An information architect will create the structural design of a website and the process flow with a user’s experience in mind. They will guide the designers, developers and clients on how best to deliver the information that a user is looking for and how to simplify tasks that you want them to complete. An information architect is involved in a website from start to finish. Post project, they look at how the user experience and conversion rate of a website can be improved.

We are currently looking for an Information Architect to join our team. Is the job described above something that you have experience in, or an area that you can see yourself getting involved in?

Let us know if you are already an information architect or are a graduate that has studied relevant courses and wants to progress their skills further.

Confidence is a preference.

The job, based in Manchester would involve dealing with all stakeholders in a project, initially with the owner of the project and some potential users, then onto the designers and developers. Once a project is live, you would be feeding analysis and recommendations back to the SEO team.

A few handy skills that an information architect would have or need:

• Understanding user data and constructing personas
• Wireframing/prototyping
• UX design
• Process flow (including some experience of card sorting)
• Conversion rate optimisation with usability testing experience
• Insatiable appetite for continuous improvement
• Project management expertise would be a great addition

Speak to Dave if you fit the bill.

dave@evolutiadesign.co.uk

0161 868 0008 ext 104

Apple released iOS 5 yesterday with over 200  new features.

To upgrade your iPhone 4 “Just connect your device to your Mac or PC and follow the onscreen instructions in iTunes.” or so Apple will have you believe; unfortunately for the swarms of people with upgrade issues it’s not quite so simple.

In my instance, when I try to upgrade, it takes 5-10 minutes before alerting me that “There was a problem downloading the software for the iPhone. The network connection timed out….”. The advice on the error is to ensure that my network settings are correct and that my network connection is active. If you are reading this post then it’s safe to say that all is well under the bonnet.

After looking around I stumbled upon a blog on the osxdaily site. http://osxdaily.com/2010/11/18/itunes-network-connection-timed-out-error-3259-iphone-update-fix/ and thanks to Manish Patel, I found that the network setting that Apple are referring to was my antivirus and firewall.

Although iTunes is added as a trusted application, the download was still being rejected. Temporarily disabling my antivirus and downloading the update again solved my problem.

For those with windows and Kaspersky Internet security 2011, to do this, click on the Kaspersky icon in your system tray (The one in the bottom right hand corner of the screen) and on the protection Center, click on the down arrow on the System and Applications Protection box. From this screen you can disable some of the antivirus options (Remember to turn them back on when you are done) and try the download again.

I have recently started the development of a social networking site for gamers.

The designs for Gameaface – as christened by our client – are complete and signed off ready to be coded.

Building the site on top of a social networking framework makes sense, but which framework to use.

After looking through various frameworks, the two main choices are Elgg and Social Engine. Elgg is open source. Social Engine matches the features that we need better than Elgg.

Initial thoughts of Social Engine are that it is aimed at people who want to set up a site very quickly and with little alteration from the Social Engine defaults. Styling the site is done by creating a theme and changing CSS as required. Making structural changes involves dragging and dropping widgets and components onto pages using the admin control panel which is fine for people who want to make very basic customisations, but doesn’t have the flexibility required for a complete overhaul.  The documentation is seriously lacking and only explains how to use the admin interface to make changes; for example, to add an additional page into the signup process involves a fruitless search through Google (There isn’t much of a community using Social Engine yet).

Aside from that, there are a lot of features to the system and there are plenty of additional components that can be purchased to fill in the gaps.

Google have recently announced that they will be enforcing their new Google Product specification and policy changes on the 22nd September 2011.

What this means for anyone who feeds products up to Google’s Merchant Centre is that if your feed does not comply by the 22nd September, Google will take action against you, most likely rejecting your feed and removing your products from the Merchant Centre.

One of the policy changes, “Data Freshness” means that the data in the feed needs to be accurate and up to date. Currently a lot of merchants are gaining a competitive edge by violating Google’s policies such as listing prices excluding VAT, while others who follow Google’s policies are forced to list them including VAT. Hopefully Google’s latest changes should move a little further towards resolving this and putting all merchants on a level playing field. If a competitor is gaining an edge by violating Google’s policies, you can still submit a violation report to Google at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/request.py?contact_type=policy.

For a summary of the policy and specification changes, see Google’s blog post (http://base-forum-announcements.blogspot.com/2011/07/weve-made-changes-to-google-product.html).

For the full UK product feed specification see http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=188494&expand=GB.

Google recently added reporting of site speed to Analytics and further to Tom Critchlow’s post Google Analytics Now Tracks Page Load Speed, I have looked at the implications, use and shortfalls of the new site speed stats.

Adding site speed metrics into Analytics implies that Google is going to give more weight to site speed in its ranking algorithm. Even if this doesn’t happen, site speed has a big effect on the number of page views, time spent on site and conversion rate (see SITE SPEED FOR DUMMIES by Craig Bradford).

Site speed tracking isn’t enabled by default, you have to add an additional call to the Analytics script on your site (See Google for instructions). I can only assume the reason for this is that tracking the load time makes an additional call to Google’s servers which would ironically result in a slower load time for your visitors, an undesired effect if you aren’t interested in site speed. This is also why Google only use a sample of your site visitors.

The default view for site speed groups all visitors together and splits the results by URL. This can give a misleading load time in the long run as traffic from slower devices such as mobile devices on 3G connection increases.

The table below shows the percantage of visitors using mobile devices to access some of the eCommerce websites that we manage.

Clearly if the percentage of all visitors accessing a site via 3G or slower increases by 0.5% each month, the average load time of your site is going to increase. A lot of mobile device usage could be over a wifi connection, however it makes sense to group your results by device type when monitoring your load speed over a significant time period.

In all, the site speed tool is useful for getting a sample of how fast a site loads for your visitors rather than the load speed for testing tools which generally use a fast internet connection. However for tracking speed improvements beware that the data is skewed by any change in the average connection speed of visitors and that it may be better to use a dedicated testing tools which uses the same connection each time you run a test.