Skills Canada Alberta Unveils New Site

Skills Canada is an organization known nation-wide for its efforts to promote careers in the skilled trades to teens and young adults. Every year, students from across the country participate in local, provincial, and national competitions that teach and test the skills required to work in the trades.

As competition categories began to span a larger number of disciplines, the Alberta branch of the organization began to feel the impact on their website. It became bogged down with information and was overwhelming to navigate. There were so many layers of information – regional, provincial, and national events; trade categories; special events; teacher and parent information – that sorting through it all became frustrating. It became a tangled web of news, registration forms, and event listings that required far too much clicking and drilling in to find what you needed.

We teamed up with our friends at Fission Media to rebuild the Skills Canada Alberta website to better handle large amounts of information. The biggest challenge was to find a way to organize all of the information so that none of it would require more than a couple clicks of the mouse to get to, making it easier for all users.

Most of the organization and navigation problems were solved by categorizing each event listing by location, event level (i.e. regional or provincial), as well as by discipline (e.g. welding, baking, auto body repair). This was especially important because the site has many audiences: competitors ranging in age from junior high to college, teachers, parents, volunteers, and alumni. Each type of site visitor can access the site from whatever path suits them. If you’re a teacher from Vegreville who is interested in registering a student for a welding competition, you can browse through the welding events, or look at all of the event listing for Vegreville, or you can head straight to the Teachers & Instructors menu if you already know what event you want to register for. If you’re a student from Calgary trying to find a competition you’d be interested in, you can simply browse by Calgary’s regional events, or you can browse by discipline to get a detailed description of each trade. No matter who you are or what you’re looking, there is an easy way to find it.

The site still contains a great deal of information, but streamlining and proper categorization have made it simple to navigate and easy to find the exact information you’re looking for. Is your website built to accommodate growth? If you need advice on how to organize and categorize your website, give us a call!

Image credit: Skills Canada Alberta

Posted by Ramona on January 22, 2012 in clients

A Day Made of Glass

“Can you imagine organizing your daily schedule with a few touches on your bathroom mirror? Chatting with far-away relatives through interactive video on your kitchen counter? Reading a classic novel on a whisper-thin piece of flexible glass?”

These are the questions Corning asks viewers of “A Day Made of Glass” video. The company, which supplies the glass for iPhone screens and other high-profile pieces of technology, produced the video as a promotional tool for their investors, but it went viral upon its release to YouTube.

And we can see why the masses would pick up on a video like this. It may be a marathon 6 minutes in length (unheard of for a viral video) and contain no dialogue, but the scenes of a family going through a day in their lives assisted by incredible pieces of interactive technology (all incorporated into Corning Glass, naturally) are pretty captivating.

But what we find the most fascinating about this video isn’t the electronic day planner on the bathroom mirror, the interactive kitchen counter, or any other individual piece of technology. What’s most intriguing is the bigger picture, the overall message of the video: that technology has the ability to not just become an important accessory in our lives, but to blend seamlessly into them. The products in the video are so adaptive and so intuitive that the consumers are able to use them however they want to. There is no going out of the way to accommodate the technology.

As amazing as modern technology is and as far as it has come, it still has a long way to go in terms of being truly user-friendly. We are fortunate to have all of the technological conveniences that we do, but we also have the potential to push them even further so that they truly enhance our experience. Sure, your laptop can store and play music, connect you to the web, log your appointments and schedules, and connect you to people around the world, but is it intuitive enough to know which function it should perform at any given time? Does it sync to your life or do you have to plan your life around it?

The Corning Glass video is an example of the mindset all companies should have. You might think your products or services are enhancing your customers’ lives, but do they adapt to how your customer wants to use them? Are they intuitive enough to be flexible?

While you’re mulling it over, check out Corning Glass’s “A Day Made of Glass”:

Posted by Ramona on January 12, 2012 in interactive, technology