Irony is not dead

Day 2 of the b.a.b.s. Workshop today.

One of the presentations was from the Inspire Group; talk about a misnomer! They're producing a whole new section of web for the SPARCling website - possibly the most user-unfriendly site in the whole of the world wide interweb - and they announced and described ('scoped' in horrendous SPARC terminology) the project today. The subject matter of the new section is irrelevent but what was amazing is they did the whole presentation (about a web site, remember) without using a computer or screen!

Truly, they excused themselves by saying they weren't going to use PowerPoint so they are obviously influenced by Mr. Tufte and his understandable and believable view that ppt is the work of the Devil but they then didn't use any pixelated aids at all. Nobel-threatening gems such as 'users use different computers' and 'text prints faster than graphics' were thrown out to justify their lack of inspiration. Ppt is, indeed, the work of the devil but Mr. Tufte isn't saying don't use computers!

They handed out one spiral-bound booklet for each four- or five-ish people so everyone had to share and then proceded to draw words, lines and squares on a whiteboard to illustrate their proposed mouse-clicking sequence. 'When I click on this (point to word on whiteboard) it will come up with this page (draw square on whiteboard to ilustrate a page of text).' and then they held up the booklet open at a page showing screenshots of their mocked-up web pages.

They plan to 'go live' in 'mid-December' so beware. If you go to the Client Showcase page on the Inspire link it lists only three examples, big companies for sure, but three? One of them is Telstra Clear which has a case scenario and then 'The Solution .. click next' text at the end. Click on 'click next' and you'll see why I'm not inspired.

Oh, and their site uses Flash; 'nuff said.

p.s. Just found another howler; if you go to the Contact Us page on their corporate site you can't click though on their contact email addresses!