 that you are enjoying front end sessions and it's a great honor for me and privilege to introduce our next speaker Mark Walton he is a designer he runs a design shop in Cardiff Wells and I am almost sure that most of you know that he has designed the home of Drupal the Drupal.org he made a redesign of that and also designed the logo the branding for Drupal itself he's been involved in Drupal community since 2008 he's attended and spoke at several Drupal cons and he's also an author and publisher of Five Steps and it's a series or a collection of books by different authors about the design process so I'm not going to take much time it is gentlemen please welcome Mark Walton thank you thank you everyone hear me all right great well thank you Joseph what a great it's really great to be here I haven't been at a Drupal con for two years I was just saying it feels like things are quite different to the last time I spoke at a Drupal con which was in Copenhagen this is my something Drupal con it's much bigger I can't believe the amount of hands that were up this morning who's this is that first if this is your first Drupal con welcome so today I'm going to I'm going to talk about I'm gonna talk about a few things I'm gonna talk about CERN which is a project I've been working on for about 18 months and I'm going to talk to you about CERN and what a great crazy place it is and how many similarities it has with the Drupal community actually and then I'm but it kind of sitting around that I want to talk about designing in a community how many of you are designers right okay how many of you are actively contributing to the Drupal community in the Drupal project as designers how you finding that couple of giggles right yeah it's hard so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that and what I've learned over the past you know four years of working with similar communities similar organizations similar projects and hopefully there'll be one or two things that you can take away today that may make your job a little bit easier but one thing that I'm going to talk about first of all and don't worry this doesn't have any sound is I'm gonna talk about screwing up and I talk about failure and about how failure is really important to what we do as designers yet in in in our schooling as designers it's drummed out of us at a very very early time in our schooling that failure is is frowned upon and actually thinking about it failure is frowned upon in society from from a very early age actually not much older than these kids and it's mostly to do with school so these these two lovely little toddlers trying to work out what they stares for and they're they're being filmed and they're being filmed by their parents or friends or you know people who just enjoy watching babies fall flat on their face which happens right and they and they get up but the critical thing at this age is that you are and I have two small kids myself and you're encouraged when this happens your parents and go loser you're a loser baby and walk away no when a baby falls over you smile you laugh you give it encouragement you of course you say you know oh dear we'll go to a hospital with that broken nose but you you you know you you you don't chastise it now is anybody a snowboarder okay a few people right so I started snowboarding I don't know it was about seven years ago something like that and me and my noise a bit longer about ten years ago me and my wife and my girlfriend at the time she not and my girlfriend at the time that would be weird she was my girlfriend at the time I'm now married to her let me clear that right up this thing is being televised so we totally throw me we we arrived in Austria and lovely little village it was the snow hadn't been good no surprise there so we we booked some lessons and you know you you turn up and there's a whole bunch of other people who were also booked on lessons and you go up the up the cable car now they didn't tell us how to use a cable car right well this is actually was a chairlift two-man chairlift so never used a cable never used a chairlift before it's a little two-man thing so you you know you're holding the board because it's not on your feet at this point really sticky bit on the floor there it's really putting me off so you and you hold you hold on to your board because you don't clip in right and you sort of stand like this waiting for the for the chairlift to come around and it and it smacks you on the back of the legs and whoosh up you go with quite some considerable speed right chairlift is not on gears like a like a cable car which starts really slowly and then no it just smacks you and away you go so we're on this thing and it's rocking as it does on the way up and it goes really high really fast and we didn't realize that you had to pull down the thing so I'm quite scared of heights so I'm clutching up I'm trying to hold my snowboard and clutching on to this so this is one part of failure right and you get to the top and they they tell you how to clip into your board and there we use these like clip-in ones so you didn't have to worry about straps and and then you you get you get on a hill that's about this high and then you you go and you go about this far and you're like yes it was amazing when you do that a few times and it's cruel because it builds up your confidence in your ability all of a sudden you think you're a snowboarder right and then they leave you the instructors like right that's the end of the lesson today and everyone's doing this and everyone's feeling great bit in public and they leave you when they go and they say right we'll see you tomorrow the slopes of yours off you go you can go down a red run or something so you try that and you fall on your backside repeatedly in the same place for a week snowboarding learning snowboard is more about pain management than it is about learning a new skill it's more about how willing are you to put up with falling on that same spot to the point where when you do it your back to your body tries to deny it's just happened by kind of thrusting forwards and you're like oh you know it hitting that one same bruise my point is when you when you snowboard learn to snowboard you do what those toddlers were doing is that you fail in public and the support that you get from the people around you instead of the nice kind of people they don't shout loser at you when you fall on your same bit and your backside tries to deny the reality of the situation now designers I'm a designer having for a long time we're taught to go and get a brief from a client right and go and squirrel away in a little room and come out with the solution tada solved your problem here it is what do you think okay I'll change a few things there it is it's a very personal sometimes secretive process and that can have a it can have a you know it's good some good things come out of it right simplicity perfection these are things that are born from people crafting and squirreling away on something for hours and hours and hours but the closer you get to perfection the easier you can see the cracks like a whitewash wall right the closer you get to something that is so minimalistic so perfect in its form the easier the mistakes are to see now some would say that that is a symptom of the process that's a symptom of a designer not giving up squirreling away but the what what can happen that is bad is that it can it can affect organizations that right across product ranges right across core what they do so an example of this is airlines right business business class being a great example is that business class experience for long haul it's supposed to take the complete stress out of the out of the situation out of the travel you it is not supposed to be an arduous thing traveling business class supposed to be pleasant they're getting closer to perfection right so when the cracks do appear and they do they see so much worse so I was flying back from the Middle East last year and it was an overnight flight to London and I was flying business class and settling in is late it was like 1 a.m. when we set off settling down in my seat and you know they come around with drink and hot milk or no it's nice right for business classes nice and they come around with what they did with it and I thought this was weird and this was a crack they came around with pyjamas so they're like pyjamas mr. Bolton I was like okay so I took the pyjamas and I was like what am I supposed to do with these so I'm looking around the cabin seeing other people taking pyjamas I'm like right I'm not gonna make the first move so I see what other people are doing with these pyjamas and thankfully nobody did make the first move and I didn't have to go and then have the embarrassing situation of working out how far do I go with my clothes and where do I put them afterwards you know all of these things now that's a company who didn't think through that experience with that simple question this also happened in and it happens in hotels happens me twice now I've arrived at hotel and there's no reservation and they're giving me a meeting room so I've slept in a meeting room well I mean the swag is better from the hotel room I've got pens and bulldog clips and all sorts from this you know I'm sick of shampoo so anyway the whole point of that little rant about a few things was that it really goes to the theme of this whole conference which is opening up and it's something that we as designers don't do naturally either through our just by being who we are what we do our schooling for me personally was through the way I was taught so when we when CERN approached us a couple of years ago they said it was an amazing telephone call they said hi it's CERN I was about to go yeah right whatever and put the phone down they're like no no really is can we chat because we have a problem with our content and we have a problem in that we're a large complicated vocal community with very little hierarchy and after seeing how you worked with the Drupal community we think you'd be the man for the job if you're up for it so after a bit of back and forth we started on the project so who's heard of CERN right probably most of you that's why CERN is a flat out bonkers place it's brilliant it it straddles the border between France and Switzerland and Geneva CERN is like a really dodgy old-looking university campus with knackered buildings and loads of physicists walking around and other people too but it's to always you know first looking at it it just looks like a university well it was where the web was invented this is the actual next box that Tim Berners-Lee invented the web there's a sticker on it that says this this machine is a sir do not power down it's kept in a little box a little display cabinet in CERN it's quite you know physicists aren't really into kind of like making a big deal out of things like that it's just like huh it's a computer like and they're going it's the web it's the web they're going are you coming I'm like and then then they should know so there's I mean there's there's so much stuff here every time I go there I my jaw drops I have these moments of just like because of the crazy stuff they're doing balls for the crazy stuff I see so this is the this is the basically the server farm where the the experiments all the data comes out of the experiments so that is on the LHC which is the light large hydrogen collider the the amount of data that's coming into here is well there are about 600 million collisions a second going on in the LHC the computer discards maybe two-thirds of that but keeps 200 million collisions a second and all of that is stored here in lots and lots and lots of computers just to give a sense of the scale of the thing right this extends probably about the same distance that way and a little bit that way all of that is for the LHC it's tiny little thing in the top left-hand corner behind the yellow is the internet tiny but it's the European backbone there literally is a big pipe behind there and there's a few other things which power things like search and stuff like that so there's a lot of stuff what a lot of people don't know is that CERN is a complex of accelerators there's a lot of stuff going on it's also the poem of the best typography in the world check that out it is futuristic so what happens is we're just trying to explain a little bit about what happens so the LHC is a collider but before the protons which incidentally come out of a little bottle about that big about the size of a lemonade bottle and that is enough for about I think it's about 200 million years of use protons in that so they're like protons attached somewhere here and they go firing down it and they get sped up and they get accelerated and accelerated through these different accelerators and boosters and they get they get thrown into the collider they don't accelerate in the collider they just go around and get smashed into each other at four points so LHC B which is an experiment over on the right Atlas CMS and Alice which is over over there so and they're all looking for different stuff CMS and Atlas are looking for similar things and I talked about the typography check that out it's full of great things like that and signs that say cavern and this was when we went to see the CMS detector so we actually were looking up to see this so just to give a sense of scale let me just look on that because that's okay yeah so this this little thing over here that's a dude right so this thing the cabin is about twice as high as this room and twice as long the machine itself is about a third higher of this room again and a little bit longer than this room and what happens is is this thing here see that we're very looking on that day that's the beam pipe so that that little pipe there that's where the protons go in that is a single piece of beryllium that that spans the length of the of the machine so that was all exposed that's very exciting it wasn't excited as the other people who were with me they were all like they were like muppets and they were very I was like it's just a pipe it's just a metal pipe there's also well the thing about CERN is that it's got very very unique problems right one of which is signage they needed a sign for a dead dude and this this is for in case there's a helium leak right each one of the magnets is filled with helium and if that leaks you're dead basically so it's like warning dead and when I saw this I was just howling and this was rather embarrassing because everyone just walked straight past this and looking at the beryllium pipe I was like check this side out and I'm photographing myself laughing spot the designer and so else very funny this is this is so as well as the big experiments that you see on TV and stuff that Brian Cox talks about all the time things like that there's a whole load of other experiments going on at CERN CERN is actually the infrastructure right it provides the beam the beam basically the beam of protons right it gives it to various experiments and those experiments do stuff with it so this is a this is called azolda which is a crazy looks like just plumbing and tinfoil and crazy guys hanging out at the top so what this is is the beam comes into azolda and they do stuff with it there's a brilliant experiment in azolda called which which stands for weak interaction trap for charged particles they so made up that name to fit the words which but it's only ever worked once and it blew up then every time we try and turn it on it blows up and I feel the only time it did work was on a full moon so it's got this picture of a witch on the side of it and they're like oh that's which and I was like that's cool that's such a cool story and they're you know physicists they're like it's very interesting this is Jasper and he runs an experiment called cloud get this they're making clouds at CERN now to do this they needed the cleanest environment I don't know this but clouds are made from bits of stuff right which moisture attaches to and then they build and it turns into clouds and algae turns out algae get stressed this is a great this is how I hope this is true and please if it's not nobody come up to me and be a smart ass afterwards and say you know story well actually because I don't want to know I like this algae get stressed in the sea there's algae just lying there in the in the heat they lie me under these lights and then it goes oh you know it's really too hot and spits out biomass so and this floats up and it creates clouds and then the cloud shade the algae and he goes how cool is that if it's true which I really hope it is so cloud cloud is an experiment where they're doing this kind of thing they're making clouds not with algae stress algae yeah they're torturing algae in there yeah you're hot enough yet they're making clouds and then they're firing the beam at these clouds to see what happens now the beam going into cloud isn't like tiny tiny leg in a brilliant pipe it's really big like this big beam now they had to make the cleanest environment on earth and then they had to make the cleanest water on earth so that they you know there were no contaminants in there very very cool problems very interesting interesting ways you know we need the cleanest water so they just go and make it that's the cool thing about soon is that the problems that they have there are quite unique so they just go and make stuff so there's got an iPhone or similar smart touch device right the capacitive touchscreen in your smart touch-enabled device was invented in CERN in the 70s as a way to cope with the the amount of controls and the control power in the control rooms so it was you know so we need a touchscreen but it needs to be you know interesting problems and there's a lot of knowledge share that goes on there's a lot of these things that are solved and then get put out into industry cat scanners they do a lot of medical research stuff because they've got loads of radiation that they don't really need to radiate stuff and get it to those people right so what do we have so that's CERN right so what do we actually do well on the project I'm going to talk a little bit about Drupal but it's going to be at the end if you wait if you're waiting for the Drupal bit it's you're in for a bit of a wait and we leave in that's good right so we spent a long time researching the project it was funny we went the original proposal kind of had you know quite a bit of research budgeted in and they went you might need to slightly amend that we spent maybe six or seven months talking and designing mostly talking mostly conducting interviews with with users with stakeholders there's a the issue is is that it's a very very flat organization so the stakeholders there isn't one one guy in charge just saying yeah signed off build it it's just not like that very similar to the Drupal organization except there was an address in CERN so we we spent a long time talking to people in the experiments so I mentioned that CERN provides the beam it provides the infrastructure so IT personnel engineering to a degree and it gives the beam to the experiments all of these other experiments are also individual communities sometimes just a few people but in other times in the case of Atlas or Alice several thousands people and each group of stakeholders needed to be involved in some way in the conversation so how do you manage that well first of all we just ignored it all and we concentrated on the on the the people using the website there's a danger in projects of this scale similar to the Drupal Association is that you can get terribly sucked into into the problems of the project without actually stepping out and spending real quality time with the people using the website the system the software whatever it is you're working on so we did a lot of that and the we whenever we work on a project we try and model the audience and I find personas work very well for me they may not work well for you there are other ways in which you can model your audience I get a lot out of personas simply because the very creation of them helps me understand their needs and their motivation so we did a survey we did some quantitative stuff so we did a survey on on the CERN website we had about 3,000 respondents in like three days or something ridiculous turns out people really like filling in surveys on the CERN website when now we crunched that data manually a lot of it was open-ended questions there was some stuff like you know some things like age and gender and things like that but a lot of it was why you here what are you doing just getting the context around it and then we tallied repetitive phrases so you'll see over on the right there we tallied a lot of these repetitive phrases now you get a sample that large and those repetitive phrases will come out so it's a total we were stuck in a room losing the will to live for about a week the three of us just going oh this is rubbish why did we do this but we had to you know that thing where you're waiting for a bus and you've waited like it's 20 minutes late and you're like I'm here now I've got it I've got to keep going it was like that so let me just go back so what was very interesting is that it broke down the audience into four major four key personas students which was by far the largest audience group that that is using someone was filling in the survey at the time actually that research was further added to throughout the course of the kind of six or seven months and it played out then that teachers teachers are really interesting because they they mostly logistical their interactions with CERN so they want to find lesson plan material on that kind of thing or they want to come and visit CERN or they like to keep up on their subject if that physics teachers or whatever scientists and researchers use CERN a lot and they're looking for very specific information updates on specific information and they're highly knowledgeable about their subject area and then we have the general public who are generally generally a bit dumb where it's where CERN is concerned they're like is it gonna blow up are they making black holes am I gonna die tomorrow there's a lot of fear we were quite surprised about that those came up quite a lot you'll see actually you weren't in this one maybe it's down the bottom but what what that was very useful because it gave us a sense of what are people coming there across all of the user groups and the one thing that came out time and time again you'll see all of those lines across the top right right there were updates people wanting to know what the hell was going on now that represented a real challenge for us because these four audience groups span complete numpties like the general public who were gonna die to physicist particle physicist high energy physicists who use the word Femtabarm in everyday language so our job was to lay it right so we've got to provide content in a meaningful way to from from general public this end to high energy physicist I don't know why did those voices and so we created these personas and we mapped their these keywords that we got on a on a kind of a graph it's fairly arbitrary but you can see where some dip above this line and we can say that well for general public they want to know what's going on they want updates and one progress of the LHC they want to they want to learn they want knowledge and they're very curious about certain they want to know what's going on there not very trusting and we really needed to understand how certain organizational structure works as well now in any social group maybe that's a very bold statement my experience of any social group is that or big organization like that is that the people who you think might be important on always the people that end up being important so the in an organization this could be the CEO so you know you panda to the CEO's needs he you know he or she may not be the person involved in this at all who you really need to speak to is the head of operations or the deputy head now it could be somebody who's very vocal lots of connections knows everybody bit of a gossip knows what's going on and those kind of people do the politics very very well and they can move a project and those are your friend those are the people that you really need to identify very quickly and within certain but the problem with that is that involves talking to a lot of people generally to try and identify those people again those people will come out in the trends of feedback really here most people like how you need to talk to Bob in accounts you know then you start somebody else they're like Bob Bob knows that speak to Bob so yeah certain provides the infrastructure it's a community the experiments use the infrastructure and they are a community too I mentioned the content problem as one of the very first things that certain said to us was we've got a content problem so we needed a strategy around the content we needed to understand how soon was talking about itself how the media was talking about certain house stories about certain and there's so many wonderful stories about certain that actually never really see the light of day because they're written in the wrong language for the wrong people general public doesn't read it because it has the word femtobomb in it so after we work with the director and she spent a bunch of time speaking to a lot of people about editorial processes where the problems with the content are the moment and we defined a strategy and basically an understanding of the of what the problem is and we made a diagram and it turns out that this diagram was the best thing that we did last year probably in in trying to convey the problems that certain has so our diagram looks like this orbital content so the problem is if you think about content this way you have orbital content which is the stuff that doesn't live on your site and in fact most of the time you're not responsible for and they then in insurance case we have these you know categories that across the top this is the content for these types of people then they have public content experiments people and then we get down to operational content very important for you know if there's a fire what do I do my toilet's broken and even you toilet that this has been important content for people in certain don't ring them if you toilet broken they're good but they're not that good departmental content is serious physics it's you know it's scary stuff now the problem with the with the current site was that people were going from fluffy orbital YouTube video about some and there are some bad songs like certain songs like Drupal as his own song so it's and the people were going from that thing on YouTube all the way down to big scary experimental physics content they're like whoa you know it's like being smacked in the face then to bomb so what we had to do was to you know first of all get them to acknowledge this get them to you know understand that they have a problem and then organize the content and the creation of the content around these tears and in time CERN will invest CERN will invest more time in this orbital content because chance to know who's been to the CERN website be honest 2 3 4 5 quite a few or more quite a lot okay you're in the minority not many people go to CERN to learn about CERN because they can't when they get there so a lot of people learn about CERN from the the the media that's a problem for CERN because their press office can't be across every little bit of content that's created so there are some interesting things that came out of this things like are you going to destroy the world and when when it blew up a few years ago you know that was a real nightmare to manage for them because there there's a supermarket in Geneva and about 100 meters underneath aisle 16 they're colliding particles at the speed of light so this stuff is happening in their neighborhoods and that's that that's the interesting thing that came out for me is that this touches people in a very serious way going back to designers sitting in their little cupboards I don't think it's not a cupboard really in the studios you know squirreling away creating something perfect on their own is not it's not conducive to producing good work I don't think I don't remember Bob Ross Bob Ross was a painter for those of you don't know he was on the telly in the 70s I grew up watching Bob Ross all the time no not all the time I he was I drew from well from from a very early age painted had oils and you know all of that kind of stuff he's a bit of a hero and he always he was talked about happy accidents oh I'll be accidents no way when he screwed up right on the telly like big black splodge oh I'll just turn that into a tree or a waterfall and he was so nice when he did that you're like ah that's brilliant and so I I at some age or another in school I decided that I didn't want to do art anymore and I didn't want to Bob Ross and then I wanted to be a forensic scientist what an idiot so I went and did a level art which is like 16 to 18 year olds and did biology chemistry and physics and failed them totally publicly embarrassingly two ends in a you don't know what and me to this day like nearly you're nearly got a E but I think it was the nature of the failing that that made me work much much harder it was it was with my peers it was very public embarrassing was awful Mike Tyson has a great phrase that everyone has a plan until you get smacked in the face and that is every designer should really take that to heart because any project will smack you in the face quite a lot and you need to have the ability to course correct very very quickly and if you're doing it if you're designing openly then you have to do that openly and you have to take that hit and take that mistake publicly and move on it's really hard to do so the way that I do that and the way that I mitigate that is is by fidelity so I am much more and this is why I've worked for a long time I'm much happier sketching for a long time in a project and then at the right time going higher fidelity now higher fidelity may mean in a browser it may mean in a Photoshop in Photoshop not a Photoshop so we did this on this is some of the really old I found these sketches from Drupal 7 that Lisa and I worked on a few years ago so we spent a long time at this level this is some ridiculous content we needed to model the audience so we did it a whole bunch of ways before we ended up with two personas but that's what we needed to go through in a lot of work you have to go through the crap to get to the good stuff you have to go through the motion of discarding this is where some things like web patterns on the web I and for you know we're all we're systemizing the web where you know this grid system that grid system this type system this you know this pattern this pattern we're not we're not necessarily going through the crap before we get to the good stuff we're just using the crap not that it's crap but it's it's ubiquitous right so we did a lot of that we did a lot of sketching edit in place whizzy wigs they seem pretty familiar now a lot of a lot of stuff so we spent a long time at this stage a lot of post-it notes that that gives you the ability to change direction really easily also another thing about sketching is that I find you get much more honest feedback from people users and stakeholders on sketches and paper prototypes because they don't think you've invested time in them they're throw away their stuff you've done in 20 seconds he's only spent any seconds on that I'll say it's crap because that's what I think if you've spent a long time crafting something beautiful they're less likely to say that so well that's my that's my experience so guy Kawasaki talked about a make mantra he talks about it a long time ago and it's very similar to another thing which we've used in the past called an idea brief which is this this idea of you you take a project and a brief and you try and distill it and distill it and distill it down to a phrase or a a couple of words that is a is an actionable kind of springboard for ideas or it could be used as a phrase to communicate something on a project so for Drupal 7 it was that we had a bunch of design principles but the one that stuck out time and time again was privileged the content creator that came I came up and up and up throughout the whole process of that project and so there's a bunch of people who have those you know sometimes they're kind of straight lines FedEx peace of mind Nike so you can use a make mantra as a guide so when you as you can do on a project you meander off the point you you can use it to pull you back does it answer this problem stick it on your wall and it's a springboard for ideas so when you're stuck we'll have those days when days when I'm a stuck and you can go back to it and it can help you take you in a direction that you may not have gone this was a good one is well particularly with CERN right it's a big complicated project big complicated organization and it's not simple and there's a desire sometimes to try and make something simple well some things just never are and making them simple actually is doing a disservice to them just some sometimes things are complex lying about their simplicity I find is fine because how you how we use this make mantra for example I'll show you in a minute is to is to explain the approach now that's not saying that our approach to a complex problem is a lie it's saying that our approach to a complex problem may see simplistic but it's actually not it's kind of lying and big organizations freak out about change and I think that's without exception in my experience a lot of organizations just simply freak out and then it goes into committees and sub committees and other departments who's gonna have to be signed off and all these stakeholders come out of the woodwork right we've all been there and so a simple statement like this can and what what that is really is is people freaking out about things they haven't heard about before this notion of you know I wish I was consulted so to in order to consult with lots of people your message has to be really quite simple so that's one thing that this make mantra can do is is to it's have a simple a simple thing to tell people one of the problems with CERN is that it's big engineering but I mean you've seen photos pipes and tinfoil crazy physicists behind computer screens and clouds and big magnets my mom wrecked things that's boring right she my mom really is not interested in that she should be because of the story behind what CERN is doing is actually you know one of the most important I think one of the most important human endeavors on the planet it's it's incredibly important and yet she finds that boring so we can't show pictures of magnets now NASA has a really easy job of it because they're doing something similar they're exploring out of space CERN is exploring in a space except NASA's got pictures like this right and CERN's got pictures of magnets and crazy physicists and that's not conducive to to inspiring people so we needed a way of inspiring people what CERN does have are these and these are event visualizations from the experiments on the LHC so this is what happens when two particles hit nearly the speed of light they change into lots of other stuff that goes through the through the experiment so that big CMS the big experiment the big hexagonal one I showed you earlier right in the beam pipe in the middle of that there's an X there's an explosion of particles and they get twisted and turned because of the different magnets that are in that in that machine and by the amount of curve and the amount of trajectory this is guy I got a U in physics then they can tell which particle it is and what's coming out of it so and these are beautiful this one I love this this is cloud just and computers are making these from from little particles so CERN has this so one of the things that we wanted to do was show these in a near live state this is happening right now at CERN problem that we've come up against is that when you ask a physicist to explain this you get stuff physicists understand what I needed was I needed to ship my mom out to Geneva set her up in a little office and get people to bring her like captions for these images and she would go and then they go and do it again that's that didn't happen but it would have awesome if it hadn't and so we needed to understand how we talk about what's going on here to different people those different audience groups right some general public physicist really smart so we came up with ways of tracking this ways of talking about it to people like I'm talking about it to you now is that generally there is a there is a degradation of comprehension of what these things are from scientists who are really smart to general public who are really done now what we needed to do was have an inverse scale there applied a wonder so I talk about the wonder in the same way that NASA inspires my four year old daughter to look at pictures of stars she's not gonna do that with magnets so equally scientist is gonna get really fed up if you're ramming all this highly visual stuff down their throat 24-7 so as comprehension goes down wonder goes up turns out dumb general public really like shiny things and the scientists really don't just give them femtobarms so what's happening on the project this is what's happening this is we're this is the homepage and we're we're working through one of the things that people said they needed was updates how what's going on and there's different ways of telling that story to different people sometimes it could be that there's a shut down we're close to two months which is what happens in fact soon it's gonna be close for a couple of years for all kinds of upgrades and stuff very soon so those stories that aren't that important aren't that interesting and there are stories that need more explanation so we have stories with links stories without links updates without links but then when something happens something is noteworthy so we needed a different display of these updates so this is a noteworthy display when they thought they'd you know those neutrinos are broken the speed of light just turned out to be a dodgy wire then either way of saying this thing is important so it's more important to this other stuff so it's gonna go sticky at the top and it's gonna have an image because we're going back to that orbital content most people are gonna be hearing about this outside of the Sun site and they're gonna be coming here for you know from the horse's mouth they're gonna be coming here for the truth so it needs to be big and the other thing is when there's a significant event a significant story there needs to be a different display on there to prop that up so we have a this is where we'll have full full screen photography we'll have a high contrast caption to the story at the top the next thing you may have seen a few months ago which we actually did which was a roadblock so this was when there was the announcement I had to sit on that story for about a day and a half it was the hardest thing I've ever done I sat there like that on my hands with my mouth shut for a day it was very exciting but we're under complete embargo so this is where the whole site just disappears and one story is up now this this got and they stopped counting the Unix on this but it got to lots like 50 million or something so it's not Drupal it's a static HTML because why would you need Drupal for this that's like you know really is cracking us and not with a sledgehammer you just needed something that's very very lightweight extremely lightweight and on its own they could just drop in it hardly ever happens this now the like I said the challenge of these updates is is this is how physicists are used to seeing updates in CERN this is page one it's called which is brilliant page one and this is dotted around CERN on big screens it's like there's one in the cafeteria it's great people eating their lunch looking at the worrying thing is I know what some of these things mean now which is slightly terrifying but you see that there's such a disconnect that's what I'm trying to get to there's and you'll see this in other organizations other businesses there's a massive disconnect between what the organization thinks the users of their website need and in the language that they'll understand it and there's a huge even though CERN's got a really great press team and they do a lot of work to make sure that that language is is appropriate and it'll issue press releases out to newspapers and things like that but they struggle with it because they're in there every day in the organization very very hard for them to just reach out and go I'm sorry you didn't understand that so we've had to put in place editorial processes to make sure that this this doesn't happen much so one of things is the the applied wonder so we would how do you make that scale I talked about that scale apply the the wonder scale against the comprehension so we did it very very simply this is the homepage that's one of my favorite images beautiful that's from Alice so we have the homepage very high wonder this is for the general public this isn't for Bob the physicist he's not he's not bothered about that and the about section is the way that we underpin the page with just a simple graphic a simple textural meaningless in many ways no context on this it's just a pretty picture of space and nothing more there's a terrible tendency with designers to over rationalize stuff that is just beautiful there's a great great designer who called it the the design escalation problem I think he called it which is where a client comes to you for a logo you know now I'll do your logo but what you really need is a corporate entity and then you go naturally no what you really need is a is a is a design system no what you really need is a is a business strategy a business strategy is all wrong up we go and and the the danger of that is that you lose sight of what a lot of designers get into design for which is just to make beautiful things so we did that on there we had some fun with beautiful images and these are textural they're not meant to mean anything they're just meant to underpin the content give the content some context I mean it's just a blue shape really mean anything but my mom thinks it's pretty public physicists however don't want any of that crap give me text nothing but we're brilliant meetings with some physicists we so one of the things is that either on the the system of getting the visualizations to Drupal via another Drupal was like magic it's taken a long time for that actually to happen because the experiments are spitting out stuff as proprietary has to go through conversions has to go into a kind of a repository where captions are added by certain people and we were sat in a meeting with a with a physicist representing an experiment just saying you'd like you know we need talking all through this increasingly bored actually she started getting really angry I could see it I could see it happening but I couldn't stop talking about it because you know it's kind of a well-rehearsed spiel so I can just like she's getting really cross so in the end she just was like I'll give you whatever you want in whatever language you want it I'm a physicist how to make a dumb web designer look dumb I'm a physicist she actually said those words brilliant so they want text so this is low wonder it's not meant to be fancy schmancy it is designed specifically for that audience group to get what they need it's very legible the way finding is easy it's easy to get around that's what they need I mentioned Drupal very briefly I'm gonna talk about Drupal 55 minutes into my talk so we've done a bunch of Drupal things for CERN the first thing is to make a CERN is a all of the so they've gone from kind of just HTML as they would because they you know kind of invented the web they've gone from crappy HTML stuff all the way through a whole bunch of other systems for people making websites so the people who make websites at CERN are users so if you were a user a CERN user you can have a website and there's 30,000 websites thereabouts and that includes departmental websites the idea is that any new website will be built on a shared infrastructure shared design patterns shared so one of our jobs was to create a theme for Drupal that would be a base theme with some very small amount of controls to give some variants between different different sites so this would be an example of an engineering department site so they can change the colors it's as old as they can change the kind of the top story there very very small changes but with some imagination they can look fairly different we also built a timeline application it doesn't look like this you'll be pleased to know CERN as a whole bunch of timelines a very historic place it was you know at the end of the war really that it kind of all came together because there are all these nuclear physicists around and somebody was like there's loads of nuclear physicists knocking about we better get them all together and do nice peaceful things and so that's what happened and the timeline because it's such a historic place there's all these interweaving timelines things like supersymmetry is it anyone heard of supersymmetry good maybe you could explain what it is because I haven't the foggiest but supersymmetry in fact don't supersymmetry started off in the 60s I believe it was postulated then it kind of stopped and it was only last year when there was enough energy in the collider and enough data to support to support the findings that they ruled out actually it was a little rubbish so I'd interview with the guy who did it he's like his life's work right and he's like I think it's brilliant got it I mean totally got it so so we were thinking right well how do we show the timelines start in the 60s then they stop for a whole bunch of time and then they start up again there's lots of different timelines lots of different overlapping timelines as well so we built a system that basically Drupal spits out timelines for us to embed and eventually these will be embeddable all over the web you can take a certain timeline and you can just pop it in somewhere like you would Google Maps which is pretty cool so we did that so when now well there's a lot to do still we're working to the project to the end of the year and we're building a pattern library for CERN so some of the things that you've seen today will be then shared and used across those websites in CERN the idea being that you know it's a big it's a big organization it makes sense for one department to invent a carousel and for another department to use that carousel instead of inventing a new one how that works in practice is a totally other story because a community that has little or no hierarchical structure well there is some but it it's very very difficult people just do what they want I'll just do it and I learned very early in the project not to fight that I think that comes back to you know some of the lessons learned on the Drupal projects that I worked on where you know I found something so important that I go into issue queues and I really trying to argue these points and I think I've learned when to just go you know what fine I think it's one of the most valuable lessons that I learned in those two projects and it played well in a meeting I added CERN where we have this toolbar you probably saw it on couple of the screenshots it goes across the top and that's the Drupal module one of the departments wanted to take that module fork it and put navigation in it like yeah you might not want to do that because of all of this rationale and reasoning and research that has got us to this point and they're like yeah I will do it anyway we like all right then and that was it I was a meeting they were like left and I was like you know I'm not gonna get upset about that we're also working on a page in if you're logged in to the CERN website as a CERN user you don't get all that fancy schmancy homepage with stuff you get a page that hasn't changed in about 12 years and it's just a page of links a million bazillion links and we're working to redesign that in some way and bring a bit more user functionality into it so that people can have their own predefined predefined points that is incredibly painful you know you you take users been using the same page for 12 years that's never happened in my career I just go here and click this link and it's like there it's like they're riding a bike or they're eating it's a completely automatic response how do you redesign something like that a lot of people in CERN think we should leave it the hell alone sometimes in the project I'm inclined to agree I'm running out of time so I'm gonna skip through these pretty quick we learned some good stuff and I hope that well first thing that open design is really hard it's hard because of the it goes against our natural inclinations as designers and failing publicly and openly is really really hard to take on the chin sometimes especially in an environment where design is rewarded with it's rewarded if data is provided so you guys may see this in the Drupal community I've seen it in other communities and we saw it at CERN which is you give me proof and I'll believe what you say and that's very difficult to design in that environment because it actually nurtures an environment where risks aren't taken as much because it's a total pain to do produce an idea prototype it research it get findings that back up what you're thinking is then present it and this happens all the time in open design we learned that content don't ignore the content problem on a project the content is really really important the whole movement of content first is is again siloing content and content's been siloed for long enough used to be at the end of a project right here's you do the project and then you're right client right all your content and they go what because there's this mountain like this they're like I'm never gonna get this done and they don't and our content first is taking that and putting it the start so you never start your project because the client's going and you don't actually know what that content should be and because content changes and ebbs and flows throughout a project so content shouldn't be first or last it should be all the time content all the time that should be a new movement they go write a book such a catchy title editorial people are total control freaks because that's what they do it's taking me a long time I used to look at the BBC where I work with news organizations now and sport networks and this is pretty much true across the board is the editorial people writers broadcasters journalists they control the message in the or they want to in the same way the designers control the design now we are coming to terms with the fact on the web that the notion of control was only ever really a lie it's like the matrix it was a lie we live in a lie lying to ourselves and I'm hopeful that editorial will eventually get to the same point because they can't control the way people consume and read content on the web it's enough you just can't do it and especially where it comes to like press releases in this very structured way of releasing content to the world you know that that's been there since you know the dinosaurs a big physics hurt my brain hurts and big engineering hurts so there's a lot of pain so the not that that means anything to you but it it sure makes me feel better saying it and opening up is good so as designers or whoever you are talk about your work whilst you're doing your work I think that's that's key don't wait to the end and do a presentation talk about your work along the way study design critique even if you're not a designer read upon design critique and learn about how to critique design in a way that a designer will understand what the hell you're not talking about and not be defensive and that's me thank you very much I don't know if we've got any time for questions because I've liked on it