New Faces at Delvinia. Say hello to Roz.

We’re very excited to announce that Rosalina (Roz) Lin-Allen has joined the Delvinia Interactive team as Director, Client Strategy. Roz will work closely with the team building our roster of interactive clients. Roz comes to Delvinia with over 14 years of interactive experience working with some of the biggest brands in Canada, e.g.: Bell Canada, Sony Canada, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, Vincor and 3M.  Please join us in welcoming Roz to the Delvinia team.

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.

Facebook’s Next Big Step

The importance of the recent announcements of Facebook changes at the F8 conference cannot be under estimated and should be understood by individuals and businesses alike. For the individual you should be aware of how your data will now be shared and distributed across the web. Robert Scoble points out in a great post on privacy how he suddenly had access to all his friends music selections the day of the F8 conference. He speculates that few of his friends were aware that this data was now public in this way. Music favorites are only a small part of the big picture. What sites you like outside of Facebook can now be tracked and measured via Facebook. Your interactions across the web are now accessible by Facebook. The level you choose to share is ultimately up to you. You can always close your Facebook account as some Google employees are doing. The first step however is understanding what the changes now mean.

For business you need to re-calibrate your on-line strategies to make Facebook a greater consideration then ever before. Most businesses are incorporating Facebook into their digital roadmap in some way, however this planning needs to be ramped up to a new level. The access to user data, the ease of distribution of that data and the policies around this require some very structured and nuanced thinking. It’s no longer acceptable to dabble in Facebook or play around with social networking. You are now connected to your customers in ways that were impossible last month.

Whether you are interacting with Facebook on behalf of yourself or your company the ramifications just got a lot more complicated. Take the time to educate yourself on this new reality because the changes are coming fast and furious.

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