Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK has recently been blogging about the idea of a ‘TechHub’ in London.  It’s an idea that he has personally championed:

So I am hereby serving notice that TechCrunch UK is going to start campaigning for a Digital Hub for the UK.

The working title for this concept is “The TechHub”.
…
Unfortunately this is going to sound boringly London-centric. But I think it ought to be in London. Why? Simple really. Money, access and the networks inside London.

I’m not sure that this idea holds much water.  London has a number of major problems, mostly related to cost, which are major obstacles for small companies.  London’s major claim to a role in the software eco-system comes from the fact that the financial services sector employs a lot of very able people developing and maintaining their software infrastructures (one of my favourite developer-bloggers, Kirk Wylie, is one of these).  But the London financial services sector is in deep trouble right now.  Moreover, office space is very costly in London compared to pretty much anywhere else in Europe, never mind the rest of the UK.  The ‘London premium’ on salaries required just to get people to work there is an unavoiable fact.  What’s unique about Silicon Valley is that its whole identity is bundled up in the idea of innovation, technology and entrepreneurship - the technology and software industries dominate there.  London, on the other hand, is a centre of culture, tourism, history, government, finance and countless other things.  The software industry will only ever be a small part of what London does and these other industries all compete for valuable space, resources and labour.

I’d like to argue against the idea of a single Tech Hub.  Britain (or, more to the point, England) is a small country and there really isn’t much need to focus all of our attention on one area, particularly one that is already over-crowded.  Travel between London and Manchester is doable in under two hours by train and this could be cut further if plans for a high speed rail link are approved.  This would allow for startups to take advantage of the much lower costs of locating in, say, Manchester without losing touch with London and vice versa.

But if we do need a Tech Hub as Mike Butcher insists, where would I place it?  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’d vote for Manchester.

Why?  The North West of England already has a number of advantages.  The number one advantage as far as I’m concerned is the growing strength of the local developer community.  There are a number of grass-roots groups in existence for networking between people working in the digital/tech sector - these are not top-down imposed groups funded by some quango or other, but private community initiatives to promote the North West tech community’s growth.  The umbrella group for these, North West Digital Communities helps to ensure cross-fertilisation of ideas amongst the groups.  The GeekUp community already holds regular meetings in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Chester and Preston.  Web development is well represented with groups for Ruby, Drupal, .NET and PHP.  The PHP group in particular has grown extraordinarily in a short space of time and will, later this month, be holding the PHPNW08 Conference.  Jeremy Coates deserves huge acclaim for driving this forward.

In addition, AgileNorth plays a role in promoting agile development practices and the Northern User Experience group is a growing forum for discussion of usability issues.  The startup company sector is represented by NW Startup 2.0, which brings together innovators, venture capitalists and local tech companies for regular meetings and workshops.  The notion that it’s all grim up north isn’t borne out by the facts.

If there’s anything that the North does badly, it’s probably self-promotion.  Years of industrial decline as the manufacturing industry of the 20th century has withered away have left their mark and a lot of people don’t yet feel ready to shout about the good things that are happening.  But what’s happening here is an organic, grass-roots growth of clusters of talented, passionate people who are interested in innovation.  You can’t create that by coming up with clever branding ideas, blog memes or ‘campaigns’; nor can you create it merely by throwing money at it.  It requires passion, inventiveness and talent, combined with the right environment to enable the expression of these attributes.  The North of England does a lot better on these scores than many people would think.

I have just written an article over at E-consultancy entitled ‘Usable Internal Business Systems - Just a Pipedream?‘.

I would recommend having a read as the usability issues that I talk about are what we have all experienced during our working lives, and there is extensive research provided which proves that the majority of business systems and software solutions in the market don’t value usability anywhere near as highly as we would always advocate.

The article includes my:

• evaluation of the enterprise level software market
• industry analysis on the lack of importance placed on usability in software
• advice on how businesses can attempt to improve the usability of their existing systems
• advice on how User-Centered Design should be embraced for businesses looking at bringing in new internal software systems
• summary of why usable internal business systems shouldn’t be a pipedream

Further reading

• User-Centered Design for Lean Manufacturing Business System Improvements
• User-Centered Design and Agile Development
• User-Centered Design Process Overview
• PRWD Press Release - Bringing User-Centered Design Into A Manufacturing Business

A study carried out jointly by BITKOM and Oracle found that ‘More than 50 percent of German companies use the means of communication provided by web 2.0.’

So why are UK companies taking so long to catch on? Below are a few issues which I think are to blame.

Afraid of the unknown

For many, the online world is something they are still getting to grips with and at first it can be a daunting task to keep up to speed with the continually changing online landscape. But we all know not to knock it until you’ve tried it, and those who aren’t are getting seriously left behind.

Not buying into the idea of ‘web 2.0’

Frequently I hear ‘but we have a website, we don’t need anything else’. These little figures from Microsoft digital advertising solutions, speak for themselves:

• 73% of UK social networkers have visited the personal space of a brand
• 16% have had a dialogue or sent a message to a brand
• 68% will visit a website related to what they have seen or read on a friend’s site

It’s not enough to simply have a website - consumer’s use a range of different networks and sites to find out about your business and brand.

According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006) , social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines.

Confusion on how to measure the results

There’s no jiggery pokery involved, and compared to some forms of activity this is one of the more tractable and measurable activities. On the simplest level of measurement; conducting searches to determine the number of times a brand was mentioned on forums and blogs is a good self analysis tool. However there are some pretty smart ways and means of tracking conversations about your brand which range from monitoring online share of voice within a particular sector, analyses of content and tracking micro blogs to name a few.

Not sure where to start?

A good starting point is a company blog, something that we here at PRWD could help you set up. It gives your customers and possible consumers the opportunity to see a more personal side to the company and allows them to participate and comment – and as marketeers and usability professionals know the key to building brand loyalty is getting the consumer highly involved with the brand.

Google’s famous motto ‘do no evil’ seems to be in conflict with the terms and conditions of their new browser Chrome – Google stated that they can use any of your copyrighted material posted to the web via Chrome. This has since been retracted but inevitably makes me question Google’s true agenda. The other thing which strikes me is the similarities between the Microsoft and Google chrome logos.

Impressive Look, Speed and Ease of Use

Ignoring my initial hesitance I downloaded the browser and I have to say I’m impressed with the look, speed and ease of use.
I’m also please to see Google have created a URL box which also works as a search function, called the omniBox. A great example of applying user centered design. The browser is a lot less cluttered also meaning that more appears above the fold and its faster to load. Another nice feature is that you can grab tabs to open them up as new windows.
Chrome, which is still in beta version, has had a few teething problems; its unable to use some plugins and is currently only available for Windows. Also if you type :% into the search bar it makes Chrome crash, but I’m sure these will all be ironed out in the near future.

Google, The Big Brother

My real shock was when I opened up my history. It had listed my history pre-Chrome, showing information such as who’s profiles I had viewed on Facebook, emails I had sent and documents I had opened on my desktop (with exact times) and the option to open them direct from the browser. Its a useful feature and there is the option of ‘incognito mode’ but it a little too scary to think what people could do with such information if they got a hold of my laptop, not to mention what Google can do. I’m all for intuitive search but for me however, it’s a little too far - I think it’s time to de-Google.

If you have already tried it, how are you finding this new web browser, and what are your views on the advanced history functionality that can track your daily activity to such depths?