There’s a lot of buzz in the technology world about User Experience, or UX as it is more commonly abbreviated. There is definitely a need to make the  human-machine interface a more natural and intuitive one. However, I was reminded this weekend that UX can (and indeed, should) be applied to every interaction that a business has with their clients.

Let me elaborate by using an example of what happened to me this weekend when I met with a few friends for breakfast.

We decided to try one of the restaurants in Camps Bay, and the first thing I noticed about this place was that it was polluted with noise! The main culprit were the juicers that were placed on the bar counter which was quite close to where the clientele were sitting; these noise creators should rather have been hidden away in the kitchen. The restaurant has a sleek and minimalist design and layout, but doesn’t provide sufficient sound damping.I’m rather susceptible to ambient noise, but I’m sure that I’m not the only one who is negatively affected by loud, repetitive noises while I’m trying to hold a conversation.

The second annoyance of that morning’s experience was the frequency of interruptions from the waitrons and manager, constantly asking if everything was  alright, or if we needed anything else, and so forth. I certainly appreciate helpfulness, but I don’t enjoy having my conversations interrupted unnecessarily.

When I left the restaurant, I realised that I probably wouldn’t rush back there, but rather go to a tried and tested place where I can feel more comfortable and enjoy the dining experience. With a bit more thought and cognizance of the senses that encompasses a person’s experience, the restaurant could’ve easily made my experience a more positive one, but more interesting for me is how this experience is mirrored on the web.

This particular restaurant clearly had a major focus on design. It is attractive and modern, and made you feel as if you were going to enjoy something special; however, the content of our conversation was drowned out by unnecessary noise. With websites and applications, often the design overcompensates for a lack of good content. It screams: “Look how attractive I am!”, but underneath the glamorous exterior there is either little value in the content, or the value has not been clearly thought through and articulated.

My friends and I were often unnecessarily interrupted, meaning the flow of our conversations was broken. This happens in interface design all the time. Instead of following a process to its logical next step, often systems will take us to areas of the system where we weren’t expecting to be, leaving us confused, irritated and searching to find our place again.

User Experience design is nothing new. Good product and service designers have been doing this for years. It’s a combination of many skills and leanings, but probably the most important traits a UX designer can have is great observation and an empathetic nature; the ability to see how people are experiencing the product or service as well as understand their needs. Armed with these traits (as well as a healthy measure of experience) great User Experiences can be crafted.

Today I had the privilege of attending the RE/MAX Broker/Owner Conference at the Spier Estate. White Wall Web has a long history with RE/MAX but my personal involvement has been relatively short. Today I got to know them a bit better as well as seeing what makes them such a great brand.

It’s great to see a company’s top leadership interact with such charisma, honesty and integrity. It is clear to me that they see RE/MAX as a large family, with each broker/owner a valuable and respected member.

The 2 speakers, Christopher Invidiata from Aboutowne Realty and Steven Murray, President of Real Trends, both gave enlightening and useful talks on a variety of topics, applicable not only to realty, but to business in general. I personally walked away with many revelations and valuable business nuggets that I will be applying in my team.

One of the core concepts of today that resonated with me was trust. This was grouped with 2 other concepts – price and convenience – as the 3 parts to your value proposition. The message was clear; focus on trust and convenience. Price wars are to be avoided.

Trust has always been an important part of the WWW ethic, and it is something that we look for in any other company (and indeed any clients) that we deal with. It is something that we endeavour to build into our systems too, from ensuring the data in the systems is trustworthy, to making sure that the systems can be trusted to work when they should in the manner they are supposed to work.

Trust between people takes a long time to build up and is very easy to destroy. The same goes with the relationship between humans and machines; if a machine doesn’t do what it says on the box, you’ll lose trust in it and probably not use it at all. If a system doesn’t provide you with correct data, you’ll probably discard it for a system that does.

This is why we believe it’s so important to spend time understanding and clarifying what our clients want out of their systems. New clients may come to us by means of a good referral, but we need to keep their trust by understanding what it is that they want then delivering that for them. The moment we falter by being out of sync with their requirements, we take a step backwards on the trust path.

So get to know your client. Spend time with them listening to what they have to say. Build trust and build right. You’ll end up being grateful.

In previous posts we have discussed the importance of tweaking your website’s meta descriptions and meta tags in order to optimise your site. Although doing this is very important, prioritising links on your site is something that needs to be checked at least once to ensure that your site is ranking as highly as it deserves to.

First Link Priority is the rule that if a web page contains multiple links to the same destination, Google’s search engine will ignore any link that comes after the first one.

Let’s take an example of a Real Estate agent’s website:

The page contains a banner which is linked to a specific area where the property listings are located. Below that banner is a text link to the same specific area that is optimised for the same phrase as they have used in the banner – Google will identify the link on the image first and ignore the keyword rich link in their optimised phrase.

The image will not grant as much “link juice” as the optimised text link will – which will dilute the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

Contact us for assistance in creating a SEO strategy that takes into consider the practise of First Link Priority.

In our previous post, we discussed why you should consider making a shift to mobile; in this post we’ll delve further into the opportunities that can be created through having a mobile site.

At last year’s Google Searchology conference, it was confirmed that Google is returning optimised mobile websites ahead of desktop results for certain mobile queries. So, those companies who are merely redirecting a mobile user to another domain, rather than optimising the site for mobile searchers, aren’t benefiting as much as they should with their mobile site.

Mobility is a ranking factor for mobile search – by not optimising a mobile site it may be more difficult to appear in a competitive non-branded search.

Mobile search is growing faster than searches from PC’s, this leads to mobile ranking factors becoming more prevalent when developing a mobile site. By providing a mobile landing page to a mobile user makes it more likely that the user will execute the desired actions.

40% of South African’s have WAP enabled phones, which means the potential reach of mobile sites is huge. That reach is further extended by optimising your mobile site so that it ranks higher in general searches.

Talk to us about developing an optimised mobile site and extend your reach to your target audience.

The use of mobile phones for Internet searching is a fast growing trend in South Africa, which offers a major opportunity for companies to tailor their marketing efforts to reach a mobile audience.

Is your company truly leveraging your mobile audience? Are your listings accessible on mobile devices, and are you meeting the needs of your mobile audience?

Why go mobile?

Having a mobile site does not only satisfy the needs of the mobile user, but also increases your chances of ranking higher in search results – thanks to Google’s separate mobile index.

In addition to this, mobile users want to be able to quickly and easily perform the tasks that are important to them whey they are mobile. For example in the Real Estate industry, if a potential customer can search and find properties in the area they are currently in, the likelihood of them viewing the property and potentially buying is increased.

Some considerations:

The screen size and resolution of a mobile device is considerably smaller to that of a desktop PC, so it’s important to create a mobile website to enhance the user’s experience when they are searching via their mobile device.

In today’s age, people are expecting effective mobile websites – content, context and interface are crucial to providing an enhanced user experience. Today’s users want mobile websites that are direct, easy to navigate, and more importantly, provide them with the information they want instantly.

So why not leverage off this mobile audience to target potential new customers? Contact us for assistance in creating your mobile site.

This article is based on a presentation I gave at the recent Rubyfuza conference, which was addressed at Ruby developers. The title of the presentation was ‘The Business of Ruby’ – specifically because it was given at a Ruby conference. However, it had very little to do with Ruby. In fact, it had very little to do at all with any programming language, any framework or any specific technology. I didn’t write any code or show any interesting snippets, explain the latest incarnation of this or that gem or plugin.

I wanted to step out a bit. Get to a higher level and talk about the people that usually cause developers the most stress (and no, I don’t mean Project Managers). I mean clients. Customers. The people that we are ultimately building our software for. The real people that (again, usually) don’t speak “geek”. These “real people” never seem to be interested in developers fancy, elaborate code or their highly elegant software architecture. The people always seem to be more focused on the design and how easy it is to use the systems or applications that we build. Because, at the end of the day, you have to admit that clients are the ones that are paying our bills, so we need to satisfy them.Dave Hoover of Obtiva mentioned that although there are now more programmers than ever before, the world really needs good developers. Although the craft of programming is a very important part of the work involved, equally important is an understanding of the entire ecosystem that programming is a part of. This ecosystem includes anyone or anything that interacts with your software. Developers build software – you cannot have a software company without developers, but you also can’t have a software company without clients.

The quote below by Jeroen van den Bos highlights the typical relationship between client and developer:

So to help you make sure that you build the software clients want and avoid the pitfalls that usually plague software development such as misunderstood specifications, missed deadlines and lots of late nights, I’ve put together some thoughts below.

Listen, question, then listen again.

We need to carefully listen to our client’s requirements. I know it sounds terribly obvious, but it’s the truth.

The client usually has a lot to say. Some of it is clear, some of it needs a bit of fleshing out. That’s alright. Just listen. Take it all in. A lot of us have been in the industry for a long time and heard a number of relatively similar requirements from different clients. This makes us believe we have an reasonably good idea and a clear understanding of the requirements before the client has explained the whole idea. This can be dangerous, as there are often a few important ‘devils’ hiding in the detail that we miss if we don’t listen carefully.

When something doesn’t make sense or needs elaboration, question the client, but be sure to prod just enough to get the client to give you the information. Try not to lead them too much.

Roleplay

Roleplaying is vital to any successful development project

Roleplaying should be actively encouraged. It allows you to really see things from a different perspective and be sympathetic to the potential users of the system. Once you understand their perspective, you will have a deeper understanding of their needs. If you don’t get into character, you’ll never really know what the users of the system want or how to tailor the software to ensure that it makes sense to those users.

Wireframe

Building a wireframe helps you understand the system

Clients love wireframes and you should too. They can be tricky to build and time-consuming, but they’ll save you boat-loads of time in the long run. They are important to get the client involved in building the system and help them realize just how much work goes into building a system. The client will gain a new-found respect for the development process and all the detail that needs to be considered. Wireframes allow you to spot potential issues in the system before you build any code, meaning that there is less likelihood of wasting time and energy.

I’m not advocating that the whole system should be specified upfront or that re-factoring should be avoided at all costs – definitely not! But we should be able to understand the system as a whole and the workflows/processes at a high-level before we start to lay the groundwork for the system.

The other benefit of wireframing is that it works hand-in-hand with Roleplaying and forces the team to design the system from the perspective of the user.

Collaborate

In the words of one particular master...

A successful software development project is delivered by a team. The team consists of a number of people, and the client is as much a member of the team as the developers. Take the client out of the team and the project is doomed. The client can’t simply be there at the beginning to give the specs and again at the end to test what you’ve built. They need to be there throughout the project, helping with suggestions, clarifying the specs and answering any questions. The client needs to invested in the process as they understand the business to which the software is going to be aligned.

Wrapping it up

Building software systems is more of an art than a science, and needs skill, creativity, passion, sensitivity and understanding – the exact ratio and balance between these element is not something I can define though. However, if we keep striving to build our abilities in all these areas, everyone benefits, especially the client. And a happy client is a paying client.

Said to be Africa’s first Ruby conference, Rubyfuza, will be held on 3 – 4 February 2011 at the Strand Tower Hotel in Cape Town. We strongly believe that Ruby is fast establishing itself as one of the most promising dynamic programming languages, so with this in mind, it was only natural for us to get behind this initiative as a sponsor.

Presentation topics range from apprenticeships to selecting the right data store for your next project, with our very own Executive Director, Zayne Upton, presenting on ‘The Business of Ruby.’

“Often when we get really involved in the code, we forget the bigger picture – that ultimately we are (usually) building our software for a client, a real person that (again, usually) doesn’t speak “geek”. These “real people” don’t seem to be interested in your fancy and elaborate code, or your highly elegant software architecture. They always seem to be more focused on how it looks and how easy it is to use. You know they’re paying your bills, so you need to satisfy them. I’m going to help you find out how.”

“It’s great that initiatives like this are starting to emerge in South Africa” says Zayne. “Ruby – and especially the web development framework, Rails – has taken hold in Silicon Valley, due to it’s ability to get applications built quickly and with very little effort. This allows for rapid prototyping, meaning applications can be let out into the wild sooner and you can start seeing a return on your investment sooner. This is why White Wall Web uses Ruby on Rails almost exclusively for our custom-built applications – it just makes sense.”

For more information on Rubyfuza, visit their website or follow them on twitter.

Executive Director, Zayne Upton, was recently featured on eTV’s The Tech Report in an insert focusing on Cloud Computing.

Zayne explains the concept of Cloud Computing in layman terms, and highlights the benefits and what it means to the average Internet user.

Recently I featured on eTV’s ‘The Tech Report” illuminating the concept of Cloud Computing and discussing the benefits thereof. I thought it would be fitting to further my thoughts on the topic, as the insert didn’t allow me to expand on why I’m so passionate about the technology or what the path was that has led me there.

Lets step back a bit

I’ve been in the technology world working with computers for most of my adult life and to tell you that I’m tired of computer problems is quite an understatement. I used to really love the idea of being able to build my own computer up from various components that I had specifically chosen for their features, performance, speed, etc. I could sit for hours configuring the multitude of settings, tweaking this, fixing that, until the machine was running optimally. That would never last for long though. Something invariable changes and incompatibilities arise – usually it’s an updated driver, an update to the operating system or something as obscure as temperature fluctuations due to a faulty fan. Just like a mechanic’s car spends a large portion of its life with the bonnet off, so the geek’s PC usually spends most of its life with the side panel open – easy access if something needs to be changed, ripped out or replaced.

I’m over that now though. I simply don’t have the time to tinker anymore. I actually need my computer to work. Not just some of the time, ALL the time. I rely on my computer to provide the tools I need to do my job every day. I also rely on my computer to provide me with entertainment when I need it after hours. I don’t want to struggle with my tools, I just want them to work and I want them to work easily and understandably.

It’s at this point that some of you may be thinking: “Get a Mac”. Well, that is one option, but it’s not quite the right fit. I wanted something smaller, something that lasted at least one whole day on a single charge. I wanted something that turned on immediately – I didn’t want to wait for the damn thing to boot up, reload everything into RAM, blah, blah, blah. I wanted something that I could use anywhere: in the boardroom to take notes; at the coffee shop to read emails; in bed to read those novels I’ve been trying to get through.

You see where I’m going with this. For me, the iPad is, to date, the quintessential device. It allows me to do all this and more. Yes, there are things that it doesn’t do, but I’m happy to focus on the reasons it excited me in the first place and instead look for alternatives for the things it doesn’t do or doesn’t do well. And if you’ve been wondering how this relates to Cloud Computing, this is where I deftly bring it back in.

Store it in the Cloud

A lot of the criticisms of the iPad are launched from a specific paradigm. This is the computing paradigm that we have all become used to. We have desktops at work, laptops that we carry around with us, and for some, external hard drives with loads more information on them that we also carry around and have to plug into our desktop and laptops whenever we need them. We have files stored on our computer that we need to access by opening our computer, searching for it and loading it up in the application that we used to create it. We store stuff – lots of it – as if it had a tangible quality to it, as if they are actually things that we can grip in our hands. We keep important work documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, images, videos, etc, on us, because we feel the need to be able to access them whenever and wherever. So we end up carrying a lot of equipment, cables and adapters with us. Anyone in this situation will tell you that the more you travel, the heavier your tech rucksack becomes.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The paradigm of the iPad is something different, something new. It’s an easy-to-use, always-on, highly portable window to the internet. It’s not a “computer” in the traditional sense at all. It’s important to understand that. It’s no longer about the specifics of the hardware, but rather about the way we interact with it. Computing has become a commodity – few people outside the IT arena care about CPU speed, RAM, hard drive capacity or graphics processors. In fact, most of the tasks performed by the majority of the work force don’t require even a fraction of the computational power already available to us. Manufacturers have realised this and have started to differentiate themselves in other ways by making their offerings sexier and sexier, but ultimately they’re still following the traditional paradigm. Apple have eschewed this way of thinking with the iPad and instead boldly proclaims that the future of computing is online. This ideology also manifests in the new AppleTV, which doesn’t have a hard drive at all. All content is streamed.

You can’t connect an external hard drive to an iPad (at least not without jailbreaking and an enormous amount of effort) specifically because in the iPad paradigm there is no real need for it. Your information should be stored online. You need to think of the internet as your hard drive and change your understanding about the way you store and retrieve your information.

The Challenges

Shifting people’s mindset to adopt to this new method of working can be a tricky process and requires that some important groundwork has already been laid. Most important is the connectivity to the internet. If this is lacking, patchy, slow, or expensive, preaching the merits of Cloud Computing will fall on deaf ears. Here in South Africa we are just beginning to lay down the necessary infrastructure that will enable real Cloud Computing, so early adopters will face some challenges.

Another challenge is that the applications needed to facilitate Cloud Computing and specifically Cloud storage are still relatively immature. There are some clear trailblazers though and probably the best example is the Google suite of applications, specifically Gmail. Dropbox and Box.net are also great examples of online storage and sharing applications that work across multiple platforms. However there is still much work that needs to be done to make the experience seamless and easy enough for anyone to use. Apple has put a serious amount of time and energy into the user-experience of iOS, the operating system of the iPhone and iPad, and the resulting mass adoption of the platform is evidence that they are on the right path. However, the rest of the ecosystem needs to support that experience, and we are just not quite there yet. A clear example is the fragmentation of the e-magazine and e-newspaper sector – publishers are not yet clear how to transform the content for best results in the new medium. Switching between the app for Wired and Popular Science for instance, can cause much confusion as they implement their navigation methods quite differently.

Security often comes up as a major concern: how can my information be safe if it is available on the internet? The truth is that storing the information on your PC is, in most cases, less secure than you think. If your computer were stolen today, how easy would it be for someone to access your confidential information on the hard drive? Is your computer password protected? Is your filesystem protected with the correct Access Control Lists? Are your confidential files encrypted? These security concerns and issues are high on the list of priorities of any company that builds online applications that store sensitive data, because they know that trust is something that can easily be lost and is very difficult to regain.

Where to from here?

I have no doubt that the shift from local or PC computing to online computing will take place. That is clear from the trends in the marketplace: Apple surpassed Microsoft in market cap in May this year, largely on the back of their visionary mobile strategy, while Microsoft continues to plod along bringing out yet more versions of the same old desktop software and tries desperately to play catch up with their Windows Phone 7 platform.What is less clear is the manner in which this shift will manifest, how quick the uptake will be and when it will reach the tipping point. But you should probably start getting used to the idea that quite soon the dominance of the desktop and laptop PC as the primary computing devices will shift. Perhaps in a generation or 2 children will be asking their parents: “Daddy, what’s a laptop?” in the same way that the children of today ask their parents: “Daddy, what’s a cassette tape?”

If you have been following the news around WikiLeaks this past week you may have heard a bit about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We experienced a DDoS attack firsthand this week on ProfessionL, one of our products, so we thought we’d write a post about what DDoS is, and expand a bit on the back story…

Back Story: The WikiLeaks Fandango

The WikiLeaks founder, Australian born Julian Assange (See NY Times full story on his background) turned himself in to UK officials on the 7^th of December after a international warrant for his arrest warrant was issued by Sweden for rape and molestation charges (more here). This will, in all likelihood, kick off a potentially long protracted battle where Assange will be fighting extradition to Sweden to face the charges. This comes about a week after WikiLeaks released 250,000 diplomatic cables (referred to as “Cablegate”) amidst much controversy which has embarrassed many governments and strained international relations. A lot of media attention has been focused specifically on the cables between the US and Iraq. Shortly before and then again after WikiLeaks went live with Cablegate, it experienced a DDoS attack and went down for some time.

Assange claims that he is innocent of the charges in Sweden, that the sex was consensual, and that the charges are politically motivated. He has polarized many into either complete disdain on the one hand, or near hero worship on the other.

One of the effects of WikiLeaks/Assange’s notoriety has been the relinquishing of support from many of WikiLeaks’ prior support/suppliers, which some allege is due to powerful government pressure.

Groups of hackers, some semi-organized (like the group called “Anonymous”) and other sympathizers, decided to “attack back” against what they feel is an attack on information freedom. This has lead to the bringing down of, and/or disruption to, some large sites including MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon.

Some of the attackers are senior and experienced software engineers or hackers with a serious agenda, others are just kids having “fun” taking down big sites and making news.

So how does DDoS work?

Basically a virus is created to infect PCs and servers with an internet connection. The compromised computer waits for an instruction from a handler – each handler handles multiple compromised computers. The attacker installs software to coordinate an attack, chooses a server to attack, and sends instructions to compromised computers via the handlers. The instruction is to visit a particular site or server via regular web traffic from the compromised computer. If enough computers access a site concurrently it can bring that server down due to the new unexpected load.

The reason that DDoS is so effective is that it is very difficult to distinguish the “bad guys” (compromised computer’s traffic) from the “good guys” (genuine traffic from visitors that genuinely want to see the website). With so many concurrent visits, the simple method of processing of any complex algorithm to work out the difference between the two types of traffic can itself cause a server to crash.

Recently there has been a major proliferation of DDoS software which can be purchased and installed by attackers, and where the handler and compromised computer chain is already available and waiting. Hacker groups also share advanced open source versions of DDoS software amongst themselves to make their groups more “powerful.”

Anyone with a decent enough knowledge of Linux can become an attacker or join an established group. Many people with technical prowess, but no real agenda other than to “see what they can do” join in. It’s a game for them and it offers great networking opportunities with other proficient engineers.

The other difficultly with counteracting this is that the source of the attacks are distributed and the owner/manager of the computer/server sending the attacks is not aware that there computer is compromised and thus sending attacks. This is near impossible to solve as, in order to not become a compromised computer, you need (very) up to date anti-virus software. There are obviously myriads of computers connected to internet that don’t have up to date anti-virus software and it’s highly unlikely that this situation is going to change anytime soon.

This also makes it impossible to know where the attacks originate from, unless the attacker owns up.

How has it affected us and what are we doing about it?

White Wall Web manages several high traffic sites – some of which are hosted in other countries – and in conjunction with RSAWEB, we proactively manage the hosting of these sites too. Recently we had a major attack on ProfessionL, one of our startup projects. In our review of the DDoS attack, the IP range of the server used to host ProfessionL is the same as those used by “Anonymous”, so it appears for some reason that our server was targeted by them. We doubt it was deliberate, which is one of the reasons why DDoS is a very blunt tool for making a point – innocent people get hurt, a bit like war.

Using various tools and algorithms we are finding ways to organize the IP addresses that come to our server into “good guys” and “bad guys” categories. Bad guys get blocked completely, good guys get let through immediately, and the rest go through our tests.

This is a nightmare to manage because sometimes good guys end up on the bad guys list in error. The bad guys keep getting better at looking like good guys. It is extremely time consuming and a big distraction from the important “real” work that we deal with every day. Clients and end users struggle to understand why it can’t “just be fixed” and it can have a major impact on the business. Smaller sites or companies with minimal resources behind them, will simply take their site down and wait for the attack to end, or move it and hope they don’t get targeted again.

South African context

Due to the price of bandwidth in South Africa, ISP’s, company networks and home users are more vigilant with their bandwidth usage. They are more likely to detect spikes in bandwidth usage and isolate the root cause due to bandwidth caps and costs per mb. For this reason few attacks come from compromised computers based in South Africa. If they do, they are generally shut down very quickly. We don’t doubt that we will have our fair share of attackers – there are certainly people here with enough skills and time to spare.

Our solution to this malicious attack is working pretty well right now, but like in war, things can change quickly, and the best you can do is ensure you’re monitoring your site carefully. When a DDoS attack happens, you will need to move quickly and adapt to avoid being caught in the crossfire.