Let’s get some reality on the web accessibility debate.

We all know about WCAG 1, we have all at least had a look at the associated checklists.  If you are lucky you may have glanced at WCAG 2.

We all have been developing and designing our sites with semantic content, in compliance with W3C guidelines, using progressive enhancement for the interactive components, unobtrusive Javascript, and graceful degradation of the pages for legacy browsers.   Maybe used some of the attributes of ARIA. Sure that’s a no brainer.

We know that doing this will solve most of the accessibility issues.

So much so that one would think that the cause for accessibility and universal design was over.  Right?

No – wrong.

We are not Assistive Technology users

If we set aside the fact that we still have people in Australia building non standards based sites with tables for layout and inline javascript.

We as a community (edit – able bodied) in general are just paying lip service to accessibility.  We have become complacent. We are engaging in a mindless tokenistic effort with accessibility.  Do we really care…

Often the real answer is No.  At least now we are being honest.

Think about it when was the last time you included a round of accessibility testing in a quote.   Or for that matter when was the last time you even considered it, or even raised the topic.

To often if the client does bring up accessibility in early discussions, we will just ignore it.  Pretend it isn’t an issue.

Even government agencies, local, state and federally, have been dodging accessibility issues.  I have seen it personally, straight faced lies, or statements of avoidance veiled in bureaucratic misunderstanding.   The mindless ticking off on the WCAG 1 checklist, just to get the KPI achieved, too often by a junior staff member who doesn’t really have any interest in accessibility or the like anyway.

This has to stop.

Yes some of us are doing something, but in reality is it enough.

Are we calling our fellow peers to task when the accessibility on their web site is just not up to scratch?  We used to do this with  web standards.  Why not accessibility?

Maybe we need to remind people that ensuring a web site is accessible in Australia is a legal requirement.

Losing our way.

Still with accessibility we have gone very quiet.  Even silent.  Why?

Simple we have become our clients, we are now just playing the same lip service, tokenism game that our clients are often playing.   Yes in public we (they) will state that we care about accessibility.   But in reality we (edit – as able bodied designers and developers) don’t have to use assistive technology (AT), we don’t have a disability, in general we can see and use the web as it was intended.  We are a million miles from the practical world of using AT.

The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users.   The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assitive technology we see.

Why we are doing nothing.

In a lot of cases we have the tools with the standard issue Web Technology to make the entire web accessible. We have had them for over 4 years now.  Still a lot of sites fail all but a basic Jaws reading test.  Why?

We know why, we just don’t talk about it, it’s the elephant in the room:

• Money

  Money is the primary issue.  It’s always  comes down to money, it costs for testing, it costs for recruiting, it costs to find the best solution.

• No ROI

  From the clients view there is a perception that there is no return on investment.  The AT audience is just too small and they are seen as being just on welfare and not having any disposable income at all.

• Lack of Skills

  There is a lack of skills or documented solutions for all but the common accessibility issues.  Yes lots of people around the world have found solutions to most of the problems.   However if you want to solve it locally you have to reinvent the solution again or call in an overseas or interstate high paid consultant.

• Social Value

  In reality there is no socially inspired public relations value in accessibility.  A business can be seen to get more value out of sponsoring a guide dog than making their web site accessible.

• Why Bother

  Although the Australia Human Rights Commission hasn’t been sitting on it’s hands on these issues. There is a general public and web industry perception that they have. So if the legislator isn’t bothered with enforcing compliance why should anyone else care.

• Lack of Tools

  There is no sure-fire tool that we can automatically measure accessibility of a site.  It takes real testing and a compliance checklist to ensure a site is accessibility to a wide spectrum of the community.   It’s much easier to just lie on the checklist, after all who is going to check.  Yes I have seen this being done time after time.

What can we do.

It’s a sad really.  In a way we shouldn’t have even got to this state.

It’s as if the hard battle for accessibility has only been won on the popularist visually impaired front.  Leaving the cognitive, motor control, hearing and the like issues out in the cold.

Now I don’t have a solution, however this is something I have been thinking about a great deal.

I’m certain what every we have to do, isn’t going to be one simple solution.  On a side note: don’t look to HMTL5, that’s not going to be the magical panacea.  I except  the answer will be in a multiple pronged approach:

• Kill off Accessibility

  In some ways even considering accessibility as a separate item is the wrong approach. We really need to be considering the ideals of universal design, in which everything is designed for everyone.   Let’s just for a minute forget about accessibility as a separate issue. We need to design and develop for people using AT just like we do for any other usability issue.  This is where  Inclusive Design comes in.

• No more checklists

  Lets be honest the WCAG checklists  don’t work. We don’t have HTML or CSS checklists.   Why should we have accessibility ones.   Checklists are just too open to management and insecure web team members abusing them and warping the real results.  After all who is going to challenge or randomly audit them – senior management, I don’t think so.

• Merge the Guidelines

  Over time it would be idea to merge WCAG in the core of HTML and CSS guidelines such that it is just second nature to the recommended implementation examples with HTML or CSS.   Okay this is a really long term solution considering we are just getting into HTML5.

• Ninja Accessibility

  Being realistic we aren’t going to get all those ideas of the ground tomorrow.  However we can take advantage of the aging baby boomer population in the west.  This generation of older adults, will start to have a lot of leverage and will also start to encounter  a number of minor web accessibility issues.  Via overcoming these issues by stealth, ninja like, one is able to introduce an inclusive design mind set to the client, via an area they can relate to.

• Accessibility Patterns

  This is one that I touched on above.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a centralised library of accessibility solutions, a bit like a UI pattern library like Yahoo User Interface Library or  the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.  That way designers and developers could just look for a solution to a problem or just consider the overall UI recommended in terms of an inclusive design.    Either way it would be a win, win situation.

  Now there are lots of very smart accessibility design practitioners across the world.  I know a good number of them have encountered most of the common issues and then some more.  Some have published these issues and the work arounds as they discover them.  Some have just listed the issue and test results, leaving the solution as a guarded revenue stream.  And others are just too busy to really contribute.

  We need to harness this information and store it somewhere centrally.   As a community resource.   Think about it, think about the differences that developmental patterns and UI design patterns have made to the developmental process. No more reinventing the wheel (or widget) .  They have allowed the adoption of a landscape where good practices are now the norm.

  What we need to do is foster the accessibility community to build accessibility patterns as solutions to common problems.   Such that any designer or developer can drop the solution in place and be confident of the out come.   Yes this does need some altruistic contributions back to the community by accessibility solution specialists.  However just consider the overall result in the longer term.

In a way I have dream that in the next five years we can turn this around and have  accessibility issues approached in the same way we now do for web standards.

However in order to do this we need to start today, and make real changes in what we do.

Are you with me!

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Edge of the Web conference in Perth on UX Architecture for the Small Guy.   I will do a brief write up on the conference shortly, so standby on that one, but for now on with the talk.

Why this Topic

Too often I have been to various conferences and I have heard from some very experienced UX people discussing numerous case studies of projects.   All of them have one thing in common – large budgets or large teams.   Frankly these are not the projects that happen from day to day in Perth.  But they appear to be the mainstay of the UX designer, one gets the impression they are the general bread and butter in some parts of the world.

It is from this frustration and the lack of direct application of IA or UX in general for smaller business projects that made me rethink my design approach a number of years ago.   Why couldn’t we apply UX principles to SME projects or was it just for the larger projects?

I asked around the UX community, no one seemed to be willing to discuss applying UX to smaller projects.    I did have one amusing conversation in which the other party considered a small project being our gross income for the year.

Hence talk was born from this lack of a reality check and the need for information that could be applied on day to day basis in the real world.

So what was Covered

This presentation is aimed at people not familiar with UX Design and UX practitioners who have not considered using User Experience Design tools and techniques on smaller projects.  In a way this talk was also a lead-in for the other UX based talks that where on throughout the conference.

The talk itself dealt with the way we are still using a simple waterfall based process for SME projects, and why we are doing it – suggesting that maybe an Agile UX approach would be a better way to work.

Based on my years of experience of designing user experiences for small business I presented a dramatically shortened list of tools and techniques, for a UXD process focused on smaller projects, down from the 50 odd usually available.    Some of the tools I have discounted you maybe surprised as to why I have cut them from the process

I also discuss what happens when we go with our “gut instinct” and ignore any user research, the outcome is very interesting indeed.  Finally I look at selling user experience, be it to your boss, a boardroom or just a SME business owner.   Without knowing how to sell UX any change in the way we do things is just going to be a waste of time.   So in a way this aspect is the critical element of this presentation.

I touch on a fair number of different topics in this talk.  To really do each topic justice I’m going to present then here over the next few weeks in a lot more detail than I presented at the Edge of the Web.

Also if you were fortunate enough to be in the audience of my presentation any feedback is most welcome.

This year I was honoured to be given the opportunity to speak at OZ-IA 2009.  I will also be speaking at the Edge of the Web 2009 in November for the first time, right after the keynote, talk about pressure!

The following is my initial transcript of my presentation at OZ-IA 2009, The Art of Skywriting  – The Demise of the Tag Cloud.

Now it’s not going to be word for word the same as the audio recording, but you’ll get the idea.  As usual it’s also available on Slideshare along with all my other presentations, distributed under creative commons license.  Soon as I have the audio I will sync it with the slides to make it easier to understand – promise.

Tag clouds have been a part of our community for a while now, we have come to love them, we have embraced them, welcomed them into our households. They have become part of our teams, an ever-present design or navigational component.

Or so we thought.  I don’t know if you have noticed but over the last few years Tag Clouds have been disappearing from web sites at an alarming rate.  In the dead of night they have been ripped from their home page, tossed aside, unwanted to die a lonely death on the curb side.  It’s as if no-one really cares.   I know I care!  What has been happening to our Tag Clouds!

I feel it’s time we got some real answers, answers from some fellow professionals, so I have called in a few favours the managed to get the SUXU team “Special UX Unit” on the case.

Now at last we can surely find out if some heinous crime has been committed and finally learn the true fate of the Tag Clouds.

The Investigation

To understand what has happen to Tag Clouds we really have to understand their history.

Tag Clouds first came onto the scene in a big way in 2006 when Stewart Butterfield (the designer at Flickr at the time) leveraged of the work of Jim Flanagan’s Search Referral Zeitgeist.   So for better or worst Flickr saw an opportunity to try something new and find a use for all those community tags.  Mind you Tag Clouds in theory have been around since 2002 in an online implementation and as theory way back to 1995.   It’s just in 2006 Flickr pushed them out into the limeslight.

Over the following year Technorati and Delicious would both implement Tag Clouds onto their home pages, shooting the status and popularity of Tag Clouds into that of a mega-rockstar.   Everyone wanted to have a Tag Cloud on their website, from blogs, to tech media sites.   It was even suggested that Tag clouds could replace the trusted menu navigation system.

By 2007, even the conservative end on town, in the form of the retail sector was looking at Tag Clouds. As the fringe of the retail sector began to implement Tag Clouds to allow customers an easier method to connect with their popular product lines.

Still what are Tag Clouds really like?   Just like we profile the suspects, so too the crack team at SUXU have profiled the major 3 types of  Tag Cloud

1. Mr Popular (the Elmo)

   With this tag cloud the word size represents the number of times a tag is applied to the single item.   These Tag Clouds are usually generated of audience contributions, like in the case of Last.fm.

2. The Streetwalker

   For this Tag Cloud the word size represents the number of items that to which the tag as been applied (or used).  As in the case of Deep Search, the large keywords have more search items applied to them.   There is no real freewill here, it’s just a case of take what you find.

3. Mr All you Can Eat

   This final Tag Cloud is used for representation of content categorisation. The bigger the words, indicates the more items in that category.   This type of Tag Cloud is very popular in blogs.   It is rarely generated from data that is provided by a global community.

Just a reminder that tag clouds in theory allow for a number of key visualisation techniques:

• As we all know Tag Clouds allow for a visualisation of the presented word frequencies, we can see in this case that Swine-flu and flu are prominent when Japan is not.
• They allow for a community or audience to contribute the tags and determine the direction of the Tag Cloud
• Tag Clouds can present an alternative navigation aid, allowing for easy discovery of the required or new content.
• And they can also present the visualisation of a semantic categorisaton, where the related items of information can be presented in close spatial approximation in the Tag Cloud. In this case Science, Politics and Religion are related, and so is Science Fiction, Sci-Fi, Sex and Zombies.   It gets stranger with Star Wars, Star Trek and Toilet – what are people saying here.

By the end of 2007, early 2008 Tag Clouds had really made it, even the Microformats community was now looking for a model to implement tag clouds. They where considering that there were enough instances “in the wild” as they like to say, to warrant a Tag Cloud Microformat.

Also the IA community stepped forward and deemed that Tag Clouds were now a useful technique for any designer’s toolbox and so they went and produced a design pattern for Tag Clouds.

However we did note and under-current, that like the Tech fringe of computer geeks, Tag Clouds seem too only appealing to a fringe community.   Like with Iggy Pop, the general public just didn’t embrace Tag Clouds.

Also like Rick Sanford, lead vocals, percussion and… flute, time had passed maybe, no longer was the white sexy neck tie, bare chest and mullet in vogue. Sorry Rick and prog rock, time to move aside.

It’s at this point in our investigations that we found unsolved cold case after cold case, hundreds of instances of the innocent Tag Clouds that have been brutally slain.   Clearly justice needs to be served.  We now had our suspects.

The Case for the Prosecution

Geeks and Geeklettes of the jury, we all know about Tag Clouds and their history now.  It’s is clear as has been presented by the members of the SUXU that their has been a heinous crime of murder committed here on a monumental level.

Suspect One

But did you know that by 2006 when the tag cloud population was at its peak that only 7% of the Internet community was in fact tagging [1].   Hence only 7% of the community was providing the tags for Tag Clouds.  This later increase to 12% as the Tag Cloud population waned.  Still with the beloved blogs being the home of the Tag Cloud. The number of bloggers on the web is only about 10-15%.   This means only 10-15% of the web community is supporting Tag Clouds.   Surely these people, the controlling fringe elements of the web community are a suspect.   Hence I give you suspect number one.

Suspect Two

We all know as professionals in the UX field that words do not always have the same meaning from society to society from one cultural group to another. For example I’m just looking for a wholesome “Family Guy” and I get this.   Err No. That’s not what I wanted.  Tag Clouds don’t help this matter.  But it’s not their fault.   Words and their differences are to blame.   So we have suspect two – our differences in meaning.

Suspect Three

The death of so may Tag Clouds can be lain at the feet of users.   They just don’t get them at all.   According to research people often just didn’t get that those items where links they could click on, or that they in fact lead to more information, or that they presented a visualisation of the information of the site.  Tag Clouds didn’t come in most cases with a manual.  But frankly realistically who would have read it if they had.  So the pesky users are suspect number three.

Suspect Four

You know what, people didn’t even realise that the big items in a Tag Cloud where big for a reason.   They considered that is was like that because the designers just wanted it that way.  If it was red or green in colour it was just a design element, and that was all.    Hence maybe the designers are a little to blame here in their presentation of Tag Clouds. So I give you the designers are suspect number four.

Suspect Five

People with accessibility issues are a pain in the arse.   They really made life hard for Tag Clouds.  Constantly complaining about, font resizing issues, colour-blindness, motor coordination issues on small sized words, lack of weighting and semantic spatial relationships for visually impaired users.   So much so that really we do have to consider these members of our community as suspect number five.

Suspect Six

Finally search engines are our last suspects.  The search engines and their bully gang have been lurking in the back alleys of the web. We know they have been secretly a little jealous of the Tag Clouds; especially the in-house search engine.   I put it to you that the in-house search engines with their brothers have been a contributing fact to the demise of the Tag Cloud.

However it does stop their ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  The 6 accused have marginalised Tag Clouds. To the point that they have become little more than noise or window dressing on a page.   And in the harsh commercial reality of the Internet anything that is noise on a commercial site of any nature is bound to be “remove”.  It just makes sense.

Designers started to list Tag Clouds in a warped mangled alphabetical order, but this was just another attempt to destroy them, as we will see.

Tag Clouds and User Research

Research has indicated that with Tag Clouds:

• Large tags attract more attention from users
• People don’t read a tag cloud, they scan for the word
• The centre based tags of a cloud will attract attention
• The upper left Quadrant of a tag cloud get more attention on average
• And that Tag Clouds are just not suited to supporting the search for information

I put it to you that these 6 suspects are guilty of the crime of murder of the Tag Clouds by conspiring to present Tag Clouds in their worst light.

The Case for the Defence

There has been no murder here at all.  Let’s be fair, these suspects are guilty only of marginalising the tag clouds, not of wholesale murder.

The Tag Clouds are just alive and well, hidden in plain sight.

Sure the Tag Clouds have disappeared from the home pages of Technorati and Delicious. Yes they are not easy to find on these sites, yes you have to login and be a member of the community to find them now.   But they are still around. Protected from the thugs of society.

You can still find Tag Clouds, alive and well in the lower reaches on articles on media sites.  Have a look; below the last adverts in the side bar, they will be living out their lives there.   Admittedly it’s not the best of places, but they are alive.

Tag Clouds are still in the mainstream; Governments are using them, as shown here. Also they are being used by MIT (not the Melbourne mob) and by the Creative Commons people.   Now I wouldn’t be calling these sites fringe, would you?   I would say more the conservative end of the community spectrum.

Anyone can now make or implement a Tag Cloud, there are now Tag Cloud Generators such as Wordle and also  a formula for the weighting on a Tag Cloud.   If anything we are promoting and cementing maturing Tag Clouds into our community.   So now Tag Clouds are here for everyone.

The Maturing of The Clouds

We can see that Tag Clouds have grown and matured, which the prosecution has failed to acknowledge in their haste to find a suspect.

Some Tag Clouds have become Index Clouds, where the information is presented in a alphabetic index like fashion.

Others have become Button Clouds, overcoming the issue of the user not knowing if it is link, by making it like a button with a little weighing for good measure.

Search Engines aren’t the enemy of the Tag Cloud – they are the Tag Cloud’s friends. They are not some back street gang of thugs to be avoided.

Many Eyes and Deeper Web have both been leveraging the power on the Search Engines to provide them with the best of both worlds.   With a situation that the results of the Search allow for an extended result set by using the semantic comparative nature of the tag cloud.

Text Clouds

This can be extend further with the use of Text Clouds, here the we feed the output of the search engine (the shark) to the goldfish (the tag cloud)  such that:

• The popular keyword search terms become the items in the tag cloud
• It still has all the display and usability issues of a traditional Tag Cloud.
• However the information base is a lot larger than a Tag Cloud, allowing for a better distribution over the terms.
• One issue with Text Clouds is that they are open to trending as the keyword search terms of a search engine are.

Topical Grouping

Luckily for us Tag Clouds have changed for the better via the use of Topical Grouping:

With Topical Grouping you take a topic of interest:

• Then you display in a Tag Cloud for that topic all the related topics and sub topics.
• This presents a drill down and sideways effect on topic examination.
• Topical grouping does allow for an increase in findability for a moderately small population of tags
• As you would expect using Topical Grouping with a Tag Cloud increases the rate of a serendipitous find.

Was there a murder? No good people there was not. It is just Tag Clouds have matured and the prosecution failed to see this. .

The Verdict

You have heard the case for the Prosecution and the Defence.   In this case we have 6 suspects

• The Community
• The Designers
• The Users
• The Search Engines
• People with Disabilities
• Or our Differences

Which of them is really guilty?

If you really consider it the UI designer, the IA is to blame, that’s us, and we are the guilty part here.  We have never give the Tag Cloud a chance, never allowed it to mature and grow.

Lucky for us they have not died but have just matured out of sight and are still in use on the fringes of the web communities.

References

[1] 28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content (PDF)

[2] Improving Tag-Clouds as Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces (PDF)

This is the presentation given on Wednesday 24th June 2009 to the Perth Branch of the Silverlight Developer and Designer Network.  The slidedeck isn’t going to make much sense without the transcript below. Just be aware of that if you are slide deck with out following with this transcripts.

Let’s ground this a little and get real before we even start.

To often we design web sites and applications with a limited amount of information and specifications as to what is really is required. It’s a fact. Let’s not stand around and pretend otherwise.

Designing and developing it this type of environment can be hell. Sure I can talk about how to overcome this issue and pass on a few techniques that could assist you.

But what happens when you have got almost all the information you need and things still go wrong. What then – what are the solutions?

Let’s step back away from the web and desktop applications for a moment and consider an average couple, Simon and Maria. They are a loving young 20 somethings. They both have jobs that they don’t really aspire to. Yet still they battle on to save for those overseas trips and such. And just like you and me they get to experience life and all around them, the ups and downs.

Screaming Buttons

Maria and Simon have learnt, just like you and me, that buttons in the real world go off and on. They turn on the stereo. Stop things dead and sometimes they just silence the screaming.

So why does it have to be any different on the web. Why do they have to put up with buttons that just don’t look like buttons at all. You know the ones. They are just impossible to even find out that they are buttons visually. And when you do find out, well you just aren’t that sure what they are going to do. You are always thinking they could – delete the page, make you start over or destroy the world. You are just never that sure.

Really a button should “look” like a button and be labeled as such. Not some arty thing that no one can’t find or even work how they work. Applications and the Web are functional things they have to work or they are just waste of space. Crazy arse buttons are for an art gallery.

However we break our own rules here too. Even if we have buttons that look like buttons as they should. With the maturity of the web the previous experience of people like Simon and Maria really needs to be considered. Just like in the real world they have learnt from childhood what a button is and how to use it. We have learn that the power switch or light switch (which is usually unlabeled) turns on a appliance on the plug socket or the light in a room. Previous learned experience has taught us this.

Same with the web we now have expected instances of button types and iconography that have been ingrained into our common web cultural knowledge, as to have expected outcomes. For Example (and there are many more):

• Search
• RSS feed
• Shopping Cart
• Email
• Home
• Navigational Directional Arrows

In all these cases we know what to expect from the button type or icon. Yes they don’t look like buttons, but the symbolism behind the message works for us.

So in this case we break a few eggs… Still a button should be a button. But the omelets form the eggs does taste nice.

Tools, Functionality and Bears

Back to Simon and Maria. They both use multifunctional tools like the Leatherman. Nice handing tool, bit like a modern Swiss army knife. Has all sorts of gadgets and things hanging of it that are designed for various functions. Such things as a knife, a pair of pliers, screwdriver, nail clippers, and maybe even a coffee maker.

Still besides the great multifunctional of the Leatherman, Simon and Maria still use single functional tools such as knives.

I can understand this, knives are cool. You can cut bread with a knife. Cutting bread with Leatherman is possible, but hey it’s just too hard. A knife makes a single clean cut.

A knife is also really handy when you are faced with the odd suburban random Bear attack. You know the story – you are walking down the street and suddenly in board daylight and this massive Bear out of nowhere attacks you. If you have your trusty kitchen knife you are fine. But handling a Bear with a Leatherman – I don’t think so.

The multifunction tool like the Leatherman can cut things sure, but not that well. Also it’s not that good for locks or fences is it.

On the other hand a pair of bolt cutters is ideal for the odd fence and padlock cutting. It’s also a great accessory for late night “shopping”.

So despite the great multifunctional components of Leatherman, still Simon and Maria prefer to use a Single function tool like a knife. A knife just does the one single job, but it does it so well.

So why do we insist on having these multiple function web sites and applications that are just not doing one core thing well at all. They are constantly presenting us with various different functions all over the shop. Never really doing anything that well, remaining forever average.

Is it that we enjoy having a world of mediocrity where things are always dull and the same. Are we that budget aware that average, a score of C+ is the best we can be bothered with.

Why don’t we have single function applications? I know on the web with the use of APIs this is starting to happen. But still in Intranets and the like all I see are these massive over weight corporate spaghetti code fest. What gives?

Applications that do the job well and just interconnect with other single functional applications to make a suite of online applications aren’t that hard to design and code. In fact they are often easier to build. Think back look at how the MS-Office package started. Word was just for word processing. Excel was just for spreadsheets. Now look at the bloatware that it has become. Sure those two applications still do their core functions, but they also do a lot more. Things we often don’t really want in the first place. It is just endless marketing bloatware.

What we need to focus on when we code and design applications is to keep it simple.

Do one thing and do it well, shine at being the best application for that function in the world. Let’s have a little less applications that make me coffee, and comb my hair all before morning tea time.

We need to just focus on the core of the application or web site and translate that into a core message.

Okay that sounds good, in theory, but what do you do when you have lots of demands by your boss or client.

Simple – there is still only going to be a certain number of elements that are important or the core of the application at this point in time.

So like the ATO (Australian Tax Office) have done, we just focus on those elements as required.

By the way, you think you have an issue with functionality and information retrieval. Just take a moment to think about what it would be like to be in the shoes of the web team at the ATO. Still with all those issues they are just focusing on the core issues of the day.

And Now For Forms

I hate forms in real life; I can get bet you hate them too, as does Simon and Maria.

Forms are the bane of our life. I approach them with dread; they are often poorly designed and put together usually by something with no experience in the art of form design. More often than not the lowest level sectional officer gets the form design job, based off the chook scratching of some Director.

Guess what it’s the same on the Web. Yeah you’re not that surprised. The people in charge of web design project seem to have this burning desire to replicate the paper world based world with no consideration for the web.

Now I’m not going to rapid on about forms, I’m sure you are all experts a form design. But I am going to just point out a few things that people love and hate.

So why do forms suck so much.

Well usually it’s simply because of the sheer size of the form. It’s just too big… Frankly it scares the crap out of us. We look at it and think, okay there goes the next few hours of my life on this endless form.

A simple solution to all this is to just have a good look at the form. In most cases it can be segmented into functional or information related areas and you could slice it up onto separate pages.

Yes that is making the completion process longer or is it…

Consider Amazon.com, do you remember how many steps there is to in the process to buy a book once it is in the shopping cart. Is it 4 pages, 5, 7, 10…

Well really it doesn’t matter. Not at all, not one little bit!. Why? Well because of one simple factor – as long as we are seeing that we are progressing towards out goals and they are still in sight then we are usually happy.

The one exception here is a 35 page survey, mind you if you building a survey beyond 2-3 pages, expect a failure. But that is another issue, there is specialized approach to online survey forms that 90% of the surveys on the web just ignore.

It’s all about Confirmation Candy

We all love candy. The sweet tooth takes us all – we want – we lust over candy. Some would even kill for it.

Well in the world of the web, it’s the same. We love getting feedback, the visual candy the sweet and the sour type that lets us know that we are on the path to salvation that final form completion nirvana.

Giving these simple instant visual cues of positive (tick) and negative feedback (cross) let’s feel good or at least wanted for our progress through a form; even if we get it wrong.

The use of these elements is become now so common place that when they don’t appear on a web form, one really does start to question the validity of the form itself.

So why aren’t we using this instant feedback and error message technique on desktop applications. Usually at best we just get a beep or the field goes dull red.

Speaking Nicely to People

Forms are not just about the sweet and sour confirmation candy, they are also about talking nicely to people and making sense.

Take this case from Bankwest’s online banking facility. You would expect to that if I by accident put a dollar sign in the amount field it the application would have been nice about it and just removed it for me.

Well it is a bank… they have to be a little anal.

Still what would it have take to do that, code wise., not much at all.

Similarly with credit card fields, would it be that hard to filter out the spaces or dashes when you submit the form, instead of making the user do it.

It gets better. I like Bankwest, I’ll let you into a little secret they have invented a time machine, yeap it’s “Back to the Future with Bankwest!”

If you make an internal account transfer on certain days it seems that if you put in today’s date, it tells you that you are in the past or the future! Wow – I wasn’t that aware I had time traveled. Again – another error message, that will a little care could have been corrected. Clearly the system was not really independently user tested.

You know I hate stupid error messages that aren’t friendly and considerate.

What we should be doing is not leaving the error messages to the development team.

The marketing people, the copywriters, should write them. Funny thing is in the real world I can’t see that happening, can you.

Playing Hide and Seek.

Sometimes you know we make things too complex, when a simple solution would have helped.

Take this Linksys router support site. Nice design, overall UX makes me think these guys are professionals and know their stuff. Until you start the game of find the download link for the drivers.

I expected it to be under the drivers section on the page – but no you have to select a version then the driver will appear.

Still then you have to hunt visually for the correct link, as it’s the same colour as other page text elements. Finally you find the download link.

Simple things to fix, but for the sake of a “clever interface” the UX is lost.

Also, what if I don’t know the version or can’t find it… didn’t think of that one.

It’s all Confusing - Stepping beyond the problems

Yes it can be a little confusing. But what we are talking about is the fine detail. The things that make it a average experience to a mind blowing one.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s just thinking about the people using the application, and being considerate.

Still after you have you application perfect and it’s delivering the best user experience it can. You can still have issues. You may not be getting the conversions and sales you want. Well it maybe a few simple things that are not helping.

Are you considering AIDA – that’s number of design rules you can follow on your interface:

• Attention: get the users attention and make them feel wanted.
• Interest: now you need to spark interest in people quickly, showing of your best aspects.
• Desire: you have to spark the desire of the user for your product; this is usually a totally visual sell in most cases
• Action: finally give the user an action point that they can progress to, somewhere they can take the page to the next step.

Also consider the Gutenberg rule. Basically this maps out a thing we call reading gravity (in the western world). It tells us that people tend to end up with their eyes hovering in this Terminal Area (see below). Of course this enforces the reverse F patterns we see in eye tracking.

Still at the end of the day your application needs to be good experience at any cost. Sure you can make it average if you like, if the budget in time or dollars is just not there.

However trust me on this one, people like Simon and Maria will just consider you a roadblock and will work around you. Remember in the PC verses Mainframes conflict of the mid 80’s. The accountants brought PCs into the workplace as the Mainframes where not providing in their arrogance the needs of the corporation. Hence the mainframes became a roadblock, and the users removed it.

Don’t under estimate your users ever. They aren’t stupid people; they are just like you and me. If they are forced to use a bad system, sure they will pay lip service to it and develop their own system with the tools they can gather around them. Things will appear to be well and good, with no issues that management will see. Except in reality your users have just reworked the system to make it usable if you will not.

In summary it’s easy to remember

• Streamline the focus of your application or web site
• Segment any forms or procedures that are too long.
• Simplify things down to its core functionality

One final thing whatever we build it’s not for you or me for but for them, the unseen users.

So on with the summary of the second day for OZIA 2008. Okay this is a few days late, but better late than never, eh. Day two sees the return of three minute massages, juice bar, real coffee and great speakers after the official and alternative (late) dinners. As with day one I’m not going to summarise it all, but just go over  few highlights I had.

Website to Webapp – designing for workflow – Shane Morris

Shane Morris looked at the problem of using tools and techniques developed for the old school web of the document view to the newer application based web site.  And how they just don’t apply anymore and how there are alternatives like screen flow (in various forms) and functional mapping techniques could be used instead.

How many seconds does it take to order a burrito? – Zafer Bilda

This was an incredibility interesting talk on the application of Information Architecture techniques onto the improvement of sales and procedures for a small food chain.  It was especially enlightening to see so many user research and navigation tools being used in what is traditionally a marketing area.

Contextual Enquiries – the who, how, why, and when – Lisa Herrod

Despite some minor technical issues, Lisa Herrod delivery a  good presentation on contextual enquiries.   It was really just an overview of some of the pain points and ways around them for people wanting to move into this area of contextual research.    I found myself agreeing with many of the points she was making.  Of particular importance was the classic do’s and don’ts.  This will be one talk to rewatch on the video.

The Pleasure and Pain of UX freestylin’ – Donna Spencer, Gary Barber

I have no idea what this session was like, as I was presenting it, feedback is always welcome.

If you missed, maybe the slide deck will help, yes it does contain ‘that’ slide.  Hopefully the podcast and video will follow.  Sorry no transcript at this point in time.

At BarCampPerth 2.0 stepped up again and presented. This time I wanted to push things a little, well a lot. I didn’t want the standard presentation. What I wanted was something entertaining with a defined takeaway message.

Now I really wanted to focus on an introduction to User Experience. But that can be a very dry and lets be honest, boring topic.

So I opted for a thematic talk following an information journey. The slides are on slideshare. There was a video recorded, so we shall see if it is encoded, if it is, it may give you a better insight than the transcript and slide set.

Disclaimer

The views, side comments and delivery method of this presentation do NOT reflect the views of the author or presenter and where included for entertainment value only. If you are offended by adult only content and views proceed no further.

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My World

This is my world. The world of the back alleys, the dark dingy bars.

The girls looking for their last few johns for the evening.

The stale odor of the last cigarette and the tack tack of the sticky beer carpet underfoot. This is my experience.

The cars, the girls, the guns, the good times, the bad.

This is me, – Vince (Vinny my friends).

This is my tale. I deal in “User Experience”. It’s my trade.

I run a number of businesses for m’ boss, Sol. Now Sol is good boss, can’t complain. You just have to look out for his right hook and love of new shoes.. if you now what I mean.

So Sol calls me into the “office” the other day.

Vinny, my boy I have heard there is something new on the streets. Something we need to get onto. I need you to find out about this “User Experience”. Go find me the secret to this user experience before the Fenchenso Brothers do.

The Mission

So I have been out on the street researching this “User Experience”, and well because I feel I can trust you, so this is what I know.

This user experience thing it seems is all about the users. That’ll be the clients and the johns, the users. They are, it seems important, seems without them we can’t have a family business.

Now I’ve been thinking on this and well. seems right to me. We like need the clients. Gotta have someone to protect. Need the punters, the johns, hey they are bringing in the cash, right.

They say this user experience thing has to be a good one.

But I just don’t know about having to be friendly with them and making things pleasant and nice. A good user experience.

I mean lets get real, some of my clients like to be scared, they understand, fear is good for them. So I suppose that’s a good experience overall. Better than having a conversation with Billie the Bat.

So with these users I guess we need them, as they let us know about the important factors:

• Like the business needs
• And their user needs and wants.

So with all this user experience I have found that it is all emotional with lots of this Psychology stuff . Seems the emotions like

• Fear
• Lust
• Desire
• Greed

These are all good. They are a good user experience.

More User Research

But Jerry, he’s Sol’s bookeeper, tells me research is important too.

He says I have to research and get to know the users more than just a few chats.

Seems that doing this research, getting all cosy with the clients, johns and punters then we’ll get to know them better.

So I just send Justine and Rhonda out to get all close with these users. That worked a treat. Yeah this research thing is easy!

You know what I found out,

Most of the time its not secrets, just lots of whining about things not working, about this is too hard, this is not right, whine, complain, complain, bitch…. bitch. This and that!

Glad I asked the right questions during this research. Cause now I know that we just have a bunch of “whining arseholes” for users.

Seems the right questions enable me to stop us having problems later. See I was able to cut of the problems before they started. Sent Billie the Bat to visit them. Now they are having a sweet user experience. Just what was ordered.

So this user experience thing isn’t easy, you have to be skilled in a number of areas. But lucky I’m multi-dimensional. I can understand all about the aspects that it covers.

Making the User Experience is like making good lasagna, you build it up layer by layer, emotion on emotion, experience on experience. So people can understand what is expected.

Yeap like the good lasagna mama used to make.

But then some ponce on this intraweb thing tells me people don’t want a user experience.

That it should invisible.

That the best customer experience is one that people don’t know they are getting. Like it’s an experience not to have an experience. like an experience by stealth.

I tell yer this is getting confusing.

Now hang on I’m sure Justine and Rhonda would be a little upset if their customers didn’t get an experience!

This just seems, wrong, So you I suppose what they mean is you have to experience Billy the Bat to know what’s a good experiencing.

They say that people just want to find information and stuff and be able to use it easily, with little experience. No experience that is invisible, by stealth after a “sweet” experience

Now that I’m totally confused, So I decided to go do some more research with Billie the Bat and few friends.

So what is a Good Experience

Turns out it’s a lot more. After a few conversations down the dark alleys I have the secret. The secret to this user experience. People it seems have been hiding it. Damn those Fenchenso Brothers.

Now I don’t know if I can trust you. So I’m just going to remind you, there is Billy and maybe you need some new shoes.

So can I trust you.

Well it seems this all about this user experience not being a Science, It’s an Art. Now I like me a bit of the arts. The Mona Lisa, Elvis or Superman (the american way and all that).

This Experience it seems is all about being

• Useful

  Seems we have to be useful, innovative in our solutions. Honing our skills to find creative ways of doing things.

  Well I love I little creativity, a little flair for the different. So I’ve taken up golf too!

• Desirable

  Things must be desirable. We have to appreciate the the ways things look and make them even more appealing.

  Well der. I think we all know that! Lust and money, sex sells. The Family has that one nailed. No work needed there!

• Valuable

  The user experience must return a profit. It’s all about the business needs. But also making the customer satisfied.

  I don’t know about you but this Experience thing is a just easy. Everything we do is about profit. And really our customers are always satisfied, I never hear a complaint twice. Which is good, eh.

• Accessible

  Its good business practice to allow for the disabled and make things easy for them. We have to make the places accessible to them.

  At first I was, why!

  But then I get to thinking, well, their money is good too, and most of them are loaded! So we’re going to be accessible in all our business now.

• Credible

  Then things are presented to people they have to appear credible.

  So things have to be credible, Liek the mother church, any one disagree! There are guidelines for this it seems. But Don’t need them.

  Well again, we have been doing this.

  All our businesses are on the level, we paid tax once. It’s all very neat and orderly, and what you see is what you get. I just don’t see that the problem here.

• Findable

  Things, like people and information and stuff has to be findable. This is so users can find it when they want to.

  Okay I can see this.

  When the john, wants a girl, she’s there.

  If our clients need to reminded then they can ‘find’ us.
  Need to get some extra stuff, we have people on the corner.

  That’s what they call good findability. Yeah, good navigation, navigation to the source! Navigating the user to what we want.

• Usable

  This is important, they say, how you do it and opinion of the people are helpful in making things usable.

  Well, that’s a given, if you can’t use it, what good is it. Client can’t use the stuff, then its a problem.

  If it’s there problem its my problem. And you know you have a solution to all this. Fix the problem with Billy the Bat.

The Team

So I looked at all this and reported back to Sol.

Sol looked up at me:

Vinny, So now you have the experience. But you don’t have the soldiers, the team the team to deal out the experience.

So now I have only a few hours to assemble a team, so you being people in the know, peeps of the streets. You will help me. eh.

So you know nothing! Your not working with the Fenchenso Brothers are you!

So What skills do we need in a team

• Information Architect

  Seems I need these peoples to organise the information, helps the users find what they want. So I need someone good with locating things or organised.

• User Researcher

  So we know tis, gotta go talk with the uses, get the information outta them, you need someone with lots or people skills and bend the users to our will.

• Visual Designer

  It’s good look good, eh, product has to be “appealing” Need to have our products leap out at people entice them to buy it. all this. So the person need good design, layout and an eye for what is beautiful but not er, slutty.

• Information Designer

  This is about the interfacing with the user. Sounds like a Justine and Rhonda job to me. But it;s more it’s about these columns of information called “data sets” and tree maps and weird stuff.

• Interaction Designer

  This needs someone tough, they have to work with the arty designers and the back room boys. They get to know tools what to use in the interaction and when.

• Copy Writing

  All about sounding good, you know a well worded contract, its very important. People have to understand the best way to explore out products, but this has to be inline with the Family Business.

Yeah, Now I have the user experience team and the “secret” , now it is time to take a hit out on those pesky Fenchenso Brothers.

References

• Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills
• Building the UX Dreamteam
• User Experience Design

These are the base notes and transcript of my Podcamp Perth presentation on Saturday 27 October 2008. There was a videoed as well, how well this comes out given the poor lighting in the room and the fact that I tend to walk around the room and chat with the audience remains to be seen. Please note that the presentation slides will not make much sense without these notes, then again the transcript is not a really good information source in a pure text format, plus I have a habit of diverting from the defined script all the time. When I have the audio I will slidecast the presentation.

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The Problem

We all have this problem, we have way too many passwords, Take the average person. Dave, He’s like us, he has a nice car, good friends, hes a professional, and well too many passwords, way to many. To the fact he has a little black book, the little black book id his dirty little secret. Its full of passwords and usernames for all the systems at work and all the social sites and professional associations and forums he is a member of. There are hundreds of these passwords . This is a little unprofessional of Dave. But, although he does stress about this, what can Dave do. He can’t remember them all, and he has been told that having one of two passwords is a bad idea as well.

The situation that does worry Dave is if someone got hold of his little black book. And if that someone was someone like Hank. Hank is a “nice” guy, Hank collects passwords for a living, Hank collects “people” or their identities for a living. He collects them for his good friends. Friends that well work on the darker site of town and are open to interesting employment methods if they don’t get what they want, like finger removal.

If Hank where to get Dave’s Little Black book things would not be that good.

So how does Dave get around having all this passwords.

The Solution

Back in 2006 by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal put together the basis of an idea that would allow the identification of you as you or Dave as Dave via one password. All that is required is an identifier and a password, one only ofr many systems or web sites. Yes the corpate dream of a single login is possible. One Password to rule them all! This became know as OpenID.

Brad’s efforts where enhanced by the offering by various money incentives by vendors and work from the open source community resulting in the first draft implementation of OpenID. Now near the end of 2007, we have OpenID Provider Authentication Policy Extension 1.0 – Draft 2.

What is OpenID?

For Dave OpenID means he doesn’t have to remember lots of passwords. But technically for us geeks:

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

Who is Using OpenID

In 2007 well over 4500 sites using OpenID and its increases every hour. There are well over 120 Million OpenID accounts. Thats a lot of people. Most of these people are not even aware they have an OpenID account. OpenID is not something that is going away, it has the backing of AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell and other heavy weights in the web industry.

But it’s early days yet, OpenID is young, really young, its only in the adoption phase. But for people like you and me, well that is the time to consider OpenID, and maybe it’s time for Dave too.

OpenID is unrestricted. This means that anyone can have an OpenID or can set themselves up as an OpenID provider. Even Hank and his nice friends. There is no central control organisation. Remember no one owns OpenID. However we do have the OpenID Foundation acting as a steward for the community.

Now OpenID is very much centered at present on a Web implementation. But consider this, with the support of Mozilla foundation integrating OpenID into FireFox (3) and Microsoft is implementing OpenID 2 into Windows Vista (and backwards into Windows XP via .Net 3). OpenID isn’t something we are ngoing to see disappear overnight. In fact it’s doing to start to become seamless, part of the corporate authorisation tool set.

This is all good but what really are the good and bad points of OpenID.

• A way for you to prove that you are you however it can’t guarantee that you aren’t a bot or just somebody else.
• Allows you to login without making new Accounts, however it does beep track of what you do on the sites you visit.
• It is secure, you only entrust your password to one site, not many. However you should not let your guard down, all those old tricks and security measure on the web still apply.
• It is all about helping you bring your online identities together, however you choose when and with who you use it and the degree of trust.
• It is spreading fast, however it still in the early adopter space, Many of the interfaces are still being tweaked and improved on a day to day basis. But with the integration into browsers this will all be pushed aside and mass market adoption is expected.

The bottom line is that Dave has to ensure that he can trust the web site that he signs up on for an OpenID.

But what really happens

Besides this easy sign up process and despite sites like wikispaces hiding the OpenID signup (hint try the signup link, yeah I know not good design at all). So what is really happening behind the computer screen. But we need to get some terminilogy right first off.

• Consumer – A site that uses OPenID to sign you up or login is called a consumer, they consume an OpenID or use it.
• Provider – A site that gives you or looks after you OpenID is a provider. They provide the OpenID.

All Dave has to do is provide his unique URL, and the web site he is signing up to, will then send him to this URL and ask him to login, It’s at that point that the following conversation is heard if you listen really carefully to the the LoLCats.

Consumer: “Hi we have the guy that says you are the place to sign him up”.

Provider: “Make it quick you look a little shady, lets say I we just exchange a little secret password between us so I know you are you”

The Consumer: “err Okay, then”

Provider: “Okay I suppose I trust you, a little, you can come over and hang over here, Dave’s site is… ”

Provider: “Hey Dave, there is this site that says you want to signup, can you just login and prove to me that you are you.”

And so Dave logs in.

Provider:- “Okay Dave you are the real Dave, I have been asked to tell this other site that you are the real deal. So tell me what persona do you want to tell them and do you trust them”

Dave selects the details.

Provider: “So you trust them. Okay, I’ll send them the details”

Consumer: “Hang on now you have been a while…how do I know that those details are really from the true Dave.”

Provider: “I knew you where a bit shady…Remember that little secret we both made – well it is ……. “

Hence what has occurred is a transaction between a consumer site and a Provider to authenticate Dave as Dave. But its move than that, Dave can tell the Provider to use a designated profile that may for example have limited information in it.

Dave can also determine the level of trust, does he want to be prompted every time for a password he logins in. Or does he want to trust the consumer site with an auto login for the next week, month, six months or forever, depending on the Provider. Now Dave can change this at any time so he need not worry if he changes his mind.

One thing OpenID does not provide is 2 Factor Authentication or just Strong (1) factor Authentication. This must be provided by the user. However with the use of secure transactions (via a SSL, it is possible to use OpenID for banking and e-commerce.

The down side of all this is having this single ONE password. This ONE password is what Hank really wants. As I said before you have to ensure this password is very secure and hard to determine.

How do I sign up for OpenID

There are a number of independent providers that Dave can use, but it basically comes down to does Dave trust the provider.

• ClaimID
• myOpenID
• myVidoop
• VeriSign’s Personal Identity Provider

Details of these and many more can be found at the OpenID wiki site.

With OpenID Dave can setup a series of personas (as discussed before) within his OpenID account, He can have one for Business, one for Recreational activities, one for one site, one for a another, as many as he likes, he can release as much or as little information to enquiring sites. He can also use OpenID as a centralised resource for his picture or icon if he wishes.

Signing up is just like signing up to any Social Network Site, the details are usually very similar.

But the one thing that Dave has to be careful about is ensuring that his Username is unique and his password is relatively secure.

But this gets better, Dave discovers thats his old Livejournal blog (dusted and forgotten) is also automatically acting as an OpenID as well.

These are liek Automatic OpenID providers:

• AOL – openid.aol.com/screenname
• LiveDoor – profile.livedoor.com/username
• LiveJournal – username.livejournal.com
• Orange (france) – openid.orange.fr/
• SmugMug – username.smugmug.com
• Technorati – technorati.com/people/technorati/username
• Vox – member.vox.com
• WordPress.com – username.wordpress.com

What About Hank and his mates

Still in the back of Daves mind is a concern about Hank and his “nice” friends in the Mob.

Yes Phishing can be a problem as a malicious fake provider can be setup to lure people like Dave into entering their Authentication information as they pose was the real provider. Just like with any transaction Dave has to make sure that he is on the right site URL. However moves are in progress to counter this as well.

Cross-Site Request Forgery is the main concern here Checking the referrers head would be useful, but not that reliable. A hidden form element with some part of the exchanged secret would also help, most reputable providers are doing this.

Creating your own Personalised OpenID site

What if Dave wants to make his person site the URL for the OpenID, can he do that. Yes very easy. It’s just a matter of dropping a little bit of code it the HEAD tag section of the home page HTML, And then confirming the new URL with his provider

<head>
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://youraccount.myopenid.com/" />
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location"
content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?
username=youraccount.myopenid.com" />
</head>

The details of the servers in use will change depending on the provider. But its all the same in principle, but I would check with the provider. Its just a little bit of customisation that redirects the details as required. Making it even easier to remember the OpenID URL to login.

But Dave wants his own OpenID Provider.

Okay this, get a little more complex, but there is help at hand. Most of the major open source languages have implementations of OpenID via various libraries. There are often Provider and Consumer base modules available in:

• C#
• C++
• Java
• Perl
• Python
• PHP
• Ruby
• ColdFusion

Remember when setting up a Provider its all about Trust, and the value of that trust. You can’t afford within the world of OpenID for one minute to muddy the trust the users have placed in your service. It must always be there for them and be 100% secure.

The Future

Okay there are a number of proposals circling around and related to OpenID, such as OAuth, Yadis and iNames.

OAuth

You know he deal, you want to reconnect to al your friends on the new social networking site. So they ask you for you gmail account or flickr account or whatever account username and password. You know you can trust them, right. WRONG. why should they have access to your private information. Would it be easier for them to ask permission and the site concerned (eg Google) autheticate this and then provide only the information you have authorised. Wouldn’t it be good if there was just a standard open protocol secure API for this. Pipe dream? well no. It’s the new kid on the block (since November 2006), but this is OAuth. OAuth Core 1.0 final draft was release this month. If you are developing for the interactive web or desktop with trusted data transfer, have a look at OAuth and support it.

Yadis

This is a little like OpenID, and draft 2 of OpenID has some of its functions, but Yadis goes a little more towards the users URL containing the right and requirement for sharing of the determined information. Will this ever see commercial acceptance. As Yadis maybe not, as a rolled in component of OpenID, more likely.

iNames

As the use of a URL for a single person identifier becomes very important, it’s a little hard for everyone to have a URL, especially in the corporate world. So inames are basically web like identifier made so that they are easy for people to remember and use. An example of a personal i-name maybe =Bob.Smith or for a company =My.Company. Hence you combine the iName with a URI to get the unique identifier, eg BigCompany.com.au/=Joe.Smith. There is some debate over the use of this concept. Mind you it is a good idea. Implementation is another thing.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

http://wiki.openid.net/

http://openid.net/

http://blog.openiddirectory.com/

http://www.myopenid.com/

http://oauth.net/

Technorati Tags: podcamp, podcampperth07, openID, oauth, yadis, inames, social+networking, authorisation

With a little under a week to go till Webjam I decided to step up (thanks Kay Smoljak for the prompt). Not expecting to win anything, just hoping my presentation would raise a smile on a few faces. Well I managed somehow to snag third place. I can tell you that blew me away.

A note about the presentation “Western Web3.0“, it is not meant to be serious at all, it will not mean much without the audio. Anyway, it works by clicking on the numbers on the left of the screen. If it doesn’t work in your browser, tough, it was only made to present on the night and that was it. It maybe a tad slow to load, like I said it was a quick and dirty production.

Richard Giles and Simon Wittber from Scouta stepped up after major issues with the screen projector and gave us ICCARUS and won. Nick Cowie web-sledged us all and made us race off and make our sites work on the mobile web, and took out the second post.

Big hat tip to Lachlan Hardy, Lisa Herrod and Tim Lucas for bringing webjam to Perth, you guys rock! Thanks also to Nick Hodge from Microsoft for trekking across to Perth.

Rumor tells me there will be a webjam next in Perth at the Byte Me! festival, rock on!

Tonight is the Western Australia Web Awards (WAWAs) presentation. Yeah you know I’m a finalist. I should be excited and pumped. Instead I’m just plain exhausted, it has been an extremely busy week. You can follow the twitter feed on the WAWA site too if you aren’t at the WAWAs.

Update: and curiosity of Stewart Greenhill here is the video of the presentation:

Technorati Tags: wawa, webjam, awia, perth, webjam4

You know the story. Your client or boss wants to put a report online, it’s just a few pages long, but they want exact print output control of the document or they just want to ensure that the cost is kept to a minimum. So you end up putting the document online as a PDF. Now I ask you is it really readable by everyone. That is normal viewers, assistative technology viewers, search engine bots and viewers in remote areas on slow connections. I can bet that in most cases one of these groups is missing out

So you ignore the problems and just get the job done and get the PDF online. If you have been in the industry for a while you would have done this. Yes even I a have done this, shame on me. Come on, I bet you have too. Well I’m going to discuss how to get over some of the problems you will have created with PDF distribution of information on the Web.

Suitability of PDFs – when to use them

I’m a business realist; I know there are times that you have to use a PDF. But let’s have a close look at the times you should use a PDF the and times you shouldn’t.

When to use

• Large reports, papers, documents
• Books or book chapters
• Legal or procedural forms intended to be printed.

When not to use

• Short brochures and specification sheets (include a HTML version of the information)
• Product catalogue pictures and brochures (or consider an online catalogue)
• Short one of two page documents. These should be in HTML.

The Acrobat distribution problem

There is generally not a major problem with version control of the PDF reader. In that previous versions of the reader can read the base features of the new versions (as long as the security features aren’t activated. However there is one version where all bets are off, as there is a distinct problem.

If you have been working with PDF a while you would have come across this error:

Error: Database: corrupt database

First off you think, hang on – where are the database within a PDF. But there are several data tables of information within a PDF if you think about it. I have found from experience that this only tends to occur if the document is being read by Acrobat reader below version 5.02.

Problem is there are a lot of computers in the corporate world; especially government, that still have Acrobat Readers that are version 5.0. It seems there was massive push with distribution of version 5.0 This was for Adobe a double edged sword. As this leaves them with a large number of corrupt readers that would nor read version 7+ files. The release of the voluntary patch to 5.01 and 5.02 was frankly a waste of time as it’s well know that IT sections don’t apply non operating systems patches. Hence till the OS is updated the problem remains for most corporate users.

Or does it? Try removing some of the accessibility settings when you make the PDF. The main one in case is the “Enable accessibility and reflow with Tagged PDF”. You will find this under Settings, in the Application Settings section. Ensure it is NOT checked. That’s right I know it’s insane but uncheck it.

Of course the other alternative is to get the user to upgrade to version 7 or above. Good luck with that. So here is a classic case of good distribution can come back to bite you. But what do you do with Quark or InDesign created documents. Well I don’t have a solution for that case, yet.

Optimisation

You have a PDF it’s well over 5 Meg in size and you really want it to be about 1 Meg or less. So how do you get it smaller? You have tried the optimise settings in Acrobat, but still it’s just way too big. First things first, you may have to have the PDF rebuild. There are a lot of things that we as designers do, in our rush to get the job done, that make the resultant PDF, as a vector based document, bloat to an unworkable size. Here is a short list of things you can do to make the document smaller file size wise.

Using InDesign

• Check the InDesign files for hidden images or vector shapes. You are looking for things that are hidden under other layered images or objects. Look for items off to the side of the Layout, this is still placed in the PDF, if its not required remove it.
• If you have an image that has a mask over it within InDesign, there can be wasted pixels there. You need to redo the image so that it is clipped or cropped as close as you can get it to the mask edge. As the complete image is rendered underneath the mask layer in the PDF even if you only see 10% of it.
• Ensure all gradients are vector generated and not bitmap images (Tiff, Jpeg etc). This is especially true of that groovy Illustrator gradient you are just been working on; in this case render them as a true vector EPS file and place this into InDesign.
• Use Jpegs that are optimised instead of Tiffs. Jpegs have a smaller initial footprint.
• Use pictures that have large blocks of the same colour in them and not great amounts of detail or different colours. Bright and colourful is often better.
• Use black and white or duo tone images.
• Use Adobe smart object when you can for cross platform object they seem to help a little, especially in CS2. The compression on Smart Object is very good for some reason (I have no idea why).
• Then export file as PDF, assuming you have all the accessibility tags in place too.

Using MS-Word

• Optiumise all images as if you are doing it for the web before you insert them into the word document

Using Acrobat

Now start work in Acrobat, use the PDF Optimiser tool under Advanced > PDF Optimizer. Remember to save versions of your file as you optimise. Things to consider while optimising:

• Select Flatten transparency
• Clip complex regions
• Don’t disable embedded fonts unless you really have to. You still want you typography to remain as you designed it.
• Down sample the images step by step, soon as you notice a difference at a glance take the previous version, you have optimised too much
• Remember to clean up any referenced structure elements like bookmarks that are not referencing the pages in the document. This is important if you are chopping a document into different chapters.
• Don’t ever try and combine two documents together or build a document from separate InDesign page exports it will always be a lot larger than the single run InDesign export.

Searchable PDFs

Yes Google and most search engines will index your PDFs. But please ensure you do a few things to help them along. It does help if you complete the Metadata section of the Description tab in the PDF (Ctrl-D) :

• Complete the Title field, this becomes the link text
• The Subject field, this maybe become the description depends on the search engine and the version of PDF.
• The keyword (delimited with semi colons)

You should if you have the time consider completing the Additional Metadata section of this dialog. You can import and export these via an xml file. This will give you a better metadata footprint, and is very handy if you are doing a lot of documents with a standard baseline of metadata.

Now the really interesting bit, did you know up to till version 7 Adobe has produced a different method of presenting the metadata within the file format for nearly every version of Acrobat. In version 6 it is presented in version 5 format and version 6 formats, just to make life interesting. In Version 7+ we have an enhanced version 6 format. Luckily a well written search bot can tell what version the PDF document is written in. Version 8 follows the version 7 format for the most part.

Accessible PDFs

I’m not going to go into a great detail on this, but the bottom line is all the accessibility must occur in almost all cases before you create the PDF. You can do it afterwards, but it does tend to more time consuming the later in the process you add in the accessibility.

Pre Production – MS Word

• Ensure that the document structure is written in using the Heading styles
• That a table of contents is defined,
• That all images and diagrams have an alternative text defined.
• That all links have an screen tip text defined
• With tables that all header rows are check under Table Properties as “Repeat as Header Row at top of each page”
• Ensure the colour contrast is readable for extremes in contrast and colour blindness. Light grey on white is not a contrasting colour scheme.

Pre Production – InDesign

• You have to tag the document either via File Export or by turning on tagging by default for all exported files are tagged. You do this via File > Adobe PDF Presets > Define and click on the presets you want to be tagged and check Create Tagged PDF . If you are doing a high quality print this is the default anyway, but it’s a good idea to check.
• When building the document you need to define headers (semantic structures) that use styles that have the right names, that is h1 to h6. Nothing else, use exactly h1 to h6.
• Check the Structure Panel to ensure you are progressing well with the semantic structure.
• Add alterative text to images, right click the image tag in the Structure Panel and selecting New Attribute. Add “Alt” in the name field (note capital A) and the alternative text in the value field.
• Links and lists will have to be edited post production. Although this may have changed with InDesign CS3.

Post Production – Acrobat

• Ensure the fonts have not been rasterised (scanned), check, you must be able to copy the text at least.
• Use Acrobat 7 or above for the base line, JAWS and other assistative technology may have issues with anything below version 7.
• You can add tags to the document via the Acrobat, but it is not an easy issue, it will take time to complete. View the tags by selecting View > Navigation Tags > Tags.
• If there are no tags, select Advanced > Accessibility > Add tags to Document, to add them
• Select the Content Tab and use the right click on the structure elements to edit the accessibility elements.
• Within the Touchup Properties dialogue remember to use the Tag tab and fill in the elements required there.
• Build the bookmarks structure in the Bookmarks tab for the document via Acrobat. This just takes time.
• Build the thumbnails in the Pages tab. Don’t forget, to set the Page Properties (right mouse click) to Use Document Structure.

Summary

PDFs are not just simple build, link and upload document format. If you must use them, use with caution and optimise and make them accessible at all times. Suddenly you will find that quick fix by using a PDF, isn’t really that much of a quick fix after all.

These are the notes from the mini talk “PDF is not your Friend” I gave at the Perth July 2007 Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) Meeting. There is a podcast and the slides are available as a PDF document (852 k), on slideshare or below.

Technorati Tags: acrobat, pdf, indesign, accessibility, optimisation, searchability, seo, AWIA, port80, mini+talk, metadata

And once again I stepped up to the podium (not that we had any). Not once but twice. In true BarCamp style a presentation panel was thrown together in a mad hurry on the topic of “Start a Web Business” with Steven Hambleton, Miles Burke and Rosemary Lynch and myself. Of course we went overtime, and of course people wanted more so with half the talk done we moved to an afternoon slot.

The real presentation I came with was an introduction to the WordPress Loop and how it works. Here is a PDF [3.68 Meg] of the slides from the presentation. And it’s below, as well on Shareslide. There will be a podcast and video (yeah you get to see my ugly face).

There is now a BarCampPerth Wiki, go have a look at the other presentations.

Massive thanks to Myles Eftos for organising the event.

I will blog more on this over the next few days.

Technorati Tags: Petth, BarCamp, BarCampPerth, BarCampPerth07, Wordpress, Loop, PHP