BBC News redesign: Can someone powerful please yell at them?

The BBC News website is extremely popular, so it's not surprising that yesterday's BBC Internet blog post about it's redesign attracted over 1000 comments - this must be a record?

The News Website Editor, Steve Herrmann, explains the changes in terms of doing some research and asking people what they wanted changing (and heard what it appears they wanted to hear):

But it was also clear from the feedback we got that there were others who thought the site design could do with a bit of a revamp – something we’d been thinking about doing for a while.

The specific changes he focuses on are:

• the changed width - because 95% of screens are wider
• more open design - to make it easier to scan
• new masthead - which is about cross-site branding
• bigger images - from user feedback and 'the power of pictures in telling stories on the web'
• space for adverts - for the international audience
• space for embedded media
• incorporation of TV and radio current affairs content

Several of these make sense in terms of usability issues which have been known about and well understood for years - such as better use of pictures.

A number of comments from other developers than me point out that the accessibility was obviously not a factor in the redesign, not just in terms of requiring that it meet WC3 but that it appears it wasn't cross-browser tested. A redesign should be improving accessibility.

This is truly unacceptable and I hope the accessibility movement and organisations for disabled people scream their tits off about it. The BBC is in a leadership role with its website and it has huge resources. Someone, somewhere decided to ignore this. Who were they? Was it Herrmann?

I had a quick look at the very prominently featured 'accessibility help' and it's a link to 'my web my way', which is about 'the web', not the BBC News website.

This features a 'change colours and text size' button - absent on the website and a lot of 'rah rah' for the BBC from selected disabled comments. I understand that it is better than other websites and that many disabled users are grateful for some attention, but when most commercial websites pay no attention and - for me - when Council + Whitehall websites (which are the best) get hauled over coals when they're not 100% perfect the BBC can indeed 'do better' (as they would undoubtedly put it).

A number of other comments point to a design-led rather than user-led process, such as the choice of the Verdana font, unfluid design and the wasted top banner space.

I would add a couple of things to what others have already said which add to the design-led feeling.

1. Because of the redesign, the left-side navigation bars are now too close together. Combined with the on-focus colour change this would definitely cause issues for users who have trouble using a mouse - it fails 'the mom test'. I don't know what's gained from keeping the on-focus, either.

2. Removing links from the page is design-centred rather than user-centred. This pushes people towards search, which is an issue for most sites to do well and certainly is not very good on the BBC site. This is why you always need alternative navigation routes, like a site map. I know from doing this process that there is always pressure to remove links but when you test you can easily make both an 'uncluttered' look'n'feel, which is really about removing visual distraction, as well as providing more options both for navigation and content. Look at the Guardian's recent redesign - does that look 'cluttered'? Everything about the redesign process as explained appears to be dominated by this idea.

Overall, I'm disturbed that, from the BBC's presentation of it's News site redesign it's fairly clear that it wasn't led by usability - making the website more useful - but a whole lot of other factors which pushed user-focus aside. Changes aren't explained in terms of testing results and rarely about becoming more useful. I can imagine what actually happened from the mentions in the BBC blog post about some of those other factors, as well as from previous blog posts which mention terrible ideas like coding from photoshop designs - the very essence of being 'design-led'.

In the first response to the blog comments by the head of 'design and user experience', none of the accessibility issues are responded to and the 'technical' issues are referred to the 'technical team'. She also gives the very strong impression of being prepared to change design elements from blog responses and this response in particular really makes me think they're 'design-led':

We added the extra white space because a number of users told us, through surveys, listening labs and usability tests, that the previous design was starting to look "cluttered" and "busy".

This isn't the language of someone responding to test results and producing a user-led redesign - or even, to cut her some slack, of someone communicating process to non-tekkies.

Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with how this happens and how this works having fought too many losing battles - power and who has it is an real issue in defending the bloody user in web design.

That an organisation the size of the BBC is still behaving in web development this way in 2008 requires someone powerful outside the BBC to yell at them to do this stuff properly. Perhaps Cameron could add this to his BBC websites critique? And perhaps someone could do a FOI request for the process documentation so we can see exactly who's responsible rather than make educated guesses?

Dan G has more:

Something very strange is happening in the BBC webdesign department.

~~~~~~

One of his comments takes him to task for his own coding and design - so I expect something similar.

Just to say, I don't care. It's a bit ad hominem ... (although I am interested to know if something plain isn't working, which I understand can be the case with some video servers).

I had one of these to my post 'BBC Blogs: Why bother?', which got hundreds of visits via the BBC Blog post which specifically mentioned it.

Please have a Flash bypass (you do not have it now) as there are many businesses, mine included, that will not allow Flash. Without the bypass we will not be able to see your videos.
Flash tracks, by IP address, every use of it and puts the information together into a report for its subscribers. Please show some respect for the intelligence and privacy of your readers.
I am glad to see you finally got rid of the 3cm wide blank band near the top.

I will investigate this but it's news to me (I don't read all the technical news all the time), so it's not about disrespect. Further, the past design was Blogger off-the-shelf. This one is 'off the shelf' tweaked. Did I ever claim it was perfect? And I'd rather spend time researching posts than - basically - fussing with design or coding in order to impress, who?

I would say that a business blocking Flash is stupid. Video is a business tool and to over-block (to stop YouTube time-wasting) is short-sighted. Sounds like someone was sold a filter package and they didn't tell them what the side-effects would be — all too familiar.

More about that in this post: How to disable web filter software.


Update: The BBC Sports Editor has commented further here.

Our audience research cannot just be confined to this blog. We have been working for months to develop an approach that works for our users and gives them a more dynamic sport website, now and in the future. This was considered research and usability testing - which was used by a team of technical, design and editorial experts to help define this new-look website.

But how was it used? And what happened with accessibility?

And this post is sitting prominently in the 'blog reaction' column next to the reactions post on the BBC Internet Blog, sending me hundreds of hits again. And I'm not getting any furiously disagreeing readers ...

How piracy helps business

Karen Croxson, a Junior Research Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford, gave a lecture at the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference explaining how software and music piracy can actually help businesses.

While piracy may harm sales, it can also serve to provide free marketing, helping to create ‘buzz’ about a product.

This is product specific and may explain certain protections: console games vs. office software for example.

The unauthorised copying of digital goods such as software, music and films – a practice referred to as ‘digital piracy’ – has been claimed to place in peril the viability of whole industries. With perceived losses running so high, one might expect to see all sellers moving mountains to safeguard their intellectual property technologically. In fact there are some puzzling differences in attitudes.

Piracy can displace sales but highlights the importance of being realistic about this: not every copy implies a lost purchase. In any market there are some who value the product but never would buy (perhaps children with limited pocket money) and their piracy poses no threat to sales.

Given that the cost of piracy is likely to come down to a personal calculation (related to such things as the value of time, fear of penalties and moral costs), there may be variation across markets in the genuine sales threat – the temptation to pirate by those who would otherwise buy.

Croxson using the example of the Arctic Monkeys to explain how valuable 'word-of-mouth' is, although putting a sterling value on this is very hard to do.

The instant success of the music group's first album was due not to traditional marketing muscle but to the energy of early consumers who hyped its songs through social networking site myspace.com.

• Lecture (PDF)
• Karen Croxson
  

Hat-tip: Etre

Embedding video: why isn't it obvious to the MSM?

I blogged a few days ago about the BBC's new use of Flash video across the news website — my main question was to ask just why they won't allow embedding by others of their content. Or rather, why they will allow it when that content is nicked, republished on YouTube etc. (they aren't policing this with take-down notices) but won't enable it.

As I commented, this makes even less sense when much of that content - yes, news content - would be of interest to exactly the audiences they are desperate to appeal to. Start with teenagers embedding news about climate change on Bebo/MySpace and think on. It's hard to see where the negatives are but presumably they think there are some.

Of course, I tried to comment but actually gave up after re-hitting the button periodically over about eight hours.

So I just don't know but my, I think fair, assumption is we're talking slow-moving, dinosaur like corporations and behomoths who just don't get it - where media consumption is moving to and why they're losing out. The success of video online shows that the web can actually increase your viewership/revenues if you stop trying to fight and control and start responding quicker.

This is an across the 'MSM' (mainstream media) thing and speaks to why they're being so quickly outgunned/flanked on the web, because I just tried to promote an ITV drama and found I couldn't. Free marketing and they don't want it.

I love Jake Arnott's books and they have dramaticised his fourth, 'He Kills Coppers'. Radio Four gave an ITV drama a four star review. But I am so pissed off that I can't embed a preview here that I'm not going to link — and the ITV page for it isn't top in Google results, you'll have to look. And the link must be what they want: all hail traffic to their website. Why? You can get your revenue via ads in the embed!

This is absolutely terrible marketing and completely inexplicable: because I've yet to hear an explanation.

Michael Grade presumably thinks me promoting one of their dramas is about 'not handing control to a third party' (i.e me). He should try talking to Comedy Central instead of the bitter people running the music industry.

It's part of Viacom, run by Barry Diller and they say:

"We definitely feel that [allowing embedding of] video on the Web is a huge tool. It drives word-of-mouth discussion about a show."

NB: I haven't mentioned ITV's use of Silverlight, rather than FlashVideo. That's a deal whose stupidity and short-sightedness should be blindingly obvious.

• Postscript #1 (BBC): Oh yey of little faith ...
• Postscript #2 (ITV): I have a response back:

At present we do not have any plans to make our programmes available for embedding/downloading due to rights issues.

More online women entrepreneurs would boost our economy

"Women need to know that even if they have never programmed a line of code in their lives, there is a great variety of user-friendly tech solutions to explore and implement, allowing people from all walks of life to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs."
Amy Tiemann

~~~~

I was struck by a line in a Mail On Sunday article about Julia Reynolds, the women responsible for transforming Tesco's clothes operation — she's moving to a dotcom.

The article is about how she couldn't stand the macho dickheads running Tesco any longer and was packing her trunk and leaving.

"I'd just had my fill of chest-beating alpha males. I had some of the most horrendous things said to me and it is only now that I can laugh about them."

She remembers comments such as, 'Who the f*** are you to be driving a [nice] car like that?' and 'Who the f*** do you think you are to have a big job like that?'

What interested me is that she'd choosen a dotcom, online retailer figleaves.com — something she said she wouldn't have entertained only two years ago.

Obviously, this isn't 2001 and the general business viability of dotcoms in the UK is pretty well established now. Or is it? A BBC Money Programme story last week looked at a women dotcom entrepeneur and she related just how difficult it was to get start-up capital. She finally found 'angel' investors but it was very hard and you were left wondering if being a woman was a hindrance with getting investors.

Women's relationship with the web is evolving. In 2007, eMarketer predicted there would be 97.2 million U.S. female Internet users aged 3 and older, or 51.7 per cent of the total online population.

A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls — it describes them as a new breed of “super-communicators”.

• Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs
• 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys
• Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of boys of the same age
• But boys are twice as likely to post videos online

Hitwise estimate that almost 55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%.

Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of Nintendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%). The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) says that women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (31 per cent) than boys age 17 or younger (20 per cent).

According to the US National Foundation of Women Business Owners (NFWBO):

• 26% of the 9.1 million women-owned businesses in the U.S now have homepages (compared to 16% of men business owners).
  
• 17% of women business owners now cite business growth as is the most important reason for using new technology, compared to just 10% of men business owners.

There is quite a history of women's involvement in dotcoms. Most famously there's Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of Lastminute.com, Natalie Massenet, who set up the popular shopping site Net-a-Porter, Julie Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited, Karen Derby, founder of Simplyswitch.com, Sally Robinson, a farmer's wife from Yorkshire who started an online business selling bras, and Lopa Patel, founder of redhotcurry.com.

But Carol Dukes, ex-managing director of EMAP online and Carlton online, cautions about the focus on so-called 'dotcomdivas'.

If you look at the actual numbers of women doing start-ups, there are very few of us - maybe three out of 100 companies. We are still treated like a freak show: "Check it out! It's a woman running an Internet company!" There are women opening hairdressing salons, shops and PR agencies and nobody turns a hair.

I had a look to see what the government is doing in this area. There appears to be a lot of concern - and funding - to improve the numbers of women scientists and engineers, but not web entrepreneurs. In sharp contrast to the States, there doesn't appear to be much coming from government which is aimed specifically at women. What I did find on the primary service, BusinessLink, specifically about the web and women, was one broken link.

Internet-based businesses are described as perfect for women who need to juggle family commitments and need flexible working.

Research, commissioned by insurance group AXA found that 34% of new and expectant women were planning to set up their own business from home.

The most popular ways of doing this were to use the web and email to carry on offering professional skills like accountancy on a consultancy basis, or to move into retail - buying or selling goods on email or launching a mail order service.

Shriti Vadera MP:

Getting more women into business is a challenge, not just for gender equality but for national economic success. We would have 700,000 more businesses if proportionally as many British women as American women started businesses

Shaa Wasmund, a serial entrepreneur who has worked with inventor and business tycoon James Dyson says.

We need to completely and utterly rethink business support. It needs to be overhauled right the way up from the Learning and Skills Council up to the small business advisory services like Business Link.

These services need to be real and relevant for women, not just run by civil servants.

More use of technology, particularly the internet, is the key to this, she says.

Better government support for women web entrepreneurs isn't about 'PC' — it's about growing the economy and making the most of all the talents.

Gaming YouTube

There's buzz that 'The evolution of dance' has finally been knocked off the YouTube #1 spot by a fan tribute to an obscure Brazilian pop band called Cansei de Ser Sexy. waxy.org examines this in detail but doesn't nail whether it's definitely gaming, it just smells like it. At least partly because it's an awful video.

This is a long standing complaint, Mashable published Gaming YouTube for Fun and Profit in 2006.

Essentially, if you set your browser to auto-refresh a YouTube page (a Firefox extension does it), every time the browser refreshes the video has a new view added to it. People testing this, though, don't seem to necessarily see 1000 refreshes becoming 1000 extra views.

Numbers can be inflated by videos being embedded on high traffic sites but waxy couldn't find any evidence of that being the cause with this one.

There have been claims that the early high numbers for some Obama sites (such as his MySpace) and videos were also being gamed but that's now discounted I think as they're within range of other candidate products/other content.

What's annoying is that YouTube (Google) doesn't seem the slightest bit bovvered.

I'll stick to the Viral Chart for now for seeing where trends are — generally, the best policy with stats is to look first at the trends.

Tabloids kill kids?

A seventeenth teenage suicide was announced today in Bridgend. And one of the parents faced a press conference to denounce media coverage.

Sharon Pritchard and husband Vincent appealed to the media to stop high profile coverage.

They said: "We have lost a son, and media coverage made a difficult time unbearable. We did not wish to speak to the media. Not just for ourselves but for other families.

"We feel the media coverage could trigger other people who are already feeling low - to take their own lives.

"We feel that Nathaniel might have thought it was a way of getting attention without fully thinking through the consequences."

They said they never believed there was any 'internet pact'.

Much of the media has been speculating about the guilt of Bebo/MySpace, with zero evidence, though encouraged by the web-naive local MP, Madeleine Moon, who is now complaining about the coverage she generated. Teens in the area are actually using social networks to work against suicide. In the entire history of the web there are only a very few isolated examples of online 'suicide cults'. Yet the tabloids haven't stopped speculating in their ignorance (or worse).

People who know the subject well are angry too.

Suicide Prevention Charity Calls for End to Media Coverage of Bridgend Suicide

5 February 2008

With reports today of another young death in the Bridgend area being attributed as a possible suicide, Papyrus, the national charity for prevention of young suicide, is calling on media to resist further coverage surrounding the recent tragic suicides in Bridgend. Although this latest death is not yet confirmed as suicide, the charity reiterates its concern regarding copycat instances. It is well known that insensitive media reporting of suicide can prompt copycat cases, says the charity.

“Media coverage must stop,” said Anne Parry, chair, PAPYRUS. “We believe there is nothing further to be gained. We are seriously concerned that any more coverage would be counter-productive and exacerbate the current state of affairs, with disastrous results. At worst it could lead to further suicide attempts. We are asking media please do not draw further attention to this situation. We are also calling on other charities to support our initiative.”

I just looked up 'suicide town' in the UK Press:

Mail: 'Two cousins in 'suicide town' hang themselves within hours'
Metro: 'Police probe death in Bebo suicide town'
Express: '17TH TEENAGER DEAD IN SUICIDE TOWN '
Sun: '17th victim in 'suicide town''
Telegraph: 'Suicide websites blamed for deaths'
Times: 'Is an e-suicide cult sweeping the UK?'

The tabloid wing of the BBC: 'Web worries after suicide spate'; 'Call to ban 'suicide chatrooms''

Guardian: 'There's no such place as 'Suicide Town''

Here's the rules, updated by the Press Complaints Commission [PCC] in 2006, my emphases:

Until now, reporting of suicide has been covered by the Code’s general provisions on Intrusion into Grief and Shock, which require the press to carry out inquiries with sympathy and discretion and to handle publication sensitively.

However, as part of its annual Code review, the Committee considered international evidence highlighting the dangers of imitative deaths following reports of suicide.

In the light of that, the Committee, which writes and revises the voluntary Code to which the British press subscribes, felt that the risk of copycat suicides should be addressed specifically.

Code Committee chairman Les Hinton, Executive Chairman of News International [fox? henhouse], said: “During our annual review, we received convincing evidence, from the Samaritans and others, that media reporting of suicide often prompted copycat cases. It is an international phenomenon.

“We have attempted to minimise that risk - while maintaining the public’s right to know - by emphasising the need for care to avoid excessive detail, unless it is in the wider public interest to give the information.

[Here's the agreed clause: *5ii: When reporting suicide, care should be taken to avoid excessive detail about the method used. - The asterisk indicates that under the new sub-clause exceptions could be made if editors could demonstrate that it was in the public interest.]

“For example, while it might be perfectly proper to report that the suicide was caused by an overdose of Paracetamol, it would probably be excessive to state the number of tablets used.

“We have consulted with the industry on this and it has been accepted. The new rule, in effect, codifies a practice already currently followed by many editors.”

The existing code was that reporting of suicide was covered by the Code’s general provisions on Intrusion into Grief and Shock, which require the press to carry out inquiries with sympathy and discretion and to handle publication sensitively.

So if the PCC already has rules and if the press isn't reporting details then 'suicide town', according to the self-regulated press doesn't constitute 'Intrusion into Grief and Shock'?

Apparently not, as the tabloid press seem to think they've done nothing wrong.

The Director of the Society of Editors, Bob Satchwell, told the BBC:

"There are a lot of things that can be done to help prevent suicide but one of those is not blaming the press or saying that they should stop reporting.

"I have read in the media a lot of harrowing and really frightening stories from some young people who were interviewed and they need listening to."

Speaking of the specific use of 'suicide town', this dick said:

"I think there are bigger issues here.

"There seems to be an unusual number of suicides in Wales and particularly this area and indeed Madeleine Moon has said so herself in the House of Commons.

"There are an unusual number of suicides occurring and there is a role which the media can play in trying to help in this situation."

I would love to see the parents take on the PCC with this:

Sharon, said: "Media coverage put the idea into Nathaniel's head."

Sitting beside Nathaniel's father, Vincent, Mrs Pritchard said: "We have lost our son and media reporting of this has made it an incredibly difficult time and more unbearable by intensive media coverage."

Which 'public'? Which 'interest'?

Postscript:

The Daily Mail really has no shame. Covering the press conference the next day there is no mention at all of Sharon Pritchard's comments about the media, nor the Police's.

Show Me The Bunny

I was mentioning today about trying to get my head around the aspect of Social Networking called the Social Graph, known as Facebook's 'secret sauce', and reviewing what's in my Reader I came across this neat summary from Dave McClure on TechCrunch

Here are seven major aspects of Facebook you can use to increase the visibility of your startup, business, product or service:

1. Set Up Your Graph: Profiles & Privacy
2. Make Connections: Networks, Groups & Events
3. The Need for Feed: Your [Shared] Social Activity Stream
4. Share Your Content: Share & People-Tag Your Stories & Media
5. App to the Future: The Facebook Platform, APIs, & Applications
6. Pay to Play: Ad Networks, Sponsored Stories, & Paid Distribution
7. Show Me The Bunny: Gifts, Points, & Virtual Currency

He goes into detail on those aspects. What Dave means when he talks Bunny, though, isn't what you might think — it's something new:

There are 3 major types of virtual goods: decorative, functional, and behavioral. Decorative goods are those primarily geared towards self expression. Functional goods are those that meaningfully alter your user experience. For example, a suit of armor in World of Warcraft that confers a special advantage to you would be a functional virtual good. Behavioral virtual goods are graphical icons that capture some sort of social interaction. This is the type that is most prevalent on Facebook today. Virtual gifts are the best known example of this category of virtual good.

Two of the top 10 Facebook apps, X Me and SuperPoke!, are essentially just interaction tools. In the X Me screenshot above right, each of the icons – whether it be Love, Punch, or Kiss – is an encapsulation of a specific social interaction. Though it may not be purposeful, these types of casual apps are training users to understand how to interact with virtual goods. I can easily see how these apps become platforms that launch broader virtual currency systems. For example, expanding this app to allow users to attach custom graphics to their custom actions would create a new, rare class of virtual objects.

I was just looking at Amnesty's great new web campaign, UnSubscribe (Hat tip: David Wilcox, he has a report of the launch). it's all about attempting to exploit the Social Graph. Really great design and lots of stuff in there. They don't even forget valuable things like email sigs. They have video and sign-up widgets.

Couple of things though:

1. It doesn't actually chart results. What is the impact of web campaigning? What has Amnesty already achieved?

I think the Number Ten web petitions shows some of the limits here, the potential for cynicism, although I'm sure you do have an effect (I know you do from experience) but it would help to show this, to demonstrate the impact somehow.

2. All the widgets are with WidgetBox and they have a very irritating method whereby you can't just get the embed code. You have to select your platform then it does it for you and a post magically appears (which I don't want). YouTube usually gives you the code option.

One very real reason why this is more than annoying is because if you auto-ping that's the post content which will appear in feeds - their headline choice etc. and none of your surrounding context. It reminded me of using MySpace and especially using Bebo, which has loads of walled gardens. This is also more than annoying campaign-wise as well because I then had to look elsewhere for the embed code for this campaign video.



Here's the sign-up widget (not in it's own post!)

Mobile web taking off - slowly

BBC News has an interesting summary of the state of the UK mobile web market. It's healthy, they think;

Figures for February 2007, from the Mobile Data Association show that almost 15 million people use the web via their handsets each month.

New flat rate price plans and much faster speeds are increasing usage but most have download limits and stop Skype or streaming video use.

They have only recently stopped ridiculous restriction to their own portals and content and have seen portal content usage rise and spending within previously walled gardens.

T-Mobile said "Usage is as diverse as the people using it."

"Half of our customers surf the internet on their mobile when they are at home watching TV. They do not need to go to a laptop and fire it up. The mobile is there for them."

"Social networking has rocketed up the charts recently," he said. Sites such as Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and eBay have become very popular destinations for customers."

Said Vodaphone:

"It's different and relevant to the individual. It's the real long tail of relevance."

Why is the UK press ignoring Bebo?

NMA today:

[UK owned] Bebo has overtaken search giant Google as the most viewed web site in the UK, according to new research [ComScore] out today.

The news comes in the same week that Bebo signed a deal with Yahoo! that will see the internet giant sell advertising for the social network, integrate Yahoo! answers within its platform and develop a Bebo-branded browser toolbar.

Here's Bebo Vs MySpace in UK Google Search traffic Vs. UK Press coverage (Google Trends):

The thin blue line at the bottom is Bebo's UK Press coverage.

One can speculate why this is the case but it's so huge that it's rather an indictmentof UK Press coverage of the Web in general.

Usability myths and professionals discussion

More discussion on Alastair Campbell (no, not that one, the other one) of Nomensa's blog about 'Usability myths and professionals'.

Alastair had responded to comments I made about their advice to government web workers (they're at the end of my original long post).

I think Discount Testing is do-able, Alastair has lots of concerns - I think that sums up one disagreement.

We're also disagreeing about the value or otherwise of guidance and 'myths'.

Here's a couple of things I wrote:

[Discount testing]: We are not disagreeing, what I’m saying is that Usability is a movement, a general aim which everyone has to buy-into — that’s the goal. Out of that comes budgets, attitude-changes and far better customer service.

[Usability professionals should prod government]: The UK - for one thing - is doing well in some areas. We do have a lot of good work. But just like Bebo being ignored over MySpace don’t you think our political leaders are rather letting the side down if they aren’t prepared to engage with industry on something as fundamental as the usability of their products? And stop spinning the failures and talk up the real successes?

New blog style musings

Designing/the creative impulse -- I've been tweaking around in the right hand column but, after a while, you reach a point (madness?) of no return and so ...

... I picked a new template entirely ('Snapshot') — Big plunge but hey ho ...

Doing it was a slightly naff experience as Blogger gives you 'preview' but in an unresizable window :/

And it does look different in reality.

Why - Apart from boredom, I became aware that the content width was too wide, twenty or more words across is harder to read. For me.

So this is easier to read but then there's the scrolling ... I think this still might be that bit too narrow, so may change that but my first attempt didnae work and my brain hurts. The actual Snapshot template needed changing as it's quite pink (not moi style).

The sidebar location also 'scans' better, it's less the 'lead' (in).

Also, new content column only just about holds default size YouTube videos but not MySpace ones (had to do a fix to get the Chasers one vaguely right) - but then Rupert M*****h's space is rather GLARING and BIG and LACKING in OPTIONS ...

Plus it's taking me a while to figure out how I've lost bolding in body text (in FF). Ideas?

But a quick squizz around the archives, old posts look OK except the odd table but nothing life threatening.

I think!

All good fun :/

• old style comparitor on archive.org
  
  
  

The Chaser's War On APEC

According to the BBC, Over The Top security such as enormous 'Secure zones' for the APEC conference have left a "bitter taste in Sydney", which I can well believe.

Hence the security's easy breaching by a bunch of Aussie comedians, one dressed as Osama Bin Laden, have made them folk heroes.

Despite a crackdown estimated to have cost as much as A$250 million - more than for the whole Olympics - the team from ABC TV Comedy show Chaser's War On Everything were able to make it within 10m of the InterContinental Hotel where George W Bush was staying.

The skit had been approved by ABC lawyers but was written in the assumption they would be stopped at the checkpoint on the corner of Bent and Macquarie streets (in the centre of Sydney's CBD).

Instead they were waved through the first checkpoint on Macquarie St and then a second which had sniffer dogs. They eventually stopped themselves at Bridge St.

The video, posted on their Myspace page (Male, 88yo, Sydney), shows their fake Canadian motorcade being waved through police checkpoints on the edges of the APEC security zone in central Sydney.

It also shows a police officer taking two polaroid photos of the crew on the scene after they were detained.

Here's Channel Nine's coverage:

The fake motorcade had been staged as part of an APEC-stunt week, which included using fake 'APEC Security' badges and stopping random members of the public and frisking them - everyone complies.



The following day the serial pranksters were at it again, with three members of the team marching a black cardboard motorcade with Canadian flags down Bligh St in the city, just a block away from where police mistakenly waved through their first mock motorcade.

• More Chaser's videos

"MySpace is the biggest youth club"

In America, maybe - it's Bebo in the UK. Who is advising Gordon Brown? Sounds like he's read Tom Steinberg if he's mentioning Mumsnet. No detail of course but his words are in the right place.

Number Ten Website, hat-tip Steven Clift:

*Question:*

You have offered solutions of juries, commissions and conferences, and yet at the same time we are seeing a massive growth in social networking, facebooks and the like that are actually describing a very dramatic different way that individuals engage with each other and with society. My question is really how can we ensure that perhaps voluntary groups that rely on time, passion and the money of these people don't go the same way of the participation in local democracy?

*Prime Minister:*

Well these are all very important questions. Let me start with the last one. We have set up a review into social technology and how it can benefit communities and we want to give prizes every year for those people who are making big advances in social interaction through using the new technologies. I mean it is true to say that in Britain today MySpace is the biggest youth club, and it is true to say that some of the great internet organisations are getting through to far more people, like Mumsnet or some of the organisations that are linking parents together in a way that formal organisations find difficult to do so. So yes we have got to encourage the new technology, we have got to make it possible for organisations to adapt to the new technology, and one of the reasons that we have tried to provide grants for innovative things is so that organisations can do so. And I think if we celebrate where advances are made in the internet that encourage community action, encourage community networks, that would be a very good thing to do.

Nicholas Carr goes ballistic

Adblock Plus: the nuclear plug-in
from Nicholas Carr

Adblock Plus, the Firefox browser plug-in that erases advertisements from web pages, is a killer of a killer app - or at least it would be if it became widely popular. Right now, it sits like a coyote at the edge of the net, quietly eyeing all the businesses it would happily devour. The plug-in, writes Noam Cohen in today's New York Times, has the potential to be an "extreme menace to the online-advertising business...

Yes, potential ... but something in the 90s% of even Firefox users (it's not easy to plug into Internet Explorer) don't use add-ons. Plus, who's going to develop and promote a full-on ad blocker? Symantec?

Carr: If web users decide they don't want to see ads, Google would face an extremely unpleasant dilemma. Either its business or its credibility would end up in tatters.

Flee for the hills! Cash in your options now!

Says Cohen, about similar PVR 'concerns':

(As things turned out, TiVo and a rival, ReplayTV, opted not to include an automatic service to skip ads after vociferous objections by the television industry.)

He also points out that business whingers - for that is what they are - already have an answer, which is

“to serve ads from their own servers.”

Haa'retz do this and I still see internal promotions elsewhere. What I don't see is the full horror, revolving, irritating, smack-me-with-your-BRANDING ads ...

Marketeers have started to get the message about pop-ups, which is not because of AdBlock.

Yes, AdBlock is grrr-eat, but who else but geeks? Seriously? The odds are stacked against it. There's not a version for mobiles - the future mass market - and I'd imagine that's a even harder environment for something like AdBlock.

There have always been these type of developments because anyone can tweak how they receive the Web, that's why there are so many browsers. Things like AdBlock have been around for ages. I s'pose you could also say that things like MySpace have also been around for ages but ... calm down Nicholas! It's only an add-on!

More birth pangs of government 2.0

Public Sector Forums, which is a .gov.uk only forum, goes gangbusters today on one "wheeze" from the local council website (aka 'take-up') publicity campaign, run out of Whitehall [their bold]:

Take-Up Campaign's Accessibility-Busting Web Poll

[Whitehall's] 'Connect to Your Council' Take-Up Campaign is set to unleash its latest wheeze to get punters flocking to council websites: A national online competition to find England's 'favourite local attraction'.

The Pride of Place' poll, due to launch in a few weeks' time, will be accessed via council websites thus – so the thinking goes - 'raising awareness' of local authority online services.

The Campaign's PR agency, the Central Office of Information-owned Government News Network, are co-ordinating the nationwide poll. The GNN are in the throes of writing to every council urging them to do their bit and promote the poll prominently on their websites.

Unfortunately, the bad news is that web poll created by the Take-Up Campaign fails to comply with even the most basic web accessibility guidelines, having been purposely designed in a way which makes it impossible for certain users to access.

PSF point out some other problems with the Poll, which all sound fixable, such as use of Pop-Ups and lack of a link to another route to voting. [The latter is easy but easy to forget. We've added alternates to Google Maps page's content as we've discovered issues for some.]

It doesn't sound like a brilliantly executed Widget. Most notably, as PSF finds:

The guidance prepared for councils notes that "participants will be able to vote more than once" but "if possible votes will be limited to one per session to stop frivolous multiple votes". Very interesting...

But the biggest gap is missed — only council websites are being used (promoted to), as far as I can see. Thus missing the most obvious use for widgets. It's very unclear what possible reason there might be stopping making this more widely available - there's nothing to stop anyone using the code, although I'd be reluctant to use a unnecessary pop-up.

It's just like other netmarketing campaigns. Earlier this year Hasbro through Monopoly ran one in the UK as they have elsewhere, making use of town pride. They didn't have a widget though, so we had to plug it in other ways on our council site. Got lots of hits!

With accessibility, this is an acknowledged problem with Web 2.0, given the reliance on JavaScript and the lack of proper tools.

Thoughtfulness - alternative routes to voting - and engagement with your audience helps but there are basic issues which yelling doesn't fix. This blog tool, for example, could easily build in accessibility fixes to authoring tools. They haven't.

None of this should stop Web 2.0 and can't. PSF's tone suggests some think it should. Widgets can be made more accessible so advocates should talk to industry if they aren't already. If a provider advertises themselves as 'accessible' or at least being inclusive and making real efforts, people should flock there.

I'm referred to the Connect to your council media plan (PDF, 430kb)

And notice that they're saying in a section on Google that:

As in phase two of activity, relevant Google key-words will be purchased for the duration of phase two of the Campaign. Keywords are used to target the Campaign home page to potential customers who enter relevant search terms and improve advertising performance accordingly by making www.direct.gov.uk/mycouncil a top Google search listing.

In terms of overall Campaign strategy, it is recognised that the majority of referrals to council websites come from Google. This is reflected in the low key approach adopted for Campaign branding, with creative executions designed to:

• make councils the 'heroes' of the advertising;
• create a call to action;
• build the association between councils and the services represented;
• Communicate the online message.

I don't understand exactly what they mean here except that there's no branding or creativity in your keywords ads! But this should give notice that in key areas Council landing pages connected to certain terms may have some traffic redirected.

A lot of councils (most definitely not all) are #1 on key terms right now. So what are those terms? Would help stop double-bidding for one thing.

I've posted before about the issue of fine-tuning with keywords bidding.

And it turns out I can now actually ask these sorts of questions directly as those responsible for the 'Take-Up campaign' can now be addressed directly! In public space! Sort of!

Very discreetly on Monday the Department for Communities and Local Government rolled out it's new 'Have Your Say' web 2.0/social networking/most of the shebang website (yes, there's a tagcloud).



It's public facing and according to the - hard-to-find, more later - instructions posts will be read by civil servants. And responded to. It appears they mass signed up circa 2500 of the lucky 'policy officers' straight off and they appear to have added another 1000 users since yesterday.

We value your opinions and undertake to publish all comments, so long as they do not break the discussion rules outlined in our terms and conditions. Please ensure that you read the terms and conditions before posting a message. All comments you post on this site will be read by relevant policy officials, who will also take part in each debate.

Please note: That some topics will run for a specified time period and then close. Closed topics will remain available to read in our archive.

'Famine to feast' as I just emailed. It's not really a forum for other government web workers to talk to them through, although we could.

The introduction doesn't say that it's just for one class of people, so how the civil servants actually cope if it takes off like the Number Ten petitions, I'm not sure. It appears to be a fairly generic and 'beta' terms and conditions/introduction and use will change it to be much clearer on how contributions actually work.

It's not 'about us' and the only way to find it is via the 'home' link, which only appears on the Forums pages. This adds to my impression of it being kindof out-of-the-box web 2.0. Not properly introduced or explained but all working and well-styled.

It's a very good start and worth noting that very few other governments are doing this that I'm aware of.

They promise wikis and more and have one blog they're hosting thus far, which leads to a very good Olympics Authority blog which looks and acts like a blog and has got top brass contributing.




Lastly in egov Whitehall vs. local government updates, their advice on usability and other basics for web workers is finally available again, a simple lack of a redirect blocked it for many months.

It's a bugbear of mine when smaller governments manage to provide their hard-pressed and under-resourced web workers with proper advice and help. As far as I can tell, this is all Whitehall has planned for UK workers and it's already partly out of date plus the attitudes on display are distinctly unhelpful.

It's instructive that despite top-down, much publicised instructions to cull public websites in the name of 'transformation', web workers are offered endless specialist sites and forums, most of which have no traffic, a fair few of which are abandoned, defunded, and endless 'help' which is really aimed at bean-counters and bureaucrats and not the front-line.

The FAQ answering the question posed by amongst others me — Whilst accessibility requirements and guidelines are well documented there seems to be very little information available regarding usability. Can you please give some authorative [sic] sources for usability requirements and guidelines? — is really bad. Usability is essential to anything claiming to be 'customer-focussed' and about 'transformation' and the entire tone is take-it-or-leave-it.

The answer, written by Nomensa I assume, a usability company contracted by Whitehall, claims that: "no usability guideline is black and white, and the context and users have to be taken into consideration."

Whoever wrote this has a vested interest, pushing their expertise— are they really saying that someone like Jakob Nielsen doesn't make basic, apply to all, guidance? That ordinary web workers have nothing to learn from Nielsen or any of the others in my links list? That only filtered and packaged government-approved usability guidance is kosher?

This goes to the heart of the problem about our alleged specialness as websites ... leading people to believe that norms don't apply to them because they're an egov site is a big mistake.

"Other guidelines will tend to be generic, i.e. unhelpful and potentially open to a great deal of interpretation for someone without usability expertise.

I think the best advice is to use the CDs provided and come back to the helpdesk to fill in any gaps or answer any remaining questions."

You come back to me, darling. If our guidance isn't usable is confusing you. Can't do anything yourself, you need the professionals. You'd think they were selling used cars ...

Here's a link to my presentation about how, yes, YOU can do some of this yourself. The use of Homer Simpson on the first slide is very deliberate.


Postscript: Doh! I've posted about SlideShare several times - here's the presentation using SlideShare! n.b. some images have been lost in the translation.





~~~~~~~~~~~


Postscript: just saw a great 404:



The page title is 'technorati is borked again'.

• Alastair Campell of Nomensa responds on his blog to my points about their advice
• My response

Paxman's involuntary elitism

The Guardian comments today about Jeremy Paxman's MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival:

Listened to live, his speech - Never Mind the Scandals: What's it All For? - had a far greater impact than any reported version could convey. This is because it was really a condensation of three separate lectures rolled into one, a passionate and deeply personal cri de coeur about the current state of television, from a master practitioner.

Yet The Guardian is the one making only two clips of the speech available on it's YouTube channel, the second of which makes Paxman sound like he's having a go at the Net (funny, that choice for this channel).

This was from shortly before the clip:

I feel uncomfortable saying this, because I know that some colleagues may take it as an attack upon them. So let me say that I think the young people entering television now are more technically able, more visually creative than at any time in the short history of the medium. I admire them, not least because I have no idea how they do half the things they do. My point about the vaccuousness of much news reporting is not to lay into them, but to plead for them to be given the time and the space to do a better job and for all of to stand back and ask what we’re using this medium for.

More in context, Paxman did not comes across as a luddite; that's one tiny bit of the speech. He barely referred to the Net. On it's website, The Guardian makes no reference to the video, instead referring you to the text.

The other clip is about faking it:



Their partners at Edinburgh, the BBC, told us, after discussing Paxman's speech, on Friday's Newsnight that:

"You can see the whole of Jeremy's speech on the Newsnight website"

'Read' isn't the same as ' see' in my book. Here's the old fashioned text. When the video is available, this stuff is elitist behavior. I'm not impressed and neither should you be.

The Guardian's 'highlights' selection, the lack of the speech in it's entirety online when the live context is important. The industry was there applauding - at what? - and silent - at what? Maybe I'd like to know how they reacted when Paxman drew attention to Tony Blair calling journalists "feral beasts" that tear people and reputations to shreds?

I found the media’s response – and particularly the response of the television industry - to the Blair challenge pretty depressing. Hardly anyone engaged with the substance of the criticisms – of our triviality, our short-sightedness, our preoccupation with conflict. The immediate and almost universal reaction was not to examine the charge sheet, but to utter a blanket plea of ‘not guilty’, usually followed by well, you misled us about WMD, as if that somehow entitles us to say whatever we like. Well, it won’t do.

The industry were there because the event was important. Who wasn't there? Us.

I would have liked to have seen the clip of Paxman saying this:

Just look at almost any regional news programme, with its tawdry catalogue of misfortune, recited in deadbeat vocabulary. You’d think that every child in the city was being sexually abused, every journey every day disrupted, resulting in ‘pure misery’, every teenager a drug-crazed psychopath. Does it alarm? Sure. Does it help us understand? You must be joking.

Or this:

Take, for example, the outbreak of bird flu in Suffolk this spring. The thing was contained and dealt with effectively. There was no panic, except in so far as it was generated by television news coverage. An expensively coiffed presenter is driven up to Suffolk to stand in a field in the vague vicinity. A helicopter is put up so a reporter can speak of the incident as if it was the scene of a major tank battle.

For me the nadir was an interview with a woman who owned a chicken coop. The reporter knew what was wanted. ‘We have a dead chicken over there,’ the woman wailed. ‘Whether that chicken was knocked down by a car, we don’t know.’

And that was it. There was a dead chicken in Suffolk. Cause of death unknown. What, precisely was this chicken’s owner interviewed for?

There are plenty of definitions of news. But whether you subscribe to the view that it is something out of the ordinary, or – my own favourite – that it is something someone doesn’t want you to know - the fact that a chicken has died in Suffolk, possibly after colliding with a car, doesn’t cut it.

Milton Keynes betrays Keynes

The Guardian reports today that:

An independent website about life in Milton Keynes has failed in an attempt to win access to data on the same terms as the local council's official site. The decision by the government's watchdog on public sector information illustrates the weaknesses of rules supposed to encourage the re-use of official data.

The Milton Keynes case concerns a four-year battle by a web design company, Zero-Now, for access to information about public services held on a council database called the Community Online Information Network. Zero-Now wanted up-to-date information for use on its website miltonkeynes.com. However the council preferred to make the information available through two official websites, run by a contractor partly owned by the council, milton-keynes.gov.uk and mkweb.co.uk.

The (OPSI) [Describing themselves at "at the heart of information policy, setting standards, delivering access and encouraging re-use of public sector information"] failed to uphold the complaint - on the grounds that the contractor with access to the database was performing part of the council's "public task". So, as no re-use of the data beyond the public task was taking place, Zero-Now had no grounds for complaining about unfair terms. However OPSI decided there was "room for improvement" in the way Milton Keynes handled information, and made five recommendations.

These are:

• OPSI suggests that the PSIH [Milton Keynes Council] should implement its draft re-use policy as soon as possible, and encourage the re-use of its information.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH considers undergoing the IFTS Online assessment process.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH publishes a standard licence on its website or considers mandating OPSI to license the PSIH’s material through the PSI Click-Use Licence.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH should publish details of any exclusive licensing and publishing contracts on its website.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH should publish a statement of what constitutes its public task.

• Report (PDF - 151 KB)

However ...

PSIH would only be under an obligation to allow re-use in circumstances where re-use had already taken place either by the PSIH itself or by a third party.

So, the Council is entitled to deny access just so long as it refuses access to everybody. Great logic there. Plus it is entitled to 'exclusive contracts'. Somehow this 'encourage the re-use of its information'.

Sounds like OPSI needs to stop handing the job of reconciling these two opposites to someone else.

What's interesting is that there is a huge shade of grey here, because Zero-Now are nothing but a commercial enterprise and the Council dominates MK Web traffic.







The 'Official website for Milton Keynes'?!? Ya gotta love the chutzpah.

One look at MKWeb - #1 in Google for 'Milton Keynes' - tells me that it's taking it's community responsibilities online far more seriously. You'd like to hope it would be because it's council- sub-contracted and presumably Zero-Now's management there is suitably managed.



But despite all that, this still doesn't mean that Zero-Now shouldn't have rights to the Community Online Information Network stuff to use elsewhere, as a 'council person' (or OPSI) might think.

As The Guardian explains at length in the Free Our Data Campaign, this is about boosting the economy, amongst other reasons.

If this company - who do have a strong website of their own, marketing-wise - can do interesting things, imaginative stuff taking ideas from other websites, then surely the Council can reuse that elsewhere? Surely that helps the city? Put that in Zero-Now's contract.

It's worth noting that this also supports women in the economy.

There are many ways, through providing widgetised access to edited content, for example, like many a website does, that the Council can deal with them and everyone else. And can also provide access to - say - the local paper. or the local college or the local history buffs.

Even though the Council sites dominates on 'Milton Keynes' local sites thrive because people use them. Increasingly. Hence target the elderly, youth and radio four listeners (I'm characterising). They can have some screens, maybe one can be a (revised) 'PSI Click-Use Licence' - click - and you get a widget ...

I know there's this and there's that with government rules and scales and balances but this is 2007 and the Web is now several years ahead of government, especially slabs of it like the OPSI.

Where's the leadership to drive the changes which are needed? Who in government is doing that job? Gordon Brown? The Millibands? When did you last see a politician make a joke about their web-ignorance in public and be called on it by a MSM journalist, or themselves laughed at like they're an idiot and they need to get with the program? Huh?

One of the reasons I sound annoyed is because I was on a train the other day surrounded by teenagers talking Myspace this and Bebo that. The disconnect between their new world and the land of the OPSI's and most politicians is vast and agencies like OPSI and the COI are letting them down.

Another point which I doubt the Council is considering is that if Zero-Now really are as good at SEO as they claim then maybe they have something to worry about. However, given that a quick Google search reveals 933 incoming links to MKWeb versus 3 for miltonkeynes.com, and given that this represents the standing start trusted sites have, then they shouldn't worry about too much traffic disappearing into a commercialised front-door.

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones", John Maynard Keynes.

Give them access, manage that access and leverage benefits for yourself. Like other websites do.