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I'm one of those quirky people who finds forms intensely interesting.
I've had a great deal of past involvement with market reseach and online transaction sites which has emphasised to me how important effective and usable form design is in order to ensure that forms achieve the goals set.
In my current role I've guided my team into supporting a number of research projects and we're currently reviewing and redeveloping our website and intranet forms capacity - touching on every other area of the business.
So I was very interested to watch Jessica Ender's presentation at the Web Standards Group (WSG) in Canberra last week.
Jessica, who owns Formulate Information Design, a specialist form development consultancy in Canberra, gave a very professional and passionate talk focusing on the four layers of a form and the appropriate process to use when developing a form.
She brought it together with the four Cs of good form design, clear, concise, clever and contextual.
While much of this was not new to me, Jessica's talk placed it into a new context and I'll be revisiting our approach to the redevelopment of our forms based on her insights.
What type of methodology do you use for developing forms?
Are your online forms effective?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Online government forms don't have to be boring | Tweet |
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Choosing a minimum resolution for a government site | Tweet |
In the good old days (around 1995), choosing a display resolution for a website was easy. Everyone had 640x480 monitors, so that's what we designed for.
By 1998 it was a little harder - many, but not all, people had upgraded to 800x600 screens. So if you wanted to target early adopters you could aim high and have all those additional pixels (over 170,000 extra!)
A few years later 1024x768 was building steam - finally overtaking 800x600 around 2004. However there was not a strong enough case to upgrade - 800x600 was still around 40 percent of the market.
This year I'm looking at an upgrade to our website's design, and are currently working through one of the most important questions - do we maintain the site at 800x600, or design it for 1024x768 (almost double the display real estate)?
To help answer this question I've had Google Analytics installed for my agency's website. This gives me a clearer picture of the display resolutions in use by our audience - and was simpler to implement than the method within WebTrends.
When I had it installed I told our web designer that if 800x600 (and smaller) was less than 5 percent of users, then I could make a case to switch to the higher minimum resolution.
Anyone using the lower resolution would have access to the same information, but right scrolling would be required.
After running Analytics for a while the display resolutions have stabilised as follows:
1024 x 768 - 43.76%
1280 x 1024 - 17.81%
1280 x 800 - 12.98%
800 x 600 - 6.01%
1440 x 900 - 5.91%
1680 x 1050 - 3.95%
1152 x 864 - 3.66%
1280 x 768 - 1.51%
1280 x 960 - 1.43%
1920 x 1200 - 0.69%
Others - 2.29%
Now clearly our website users are overwhelmingly using display resolutions larger than 800x600.
However the number of 800x600 users hasn't quite reduced to my magical 5 percent number.
So do I maintain a minimum of 800x600 to support the remaining 6 percent of people, but disadvantage the other 94 percent, or do I push forward to a 1024x768 minimum and potentially disadvantage that 6 percent?
Of course the decision isn't quite that straightforward - a 1024x768 screen doesn't actually offer all that space for a website - there's the browser frame to consider and many people do not maximise their browser screen.
Also it is possible to develop expanding websites that reconfigure for different resolutions - it just takes longer and costs more.
But it is an interesting question to consider - what's the official minimum resolution for your website, and why?
Friday, July 25, 2008
Many different approaches to web marketing | Tweet |
I've just been directed to Jeremiah Owyang's post, A complete list of the many forms of web marketing for 2008.
It's quite a useful resource to draw on for innovative ways to use the online channel.
It's made me think on the communications approaches my agency has used in the last year - based on the categories and subcategories in Jeremiah's post.
Corporate domain
- Corporate site
- Microsites
- Intranet
- Extranet
Search marketing
- Search engine optimisation
- Search engine marketing
Outbound and syndicated web marketing
- Email marketing
- Syndicated content and RSS
Brand extension
- Web advertising
- Social networking, Forums, Wikis, Collaboration
Community marketing and social media marketing
- Online video
How many of the areas indicated by Jeremiah is your organisation engaged in?
No future for paper invoices? | Tweet |
These days the majority of postal mail people in Australia receive is either advertising material or bill. In the future, this may be cut even further to only ads.
In the European Union there's a major project underway to create a whole-of-government standard for all EU government invoicing, that can also be propagated across the private sector, creating savings estimated at EUR65.4 billion per year for businesses.
That's a staggering amount of savings simply for removing those paper bills - not to mention the environmental benefits of saving all of that paper, printing and transportation.
If successful it will mean that the EU government will strongly encourage all of its suppliers to move to e-procurement - at some point mandating the change. This will be propagated out to national, regional and local governments in the EU area.
The impacts of this are likely to be global. Any business with a relationship with EU governments will have to move towards the EU invoicing standards to maintain their billing arrangements. In turn this will influence them towards adopting a standard system across electronic billing for their other government and private customers around the world.
It will be interesting to see how far-reaching the effects will be, whether other governments will mandate other e-procurement invoicing standards - raising new barriers for organisations dealing across national boundaries, or will support the EU approach to potentially create global e-invoicing standards.
More information about the initiative is available at the European Commission website in the e-Invoicing working group site.
How management beliefs inhibit egovernment | Tweet |
I've met others who regard online communities as some kind of crutch for a few lonely people with limited social skills.
This is often characterised as a generational gap, shaped by how people see themselves in context of digital technologies;
- those born before widespread internet use are more likely to be 'digital immigrants'
- those who grew up in a connected world are more likely to be 'digital natives'
For example, a group of senior executives I worked with a number of years ago were avidly interested in technology and thought of themselves as in tune with the modern world.
However when presented with the concept of an online forum for their customers, they were extremely unwilling to take the risk of having negative feedback posted about their company.
They saw this as a major risk - many customers were already complaining about their company via other online forums, which were totally outside their control.
Their initial decision was to either prohibit any comments on their forum that could be construed as negative, or to not have a forum at all.
It took several months to help the group understand that if they did constrain the participants in this way the forum would not be credible.
It took about as long to convince them that if they decided to not have a forum then others would fill the gap and the organisation would have no effective online channel to present their side of the story.
The organisation eventually gave the go-ahead to experiment with a forum - which my organisation managed and moderated. Other than screening for language and tone, no censorship of customer sentiment took place.
There were negative comments made. These were responded to with objective and factual information about the organisation's approach and how the matters raised were or would be addressed.
This approach helped turn several of the most vocal objectors into supporters of the company. It also allowed the organisation to uncover several easy, but important improvements that helped many other customers (who probably would never have bothered complaining, but would have changed suppliers).
The organisation now operates a number of extremely popular and successful forums and blogs and conducts much of its business online.
It has changed its mental model of the online world, and this has helped them better understand and meet their customers' needs.
Many organisations have not made this leap as yet, and some are in the process of doing it.
Where does your department sit?
