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.

We all know the goal of any web site is to make the user experience as informative and pleasant as possible. Reduce the frustration factor and all that, close the sale, win the customer.

Well seems Donna Spencer has found a few car sites that are the exception to the rule, particularly the Peugeot site.  In short the sites alienate, and hard to navigate without previous product experience.

Now at first I was under the impression that maybe this site was basically put together by an inexperienced marketing agency that has no idea on how to approach the web at all.

During last week I got to see Jared Spool keynote at IAsummit via a streaming into Second Life. Okay its wasn’t that great, the streaming not the presentation. After reviewing the presentation later. It’s apparent to me that some people maybe missing the point of methodologies.

Jared’s core comments are summed up well by Mia Northrop and Molly from NLC Internet Marketing Blog, basically he proposes that we should be moving away from UCD and start to own up to the point that we haven’t really been practicing it anyway. Thumps up Jared.

We all produce near perfect interfaces for web sites, with a user experience that is optimal for the clients audience and budget. That’s a given. After all the dark years we are all doing it the right way, or at least trying to. Right?

And as the user experience spotlight has streamed over the web, it is now focusing on the Intranets of many organisations.

Rise of the Intranet

Now an Intranet can be a completely different beast than the corporate web site. For starters it’s not just about a single web site, it can be multiple sites over distributed and differing solution architectures. Containing various off the shelf applications from CRM, accounting, records and knowledge management and the like.