Sydney day 1

We caught the first flight to Syndey, landing at 8.05am. After an hour through customs, we got to our awesome hotel (highly recommended!) and hit the town. The weather here is amazing, it feels like our NZ summer, not too hot not cold. I decided to check out the Rocks, Circular Quay area and Botanical Gardens cause the last two times I've been to Sydney I really wanted to visit these but didn't make it.

I saw an awesome exhibition at the M.C.A. - a collection of young aussie artists. There were a number of pieces that stood out - grafetti art, a scene made inticately from polystyrene balls, and a map of Sydney overlayed with Paris. One collaborative piece of Bart Simpson drawings drew me. The piece is the artists' comments about Evolution vs Intelligent Design theories and even though both have just as much merit as each other, we are taught Evolution as fact because we live in a materialisitic society. The Bart Simpsons had been drawn from memory, which was a comment on mass media - even though they were wonky everyone could still instantly tell they were Bart Simpson because of media. And then there were LCD screens hung up showing a spa pool bubbling away - which was the artists' way of telling everyone to just relax about these big issues. I love it! To me this is a brilliant piece of art - one that comments on something important, but is still fairly accessible to the people viewing it.

The Botanical Gardens were breathtaking, it was a lovely relaxing area. I especially liked the herbal area - it was so informative about all herbs: culinary, dyes, medicines, etc. and I learnt so much there.

I LOVE SYDNEY!!! :)

Webstock - conference Day Two

Wow what an awesome conference! Russ Weakley delivered a very funny and informative presentation on letting go and allowing the users to control their own experience. He related it back to working with one of the Australian museums which wanted to structure their information by department - but this of course isn't how people will look for the information when using the site. So he was like "Well what if we tagged pages and then people could search for them and related pages by tags". And then bringing this to the next level by allowing users to comment and add tags themselves.

Heather Hesketh talked about Progressive Development - Gradual small changes, rather than large redesigns, and scheduled for say quarterly or monthly. This is really interesting because the general impression I've had from clients is that they want the project to be just finished, and we have been trying to encourage them to treat their site almost like a living thing, it needs attention regularly.

Ben Goodger did a talk on Firefox, the history and also showed a demo of Firefox 2, which looks great. I love one of the new features - if it, or the computer, crashes it reopens with all the tabs that you had open restored. There have been times when I have had 15 tabs open, and lost them all because something crashed and I hadn't got round to reading or bookmarking them yet!

Tony Chor from Microsoft did a good presentation of IE7, which is of course a huge improvement on IE6. I don't think the crowd were really impressed because I'd say most, if not all, Firefox users and IE7 doesn't really have anything that Firefox doesn't already. But I think it's awesome because most internet users only have and only know about IE, so it will be really great for them, and for our jobs!

Then there were drinks and nibbles, following by dinner, followed by Odessa playing and dancing. There were some gorgeous kids there who loved the music and were just dancing by themselves!!

More photos are of course on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/webstock/

Webstock - conference Day One

I am so exhausted! It was an awesome, full on, day. Probably the highlight of the day was Joel Spolsky's talk "Shiny geegaw vs great design", which was very similar content to Kathy Sierra's workshop that I went to the day before. Essentially - make an awesome experience for the user.

After lunch was the 8x5 sessions, which I was taking part in. My talk was on Web Standard and .net - which is a pretty contriversial topic!! To be honest, 5 minutes isn't long enough, and I think 5 minutes wasn't long enough for any of us because we all had really in-depth topics. But it was fun making it fit into that, and it was great having the fast-paced stuff!

I chose to go to Rachel McAlpine's stream which I found really interesting. She really brought writing for the web down to street-level. The fact is that anyone and everyone these days write content for their website or intranet. So she pulled out some basic guidelines for making that better - like using a lot of headings and making sure your main points are at the start of the paragraph.

Kelly Goto's talk was of course really good! Again, she brought up the whole user-centered design of applications and sites. Getting to know - really know - who will be using your application and what matters to them.

And, the Kiwis won in the Tim-Tam, Chit-Chat Trans-Tasman Taste-off! Yee-ah! Then the day finished up with cocktails :-)

Webstock - Kathy Sierra's workshop

To kick Webstock off, I went along to Kathy Sierra's Workshop - Creating Passionate Users. It was SO good that afterwards I ran to the office to tell the others all about it!! It is really exciting for me cause I now I have some really cool ideas of stuff we can do with Go Fetch! and make it better for people who register and use it. There was so much stuff that I learnt, and there is no way I could cover it all here, but here are some key cool things:

1. People are passionate about things in their lives, and this is characterised by certain behaviour. But we can also use this in a backwards way to spark people's interest in products/services and to keep their interest up.
2. For people to be interested and attracted to something there needs to be a brain-level reaction. Our brains react and pay attention to things that are:
   • Novel - something strange, different, unique.
   • Beautiful
   • Cute and innocent
   • Funny
   • Faces and facial expressions - and these don't need to be human faces it can be animals or drawings
   • Unresolved - things that make you go *huh?!*
   • Sexy
   • Scary
3. If things are written in conversational tone rather than facts and information then people pay attention much better.
4. Animation - we take notice of moving things and tonal changes. So this should only be used well to draw attention to a specific thing on the page.
5. So now we have people's attention, we need to retain it by giving them a compelling picture to aim towards ("That looks cool, yeah I want to do that!") and a way to get to it, an easy way to get started.
6. We love learning and understanding, so there needs to be a way for people to learn more and more about what they are aiming towards. Also to keep learning, the tool or site needs to be very unobtrusive so that people don't have to learn to use the tool, but instead focus on achieving their goal.
7. Games are really good at keeping people motivated by providing levels - and the same idea can be applied to our tools. They don't need to be as specific as levels, but people are continuously motived if they feel they have achieved something and are more able or get some reward afterwards.
8. If people feel they are part of a bigger picture or meaning then they will be more enthusatic. E.g. Coldplay and Fair Trade. And people will want to and encourage others to do things like wear the Fair Trade braclet or t-shirts.
9. Community is really important -for people to be able to interact, comment or have some part with others going through the same things.
10. And of course the most important bit of all, is that it isn't about us webdesigners, or about the tools that we are trying to sell, it is about how the people using the tool feel.