Articles by Month: November 2006

Panorama: gargoyle looking out across Paris

Panorma: gargoyle looking out across Paris

This trip I had some fun taking lots of photos, stitching them into big panoramas. This is one of my favourites, of a gargoyle on Notre Dame looking out across a cloudy city. (You'll need to zoom is to see all the lovely details.)

Posted by jamesr at 10:44 PM
Categories:

The trouble with portal dashboards…

Janus Boye has written an article on the usability issues with portal dashboards. To quote:

Based on hundreds of interviews CMS Watch has conducted with users worldwide, it's clear that portal software customers must invest more in creating usable and accessible user interfaces. Today most organisations blindly adopt the default 'building block' approach to layout found in enterprise portals --- a relic from the early days of public internet portals.

Posted by jamesr at 08:16 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Information management, Intranets, Usability & user-centered design

Search is the big topic

I'm at the Online Information conference in London, and it's clear that the big topic of the conference is search. Almost one-third of the sessions are on some aspect of search, whether it's the public search engines, or enterprise search.

There's a lot of talk about the enterprise space in particular, which is very encouraging. It's clear that information professionals (if not yet others) have rediscovered the importance of search for general business users.

Every second sentence involves "Google" (whether good or bad), which is pretty funny. What is most interesting, however, is that there is a lot of talk about the "future of search": what search will look like, how it will work, what the marketplace will look like.

What has barely been discussed is making search work today. So the talks are long on aspirations, theories and predictions, but still very short on practical advice for organisations looking to improve their current search experience.

This is something that I've obviously written about in the past, and I'm looking forward to seeing more practical advice at future conferences as real-world experiences build up...

Posted by jamesr at 07:44 PM | Permalink
Categories: Search tools

Stained glass detail

Stained glass detail

Having just spent a long weekend in Paris as part of my London trip, I can safely say what many already know: Paris is a beautiful city!

This is detail from one of the magnificent stained glass windows in Notre Dame. Still uploading the rest of the photos from the weekend...

Posted by jamesr at 12:58 AM
Categories:

Users don't personalise

This keeps coming up: one of the benefits that is sold for portals is that users can "personalise" (or tailor) what content and functionality is displayed on their home page. The problem is that users don't personalise, despite the hopes (and optimism) of the IT team.

Now, I "know" that the real-life statistic is that only 5-10% of users personalise. This means that 90-95% of staff will leave the portal as-is, leaving the portal owners with the same design, usability and IA challenges they had with the intranet.

The problem is that I don't have an official source for this figure, although it matches the direct experiences I've had with organisations. Now I'm being asked by intranet managers to give them some "evidence" that they can use when dealing with their bosses (and IT).

So, can anyone point me towards a source for this figure? Please email me if you can help.

Posted by jamesr at 12:39 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

6x2 methodology unveiled

Today I completed the draft of what will be our next report: the 6x2 methodology for intranet planning. This is something that I've hinted at for the last few months, but I can finally unveil what it actually consists of:

• Step 1: Give the intranet a version number
• Step 2: Scope the first six months
• Step 3: Determine a new version number
• Step 4: Review the in-scope list
• Step 5: Create a detailed project plan
• Step 6: Sketch out the following six months
• Step 7: Create an executive briefing
• Step 8: Create an 'intranet concept'
• Step 9: Implement the six month plan
• Step 10: Review the project outcomes

I realise this still doesn't give a lot away, but it won't be long before the full (70 page) report is out. In the meantime, what I can say is that it is a very different way of looking at how to manage the ongoing improvement of the intranet, and an approach that works within existing constraints instead of trying to work around them.

News flash: I've just finished the slides for my workshop at the Online Information conference in London next week. This will now be the first time anywhere in the world to see the full 6x2 methodology, as I've made it the core of the workshop. This is something you wont want to miss, so if you're in (or near) London you'll definitely want to sign up.

Posted by jamesr at 09:27 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Moon over the pre-dawn beach

Moon over the pre-dawn beach

I recently had a long weekend away, up the coast at Forster. It's a lovely area, and my two 4:30am starts were rewarded with a number of beautiful pre-dawn coastal photos.

This one is entirely free of Photoshopping (I promise!), and the red is actually the product of nearby lighting, which is very striking against the deep blue sky...

Posted by jamesr at 09:22 PM
Categories:

CMPros meeting (Sydney, 23 November)

If you are in any way involved with content management, you will want to attend the CM Professional meetings that are regularly held in Sydney and Melbourne. These gatherings are open to all, and provide a unique opportunity to share ideas with others in the same field.

Details on the upcoming meeting in Sydney:

Sydney CM Pros Meeting

Our final Sydney meeting for 2006 will be on 'Measuring the success of your website'. A panel discussion on Google Analytics, Webstats, Search Ranking and other objective and subjective ways of measuring the success of your website.

Details are ...
Time | Thursday, 23 November 2006 | 5.00pm to 7.00pm
Venue | Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts – 280 Pitt Street (near Bathurst Street), Sydney
* Please note the earlier start time (the Panel will commence at 5.15pm).

Format ...
Panel presentation and open discussion. There are still some panel places left, so if you are an expert on this topic and would like to assist in leading the discussion, please email david@komodocms.com

Please come along and celebrate the end of 2006 and circulate this email to anyone you feel would be interested in this topic.

Cheers and best wishes for the season,

David Warwick
Co-Chair
CMPAC

Posted by jamesr at 06:02 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Organizing your global corporate intranet

Indi Young has written an article on the IA of global corporate intranets. To quote:

"Are we too US-centric?" This question is on the minds of every US client that we talk to. International companies rely upon their intranets to help customers and employees in other countries communicate. As such, it's important to make sure your intranet provides information that is appropriate for all its users.

Posted by jamesr at 01:24 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Launch of the Intranet Leadership Forum

After our recent hard work, it's great to be able to officially launch the Intranet Leadership Forum. To quote:

The Intranet Leadership Forum is a professional community for intranet managers and teams in Australia and New Zealand. By joining the Forum you will have access to real-life solutions for your organisation’s intranet issues from peers who have already found the answers, saving your organisation time and money.

You will receive many benefits to improve the effectiveness of your organisation’s intranet and the skills of your team. These include workshops, best-practice toolkits and guides, a members-only website and networking opportunities.

The new website contains a considerable amount of detail on the Forum, including how the workshops will be run, sample online discussions, a sample "how-to" guide and much more.

We've also organised a launch party for those in Sydney (or nearby), details as follows:

You are invited to join us for drinks and networking to launch the new Intranet Leadership Forum

Thursday 7th December from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Swissôtel, Market Street, Sydney

Also hear James Robertson introduce his new perspectives on ’The evolution of intranets’

Register by Friday 1st December via email: register@intranetleadership.com.au
(limit of 2 people per organisation, advance registration a must to allow for catering to be finalised)

Posted by jamesr at 01:14 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Presenting at Online Information (London)

Just a quick note to say that I'll be back in London again in a few weeks, for the Online Information conference. There's plenty of good stuff at the conference, but I'll highlight that I'm running a half-day Intranets as a business tool pre-conference workshop.

This will feature my brand-new 6x2 methodology, which is a unique way of planning the enhancement and growth of intranets. I'm not often in the UK (perhaps once a year on average), so I would encourage you to sign up to the workshop or to seek me out during the conference itself. (I think you can register for just the workshop if time is limited.)

Posted by jamesr at 07:41 PM | Permalink
Categories: Conferences & presentations

No career path for an intranet manager?

Jane McConnell has written about the perceived lack of career path for intranet managers. To quote:

One evening during KMWorld & Intranets, I stood in the dark streets of San Jose, light rain falling, talking with a colleague discussing career paths for intranet managers and we ran into a conference attendee, an intranet manager in a very large organisation I will leave un-named. He feels strongly that an intranet manager cannot move up, nor sideways, only down.

Posted by jamesr at 03:57 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

World Usability Day (Sydney, November 14, 2006)

Who said users don't matter?

On November 14, 2006, in towns and cities around the world, life will be a little easier. That's when the second annual World Usability Day takes place -- a global event promoting the value of usability: designing things that simply work better.

As part of this event, Sydney will host a number of free activities at the State Library of NSW. The focus will be to communicate ways of improving the user experience of products and services.

The program includes:

• The benefits of including usability when designing products and services
• Microsoft's usability strategy for Office 2007
• Mobile phone usability and the opportunities for the future
• Launch and demonstration of NEWS Lab - the new research and development section of NEWS.com.au
• A demonstration of how vision impaired users experience the web and how it can be improved.

This event also provides an opportunity to talk to professionals and learn more about developments in usability.

For more information, please visit the event site.

Posted by jamesr at 07:10 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Intranet as a mirror to the organisation

Every organisation has a unique mix of culture, business processes, history, technology and strategic directions (to name but a few factors). When it comes to intranets, it can then be said that they hold up a mirror to the organisation. To put it another way: the most successful intranets are those that directly reflect the unique nature of the organisations they serve.

One of the most immediate consequences of this is that we need to abandon the naive idea of the 'best' intranet. There can be no absolute measure of intranet quality and effectiveness, and the success of the intranet is only meaningfully measured within the local environment.

Organisations are unique

Even within a single industry sector, such as the insurance industry, the public sector, or healthcare, organisations are very different. These differences are generated by many factors, including:

• size
• geographic spread
• technology
• resources
• culture (staff and organisational)
• staff skills and experience
• history
• services offered
• strategic direction

The result is that every organisation has a unique environment, which strongly influences the direction and role of the intranet.

[CM Briefing 2006-20, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 08:20 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets, James' articles

Intranet kiosks or remote access?

There are many staff that have little (or no) access to a computer during work hours, let alone the intranet. To name but a few, these staff include: nurses, factory workers, construction engineers, parking inspectors, mobile salespeople, community centre staff, truck drivers and pilots.

In some organisations, the proportion of staff without ready access to a computer might be quite small, while in others it may dominate.

In either case, it is important that all staff have access to the information and tools that they need. The migration of content and services to the intranet must also not disenfranchise staff; stated more strongly, all staff should directly benefit from intranet improvements.

The challenge then becomes how best to provide access to the intranet for these off-line staff. The option first considered is often to install ‘kiosks’ (computers with intranet access) in key locations throughout the working environment.

While this is potentially useful, a more effective approach may be to provide remote access to the intranet for all staff, so that it can be used from home (or elsewhere).

[CM Briefing 2006-19, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 08:08 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Feed your enterprise with RSS

Conceptually, 'news feeds' are quite simple, allowing content such as news articles to be delivered over the internet without the need to browse a website.

News feeds first came to our attention during the mid 90s when the hype surrounding 'push' was at its peak. The hype didn't last and it was some time before feeds were again the centre of attention as 'blogs' entered the mainstream, almost a decade later.

Nowadays everyone has a blog and many websites offer a variety of feeds, from news, blog posts and even blog post comments. The technology underpinning these feeds is predominantly RSS, which originally stood for 'Really Simple Syndication'.

For the purposes of this discussion, the terms RSS and 'news feeds' cover the actual RSS protocol (in all it's various versions) as well as Atom (a later refinement of the RSS protocol), RDF and any other type of asynchronous information feed.

Lately, the concept has evolved to include multimedia, with 'podcasting' making use of feeds to deliver audio (music and radio programmes) and, more recently, video (ie 'vodcasting').

Hence it's quite common for most web users to be using feeds on the public web. But what about within an organisation, are feeds useful there too?

RSS in the enterprise

A company can create its own feeds for internal use. The obvious use for these feeds is for distributing corporate news, particularly useful for multinational corporations where geography makes the coordinated updating of intranet news difficult.

However, there are a number of other hugely beneficial uses for feeds in the enterprise:

• compiling multiple content sources
• keeping up with industry developments
• easily publishing corporate news
• collaborating within project teams
• synchronising and replicating content

[November KM Column written by Patrick Kennedy, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 07:49 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Information management, Intranets

Is left-hand navigation evil?

The design of intranets can be pretty standard, with many sites following the same basic layout. The diagram above shows a typical intranet page, consisting of the following elements:

• page header, containing global navigation
• left-hand navigation, containing local navigation
• body of the page
• page footer

This is all pretty standard, nothing that anyone wouldn't immediate recognise. By default, new intranet designs tend to automatically follow this model. All that being said, I'm nonetheless starting to wonder: is left-hand navigation evil?

The good

Left-hand navigation is obviously not inherently evil. There is a clear need to help users to navigate their way into the intranet, down to lower levels of the site. The left-hand navigation provides a simple and consistent way of doing this, as well as providing 'at-a-glance' visibility of the major links and sections.

So far, so good. So, what's the problem then?

The bad

The issue is not with the design of the left-hand navigation, but how it's used. In particular, how it ends up being used in a decentralised authoring environment for a large and organically-growing intranet.

These are the issues that I see all too often:

• New items get added to the left-hand navigation in an ad-hoc way.
• This quickly leads to a near-random list of items, with major sections ("HR policies and procedures") scattered amongst individual items ("Online payslip").
• In many cases, there can be more than a dozen items squeezed into the tiny sidebar, severely impacting on readability and usability.
• By providing a convenient (and default) place to put links, there seems to be no requirement to think through what is added.
• With the key links on the sidebar, this leaves little obvious purpose for the body of the top-level pages, and many authors (feeling the need to fill them with something) write the standard "about us" or "overview text".
• This leaves the body of the top-level pages as useless "blah blah" text, with the primary purpose of these pages (navigation) being squeezed into the sidebar.
• Links are often also duplicated in an ad-hoc way between the left-hand sidebar, the body of the page, and any right-hand "related information" boxes.
• Having run intranet usability tests, we often see users completely miss the left-hand sidebar, particularly when it is poorly designed.

Note that experienced authors and site administrators do not fall into these traps, and there is nothing inherently evil about the left-hand sidebar. However, in a large organisation many authors are fairly inexperienced and are given little in the way of clear guidance or training.

Having been given the responsibility to maintain the HR section, they do their best to find a place for new content as it is added. Without a clear understanding of information architecture principles, the ad-hoc use of the left-hand sidebar seems like a perfectly good solution.

In practice, however, the poor use of the left-hand sidebar keeps coming up as one of the major usability issues on intranets. Even when completely redesigning sites, the ad-hoc use of the sidebar seems to creep back in even before all the content has been migrated, lessening (or even entirely eliminating) many of the intended benefits of the redesign.

This also comes back to the need to design intranets all the way to the bottom, and not to finish the design process at the home page of the site.

Eliminate the sidebar?

I'm wondering whether the answer is to entirely eliminate the sidebar. I'm a great believer in having the key navigation to lower-level content within the body of the page. Usability studies consistently show that users focus on the body area, and filter out most (or all) of the surrounding elements.

This devotes the majority of the top-level pages to their primary purpose: navigation. It also gives more space for supporting text and other design elements which greatly improve information scent.

They would be eliminated not because they are inherently evil, but because they inevitably seem to be used poorly in a decentralised environment. Of course, training and mentoring of authors to build their skills is the only long-term solution, but eliminating the left-hand sidebar might remove one of the obvious traps for inexperienced authors. It might also help to eliminate much of the useless "blah blah" content that overwhelms many intranets.

Your thoughts on this? Please do email me.

Posted by jamesr at 10:44 AM | 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

Eyetracking of forms: should we accept the conclusions?

Caroline Jarrett has written an article summarising the research on the eyetracking of forms, and discussing the conclusions. To quote:

Now, I think all this is very interesting and I'm glad that Matteo is working on it. But I'm a touch cautious about applying all his conclusions without thinking them through a bit more. For example, he advocates placing labels above the fields because that condition was the quickest - but as 'Steve' points out in his comment on the article, the labels are slightly easier to understand for the form where the labels were placed above the fields.

Posted by jamesr at 03:20 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Card sorting: an inexpensive and practical usability technique

Joshua Kaufman has published an article on card sorting. To quote:

If you're designing a system to organize content, you can either come up with your own labeling system -- which may or may not be shared by others -- or you can talk to the actual users of the system and learn how they perceive its content. There are many methods of gathering this user data, but they can often be both time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, there's hope: one method that is generally inexpensive, quick, and easy is card sorting.

Posted by jamesr at 05:47 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

The various approaches to evaluation & measurement

IBF has published a summary of my talk at IBF Live on "The various approaches to evaluation & measurement". To quote:

Some popular preconceptions about intranet evaluation came under fire in an entertaining and provocative keynote address by James Robertson at this year's IBF Live 2006 event. His central message was that intranet teams often evaluate and measure for the wrong reasons and without fully grasping what their intranet is for.

James, who is MD of the Sydney-based consultancy Step Two Designs and author of The Intranet Roadmap, argued that users will ultimately determine whether an intranet is successful. Even a perfectly designed and structured site will be useless if it does not provide the information and functionality they need. The key to usefulness is to view the intranet as a business tool, the effectiveness of which is measured in terms of outcomes, not activity.

Scroll down to the bottom of the article to listen to a podcast of my talk, along with the other keynote speakers...

Posted by jamesr at 05:38 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Visible narratives: understanding visual organisation

Luke Wroblewski has written an article on visible narratives, with the aim of bridging visual design and information architecture. To quote:

Whenever we attempt to make sense of information visually, we first observe similarities and differences in what we are seeing. These relationships allow us to not only distinguish objects but to give them meaning. For example, a difference in color implies two distinct objects (or different parts of the same object), a difference in scale suggests one object is further from us than the other, a difference in texture (one is more blurry) enforces this idea, and so on. Once we have an understanding of the relationships between elements, we can piece together the whole story and understand what we are seeing.

Posted by jamesr at 07:41 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Usability & user-centered design

New IE7 shakes up CMS and portal implementations

Tony Byrne and Janus Boye have written an article on the impact of IE7 on CMS and portal products. To quote:

IE7 has been available in beta since Spring, 2006. However, early versions were buggy, and seemingly many vendors did not test it seriously. But Microsoft fixed nearly all the bugs and in mid-October made a release candidate available for download while making noises about installing IE7 automatically through its notorious "AutoUpdate" service. Used infrequently in enterprise settings, AutoUpdate is a common service among home and small business computers running Windows.

Portal and CMS developers have been scrambling ever since. Noted one CMS vendor in an e-mail to us, "We were a little surprised at the schedule, having assumed it would be released a bit later. With the AutoUpdate, you really can't afford to wait!"

Posted by jamesr at 09:21 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Top 5 scariest intranet tales

Toby Ward has written an item on his scariest intranet tales. To quote:

Boo! Okay, really, that's about as scary as I'm going to get here. After all I am talking about intranets... dull, boring, uneventful intranets. Hell, I may be passionate about them but I'm also a realist... On the eve of Halloween, and having seen so many hundreds of intranets, I thought it would be fun to relate my top 5 scariest moments in my intranet years. Of course, intranets can't really be scary in the literal sense so when I say 'scary' I'm really meaning 'stupid'.

Posted by jamesr at 08:18 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets