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Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The increasing importance of UX in sport website design

Having now notched up over ten sport website designs/builds across two major football codes, I'd like to think I have learnt a thing or two. It's not really rocket science, but there are a number of key differences from typical corporate websites or e-commerce based websites.

One of the interesting things I have found is that not all sport properties create their website's the same way. One of the key reasons for this is that it depends what department within the organisation is in charge of the website. Sometime's marketing takes the lead, or alternatively marketing/public relations, and in other scenarios I have seen commercial operations or IT take the lead on developing the site. On top of that there are typically external organisations involved that influence the site design and objectives. This can include; design agencies, rights holders, sponsors, media agencies, and miscellaneous consultants (always a favourite option in sport).

This can often cause interesting conversations in the design workshops. If it's marketing let then the brand is often thrust forward as the main site objective. If it's commercially led, then membership sales, ticketing, merchandising, or promotion of sponsors often take precedence. It it's media or PR driven then news, media releases, and communication with stakeholders is a priority. And if it's IT lead then the inevitable happens and it's all about the technology.

Of course the reality is that all of these objectives and all of these areas of expertise are critical to the design of a sports website. The crunch point comes in designing the home page - it doesn't matter how important the key messages are - there is only so much space above the fold on the home page. Rather than one of the areas taking precedence, user experience design (or UX) can help sport organisations achieve their key website design objectives with minimal compromises.

The typical way sites have been designed is for key staff of the organisation to be interviewed on; the objective of the site, the key types of content (or information architecture) on the site, and branding requirements. Web or graphic designers then go away and prepare wireframes of the main pages, and then move onto pixel perfect Photoshop designs of key pages and components. Once approved the design is then thrown over the wall to the web developers.

One of the key issues with this approach is that it is not iterative, and by the time staff from the respective departments finally sees the site (and invariably it "isn't what we thought it was going to be like) the whole project is too far down the track to go back and make major changes. This is especially true with sport websites as they are often required to be launched for the start of a new season or campaign, the dates for which are locked in stone.

One of the techniques being espoused in UX circles to fix this problem is to allow designers and developers to work in tandem to develop the site, rather than as a sequential process. By combining an iterative design process, agile development processes, and some of the newer UX tools and techniques, it is possible to have a process that works in conjunction with the stakeholders at every step of the process, starting simply and growing into increased levels of fidelity, and all whilst the development process is ongoing - so that season launch date can still be met.

One tool that I have been playing around recently to do this is Microsoft's Expression Blend 3 with Sketchflow. The tool allows you to literally start prototyping screens by sketching them, and whilst the designers and UX folk are working with the stakeholders, developers can actually start plugging some of the backend plumbing and sample data.

Matt Morphett did a great demo of Sketchflow at ReMIX in June this year, including how the tool can be used with a waeco tablet. Check out the video of Matt's demo here.

Now no tool or process by itself is magically going to produce a great sport property website. But getting stakeholders working closer with the site designers and developers, in an iterative process, with tools that support such a process, has to be heading in the right direction!

It's early days but will let you know how my travels with Sketchflow go ....

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Head for the sky

Looks like this people are still interested in my opinion on Cloud Computing! Alexandra Cain has written an article in the December edition of CFO Magazine, following on from an interview she did with me.

My comments follow on from my experiences implementing a new hosting environment and a SaaS based Anti-SPAM solution at work.

If you had read some of my previous comments about cloud computing, you will remember one of my bug bears is the lack if tools available from cloud vendors for IT Pros to work out how much resource their on premise app uses and hence what resources would be consumed in the cloud and at what cost.

At a recent Microsoft event for Web Devs, I was very please to learn that one of the pricing options being rolled out in March for Azure was a subscription model, where you can purchase X amount of compute power for $Y. At least this helps IT Managers know how much a month they are spending on Azure.

It still not allowing us to reap the cost benefits of the cloud though - certainly not the upside of it anyway. May be a capped plan similar to mobile plans might be a way to go?

At the event, the speaker was asked if there were any tools for Azure to determine the required compute power required for a existing on-premise app to move into the cloud. Alas, the speaker admitted there were none currently available for Azure. And don't get me started on the need for comparison tools across the various cloud platforms...

So it's still an emerging technology, but there no doub cloud computing is going to stay and change howe we do things.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Rugby sidesteps cloud computing

I spoke at a recent AIMIA event entitled "Cloud Computing - Beyond the Hype". Was an enjoyable event, and thanks to the AIMIA crew for inviting me to talk.

IT News journalist, Brett Winterford, was there and was nice enough to write an article "Rugby sidesteps cloud computing" about what I said at the event.