Never, ever, insult your users.

Unless your web site revolves around insults, and every error message consists of a purposefully engineered insult for humorous reasons, treating your users with disdain or disrespect is a huge no-no.

Earlier today I decided to sign up for reddit, the popular social bookmarking service. My experience has turned me right off the service. Here’s my rant:

1. The CAPTCHA

First, I clicked Submit Link, and was presented with an option to register.

I’m personally not a huge fan of CAPTCHAs, for many reasons (there are alternatives, but there’s no panacea), but I do empathise with why people put them in place. Unlike someone who has poor eyesight, I can usually read the letters, and it’s usually only once that I need to type them in, so we’ll let that slide for now. And at least the letters in reddit’s CAPTCHA are relatively easy to decipher compared with others that I’ve seen in use … right?

Wrong.

2. The Insult

Here’s what I was presented with after clicking the Create Account button:

Apparently those letters weren’t as easy to decipher as I thought! Here’s the clincher though — not only was my attempt at passing the CAPTCHA unsuccessful, but I was insulted for my trouble!

3. The Déjà vu

Once I’d managed to endure a second CAPTCHA and finally registered, I thought that would be the end of it. But no! I was immediately presented with another CAPTCHA that I needed to pass in order to actually submit a link.

After having already been insulted, this made me really grumpy. Proving that I’m a human is annoying and somewhat degrading, so getting me to jump through that hoop a second time is downright rude. But, like I said, at least the letters displayed in the CAPTCHA were reasonable easy to decipher, right? (Ahem!)

At this stage my only thought is “If I’m going to be asked to do this every time I submit a link, I’m going to be turned off the service pretty quickly … especially if I’m going to be insulted some more every time I get it wrong.”

4. The false accusation

Hooray, so I passed the CAPTCHA. But wait — I’ve been presented with another hurdle!

This infuriated me. Too fast? What does that mean? This was the first link I’d ever submitted. Was I meant to type more slowly or something?

I’m assuming this is a bug, and should only be presented if a user tries to submit too many links in a given period (which I didn’t). But that aside, even if this had been my second link, why should I be prevented from submitting something within a certain period if I’ve already proven I’m human?

Thoroughly peeved, I went off to lunch and left the submission page in my browser, to tackle when I got back. If I could be bothered.

5. More Insults

Back from lunch, and I’ve tried again — only to receive more insults for my trouble (note the CAPTCHA image changed after it rejected my attempt, hence the discrepancy below).

Argh! Apparently I still can’t read (cos you know, it’s clearly my fault … honestly, can anyone tell me what I’m missing with these damn CAPTCHAs?).

At this point, I decided to pack up and leave. I’d experienced enough friction (and been insulted and falsely accused too many times) to decide that reddit was not worth my trouble.

Am I being too harsh? Is it reasonable to pick on one site when no doubt there are plenty of usability issues that need addressing with our own site? (although we certainly don’t insult any of our customers!) Should I have approached reddit privately first before posting in a public forum about it? Maybe. I figured they’re big enough that they can probably take it.

To be honest, though, I’m more interested in hearing your horror stories with signup processes and CAPTCHAs … does it get any worse?

reddit have just announced that they’re open sourcing their code. Good news, I guess — now anyone can try to fix this terrible state of affairs for them…

Sifting through the notes I took last Friday, here are some snippets that I jotted down from another speaker whose talk I got a lot out of — Steve Baty, who spoke about Analysing User Research Data.

Steve managed to introduce a number of quite scary and complex looking statistical formulae, without having his audience drift off to sleep or turn and run for the exit. Being passionate about his chosen field and a charismatic presenter certainly helped matters. Perhaps it’s just because, with his glasses off, he looks like Charlie (David Krumholtz) from Numb3rs, which probably reinforced his credibility in my mind.

The takeaway that I got from Steve’s talk is that user research data is useless unless you do something with it, and that “something” needs to be well-defined before you collect it. He advocated

• defining the level of precision that you’ll be measuring up front
• taking into account the mean, variance and standard deviation of your sample data, and
• taking dual sets of data, so that you can compare them to determine whether deviations in your data are because of the design you’re testing, or because of the differences between users in your test group

Steve recommended approaches when interpreting data from A/B testing, task completion rates, time-to-completion and page view data, and his heavily scientific approach to usability testing reinforced the term “user science” (most of us are probably guilty of taking an approach that is more indicative of “user art”).

The podcasts and slides from both Web Directions UX and Web Directions Government will be appearing on the conference site’s blog soon. Go check them out!

It was a chilly start to the day with the temperature hovering just above zero degrees as we waited in the dining area of Old Parliament House, cups of coffee in hand, listening to people who’d attended the breakfast session tell us how good Jason Ryan’s presentation had been. Jason is currently Communications Manager at the State Services Commission in New Zealand and presented on “Government 2.0: The public management challenge”. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to meet Jason however I did talk with one of his colleagues at the State Services Commission Rowan Smith who is involved with the New Zealand Government Web Standards project.

At 9:00am John Allsopp opened the conference and talked about how the focus of these conferences has expanded and is no longer about accessibility and other technical low-level issues. Although these are still as relevant and important now as 5 years ago the adoption and integration of best practice in those areas has reached a point where can move onto the next big thing, which for this conference was eGovernment: how government communications and collaborates online internally, with other agencies and with the public and citizens as well as the delivery of services online. He emphasised that we, the participants and active members in the web industry, are key in driving that change and moving towards having two-way communication between the government and the citizens that government serves.

José Manuel Alonso from the W3C on eGovernment standards

The first presenter for the day was José Manuel Alonso, eGovernment Lead at the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), working out of the W3C’s office in Spain. José covered in detail many aspects of the technical challenges with deploying government services and information over the web. He quoted research that stated 29% of people would prefer to communicate with the government via the Internet but that more needs to be done, including improving the content and design of government websites.

José talked about the interoperability framework, open standards and the fact that even transferring data between systems using XML even if using similar or identical schema models may not be enough. He explained that in Europe there are some interlingual issues with differences of meaning and interpretation of words so even if organisations in separate countries agreed on a single XML schema that there may still be confusion or differences of interpretation of shared information.

He then discredited the idea of one-stop shops and cited a report that in 2007 searches for five top news stories in Google rated blogs higher than the New York Times, showing the change in how people find and access information. José also quoted Brian Humphrey and Ron Myers of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) who said “We can no longer afford to work at the speed of government. We have responsibilities to the public to move the information as quickly as possible so that they can make key decisions”. If you can’t do something useful with your data and information, put it somewhere where someone else can! He then listed a few examples of both organisation collaboration with third parties as well as third parties transforming and mashing up data and information, including the Library of Congress’ project with flickr, USPOT’s Peer Reviewed Prior Art project, FixMyStreet, Follow the Money, MapLight, OpenCongress, GovTrack and TheyWorkForYou (after José’s presentation I went and let him know that Australia now has a soon-to-be-launched version of TheyWorkForYou called OpenAustralia).

He finished off his presentation by looking at some of the challenges and opportunities with mash-ups and sharing data such as privacy and security, semantic technologies, linked data such as RSS and RDF and the importance of ensuring and guaranteeing the authority of data, and don’t forget about developing for the mobile platform!

The W3C has an eGovernment proposal out to its membership for review, which concluded today — the results of that review should be known within a couple of weeks and if (as is expected) the W3C membership give the green light to the W3C’s eGovernment initiative then an Interest Group will be set up shortly to start looking at this in more detail and look at establish standards around eGovernment.

Finally, José stated that eventually the “e” should be removed from eGovernment — once web services become an integral part of government and no longer treated as an optional add-on but a core component of how government operates, communicates and provides services. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Jenny Telford the Australian Bureau of Statistics on opening government data

The next presentation was by Jenny Telford, Director of Products and Services from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) who went through in some detail the work that the Bureau has done over the last few years and the transition from (can you believe it) charging people to access Census data online to the situation today where they have a number of tools, reports and data formats available with some quite powerful data extraction configuration capabilities.

One of the reporting functions available allows advanced users to access and aggregate individual “units” of Census data. Although no names and addresses are exposed the ability to aggregate data and compare with other sources could potentially allow people to get access to private information so they’ve had to employ some advanced algorithms to protect people’s privacy.

She admitted the Bureau still has a way to go with further opening data, increasing geospatial reporting capabilities and looking at their copyright and intellectual property (IP) protection policy. Currently there is a 500 cell limit on some reports as a rudimentary means of preventing large-scale collection of data — a measure she admits needs to be looked at.

Some of the questions asked after Jenny’s presentation included the culture shift of Generation Y and growing indifference about the disclosure of personal information and how this might be reflected in future Censuses, as well as questions about utilising communities to validate and augment information in the Bureau’s databases.

Ralph Douglas from GovDex

Ralph was next with a brief 25 minute presentation on GovDex (which I missed half of as I was talking to Amit from the W3C Canberra office about getting involved in the Consortium’s eGovernment Interest Group). GovDex is a government-run secure (classified as IN-CONFIDENCE, with plans to have a PROTECTED version by the end of the year) online collaboration tool which allows internal, cross-departmental and government-community groups to connect and share ideas online using a wiki facility and a member registration/information database. Unfortunately the presentation was a bit light-on and dry; I didn’t get much out of it, although the application looked like it could be useful.

Lisa Herrod from Scenario Seven on usability

Lisa Herrod’s presented on usability “More than skin deep” — a presentation I’d seen before at last year’s Web Directions South conference in Sydney, but nonetheless just as good the second time around with practical ideas on how to take a holistic approach to usability, how it ties into the code and accessibility, how automated accessibility compliance checks are not enough and the idea of an Accessibility User Profile as part of your persona development. Considering people with disabilities as a primary user group ensures their requirements are considered throughout the development of a website rather than a feeble and rushed attempt to retrofit a finished site for WCAG compliance at the end of the project.

Matthew Hodgson from SMSMT on social computing

Matthew was up next to talk about social computing in government, a really good presentation that started with a story of a project he was involved with some time ago to introduce a wiki in an unnamed government department. The aim was to enable collaboration between different sections within the department with an aim to address serious knowledge sharing and efficiency issues that the wiki implementation group he was involved with had identified. Unfortunately once senior management found out about the wiki and that sections of the department weren’t going through the proper channels to have information approved and signed-off for dissemination (even just internally) the wiki was shut down.

He likened some organisations to Darth Vader — the need for control, to lock down everything. Why would average people know what information they want? He also provided an interesting statistic: that 100 million hours of knowledge have gone into Wikipedia … the same number of hours that Americans collectively spend watching TV commercials every weekend! If only people put their time to better use in contributing to global knowledge through collaboration projects like Wikipedia or productive and problem-solving projects like Appropedia, the sustainability wiki.

People are social creatures — they need to have that social need met and there are ways of meeting that need in a work context (Matthew referred to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) — it’s not about wasting time socialising with friends. Communities and networks aren’t necessarily geographic — if they were then you would communicate face-to-face with those in your network (like we were at the conference). However for people who’s networks are based around an interest or otherwise then the fact that those networks function online doesn’t take away the fact there still needs to be a social element to those interactions.

Robert Hoekman Jr. from Miskeeto on usability and minimalist design

The final presentation for the day was by Robert Hoekman Jr. all the way from Phoenix, Arizona, who opened with a declaration that there are still a lot of awful sites out on the web — sites that make users feel dumb, unable to quickly and intuitively figure out how to use a web interface and how sites have all these features crammed into them that doesn’t make them better, it just makes them more complicated to use and learn.

His classic line was “Understand users, then ignore them” — going on to explain that you need to understand users’ needs but that people don’t always know what they want or say things that don’t truly represent how they might use something in a real-life situation. He used an example of a fast food chain that introduced a lo-carb cheeseburger which during user research sounded like it would be quite popular but when put on the menu didn’t do to well at all. Sites need to support an activity or range of activities, not the audience types. Your user research should determine the essential requirements of your users but not over-scrutinise your users and attempt to cater for the needs of every single possible user type.

Robert then talked about minimalist design — building only what is absolutely necessary: “Once you start putting real glass windows in your tree house, you’ve lost the point of what a tree house is meant to be”. Ever get sick of using a hammer? A hammer has a well-defined purpose and you are unlikely to pick up a hammer expecting it to do something else, which also means the hammer never disappoints because it does exactly what it was designed to do — and nothing more.

He referred to a couple of case studies including the WordPress home page and Squidoo website and how changes to the page design to make it simpler and more obvious had real, measurable effects on site usage.

He gave some further good one-liners of advice including “Turn beginners into intermediates. Immediately” (referring to how sites should be intuitive to use and immediately empower the user), “Design for uniformity, consistency and meaning” and “Reduce, reduce, reduce and refine” … including only what elements are necessary and having conscious decisions behind the placement of every aspect and feature on a page.

Finally …

John then took the stage to wrap up the conference, again thanking the sponsors of Web Directions South Government 2008 including SitePoint and the presenters. I asked a few people for their thoughts on the conference and the response was positive, although several said they were expecting more of a government focus — an opinion I shared, although it was hard to get out of anybody exactly what being more government focussed might entail. Afterwards I discussed this further with Maxine (one of the conference organisers) and concluded that people want more emphasis on the context of government; the particular and peculiar challenges of working in a strong hierarchy with decades of embedded top-heavy culture, procedure and culture, the wariness of innovation and especially social computing. This could be incorporated into the conference through more case studies of government projects and more presentations by people who actually have experience working inside government who can relate to the pain felt by those “on the inside” trying to do good work, building accessible and usable websites, applying best practice in design, user research and testing.

Of the four presentations I missed out on I had a chance to speak with Scott Gledhill and David Hayward afterwards to get a synopsis of their presentations. Scott’s was a follow-on from the article he had published in the Digital Web Magazine on Corporate Web Standards and the sad reality (or interesting challenge) of implementing web standards in an environment where time and efficiency are the priority. David presented on exploiting geospatial data, using a case study of the development of the NSW Government’s Spatial Information eXchange SIX Gateway site.

All in all though, another great Web Directions conference organised and run by John, Maxine and the crew which will inspire me (and I hope others) for many days to come.

For more information about the conference, program and speakers go to the Web Directions South Government 2008 website.

The core message of Andy’s presentation was that other industries have long understood the importance of a positive user experience, and the Web can learn a lot from this.

His presentation gave lots of tips, with plenty of rich examples:

1. First impressions count: Hoteliers understand this, hence good hotels offer smiling greeters in the lobby, chocolates and written notes on your pillow.
2. Attention to detail gets noticed: Apple are a company that realize the difference that attention to detail can make — consider the effort that has been put into the packaging of their products, which results in customers actually photographing the unboxing of their iPod. From the sound of the door closing on a new BMW to the rubbish bins at Disney theme parks being themed, people notice this stuff.
3. Personalisation and customisation matters: Starbucks allows its customers to customise their coffees, and the Nintendo Wii and other games let users create their own characters. Second life takes this to a new level to accommodate people’s needs to assert their individuality. For web developers, something as simple as welcoming people by using their first name can have an enormously positive impact on their experience on your site.
4. Dripfeed your information: Andy reference computer games as a huge source of inspiration for him, and showed a video of a combat game that taught players how to perform tasks incrementally. By gradually releasing information about how to perform tasks in digestable chunks, you can avoid overwhelming them. As an example, Basecamp displays optional videos for new features, and the Yahoo! site utilised a lightbox to explain new features when they launched their redesign last year.
5. Take care of the mundane: Andy referenced the hospitality industry heavily when making this point — the doorman hailing you a cab, the waiter filling your glass when you don’t notice, and the barmaid remembering your drink are all great examples of what makes a positive user experience in one moment, which can carry the user through to a positive experience throughout their entire visit. Web analogies include taking care of unnecessary tasks for users by prefilling them with intelligent defaults.
6. Make it fun: Andy showed an example of a drink package that had the text “Stop looking at my bottom” on the underside of the container. Little touches like this obviously require the right context and a bit of thought to do properly, but when they work they can make your users smile for the rest of the day. Another example was a personalized email from MOO, which read “Hi, I’m little MOO, the software that will be managing your order…” A banking site might not get away with being this cute, but it’s definitely possibly to be playful without being unprofessional.
7. Feedback is important: Poker machines are feedback-heavy — they emit a “bling” sound, and the cleverly crafted “ding” of coin as it hits the metal tray causes other punters to take notice, sit down and try using a machine themselves. Likewise, a button always lights up in an elevator — if it doesn’t then you might wonder whether the lift is broken or not! Status bars and other indicators to let a user know where in the process they are presently located help manage expectations and keep the user engaged.
8. Recommendations are powerful: last.fm is a good example of how recommending music to a user is a terrific service that really adds value. If you can provide contextual information to your users that taps into the knowledge that the entire user base has created, then your users will pay attention.
9. Users love competitions: By offering a competitive element — whether that be through scores and a leaderboard, or just by letting people “collect” things — badges, blog posts etc — your userbase will have an additional reason to return to your site and engage with your data. Leaderboards can have a negative effect too, of course — the digg leaderboard stopped being a useful indicator when those users at the top started posting quality over quantity, in order to maintain their position on the leaderboard.

These experiences can be plotted as a user experience curve — an actual graph that, while subjective, shows a user’s positive and negative experience over time. Andy mentioned Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as applied to the Web. The items in the hierarchy were:

1. functional
2. reliable
3. usable
4. convenient
5. pleasurable
6. meaningful

I agree with Andy’s comment that it is very rare that a user experience on the Web meets those levels of experience at the top of the hierarchy (pleasurable, meaningful experiences). He encouraged attendees to look to other industries, and other areas in the offline world for inspiration to bring positive user experiences to the Web.

Three members of Team SitePoint are wandering around at the conference, so feel free to come up and say hi!

Photo credit: Dave Shea

I’m not here to do that. The news is 5 days old and I have no intention of clogging up your RSS by regurgitating the same content… as important as it is.

What I do want to highlight is that there are a number of WCAG 2 requirements at risk.

It is important to note that some WCAG 2.0 requirements are at risk; that is, they may not be included if there are not sufficient implementations [By 30 June 2008].
- Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group mail list

Get Involved

I would urge you to take a look at each of the At Risk requirements to see if there are any relevant to your area of expertise that you are able to implement over the next couple of months. Alternatively, there may be someone with complementary skills that requires your assistance in implementing one of the at risk requirements.

The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to “test drive” WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented in Web sites. WAI encourages a broad range of Web sites and Web applications to use WCAG 2.0 at this stage, and share implementation experience.
- Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group mail list

As an example, I plan to submit an implementation for success criteria 1.2.6 Sign Language, I have expertise in this area but average video editing skills. In order to implement this effectively by the due date, I’ve had to find someone with video editing skills.

My plan is to provide and record Auslan interpreting at a couple of my upcoming conference presentations and then upload them to my site. Hopefully other local Deaf organisations will do the same.

Important Dates

So if you’re interested in a little bit of grass roots people power, jot down these dates, blog about it and see if you can get involved too.

23 May 2008 - Register your intent to provide implementations of WCAG 2 requirements.
30 June 2008 - Provide implementation experience to the WAI and/or comments on barrier to adoption of requirements.

Relevant Links

And finally, if you want to get involved, you may find these links helpful:

• Instructions for Implementors
• WCAG 2 Candidate Recommendation Implementation form
• Implementation Information Form

Let us know if you submit and implementation to WAI and we’ll talk about it some more here.

For the most part seminars and industry nights hosted by the Mobile Monday guys or AIMIA focus on marketing, advertising, gaming and identifying ways of further monetising the mobile industry. BORING. I’ve even stopped attending the Mobile Monday events because they appear to have such little interest in promoting any discussion around best practices or mobile accessibility.

Given that these are the two most prominent Australian industry groups hosting discussions on mobile technology at the moment, it seems pretty obvious that there’s little interest in this area for either group. Even the Web Standards Group has had very few mobile related events.

Mobile Means Mobility

Mobile use is at an all time high globally and it offers affordable access to the web for a huge proportion of people including many users with disabilities. It’s time for industry groups to get back on track and deliver informative sessions on how we can produce accessible, usable web content.

The W3C WAI Mobile pages provide links to a couple of documents that deal with mobile web accessibility and how we can better design and develop mobile sites for users with disabilities:

• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a guide for making a Web site accessible to people with disabilities.
• The Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) is a guide for making a Web site usable from a mobile device.

There is also a great deal of information over at the Mobile Web Initiative Best Practices Working Group blog (MWI BPWG).

The Open Letter Initiative

This morning via my RSS I came across an article on a favourite blog of mine by iheni on The Open Letter Initiative (you may also know Henny from the Web Access Centre blog). The Open Letter Initiative, which commenced in November 2007, was spurred by Google’s announcement of the open mobile platform Android. The letter reads:

This open letter is addressed to companies from the mobile technologie (sic) sector, developers, research scientists, organisations, politicians and all kinds of disseminators (sic)as well. The open letter informs about the perfect mobile device for blind persons, screen reader software for mobile platforms, mobile internet access, satellite navigation for blind pedestrians, mobile access to map data, accuracy of GPS receivers, self-help, commonalities of blindness and dyslexia/illiteracy, accessibility, corporate responsibility, proposals for Nokia’s and Google’s public relations and the importance of free software and affordable cell phones for the many blind people from developing or newly industrializing countries.

What Do We Want? Discussion! When Do We Want It? Now!

What I’d really like to see is a lot more information presented by web community groups and industry nights that focus on accessibility issues for the mobile web. I don’t give a toss about what the latest Nokia is, or what cool data plan 3 is offering at the moment. I want presentations, discussions and tutorials. I want to hear real people talking about their experiences and I want us to do it now.

Of course the groups I’ve mentioned here are all Australian, and this is not an issue specific to us. Are other countries addressing this better than we are? I’d say so… but how?

Getting Started

Being from Australia means that I’m most aware of the local Australian industry groups you might contact here. But there are no doubt many more in your local area too. For those of you outside Australia, what are the best industry groups to contact? Let us know.

If you’re in Australia, you can contact any of the following organisations and tell them you want to see more discussion around mobile web accessibility:

• AIMIA
• Australian Web Industry Association
• Mobile Monday Local chapters listing
• WIPA
• WSG

All it takes is for us, the community, to speak more loudly. Contact the industry groups you’re involved with and tell them you want to know more. Better still, put something together and present it yourself. But don’t forget to let me know… I want to come along and see it!

Like many others, I didn’t really get the relevance of Twitter. To some extent I thought it was a prime display of insecurity via the Look at Me channel. As someone who really struggled with the decision of whether or not I should even enable comments on my blog, Twitter was a real challenge.

I saw it as a one-on-one activity (i.e. person - device) rather than a one-to-many relationship via the device. Face to face conversations were interrupted by regular mobile beeps alerting a DM (not a Deep and Meaningful, but rather a Direct Message), and in one instance I was even woken up at 3am no less, by a message alert on my partners phone. Needless to say, it didn’t help the cause.

Within six months though, I’d started using Twitter in a sort of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em response. I started to like it and even got to know some people better than before.

Getting a Second Life

Then one day about eight months ago, via a chance meeting in Second Life, I met a fine chap by the name of Hugo Sharp. Hugo and I got chatting as I stopped to alleviate a case of flight induced kinetosis. While he was having incredible trouble figuring out how to sit on a seat, I felt like I was about to vomit on my desk. Nice way to meet someone for the first time. So after quickly establishing that I had no idea how to help him sit, we got chatting about things in our first life, connected on Twitter and most likely Googled the bejesus out of each other.

The interesting thing to come out of that short conversation was that Hugo had a keen interest in wine, hosted The Oz Wine Show podcast and was close to launching a new Australian wine site, Project Vino. As a wine collector, this all sounded pretty interesting and I was thrilled that there was something being launched in Australia.

At that point I’d been a member of Corkd for quite some time, but there’s just so much they’re not doing with the site. For me, wine is about sharing, being social and appreciating the subtleties of each new bottle you open. Unfortunately there’s no real sense of community on Corkd. In fact, there’s not much that draws me there except a desire to keep track of my cellar, and even that could be done so much better. Even when I’m cataloguing my cellar, I can’t help noticing usability flaws and other areas for improvement.

Where’s that drink?

So I guess you could say Twitter’s turning me to drink. Tomorrow night, April 30th, 7:00pm AEST, will see the launch of the world’s first ever Twitter wine tasting.

Twelve prominent Australian Twitter users will take part in an evolutionary new twist on the traditional wine tasting format. What separates this wine tasting is that the participants could be anywhere in the world. They could be in front of their computer at home or on their mobile phone in middle of the Sturt Desert. All will be connected in real-time however by the latest and greatest online communication tool - Twitter.

- Project Vino

Now while I’m far from a ‘prominent Australian Twitter user’, I am on there occasionally and I do like a nice glass of wine.

But what’s the point of it all?

Part real life user testing, part marketing, part social experiment. I’ll be doing something I like (wine tasting) with people I probably wouldn’t have been able to meet up with all on the one night. Twitter is simply a tool that’s allowing us to connect as a group in real time, with an ability to broadcast to a much larger audience. So whether it’s for the wine, the technology or the experience, it’s going to be different, that’s for sure. And I’m anticipating a great user experience!

So if you’re into wine, Twitter, or just want to observe an online community participating in a real time physical event, tune into @ProjectVino via Summize on April 30 and pour yourself a glass too.

Event Details

Twitter Wine Tasting 1 – Kirrihill Wines
April 30, 2008
First wine: 7:00pm AEST
Second wine: 7:15pm AEST
Third wine: 7:30pm AEST
@projectvino on Twitter / Sumarize

The IxDA is a member-supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of more than 1,500 members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues.

Now, as Michael Jackson once said: “I’m a lurker, not a writer”.. OK well maybe that was me. But all the same, there’s been a really good discussion going on over the last few days that I’ve been watching with great interest. List members have been posting ‘The One Book’ they’d recommend to Engineering Management folk (or anyone else for that matter, I’d venture).

So without further ado, here’s a summary of some great reading on User Experience, Usability, and Interaction Design:

• The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
• Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, Ellen Isaacs & Alan Walendowski
• Communicating Design, Dan Brown
• The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
• Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
• Thoughts on Interaction Design, Jon Kolko
• Don’t Make Me Think (sample chapter), Steve Krug
• Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss
• A Designer’s Art, Paul Rand
• Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
• The Universal Principles of Design, William Lidwell, Kristina Holden & Jill Butler
• Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction, Sharp, Rogers & Preece
• Designing the obvious (pdf sample chapter) Robert Hoekman, jr.

Now it’s pretty likely that none of these are going to make Oprah’s book club for 2008, but don’t let that stop you!

So what’s the ‘One Book’ you’d recommend to User Experience newbies? And which one’s your fave?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.

This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.

Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.

For instance, when I was in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago visiting family, I took a drive around the Adelaide Hills. Cruising along the freeway at 120 kms/hr, I passed the sign in the picture on the right. The first thing that popped into my head was “What the heck does that mean?”

I’m not sure what it’s like in your part of the world, but when I was last living in Adelaide, South Australia, the term arrester bed definitely wasn’t common language.

(I was half expecting to see an intimidating king-size mattress in full police uniform step out from the bushes and order me to pull over.)

The second thing that popped into my head — and this is possibly an indication that I spend far too much time online — was this:

“Imagine if something similarly obscure was used to describe a tab on a web site. No-one would know what the text linked to!”

Steve Krug wrote about this very concept — that we should think of our users as driving by in a car, and provide them with navigation labels that are quick to digest. However it’s obvious that we shouldn’t use every billboard that we come across as inspiration.

The moral of this story is that, when deciding upon the words to use for your navigation items, it’s really important to use language that your audience knows and understands immediately, without them having to delve deep into the limits of their vocabulary and figure it out. Exactly what that language is depends on your site and your audience — if your site is for teens, then it may be perfectly acceptable to call the link for your Contact Us page “Write Us, Yo”. For most sites, however, you’re better off sticking with the much safer Contact or Contact Us.

PS. I found out later that an arrester bed is in fact an emergency ramp, available for drivers of vehicles (usually trucks) whose brakes have failed. The ramp provides a safer way of coming to a stop than the barrier gate or a tree. It may be an American term; personally, I’d have preferred to see it called “Emergency Safety Ramp”. In the heat of the moment, that’s going to require less brain power on the driver’s behalf, thus potentially saving more lives.