and really question those, but include them in that process so that there was a lot of give and take.

Paul: I mean yeah, because your initial reaction when you look at a company like Google, that it is a very developer-centric company. So I was kind of half-expecting you to say that you encountered quite a lot of resistance to the kind of design changes that you were introducing, but from the sounds of it, because your methodology is quite scientific, for want of a better word, you know it’s very logical, etcetera that it sounds like it went down quite well.

Jeff: Yeah, it did. It feels like we’re using the scientific method: doing testing and research and analysis and things like that. Ultimately though, so much of design is really, really hard to measure. Especially when it comes to matters of taste and perception and things like that. I mean, we can measure click-throughs and we can measure conversion rates and things like that, but ultimately the changes had to come from just being good designers. So having this relatively, kind of quantitative analysis that we did just allowed us to sort of speak on the same terms with the engineers. Have them trust us, and then let us make the changes we felt in our gut we should be making. So a lot of times I’ll be working with somebody who is very technical and they want to say, “Well if you make that change, can you show us some data that’ll prove that that’s the right change to make?” And almost never can I do that. Right, like we can do little tests and we can do some A/B testing and multivariate testing and stuff like that. And that’s good for little incremental changes but when you’re fundamentally changing an application it’s almost impossible to measure the accuracy of the decisions that you’re making. And that can be hard for somebody who really is a very analytical thinker, very quantitative in the decisions that they make, to sometimes kind of let go and say “No. You’ve go
t to trust us. It’s just going to be better.”

Paul: So were there other techniques that you used beyond providing data to kind of bridge that gap between the way that maybe designers see the world and that of developers?

Jeff: Well I’ll tell you another thing that I really believe in, is prototyping rather than just drawing mockups. One of the benefits I had going into Google is that I had a remarkable team at Measure Map that were quite technical. A very good front-end developer who could do lots of JavaScript, AJAX, CSS markup kind of work. A talented Ruby developer, and then a guy who was great with Flash and ActionScript. So bringing this team together, all of them good designers, but all of them with very technical backgrounds, we could come in and very quickly start to realize what a redesign might look like. Also the thing that really helped us was that Analytics internally had a very well-developed API. So we could say “All right, show us how this API works, then we’re going to immediately start experimenting on top of it using real data. We can bring users in for usability tests and they can see their data in our prototype in a matter of weeks, rather than months and months of development.” So having that separation between design, front-end and back-end, through a robust API allowed us to prototype so quickly that they could immediately say, “Wow! Look at all the work this team is doing!” Rather than us standing in front of the projector pointing at Photoshop comps or something and saying “Imagine what it would be like to click here.” We just had a thing working that people could log into anytime.

Paul: Yeah, I can really understand how that would make an enormous difference. So I’m presuming that you talk about your little team of people that went in there and started doing prototyping and stuff like that, but obviously you’re going to want to engage more with the developers that are there. I mean, the traditional danger has always been that as a developer and a designer you work independently. The designer does his thing. He hands it over the partition to the developer. The developer goes away and does his thing. Now I presume you wanted to avoid that. So how did you establish that working relationship? How did you end up working closely together?

Jeff: I have almost no interest in that sort of “waterfall method” where somebody goes off and does research, hands it off to designers, designers then do some of their magic, hand it off to developers. I’ve never been successful at doing that, primarily I think because I learn so much from the process of building things. So again, it was just, really one of the first things we did was invest a lot in getting the teams to trust one another. And that meant really just spending time with each other. So that meant almost every day just scheduling some time in the conference room for us all to kick around ideas, to look at some of the existing work that they were doing, some of their future plans and just spending a tremendous amount of time with them. We also just had our desks right next to the development team. We were embedded, we were just right there. So we felt like part of the team. We’d all go eat lunch together. I mean simple things like that just make the development process so much more, so much easier because there’s real people working with each other rather than faceless “other people” handing specs over. So putting a lot of time in: absolutely crucial to success in a process like that.

Paul: So obviously you got to work with a great group of people over at Google. Some of the most talented developers in the world I guess. So I’m really interested to know, what was it you learned from them? You spent all this time with them, what was the kind of thing that you took away as a front-end interface designer what did you learn from this amazing group of developers?

Jeff: Well, a couple of things really. I think the thing that struck us the most when we first got there was just the enormous scale of everything. Like Google, as you can imagine, Google has lots and lots of users, but they have a tremendous diversity of users too, literally from around the world. A statistic that we throw out all the time is that seventy percent of Google’s traffic comes from outside the United States. So the audience that we were used to designing for is really the small minority of people, and in fact the rest of the world is where all of the products are being used. So we had to think about that diversity of audience even in the design decisions that we were making every day in that everything that we were designing was going to be translated in up to forty different languages. So that was probably the first thing that really brought our attention. The second thing was the unbelievably high standards that Google had for their products. Like you said, I totally agree, they’re some of the best engineers in the world. They have coding standards. They have testing standards, QA standards that were absolutely remarkable. I just learned so much about how every little detail fits into place to make a product that’s as robust and as really scalable and useable by a global audience that Google has. It was really like I got a crash course in some of the best computer science education I could possibly ever ask for.

Paul: Very cool indeed. So for the designers that are listening to this now, the front-end people that maybe are working with developers day in and day out and secretly behind their backs are having a bit of moan about those developers, they’re finding them quite tricky to work with, what advice would you give them about interacting and working with developers?

Jeff: Well, like I said, you’ve got to spend time in the trenches with them. That I think is just the most obvious thing that I can recommend doing. For both sides. It was hard for me to trust a lot of developers, like “Oh, you’re only concerned about your servers, you don’t care about users at all.” Which of course is completely false, but that’s an inherent bias that I would have. So again, spending that time: incredibly important. I think one of the things that I try to educate the most while I was there was that the level of detail, the care, everything that goes into the coding standards that engineers have, we have that same standard for the interfaces that we build. So I think sometimes, and I hate to generalize across developers, because I’ve worked just the entire spectrum of developers. One of the themes that I hear from time to time is that design is something that kind of happens at the end. Like “We do all the hard engineering. We get all of these systems in place and write all of this code and then we need some designers to come on and put the interface on so that we can actually launch this thing.” That I think cheapens a lot of the work that we do, and it’s a little bit demeaning for the discipline of design, of user experience. So I think we have biases on both sides and that frankly understanding more about what goes into the process both from a front-end and a back-
end point of view is kind of what brings us all together.

Paul: So if you could communicate one thing to the developers, one lesson, the question the other way around I guess. I guess in some ways it’s the same answer, isn’t it? It’s kind of stick with one another.

Jeff: Yeah, a little bit. Also there’s some really simple techniques that I’ve used, for example: even before we started we’d schedule a usability test with the existing product and get the engineers into the room behind that one way mirror and we would just watch. And we would watch people flail around with the interface and struggle and get frustrated and push the keyboard away. I mean that’s just golden. People see that and they’re just like, “Oh man, we’ve got some work to do.” So making it as clear as possible, what our users are trying to do, how we can all collaborate together to help them: incredibly, incredibly important. That said, it wasn’t, you know when I did consulting at Adaptive Path I was inside lots of companies. I worked with some of the biggest companies in America and saw inside of them and, to be honest, Google is truly a user-centered company. I was just so impressed with that. Broadening that idea of user-centered technology development is something that we worked on. Making it more of a balance between front-end and back-end is more some of the things we worked on. But ultimately I think Google really understands that putting users first is the way to be successful. Just look at the search results page with it’s very simple but incredibly effective advertising techniques, and you know, Google never had a front page that was full of the sort of portal design stuff that Yahoo! and other companies have done. So really, it was very fertile ground for the kind of work we wanted to do when we got there.

Paul: Very interesting. I’ve just thought of one other question that I get asked a lot from people looking to get into web design: they say, “So what am I better off doing, you know, where’s the best place to work? Is it in the large company? Or is it doing something in a small company by yourself?” Now you’ve obviously done both of those and there is no definitive answer, but what would you see as the pros and cons of a large company in comparison to working somewhere smaller like Adaptive Path?

Jeff: You’re right, in my career I’ve got swung back and forth between big and small. There are definitely benefits and drawbacks to both of them. In the bigger companies I think just inherently things move slower. Now, I mean Google is renowned for it’s “bottom-up culture” and good ideas are always emerging from people taking their twenty percent time. None of that is a myth. That all really happens. But at the same time, like I said, when millions of users, or hundreds of millions for some of the products. You just have to take a lot more steps, and what that does is it increases the distance between the idea that a designer or developer has, and a user actually seeing that idea. And one of the things that I love about this sort of entrepreneurial startup environment is that you can think of something, you can try it out, you can get it in front of your users. You can do that in an afternoon. And you can’t do that with a product like Gmail or Adwords or something like that because there’s so much inherent infrastructure and risk, things like that. I think it’s incredibly worthwhile for people to have both experiences, and frankly see what they like best. One of the things I really have learned in my career is that there are people that like to start things, and that there are people that like to run things. And there is no inherent judgment between the two, but once you understand “Ooh, I love having a big system and having that system run perfectly, and putting all the things in place to keep that, you know.” And that’s fantastic. I’ve learned, in my career, that I’m kind of on the other side. I love starting with nothing and building up something, and at some point I need to hand it off to somebody who is much better at running and maintaining, right. So those are the kind of things you learn by doing a lot of very different projects and product development and stuff like that as your career kind of goes on, I think.

Paul: So you’ve left Google now? So what’s the next step? What are you up to at the moment? Let’s finish on a looking forward note. Where are you going? What are you doing?

Jeff: I was at Google for just over two years and left about six weeks ago, and to be honest I’m spending a lot of time right now cycling and trying to sleep late, and things like that. I tell you it’s a tremendous luxury and I’m not taking it for granted at all. The immediate next thing is that I’m organizing a little conference with my colleague Bryan Mason, who I have worked with at Adaptive Path. He and I are doing a conference in San Francisco in August about starting companies. Yeah, as I was leaving Google I was thinking, “Well, what should I do next? What would be interesting?” So I talked to a bunch of my friends who have been entrepreneurs, or who are now investors and I just asked them, “Tell me your story. How did you get to where you are?” And I found those stories so interesting that I thought, “Man, we’ve got to share this. This is great.” And I thought, “Well, I could do a podcast or something like that.” But then I thought, “I love getting people together and having sort of a community feel.” So we thought: we’ll get one day, San Francisco in August. We’ll get everybody together and we’ll just have these conversations. So I’m really looking forward to it. It’s called “The Start Conference” and you can find it at thestartconference.com. That’s what we’re doing now.

Paul: Excellent stuff. Thank you so much Jeffrey for coming onto the show and talking about that. The issue of designers and developers working together is something that’s really important and I think there’s a lot of work still to be done, and it’s good to see that there are people out there that have got it right and are going in the right direction.

Jeff: I appreciate that Paul.

Paul: Thanks for your time.

Jeff: Thank you.

Thanks to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Adding a jingle to your site

Chris writes: A client of mine wants to incorporate 4 second jingles at various points on their website, triggered on page load, to reinforce their servicing brand. My first reaction is that this could get annoying but was curious as to your thoughts on the use of audio on the web.

I don’t think that there is any set ‘rule’ here but basically I would agree 100% that you shouldn’t do it because it will annoy the hell out of the site’s users.

There is an argument that audio branding can be included if th
e user only has to hear it once. However, I would dispute this as well for the following reasons:

It may well still annoy (and therefore have a negative effect upon) the site’s users
Users aren’t expecting it and it could embarrass them in an office environment
Quite a lot of users will have the sound off. Therefore, if you decide that the audio is only an ‘add on’ for the brand then you may as well conclude that it’s not necessary at all.

I have talked about audio on website before and reached the conclusion that, even though technology and bandwidth makes it more doable, it’s the wrong medium for audio. I think I likened it to having a soundtrack while you’re reading a book – it’s just wrong!

Of course, there are no doubt exceptions to this rule – really well thought out and produced audio indicators on a web app for example – but, generally speaking, audio branding on a website will have a negative effect. If your client is insistent, try and persuade him to include a video download on the site where audio will certainly work.

Fixed or bespoke pricing

Jon writes: We are a small web design and development company (4 people) and have tended to concentrate on higher value bespoke work. We are probably about to merge with another slightly larger company in a neighbouring town. This other company have traditionally aimed at a somewhat lower value market.

My question is about pricing. The other company operate to a very structured price list (£x for a 5 page brochure site, £Y for a basic ecommerce site, £Z for an ecommerce site with knobs on etc). We have always priced each project individually using a mixture of time costing, guesswork, and a “how much can we get away with” approach.

Do you think that a merged company approaching a wider market and value range would be better to adopt one approach or the other, or continue to do both? Would the existence of one approach damage the ability to operate effectively at the other end of the scale?

I guess the big question here is – are you going to remain as two different entities with some shared resources, or are you going to merge more fully and share work between the team no matter where it is sourced from (i.e. will one of their designers work on a future project from one of your existing clients)? If it is the former (which I suspect it isn’t) then I would keep the two pricing models the same as they are. I wouldn’t try and hide the fact that the two companies have ‘merged’ though, just explain that there are two teams delivering different services.

However, if the two companies are merging more fully, then I think this is actually fairly fundamental stuff. It’s almost like you’re all starting again and need to write a business plan. I think you would be opening yourself up for much criticism if you tried to operate both pricing plans.

I suppose other questions to you would be:

Which pricing plan is most effective (who is making the most profit)?
What does each company’s order book look like? I.e. have you just signed a massive contract at your higher rates?

This is interesting stuff and I’d like to know how it works out. I suppose the biggest unknown for me (that may well answer all of my other questions) is that I don’t know the reason for the merger in the first place.

Headscape is recruiting (again!)

Posted in News on March 26, 2008 by Paul Boag

Headscape are currently after two new members of staff. If you are an experienced Information Architect or a newly qualified developer, we would love to speak to you.

Yes I know, I am not supposed to be blogging at the moment. However, the reason I am not blogging is because we are so insanely busy. In order to get around this problem we are recruiting (yet again!). If you fancy the idea of working with the gang at Headscape then drop me an email.

Here are the jobs…

Information Architect

We are currently looking for a smart, articulate Information
Architect to work with our clients on initial stakeholder interviews,
user testing and the production of wireframes.

We are looking for candidates with some or all of the following skills:

An ability to organize complex information into simple, easy to
understand structures.
Experience in running stakeholder interviews and other requirement
gathering exercises.
Outstanding organizational and communication skills.
Proven experience in preparing, running and reporting on usability
test sessions.
The ability to produce easy to digest documentation on IA and
usability issues.
Extensive experience creating sitemaps, wireframes, use-case
scenarios
and flow diagrams.
Experience of working with large, complex, information heavy
websites.
Ability to plan and execute competitive analysis.
Proven experience of working with and producing personas.
The ability to meet aggressive deadlines.
A good understanding of the design process.
A good understanding of technical constraints.
Experience of copyrighting.
Experience of working with B2C ecommerce sites.

The ideal candidate would be one who is able to work from our Southampton office for at least part of the week.

Experience:

Bachelors degree or the equivalent
3 years experience designing websites preferably within a web design
agency.

Graduate web developer

Starting salary: £22k+
Location: Southampton

Headscape is looking for a graduate web developer, with a 1st or 2:1 degree in a relevant discipline, who is passionate about their profession, keen to learn and can demonstrate good problem solving abilities.

Headscape’s core development technologies are ASP.NET v2.0, VB.NET, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and XML/XSLT. We have our own, highly flexible content management system software that is the basis for most of our website implementation projects for clients. We are also in the process of developing an online service aimed at web designers.

If you don’t have skills in our core development technologies, don’t worry. We can help you to acquire the skills you’ll need. What we need is demonstrable ability and enthusiasm.

You will need to be a fast learner. You need to be a confident, productive developer. You need to understand relational databases. You must be motivated by developing real-world, web-based applications that really matter to their users. You’ll want to grab with both hands this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a web agency with a national (becoming international) reputation.

If you have had some web development experience outside your degree course we’d love to hear about it too.

Your role will involve working in client project teams with project managers, designers, information architects and user interface developers to create superb bespoke web solutions on-time and within budget.

About Headscape

Headscape is an established web design agency based in the Southampton,
England. We produce top quality websites that are accessible to the
widest possible audience, easy to use and designed around our
clients business objectives. Clients include large government bodies,
educational institutions, charities and the commercial sector.

112. Jina

Posted in Classic shows on February 20, 2008 by Paul Boag

On show 112: How to be more efficient using HTML snippets, Jina Bolton on women in web design and moving to a mac.

Podcast: Download (30.4MB)

Download this show.

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News and events | Using HTML snippets | Jina Bolton on women in web design | Listener emails

News and events

Some customers are not worth caring about

My first piece of news is a post by Gerry McGovern. In his latest post he argues that some customer are not worth caring about.

The thrust of the article is that by appealing to everybody, you ultimately appeal to nobody. This is something I see repeatedly from clients who define their target audience as “the general public” or “men under 50.”

You also see it among developers who become overly concerned that people using IE4 with Javascript disabled might be unable to access the site. Even content providers suffer from this problem, dumping content on their websites “just in case somebody finds it useful.”

Ultimately building a website has to generate a return on investment and some customers don’t generate that return.

Version targeting rumbles on

Next up is two new articles on A List Apart, which once again tackle version targeting. Jeremy Keith argues against it, while Jeffrey Zeldman defends the position.

I have tried to stay fairly objective in my coverage of this issue. However, although I understand the position of people like Jeremy, I believe that Microsoft have done a good thing.

The arguments against strike me as somewhat naive and arrogant. We live in a world of compromise and yet as compromises go this isn’t a bad one. By adding a single line of code we have the ability to control how the market leader renders our sites. As Zeldman says…

Designers and developers should be popping corks, hugging each other, and weeping with joy. IE no longer sucks. No version of IE will ever again surprise us with unexpected displays or behavior.

Perhaps I am overly pragmatic, caring more about real world scenarios than purity of solution, but I am hopeful about the future.

Let users tagging your posts with delicious

The last news story is two posts from Christian Heilmann. The first is a Javascript technique that returns any delicious tags associated with the current page. This is a great way of introducing tagging to your site, without having to tag all of your own articles. The downside is that when users click on a tag, they are not taken to other articles you have written. Instead they see all delicious links associated with that tag. Good for the user, maybe not so good for retaining users.

The second post by Christian is another Javascript solution. This time he provides a mechanism for walking a user through the key features on your site. It generates an animated series of popup caption boxes beside different screen elements. It is definitely useful for showing off key features to new users. However, I have to wonder if a good screencast wouldn’t do the job better. Nevertheless, it is an interesting proof of concept. Check it out.

Feature: Using HTML snippets

If you are part of a web design team or skip constantly between projects, then you might want to consider an alternative approach to writing your HTML. Discover how we became more efficient at Headscape by using HTML snippets.

Expert interview: Jina Bolton on women in web design

Paul: Okay. So joining myself and Marcus today is Jina Bolton. How are you, Jina? Good to have you on the show.

Jina: I am doing well. How are you?

Paul: Yeah. Well, other than the weather that we just keep complaining about, things arenít too bad here. We are bearing up under the strain. So, for those of you that havenít come across Jina before, she is now an internationally renowned speaker

Jina: [laughs]

Paul: and author and incredible web designer. And is the kind of quality of person that is selected to appear at South by Southwest (SXSW) Marcus just for your interest that she is the kind of person they are looking for not you.

Marcus: You know, I know that because I got a magazine thing through by South by Southwest and there she was on the cover of it.

Paul: Ummm!

Jina: [laughs] Yeah. I got into a little for that too.

Paul: Why did you get into trouble for that? Who with?

Jina: The company I work or. Iím not really a speaker on behalf of that company, so

Paul: Ahhh, I see.

Jina: and they printed that company name by my name.

Paul: Right.

Jina: Anyway, different subject. [laughs]

Paul: Okay!

Marcus: [laughs]

Paul: And the company you work for will remain nameless and notorious for their strictness over things like that, so

Jina: Yeah.

Paul: There we go. But, basically yes Marcus. They want young attractive, intelligent and clever designer rather than an aging pop-star. Sorry about that.

Jina: [laughs]

Marcus: [laughs] I can live with it.

Paul: Yeah. Jina has been kind enough to let me come on her panel, so that should be fun shouldnít it? Iím looking forward to that.

Jina: Yeah, I think it will be great.

Paul: If we actually get our act together and organize it.

Marcus: But, Jina is obviously that much richer after you have paid her Paul.

Paul: Well yes. You know I did have to bribe my way on. But, it seemed to work, so that is good.

Paul: So, there are so many things we could have gotten Jina on the show to discuss. She seems to be talking a lot about CSS lately. Mainly just by putting the word sex in the title of everything she does, which seems to improve your ratings to no end.

Jina: [laughs] You found my tactic.

Paul: Yeah. It seems to work for you Jina, so thatís good. But we wanted to go for a little bit of an unusual subject. I wanted to really look at the role of women within web design because well letís face it, your kind of a rare breed in some senses Jina. There arenít as many women in web design as perhaps there should be. And I just thought that it might be an interesting subject. And Iím sure that you have some opinions on it and so maybe we can encourage I know that there are a lot of women that listen to our show that maybe havenít moved full-time into the world of web design and maybe youíve got some advice to offer. So thatís the kind of plans. Does that sound okay with you?

Jina: Sure.

Paul: Good. Okay, well letís kick off then just by asking a really kind of obvious question, but kick us off with this Do you believe that women provide something unique to the world of web design, and if so what is that? Is there actually a difference? Is there something that makes womenís role unique?

Jina: Ummm. Well I think that there is something unique being brought to the table, that personís own personal style because I think that men and women have the same skill set. Now of course there are a lot of women that have a feminine style, so they do bring that into play, but I think it is more style than it is the natural skill of designing itself.

Paul: Okay. So, do you believe that there are kind of genetic differences really? ëTheyí make all kinds of things for example that woman have better color perception than men, but men have probably got better 3D acuity and things like that. Do you think that that actually makes a difference? Or is that all so marginal, that itís not that big deal?

Jina: Well I havenít really thought about that to be honest. As for color, I donít know. I guess, you know, a woman sense of color perception is supposed to be more acute. Maybe they could bring better colors to the table, but I think the skill sets are pretty much the same. I guess, you know, a lot of men can design for men and men can design for women. I think the skill sets are the same.

Paul: Oh, okay. So you wouldnít believe say, for example, if there was a website that was primarily aimed at a female market that it should be a female designer that works on a site like that?

Jina: Ah, well. So I do think that a female designer would have an easier time knowing how to cater to a female audience because they are that audience. But I donít think that it would make the website design better. I think a man would be just as capable in creating for that female audience.

Paul: Ah, that is interesting. Marcus, what do you think about that? I kind of always naturally presumed that somebody is more capable of designing for their own gender.

Marcus: Iím surprised by Jinaís answer to be honest. But, thinking about it, it is something that you think ëYeah, it makes more sense for women to design for women.í but really itíd to do more with the content. I think it would be hard for a man to produce content for a site aimed at women. But maybe the design is something, like Jina says, is more the designers have a set bunch of skills and whether you are a man or a woman it really doesnít make any difference. So it is more of a content issue.

Jina: I do agree that it would be easier for a woman to do it, because like I said she is that audience so sheís gonna know what kind of things a woman would like. But, I donít think that would make the website design any better because a man would be able to do just the same.

Paul: Hmmm.

Jina: You know it is kind-of sort-of like to ëbring issues into ití. Like, I had a firm that was from India who was asked to design for the National Civil Rights Museum and his isnít African-American, nor was he even American, but he did a fantastic job. So, I think for gender it would kind of the same. Like, if he was African-American he probably would have had an easier time but he would still have been creative with the artistic part.

Paul: So basically, he had to work harder to achieve the good design, but he could still do it.

Jina: Right.

Paul: Hmmm. Yeah. I do see where you are coming from on that. You mentioned earlier about a kind of feminine style to design. Do you think there are differences in style? What would you class as being a particularly feminine style of design?

Jina: I think it is really color choices and font choices, as well as certain patterns like some designers I think of at the top-of my head *Vera-Ley* and *Legha Alfanterra* they both you know if you look at there websites they are very very feminine. You know my website is really feminine looking, but I think it is because of the colors theyíve chosen and the font choice weíve picked and as well as the patterns. I notice a lot of guys tend to go for the grungier things and the girls kind-of go for more of a clean look. But I think those are stylistic differences.

Paul: So when do you think that kind of where do you think that comes from? You know is that something that is trained into us? You know, blokes tend to go for grungiest stuff? Even from being a kid I guess ëboys are blueí and ëgirls are pinkí, you know, all that kind of thing.

Jina: [laughs]

Paul: But, how much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture do you think?

Jina: Ewe I have no idea. [laughs]

Paul: [laughs]

Marcus: [laughs]

Jina: But, I do think it comes from the way people are brought up like you said ëgirls are pinkí and ëboys are blueí. I think it is really what that person has come to like as they have grown up.

Paul: Hmmm.

Jina: To be honest, Iím not a real fan of pink at all

Paul: [laughs] Good for you.

Jina: but I use it in my website for some reason. [laughs]

Paul: [laughs] I mean yes. You see the trouble that you are making Jina, is that we are trying to make informed comments on this show and nothing that we ever say on this show is informed.

Jina: I think, this topic is kind of just subjective I guess.

Paul: Yeah. Basically you are saying that I picked a dumb subject. That is what you are saying isnít it?

Jina: No, no.

Paul: [laughs]

Jina: A good topic to talk about it, but it is kind of confusing.

Paul: Yeah.

Jina: You know and when I started out doing websites, I used to do websites for rock bands. And all of those sites I did were grungy so I am kind-of contradicting myself.

Paul: Ahhh. So I mean, I guess the big question is that whether you know obviously the industry that you have chosen is a male dominated industry. There are far more men out there. Certainly there are far more high profile men out there on the speaking circuits and writing articles and all of the rest of it. I mean do you perceive that as a problem?

Jina: I am not really sure if ëproblemí is the word. I do think it is getting better. I see a lot more women speaking now and even attending conferences. I see more and more women in attendance. And of course, more women writing articles in books, but I think it may have to do with that it is a fairly new field, in comparison to other design related fields. And so now that it is getting taught in schools, more and more women will start getting into it.

Paul: Hmmm. I mean that raises quite an interesting question. You know, how did you get into it then? From you know, what is your background and how did you end up being a web designer?

Jina: Well actually, my Dad was playing around with making his own personal website and I was intrigued by the idea of publishing to the Internet. So he kind of showed me really-really basic-basic HTML using font tags and tables.

Paul: Yeah.

Jina: I grew up as an artist so I went to art school and I was actually going to be a print designer, but as I was learning HTML it became my hobby and it just kind of merged and became my job.

Paul: Hugh. Okay, fair enough. It is just interesting to know. Okay, so do you think we should be you know you talked about that there are female designers learning at school these days on how to become web designers. Do you think we should be doing active as a community to encourage women to come into the profession? I mean, I know for an example, that there was a lot of talk at one stage about proactively discriminating in conferences to encourage there to be more women speakers. Publications need to make a point of using female authors in order to you know setup role models almost artificially. Is that something you would encourage or do you think that is a slippery slope?

Jina: I have mixed feelings on that. As a woman, I have definitely benefited from people that were looking for more female speakers or more female authors so it has definitely helped me. But, I think discrimination is sort of a fine line and if a guy is more capable and more skilled he really should have more of that opportunity than a woman who is not as skilled. I wouldnít want her to get in, just because she is a woman. But, the fact that there are more opportunities is helpful so I am kind-of on the fence on that one. It is sort of like the same way I feel, and I know this might be considered controversial, but the whole you know like when you get a job. Are you getting hired in my case, if I get hired because I am a woman and I am half Asian versus somebody who maybe is a White male, but who are a lot more skilled than me. I donít know how I feel about that. You know, I am all for more opportunity, I think that is a really good thing. But I think that any discrimination is discrimination.

Paul: I mean it is an interesting one, as somebodyís employer, and I donít know Marcus will feel about this but there are occasions when I really think we miss out as a company. I am sorry to say, we are an all male company, all thirteen of us. And not because we have gone out to be that, in fact precisely the opposite. Weíve often offered woman jobs and they have turned us down actually.

Jina: [laughs]

Paul: And it is a very sad reflection on us. But, I mean Marcus how would you feel about actively going out and saying ëRight, okay, we want to hire a female designer because we want that female perspective.í?

Marcus: I am not too sure how I feel about that, from an employment point of view. As an employer, I think you have to look at who is the best candidate. But what I was thinking about when we were talking about earlier, and this goes back to what I am not talking at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year

Paul: [laughs]

Jina: [laughs]

Marcus: and one of the reasons of why I am not doing that.

Paul: Itís because youíre White, middle-aged and middle-class.

Marcus: No, but one of the things the people who are organizing the panel have to look at different they have to think about ëOkay we are going to have a bunch of panels talking about business, a bunch of panels talking about designí you canít have everything. All the panels cannot just talk about business, for example. So you have to think, okay we will have to split it equally between the different types of genre, if you like. Now, doing that we also want to have an equal split between men and women, I donít think there is anything wrong with that. As an employer it is a different thing. I am not sure, where the law stands on that.

Paul: Ummm!

Marcus: Iím not sure we actually would be able to say we have to have a female employee, or whatever. I think you would be discriminating against other people by doing that.

Paul: Yeah, I guess you are. But, I think we are actually (I have to be honest) I think we suffer as a business to some degree. A classic example of that was not long ago we worked on a website for a higher education institution where over 75% of the people that went there were women. And we were having to do a design. We did the first design and we put it in front of bearing in mind all of our designers are men and we put in front of some test users and the overwhelming response back was ëYouíre trying too hard. You know it is kind of overly feminine.í And it would have been so much easier in that situation if we had a female designer there just to say ëGuys. You really donít need to make it pink and you donít need the little fairies in the corner.í

Marcus: [laughs]

Jina: [laughs] Exactly, you donít want to go with crochets with pink and flowers unless that is the brand you are going for.

Paul: Yeah, I mean that is a good question actually. Do you think there is any bear in mind there is a lot of male designers out there that are listening to this show what are the absolute no-noís? How can they design for a feminine audience without kind of really going over the top? You know, is there any kind of advice you can give, or is it just kind of feel as you go along?

Jina: I think you definitely want to get critiques from women, like if you have peers letís say you are working at a design agency and there are female designers around you, get their opinions. If you donít really have that, I donít know, I guess go to Starbuckís or something

Paul: [laughs]

Jina: and get some critiques because I am just up more for just keeping it simple and clean.

Paul: Yep. That sounds like good advice. I think we are going to have to wrap it up there Jina. Not because I am bored with talking to you, but because the sound quality on Skype sucks so much today. I think weíre gonna have to get you back on the show another time to share maybe some more stuff.

Jina: Okay.

Paul: I donít know, maybe when you are over in the UK that might be possible. Iím sure that it will happen before too long.

Jina: That sounds good.

Paul: Okay.

Jina: And it might even be our Internet connection. I am sorry about that.

Paul: Thatís alright, these things happen. I blame Marcus personally. I never have problems except for when he is on.

Jina: [laughs]

Marcus: Ha ha ha.

Jina: Thatís awful.

Paul: [laughs] Okay. Thanks very much for your time and we will talk to you again soon.

Jina: Okay. Alright.

Paul: Bye.

Listeners email:

SXSW

This week we have a couple of questions about SXSW:

Rich asks…

I am attending sxsw for the first time this year. What should I expect and how can I get the most out of it?

Last year was my first year at SXSW and to be honest it is overwhelming. Before I went I planned out all of the panels I was going to attend but to be honest I wasted my time. I don’t think it is really possible to prepare for a 10 track conference. Ultimately what you go and see will be dictated by how much energy you have left after the various parties you were attending the night before!

Talking of parties, in my in my opinion it is the social aspects of SXSW that is really the most interesting. At the end of the day, you can find out about most of the topics covered online. However, it is meeting and chatting with other web designers that is the really inspiring bit. To this end I would suggest two ideas.

First, take time to just sit in the corridors and get chatting with people. If you are in a good conversation, don’t worry too much that you are missing the panels. Its amazing who you meet just sitting around. Oh yes, and don’t be afraid to introduce yourself to anybody. Most people are friendly and if they are not… screw them!

Second, if there are people you know already attending or if there are people you want to meet add them on Twitter. That way you can see where they are and what they are up to. As a newbie last year, twitter was how I found out where all the best parties were. Definitely add me as I intend to keep twitter up to date with my comings and goings.

Talking of parties and socialising Matthew asks…

Have you considered doing a live show at SXSW?

We have considered it but have decided against it. To be honest, sxsw is manic enough without adding a live show. What is more, I don’t think live shows are that interesting to those that are not attending. This means we will not be releasing a show on the 12th March. However, we will be recording as many interviews as we can cram in, which we will be using over the coming weeks and months.

Although we are not doing a live show, that doesn’t mean we wont have opportunity to meet up. Boagworld is once again sponsoring the Great British Booze up, which is happening on Monday 10th March from 7:30pm at Shakespeare’s Pub (314 E. 6th Street). Full details at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/403331/

Moving to the mac

Brenda asks…

You mentioned on the Christmas list that you recently converted from Windows to Mac. How did it go? Did you have to buy all new software, or were you able to convert licenses for some of it? What was the learning curve like? What do you miss most from Windows? What would you say the overall budget for this was (emptying out that duct tape wallet)?

A very timely question Brenda. With Marcus intending to buy a mac, we have been discussing the switch. I have to say that for me it went very well. Within a week I was entirely happy working on my new macbook and could do everything I did under windows and more. I have certainly never looked back and can honestly say I miss nothing.

However, I confess I was in a luxurious position. Unlike most people I had Headscape to pay for the raft of software I had to purchase. Admittedly companies such as Adobe allowed me to transfer my license from windows to the mac (after jumping through some hoops). However, that was not always the case. Fortunately most of the software I purchased was only $30-40 each. However, that can quickly mount up. The biggest waste was on Microsoft Office. To begin with I couldn’t imagine life without Outlook and Word. In hindsight, I really didn’t need it. iWorks which costs a fraction of Office does everything I need and Apple Mail is a much more pleasurable experience than Outlook. I didn’t keep track of how much I spent on software, however I would guess it was $200-300.

Overall it was a great move and I love not only the mac OS but the great software being developed by some very cool mac developers.

To leave an audio comment for the show skype “boagworldshow” or call +44 20 8133 5122.

browsers, business, conferences, CSS, html, javascript, macs, Podcast, strategy, strategy, sxsw

Come on you cheap skates!

Posted in News on December 10, 2007 by Paul Boag

Okay I have been doing this blog and podcast for over 3 years now. It’s about time I parted you from your cash.

Other than a bit of money from Google Adsense I haven’t made a penny from you. Every week you listen to the podcast and read the blog but what do I get in return… nothing!

Well, okay that isn’t strictly true. I get loads of emails encouraging me and it has to be said the podcast has been good for business, but that is not the point!

This christmas I want something more!

Picture of some of the kids from the Bethesda project

For a while now I have been supporting a charity run by a friend I grew up with. They run a orphanage and school in the heart of rural India (Chinnia Kalvarayan hills,Tamil Nadu). They take in kids that have no family left and teach many others who would normally have little in the way of formal education. They give these kids a chance to change their lives and to become something more. In fact they have been so successful that the children are starting to look at higher education. For example one girl called Rachel is now training to be a doctor in China even though she had never been on a bus let alone flown to another country.

The trouble is sending somebody to study as a doctor in China is expensive and they have more kids that want to do similar things. That is why I am after your money.

But I know you lot. You are hardened cynical geeks. You don’t care about the poor children ;) So ask yourself this: How much is the information on Boagworld worth to you? How much have you learnt or how much has the show entertained you? Surely its worth at least £3. Maybe even more!

Once you have made up your mind give that amount to my Christmas appeal…

Give to the Boagworld Christmas Appeal

Of course, because I only thought up this idea an hour ago I am not very organised. There is no impressive site and no fancy campaign. Just give to my paypal account and Ill pass on the cash. As simple as that. After all, you aren’t impressed by well designed websites… are you?

Why not support the cause on your site?

If you fancy going one step further than giving me all your cash why not support the cause by adding the donation link to your own site. You don’t need to call it the Boagworld Christmas Appeal. Call it whatever you want as long as people give us money!

Show 102: Worktime blues

Posted in Classic shows on November 27, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at why you should have a training budget and how to spend it. Marcus looks at capturing requirements and Roo Reynolds introduces us to the possibilities of virtual worlds and their impact on web design.

Download this show.

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News and events | Marcus Requirements capture | Paul: Spending the training budget | Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds | Question of the week

News and events

10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers

I know that many of the people that listen to the boagworld podcast are freelancers so I keep an eye out for stories that appeal to this group. I was therefore drawn to an article in my news reader entitled 10 Absolute “Nos!” for freelancers. It’s a great article that lists 10 questions asked by clients to which the answer should always be no.

The questions include classics such as “Can you show me a mock-up to help us choose a designer/developer?”, “Can I pay for my e-commerce site from my website sales?” and “Can I just pay the whole amount when it’s done?”. Almost without exception I agreed with every item on this list. The only exception is “Will you register and host my site?” because I think a lot of clients expect this even if it is a pain in the arse. Of course, the fact that I work for an agency rather than as a freelancer could be colouring my view on this one. However, whether you are a freelancer, an agency employee or just an enthusiastic amateur this is all good advice.

Making the most of working with designers

Adaptive Path are an agency I really admire. Not only do they produce some cutting edge work they are also some of the foremost thinkers in the world of web design. I was therefore understandably interested when one of their clients recently asked them how to make the most of working with a design agency.

The resulting blog post called “Making the Most of a Design Engagement” is a fascinating collection of tips that is definitely worth a read.

The subject of how an agency and client engage is something that I have posted on a number of times [1], [2], [3]. However, reading the perspective of another agency (especially one so well respected) is very enlightening. What I found most encouraging of all is that they obviously struggle with the same kind of client issues we all do.

Whether you are somebody who commissions web designers or whether you are a designer yourself take the time to read this short post.

How Open ID will change your site

Just before I went away on holiday (did I mention I had been away?) there was a new post on the Think Vitamin website about OpenID. I am a big fan of OpenID and have spoken about it before on the show. However, its a tricky concept to explain. At its heart it allows you to login to all the many services you use on the web from one single site so having to deal with only a single username and password.

I sincerely believe that if you are building a new website that has any form of login then you should consider including an OpenID login. The problem at the moment is that you will have to do this in addition to the normal login process. You might wonder if it is worth the effort.

The article on the Think Vitamin site does an excellent job at explaining just how significant OpenID is going to be (even though it exaggerates it in places). It explains the background, the problem and the possibilities. If you haven’t looked at OpenID yet or are sceptical about its worth then the Think Vitamin is a great place to start.

Good practice when working with Tag Clouds

Tagging is everywhere these days. From Flickr to Delicious every site seems to have tags. Even blogs like this one has tags. Tags are a useful alternative form of navigation that allows users to quickly find related content no matter where it is in the sites hierarchy. There is no doubt they are powerful and incredibly useful especially on larger sites with a lot of content.

The problem is that they are relatively new. We are still working out how to successfully integrate them into our websites and what role they play. Fortunately a recent article entitled “Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices” attempts to establish some best practice for tagging and makes some suggestions about their design and integration.

If you are doing some design work with tags or if you are looking to add tags to your own site then you may want to take a look at this post. My only word of caution is that it only tells half the story. It addresses tag clouds but says little about how tags on individual pages should be displayed.

Marcus’ bit: Requirements capture

While Paul has been buddying up with Mickey, Donald and Pluto, I have been working with a UK higher education institution at the very early stages of their website redesign project.

One of the things that we have been discussing in detail is the process we will go through to capture requirements and set objectives for the site. I thought I should share them here.

Existing site review

I have looked in the past at carrying out an expert review relating solely on a site’s information architecture. A site review takes on board some aspects of the existing site’s IA but is more general than that.

I tend to look at the following site features very much from a usability point of view:

Navigability – can I find things?
Consistency of navigation
Visual hierarchy – consistency of the design
Writing style
Processes – search, making a comment, ordering etc
Terminology
Content – grouping, repetition, wide/narrow mix, internal/external mix etc

The main purposes of the review are:

To highlight to all stakeholders what the site issues are
To highlight to all stakeholders positive aspects of the existing site
To suggest possible solutions to issues
To explain the processes involved in achieving goals

Stakeholder interviews

We have found that interviewing key internal staff (i.e. content owners) and sometimes key users, is the most valuable exercise in creating a requirements and objectives document.

Each interview is done on a one-to-one basis to ensure that people say what they really mean! The interviews are semi-structured which means that we will create a script of questions but will happily allow people move off-track.

The interviews aim to gather opinion on the site’s user base, weighting of content, issues and opportunities.

Work together

Though we are usually brought in as experts to consult on this type of process it is imperative that the client is involved at every step of the way. This is because one of the purposes of the exercise is information gathering. For example, creating user personas based just on stakeholders interview input may miss something that discussing/reviewing with the web team would not.

Create the document

What we are trying to do is record all findings in a manner that can be used as a basis for all the work to follow – IA, design, copywriting, build etc. In other words – create a list of requirements for the new site and give them an order of priority.

It needs to get into detail to be useful. A recent review we carried out contained over twenty specific opportunities for the site, which target audience groups each issue related to and how the site could deliver each opportunity.

This was coupled with a detailed list of requirements per audience group – 25 audience groups with over a hundred requirements. The requirements we also graded for importance into ‘must haves’, ‘should haves’ and ‘nice to haves’.

Paul’s corner: Spending your training budget

I recently received a question from Harry asking “what approach do you take to training?”. He has some budget set aside and is wondering how he should spend it. As I am always keen to spend other people’s money this seemed the perfect subject for me to talk about… read keeping your skills sharp.

Training course give away

While I am on the subject of training, the guys over at Clearleft have two training courses coming up on January the 24th and 25th in Brighton. The first is CSS mastery by Andy Budd and the second is Bulletproof AJAX by Jeremy Keith. If you would like to attend but cannot get your company to produce the £345 + VAT for the early bird fee then I might be able to help. I have one free place to give away to either course (your choice) for a lucky random winner. We will announce the winner on our Christmas special so entries need to be in by Friday 14th of December. Just send me an email with your name and contact details with “clearleft competition” in the subject line.

Ask the expert: Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds

Paul: Okay, so joining me today is Roo Reynolds who is a meta verse evangelist for IBM, Its nice to have you on the show Roo

Roo: Hi Paul,

Paul: What on earth is a meta verse evangelist?

Roo: That’s a good question, I guess a meta verse evangelist is someone who helps people understand the very exciting and confusing area of virtual worlds.

Paul: Ah, virtual worlds. Now the people listening to this show might be thinking what has that got to do with web design, why have we got someone one on here talking about virtual worlds and I am quite happy to admit that that’s not our normal fair. Its not what we normally cover on the show but I wanted to get Roo on partly because um, well to be frank we grew up together didn’t we pretty much

Roo: we did we were family friends for many, many years

Paul: yeah, which was very bizarre to then discover the he is a kind of world authority on virtual worlds. so that sounds very dramatic doesn’t it

Roo: A thought leader?

Paul: A thought Leader

Roo: I remember inheriting your old star wars toys Paul

Paul: There we go, So I set you of on a good direction in your career by getting you into Sci-fi early. I am now taking all of the credit for all that you have achieved since then.

Roo: Its all thanks to you (giggle)

Paul: yeah (hahahaha) Well um, but I though it was quite interesting. I was doing a presentation where one of the things I wanted to talk about in this discussion was upcoming and emerging technologies and how they would affect things and I wanted to talk about virtual worlds and realised that I knew absolutely nothing about them so I gave Roo a call and we had a chat on the phone. Then I got educated so I figured I ought to pass on that education to everybody that listens to this show so that’s um, a bit of the background. So lets kick of the with the first questions. So what exactly are virtual worlds and why do you think there is so much hype surrounding them at the moment there has been lots of talk about, you know, things like second life and that kind of thing. Perhaps if you could explain them a bit, and explain why there is so much enthusiasm about it at the moment

Roo: yeah I can try. So I guess I can ask you to think about it. as it a good an example anyway, probably the most popular example of a virtual world. At the moment. So these are things which are kind of digital online environments or as some people would describe the as multi-user virtual environments its that kind of online social space. So to the untrained eye they might look a lot like game but there are no game elements inside virtual worlds or rather there are but they exist within the broader world. So something like second life doesn’t really have any point there is no final point no enemies to kill there is no “x” level to achieve its just a world and if you want to inhabit that world and build a shop or you want to habit that and be an explorer and wonder around finding interesting things and talking to people then that cool as well.

Paul: Hmm, I mean the immediate thing which comes out of that is well, you know, what is the point. Why do people take part in virtual worlds and what kind of ways are people using them

Roo: Yeah, there are a lot of different answers to that, almost as many answers as there are different people really so as in the real world there is not point. people make up their own point they decide that the are going to make a lot of money or they are going to be an artist and be well known or open a sex shop or whatever it might be and people will have different personal goals which they set themselves. So really any goal is a tangible thing that people will almost determine for themselves

Paul: So I guess in many ways its like the web itself it’s a tool and how chose to use that tool is largely up to you

Roo: Yeah exactly. And within that you will get lots of different things, I mentioned some, you will also get games within that so people play chess inside virtual worlds and people do all kinds of crazy things. Yeah I guess the answer to your question is really why is there so much hype about them, its because over the last 12 months or 16 months or so the press has been covering this is quite a bit way. That turned it into a kind of hype feeding frenzy. Garner had a very famous prediction about how 80% of active internet users by 2011 I think it was will be using virtual worlds and will have an avatar. Not necessarily in second life but in a virtual world. And all of this make people realise that this might just be the next “big thing” its gone from being the kind of space where people will, I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, everyday people will would hang out in to becoming a space that a lot of big companies and small companies and advertising and marketing firms are really getting interested in. You know we have all seen “the web” in that ,very early in my career, was the web being picked up by corporation and some people almost missed the boat and had to catch up later on

Paul: So Why do you think this is going to be the next big thing? Why do you think a virtual worlds are going to be you know, you talked about how some companies had to play catch up on the internet you almost imply that this I going to be as big as the internet is. Did I miss interpret that or do you really think its going to be incredibly significant and if so why?

Roo: Well, I think it is always going to be a subset of the internet, you know, this is just another communications media and its probably will remain a subset of the web. There will always be a place for flat 2D content, But once you start getting into 3D social stuff and giving people a real time opportunity to relate to each other and see each other and this sense of presence where you can see what the other is paying attention to. For me joining a circle for the first time, a circle of people talking and I walked up to it, and you know people took a step back to invite me into that circle. That was a really compelling moment to me. It was also a real eye opener that the “real world etiquette” that we see in society all the time actually was playing out for real in this virtual space as well. In terms of why it might be the next big thing a lot of different elements are coming together at the same time here, we finally have, almost complete availability of broadband, certainly in this country and in the west. We have got fairly powerful machines now that have 3D graphics accelerators and sound cards, this is something which is now also happening in corporate environments as well as at home. There is kind of a point in time where the… someone might describe it as a tipping point where there is this lot of interest and we have seen this massive press interest, but also big companies getting involved, you know when you see Sony with their playstation home project which is going to be like a lobbying environment for the playstation 3 its been delayed a little bit, but that is really the kind of mass Market application for virtual worlds and it is things like that which really opened my eyes to where this might take is. This is not going to be a niche thing with a few geeks hanging around and some would argue that it has never been that. Really virtual worlds have been attractive to creative people and to the people who feel like they want to kind of express themselves and share things, Its not full of 16 year old boy with glasses sitting in their bedrooms and really there is a difference between games, traditional online games and Massively multiplayer online role-playing games And a space like virtual worlds that allows them to be attractive to the mass market . So yeah I wouldn’t say it is going to replace the web or even be the largest portion of the internet. But there is certainly a growing space for these virtual worlds

Paul: so what, I mean, I can understand how some people are maybe making money out of being involved in virtual worlds where, I don’t know, where they are creating things which they are selling inside that virtual world, but what about other companies, how are larger organisations using it. For example, how do IBM use it?

Roo: well, we are maybe quite weird in because we do an awful lot in virtual worlds. We do everything from recruitment too employee discussions and meetings. although of course we cannot use a virtual world for confidential discussion, we certainly have the types of meetings we would have in public spaces, like conferences, we also have virtual facets to real world conferences like forties a really big conference we run, and we had that for the first time happening in second life running in parallel to the real world event so people who could not make it to the real world event could at least attend. They could see and hear some of the presentations and they could mingle and network. So like I said we are a bit weird in that in that we do so much, that’s partly because we are such a big company. Now a lot of other people would look at it and say they have a very particular need or desire, something they want to get out of it and for some people historically it has been marketing, or advertising, it has been to reach a wider audience or to reach them in a different way. Which is more playful and allows them to be really participants rather than just eye balls

Paul: yeah, I mean one thing you said was earlier was that you referred to virtual worlds as a subset of the internet and the web. Its another that that going on online. One of the things which strikes me is that if you do something, in something like second life, say if you run a conference that conference is kind of just fenced into the second life world so its not going to get picked up by search engines, its not going to be very accessible and things like that do you think that there are going to be changes in that, do you think there will be more crossover between virtual and maybe the more traditional web

Roo: yeah absolutely this is one of the areas that really excites me at the moment, this whole area of interoperability and that needs to be not just between different virtual worlds but also between the web and virtual worlds so this idea of the virtual universe sort of thing as a virtual world or virtual worlds is something that IBM even throws this term 3D internet around quite a lot. In a kind of evolutionary next step when you look at virtual worlds today they tend to be proprietary walled gardens and actually a lot of people would compare them to AOL in the mid nineties but actully when you start thinking about how they may interconnect, and that inset just moving your avatar from world of war craft to second or habbo or whatever its actually much more interesting than that. Its things like bringing you wallet with you your friends list with you being able to blur the lines between virtual worlds and bring content in from the web and share content back out to the web, these things are beginning to be possible and in some ways one of the reason I think second life is so successful because it does have the ability to make request to web content and bring that in so you have dynamic stuff going on. But that is still very early days and I think that we will probably see a massive focus and in fact the big conference in san hosa very recently where this came out in a very big way but a lot of companies will be wanting to get together and its very, you know the will is definitely there to have a real focus in the next few month on interactivity

Paul: I mean so, I am kind of very aware this for many of the people listening to this show that are kind of a mixture of designers, developers, you know, people that are running websites that a lot of this is very theoretical and it is not something they would be directly involved in at the moment. I mean do you think there is anything that they should be doing, that they should be aware of when it comes to virtual worlds. Is this an area you think they should be keeping an eye on or doing anything actively.

Roo: Yeah, I guess most people I talk to even if they are not going to rush out tomorrow and buy some space in some virtual world and um, you know its not for everyone. But most people who I talk to at least want to stay informed once they have got that hook in their head that this is, you know, I obviously find it very interesting but people tend to come away with the a sensation that this might go somewhere and there is enough evidence already today that its fairly compelling, if you look at it on the “garnet height curve” this idea that things go though a life cycle of interest it haven’t yet peaked the top of that and it is now falling back down into this trough of disillusionment in the long run what might happen it might reach the stable plateau where it will actually become a really useful space that interesting work will happen and kind of follow the same progression as so many technologies before it. Most people come away with the feeling that they want to keep an eye on it. Now I guess if I am going to step back a little bit and look more broadly at what is going on, on the web then for web designers and for almost all of them, this is very big on their radar the whole area of social online collaboration and this whole “web 2.0″ umbrella which you started talking about a year ago if not longer and has been you know really quite large for me, that fits very neatly into this same space. What you are talking about are people sharing content and whether that is a a chat or something they have built themselves you know, you look at a world like second life and most of it is not built but the company that runs it. As with youtube and del.icio.us and as with flickr and so many other popular services and site these days, it is built by its users. So maybe it is something people need to be aware of maybe its something which will gradually fit into a growing mentally of this is how the web works. Yes it happens to be 3D at the moment on the popular ones and yes they are not all currently delivered through websites, mind there are plenty that are, and there probably will be an increasing number that are delivered though the browser. So yeah, if people find this stuff interesting then they should keep an eye on it, maybe read a bit more about it.

Paul: Where is a good place for them to go then to wrap up, as far as if they want to find out more information or want to read up about the potential of it, where would you recommend they start by looking?

Roo: well there are a lot o very good blogs out there, if they have a very academic mind then they and want to read some really good writing on the subject then the best one I can think of is http://terranova.blogs.com/ , its one that I have guest authored for, but not the one I regularly write for, the one I regularly write for is http://eightbar.co.uk/about/roo, which has got a growing profile in the space of virtual worlds, That is written by a bunch of IBMers writing about what they find interesting. I have a personal blog a personal blog at http://rooreynolds.com if anyone wants to follow that although, please don’t all come at once

Paul: (Laughs) its really not that popular out podcast that it would…

Roo: no you are paul, you wouldn’t know how popular you are, but you are.

Paul: That’s okay, Thank you very much for you time , I think it is interesting we spend so much time on it with the immediate here and now problems, but every now and again it is nice to poke out heads above the parapet and see what is going on a bit further afield; so thank you very much for time coming and being on the show

Question of the week

Do you think virtual worlds are going to be a mainstream method of online communication or are they a novelty doomed to failure? Answers in the comments.

Show 101: Delusional

Posted in Classic shows on November 6, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul finally looks at the subject of intranets. Marcus delves deeper into the subject of rates and Andy Budd discusses getting design sign off.

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News and events | Marcus: Rates (Part 2) | Paul: Intranet delusions | Andy Budd on design sign off | Question of the week

News and events

OpenSocial from Google

The big news this week is the launch of OpenSocial, which is a new way for developers to build widgets/applications for a number of high profile social networks. At the moment the line up includes Google, MySpace, LinkedIn and many more. It really is an impressive list of partners.

This is exciting news for those who wish to deliver content to existing social networks as before OpenSocial it was necessary to re-code your application for each site it was delivered to. In many cases this just wasn’t worth the effort and a lot of developers just focused on the big name that is Facebook.

Now developers can build once and deliver to any number of social networking sites. However what is even more interesting is that you can build these applications using nothing more than HTML and Javascript. Unlike building an application for Facebook, coding for OpenSocial looks like it is going to be extremely easy.

The development community is still trying to get their head around what exactly all of this means but it would appear that OpenSocial does not go as far as some would like. For example (as Jeremy Keith points out) it does not solve the problem of having to re-enter your personal details and friends on every site you sign up for.

Content and presentation

I came across an excellent post by Mark Boulton this week that looks at how designers engage with content. He comes at it from the angle of typography, arguing that it is about a lot more than just typefaces. However, his underlying point is much broader.

How often do we really engage with the content on the websites we design? Does the content inform our designs? Are we just building templates that get populated or are we really working with the content in the same way art directors do?

If you look at traditional ad campaigns the design and content work hand in hand. The design reinforces the message and the message informs the design. Although we see this all the time on TV commercials, billboard ads and marketing campaigns we rarely see it on the web.

In many ways we have cracked a lot of the technical challenges of the web. We have best practice for coding, accessibility and usability. We know how to make our sites available and usable for all. But do we know how to really engage with users? How to interact with them on an emotional level? That is the next big challenge.

Online calendars and date pickers

The final news story for today is another great list from Smashing Magazine. This time they list the top online calendars and date pickers. I don’t know about you but I seem to spend a lot of time working with dates for various reasons. Much of the information we put on the web is date specific, from events to blog posts. It is common to want users to be able to search by date or access a calendar of events.

This post from Smashing Magazine offers a plethora of date related tools from online calendars you can embed into your own website to date pickers that avoid those difference in date formatting.

If you ever need to work with date related information this list is worth a look.

Marcus’ bit: Rates Part 2

This can be a tricky subject and, because of that, I’m not going to go into what Headscape charges. I’m going to look at some survey figures and talk about charging for different services and when and how you should go about raising your rates.

This topic is of interest to both clients looking for an agency as well agencies and freelancers – we all want to know if we’re competitive. To save myself writing about this from both angles, and probably confusing everyone, I’m just going to concentrate on this from an agency standpoint. However, each point is easy to switch round to the client angle.

Enough rambling…

You get what you pay for

So using my favourite car analogy, are you offering a Bentley, a BMW, a Ford or a Lada! I guess the point I’m making is don’t over or under sell yourself. Recognise what you can offer and go hard for that market.

Have you got thousands of happy clients being serviced by a hundred staff in marble clad offices in central London? Or are you and your mate from Uni just kicking off your business in your dad’s garage?

You might not like it but talent, in this case, doesn’t really matter one jot. No big spending client is going to go for our second option above. This is fact of life. Accept it, move on.

If you want to charge top dollar then you need to show the following:

Relevant, high quality portfolio
Reliability and flexibility
Wide range of services
Innovation or at least ‘keeping up’

So, what do people charge

Right here, right now – I don’t know. However, I have got details of a UK survey carried out a couple of years back that, with a bit of an uplift, are I believe still relevant.

These are daily charge out averages across all agencies that submitted to the survey:

Director – £750
Consultant – £650
Creative lead – £670
Designer – £570
Project manager – £600
IA/usability consultant – £610
Developer – £610

Of course, the actual figures varied greatly even within certain disciplines. For example, creative lead rates were as low as £370 and as high as £800.

Pricing roles

At Headscape we used to have one flat rate for all services provided. At the time, this felt fair and was certainly easy to manage.

As we have grown, we have found that the pressures on some staff, particularly the directors, have grown markedly and therefore we have had to charge more for those roles.

Regionality

The survey suggests that regional price differences are, pretty much, London and ‘everywhere else’. Notably with the South West coming a strong second! (We are based, more or less, in the South West).

Large city based agencies will always be able to charge a premium but I expect this is less so now due to ease of communication. We have had a number of clients over the years that we have never met.

Raising prices

This is a balance. We should all raise our prices to keep up with inflation but, we should only do so if we think the market will take it. Also, it’s possible that a particular service that was seen as ‘cutting edge’ and therefore got a high price tag, may later become ‘run of the mill’ so it’s possible that you may need to cut the price for that service.

Paul’s corner: Intranet delusions

I have been asked a number of times to talk about Intranet development and I have always avoided doing so. This is partly because I am not an expert in the field (although that doesn’t normally stop me talking about something!) However, it is also because intranets are a massive area and one in which so many mistakes are made. There seems to be a huge amount of naivety about developing and running Intranets. Against such a backdrop I am somewhat unsure where to begin.

In the end I have decided to take 5 of the most common misconceptions about Intranets and see if we can shed some light on why they are wrong.

Ask the expert: Andy Budd on design sign off

Paul: Joining me today is Andy Budd, hello again Andy.

Andy Budd: Hi Paul, how are you doing?

Paul: Not bad, it’s been a little while since I’ve had you on boagworld, I think?

Andy Budd: It has, I think it’s been a couple of years now, I think it was d.construct 2006 was the last time I remember chatting to you.

Paul: Unbelievable, I’ve spoken to you since then on the .net podcast mind, so, we’re keeping in touch.

Andy Budd: Yeah, and also just hanging out together, and doing, ya know, things.

Paul: I try and obviously avoid you, because whenever I meet you, you seem to be horribly rude to me but I will forgive you.

Andy Budd: What?!?

Paul: (Laughs)

Andy Budd: Oh Paul, you know that’s not true, that’s not true.

Paul: Ye, but I want to paint you in a bad light and get a bit of sympathy for myself.

Andy Budd: Oh okay, that’s your tactic actually isn’t it?

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: I also heard that you try and play dumb, so ya know, everybody else comes across as being smart and you get the sympathy vote.

Paul: You’ve been listening to the Rissington Podcast haven’t you?

Andy Budd: (Laughs) I have indeed.

Paul: (Laughs)

Andy Budd: I’m not sure I’d buy that but, ya know, it sounds good.

Paul: You think I’m just naturally dumb?

Andy Budd: … So what was the first question?

Paul: Okay.

Andy Budd: (Laughs)

Paul: First question, no, what we’re going to talk about today with Andy is just looking at maybe processes, ya know, when you run a website company how do you go about dealing with getting things like design sign off and this was something that came up quite a lot in the 100^th episode that we recorded a little while back and is also some we talked, we vaguely talked about running a web company on the .net podcast recently but I kind of wanted to home in more on design, because design is a hugely subjective area and getting design sign off is quite a challenging process. So Andy lets kick by just, if you could give us a rough sketch about how clear:left go through the design process, what are the steps that you go through?

Andy Budd: Yeah absolutely, it’s kind of interesting because it has changed, ya know, a small amount anyway from when when we started to what we’re doing now. I guess one of the main differences from what we do to what a lot of other agencies do is we generally only present a single design concept. It’s very common, particularly for companies that come more out of a print background to do this whole idea of like, we’ll show three design concepts to a client, I think that partly comes from a desire of print design companies too sort of make a bit more money rather than just showing one design, they do three designs a let the client pick. I’ve always found that this is kind of an odd way of doing things because, well first of all I don’t think you really giving your client good value because what your ending up doing is your doing three times the amount of work and the client only get a third of the value, they get to pick one of those three designs.

Paul: (Agrees)

Andy Budd: The other thing I’ve found is whenever I worked at agencies that have taken that process and I’ve been the designer developing the designs invariably what happens is you, say you’ve got a week to produce the designs, you spend maybe three of four days on one design and it’s working really well and your happy with it and it’s moving in the right direction, you only spend one or two days on another design which you kind of fine with, if the client picks it then your happy because it looks nice and then you’ll do something quickly for the last half a day just to kind of fill up the space.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: And then you have this horrible situation were by, even if the client picks the design that your least convinced with or what more than likely happens is they’ll pick elements from each design and create a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, and I kind of do think that clients come to professional design consultancies for their design knowledge and their design experience and I think that from my perspective and from my experience the design that the designer feels most happy about is probably the design that fits closest to the clients goals, because that the one they’ve been spending the most time and effort on, thinking about, so really the first thing we tend to do at clear:left is only ever show our client an initial design or one design. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll only create one design, quite often, for instance, Paul one of our designers, our lead designer might create a couple of different versions initially and we’ll have a design review and I’ll look at what’s going on and we’ll chat about various pros and cons of the different designs and he might spin off in another direction but we tend to show the client what we think is the best bet rather than something that is half finished or just something that we don’t think is quite right.

Paul: Yeah, I would agree with that, that the whole principle of if you show a client a multiple designs they inevitably pick a little bit from each of them and that never quite works as well as it sounds. I mean, have you ever tried with multiple designs, having more than one designer work on those designs so you do like one each with three of you or something like that?

Andy Budd: Well again, I think this goes back to giving value to the client and I don’t think it makes sense for the client to pay for two or three designers time and expertise to give them the opportunity to only pick one.

Paul: (Agrees)

Andy Budd: I think what tends to happen in that sense is design stops being about solving problems and starts to become much more subjective and almost a beauty competition.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: So what happens is rather than the client picking a design or understanding the design from a technical point of view, ya know, why you’ve, ya know, what mood your trying to create or what feeling or sensation or how the hierarchy works and how the hierarchy that you’ve created matches the hierarchy of use that you need a user to flow through. Rather than it being more scientific it becomes much more subjective and it becomes much more about, ya know, whether the client liked particular colour, they had a particular colour on their bedroom wall and they hated it or they loved it or it’s their favourite colour, so I think, again, just having that kind of three design approach makes it much for subjective and much less scientific.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: I do agree that if a clients got lots of money, ya know, your talking with a big client and they’ve got months and months of design budget available then it does make sense, the kind of clients that myself and most of my colleagues sort of deal with, they got reasonable budgets but they haven’t got budgets to burn so they want to see as much value as possible and the idea of pitching two designs just kind of, ya know, seems… it just doesn’t in an environmentally sort of, ya know, challenging world that we live in at the moment, where people want to recycle and people want to see usage. Throwing two designs away always seems a bit, kind of wasteful.

Paul: I mean, talking about the thing of making the process more scientific and less subjective, how to do you go about encouraging the client to set aside personal preference and focus on how they should really be judging the design? And, sorry, there’s a spin off question now which is how should they really be judging the design?

Andy Budd: Well, it’s a really difficult question …. I think everybody feels that they have a good understanding of what design is. Everyone’s got their own personal opinion, everyone’s got their own personal tastes, so everyone feels that they’ve got an understanding of design. We’ve all watched changing rooms, we all know that a fancy designer comes along and he’s got big cuffs and ya know paints, crazy colours on the wall, sticks vases all over the place and that’s design, but I think what people actually see is not design but the manifestation of design. The actual design process is much less creative than people like to think, it’s much less throwing bits of colour on the wall and using your creative juices to see what colours and shapes match. It is much more the processes, much more the starting off with a central problem or a central set of problems that you’re trying to solve and using design techniques: hierarchy, colour, weight, positioning, to create a design that solves a solution, and again, and you have to look at design works within constraints. If you are asked to sit down in front of a blank canvas and just create something, that’s much more than an artistic endeavour than a design endeavour. Funny enough, we were having this conversation in the office today, a couple of minutes before we had this conversation and it’s much easier for good designers to have constraints, to have content to design around to have an idea who’s going to be using the site so I think design is much more the scientific process than a number of clients give it credit for. In answer to your first question “how do you get clients to feed back in the right way”, it’s very, very difficult. Ideally, what I’d like to say is, we sit down with every single client and explain the design process in detail, explain how it all works and stuff but unfortunately, design is very subjective and also feed back is very, very difficult to interpret. If a client comes to you and says “I want it more wizzier, more zingy” their using the vocabulary they have at hand to describe something they have an idea of in their mind and our job as designers is to try and understand what it is they are actually trying to say. They are trying to communicate a visual thing or a motional thing with words and quite often it’s not possible, quite often, you will have to try two or three different approaches before you actually figure out what “zingy” means. Does “zingy” mean bright and colourful, does “zingy” mean they want motion and so it’s difficult having design discussions with people who aren’t trained in using ya know, having design discussions and frankly, I find it difficult enough sort of having internal design reviews with our designers and trying to describe what’s right and what’s wrong with the design. So I do, ya know, I do really understand from a clients perspective, how difficult it is to try and deal with their designers and get their designs or get their sense across. I think we always try and take it back to first principals. We try and encourage our clients, no to sort of worry or obsess too much over the details but to kind of think more of the broad picture so not more whether you like this particular colour or whether you like this particular shape but ya know, what kind of sense of feeling you’re trying to have this design communicate ya know, we’re doing some work with an environmental website at the moment and they really wanted to create a sense of a feeling of nature and openness and warmness but really avoid the kind of clich233s ya know, let’s have pictures of trees and ya know, it will all be green and kind of earthy. So they communicated the sense and the emotion they wanted to get across and then we obviously translated that and put it into graphical format and I think in reality, that’s what the designers’ job is. It’s translation, except instead of translating one written language into another, we’re translating a written language or an oral language into a visual language and so it’s interesting but yeah, it’s setting the boundaries and saying to people, this is not, ya know, we’re not asking you at this stage to comment on the details or on the general sense, the layout or the feeling and as you move along, get more and more specific.

Paul: You talk about how sometimes a client uses a different language to describe what they’re seeking from a design so do you ever use things like mood boards or what other sites do you like as a way of kind of getting an idea of their personal tastes? And should you be catering for their personal tastes anyway?

Andy Budd: It’s a fine balance, I mean, yes and no. Ultimately, it’s not the client that will be using the website, it’s the clients’ client, so the clients’ customers so really the ultimate goal is to create something that, ya know, the customers or the visitors are going to use, the visitors are going to love and their going to feel as though it’s their own but obviously, you are also dealing with human emotion and if a clients paying you money to create a design, you want them to be happy with it as well. Again, it’s an interesting challenge. We used to in the past, really encourage our clients to go out and have a look at different websites that are out their and we’ve actually got a, sort of a flicker group of inspiring websites that we can point clients to and say, look, here’s some of our favourite websites. Why don’t you go and have a look at some of these, ya know, use those as a basis because it’s really useful instead of asking people to off cold to describe what they want and to actually show you stuff and say, I like the typography of this site or I like the colour scheme of that site. A lot of designers will actually say, you shouldn’t ever show sites, ya know because then it kind of gets a bit derivative but I think, ya know, as we’re working on the web it is helpful to show clients similar designs in that same medium so I think it is useful for us anyway to show clients sites. And that’s always a good starting point, ya know, we like this site because and we like that site because. Unfortunately is sometimes backfires and sometime, particularly if the client isn’t as, sort of embedded in the design community as we are, they will pick some sites that they use on a daily basis that don’t necessarily show good design as designer might preserve it and then we have to kind of work round the edges and show kind of show them what we think they might be kind of thinking about, but the mood boards is a really good point it’s something that we’ve started using more recently and it’s a really good kind of first step, rather that jumping straight to the design process and possibly missing a translation, we have started showing clients mood boards, and if some of your listeners don’t know what mood boards are, they’re essentially a very quick way of explaining a mood or a sense or a feeling or a colour scheme on a design without actually having to do visual design, so what you do is take elements of design that you might have seen elsewhere, you might take some interesting photos you’ve seen on flickr, and maybe those photos have an interesting colour scheme or they might have a particular theme or sense that your trying to get across, ya know, maybe take some navigation elements from one site or a t-shirt you particular like the colour scheme from, a whole bunch of different things, put them down on a piece of paper, I mean in the old days it was a piece of paper in advertising, they would cut out bits from magazines. These days we tend to do digital mood boards which are more graphic art and photos and present them to the client, and that gives the client a kind of basis in which they can spin off their opinions, so they can look now at this mood board and say well, we said we wanted it clean, we didn’t mean we wanted it sort of white, we meant we wanted it sort of, ya know, some other adjective that works with clean, and it kind of gives them a discussion point, rather than just sitting around words you can now look at something physical and tangible and the good thing is mood boards only need to take an hour or two. And again we’re working with a client at the moment and we initially created some mood boards for them and it sparked a discussion and they weren’t sure about some of the things on the mood board but some of the things on the mood board they really liked so we worked out a second iteration which was even closer to what they wanted and when we finally sort of got to a level that we felt both of us understood what we expected from a design point of view then you can move onto the next stage.

Paul: Yeah, I mean it’s quite interesting, I think design from my personal experience is as much about what you do before you site down in front of photoshop or whatever than it is actually in the actually putting pixels on the page. I’d be interesting in what other things you do before you get to the design stage, you’ve said you use mood boards, what about things like personas what business background information do you tray and get before you start? Do you get people to personify there company and describe what kind of person it would be, ya know all the kind of techniques that people use, what do you guys use?

Andy Budd: Well again, that’s really interesting, I mean your right, a majority of people kind of think design is a visual thing, ya know, so, ya know the first thing they think about or expect when they’re getting designs is to see some kind of photoshop comps or some pretty pictures, clear:left we are a user experience design consultancy and what that essentially means is we kind of do meta design, we don’t just do the visual stuff but we design the systems and so what we do from the outset of dealing with our clients is we have workshops with them we ya know, a big discovery period to find out exactly what it is that they want, ya know, requirements gathering, we’ll do research into their users so quite often we’ll go out and we’ll interview potential users, their potential kind of market, we’ve done work in the education sector we’re we’ve spent a few days in schools and we’ve talked to teachers and pupils and school secretaries to find out how they do their day to day work, what kind of features and functions they would require off a site, using this information research we might create personas, and personas are a great way of capturing a rough demographic I guess of users and it allows you to start thinking in terms of how people will use the site because what tends to happen is people will sit down and think of the stereotypical user but each users got different needs and the nice thing about personas, is if you’ve got your personas fairly accurate it can then help you work out what features and functionality you need by following on the scenarios, a scenario is say your buying shoes or you doing a shoe store, so it might be that I want to buy a pair of dress shoes because I’m going to a formal function so I want to get a pair of smart shoes to match my suit so then what you can do is you can sit down and plan out on this system, how would I get from the homepage through to the purchasing process, how to get from a to b to c and that kind of helps design the system. The problem with personas is quite often you will do personas and they’re sitting in a draw, so personas aren’t right for every single project, and we’ve had a couple of experiences recently were we have done personas and we probably shouldn’t have done because the client already had a fairly good understanding of what they wanted to do but it’s kind of trial and error.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: Most of the time we find personas work really, really well, but they do work best when the client doesn’t really have a set idea of how their website is going to function and ye we do wire frames and wire frames are a big part of what we do, a big part of information architecture and big part of the user experience and design and again if your listening are you aren’t aware of what a wire frame is, it’s kind of somewhat like a story board in movies, so in a movie rather than just going and filming everything because celluloid’s really expensive, they’ll get some artist in to draw out scene by scene, frame by frame almost, how the story is going to progress and that’s a way of planning the shots, planning the locations and you can sit down in front of the story board and get a real sense of how the movie is going to flow and to work before you ever need to set up on set, and so we do something very similar with our websites, we create wire frames, which they can be on paper, they can be in HTML and it’s literally kind of a wire frame a kind of rough representation of how the site is going to fit together, and so when it comes to visual design and it come to the interface design the designer isn’t working from a blank sheet, they’re working from a fairly details blueprint, no so much on layout terms but on content, ya know, we need to have this block of content here, this is what inside this block of content, this is the hierarchy, this is more important, this is less important and so basically once the client has seen the wire frames and understood how the process is supposed to flow, they’re already signed off and they’ve already agreed to lay off the design decisions were as more traditional visual designers would try and do that on a photoshop document and I don’t really think you can capture, ya know, if you doing a fairly flat design or a fairly simple brochure website, you can probably capture that sense in a photoshop document but if you doing a more advanced, if you doing a more complicated site that has more interaction, maybe a, like a sort of social software, web applications site, you can’t show all this stuff in a flat document so you need to have this click through process.

Paul: No that’s cool. Okay to rap up I just wanted to ask about the subject of iterations because it’s something that we’re asked quite a lot and basically what people do or are concerned about is how many iterations do you go through when the client comes back to you and says I want this changing and then you make that change and then they want something else changing and it kind of can go on through this endless cycle, were do you draw the line do you have a contractual arrangement, we’ll do three versions of this or how do you deal with it?

Andy Budd: Again a very interesting question, the way we tend to work a clear:left is we tend to sell our services based on time spent rather than some kind of end point, because design is very subjective and as you say, you can’t sort of keep going on and on and on and keep making changes because not only will the project spiral out of control in terms of time but also in terms of budget and stuff, so what we tend to do with our clients and with our project is we specify a certain amount of time, we’ll spend 20 days on visual design and ye 20 days on a template build or whatever and we are a little bit flexible and this kind of almost goes back to something I was talking about on my blog recently about deadlines and stuff, ya know, if design takes a couple of days more and templates take a couple of days less in the end it all kind of balances it’s self out, but we do tract time to make sure we’re on track, we tend to say to clients that we’ll offer two iteration, again sometimes it requires more sometimes it requires less, but all along we track the time so to make sure we’re not going vastly off. What we try and do is kind of make the iterations increase in size so going back to what we where say before about the mood boards, you can do a mood board really, really quickly and you can get to a point a lot faster, understanding what the clients needs are by giving them a mood board or a couple of mood boards, a couple of quickly little iterations and, ya know you get significantly further down the line. Something we’ve been doing recently which I think is a really interesting idea and seems to be working really well is this concept of a one day design concept.

Paul: Okay.

Andy Budd: And so what we do is, in the olden days we’d spend like maybe a week coming up with an initial design concept and it was really good and it was really high level and it was really detailed and we’d give it to the client and if the client wasn’t sure about various elements, we’d be a little bit, because we’d spend so much time and effort into the design we’d be a little bit more resistant to making changes, were as we realised that if we did just a quick design iteration, that was just one day or one and a half days we’re much less kind of stuck on the design because it will be rough, because it will a bit rough and ready, which means that we’re much more flexible and happy to make changes and go in different directions also it means that if you are only given a day or a day and a half to do a design, you don’t obsess on the details, you work on the more broad brush strokes, you get the feeling and the sense and the layout right, you don’t worry about how the text is aligning or how the icons are place and that give clients first of all some instant feedback and rather than the old days, you’d go away and do a design, magic would happen and two weeks later a completely finished product, it gives clients a bit more of an insight and a bit more input into the process.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: They’ll see after a design they’re getting something that’s already start like a real project and they’re getting really excited, they sort of start inputting and feeding back. The difficulty is managing the right kind of feedback and getting the right kind of feedback at the right time because obviously in the early phase is what we really want is our clients to feedback on is just the overall look and feel. Is the layout right, is it giving the right sense, and not obsess about the details because we haven’t spent any time on the details.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: And then we iterate and once we’ve got an idea we’ll do another iteration which is more finessed and then maybe a third iteration which is more finessed. And then normally by that point because we’ve gone through a bunch of different steps and we’ve kind of had client buy in on the way by the time it gets to the second, third round of iterations, it usually is just dealing with the details.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: The problem is that almost all clients obsess about the details more than they really need too. And it easy too, I understand, if someone puts a design in front of you and they say, give me feedback clients obviously want to be really helpful, and they’ll jump into the design and say well that buttons miss aligned or I don’t like that orange I think it should be a different colour or whatever and really obsess about the details and I think at that point, ya know, that’s our job to obsess about the details I think. As designers we are more obsessive and we’ll sit there and we’ll move things a couple of pixels or ya know, play around in the colour palette and make sure things are exactly right and so what we’ve been tending to do is once we’ve got the initial direction of the project, once we know that the client likes the overall scheme, we kind of go ahead and build it and don’t necessarily go ahead and design it and while we’re not necessarily, not asking for feedback, so we’ll present our designs and if clients look at them and say oh well this is wrong and that’s wrong, that’s fine we’ll go and make the changes, as the client looks at them, I think basically what I’m trying to say is if you ask for detailed feedback you’ll get detailed feedback, if you present something to a client then if there is an issue they’ll feed back and if there isn’t they won’t. I think this has come about from a lot of usability testing, we sit down with test subjects and if we ask them for an opinion they’ll always give us an opinion, trying to be helpful whether that opinion is something they really think or something they’ve thought, well I’ve been asked to say something so I better say something.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: And so we’ve been trying to be a lot more subtle with feedback and rather asking for a definite cut off time, a definite sign off, we now expect a long list of stuff, it’s like here are the design, if you have anything to say that’s fine but if you don’t that’s great we’ll just get on and implement them.

Paul: Yeah, I like that. That’s a really good approach. Thank you very much Andy that was a really interesting conversation. I think every agency does things in a slightly different way and it’s good to hear the clear:left methodology.

Andy Budd: Excellent, well actually, sorry can I just jump in there and say something.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: Because I think this is an interesting point and it is a problematic thing, I don’t think a lot of companies have a process and a lot of companies will, ya know, every single project they will do the same thing time and time again and that’s good because you know at the start of a project exactly what your going to do step 1, step 2, step 3, the problem is not all projects and not all clients want all those step or all of those steps are necessarily valid for the thing they are trying to do.

Paul: Yeah.

Andy Budd: So I think what we’ve learned over time really at clear:left and it’s something we’re still learning and I think everybody’s still learning is rather than having a process have a methodology have a bunch of tools that you can use on a particular project, so if a certain project requires wire framing we do wire framing, if it doesn’t, drop it. Ya know, if a certain project needs a mood board, we do a mood board if a certain project doesn’t, we don’t do it. And so I think a methodology is the right point here rather than a process because a methodology keeps you flexible and a methodology means you don’t get stuck doing the same stuff over and over again.

Paul: Excellent, Okay, thank you very much Andy and I’m sure we will have you back in at least before the next two years are up. (Laughs)

Andy Budd: Yay, well thanks very much Paul delightful.

Question of the week

What tips or techniques do you use to smooth the process of design sign off? Answers in the comments.

Show 83: iphone bollocks

Posted in Classic shows on June 19, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks about the importance of undo, Marcus explains the benefits of stakeholder interviews and Struan Robertson highlights some legal deathtraps waiting for us online.

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News and events

Safari for Windows

Probably the most talked about story of the last week is the fact that Apple have released Safari for windows. To be honest I am a little surprised just how much has been written about this considering I don’t think the impact is going to be that significant. Will Safari cut into Internet Explorers market share? Probably not. Will it undermine the market share Firefox has developed? Almost certainly.

If safari under windows rendered exactly the same as under OSX then there maybe some benefit to windows based web developers. At the moment it is impossible for them to test on Safari without buying a mac. This has the potential of changing that. However, in all likelihood differences will emerge and if they do then this is just another browser that we have to test against.

We will see.

Applications for the iphone

At the same time Steve Jobs announced Safari for windows he also talked about the iphone. The biggest criticism of the iphone to date has been the fact that it is locked down so third parties cannot develop applications for it. Apparently Apple have been thinking long and hard about the problem and have come up with a solution. They are going to allow developers to build web 2.0 applications that can be accessed by iphone users using the built in Safari browser.

What a load of bollocks. They are telling us something we already knew. As soon as Steve Jobs announced that the iphone carried a full safari browser we knew that web applications would be developed for it. Sure, they are now saying that methods are going to be provided to automatically access iphone features such as dialing and google maps but very little detail was given. As far as I can see Apple is not giving people anything more than they already had.

Jason at 37 Signals is excited about what this means for web apps. He says…

This is the coming out party for web apps. We are very excited about this. These are exciting times.

…and he is right. It is exciting for us web developers. However, I am not convinced the user will see it that way. David Shea mirrored my own reaction at this news when he simply posted a graph showing the astronomical cost of data calls on mobile carriers. Web applications are great for web designers but for users of mobile devices like the iphone they could quickly be prohibitively expensive.

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work

I found a great article on Think Vitamin this week that talks about design trends on the web. One of the things you learn early on as a designer is that despite your desire to produce something completely original you never will. Everything has been done before and in this article Larissa Meek takes us through 7 styles of design that appear again and again on the web.

The article very much reminded me of design meltdown, an excellent site that showcases different approaches to design. However, what I particularly liked about this post is that the author showed examples of how these styles occur in art as well as online. This is nice because it encourages us as web designers to look beyond the web for inspiration, a subject I have spoken about before.

CSS frameworks

The final story caught my eye because it is an extension of something we have been doing for a while. A while back I talked on the show about the fact that Headscape work with standard XHTML templates. We use these templates as a starting point for development. They allow you to jump start the build process as well as ensure consist naming conventions across the entire design team.

In a new post on the List Apart website Jeff Croft proposes a similar approach for CSS, based on the concept of Frameworks. Jeff argues that certain aspects of CSS development are often repeated across multiple projects. From browser reset styles to creating horizontal menus and standard grid layouts, it seems absurd that we generate these from scratch each time. Jeff proposes that instead we create a series of CSS files that we can be reuse again.

Its a great idea and one definitely worth exploring if you work on lots of similar projects or are part of a large team where you are looking for consistency.

Agony uncle: The importance of undo

A couple of weeks back I received this email from Tom in Texas:

I am a designer currently working on developing a web 2.0 app. The developer is doing some really cool AJAX stuff but unfortunately most of it breaks the back button in the browser. He is arguing that it doesn’t really matter as there are lots of other ways of going back. What is your opinion on the subject?

Once I had recovered from the naivety of the developers comment and finished counting slowly to 10, I started to think through the role of undo. In the end this very simple question from Tom evolved into a blog post on the importance of undo. It is this subject I am looking at in todays show.

Client corner: Stakeholder interviews

Got this question from Dusted.

I’m about to begin a project to help an organization evaluate its current web site and web site management. I’m also going to perform some research and planning to help them start developing a new web site.

The organization is quite complex with a lot of different departments – marketing/events, sales, information/press, youth and more. Each person responsible for each department will be interviewed and I need some advice about what questions to ask them.

Starting off with a few…

Describe your department’s needs of the web site.

What can be done in a better way?

The results of the interviews will be used when I present my evaluation (and research/planning) to the board.

Any advice, links to articles, books… help of any kind would be deeply appreciated.

We have done quite a lot of stakeholder interviews over the years so this question seemed like one I could help with.

Stakeholder interviews can often be confused with user interviews, as they can often happen during the same process. I tend to differentiate the 2 by calling them internal and external stakeholders. These groups will always require a very different set of questions.

This piece refers to internal stakeholders only; those people that:

Will be paying for the project!
Are content owners
- Some won’t know or want to be content owners – “that’s X’s job”
- Some will consider their content considerably more important than everyone elses – “there should be a tab called ‘Corporate Accountancy’ and a big ad on the homepage”!
Will be users e.g. sales

There are a number of good reasons for talking to stakeholders, as follows:

Politics

Most organisations involve some sort of tension between departments/stakeholders/teams/whatever. Giving representatives from each of these groups (make sure you don’t leave anyone out!) provides everyone with a voice. It ensures that everyone has said their piece and it’s down in writing. Ultimately, it gets buy in on the project from all parties thereby creating a better end product.

Education

This applies from both sides. The interviewer is looking to be educated regarding the various points and specialisms that the interviewee has (that’s the point of the interview!). However, the interviewer also has an opportunity to educate a whole raft of internal staff about the web. A good example would be why it’s not a good idea to name site sections after departmental structure. In fact, teaching users to think of their end users early in the interview will probably affect what they have to say.

Verification

Talking to internal stakeholders can often highlight the need to develop certain functionality/facilities/micro-sites/etc that web managers only thought might be useful. Interviews can also be used as a test bed for ideas as well as feedback.

Semi-structured

Following on form the last point, make a point of telling interviewees that they can go off track. The questions are useful as guides but don’t stop writing down what someone is saying if it doesn’t fit with the script.

So, finally on to some good questions to ask&#…;

Questions will, of course, vary depending on the organisation, end user requirements etc, but looking back through a number of scripts, these seem to crop up regularly:

What does your department do?
What are your ‘processes’?
Who is your client and what do they want?
How do you think the web can help you deliver?
What is your role?
What is the biggest pain about your job? What takes the most time?
Describe your Internet understanding/usage?
Describe your software understanding/usage?
Name applications that you are a confident user of.
Do you store any information in databases? What?
The current website – what’s good and bad about it, what’s bad about it?
Are you tasked with providing content for part of the website? If not, do you want to be?

Ask the expert: Struan Robertson on Legal Issues

Today’s guest expert on Boagworld is Struan Robertson a corporate lawyer who specializes in IT law. I first met him on the .net podcast and thought it would be great to get him on the show to give us a small taster of the kinds of legal issues encountered by web professionals. In the show he answers three questions on particular scenarios to give you a taster of the kind of issues that can arise. These include:

What are the dangers of working on websites for illegal companies
Some of the issues surrounding using images when you aren’t sure about the licensing
Storing private data

Although the particular scenarios are quite specific hopefully they communicate some underlying messages and encourage you to take your legal obligations seriously. If you are interested in learning more about the legal issues surrounding web design and IT in general then check out Outlaw.com where Struan provides a lot more advice. Also Struan writes a column in the .net magazine where he covers different legal issues each month.

Show 77: A dream?

Posted in Classic shows on April 30, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks about how a client’s work is never done, Marcus looks at dealing with scope creep and we review Dreamweaver CS3 (is it really worth upgrading?).

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News and events

The web design survey

A List Apart are trying to build up a picture of the web design community by launching their web design survey. In my opinion this is an incredibly valuable project because there is so little statistical data on our profession. We have next to no information on salary levels, job titles, location, type of work done or even educational background. Its a strange situation for what is now a mature industry. Perhaps, as Jeffrey Zeldman suggests, it is largely due to the fact that we work in a hidden profession where the practitioners have meaningless job titles that bear little resemblance to the work we do.

Coding for content

If you listened to the SXSW special we did a while back you may remember me interviewing Garrett Dimon about the recent redesign of his blog. In that interview he talked a lot about his desire to focus on content and that the design should exist only to support that. The results of this effort are truly phenomenal and he has produced one of the most refreshing sites I have seen in ages. It is clean, easy to use and really succeeds in bringing the content to the fore. Well, this week he wrote an article that follows up on previous comments he made about his design approach by talking about how he coded the site. Its a great article and really shows off the fact that an attention to detail and methodical thought process can really generate some amazing results.

Don’t be a hero: Giving up is good

How often have you heard me drone on about return on investment? Well, now you can hear the guys at 37 Signals talk about the same thing but from a slightly different angle. In their post “Don’t be a hero: Giving up is good” they talk about the fact that developers don’t like to be beaten and will continue grappling with a problem long after it ceased to be profitable. The article argues that it is important to know when you cut your loses and drop functionality if it is simply taking too long to implement.

Working with tables and CSS

It’s amazing how many problems you have with tables even after you have moved across to CSS based design. One common problem I see a lot is the data in tables pushing out the tables width which in turn often breaks the design (see an example). Fortunately this week I found a post that seemed to solve the problem. It uses the table-layout property in CSS along with overflow:hidden. Its a useful little technique that is definitely work checking out.

Client corner: A client’s work is never done

In last week’s client corner section I talked about the role of the client and how in many cases it is very poorly defined. This started me thinking in more depth about how clients perceive web projects and how they often fail to grasp the enormity of the undertaking. In this weeks show I explore the ongoing commitment that clients have to make to their websites and look at what exactly they will find themselves doing on a day-to-day basis. As with last week’s client corner, this is a subject I have recently blogged about and so if you want to refresh your memory on what I said in the show check out my blog post on the subject.

Agony uncle: Dealing with scope creep

This week we will be reviewing a question from Bob in Iceland – “How should I deal with clients that keep changing the spec throughout a project?”

I guess the first thing to say is that the spec will change, they always do. Often it is perfectly understandable because people see a new design or piece of functionality and think ‘hey, we could do X or Y as well’.

But… and I have been as guilty of this as anyone… often the scope will creep as the client learns about the web development process as the project goes along. This is avoidable. It can often be seen as pedantic, or possibly even negative, to spell out exactly what a client is getting. For example, design iterations or template styles. Ask yourself when writing the spec – would a layman understand this? If not, then add notes to explain.

So, what to do when the first request outside scope comes in? As with most things, use your brain regarding how to respond!

If it is a 5 minute job then just do it, but make sure that client is aware that it is outside scope so a) you can earn some points with them and b) let them know that you are keeping a tight eye on the scope of the project.

Anything over that, you need to respond in writing (email is fine) stating that the work is outside scope and you estimate it will take X hours to complete… please confirm that you wish us to go ahead with the work. This puts the onus back on the client and makes them think about whether they really do want the work done.

It is good practice to have a change control procedure written into any statement of work. These can sometimes be over the top, demanding contract extensions in writing and the like (which probably is appropriate for a large new piece of work) but usually something like –

As and when issues arise, it is the project manager’s responsibility to raise these with the client and agree any actions to be taken.

If any rescheduling is required, the project manager will be responsible for ensuring that acceptable changes to the schedule are agreed with the client and documented.
The project manager will maintain an issue log and ensure that issues are either closed following discussion with the client or result in an agreed change to the project plan, with associated change documentation including price change where required.

Basically, this is saying ‘use your head’ and make sure you write down whatever is agreed.

Sometimes, however, it is wise to carry out additional work as a gesture of good will. This is usually appropriate if you ‘owe’ the client a ‘favour’ of some sort, for example if you had charged 5 days to produce a design and it took 1 because they signed it off immediately. You don’t necessarily actually owe them anything (assuming a fixed price contract) but they will be aware that you didn’t put in as much effort and probably won’t take a kind view to your charging them for an extra half an hour’s work at the end of the project.

Review: Dreamweaver CS3

I finally got my hands on a copy of Dreamweaver CS3 this week and although I am still taking it all in I thought I would share some of initial thoughts.

I guess the question you want answer is whether it is worth upgrading or not. As normal the answer isn’t black and white. If you are a a strong standards based designer who has worked with things like DOM Scripting or AJAX then this upgrade probably isn’t for you. However if you are still finding your feet with CSS and don’t want to learn Javascript then this upgrade is definitely worth considering.

Obviously Adobe is trying to pursued us that Dreamweaver offers a huge range of reasons to upgrades such as better Photoshop integration and improved browser testing. However, when it comes down to it, I believe it only offers two killer features.

CSS Layout made easy

If you are new to CSS this feature might be useful. It basically allows you to select from a series of CSS layout templates to get you started. Now, this never replaces hand coding it from scratch, however if you are anything like me you find it easier to learn from example and this certainly helps with that.

Spry framework

If you have tried and failed to get your head around DOM Scripting and AJAX then I would suggest you start off by buying “DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model” (J. Keith) or “Bulletproof Ajax (Voices That Matter)” (Jeremy Keith). However, if even that fails then you might want to take a look at the Javascript framework now built into Dreamweaver CS3. As with CSS layout I should stress this isn’t as good as hand coding because:

you are stuffed if you want to add or amend functionality not offered from within the framework.
the code is bloated in places meaning it will make the page take longer to download.

However, that said, the functionality offered in Dreamweaver is very impressive. You can achieve all of the following without touching a line of code:

Work with XML datasets (like RSS feeds)
Expand and collapse content areas
Make accordion menus
Validate forms

The code isn’t great but at least from what I have seen it degrades reasonably and isn’t too intrusive.

If you are a confident CSS and DOM Scripting coder then the upgrade offers considerably less. Personally the best thing I saw was the ability to sort my CSS files in a drag and drop approach. Beyond that and copy and paste straight from Photoshop, there really isn’t much to get excited about.

The question is; has Adobe done enough with Dreamweaver CS3 to keep themselves ahead of Microsoft’s Expression Web which reports say is very impressive. Personally the lack of mac support in Expression Web could well be the deciding factor in what otherwise are very equally matched products.

“Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 (PC)” on Amazon

“Microsoft Expression Web (PC)” on Amazon

Making content accessible

Posted in Accessibility on October 3, 2005 by Paul Boag

Isn’t it funny how so many people who claim to be committed to website accessibility (myself included) tend to ignore the more subjective criteria of the WAI guidelines?

Take for example this humble guideline included in the most basic level of accessibility:

14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

I don’t know about you but I always gloss over this one! I guess that most of the time I am not responsible for content so it’s not my problem. Of course, accessibility is my problem yet I very rarely challenge my clients over whether their content could be clearer or simpler.

So what makes content more accessible?

Well actually, the W3C who wrote the accessibility guidelines also make suggestions about how to comply with checkpoint above. These include:

Ensure your headings and link text are as clear as possible even when read out of context
“Front load” both the whole page and individual paragraphs so that the most important content and summaries appear first. This will aid skim reading of pages.
Limit each paragraph to one main concept or idea.
Avoid slang, jargon, and specialized meanings of familiar words, unless defined within your document.
Favor words that are commonly used. For example, use “begin” rather than “commence” or use “try” rather than “endeavor.”
Use active rather than passive verbs.
Avoid complex sentence structures.

I work a lot with Higher Education institutions and other government bodies who are largely passionately committed to ensuring accessibility sites. However, they often fail horribly on this very basic checkpoint in the accessibility guidelines.

The phrase “content is king” is truer than ever before and we need to focus on ensuring that content is accessible as possible.

Molly Holzschlag : Web Essentials 05

Posted in Reviews on October 1, 2005 by Paul Boag

I have just finished listening to Molly Holzschlag’s keynote speech at the Web Essentials conference in Sydney. As usual, Molly had some fascinating insights into the changing world of web development, but something about her presentation just did not sit right with me.

Specialists working together

Molly primarily focused on the increasing number of fields within web design. As web development becomes more complex, so the need for specialists in different fields becomes more important. From usability and accessibility consultants to designers and developers, the range of specialists continues to grow. Molly went on to say that these specialists are increasingly working together to develop more complex web applications.

So what’s my problem!

So why did this not sit right with me? I certainly agreed with everything Molly said and she is definitely more knowledgeable than I am about the latest developments in web design. I think what I felt uncomfortable with was that Molly spoke as if this collaboration of web design specialists was the norm within the industry. In my experience, the web development world Molly was describing only exists within the high end of web design. I got the impression Molly believed that the majority of web designers specialised in different fields and worked in teams to develop sites. Although she did acknowledge this was not the case throughout the industry, I think she had a slightly unrealistic view about what was the norm.

There are still many all rounders

I work with fairly big clients including government bodies and various higher educational institutions. However, even within organisations of this size their web teams are limited. In most cases, they consisted of web editors and web developers/designers. Largely speaking individuals in web teams still have to be general "all rounders" and do not get the luxury of specialising in specific fields such as accessibility or usability. The majority of people still need to be "jacks of all trades" to some extent.

Now obviously the clients I work with are not comparable with those who engage Molly. However, I did get the feeling that Molly was describing a web design world that is still beyond the majority of my clients and certainly beyond the reach of the majority.

The need for trailblazers

Of course, it is important to remember that Molly and her peers are trailblazers in the industry, which are vital to our continued growth. However, I do have some concern that the gap between these trailblazers and those who follow might become too big for us to bridge. It is important that there are individuals who can bridge that gap and bring these working practices at the forefront of web design to the rest of the industry.

No real conclusion

I am not sure what my point is here and I have no nice conclusion to wrap up with. This is certainly not meant as a criticism of Molly or her peers. I guess it is merely me expressing a concern that for most of us, the world Molly describes is not yet here.

If you have had time to listen to Molly’s keynote I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Does your organisation have specialists or are your web developers "jacks of all trades"?