The other day I was floored and humbled as I regularly am during a session of usability testing for a site prototype. Up to this point the testing and functionality determination had gone well. Then someone put a massive road block in the way. There it was sticking up out of the ground blocking all findability of the core information on a site. Well maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it did make me think; which is good.

It’s really an old chestnut this one others in the field like Laurel Papworth, Stephen Collins and Matthew Hodgson have all commented at length. However the other day I ran smack bang into the adoption of Web 2.0 (much how I hate the term) by government. It seems to be at least on the table still with various levels of Government within Australia.

Now I have some ties to government but not a great deal. I wouldn’t say that I’m infused in the Government culture, but I still feel that I can comment on a few issues relating to Government and its adoption of web 2.0 and its social networking aspects.

Don’t know if you have noticed but the web is becoming obsessed with video. First off we had YouTube and the like with the publication of amateur video and the associated commenting.

Now the web has moved on from all that to conversational video. So has video killed the forum, the IRC, the blog. The interesting point for users in Australia is the low bandwidth of the broadband services can make the use of these services is all but impossible in some places. Still there are some interesting services now available:

Some people can suffer distractions more than others, where as others can be total immune from the usual distractions.

Ever had a morning where you seem to be not getting any thing done. You check email, forums, feeds and twitter (the Loop). The phone rings, then you answer some new email. IM fires up, you deal with that. The doorbell rings a courier turns up and the distractions just go on and on. Sure you are scheduling tasks, and getting on with the short ones, but still it feels like you are spinning your wheels. You seem to have all your task management working just fine. So what is the problem? Maybe its all the minor distractions just getting to you.