Meeting with clients in Canberra recently reinforced our belief that the topic of website consolidation is a hot issue right now. Should government departments – and to a lesser extent, corporate bodies – have a proliferation of websites for each campaign and project? Or should their online presence be consolidated in the form of one main website containing all the disparate elements of the business or body.

There appears to be somewhat of a standoff between government and bodies on whether to create – for example – campaign sites, or to incorporate these into department websites.

Creating separate campaign sites has its benefits. These sites can be designed around one focused message, cutting through the noise of the rest of the Department’s activities. However, they also introduce confusion, as users must find a separate site rather than finding all content on the parent Department site.

The Department of Health and Aging (health.gov.au) has individual websites for many of their campaigns, such as How do you measure up?(measureup.gov.au); Alcohol-related harm (drinkingnightmare.gov.au) and the national tobacco campaign (quitnow.info.au). The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (dbcde.gov.au) has lots of information about the switchover to digital television on their main website but have also developed a campaign website, Get Ready for Digital TV (digitalready.gov.au).

Whether or not to create a stand-alone campaign website  is the question. This is a question that has been increasingly prevalent lately, and we’d love to hear your thoughts or experiences…

Thanks to everybody who came last night to our World Usability Day event. We had a lot of fun and hope you did too.

Some discussions were held around what trends we will be seeing in the coming year. Most of these seem to be technology driven, and many will present interesting usability challenges as designers face the task of building new experience types around these new possibilities.

Some of the key topics discussed focused around:

• Mobile web – How to face the challenge of disparate handset specs, smaller screen and distracted users? When is a pared down mobile version of the site the better choice, or can new high resolution handset allow users to easily use standard sites?
• Location awareness – This is a feature we expect to see a lot more of in the next twelve months, and how designers approach its implementation will be very interesting

There seemed to be a few points of disagreement amongst the audience, so as promised we’ve opened up this page to continue the discussion. Feel free to put your usability predictions in the comments area below. What trends in research and design do you think we will see emerging over the coming months?

Welcome to UsabilityOne’s shiny new blog.

A quick introduction about us, and what we plan to do in this blog:

We are an Australian based usability research agency with offices in (not so) sunny Melbourne, and (slightly more) sunny Sydney. We conduct user research and usability testing for a wide range of clients, to help them improve the user experience of their interfaces.

As a team, we frequently share interesting articles, tools, discussions and resources with each other. This blog is a place for us to share these with you, as well as to put up some thoughts and opinions of our own. You can respond in kind, and share your thoughts on our posts, as well as add content which you feel would add to the discussion.

Another usability blog?

Yes, there are a lot of blogs out there writing about user experience, and we definitely don’t want to just add to the noise. We hope to be different in a few ways. We like to think that we have a unique perspective on a number of aspects of usability.

For starters, we are not a design agency. Whilst we work closely with designers on most projects, we focus on the research side of things. Where others may focus on principles of design, we focus on the principles of research design. And how that can help you to design a better user interface.

Additionally, being a consultancy we get to work on a lot of different projects. We work on all kinds of interfaces, large and small, stationary and mobile, and get to experience many different approaches to solving user’s problems and meeting their needs. We frequently find that some of the best solutions to an issue come from a different industry or platform to the design in question.

These differences will also mean we can offer a unique set of perspectives on usability and user experience. Hopefully, what we write in this blog will sit nicely alongside those you already have in your feed reader or morning reading list.

So don’t be shy

This blog has been set up to enable a conversation with you, the reader – our clients and peers. If you have a question for us, disagree with us, want to show us something, or just want to say hi then please do. Leave a comment, or send us an email if you would prefer. Look forward to hearing from you.

The U1 Team.