RuthEllison.com

I’ve been a fan of the Nintendo Wii every since we managed to get one in the initial rush of the Australian launch. When hubby and I found out about Wii Fit, we pre-ordered it and picked it up yesterday. As this is the second day since we’ve had it, we’ve managed to spend a bit of time checking it out.

For those not familiar with Wii Fit, Nintendo describes it as “the first step to a healthier lifestyle”. The Wii Fit uses a very cool Wii Balance Board that can measure your weight, centre of gravity and can also calculate your body mass index. The game has over 40 exercises ranging over the following categories: yoga, muscle workouts, aerobic exercise and balance games. Specific exercises include, jogging, step aerobics, hula hoop, ski jumping, ski slaloms, etc. What’s particularly cool is that it helps you to keep track of any exercise that you do outside of the game, which is added to the log.

My initial impressions of the Wii Fit has been generally very positive. The set-up and calibration of the game has been very easy with clear step-by-step instructions accompanied by the appropriate visuals on screen. There’s been a few areas where some improvements could be made but it’s all very minor. Once set-up is completed, you pick a trainer (male or female) who will guide you through a range of exercises. The exercise tutorials are clear with the trainer taking you through each step before you actually do the exercise. Hubby has spent more time playing Wii Fit so he has unlocked a range of games/exercise that I have not yet gotten to. From what I can see, they tend to follow a similar follow-the-leader format for many of the exercises. There’s a few cute and fun games including penguin slide where you have to catch fish whilst balanced on a piece of ice.

The only negative thing I have to say at this stage is that the graphics, while clear and useful when used as a step-by-step guide through the game, aren’t overly flash. The yoga exercises and muscle workouts are overly simple. I would have liked to have seen a more human-realistic feel to the graphics rather than the line drawings (with simple block fill) used. The rest of the game utilises the normal Wii styled graphics which is pretty much the same as from Wii Sports.

The interaction with the Wii Balance Board is on the whole, pretty good. It seems to be fairly accurate at determining what you’re doing. The jogging on the spot was quite challenging as my instinct is to run forward. That was probably the most awkard interaction out of the exercises I tried, but I think I burned the most calories with that one!

On the whole, I’m loving the Wii Fit so far. I’m very unfit and I don’t do any exercise. In light of that, the Wii Fit is perfect for me. I get guided through a range of quite fun exercises which means that I can slowly work on getting fit and hopefully lose a few of those extra kilos that I put on in the last seven months. It’s also making me more aware of my balance points which affects the posture. If you’re a hard core exercising type of person, this probably isn’t suitable for you. But on the whole, both thumbs up from me!

How many of you are familiar with the infamous Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares tv show? It features the famous chef, Gordon Ramsay, who visits a struggling restaurant and has one week to turn it around. As I started watching the series (the UK version first), I couldn’t help but noticed that there was many similarities between what Gordon Ramsay does and what we do in the user experience field (potentially, minus all the F-words).

I decided to share my thoughts about whether Gordon Ramsay is a guerrilla user experience (UX) consultant at yesterday’s BarCamp Canberra. BarCamp Canberra is the very first of many, I hope, BarCamps to be held in our capital. For those not familiar with BarCamps, Wikipedia defines it as:

An international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols.

The Canberra BarCamp covered a wide range of topics, including design, social networking, open source and future technologies topics.

Defining user experience

In my presentation titled Ruth’s UX Nightmares, we briefly covered the meaning of user experience:

All aspects of an individual’s perception and interaction with a company, its services, and its products

Designing a product (whether it is a website, web application, a service, or a physical product) is not just about the actual product. It’s about the broader meaning of design (which was covered nicely in Darren Menachemson’s talk on Broadening design thinking). This means thinking about all aspects of the product, from the look and feel, interaction design, information design, help services (online and offline), the physical interactions that may exist with the organisation and the customer, as well as the context of use.

In Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, some of the UX elements that Ramsay looks at include:

• Amount of choice on the menu - too many choices that are presented to the customer can cause confusion
• Price of food
• Quality of food – is the food sourced locally? Is it fresh or is it frozen/packet food?
• Quality and timing of service
• Staff attitudes
• Décor (visual elements)
• Layout of restaurant
• Brand perception
• Interaction between the front of house service and kitchen

What this shows is that there are many elements that form the user experience. They all need to be considered together in the context to run a successful business or product.

The Gordon Ramsay Guerrilla UX Method

The Gordon Ramsay Guerrilla UX Method is a tongue-in-cheek look at a simplified UX life cycle of research, design, testing and implementation. Ramsay’s methods align with many UX techniques.

Research

The key idea of research is to gain an understanding of the business and the users that will be using the products that you are designing. Gordon Ramsay achieves this by:

• Conducting expert reviews where he always tries the food of the restaurant that he’s helping.
• Running contextual inquiry where he observes the way the chefs are working in the kitchen, as well as how customers are serviced.
• Conducts user interviews to find out what people are thinking about the food and the restaurant. He often does this by walking about the city/town and asking passer bys about the restaurant.
• Doing a competitor analysis to find out about the other restaurants in the area. He’s then able to recommend whether a new direction is needed with the restaurant, such as the recent US episode where Ramsay recommended a move to healthy food to best service the health spa area that the restaurant was located in.
• Researching the business - for example, where to source the freshest products such as fish from local fisherman rather than importing frozen fish from overseas.

Design

Much of Gordon Ramsay’s design methods are about simplifying the product being presented to the customer, while maximising the quality. In the La Parra de Burriana episode, the owner was offering 72 dishes to customers, including his signature dish - prawns in garlic, with chocolate sauce. After a few choice words from Gordon Ramsay, the new menu was simplified to a few key dishes that could be handled by the staff.

Surprisingly, Gordon Ramsay also looks at navigation and orientation. In the Moore Place episode, customers were confused upon entering the restaurant. It wasn’t clear where they had to go next. After a physical restructure of the layout, customers were guided to the dining room with no chance to get side tracked.

The design of the décor is a big factor in every episode. Gordon Ramsay almost always recommends a simple elegant style to fit with the simpler menus on offer.

Testing

User testing is another key factor with Gordon Ramsay hitting the streets with various products on offer. My favourite is the giblets club sandwich user testing from the La Riviera episode. The key message is to offer products that people want, rather than what you think they want.

5 rules

I finished the presentation with five Gordon Ramsay’s rules applied to UX. These are:

1. Keep it f***ing simple
2. Customers, customers, customers - it’s about knowing your users and thinking about the entire user experience
3. Communication is key
4. Know what you’re doing - do your research and make sure that you understand the context and the constraints
5. Be passionate! Gordon says “cook from the heart!”

I’ll probably expand this in a separate post.

The presentation

| View | Upload your own

Note: I’ve been having issues uploading my presentation to slideshare, so you may notice some funny stuff happening. There are a few slides in there which are appearing with a red background and it shouldn’t look that way! It looks fine in the original presentation. Weird….

The verdict

The very first BarCamp Canberra was a success. I thoroughly enjoyed the day. Thanks to the unorganisers (Andrew Boyd, Stephen Collins, Simon Pascal Klein and Nathanael Boehm) and to the generous sponsors.

You can catch many of the great presentations on slideshare and photos on flickr. There’s also the twitter stream and video will be available soon.

Edit 22 April 2008: The podcasts from BarCamp Canberra #1 are now available.

One of the challenges in regards to living in a Geek Household is what do we do with our computers once they become obsolete. My hubby’s workplace recently wanted to recycle many old computer items (computer cases, CRT monitors, power supplies, printers, old servers). We decided to hop on the band wagon and recycle some of our old servers and other computer bits and pieces.

One of the things to be aware of is the difference between end-of-use versus end-of-life products. The first can be reused while the latter requires environmentally sound disposal.

Due to his enthusiasm for recycling and other green matters, my hubby was tasked with recycling these “e-waste”. What he quickly found was that it can be extremely difficult and expensive to recycle e-waste in Canberra, in particular, bulk loads of computer items. From a quick look through the items, I’m guessing that some of the items were end-of-life while others were end-of-use for their business (including good quality working 21″ CRT monitors that were surplus to their requirements as staff had upgraded to 30″ LCD monitors).

So if you’re in a similar situation of recycling bulk loads of computer gear, what are your options for getting rid of your unwanted computer gear legally (dumping of computer items is illegal in the ACT)?

Mitchell Resource Management Centre and Mugga Lane Landfill and Resource Management Centre

The Mitchell and Mugga Lane Resource Management Centres are located in Flemington Road, Mitchell ACT and Mugga Lane, Symonston ACT. You can drop your unwanted computer gear there. The computers are sent to Melbourne for recycling where plastics and other easily recycle materials are extracted.

Disposal fees apply as follows: computer box $15, monitor $22.50. Note that with bulk loads, the website states that it’s $30 per 10 kg. When hubby brought a trailer load full of computer items to Mugga Lane, they refuse to charge per 10kg. He was told that it was charged by the tonne. The Mitchell centre said that they didn’t do bulk loads.

More information over at www.nowaste.act.gov.au

Charity Computers

Charity Computers is a not for profit organisation and registered charity run by Canberra Christian Life Centre. Charity Computers receive donated computers in both working and non-working order. They don’t seem to accept bulk loads, unless it’s all computers than can be reused in a home situation (rather than the mix of business computer gear from hubby’s workplace).

For the donated computers that are working, these are repaired and reused. These computers are sent to individuals in need or not-for-profit organisations. Charity Computers are involved in training the unemployed for jobs and are also involved in charitable activities locally and overseas.

Disposal fees of $25 apply to Apple items, 14″ monitors, faulty monitors and monitors without stands. Disposal fees of $5 apply to printers requiring ink or are faulty, and dot matrix printers.

More information at www.charitycomputers.com/

Dell recycling

Dell offers recycling for any brand of computer, keyboard, mouse, monitor or printer. Dell will arrange to pick up the equipment at your home for a flat fee of $10 plus $13 per item in metropolitan areas or $15.50 if you are more than 40 km from your capital city. You can also take your PC to one of two drop off points in Sydney and Melbourne for $8.50 per unit. Contact Dell Recycling on 1800 465 890 or email recycling_dell_au@dell.com for more information.

Dell also offers free recycling for Dell branded products.

I’m not sure about bulk loads but it’s likely the same as the costs for the home recycling (i.e. paying for each item to be disposed).

More information at www.dell.com.au/recycle

Green PC

Green PC is located in Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the ACT. It is a not-for-profit organisation that states its dedication to “breaking down the digital divide” that separates the information rich from the information poor. They refurbishes donated computers and make them available, at a price, to those that may not be able to afford a new computer system. They also provide IT services at affordable rates to registered charities and community groups.

At this point in time, they will only accept Pentium 4 desktops and laptops and LCD monitors.

More information at www.greenpc.com.au

Lioncom

Lioncom is located at 8 Pirie Street in Fyshwick ACT. They handle recycling and disposal of computers and are committed to a 100% No Land-fill policy.

They handle bulk loads (call to make an appointment). Disposal costs are $8 per computer, $18 for small monitors (can’t remember the price for 20″ and above monitors), and $1 for miscellaneous items like keyboard, mouse, cables etc.

More information at www.lioncom.com.au

Freecycle

An anonymous reader kindly provided the following suggestion:

On freecycle act (a yahoo group) working monitors are snapped up very quickly.

You can try the ACT Freecycle group or check the Freecycle website for other Freecycle groups around Australia.

The verdict

Hubby ended up going with Lioncom as they seemed to be the only organisation that would except bulk loads of computers. I was really surprised to find out how difficult it is to dispose of bulk loads at the Mitchell and Mugga Lane Resource Management Centres. They would have been my first choice for bulk loads, but it seems that it’s only worth going to the Mitchell and Mugga Lane Resource Management Centres if you have at least a tonne of items.

We’ll have to do another computer recycle and disposal run in a few weeks. Looks like Lioncom will be the choice again.

If you’re aware of any schools or other organisations that can make use of old unwanted computer gear (probably a mix of working and non working items and will possibly include server gear as well), please drop me a comment. I would have thought that there are schools out there who may want to have the opportunity to strip down a computer. Anyhow, drop me a comment if you have any other recycling/disposal suggestions or resources that I can add to this post.

DISCLAIMER: The prices above are provided as a guide. Please ensure that you check the websites mentioned for the latest prices.

Edit: Added Freecycle to the list.

The March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting was held yesterday at the National Library of Australia, covering topics of wikis and collaboration.

GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

The first speaker was Brian Stonebridge from the Department of Finance and Deregulation, who talked about GovDex. GovDex is a resource developed by government agencies to promote interoperability and collaboration within Government. It provides governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to when developing information services. GovDex can be used by all levels of Government (federal, state and local) and provides the facility to have private and public sites. Most GovDex sites are currently private.

GovDex is currently secured to IN-CONFIDENCE level of security, with PROTECTED security planned for GovDex 2. GovDex is built on the Confluence platform.

Brian and his team member Rita provided some examples of the use of GoxDex. One was the Five Nationals Collaboration Workspace, which provides collaboration for meetings between five Governments around the world. Another example is the Australian Government ICT Standards Interest Group, which is used to establish the Australian Government position on OOXML (a hot topic!).

Kate from the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts also presented a GovDex site that they’re currently using for incoming Graduates for both DEWHA and Department of Climate Change. The site is used to keep in touch with the incoming Graduates who are often spread around Australia (I reckon that there are quite a few overseas enjoying a holiday before starting work!). The site provides information about Canberra, the Department, HR information, training information etc. She provided a lot of positive feedback about GovDex but also mentioned that the uptake hasn’t been as good as expected.

If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been any big announcements of GovDex, the reason is that the Department of Finance and Deregulation has done a soft launch rather than take a big bang approach. They’re still checking for scalability issues and ironing out some usability issues with the user interface. What I found particularly interesting was Brian’s comment that he expects to see a bigger uptake of collaboration tools under our new Government. It’s interesting to see the influence of culture from top down when it comes to collaborating within and between agencies and departments. It might still take a while for it to filter across federal Government but it’s definitely encouraging.

Wikis at work

The next speaker was Michele Huston, the Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia. She presented a case study on the implementation of wikis at the NLA. Michele stated that libraries, rather than being as starting point for information access like it was in the days before this prevalent use of the internet, are now just one of many nodes of information. This results in exploring new ways of managing knowledge. Hence the interest in wikis as a new way of managing information.

Wikis in the NLA have been in existence for about two years although it’s picked up a lot more popularity through out the Library over the past year. They are also using Confluence as the technological platform which had features additional to the ’standard wiki’, such as access control, a WYSIWYG (which was a key requirement from NLA) and the ability to post news items. The wiki started with two projects and was exposed to the rest of the Library via one particular project.

Library users liked the wikis and have been using it across a range of things including IT documentation, rosters, processes etc. They liked the flexibility, freedom and trust that came with a wiki. It’s not all roses though. There are some issues with the user interface, scalability, and the wiki also provides another spot to store documents. In addition, the same elements (flexibility, freedom and trust) that they liked were also the same elements that they didn’t like due to the feelings of uncertainty of some users. Michele also mentioned that what hasn’t worked is archiving of documents and publishing workflows.

What I found really interesting is the culture of trust within the NLA. There wasn’t much governance around wikis. All staff can request a wiki and all staff can edit any of the wikis. Michele has found that staff were more comfortable exploring, creating content and making edits in their own wiki space, rather than one big overall organisational wiki. She has also found that no matter how messy the content may look, staff do go back to clean it up later on

So is it a success? Michele states that it depends upon how you define success. They currently have 88 wikis which have been implemented over the past two years. The take-up within the organisation has been great. To me, it definitely sounds like a success.

Trust

So the question is whether a wiki will work in your organisation. There are many factors that will influence the success of wikis within the workspace but one of the key ones for me is trust. For wikis to work, you need to trust your staff. This is often much harder in the Government space but as long as you trust your staff to do the right thing (i.e. treat your staff like adults), this will go a long way in fostering a collaborative working environment.

There’s a good range of excellent web events coming up shortly and I’m proud to announce it here (despite being a bit behind the foot, as these events have officially launched some time ago).

Website user experience & CSS workshop

The first is the Website user experience & CSS workshop run by my friends Donna Maurer and Russ Weakley. They are both experienced teachers and trainers - I attended one of Russ’ CSS workshops a few years ago and it was excellent and Donna is one of the most experienced Information Architects in the world.

This is a hands-on workshop where you will will learn to build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

The workshops will be held in four cities:

• Canberra - Monday 31 March and Tuesday 1 April
• Melbourne - Thursday 3 April and Friday 4 April
• Sydney - Monday 28 April and Tuesday 29 April
• Brisbane - Thursday 1 May and Friday 2 May

More information and registration can be done over at http://www.maxdesign.com.au/workshop2008/

Web Directions South Government

Brought to you by the same folks who run the excellent Web Directions conferences, Web Directions South Government (Gov08) will be held in Canberra on 19 and 20 May. Gov08 will be a full day two track conference, plus an optional extra day of workshops, focussing on the concepts, technologies and techniques for meeting the challenges of eGovernment.

The line-up of speakers look great. If the past Web Directions are anything to go by then this is sure to be yet another great conference.

More information is available at http://gov08.webdirections.org/

Web Directions UX08

Also brought to you the same folks who run the Web Directions conferences, Web Directions UX08 is a full day two track conference, plus an optional extra day of workshops, focussing on concepts, technologies and techniques for building great user experiences on the web.

More information is available at http://ux08.webdirections.org/

BarCamp Canberra

I’ve announced it in an earlier post - BarCamp Canberra is happening 1000-1700 on Saturday 19 April 2008 at the CSIT Building, North Road, ANU.

More information and registration can be done at http://barcamp.org/BarCampCanberra

BarCamp Sydney

BarCamp Sydney is happening 9am-5.30pm on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 April 2008 (the weekend before School Holidays) at the Roundhouse at UNSW, Anzac Parade.

More information and registration can be done at http://barcamp.org/BarCampSydney

Canberra Web Standard Group

Canberra Web Standards Group is happening tomorrow! We have two interesting topics covering GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies, and Wikis at work and it’s FREE.

More information and registration can be done at http://webstandardsgroup.org/meetings/index.cfm?event_id=150

IA Cocktail Hour

Another free event for the Information Architects (IA) community and those interested in this space. This will be held tomorrow straight after Web Standards Group meeting.

More information can be found at http://iacanberra.org/2008/03/26/ia-cocktail-hour-27-march-2008/

After I installed the latest Windows Updates this morning, I got home and noticed that Microsoft Word 2007 would crash every single time I opened Word. To make matters worse, Word would also crash every time I tried to exit the program.

Lovely conundrum.

After an hour of frustration and a giggle at the appropriately titled Word 2007 crashes aren’t a bug, they’re a feature, it occurred to me that I went through this exact issue some time last year. A quick hunt through my del.icio.us bookmarks revealed the answer in the form of the Microsoft Knowledge Base’s article about crashes in Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word 2002.

The issue is with a corrupted key in the registry. The steps to fix this problem are:

1. Exit all Office programs.
2. Open the Registry Editor by selecting Start, Run, type regedit, and then select OK.
3. Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
Back up the registry key (select the Data folder, and then select File then Export. Call it whatever you want and save it to an easily accessible spot like your dekstop).
4. Delete the Data subkey (select Data, then select Delete from the Edit menu).
5. Exit Registry Editor.
6. Start Word. Ta da!

Hopefully this will save you some hours of frustration!

I’ve always watched the various BarCamps around the world with envy, wishing that I could be part of the exciting unconference environment. So I’m excited that BarCamp Canberra is finally happening! For those new to the concepts of BarCamps, Wikipedia defines it as:

An international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Here are the details of the event:

• Who? Anyone who is interested in technology, the Internet and related topics. We have room for 60ish people, so bring your colleagues.
• What? A good opportunity to share ideas and projects and to work with like-minded individuals.
• When? 1000-1700 on Saturday 19 April 2008
• Where? BarCampCanberra will be held at the CSIT Building, North Road, ANU.
• Website? The BarCampCanberra blog is located at: www.barcampcanberra.org/blog. Updated information about the event will be posted there.

BarCamps are only as good as those that help to be part of the sharing and collaborative knowledge sharing environment. So don’t be shy. It’s free to register for the event and there’s an Upcoming event for it too.

I’m looking at presenting something related to accessibility and/or along the lines of user experience related subjects (thinking about users when designing a product/website/webapp). We’ll see how it goes with timing of our garage sale and house renovations!

It’s one of the absolutes of life - filling in forms are not fun for the majority of people (with the exception of Andrew Boyd who loves forms so much, that he “would do it [designing] for free”). I’m not a fan of filling in forms. Come tax time, I rather get our accountant to do our tax return than try tackling it myself. Yet many organisations seem to be very Vogon-like when it comes to forms (Vogons are the masters of bureaucratic behaviours). Every organisation seems to have a multitude of forms for every aspect of life - taking leave, applying for access to a building, security clearances (which are always deeply painful to fill in), medical insurance, house insurance, survey forms, win-an-ipod…the list goes on.

Love it or hate it, forms are part of lives. I’ve spent a few years doing user centred design work around translating paper based forms into an electronic medium, so it was a refreshing reminder at last night’s Canberra IA Cocktail Hour when Jessica Enders from Formulate Information Design took us through her presentation, Form Design. Jessica started off with a very amusing clip from Black Books which nicely demonstrated the joys (or lack of) of filling in forms.

She talked about The 4 Cs of Good Form Design:

• Clear - forms should be clear, enabling “the form-filler understanding, with minimal effort, what to do with the form as the designer intended.”
• Concise - it’s about being efficient and being only as long as needed (not necessarily being as short as possible, which brings about its own usability and accessibility problems).
• Clever - forms should reduce the workload upon the user. Don’t make users go through all of the questions if they’re not relevant. This is a lot easier to achieve with electronic forms but can also be done with paper forms (think of the directional instructions you get on some forms, such as “if no, go to question 6″).
• Contextual - provide enough context and don’t make people guess at the meaning of words. Jessica gave an example about a survey she was recently completing that asked for her annual income - is that income before or after tax? Let people know why they have to complete the question. I’ve noticed the why behaviour in many of my user testing sessions. The participants wanted to know why they were completing certain questions. Once we put in succinct explanatory text about the why, we found that the participants were a lot more comfortable with providing the information being asked for.

Jessica also took us through her “4 layers of a form”. These were:

• Questions and answers - the “meat” of the form.
• Flow of information - she suggests mapping out the flow of questions to see at a glance the relationship between questions and impacts if questions were to be moved or removed.
• Layout - this is about the layout of elements on the page, visual hierarchy and “page furniture” (repeating elements like logo, header and footer).
• Process - a holistic view of the form filling in process.

Edit: Updated reference to Andrew Boyd and his love for designing forms (rather than the filling in of forms). :)