Times have just got to change. I’m a little sick of living in a world that is regionalise into sales and licencing zones for no real reason besides to restrict sales due to some arcane money grubbing corporate policy.

What makes matters worse is people building experiences that highlight this and rub our face in it time and time again!

I regularly buy music online from various places, I tend to favour non DRM music, or if I can buy directly from the artist which is even better – I don’t like iTunes much at all.

Now eMusic, which I use, have recently redesigned and tweaked their user interface  towards a very strongly  recommendation engine based sales model.  Now I have no issue with this at all, in fact I applaud it as a welcome change, as it’s always good to discover new music.

It’s Very Simple

After you have signed in, eMusic knows your country of residency as it’s in your billing profile, they also know your likes, dislikes and  previous purchases.  Which is good as all this leads to a better browsing and recommendation experience.

Or so you would think.

Below is the home page of the eMusic site after I signed in.   It shows you a selection of “New and Noteworthy” albums.

Now seeing as eMusic knows so much about me, I would expect the selection to be tailored towards my tastes; and yes it is, at least a few of the albums on the home page are of interest.

However despite knowing so much about me, eMusic goes and destroys the entire experience by not allowing me to purchase ANY of the albums recommended.   Due to licensing restrictions in Australia.

Here I am, wanting to purchase an album, but I can’t.   To make matters worse eMusic decides to wave a large flag in my face, screaming, “HA HA you can’t buy this”…

Changing the Approach

Now what would it have taken to exclude the albums from being recommended.  Emusic you already know they are “Not Available” due to my being in Australia, as we can clearly see this on the screen (above).

So just exclude the items “Not Available” from the query, really it’s not that hard.  Just show me the “Available” high rated or new albums.

A recommendation is a waste of time if I can’t purchase it.

Maybe eMusic just wants me to move a few clicks away and download the music for free.

You know I try and support and do the right thing by the musicians, but sometimes the paper pushers just get in the way and destroy the experience.

The model and experience is broken, they need to change.

I have been interested in agile process for a while, especial it’s use with UX techniques.

The other day I ran into a myth that there aren’t many User Experience Design people with skills that can work on agile teams.

It seems UX people aren’t very flexible.

This I find almost laughable, in fact most UX professionals I have found are extremely flexible, often changing tack or techniques as required, at a moments notice.  Maybe we are too flexible.

The core of any agile process really is to have a role less team that can specialists with generalised skills.

Having the traditional defined roles of a Architect, Business Analysis, Project Manager and Developer is really against the principles of working as a collaborative team to achieve days tasks.

In fact what you want to have is the entire team being “T” shaped in a way.    With just deep specialisation in key areas, but still able to operate on other duties as required to get the team over the line.  Hence like the rise of the UX Developer.

Looking at this mix, maybe a User Experience Design “T” shaped person is also required.

Well it seems that “user experience” or even “design” is still a dirty word in the agile sphere.

Sadly I see this time and time again.  The UX specialist is brought in on a agile project at the end or just to correct some issues.   The consistency of maintaining the user experience is often lost as they leave.

The reason given is often that they can’t find UX people to met the team requirements when they are building the team.  Or that the user experience or requirements aren’t on the clients mind.

There is also a false belief that there aren’t any designers that can code (at least on the front end) and understand User Experience and maybe get Usability too.

Looking in the Wrong Place.

I’m calling people out on this one!  I know a lot of my freelance contacts (including me) who are UX or design based could fill any of these “missing skills” for an agile team.

The people exist, we the “T” shaped UX people are sitting around waiting.

It’s just your recruiters or  team builders that aren’t looking in the right places or asking the right questions.

Mainly this comes from the way people are recruited – along old school waterfall process – go get a BA, a Project Manager, a few Developers and maybe a tester or two.   Unless the BA and Testers are closet UX people, and it does happen, the project is going to face issues.

Which is a pity as these project could escape the usual last few sprints with the UX polishing consultant, and do it all properly from the start and save resources.

I guess that solution is for all UX people to just say they are a BA instead.

Will be very interesting to see the audience attending the upcoming Agile UX  Conference in Sydney.

The following is an approximate transcript of the talk – “Outta time, scope, and we fixed that already – Is there a Disconnect” I gave at the 2011 OzeWAI conference in late November 2011. As usual the slide deck is on Slideshare.

I also have a collection of sketch notes from OzeWAI 2011, as I find it easier to sketch the talk than take notes.

…oΦOΦo…

I have been involved with the Australian Web Awards for three years now.  Over those three years I have noticed an alarming trend in the results.   An almost disconnect from the Australian Web Industry in terms of accessibility.

For those that don’t know the Australian Web Awards is a national competition based around best practices, it has been running now for 3 year nationally and 7 years over all.

The core vision for the Australian Web Awards is to promote best practice in design and development for the web in Australia.   It does this by providing a competition designer and developers can benchmark themselves against.

The Australian Web Awards allows entries from anyone that works the web in Australia, from govt, corporate to the freelancer.   The only people that are discouraged from entering are the judges.

It’s an interesting fact that over the years we have found that the big budget sites are in fact at a disadvantage.  It seems the medium to small budget sites appear to win time and time again.

It doesn’t matter the size or complexity either.  If you have a multi-million dollar site verses a $40,000 site, both with the same number of pages and complexity,  the large corporate spend just doesn’t seem to have the focus on quality to get up in the Australian Web Awards.

The Report Cards

The issue comes to light when you look at the average scores for the sites judged against the 5 main judging criteria over the last 3 years.  As can be seen (below) all the areas have increased in quality over the years, the only criteria that has gone backwards is Accessibility.

When I first saw this I considered if it was just a back slash against WCAG2.

But maybe it’s something a little more.

Now let’s remember that the sites that have entered the Australian Web Awards are not just the average run of the mill site.  Often they will have been tweaked and improved, made the best they can be.

These sites from the owners and agencies viewpoint are as perfect as they can be.

And yet they come up wanting.   Overall we, as an industry have failed in accessibility.

You know I didn’t expect this, it blindsided me.  When I received the results from one accessibility judge after another, all telling me the same thing, over and over it was a bit of a shock.

For a while there it did make me question what had happened, if people really didn’t get the accessibility requirements.

Then I looked deeper into the statistics.

The Statistics

Now all the entries stated a level of WCAG compliance with their entry this year, so let’s start there.

About 30% stated they didn’t bother with WCAG2.   Of those that considered WCAG 40% where focused on WCAG1 and about 30% on WCAG2.   Interestingly

Now if we compared the stated level of compliance to the level that we found some interesting stats:

Interestingly if you stated you had ”No Compliance” in fact your site had a 69% chance of being compliant to WCAG2 A
anyway. Which just goes to show that WCAG2 A compliance isn’t that hard to achieve.

As to be expected WCAG 1 A had a high level compliance, as did WCAG2 A.  The surprise was that very little of the sites that said they where AAA where even close to mark.    Which may indicate a lack of compliance understanding.

Top Issues

Over the last three years the same issues have been repeated time and time again.   Despite developers telling me over and over they understand these issues.  It’s very clear that in Australia at least they don’t.

Plus there was a whole collection of five percenters that are still important. These issue I found where often completive on the same site.  So they are worth keeping an eye on them.

• Dyslexic text issues, justification, leading, general spacing.
• Content heavy no chunking
• No transcript, caption or video alternative.
• Click areas that aren’t obvious.
• Can’t stop constant movement – usually a carousel.

It also seems that certain states just don’t get some accessibility issues.

The Gatekeepers

Now Statistics like this can, but are they really telling us what is really going wrong. Why has accessibility slipped from the agenda in Australia?

Now I have worked on the web with private industry from small business to large corporate for the last 15 years.    I regularly chat privately with key decision makers over accessibility and ask for the real reasons accessibility goals are not being met.

Over this time I have found it comes down to a 4 types of key personas or gatekeepers if you will, these are their response:  (ed – please note I’m not going to publish here all the comments I quoted in this section during the talk)

Tran – The Web Agency Developer

• Either we do the correction or the client’s inhouse team does it, at the end of the day a solution has to be found, often its remove the function or content that is the final fix.
• Accessibility is just one aspect of my Job
• I just code; accessibility is the clients issue now
• The CMS stops me from making accessible web sites
• We can’t implement the right accessibility due to our.
• Why isn’t accessibility an issue at developer conferences and on developer blogs if it is important.

Joanne – The Web Agency Project Manager

• Resources are an issue – getting people that really understand accessibility with other good development and design skills is hard
• The National Transition Strategy is just a pain, but it’s also a good instant money maker
• If it’s not in the budget/scope it doesn’t happen!
• The project is already underway (when commenting on inclusive design)
• If the client doesn’t ask, we don’t tell, don’t involve, let it ride.  After all we can charge more later on if it becomes a requirement
• WCAG 2 is just too hard to understand, at least WCAG1 had a simple checklist
• Accessibility is just bullshit, all this work for less than 1% of our audience, I can understand doing this usability stuff but anything else is just not in scope.
• If we don’t have the inhouse skill, we often just fudge it.  Like who is going to check.

Nik – The Business Owner / Director

• Accessibility is just a game of he said – she said, its open to option.  We trust our in house developers over the external consultants.
• I’m sympathetic, but this is business, we can’t afford to have any of the accessibility stuff.
• We CAN afford to discount and forget out the disabled community.
• On ageing population:  Baby Boomers are running out of cash anyway, so they are a dead end.
• Show me a real study on the return on investment for a web site with accessibility improvements alone.

Peter – Govt Directors / CEOs / IT Managers

• We are only doing this WCAG/NTS stuff over sufferance; even then we know we are not going to be challenged.
• All we have to do is appear to complete the paperwork.
• I don’t think this accessibility applies to us, if it does it’s just public facing sites.
• No one is disabled here; if they were we would just redeploy them.

So now we have all these viewpoints of the gatekeepers. Now I’m sure you have heard them before, time and time again.

Sure there are some solutions around, you can put in a policy, mentors, decentralise, do audits, train people.  These are great if you have lots of resources and a big budget.  Sadly that is not a world I believe we all live in.

Now the Australian Web Awards has pointed towards a degree of industry disengagement.  The question is the cause just the usual issues, or is there something more.

No Solutions Here

Do I have a solution to all this.

No not really.  Maybe you have one.  That’s what we are here to discuss.

One thing I do have is a direction we may have missed.

Now I was talking about the issue of accessibility with an award winner at the Australian Web Awards a few weeks back.  He gave me a possible solution.

Remember Web Standards

Remember years back….

When there was a push for web standards, at least every conference had 2-3 people talking on web standards.  There were books and articles all over the place on web standards.  There were how to do guides, bug squashing sites, code libraries, how to implement guides and so on .

It was a wonderland of knowledge,

It was this free and cheap resource based that was the core to helping evangelise web standards

This allowed developers to easily setup and take up web standards.

It even allowed those usually closeted developers, who don’t read blogs or attending conference.  The ones locked away in the back rooms in cubical hell.   Yes even they came on board with web standards.

It also allowed educators to understand web standards (to some degree)

Where did Accessibility Go?

But what happened to accessibility along the way.

It’s like Accessibility and Web Standards were brother and sister, happy always together.

Friends forever -  until Web Standards became the popular one, the queen of the ball.   After all she was the one “everyone” was talking about.

The brother “Accessibility” seemed, a little lost, unsure on what really just happened!    Time after time people only wanted to speak with his sister “Web Standards”

We need to bring them back together so they are working with each other and not against one another.  Working groups take note.

But still you know “’Accessibility” he doesn’t really trust his Web Standards sister after all she has all this glitz and glam with html5 and css3, very sexy!

He just has WCAG2…. Sorry it’s a little boring!

Issues Blocking the Path

But it’s not that simple, there are 4 issues that seem to be blocking the path ahead.

False Hope and Stepping Up

I have seen this cycle a few times now – every few years a leading accessibility developer will commit to helping the community – to giving it back.

This is great.  I usually cheer!  It’s a time of celebration.  It’s always great to have someone that is very talented giving it back to the community.

However 12 months later, upon review, I usually find nothing has happened, and it was all hype.

Now I have nothing against the developers concerned.

I can understand completely what has occurred.

This is sad catch 22.

Usually we find, as an industry, we can’t afford to put that new found knowledge on the improvement of accessibility out to the community. It all comes down to dollars and cents.

If you are making a living of this IP, then really you can’t share it.  I really get that, I have been in the same boat.

Or maybe you can share the IP.  There certainly are business models that allow you to give away the baby and sell the bath water.

With this in mind we really need to get more people talking about accessibility, just like we did with web standards.

In any community there is about 5% of the population, at best, that will engage in a cause, and about 1% that who will evangelise it.  Accessibility is no different.

So maybe we need to stop relying on the top experts to provide the solutions to our problems.

To be honest these experts don’t have the answers to this problem that they can share anyway.

But you and your colleagues do.

We have the resources  - Jacqui talked about that this morning.

There is a limit to how much we can do as well. We all have to remember that. So let’s be realistic on the free time we all have.

However if we all just blogged, discussed, presented about some issue every now and again maybe we could inspire one developer to write more accessible code.

It would make a difference.

So I ask you what have you done to help accessibility along in the last 6 months, 12 months, 18 months….  Feeling guilty, good, do something about it!

The CMS Issue.

Have you even had a good look at the Content Management Systems (CMS) that and being sold by most web agencies.

They come in three flavours – Open Source, Off the shelf or the Bespoke – roll your own versions.

Now I haven’t looked at all of them on the market, after all there are 100′s of them, but have worked with a good number of them.   They aren’t that accessible.  Now what hope does anyone have if the base application you are using to produce an accessible web site isn’t following the recommended standards.

Sure with most CMS you can tweak the front end templates and sometimes you get lucky and you can make a site more accessible.

However accessibility is more than the front end of the site.

Have you looked beyond the login prompt to the admin control panels of these CMS.

Almost none of them are WCAG compliant, let alone even looking at ATAG.

Now that’s another hobbyhorse of mine, talk to me later about that one.

We need to get the developers of these applications to understand the accessibility issues.

We need to have them make that empathic link with the disabled – to engage them.

This going to be hard – these are usually the developers that are even further away from the mainstream of the web industry.

I know that some developers, for instance in the Java community are just getting to grips with JavaScript.  And have only just discovered about web standards.   Now I don’t consider myself to be on the bleeding edge, but really wasn’t that 10 years back. Hello 2001 calling.

At that rate it’s going to take us another 8 years to get WCAG 2 into these peoples mindset.   Think about it can we afford to wait.

I sometimes get the feeling that some of these developer are just living in the backwoods with a banjos playing.   Nice people, just old habits.

When was the last time you heard of someone talking about accessibility or the hard-core accessibility fixes at a developer conference.

Not a generalist conference, but a hard-core developer conference.     You don’t.  Accessibility is off the agenda.  Why?

Somehow we need to make a case for these CMS developers and firms to come into this century

A good deal of the issue is the code base, which can be from 10 to 15 years old.

This brings a degree of legacy for CMS compliance to WCAG or ATAG.

Mostly for these systems it’s a complete interface rewrite, not something that is undertaken likely.

Now I know there are some in house systems that are still written in Perl. I can understand the developer’s pain.

Same old issue, limited audience, limited resource, no one asks, why bother.

Vendors are not to Blame.

But it’d not all the vendors fault.

My associates in “web agency” land tell me that it’s very rarely that a client will enforce WCAG2 requirements in a contract.   There is a tendency, for the sake of future relations to side step the issue.

So when was the last time you pulled up a vendor on a core CMS accessibility issue?

Do you have a checklist to help an agency understand WCAG 2 requirements?

Do you enforce them, to the level of stopping the project?

It’s amazing I have seen large projects roll forward instead of folding over accessibility issues that were clearly a vendor’s issue, and should have been fixed during implementation.

Now from a vendors view having the first to market ATAG compliance CMS must be worth something  – one would hope.

Watch this space, things are afoot here.  There is hope.  Maybe next year I will have news I can share.

Education is a Factor

This lack of engagement also comes from the way we are training our graduates.  Often when a graduate enters in to “web agency” land they have no or a very limited knowledge of accessibility

Have a look around at the courses offered by Universities and TAFE sector, how many of them offer a unit in accessibility, there is ONE.   Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I know some lecturers do go out or their way to drum in accessibility, spending at least 3-4 weeks on it.

These guys are my Heroes.

Sadly the norm still seems to be one lecture, if that, on accessibility.  Not a lot you can cover in 45 minutes for the entire scope of accessibility.

I wonder sometimes, do the lecturers know that WCAG exists, the University might, but do they, and if they do why are they teaching it old school and not inclusively?

It would help if students were exposed to impairment simulator kit,  Zimmermans vision kit,  the full ageing simulation suit (Nasco or Gert), or at least use a vision or hearing simulator (eg the one from Cambridge University).

Now I know these aren’t perfect, but they do at least give a perception of the issues at hand and can help a person start on the road to a level of empathic understanding or the disability.

One more Problem, the other Gatekeeper

But even if we get all this right, spreading the word, the perfect CMS, the right education.  It just goes like clockwork.

It’s still going to fail – why?

Really it’s very simple, we are not longer in control of the web site.

Yes, that’s right.  We don’t control it.

We are just the “web monkeys” behind the scenes.

It’s the admin assistant that has just been getting the job done updating the website, 9-5 week in week out.

The content publishers – they are in control, not you.

The content publisher – like Cate is the centralised goto person of the office.  Hence she is very multiple skilled.

They are often time poor and are usually handed issues that aren’t theirs from the people around them.

Badly designed interfaces and procedures constantly frustrate them, and they are forced to find quick and effective workarounds.

This person also has a very full outside of work hours; they often consider that they’re doing everyone’s job for them.

The control is with them, the content updaters, the content publishers.  We handed the control over to them years ago, during the CMS revolution.

You know if they don’t feel like putting the semantic structure in the content, or using the right elements on a form, or setting up the PDF link correctly.

Well they won’t, after all they are busy people.

We can have a perfect template, a perfect CMS output, and still can be an accessibility nightmare.

Just like PDF files need to come from a perfect semantic structured source, so too the content in that the CMS uses needs to have a perfect semantic structure

Still this is meaningless as no one will care so long as it looks good from a visual viewpoint.

Empathic Engagement

All the content publishers want to do it get the job done, the simplest way they can. We have to really understand this. To them it’s just work, get it done, pay the bills.  And go home.

Sure you can train these people all you want, have policies a metre thick. But at the end of the day, they have to really understand. They have to have empathic engagement with the disabled community.

Without even a seed of this empathic engagement they are just lost and there will be no professional care, the attention to details that makes a difference.

We need to stop singing with choir and get out there and talk to the disengaged especially the content publishers. They are the new sheriff in town.

When we got started in accessibility it was usually because of personal instance or that we saw or worked with disabled people in action?    See it’s that empathic engagement that made us think about accessibility issues.

We need to capture the emotional journey of the disabled and give it back to the gatekeepers.

In Summary

See we need to distil this empathy that we discovered into bite-sized pieces.

Just the right sized pieces so that people like Cate (the content publisher) can understand how we felt about accessibility and be taken on the same emotional journey.

Polices help, but reason and understanding is a better approach.

So let’s go talk, engage, educate, present at developer conferences, and most of all promote empathic engagement. Promote understanding.

The other day I added up the time I spend on volunteer work, you know, contributing back to the community and the like.

I used to see this as just an hour here, and hour there, no big deal.  I just consider it to be part of what I do.

However when I added it all up and came up with a yearly average. It was a bit of a shock.

The amount of time I spend volunteering is a little over an hour for every workday.   It’s around 240 hours annually.

Now that doesn’t seem that bad, until I put a dollar figure on this, in terms of lost income.   Now for me that’s a considerable slice of my time and money.

Makes you think if this volunteering is a good thing or not.

The upside.

Volunteering has a great number of benefits, not the least of which is that you are supporting the community and providing a service that often would never happen without your effort.

One of the major benefits is the connections and people you meet. Often this networking opportunity would take a lot longer to achieve, but volunteering will often shortcut the process. However you have to be willing to take advantage of the opportunity or the new contacts will be lost over time.

When times are good volunteering your time isn’t really an issue, it seems freely available.

For me this good time is when I don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for the next contract or slice of work to fill the next week or so.  Things just seem to flow, there is nearly no stress and everything just appears to just happen. Most of this comes from constantly networking.

You just don’t even think about your  time volunteering.  The time is not seen as being wasted or lost, volunteering just becomes just part of the work/life process.

The downside.

However this can all fall apart.  When the times aren’t so good you need to focus on other aspects of your life from family, to business.  Those extra hours that you try and find for volunteering often just aren’t there.  So you end up stealing time, usually from your family, this is not good.

I speak from experience here.  Over the last year, sadly  I have personally dropped the ball several times with volunteering.

Mostly it came down to doing volunteer work or putting bread on the table.  You can guess the latter won.   Still one does feel guilty over this.  I can’t but thank the fellow volunteers who picked up my slack.

Still with many work prospects not as perfect as they used to be, one does consider if it isn’t time to focus on my core personal needs.

Just think and say thanks.

So next time you are at an event or organisation run by volunteers.

Just stop for a moment, think if they were not here. This all would not have existed and you are in fact piggy backing on the charitable work of these volunteers.  It’s no good taking the attitude of “oh well someone else well do it” – because you know they wouldn’t have.

Just stop, say thanks to the volunteers let them know that you appreciate what they are doing for you and the community.

Also don’t assume they are getting any real benefits from their work, as more often than not they are loosing out on the time front.

As with any young industry we tend to endlessly debate the labels we should be placing on the User Experience based roles that we are conducting.

Along with this debate on the labels, we seem to be now in a blame game on who really is responsible as an industry (which I had no idea we where) for the on going career development of  junior,  mid level and senior UX people. Maybe better to just fix it folks.

As these elements of navel gazing have been going on quietly in the background the game has been changing.   Maybe For the better.

With any new discipline, well new to the main stream, it will influence other roles as elements of its workflow and techniques become widely known.

Over the last three or so years I have been noticing that there has been a  dramatic tendency to move away from the UX professional to favouring o role more like that of a senior developer or sometimes a BA with UX skills. Not that BA′s doing UX is that new, we all moonlight as BA′s when we can’t find UX work.

Let′s call them a UX developer.

It is not all that bad.

Now I know a lot of you will be a gast at this.  But just think for a moment.

To often as UX professionals we are asked to do the impossible, to be the super UX hero and save the day.

You know the scenario well.  You get a phone call asking for help with a project that is in its final stages.  All they need is a little UX magic to make the project shine.  Familiar?

Now you know it’s way to late in the project for you to have any major influence on any of the underlying flaws in the UX. But you take the gig anyway.

You do it in the  vain hope that you can at least make a little difference and hopefully the project management will learn that the time to get the UX professional involved is at day one, not before launch.

You do the best you can, but you know it’s not going to be good enough.

The watching, learning, mentoring.

Now the senior developer or BA watches and learns from you, maybe you inspire them to go and do a little professional development on UX.  Overall they pick up a few core UX skills.   Which is good.

On the next project these forward thinking devs or BA start to apply these learnt skills early in the process, so at least in part there is some element of UCD with a UX component considered.  Which again is good.

After all they are already a part of team framework – project manager, BA, dev. With someone in this team championing the UX component there is no need to inject a UX consultant into the mix, who is just going to disrupt things anyway.

Now from a project management view the injection of the UX professional just didn’t work out that well anyway. At least now the team internally now has the UX skills to move forward.

Developers control the game anyway.

Yes the UX developer does have at Cooper puts it “skin in the game”.  Yes they are concerned with optionisation of the system, to focus on the best business outcome.

However the UX consultant isn’t the only one that can deliver a non biased view that supports the user cases.   A good BA or UX developer can wear this hat as well. They can be objective they can change hats mid stream.

I have seen this more and more with recent projects.

Afterall we as UX professionals don’t control the projects, the devs do.   Now maybe we should be training and mentoring developers in the UX cause not designers. Which is opposed somewhat to what Nat Boehm has to say.

So overtime maybe the UX consultant will be as dead as the webmaster, a thing of the past.

In the future maybe consideration of the UX will be just a mainstream inclusive activity of the development team.

You may have noticed that the output from this blog has slowed over the last ten or so months from at least a post a week to if you’re lucky one post a month. Sorry about that.

I can’t really put my finger on why my blogging output has decreased.

I still like writing, I mayn’t be any good at it, but I do enjoy the process. Writing in this type of format is liberating and can be very creative. Very different from corporate report speak of business .

Still there must be some reasons for this decrease in output:

Increased Workload

Yes it does sometimes get busy, especially on the home (non business) front. Still even business wise I have crazy periods and slow ones. Sometimes for the first time in ages it’s been at a complete dead stop. So I don’t think it’s an overload of work. I always seem to have the capacity for more.

Less Quiet Time to Reflect

The lack of time to stop reflect, to have that down time or moments between, may be a contributing factor. Often during these times I will mentally formulate and draft design ideas and posts. So this reduction of this time would be a factor.

Volunteer Work

The other day I worked out how much time I dedicate to general volunteer work. From organisating two meetups, mentoring people, the occasional presentation and organising the Australian Web Awards. This does take up a lot of time. Often leaving me will little personal time. It’s this personal time I used for blogging.

Lack of Ideas for Articles

Well not really. I have at least three to four ideas for posts every day, most I forget to document, especially when I haven’t had the time to act on them.

Twitter

Well my twitter and other social media output has dropped as well. So that’s not it.

Overall

So it comes down to time and lack of it – doesn’t it always. Seems I’m filling my life too much with volunteer work for others and not enough for me.

Now to do something about that.

I don’t mind completing surveys, I even do those phone surveys.  Having working with several different marketing teams and conducted countless UX information gathering surveys over the years.  I can understand the difficulties of getting a good response from people. So I don’t mind taking the time to complete the odd survey.

Still I have to wonder sometimes if the teams behind the surveys are really understanding their audience that is completing the survey in the first place.

A few weeks back our fence was blown over in a storm.   We put in an insurance claim, it was processed, and we got the fence repaired.  No issue, good service all round.

Then I get an email request to complete a customer satisfaction survey from my insurance company.

What is Dissatisfied

The survey seems very standard. Besides being inaccessible in parts if you only use a keyboard.

All was good until we (partner and I) complete a question that asked us to rate the service from 1-10 (10 being outstanding).  We gave them a 7.   The survey responds asking why we were dissatisfied.  We weren’t.  We just rated 7/10.   Not perfect, but not dissatisfied by our ranking.   But the survey consider the rating of 7/10 as dissatisfied as it changed the questioning to suit.

This assumption, that if it’s not a 9 or 10 then the customer must be displeased, doesn’t in anyway take into account the personalised rating scale of the customer.   We may never give a score of 10 or 1.  We could be very happy with a score of 7/10, as we were.

Lesson to be learnt here is that you can’t assume that a 7/10 or even 6/1o indicates a negative emotion or dissatisfaction from the customer.   This type of survey  gleans towards a negative bias or an over inflated towards the extreme positive.

Now that was a minor issue compared to the next one.

Doing the Likert Scale

The presentation of a Likert scale question is never easy.  A UX professionals we are always looking for a new way to present a question or interface without promoting any bias.

However when we were presented with the following question.  We both starred at the screen for a good minute before we could jointly work out what was required.

What you are meant to do, and it took us a few goes to work this out, is drag the card (on the left) to the response boxes (on the right) and drop them there.  They then appear as a box with text in within the response area.

There are a number of issue with this interaction:

• It’s very different to the traditional layout, it was completely outside what we were expecting.
• Initially you can read the page question as “How would you rate your experience in terms of:” Answer – “Extremely, Very, Reasonably…”
• You may ignore the small help text “Please drag each item to a category”
• You may ignore that card completely
• There is no indication as to what an “item is” or what a  ”category is”, they mean the card or questions and the possible answers (on the right).
• The process of reviewing or moving categories isn’t as smooth as it could be.
• There is bias to dragging the cards (items) to the responses (categories) at the top of the page.
• It’s only usable with a pointing device.
• I just don’t even want to think about the accessibility of this.
• I still don’t know what the “+” buttons on the responses do.

Yes it’s fine when you workout what to do. But most people aren’t they concerned about the survey and are likely to leave if the question layout breaks a mental model.

Overall it just seems to be a fancy “cool” javascript insert, that frankly should have been killed off or tweaked to make it usable.

This is a classic example of a new interaction technique not being the best delivery method.  Sometimes the cool tech is just not the best way.

Now the concept is still valid, but it just needs a little more refinement, and maybe a little proper user testing and it would be an innovative interface.

Still sometimes I do wonder if these insurance firms employ anyone to consider the user experience of their customers.

I get asked this a lot. “What are the best UX books to read?”

In true UX tradition my answer is depends.

It depends on your experience as a UX practitioner, your experience with scientific research methods, psychology, interaction design, user interface design, product or visual design and your level of communication skills.

Still having a list of starter books would be handy.

Yeah sure others have their lists from the likes of Will Evans, Paul Seys and Nick Finck however some of the books on these are either too complex (for someone new to UX) or take way to long to get to the point. Bit like this post.

So here is a list of books I would pick as the must read UX books.

The UX Book List

• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett
• A Project Guide to UX: For user experience designers in the field or in the making by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
• Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowle, James Box
• Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko
• Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
• A Practical Guide to Information Architecture by Donna Spencer
• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People: What Makes Them Tick?  by Susan Weinschenk
• Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne
• Measuring User Experience by Thomas Tullis, William Albert
• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art  by Scott McCloud
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder

More Specific Methods and Techniques Tuning

• Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin, Dana Chisnell
• Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules by Jeff Johnson
• Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski
• Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indy Young
• Card Sorting: Design Usable Categories by Donna Spencer
• Prototyping: A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping by Todd Zaki Warfel
• Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville, Jeffery Callender
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown
• The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas  by John Pruitt , Tamara Adlin
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web  by Louis Rosenfel, Peter Morville
• Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish
• Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography by John Van Maanen
• Remote Research by Nate Bolt,  Tony Tulathimutte
• Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson
• Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks

Let’s Get a Lot Deeper and Serious

• The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Heuristics and Biases by Thomas Gilovich
• Design Meets Disability by Graham Pullin
• The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden
• Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research by Patricia L. Sunderland, Rita M. Denny
• How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Living with Complexity by Don Norman

So what are your killer must have UX books, I’m sure they are few that are different to the list above.

I was killing time, waiting, doing the Dad’s Taxi thing. While I waited, I was catching up on Twitter, on my phone, plus reading the various articles from my stream.

You know what is becoming a real pain point.

Non responsive designed web sites. The ones that don’t scale well on mobile devices, sadly they are still the norm.

Especially news and information sites.

Why is it the information on these sites being the major selling point and yet it seems to be very hard to access on a mobile device. it’s not like mobile is new.

It’s got to the point when I follow a link to one of these sites and it becomes to hard to read I just abandon the article.

Change is Required

Now in the early days of the mobile web, a few years back, I would put up with this.

Sure I could get reasonable rendering of a page. But you know its just too small to read effectively.

So you zoom in and play the silly game of rescale the page just right so you can see the content area filling the screen. Being careful not to touch those damn banner ads.

Well I’m sick of this!

I just want to get on the site read the information and go. Not spend half my time realigning the page so I can start reading the site. How hard can it be, we have the technology.

After all I’m the one in control here. If your site is just making to too hard to read on a mobile then why should I bothered staying.

Interconnectivity is the Key, not the app

The key here is being able to interconnect and link information sources in a way than I can browse a stream of information, conversation and the like that I am interested in and can read with ease.

Not articles that has been selected by some marketing focused editor on some mobile app.

Just like the social network is about me. So the information sources on the web need to be about me.

Yet people are in love with apps. They are the savior of the universe, or so we are being told. This has refocused media outlets to the mobile app space, instead of first looking at their web sites.

Present the only way to truly interconnect information is via the humble hyper link, the backbone of the web, with a little RSS thrown in for good measure. Not a handful of mobile apps.

Mobile Apps just fail in this area as you can’t really, at present, link information sources between them. Unless they act as an aggregator like FlipBoard.

Given this wouldn’t the web be a better delivery medium for information sites than the silo of an app.

I Want My Web, My Way, Now.

There you go media, news and information sites you are on notice.

Your apps are a waste of time, they are just dead silos of information. They are not an excuse to not format your web sites for the mobile web.

You need to go back and stop playing in the app sandbox and get into the wilds and fix your web sites, make them usable, readable on my mobile device.

Or I’m just going to look elsewhere.

I do wonder how the mainstream deals with this issue.

As a web professional and an avocate for inclusive design (web accessibility) I have often wondered why organisations are so obsessed with using PDF documents on web sites as opposed to HTML based documents.

After all PDF documents don’t do accessibility as well as HTML pages do.

Given the ease of use of most modern CMS you would consider web page creation and editing would be as easy as authoring a word document.

Now I have a good idea why my clients use PDFs over HTML, especially government agencies, but I don’t have the community wide picture.

So I asked Twitter – “Why do you use PDF over HTML?”

I got a bit of a response.  Now this survey and its (200) responses aren’t that scientific, they are multiple tiered and are as expected, full of statistical analysis holes. Still the results do give us a glimpse as to why people use PDFs.

Now there is no primary reason as to why, but more a mesh of several supporting rationals.  They are in order of preference:

1. Preserving the Print Format

   The requirement to have the onscreen visuals appear the same as the print version was clearly the leading reason. Out stripping others by two to one.

   This is really understandable when you are dealing with documents having a complex print layout. It seems CSS print styles just don’t cut it. To the point that sometimes having a different style layout for print, for a web page, can be a bit of negative user experience (however that’s another topic).

   Documents that have been through a visual design process of a print production team seem prone to this requirement. Yes the content is the primary focus here,  but sometimes the way it’s presented can be just as important in communicating the message.

2. Encapsulated Format

   Being able to save and transfer a document across platforms was important as well.

   People are looking for a medium that doesn’t require complex software, that will maintain the layout, images, typeface and all the content as one encapsulated package.

   Try saving a web page for use later, it just fails in so many ways, and a MS-Word document – well that needs MS-Office for the most part.

   PDF is the only one left standing as an encapsulated package, it’s also cheap to read and produce as well.  Issue is it’s not that portable in reality – take the issues displaying or saving a PDF viewed on the web using a mobile device.

3. Easier to Publish

   Easy of publication is another core reason. To creative a PDF is often just a simple process of saving a document.

   This is easy and within an existing business workflow.  So it’s understandable that it appeals to the vast majority of people.

   To publish it to a web site you just create the link in the CMS, and upload the document. Set and forget, no need to worry about the layout working or not.

   Contrast this with the list of issues using a CMS editor to create a web page.

   You usually create the document in MS-Word and have to cut and paste it into the CMS editor, this causes layout issues. Or you have to use some weird keyboard/process gymnastics to get the layout reproduced right or worse have all the formatting disappear and have to reapply the lot.

   Then you have to put the images in separately, scaled down for the web, and allow for those accessibility tags.  After all this there still maybe layout issues with the page design.    It’s just a nightmare.

   Clearly the web publishing process has a long way to go.   Maybe this is an area some of my fellow UX colleagues could look into?

4. Existing Hardcopy Documents

   Duplication of existing hardcopy documents is also another core reason.

   When you have an existing hardcopy document, you really are only duplicating the distribution and availability of the document to a web medium.  You are just presenting the document to a wider audience that those that can collect it from your offices.

   The use of PDF with its layout preservation and encapsulated package is the perfect solution for hardcopy duplication.

   In this case people also stated that they tended to only used PDF for duplication exisiting hardcopy documents.

5. Other Reasons

   The following are minor reasons people stated for use of PDF documents over web pages.

   • Duplicate HTML Content

     A low percentage of people indicated they presented everything as web pages, but also allowed for user driven server side generation of PDF documents as required. Or they just  duplicated all the static PDF information available as web pages. Use of both formats was equally weighted in this case.

   • Providing More Detail

     Others, using the semantic structure of the web, presented summary information on topics at the high level of a site as web pages moving down to specific summaries on mid level web pages and PDFs as the final low level detailed pages.  This is a very typical government model of information communication.

     I suspect while  this may not be prefect, it harks back to having a secondary reasoning for the ease of publication of the detailed information.

   • Interactive Forms

     Despite Adobe pushing PDF forms only a very small number of people even referenced using PDF forms. Sure normal hardcopy form duplication was mentioned. But the use of interactive PDF forms was left to a minority.

   • Low Usage Document

     Just like the use of PDFs for detail pages, documents with a low usage also where seen as more cost effective delivered as PDFs.

   • Web pages not a formal document

     This was a very interesting comment.

     It seems that the very volatile nature of the web page doesn’t make it a highly considered  paper replacement.

     Where as PDF’s, which are just as volatile, maybe because they come from a process close to the formal document are seen as more formal, stable.

     Interesting perception.

   • DRM / Security

     Contray to what publishers and the legal department may tell you;  the use of PDFs to enforce DRM or any type of security is very low on the reasons to use PDFs.   In fact I would presume the usage of security features of  PDF documents is generally low . Which in a way is a good thing – accessibility wise.

This rounds off the reasons to use PDFs over web pages for content delivery.  Still I hope that this continued PDF madness does ease up a little.

However I fear we will not be seeing this real soon, until web publication and print styles become as easy and effective as PDFs.