Amster dam exspensive

Last day! I have to say as insightful and interesting these seminars have been, I've had enough. I'm all learned out and pot less. Damn this place is expensive. Think its why its called Amsterdam, nothing to do with all the water its so Dam expensive - deliberate spelling mistake for all you sticklers out there.

My final day involved Thinking by design, that wasn't what I did that's what it was called. I am gonna keep this one short cause my battery is dying and I have packed my plug converter things!

Picture the scene, I'm sitting in a back packers hostel at the bar. Thinkpad on my lap, music is pumping out some sort of drum and bass from the extremely loud music system they have hear and I'm surrounded by people who look like they need a good bath. Christian would love it!! I can hear him now, "er could you turn that down I can't concentrate and please don't smoke that cigarete next to me, oh its not a cigarette!"

There where three tutors for today - I also packed my notes so can't remember their names but I can tell you they all worked in very senior positions positions in their web design team. There was a very charming lady who looked like she would fit in on the set of desperate housewives and then a lady who looked like she would fit in as part of a little Britain sketch. Wont say which one but the words 'dust' spring to mind! Lastly was a Latin American chap, lacked a little charisma but very knowledgeable.

We looked at lots of case studies from work that they had done at Ebay and they work in a similar fashion to us, similar team set up, just bigger. They shared learning's on stuff they have experienced and where happy to offer their best practices. We looked at what they called their 'patterns' which were basically templates for every possible web page that would need designing/building and again offered tips on how to build sites efficiently and in a costly manner. Some of the tips where genius, others we already do.

We looked at how their site had evolved over the years and explained the rationale for why things happened. They also gave tips for how to get stakeholder buy in. One tip which did make me smile was using fear as a method to convince stakeholders. Not wave a gun in their face but explain what competitors do and how we need to be ahead of them as opposed to being reactive and falling behind. I still liked the idea of waving a gun at them! Down to 37% battery, move on Rob.

To surmise a good day - picked up lots of tips from a world leading organisation in online purchasing. Not everyday you get that insight.

Now off to the airport, looking forward to getting home and having some sort of normality back in my life. Who am I kidding, we have bloody loads of festive frolics booked for December! Hoping for a safe journey home with little delays, never flown on my own, this should be interesting. Passport, money, ticket, one out of three aint bad I guess!

How to sell a TV.

Yesterday's subject was Websites that Sell, though it should have been called How to Con People.

You work in Currys/Comet/QD and your job is to sell TV's. A couple come in and tell you that they are looing for a cheap second TV for the spare room in their house. So you offer 4 different TV's at various price points in the range. The prices are £250, £450, £650, and £1500. Which one do they buy?

Well in most cases it's the £650 one. The little step-ups in price from model to model is normally small enough for the salesman to overcome. However he has no intention of selling the £1500 model, but it's there so that the customers walk out of the shop thinking they have been prudent in saving £850, when in fact they have spent more than they initially anticipated.

Other tricks of the trade are to slightly loosen the ariel at the back of the cheaper TV so that when you give it a little tap the picture momentarily shakes, highlighting the effect of a lower aspect ratio. Also the contrast is turned down on the cheaper models so that the picture quality doesn't look as good. So make sure they are all set to midway before you compare.

Shopping

Next to our hotel is a C&A, remember them? Rob's been in dreamland kitting out his wardrobe. Sorry Martel if you're reading this I may have spoiled your Christmas present too. So I googled C&A to find out why they suddenly vanished from the UK high street...

They are owned by a Dutch family (so no shareholders) who were notoriously secret in the way they ran their business. Not even senior management were aware of their financial reports until 1998, 3 years before they pulled out of the UK market. And outside their corridors of power no one was aware how the company was performing, especially shop staff. So after 75 years in the UK they finally gave up, losing £250m in their final year.

Something thing that's been rammed down our throat this week is not working in silos. And not just within a web department, but throughout Sales & Marketing too. If we're not talking to each other then just like C&A things can go pear-shaped. Now I know this is nothing new, and to be honest I think we are pretty at communicating across the business, but it's all I could think of that linked in with the C&A story.

I saw a exert from a usability study earlier. This is where you video record Joe Public trying to fulfil a task on a new website design, to see if it works as well as you anticipate. Well in this instance the site wasn't doing well at all and Joe was having real trouble finding his way around. So much so that the quote I liked from Joe was:

'Man, I just can't get this thing to work. This site is so poor. P.O.O.R. It's POO! R.'.

I'd seriously have to consider my career if someone called my site 'poo'.

Test

The more I learn the more I hear keep it short. I find that mildly amusing cause everyone is 6foot 5 over here, even the women! Wrong context.

Day fours learning session was 'Visual design principles for effective websites'. What is a user Experience Architect doing on a course about design principles you may ask, good question. I think about it like this, how can you design a car if you have never driven, how can you cook a good steak if your a vegetarian. You need to experience these things in order to do something great.

I almost forgot that I spent five years of my life torturing myself around design principles at college so this session opened some old wounds.

I have listened to a lot about design principles that improve usability and we looked at some examples that ruin usability. Like an old married couple the two walk hand in hand, good usability comes out of good design. This session has made me appreciate how much their is to consider, do you left align? What resolution do you design for? How do you design banners that work? What emotions are evoked by what colours? I'm in danger of analysing everything I do! Its all very subjective though so loads of hands up at question time. One thing you can't argue with though is know your users and test the bloody thing!

Day 3 long live the sitemap or footprint

What a great day. Jen Cordello is brilliant. She really knows a lot about IA and she is a mum to be. I know this may seem a stupid point but to me it means she is real. When someone can be that good at her job and not be married to her job you have to take your hat off. I have met so many people who have no life outside there passion get them on a subject outside something like IA and they struggle to show any personality. Jen was different though, she knew her stuff and had a charming humbleness about hee that endeared you to her. Unlike Dan from the day before her material was excellent, the handouts where spot on and had context as well as being informative and the day seemed to go pretty quick.

I wrote the same amount of notes in the morning session as I did in the whole day yesterday. So much that I can’t even try to get it all on here. I’m just gonna throw down some highlights.

Yeah I tried to look at my highlights and even they will take me hours to blog about so im gonna write down what I highlighted in my notebook ..

There is loads of that as well. So possibly a few words?

Sitemaps are back – but they are now called footprints!

Short change

We're staying in the Swissotel. It's very nice. The Swiss are known for 2 things, chocolate and timepieces. Each evening I find a Toblerone has been left on my pillow, I don't think Rob gets one as he's staying in economy class. And each morning Rob is late (even though he has brought 5 watches with him), so the Swiss effect hasn't rubbed off on him yet.

However I've just got back to my room, and there was NO chocolate. I was not happy. It wouldn't normally bother me, but I had become use to it as a little treat for the long walk back from the conference hotel - it's nearly half an hour you know. So I moped about the room for a bit (not on one of these, but the grumpy type), and then thought I'd get a drink from the fridge (I don't think Rob has one of these either). And there I saw my Toblerone. Probably in the right place, keeping it nice and cold, but not where I thought it would be.

Of course I wouldn't be telling you this dull anecdote unless it had a connection with website design. I am now a repeat visitor to my room, I've been here 3 days. And I expect things to be in a certain place. If they are not then I get frustrated and feel a little down. Had this been my first night in the hotel (an infrequent visitor) I'd have no expectation, and would have been delighted when I found the chilled triangular choc. So what am I struggling to say here? Be careful of change for change sake. If you're going to revamp your site then make sure you have a good reason. Especially if you get a lot of repeat visitors. The rationale 'it looks tired' or 'it needs a refresh' is rarely true. Only because we look at the site every day do we have these thoughts - these are seldom shared by our customers.

Default language

Makes me chuckle how English is the default language. Everyone when they appraoch you, doesn't matter where they are from will address you in English. I have had several people greet me and I have greeted several people with English, I guess we rule the world when it comes to accepted business language.

Shame English humour isn't the default, I don't think the waitress saw the funny side at lunch when she asked me "what course are you from sir" and I replied "the international Volleyball coaching". She simply wanted to make sure I was sitting in the right place but after my attempt at making her laugh she looked like she wanted to punch me in the neck!

Day two - P45 please

Day two. Information Architecture – Structure and context with Dan Brown. I was sure he wrote the Da Vinci code but he didn’t mention it. Mind you he did mention his other book he had wrote oh and his son. First impressions of Dan where that he had some sort of throat infection as his voice was so gravely it was almost like he was putting it on. He assured us that was how he spoke and he kicked off by talking about himself, his second favourite subject, his first we would later find out was his son. Where his wife featured in this I’m pretty sure came a lame fifth after violent magazines and IA. He is a co owner of Eightshapes a user experience consulting firm based on Washington DC. Anyway that’s enough about him as he did a pretty good job of talking about himself.

We were straight in with the first topic which was about tips, tricks and techniques. The first tip was around Paradox of choice. Until today I wasn’t 100% sure of what paradox mean but in this context it simply meant, don’t give your user too many choices. Limit the choice and keep things as specific as possible to avoid watering down what your actually trying to achieve.

The second; context through content, basically provide examples where possible.

The third was use plain language, fairly obvious really. He showed an example here of a US government website where it had quick links but the quick links where all acronyms. Ok if you knew what they meant I guess.

The fourth tip was multiple front doors. Now on this trip I’ve already seen multiple front doors, most of the illuminated with a red neon light but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what he was getting at. What Dan was getting at was that users come to a site via multiple routes and as outlined yesterday they very rarely see your homepage. So he suggested building from the bottom up, start by looking at your deep linked pages, your lower tier pages and not your homepage. He suggested his home page designs came out of what he proposed with the lower tier pages.

Number five, growth. Design pages that are versatile, pages that can cope with change. The example he used here was CNN and how they had an area for ‘hot topics’. This could be updated daily with the latest optical news story.

Number six. Multiple way finding systems – sounds slightly perverse but maybe that’s because I’m sitting here watching re runs of Sex in the city, Dutch TV aint that great so gimme a break. Cant really remember the exact reason for this being a tip but I’m fairly sure it was something to do with having releavnt content, even if its duplicated, in every corner of the site. Something we thought we had to move away from for the Aviva re brand project.

Number seven. Abstraction, templating, modularization. Now at this point he started to loose me. If we look back at point three, use plain language he is already contradicting himself and we were only 45minutes into the seminar! He lost me so much that all I have in terms of notes is spend time working out your template design. I’ll check this one with Martin.

Number eight was his most valid point so far. Progressive disclosure. Again a bit ambiguous, why he couldn’t just say bite sized information or something similar was beyond me. By progressive disclosure he meant show small sizable chunks of information where possible. The example he used this time was another news story. This one having a high level summary linking to the full story if the user choose to do so. As most of the research I have seen so far suggests users scan read and in a F shape it would make sense but it does add another click into the process. Dan assured us this method tested extremely well and the extra link caused no detriment to the journey.

That was the last of his three T’s and quite frankly he peeked a little too soon as the next few hours was if I’m honest were like a Manhattan cocktail without the alcohol, naff. I need to turn off Sex in the city now! As I mentioned in my earlier blog the one thing that did make me sit upright in my chair was when Dan the man suggested that sitemaps where a dying trend. He displayed his own take on what he felt sitemaps where evolving into and proclaimed “sitemaps are dying and experience maps are evolving”, surely that’s the same thing right? His diagram looked like some sort of molecular structure with lots of circles linked together. I’d question this pearl of wisdom, as much as they pain me, lets not write off sitemaps just yet.

His slides where un inspiring and monotonous and without any notes in six months will mean nothing. So we hit lunch a little deflated. Dinner yet again was fabulous and yet again contained more red meat. After lunch things did pick up but the continual references to his favourite subject, his son where beginning to grate on us. I was starting to feel like I was learning more about him and hid favourite subject, his son than I was IA. We trawled through more examples of both good and bad IA including flickr and how it organises the user needs without compromising design and then we moved on to content types. I was hopeful that this may teach me some new techniques but with slides like, ‘stickies help brainstorming’, ‘click through the existing site’ and ‘interview content owners’ it quickly became apparent that I would just be validating what I already knew.

As the day wore on I picked up a few more tips around navigation and how they can be broadly categorised but one thing which did surprise me was how he seemed quite happy to endorse the use of content being duplicated and over lapped in several parts of the site. I thought this was bad practise but Dan suggested otherwise. I questioned the use of duplicated content and time and time again he gave it his endorsement.

He last part of the day was around wireframing. For a little while me and Martin joked that perhaps he would rubbish the use of wireframes and we would be out of a job by the time we got back but no, he was a massive advocate of wireframing. I wont bore you anymore than I already have so the highlights where;
Thinking about the site in components. What are the components that will make up your site, think about them in a list then position them on the page.

Have some rules that can be applied all over the site, I’m confident we do this well already.

Consider the appropriate fidelity – base this decision on your desired outcome and audience.

Collaborate – use every resource at your disposal and talk to people
So in summary an up and down day. At some points it was a little dry and his documentation didn’t nothing to inspire learning but I always feel if you can take away a handful of things you have achieved something. A common theme is starting to emerge though. We’re listening to experts talk about all facets of the web and so far what we do at NU is bang on with everything that I have heard so it’s a good feeling to know I’m part of something pretty damn good.

The Site Map is Dead - Long Live the Concept Model!

UE team, down your tools. Stop work on those site maps straight away. It's all wrong. Site maps represent the past, move towards the Concept Model. Well that's what we were told today anyway. Will it catch on? Not sure. Back to work guys.

"Hi, my name is Dan, now let me make an introduce myself. I love talking about me. In fact I am my second favourite subject, my son is my first." And he wasn't wrong. After today I know as much about his toddler as I do about navigation.


Now Dan is (in a nice kind of way) a bit of a nerd, and he just loves his 3rd favourite subject - Information Architecture - Structure in Context. He claims to be able to speak about it all day long, and I wouldn't bet against him. He also loves movies, violent comics (?!), and his own designs. Indeed I can't think of any website examples that we saw today that Dan hadn't created himself. So he was a little self-obsessesed.

Now let me briefly explain todays topic.

I moved house earlier this year, and put a load of my things into storage, loads of things. I filled the size of a single garage floor to ceiling. Every now and again I needed to get something out of storage, like my drill, and it was a nightmare. If I had simply put everything I owned into black bin-liners than it would have taken me ages to find the drill, and I would probably have bought another instead - bad navigation, the equivalent of a user leaving your site. But if I had put my drill into a box marked 'power tools', used multiple labels on the box in case some fell off or were obscured, and better still, ensured that the box was transparent so I had an idea of it's contents, then I would have found the drill in no time - good navigation. So that's what we need to do with our websites, put pages where users can easily find them with minimal effort.


So we spent most of the session looking at different ways to slice up a website. You wouldn't think it could be a whole days material but it more or less was. You can categorise by topic, chronology, audience, content, product/service, author to name a few. I won't go on.

One of the quirks of a European conference is the number of mixed accents you get to hear. German/English, Dutch/American, Norwegian/American, some easier to understand than others. I laughed today when a girl with a heavy Dutch accent asked a question. Her accent was so thick that after a couple of attempts Dan (the speaker) obviously couldn't understand a word she said, though he continued to pretend he could. After a third and final attempt, and to save any more embarrasment or awkwardness, Dan gave a completely irrelevant answer and we moved on. The Dutch girl looking as confused as Dan. You had to be there.

That was nearly as funny as listening to Rob chatting to the Norwegian woman sat next to him, She also wasn't quite as fluent in English as perhaps some others in the room. So knowing this, and for reasons only he knows, he decided to use the phrase 'anally retentive' and then spent the next 5 minutes trying to explain it has 'nothing to do with your bum' (pointing for effect). I had my head in my hands.

Morning walk

Nothing much to add here but walking in this morning we were crossing the water and it was a gorgeous winter morning. The sun was shining and we were excitied about what the day held for us. I captured this on my camera and thought I'd bung it on here for no other reason thatn I like the picture. All together, ahhhhhhhhhhh. Gotta run, about to go learn more about Information Architecture, one little gem from this morning, Site maps are a dying trend! Wohoo!

Getting squashed

Walking in this morning something occurred to me. Whilst taking our early morning jaunt across Amsterdam to the venue we've had loads of close encounters with cyclists, cars and worse still trams. You don't hear those buggers coming. There seems to be no logic to their road system. All the locals seem to understand it but we are constantly checking both ways as not sure where things are coming from. To complicate matters there are roads, cycle paths and then tram lines. So you think your standing at a safe spot in the middle of the road, almost like a pavement only to realise you have tram lines running under you feet and stay there and you will get mowed down by the SBD trams, (something else I've learnt, not to use acronyms but hey).

So whats my point? We are having all these statements rammed down our throat and one of which I have heard from most of the speakers is understand your audience and don't make things too personal. If you have a global audience don't use things that localise your site. Much like the roads in Amsterdam the locals know how to use them and if I was to stay hear long enough I might understand them but I am only here for a few days. We need to think about our users in the same manner. They are more often than not on a flying visit. Don't confuse them with stuff that is personal and localised or like me that will end up getting frightened and never attempt to cross that road again or in web terms never come back to the site.

What do you expect it to do?

Deliver what is expected of you. I heard it so much today that I started to analyse everything. What did I expect the toilet to do after I had finished doing a number one stop? It had no place to flush so what was I expecting to happen? The sink. It had no handle to turn the tap on so what did I expect it to do? They actually both worked with infa red the latter being a great way to save water as it only operated when your hands where underneath. What was I expecting from the first day? As I didn’t have any massive eureka moments does it mean it wasn’t good? No it simply means I know more than I thought and I have had worked with some good mentors. So what did I expect the cup which served Martins chocolate mousse to do at coffee break? Certainly wasn’t expecting it to be a Willy Wonker style cup.

Day 1: Coffee fueled learning

First off I wanna say the views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page has not been reviewed or approved by anyone in Web Ops and therefore is simply the opinion of the Author. Also its a blog, its meant to be fun, light hearted and not too serious. It not meant to be gramatically perfect either, its our diary. So all you sitting there with your red pen sucking through your teeth about miss use of grammar, if you want Shakespear, jog on. Glad we got that sorted.

Well, what an eventful first few days! The journey over was fairly painless thanks mainly to “Gail Moreleys” Easy way to enjoy flying by Allen Carr and I only made three visits to the throne as opposed to my usual eight or nine. We were up and down in our farty little Fokker 100 in about 35 minutes, ironic really my journey to the airport took longer than the actual flight!

We arrived at the Swiss hotel and Martin had done a good job, it was slap bang in the middle of Amsterdam. First Impression of the city were as expected, pretty much like any other major city, mega busy with lots of multi national folk wandering the streets, knitted jumper slouched round their shoulders, sleeves fastened at the front by folding up the cuffs. The only major difference with this city is that everyone rides a push bike and smoking doobies in public places is common practice. All that aside we trundled into the hotel and checked in, well so I thought.

Being slightly cynical and having entrusted Portman travel to book my hotel I wasn’t too surprised to hear the slightly patronising and overly polite receptionist say “I’m shhorry Mr SShhterry we haf no reshherashhhon in thisshhh name”, apologies at my attempt to try and emulate a Dutch accent in written terms. I wasn’t too fussed as I fired up the laptop and showed the now not so patronising receptionist my booking. She yet again showed me her pearly whites and assured me they would get to the bottom of it. In the mean time we were joined in the lobby by four rowdy Geordies who seemed somewhat intoxicated on the cities narcotics, we requested rooms no where near them. Finally after about half an hour and several phone calls to the banker we dealt on room number 205 and room 435. Would seem the hotel messed up and Portman had done a fabulous job, that’ll teach me. Martin was given what seemed to be the penthouse in comparison to my shoe box but never the less we settled into our homes for the week, unpacked, freshened up hit the city to watch some footy and enjoy and cold pint. In true British fashion we searched for the nearest English bar and complained about the price of the beer and how we didn’t like the look of the local grub! What ever happened to embracing the different cultures?

I’d love to tell you more about how our night panned out and what we got up to but you know the rules, besides this is supposed to be about our experiences on the course and not a seedy insight into the fruits that Amsterdam boast. Which reminds me usability conference!

Now if I’m to believe one of the first things we learnt today and that’s that the average user scans a sight for no longer than about two minutes at the most and rarely read all of the content I’ve kinda cocked up as im 500 words in and only now getting on to what I learned today. I guess my argument would be this is one of those sites which is rich in content and you come here knowing that you are going to be doing a fair amount of reading. So if you are still reading and I do still have your attention, thanks for being patient. Lets face it though, the workey stuff I’m about to go into isn’t half as interesting as listening to how I was up and down on a toilet seat like a yo yo in the airport!

It was an early start, Martin rolled over and woke me up with a coffee and a smile…We were just thinking of your expenses budget Chami, one room booking is better than two. Just kidding. On arriving at the venue we were greeted by some smartly dressed NNG peeps and I held my breath as they searched for my registration documents, surely lightning can’t strike twice? Luckily this time no probs and I was handed my conference pack along with my funky NNG satchel, oh its so Milan catwalk, me and Norris are gonna be the envy of NU with that bad boy hanging on our person!

We marched into the conference suite and we were handed more gumf by a lady that would struggle to get through airport metal detectors she had that many interesting piercings on show.

First speaker was an angelic looking Indonesian lady called Hoa Laranger. Her tone was mellow and her American accent made her slightly more interesting, not sure why? If I’m honest in her first hour and a half she didn’t exactly tell us anything controversial or earth shattering and a lot of what she preached we were both aware of. What it did do though was give us the satisfaction that what we do on a daily basis is spot on with what a world leading usability coach would teach. It was almost a NNG stamp to say, what we do is on the money. I noted some gems which I hadn’t cared to think about below. Oh and by the way, if you don’t agree, tough, they are Hoa’s statements which I simply noted!

Don’t localise your site unless you know your user. Aviva.com would be a prime example for this. If we make reference to something UK based it may put off a user say from the States. The example she used was where someone had used the term petrol on a global site which or turned off an American user as they refer to this as gasoline.

The importance of lower tier product pages. So many search engines deep link now so having relevant contextual copy with clear sign posting and an easy way to navigate back up the site is paramount. A whopping 75% of users by pass the homepage.

Slogans and mission statements can confuse. By placing something like this on a site we are assuming that the user has seen the offline marketing, or the TV ad. If they haven’t its simply wasted and will only prove to confuse the user as it will seem ou of context.

Less is more. We hear it bounded around all the time but its very true, if you believe what Hoa says anyway. She has suggested to some companys that to improve the site they need to remove 50% of the copy on the site. Every link, every bit of copy, every image poses a decision for a user and give them too many and they wont make any at all.

Manage expectations. A link is a promise, if you say click here for our latest half year report and then they click only to find something other than what you promised you will loose the user. So manage that expectation, do what you say you will do and keep your promise.

Martin doesn’t eat eggs – can’t say what he calls them though, ask Amanada.

Users read standard sites in an f shape. Hoa presented lots of data that showed in a heat map style where the user looks and it showed a definite f shape. I’ve got an idea, lets wrap our text in an f shape?! I think I’m on to something here.

Lots more interesting insights into her findings over the 10 years she has been doing user research but just as I was jotting my last few notes I noticed a pale grey haired chap appear at the back of the room. Jakob Neilsen. A strange looking fella, he has surprisingly young skin and as a result looks like he’s wearing an old man disguise complete with wig and oversized clothes. He obviously moisturises. He is also so white he is almost translucent, like a jelly fish. Delightfully charming chap though.

Neilsen is of Nordic decent but has clearly spent either a lot of time in America or working with Americans because his accent has definite American under tones. A pleasant chap who again was easy to listen to but his timing wasn’t great. For a man who has devoted his life to knowing his users and doing in depth research on user behaviour he clearly didn’t pay much attention to his audience today. Lunch was due to be served at 1 and yet at 12.45 Neilsen was cramming us with information and stats. I simply couldn’t concentrate on anything more than what I was gonna be served for lunch. Could have done with a lighter touch on the info being force fed Fois Gras style just before lunch. Never the less a good hour with him and again nothing ground breaking but good to hear him speak and see what makes the guy tick. You could tell he is very passionate about good usability, he got excited talking about it, you could see, even from the back of the room!

Lunch was fantastic, red meat to go with the red meat I had eaten the night before, think I can feel gout coming. After lunch we had another lady speaker called Kara Pernice. She put me in mind of Stiflers mum. She clearly worked out. She was no taller than 5 foot 2 but she looked like she could squat a small bungalow. Again another American but with a much thicker accent than those before her. She exuded confidence and was by far the best speaker of the three, even injecting a little light hearted whit into her presentation. She, as did Neilsen and Loranger talked a lot about do’s and don’ts critiquing websites highlighting examples of what they were trying to demonstrate. She talked in depth about use of images and the pit falls we make, using images to try and liven up a site. She also talked badly of using stock images, something NU could be accused of using. She talked about the effective use of text in a banner and what blend works best. Incidentally, she suggested all text banners work best and backed it up with some stats. Mmmm stats, I can almost hear you MI boffs frothing at the mouth. We looked at images where eye tracking had been used and it was suggested that guys look at images in depth much more than women again giving stats to back this up. Then an interesting twist, she showed two pictures of a baseball player. One had the results of where the women had looked the other where guys had looked, funnily enough the guys had a bigger fixation on the male genitalia than the women! Martin looked at me and asked if I was involved with that study. Cheeky sod.

He day finished up with a conclusion and a ‘what we looked at’ from Nielsen. All in all although not a revelation in terms of learning’s but all the same a very useful day where we confirmed what we do is correct. The procedures, the thinking and how this all contributes to creating fantastic websites.

Now off to bed, just realised my clock on the telly says 00:47 and it’s another early start tomorrow. Eight hours of Information Architecture lectures, shame Christian I didn’t do this a month earlier could have been handy learning’s for the Aviva project!

Oh..one last thing, seems I have taken a bit of a battering in Martins blog what with saying I made him late this morning. Well for info I got ready in 15 minutes. He isn’t so perfect though. When I got to his room tonight he was muttering on about how his phone chargers weren’t working on either of his phones. Helps if you flick the switch near the door to power all the sockets in the room you dullard!

Only 40 hours of conference to go...

This is the scene. We're both in my honeysuite of a room, tapping away at laptops, overlooking Dam Square decked with it's Christmas lights. We're sipping coffee that Rob has just made from my espresso machine, listening to his Lighthouse Family collection, talking about where we'll eat tonight (table for 2 please). This is the life. But first I gotta do my homework and make notes about what's been going on, because in Amsterdam it's easy to forget...

Yesterday was good. We checked in, went out, and watched football in the nearest pub. They don't show rugby here - if you like watching men having a cuddle I think they have specialist clubs for that sort of thing. Sadly beer ain't cheap, nearly £6 a pint. Especially as we must have gone to the first tourist trap we saw. So what you need to do is set up a tab at your table, then move table a few times so you can see the TV screens better, and then wait for the staff to change shifts. 3 hours later when we asked for the bill they didn't know what we were talking about. So we got £24 worth of ale for free. Might be advisable not to go back though, just in case.

That free beer didn't taste so good this morning. We're only an hour ahead of Norwich, but that hour makes SO much difference at 7am on a Sunday morning. But we are responsible adults and we know that we're here to further our pursuit or usability expertise and nothing will get in the way of that. Now we were late leaving the hotel because Rob took ages getting ready (yeah I know this link should open in a new window but I haven't worked it out yet) but soon enough we were dodging the trams and early morning dope-heads as we dragged ourselves across Amsterdam for our first day of learning - The Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability.

Thankfully it was a bit of an introduction to UE. Getting everyone (us) up to speed. Nielsen - the people running the whole thing - talked through a load of their studies, highlighting good and mostly bad points about web usability. How we laughed at the poor design of all these sites, wondering which idiots put them together. Hopefully next year they won't be using v.10 as an example. So it wasn't exactly rocket science, but then it's good to have your ideas reaffirmed by the experts too. And there are certainly a few ideas that we can bring back with us across the water.

So what have I learnt today???

• Most users of search (75%) are now by-passing the homepage, going straight to landing pages.
• More and more users are aware of the scroll facillity, but are often just too lazy to do it.
• When writing web copy get straight to the point. Confirm to the user that they are on the right page.
• cheese.com is a weird old site, but has rather good navigation.
• Users scan text links and headings, so make them relevant.
• Dutch people are so tall, and consequently have trousers that show too much sock.
• Users read most web pages in a F-shape, so put the good stuff in these areas.
• The mako shark is the worlds fastest shark and swims at speeds of up to 40mph.
• Most users aren't web experts, even vaguely so. We have to design for the majority who are still coming to terms with relatively simple ideas such as multiple windows.
• Use bullets to break up a paragraph, tick.
• Rob doesn't like cheese, which is odd because when he takes his trainers off in the conference room that's all anyone can smell.

Right. Getting hungry now. There's a nice little Argentinian restaurant round the corner that's got my name on a t-bone.

Bon Apetito.

Quickie from the Dam

Just a quickie cause Jacob is about to kick off. I've eaten too much red meat and I've already suprised Martin with just how unlucky I am! Learned a lot already, users really are stupid. More to follow later..

It's Sunday. 7.10am, so early. What are we here for again?

Launch minus 5

Passport, flight tickets, euros, hotel, all done. Rob hasn't even booked his place on the conference yet. I think he's hoping it's full so he can spend the week with Anne Frank.

Why can't Amsterdam be nearer the Mediterranean :(