Eclipse now Deloitte's Online Practice

From the 1 July 2009, Eclipse will be known as Deloitte.
For the last seven years we have been Deloitte Australia's online practice, operating as part of the firm, but going to market with a unique brand.
We are now a fully integrated business unit of Deloitte in a technology group with over 300 practitioners.
We are still the same team delivering world class online advice, solutions and outcomes for our customers.

Semi Permanent '09 Sydney

Getting creative types to orate for an hour about their work must be hard given that the creative industries are largely visual and sensory and often defy our attempts at verbal explanation. So congratulations are due once again to the Design is Kinky crew for assembling yet another breathtaking array of talent who mostly spoke quite well, at this year's Semi Permanent conference. The success of previous years' line-ups has been patchy with speakers such as last year's wunderkind Anthony Lister, who after a dramatic entrance shootout, appeared to soon grow bored of his audience.
Part of the success of this year's assortment was perhaps due to the fact that most of these artists and creative professionals have been forced to verbally sell their own work from an early age and have maintained a single minded focus on defending their unique ideas to clients, agents and agencies.
Daniela Federici, who got her extraordinary break after graduating photography at RMIT, was invited to photograph the iconic Guess campaign by Paul Marciano, featuring another new discovery, Anna Nicole Smith. She was a hugely rewarding speaker whose funny insider celebrity anecdotes and generous advice and technical asides were both entertaining and valuable.
Vernon Wilbert from Digital Domain told the absorbing story of the creation of the Gears of War campaign for xbox, the first campaign animation to use the actual games engine, resulting in an ad that was not only true to the game, but wildly successful with its intended audience. The larger than life enthusiasm of the Californian kept the entire auditorium on the edge of its seat.
Other speakers used different techniques to win their audience. Tim Kentley from XYZ Studios turned the lights low and presented by candlelight whilst stretched out on the floor. Kate Gibb confided her white-knuckle terror at public speaking from the outset and proceeded to read from her tightly clutched A4 notes. Whilst this breaks all the rules, the audience loved her nevertheless and were able to focus on her images and her insider stories of the UK band scene.
Overall, this is possibly the best Semi Permanent yet. Watch out for the first SPMelbourne later this year.

What’s the secret to writing engaging web content?

Did you know that, on average 8 out of 10 people will read a headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest?

There is much to be said about human behaviour online. While the recent trend towards user-generated content has resulted in increased communication online, users continue to spend the majority of their time rummaging for information much like animals forage for food. Whether content is user-generated or not.

So what are the basics of copywriting? There are the obvious fundamentals; Snappy Headlines directed at user needs, Blurbs that make their point first (and elaborate later) and Calls to Action that make it obvious to the user what to do next.

And what else do you need to think about? Well, you can identify keywords so that you can construct content that is optimised for a search engine.

But while armed with the basics for copywriting and some statistics about human behaviour online, ask yourself this question – “What motivates Joe Bloggs to read my content?”

The answer is personality.

Personality, in relation to writing for the web, is the conversation that you have with your end-users. (And aren’t I glad that talking is one of my strong suits!)

Brian Clark, a web copywriter, states that “the purpose of the headline is to get the first sentence read” (and similarly, “the purpose of the first sentence is to get the second sentence read.”)

In fact, the principles that apply to good communication are the same ones that apply to the web.

And to illustrate this point I have taken 5 communication tips and adapted them for the web:-

1. Before you talk, find out what the other person is interested in. Do a bit of research.
2. Don’t talk on and on.
3. Staying up on current affairs is a must for interesting conversation (or blog). Watch the news and read the papers.
4. To be interesting be interested. Ask for user feedback and input in to what you have to say.
5. If you can recall what people have said this shows you are interested in them. Testimonials or comments from end-users are a great way to do this.

With this approach – I wonder if the web really can evolve to be like a Sci-Fi movie where users interact with a website by having a conversation?

The power of the crowd can improve your data quality

Well thought through online strategies can do so much more than deliver high quality web sites for internal and external users. They can dramatically improve some of your business fundamentals. There are few things more fundamental than the quality of your data.

When people think of data quality they often focus first on customer data. One of the best ways to ensure that customer data is right is to provide a way for your own customers to update their details online. On its own, this is an important capability, but to be really effective it needs to be linked to something that the customer regularly does on the web, such as reviewing their accounts, orders or other interactions with your organisation. Truly effective businesses make updating customer details part of every interaction and available to all stakeholders in the customer, effectively building a Facebook-like facility for their customers identifying relationships (friends), preferences and activities.

Apart from enhanced customer service, it is worth remembering that it is much harder to maintain a fraudulent identify when you are connected through multiple relationships and you have to maintain an exponential number of fronts.

Business data includes much more than just customer details. Online collaboration both inside and outside the enterprise can enhance almost all data in some way. One of the most common problems businesses face is maintaining an accurate understanding of the definition of complex business terminology. Every organisation develops their own language and expects staff, customers and business partners to understand it. Worse, few maintain a dictionary of this language.

Consider creating such a dictionary, with components that are visible internally, other parts to business partners and a relevant subset to the world in general. To really leverage the power of the web, make this dictionary readily updatable (even using a wiki). While open to misuse, it is unlikely that internal staff or business partners who are easily traced will deliberately abuse the privilege. Online communities have shown that complex topics attract genuinely interested contributors who can often provide a better explanation to their peers that you could hope to publish either from an insight or simple labour perspective.

Finally having learnt to use the web to better maintain customer data and your data dictionary, it rapidly becomes obvious that many datasets would be candidates to be open to a wider community for monitoring, comment or even enhancement. Consider lists of branches, community contacts and products. In the last case, suppliers sometimes make changes which flow through your supply chain without being updated in online catalogues.

If there is one thing we’ve learnt, the fear that we feel about opening our content up for collaboration is often disproportionate to the real risk of misuse. If you succumb to this fear without carefully considering what you are worried about, then you’ll miss out on the power that the crowd can bring to our business.

Are you tuned to your customers’ channel?

Sometimes there are advantages to being late adopters of technology. Wait 6 months and you’ll get a new and improved model cheaper, faster and tinier/bigger/better and you’ll also have the benefit of those 6 months of research and user reviews to help you make your purchasing decision.
Applying this to the world of online retail in Australia, we are years behind the US, but we have the benefit of learning from the successes and failures of American online retail models. We also have access to a wealth of research and statistics relating to the American retail market which can help support our local business-cases and strategies for online retailing.
Unfortunately there is a dearth of research on Australian consumer habits, although we can draw on the findings of the 2007 census and ABS data to answer some questions.
Recently Deloitte decided to survey our own people across Australia to bring to light our online shopping habits. Two of the questions that we asked related to how our people research and purchase products. The tables below illustrate their preferences for using purely online versus other channels (word of mouth, print and in-store).

The survey results demonstrated a very strong preference for conducting research online, regardless of whether the purchase was made on-line or in-store. An average of 93% of respondents said they researched online across all categories. Whilst the typical Deloittian is not necessarily representative of the wider community (higher broadband access and income), there is a lesson here that can be applied to Australian retail models and that lesson is that Australians use more than one channel across the customer lifecycle. We may purchase instore but there is a high likelihood that the purchase was researched online or using a different channel to in-store. The inverse is also true, people regularly research in-store but then purchase online to get the best price or simply for the convenience. Retailers like IKEA have learnt this lesson and assist their customers across all channels with such tools as an online kitchen modelling application that allows you to print out your list of components to present in-store. They also provide an online assistant that will answer all your questions in real time using live chat.
The important thing to remember is that even if you don’t have an online shopping cart and payment gateway, you should still treat your online channel as an online store by providing:

• Accurate and detailed product information and imagery
• Helpful online assistance that doesn’t first require your customers to register their details
• A consistent experience to your ‘bricks & mortar’ shop front.

If your customers aren’t actually transacting with you online, they may still be doing their research online and so encouraging online membership in return for exclusive online offers that can be redeemed in-store is just one way to keep them engaged with your brand and product offering. Providing them with in-store product availability via your website is also extremely useful to customers. Pre-ordering and booking online can also support the sales pathway without the necessity of an online shop. And increasingly, we are seeing the online channel being the source of independent consumer ratings, with online retailers like Target, Amazon and Best Buy actively encouraging their customers to provide ratings of their products on their site.
Remember, not every ‘call-to-action’ is a transaction. Your online channel can be supporting your customers across the entire customer life-cycle.

Web Directions South '08

Web Directions South provided a fabulous assortment of goodies (thanks for our new laptop bags and usb keys adobe!) and plenty of food for thought for us lucky enough to attend the jam-packed 2-day conference this year.

As soon as we entered we encountered the impressive Microsoft Surface, the tasty table-top (literally – you could eat off it!) computer which allows users to interact with it via hand gestures, motions and even responds to some specially tagged physical objects. At the end of the first day August de los Reyes, the creative director for the Surface team gave a closing address that tripled my reading list as he outlined the great variety of sources of inspiration drawn from art, psychology, history, and video gaming that lead to the NUI (Natural User Interface) derived principles behind Surface. His breakdown of the movement from CLI-GUI-NUI and finally predicting the next phase in user-interface development *XUI* perfectly sums up the direction of emotion-based User-Centred and User-Generated Designs to come (Web 3.0 anyone?):


Apple’s presence at the conference was no less evident than its nerdy PC cousin, as a good deal of the crowd twittered away on their iPhones for the whole two days, highlighting the growing opportunities for developing applications and sites tailored for these kinds of NextGen phones. As part of this focus, Tim Lucas/Peter Ottery’s gave great insights into the design and development considerations in re-creating the news.com.au for iPhone and Gabriel White’s talk also got us thinking about the need to create more contextually-adaptive applications for these not-so-smart mobile phone devices.

Probably indicative of webdirections’ accessibility origins was the popularity of Ruth Ellison’s talk on "Integrating accessibility into design". She lived up to the standing-room-only crowd with incredibly pragmatic, useful insights into the importance of contextual research to understand various user requirements. There was also great debate amongst the crowd as to usability vs. accessibility and the benefits of incorporating accessibility early-on as part of design and testing so that accessibility can be brought to the forefront of a well-resolved solution rather than just a compliance box to be ticked. I think this approach is especially relevant for many of our clients who are part of the Government, Education and Banking sectors where accessibility should be key. Actually to be honest I was most impressed with her use of a wiimote to control her PowerPoint presentation – finally a business justification for our recent office acquisition! (I wonder if I could conduct our next client presentation with my wii guitar?)

And it wouldn’t be called webdirections if there weren’t a few sneak peaks offered as to what’s coming up. We were quietly intrigued as Jina Bolton highlighted the new features *coming soon* from CSS3 (multi-background images and patterns in one div, creating complex print-like grids on the web) while Michael Smith showed what’s to come a tad sooner with HTML5 (embedded video content without plug-ins, new form attributes and a bunch of new APIs for offline and WebApps).

It was also surprising to discover what can already be achieved in the field of data visualisation using existing technology – Dmitry Baranovskiy gave an excellent introduction to Web Vector Graphics using SVG, Canvas and VML. Along with a few slick demos, he introduced how these can be utilised across all browsers using his Raphael framework. Jeffrey Veen continued on this data visualisation theme opening day two as he demonstrated how some good old-fashioned information design applied to helping users tell their own story with and transform data to useful information.

A bonus of the conference was the Adobe stand where we quietly sat in awe dropping lunch off our plate watching demonstration of the new features in CS4. The following three features will save us designers so much time I plan to book in another week’s holiday this Christmas:

1. Content Aware Scaling in Photoshop
2. Creating runtime function page-flipping swfs with from Indesign in (almost) one click.
3. The new XFL exchange format to open Photoshop, Indesign and AI files as-is in Flash.

Probably the overall theme for me at the conference was the “people movement” happening online and the exponential potential to build incredibly powerful shared knowledge banks – the main subject in David Peterson’s talk on the semantic web and tagging. Gains to be made through listening and collaborating with ‘the people’ was also reflected in Daniel Burka’s excellent case study on the iterative re-design process for digg’s comment section. These ideas were brought together in Mark Pesce’s closing address as he passionately rallied the troops to encourage Mob Rules and a sort of “Anarcho-syndicalist commune” system – a fitting end as we were inspired to take action after two days of intense conference-sitting!

SmartForms – A Developer’s Perspective

Over the past year or so, Eclipse has been engaged by the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development (DIIRD) in Victoria to translate static government forms to interactive, dynamic PDF forms known as “SmartForms”.

For the uninitiated, the term “SmartForms” is attributed to the set of forms which coincide with the “SmartForms” program – a national government initiative (as promoted through business.gov.au) that seeks to enhance business-to-government transactions through the use of these forms. Some of the benefits of using SmartForms over static, read-only forms include:

• Reduced time to complete and send forms – forms can be opened and filled in using Adobe Reader, and in many cases, submitted back to the relevant government agency through the click of a form button


• Flexibility to save partially filled in forms to your computer for later completion, or alternatively, print forms out for hardcopy submission


• Dynamic behaviour enables forms to change appearance based on user input


• Ability to validate field data as it is entered


• Improved security through the application of digital signatures to a form


• Ability to pre-populate a form with client profile data (through the use of Adobe LiveCycle Forms)


• Assists back-end integration with external systems through the use of XML Schemas to standardize the XML payload sent on form submission


• Ability to connect to Web Services when filling out or submitting a form

These features offer a more streamlined and automated approach to completing forms which would not be possible with standard PDF’s, and as a result, SmartForms could perhaps be an attractive prospect for government agencies that are looking to improve the way they serve businesses and the general public.

The actual technology which SmartForms makes use of is known as “XFA Forms” – “XFA” standing for XML Forms Architecture, an Adobe proprietary standard which utilizes XML to define the appearance and data of forms. These XFA Forms are built using the product called (...shiver...) “Adobe LiveCycle Designer”, and it’s fair to say that this program is capable of triggering a career change to say, the Southeast Asian rice paddies or to the Himalayan mountain trails, or in fact any place where you can be assured that you’ll never encounter a computer again. It is, quite possibly, the most frustrating piece of software I have dealt with and has produced more than a few exasperated sighs and looks towards the high heavens. Amongst other things, the interface is clunky and fiddly, gifted with a seriously unsophisticated form designer tool; the program suffers from poor performance, particularly when forms become large and complex; and most frustratingly, it has an inexplicable desire to crash itself often at the most inopportune moments. Having been accustomed to much more stable development platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse, LiveCycle Designer is quite a shock to the system. The usability issues are perhaps excusable given the products short version history – it was initially shipped with Adobe Acrobat 6 as Adobe Designer 6.0 and has now been integrated in with Adobe’s LiveCycle product suite as LiveCycle Designer 8.0. I have yet to have had the pleasure of experiencing its most recent incarnation as Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES, so fingers crossed many of the problems I faced in 8.0 has been ironed out by now.

Development quibbles aside though, XFA Forms is quite a robust forms technology which holds its own up against other alternatives, such as the open XForms standard which doesn’t specify the presentation of the form as XFA does. In this respect, XFA Forms is useful in the SmartForms arena where the portability and (in some respects) flexibility of PDFs over HTML forms provides a value-added experience for customers. Time will tell whether the development experience will be a less painful one, but in the meantime at least, given the popularity of the SmartForms solution, fellow Eclipse engineers can look forward to harvesting fruit in particularly trying conditions.