Today I am at the first day of the OZia conference here in Sydney. I’m sitting here listening to some interesting presentations and below are my impressions from the first ones of the day. Later I will link to slideshows and recordings as they bocome available.

Anatomy of a redesign at fairfax digital

Liz Pek, and Andy Coffey described the workflow behind the recent redesign of smh.com.au and theage.com.au. Using a solidly UCD based process mixed with strong collaborative processes. Liz described going through many design iterations exploring different ways of displaying the information on the news page while fulfilling the business and user’s needs. She also described FD’s use of Personas and otherUCD tropes. Andy talked about his teams use of conceptual design in the early stages and a strong grid later in the process to visualise the information on the site.

Forget page length, think information scents

Iain Barker told us about a discussion taking place online discussing the myth of users disdain for scrolling. He showed some interesting statistics about users scrolling and the numbers of users who are happy to use links far down the page. He then went on to discuss the concept of “information scents,” and how the composition and “flavour” of a piece of information is probably more important than how deep down a page it is. All in all Iain’s focus was on context, and how length of a page and the efficiency of that design are completely dependent upon that context.

Optimising landing pages with numbers

Hurol Inan, talked about various method to optimise information on a page. He talked about understanding metrics, gaining control of the page / site. He talked about an approach based upon testing (technical and user testing), collaborative design and several best practice concepts.

Statistics with Steve Baty

OMG.. too much math. Actually an interesting presentation if not really about a topic which relates closely to me. Mostly by choice, we can’t know everything. Steve talked about understanding research measurements, selecting research subjects and statistical sampling, describing the data and a bunch of formulae. He also showed us some example of bad statistical researchand highlighted some dangers with statistics.

more later…

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