webdirections » Blog Archive » Emily Boyd and Stephen Cox: debrief

Thanks so much to all who came along last night, but most of all thank you to Emily Boyd and Stephen Cox who went to a lot of trouble to prepare their presentations. More on those in a second. It really was great to see so many new faces last night among the familiar ones. Each of these events we have done has been even better than the last: what I love most of all is seeing people stick around for a while afterwards and connect up with others in the industry.

I was really impressed by the UI thinking behind the Australian task management web app Remember the Milk, as explained by interface designer Emily Boyd. She spoke about a few simple Ajax techniques that made the sign up process more seamless, and talked us through the challenges of “undo” in the context of a web app. We also saw the way that Remember the Milk manages setting up ongoing reminders. Rather than the bewildering nightmare of dialogs that confronts you in Outlook when you want to do this, with RTM you get a single field into which you can type something like “every Wednesday”. Nice hey? Oh yeah, and you can even do this in an ambitiously large, and growing, number of languages. If you haven’t done so already, check out Remember the Milk…….as I’m going to this morning, just as soon as I cross all the items off this scrappy piece of paper on my desk that I use as my task management system.

And if you’re interested in more of the same, at Web Directions you’ll get the chance to see Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson, who’ll be talking about another neat Australian web app, Campaign Monitor. Emily’s going to come along too, and ask the guys some really hard questions

We then had Stephen Cox talk us through “just what is corporate ethnography and what can it do for you?”. We saw what ethnography was, and then how this discipline sits with respect to traditional user testing and observation. Which made me want to shout out one of my favourite quotes: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”, which probably would have ruined the moment for everyone. We were then lucky enough that Stephen was also able to talk about one of his more recent projects, where he did a lot of work observing sports fans for the Fox Sports site. Here we saw that his job isn’t just day after day of riding on the trains and seeing how people read the newspaper, because after you’ve done all that the client ultimately does need some ideas for how they can improve their site or application, and some actionable items. So, for example, having worked out the different ways in which people use sport at different times of the week, they were able to make changes to which style of story is privileged at different times of the week. Keep an eye on Stephen’s writing via the Intuity site. And for more of a similar nature, come along to Web Directions to see our keynote presenter Kelly Goto, who’ll be talking about “Designing for Lifestyle”.

I loved both the presentations: it’s always great to be able to give a platform to hard working knowledgeable people who want to share their expertise. Sadly, the technology to allow us to podcast the event just wasn’t there, and there was a bizarre absence of photography, so those out there who weren’t able to come along are just going to have to take my word for it that the evening happened at all.

Both John and myself are very aware of the fact that the price of a ticket to our conference seems punitive to many, in particular those who have to pay their own way. Though anyone who has taken the time to buttonhole me on this will certainly also have experienced how I will stand my ground by explaining just how much it costs to put an event like this on, and counter attack with my mantra that it’s time we all started taking ongoing professional education in this industry seriously. But I digress. The point I want to make here is that we put free events like this on for a number of reasons, but one of them is to give something of genuine value to those who are unable to come along to the conference. So do watch this space for announcements of future events, and it would be great to see you all again at the next one.

Posted by Maxine on 1/09/06 at 10:29 am

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