Shift News

Silver Award to Haka interactive feature

14 December 2006

The Society for News Design’s Best of New Media Design competition has awarded Silver to Shift for The Haka interactive feature.

The Haka feature lets visitors to Tourism New Zealand’s site watch the haka and learn the actions. The Society for News Design is an international organization for professional journalists. The Silver Award is for the 2004-2005 competition is awarded in the category of Non-Breaking Features.

Miriam Walker becomes President of New Zealand’s Usability Professionals Association

30 November 2006

Miriam Walker has taken over the Presidency of the New Zealand chapter of the Usability Professionals Association www.upa.org.nz. The Usability Professionals Association promotes and advocates the design and development of usable products, websites and services.

The UPA meets in Auckland and Wellington for training, talks and social events. Miriam is a usability consultant with Shift’s Auckland office and has previously held roles including treasurer of the New Zealand UPA and secretary of the New Zealand chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

Victoria University Usability Course Dates

30 November 2006

Shift and Victoria University Continuing Education have confirmed dates for the new one day course User-Centred Design for Websites.

Accessibility, information architecture and user testing are key topics of this course - with the day formatted to reflect a standard project lifecycle to help participants understand how and where each of the user-centred design approaches might be used.  Key learnings come from practical application of each of the techniques, with participants bringing to the table their own web project issues.

The course is suitable for anyone who is involved in designing and developing a website, including web developers, information managers and project managers.

Matthew Wright, Jonathon Reay and April Hague-Smith present these courses, scheduled for 9 May and 10 October 2007.

To sign up, contact Victoria University Continuing Education.  Full course details will soon be posted on their website. 

Te Ara Goes to Print

27 November 2006

The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has recently released the first two books based on Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. The availability of these volumes marks a significant event in New Zealand publishing; for perhaps the first time, reference material created specifically for the web has been re-published in book form.

The two books are made up of content drawn from Te Ara's first theme, New Zealanders. The first, Māori peoples of New Zealand: ngā iwi o Aotearoa features chapters on 36 major iwi, while the second book, Settler and migrant peoples of New Zealand, tells the stories of 45 different migrant groups. Although each volume includes several hundred images, thousands more pictures, video clips, interactives, whakapapa and audio files are available on the website.

A recent interview with Jock Phillips, General Editor of Te Ara, is available as a podcast from Radio New Zealand. The interview discusses the Encyclopedia project and the relationship of these books to the website.

Gibson Group takes home seven awards

22 November 2006

Wellington film and television production company Gibson Group, whose website Shift recently helped to relaunch, came out tops in the 2006 Qantas Television Awards.

The awards, which celebrate the best of New Zealand television media and programming, were held at Auckland's Aotea Centre last Saturday.

The Insiders Guide to Love scooped the awards for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Drama, Best Camera (non-factual), Best Director (drama) and Best Script (non-factual), with Paul Sutorius taking home the prize for Best Editing (Factual) on Aspiring.

Well done Gibson Group!

Massey design wins award

22 November 2006

We would like to congratulate the students and staff from Massey University who won the Tertiary Student Award at the 2006 TUANZ Business Internet Awards.

The winning project was a website to encourage travelers to visit Shanghai's Yuyuan Garden. The site was designed to educate and inform a western audience about the rich philosophies and principles involved in the construction of the garden.

Shift has an ongoing commitment to New Zealand design education. We are proud to sponsor this category which recognises the outstanding achievements of young talented designers from around the country.

Te Ara at TUANZ

22 November 2006

We are excited to announce that the Ministry for Culture and Heritage website, Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand was a finalist in the Information category at the TUANZ Business Internet Conference & Awards held last night at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington. This is the second year in a row that Te Ara has been a finalist at the TUANZ awards.

Since Te Ara went live in February 2005 there have been over 1.5 million visitors to the Encyclopedia. Each month Te Ara's users view more than half a million pages and download over 50 gigabytes of images, text, videos and sound files.

We are proud of Te Ara and our close relationship with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and would like to congratulate the entire Encyclopedia team for a job well done.

Shift would also like to congratulate the Ministry for their work on nzlive.com which won the category award.

Welcome to Shift

16 November 2006

Welcome to our new look Shift website. It’s the result of concentrated and coordinated efforts between our Auckland and Wellington studios to create a site that we think truly represents some of the things that really matter to us: simplicity, usability, and beauty.

It would be fair to say that nearly every one of our designers - both past and present - helped out at some point during the site's development, many of them sketching concepts, some designing final pages and even a few making bets on whether we would ever get it finished! Of course our developers and our great client services team also deserve a big hand for putting the site together and for wrestling the content into shape.

We're very proud of our new site. We hope you like it and will keep coming back to see what the Shifties have been up to. In the mean time, why not let us know what you think?

Shift joins celebrations of World Usability Day

15 November 2006

Peter Grierson and Miriam Walker from Shift Auckland joined the Usability Professionals Association in celebrations of World Usability Day on 14th November 2006. By attaching balloons to particularly usable and unusable things around the city, UPA members drew attention to the need for user centred design of technology, built environments and signage.

This flickr photo set shows the Auckland group having fun. Unfortunately the Wellington event (including Shift’s Matthew Wright and Jonathan Reay) was moved to a café after high winds made the balloons ‘unusable’. Auckland UPA followed up with a great evening of infotainment. A very well received talk from BNZ’s Shona Bishop on institutionalizing usability was followed by a panel discussion MCed by Peter and including Miriam, BNZ staff and other Auckland usability professionals.

Shift triumphs again at Online Oscars

01 August 2006

Shift has triumphed again at the 10th Annual Webby Awards, the Internet equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars. They take home the Webby for Best Tourism Website for their work on Tourism New Zealand’s http://www.newzealand.com/travel. Shift also won the award last year, and it’s the third time they have been nominated. http://www.newzealand.com bested nominations from Montreal, Italy and Australia to take the prize.

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