Articles by Month: July 2006

Using 'guides' as a supplemental navigation technique

Maish Nichani has written an article on writing guides, to help users familiarise themselves with a site. To quote:

Supplemental navigation techniques provide an alternative, complementary or adjunct view to seeking out information on large websites and intranets. This article describes when and how to use one such technique -- the 'guide'.

Posted by jamesr at 05:46 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

More about Scott Berkun

I suspect that many have not come across Scott Berkun before, and are wondering why we've chosen to bring him out for a workshop tour. Let me first say that I've been following Scott's writings for some time now, and his online essays are always amazing, whether he's covering:

• How to pitch an idea
• The mistakes of version 1.0
• How to survive a bad manager
• Why you must lead or follow

These writings give good insight into the pragmatic nature of Scott's thinking and writing, which is reflected in his excellent book The art of project management. At the end of the day, though, we're only interested in bringing out speakers who can progress (or challenge) the thinking of those attending their workshops (including us). Sitting comfortably at the intersection of user experience (UX) and project management (PM), I'm confident that Scott is one of these rare individuals.

If you're involved in any kind of web or software development, this workshop is for you. If you're one member of a big team on a big project (or programme of activities), then the workshop will be doubly relevant. It's going to be fun!

(Scott is will be in Australia from 1-8 September, read the details.)

Posted by jamesr at 06:05 PM | Permalink
Categories: Conferences & presentations

Q and A about the ECM marketplace, circa 2006

Tony Byrne has written an article about the state of the ECM marketplace, as it currently stands. To quote:

First, there remains a fairly wide gap between customer expectations and what these products can really do. Outside of document imaging (which is very mature and relatively well-understood technology), most of the major ECM offerings consist of platforms and toolkits, but customers often believe (and are sometimes led to believe) that the vendor understands their particular business scenario.

Secondly, it means that customers are teaching vendors how to integrate the hodgepodge of different technologies they acquired, and not vice-versa. When wanting to integrate two tools from the same vendor, a customer wants to hear more than, "just license our web services toolkit." But when you strip away the marketing-speak, that's often all they're left with.

Posted by jamesr at 07:37 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Brand experience in user experience design

Steve Baty has written an article on brand experience, in the context of user-centred design. To quote:

This article attempts to identify the appropriate role for brand values as one project objective within the broader framework of user-centered design. If two organizations that provide similar services or products to similar markets both applied a typical user-centered design process, one might logically conclude that they would develop similar Web sites. User research during the early stages of both projects would uncover similar goals and objectives for the target audience -- which is the same for both Web sites -- and, in turn, would lead to similar results.

Posted by jamesr at 10:01 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

CMS simplicity

Michael Angeles explores the topic of CMS simplicity, and the impact it has on the long-term success of content management solutions. To quote:

In the end, it's about money. If you believe that ease of use leads to making more money, you might start to take it seriously. We need to see some studies demonstrate that. But what we're talking about here in terms of actions is simply ensuring the satisfaction of your key asset, your knowledge workers. To put it simply, if employees are happy to keep adding to the business, the business benefits.

Posted by jamesr at 03:19 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Spring rolls for lunch

Spring rolls for lunch

As previously blogged, I've just come back from two weeks of holiday in Vietnam. Many (way too many!) photos were taken, and I'm slowly uploading them to Flickr.

This photo comes from the now-completed set of photos taken during our two-day tour of the Mekong Delta. Watch this space for further photo sets over the coming week or so...

Posted by jamesr at 08:01 PM
Categories:

Folksonomies: a user-driven approach to organising content

Joshua Porter has written an overview of folksonomies. To quote:

Although taxonomies are common, it can be difficult for design teams to implement them. For one thing, taxonomies are very expensive to create and maintain, often involving month-long projects by several members of the team. For sites with thousands (or even millions) of pages, this Herculean task is sometimes never complete. As a result, broken taxonomies can remain until the design team attempts a complete redesign. Second, taxonomies may fail to reflect the language of users if they are not fully tested with the target population. This results in a less effective site that leads to user failure, user frustration, or increased support costs.

Posted by jamesr at 03:40 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

Taming your "target" content

Maish Nichani has written an article on taming your "target" content. To quote:

When it comes to the design of intranets and large websites, the limelight is firmly on issues of taxonomy and navigation (info-seeking) and not so much on the final use (info-using) of the content, known as the target content. The focus is still on the library card catalogue and not on the book. In a book world, this is a non-issue; the book is a well-defined, structured entity. But in a web world, we have to deal with open-ended, heterogeneous content, which if not designed for use can be as detrimental to the user experience as weak info-seeking structures. This article briefly describes a simple approach that can help improve the use of target content.

Posted by jamesr at 02:22 PM | Permalink
Categories:

Guide to remote usability testing

Nate Bolt has written an article on remote usability testing. To quote:

If you'd like to get started with remote testing, you have three easy steps. First, choose a recruiting method, then decide on a screen-sharing tool, and third, figure out if audio and video recording is important to you and decide on a method for that. Then you just have to give it a whirl, ideally with a trial study, or you can just use it for an actual project. If you're already doing some remote usability, don't forget to experiment with different study designs and new tools. In 1999, we did 5% of our studies remotely at Bolt | Peters using Timbuktu or PcAnywhere. By 2005, almost 95% of our studies were conducted remotely. Now we hardly ever leave the computer screen, which is everyone’s goal, right?

Posted by jamesr at 12:07 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Sydney CM Pros Meeting (Sydney, July 26)

We will be running a moderated panel on Content Management Workflow and Capturing Processes in line with recent discussion threads on the Australian CM Pros List. In order to fit in with Open Publish, the meeting is being moved from Thursday to Wednesday, so please ignore any previous notifications. Please circulate this invitation to anyone (any lists) that you feel may be interested in attendance.

Details are:

Time | Wednesday, 26 July 2006 | 5.30pm to 7.00pm
Venue | Avillion Hotel, 389 Pitt Street, Sydney (same venue as Open Publish)

Panelists:

James Robertson | Step Two Designs & CM Pros Co-Chair
Matthew Moore | Oracle
Melanie Kendell | Emorphus
Marius Coomans | Active Web Communications

Moderator:
David Warwick | CM Pros Co-Chair & Komodo CMS

(Attendance is open to all interested parties, however nomination for office bearers is only open to paid-up CM Pros members.)

Cost:
As always, the cost is FREE, however for Open Publish, we ask for a voluntary donation of $10 to assist in covering the room hire. If $10 is an obstacle, we would rather your attendance than your money ;-)

See you on the night!

Posted by jamesr at 11:59 AM | Permalink
Categories: Conferences & presentations

Scott Berkun is coming to Australia!

Why do so many design intensive projects go so wrong? Scott Berkun will be presenting a one day masterclass titled Leading successful web and software projects, designed to teach you the best practices and leadership tactics for starting, managing and shipping web and software projects that rely on design skills.

Scott Berkun was the program manager at Microsoft responsible for versions 1.0 to 5.0 of Internet Explorer, and is the author of the best-selling The Art of Project Management (published by O'Reilly). This is Scott's first visit to Australia, and he shouldn't be missed!

Scott is unique in understanding of both design and development skills, and the challenges of managing complex and ever-shifting projects. This masterclass is designed for both project managers and user experience professionals (including usability specialists and information architects).

Tour dates:

Sydney: 1 September 2006
Canberra: 6 September 2006
Melbourne: 8 September 2006

At this masterclass, you will learn:

• How to diagnose and resolve common project challenges
• An understanding of how managers view the role of user experience specialists (and how to use it to your advantage)
• Techniques for building credibility and earning influence
• Tactics for setting goals, tracking work and delivering on time
• How to prevent a crisis (and how to survive it when it happens)

Through interactive discussion and fun exercises, you'll explore why so many web and software projects fail, how to influence decisions you don’t control and how to successfully plan and schedule your own projects.

Book early to guarantee a place and to obtain the early-bird rate!

[Full event details]

Posted by jamesr at 07:00 PM | Permalink
Categories: Conferences & presentations

Productive dashboards

Michael Andrews has written an entry on enterprise dashboards. To quote:

New generation dashboards are now presenting data more relevant to front-line employees, particularly their KPIs (key performance indicators). The seamless corporation created by enterprise software is allowing a multitude of data indicators to be collected and presented in ways tailored to the work of individual employees. Such dashboards promise to improve measurement and awareness of activity (enabling improvement) and support long-standing goals to de-layer decision making and give more responsibility to front line staff. Dashboards have moved a big step toward relevance to employees, but few dashboards are truly user centered, because they don't address underlying user motivations.

Posted by jamesr at 10:26 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Intranets

Enterprise expertise management systems and organizational reality

Dennis D. McDonald has written an article on enterprise expertise management systems. To quote:

In my research I'm trying to understand the characteristics of organizations that will impact their adoption of expertise management systems. The purpose of this article is to discuss how this situation might relate to automating some of the processes involved in expert location. The details suggested here are based on a review of systems that are currently being developed or marketed as well as a straightforward application of basic business process automation and workflow management techniques.

Posted by jamesr at 03:19 PM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Do links need underlines?

Jared Spool revists the age-old question: do links need underlines? To quote:

During our recent Virtual Seminar on home page design, several people asked about whether it makes a difference if links are underlined or not. It’s a good question and one we get frequently. Let's look at some examples.

Posted by jamesr at 09:27 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Why do we share knowledge?

Patrick Lambe has written an entry exploring why we share knowledge, providing a simple but useful model. To quote:

There's another common assumption in the knowledge sharing literature that I think needs to be challenged, and that is that knowledge sharing is essentially an engineering problem somehow associated with motivation. It's an input/output problem. If you can understand the levers of motivation, you can design a system that will create the right input, and hey presto, out will come the desired knowledge sharing.

Now I'm sure it's perfectly true that motivation matters in many cases, but I can think of lots of instances where knowledge sharing is not obviously instrumental and cannot be said to have motives driving it.

Posted by jamesr at 09:12 PM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

User focused language for intranets and websites

Nick Besseling has written an article on writing for users. To quote:

Despite the growing awareness of content quality and usability, there is still many organisations and online content producers that can’t get out of their headspace and silos. (See user logic). Why are some still continuing to develop intranet and website content focused on what we or our managers think users may want?

Posted by jamesr at 04:19 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Back from holidays in Vietnam

The lack of posts over the last two weeks is a direct result of being on holidays. As a spur of the moment thing, I had an opportunity to spend two weeks travelling through Vietnam, which I jumped at without hesitation.

It's a lovely country, and we managed to travel from Ho Chi Minh City in the South through to Hanoi in the North, with a few stops along the way. I've already uploaded the first batch of photos, with many more to come...

Posted by jamesr at 04:13 PM | Permalink
Categories:

Oz-IA Conference & Retreat

On the last weekend of September 2006 there will be a conference and retreat on information architecture in Sydney, Australia. This is the first such event dedicated to IA in Australia.

Details as follows:

Oz-IA 2006
Sep 30th & Oct 1st
Sydney, Australia

As well as conveniently following on from this year's Web Directions conference), this event is scheduled for the same weekend as the EURO IA conference. Keith Instone has already suggested a live link between the two conferences.

The retreat is planned to be a semi-formal series of practical sessions on information architecture and related topics, aimed at practicing IAs and those within the broader industry interested in expanding their knowledge of the theory and practice.

There's some great local and international speakers to get the thoughts moving, including Mark Bernstein, Thomas Vander Wal, Dan Saffer, Donna Maurer, David Sless, Steve Baty, and James Robertson (me!).

There will be case study presentations; detailed how-to sessions; and general 'where are we going' discussions. We will also be organising some group participation sessions and even leaving a slot or two open for some self-organised sessions.

And there'll be opportunities a-plenty to meet and mingle with peers and uber-IAs from Australia and around the world. It¹s a weekend retreat, so you can relax and discuss the joys, tribulations, and tricks of information architecture with like-minded individuals.

More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks & months, so pencil in those dates, subscribe to the RSS or Atom news feeds, or sign up for email announcements.

I think this will be a great event, organised by practioners for practioners. All the good stuff at a price you'll be able to afford!

Posted by jamesr at 10:01 PM
Categories: Conferences & presentations, Information architecture

The real cost of email in organisations

Much has been written about the impact of 'email overload', in terms of the productivity cost and impact on attention spans for staff. There is another very real cost of the reliance on email: the duplication of information management activities.

'All staff' emails are often used to send out new policies and procedures, product updates and other changes. These can range from a few paragraph to 50 pages, and it is left for each staff member to keep track of this information.

In an organisation of 1,000 staff, this leads to the effort of managing these updates being multiplied by a factor of a thousand, generating a significant impact on productivity, consistency and accuracy.

Corporate communication via email

'All staff' emails are often used as the primary way of distributing many types of information, including new policies and procedures, changes to IT systems, training materials and product updates.

In many cases, staff need to keep this information for later use. In practice, most staff store these messages in elaborate folders within their email program, so they can be quickly searched when needed. Every staff person comes up with their own folder structure, and conducts their own information management activities.

In practice, these email folders continue to grow until IT enforces limits on mailbox sizes, and they are required to delete potentially valuable information to meet IT policies.

[CM Briefing 2006-12, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 10:20 PM
Categories: Information management

Five key intranet policies

Most intranets have some form of policies and procedures, typically focusing on authoring guidelines and standards.

The question is: are these the right policies to have? In many cases, intranet teams have established policies that they find difficult to enforce, while missing the opportunity to develop policies that will be much more beneficial for both the intranet team and the site itself.

This briefing takes a different look at the role of intranet policies, and outlines five policies that all intranet teams should develop.

The role of intranet policies

Policies and procedures are all too often written as administrative or bureaucratic documents outlining how to operate within an organisation. A classic example of this is the "email usage policy", commonly written, but almost never read.

When it comes to the intranet, many organisations have policies that cover intranet authoring standards, such as writing style, linking policies, and the like. While these are certainly useful, there are policies that can have a much greater (and more direct) impact on the success of the intranet.

Intranet policies can be written as simple guides outlining how the intranet operates, and how it is to be managed. These 'human-friendly' policies should ideally be no more than a single page in length, designed to be given to intranet stakeholders and authors.

They should also be written by the intranet team, rather than some other group. The primary purpose of these policies is to answer common questions, or to resolve common issues.

More importantly, they give the intranet team support when dealing with difficult situations. Even when the policies have been written by the intranet team themselves, they still provide greater weight than just the verbal recommendations of the team.

[CM Briefing 2006-11, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 10:09 PM
Categories: Intranets, James' articles

Intranets as a news channel

Improving the effectiveness of internal communications is often one of the key goals underpinning corporate intranets. In practice, this is often reflected in 'latest news' section on the home page of most intranets. While news on the home page is certainly widespread, the question needs to be asked: how effective is it?

This article explores the role of the intranet as a news channel, revisiting some of the assumptions about how best to deliver online news within an organisation.

News on the home page

News is often the central element of intranet home pages, filling up the central area of the page and providing the most frequently updated content. This 'latest news' section is used to communicate a range of news items, including:

• CEO messages
• major corporate updates
• updated policies
• changes to the intranet itself

Updated regularly, this news section represents the intranet's role as a news channel, one that reaches staff throughout the organisation. The fundamental principle is to provide a single location that staff can visit to find out the latest happenings and updates.

Intranet news is also intended to be a 'pull factor' that will draw staff to the site every day, as well as giving the intranet ever-changing content that shows that the site is both useful and up-to-date.

[July KM Column, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 09:39 PM
Categories: Intranets, James' articles

10 information retrieval patterns

Joe Lamantia has expanded on his previous posts by outlining 10 information retrieval patterns. To quote:

In this follow-up, I'll share a set of 10 potentially reusable information retrieval patterns that describe the ways users combine and switch modes to meet goals: Each pattern is assembled from combinations of the same four modes. We found these patterns while analyzing and interpreting user research on the goals and behaviors of a wide variety of users active within a large information environment. This environment provides complex financial services content and capabilities through a product-based user experience that requires a costly subscription. This particular set of patterns emerged from a mix of user research gathered using ethnography, contextual analysis, cognitive walkthrough, and heuristics review, in addition to straight forward interviews with users.

Posted by jamesr at 09:42 AM | Permalink
Categories: