Scott Savage’s Blog

My second festival for this Spring weekend was a bit closer to home, the Burwood Festival. It was held on Burwood Road and in Burwood Park. I remembered my camera this time, so here are some photos:

Burwood Festival Tents	Burwood Road closed for Burwood Festival
Burwood Festival model boat show	Mustangs everywhere
...and plenty of Fiats	Stalls and pavillion

View back across the main flower bed to the Ferris Wheel

Yesterday I visited Canberra Floriade 2009, an annual flower and gardening show in Canberra, Australia. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, so I only have Blackberry Pearlphotos to share with you. The Floriade website is actually a really well designed site, and definitely a must see before you visit the show.

The main reason I went to the show was for landscaping ideas, I am currently designing how our backyard will be done. There were a few landscaped areas with different themes that were interesting, but generally the show was a lot smaller than I expected. I guess what is difficult for me to appreciate is the sheer volume and density of flowers. Once you realise that each tulip (and there would be several hundred thousand) planted is an individually purchased, planted and cultivated bulb you can start to understand the amount of effort that goes into the displays. The fact that the show (and parking!) is free is also amazing, especially for someone who comes from Sydney where literally nothing is free.

While I was in Canberra I also visited the War Memorial and the National Portrait Gallery. Both were great venues that I hadn’t visited since the days of school excursions. It was interesting to see the War Memorial is definitely keeping up with the times and has gone for the sensory type experiences. This is particularly true in the post-1945 conflicts area, as well as the Lancaster bomber raid reconstruction (my favourite). I think the War Memorial has struck a really good balance between solemn spaces (like the tomb of the Unknown Soldier) and engaging interactive displays. For people my age who have never directly experienced a war it is difficult to comprehend the warped realities of war based on aging photos and equipment under glass. For me it was strange seeing the names of towns I recognised being discussed, because I was recognising the town names from Band of Brothers and Call of Duty. I believe that information transfer is the most important thing, and if it takes these experiences to do that then so be it. I think the War Memorial is walking the line between entertainment and education very precisely, experiences and blogs are engaging and effective communication tools.

While on the way down to Canberra we stopped at Goulburn. We had coffee at The Roses Cafe, a very nice little cafe that would give the best cafes of Newtown a run for their money for quality and selection of food. There are some good photos of Goulburn and the cafe on this weird worm blog. I actually really enjoyed the architecture and authenticity of Goulburn as a gold rush era inland Australian town and would definitely recommend it as a stopping point on the road between Canberra and Sydney, it is a great insight into the problems with freeway bypasses and McDonald’s service centres.

Sydney Airport is one of only two airports in the world that operate tours around the tarmac (the other is in San Diego, USA). I went on the Sydney Airport tour today, and you can get yourself on the next tour through their website.

The tour goes for a little over 2 hours and covers the vast majority of the airport. It is definitely a tour for aircraft nerds, with a ton of statistics and history being relayed by the very knowledgeable driver the entire time. I do think that even non-nerds would enjoy the close up look at an amazing facility that, these days, many dismiss as little more than a big bus stop.

The most interesting parts for me were the hangers with vehicles under maintenance (including the huge Qantas Airbus A380), seeing a Boeing 747 take off at close range and seeing how friendly all the airport employees are. The tower controllers roll up their blinds and wave, all the pilots wave, the ground crew all wave and even maintenance crew are happy to wave while sitting inside a jet engine. It sounds kind of lame, but you really do feel privileged to be part of a close airport community (even if it has 32,000 employees within it’s fences).

I can recommend the tour to anyone, I did it as a Father’s Day present and I think it was perfectly suited to that. They offer daytime and nighttime tours. I did the daytime and it is probably the nerdier of the two (less food, more time on the tarmac). Enjoy and comment!

MasterChef has been a huge surprise hit in Australia. The TV ratings have been sensational for Channel 10, with an average of 1.96 million viewers nationally (not bad from a total audience pool of just over 20 million). What keeps this average so high? The key, ironically, is the stickiness created by the side dishes. The MasterChef website gets an equally, if not more, astonishing 2 million views per week.

This website content is what keeps people engaged. Full show episodes stream very quickly from the site not long after screening, letting you catch up if you have missed an episode or just feed your addiction. Every recipe on the show is uploaded and available for those at home to have a crack, and beautiful images are cycled past the viewer. The taunt of “Can you master this MasterClass dish?” next to a picture of a beautiful coffee eclair is a great teaser to engage those at home.

The engaged community that has been built can be confirmed on Twitter. There doesn’t seem to actually be an official MasterChef twitter account, but that hasn’t stopped loyal fans creating unoffical ones and swamping Twitter with comments about how hungry they are, which recipes they love and who they want to get kicked off. The episode finished over an hour ago, but tweets are still coming in faster than one per minute. I really hope someone is monitoring this community really closely, what a great way to get feedback on the franchise directly from your customers.

Even if they are not monitoring the Twitter community, they will at least be monitoring their public forums. Yet another nod to the importance of communities in building a loyal following behind a brand. Over 30,000 posts proves that people are enjoying it, and breaking down the forums by participant gives a great selection criteria for the next season’s contestants (rumoured to be celebrities). Finally, they also have a Digg-like rating system on each recipe, so again the community can feel engaged and contribute back to itself.

How do you then cash in on this community? The product integration with Coles is subtle yet very effective. Recipes have a cost from Coles listed below them, for example this tasty soup is a mere $3.50 per serve. The PDF that you print to take to the shops of course has a Coles logo in the top right corner, as well as any notes about whether Coles stocks the item or not. They could have even taken this to the nth degree by having “MasterChef Prefilled Shopping Carts” from Coles Online, what armchair chef doesn’t want the ingredients delivered straight to their house? Even better, you could pre-empt the episode and deliver the Mystery Box challenge ingredients on the night of the Mystery Box episode! Now that would be challenging our engaged community.

The only thing that Channel 10 have done wrong, is screen Biggest Loser USA directly after MasterChef on a Sunday night. Then again, for some reason Biggest Loser makes me hungry too…

Xero touts itself as “The world’s easiest accounting system”. I don’t think they have much competition as far as usability goes in the accounting space, but I would guess that is because their competition probably think it is impossible to reduce accounting functionality into a usable package. I have had an extensive play with their demo, and I have seen a really surprisingly large number of unique and very usable elements to their user interface. Just when you think Web 2.0 usability techniques have plateaued, it is nice to be reminded that there are still plenty of boundaries to push. I just want to point out a few of my favourite interface elements of this beautifully designed interface.

The Xero Dashboard

When you first login you are greeted by a welcome message. This isn’t particularly unique, but it has nice touches. A warm dialog, pre-loaded sample data and a link to view the sample data straight away. They even have a different demo company set up for each country they operate in, taking into account local accounting rules etc. But that’s not all! Once you load the Demo Company data you can either take a tour, or tackle one of the top 10 tasks that people complete in Xero.

Getting Started Alert

I think this shows a good level of hand-holding, but also of understanding and targetting your customers.

Another nice usability touch is the auto-logout function. Users generally hate the auto-logout 99% of the time, but it does save their bacon that final 1%. To make it as unbtrusive as possible Xero use a lightboxed login box when your 30 minutes is up (and it is good they actually display the limit here too). This makes logging back in a breeze, and teasing the user with all their content subtly appearing under the lightbox makes them feel that it isn’t a big process to dive back into the software again.

Lightbox style Auto-Logout

Reports are another area where usability is always difficult, in this case navigating to the reports that you use most regularly. Xero allows the user to simply click the star next to the report, and that report will then appear in the higher level Reports dropdown. You never have to see the full list of reports again!

Simple report navigation

It’s pretty minor, but it is a solution I never thought of to a problem I have faced for a while.

Finally one last idea that looks simple, but is actually very effective. The action button that performs more than one action:

Consolidated Action Buttons

I like this because it keeps action buttons to a minimum, allowing them to be placed more consistently and concisely on a screen. It also forces you to make sure the actions on a page are related and required.

Other nice elements include inline help content throughout, consistent positioning and colouring of action buttons, good usage of white space around tabs and tables, the ability to save drafts or ‘publish’ data entry and the use of simple language (“Money coming in” rather than “Accounts Receivable”).

Well done Xero, you are now my usability reference whenever I get stuck!

The ACMA's Little Black Book

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA, is the Government’s media regulating body. They work on a complaints basis, so if content is deemed to be R18+ or to contain excessive amounts of violence, drugs, terrorism etc. then they ban it. They cannot search for new material currently, but instead they review complaints submitted to them (by the public, law enforcement etc.) and then decide whether to ban it or not. This list of banned items is called the ACMA Blacklist.

So why are people so upset about this list? This filtering of content has worked well for movies, why not the internet as well? There are two main areas of thought here:

1) Why is the list black? – The content of the list is not publicly available. In the ACMA’s last report however, 781 overseas sites were added to the list:

• 3 were pedophilia related
• 410 were rated “RC – Child – Depiction”
• 251 were X-rated
• 117 “other” legal content

Previous years showed similar statistics. Wikileaks claims to have the list in full, although of course the ACMA or Senator Conroy would never admit that. This secrecy and the lack of transparency around the reporting process, judgement criteria and the Blacklist itself has people concerned. This was heightened by the leaked Blacklist containing links to popular sites such as YouTube, Geocities and Flickr, as well as plans by Senator Conroy to monitor the blogosphere for dissent.

2) How will it be enforced? – There is enforcement currently in place, Australian websites on the Blacklist can be forcefully taken down. Sites that even link to Blacklisted sites can be fined $11,000, although the irony is that you will never know your link is Blacklisted until it’s too late.

Senator Conroy has decided that the Government needs to be more proactive about this process however, they need to make the filtering mandatory at the ISP level (the company who provides your internet connection). He has setup a live trial with a number of lower tier ISP’s to test his theory, having been rejected by the three big players: Telstra, Optus and Iinet. This opposition is mostly at a technical level, basically arguing that the filter will substantially slow internet access and be largely ineffective (Peer to Peer, Email and other traffic will not be filtered).

Not Happy Jan? You can:

• Join the GetUp Save the Net campaign 
• Contact the minister and express your concern
• Leave any ISP that supports the trial

I just hope that they use the inevitably flawed trial as a way out of this sticky web they have weaved. Please try and focus on getting the National Broadband Network right before you cripple our current copper tangle.

Telstra workers working hard

Telstra went all quiet after they got kicked out of the National Broadband Network tender, apart from a few whimpers about not caring anyway.

Everyone thinks the value is under the ground, in the pits around the nation. More specifically the value is in the copper, or rather it is if you are proposing the cheapest possible national roll out via VDSL. Telstra has been under investing in this asset for at least 20 years, so maybe the value isn’t really there?

One way or the other this asset will end up back in the NBN’s hand, and Telstra has always known that and milked it for every cent it can. It will eventually lose it though; through a Telstra’s lawyers dead hands, structural separation of Telstra, a massive compensation package or some combination of the above.

This is all part of the plan and a distracting safety net as far as Telstra is concerned. This was revealed this week with Telstra’s decision to upgrade its cable network to 100Mb/s, hidden in the fact that now they will deliver PSTN calls over the cable. Optus have been doing this for a while to avoid Telstra copper, but ironically Telstra is now trying to avoid copper too. They want to make sure no spare cent ends up in the hands of the new NBN owner.

So what’s next for Telstra? Telstra will lose the copper lines, keeping their high margin fibre customers (migrating them off copper PSTN lines) and getting a nice gift from the government to give them breathing space. Next steps are to capture as many high margin Metro customers as possible, and clean up the rest with NextG (maybe delivering VoIP over NextG?).

In the end though, Telstra’s plan will only work if the customer’s embrace it. A patriotic duty to support a national network will be hard pressed to overcome the Telstra brand and aggressive marketing and retailing. The economies of scale are being pressed from every side possible.

Sydney Airport (SYD) is one of the oldest continually operating airports in the world. This also means that the city of Sydney has slowly grown around the airport over the years, with many people now living directly under the flight path. This is particularly true for those in the inner west. When buying a home in this area it is important to do some research as to whether you will be affected by the flight paths. The weekend flight paths are often very different from those during the week. The street seems sleepy and quiet during the Saturday Open for Inspection, but during the week you might be able to feel the windows rattle as a 747 thunders in to land. The curfew from 11pm until 6am does help, however airlines are allowed to break the curfew (for a fee) and of course a curfew is not guaranteed to stand forever (especially now that Macquarie Bank owns the airport).

Sydney Airport Noise Contours - Q3 2008

So what can you do? The first website you should visit is the Air Services Australia site, in particular their Noise Exposure Index Reports section. Attachment D is particularly interesting, the report provides noise contour charts that are overlaid on an abstract map of Sydney. The various coloured lines and shading show the regions exposure to aircraft noise. The noise contours for July-September 2008 are shown to the right. The rest of the report is also interesting, as it shows changes in noise and movements over time, notes reasons for some of the changes (i.e. the east west runway currently being closed due to a safety upgrade) and the types of planes.

Some of the councils affected by aircraft noise also have noise exposure reports on their websites (although they are often difficult to find). For example Marrickville Council provides a Australian Noise Exposure Forecast 2023/2024 (ANEF) Map. This provides forecasted noise exposure information to those people looking to live in or around the Marrickville region. This means you can not only see what the noise levels are like currently, but also predict whether you will be affected in the future. With constant delays and indecision still preventing the construction of the second Sydney Airport, it seems wise to plan for aircraft noise being a staple of Sydney for a long time to come.

Sol Trujillo Money Cartoon

The latest buzz around Telstra is that they have engaged a recruiter to start the hunt for a new CEO. This rumour comes hot on the heels of his two amigos, Greg Winn and Phil Burgess, returning to the US. Sol has now been CEO of Telstra since way back in 2005 and quickly became known for his ‘no compromise’ stance towards Government regulation.

The evidence that this policy has backfired on Telstra is now building, with Optus now looking to be in the box seat to grab the National Broadband Network contract by the end of March. It is quite likely that the contract will be awarded in conjunction with at least one other party, ironically most likely a group of ex-Telstra employees. That has to hurt a bit, especially for people within Telstra who were opposed to Sol’s strategies.

So what happens next? Well if, as expected, Telstra misses out on the NBN contract then I think Sol would be more than willing to use that as an exit strategy. Would this signal a change in direction for Telstra, or would the new CEO have even more incentive to fight the process every step of the way? I would like to think that they could take a more positive approach and focus on delivering the best wireless solution possible and keep competition in the market strong. I guess this would entirely depend on the Government and how they see the NBN tender winners leveraging Telstra’s existing infrastructure. I hope they have the lawyers and strategy in place, otherwise this could get very messy.