Category: standards     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 32 comments

Over the last few years, the Government of Canada has done its best to attempt to control the look and feel of its internal and external web properties by instituting the first two versions of the Common Look and Feel (CLF) Guidelines and mandating that every department and agency adheres to them by certain specific dates. And while the current version (CLF 2.0) is a definite improvement over the original version of CLF in terms of accessibility, coding standards and visual interface features, ask any user experience designer out there (and by out there I mean outside of GoC since I'm outside the firewall and therefore have no idea about the CLF pulse on the inside) and they will tell you that it is still nowhere near a modern web standard.

I mean no disrespect to the guys at TBS, but after a couple of iterations, it's time to get this thing on the right path. I think the first two versions have proven one thing: that creating the visual blueprint of our government's web presence should NOT be left (entirely) up to internal organizations. I can't even begin to guess the total amount of taxpayer money spent on creating the CLF specifications, and the even more obscene amount spent to port government web content from CLF 1.0 to CLF 2.0. And while there are a handful of departments (e.g. Service Canada) that have done a nice job of designing within and around the constraints of CLF, most of the Government of Canada sites (including the TBS site) are still a visual eyesore. And it's not just TBS' fault, it's the individual departments' complete ignorance of color theory and their inability to select design shops (because let's face it, most of them hire external consulting firms to do the web deed for them) that actually understand how to design a professionally pleasant website in the 21st century.

I could go on an on about why CLF 2.0 is bad, but that's not the point of this post. What I'm going to do is attempt to give you my thoughts on what would make CLF 3.0 a much more successful endeavour, from both the GoC perspective, as well as the taxpayers'. Feel free to download the template (MS Word document, 100Kb) that I created for the purpose of this discussion (you can also do so by clicking on the image above). The template is distributed under a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution Share-Alike license.

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Category: community     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 5 comments

It's not a secret to anyone that baby boomers are about to retire in massive numbers and public agencies can ill afford to fall behind in the talent game. On paper, mobility across jobs, projects and teams are just some of the reasons why the public sector should be an employer of choice for today's top talent in all disciplines.

But let's face it, as much as no one wants to hear it (especially in a city like Ottawa where a large percentage of the population are public sector employees), the situation is not quite as well defined. The public sector bills itself as an environment that makes a difference in people's lives. These days however, 76 percent of a recent survey of young people up to the age of 30, think non-profits are more likely to make such a difference compared to only 16 percent who would prefer the public service for this same reason.

Now let's look at creative types (insert your favourite creative job here, I am a User Experience professional so I do consider myself part of this group). Since a great deal of our work relies on imagination, we absolutely don't enjoy working in a command and control organization. Moreover, creative types enjoy an environment that relies on the enthusiasm and optimism of young adults. Something we can find in non-profits, boutique consulting firms, etc. but not so much in the typical public sector department.

Another survey of young professionals revealed their notable preference for job mobility within a single organization as opposed to the open market. Sounds like an ideal situation for the public sector, but in reality, its image is one of a slow-moving, bureaucratic monolith, hopelessly experimenting with 'innovative practices' fed by external consulting firms, to streamline itself in what is becoming a much more competitive economical landscape.

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Category: user experience     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 5 comments

The more I work on large projects, the more I realize that there is a point in each of them where a rift is created between the priorities of the senior management team and those of the UX team. Let's think about the typical timeline of how this plays out: Initially, we present our past work, our methodology (process) and the advantages of having a UX team on board. We show them user research, IA and design documentation, previous prototypes, finished designs and we hope that something will resonate with them that will persuade them to hire us. We'd like it to be something we've done in the past or the methodology we're employing, but as the project goes on, we realize that it was something else.

Typically (and I say typically because of my own experiences, I am sure things are slowly shifting), senior management is intrigued by the idea of having a UX team on their project mainly because one thing only: risk management considerations. I know, this sounds cold, but it's at least a large component of the truth. I've had this discussion as part of lessons learned / post-mortems of many projects that I've been involved with, and without exception, that was the main reason why a UX team was initially considered for the project. To expand a little further, the senior management team sees having a UX team on large projects as an insurance policy that states that by employing UCD methodologies the client will be part of the design proces. As a result, when UAT comes around, it will be very difficult for the client to reject a design that they were at least partially responsible for. All very valid points.

However, at some point in the process (in my experience this occurred anywhere between right after the end-user research stage, to the end of the high-fidelity prototyping stage), senior management starts to get impatient... Even though we are on track as far as the project plan is concerned, and even though the clients love the idea that we are constantly picking their brains in regards to how to redesign their product, senior management teams tend to get unhappy about the things that we uncover. So in this series of posts about why the senior management team hates UX, this is the first item i want to talk about...

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Category: community     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 2 comments

Last week I stayed up until 3:00AM EST to watch the live feed of the Davos World Economic Forum Social Media Panel, hoping that one of the speakers will describe the future impact of Social Media in all aspects of product design. The first guest speaker, George F. Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, provided me with a good starting point. He introduced the concept of 'Social Sigma', by making a parallel with Six Sigma and explaining that in the near future all companies will have to probe social networking and social media sites during the process of designing their products.

Don't get me wrong, this idea has been around for a while, but in a different form. Information Architecture, Design or UX practitioners following UCD (User Centered Design) Methodologies made of point of ASKING a sample of the product's end-user population about how to design a product. Virtually every site and consumer brand out there ASKS for feedback on their presence and products. This paradigm included ideation about business/technology requirements as well as user interface (ease-of-use, simplicity, recognition, etc.), and in most cases, it worked very well. End user research, IA, interaction design, prototyping, usability testing, all of these minimized the risk and in the end the product was relatively close to what the clients wanted. But...

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Category: branding     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: add comment

It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years since Ampli2de was born in 1999, back home in Transylvania, as a project that started out of boredom more than anything else. As I was looking to do something productive during my first summer after university, I came up with a name (the company used to be called Ampli2de Studios S.R.L.) and I ended up spending a few hours one night putting up some posters all over town about our new web design startup. All it contained was the name, the number, and the logo (the first of the three pictures after the break).

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