Month: October 2006

links for 2006-10-28

My Mobile Game Directions Pecha Kucha

Yesterday I presented my talk on mobile gaming at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Rotterdam’s Off_Corso. I was programmed as the first speaker, which was exciting (and also allowed me to benefit from the primacy effect, as my girlfriend pointed out). Colleague Iskander was kind enough to record the whole thing on his N70 (fittingly) and I present it here for your enjoyment or aggravation, whichever you prefer (please take note that the talk is in Dutch). The slides I used are over at SlideShare.

I’m still not sure the subject matter was appropriate for the event, considering the majority of speakers were either graphic designers, autonomous artists or architects. The crowd might’ve been a bit underwhelmed by my commercial and pop cultural references. Oh well, I had fun, I guess that’s the most important thing.

Many thanks to Nadine and Bart of Hunk Design for letting me loose on stage. ‘Nuff respect to all the presenters for taking the trouble of preparing a presentation. There were plenty of cool and inspiring ideas on show. Finally, thanks to the creators of all the images I used, you can find the credits in the SlideShare show.

Update: I’ve deleted my YouTube account so here’s an embed of the video on Vimeo:

Accessibility (a Euro IA theme)

It’s been a while, but here’s my final post on the Euro IA Summit. Usability has been a design value long championed by HCI professionals from which IA has partly developed. Naturally, they’ve often been responsible for ensuring usability in projects. There have been developments that force IAs to take a broader view and see usability as one of many values that go into a successful user experience on the web. Morville realised this quite a while ago and reminded us in his keynote of his user experience honeycomb.

Accessibility is one of those other values, and quite a few talks discussed it in some way.

For instance Fredy Oré’s talk on the project he did for Digital UK (the independent, non-profit organisation leading the UK’s move to digital television) contained quite a few examples of how he as an IA was faced with accessibility problems. From figuring out how to create a site structure that would support both English as well as Welsh to working around the limitations of a legacy CMS, there were many accessibility-related decisions to make.

Bogo Vatovec summarized the results from a test he did with several content adaptation solutions (mobile web browsing applications). The state of affairs in this area appeared to be quite sordid. Opera’s mobile web browser came out as the best option currently available. However, smart software will never be the silver bullet to solve all mobile web-browsing woes. We’ll need to build sites to be accessible for a broad range of devices. I feel we need to go even one step further and create alternative architectures specifically tailored for the mobile context.

Finally Steven Pemberton flexed his W3C muscles and overwhelmed the poor non-techy IAs with a deluge of information on new web standards such as XHTML 2 and XForms. The key takeaways for me were that the W3C is still pushing for a true Semantic Web (yes, uppercase). Example: Pemberton said XHTML 2 is “microformats done right”. Also, XForms promise to be a real alternative for other RIA technology, with the main benefit that it won’t need third party technology to be installed on the client.

So again, I expect IAs to be involved in more and more accessibility-related discussions. Accessibility is one of many design values that go in a user experience. These values should be prioritised for each project. Some might even put accessibility above usability. IAs could do worse than educate themselves on some accessibility basics.

This is the fifth and final post on themes spotted during the Euro IA Summit 2006. The first post was on strategy, the second on social search, the third on process & deliverables and the fourth on involving the client. My first post-summit post can be found here.

My photos in Schmap’s Rome, Venice and Florence guides

Lieke in the inner cloister

Planning on making a trip to Rome, Venice or Florence? Check out the free digital travel guides from Schmap. The new editions contain some photos I took while vacationing there this spring. Schmap use Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flickr in their guides. They always politely ask for permission first even though strictly speaking they don’t have to. The guides are PC only but they’ve promised me Mac versions will follow shortly.

And yes, Edgar was there first.

Update: the nice people over at Schmap really love me. They’ve included this insanely great photo of the Cab Inn City hotel in their next Copenhagen guide.

See me Pecha Kucha on mobile gaming

Mobile Vader

Next Wednesday, see me do a presentation on mobile game design at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Off_Corso, Rotterdam. Pecha Kucha are super short presentations consisting of 20 slides. Speakers have exactly 20 seconds per slide to do their thing. Quite a challenge! I’ve finished my slides and a first draft of the talk, now to practice the hell out of my lines… Here’s an Upcoming.org entry I made for the event, here’s the Dutch and international site and finally, here’s some cool Pecha Kucha tips by Yongfook.

links for 2006-10-13

Moo’s cool

Moo cards package Silly title, I know. Sorry Chris.

I received my free set of 10 Flickr calling cards. They’re great, I’ll order more soon and give the nice people at Moo some of my money.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a ‘send to Moo cue queue‘ button somewhere in Flickr? So anytime I see a photo I want a print of, I can just fire it off and forget about it until I’m ready to order a batch.

Here’s some (mediocre) shots of the out of box experience.

Involving the client (a Euro IA theme)

As an IA community we’ve spent an awful amount of time educating our clients about the worth of our work. In a lot of instances we were aiming at making the client be more like us. At the summit, it was interesting to see a number of speakers stress the importance speaking the language of your client and involving them in your daily work. Some examples: Olly Wright’s talk on strategy included such lessons as understanding your client has a boss and finding out what he or she wants, speaking $$$ €€€, the fundamental language of business and making your assumptions explicit. Jared Folkman pointed out we should stop talking about users and start using the word client (certainly when working on retail websites). Doing so, we’ve already started using some of our client’s language. I mentioned agile design and development earlier and do think that one of its points that stick out for me is the focus on face-to-face meetings with the whole team (including a client). Finally, Warren Hutchinson’s presentation workshop on how to run workshops was insanely useful for learning new techniques to loosen up and get real results in client meetings.

This is the fourth post on themes spotted during the Euro IA Summit 2006. The first post was on strategy, the second on social search and the third on process & deliverables. The final post will be on accessibility. My first post-summit post can be found here.