This episode of the Boagworld show is sponsored by Aurelius, LinkedIn Jobs and Userlist.
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Paul: This week on the Boagworld show we look at becoming a user experience developer, and the ongoing battle for an accessible web. This episode of the Boagworld show is sponsored for Aurelius, LinkedIn Jobs, and User List.
Paul: Hello and welcome to the Boagworld show, the show about all aspects of user experience, design digital strategy, and working in digital. My name is Paul Boag and you’re joining us for the virtual meetup season, where people just kind of turn up in the chatroom. As they are doing right now. Some of them come on the mic and we chat and we hang out, and Marcus is here, so that makes it all all right. Hello Marcus.
Marcus: Hello Paul. Are you very chilly today Paul?
Paul: Oh, because I’m wearing a scarf. Yes.
Marcus: Indoors.
Paul: Indoors. Yeah.
Marcus: Heating not working?
Paul: No, no. It’s nothing like that. I’ve got a cold.
Marcus: All right.
Paul: I’m trying not to play it up, because you know, I’m a man. We like to have a good moan about our colds, but I’ve a soar throat. I’ve got a poorly throat.
Marcus: Aw, poor Paul.
Paul: I suspect I’ve probably got the coronavirus, which is why I’m self isolating and not doing anything and just sitting at home.
Marcus: That’s what you’ve always done, Paul.
Paul: Ah, yeah. Yeah.
Marcus: I’ve got a little bit of a cold as well, and I instantly thought, “That’s it.”
Paul: That’s it.
Marcus: I’ve got it.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: You know what, I have genuinely, genuinely, run out of toilet roll. Okay.
Paul: Right.
Marcus: I thought, “I’ve got to go and buy some.”
Paul: Yes.
Marcus: I got looks of like, “You’re one of those people that ruin it for the rest of us.” As I picked the last packet off the shelf.
Paul: Oh, really?
Marcus: In the co-op over the road.
Paul: Oh, right. Are you hoarding toilet roll in case-
Marcus: Well, apparently it’s a thing.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: It’s a massive thing.
Paul: In case of the apocalypse. Yeah.
Marcus: Well, we’re all going to be dying in our beds and unable to get out and quarantined and … so yeah, go and buy lots of tins and beans and loo roll for some reason. I don’t know why.
Paul: Have you had anything canceled from a work perspective yet?
Marcus: We are thinking, not thinking, it’s likely that there will be an American project coming up in the next, oh I don’t know, couple of months. We’ve already thought well, that’s going to be a remote thing instead of an in person thing.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: So yes, I guess, if that happens. It should be.
Paul: It’s kind of scary isn’t it from a business perspective how big an impact that it has. They’re talking about a lot more people home working, which is fine for me. But it doesn’t work everyone does it, by any means. Obviously I speak at a lot of conferences. We were due to go out to Croatia later in the year, and we just don’t know whether that’s going to happen now. Because obviously I mean conferences are a petri dish of disease at the best of times, as people come from all over the world and start shaking hands with one another.
Marcus: Yeah. I mean, do you really want to get on a plane. I mean that’s like, they’re always full of disease and horrible stuff like that.
Paul: Well, I mean the great thing is, is that next December I have a cruise booked.
Marcus: Oh, how lovely.
Paul: I know. Guess the cruise line as well? It’s Princess Cruises, the same people that had the ship in Japan, so you know. But life goes on, doesn’t it.
Marcus: Yeah, but yeah, guys at work have got Japanese holiday’s booked.
Paul: Oh, really.
Marcus: Until the foreign office says, “Don’t go.” You’re not insured.
Paul: No.
Marcus: You’re thinking, “Well, shall I?”
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: But, I’m of the feeling might as well get it.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: Get it over and done with.
Paul: Yeah, but then we’re relatively lucky in a sense because we’re of, we’re not in a vulnerable group are we.
Marcus: Although, I’m more vulnerable than, we were looking at this yesterday because what all anybody talks about at the moment. Yeah, if you’re in your age group you’re I think 0.4% of people between 40 and 50 die from coronavirus, or whatever it’s called. In my age group, 50 to 60, it’s 1.3.
Paul: Oh. That’s quite a lot.
Marcus: That’s a big jump.
Paul: Yeah, that is a big jump. Crikey. Also you know, all those years of smoking, your lungs are knackered.
Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that’s good for you isn’t. Smoking, that’ll make me harder.
Paul: Yeah, sorry about that. Anyway, we’ve spent far too much time talking about the coronavirus considering-
Marcus: Much more important.
Paul: … you can’t avoid it, could you. It’s just everywhere at the moment.
Marcus: I got a new notebook, Paul. You know like when you get a new notebook it’s a nice thing. Oh, you probably don’t-
Paul: I don’t do notebooks, but I’m aware that people do.
Marcus: But this one, look, look, look, look, can you see?
Paul: Oh, it’s got squared paper.
Marcus: Squared paper. I forgot how much I like squared paper. It’s a thing of beauty. Little things, you know.
Paul: I’m trying to be excited for you. Actually, I kind of know, my equivalent is a new sharpie pen.
Marcus: Yes.
Paul: Before the nib gets kind of crushed down and it obviously gets bigger doesn’t it, you know as you … a new sharpie pen. I love a new sharpie pen. Although I must admit-
Marcus: I’m a [inaudible 00:05:50] boy myself, but maybe.
Paul: … I’ve gone off of sharpie pens, because, so I got with this new book that’s coming out. I said didn’t I about signing postcards, have I mentioned that before on the podcast?
Marcus: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, and I massively one upped you if I remember rightly.
Paul: Oh, did you? Probably. That sounds like that kind of thing. But anyway-
Marcus: Signing albums back in the day.
Paul: Yes, that was. Yes, I remember. I was signing these 500 postcards with a sharpie pen, and I swear they gave me a headache in the end, because they, the smell of them.
Marcus: Oh, what from the fumes? Yeah.
Paul: Anyway. What have you up to this week Marcus?
Marcus: Well, because you always ask me this and I like to prepare something. I really-
Paul: Oh, right. I never do.
Marcus: Well, just a few kind of thoughts about sort of, just to remind me of what I’ve done. I basically thought that really all I’ve done is been flitting about.
Paul: Oh, okay.
Marcus: I’ve been flitting.
Paul: Yes. I bet people have loved you for flitting.
Marcus: Well, the thought that came out of this actually is quite relevant to people loving me, or not.
Paul: Yes. Why.
Marcus: But anyway, so it’s fairly normal for me to kind of flit from one thing to the other. That’s what I do, and I don’t mind it at all. I’ve often said that I wonder what all the fuss is about, about with email and interruptions and things like that. They’re just simply a part of work, aren’t there?
Paul: Yes.
Marcus: He says.
Paul: Okay. Uh-huh (affirmative).
Marcus: Anyway, and it got me thinking-
Paul: Don’t get me on that.
Marcus: What’s the best way to interact or interrupt your coworkers when you’re working with them? Things like obviously phone and email, text, like messages, that kind of thing. The person you’re connecting with they can just ignore it if they’re busy, that’s fine. But what about if you’re in the same room. What should you do? I have to confess, I confess to being a little bit naughty on this. I just say, “Hi, Dave.” Or, “Dave.” You have to forgive me, because I’m so nice in other ways. But I do just talk to people. I guess it’s also partly being sort of the boss figure I suppose, although I still don’t feel like the boss after 20 years or however long it’s been.
Marcus: Anyway, I’m rambling. See, because I know, because obviously I’ve talked to developers over the years about this. They’re potentially kind of holding 20 things in their head, and when I turned around and go, “Hey, Dave.” It all comes crashing to the floor when I say, “Hey, Dave.” But, spare a thought for people like me who are spinning 20 different plates. I can’t, and I need to spin my 21st plate and I can’t get the other plate off until I’ve asked Dave his opinion on what the thing is I’m talking about. Anyway, I’m just trying from another point of view.
Marcus: But that’s what was occurring to me this week about sort of interrupting people. I’ve always said what you should do is if you don’t want me to talk to you, is put your headphones on.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: And that’s it.
Paul: Yeah, no.
Marcus: What do you think?
Paul: That’s the universal message for, “Don’t interrupt me.” What I’ve got a problem with is, “Spare a thought for me because I’m juggling 20 things.” You choose to juggle 20 things. You could be much more organized. Basically you’re saying, “Help me out, because I’m unorganized.” Which is crap.
Marcus: Oh, no, no, no. I’m super organized. I’m doing so many things at the same time. What have you been doing Paul? I’m walking away from this quickly. What have you been doing?
Paul: See, I’ve been doing one thing.
Marcus: Have you?
Paul: I’ve been focused and I got it done, and it was great. I’ve been wire framing.
Marcus: Okay.
Paul: It’s been fun.
Marcus: I’ve done some wire framing in there as well, in my 20 things.
Paul: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. More and more, I’m doing the conversion rate optimization wire framing. We’ve got this page that’s performing very well on search engines, but people aren’t converting. Truth be told, a lot of the time the reason that they’re doing very well on search engines is because they’ve been designed for search engines and not people, right. Nobody got lots and lots of text in, and they got a bit key word stuffy. Not too bad, normally people are not stupid anymore.
Paul: Understandably people are terrified of, “Well, if we change things, will it ruin it with Google?”
Marcus: Oh, yeah. Then it’s all going to fall down and you won’t be number one on Google anymore.
Paul: Yeah. I do get that, I do understand it. But then what’s the point of driving all this traffic to your site if they’re going, “Whoa, that’s really wordy and I can’t cope with that and I’m leaving.” You know? That’s what I’ve been working on, is that constant balance between you want to maintain SEO and you want to improve the conversion rate at the same time. Of course, the trouble is, is you don’t really know, or there’s, no, that’s not true. There are so many rumors flying around, right, about what Google penalize or don’t penalize.
Paul: One of the things that for example you often do when you’re faced with a page with all this content and all of this kind of stuff in. Is you go, “Well okay, let’s break it down into chunks so it’s more manageable for a start, that’s a good thing to do.” Then, you do things like well okay, we don’t need to show all of this immediately. It can be revealed in time and in different ways. But soon as you put anything under a tab or an accordion, “Oh, Google is going to think that it’s evil text that’s just key word stuffing, and we’re going to get into trouble.”
Paul: But actually that’s not true. Google are very open and say, “Look, you know, yes we do penalize white text on a white background. Yes, we do penalize text that’s been shoved off the screen.” But they’re intelligent enough to work out, “Oh, actually, this looks like some kind of accordion thing where they’re revealing content over time.” But, a really interesting area. I love that tension between the SEO and the conversion rate and stuff, so that’s what I’ve been playing with this week. It’s a fun game.
Marcus: I guess, I mean how quickly will you know if what you’ve done is successful?
Paul: Well, that’s one of the downsides I think of being a consultant. Also-
Marcus: You’re not building it, yeah.
Paul: Yeah, I’m not building it. Also, people don’t necessarily come back to you and say, “Oh, that worked really well.” Or, “No, that didn’t.” You don’t, there’s only some few, relatively few of my clients that I’m working with on a regular basis. Because, well you know what consultants are like, they’re quite expensive to keep hanging around for too long.
Marcus: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: I often don’t see how big a difference it makes, which is a bit frustrating really. I would like to know more than I do, but it is what it is. Also, a lot of times … with some of the bigger clients I do, but this particular one, I’m quite a big investment for them. So yeah, they’re not going to be coming back to me every week asking me to do this again, you know?
Marcus: Hopefully, well fingers crossed it will do well, and you can just ask them.
Paul: Yes. I mean I will.
Marcus: If they don’t shout at you Paul, it’s good news.
Paul: Yeah, there is that. There is that feeling of, “Do I want to ask them? Is it worth the risk, or should I just creep off into the dark and never be seen from again.”
Marcus: Yeah.
Paul: Because I mean, and I said this to them, it’s kind of weird isn’t it that people come to you. I think I was saying this on Twitter recently. They come to you and say, “Fix this.” Right? “Make this better.” You start going, “Well, the way to do that is we run some testing and we form a hypothesis.” “No, no, no. I just want you to fix it, right?” “Yeah, but the way you fix it is by doing user research and testing.” “No, just look at it and tell us what to do.” Right?
Paul: That’s what you often end up doing, and it’s like, I don’t know. I’m drawing immediately-
Marcus: Paul Boag just said he didn’t know.
Paul: I don’t know. Well, it’s true. There are so many variables, especially with something like encouraging people to take action. There are so many influencing factors, that you are taking at best an educated guess. Unless you test.
Marcus: You test it. Yeah, of course. Even then, I mean the testing is like, well yeah … you’re testing 1000 people?
Paul: Yeah. I know, are you testing by paying people money, which mean that they concentrate on it more? Or are you testing them in a fancy usability lab where there’s no distractions? Even that, it’s trial and error. That’s the only way. Which is where things like AB testing are very good, because that’s real people in a real environment. There you go.
Marcus: Okay.
Paul: Shall we, well actually before we get our first person on, which is Donald are you back yet?
Marcus: He says he is. Yes.
Paul: He is.
Marcus: “Donald Livingston, I’m back.”
Paul: Oh yes he just said. All right, well we’ll get him on in just a second, but first of all we’ll do our first sponsor.
Speaker 3: Boagworld.com. Boagworld.com.
Paul: Our first sponsor of the day is LinkedIn Jobs. Thank you very much to them for supporting the show. It’s a good one to have on if I’m honest, because I think a vast majority of us, a lot of people that listen to this show are either trying to find a job or they’re desperately trying to find people. Matching those two could be very difficult and very time consuming. I work obviously with a lot of people that run teams and that kind of stuff and the worst thing, worst thing, is hiring the wrong person. It has this enormous negative impact on your business, and your own personal mental health.
Paul: I mean Marcus, without naming anybody, we’ve had one or two occasions where our stress levels have gone up and our team has become uncomfortable over the years. Haven’t we?
Marcus: Hmm. I can think of four.
Paul: Wow.
Marcus: Well, five actually. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul: Am I one of them Marcus, that’s the question.
Marcus: That was the fifth one.
Paul: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you didn’t hire me, so you just kind of, I just came in the package didn’t I really.
Marcus: No, you weren’t one of them, Paul.
Paul: That’s why something like LinkedIn Jobs is so good because you can screen not just for those kind of hard skills, but also soft skills as well. Things like being a good team player, all that kind of malarkey. Also it’s really good as well because one of the other problems that we used to have is we would get a lot of people that would apply for jobs with us, and then you’d discover, “Well, actually I live in Brazil.” Okay, that’s kind of complicated and there are visas involved. You can basically weed out all those inappropriate applicants based on criteria like do you have a visa and that kind of stuff.
Paul: Most importantly, over 675 million people have been using LinkedIn Jobs at one stage or another. You certainly don’t need to settle for the wrong person. You’re going to have no shortage of applicants. Find the right person for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want, and you’ll get the first $50 off. You just go to linkedinjobs.com. Sorry, LinkedIn.com/boagworld. I just randomly threw jobs in there, so LinkedIn.com/boagworld. To get $50 off of your first job, terms and conditions apply. See site for details.
Paul: I’m going to say that one more time, because I feel like I screwed up the-
Marcus: The really important part.
Paul: Yeah, the most important part. Linkedinjobs.com. No, I’ve done it again. LinkedIn.com/boagworld. There we go. Got it. Flipping heck. Okay. Right. It isn’t a mouthful. Somebody told me, “Oh, it’s a bit of a mouthful that URL.” Not it’s not. It’s LinkedIn. You know, it’s like we type it in every day.
Marcus: Don’t say it again. Don’t say it again.
Paul: Don’t say it again, right. Let’s invite Donald onto the screen, who raised his hands with trepidation and I leapt all over him. Yeah, Aslan is now having a go at me saying that he thought I was a professional speaker. I guess I’m professional because people pay me, but it doesn’t mean I’m any good at it, does it. That’s two very different things. Yeah, Donald said that he would come on and have a little chat. I don’t know Donald, not met Donald before. Donald doesn’t sound like one of the regular slack people? Hello Donald, how are you?
Marcus: Yay.
Paul: Can you hear us?
Donald: Hello Paul, can you hear me?
Paul: Yes.
Donald: I can hear you, can you hear me?
Paul: Yes.
Marcus: Yes.
Donald: Yes, okay.
Paul: Excellent, so Donald how have you, have you been in the slack channel or are you just following us on Twitter? How did you come out about.
Donald: I’ve been a member of the slack channel for some time. I’ve been listening to you and Marcus for the better part of a decade it seems.
Marcus: Wow.
Donald: Actually, I’m rather excited to be on the show.
Paul: Oh, that’s lovely of you. Yeah, I mean it’s, oh crikey a decade.
Marcus: I’ve put two and two together. Your name is Donald and on slack you’re Don, and I know it’s a simple thing.
Paul: Oh, yes. There, that’s it. Yes. Yes. [inaudible 00:20:12].
Marcus: Yes, lots of jokes.
Paul: Thank you.
Donald: Yeah, my full name is Donald, I go by Don. Yes.
Paul: That’s the problem. That’s why. I did, I felt like it was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. Thank you Marcus for joining that dot. Don, what is it you do? Tell us a little bit about your job.
Donald: Well, I’m the senior UX developer at Fashionphile. Fashionphile, it’s fashion with P-H-I-L-E at the end. We specialize in buying and selling luxury handbags and accessories. The high end like Chanel, Louis Vuitton. Those kind of high end merchandise that you’d buy for thousands of dollars. Our company purchases them, verifies their authenticity, and then sells them at discount. We have a lot of experience in professionalism around that brand, and my job is making sure the website both operates and looks good. Like I said, I’m the senior UX developer here.
Marcus: It looks very nice. It looks lovely. I’m looking at it right now.
Paul: Is it a nice one? Have you pulled it up?
Marcus: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Paul: What’s it called? Fashion …
Marcus: Phile, with a P-H.
Donald: Phile.
Paul: Yeah.
Donald: Fashionphile.
Paul: Let’s have a look at the sexy site.
Marcus: Yeah, lots of-
Paul: Oh, you’re a sucker for this kind of stuff my Marcus, aren’t you. Yeah, you like your fancy watches and that kind of thing.
Marcus: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Paul: Oh, it is a nice site actually. Very clean. Like it. Now, Donald, you said something really interesting there. You described yourself as a user experience developer. Not a user experience designer, a user experience developer. I love it. I love that. I love that. In fact, I wrote a post awhile back about we need more user experience developers. Why do you include the user experience bit in your job title?
Donald: It’s largely self inflicted. Because, I really enjoy making sure that the experience is optimal and user centric, and making sure that it not just works but it works well, it works cleanly. The way I kind of describe my position is balancing the left brain and right brain of the user experience. I work with a lot of really great designers, create some beautiful artwork and interfaces. But they don’t the knowledge of the logical underpinnings that go into creating software or a website. Alternately, I work with a lot of really great backend developers. Really smart guys, really great coders. But they couldn’t create an interface to save their lives.
Donald: My niche is balancing those two disciplines.
Paul: Yeah. I really like that. It’s a very important role. I think people constantly underestimate the influence developers have the user experience. I mean, there’s a huge amount. If you take your typical designer, and I’m the same with this wire framing that I was doing. I was talking about I was doing some wire framing this week. I don’t show every error message, I don’t show every permutation. I don’t show exactly what it’s going to look at every scale. Developers have to interpret all of that stuff. They have to take a static comp and turn it into a living, breathing website. There are so many decisions that are made in that process as you do that, that are absolutely vital.
Paul: Then, of course there’s things like performance, which is probably one of the biggest influences especially on an e-commerce site. It has an enormous impact on conversion rate and that kind of stuff. Then, there are so many developers that introduce things, take short cuts. If they’re not user centric in their thinking they take shortcuts that are great for them, like putting in a capture form for example, but are terrible for the user. We need these people that kind of sit across those two disciplines, so that is very, very cool. How long have you been there?
Donald: At Fashionphile I’ve been just over a year here.
Paul: Okay.
Donald: Yeah, I’ve been in the industry 10 years-ish. Yeah, at various different companies and agencies. I’ve worked for companies. I’ve worked on projects for companies including Sysco and Verizon. I worked at a local company here in Utah called OverStock.com, you might be familiar with them. But yeah, I’ve had a bit of a career.
Paul: Yeah. Have you always worked in house, or have you done some agency stuff as well?
Donald: I’ve done some agency work. I worked at agency for a while, [inaudible 00:25:25] McCann who are an advertising agency where I worked on some various projects there, so yeah.
Paul: I was going to ask you, sorry Marcus. I was going to ask you-
Marcus: No, I have to apologize, because I just keep looking at all the nice stuff on the website.
Paul: Oh, is that you, yeah, you completely zoned out of the interview and are now looking at the website. Don, tell me what in the last year that you’ve been at Fashionphile, what’s the picky piece of work you’ve done that you’re most proud of?
Donald: Well, there have been a few. The one that I’m most proud of, about midway last year Fashionphile entered a partnership with Neman Marcus. They’re a department store here in the States that they’re a little bit more high class department store. As part of that partnership, had to create a portal site for Neman Marcus employees to be able to both access their inventory. It was part of that partnership we would have people be able to pick up and drop off merchandise at Neman Marcus department stores, rather than us shipping it out to them or having them send theirs into us.
Donald: We created a portal site for the Neman Marcus employees to both track incoming packages to their stores, and also how to, once customers have dropped off those packages to their stores to send them back into the main Fashionphile offices for authentication. That was a green field project for me that I was able to build from the ground up. I built using the UJS framework, using our new backend API that one of our backend developers here created. It was a really fun, like I said, a green field project.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: Always nice.
Paul: Yeah, you don’t get enough of those, do you.
Marcus: No. There’s always baggage, isn’t there?
Paul: Yeah. I’m quite interested, Louis is asking about it as well in the chatroom, about the type of people that use this site. Especially around things like the buy it back feature that you’ve got. I mean, who is using this site? Is it people like Marcus that have got more money than sense? No, I’m joking Marcus. What kind of people are we talking about here?
Donald: That’s a good question. A lot of our merchandise is fairly high end, so it’s going to appeal to customers with a little bit more, as you say, more money than sense. But it also, it makes these higher end merchandise available to clientele that may not be able to otherwise afford it. We have a thing where after the merchandise has been on the site for a certain period of time we start discounting, and we have kind of a last call. This has been on the site for so long, we’ve discounted it further. It enables us to make things available, really nice merchandise, available to people who otherwise might not think it would be in their buys range.
Marcus: Hmm.
Paul: Yeah, no it’s really good. Is it mainly desktop users still, or are you getting a lot of mobile traffic? Because I could imagine that this is the kind of site that people pull up regularly and keep going back to. I imagine them looking on their mobile phone every day to see what the deal is kind of thing.
Donald: Yeah. A lot of our traffic is mobile, and so that’s one of the things. We want to make sure it looks nice on the desktop, but that’s actually one of the back and forth I frequently have with our design team. Our design team frequently likes to make things really look nice, but looking nice on the desktop. I have to push back and say, “Okay, let’s make sure this is mobile first, because that’s where most of our traffic is.”
Paul: Yeah. Yeah, I wondered whether that would [crosstalk 00:30:01] come up-
Donald: It’s a perpetual struggle.
Paul: Yeah. I wondered. That’s part of why I asked the question, because it sounds like you’ve got a team of designers that are more traditional designers than they are digital designers. You’re having to do that translation work for them, which is you know, good luck with that one.
Donald: Yup.
Paul: Yeah. Don, thank you so much for coming on, what a … I love the principle of the business. I think it’s really interesting. I love that buy back feature, I think that that is absolutely superb. It sounds like you’re doing some really good stuff, and the site looks great. As somebody who’s obviously sitting between two very different world views, you must be doing an amazing job judging by what I’m seeing. So thank you very much for coming on the show.
Marcus: Cheers, Don.
Donald: Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you, Marcus.
Paul: There we go. Slight delay, which made the conversation slightly more tricky for poor old Don, but not too bad. That was brilliant. This is a fascinating business model. I’m always interested in discovering new approaches to stuff like this, where somebody comes up with a slightly different way of doing things. Really interesting.
Speaker 3: Boagworld.com. Boagworld.com.
Paul: Okay, so what next. I suppose we’ve got to do another sponsor haven’t we? That’s got to cram them in, cram them in. This is more mine. This one, this is the Balsamic thing. You know the Balsamic thing, basically giving away their sponsor slots to other people. I don’t consider this so much a sponsor slot as a ooh, look, what cool new thing Balsamic’s pointing us at, which is really good. The one that they’ve got this week is called User List, right. It’s a really useful tool for anybody who has got a SAS product, right.
Paul: You produce some software as a service and you have to communicate with your users, don’t you. You’ve got to do onboarding emails, you’ve got to do notifications about what’s happening. There’s load of communications that go back and forth. User list enables you to manage all of that. It’s a little bit like Intercom in that regards, but Intercom is this huge monstrosity of an enterprise tool for the big boys. The grown ups. But for most people, it’s massively expensive. Actually, it’s got far too many features, so that’s why this looks really good, User List. I was having a poke around it earlier.
Paul: It’s much easier to use than something like Intercom that’s become quite intimidating. They’ve got all kinds of support as well that you can get around it. For example, they’ve got like a free email planning worksheet, to help you overcome that kind of analysis paralysis and to get started with it all. Because one of the big problems, I do a lot of onboarding emails like when people sign up for a Master class or whatever else. It takes quite a lot of thought to go, “Okay, when do I want to communicate, what do I want to say in order to be relevant in that particular moment, et cetera.” If you just fancy getting a hold of their worksheet, it looks like you can download them for free at userlist.com/worksheets.
Paul: Obviously if you want to check out the product itself that’s userlist.com. It looks like quite an interesting one, so thank you for Balsamic for supporting the show and giving away their slots to other interesting tools. That said, I’ll say this anyway, there’s a promo code that I think still works if you fancy Balsamic as well. If you go to balsamic.com/go/boagworld, I think there’s an old promo code that will work there as well. Cool. Okay, so that’s that. Now, we had somebody else, somebody else, who else.
Marcus: Natalie.
Paul: Natalie. Thank you, I’m glad you were paying attention. Let’s see if I can find Natalie.
Marcus: [crosstalk 00:34:12].
Paul: Get Natalie on. Where is she, she must be here somewhere. We’ve got a long list. There she is. Right, so I’ve just invited Natalie on. Now, there’s another name that I don’t recognize that probably has been in the slack channel for 300 years.
Marcus: No, I don’t recognize her name.
Paul: She could be called something completely random and different couldn’t she on the slack channel. It’s where all the cool kids go, the slack channel. Which reminds me, I really should give the slack channel a little push. I can’t find it quickly, and Natalie’s already here, so I’ll stop waffling. Hello, Natalie.
Natalie: Hello, how are you.
Paul: I am very well.
Marcus: Hi, very well.
Paul: See, this is one of the advantages of us doing it slightly later in the day, Marcus. You have poo-hood doing it at 5:00, but we’re now getting our friends from over the channel. Over the channel.
Natalie: I’m west coast.
Paul: Oh, you’re west coast.
Marcus: The west coast, wow.
Natalie: West coast, yeah.
Paul: Bright and early for you.
Marcus: Good morning.
Natalie: Good morning.
Paul: Natalie, tell us about yourself. What is it that you do, where do you work, that kind of thing?
Natalie: Yeah, so I’ve been listening to the podcast since episode one in 2005. We have actually met, Paul, at South by Southwest. I think in 2009.
Paul: Wow.
Natalie: Yeah. I’m in the slack channel, but of course our work days don’t overlap at all.
Paul: No. That is, I really, that’s one thing I really regret about the slack channel is that it is a little bit European focused. If you’re in Australia or west coast, you get screwed a little bit with the slack coast.
Natalie: Yeah, it’s pretty quiet.
Paul: You’ve been listening since the beginning then, that’s incredible.
Natalie: Since episode one, yup.
Paul: Wow. That is, I am so sorry.
Marcus: Yeah, back when Paul had hair and I had dark hair.
Natalie: Yeah, and before Marcus was part of it, yup.
Paul: Yeah. You’ve been involved with the podcast longer than Marcus has, that’s awesome. Get off Marcus, you’ve been upstaged, bye. What is it you do, Natalie?
Natalie: I currently split my time between two businesses. One is Digitally, which is an accessibility consultancy that I run on my own. I do training in accessibility for designers, developers, everyone else. Also consult on projects for developers who need to build an accessible project for somebody. I can come in and review at every step of the way, wire frames, designs, everything. Make sure the final product is [inaudible 00:36:53] compliant. Then, my other business that I work on two days a week is nsquared, a tiny little software company. We do WordPress plugins. We’ve got five of them so far.
Paul: Oh, cool. So quite … then.
Natalie: Yes.
Marcus: I’m interested to know where you met Paul at South by Southwest.
Paul: Probably at the bar.
Marcus: Yes, that’s what I was thinking.
Natalie: No, you did a live show.
Paul: Oh, yes. We did, didn’t we.
Marcus: I know, right, right. Yes. Yes.
Paul: I forgot that, wow. That’s-
Natalie: Yup. Yup. I came up and talked to you after the live show, yeah.
Paul: That was in the heady days when there was little competition and we had huge audiences.
Natalie: Right.
Paul: Not like now where this is it. The 15 people that are currently in the room. How the world has changed. I’m really interested in your, the accessibility work that you do. Would you consider yourself more from the design side of things, or the development side of things? Or I guess when it’s accessibility it’s both isn’t it, really?
Natalie: Yeah. I mean, a long, long time ago, I came from the world of graphic design. I got my start in my career doing packaging and trade show booths.
Paul: Wow.
Natalie: Designing trade show booths, yeah.
Marcus: Someone’s got to do it.
Natalie: I know. When the web came along I just was fascinated with it, and I would say I’ve really moved into more a developer role. I mean, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years so it’s been a really long time. I do almost more of a front end developer and do a lot of job script development and things like that. I’ve really got a good experience in both sides of things, which I think is really helpful for approaching accessibility and keeping track of everything you need to think about.
Paul: Yeah, because it’s constantly changing isn’t it, and best practice improves. It’s tiring working in this industry, isn’t it really.
Natalie: It is. I just had a contentious call with a client yesterday, I was giving them some advice about alt-texts for their images and link texts and things like that. They were very upset on the call because they were doing things the way they had been told like 10 years ago by someone else.
Paul: Yeah, that is the trouble isn’t.
Marcus: It’s your fault now.
Natalie: Yeah, it’s all on me.
Paul: How are you finding interest in that? For a long time accessibility was quite a tough sell. Do you still find that, or do you have people queuing up wanting help with it these days?
Natalie: It’s kind of weirdly both.
Paul: Yeah.
Natalie: There’s definitely some people who just think, “This is ridiculous. We don’t need to do this.” I have a hard time convincing them. But then, I do have more and more people specifically looking for accessibility. We’ve had a lot of law suits here in the US, and they’re increasing all the time.
Paul: Which is good for business for you then.
Natalie: Yes, good for business. Then, I go to a lot of meetups and things like that and meet other developers. Then, they hire me on to consult on their projects that need to be accessible, so that’s been really helpful.
Paul: Yeah. I mean, I’ve also found the shift that we’ve seen towards also talking about inclusive design. The idea that at some point we’ve all got accessibility problems. Like, for example years back where I severed the tendon in my thumb and I was in a cast for six weeks or whatever it was. Or, when you’re trying to use the internet while juggling a cat. Not literally juggling it, but you know, we all have those kinds of moments where screen glare, and so you know. I think thinking in those terms suddenly opens up the conversation about accessibility. Makes it much more approachable from a business perspective, rather than it just being about legal compliance. It’s a carrot and stick approach in my, you know, you’ve got to scare them about the compliance, but also put up the possibilities, too.
Natalie: Yeah. I know at least a couple of developers who had some real problems with carpal tunnel and repetitive stress injury who have said, “I have a whole new appreciation for accessibility since I had to struggle with that, and trying to do my job with all that pain.” Yeah. They just have a whole new perspective on how important it is.
Paul: I’ll tell you another instance where you get a new perspective is when you reach me and Marcus’ age.
Natalie: I don’t think I’m very far behind you.
Paul: Well, I wouldn’t possibly say. He said in his best British accent. But, it’s true. As we age, reading becomes a nightmare on some, especially on mobile phones and if you’re out in the sun, and the text ends up being so tiny. I actually, I’ve got this problem on my own Boagworld. It’s interesting because that website was designed by Ed, who works at Headspace, about five or six years ago. He’s quite a lot younger than me. It was fine five or six years ago, I looked at it and thought, “This looks great.” Now I’m looking at it going, “I can’t flipping read my own website.” It’s something we all struggle with at some point, isn’t it?
Natalie: Yeah. Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I’ve noticed I start holding things out further and further. “What is this?”
Marcus: You end up with these. I think I know how old you are based on that, but I’m not going to say.
Paul: Yeah, you can. You can definitely gauge peoples age by how far away they hold things from them.
Marcus: We’ve been starting to do things like insuring that the websites we build, that the text changes with the settings that people have on their iOS device. Which is an advance in that area, which is really helpful. Because obviously the likes of me I set my iPhone up to be a little bit, everything’s a little bit bigger. So if I get a website that recognizes that, then that’s a good thing. That’s something we can certainly do.
Marcus: We work a lot with law firms as well, and it’s just compliance with them. It’s like we’ve got to make sure that we’re compliant, because obviously they don’t want to be sued for, yeah.
Natalie: No, yeah.
Paul: But you think sometimes the compliance aspects can almost sometimes be a barrier to good accessibility. Now, what do I mean by that. Sometimes people latch onto, “We need to make this compliant and we need to fulfill the W3C guidelines or whatever else.” They’re not actually, it’s kind of living to the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. Do you find that Natalie, is that a problem that you come across?
Natalie: Yeah.
Paul: Yeah.
Natalie: Yes, definitely. I just did a project for a local hospital here, and they said they wanted the product to be accessible. But then, they didn’t want to redo any of the designs, which all had terrible color contrast issues because it was their branding colors. They didn’t want to make these changes. You can’t just, it’s not just checking off the check list, you have to go back and think about the overall user experience and how accessible that is, and how easy it is for everyone to use. It’s not accessible if you checked all the boxes but you have a terrible user experience.
Paul: Absolutely, and that’s the trouble isn’t it.
Marcus: [crosstalk 00:44:53] with performance as well you could argue. If something’s really badly performing, than it may be not accessible under certain context or a particular context.
Paul: Yeah.
Natalie: Yeah.
Paul: It’s really interesting. I think it’s good that the guidelines have evolved to reflect that. If you look back to [inaudible 00:45:14] one and it was quite, do these automated checks and everything’s going to be all right. Well, [inaudible 00:45:21] three or whatever it is that we’re on now is much more subjective. But, I think a lot of people still have got that mindset of if I just check these boxes and I do these things. Of course, the other problem with accessibility is even if you make something accessible, you launch it, and it’s accessible for like five minutes before someone uploads an image without an alt-tag. It’s much as a culture change as anything else isn’t it, really.
Natalie: Yeah. I always try to make sure I do training for anyone who’s going to touch website content, before or around the time project launches for that very reason, yeah.
Paul: Yeah. I find myself getting involved in governance stuff sometimes as well of even basic things like, well this is how we approach building, or creating a webpage from an accessibility point of view. But also, this is what we do if somebody complains. Because I think sometimes there’s not even anybody to talk to about this. A complaint comes in and it gets pinged around the organization and nobody actually ever does anything about it, and so in the end people end up suing, because they’re not getting any kind of response out of it.
Natalie: Yes.
Paul: There is this perception that people kind of just one day decide to sue you, and it doesn’t happen like that. It’s only when you constantly ignore them, or don’t help them that it becomes a problem.
Natalie: Yeah.
Marcus: [crosstalk 00:46:54].
Natalie: The state of accessibility on the web is so terrible that you can’t really blame anyone for just reaching the end of their rope and just getting so frustrated, that they’re doing the only thing they can think to do.
Paul: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I don’t, you know, a lot of the time it just comes down to the organizations don’t see the value of it and so don’t have people dedicated to it. That’s where the kind of stuff that you do is so valuable.
Natalie: Oh, thank you.
Paul: Well, it’s lovely to meet you again Natalie.
Natalie: Nice chatting with you.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: That was a long time ago.
Paul: That was, 2009. My word. When you’re done if you could in the chatroom pop in those two different sites, we didn’t even talk about nsquared. But pop in the URL so I’ll put them in the show notes to make sure they’re included.
Natalie: Okay, no problem.
Paul: All right, thanks for coming on.
Marcus: Thanks Natalie.
Natalie: All right, thank you.
Paul: Bye-bye Natalie.
Natalie: Bye.
Marcus: Bye.
Paul: Wow. Any conversation about accessibility I can’t shut up. As was quite apparent. Poor old Natalie didn’t get a word in edgewise then did she? I got a bit over excited.
Marcus: That’s most guests Paul, don’t worry.
Paul: No. When Don was talking, yeah, Don was talking about APIs and stuff like that, which just went over my head. But accessibility is a pet subject, I must admit.
Speaker 3: Boagworld.com. Boagworld.com.
Paul: All right, let’s pop in our last sponsor. Again it’s another really good one, so I’m excited to have them in the show. Which is Aurelius. We talked about them last week. They’re a user research tool. User research is great, we should all be doing it, but it has it’s challenges around it. We can end up with lots of notes to wade through. We have clients and colleagues who need convincing of what we’re doing. We’ve got to interpret all that data that we gather, and all those notes. We end up then repeating previous research because we didn’t know it had been done, and you couldn’t find it. Oh, it turns into a nightmare.
Paul: That’s where something like Aurelius helps. It’s a single platform for organization, sharing, and interpreting all your user research. It helps you move from that raw research data to actually insight things you can action. Because it can feel very overwhelming when you do that kind of user research. Everything goes into this research repository where you can analyze it, you can make sense of that research data easily and fast. It helps you create those key findings and insights. You can search through everything so you’re not repeating yourself. You can share your resaerch findings to ensure that it actually impacts decision making across the organization.
Paul: Go and check it out. It’s at aureliuslab.com. That’s A-U-R-E-L-I-U-S lab.com. Thank you very much for them joining us on the show as well. There we go. Been a really interesting show. Talked a little bit about accessibility and high fashion. Two very similar united subjects. How am I going to create a title for this weeks show, when it’s like two totally different things like that.
Marcus: You’ll have to be creative Paul.
Paul: Yeah, [inaudible 00:50:15]. Marcus, do you have a joke for us?
Marcus: Well Don, our first guest, is a regular poster of jokes.
Paul: Oh is he?
Marcus: Yes. Now, I have to say Don that I don’t use a lot of your jokes.
Paul: Why? They’re obscene aren’t they? Let me guess.
Marcus: No, they’re not. I’m going to give you a couple of Don’s. These are probably the best I can find, bless him. Have you heard about silent tennis? Apparently it’s like regular tennis, but without the racket.
Paul: Oh.
Marcus: Boo boo.
Paul: That’s quite a good one actually, I quite like that one.
Marcus: All right. Here’s another one. I turned over a new leaf yesterday. The people at the Nissan dealership weren’t happy.
Paul: Well as someone that owns a leaf, I quite like that. Those are both from Don are they?
Marcus: Yeah, he puts lots in. But yeah.
Paul: Those are good, why are you not using those jokes?
Marcus: Well, I just did use them. I just searched through quite a few to get to those. I feel guilty now.
Paul: Oh, I see. You’re saying the overall quality is very low is that what you’re implying. Poor Don’s jokes don’t stand up to much, then.
Marcus: No. I’m being mean. They’re wonderful. They’re certainly better than anything I can come up with.
Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Do you know what, I’m loving this season. I’m absolutely loving it. I’m loving having not the normal suspects. Not people like me that write books or go speak at conferences, all that. But people that are actually at the conference doing this kind of stuff on a daily basis. I think you get a much more real impression of the industry. It was interesting, I was writing a post this morning about quality of research. Yeah, so I Googled what else was out there. Everything that you find, it’s all like, “Oh, best practice, you should be doing user diary’s and you should be doing infield studies, and you should be.”
Paul: Which, you can only do if you’re at the very top of the kind of pyramid of sites. If you’re working for the Googles and the Facebooks and things like that. The majority of people don’t work in those kind of areas. They’re in the position Natalie’s in of having to fight for accessibility to even be taken seriously, you know. That’s why this has been such a good season I think from my point of view, because it reassures you that you’re not doing something massively wrong and that all this stuff you read online isn’t the norm.
Marcus: I just think it’s been really nice to put names to faces that we speak to on slack all the time.
Paul: Well, yes.
Marcus: There is that too.
Paul: That’s the best bit, really. But there’s a lot of people that are listening to this that maybe aren’t part of the slack community.
Marcus: True.
Paul: I forgot-
Marcus: They should be.
Paul: Well yes, they should. I’m trying to now remember the URL. That’s it. Boagworld.com/slacking. Please join the slack channel. Even if you’re a stalker. We’ve got like, I think we’ve got one and a half thousand to 2000 people in the room, and probably I would say less than 100 are regular contributors. But it’s so nice. It’s so nice to bring those people together, and it’s such a nicer place than Twitter these days. There’s very rarely any conflict and everybody’s really supportive and encouraging of one another. I don’t know, for me out of everything I’ve done in my career, I think the slack channel is the bit that I like the most out of it. Isn’t that weird.
Marcus: That’s cool. That’s really cool.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: Yes, I think it’s cool as well.
Paul: Yeah, it’s just this really nice little place to hang out.
Marcus: Aw. We got a heart from Daniel.
Paul: Aw, thanks Daniel. He probably means that heart sarcastically, but we’re pretending. That is pretty much the level of our slack channel. It’s come in and abuse Paul, that seems to be the universal constant that everybody is united behind. Anyway, I’m just waffling at this point. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I hope you’ve enjoyed our two guests, and we’ll be back again next week where we will be, I was about to say what we’re going to be talking about, but of course I have no idea.
Marcus: We’ve got no idea.
Paul: I have no idea. We will be talking to people. If you fancy being one of those people, we would love to have you along. You can definitely join us, and you can do that by going to subscribe.boagworld.com/community, and just sign up for notifications. But until next time, thank you very much for joining us, and goodbye.
