Sharing information — Ausgrid’s Neighbourhood works map

By Gruden | Published: August 3, 2011

Driven by a desire to share a wealth of data with their customers, Ausgrid asked Gruden to work with them to design and build an online information tool that makes information about various neighbourhood works accessible to the public. Members of the public, developers and researchers can now access information divided by 39 Local Government Areas (LGA) within Ausgrid’s network.  The information covers previously unavailable data such as quarterly residential electricity use, solar power, and streetlight repairs.

Neighbourhood works map of region

Involving collaboration between various teams within Ausgrid, the aim of the Google Maps based application is to showcase the breadth and detail of information about the biggest electricity distribution network in the country. The challenge for Gruden was to create an application that would illustrate all the data available, formatted to compare against different quarters, in an easy to use and uncluttered interface. The tool should highlight the data available and allow its audience to easily interpret the information presented.

At the opening stage of the project, one of the key issues to address was how the data should be presented to the user in the simplest fashion that would allow them to digest all the information available for their Local Government Area, but also switch between data sets and different quarters for comparison. By presenting familiar and simple interfaces, including using the familiar Google Map interface and designing simple graph views, we were able to present the data in a fashion that carried the ethos of the whole project: transparency and simplicity. In this case, simplicity was definitely the best solution.

Neighbourhood works chart

In addition, developers or interested parties can download a spreadsheet containing the quarterly data behind the map, made available without use restrictions. This allows deeper analysis of the information, comparison between different regions, and republication in different formats and contexts.

Corporate Communications Manager Anthony O’Brien adds:

It gives the entire community a view on many layers of information in their local neighbourhood. We hope that people who access it will find out more about what’s going on in their local area and find ways to use it that suits them.

Gruden built and integrated the tool into Ausgrid’s Sitecore CMS, allowing Ausgrid to provide additional information and supporting links around the data sets and topics, further enhancing the user experience and really supporting the information tool.

Having performed the initial import of data for launch, during the secondary phase of the build we also designed and built a custom upload interface that allows Ausgrid to upload a spreadsheet containing new quarterly data as it becomes available — ensuring the information tool management becomes internally self-sufficient, and the tool itself remains relevant.

As an agency it was exciting to be part of such a pioneering initiative by a client such as Ausgrid, and with the end result gaining great positive feedback at launch, we’re looking forward to seeing how the Neighbourhood Works tool is picked up and integrated into the communities it serves. As the online audience becomes further educated on how to access information, and businesses continue to adapt to the mentality of transparency, we look forward to seeing how others tackle these issues.

Check out the Neighbourhood works map.

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Social Media & B2B

By pauline | Published: May 27, 2011

At Gruden, we’re finding businesses increasingly taking social media seriously — and it’s less and less about a marketing gimmick and more about an actual communications tool. One space that’s often overlooked by the wave of social media marketing is B2B. If ‘social’ is all about people, then how is it useful when two businesses are talking to each other?

Pauline Hanuise comes recently to Gruden from an agency background in Europe; she prepared the following as an internal primer and explorative document on social media techniques, particularly where there’s room to adapt them to the B2B context. There’s some great information here we wanted to share. -peter

As social media can be very powerful tools if you use them correctly, as digital agency, we are very interested by this kind of media and want to build strong experience in implementing efficient social media campaigns to offer our clients a large scale of possibilities using social media for B2C and B2B companies.

Here are some ideas about what it is possible to do with social media.

Generating Traffic

One of the most important things about the social web is to promote all your content and your sites on other sites and communities, and as they start working in an exponential way, it’s easier to drive more traffic on your websites.

“For example, more and more people are using Twitter for real time search results. And each of these people influences many others, whether through direct business dealings, or other internet channels like their own blogs, or video interviews.”

Similarly with Facebook, when a customer “likes” your page and becomes a fan, a message is published on his/her wall and all his/her friends see this notification, etc.

As a company, you should consider a response to every comment you receive and engage with those talking about your company or brand. This is a good way to be closer to your clients and generate interest for your brand/company.

Some successful Facebook campaigns consisted in asking your fans the next product they would like to see or asking your customers to become a fan of your Facebook page to receive free samples of your products or reductions.

In other words, you can be pretty sure that if you give your customers what they want, you will generate traffic (and leads) quite quickly.

Generating leads

One of the big strengths of FB is to collect data from your fans. Like that, you can generate a database very quickly and use it to create a newsletter later on to explain/sell your products/services. And to generate fans, nothing’s easier than to organize an online contest on your FB page with some prizes to win – or even give them samples or reductions.

One of the company’s I worked with has a nice way to make their potential clients look at what they’ve done: they organized a weekly contest to win one of their products/services (but you can also allow a budget to buy prizes if it’s not possible for the company to offer products/services on a weekly/monthly basis). Then, each week, you had to answer a few simple questions about the company and its products/services. All the answers were on their website; like this you were forced to use their website and check several pages to find all the answers. And I guess that all their new or potential clients have already won something. They offered prizes you can use at home (an ice cream maker for example)… a nice way to make people thinking about their company even if they are not at work ;)

Ogilvy have a useful slidedeck on Social Media in B2B, including a takedown of common myths.

Importance of a good communication management

We also think that a company which wants to be active on social media needs to have a good administrator who can control communications flows on the social media they want to use. As social media are more dynamic and interactive, they need to have an offensive communication strategy and know very well how to manage this kind of communications (which is rarely the case). They also need to invest some time daily to manage their social media campaigns otherwise their campaigns and social media strategy might certainly be unsuccessful.

Implementing social CRM

One of the strongest benefits of social media is that it can humanize a company. More and more marketing specialists are speaking about social CRM (customer relationship management), even for B2B companies, and we think it’s really worth paying attention to it. The goal here is to use social media to manage customer relationships. Most companies already have CRM processes and a CRM system. Traditional CRM was very much based around data and information that brands could collect on their customers, all of which would go into a CRM system that then allowed the company to better target various customers.

Social CRM is a much more user-centred process than traditional CRM and it’s probably why companies need to pay attention to this. Audiences are changing and evolving with the growth of social media. The challenge for organizations now is adapting and evolving to meet the needs and demands of these new social customers.

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Accessibility Update for the Australian Govt — Update

By Peter | Published: April 13, 2011

Last Wednesday saw Gruden and Sitecore co-host an Accessibility Update seminar at the National Library in Canberra (previously). The event was well-attended with representatives from web teams from a range of government agencies.

We opened with an update from Jacqui van Teulingen, Director of Web Policy at AGIMO, with an overview of the current status of the National Transition Strategy (slides — PDF format, 324kb). The team have recently completed a survey of agencies to assess compliance status and needs for transition; we look forward to the release of their report.

Peter Howard, Digital Strategist at Gruden, followed with a case study on AusTender’s transition process (transcript).

This was followed by Mark Stanton, Technical Director at Gruden, with a talk on achieving Sustainable Accessibility (transcript).

Finally, Greg Baxter, Product Evangelist at Sitecore, presented a demonstration of the Sitecore CMS’s ability to include accessibility rules within the authoring workflow (slides — PPT format, 4.3MB).

The seminar closed with a Q&A session with the panel, which included discussions about the NTS; about how accessibility can be built into authorship, balancing tools and workflows with education; and about challenges facing agencies with respect to complex sites and document libraries.

Thanks to all who attended. Should anyone wish to discuss their own particular challenges further, the teams at Gruden and at Sitecore would be happy to take your call.

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AusTender & WCAG 2.0

By Peter | Published: April 13, 2011

A Strategy for Transition and Compliance

The following is a transcript of a talk given by Peter Howard at the recent Accessibility Update for the Australian Government event in Canberra.

Today, I’m going to be talking about how we’re managing the transition to WCAG 2 on the AusTender system. I’m hoping that our approach to the transition can demonstrate how other teams can manage a task that may seem daunting.

I’ve been involved with the AusTender project since the time of its redevelopment back in 2006. Gruden’s involvement goes back another couple of years. Over the years, we’ve developed a close working relationship with the team at the Department of Finance. We regularly meet up to workshop current and upcoming work on the AusTender system. In a workshop last year, we thrashed out an approach to WCAG 2 that would work both for us as developers and for Finance as managers of the system.

transition to WCAG 2.0 and into the future

The first thing we did was to assess our current conformance level. We’re currently conformant to version 1 of the guidelines, to double-A. And we’ve had positive feedback from users. We’re working both to become conformant to version 2, and to move into the future sustainably.

As part of our planning efforts last year, we did a basic review of the guidelines to look for areas where we expected to have problems.

There are a few changes in the guidelines that make it fairly clear we’re not conformant. One big example is that we used to rely on the fallback that if content was accessible with JavaScript disabled, it was accessible. That hasn’t been a reasonable assumption for some time, with recent surveys suggesting that JavaScript usage amongst screen reader users, for example, is just as high as among the general web browser population, in the high 90s

The version 2 guidelines require that functionality and controls provided by scripts are themselves accessible, with various mechanisms to achieve that. Additionally, the version 2 guidelines ask us to take into account more contexts of use, rather than just thinking of the screen reader “text only” alternative. We need to think about people using different input devices, accessing the site using only a keyboard, and to the extent it’s feasible, using mobile devices.

So we knew we had to go deeper.

AusTender public and admin screens

We’re currently working through the next stage of the process. We’re undertaking a Compliance Review that delves much deeper, assessing both the public-facing and admin-facing systems against all three levels of the guidelines.

To a limited extent, we can use some automated tools to help guide us through this process. But the version 2 guidelines have been deliberately written so that automated tools can’t test for everything. They’re a good start though. So we’re working by selecting a few key pages on both the public and admin sites, and testing those. For example, most of the records within AusTender are modelled around common search, list, and view interfaces. We use a handful of common controls across most of the site, so we can assess those individually rather than having to check every page on which they appear. We’re then testing using some automation, then checking over the guidelines that are highlighted or that require manual follow-up.

Coming out of this process, we’ll have a list of the various issues that need to be addressed. We’ll then classify them depending on how easy or hard they are to fix, how significant a problem they are, and how visible their impact is.

This basic approach is something that anyone can apply. At Gruden, we’re using a similar approach with a few different clients. We, or your team, can look at your site  and select a range of typical pages, aiming for wide coverage without going into so much detail that the effort has few returns. We’d then use a combination of automated testing to highlight potential problems, and manual testing to cast an eye over page and content structures, and interactions or controls that may be problematic. Findings can then be prioritised.

The next stage will be to fix the problems. AusTender is a completely custom system; we manage the administration system, so we’re not dependent on a third-party CMS.

In addition, we regularly release updates to the application, either to support new reporting requirements or to make improvements to user interfaces. So our approach to Transition is to integrate fixes into our regular release cycles.

AusTender public screen with ARIA landmark roles

Our first step are the quick wins. There are a number of things we can do to improve use that are essentially “invisible” (air quotes) to most users. What I mean is, they’re not going to have any impact on layout nor on interactions, except where users rely on the additions. For example, we can use the W3C ARIA “landmark roles” (see image) to mark up different areas of content, such as search and navigation and main content. We can introduce “skip to content” links. We can make sure we’re including additional markup that provides metadata or additional information about existing content.

AusTender uses structured forms on the admin side to control public output

As far as the administration of the system goes, we have some benefits. In the system’s favour, administration is highly structured, and users are only given access to a limited subset of formatting tools. The example in the images (above) is taken from the admin and public screens for ATMs, with fields on the admin form corresponding to headings shown on the public screen.

This means we can control the output to ensure that data is output under clear headings, and that potentially inaccessible markup is avoided.

This is a big bonus. Hundreds of thousands of users access hundreds of thousands of documents through the AusTender system. If we can make a few small changes to ensure they all become accessible, it’s a big win for public access to government data.

There are a few “gotchas” in the version 2 guidelines. I mentioned the JavaScript issue. We’ve a number of controls, particularly on the public-facing site, that have been enhanced through the use of JavaScript. When we implemented them, we made sure the functionality was still accessible with JavaScript disabled, and we’ve paid careful attention to the usability of the controls in the most general cases. But we’re going to have to have another pass at them to consider other contexts. The little minus buttons in this image are an example.

AusTender's script-driven controls with problem area highlighted

To a sighted user, it’s clear what the minus button is going to remove. But if you’re navigating via a keyboard and a screen reader, we need to make sure we’re providing context as to what exactly is being removed, and just “where” a user’s focus ends up after the button they’ve just pressed is removed from the content. There are a range of “hints” we can provide with additional text that isn’t shown to sighted users, so doesn’t impact any of our layouts or interactions.

transition to WCAG 2.0 and into the future

So what comes next? As we complete our Compliance Review and the early quick wins, we’ll be prioritising fixes for inclusion in subsequent release cycles.

We release updates every 2-3 months, so we’re currently optimistic we can have widespread if not full compliance by the end of the year.

More than that though, we’re preparing for the future. We’re modifying our own development workflows to ensure compliance is ongoing. It’s not enough to just get to the point where we can tick a few boxes on a checklist. Accessibility is a whole state of mind. Back at Gruden, we’re working with our designers and developers to consider wider contexts of use when designing and implementing controls. We collect a lot of data about user behaviours, and by measuring and observing user patterns, we work to identify and improve potential usability issues. We’re going through a separate process with the AusTender team to document our interface standards, with the consistent usability and accessibility of our interfaces a key goal. And we’re building checkpoints into our release processes to ensure any new content models or interfaces have been designed, and are released, with accessibility in mind.

The specifics of our transition may not necessarily apply to your own sites. But I’d encourage you to think about the strategic approach. Pick an indicative range of pages or functions to test. Focus on the quick wins. And build accessibility into your development and authoring workflows. With this established, you can go through a transition and on into the future.

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Sustainable Accessibility

By Mark | Published: April 13, 2011

The following is the transcript of a talk given by Mark Stanton at the recent Accessibility Update for the Australian Government event in Canberra. The event was very well attended so thanks to all who came along.

For accessibility to be truly supported, an organisation has to think of it as more than a checklist. Accessibility is a complex issue that has arguably been made more complex with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2′s (WCAG2) more comprehensive approach. I believe that for accessibility to be ongoing and sustainable 3 elements are required:

The first is awareness – establishing an understanding that accessibility is an issue that needs to be addressed.

When the Web Standards Group was founded in a Sydney pub back in 2003, awareness was one of the main issues we set out to tackle. I’m very pleased to say that we’ve come a long way since then. At the grass roots, among people who build web sites for a living, awareness of accessibility is light years ahead of where it was 8 years ago.

Today Jacqui and her team are carrying the torch, doing excellent work to raise awareness at higher levels in the decision making chain.

The second element is education. What does it mean for a site to be accessible? This was also a key goal and, I think, a key success of the Web Standards Group.

With WCAG2 there is a certain amount of re-education that needs to go on, but the momentum is there and I’m confident progress will be rapid.

The final element is empathy. I believe that empathy is at the heart of good decision making, but unfortunately empathy is the least evolved of the three elements.

As the statistics that Jacqui presented show – accessibility, or a lack of accessibility, is a real issue for many Australians.

When accessibility is mentioned most people think of vision impairment, or maybe also hearing impairment. Fewer people think of common mobility impairments such as arthritis, RSI or Parkinson’s or cognitive impairments like dyslexia or memory limitations.

The sticking point with empathy is that most of us do not have a disability, we do not experience the fundamental difficulties that many have to live with every day.

So how do we overcome this? The W3C have released some draft documents called “How People with Disabilities Use the Web“. These are stories of users with a variety of disabilities and the ways in which they go about interacting online. These are a great way to begin to understand what accessibility means on the ground.

A technique I like to use is to ask people to pick up a pen in each fist and then try and use a computer or website. Obviously you can no longer use a mouse, key combinations are more difficult and your typing will be much slower.

But can you still complete the tasks you need to carry out? This physical challenge make mobility impairment real to able bodied people and helps build empathy.

As Jacqui pointed out good accessibility is also good usability and the flow-on benefits are not limited to those with disabilities. A recent survey of mature age Australians found that 68% reported having difficulties reading a page because of to size or colour of the text. Similarly with mobile devices screens are getting smaller and bandwidth is become more constrained. Good accessibility will help in these instances too.

One of the great steps forward with WCAG2 is that takes a more holistic approach, it acts as a guideline to improving the overall user experience, not just making it possible for screen readers to access content. It is, in effect, a lowest common denominator that allows more people to interact more effectively across the broad possible range of devices and contexts.

The key to good user experience, not just good accessibility, is an understanding of users and empathy for their situations.

Which brings me to Gruden.

Gruden are a digital services agency with a focus on web. Our business is to help clients use the web to achieve meaningful outcomes such as improved communications or the delivery of new tools.

We do this by providing a range of services including design, information architecture, application development, CMS implementations and strategic consulting.

Web standards underpin everything we do and accessibility is an integral part of our day to day activities. For us it’s not so much a matter of how we achieve compliance but how to achieve and maintain the optimal experience for end users.

And we believe that in order to manage accessibility on a continuing basis there are several areas that need to be addressed through out a project’s lifecycle, and they are:

  • Awareness and attitude
  • Personnel and training
  • Infrastructure and procurement
  • Solution design and development
  • Testing
  • Support

Let’s go through them.

It starts with awareness and attitude. The commercial imperatives mean that awareness at, and commitment from, the top down is essential. We strongly recommend that accessibility is not presented purely as a technical hurdle to be overcome, but that management is “sold to” and made aware of the value found in building solutions that are accessible, usable and appropriate for their target audience.

The next level down is staff. We are not in the business of providing recruitment advice, but when Gruden recruit people, regardless of whether they’re programmers, designers, project managers or analysts we need to be confident that they have a good understanding of the web as a platform and of how people interact with it. This obviously includes accessibility.

Our recruitment processes always includes some non-leading questions to reveal the candidates level of awareness. For designers this may be about the use of colour, for developers it may relate to the technical aspects of web standards. Whatever the role, these questions are framed to establish the level of knowledge and to ensure we recruit the right people.

The next level is infrastructure and procurement. From time to time we work with clients to either review their existing infrastructure and toolset or to advise on upcoming procurements in this area. We recommended – particularly to our government clients – that accessibility support is always included as a mandatory baseline requirement.

Accessibility is a key consideration in the design process. We consider it in-line with other essential requirements such as security, privacy, brand and maintainability. From the information architecture through to the look and feel and even through to the design of publishing workflows, we focus not only the business requirements but also end user’s needs such as accessibility.

Our testing strategy and procedures vary from project to project depending on the nature of the application and the defined quality gates. However there are some essential elements and accessibility is one of them. Accessibility testing is integrated into various stages of the design and development process from early mock ups and prototypes through to final conformance testing and involves a mix of automated tools and manual testing.

The final stage is what happens after go-live. Modern web sites and applications are dynamic in nature and constantly evolving. It is therefore critical that the work we do in the design and build stages carries over beyond the initial delivery. We provide our customers with ongoing support that can include periodic site reviews and feedback on how and when business should react to evolving accessibility best-practice.

As you can see Gruden do not just focus on point in time assessment, remediation or publishing a conformance statement. We work with business managers, communication teams, content publishers and IT to transfer knowledge and culture and to help embed accessibility into their business processes.

The Australian Government is leading the world in using the web to deliver customer-centric, equitable and transparent services.

As I talk to people in Canberra I hear about many exciting initiatives that are underway and many more on the horizon.

  • The Department of Parliamentary Services are in the process of building a system to digitise and publish the audio, video and text records of all proceedings in Parliament House through their website.
  • Human Services are looking to greatly improve their online services delivery and provide a consistent customer experience across Medicare, Centrelink and the rest of the portfolio.
  • The Department of Immigration and Citizenship are looking to implement an online self-service portal that would allow customers to manage their visa applications from start to finish through a single browser based interface.

There is a great opportunity to embed accessibility into these projects and many more like them. And I believe that doing so will not only assist the group who rely most on web-based access government services, but will result in better outcomes for all users.

Posted in Accessibility, Gruden News | Comments closed

On Chatter and What Matters

By Peter | Published: April 1, 2011

(Cross-posted)

Some time back, I read an interesting writeup of a post by Twitter’s Evan Williams. Williams wrote:

This last point [re. unstructured data] is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter’s goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible.

Sippey:

I think this is the first time I’ve seen Twitter’s goal stated that succinctly.

Sippey quotes Williams again, defining “the perfect Twitter”; emphasis Sippey’s:

The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about — relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you’re most interested in — even if you don’t follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.

This stuck with me. Social networks have a big problem that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, that of attention, and of value. As an example, consider the relationships I’ve recorded in Facebook. I’m “friends” with family, with people from my past (school, uni, work), and with people I’d call friends today, in-so-much as we regularly see each other in the real world. All of those relationships are at different locations on a spectrum of how much I care, of how much I want to know about the other person. Chatter is important for certain relationships, but for others, there’s little value in the regular noise. In the case of some of my Facebook friends, for example, I’d want to hear about engagements and weddings and children, but I’ve very little interest in their day-to-day lives. In the case of others, I want to hear every little detail. Then most sit somewhere in between.

People in different social circles

I’ve few tools available to me, however, to try and manage the level of noise. At its simplest, I just remove people from my Facebook stream (the landing page’s “latest news”) when I don’t want every little detail. This does mean I need to seek out information for other updates though, and that’s not something I want or care to do. Over on Twitter, I restrict the number of people I’m following, and I remove pretty much anyone with only a couple of strikes.

This behaviour serves to make sure I’m mostly only seeing things I care about, but it doesn’t let me see everything I care about, and that’s a crucial gap.

I don’t know what the solution is. Facebook are evidently trying lots of little experiments to improve things in this area, but I wonder if people will tire of the noise before they’re given a useful way to filter things (and “Top News” frustrates because it either filters too much or misses good stuff seemingly arbitrarily). Twitter are working on the issue from slightly different angles. Their location-based Trends are one way, even if they’re flawed. Last Saturday night provided a good example of them working, the trending topics either #earthhour or #nswvotes and other election-related topics. But at other times they’re inane, and they often fill up quickly with spam. Below, election night is on the left, ordinary mid-week on the right.

Twitter trends, election night and mid-week

A few weeks ago, as I returned more fully to Twitter after a two-month hiatus, I upgraded the Twitter app on my iPhone. With the upgrade, I found an annoying semi-transparent bar blocking the view of my timeline with such inane topics. Twitter quickly improved the situation by making the bar appear in a fixed location above the timeline, rather than blocking it, but the update to the app was buggy, with regular crashes as the app refreshed the topics but failed to load my timeline. This apparent preference for the irrelevant was offensive enough to make me find another Twitter client1.

The internet quickly dubbed the bar the #dickbar, and protested2. The protest has been more than just the usual complaints about change, with some great analysis from Marco Arment and Justin Williams. Justin proposes an alternative to the seemingly irrelevant trending topics, referencing Apple’s Genius recommendations in iTunes:

If Twitter wants to improve the trending experience for everyone, it should change how they are calculated entirely. Rather than generating trends based on the location of a tweet, they should instead show trends related to what is happening in my timeline, who I am following and who my followers follow.

At first glance, this seems like a good idea. Justin gives his own example, following Mac developers and mobile computing commentators, so expecting such a solution would show him tech and mobile trends. Alternatively:

If someone follows a variety of sports stars and celebrities, I would expect they see trends related to big games, Charlie Sheen’s latest exploits or Brett Favre’s dong.

Unfortunately, it’s just not this easy. Many of us don’t follow such a narrow circle of people that they would all also be following the same people, which would be necessary to keep the trending topics relevant. And if we did, of course, the trending topics would probably tell us nothing we don’t already know, just acting as an echo chamber. We come back to the same problem I have on Facebook — I follow people on Twitter from all sorts of different circles too, some tech, some politics, some regular real-world friends, with a huge range of interests themselves. Many of the people I follow are themselves following celebrities and sports stars, so their own interests would easily “pollute” my own in any “Genius” trending topics. Even the political tragics are scattered across the political spectrum, and I can’t imagine what I might find trending in those dark niches.

I suspect that, of course, the solution lies somewhere between these. Sometimes it’s going to be useful to see what people the world over are talking about en masse, and Twitter’s Global trends are more interesting to me than their Sydney topics; other times I can count on the people I’m following to re-tweet interesting things, and those act themselves as a sort of “Genius” recommendation, in that I’m predisposed to trust their judgement; other times it’d be useful to get an at-a-glance view of what the most popular topics are being discussed amongst my immediate circles.

Alternatively, we’d have a solution like Fever, which presents popular stories and topics given a whole bunch of RSS feeds. If I could do something similar with Twitter or Facebook, I should be able to friend or follow a whole bunch of people but keep them “muted”, using their streams only to feed a recommendations engine. That might be a useful way to detect trending topics or major events within my wider circles, by looking for the nodes in the conversations.

Footnotes

  1. The hunt for a third-party Twitter client ironically came shortly after reading about recent comments by Twitter themselves that many read as disparaging third-party clients; GigaOm ran Twitter to Client Developers: We’ll Take it From Here; the idea that theirs is the One True Way is especially ridiculous when many of Twitter’s current conventions came from third-party developers; cf Craig Hockenberry’s Twitterific firsts
    ↩
  2. Addendum: Just this morning, Twitter removed the QuickBar completely from their iPhone app; their blog post announcing it is worded such that it could be responding to any unpopular change though, and misses the point somewhat, talking up the concept but failing notice the weakness in the execution
    ↩
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Accessibility Update for the Australian Government

By Mark | Published: February 28, 2011

With the endorsement of WCAG 2.0 as the standard to be applied to all government websites, the Australian Government is poised to improve the provision of information and services online.

It is now more important than ever to ensure your Agency’s investment in its online presence continues to deliver ongoing value while achieving and maintaining conformance.

Join Gruden and Sitecore on Wednesday 6 April at a special information session for an insight into how your Agency can implement practical and sustainable solutions that ensure you meet your accessibility obligations now and into the future.

  • Update on the Australian Government’s Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy by Jacqui van Teulingen, Director – Web Policy, AGIMO
  • AusTender Case Study – Ensuring accessibility in a whole-of-government web publishing system by Peter Howard, Technical Analyst, Gruden
  • Sustainable Conformance – Helping Agencies achieve compliance and build their conformance capability by Mark Stanton, Technical Director, Gruden
  • Beyond Technical Accessibility – How Sitecore CMS manages author behaviour to enforce accessibility compliance by Greg Baxter, Product Evangelist, Sitecore

This session is suitable for anyone who is responsible for the management of an Agency’s online presence.

Agenda:

  • 2:00pm Arrival
  • 2:10pm Welcome
  • 2:20pm Presentations

Date: 2pm, Wednesday 6 April 2011

Venue: Conference Room, Fourth Floor, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Canberra

RSVP: Please register online before Wednesday 30 March

Questions? Contact John Yarrington at john@gruden.com or 61 2 8256 5300

Upon conclusion of the presentations, we would be delighted if you would join us for a networking afternoon tea.

Posted in Accessibility, Gruden News | Comments closed

Just What Is The Mobile Web?

By Peter | Published: February 8, 2011

Introduction

With the dominance of the iPhone, the rapid rise of the iPad, and the advent of a wealth of devices based on Google’s Android or Windows Phone 7, the web is moving more than ever into the spaces beyond the desktop. While the mobile web has long been considered separate from the “desktop” web, it’s become increasingly clear that mobile and the desktop are just at different locations along a spectrum of web access. We can no longer define devices just by their capability or by their context of use. (I like to think of the iPhone as enabling “on-the-go computing”, while the iPad delivers “living room computing”, but even those boundaries are blurred.) We can no longer assume that only certain tasks will be desirable to someone using a mobile device, and it seems a dangerously inefficient path to start creating specific versions of a site for specific devices.

Gruden website on MacBook, iPad, iPhone

At Gruden, we’ve always tried to build sites that would work across a range of browsers on machines with varying capabilities, and our approach to mobile is similar. Think about the core content and functionality across your site, and then think about the ways it might be enhanced in specific contexts or with particular capabilities.

Web vs Apps

App Store logo“Web vs Apps” is a false dichotomy — like most things, they exist at different locations on the same spectrum. Some things are obviously “apps”, with features that can only be delivered or only make sense well beyond the web — this can be clear when using, for example, a mobile device’s camera or contacts list, or for games that need the resources available to a native application. But at the other end of the spectrum, many of the things available in the iTunes App Store are really just web content, repackaged.

Where things get the most interesting is in the middle, where we extend your core offering beyond the web using features available in certain contexts. If your primary offering is a service, think about the different ways you engage with a customer in different contexts. If your web offering is about the content, think about how people consume that content, and how they can really engage with it. In some cases, given particular requirements and audience demographics, packaging something for the App Store makes sense. But in other cases, more might be gained by building atop your existing web site. Mobile browsers are increasingly offering up access to functions that were traditionally only available to native applications — it’s straightforward, for example, for a website to ask a mobile device for its physical location, or to “install” itself to a user’s device for use without a web connection.

Examples

The classic mobile web examples suffer by extrapolating too much from a device to a user’s context. One imagines a restaurant site — visited on a phone it might offer contact details and a map, while on a desktop it might favour the menu or function details. But what’s to say a user’s not using their iPhone from the couch, or while making their way to the restaurant and wanting to know more about the menu? Or maybe they’re at their desktop looking for a map to work out how to get there? Similarly, some banking sites will offer a mobile version that shows someone their current bank balance or the nearest ATM, but — for no apparent reason — not let them transfer money to a new account.

Even stranger, a site might offer up a “streamlined” version of itself to any visitors on mobile devices, but not consider whether it could always be streamlined — if you have extraneous information that needn’t be shown to mobile users, maybe it needn’t be shown to desktop users either.

Facebook's mobile optionsUsers may also get confused when they’re being asked to access your site in multiple different ways. Facebook offer both a “mobile” version and a “touch” version of their website, both with slightly different looks, the latter pointing iPhone users to their iPhone app as well, and both offering a link through to the “full” version of the website. The iPhone app offers some native functionality (eg, access to the camera and photo upload), but when accessing the website it’s unclear why there are multiple different versions that a user may need to select from.

Design for the mobile web may be well-intentioned, but it too often fails to take a holistic approach. The key to successfully designing for the full spectrum of web-enabled devices, from the desktop to the phone through tablets of all sizes, is in consideration of your content strategy as a whole. Successful mobile web offerings either target a specific niche or are about offering users a coherent experience regardless of how they access your site.

Next Steps

So what comes next? We’d recommend a range of activities; the specifics of each would vary depending on where your offering lies between content and product or service, but the high-level principles all apply:

  • IA Review; a look at the breakdown of your site, and content hierarchy both between and within pages
  • Content Strategy Review; a workshop with the people responsible for the creation and publication of your content
  • Customer Touchpoint Review; a look at the different ways people interact with your organisation and your content or services, both on and off the web; this may include an Analytics Review where the data is available
  • Techniques for Flexible Content and Structure; a workshop with your content and technical teams to review options and common problems when presenting content across different devices

Performing these activities will give you a strategic direction on which to move forward, and our design and development teams can assist in implementing a Mobile Web Solution that presents your content appropriately, integrates with your content workflows, and targets your users regardless of device and context.

Posted in Design, Industry | Comments closed

Open Government Now

By Peter | Published: February 3, 2011

Introduction

The idea of ‘Open Government’ has become popular in a few different forms over the past years, tending to follow general internet trends with only minor modification to make them appropriate to the context of government. More recently, however, it’s becoming a mature concept with clear goals and guiding principles.

History

In the late 90s, the web was discovered as a self-service platform, a way for businesses to offload customer service to a seemingly free alternative. The buzzwords were all prepended with ‘e-’, and so we got e-Government and e-Citizenship. The idea was to get existing processes online, but the end goal wasn’t transformative (e-tax and e-voting), and there was never a sense of ownership imparted to the citizen.

In the early 00s, in the wake of the dot-com bubble, we saw little new in the government space. Though the period did allow for some consolidation, with some of the promising ‘e-’ projects coming to fruition, and the more burdensome being left behind.

Then Web 2.0 hit. With a focus on the user, Web 2.0 became conflated with many of its early success stories in the ‘social networking’ space, later expanded to ‘social media’. This time around, the ’2.0′ got appended to things, and we got ‘Government 2.0′. Now the end goal was transformative — replace the government of institutions with a government of people. But it quickly descended into the mere use of Facebook and Twitter. Again, there’ve been some successes, but the best results have been from groups that already had strong community ties, such as local government or institutions.

Along with a focus on the user, much of the strength of Web 2.0 has been aboutdata, manifested in the ‘mash-up’, combining datasets from disparate sources. But as mash-ups became more ambitious, people quickly realised that governments were responsible for some enormous datasets, ripe with potential for mixing and viewing in different ways. The Creative Commons licenses had been eagerly adopted by Web 2.0 pioneers as a way to share data, and there were calls for governments to adopt the CC license for their data. The Australian Government stopped short of endorsing Creative Commons in their response to the Gov 2.0 Taskforce, but agreed in principle with the use of “open attribution” licenses.

Open Government Now

‘Open Government’ isn’t just government services accessed online; it isn’t just government institutions embodied in social networking sites; and it isn’t just government data made freely available. It isn’t just about a commercial relationship (services in return for tax), and it isn’t just about democracy (representation and policy input). All of those things play a part, but it’s about much more than just theimplementation.

In their Declaration of Open Government, the Australian Govt based their “support for openness and transparency” on three principles: Informing, Engaging, and Participating. These three ideas aren’t new to participative democracy, but ‘Open Government’ recognises that new technologies assist in institutional reforms that support democratic principles.

Implementation

Supporting the Declaration, the Australian Government have also been pushing through Freedom of Information (FOI) reforms that promote disclosure, and establishing an Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to oversee FOI. Work continues on australia.gov.au and data.australia.gov.au (formerly data.gov.au) to provide central access to government services and data.

At the agency level, implementation can be more difficult. The FOI reforms require agencies to publish a much larger amount of documentation than was required previously, including the publication of documents as they’re released with particular requests. This can require significant extensions to existing web publishing models to allow documents to be indexed and searched, without overwhelming a site’s IA so as to confuse the end user.

Agencies should also consider an appropriate level of engagement with the public. Few will find it appropriate to create Twitter accounts, but many will have existing communications channels that may be enhanced with different web technologies, or with integration with third-party services. Agencies that already deal directly with people may find that their existing service workflows may be improved or neatly complemented with a web component.

Next Steps

Talk to Gruden about:

  • a Content Strategy, particularly to support your agency’s FOI requirements, including workflow, publishing, searching, and integration options with your current site processes and IA
  • a Service Interaction Review, to see how online processes can augment your existing service offerings, considering all end-user touchpoints
  • a Social Media Strategy, reviewing existing discussions including or affecting your agency, and suggesting simple ways to start participating in those discussions
Posted in Industry | Comments closed

Are you PowerSmart?

By Dan | Published: January 18, 2011

Electrical appliances actually cost different amounts of money to run during different periods of the day

During the Christmas break Energy Australia (EA) asked Gruden if they could help create a campaign educating the Australian public on how they could save money on upcoming bills.

There were a number of energy usage calculators already made available on the Website but this time EA wanted a calculator which was much more simple, something that was fun to interact with, something visually engaging, something people would actually want to use.

Current versions forced users to input large amounts of data into several form fields, then click to see what they needed to do and how much they would save. So we thought, how about designing something that only needs 1 click, shows the savings upfront, reinforce this learning process with some handy hints then mix in a completely random element to make things a bit more interesting. And…why not use a game wheel instead of a traditional looking calculator?

EA had already trialled a large, physical version offline to great effect so why couldn’t we build upon this experience online? We thought we could. So we did.

Stay tuned for more
We’re continuing to work with Energy Australia on a number of exciting projects. In the meantime check out the calculator in action.

Posted in Recent Projects | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

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