Where thoughts gather

The Brothers ingram Grim

When you enter a room, and the first thing you see is three men dressed in leather trench-coats, high boots and sporting long hair the thought of slowly treading backwards, through the door, tip-toeing up the stairs and running as fast as you can away from the place does dance across the mind.

The Matrix / Sadomasochistic film flashbacks aside, I managed to dampen down the urge to flee and wandered across to the registration desk. (I later worked out that these three were in fact the Ingram brothers from Hastings; Jonathan, Thomas & Richard.)

Profile images can be a dangerous thing, and sometimes they can be useful. Jeff Van Campen was manning the sign-in-point and managed to quickly tag me to my moniker, introduce himself with a quip about how he didn’t look like his Twitpic in RL and find my sticker with good speed. It was pretty refreshing to find so many intellectually gifted folk dressing down to meet each other, although I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some sort of underground recognised web-designer clothing range? Perhaps someone could fill me in on this… it appears that jeans are the haute-couture of techno-webbery circles, especially when combined with a slightly humorous / colourful shirt. However, I digress… fashion isn’t something I understand too well, so we’ll bounce on.

The reason I ended up coming along are as follows: one; I want to learn about things.. and two; Nick Smith told me to. I say ‘told me to’ he may have said something like “well, you went to that Drupal thing.. come to this one (it’s better*)“ . I have to admit my knowledge of web design is completely limited. Back in high school I worked with a friend to set up a gossip site that covered the in-school tittle-tattle but he did the coding and I wrote the stories, ohh and when I say coding I mean html things. I then dabbled in writing in html where tables and buttons were as far as I ever made it! So, the prospect of coming to an event filed with people who lived in code was slightly daunting.

*he may not have said the “it’s better” bit

Thankfully my first natter of the evening was with a delightful lady called Valerie. Jeff had pointed her in my direction as she spotted a conversation about Vibram Five Fingers that we’d been having along with Nick on twitter. Valerie, thank you for breaking me into the LWS group gently! I may have given up if you’d have tried to talk to me about *insert generic webtech1337geekery term*.

Having made my way to the only free space in the room (the back) I was presented with this view:

I know I’ve distorted it, but essentially the spasmed image does my vantage point justice. Thankfully, and somewhat strangely, the presentation was done in spoken form and the chatterbox Andy Budd was able to broadcast his voice around the room.

The Actual Speaking and Point of Being There Part:

Essentially, I think, user experience focussed design is about getting creatives to consider how the end user will handle the site:

• Will they be able to get to what they want easily
• Do they understand how to move between pages
• Is everything available easily
• Can they do it without asking for help
• Are links hidden away, or easily spottable

Of course, sometimes a site designer won’t be allowed to make a website that focusses solely on the user experience because sometimes a client will want the website to hide certain things away (Ryan Air’s contact number was the example Andy offered here). If designers are able to take a step back and think about how a non-tech would view and use the site, then surely that would be a little step towards making the ‘net a more enjoyable experience.

Speaking of user experience, I’m now rolling with Office 2010 – and it seems Outlook failed to do a user test.. the send receive button is now hidden away in a tab.. a bloody tab!

As always with these things, the conversations heated up as the drinks went down – and I saw some lively chattering going on at the back of the room between man#1 and man#2. Man#3 just walked around in a suit all the time trying to get a better view of things, like me he’s a lifetime

ohhgodI’mshorterthaneverythingeventhatbloodycoffeetablewithoutlegs

victim, but he hasn’t come to terms with it yet. Don’t worry friend, when you do you’ll accept that there will be times when we don’t get to see things, and unless you plan to carry a ladder in your imac case you should really stay still and try to listen.

Despite my reservations, I came back having absorbed quite a bit of information. I’m also proud to say that this tweet, preceded Andy Budd’s revelation. And with that, I’m about to write off to the DailyFail and ask if I can have a fortune-tellers column…  or at least a lovely tank in a German aquarium….