Day 2

Jared Spool keynote

[Jared's slides]

I missed a big chunk of this because of (a) a phone call and (b) diverted attention. However….

redesigns are dead, or at least they should be; the best way to improve a Web site is with small iterative improvements, well-tested.

he had some fantastic comments on implementing design, and design guidelines, throughout an organization. “educate and administrate” is the theme, which means to use design problems as teachable moments, rather than throwing the book at people. It also means making good design the easy default.

similarly, the best way to get at better experience design is to make testing easy and inexpensive. (there’s a typo in my original notes!) I love the idea of having a regularly scheduled usability test session every N, and just testing something, anything. to find test subjects, go where they congregate, online or in person.

social metadata & the relevance revolution

[Gene Smith's presentation]

on the topic of social information architecture: how sites come together through user-created content. at work, the only thing we have like this is the book exchange. in the rest of my life, this applies to OlyBlog. it could, theoretically, apply to the ENA site, but I don’t have time to go there right now. (make this a placeholder for that thought!)

the 3 ingredients for social IA: way to capture user actions; way to aggregate & display; feedback to change the system.

in a ranking system (one form of aggregation), you need multiple rankings to call everything that’s interesting about a particular set. for OlyBlog, maybe different (custom?!) views?

there are, apparently, open source libraries for collaborative filtering (people who liked X also chose Y), including in PHP.

thought experiment question: what are the feedback systems that exist by default on OlyBlog? how do they effect the site content and people’s experience of it?

a question at the end that I’m going to leave alone for the moment: the use of social IA in intranets? (what is scuttle at IBM?!)

accessible design w/out drama

in general: “Don’t praise the machine” — where the machine is the rules and (especially!) the validators (or the DJ-bot 5000, for that matter).

lots of crazy stats about how many people are (insert disability here). something that overlaps with work issues: fastest growing demographic is the oldsters.

a to-do for work: still need to train people using WordPress and/or Drupal on some of the basic accessibility issues.

improving front-end architecture

[Garrett Dimon's slides]

very inspirational with lots of head-nodding. he focused quite a bit on the long-term issues of web design, which is a place where I have a lot (5+ years!) of experience.

markup as a craft — THE underlying craft of web design. can I get an amen?

plazes was a really nice example of accessibility issues changing the overall conceptualization of a site. for work, this might be something to consider in reworking the maps section of the site, which is something we plan on doing.

keep an eye out for his work with Derek Featherstone on accessible forms.

and his slides were very cool; well worth a look just for some of the grids.

designing for community

this presentation brought OlyBlog front & center in my brain.

“never lose sight of what your product is separate from the social networking aspect.”

90% of visitors are passive users of the site. the 10% — creators, commenters, etc. — need the 90%. who are the passive users on OlyBlog? what do they want/need? why are they there?

remember to send a link to newsvine to C.

idea for book exchange: use ajax to do on-the-fly checking for available usernames.

how do you create a system that rewards good long-time users w/out punishing new/untested users?

Day 1

the new community

general impressions? Derek is a lively and friendly speaker, who has a good turn of phrase & concept, and happens to be insanely optimistic.

a good definition of community: the ability to use voice in public/immediate way, forming relationships over time.

I think I’ll find myself using the term “company town” quite a lot from now on, because it captures a certain aspect of community sites so perfectly. (And because I remember my grandfather explaining the concept of the company town as we drove through mining country in southeastern Arizona, when I was a kid.)

two contrary-wise positions that are worth mentioning here:

• Joe Clark on the death of privacy
• Ralph Brandi on weblogs (not) as conversation

a note for OlyBlog, as a company town: treat your folk well, and acknowledge their diversity of online selves.

mobile phones & the mobile web

[Brian Fling's slides]

great slides, especially the combination of the originally presenter’s and those of the guy who actually presented.

telcos suck.

Americans don’t carry PDA phones, nor do they (over 18) particularly use the mobile web.

there are way too many devices, but some basic commonalities apply. to find the most popular phones, look at what’s being given away with new subscriptions. also the razr.

most screens are 120px wide.

at this point, SMS reminder service might be the hottest possibility. I have this idea kicking around in my head for a “send my schedule on the first day of class” service.

rapid dom/ajax development

stuff to look up & understand later: anonymous functions, closures.

keys to rapid development: maintainability. finding bugs, managing the work of others. extensibility. flexibility.

I do, finally, need to learn and understand OOP. nothing else to do for it.

he recommends using libraries, in part to avoid reinventing the wheel. I still wonder if we have actually invented the wheel yet, metaphorically speaking.

I’d like to create a click-to-expand FAQ in a few spots around the main site…or at least convert the SOS FAQ (say that 5 times fast!) to click-to-expand.

go back and look at the comparison chart for all the libraries.

JSON sounds intriguing, but the idea of XSLT-style syntax makes my brain hurt from here.

I like the idea of a “premade HTML shell” — I’ll have to tuck that away in my head for future reference.

[I skipped all the morning sessions on Day 1 to instead have breakfast & go to the Chinese garden with my sweetie. Plus I missed one session on Day 2 while I was trying to help him after he lost his glasses in the Columbia River.]

overall, it was, as usual, a great experience. (as usual, it was too hot in Portland, but that’s neither here nor there.) I always get a lot out of WebVisions.

jared has started. focusing on the nature of experience design and what it means. sandisk — they think they have an ipod-killer. #2 in the market. “I guess they’ve got their work cut out for them then”

he’s very funny, cult of netflix, dissing sharepoint intranet. redesigns destroying value.

(now that I have got cyberduck working, I’m frantically working on Paula’s site as promised.)

phone call from C. came back to wackiness with trip planning on travelocity.

multidisciplinary nature of experience design …hey, that’s *my* job!

the fema graphic that was on the daily show. what was the person who did that design thinking?! usability testing is about seeing a design through someone else’s eyes. cultural difference.

(okay, internet is really, really, really slow.)

good communications, clear focus on vision “a stake in the sand focused on the horizon” what should the experience be 3, 5, 10 years from now? the right people,

missed some stuff while another page loaded (personalized google is teh suck on safari).

redesigns are dead. small continuous improvements. we haven’t caught up to that point.

ugh, I have too many tabs/windows open, and I can’t track with the presentation.

approaches to facilitating experience design. guidelines documents. seriously, it took us 5 years to get to a draft that is still not official!

educate & administrate. that’s how I want to implement the guidelines.

use of asterisks inappropriately.

educate includes having a clear vision of success. disseminate user knowledge & feedback quickly. use design problems as a “teachable moment” — in the other model, problems involve punishment. (hmmmm, how would that work, exactly.)

160 sites that they “know of” — want to hold a conference. I think the UW has this problem, hell, we probably do too. “build communication paths to all the design agents” let them know what the goal is, and how what they do effects that goal.

make collecting feedback on new design ideas incredibly expensive. some company has a usability test scheduled every wednesday, w/out knowing what will be tested. makes it EASY.

sharing lessons learned. and then making good design practice the path of least resistance. (which is why I LOVE using templates in WP.)

uietips newsletter, uie.com, uie.com/brainsparks

maybe THIS is where my career is going.

q: does it have to be expensive? no, not at all: netflix success vs. walmart, blockbuster. just throwing money at a problem makes it worse. takes thought, skill, and attention to detail. constantly ask: what are we trying to do? doing small things is working better than doing big things. (that certainly gives me hope!) creating the vision is best done with a couple of beers. (hey, maybe I should invite the intranet gang out for lunch.)

q: how to find users? can use surrogates, but users also congregate in like groups. (like this event!) (somebody tell jared to take his hand out of his pocket!) “discount usability movement”

q: how to overcome beurocratic (sp?!) sclerosis? this is the reason why they’re so excited about apple, netflix, et al, because they become an example of how to succeed. turn this (experience design) into that (shareholder value, increased revenue, etc). steve jobs like a virus: he infects businesses.

So while I was sitting here, sucking up electricity, Jonathan Snook wandered by and reminded me that we had met at the SXSW closing party. (I know I took a picture of him, but it’s not online, and it’s not on this computer.)

I’m going to go to the closing party for WV, too, at Greek Cusina, because it was SO VERY tasty last year. We were thinking about seeing Ferris Buehler at flicks on the bricks, but I doubt we will. (Kind of a cruel thing, watching a movie like that w/out glasses.)

One final note: can somebody tell me how to get FTP working right in OSX?!

harness user actions to make site more relevant. he’s from the middle of nowhere, aka Edmonton Alberta Canada.

blah blah blah about his company. he does IA, mostly. has been a metadata nerd. take what users are doing to create architecture of sites.

emergent information architecture -> collective intelligence -> information architecture 2.0 or social IA.

get a better understanding of social systems
practical ideas for tweaking your own systems
feedback loops as part of design process

he’s tweaked to fit with some similar presentations.

structural design of shared information environments “fancy term for websites” interested in systems where users are co-creating the environment. less structured, more organic.

social IA: user actions create some or all of the environment. use wisdom of crowds to solve problems of IA.

examples: amazon, starting with “customers also bought”, highlighting listmania, combining algorythms with user-generated data. wikipedia, not just creating the articles, but also the connections between them, created by contributors. flickr. not just tagging, but contacts. (I rarely view by tags, but I like the contacts stuff.) delicious. “canonical services” digg.

range of uses, from augmentation (amazon, ebay) to co-creation (delicious, wikipedia).

“contrails in the great database in the sky” and nobody seems to mind. ah, yes, how the information we throw out into the universe can be mined to serve us more and better ads.

“whoever has the most friends wins” (re: linkedin)

the new yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog. vs. a new cartoon “Ogle Earth” — the shift in expectations. web as part of our social infrastructure. (hi, guys!) people expect to be part of the conversation, and to get the most relevant stuff. (thinking again about personalized home pages?)

3 ingredients for social IA: way to capture user actions; way to aggregate & display; feedback. today less concerned about why (from our POV or users) than how.

user actions: the things they do that we can track. understand popularity, community, reputation, etc. for the moment, put aside higher goals & motivations.

speculative graph…low to high engagement vs. social intent (personal to participatory). automatic, personal, low intent: pageviews, clickthrus, downloads (server log stuff). personal but more engaged: purchases, tags (boundary-crossing), bookmarks, linking to something. more participatory: posts (flickr, youtube, blog), ratings, buddylists, comments/reviews, wiki-ing (nice coinage). trackback is off in its own little corner: low engagement but more participatory. (I wonder if that is part of why trackback is broken. it’s really easy to fsck with other people.) plus mentioned not on his chart: last.fm.

as moving to the right & up, identity becomes more important, including its persistance over time. how many of these actions involve an “object” (a virtual or real).

topographies of services. delicious (blob in middle right), amazon (a line of sort heading up and to the right), youtube (a blob similar to delicious, maybe a little higher up, with the anomolous dot of pageviews).

on to aggregation & display. bringing together user actions in a relevant way, and then displaying them. coming up with a set of rules for both.

lots of kinds of aggregation (5 (of N), he’ll talk about 4): listing, ranking, clustering, collaborative filtering, and other stuff.

ebay example of listing and prototagging. men’s apparel category; used to shop there before there was a banana republic in edmonton. new pants or used pants? evolved conventions in the subject line. NWOT: new without tags; NWT: new with tags.

listing friends.

youtube and ranking. counting & ordering actions. the essence of popularity. a bunch of different axes of popularity. worst rated: “the cesspool of youtube, but that might be redundant” — getting different videos with different qualities.

yahoo most recommended photos. girls in bikinis: never show up in most recommended, but always in most viewed. reveals something. need multiple rankings to call everything that’s interesting about a particular set.

collaborative filtering: comparing your history with those of others to find stuff you might rate highly. amazon, also netflix (yay!). open source libraries for collaborative filtering (?! in php?!) — kewl.

examples from amazon: new U2 album links to a variety of stuff, but Joshua Tree only to other U2 albums.

digg shows up under “other algorthyms” a whole bunch of factors are included. number of votes, source of the story (original or repost), history of submitting user, traffic of category, reports on the user.

feedback experiments. “okay, that was not very successful” “I tricked you into [the wave]”

feedback loops in social software. positive feedback in Digg. influence wanes over time. plus the feedback loop on the individual users and their ratings. “Top 100 Digg users control 56% of Digg’s home page content” how do those other users feel? do you really want to participate? is it really democratic? “but we’re just going to talk about the hows”

5 (of N) places to intervene: introduce delays (moderation of blog comments), modify strength of feedback loops (imagine adjusting the rules), access to information (cliques on digg: what if you couldn’t see who had posted a story until after you voted for it?), adjusting incentives/punishments, change the system altogether.

examples: the emergence of tagging with flickr & delicious. google’s aggregation of links as votes.

mefi cover charge: another intervention point, through limiting membership. or gang initiation. recommended by a member, etc.

danella meadows, list of 12, based on big systems: economies, but they work great for smaller systems. look on wikipedia.

challenges. spam, gaming the system, achieving balance, relevance (do your users find it valuable? talk to real people!), unintended consequences.

his design principles. allow for different levels of engagement (that connects to something earlier today, about the 90%), monitor & tweak feedback loops, participate in the larger ecosystem (ala Powazek & the company town), design new actions, aggregators, displays.

atomiq.org

q: when tweaking, don’t you run the risk of alienating the user? yes, absolutely. (I think I remember some discussion on this topic in the new web apps panel at sxsw.)

q: ???? basic thing is figuring out what people are doing that you can do something with and doing that. wary of talking about systems that need high level of participation to get off the ground.

q: inside the enterprise. scuttle (what is that?) something at IBM.

q: what did you not talk about? myspace, consumating.

q: is there a site that lists them all? no, maybe on wikipedia? questioner has found all of them really boring.

He’s eligible for new glasses (or at least the MEAGER benefit we get), but he also has to have an eye exam before he can get them. There are facilities available in our plan in Portland, but they take a week to 10 days to make glasses. The place we can go in Olympia closes at 6pm today and doesn’t open again until Monday. We could go to LensCrafters, but he’d still need to get an eye exam.

And I’m waiting for him to come back from the river. (He should be safe *enough* to drive back. Keep your fingers crossed.) I have enough info, at least, that when he gets in we can make some decisions. I may be bailing on the rest of WebVisions, just as I’m bailing on the 1pm session to get my info in order and prepare myself.

the drama in the field gets in our way. (hmmmmm….)

starting with high-level stuff, and then into concrete.

most of the audience is people for whom accessibility is part of a larger job.

break down hope at the beginning to bring it back later.

why are all these standards competing with each other? why isn’t there this accessibility thing that we can drop a cup of into our product?

we can’t guarantee that every message we create is going to be understood by the total set of all human beings. some people are good at convincing a broad range of people. there’s a point where you can’t get your understanding out into the rest of the world. not a cognitive disability: just a core tenent of human communication!

by creating standards, not to make it perfect. the messages that can be communicated can be percieved & understood by the widest range of people possible.

2nd disturbing thing: instead of thinking about people, we think about the standards, checkpoints, etc. keeps up from our full capability. the map is not the territory.

standards exist to be codified, policy-compatible. boil a grand concept into measurable criteria. can’t guarantee that it’s better. we have limitations, because we have to get something. (“if men were angels” and all that.)

folks “subject” to 508 et al start to think about the checklists and make something aweful.

why can’t standards be more specific? limitations of communication. when talking to people who don’t have inner motivations. rolls his eyes dramatically — when he mentions accessibility to designers, first comment is always “oh, alt text for people who are blind?”

508, in adapting an earlier version of wcag 1.0, dropped off lots of things in favor of simplicity.

looking past the documents & criteria (created so they could be measured) and focusing on how people use stuff.

simpsons reference: bart gets elephant. DJ jobs will be replaced by DJ-bot. “Don’t praise the machine”

if standards are an approximation; validation tools are then an “artschool knockoff” of that! “I passed Bobby” is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. the understanding stops at getting the icon; but at the bottom it says check this, this, and this. the machine can’t do that. “that’s why we have English teachers, right?” individuals need to look at what they’ve done.

“paraphrasing and getting it mixed up with with einstein.” (simple but no simpler)

was working on a meta-tool to mashup all the other tools, because of all the discrepancies.

best result: minor improvement. worst result: abomination. inaccessible and unusable.

picks on Bobby because it’s the name everybody knows; lots of others with their own idiosyncracies. if you give someone a hammer, that doesn’t make them a carpenter.

get away from “gaming the system” to get the “tangible artifact that represents accessibility.”

was at sxsw 04, advanced accessibility presentation. austin accessibility rallies. veen: “I don’t care about accessibility.” “what we in the industry call an ‘oh sh!t’ moment.” he said this, posted it to blog (I think I remember that): because he believed in standards-based design, and thus accessibility problems dropped by the wayside (automagically). (in theory; then again, “communism works, in theory.” my simpsons reference!)

#1 indicator of accessibility: conforming to standards.

but what people heard was the kick off line, and then the hype that standards is all that needs to be done.

three things to do….

designing for people. (hm, tools have trade secrets; can’t trust them.) NIH study in 2004, with ranges of disabilities. “can’t grasp or handle small objects” — 2.2 million (18-64 yrs old). huh. total is 3.8 million. hockey-sticks at 65…which is the fastest-growing group of users (and just people in general). vision trouble: 13.3 million (18-64) — not blind but poor vision. and the usual problems with IE and text-resizing.

getting into hearing loss issues, costs of captions. 11.9 percent of 18-64, and then 1 in 6 over 65. “numbers don’t lie”

you don’t hear from people, because they learn to work around.

I missed the ADHD number. And then attention deficit trait (13% of people in IT industry?!). attention span issues.

designing for standards. beneficial specifically because contract between producer and user agent. when you understand how things are rendered in alt devices, etc., you are providing better information. (this is a list with 35 links, vs. line-breaks, etc.)

people using CMSs? about half. (we are a mishmash.) can be a good thing. when you have a system that goes off the rails, fixing accessibility problems can be a bigger problem. fixing templates: easy to improve lots all at once! but if the stuff inside is junk, job could be a lot harder. “just type your stuff into here” but no knowledge among those people about what to do with images, etc.

question about finding people. I missed some of the answer, because I wasn’t paying much attention, because I know where I can find them, I just need to DO it.

problems with captioning and small sizes of video? script? recreate captions? audio description? help? cross-player problems with UI. ability to display SMIL/SAMI (?) captions outside of the bounding box. best advice: …question about what’s being used… Magpie is captioning software. WGBH. sounds like she’s getting already-captioned video from video group.

Oregon institute on disabilities, etc. really fscking long name. local guy, offering his assistance to locals. more similar centers nationwide (ADA). good for finding testers.

the basics on images, link images. text equivalents for rich media, captions for video.

layout: hope-building exercise. layout tables are not necessarily inaccessible. but often symptomatic of an older system of design. (I don’t do tables. Haven’t for years.) fixed vs. liquid. good news: browsers that scale up the whole page. IE7, apparently. Opera does the same thing. also familiar, the trouble with px in font sizing.

contrast. outside of black on white, the math gets complicated. grey on grey = bad! soothing, but unreadable. who has best refs? I thought he mentioned joe clark (I was distracted again).

tables, data style. communicate using the semantics of the table. there was a conference in DC just on data tables; he’ll cover in 90 seconds. use th! *scope* for disambiguation. okay, that does work.

forms. label is really cool! (I explained it to Tom yesterday.) find alternatives to form.submit and other JS-only stuff. bigger problem than

navigation. ugh, it’s 2006. “click here” is evil. use structure. device-independent menus (dropdown)

honestly, nothing is especially new to me here in terms of techniques, although I greatly enjoy his presentation style.

CAPTCHA: his particular hobbyhorse. pandora’s box.

q on captcha: on blog, had 2700 spam comments, and captcha stopped it. what else to do? Matt uses spam karma 2 (for WP), and has great success. a high value target will attract mechanized defeat of captcha. “the club lock of web security.”