Worldwide events

• An event apart August 18-19, 2008
• UX Intensive - June 16-19, 2008
• UX Week August 12-15

I did have more events listed, however this post was hacked. arr. So Annoying. Once I have secured the site I”ll add the rest of the events I had listed. Thanks

We’ve all come across some sites that have frustrated us, and I’m sure you’ve recounted this to your friends. Maybe you’ve even gone as far as not using that site again if it’s frustrated you that much. That’s all well and good if there’s an alternative available, and even then it might not be any easier to use.

This post was motivated by some recent use of an Apple store site and the Transport for London site. It just so happens that in both cases I have had some bad user experiences with them and I have no alternative site to turn to in hope of a easier life! What a shame! What makes it more annoying is that with just a few simple tweaks, these issues could be resolved.

What’s got my goat with the Apple site?

Your online reserve system for the Genius bar! Come on Apple, you do everything else on your site so well, please think about changing how people can book a place at the genius bar… My scenario:

I have a problem with my MacBook Pro and I want to book an appointment at the Genius bar in the Apple Regent street store, London.

1 - I hit ‘Reserve�? under the genius bar heading.

2 - I am presented with a screen asking me if I am a guest or member. “Hmm… Guest or member… what’s the difference? I guess I am a guest?�? So I click that.

3 - I am now presented with a Sign in screen. “I have to sign in?�? I read the information under the sign in heading. “Please sign in with your name and email address. Also please include a phone number where you may be reached regarding your reservation.�? “ok, I guess this makes sense�?. So I fill in my details.

4 - Now I am presented with 3 options… “Technical Support / Genius bar�?, “Personal Shopping�? and “Workshops�?. Well now I am thinking “Didn’t I already make this choice?�? So I click Technical support anyway.

5 - Now am being asked which product I need help with. I chose Mac.

6 - Now it asks me to choose a day. Now depending how lucky you are; you get either a day where you can click and see available times, or you get no days available!

I have been going through these steps frequently for the last 3 weeks trying to book a convenient time. I’ve had no luck so far and have had to endure this back to front & unnecessarily long process with no appointment made yet!

Suggestions for improvements:

Once I have selected that I want to book an appointment at the genius bar, you should be presented with the available times that you can book. Once you have chosen an available time, you should then proceed to give more details and secure that booking.

The steps could look more like this

1 – Reserve genius bar
2 – Calendar of dates (If no dates, provide details on alternatives, ie, can you book by phone? Do you have to wait until the next dates are released? When is this? Etc. )
3 – Register details along with which product you need help with
4 – Confirm booking

These steps ask for the same information, just in a more useful order and only once. I think Apple have forgotten to consider that the user may not be able to complete this task first time round. It’s very possible you won’t be shown a date and time that is convenient, if any date at all. So streamlining this process as much as possible is essential to making it a useful tool. Apple, please reconsider this design. At the very least, once you have taken my details, save them so when I want to check times again I can go a little faster.

Onto managing my Oyster card

I live and work in London and I want to manage my Oyster card on a monthly basis (it was weekly not long ago!). In my eyes I am a power user and I feel that I represent a large portion of the London Oyster card internet users! As a daily tube user I usually want to do one of two things when I visit the Transport for London website.

1 – Check a route for times and changes
2 – Log in to my oyster and top up my card

The first one is nicely addresses on the homepage with this handy search box:

The second one I always have to fight for. I never remember how I got to the login page on my last visit. So I start to quickly scan the page and look for the first thing that suggests I will be able to log in. Scan, scan, scan… I can’t see the word “log in: or “sign in” anywhere. I see the Oyster card image, so I just click that hoping I will come closer to my goal.

Nothing happens… If you look closer the url has changed to https://oyster.tfl.gov.uk/oyster/entry.do but nothing new on this page.

Arr, already… I am annoyed.

So, I scan some more and try to concentrate. I must be missing something surely? It’s my fault, I am stupid! So I decided to try the Tickets button at the top of the page; after all that’s what I want isn’t it? To renew my monthly tube ticket.

I am now on a page with more Oyster information. I must be on the right track now! Scan, scan, scan and still no login or sign in. [Pulls hair out] By this time I am really annoyed and decide I may as well do it at the station!

This is a real dead end and if it wasn’t for the fact I have to travel on the Tube and buses I would never return to this site. I usually come back and struggle on because I forget to do it at the station, or there is a queue. But even so, managing my Oyster card at the station is not something I want to do, so I battle on with the TFL site. (For the time being)

Currently, to get to the login page, you need to click “Top up pay as you go�?. What a limited label. I wanted to renew my Oyster monthly season ticket, so I was not looking for anything to do with Pay as you go. Why not just “Sign into Oyster account”?

It seems the TFL Have failed at addressing the thousands of people that return to the site to log in and GIVE THEM MONEY! Why there is not a sign in area on the homepage directly, I do not know. They could very easily do something like this to bring this key returning user task onto the homepage:

Click to enlarge:

I think it is time the TFL realigned the content on the homepage and though little bit more about their terminology throughout the site. It is very much geared towards educating and encouraging people to have an Oyster card. Now there are many people who own an Oyster and they need to cater for people who want quick access to their account. Another point to note is the complex password system they have in place forcing you to create a password that is impossible to remember and resulting in you forgetting it every time, or having to have it written down somewhere! Which totally defeats the object!

I hope anyone reading this has learned some lessons on how not to approach a problem and how to think about your users goals. Putting sets of redundant screens in front of them ad setting them up for a failure 90% down the process is a sure way to frustrate users and turn them away. Even if you are the only website in your field!

[end rant]

It’s been a long time since my poor blog received any attention. I’m sorry blog… you’ve been neglected… so neglected that today I had to upgrade you because you’d been hacked into. And worst of all; I hadn’t noticed! Oops… So here’s a bit of advice for any Wordpress users on version 2.2, UPGRADE! I was attacked by someone/thing that could access my posts and add malicious code. eek! Yuk! Luckily that’s all fixed now. I should make more of an effort to stay on top of updates and I think I have learnt my lesson.

But I’ve had good excuse for neglecting the blog! I have moved to the great city of London and joined the team at Snow Valley and have been working hard with them for the last 5 months. It’s gone extremely fast and I’ve already worked on numerous exciting projects, some of which I can’t wait to talk about soon! The folk at Snow Valley are packed with knowledge and it’s great to be surrounded by people who seem to each have a specialism. The latest two projects Snow Valley have been working hard on are Majestic wines and mfi. I’ll update you on more new sites as and when I can. If you interested you can always check out the Snow Patrol blog.
Signing off and I’ll be back soon. I promise!

I am happy to say three of my latest projects in collaboration with Jupiter Design have gone live!

1. Bournston - a property development specialist
2. Freeth Cartwright - a regional law firm
3. Weatherbys Bank - offering a full range of banking services

A friend of mine pointed Quicksilver out to me about 2-3 months ago. It’s a nifty application for Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger) that extends the operating system by giving you quick keyboard control to an uncountable quantity of commands and actions. And this is nothing new boys and girls, if the forums are right, it looks like this has been around since April 2003! Want to send an image attachment via email to someone? Don’t open mail and send it manually, do it with Quicksilver in a few seconds! Break free of the mouse and get more actions and control from your keyboard.

To really understand and appreciate what Quicksilver can do, you need to see it in action. I would recommend watching this quicktime movie by the Apple blog to get you started.

If you’re impressed by what you see, you can download and quickly install Quicksilver and then I would watch another movie by Stephen from inserttitleblog who shows you how to set it up so you can get the most benefits from it and swiftly start learning how this clever tool can really help speed up your work flow. Once you start using it you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it and why it doesn’t come as default on the Mac OS X!

There are a lot of resources all over the net and Quicksilver is becoming more known slowly but surely. I wanted to post this article to spread the word and help Quicksilver get the recognition it deserves.

If you own or use a Mac, give Quicksilver a go and see how you get on. It took me a few days to remember to use it and break some old habits, but now I find myself typing and tabbing my way through tasks that I would usually use my mouse to do and spend a bit more time doing it. I hope you find it as intuitive as I and so many others do.

This is good news, isn’t it? Safari is a pretty good browser as it stands, so I am expecting some updated behind the scenes stuff (such as security and performance) and some new CSS support is always welcome (Multi-column support, yes please). But what I didn’t expect to hear was they are releasing it for Windows and there is a new feature called “Resizable text fields”… (Yes this is all news to me!)

Maybe the text field you’re typing in is a bit too small to read. Or maybe you just have a lot to say. Either way, Safari lets you resize text fields on any website, just by grabbing the corner of the field. Resize a field and the web page re-flows to make room.

I am a bit suspect about how this is going to work… I just have visions of websites breaking and becoming unusable and confusing the user. I don’t have visions of this being a seamless “click”, “drag”, “arrh that’s better”. I can see this being one more thing that developers have to deal with/design for and clients/users becoming confused when it breaks the design of a site. I really hope this feature has been well tested and I am proved wrong. Of course, if websites are designed properly they should either offer the resize on the site (will this cause conflicts for sites that do offer this client-side??) or be a sufficient size in the first place. I did a quick Google to see if I could find some more info on this, and Macworld have a video of this feature in action. It would appear I have nothing to worry about, but I am holding my breath until I have a go myself.

Safari on Windows… Well, from a non-web developer point of view; great! Another choice for users and competitor for Microsoft. This is favorable news. However, I do wonder how well received it will be by Windows users. Will the “Safari on windows” market share be advanced users only? People who are interested in using or exploring how they access the internet? It will be intriguing to see how it does in the ranks in the months to come after it’s official release.

What about testing? That’s my next question, and it is the main reason I have not installed Safari 3 beta yet. Can we run both versions of Safari side-by-side? Is this just another huge can of worms for us web developers? Questions, questions, questions… Some more Googling on this one and I couldn’t find a solution to this yet. Some people have tried running 2 alongside 3 and it appears to work. However Mac OS X will use the new version of Webkit that ships with Safari 3, so that’s no good. Has anyone found a way around this yet?

Enough of what sounds like my negative take on Safari 3. On a good note, there are some very useful additions, that Roger Johansson goes into more detail about on his website. I would like to applaud the revamped “on page search” and highlighting. (A success in Firefox!) Also, the ability to drag a tab out into it’s own window is cool! I tried this in Firefox once, hoping it would detach into it’s own window and I just ended up with a shortcut on my desktop to the url!

Watch out for the official release of Safari 3 and lets hope and pray we can test simultaneously on both versions with no pain! I know I’ll be developing with Safari 3 in mind starting… as soon as I can get my hands on it with Safari 2 still running.

I have recently developed a food blog for my other passion in life; cooking. There have been a few times where I really wanted to post food things on here! But I am trying to keep this blog, web topics only… So now I can present you with… food.zucchetti.co.uk! The blog about food, food and more food.

So there you’ll find me posting recipes for home made delights and probably pics of my food outings to restaurants and any kind of eatery.

It was also another chance to play about with a simple Wordpress template and try a site done in em’s to scale nicely. The photos were important to me on this site, that’s why they are so big! I designed the site so the photos scale with the whole layout. Change the font size and you’ll see what I mean.

Pop on over and see what you think. I hope you enjoy some of the recipes I post on there.

I am on the search for where to live in London and I wanted to get a rough idea which areas in London are more crime ridden than the next! I typed into Google, “crime maps London” and I came across this little beauty which was exactly what I was after.

A clever mashup example, which uses Yahoo maps, data from Upmystreet.com and Jibble.org. Load up “Where should I live” which shows you a map of London. Choose what you’re interested in seeing from the right hand menu and watch a colour overlay load over the map, illustrating high and low densities of what you chose!

I thought it was pretty fast considering how much information it had to pull in. My only comment here would be to add a loading message somewhere. Because I did not have my browser open fully and I was not sure if anything was happening at first, and I missed the appearance of the High and Low legend bar at the bottom of the page.

I really do hope you guys continue the project. I can see much more being done with this; it’s very useful.

Some things to consider:

1. Adding a location search box for quickly finding places in London. I would have liked to type “Highgate” and then the map would zoom to this area and I can then choose what I want to see in this area, crime or population etc.
2. A clear/toggle button. Once an overlay is on, I can’t turn it off without reloading the page.
3. More detailed crime list, Types of crimes with the date of which year the figures are coming from. Maybe even choose from the past 3 years to see how/if the rate has changed.
4. Put a loading bar or alert somewhere and don’t rely on the appearance of the bar at the bottom as not everyone will see it.

Has anyone else seen anything like this for the London area? This has already been a big help for me, as looking through a chart of numbers and trying to figure out which place is better or worse… well it’s no fun.

Thanks for this neat innovation.

I was on the wine library TV a few days ago and whilst watching “90 Point Wine Values - Episode #248” and I saw these small circles on the video time line. I curiously hovered over them and was surprised when a little bubble of information popped up. Oh “how cute” I thought. So I clicked it and nothing happened, I clicked a few more times and then the video jumped to a new part of the clip. Not sure why the first time I clicked it didn’t work, my connection was slow? Who knows. Wanting to know more about this new idea for tagging video I clicked through to Viddler whose logo appeared in the bottom right corner of the video player.

I had a nosy in the learn more section and clicked “Tag specific moments within a video“. As the demo talked about tagging and showed what else the video player offered, such as comments on particular tags and the option to embed in your web page, I instantly started thinking about all the videos I had taken on my camera and wanted to share! Why didn’t I feel like this when I first looked at YouTube? I think as I browsed more through Viddler, I felt that this was more personal than YouTube. I am not one for posting and sharing all my pics and videos to the world, so I liked how Viddler sold it more on sharing video with who you want, not the whole world. (Also, I think it’s prettier than YouTube.)

So at this point, I fancied giving it a go! So, I signed up & in under a minute I was logged in with an account and was ready to upload a video!

I chose a video and uploaded it via the simple interface and waited while the progress bar whizzed by. Then I clicked the “encode” tab, and it was already encoding the video for me. By the time I wrote this sentence and took a apple shift 4 screen grab (I was writing this exactly as I was processing the video by the way) the video was encoded! I clicked the “completed” tab and it showed my video in a list.

I clicked on “view this” and there was my video! Pretty simple process. I watched it through to check it and then went on to add some tags.

I found it a bit hard work pin pointing the exact places I wanted the tags to go. I tried to add the tag “San Francisco” but as this is 2 words it treated them as 2 tags. It would be handy if there was a way to define if a tag was 2 words like i this case. So I hyphenated it. Not sure if that was the right thing to do, but I didn’t want 2 tags of “San” and “Francisco“.

I tried to move the tag once I watched it back as I felt it wasn’t exactly where I wanted it. First, I tried dragging the tag. No luck. I hovered over and clicked a few more places to see if I could move the tag, but I couldn’t. That’s a shame really! So, I went on to add another tag further into the video. I did this with no real problem, but I did end up deleting tags and popping them in again because I couldn’t move them.

I couldn’t find delete the tag button straight away either. It was hidden in the toolbar at the top where you had other buttons such as, “email this“, “get link” and “embed“. It would be nice to add this to the bottom toolbar where the tags pop up in the timeline. Most of the tag actions are there and it’s the only one that is missing.

Overall experience… pretty good! I muddled my way through the parts that were not obvious with not too much bother, but I would get frustrated with a few things if I was uploading and tagging videos more frequently. Here’s the 3 things I would like to see viddler improve on:

• A way to define a tag that has 2 words, such as San Francisco.
• The ability to move the tag once you have placed it on the time line.
• Add “Delete tag” button to the bottom toolbar where you add a comment, add a tag, share and add a video response.

Voila! My video is uploaded and now tagged in three places! Want to see the video for yourself? Here it is. If you have a web cam I would love to see how the video response works!
Oh, and one other thing… I did embed this video into this post, but it invalidated my code.

I was really looking forward to this @media. Firstly, because I was in the United States and secondly after working on my own for the last few months, I wanted some fellow web company. It didn’t disappoint; I came away feeling really empowered and inspired! I wish I could bottle up that feeling and when I have a bad day, take that bottle and help myself to a dose. So here’s my thoughts and experiences from the last few days. Hopefully for those of you who couldn’t make it, there are loads of things to get you thinking and links off to places.

Day one

I made my way over to the Westin Hotel on Third at 8:30am to get singed in and hopefully get a cuppa down my neck before the show began.

I sat myself down on the back row of the audience (they had tables this year, great idea! Looked like a lecture room) and was delighted to see that the whole row was full of ladies! Yes it seemed to me that there were more females present here, than at the London counterpart.

Jesse James Garrett took the stage to deliver – “Beyond Ajax“. As better described by Jeremy Keith, there was a slight attire problem and which was quickly resolved and then Jesse soldiered to give an inspiring presentation. I was impressed, as I would have been totally thrown off course by that mishap! Well handled. The most interesting aspect for me was Jesse explaining the research done on our cognitive processes when we interact with technology. I can’t remember the source of this information, however it was very interesting. I hope Jesse posts his slides up somewhere or talks about this online soon.

Molly chose a subject that I was surprised to see on the bill, web browsers. “The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All” I guess that says it all really… that’s why Molly probably chose this subject area. I’ll admit, I am as ignorant as the next web designer/developer in the sense that I have moaned and screamed about them not supporting “x” or behaving like “y”. Yet I hadn’t seriously thought I should try and dig a little deeper into how the browser works. Molly showed a good overview of browsers and their basic under the hood components. She also illustrated the problems faced by browser teams when it comes to deciding on how to support new features and the impact it can have to how the browser currently behaves. I took a lot away to think about on this one.

Dan Cederholm (I’ve always loved the simple bits site, cute design!) presented “Interface Design Juggling“. For me his most interesting points were on typography. He suggested some simple yet effective typography considerations that can add a touch of class and elegance to any web design. I was pleased to hear that Richard Rutter is working on a “typography for the webâ€? site where you can learn some typography theory and hands on techniques.

Cameron Adams aka The man in Blue, exhibited his skills in flexible layouts in a presentation called “Dynamic interfacesâ€?. It was interesting to see how Cameron talked about offering the user various levels of customisation (for example: myspace offers extensive customisation features and Flickr offers limited changes through predefined templates) and how this offering needs to tie in with the users goals. How much customisation does the user really need? Will they benefit from being able to change the layout? These are the questions you want to ask yourself when offering dynamic layouts.

Richard Ishida was here to tell us about “Designing for international users: practical tips“. Apart from wow’ing the crowd with his linguistic talents of Spanish and Russian to name but a few, he also filed us in on the potential problems we could run into when building a site that could be translated or modified for use in other countries. His tips and tricks ranged from syntax issues to date format problems. What does this date translate to in your country?

01/02/07

Well to me it means 1 Feb 2007, but in the US it means 2 Jan 2007. Now go and investigate what that means to a country in the east… See what issues you could run into here? For more information on this subject take a look at Richards page on the W3C.

Jeremy Keith presented a fab show as I expected on “Bulletproof Ajax“. Jeremy’s main messages here were, build for Ajax from the start and implement it at the end, this aids degradability and optimum access for all users. Keep processing on the server, don’t be tempted to let the browser handle it. It might seem ok to do so, but it’s not the browser’s role. Keep in mind the layers of separation we have all been striving for.

• Structure
• Presentation
• Behaviour

For pages full of Jeremy’s practical tips, buy his book, Bulletproof Ajax.

The end of day one’s sessions is near and Jeffery Veen comes on stage with his energetic charisma to really get us going, “Designing the next generation of web apps“. He presented a wide range of issues, from why design is hard (”fear” of being left behind and the “must haves” of web) to… developing experiences that are based on patterns that are inherent in what we already do that empowers users to accomplish their goals (Pretty much quoted directly from his slides!). Jeffery also talked about patterns in data and how we can think about illustrating them more intuitively. I was privileged to see this part of the show last year in London. It was good to see it in action again.

We all went off the Minna gallery for the @media party. It was a chance to speak to people and wind down.

I then made the mistake of eating at The Stinking Rose… I am sure everyone the next day was loving me!

Day two

Joe Clark kicked off day two with “When accessibility is not your problem“. Joe pointed out some interesting areas on when we shouldn’t have to be worrying about accessibility issues, such as font sizes and alternate style sheets. Can’t this be dealt with by the browser/user agent? I hope Joe posts his slides somewhere soon. I want to flick through this presentation again.

Cameron Moll presented “Designing for communication“. Apart from how nicely designed his actual presentation slides were, he explained how to effectively design and communicate by considering various factors such as “…eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak” (Hans Hoffman), designing for content and encouraging participation. I really wish I could sum up more of what Cameron said, but you really had to be there to witness his speech that go along with the slides. Podcast anyone? Although the slides are worth a look as he suggests some extra reading.

Dan Webb presented “The mysteries of Javascript-Fu“. Dan dished out some tips and tricks for the pro javascripter and also discussed libraries and toolkits that are readily available on the web. Most of it went over my head, so I can’t comment too much on this one. Pop over to his site for more resources.

Andy Clarke presented “Royale with Cheese“. His angle this year was looking at worldwide web design and posed questions such as “are we heading towards a globalised web style“? He backed this up by showing us sites that are you can find locally tailored for other countries. Such as Yahoo Japan, Yahoo Korea and Honda Japan. Are we suffering from globalisation and losing cultural styles due to designers looking to western web design to aspire to or to take their inspiration from? What about looking at their culture and beliefs for motivation? Where do you look for new ideas? Is there a risk that western ideas are becoming too dominant and as a result constraining web creativity? Andy highlighted some deep thinking in this area and also presented some excellent research that he has composed. I would love Andy to do something more with this research and get more people involved in this topic. Will you take you research anywhere Andy?

Tantek Çelik talked about “Micorformats, the building blocks, and you“. What can I say, this was a great overview of the subject with some neat examples of how you can be using microformats in your projects today. Tantek also introduced POSH, which isn’t a new fangled technology. It’s an acronym that’s easy to remember and maybe the name will get it some well deserved attention. We all know there are still many sites working in a real unposhly manner. For the full range of microformats currently available and in development visit microformats.org or buy the book!

@media was wrapped up by a hot topics panel where we were asked to scribble down our questions and they would pick some to answer.

Some interesting questions were raised and the main one that stuck in my head was “who should we be wary of now Microsoft are getting their act together with IE“. (Not sure how it was phrased exactly, but you get my meaning, who’s the bad kid(s) on the block?) One of the answers was the CMS vendors. Yeah, the ones who charge the earth and spit out messy code, ones that are not promoting semantic coding standards and separation of content/presentation and behavior. It seems the more expensive the CMS the worse it is. The advice from the panel was to get blogging about this. Let’s hope the people making the decisions will do some research before purchase and just maybe they will read your review about why it’s not a good system or what problems it has. What would be super is if this also pushed the CMS vendors to fix these issues! Now that would be the cherry on top.

Well, I could go on and on, but I’ll wrap up this long report by saying thanks to all the lovely people I met and chatted with. For me, meeting people is a huge part of the experience. Please do get in touch if you want to chat or scream about anything webby, I am always on MSN for a chinwag.

So here’s my mini blog roll for those of you I met last week:

• Alissa Nedossekina
• Shawn Henry
• Adrienne Rice Adams
• Angela Luong
• Anjanette Bunce
• Alix Vale
• Craig cook
• Jina Bolton
• Nate Koechley

Over and out.