Finding Your Way Around Site Maps with the Toronto UX Community

With the interactive digital world always evolving, keeping up with the latest trends and innovations can become a full time job on its own.  Reading books, online articles, blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter are all great ways to stay informed but sometimes nothing beats a good discussion with your peers as a learning tool.

On Wednesday I participated in a bi-weekly UX mentorship group that included IA’s and UXers of various levels of experience and from various companies in Toronto such as Delvinia, Critical Mass, Klick and Rogers to name a few.

On the agenda this week was a common task of most web projects: creating a Site Map.  We began by discussing how we approach creating a site map, common roadblocks and methods for presenting the site map and other site map creating best practices and tips.  We moved on to a hands-on exercise where we created a site map with continued discussion.

It is refreshing to know that the Toronto IA and UX community is always ready, willing and able to share their knowledge and expertise with their peers. We don’t discuss clients or specific projects, we concentrate on the challenges that we’ve encountered giving us the freedom to just talk openly about the tasks and end solutions.  As an IA/UXer I know that it’s our jobs to craft the best user experience we can. It only makes sense that we take the time to help each other out while doing it.

Design of Everyday Things

Our front office doors have been bothering me for a long time. And it’s not just me … everyone who walks thru does the same thing: pulls, pauses, looks down at the door handle and if they don’t see the “Push” sign, keeps tugging to pull it open. Persistent types eventually stop tugging long enough to figure out that they need to push.

It’s a simple activity we do hundreds of times a day without thinking so why is this door a poor design?

After looking around at various retail, office, apartment doors that are entranced from the street, I notice they all pull out, while inside doors tend to push in. Apparently there is a fire regulation that states outside doors must pull out.

Still, it leaves me wondering why our instinct is to ‘pull’ on inside doors. My theory is that the visual clue of the glass doors and the fact that we know it’s an office, subconsciously sends a message to our brain that tells us that door is a “pull”.

I’ve mentioned it to some colleagues around the office and they believe the shape of the door handle invites the the ‘pull’. Another visual clue as to how the door works. Usually pull doors have handles that allow you to hook your fingers in for an easier pull. The handles on both sides of our doors require you to push down. This type of handle typically equates with a push motion.

Where does that leave us? If we change the outside door to match people’s natural inclination of pulling without changing the door handles, are we transferring the frustration to the inside where people leaving the office now push instead of pull?  The addition of the push and pull signs were a post-implementation effort to eliminate the issue, which obviously  it hasn’t.

Of course, it raises other questions like: Who designed this door and why did they do it like they did? Why didn’t it follow standards? When it was installed, didn’t they realize that there was something wrong with it? Did they even bother to test it?

Usually I wouldn’t dwell on the visual and functional design of something so everyday but because I’m in and out the door more frequently (over five times daily!) –  it’s really gotten to me.

Delvinia Career Open House = Win!

Delvinia’s first career open house has come and gone (on March 4), and we couldn’t be happier with how it went. More than 40 people came through our doors last night to meet our team and talk shop.

We sent out an email to our own contacts, but we publicised this event almost entirely through our social media networks on Facebook and Twitter. Word spread quickly. Even one of our clients had a phone call from a contact who’d heard the buzz, and wanted to know more about us.

To manage RSVPs we used EventBrite, a terrific (and FREE) tool for event management. We didn’t do anything terribly fancy – simply uploaded a banner and identified some unique fields for data capture and then embedded the widget on our Careers page (where you can still view our job desciptions, by the way). As a result, we were able to send reminders to the participants, and still connect with people who were unable to make the event at the last minute.

We’re still eager to meet user experience strategists, information architects and front-end developers. If this is you, you should get in touch with us!