As many of you know I finished up at Sensis at little over a week ago, but I haven’t had a chance to tell everyone where I am going, so without any further ado…

Tomorrow I start work with Symplicit down in Docklands, Melbourne. Symplicit is a small research and design agency run by Stephen Moule and Jodie Moule. To quote their own web site, “Symplicit is a Customer Intelligence and User Centred Design consultancy, that offer services that help clients understand their customers, and in turn, design effective interfaces.” I’ve enjoyed working with both Jodie and Stephen on a couple of projects in the past, so I’m really looking forward to working with them on lots more.

In many ways the job at Symplicit is very similar to the work I was hired to do at Sensis, just agency side – lot’s more projects and lot’s of different clients. From what I know so far these clients include Telstra, NAB, Bendigo Bank, and a whole bunch more.

For now all contact details remain the same, just a new work email address to add to the mix – chris@symplicit.com.au.

Last week I lucky enough to speak at the Enhancing Online User Experiences conference in Melbourne. The whole experience was really enjoyable – maybe a bit stressful when my presentation notes disappeared just as I started to talk…

There was a range of wonderful presentations from a very diverse group of people. The two stand out presentations for me were Rod Farmer’s talking about his experiences in bringing better user experiences to 3 Mobile through better UX management, and Glenn Williams talking about how he brought a user-centred approach to the design of LotteryWest’s intranet.

In my own presentation I tried to expand beyond “straight” usability testing to show the broader value of involving users in the design process of online products and of other products. Overall I think this went down well, but I think I needed to cater for the very broad audience more specifically to really achieve this aim.

I’ve attached a PDF of the presentation below for anyone who is interested.

Working With Users Presentation (5.2MB PDF file)

Well, I finally got my thesis back and I’m very happy to say that I’ve come away with a first class honours. I’m really relieved. Firstly because I worked really hard and think it is really good work, but also, I expected to get stung by my slightly unorthodox writing style. Luckily it all seems to have gone well.

Thank you so much to everyone to who helped, and supported me during this time, especially my supervisor Ingrid, the nameless people who gave up their time, Jacquie and Gene, Geoff, Claire, Klazina, Neil, the clients who have gone without, and friends and family who haven’t seen me lately.

I’ve put the thesis up online for anyone who is interested, or wants to pretend that they have read it: https://chrismclay.me/honoursthesis/.

So finally I have found time to post the final version of the score for everyone to see. I’m pretty happy with the overall experiment, even if I don’t really like the final product — visually it’s a little rough and child like. That said with more time (and a faster computer) I think a more aesthetically appealing version could be produced.

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After choosing the piece of music, the next step I outlined for myself was to create a visual map of the music which I could use as a design tool for the following stages. What I wanted from this was a rough break down of the various layers in the music that would be represented visually on the screen, and to know when these layers were being played.

This sounded fairly simple to me and I thought I could knock out my first draft in an afternoon of listening. It took much much longer, so much so I have no idea actually how long it took. It was rewarding in many ways and made me much more familiar with the music and how it had been constructed.

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