By now, everyone in the industry, regardless their area of expertise, will have heard about HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext markup language, the structural skeleton of the design of the Internet.

HTML5 might mean different things to different people

Accessibility consultants are enthusiastic about the addition of more meaningful mark-up elements. These should improve the way people using assistive technology navigate websites.

SEO specialists are also looking closely at the development of HTML5, as Google, one of the big players participating in this movement, will start paying more attention to those sites coded with HTML5’s more descriptive elements.

Marketing people might soon start using the word “HTML5” for selling purposes in the same way that not so long ago they overused, and at times misused, the word “web 2.0”.

Developers are excited about new HTML5 API’s like Video and Audio, the element, which allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes, and Geolocation amongst others.

But what will HTML5 mean to user experience professionals?

Better forms

Forms are those bits of a page users and developers alike need and hate. HTML5 offers enhanced forms with improvements to text inputs, search boxes and other fields and provides better controls for validating data, focusing and interaction with other elements on the page.

With HTML5, widgets like date-pickers and sliders are now part of the language. That means no extra JavaScript is required to create them because the browser will handle that itself.

This is great news for users, even if they aren’t aware. Users expect form elements to look consistent across sites. They don’t want to learn a new look and feel for a drop down or a set of checkboxes. This consistency can now be brought to these new widgets. How many date-picker implementations currently out there don’t behave the way we might expect them? These new elements can also be navigated with the keyboard. That’s an improvement in the user experience.

Better mobile experience

HTML5 is a dream come true for mobile use. It enables a richer mobile web experience for the user – and across platforms, without requiring new versions for each type of mobile platform.

Producing sites that are usable across different devices, including mobile phones has been in some cases a wearing task as lots of unreliable “sniffing” needs to be done to identify a device and serve different content accordingly.

The development of HTML5 is linked closely with the development of the latest version of CSS (CSS3), the technical layer that defines the look and feel of a HTML document.

CSS3 introduces “media queries” which help identify the screen size of the device rendering a page and let designers with the same content decide which way to present it to the user based on their device’s capabilities.

While it’s not perfect, HTML 5 might just be the step you need to decrease the time and cost of developing across devices.

So when are we all going to enjoy everything that HTML 5 has to offer?

Most modern browsers, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera already support most of the features proposed on the first draft. The forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 is the first serious attempt by Microsoft to start supporting HTML5.

HTML 5 is a major improvement over the previous markup but there is still work to be done. While most of us will get to enjoy the adoption of some of these great features, a total widespread implementation is likely to take few years as the proposed features evolve over time.

As a creative lead I’m responsible for the visual direction of an interface, be it a website, system or intranet. The key to a successful design process is to get clients, involved, engaged and on board with what the design problem is and the steps taken to address the problem.

Usually these two broad aspects would feature prominently in a creative brief. But what if our clients are not equipped enough or have the necessary experience to provide a detailed brief, which is so often the case? After-all they’re not designers. Anyone involved in the process of design, whether they be graphics designers, information architects or even content strategists have the responsibility to understand their clients’ requirements. They would have had some experience of running or facilitating workshops – an invaluable tool to help us with the process of design. Whilst I am not describing workshop techniques such as Card Sorting and Audience Profiling here, I aim to give some practical help to anyone who is involved in running client workshops.

What are workshops?

A brief, but intensive group meeting (often facilitated by one or more people) aimed at the production of a specific outcome.

Fairly self-explanatory, however, this could also be an appropriate definition of a meeting. Meetings and workshops are two different things. The way I like to think of it is that meetings involve a lot of talking, whereas workshops involve a lot of talking and doing. ‘Theoretical versus practical’ could be another way to differentiate them, although there is some overlap. Workshops are far more inclusive than meetings as they are designed to galvanise people into action, even the shy retiring types. Perhaps the best way to differentiate them is that you come away from a meeting with a plan of action but you walk away from a workshop with actual findings.

So why do we do workshops?

In a nutshell, we do workshops to glean as much useful information as we can to help inform the design process. By their very nature workshops extract information from people but there are other benefits:

1. Keep the client involved and engaged with the project
It’s the clients’ project and if it’s going to be a success then it’s important to have the client totally immersed. Workshops can often be a sound-board and that in itself adds a lot of value. Clients will feel they are being listened to and they will more readily believe in the solutions that will eventually follow, as a result of the workshop findings.

2. The client is the subject matter expert – lets tap into their minds
Apart from mind-melds and hypnosis which aren’t really practical, workshops offer a less intrusive way to get into the minds of participants. What we’re trying to understand is the deeper workings of the organisation, the inherent behaviours of the people we’re designing for, the business model and the political landscape according to those close to the business. Not all views concur a hundred percent but you will identify recurring themes and patterns more often than not.

3. Provides a legitimate forum for challenging the clients’ preconceived ideas
Clients come with their own ideas of how something should work based on their experiences. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes those ideas can be at odds with your design principles. Either way it’s a good idea to gauge their way of thinking early on. Workshops engender an environment where you can legitimately challenge them, without any major implications to the project. It’s also a chance to educate your client with principles you hold dear.

4. Better understand other facets of the project
I conduct creative workshops, where I want my participants to discuss aspects of visual design. Invariably many of the discussions lead to such things as functionality and interactive behaviour. Although your task as conductor and facilitator is to keep it on the straight and narrow, this can be a good thing as long as you don’t lose sight of the agenda. You should indulge your workshop group to a certain degree so you can pick up on things other work-streams might have missed.

5. Add value and increase your profile within the client organisation
Successful workshops can be as much a learning experience for the client as it is for us. Most people go away feeling like they have contributed to the project and achieved something of significance. That’s how it should be at least, but never underplay the importance of workshops. When run properly, aside from your task of gleaning information, they will help in building a relationship which is invaluable to the smooth running of a project.

Planning and preparation

The old adage of ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’ is apt here. Workshops take a lot of planning. You need to create assets for your practical exercises such as cards, print outs, assessment forms etc, which can be time consuming but worthwhile. Here are some practical recommendations to help in the planning process. Workshops are a valuable experience if you:

1. Define your goals
Firstly you need to know what you want to get out of the workshop. Ask yourself what information you need to progress the design process. This will allow you to choose and to devise an appropriate plan for practical exercises.

2. Get the right people to attend
This is surprisingly more difficult than one might think. Workshops are held during the early fact finding stages of a project and you don’t necessarily know who should attend. You have to trust in the project lead or champion from the client organisation to gather the right people or stakeholders to make the workshop worthwhile. Much of the time you have to be prepared to run the workshop on numerous occasions so that the client is satisfied all bases have been covered. Six or seven participants are a good manageable number.

3. Choose a colleague to assist in facilitating
You can’t do it all on your own. If you’re leading the workshop you need another person to help you facilitate. That means recording findings and listening in to conversations during break-out sessions.

4. Choose the right location
Again this is not something you have much control over as it usually means relying on rooms being available at the client organisation. If you have six or seven participants you want a room big enough to accommodate them comfortably but not such a huge room so that the energy of the group easily dissipates into the space. Try and ensure there are other informal spaces available outside of the room so that they have the option to break-out in smaller groups.

5. Have an agenda
Without an agenda, you risk straying from your desired goal. Split your session into defining chunks and attribute timings around them. It’s important to try and stick to the timings so that you set expectations clearly and allow for questions and feedback once it’s completed.

6. Allow smaller groups to break-out for practical exercises
Break-out sessions are important as they allow for more fervent discussions. Working in pairs is far less daunting than voicing opinions in a large group and you can glean so much more listening in to these ‘smaller’ conversations. It also allows shy or restrained characters the chance to have their say.

7. Determine how you will record the findings
The standard way is to write away with pen and paper furiously whilst keeping an ear to the discussion and trying to facilitate the conversation. This is not the most practical method so you need to have someone help you. In addition, have supporting feedback forms, empty A4 sheets, cards or whatever material you deem fit for participants to fill out. You can then collate these at the end to support your own notes.

8. Explain how you will use the findings
This can easily be overlooked but it’s a good idea to inform participants before an exercise how the information will be used. This will give them the necessary context and you’re more likely to elicit the right sort of information.

9. Provide the necessary materials
If you’re asking participants to write, scribble, draw, build or any other activity, give them the right tools and don’t assume they will come equipped. Provide pens, paper, post-it notes, lego or whatever they need to complete tasks.

10. Ask for feedback
Again a pre-prepared feedback form would be helpful. It gives people the chance to comment on your workshop so you can make improvements for next time. Try and break it down into components such as quality of presentation material, facilities, depth of information, group activities etc and allow them to attribute a score against the criteria.

So now you have the basics it may be prudent to run mock workshop sessions with work colleagues to test your workshop plan. Have fun.

Every day for the last two or three months we seem to have woken up to a new announcement about cost cutting in the public sector or job losses or the grim economic outlook that we will all need to face up to over the next few years.

This week was no different with the Bank of England forecasting a “choppy” economic recovery for the UK as inflation remains higher than expected and growth drops below 3%, (http://bit.ly/ddo2mf ).

… It is enough to make anyone feel pretty glum.

And yet despite all this depressing news, there are a number of positive government changes, policies and initiatives which if structured correctly and supported properly could make a really positive difference.

And crucially for an online solutions provider like WTG; the web has a crucial part to play.

In this article I will identify a number of these initiatives and then over the coming weeks I will look at each in detail to understand a bit more about what it means to government and citizens and how the web will play a key part.

You only need look at the statements in the Coalition’s “Our Programme for Government” document which was published in May of this year; http://bit.ly/99w1bd ;

“We are committed to turning old thinking on its head and developing new approaches to government. For years, politicians could argue that because they held all the information, they needed more power. But today, technological innovation has – with astonishing speed – developed the opportunity to spread information and decentralise power in a way we have never seen before.”

David Cameron, Prime Minister and Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, Our Programme for Government, May 2010. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10680062

3. The Government’s economic recovery plan

Unlike the previous Labour government which promoted a more gradual recovery plan based on not making budget cuts in 2010, the new government has started making reductions straight away. In June for example the Government’s budget statement spelled out a 25% cut in departmental expenditure over a four-year period for all except ring-fenced spending on health and overseas aid. The cuts are set to lead to budget squeezes for IT in the public sector and so spark a further review of efficiency.

Already we have seen a number of departments making necessary reductions in order to meet new spending levels.

Summary

Clearly we are still to see the impact of the new Government’s economic approach and its new programmes and policies, but one thing is clear; IT and specifically web platforms have a key role to play.

Here are a couple of interesting examples of the important part IT and the web can play;

-       10 Ways Technology Can Cut Costs And Boost Efficiency In The Public Sector,  http://bit.ly/d6iWZf

-       Web 2.0 enables public sector revolution, http://bit.ly/ahKgDy

Over the coming weeks I will be looking in more detail at the part the web has to play in the three areas highlighted in this article and what it means to WTG and the online solutions and services we offer to our public sector customers.

I welcome your input on this, so let me know if you have any comments.

Google recently announced that they will no longer be developing the Google Wave platform – citing poor user uptake and lack of clarity around what it does. Why did Google Wave fail, and what does it mean for collaboration? Rich Cowtan investigates.

Death throws

So why exactly did Wave fail?  There are those who slate the entire platform, thinking that it was unnecessary and sought to unify several already efficient technologies – email, instant messaging, wikis and document writing to name but a few. Personally, I think that the concept was an excellent one. Each of the afore mentioned technologies all operate well, but collaboration is an after thought – how do we collaborate when we’re writing a document? Google Wave sought to turn that on its head, and ask first and foremost  - how do we collaborate? The result was an entirely logical stream of consciousness that part resembled a document, part wiki, part web page which allowed the easy addition of others to work alongside the original creator. It had some pretty cool features like being able to see people typing in real time and dragging and dropping files from the desktop.  So if the concept was a good one, what killed the application?

I’ll highlight two possible reasons;

Firstly, very few people saw the need for the application as a whole – features yes, concept yes, but in reality – changing the way someone interacts with key work place tools was always going to be a hard sell. Was it supposed to replace working with a word processor, instant messenger or email? The fact was that it couldn’t even if you wanted it to – people wouldn’t view all their emails through the tool, or wouldn’t work on all documents through it. A better bet from Google would have been to say it should replace all those tools – and make it so people COULD replace them.

Secondly, given my first reason, I think there has been a massive failure to plan and manage the change that this technology may have brought. Lofty aims are often hard to reach, and getting a team of people, let alone company, let alone whole world of internet users to adopt new working practices requires more than a few YouTube videos and a few blog posts. For Google this amounts to a whole heap of marketing, and for organisations who were keen, a thorough change management programme should have been instigated. Google should have helped take us from vision to implementation – by helping us understand the need, helping us migrate from the old way to the new way and by facilitating organisations interested in completely usurping existing tools and ways of working towards a wholly more collaborative future.

As is, we’ll have to make do with seeing bits of Wave pop up in other technologies, and at some point lament the fact that we can’t have a handy single platform that brings best bits of email, wiki, instant messaging (etc) in one place.

Death of Collaboration?

Death no, but it does set it back (a bit).

Most of our clients at WTG have yet to embrace collaboration. In some ways, Wave made waters already muddy a lot murkier, and to have a bit more clarity isn’t a bad thing. Our clients would ask – how should we collaborate? Should we share documents, should we use the cloud, and just what is Wave anyway? For most then, thinking in ‘old school’ terms of ‘document first, collaboration second’, makes  life a lot easier.  Create something, send it to your collaboration space, then collaborate. What the bits of Wave left over will allow is some nifty user interface tweaks which make life easier.  What Google Wave’s demise does do is postpone the nirvana of proper online collaboration for the enterprise a while longer.  When we advise on collaboration, we talk in terms of ensuring conversations, thoughts, research is all completed online.  For the brave organisation, why not go a step further, work in the cloud on documents, spreadsheets and other ‘core’ business functions, and collaborate directly, automatically by default? For those brave few, Wave would have helped, and now a few more imperfect tools need to take up the slack.

Rich Cowtan of WTG shares the successful and delicious WTG recipe for Secret Sauce -the secret ingredient in making public sector web projects a success, which is a must in these days of Austerity.

So you’re the one charged with getting together a new internet site for your organisation and making it a success.  You know what to do to get the thing built, but how to get people using it?  That’s where you reach for the secret sauce squeezy bottle.

There are three aspects to any IT deployment – the technology, the process and the people. Technology is all in hand – its about making sure the system we build fits with what you’re trying to do. The Business processes that are being refined are key to understanding the effect on the people, and in some ways, should be looked at first. Understanding the people affect of any IT deployment is the true secret to its success, and the secret sauce is understanding process while not overlooking the ‘people’ aspects of your project.

Process

You may be responsible for the intranet site development, but who’s going to update or create the content? How do they go about doing that? Some definition work is essential here – need to understand how content is created now, and how it may be created in the future. If your site interacts with the public, what are they going to do, and what process do you follow to interact with the public via the web? This is partly about how the pages are designed and what they look like, but its more the process that follows that content from inception to publish. It’s also about ensuring the web system you’re building fits snuggly with the rest of your organisation – that people know what to do when web things happen, and where the web system starts and finishes.

At WTG we hear a lot of “It’s just a website” – but in many organisations these days, web systems are becoming more powerful, more encompassing, and so need some careful consideration on how a normal days work interacts with them.

People

A new way of doing things inevitably brings changes to peoples’ work lives.  As an important asset in any organisation, ensuring that your colleagues hit the ground running is possibly the most important aspect of any new web system. If you have a new content management system, your colleagues need to know how to use it, but also need to know how it affects their job. Importantly they need to be firmly behind the new system, understand the need for the system, and be ready to accept it into their daily work lives. It’s about communications: awareness through to buy-in, and its about learning – knowing ‘how’ and ‘why’ the system does what it does.

I’d advise that for any new process or system, a programme of ‘change management’ is instigated. What I mean here is some management of the people involved, decent communication, and view of who needs what learning and training and finally support over the duration of a go-live period.

Secret Sauce

The secret sauce therefore is a decent people and organisation change management programme to go alongside the development of the IT (from the outset). This kind of programme ensures that the process and people side of any project are firmly taken care of – giving a sense of whole to the efforts to bring in a new system.  Doing so will realise benefits quicker and will generate a return on investment.  If you planted a tomato plant in your vegetable patch, you’d prepare the soil first and ensure the plant was well watered wouldn’t you? If you didn’t you may kill the plant and certainly won’t get any nice ripe tomatoes to make secret sauce with.

Before we dive into the deep and sometimes complex world of what’s involved with web governance and how WTG helps customers overcome some of these challenges, lets first consider what we mean by the term.

Web Governance: A Definition?

Web Governance in simple terms is a set of rules, roles and relationships required for web product management. This includes:

• The implementation of a Web Governance Framework
• The installation of Web Policy
• The implementation and enforcement of Web Standards.

Essentially, web governance is one of the core dimensions of a mature web operations approach. It helps reduce web development risks by establishing clear decision making authority, identifying web accountability and improving web standards compliance.

What it means for you?
For most organisations web governance and strategy is an area of high priority or at least an operational priority. With the maturity of the internet; lots of web standards, legal and regional boundaries have been introduced. Where on one hand this provides a sensible and unified approach to web content and application development and thereby provides an effective measurement of web performance; on the other hand this can involve planning, strategy and high maintenance cost.

For an organisation:
• It determines who gets to sit around the table when the organisational decisions are made
• Identifies who has final decision making authority
• Ensures clearly defined web-specific policies are in place (that reduce risk to the organisation)
• Identifies and defines the team to write the web standards (that raise the quality of the Web presence)

The above is enforced through a Web Governance Framework. Having a framework helps minimise and settle internal website ownership disputes and can smooth the relationship between various web stakeholders.

What can WTG do for you?
At WTG as part of any web governance project we provide customers with a comprehensive web strategy solution approach. It allows customers to pick and choose the required services to fit their organisational needs, starting from simple a web audit to a complex web optimisation.

The first step towards your web governance strategy is to know what you have. This gives any organisation a starting point from which to plan, layout and prioritise what they want to achieve.

This approach will help you and your organisation to:
• Organise your data
• Identify the content owners
• Breakdown the types of content on site
• Check brand reliability & compliance
• Review content strategy (IA)
• Check against web standards including:

• Accessibility, usability and design – priority 1 and 2 checks
• Validate against XHTML & CSS 2.0 mark-up’s
• eGMS metadata standards validation
• Checks against IPSV vocabulary
• e-GIF
• Marketing communication standards
• Legal and technical requirements
• Search Engine Optimisation standards
• Platforms and devices checks
• Appropriate use of media

Here at WTG were have helped a number of customers achieve this through thorough engagement, clearly understanding the current web governance and putting in a defined and measurable solution that delivers real results.

If you would like more information please visit www.wtg.co.uk or email info@wtg.co.uk

Google images have launched some improvements to their interface. This blog post looks at what these changes are, how they will help users, and what improvements should be done next.

Firstly let’s look at what user-need ‘google images’ fulfils. There seems to be 2 types of search tasks for google images:

Scenario type A – specific and basic

The most popular searches in google images seem to be either abstract keywords such as girls, tattoo, wallpaper. and the fastest rising at any one time are either the most popular celebrities or seasonal celebrations. It is reasonable to assume that users are indeed looking for images regardless of size, context etc.

source: google Insights for image search [ http://www.google.com/insights/search/# ],

Scenario type B – Ambiguous and deeper

I postulate that there is also a heavy user-base looking for the images in the long tail who are searching for images fitting niche requirements; for a presentation, for a very specific item, to put context around a certain concept etc.

The above two mental models are very different, and the interface and flow should cater for both sets; Scenario A require a straight-forward simple shallow task flow, and Scenario B require deeper interrogation of the results-set (assuming they haven’t already completed and advanced search).

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This week there are 3 main changes to google images:

1 – The number of results per page has increased (up to 1000).

2 – The image text information has been moved to a hover pane.

3 –Clicking on the image takes the user to an overlay with the image on the overlay and then website behind it.
[see the full release article at The Official Google Blog]

The first 2 new enhancements focus on improving the usability of the results set and satisfy scenario A

1 – Increasing the number of results per page view is an obvious improvement. The old site only allowed one small screen of results and users had to paginate frequently which made it difficult to compare images. The next improvement could be to allow users to select how many they would like to see on each results page, and how the page can be presented: large icons and no text, small images and text etc. Users like this flexibility to suit their needs and a lot of leading image and shopping sites have this facility.

2 – The new hover pane is also a familiar feature as users like to preview more information before making the commitment to click through. The relevancy of additional textual information around the images will depend on the task in hand. In general, users in scenario A are interested in reels of images of their favourite celebrity or topic whereas Group B require context around the image which they now must hover over to access.

The main criticism on the forums is that the padding between images is too small and hurts the eyes when a user is searching through lots and lots images for any amount of time. Take a look at www.bing.com for a similar results presentation with large padding.

3 – Now, when you click on an image, the 90s-style frame holding the image above the website which contains the image has been replaced by the image overlaying it. Right away the user can see the image in some context. They can choose to explore the underlying website by closing the overlay, go back to the results, or take the image from the overlay (copyright allowing). This is a good improvement and makes the task flow more efficient for both scenarios A and B.

In summary the changes help all users (padding issues aside). However I would argue that the changes are basic improvements, not ground-breaking enhancements that I would expect from google.

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What next?

So, what helps a user complete a task?

1. A great search facility
2. Relevant results list which is easy to scan
3. Tools to hone in on specific results such as filters, sorts, tags and related searches etc.
4. An easy flow from the results to the item

Google are constantly improving the first item (1) matching search and results via their algorithms and image recognition. The latest google images changes improve (2) the navigation and scanning within the results set, and (4) the flow to the image item has been improved. Next I would like to see enhancements for (3) by further extension of the filter function, and extending the ‘see similar’ and ‘related searches’ functions with semantic relationships. This will allow the user to hone-in on particular results thereby reducing tedious scanning through huge lists of eye-watering images.

And a more relevant and targeted set of results will definitely help their new targeted ad placement service based on the type of image the user wants. More income for google means more money to re-invest in improving the service. It’s a win-win situation!

There are formal channels for submitting feedback on google images – that’s where I’m off to next…. care to join me?