blog.

One of the current debates in our industry is the practice of producing speculative designs to support proposals and pitches - often a tender will include a requirement for a creative or two from our design team to illustrate how we would envisage the 'look and feel' of a new web site.

In April influential blogger Paul Boag announced he was stopping this practice, and the arguments he presents feel quite valid. The design of a site is a consultative process - with users, the client and our designers - and that consultancy is missing if we've got to "whip a few designs together" based on what's written in a tender. It's also something that has stung us in the past - a number of years ago we supplied some creatives to support a pitch that one of our competitors won, only to find that the web site produced was pretty much an exact copy of our work! (which resulted in a swift change to our terms and conditions.....)

Another factor, in a small agency such as ours, are the costs and resources required to produce this work - all on a speculative basis, and I think this is something that gets overlooked by those issuing the tender. We were recently asked by an unnamed local authority to supply three separate and original creatives as part of an open tender which had a value of just under £7k - that's just not cost effective for an agency like us. With heavy heart we turned the opportunity to pitch down, but it made business sense to do so.

I think the best point that Paul Boag makes is that it may be more useful for those issuing the tender to look at an agency's existing portfolio and to talk to their clients. We're lucky - everytime I ask a client to act as a reference for our work I get a really enthusiastic response, which is testament to the the team at Focus. 

So what's our decision? We're going to sit on the fence slightly and take each project on a case by case basis. But it might be worth  noting that this is a hot topic amongst agencies and that some clients might come across those who have decided to act a little more forcibly than we have.

I've just come back from a very interesting lunchtime lecture entitled: WCAG 2.0 for usability specialists by Michael Cooper (from W3C WAI).  It is the second of two events I've attended this year advertised on the 'Bristol Usability Group' network, and it was extremely informative.  Having attended the RNIB WCAG 2.0 one day course last year, I was interested in polishing up some knowledge on building accessible websites, but also in posing a few questions from the perspective of the buzz term 'User Experience'. The talk was really well organised and informative so thank you to Stuart Church from CX Partners for adding it to the Bristol Usability forum.

In his talk, Michael Cooper went through some of the beginnings of accessibility, as well as confronting a few common perceptions as to notions of what is usable, and what is not. 

For example he illustrated that whilst an image online might seem visible and helpful to the average user, without the magic [alt=""] attribute not visible to the average browser user,  it suddenly becomes unhelpful and positively annoying for the screen-reading user, as the random image url is read out loud in an effort to inform the user of it's presence. Whilst information like this is available at the W3C WCAG 2.0 Guidelines site, even Michael Cooper admits that the guidelines are 'carefully crafted to be precise, rather than to be easily read'.  Slightly ironic bearing in mind that one of the 4 key principles of accessibility is for content to be 'Understandable!'

One area of particular interest for me was the notion of a 'A', 'AA' or 'AAA' site. As with everything now, whilst definable in a court of law, what is black and white on paper is often grey in the light of day. 

As I had an official W3C WAI representative right there in front of me, I asked Michael if it was really possible to have a 'AAA' site, as some of the strictest 'AAA' guidelines seem to contradict each other. His response was interesting, and seemed to sum up the best-practise attitudes that are helpfully gaining some momentum in the web world today.

He said (paraphrased):  Yes, there can be 'AAA' standard websites, 'as long as you chose appropriate content for the specific user group, and don't use a conflicting combination of content'. 

User groups and users are ultimately who we're working for, even though we love our clients.  Whilst a bit simplistic, if we can help a user to use a site, then we are doing our job, and Michael Cooper's position on aiming to broaden the possible types and numbers of those users is a cause worth fighting for...even if that means trawling daily through the 'book-length' documentation that accompanies the WCAG 2.0 guidelines!

We look forward to this years release of PDF and Flash specific additional guidelines.

You can view the Talk notes here.

This video presentation by BJ Fogg from Stanford University really caught my eye today.  Whilst it's simple to say not everything is simple, from a User Experience point of view, it's not always simple to say why that is, in a meaningful or quantitative way.

I found this psycological framework, 'loose' as Fogg insists it is, to be pretty interesting as a way to enter into the realms of why 'less is often more'.  

Link to Vimeo video ».