we are: London

At best Intranet design is a challenging task for most, at worst it’s a thankless job that sits at the bottom of many companies priority lists.
Taking ownership can be a daunting prospect, especially as many intranets are unfocused, sprawling repositories of content and ideas, grown organically over a long period. But taking ownership is the first step in putting a tool in place that can quickly become a high priority on the business comms list.

Over the past couple of years, intranets have become a hot topic within large and small businesses, and within the world of digital design. New platforms, techniques and an ever blurring line between the Internet and company Intranets driven through the integration of social, UGC, multimedia and semantic technologies has led to more stakeholders, with more requests and usually less budget.

Persuasive design

One of our most common findings during user and stakeholder research is that reason an intranet is unused and unloved is due to the fact that it’s never worked and never been adopted by the business.

Every task users are asked to complete online should at least as easy as off-line methods, or easier, otherwise users will always fall back to the default of asking a colleague, phoning a department or worse not doing anything.

The reason behind this is that existing staff have learnt their way round the system over time, usually years and new joiners are forced to struggle through anyway they can. A recent client’s intranet is so bad that new joiners are given a guided tour as part of their induction and then offered a CD-Rom or online video tutorial. I doubt any owners of an Internet site would expect a tutorial on how to use the site as acceptable; just make it easy to use.

I’m ready to be engaged

Whilst your intranet is unlikely to become “the” destination for your staff and should not try to replace other sources of external information, it should be functional and engaging in equal measures.

Features that rank highly from a users perspective usually include:

• Buy, sell, rent
• Interest groups (sports, social, clubs)
• Lunch menu

For business engagement, these features rank highly:

• Ask the management (live Q&A)
• Personnel contact finder
• Collaboration tools (wikis and connectors)

It’s important to remember that many of the tasks that your staff use the intranet for can only be completed online, so usage should not be confused with satisfaction. Providing tools and services that help staff to become engaged with the business and each other will prove invaluable in driving uptake and long term use of the site.

“Don’t underestimate the power of the intranet for fostering a sense of culture & belonging - it may not be a core ‘money-earner’, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

How to guide

A few points that may help you in planning and designing your intranet include:

• Governance to avoid organic growth - The key to providing a consistent and usable experience is providing a strict governance model to ensure quality control. Intranets by nature are created and controlled by many people and departments and without solid governance grow organically into a combination of different style and experiences.
• Ownership and stakeholder involvement - Many challenges are faced throughout the redesign of an intranet as there is often no clear owner. Different sections and content are owned by different departments and stakeholders. It is important to include all stakeholders to both understand content and to promote a feeling of inclusion and acceptance of the work within the various content owners. This can present many challenges within time and cost restraints.
• Content - Large volumes of content can make it difficult for users to find what they need. Intranets can easily be into tens of thousands of pages. Content can generally be clearly split into two types. Content that is generated by a department specifically for employees of that department (IT generating content for IT employees) and content that is generated by a department for all employees (HR generating content aimed at all employees of the company). Splitting the information like this can dramatically improve the ease of finding content by isolating information only needed by a single department in a departmental section.
• Can’t find what you are looking for? - If content is difficult to find many users will resort to other channels such as asking colleagues to find important information. Information should be easily available so that users do not need to resort to other methods.
• Navigation - Navigation is key to providing a consistent experience and allowing users to find and move through content. In an environment where this may be defined by many different content creators it is important to ensure they follow a strict model, usually by service offered and not by business function.

Next steps

It’s important to have a plan when working on your intranet and it’s valid not matter what stage you are at, defining a new site or migrating to a new platform. Here are a few points to follow:

1. Take ownership; whilst often a daunting task, your ability to lead the project will ultimately deliver a very successful site.
2. Don’t under estimate the scale of the task in hand; updating, migrating or creating an intranet from scratch requires a lot of time, effort and support.
3. Use external consultants; they will bring a wealth of experience, offer an objective view and can help to mediate difficult decisions.
4. Don’t redesign standards; user staff are familiar with Google, eBay, Linked In and Facebook, use these interfaces rather than creating your own, bespoke ones.
5. Start collaborating now; get a range of staff involved in the redesign, they’ll become your champions and power users down the line.
6. Benchmark; creating some form of  measurement will help to justify the time and financial investments needed for short and long term success.
7. Don’t let the software control you; the platform is important but the business requirements and user needs should lead the design process.
8. Content strategy; know what you plan to do with the content and create a strategy for developing it long term.

If you have found this useful, then why not get in touch and see how we can help accelerate the success of your businesses intranet.

Content strategy, Intranet, global usability testing, information architecture, usability research, user centred design, user interface innovation, Intranet, research, usability, user experience

iPad customer review and ratings

Do you want to know which iPad to buy now it’s been released in the UK, or find out which apps really are worth buying?

Well we have the answers to your questions and hopefully more, so read on, review and comment if you want to know more / disagree / have more information for our readers.

Firstly to qualify this article as the REAL deal and not just some recycled jurno junk, I have been using a iPad (64Gb wifi) for the past month, in anger as both a businessman and home user / dad of a 2 year old child and husband to a media junkie wife. I also have both UK and US itunes accounts so can access all apps around the world.

Should I get one or wait for something else?

That’s a great questions, especially as Intel have just released news of their new Atom chip that will be super fast, up to 1.9ghz, and super lean, hone batteris lasting up to 10 days. But anyone who bought an iphone competitor in great anticipation should just get on and by the iPad, it’s the real deal, you’ll not be disappointed.

I’ll update the blog as I go, so all findings are in chronological order (did you need to know that?)

Wifi or 3G?

This one is easy, if you’re likely to use your iPad out of the home or office environment, which is most of you over 16, go for the 3G. It drives me mad trying to log onto these rubbish public wifi networks and at £5 an hour on some, a PAYG or cheap O2 iPad tariff will be much cheaper. You can also cut your normal SIM card down apparently so get a Tesco mobie PAYG and you’re in.

Will it replace my laptop?

Office apps ♥♥

If, like me you spend a lot of time reading and replying to emails, showing presentations, reviewing RFPs or proposals then it’s better than a laptop. But if you want to edit those documents, then forget it, the tools are just too simplistic to do anything useful.

Yep, it’s true even the wonderfully designed Apple Pages, Numbers and Keynote fail to really compare to much more than Google Docs (which does not work on the iPad yet).

Other contenders such Office HD, et al have even bigger problems, save your money for now, be content with reading documents and not editing them. It will all come soon and it will be the online apps that win out.

Cloud computing ♥♥♥♥

I have also come to realise how important cloud services are, the iPad and other ultra-portable devices will cement this as the future, my favourites are Huddle and Dropbox. Huddle has a great UI and is easy to find docs, view online renderings and generally do what you need to do, other than download and edit document; see above as to why this is not such an issue.

Creativity ♥♥

Again it seems that the promise of great creativity on the iPad has been jaded by the early, quickly designed apps that feel a bit rubbish, in fact less useful than the iPhone versions. There are a couple that people like me will use a lot, iMockups and Omnigraffle both hold a lot of promise for interactive designers and Adobe Ideas, whilst basic, is great for freehand sketches on the fly.

Video & music ♥♥♥♥♥

In a previous blog I describe how the iPad came into it’s own during a power cut in a hotel recently and it’s brilliant. Anyone who has watched TV on an iphone or ipod will know that if the content is good, you soon forget the screen size. Well the iPad has great sound, an amazing screen and iTunes integrated rocks as always. You can stream UK Freeview TV using TVcatchUp.com/iphone and whilst the video is not HD, it’s pretty good for a free services.

Otherwise Spotify and Pandora (US only through VPN) are both great additions to your iPhone music library, infact I have sort of given up downloading from iTunes.

Battery life ♥♥♥♥♥

Is it a goer? Oh yes, it’s got more staying power than a student rugby team at a free bar. I have had at least 10 hours of continuos video play back and stand  by last for weeks even with regular use. In fact i have stopped carrying a charger at all, even over weekends, and the added bonus is you can use any iPhone charger with it.

iBook vs eBooks ♥♥♥

The Amazon Kindle and iPad book reading argument has been raging for longer than the iPad has been around, and whilst Kindle sales could do with a bit of Apple magic, the Kindle is a muh better ebook, mainly due to it’s e-ink and matt screen. As a long time Kindle owner I am impressed by Apple’s integrated book store within the eBook app, but less impressed by the weight of the iPad whilst reading anywhere that you need to hold it, and by the glare on the beach or in the garden.

However, the killer appeal to many will be the fact that the iPad is a multifunctional device, so it’s unlikely that the majority of interested consumers would buy both, only early adopters like me would bother. So there is a good chance that the iPad will become the defacto device for the casual consumer, but the Kindle will remain the leader as far as serious readers, most of whom will be big spenders, are concerned.

As a foot note to the book piece, there is an Alice in Wonderland app that is beautiful, interactive and worth every penny, my daughter loves it and I can see it becoming the DVD of the new millenium.

Will it save news and magazine publishing? ♥♥♥♥♥

Only good journalism / content can truly do that but the apps I have seen go a long way. It seems the publishers are split into two camps, it’s a digital newspaper and looks like it or, it’s a new device with new ways of interacting let’s redesign it.

The winners so far in the new new media war are:

• AP News: mmm lovely UI and exciting ways to filter
• Thomson Reuters: A bit hectic but using the space and interaction nicely
• Zinio: Amazing renders of the actual magazines in an interactive format
• USA Today: Content is still as dull as ever but the cross over design between print and digital is lovely
• NPR: Looks great but a little less usable than the rest
• Marvel Comics: The best interaction of them all, it’s amazing, very lateral

And the losers are:

• Yahoo!: Indeed an exclamation mark is needed, it’s a bad 3D sitting room for a menu, very 80’s
• WSJ: Looks kinda 1930s, which is nice if that was the brief
• NYT: Again the retor squad have been out, nothing challenging just a bit dull and detached navigation
• BBC: Not what I was expecting at all to be honest, poorly designed and too many images
• Maxim: Whilst not on my usual reading list, the app is a terrible, ham fisted affair. Get Zinio and pay for the glossy electronic version of the print, it works, simple as that.

First impressions

It feels solid, the screen is beautiful, it’s a breeze to set up and the interaction is everything you expected. As always with Apple the bits you want to work do work, from effortless touch screen interaction to fast loading apps, beautiful email and calendars and web browsing.

In fact it’s so good I forgot about the lack of camera, USB ports, coffee machine bolt on, finger print readers, etc. When you use it you know every single part has been thought out and, unlike the all singing all flash playing future competitors, it does everything you need, just not everything you want, but it does it perfectly.

It’s far better than I could have hopped and it has been well received by everyone who uses it, in fact 100% of people who have used mine say they want to buy one now!

Mobile, apple, iPad, interface design, user interface future, innovation, iPad, Mobile, navigation, usability, user experience

Love him or hate him.

It all comes down to one single, tangible factor, which marks out the good from the bad; soul.

The reason for the Clarkson tribute on the left is this weeks Sunday Times Motoring article on an Aston Martin which sees Clarkson pitting it against design perfection in the shape of an Audi R8 V10.

And to save you the read, the Audi is just too perfect, where as the Aston has soul, something that can’t be created by following set rules, but comes from the heart of those involved and is a direct result of the creator’s passion.

All of which brings us nicely to the argument that has raged on since the start of website design; who is best placed to create the perfect site?

The Good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s go back to basics and look at who the usual suspects are, in the red corner we have “visual designers” (brand and marketing) and in the blue corner we have “interaction designers” (user centred).

Whilst visual designers have a wealth of ability and passion, it is often focused to heavily on making something look good and the risk of making the same, beautiful creation completely unusable.

Now wheel in the interaction designers, who’s passions lie in the creation of the perfect experience, through usability testing, prototyping and more testing. However, there is a strong argument against all of this testing and refining as it can just blunt a sharp, creative idea, making the end result more function than form.

Experience is all, or read Experiential

For years I thought experiential was about experiencing a design, but it’s not it’s about experience, and this where soul comes from.

An experienced designer is passionate about the look and the effectiveness of a design and ensures their soul is applied to everything they do.

An excellent example of what not to do is a site we reviewed a while back that seemingly missed both design and ease of use steps during it’s development and almost certainly skipped public testing.

Help me help you

If you want to avoid the common pitfalls of digital procurement, ensuring your acgency has soul, then follow these easy steps:

• Check potential agencies have a proven user centred design methodology as well as a creative portfolio
• Ask for CVs of key staff and make sure they are guaranteed to be on the project
• Meet the team and chat to them about what they think is good and bad
• Don’t ever feel that it’s not your right to ask questions
• Ask for clarification on every point until it’s clear
• Remember you’re the client and paying the bills

If you would like to know more then give me a call or drop me a note and we’ll take you through our experiences and see how we can help.

global usability testing, information architecture, interface design, internet research, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Mobile, research, usability

BBC iPlayer infographic

Uncategorized Interactive TV, Internet

We have two exciting new roles available for a promising candidate to join our fast growing usability research and insight team.

Head of research

This is a unique opportunity to shape the direction of the research department of our extremely successful and very exciting digital consultancy.

Full job description

Head of interaction design

A great opportunity to develop our department of brilliant information architects and interaction designers, leading the way in bespoke usable interface design.

Full job description

Uncategorized

Another day another mission to make forms simple.

As if by magic I have uncovered a very good example of the type of recommendations we have been making for some recent clients when it comes to helping users fill in forms by improving basic usability design.

Simply easy

It’s the way you do it

Yahoo has a great little sign up form that mixes hand-holding and error messaging brilliantly. There are nice confirmation checks for each field, simple explanations for the more complex entries, which fade in and out unobtrusively, excellent error handling, all of which leaves you feeling satisfied and ready to start using Yahoo.

One major failure

However even the great and the good have an Achilles heal and Yahoo’s is it’s capture anti-bot thing. Most of us hate these stupid little form fields where you have to squint at a bunch of unreadable text and type it in to prove you are not a machine.

Yahoo’s is particularly hard to read, there is no audio version and quite frankly it lets down an otherwise brilliant form.

See for yourself

So rather than doing it yourself, we have created a short video of the form, and if you want to know more about form design best practice then drop us an email hello@WeAreLondon.com

New user registration

usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, Internet, usability

In January I made a few predictions about what the year had in store for the digital world. One that I did not put in but have talked about for ages is the end of free online services.

Basically as ad spend decreases and take up of online services increases, something has to give. A recent story on the BBC website shows BT’s new aggressive stance on asking iPlayer to pay for bandwidth.

More of the same will come as people watch more video, save more photos and re-post more content via social networks. Add to this the cut throat pricing of broadband, reduced advertising revenues and suddenly you are looking at an unsustainable business model.

So, a quick review of my predictions from January:

1. Video on Demand finally gets in to peoples homes for real (iPlayer) √
   
2. Video on Demand gets a new name (iPlayer) √
3. Interactive TV advertising (Sky green button) √
4. BT Vision moves from Microsoft to open platforms (Or Sky goes onto xbox 360) √
5. DRM free VOD (can’t win them all!) x
6. Mobile web (go go iPhone, Nokia and Andriod) √
7. Nokia Tube turns out not to be an iPhone beater (yep I own one, it’s pants) √
8. iPhone Nano (By Autumn, I promise) x
   
9. Mac tablet (See above) x
   
10. No one buys Twitter (still) √

So 7 out of ten is not bad considering we are only at the start of June. And whilst you may or may not agree with all of these it’s pretty interesting to see how fast things change.

Another foot note from January was my prediction that Apple would start to slip form wonder kid to main stream business and given the recent launch of new iPhone, this seems to be happening.

Although I would hate to see Apple done anything than succeed as I love how Steve has turned a business round by giving customers what they want! And that’s where we are, helping you give your customers what they want, although I am no Steve Jobs, I know we can help you make a big difference.

Let’s see where we are in another 6 months:

1. Windows 7 is just as rubbish as Vista?

customer insight Design, future, Interactive TV, Microsoft, Mobile, Predictive, Twitter

The missing link in the connected home!

02 Joggler touch screen

Never to do things by half, we are the proud owners of two O2 Jogglers. Three days in and I am loving them and actually using them all the time! You can follow life in detail on Twitter.com/02JogglerAddict

Part of the new  O2 family pack, Joggler replaces post-it notes and calendars at home, or as O2 like to say, “it’s your new fridge door”; really?

Is it worth it?

Well, if a decent wifi digital picture frame costs £100+, and O2 will not be happy with the comparison I am sure, then £150 to get a device that organises your life, is a networked home media player and looks so good is a bargain. Add to this the 1Gb of internal memory, USB connection for external drives and a never ending line up of applications to download in the future, and you would be mad not to get one.

Set up

The box and presentation are very Apple, simple, no wrapping, just a shiny new Joggler sitting there ready for use.

• Plug in to power and it switches itself on, say hi, plays a cute tune, and then takes you through a simple set up process.
• You’ll need to know your wifi password, etc, or you can plug it straight in to your router.
• Once online, it will automatically download and install a software update, restart and you’re off.

Features

• The main selling point is the shared calendar that you can add lots of people to and sync with the online calendar on O2.
• The calendar will send SMS alerts to O2 phones if you set a reminder on an calendar entry.
• Screen wise this is better than my top of the range Sony digital picture frame and plays back movies and photos in loads of formats amazingly well.
• Audio playback is not bad, you can stream AV from your PC too over the network, and once the digital radio is switched on, you’ll have a great little home media player in your kitchen.
• There are neat little news, weather, sport and traffic feeds, although I am not sure what the traffic one is telling me.

Other nice features are coming such as the ability to send and receive text and picture messages, turning this, already amazing device, into an electronic post-it note.

What’s missing?

Key features missing are web browsing, YouTube playback, Twitter client, ability to basically edit photos such as rotate and crop and an app store.

I really think that this device could the piece of tech that finally connects the digital home.  Can you imagine how cool it would be to browse recipes on it whilst watching demo videos of how to cook and even being able to order your shopping by clicking on pictures and ordering direct.

Watch the O2 Family advert

interface design, usability design, user interface future, Mobile