Man, they really know how to feed a gal! Breakfast this morning consisted of scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, pineapple, bacon, cinnamon-raisin toast and grapefruit juice with coffee & water at the table – and that’s just what I had for breakfast, there were donuts, yogurt cups, omelets and sausage links on the buffet table as well. The table at which I sat had more than a couple of mothers with teenagers (myself included, of course) so that took up the majority of the conversation. We were joined by a gentleman who came to the conference from Holland (that’s a long way to come for a webmaster’s conference!!) who was very interested in my upcoming topic, Web 3.0. The discussion of teenagers and upcoming web technologies kept our breakfast table an interesting place until the keynote speaker began.
Joe Patella, Chief Technical Officer & Usability Practice Director of Delphia Consulting was our main attraction today. He gave a wonderful talk on “We the people: Are they really the center of your design process?”. Some of the highlights of his talk are:
- Clue bus – an actual bus he keeps in his office to remind his staff when they’ve fallen off the clue bus (as in, aren’t getting a clue about user needs in their designs) and need to get back on. Very cute idea!
- 5 D’s
- Define – user requirement gathering
- Design – identify info objects of import
- Document – style guide, etc.
- Develop – test & iterate
- Deliver – roll out production site
- Tech that helps, not hurts!
- What works best for your content contributors?
- Repurpose content
- Think “content” not “webpage”
- Info repositories – Los Vegas City site used Services/Departments/Audience to define each document or piece of information and then made the information accessible via the service, the department or the audience that was applicable to (this could be done with Drupal’s views and might be an excellent way to structure MRRL’s site…)
- User-Centered Design is a process approach
- Know your users
- Set visibility goals
- Organize information, both on the site and *about* the site
- Make a great impression
- Validate your ideas (testing!)
- Coordinate design of the total user interface
- Evaluate and Iterate
