Having had a look at the microsite what seems clear is that the one of the biggest problems with designing accessible websites are the agencies & designers working on these projects.

We would expect a charity like Save the Children to be completely on board with accessibility so its surprising to hear that they chose a powerful design experience over a completely accessible one. But more importantly we would have told them they could have had both a powerful design experience that was completely accessible.

There is nothing on the Save the Children microsite that couldn’t have been made accessible. What’s probably happened is that the agency, designers or both just don’t know how to do this. Here are a few things that might have helped provide a powerful design experience that was accessibile at the same time:

sIFR - rich accessible typography for the masses
This would have enabled the text that introduces what the website is about to be rendered in the same font but in an accessible fashion

Javascript alternatives for image effects
Techniques like these could have been adapted to produce accessible panoramic images with hotspots

Making online video accessible
Some good information here about how to make video more accessible

Alternative text
Strangely, the microsite is missing this too. Oh dear!

As the expression goes, knowledge is power, and this is really true of web accessibility. Of course accessibility has an impact on design and arguably it does create more work, however, it cannot be ignored.

There are many techniques that can be adopted to produce visually engaging website designs that are accessible. If you know about them, that is.

A conference was held this week in London about VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which I was fortunate enough to attend.

For those that don’t know VRM is concerned with all of us, our data and preferences and how we as individuals can manage this information to our benefit by controlling how other individuals, government and companies access it and what they are able to do with it. It is the opposite of CRM where our data is held by many different companies and organisations who often use this to send us stuff we don’t want. Or that’s my take on it anyway. Adriana Lukas has written a good introduction to VRM which is worth a read.

I think the aims of VRM are quite uplifting - Doc Searls (pictured above) said something like “VRM is to companies what Christmas is to children: they’ll be surprised” -  and in my mind it is as much about the opportunity for companies/ organisations as it is for individuals.

The opportunity with VRM is about how it will enable us to communicate with a whole range of organisations and companies in a much more meaningful way. And how these companies will potentially be able to use this information to our mutual benefit.

Imagine a scenario where I post some thoughts to my blog or write a tweet about my iPhone and how I wish it would let me text or email one of my address book contacts to someone else (frustratingly it does not do this. Are you listening Apple?).

Now because I have elected to share my personal data feed with Apple and because they are using VRM tools to listen to me (and millions of others) they know what we all want, can introduce this onto their product roadmap and rather than sending me the generic email about new iPhone software that we all get they can communicate more personally to me that MY issue has been addressed.

In all human relationships those that are most fruitful are based on listening, sharing and trust. Why shouldn’t we have a similar relationship with companies and organisations we choose to interact with?

For the companies adopting this it will be a big shift in the way they communicate and do business. Some won’t be able to make the journey - those with crap products or who are too arrogant for instance - which will be a good thing.

Also for government, if we all take ownership of our own data, they won’t have to worry about it and we won’t have to read stories about any more memory sticks or CD’s containing our personal information going missing.

For those that listen and embrace VRM the possibilities seem to me to be limitless. I’m sure it will happen, its just a question of when and how.

Today is a good day.

This blog hasn’t gone political but publishing this photograph which I took at a demonstration in San Francisco in 2002 against the build-up to the war in Iraq seems appropriate.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to create this banner which features some of the quotes Bush will long be remembered, for all of the wrong reasons. It might have taken another 6 years but at least from today we will effectively no longer have to suffer any further “Bushit”.

It is worth reading the Guardian where several American writers comment on their perception of “The state of America after Bush“.

Good luck Barrack Obama, the world has been waiting for you.

Lots has been written about whether the Internet is making us dumber or smarter.

Dumbing down society, wiping out history, old media is being forced to play by new media rules, the net is re-programming us, Google is like McDonalds, we’re losing the ability to read are just some of the charges levied at the Internet, Google, You Tube & Wikipedia…..

This is a really interesting subject so I thought it would be worth trying to pull together some of the posts i’ve come across. Hopefully this might help people make their own minds up, assuming you are able to read any of them in any detail

1. Is Google Making us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr

2. Google: Making Nick Carr Stupid, But It’s Made This Guy Smarter, by John Battelle - some interesting comments have been added to this post both agreeing and disagreeing with Nick Carr’s article. Interestingly Google is compared to McDonalds - “Google is to information retrieval as McDonald’s is to food”,  ”the first bite tastes great, but the rest is empty calories”¹. Much is also written about search terms of 2-3 words which deliver a widely focused result that is shallow (therefore mostly useless) as opposed to something that is narrow and deep (and more beneficial).²

3. Google is making your dumber from The Business Week debate room presents two contrasting views from Jacob Neilsen and David Alan Grier. The argument essentially boils down to fragmented facts delivered by Google mean the web is not a great learning environment (Neilsen) vs access to more information stimulates us and makes us think more deeply about the world (Grier).

4. A briefing paper commissioned by the British Library highlights the skills gap of what it refers to as the “google generation” and the way young people fail to evaluate information from electronic sources. It goes on to report “that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority and children have been observed printing-off and using Internet pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them”.

5. On a similar note, an interesting post by slewfootsnoop about dubious posts to Wikipedia illustrates the importance of questioning what you read online e.g. who’s written it, why and whether its widely held as credible elsewhere before citing it as a source. (Um not sure i did this myself with this blog post so guilty as charged).

6. According to the British Cartographic Society “Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map”³ Not sure about this one. If the British Cartographic Society were that worried about it they could easily produce a mashup using Google maps of the landmarks that have allegedly gone missing…..

7. Carol Ness from UCBerkeley writes about “Web 2.0: Opening up, or dumbing down?” and reports on a debate between two authors from opposing camps, Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, about whether web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and You Tube are the “scourge of American culture, laying waste to its 20th-century institutions and dumbing down society?” (Keen) or “is the Internet’s latest incarnation a cultural liberator?” (Duguid).

Interestingly Amazon’s web based reviews give Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet Is Killing Our Culture a big thumbs down compared to more favourable reviews to Duguid’s book The Social Life of Information.

8. Web design is now having an acknowledged impact in print. Roger Alton, Editor of The Independent wrote on 23rd Sept 08 about a “Bright new chapter in this newspaper’s history” and goes on to explain how “all main section pages have handy, colour-coded sing-posting to make it easier to navigate”. Nicholas Carr cites this as an example of old media having to play by new media rules. I’ve always skim read the newspaper to find what is of interest, so as far as i’m concerned these new devices simply help.

I happen to think that the Internet is a good thing and that if used correctly it can make us smarter. I still read books even if some people don’t, in fact I sit on a packed train everyday where lots of people read them. The internet doesn’t replace existing methods of research it supplements them. With search you have to think about the terms used to make sure you get what you need. And by asking the right questions about the information you are viewing - who wrote it, why, who links to it etc etc, it’s possible to find a balanced view online.

Make your own mind up!

We’d just like to say a big thanks to the following blogs that were good enough to feature our work recently - SeptemberIndustry, The Serif, FormFiftyFive, The Cap’m, Dirty Mouse

For anyone who’s wondering what the point of this is, it give us the opportunity to get our work get in front of more people (who will hopefully like it) and importantly for us some really talented designers have been in touch offering their services (thanks to all that have sent in their portfolios).

I recently visited Seoul, South Korea and was a bit surprised to learn before traveling that UK mobile phones would not work in this country. As an owner of an iPhone 3G i thought that it was bound to work, however on searching the internet there are some conflicting views about this (for/ against) since the iPhone 3G is not on sale in this market.

My experience - the iPhone 3G worked absolutely fine. It picks up a network and can make calls and send SMS’s no problem. I did not turn on data roaming as i’m sure this is expensive, however, since Seoul (and also Cheongju to an extent) is full of free public WiFi the iPhone actually works better here than it does in London. So if you want to use it to email/ upload photos, browse the net etc it works like a dream….

Also the Truphone application works really, really well over WiFi and the call quality is as good as the cellular network so this is relatively inexpensive way to keep in touch with people by phone. I also tried Fring, however, the call quality of this was a bit patchy by comparison (for Fring to Skype calls)

Only problem seems to be with Google Maps which do not seem to exist for South Korea. This would have been really handy since very few people speak English and trying to work out where you are/ get a taxi driver to drop you off in the right place was a bit of a headache. For some reason these are not available - if anyone can shed any light please post here!

One thing that is consistently excellent is We heart stuff an online lifestyle magazine that seeks out what’s cool and delivers it straight to your RSS reader or inbox. As they say “We do the work so you don’t have to…”

There’s been lots written about how brands should use social media. We will be sharing some thoughts about that soon but one thing I do know is that any brand which thinks it has some cool stuff should send it over to We heart stuff and let them be the judge.

There are a huge number of online resources about the most effective way to design a website.

Research by Jacob Neilsen and Steve Krug into usability has undoubtedly influenced many of today’s web designers. A recent post by Smashing Magazine entitled “10 Principles Of Effective Web Design” suggests that the “usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a website”.

Usability principles are important but our experience would suggest that a website’s credibility is arguably more influential. The Web Credibility Project at Stanford University has published some useful information about how to boost a website’s credibility, all of which we would agree with.

Our experience though suggests that there is one thing above all others that is all important in ensuring a websites success…

Brian Cugelman of Alter Spark presents a well supported argument that talented designers can influence how much faith users may place in a given website. He goes on to say that “Web design can impact the success of your online enterprise. It can boost users’ likelihood of believing content; it can influence their probability of trusting the organization operating a website; it can create a strong and lasting first impression. Likewise, poor design can evoke mistrust, disbelief, and disregard.”

Our experience would support this. Back in 2003 we were commissioned to design a website for a luxury travel company called Bales Worldwide. The new website design delivered a huge increase in sales. The main change in user behaviour was that visitors were spending more time on the website with a greater percentage converting through to sale. We would suggest that this is because the visual experience delivered by the new website design meant they felt like they were in the right place the result of which more users purchased luxury holiday’s at £3000 per person. You can view the case study on our website.

Don’t just take our word for it - have a read of some of the positive comments made about our website design for Bales Worldwide on the Travel Rants blog.

Leading brands spend significant budgets on design because they understand its value. In an increasingly competitive world there is a way that companies with little brand exposure can level the playing field and generate more revenue by getting it right online. The difficulty is often for a prospective client to make the leap and provide the investment required to originate a visually compelling website design.

If you have a great product but your website is not delivering the sales results you would expect, talk to us, we can help. If we feel there is a fit with you we’d be happy to discuss working on a part fee / part commission basis as our way of demonstrating our belief that great web design can help companies succeed and generate results online.

Contact us at success@designbystructure.com

MPs have been suggesting that film style age classifications be applied to video content uploaded to YouTube. And that a TV style watershed be in place for content containing violent or pornographic images.

Why? Videos involving school children from Hertfordshire fighting and a woman being raped have rightly been removed from YouTube following complaints from the public.

So who should be responsible for the content on social media sites such as YouTube?

YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips. YouTube’s terms and conditions are explicit about the uploading of this type of content being unacceptable.

MPs argue that operators of sites such as YouTube should deploy technology to screen clips and effectively censor them (see Times Online for more information)

The problem with this is that YouTube and sites like it merely reflect what is going on in our society. Censoring social media doesn’t really address these problems, it merely hides them. And where does this end - should socially inappropriate conversations in the pub be censored too?

The best way to manage this is to allow the social network to moderate itself by having a clear reporting mechanism for content considered inappropropriate.

And for concerned parents who want to protect thier children from inappropriate content I completely agree with Will Rhodes. When my children are old enough to surf the web, I will be monitoring their activity until they are able to make their own decisions about whether watching a “happy slapping” video is appropriate or not. If I’ve done my job properly they’ll either ignore it or report it…..

Wordpress is well designed, easy to understand and most importantly easy for non-technical people to use. It can be learnt in a few minutes. For a free application I think that is remarkable.

If you contrast this with some open source software (and many, many paid applications), which are difficult to install, let alone use there is perhaps a valuable lesson to be learnt - more design, fewer features.

So many websites, software applications and products today are packed with features that do not get used because they can’t be found, they are too complex which in the end puts users off.

Perhaps the solution for websites / web applications (and products) is to focus on a few well-executed features in terms of their design and usability.

There are some recent precedents for this.

iPhone.
Lambasted by Windows / Symbian die-hards for not containing certain features phones using these operating systems have contained for years, the iPhone has changed the whole experience of using a phone. Instead of including everything and the kitchen sink and burying features deep in menus the iPhone concentrates on doing what it does really well. Some recent figures I came across in Stephen Fry’s blog make this clear.

“An incredible three-quarters of all mobile web browsing is now done on the iPhone, despite its market share being far smaller than that of either Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/Java or Nokia/Symbian devices. iPhone users report an unprecedented level of customer satisfaction (between 82% and 90%, compared with the second placed BlackBerry at 50%).”

Flip video camera.
Flip is video camera by Pure Digital launched last year - you can read a review here. The product has achieved considerable sales success against established brands in this market because the design focuses on making it easy to use the basic features needed to shoot video (e.g. no complicated menus on the device) and then allowing people to do things with the video content afterwards (e.g. share it on the web via You Tube). For specifics see a good article from Jared Spool

Concentrating on doing a few things really well seems to pay dividends.

This presents an interesting challenge for web/ digital designers today as more websites feature and encourage user interaction. I sometimes get the impression that many designers would rather work on a “sexy” campaign for a major brand rather than be considered a “user interface designer” which doesn’t exactly sound very appealing. 

Campaigns come and go, but web/ digital designers today have a unique opportunity to create tools used by thousands of people every day. Perhaps in the end acknowledgement of a designs ease of use and uptake by users just might in the end provide a more lasting recognition of one’s work / contribution?