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Bar Camp was pretty cool. I’ve collected up notes & ideas into three posts. To start with, general reflections and what I found out about audience research in the local web scene.

I had a great time, no idea how but managed 13 hours non stop talking with about fifty people

Audience

I was keen to find out what audience research people are doing (i.e. finding out what people might want before planning sites, not just user testing what is built). Answer seemed to be - not a whole lot, or else that it’s usually done by people in market research rather than by web people. Will add to my to do list, check out market research companies.

A couple of people mentioned focus group type stuff in the breaks, but didn’t discuss these much more. One person said they had a bit of a reality check talking to some people in their target audience - “we don’t really use the internet much” type of response. Hard to know if this is an accurate reflection though - very anecdotal, and there’s the whole thing where people don’t always say accurate things when asked a general question. (Can lead to iffyness with usability testing.)

One egovt person said they’d engaged a market research company to do some work for a project, and that she felt perhaps it wasn’t always thought of as part of the process in planning / creating a site, but was not any big deal to do. Also that you don’t need to do it yourself - go to the experts.

Web / IT vendor people - response that once projects come to us, the site owner has already carried out research, decided what the site or app is going to be & do.

Agile?

I didn’t get to any of the things Agile sessions. But must be safe to assume that it would be possible to do audience research in that kind of scenario. Shorter cycles, iterative, no big deal huh.

Left field

Nothing new, but also mentioned was that thing that you can’t get from research or planning. Someone creates a web app, or anything at all, and it gets used for something, or by a group of people, for something nobody would have dreamed of. Need to leave room for this to happen.

Devolve & diversify

Couple of things. One is, can we devolve “site ownership” more? To community groups and agencies, funded by government. It’s the site owner who has ultimately got control & responsibility over what is available, surely this *should be* us?

And, imagine if the web teams, government departments, IT companies, web design agencies were a true reflection of NZ’s diversity - then much of this audience research wouldn’t be needed as we really would be creating things for “people like us”. It’s all scale and degree I know, is how things are now at least in patches. Dunno why the entire country are not queuing up to join the geeks? (kidding) Or we could have “swap” schemes…

I’ve been hunting for something I saw online a while ago. Sort of a guideline for managers on “how to work with women” from about 1954 when there were hardly any women in many areas of employment. If anyone has a link please let me know. (Weird/ interesting piece of cultural history.) Which reminds me:

“Mum test” is no more

In one session someone mentioned “the mum test” i.e. that thing where you get some random non-geek user type to try out your website. I’m glad that Brenda said “why the need to use one of your female ancestors” - as the implications sure are dodgy. So say “user test” instead & everyone stays friends:)