How Accessibility Issues Affect IA - Olga Revilla

How Accessibility issues affect Information Architecture
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• Clients ask Olga’s company to make website all these flashy websites which are accessible and for as cheap aspossible!
• 2 things Olga has learnt: Getting accessible involves all the steps of the project.
• Usability doesn’t equal accessibility! You don’t want to test for a determined group or context (usability), but the maximum amount of users and contexts (accesssibility)
• Whatever audience, whatever content, whatever goals, it should work.
• New content guidelines for accessibility 2.0

A Thin White Line, Discussing UX Practice in Europe (Panel)

• There is even rules for this panel! 1. Be honest 2. If not, lie openly 3. It depends costs 5 kroners.
• Interesting to note that there is a still a big divergence in the acceptance of UX. The further east, it seems the worse it gets.
• Italians equate agile with fast!
• The client doesn’t need to completely understand everything. Hopefully by being open they can learn more and be aware of what we do - Leisa Reichelt.
• In Poland it’s largely financial and e-commerce clients that realize the value of successful online experiences.
• Leisa Reichelt targets small companies for smaller projects where she feels that she can make the biggest difference.
• “Clients don’t have the structure to hire you” - Audience member.
• Requests for Proposals which come in with specific requests like IA, often shows a lack of education.
• Advertising agencies want to “own the client” and will often be awarded UX projects without the right skills. They just make it easy when UX makes it hard, we ask the tough questions.
• “We could fall into the problem of being ad agencies with a different name” - Eric Reiss.
• In the US, UX isn’t a hard sell, it normally appears in RFP.
• Companies came to us because they were losing money.
• Spend more of her time trying to transfer her thinking rather than producing deliverables - Leisa Reichelt

The Architecture of Fun (Joe Lamantia, Reinard Bosman)

Massively Social Games: Next Generation Experiences
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• Games are fun!
• There is an architecture for fun and you can design for it.
• Games are everywhere, they dominate the media horizon, address all ages and experiences, mechanisms are standard elements, they can also be serious.
• In the digital space, games were often solo. “Only cartman would have fun in an amusement park by himself”.
• Experiences are social. The social interactions are the source of experience value. We are moving towards more social experiences online.
• Nicole Lazzaro is awesome at games!
• Game mechanics > player choice > emotion > experience
• “Emotion comes from connecting friends, the messages they pass, and the actions they take”
• Social emotions drive play.
• Shakespeare designed the emotional space between the characters. This is the same thing that game developers do.
• There are 4 keys to fun - Hard fun fiero, easy fun curiosity, serious fun relaxation, people fun amusement.
• Plater choice rewards effort. There is a fine line between enjoyable, frustration and boredom.
• People fun emotions - amusement, player interaction, social bonding.
• Individual experiences become collective experiences - identity, history and memory.
• Trying to design for emotion.
• Designing a cross-media social game experience you need to:
  • Deepen the experience, make it more fun: representation, interaction, conflict and safety. Bragging rights are key here, combining the competitive with the social.
  • Visualize competitive results. Show the tournament results and fixtures. Put players in the spotlight. Weapons and kill statistics.
  • Trying to design for community.
  • Key roles in the online community: the star, the opinion leader, the connector and the addict.
• It’s important to be able to share your experience. It reinforces the bragging rights. Make it easy for people to share it onto other social networks.
• Use communication to progress achievements. Reinforce that you can gain a better position compared to your opponents. Challenge, invite and schedule amongst the community.
• Link the easier to use interface of the web to the console. It’s easier to schedule a game at the office, then late at night on your PS2.
• By designing for emotion and community, you can extend your experience.
• Web development never stops, whilst game development does. By using the online experience, you can increase the shelf-life of games.

Doing the right thing: Google & Privacy (Jonathon Arnowitz)

• Written a couple of books on Effective Prototyping.
• Talking about Google ad preference.
• You have a right to privacy. Privacy on the internet is slightly different. It’s the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the Internet, and to control who can access that information.
• People on the internet often behave as if they are in their home and have privacy.
• You are being watched and are watchable.
• You have the right to use the internet without being manipulated into doing something because someone has special information they have no business knowing about you.
• You should be able to tell them to sod off! Ideally you should know beforehand that they are doing this and what your rights are.
• Consensual usage of your information: Explicit, implicit, hidden, naive, coerced.
• You visit a website because you want information or services. Most services give you a cookie, which tracks your behaviour anonymously. It uses this to give you more interesting ads to get you to click on them.
• Unfortunately the thing that makes websites easy to use, is tied up in cookies. So it’s not easy to just switch them off.
• Google as a service provider is great but as a marketing company, not so great. The usage of your behaviour on other websites informs these ads.
• Introduced the cookie viewer in order to see what Google is tracking about you.
• User demographics are different to the target users.
• Privacy is not a UCD issue, whether a user wants it or not. Laws, ethics and company policies all affect it. These issues become requirements.
• Without contradictions no design, without analysis no designer.
• 5:3:1 version of design process, kinda like Apples 10:3:1
• Using friends and foes of the company / product.
• The government is watching out for their policies, not always in your best interests.
• Privacy experts care more about privacy than your quality of life.
• Users don’t care about privacy and they need protection. It’s an amorphous concept for end-users and carries no actionable meaning.
• People care about personalization more than privacy.
• Fear of accidental disclosure.
• Let the data speak for itself, users skip explanatory material.
• Make it playful, contextual and actionable.

Closing Keynote - Marianne Sweeney

• We spend a great deal of time wondering what they will do at our site but not how and why they will get there.
• She goes to delicious to check who has bookmarked the URL and what they have used to tag it.
• Googlearchy - dominant websites become more fairly entrenched in search results.
• Search engines use behavioural and social elements to determine page rank.
• These developments have introduced the following:
  • Search Distraction: Too much to choose from in search results.
  • Search disorientation: Pogo-ing back and forth between a SERP and a content page.
  • Search Ennui: Over-confidence in search effectiveness for all searches.
• SEO by the Sea (blog) which follows patent office.
• There is a lot of data being collected and it’s collected with abstract intentions.
• Why does Google collect so much information but give so much away for free?
• Why are computer scientists and marketing people driving the search bus? Why not UX people?
• We need to focus on pre-query as well as post-query behaviour.
• Search people use more than navigation.

Stanislaw Skorka - Users do not like any changes

• Director of Main Library at Pedagogical University of Cracow
• Talking about task analysis - What their goals are and what they actually do to achieve these goals. How their previous knowledge helps them achieve this.
• Book to read: Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior (Library and Information Science)
• 5 examples: Buying products, finding in library, betting on horse races, finding the law, I want to know more about cancer? I am confused…
• Comparing Amazon display to library catalogue. Seems like we missed a trick to improve the experience!
• Functions of a Library Catalogue by Charles A. Cutter (1904) from Rules for a Dictionary  - Interesting to see the main goals are still the same over 100 years later.
• Librarians used to find us physical books, now they are search engines!
• OPAC = Online Public Access Catalogue. Consistent system across all libraries which allows for integration.
• Interesting way of checking the navigation labels - Taking a screenshot with these options and allowing people to write what they thought the terms were.
• Final result was a cleaner, simpler interface with labels that people understood. However they had a negative reaction due to changes in the log-in / account details.

Webnographer - Low Cost Ethnography Techniques

Whilst the presenters, Sabrina Mach & James Page, seemed like lovely people, I didn’t like the selling aspect of this talk. I thought this was about different techniques for ethnography, guess I should read the fine print next time!

• The debate about whether ethnography conducted over a short period of time is actually ethnography. We want to be applying deeper conceptions and discarding crude and inaccurate assumptions.
• Film to watch: Kitchen Stories, Swedish Film.
• Discount Ethnography equals cultural tourism?
• Ethnography is about participation and immersion in culture. How do we replicate this on the cheap?
• Ethnography costs dollars and it doesn’t fit in with sped up agile development processes.
• Webnographer is their tool that they are developing.
• Like the way they fit in a jolly to a conference with their ethnographic research?
• Important to use both digital and real life research.
• Important to get the team involved. Eat your own dog food.
• Book to read: Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology (740) of Knowledge
• Fight between Idealists and Utopians.
• Gurus are less likely to be open to change. They don’t want to be a novice again.
• People find lab testing boring. As time wears on, they lose interest.

Maria Cristina Lavazza - From shelves to mobile devices

I was particularly interested in this session because it’s not often that you hear about the IA of food. Given it is something that is so central in our lives, it is quite surprising I’ve never really seen it mentioned before.

From shelves to mobile devices, structures change - Euroia09 - M. C. Lavazza
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• Time in everyday life is a key factor.
• The future is cross-channel integration.
• Another mention of the bridge experience at EUROIA. This is where we are now.
• Spimes connect experiences of space and time.
• Grocery shows peculiar features: repetitive, widely used, visual and high touch, developed careful and pervasive marketing tools.
• 37% of grocery consumption is considered very poor in real life.
• Carrefour slowed down their online offerings as they weren’t sure of their success.
• Countries like Italy with a strong food culture have a very low uptake of e-groceries.
• Maybe mobile / web could enhance experience rather than replace it.
• How do we replicate the real life experience online? Tesco is a good example but it still doesn’t come close.
• 1 channel, 3 steps, n services.
• The pod JOYA looks good but what does it do?
• Easy Grocery is a 3d shopping experience. Looks like Second Life for shopping.
• RFID allows better tracking and overcomes issues with out of date barcodes.
• NFC is the RFID for mobile. Safeway allows people to scan products, find out more and add them to their shopping list, then send ahead their order.
• Biometric Payments - Paying by touch?
• Mobile brings intermediacy and urgency. Brings personal ownership. Best to let the customer dictate the appropriate time and place.
• A digital ecosystem, a combination of balance and coherence.
• We must move the experience out from it’s original habitat.

Martijn Klompenhouwer & Adam Cox (User Intelligence) - Web Analytics & User Experience

A lot of this was stating the obvious for me but it’s definitely great for anyone unfamiliar with combining these methods. The book sounds like it would be a great primer.

Combining Methods: Web Analytics and User Research
View more documents from User Intelligence.

• Book to read: The Handbook of Global User Experience Research
• What is web analytics - Where are they coming from, what are they doing and where and when they are leaving.
• Web analytics is often seen as boring, their implementation is not always correct, often end up with a huge chunk of data without adequate interpretation.
• User research has data from only a small number of people, it’s just a snapshot in time, it’s difficult to capture some behaviour and the setting can be artificial (in a lab etc).
• The two methodologies help each other. User research helps interpret the data, data can focus the research. Improving the pool of information strengthens your argument.
• The example of an unexpected landing page, is something WA can pick up which UR can investigate.
• The example of preparing a usability test. Created a scenario based on these entry paths (Google)
• The example of advanced functionalities. What are people using? There was actually no data on the features.
• The example of unintended user flows. People not using internal search of a website. User research noticed that the page offered no reasons to stay.
• Web analytics can validate findings. Only 2/10 test participants experienced this problem. Quantified this issue with the data of thousands of visitors.
• The combined methods can be used throughout the process. One report without conflicting information.
• Even basic analysis helps, although the tools do not magically provide the insights. You can measure the impact of your changes. We should have access to this data, as we have information of the how and why.

IA Shuffle - Specialists in Design, do they breed failure?

• With larger teams things get lost in translation.
• They just used the “D” word.

I had great plans for my final day in Denmark after EUROIA but in the end, I only managed a nice meal and a quick scoot around the Statens Museum for Kunst (or the National Gallery of Denmark). We’d managed to miss it last time round and I was gutted!

The entrance itself is quite imposing, with Chris Burden’s Flying Steamroller right out the front. It really doesn’t give away what lies right behind the building, which is a beautiful airy amalgamation of the old and the new.

I managed to check out both the temporary and permanent collections. The permanent collection is particularly epic, so if you are short on time, I’d stick to that. From modern to positively ancient, from painting to cutting edge installations, it has it all. It took me a good 3+ hours to even make a dent and I was going quickly.

I’d not had breakfast before I arrived at the gallery, so I had a coffee and a light brunch before I tackled the place. Luckily I had my trusty Copenhagen - DK Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guide to keep me occupied. It also has a decent section on the museum as well.

The food was amazing too! I had fish cakes, served with rye bread, a mustard dressing and a lovely fresh salad. All for around £10 (I can’t remember how much it was in Danish Kroner off the top of my head).

So there you have it, a great gallery in a beautiful building with an awesome cafe. A must stop if you are in Copenhagen.

Statens Museum for Kunst
Sølvgade 48-50
DK-1307 København K
Phone: +4533748494
http://www.smk.dk/en/