Articles by Month: December 2005

Assessing your intranet security risk

Toby Ward has written an article on intranet security risks. To quote:

How vulnerable is your intranet to an outside attack? What is the potential damage to the company if your intranet is hacked? If you don’t know the answer to those two questions, which could be posed at any time from either your CIO, CFO or Chief Legal Counsel, you’d better get cracking on the answers.

Posted by jamesr at 12:41 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Well, that's it for 2005...

Just a brief note to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

It's been a busy year in 2005, with a lot of excitement, and plenty of challenges. I'm looking forward to 2006 to bring even more opportunities to chat with (and work with) really interesting people...

Posted by jamesr at 01:19 PM | Permalink
Categories:

Usability redefined: howability, taskability, recommendability, profitability

John Rhodes has published a different perspective on measures of usability. To quote:

OLD Ease of Learning: How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?

NEW Ease of Doing: How fast can a user accomplish the desired task? How much time? How much energy applied per unit of measured time?

Posted by jamesr at 08:30 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

User experience: icing or cake?

Michael Andrews shares some concerns about "user experience", when used as an alternative to identifying concrete business benefits. To quote:

Most people in UCD can't speak the language of business, so they talk user experience. They can't tie benefits to existing business goals, so they rely on the feel good factor, with vague suggestions that unhappy people make mistakes or leave in frustration (not only a insufficiently substantiated suggestion, but a negative one to boot.)

Posted by jamesr at 08:18 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Resources: Personas

Dey Alexander has created a great collection of links to resources on personas. These include:

• discussion articles
• research articles
• tutorials
• case studies
• examples and templates

[Thanks to Anu Gupta.]

Posted by jamesr at 09:22 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Intranet trends to watch for in 2006

Shiv Singh has written an article on his intranet trends for 2006. To quote:

As you look at these seven intranet trends for 2006, from wikis and blogs to the Ajax and User Experience trends, you’ll notice that they are focused more sharply on meeting employee needs, responding to employee demands and finding innovative solutions to meet the evolving information sharing, knowledge management and collaboration needs of organizations. The ecosystem certainly matters a little less today.

Remember an intranet is only as good as how it serves its employees and its company. Each organization is unique in its need. So don’t worry too much about what the ecosystem says you should be doing and instead focus on understanding your users better and strategizing about how your intranet can more innovatively meet the needs of your business.

Posted by jamesr at 09:06 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Ditch site maps? The debate continues...

Toby Ward continues the debate about the value of site maps. To quote:

"Building and maintaining a site map or site index is, like on-site Search, fixing the symptom and not addressing the true problem," writes renowned usability guru Jared Spool in his most recent posting, What about Site Maps and Site Indexes?. Mr. Spool is a smart guy. A web leader. A true guru. But he’s dead wrong on this issue. Well, partly wrong.

I'm actually going to agree with Jared Spool on this one (although Toby makes some good points also).

I haven't seen the value of site maps for some time now. As a form of navigation, they add little that can't (or should) be covered the site home page. And as the site grows in size, the site map becomes impractically large. It's just not a scalable solution.

A bigger issue came up in some usability testing I conducted several years ago now. While we all know what a "site map" is, this not the case for all users. At the end of usability testing sessions conducted in a health care organisation, I asked users what they expected to find if they clicked on the buttons in the top navigation bar. For "site map", many users said:

"Site map? Well, I guess it would provide a map of the hospital's facilities and buildings."

In other words, an actual map of the "site", in the physical world. I found it hard to argue with them...

Posted by jamesr at 08:15 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Sensible forms: a form usability checklist

Brian Crescimanno has written an article on the usability of forms. To quote:

With so many form elements to choose from, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages, it can be difficult to decide which elements to use in a given situation. Use radio buttons, checkboxes, and select boxes appropriately: for radio buttons or checkboxes, use the "fieldset" and "legend" tags to group the elements logically under an obvious heading. This grouping keeps the form manageable to users, as it can be broken down into smaller pieces in their minds.

Posted by jamesr at 07:48 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design, Web development

The ABCs of the BBC: a case study and checklist

Helen Lippell has written an article on the creation of the A-Z index at the BBC. To quote:

The project to overhaul the bbc.co.uk index began in late 2004. There was a push to change the visual design to make the user experience more aesthetically pleasing, and a need to address known usability issues with the existing A-Z index, including a lack of understanding of the multi-page format and lack of awareness of the special page for numeric entries. Unlike many web design challenges, the goal of the pages was to send the user off somewhere else as quickly as possible rather than keep them on the page.

Posted by jamesr at 08:15 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

Metrics for memes

Peter Morville has written a blog post that tracks the usage of usability and IA terms. To quote:

At the 2002 IA Summit, while talking about New Roles in Information Architecture, I showed the number of Google Hits for a handful of related search terms. Since then, it's been interesting to periodically review the annual growth rates of these user experience memes, and fun to explore the questions they raise.

(For example, the use of "information architecture" has grown by 1062% since 2002.)

Posted by jamesr at 08:01 AM | Permalink
Categories:

John Allsopp

John Allsopp has just launched a new site called WebPatterns.org. To quote:

WebPatterns is slowly getting ready for prime time, so bookmark this page, as we will be continually adding to the site. If you are interested in design patterns and web development, there are a few resources here, and many more to come soon. Be sure to check out our PatternQuiz.

[Thanks to Nick Finck.]

Posted by jamesr at 01:46 PM | Permalink
Categories: Area Health Service project, Book & product reviews, Conferences & presentations, Content management, Design & usability guidelines, Document & records management, E-learning, Information architecture, Information architecture, Information management, Interface design, Intranets, James' articles, Knowledge management, Metrics & ROI, Search tools, Usability & user-centered design, Web development, Weblogs, XML

Save your dough, shut-down the rebels

Toby Ward has written an article on the consolidation of intranets at IBM. To quote:

At one time, in the late 90s, IBM had 10,000+ intranet sites. No, not pages, 10-THOUSAND intranet sites (representing millions of pages). I call that gross intranet sprawl. What's a megalithic corporation to do with 10 grand rebel sites? Shut 'em down.

Posted by jamesr at 09:29 AM | Permalink
Categories:

Structured blogging - enterprise only?

Frank Gilbane has written an brief article on structured blogging, a term I confess I hadn't heard before. To quote:

Structured blogging activity has accelerated, and has reached the important milestone where there is debate about whether it will amount to anything. If you are not familiar with structured blogging, the term itself should be enough to give you a good idea - think of structured editing, eForms, and blogging all mushed together.

Posted by jamesr at 09:17 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Weblogs

Lil' orphan intranet: adopting an ownerless system

Paul Chin has written an article on bringing governance to renegade intranets. To quote:

While it may be tempting for IT to just let it die, the soon-to-be orphaned intranet's users will have something to say about that. It's unfair for the user community to be put in the middle of renegade developers and IT. Regardless of why the unofficial intranet was developed outside of IT's involvement, IT now has an orphaned system with a dependent user-base on their hands and no one to support it.

I find the assumptions and viewpoints of this article very interesting. Paul assumes that intranets are run by IT, and are a development platform (which is not my experience). He also uses very adversarial terms (such as "renegade"), whithout ever asking why business units avoided involving IT inthe first place. He also focuses on the underlying IT platform for these sites, without ever really discussing content, user needs, etc, etc.

So this is a very IT-centric article, and that's a pity. There's still some useful recommendations to be gained from this, but beware of the many assumptions...

[Thanks to Toby Ward.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:36 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

What about site maps and site indexes?

Jared Spool has written a short article on the value of site maps. To quote:

Our research shows that users will rarely turn to these things if the scent on the page is good. Investing resources in building an effective site map or site index is taking resources away from fixing scent problems. We recommend that our clients focus their resources on the scent problems before they turn to these devices as solutions.

Posted by jamesr at 08:06 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

Records management: specifications, certifications, and compliance

Priscilla Emery has published an article (actually an excerpt) that discusses records management certifications, and their relevance when selecting a product. To quote:

Some people co-equate specifications and certifications, but in fact, certifications go beyond defining a standard or set of specifications. Certification bodies use specifications as a set of criteria for testing and qualifying vendors and other parties as compliant with the set of defined specifications. Certification implies both a rigorous set of specifications together with a rigorous testing procedure and set process for demonstrating a product's worthiness to be certified.

Many buyers prefer to acquire certified products because it means that the software has been tested against a baseline set of specifications to be worthy of further review. It tends to aid in the evaluation process when software has gone through some hoops to get a "nod" by non-partisan and reputable agencies or authorities.

Posted by jamesr at 07:03 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management

Content management heats up

Doug Henschen reports on the results of research into content management spending plans. To quote:

Companies of almost all sizes plan to increase spending on content and document management in 2006, while more small and midsize firms expect to increase spending on imaging. These are just two of the conclusions from the recently completed "2006 Intelligent Enterprise Strategic Management Survey," a massive Web-based survey that drew more than 1,131 readers of Intelligent Enterprise magazine and its related Web sites.

[Thanks to Tony Byrne.]

Posted by jamesr at 09:26 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

IBM employees play with podcasting

Stacy Cowley has written an article on the use of podcasting on IBM's intranet, as an internal communications medium. To quote:

In August, IBM made its first official foray into podcasting by launching a series of programs called "IBM and the Future of...," featuring its scientists and other staffers discussing topics like driving, shopping, banking and urban planning. Postcasts are audio files designed to be played on PCs or portable music devices like iPods; listeners can use software to subscribe for automatic downloads of new podcasts in series that interest them.

[Thanks to Toby Ward.]

Posted by jamesr at 09:12 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets, Weblogs

Alternative business models for HCI

John Knight has written an article exploring the potential future markets for usability and human-computer interraction (HCI). To quote:

HCI's move toward a value-centred design requires a wider the focus on the user experience that would include a holistic set of user needs, including accessibility, usability, engagement and benefit. As a commercial offering the evolution of HCI services increases the sustainability of the profession. Such an offering would widen the business case of HCI and immediately opens up a new range of services including: Risk management; Design Management; New Product Development; Standards and Quality Assurance; Service agreements.

Posted by jamesr at 08:27 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Upcoming book on search analytics

Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins are writing a book on internal site search analytics, and they've asked for some help. To quote:

We'd been casting about for good sidebar material, and Rich had a fantastic idea: ask webmasters to list their site's most frequent 20-100 searches--and how many results each retrieved--for inclusion in the book. Then ask the webmasters to include a brief interpretation of the most interesting (or bizarre) aspects of those common searches (e.g., "I think the reason users keep searching for SKU numbers is..."). If we use your information, we'll mention you and thank you in the book.

This is a great way to get your name in lights, and some credit for all the hard work managing your site...

Posted by jamesr at 08:19 AM | Permalink
Categories: Search tools

2,000 downloads of Intranet Review Toolkit

As of last night, we crossed the 2,000 download mark for the free Intranet Review Toolkit, which is very exciting!

If you have used it on your intranet, don't forget to send in your feedback. I'd love to hear your thoughts (positive or negative), what's missing, or how it could be further improved. A version 1.1 release is planned for the new year, so any input you can provide would be gratefully received...

Posted by jamesr at 07:32 AM | Permalink
Categories:

Intranet portals and scent are made for each other

Jared Spool has written an article about intranets and information scent. To quote:

As we observed employees using their organization's intranet, we saw a stark trend: Almost always, users only fire up their browser when they have something to do. They have a mission in mind before they even bring up the portal's initial page. The design of the portal's initial page has to service that mission, whatever it is. Well-designed portal's do this by putting links to important content and functions (such as registering someone as a building visitor -- a common "important" function we've seen at many security-conscious clients) right on the initial page.

Posted by jamesr at 08:48 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Intranets

Is DITA going to tip?

JoAnn Hackos has written an article about the growing popularity of DITA, as a format for managing structured content. To quote:

Obviously, something else must influence XML authoring if it is to move past the tipping point. That "something else" is arguably DITA. DITA represents an enormous advantage to the information-development community. For the first time, it provides us with an informational architecture standard around topic-based authoring that is unique to technical information. It takes us out of the world as defined by book publishers, which has provided us with a basically flawed paradigm for 50 years or more. It gives us a unique identity by pushing us toward semantic markup that enhances the quality of our text. It gives us a context with which to support our need for efficiency, consistency, and effective branding of our content for practiced, action-minded consumers of information. It’s just what technical information developers need to build a unique opportunity for recognition and increased credibility in our otherwise product-oriented world.

[Thanks to Scott Abel.]

Posted by jamesr at 10:55 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, XML

Managing 'glue' at the BBC

Martin Belam has written a fascinating article on the behind-the-scenes glue that holds the BBC together. To quote:

We have an editorial process that puts 'best links' at the head of our search results pages. There is a very good reason for doing this. Across the site we have 'scoped' collections of the search index. For example if you are on the Radio One site and you search you will only get organic results back from the confines of the Radio One site. This limits our users to being able to explore little silos or sub-sets of the BBC's content. If you've navigated to that point, and know that you are looking for something on Radio One, then you will get the right results. However our search log analysis tells us that many people use search because they have navigated down a blind alley, haven't found what they wanted, or have navigated to where they expect to find the information and have failed. If you think back to how complicated the BBC is as an organisation, and that a lot of our content is presented to the public on our own organisational terms, then you can see the scope for users to fail to find the correct area when they are navigating is huge.

Posted by jamesr at 10:29 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Information architecture, Search tools

Lessons learned during CMS implementation

Jeff Oxenford has written a short but very useful blog post on his lessons learned during CMS implementation. To quote:

In an earlier post, I gave 10 lessons learned in getting an organization to embrace a content management system (CMS). These focused on getting our staff ready for CMS (i.e. the organizational culture). Below are 10 lessons we learned when implementing the system.

Posted by jamesr at 04:04 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Introduction to eyetracking: seeing through your users' eyes

Matteo Penzo has written an introduction to eyetracking. To quote:

For some time, usability professionals have evangelized the term discount usability testing. Discount usability testing was a product of the early years of the Internet. Its techniques promised to provide a simple, fast, and relatively economical way of conducting usability studies and improving users' experience of the Web and other software user interfaces. However, such studies are mainly qualitative and subjective. The data reflect users’ conscious thoughts and feelings as well as the observers' impressions. Some think this is the best, even the only method of conducting usability studies, but there are other -- in some situations, perhaps better -- ways of evaluating user interactions. Eyetracking offers unique benefits and provides a practical alternative to conventional discount usability testing.

Posted by jamesr at 03:28 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

IA templates & stencils for Visio

Garrett Dimon has published a set of IA templates and stencils for Viso. To quote:

The wireframe stencil focus mainly on form design by including a variety of form fields and common form elements. Specifically, it includes radio buttons and checkboxes that enable you to easily switch their state. Just right-click a radio button or checkbox and you can specify whether it appears as selected, checked, enabled, or disabled.

[Thanks to Nick Finck.]

Posted by jamesr at 10:11 AM | Permalink
Categories:

Moving from web to print

Tony Byrne answers some of the questions regarding publishing PDFs to websites. To quote:

While PDF has some benefits there are also some well known usability issues. Single-source publishing concepts and technology have been around for quite a while now, though implementation doesn't seem to be very widespread outside traditional areas. I am interested in your thoughts on why many organisations continue to publish so much content on their web sites in PDF only.

Posted by jamesr at 03:07 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Journal of Usability Studies

It's been out for a little while now, but it's still worth mentioning the launch of the Journal of Usability Studies. To quote:

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Usability Studies. This journal was born in response to a growing need in the community of usability practitioners and researchers. Have you ever you looked for the most recent findings of usability studies that you can learn from or wondered where to publish interesting results from your own usability studies? Until now, there was no available forum for usability practitioners and applied researchers to share and disseminate many of their findings and experiences that are of general interest to this community. To meet this need and to fill the gap between academic research and business case studies, the Journal of Usability Studies was born. This publication will be a peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, and education of usability engineering.

It's great to see a new (free) journal in this space, and there's some good articles in this issue (including an invited article by Jakob Nielsen).

Posted by jamesr at 10:52 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Finding users in enterprise environments

Lou Rosenfeld has written a blog entry on finding users in enterprise environments. To quote:

Anyone familiar with enterprise environments knows how difficult it is to come up with a sample that's even remotely representative of the 14,127 audience segments typically encountered in enterprise settings. Some of the barriers are obvious--subjects are geographically distributed, they speak many languages, and there are just so many of them--but the biggest challenges are usually political. Often, you'll need the cooperation of product managers and business units to get in touch with the users they're closest to. But for reasons that range from logistical challenges and being hard to reach, to ignorance of the value of testing and even spite, your colleagues won't always help you contact sample users.

It's interesting. In general, our experience (as consultants) is that finding internal users is pretty easy, much easier than finding external users. A few stray thought that occur to me:

• We start with the org chart and the intranet team, and work out which kinds of staff we want to talk to, and where they may be located in the organisation.
• The intranet team is generally pretty well connected within an organisation. In many cases, this is the time to trade in any favours that the intranet team has accumulated over the years...
• The goal is not to get a statistically-significant cross-section of staff. After all, even if all 1,000 problems were identified, they can't be fixed within time and resource limits. So all we are looking for is the 6 biggest issues or needs to address first.
• Good communication regarding the purpose of the research can often overcome any hesitation that managers may have in volunteering their staff.
• If done right, business areas will compete to be involved, so they get "their say" in the project.

Posted by jamesr at 08:32 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

120 articles written

According to Usability Views, we've written 120 articles in total (see their list of our articles sorted by "popularity"). That seems like quite a lot, but to be honest I'd hadn't sat down to actually count them before now...

Posted by jamesr at 08:21 AM | Permalink
Categories:

WikiMatrix

This is a great idea: WikiMatrix, which allows the features and design of many different wikis to be compared. For a long time now, there's been way too many wikis, with no easy way of working out the right one to pick.

A good first step in the right direction...

Posted by jamesr at 09:43 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

A quick primer on Social Network Analysis

Andrew Rixon has posted a primer on Social Network Analysis, outlining the major steps involved. To quote:

Given that I'm right in the middle of a social network analysis, I thought I'd throw together a very quick, very brief primer on Social Network Analysis. What is Social Network Analysis? A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, the analysis involves a study of these relationships.

Posted by jamesr at 09:25 AM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Release of (free) Intranet Review Toolkit

I'm really excited to announce a brand-new intranet resource, something that we've been quietly working all year. Best of all, we've released it for free, under a Creative Commons license. Full details as follows:

Step Two Designs, in conjunction with the IA Institute, have just released the Intranet Review Toolkit.

This toolkit provides intranet managers and designers with an easy-to-use method to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their intranets. It contains a substantial set of heuristics, allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy.

Released under a Creative Commons license, the Toolkit is free to download and use.

The Intranet Review Toolkit covers eight aspects:

• intranet home page
• site structure and navigation
• search
• page layout and visual design
• intranet content
• news
• staff directory
• intranet strategy and management

The Toolkit has been published as a Word document, designed to be filled in by the intranet reviewer. Space is provided for comments against each of the heuristics, and a total score is calculated for each of the sections.

The Intranet Review Toolkit can be downloaded (for free): Word 97 format (199kb)

Posted by jamesr at 04:40 PM | Permalink
Categories: Area Health Service project, Book & product reviews, Conferences & presentations, Content management, Design & usability guidelines, Document & records management, E-learning, Information architecture, Information architecture, Information management, Interface design, Intranets, Intranets, James' articles, Knowledge management, Metrics & ROI, Search tools, Usability & user-centered design, Web development, Weblogs, XML

Galleries: the hardest working page on your site

Jared M. Spool has written an article on "website galleries" (navigation pages rather than collections of images), examining the effectiveness of design and navigation. To quote:

Galleries are very important to user success, yet we are only now beginning to understand what they need to work well. Designing to eliminate pogosticking is still a new concept for many folks and that is reflected in many of the designs we see today. Understanding how order and layout of the links affect the user's behavior is critical. As time goes on, we suspect we'll see many novel design approaches that help users choose where to go next, all with greater and greater success.

Posted by jamesr at 08:58 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Usability & user-centered design