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.
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.
During the week the general terms of User Experience and Usability become interchangeable. Huh?
Well the ISO standard ISO 13407 - the International Standard for Human Centred Design (gets a new number too! - ISO 9241-210) is being side shuffled it seems. Now it’s a standard for User Experience. Is this a good thing?
What is User Experience, really! Well for me it’s all the aspect of the front end user interaction, the emotional response to use the page, the effective usefulness, the accessibility, the audience’s perception of credibility of the site and the directive of the user towards the site’s goal. Usability (ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability) on the other hand is just an narrow aspect of this entire user experience
