I’m delighted to announce the launch of the redesigned JISC Collections website!

The team has worked hard on this for 18 months and we’re excited to bring it to everyone’s attention, as it represents some of our finest work to date.

JISC Collections brings a great variety of digital content to the academic market. These resources are now sold in a marketplace that brings publishers and end-users together.

Here’s a brief list of highlights:

• A hugely improved and useable catalogue, with filters and sorting
• A very bespoke basket and checkout process
• Many business processes, invoicing and reporting brought online and integrated
• Customers can now manage their subscriptions and account online
• Categorised news and events and a smarter search
• A very powerful and flexible CMS in EPiServer

This project has certainly provided us with a challenge, but one I think we’ve met brilliantly. Here’s why…

A separate specification phase

Cubeworks were originally asked to document JISC Collections’ requirements and form them into a rigorous specification and invitation to tender.

We interviewed users, exhaustively modelled the organisation’s internal and external systems, described everything in use cases, and then had the pleasure of responding to our own beautifully-written brief.

Great communication

We used a novel approach that saved time and maintained clarity during the exploration phase of the project by getting the Business Analyst and UX expert to develop their initial models physically sat together at a single computer. It was like a tag team.

We ended up with many micro-iterations and the quickest turnaround of mature interactive wireframes I’ve ever seen.

Testing times

We launched the site as a closed beta back in April. Real users were invited to join up, given full account privileges and a set of end-to-end test scenarios to work through.

We received a host of feedback concerning the smaller details – an extra catalogue filter here, a new payment note there, and numerous improvements to labelling and naming conventions which combined to take a good user experience and make it great.

EPiServer

EPiServer was our CMS of choice for such a complex website. JISC Collections were delighted because EPiServer proved to be much more flexible than their old CMS. This is was in part down to the excellent EPiServer Composer module, which allows the client to create their own page layouts in-house; new template creation is probably the most requested maintenance task ever! We also integrated their entire admin system into EPiServer so that they could edit their content, administer their catalogue and manage financial reporting all in one place behind a single login.

Form follows function

In traditional software projects there’s an approach called Big Design Up Front, where the whole solution is thought about, picked apart and agreed to Up Front. The problem is that on complex projects you often don’t know what the whole solution should be Up Front, and can spend more time figuring that out than you would have spent just building it. That’s why we use Agile methodology.

For the first time we fully applied Agile methodologies to the design process. This can be problematic because on an Agile project the solution is changing all the time. It’s a bit like decorating the interior of a house while it’s still being built and assembled – at best it’s hard to maintain overall consistency, at worst it causes large chunks of rework.

Our answer was to focus on getting a quality foundation and structure in place (the HTML – easy to chop and change) and wait until the dust has settled (after prototyping, running tests on business rules, user feedback, validation and accessibility checking) before getting out the decorating gear (Photoshop + CSS).

Here’s an example:

Using an Agile design process saved time and, crucially, meant a better end solution as everyone could focus on how the site should work separate fromwhat it should look like.

We think the result is outstanding. What do you think?

I don’t work in local government, nor am I a social innovator, but I find the subject fascinating as both a citizen and someone who has worked in social media and digital service design for years. These are my reflections on the day.

It’s not about new tools… but gosh they are fascinating

One of my favourite lines for putting social media in context is “it’s not about new tools, it’s about new behaviours” and it featured here from the speakers. Yet in the group discussions afterwards the tools still dominated. Twitter this and Facebook that. Given the imminent public sector budget cuts it strikes me that the conversation really needs to urgently move on from tools and to behaviours.

What needs to happen now? Someone needs to start to put all this stuff in the context of social marketing and behavioural economics. I’m sure someone has. Can they please come to the next event?

Social innowhatnow?

The social innovators who shared what they’d achieved were really inspiring, but again there seemed to be a huge gulf between where they and local government people were at in thinking about social media. A feature of the innovators’ presentations was the impressive diagrams showing the success integration of social media into an overall service to deliver social impact. Great. However, in the group discussion the question that got people most animated was “how can I get my councillor to start tweeting?”

Why was this? My intuition says three reasons: it’s an easier place to start; marcomms people outnumbered service delivery people; and people tend to focus on tactics rather than strategy.

What needs to happen now? A local government technology leap. Skip all the marcomms stuff and start building social innovation and service design capacity on the frontline instead.

Risk, meet Agile. He’s your new friend

Social media brings lots of exciting new risks for local government people to think about, with its magic combination of immediacy, permanency, and ubiquity. Also, the general approach of social innovation tends to conflict with traditional ways of managing risk such as command and control management and policy designed to guarantee certain outcomes.

Some suggested agile methods as a way to manage these risks while keeping the iterative approach needed for solving novel and complex problems. +1 to that. However, as I know from personal experience, this is not an easy sell to procurement officers and finance directors.

As a sidenote to this: given the perceived risks of social media it was surprising how few local councils had a social media policy.

What needs to happen now? A common framework for local government to implement agile methods, including agile contracts with suppliers. A collaborative effort to produce a simple, shareable, social media policy for local government wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

These reflections and suggestions are offered up without the in-depth knowledge of the domain that I’m sure many others attending possess, so please feel free to add, amend or delete.

This article was first posted on my personal blog.

Flash – the good parts

Flash is a plugin that is available for the majority of web browsers on all the popular Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OSX and Linux). It was originally acquired (and rebranded from Futurewaves’ product FutureSplash Animator) by Macromedia in 1996, before they were bought out by Adobe. It was originally intended to be a platform to add animations to websites, but this remit gradually expanded and it is now used to create video and audio players, as well as games. The best aspect of Flash is that once you’ve created your flash file it will display on all devices that have the flash plugin.

Of course that “best aspect” is likely to be the platform’s downfall:

Lack of compatibility in modern browser platforms

With iPad sales having broken the 2 million mark in just 2 months, and a significant rise in iPhone shipments in Q1 2010 even before the iPhone 4 was officially announced on Monday it’s fair to say that Apple’s mobile devices form a not-insignificant portion of the browser market. This is bad news for sites using Flash, as it is not supported on the platform.

I don’t want this post to be another breathless Apple-adoring missive, so let’s take a step back and look at the wider issue. Flash isn’t going to be supported by Apple because it’s not a web standard, and in 2010 the main use cases for Flash can be implemented using web standards such as HTML5 and Javascript. Apple won’t be the last technology creator to turn their backs on proprietary platforms, and there’s absolutely no reason that [insert the big buzz gadget for 2011]  won’t support Flash either. So essentially, you’re setting yourself up to lose visitors by using Flash.

What you can do to replace Flash on your site today

There’s plenty that you can do to replace, or augment, Flash on your website today:

1. Stop using Flash video players and replace them with the HTML <video> tag. You can do this today, and use Flash as “Fallback content” for users in old browsers, guraranteeing you maximum compatibility.
2. Do the same as above with Flash Audio players by replacing them with the <audio> tag
3. Use javascript for animations. There’s a huge amount of knowledge available on the web showing how to use javascript, or javascript platforms such as jQuery to easily add animations and effects to your site without using Flash.

So there’s really no reason for you to not ditch Flash and embrace web standards – your visitors will thank you for it.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

It seems to be the perennial question for clients: should I reveal my budget?

My answer is a most definite YES, and here’s why.

The problem of not revealing your budget

Before I explain why I think this makes complete sense, let me just address an understandable concern. The primary reason I hear for not specifying a budget is that some clients think it will encourage suppliers to just quote that figure. Surprise, surprise, that’s exactly what happens. But that’s a good thing; because by not specifying the budget, you’ll receive widely varying proposals and you’ll be comparing apples with pears.

If you’re buying, let’s say, 50 desks and chairs for your office of a specific make and model, then you can be pretty sure supplier proposals will be directly comparable. So you can buy based on price. Simple.

But if you have 5 proposals for a complex, creative website project ranging from £30,000 to £100,000 – all proposing slightly different services, software and technologies – how can you be sure you’re really getting the best possible value? Quite frankly, you can’t.

Don’t risk eliminating the best suppliers

Let’s extend the above example a little bit further to illustrate the point. Having assessed the five proposals you’ve received, let’s say you decide that you should probably look at the proposals around £100,000 and below. This eliminates two higher-priced suppliers, and leaves you with a shortlist of three.

Let’s deal with the suppliers you’ve eliminated first. Believe it or not, this could be your loss (as well as theirs, obviously). Fine, you can’t afford anything above £100,000 but, had that supplier known your budget,  they could have potentially delivered the best  £50,000 website, so half the price. By not being clear on budget, you could just have eliminated the supplier who would have delivered the highest ROI. Would you rather spend £25,000 and get an ROI of 200% or spend £50,000 and get an ROI of 500%? I know what I’d prefer.

Adjusting the project approach to fit your budget

“How could a supplier halve their costs from £100,000 to £50,000 and still do the project justice?”, you justifiably ask. Primarily, by reducing the amount of time involved (though they might also discount for you) but without compromising quality. This might, for example,  involve setting parameters such as:

• Less design time, but more focussed
• Rather than multiple rounds of prototyping  and usability testing, they could offer one round of guerrilla usability testing, which still makes a big difference.
• Delivering technical requirements more simply or using ready components

This doesn’t mean they are offering a less effective proposal than other suppliers, it just means they are offering an alternative approach to the one they proposed when they didn’t know the budget.

Most importantly though, it means their offering can now be compared to other £50,000 proposals.

Getting a feel for the right budget

If you’re going to set a budget then, naturally, you want to make sure it’s realistic. If you’ve run web projects before then you’ll probably have a fair idea; but if you are new to this game or the project is much bigger than any you’ve run before, just pick up the phone and call a few agencies. They will be able to give you a ball park figure to work with and if you like the sound of them, add them to your shortlist at the same time.

My advice

So, to get the best use of your budget, my advice is:

1)      Speak to a few comparable suppliers to establish a ball park budget

2)      Specify a budget range in your brief or tender document

Have you produced briefs and ITTs? Do you agree with this approach? I’d love to hear your comments.

Image credit: HowardLake on Flickr

An Innaproprtiate Solution to an Irrelevant Problem

Text-only companion sites were de riguer in the 1990s, when the web was a very different beast. The vast majority of us were accessing the net on 56k modems, and most sites were built using HTML tables and/or Adobe’s nascent Flash platform. Then Google started its inexorable rise to ubiquity and publishers (or webmasters, remember them?) started to realize that content was king: quality content was the best way to get to the top of the search results and thus attract more visitors.

Having the main content of your site hidden away in the depths of nested HTML tables wasn’t great, as the signal-to-noise ratio of content to markup was pretty high, so Google ranked pages lower than it ideally should. Having the content of your site hidden away in Flash was awful – your site was effectively invisible to Google and so fell below the radar. A popular solution was to provide a text-only companion site. Easily indexable, it provided focused content and meant for better Search Engine rankings. A much-touted side effect was that the text-only version would be more accessible to users on older browsers, or those with disabilities.

Things have moved on from 10-20 years ago. Skilled web professionals have been using CSS and XHTML to provide accessible sites with a clear separation of content from styling for at least 10 years, which renders text-only sites for SEO utterly pointless. The increase in processing power and adoption of modern browsers has started to make javascript and HTML5 into viable standards-based alternatives to Flash (and Apple’s much-publicised refusal to support the platform on its mobile devices will surely be Flash’s death knell), so again, there’s precious little value in providing a text-only alternative to a Flash site when you could make just the one standards-based site instead.

Accessibility

So that just leaves the accessibility argument. I’m not buying into it. I can’t understand how a text-only site is more readable to a visually-impaired user using screenreader software. On a standards-based website it simply isn’t – the screenreader can understand XHTML and will happily ignore the structural markup. For a visually-impaired user who is still physically looking at your site, tools are avialable within the browser to make text more legible.

Other drawbacks

There’s more reasons to consider, not least of all the problem of maintainability. By keeping a text-only companion site you’re essentially creating the need to administer two sites in tandem. An immediate workaround that springs to mind is to simply automatically strip all the styling from your html site and save it in parallel, but this is fraught with complications, for example copy referring to images or links stating “click here”.

Finally there’s the SEO disadvantages. Google’s algorithms have become much more complex over the years and one technique that it uses now is to determine whether sites are trying to “game” it. It’s very likely that Google will interpret the copious duplication of content on your site as an attempt to score more highly in search results. If it does do this it will penalise your ranking, or even drop you from its index.

I’d love to hear what others think about text-only sites in the comments.

It’s a good length at 2m 25s and the animated style is enjoyable to watch. Best of all it has successfully integrated links to other videos that go into areas of the manifesto in more depth.

What’s most noticeable though is what isn’t there: Gordon Brown, the Labour Party, or any politician at all in fact. It’s manifesto as politician free zone. The thinking is presumably inspired by both the current low opinion of politicians and the chosen medium. I’m much more likely to share the video with friends if it’s unbranded. Smart decision.

The Conservatives have created a launch video too.

They have felt brave enough to stick at least one politician above the virtual parapet: David Cameron. He bookends the video with a well chosen setting that emphasises he’s a regular family man. In  a garden with a seesaw and sporting an open neck shirt, you can almost picture the end-of-the-working-day glass of wine just out of shot.

Again though the message is very much “please don’t think of us as a political party”. Most of the video features ordinary people talking about their hopes and dreams. It’s safe, consistent but perhaps a little long for the web. Unlike the Labour video it doesn’t offer a clear call to action to act or find out more.

Both parties have enabled comments below their videos, which is to be applauded.

Finally on the AV front, the Conservatives have also made their manifesto available in MP3 format so a good tick for accessibility and digital inclusion.

What about the actual documents themselves? Well of course both are available online, and again I give the slight edge to Labour. Both provide PDF versions to download as you’d expect, but only Labour has turned their manifesto into actual web pages made of plain ol’ HTML. Why is this good? Because it makes the content easier to find, reference and share. Got a particular policy you want to share? No problem, it has its own unique URL.

The Conservatives on the other hand have opted for one of those virtual documents where you get to turn the pages with your mouse. I hate these things. Maybe they have a future with the iPad but right now they’re anachronistic and a poor choice for sharing a manifesto online. A shame because I actually think the Conservative manifesto is better presented.

One last honourable mention goes to The Guardian and its annotated Labour manifesto. Browse through the manifesto and you can see commentary from relevant Guardian journalists on selected policies, each with distinct URLs for sharing too. It would have been interesting to see the parties build in something like this themselves but I imagine the risks were considered too great.

This article was first posted on my personal blog, before the Lib Dems published their manifesto and Nick Clegg became everyone’s new favourite politician. So apologies to any Lib Dems for not including you here.

Apple and Google define what the user experience is right now. Apple is all about simplicity and intuitiveness; Google is all about search and the serendipity that comes from their magical algorithms. Apple’s vision is driven by the singular ego of Steve Jobs and the genius of Jonathan Ive; Google’s by the raw power of the masses of data gathered from all our web searches.

What neither of them do is rely on a design by committee, lowest common denominator, let’s copy what our rival is doing approach. Neither should we.

Steve Mason, Senior Developer and hat wearer

Imagine Olympic 100m champion Usain Bolt winning an egg and spoon race: an expected result but an achievement nonetheless. That’s probably a bit how Senior Developer Steve Mason felt as he got himself certified as an EPiServer CMS developer.

Around the Cubeworks office Steve is known as ‘The Legend’ because of his vast knowledge and lightning speed in all things coding. Steve has already played a big part in developing EPiServer sites for Chichester College and Sanyo, so we felt confident he’d ace the test. And he did! Good to get the certificate up on the wall, especially as Cubeworks does more EPiServer sites for clients.

Steve is now in intensive training for the three-legged race.

Six by Tc7

For the uninitiated, Aggers is the nickname of Jonathan Agnew, a stalwart of Test Match Special on the Beeb. As a lover of test cricket and a long-suffering England fan, I have been enjoying following Aggers on Twitter (@aggerscricket) during the current winter series in South Africa. Not only does he keep me updated on the score, but he knows how to banter – a fine twitterer if ever there was one.

But what I particularly like is the instantaneousness that Twitter gives you of something you can’t get elsewhere. Take an Aggers tweet from this morning:

Strauss press conference. “Test won’t last 5 days” http://twitpic.com/xwfkg

Here we have it, the thoughts of the England captain and a photo from the press conference, published ahead of its appearance in other media, even in the age of 24 hour news.

What strikes me most is not necessarily the real-time news itself, but my emotion as a Twitter follower. Coming direct from the horse’s mouth, this snippet of action feels like a real exclusive. It reminds me of the feeling of discovering the debut track of a great new band that your mates haven’t heard of – well, I used to know that feeling before I entered my 30s, had a kid and lost the ounce of credibility I had, but you know what I mean! When you stop and rationalise it, it’s not that amazing, but that’s the point.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if your organisation could harness that emotion to make your users take action for the good, make a charitable donation or, for the more commercially-minded, make an impulse purchase?

Google’s Chinese operations started in 2006, with the creation of google.cn. There was an almost immediate uproar when the company admitted that it was going to filter search results through the Chinese site to censor results to comply with Chinese authorities. Google issued the following statement to clarify their position:

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,”

So what’s changed? To me it seems a shame that the Chinese people could potentially be denied such an incredibly powerful tool. It would seem that Google have contradicted their previous statement with this action, although it seems that the new stance is much more popular. From a company who’s well-publicised motto is Don’t Be Evil I can’t help but think that this is self-preservation masquerading as a stance against a publicly-maligned adversary.

Of course, others have their own opinion. What’s yours? What do you think Google’s motivation is? Is this the end of Google in China? Where is this heading?