RuthEllison.com

BarCamp Canberra #2 was yet another successful event! There was a great turnout with 71 registered users and other folks dropping in and out through out the day. We had representation from Canberra, Yass, Wollongong, Sydney and Melbourne (did I miss out any other cities?). Two streams were running simultaneousness for most of the day with great presentations running in both rooms.

Who presented?

As I have yet to master the art of splitting my self into two, here’s a quick run down of the talks I heard:

• David Page introduced us to the concept of the Yubikey – a usb key authentication system. It provides single or two factor authentication and is quite affordable. Catch The Yubikey presentation on slideshare.
• Rohan Mitchell shared his adventures in online business. My favourite slide from his presentation? Slide 18 The Learning Curve, which involves:
  1. Make something cool
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

  Catch the rest of his Adventures in Online Business on slideshare.

• One of the highlights was Pamela Fox’s presentation on making the google map for the Victorian bushfires. It was fascinating hearing about the solutions they came up with in the challenging environment, with key issues being the short time frames and lack of open data. It really highlighted the problems we face when data (particularly emergency data) is not made available in formats that enable reuse. Read more on Pamela’s blog post BarCamp Canberra 2: Mapping the Fires.
• Another highlight was Joseph Gentle‘s presentation on Artificial intelligence. He took a complex subject and made it really easy to understand. Loved it.
• Craig Thomler took us through his experiences on blogging as a public servant – a very informative presentation.
• Linda Gehard ran an interactive impromptu workshop on the good and bad of mobile phone design.
• Darren Menachemson gave an interesting talk about designing out evil, complete with great graphs!
• Caronne Carruthers-Taylor gave an interesting presentation on her experiences with UX and design. Catch her presentation Change the world with UX: user experience in federal government on slideshare.
• Dean K held an interesting discussion about the No Clean Feed recent rally and opportunities to influence the decision makers. He also raised the idea that the solutions we propose need to provide a way for Stephen Conroy to save face.
• Nathanael Boehm introduced us to Resilient Nation Australia.

My presentation

I did a light hearted presentation on The Uncanny Valley:

Find out what else happened

Didn’t make it to BarCamp Canberra #2? You can:

• Watch the presentations on slideshare
• See the photos on flickr
• Find out who came to BarCamp Canberra #2
• Catch the twitter stream
• Visit the websites mentioned in the presentations, tagged in my delicious bookmarks

Thanks

Thanks to the unorganisers (Andrew Boyd, Stephen Collins, Simon Pascal Klein, Nathanael Boehm, Craig Thomler, Rae Buerckner, Darren Menachemson) for putting together a great event and the sponsors (acidlabs, Five Senses Coffee, UX Australia,
Keith Lang, Australian Anthill, Electric Shadows Bookshop).

Can’t wait for BarCamp Canberra #3!

It’s Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

From the Ada Lovelace Day pledge site:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I have many female friends who are doing wonderful work in the technology industry – too many to name but here’s a few Aussie females that I’ll like to sing out about.

• Donna – she is a great information architect, the Queen of Card Sorting and contributes much of her time to the web community. She’s always happy to share her knowledge and experience.
• Caronne – I love her passion for the work we do. She’s an extremely supportive person and manages to balance work, life, web community stuff and life with two teens. She does amazing stuff with advocating great user experiences in Government agencies that many people don’t hear about!
• Susan – one of the many challenging things of being a women is the ability to juggle multiple stressful components of our life. Susan is amazing – she loves the work she does and some how, manages to balance work, family, photography, blogging and web stuff!
• Viv – a special person I used to work with who is passionate about accessibility and user experience. She’s a solid rock for any team that she’s on and is always quietly working away in the background getting stuff done. It’s people like Viv who work so hard and never seem to get recognition for the hard work they do – so here’s my shout out to you Viv!
• Lisa – is amazing. She knows a lot of things about accessibility, usability and user experience. We have a very similiar approach to the work we do. She’s a very calming influence and I admire her passion for the work we do.

There are many other females out there who also doing great work (I’m looking at you Teresa, Amie, Suze, Lana!).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

The good folks over at WebAIM recently conducted a survey of screen reader usage and preferences. The results of screen reader survey are now available. Interesting results to note include:

• The most popular screen reader is JAWS (74%), followed by Window-Eyes (23%), NVDA (8%) and VoiceOver (6%).
• 41% of screen reader users update their screen reader software after the release of a new version.
• 40% of screen reader users does some form of customisation.
• 28% of screen reader users sometimes uses the ‘skip to content’ link with 38% having no preference about the wording.
• 52% navigate by headings.
• 53% find pop-up windows somewhat difficult to very difficult to use.
• Interestingly, if a web page contains a photo (of the White House in the survey), 80% of screen reader users prefer the use of “Photo of the White House” rather than “The White House” (some had no preferences in this regard).

The most telling finding is the conclusion from WebAIM:

Perhaps the most significant conclusion we can make from these survey results is that there is no typical screen reader user… This survey emphasizes that screen reader accessibility is about real people – and people that have diverse abilities and preferences.

The No Clean Feed Canberra rally is finally happening! Unfortunately we won’t be around to take part in the Canberra rally as we will be in Sydney (and aiming to be at the Sydney rally) but if you’re in Canberra, please show your support for the No Clean Feed issue by attending the rally. If you can’t, please pass the message on so people are able to make an informed decision about the issues surrounding the mandatory internet filtering plan proposed by the Australian Federal Government.

The Canberra rally will occur this Saturday 13 December from 12pm in City Walk. The full details of the No Clean Feed Canberra rally is available at the Facebook event page. If you can’t access the Facebook page, check out this alternate page instead.

Need more info?

• Get informed – http://www.nocleanfeed.com
• Get involved - http://nocensorship.info/forum
• Official petition – http://www.wakinggiant.org/au_censorship.htm

One of my favourite sites about the mandatory internet filtering issue is Think of the children!

It’s good to see the Brits being proactive in the web accessibility field. The draft accessibility standard – BS 8878 Web accessibility – was released on 1st December for comment and aims to provide guidance on accessibility, usability and user experience processes in relation to people with disabilities, rather than on technical and design issues.

BSI British Standards is inviting all interested parties, and in particular marketing professionals and disabled web users, to review and comment on the draft of a new standard on accessible websites. DPC BS 8878 Web accessibility – Building accessible experiences for disabled people – Code of Practice is applicable to all public and private organizations wishing to offer accessible, usable websites to their customers. [...]

Based on PAS 78: 2006, Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites, DPC BS 8878 informs organizations of their legal responsibilities in relation to web accessibility, calling on them to appoint a specific person or department to oversee activity. [...]

The draft BS 8878 Web accessibility standard is available for viewing and commenting until 31 January 2009 – note that (free) registration and login is required.

Article via The Web Standards Project

I’ve been looking forward to a much needed holiday in the US this November. On Tuesday night, I checked my passport only to discover that it will expire in December this year. As the US requires at least six months validity on the passport, I thought I could hop on the passports website and easily renew my current passport.

Boy oh boy was I wrong. What should have been a quick and painless process turned out to be a case study for a bad user experience.

Having what I thought was a current and valid passport, I selected the Passport Applications menu item, then the Renew option. After following the form flow for a while, I got stuck on the login screen, was eventually locked out and then asked to contact the passport team (the number only works if you call during business hours). When I called the next day, I was told that I can’t renew my current passport as it has less than two years validity (thanks to a name change due to my marriage two years ago). Instead, I’ll have to go through a new passport application.

After going back and being a lot more through with my reading of the extraneous text on the passport website, I discovered that there’s actually a PDF that you have to download and read which contains important information (can you spot it in the image below?). I also discover that despite the page saying that you should use the renewal form if you have a current passport, you still need to find the relevant PDFs on the website, read the instructions in great detail and hope that you have the right form.

This was pretty annoying but I buckled down and tried to work my way through the online new passport application. The first page I get asks a series of questions (as per the following image). Note that the supplementary text for the third question “Do you want to renew your Australian passport?” doesn’t tell you about the less-than-two-years validity rule.

Once you start the form, there is no clear indication of the documentation you need to have to complete the form. As I start completing the form, I soon realise that there’s eleven steps I need to go through. Each step has to be completed before you can move to the next step (which is an absolute pain if you’re trying to work out what documents you need to have prepared BEFORE you get to that step).

The step that’s currently causing the most angst is the citizenship section. I have to prove that I’m an Australian citizen – either via an Australian Birth Certificate (which I don’t have as I’m born overseas) or an original Australian Citizenship Certificate (which I also don’t have as I’m on my parents’ citizenship certificate).

The Citizenship website tells me that I can apply for proof of citizenship, which is a 12 page PDF form, costs $55 (Australian dollars) and will take about 30 days. This is a problem – I leave for the US in less than 30 days.

I call Immigration who tells me that I have two choices – apply for my own citizenship certificate (which won’t arrive in time, unless I can prove that there’s a compassionate reason like death in the family) or use my parents’ original certificate (which is still located on the other side of the country).

The fact that I have a current and valid Australian passport, a Medicare card and the Citizenship Certificate number doesn’t matter. According to the new rules that came into effect on 1st October 2008:

From today, the Australian Passport Office will only accept the new passport applications forms which were introduced on 1 July 2008 to strengthen the identity management process that underpins the Australian passport issuing system.

The new forms better ensure the names included in replacement passports match those recorded on state and territory births, deaths and marriages registers or the Australian citizenship register.

I wonder how they thought I got my original passport?

So to fix up potentially erroneous processes from previous years, the Australian Citizens has to undergo quite a difficult process to apply for a passport. I’m still in the process of applying for a new passport. I’ve asked my parents to send their original certificate through registered mail so I can get it safely and on time. But funnily enough, I’m not the only person to be going through such a bad passport user experience.

Lessons learned?

For Government:

• Map out the entire user experience – the experience can be harder that you think and it’s not just limited to the web!
• Consider a better integration between passports.gov.au, locating an appropriate passport interview venue (some Australian Post offices) and the Immigration department (for proving your Citizenship if required)
• Rewrite your content so it makes sense!!!

For the Citizen:

• Give yourself ample time to renew or apply for a passport, especially if you need to prove your citizenship!

Fingers crossed that I can get everything sorted out in time for my November holiday…

21st and 22nd of August was the very excellent inaugural Local Government Web Network Conference 2008. This conference was aimed at those in Local Government, the public sector, community groups, and non-profits, and other tiers of Government. It was put together by Reem Abdelaty and Diana Mounter, from Local Government and Shires Associations of New South Wales.

I really enjoyed the strong sense of community spirit among the 70 (I think it was around 70?) participants. People were eager to chat and share experiences of managing their websites and providing services to their constituents. It was interesting to see the diverse range of roles – some of the participants managed the websites as a full time job, while others balanced the website management along with other duties.

There was a great line-up of speakers, including John Allsopp, Cameron Adams, Ben Buchanan, Brian Hardy, Lachlan Hardy, Matthew Hodgson, Tim Lucas, Russ Weakley… the list goes on :)

As the conference was a dual-track conference, here’s my attempt of one sentence summaries of the sessions I attended:

• John Allsopp – Opening Keynote Speaker: The real and the virtual – closing the circle – John gave an inspirational talk about how the web connects people and devices and the importance of context of use when designing services (rather than web pages).
• Robert Beerworth – Social Media and Online Marketing – Robert’s key messages included the importance of search and how it should drive decisions, and that planning/strategy is critical to a successful website.
• James Robertson – Open Source Web Content Management: are we asking the right questions? – James talked about the different types of open sourced and commercial CMS and that commercial or open source isn’t the question – rather it’s about matching a CMS to your specific business needs.
• Cameron Adams – Working with Design – Cam discussed how web design is about the integration of the look, behaviour and emotion, and provided some design tips to take away.
• Russ Weakley – Efficient, maintainable, modular CSS – Russ gave another great talk on writing efficient and maintainable CSS. What was new to me was the idea of the bridging CSS files which helps to create hack free CSS – very clever!
• Web Standards Panel – Russ, Brian and Kate talked about the NSW Style Guide (which seems to be quite the contentious issue among the conference participants, generating lots of discussion around whether they should be a common look and feel across council and shire websites), accessibility and record keeping requirements.
• Ben Buchanan – Steering the glacier: how does one person have an impact? – Ben gave a great talk about focussing on the things that you can change as well as the importance of coffee in building up and maintaining relationships.
• Matthew Crozier – Online Community Engagement – what are the benefits and how to manage the risks – Matthew talked about a case study which showed the benefits and risks of online consultation and some of the strategies used to successfully manage these consultations.
• Local-e Re-Design Project 2008 – Reem Abdelaty and Joanna Lewis took the audience through the user centred design process of redesigning of the Local-e templates.
• Matthew Hodgson – “The Intranet is dead! Long live the Intranet!” – Using a Doctor Who theme, Matt took the audience on a journey through time where we learned that people were the very first intranets, through to the evolution of intranets today and to the future.
• Lachlan Hardy – Closing Keynote Speaker: Local Government on the Open Web – Lachlan discussed various open web concepts, including web standards, open specifications (OpenID, MicroID, EAUT etc), and open architectures (API etc), and how this may be applied to local Government. I was particularly fascinated by the OmniTI URLs example – very cool!

Used with permission from Ben Buchanan

My co-worker (Adrian Newton) and I did a presentation titled Usability for Government: improving service delivery. We talked about usability, why it’s important, some of the user centred design techniques, and tips for people to take away.

I had a great time at the conference! Many thanks to Reem and Diana for putting together a great conference, and for the wonderful speaker’s gift (which now means I’m not an Apple virgin any more).

To check out what happened at the conference, view the twitter stream and flickr photos. Other presentations should be up on Slideshare over the next few days.

I’ve been neglecting my blog terribly over the past year, thanks to a throng of interesting projects (both web and non web related). I really should have posted the following weeks ago but better late than never!

There’s a number of interesting Aussie web conferences coming up, which I strongly recommend registering for if you get the chance.

Local Government Web Network Conference 2008: We believe in community

The first is the Local Government Web Network Conference 2008, which will be held in Sydney on the 21st and 22nd of August 2008. The conference is aimed at those working in the public sector, community groups, and non-profits, as well as other tiers of Government. Tickets are priced extremely reasonably.

My co-worker and I will be presenting on Usability for Government: improving service delivery.

Oz-IA 2008

Oz-IA 2008 is Australia’s annual Information Architecture conference. It’s intimate in size in terms of the number of people attending, but lots of great topics! This is a great conference if you’re interested in learning more about the information architecture field or if you’re already an experienced practitioner. Check out the great looking program! I just love the chance to catch up with all my IA friends who understand where we’re all coming from!

It’s happening on the 20th and 21st of September in Sydney.

Web Directions South 2008

How do I even start to describe one of my favourite conferences? Web Directions South has heaps of great presenters, fantastic topics and a chance to mix and mingle with heaps of other cool folks who are also passionate about the web.

It’s happening on 25th and 26th of September in Sydney but there’s also a number of great workshops being run on the 23rd and 24th of September (including Designing Interaction in the Age of Ajax by my friend Donna Spencer, and Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp by my friend Stephen Collins).

I’m also presenting one of the sessions – integrating accessibility into design.

Want a discount off your Web Directions South 2008 conference ticket? Use the promo code WDS08-RE to take $50 off the ticket price. Feel free to share the discount code.

Edge of the web

My hometown of Perth seems to be the happening place this year! The excellent Perth web folks have lined up a fantastic bunch of experts to speak about all things web, at the Edge of the web conference. It’s happening on the 6th and 7th of November in Perth, and tickets are very reasonably priced.

Hopefully I’ll get to see you at these conferences!