for excellence in Australian Web Design
The McFarlane Prize is awarded by a jury of Australian experts in various fields of the web profession. The decision process has two stages. In the first stage, entries are assessed for their adherence to best practices in accessibility and standards based coding (correct and valid use of CSS and HTML) as well as their aesthetic appeal. These criteria are outlined in detail below.
The top 20 sites from this phase will be individually assessed in four areas by members of the jury who have expertise in that field.
These areas are
Based on the two rounds of judging, the McFarlane Prize shortlist will be announced on October 11th 2010.
The winner will be announced at Web Directions South, on October 13th 2011.
The McFarlane Prize Jury comprises experts in the fields of design, user experience, accessibility and coding, each assessing finalists in their field of excellence.
While everyone was waiting for their web enabled fridges and toasters, Smart televisions nipped in, and are here today using the same HTLM5 technologies as your browser and phone.
And Craig's fortunate enough to be working on them having joined Telstra Media's IPTV team, and is using experience gained at Ziff Davis, AOL, Yahoo!, Seven, and Atlassian to develop accessible, extensible, and usable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript solutions for your television.
When he's not delivering HTML5 workshops, arranging Sydney's SydJS user's group, or fine tuning your web-enabled TV, you'll find him dreaming of a second book, or more likely spending time with his wonderful wife and new baby daughter, Jemima. Actually that's probably where he'll be!
Sarah is the Manager of Digital Media and Technology for Media Access Australia, the only independent not-for-profit organisation devoted to increasing access to media for people with disabilities.
Sarah has a Bachelor of Computer Science/Bachelor of Cognitive Science and has also completed a Master of Science entitled Interpreting the DCMI Abstract Model to support software development for Dublin Core Metadata. Her Master’s thesis was completed as part of an ARC-funded project to develop a semantic web application for cultural heritage management, during which she also worked as a developer on that project.
Sarah is an active member of the accessibility community, attending regular accessibility meetups in Sydney, and representing Media Access Australia on a number of W3C accessibility working groups. She has also attended the OZeWAI conference, Australia’s only web accessibility conference every year since 2002 and is now responsible for organising the conference.
Jodie Moule is Co-founder & Director of Symplicit, Melbourne’s leading Experience Design consultancy, focusing on customer led innovation through research, strategy and design services. Jodie has worked in UX for the last 15 years; prior to the 'UX epiphany' she worked as a psychologist across clinical and organisational fields. Symplicit works across a range of industries and device types in the digital space, traversing into Service Design and Wayfinding services; providing their clients with solutions that consider an end-to-end customer experience.
The combined backgrounds of Symplicit's co-founding directors (Psychology and Industrial Design) has shaped the company’s approach to CX/UX, meaning that understanding human behaviour is the first priority before considering technology, products, systems or processes; from there it is about design thinking as a problem solving method. This core philosophy has been carried throughout the way Symplicit does things. Understanding behaviour lets you change the experience, and that change happens through great design.
Henry is a senior visual and interaction designer that has worked for several agencies in Sydney and London over the past ten years. He's worked for all sorts of clients ranging from government departments, multi-channel retailers, consumer brands and the odd Premier League team. He designed a site way back in 2006 which received the jury's highly commended mention at the inaugural McFarlane Prize, and is the latest design team recruit at Atlassian.
Henry enjoys a decent single malt scotch whisky and occasionally updates his personal site at HenryTapia.com.
A veteran in sheep's clothing, Anson still has fond remembrances for those early, halcyon days of web 1.0. Like when Netscape invented the background image tag and we could all start putting our text over a panorama of freshly roasted coffee beans, just like we'd been dreaming of. He went on to spend the best part of a decade working across design and development in Sydney for companies such as Optus and News Limited before joining a tech start-up and heading to San Francisco for a two year stint. Now based in Melbourne, Anson runs a web consultancy focused on helping companies make data-driven decisions and avoiding, at all costs, putting text over anything resembling a panorama of freshly roasted coffee beans.
In the first round of judging, sites will be objectively assessed for their use of best practices in the areas of
In each of these areas a score will be awarded. The 20 highest scoring sites according to these criteria will be then assessed by our jury of experts. At the jury's discretion, sites may be added to this list, or fewer than 20 sites may be considered for the second round.
Scores will be allocated as follows in the first round.
The home page of the site will be tested using accessibility testing software such as Cynthia Says. Sites will be assessed for their compliance with Level A and AA of the WCAG2 content accessibility guidelines.
The home page of the site will be assessed for how valid its HTML or XHTML is, and how appropriately it uses HTML.
Points will be added for use of more sophisticated aspects of HTML, such as HTML5, and good use of structured and semantic HTML.
The home page of the site will be assessed for whether it uses valid CSS. Pages will be validated with the W3C's CSS validator.
Points will also be added for use of more sophisticated CSS as appropriate - including advanced CSS3 and browser-specific extensions (where appropriate).
Starting in 2009 we also engage what we call our "blink judge" to award points for aesthetic appeal at this first stage, as well as the machine testing for the 3 criteria above.
In the second round of judging, each of our expert judges scores each of the sites in their area of expertise. These scores are then totaled, to produce a shortlist of six sites.
This shortlist is then discussed by the judges, who name the winner, and any highly commended sites.
As experts in their fields, the members of the jury have worked with many organisations, and on many projects. This gives rise to the possibility that a nominated site has an association, either direct or indirect, with a member of the jury. Our policy is that should this be the case for shortlisted sites, this association will be explicitly declared.