OZIA has come and gone for another year. It’s a great conference, not only for excellent selection of interesting speakers, but it was so damn comfortable and friendly. I love love love the round table set up. I know you can’t fit as many people into the room, but I just find that you get so damn tired after two days bundled up into rows balancing a note pad on your knee.

About my presentation
Huge Data, Little Screen is about mobile search. More specifically, assisting users to find content on your site through the browser, using what ever hand set you may have. It doesn’t talk about SEO or much on the more broad challenges of mobile phone development – there is plenty of that information out there. Instead this presentation focuses on the interaction models for search on mobile.

About OZIA

• OZIA09 Program
• Ruth Ellison did a great write up of all the speakers on her blog.
• See photos: Flickr OZIA09.
• What people said about it: #OZIA09 on twitter

Ok, so I’m going to speak at Oz-IA in October… and I’m definitely one of those slightly nervous types. The conference is being held at Star City Casino.

Lunch date advice:
“Oh well if you screw it up you can always drink and gamble afterwards… just don’t drink and gamble before”..

Although, maybe just one shot of tequila?

More advice:
Many have said that it is all in the preparation, just knowing your stuff really well and rehearsing.

Me: “I guess the problem for me is that I really don’t like repetition and revision. It’s a bit boring.”

@tinyavatar : “Well… what don’t you like more – repetition, or…”

Me: “looking like an idiot?”

Refreshing.

UX Australia’s Keynote – Alex Wright, Information Architect nytimes.com

A fly by history of information management. Beginning with how tribal cultures created categorical systems for understanding the world around them, through to the use of symbols, the first written word and the evolution of hypertext, a connected web and just who inspired Google’s pagerank.

“Tim would have launched the web in 1984, if he didn’t crash his hard drive… just goes to show you should back up your work. It took him 5 years to re-write it.”

Interesting tid-bits:

• Folk Taxonomy is not the same as a folksonomy.
  The former is the anthropological study of the classification / naming conventions by cultures for understanding the relationships between things such as animals and plants.  The latter is when people collaboratively tag stuff on computers.
• Jewelery was used as an information system by using symbols to indicate social standing and the wearers relationship to others in the community. The use of this system came about when people began living in larger groups than 5 – 15 or so. This occurred during the time Alex describes as the Ice Age Information Explosion, around 30-40,000 years ago.
• The first forms of handwriting we know of emerged around 5000 BC on Bullae, by the Sumerians. (Now the south of Iraq)
• Charles Cutter wrote an essay in 1883 imagining the library of 1983 called “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983” in which he predicted the library would have desks equiped with keyboards and little bits of wire connecting them to a catalog that would call up and display books for the user to read.
• Paul Otlet was the creator of the universal decimal system. He had imagined a sort of paper internet, where not only would a catalog asist people to find a book, but it revealed the content of the book and its relationship to other books as well as the history of the document’s use, who has read, refereneced etc. His work took place in 1934, much of it was lost to to World War 2. A video on his 1934 vision of an internet is below… truely amazing.

• Check out the memex, a large microfilm desk which is considered one of the conceptual precursors to the web from Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think (1945)

Vannevar Bush's Memex

• Eugene Garfield inventor of the Science Citation Index, which is a system for acknowledging the weight of links between various documents in the footnotes. It is considered that his work heavily influenced the founders of google and their page rank system.
• Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse also author of an eassy called Augmenting Human Intelect. In 1968 he delivered a presentation often refered to as “The Mother of All Demos.” This demo was the first to demonstrate the mouse, copy and paste, creation of files, folders, links, video conferencing and email etc.

Some of Alex’s references:

Glut, Alex Wright
- Mastering Information Throughout the Ages
- http://www.alexwright.org/glut/

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff
- What categories reveal about the mind.

Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger
- The Power of the New Digital Disorder
- http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

Facetag
- Working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool
- http://www.facetag.org/

Some references I found:
Alex speaking at Google Masterclass
- The Web That Wasn’t: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8&NR=1

Wikipedia’s Timeline of Hypertext Technology
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_hypertext_technology

Or how coloured texta’s changed my life…

User testing: Guerilla Methodologies
Over the years, I have become a strong advocate of “guerrilla” user testing. While your testing methodology needs to meet your objectives, the benefits of guerilla testing are obvious. Most importantly you can do more testing more often. This allows the UX designer to present iterations to users and gather feedback through out the process.

Ultimately I like to aim for 5-6 users based on Jakob Neilson’s research into the optimum number of user to test for. This is also a really nice number – because from a management perspective you can test this many users in one day. I like to aim for a 20-30 minute test once an hour. This gives me time to consolidate my notes, check my emails before the next participant arrives. But don’t be fooled even this kind of testing takes time to prepare, recruit users, agree with stakeholders on testing objectives, reporting and respective design iterations.

Why leaving my notes until tomorrow just didn’t work
Despite being a very good note taker, I was finding that by the end of the day, there was a lot of information to digest. Plus the overwhelming sense that I wanted to get as much of the information down while it was all fresh, before sleeping on it. However, we all know that user testing is a long and tiring day. So it became clear to me that there needed to be a better way to streamline this. It seemed clear to me that this would be to do some of the work as I went along.

Introducing the analysis wall
So I created an analysis wall which I would go to and work through after each session while the content was fresh in my mind. The analysis wall, pictured, should be out of the view of your user group. I hid mine behind a white board, but if you have a corridor, or separate meeting room available that would work well. As you can see I’ve simply printed out the interface onto separate A3 sheets with plenty of room to write.

User Testing Analysis Wall

Also importantly, coloured textas….
The first time I created my analysis wall, it became clear that my blue biro for all users was not particularly helpful. It became a mush. It also became really difficult to connect the user to the finding. However, when using coloured textas I was able to highlight that all of the dark green findings are from a 35 year old woman, with plenty of internet experience, but no mobile web experience and no iphone experience. This is a really important aspect of the finding.

Using coloured textas for documenting user findings on the analysis wall

Outcomes/ benefits
The first time I conducted the analysis this way – I was blown away by how much time it actually saved me in pulling together my report. Using the analysis wall had meant all I had left to do is pull the findings together, offer recommendations and report in. The time saving was considerable.

Secondly, I was blown away by how I was able to engage and illustrate the “big things” to the project team immediately by inviting them to come and check out the analysis wall that afternoon. While this doesn’t replace the need for documentation to share with stakeholders, it gives an immediate and powerful overview of the user feedback. In the past I had found that stakeholders tended to observe only one session, leaving them focused on the findings of that one session only.

Most importantly, what you end up with from the analysis wall is a visual illustration of each user’s feedback among the group, and you can easily see where the views of each user align and where they diverge.

Links:
Jakob Neilson: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
Andy Budd: Guerrilla Usability Testing
http://www.slideshare.net/andybudd/guerilla-usability-testing

Um, who would click on the +Ad link seen here?

Help me understand the UX design rationale. (other than appeasing business morons)

Cool clip: RT @pureandapplied (RT@seanwhelan) Flaming Lips covering Madonna’s greatest track – Borderline. http://tiny.cc/2mGUr

Finally, the Information Architecture I did with Max for Domain’s new search facility has launched!

This blog says its ok: but could be improved… Peter Ricci, does however, gather that it’s only a first phase roll out and that would be correct. I really like that he sparked a debate about the design and I’d have to agree on many fronts. It is a bit clunky but a step in the right direction.

I’ve written about faceted navigation on this blog before, and designed the MyCareer implementation which influenced tweaks to the Drive solution… so I became pretty experienced with the old faceted navigation pattern. I must say though, I think MyCareer is the cleanest implementation, although the need for multiple select with Domain proposed a more difficult design problem.