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Matt Goddard – ‘The Humanised Web’.
Posted: Wednesday 7th May 2008
UX Media’s Matt Goddard knows rather a lot about the World Wide Web. Or at least, enough to give a talk about making web sites disability-friendly at our last Wired Wessex networking event. With that in mind, we grilled him for some more, and this is what we got:
To begin, please remind us who UX Media are. “We’re a User Experience agency who work with companies to tailor their digital strategies in a way that meets their customers’ or users’ needs. We create websites and run user testing, disability testing…”
Matt also knows a fair bit about his trade. “I’m a software developer originally, and I started in web development about twelve years ago. I worked with a number of different organisations and then decided to start my own company two or three years ago – I realised that there was a person at the end of the software code I was writing. I then incorporated UX media as a full time business in March of last year.
What’s the response been to the company so far? “Good! All the work we do is through word of mouth and through referrals – it’s all through the work we’ve done with other companies… It’s been very good!”
Anyway, run us through what you said at the event. “I tried to highlight to small businesses the way they can improve the accessibility of their web sites; the business case for this and how to engage a designer or agency to improve accessibility to their sites. And the idea was to make them realise there are an awful lot of people out there whose needs aren’t being met with web site delivery, so you have to make the business cater for that, as well as having a digital strategy.
In that sense, you put an emphasis on the user experience. “Well, absolutely! The real aspect of any disability or accessibility service is to create a compelling customer experience. The moment you think about how to make product or service easy to use, how your customers are going to engage with it and the context they’re in when they are using your product or service, then that’s what user experience is about. And that’s what I think is absolutely important: for companies to differentiate themselves. That’s why Web 2.0 is taking off, because it engages people on an emotional level as well as a functional level.”
Ah yes – the unstoppable Web 2.0 Paradigm Shift. How do you think it will develop? “There are certainly going to be a lot of mistakes made, certainly from a usability point of view, because I think that we have a tendency to forget our hard won lessons from the last ten to twenty years of computing when something new comes along…. The way I see it going is that companies are going to start using emotional engagement; there’s a lot more stock on openness and truthfulness, and I think blogs and so on allow you to engage with customers in a way you weren’t able to do before.”
As for the immediate future, Matt sees the Web spilling out everywhere. “For me, the theme over the next ten years will be that how people will interact with IT will become more ubiquitous. We won’t be able to get away from being online all the time, people will start using the web to make decisions about where they’re going to go – it will become a lot more central to people’s lives and mobile devices will be a key area. I think they’ve got a long way to go, especially in the usability and disability point of view. But I hope, within the next two to two-and-a-half years, we’ll be seeing much more advanced PDAs and devices which enable us to both communicate with each other and use online resources much more easily. I think also that the mobile phone companies and all these new wireless and internet access providers that are springing up all over the place are making that a lot easier too. We just need to wait until the infrastructure is in place.”
But to close, it seems Matt hasn’t forgotten that any potential future should be, at its heart, a human endeavour. “In context of the talk I gave, the really important aspect of usability and accessibility is that it’s about engagement and brand awareness, And I think the way we differentiate ourselves on the web now is through how we engage people. And I think that’s the important aspect of how we consider usability and accessibility. I think it’s about remembering that there are people at the other end of your service. People buy from people.”