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The relationship I have with mobile network operators is usually one of love and hate. Love because in my geeky desire to have the freedom to get online everywhere, I desperately want the connectivity drug they’re peddling. The honeymoon usually reaches it’s peak when I discover that the 3G coverage is pretty good and the Speedtest app tells me the download and upload speeds are in the range of a few megabits, speeds we were pretty happy to get over our landlines only a few years ago. From that point it’s usually straight downhill into the pits of mobile operator hell.
First the price. If you want a normal data plan with Orange that will enable you to, well, actually use your smartphone the way it was intended with all the apps and goodies it will cost you at least 40€/month. For that you also get quite a lot of included call minutes and SMS messages, but it’s not as if they give you a choice to not buy them. I would. Gladly not buy them. So if you want internet you will pay through your teeth. Sadly I only later discovered Virgin Mobile with mobile internet prices that were slightly less hallucinant. Oh well, the contract was already long signed by then.
Naturally, it gets even “better” when things go wrong. Then the incompetence can really shine. I received a monthly bill that was more than twice the normal amount. Received might be an overstatement though, as the normal way in France is for them to automatically take the money of your bank account and you can only really complain post factum. Naturally I complained, using the e-mail form on the Orange website. The website which by the way is a horrible, unnavigable “wants to be all to everyone” portal type of affair. I got an automatic reply they received my message. Then I waited for the real reply to my problem. For two weeks. It never came.
Then I dropped by at the Orange store to inquire about the solution to this, they have overcharged me quite a bit. I mentioned I sent a request online, as it said on the site. The representative calmly replied that they simply don’t reply most of the time. Excuse me?!! Indeed, a world class customer experience. Sigh. :/ Then I asked what can I do about it at the store, since I know I haven’t made that many calls to rack up all those charges. She told me there was nothing they could do at the store, since they don’t even have access to that kind of customer billing data and I have to call this and this number… Some technology company, can’t even put together a decent customer relationship system.
Called the number, got an automated reply system where I couldn’t get a live person on and not for the lack of trying. Finally I gave up and went battling with their online UI once more to recheck the charges for that month. After mastering the extremely odd filter system I finally found the problem. A bunch of expensive calls to Algeria. Now it made sense. My previous phone had been stolen more than a month ago and those calls were undoubtedly a consequence of that incident.
Now you must be thinking: “What are you, an idiot? Why didn’t you block the number?”. Aaaah, but I did. In fact I did so less than an hour after my phone got stolen. I remember even being surprised how easy the process was, I just needed to call an automated number, enter my customer code and they told me it was successfully blocked. Well obviously NOT! Tried the automated “customer relations” number again with no luck and then finally gave up in disgust. Even if I got to them, how will I prove it wasn’t me calling those numbers…
That is why, among many reasons, I hate Orange.
Alas, there was to be another chapter in this saga. While I had no wish to get further involved with that giant lump of corporate incompetence, they were the only ones to still have a few iPads 2 left, when they have ran out at all other places. So I bought it there along with a prepaid 3G card I was obligated to take. Charging the account was a slight pain in the ass, as I have discovered after some Googling, they have changed the number where to enter the charging code I bought. The problems don’t stop there as the 3G connection on the iPad sometimes simply refuses to load the page and wants to load an orange.fr error page, which incidentally also doesn’t exist anymore and all I get is a 404…
That also is why, among many reasons, I hate Orange.
Mobile operators are destined to become simple commoditised bitpipe providers much akin to your home ISP. What are voice calls and SMS messages other than greatly overcharged data transfers anyway? With that transition come lower margins and less clout than they have now. I for one can’t wait for that to happen, I just wished they realised that sooner and focus on their core product which is efficient, fast and cheap data transfer. I’d much prefer that to these disgusting death throes of incompetence.
La macrotypographie de la page Web – Anne-Sophie Fradier @mitternacht
What is macrotypography anyway? Is there a microtypography?
The difference between microtypography and macrotypography is that the former deals primarly with the individual fonts or even characters, while the latter is focused on the broader page layout.
While it may not seems so to us intuitively, the layout of the pages has changed surprisingly little since the time of manuscripts written on skins of dead animals. The macro elements of columns, initials, titles and such are still there.
The invention of the printing press changed the form and technique but elements stayed the same in many ways.
After the first World War macrotypographic styles changed, we went from a more traditional, centered, symmetrical, calm, “bourgeouise” style to a much more dynamic style with different alignments, positioning of the text, use of less traditional, new types of fonts. In your mind just imagine the difference between a traditional 19th century Victor Hugo novel and a multi-column dynamic layout with sans-serif titles etc.
With the web, what changes most is the surface since we are not limited to pages anymore and we have a virtually limitless surface to work on. Scrolling replaced page turning.
It’s important to create grids for the placement of elements on a web page and stick to them (except when not). Grids, margins, gutters, baselines should all be in your daily vocabulary in this line of work. Grids come in many forms though and naturally depend on the type of the content on your site.
These conventions give the feeling of order and comfort on the site, most of all they make it easier for users to read and navigate the content on your site.
The text has to be able to “breathe” and we can achieve that with the proper use of margins, breaks, and – while she did not use the exact term – white space.
It’s important to give time for “pause” and logical separation of thoughts in the text, that is why paragraphs were created. On the web it’s more appropriate to leave blank lines between paragraphs. One has to be careful not to overemphasize the pauses and make them into breaks. :)
Some good web layout and typography examples: Second & Park, Jon Tan, BoingBoing features (each one has its own design & layout).
For the end: “Don’t forget: It’s good to understand the rules and even better to break them.” and because it simply sounds sooo much better in French “Et n’oubliez pas: comprendre le règles, c’est bien ; les enfreindre, c’est mieux.”
Anne-Sophie also mentioned a type-related website in the pipeline Typographisme.fr. It’s not ready yet, but follow them at @typographisme to know when it will be.
I found the lecture wonderfully informative and enjoyable. Thanks to the many enlightening debates with designers at 3fs much about grids and such was already very familiar to me, but more than welcome in the lecture nonetheless. I also loved Anne’s on stage attitude and a healthy dose of humor in the lecture. Sadly I didn’t get all of it, the jokes were good I’m sure, but my knowledge of French sometimes doesn’t yet suffice for such advanced functions as humor. :)
I also started blushing when thinking about this very blog. While the theme I, with much care and thought, clicked “Apply” on has served me fine I would like to design something custom and much nicer typography and layout wise. Perhaps this lecture will give me the impetus to persevere and desgin & CSS-away.
HTML5 et ses amis : Nouvelles APIs by Paul Rouget @paulrouget
This talk was just full of HTML5 demo candy. First demo were the presentation slides themselves. They were running in a web browser and he gave us the IP so we could connect to the web socket server. That enabled us all to see the presentation on our own computers and while I’m sure there are many other uses, take screenshots.
What followed was a plethora of other cool demos, all courtesy of HTML5.
1. Drag & dropping multiple images in the browser. It then read the photo’s metadata and loaded up a Google Map of where the picture was taken. It wasn’t shown but he hinted at pretty advanced image editing, all that even before the image was actually uploaded from the client browser.
2. Webcam communication in the browser. No flash. Praised be his Steveness. Well actually the guys who put the support for that into HTML5, but hey, when you need an anti-Flash icon…
3. Audio APIs. Playing audio in a browser. Since this isn’t 1993, that wasn’t the amazing part. He then made pretty cool different audio visualizations on the audio stream, then he added sound modification (filters etc.) to the audio stream, all in real time. Neat.
Audio visualizer demo. Just one of the possible visualizer styles.
4. WebGL. 3D in a browser. Paul showed off a 3D environment with nicely modeled buildings, space ships, a bunch of camera movement and effects. Buildings even had live tweets displayed on their walls and billboards playing video. While the graphics weren’t something out of the newest Medal of Honor it was pretty amazing, especially once you remember that that’s all rendered by the web browser and even GPU accelerated.
Shaky photo of the Web GL demo. I really should have sat more in the front.
I’m sure I forgot some examples, but these are the ones that stuck in my mind the most. This stuff is still experimental, not that stable and usually working properly in only in one or two of the most modern browsers but it’s still inspiring to see where we’re heading and what will be possible on a mass scale in only a few years.
During question time we stumbled upon the ever-present debate during the conference about how to get the designers used to Photoshop to design for a new, more dynamic web reality. After the comic reply: “I don’t know.” by Paul a guy working for Adobe stood up and – probably correctly – assessed that we’re just on the brink of it all and that Adobe tools will adapt to the new realities. In the end the lecturer gave him a book on HTML5 and with the “quality” of many of Adobe apps, I hope they read it. :)
Concevoir pour expérience utilisateur – revision pour tous
Matthieu Mingasson – Twitter, SlideShare, ActiveSide blog
The notes are pretty rough and in bullet point form due to the speed of the lecture and my limited note-taking skill. I highly advise you see the presentation above, it is of a slightly older date but in most part matches with the lecture given at Paris Web.
- There’s still too much focus on making the client happy instead of making the user happy,
- UX/IA is at the crossroads of Design, Business, Technology and Content
- against a too great compartmentalization of the building process to specific departments
Building process for a website
1. Discovery
- research, getting to know your users
- audit, based on capabilities, business needs, demands
- User models: use of person profiles, imaginary users you are designing for, an UX tool for keeping the mind on the ball. It includes a questionnaire about the needs, habits of the imaginary user.
- benchmarking: collect and capture your discovery
- grid of website wants/goals
2. Concept
- Brainstorming: There are no bad ideas! Collect as many ideas as possible.
- Get the whole group together with a blackboard (it can be white though :) ), all the project documentation, lots of caffeine or coke ;)
- do storyboard sketches, good for getting the flow right, clients love them
- content, user action models, brand strategy, all kinds of visual model sketches
3. Organisation
- principles, format & functionalities, moduels, navigation – tables
- content management
- tabels with all content pages listed, content matrix
- structure (site map – rough, not going too much into details)
4. Design
- wireframes
- chart flow (yes/no process, with wireframes integrated into UML), good for developers, enables an easier understanding of the flow
- interaction design: documentation on how specific objects react, work
- prototypes: paper, wireframes, development front end demos, interface design
- readability testing
- grid
- navigation
- technology components, checking how they fit together
5. Management of production
- functional specifiations
- graphical production
- content production
- technical specifications
- ACTUALLY PRINTING OUT AND PASTING ALL WIREFRAMES ON THE WALL - screens do not suffice for an overview
- more the product develops, the less there’s user experience designer’s input, changes are smaller scale
- he uses the colour which turns the entire wall into a blackboard
- one of the best projects he did recently did not have PS designs, they just made the wireframes and specifict elements like buttons in PS, it was the fastest and most efficient
- hardline specialization of the team members, has to be avoided, it has to be in flow, ready to adapt to circumstances, example: PS/CSS3 dilemma, specialize in an area, but follow others on the side, be technology agnostic
An incredibly good lecture, we could all learn from workflows like these, based on years of experience. At the same time one has to realize there are no universal recipes.
La puissance du texte sur le web – Jean-Marc Hardy
- everything on the net is text based, search, even image search, ads…
- text attracts more attention from users
- what percentage of users click ads: text ads 2%, image (banner ads) 0,2%
- title tag is important for visibility, SEO
- create specific titles for each page
- use the vocabulary of users: e.g. low fares gets 40 000 searches per month, cheap flights gets 25 000 000 searches per month
- don’t use internal jargon
- use the keyword generator by Google (shows searches/month)
- statistically, people mostly look only at the first 11 characters in a sentence, the meaning should already be communicated in the beginning
- create deepening levels of reading: title 5 words, abstract 50 words, article
- get rid of unneeded words (ballast)
- use reassuring words, especially on e-commerce sites
- make your communication with users human, no weird machine error messages
- Use coherent text, especially in same level menus etc.
- text reinforces the image and vice versa
- main obstacles to effective text on the web:
- too basic or “barbarian” CMS
- strained workflow
- foggy ROI, without clearly set and monitored business goals, they don’t pay attention to usage statistics
- lack of knowledge of the basic editorial rules
- sweeping redesigns are not the answer, websites should be well thought out, but then develop evolutionary with small and constant changes backed up by data
Good lecture although nothing breathtaking or particularly new for me. The lecturer was Belgian and sometimes works for the EU Commission, which in my opinion desperately needs more of his attention when it comes to communicating with users and citizens in general.
