Column Two

Nick Besseling has written a blog post discussing some issues on portals. To quote: My main concern about 'Portal' software is the lack of accessibility and usability standard compliance with the software as well as taking the ability away from organisations to ensure that the code of their intranet is ...

Having spent a few days in London, I've arrived in Aarhus (Denmark). I must say, it's a lovely city, very easy to walk around, with plenty of good shopping. I've also been made to feel extremely welcome, by not just the conference organisers (thanks Janus and Flemming!), but by Danish ...

Martin White has published a new report, the Enterprise Search Guidebook. These are my thoughts on the report: Publishing content within an organisation is one thing, ensuring staff can find it when they need it is another. Organisations everywhere are realising the importance of having an effective search engine within ...

Peter Merholz has written a blog entry asking: is lab usability dead? To quote: I would love it if we could simply put a stake into the practice of lab usability. It's run its course, and it's simply not well suited to truly measuring the effectiveness of designs in the ...

I'm pleased to announce that we've organised a pair of workshops for Adelaide, as follows: Usability Testing Fundamentals (Wednesday, 30 November 2005) Information Architecture Fundamentals (Thursday, 1 December 2005) We have been running these workshops for some time, and they provide an excellent introduction to the disciplines of usability and information ...

At best, corporate intranets can be valuable business tools that deliver tangible efficiency gains and business benefits. All too many intranets, however, are simply treated as publishing platforms, as dumping grounds for second-hand documents. Ark Group Australia and Step Two Designs have come together to present a master class to ...

Rob Sullivan write on some of the search engine issues to consider when selecting a CMS. To quote: There are a few CMS which are designed with search engines in mind. By search engine friendly one must know if it support unique meta tags for each page and are these tags ...

Chris Kutler and Ray Devaney have written a case study on analysing search logs, to understand how users are seeking information in a large repository. To quote: The initial analysis concentrated on determining the frequency of keywords per search. The underlying basis of the approach was a commonly held view ...

InfoWorld has published a case study of a CMS disaster, caused by a lack of author involvement in the project. To quote: The new system I was developing would be an improvement, but I knew it would take time for our users to become productive in the new environment -- ...

Dan Saffer has written an article on some issues with personas. To quote: The main cause of this mess is that half of the personas out there are entirely made up, with no user research to back them. In most cases, no one on the design team has talked directly ...

The first of my CM Briefings for August suggests that more users demands a simpler CMS. To quote: An assumption is made that a "big" CMS will be needed to meet the "enterprise" needs. In practice, a better rule is that the more users that will be accessing the ...

I will be presenting at the next NSW KM Forum meeting on knowledge management for call centres. This should be a good fun talk, with plenty of real life examples and practical ideas. Full details: Knowledge Management for Call CentresImportant note: If you plan to attend, please RSVP by e-mail to ...

The Open Publish conference is finally here! Starting on Wednesday of this week, there will be three days of web content management, publishing and more. I'll be presenting a half-day pre-conference workshop on selecting a CMS, and then chairing the web content management stream on the first day of ...

D. Keith Robinson has written a blog entry that outlines his usable content manifesto. To quote: One of the things I've spent much of my time working with is content, mainly the written variety. How it

Rashmi Sinha has written a blog entry on the increasingly popularity of corporate anthropology. To quote: Unlike the more cut and dried approach of psychology (especially experimental psychology), anthropologists try to get under the skin of the people they are studying. Psychological method shifts the focus to what can be ...

A while back, I started a review of information management (IM) and records management (IM) practices within a public-sector organisation. Against my expectations, this has proven to be very interesting, and I thought I would share some of my personal realisations. Background I was brought in to conduct a review of IM ...

Our KM Column article this month is a case study that looks at the results of five intranet reviews. To quote: Over the past few years, we have conducted a number of intranet reviews across a wide range of organisations, and the results have always been fascinating. This case study presents ...

Kevin Cheng has written an article on moderating a usability study, aimed at those new to usability. To quote: Here are some considerations and steps I usually take when I'm moderating a usability test. For those who are experienced, I encourage you to add your thoughts. For those of you ...

It's always great to bring fresh blood into the business, so I'm excited to announce today the addition of a new senior consultant: Tudor Goode. Tudor has 10 years of experience in the industry, with in-depth knowledge of information architecture, usability, instructional design, and interface design. Tudor will be located in ...

Priscilla Emery has written an article that answers the question: why records management? To quote: To some, managing records represents one of the most boring and onerous business functions that anyone could possibly undertake within an organization. Of course, most people don

Gerry McGovern has written an article on ensuring that your intranet is well perceived by staff. To quote: Many intranets are only now beginning to show their true potential. However, many staff, having had unsatisfactory previous experiences of the intranet, may need quite some convincing that the intranet is now ...

I will be heading over to Auckland again, to participate in the 5th Annual Strategic Intranet Management Conference, being held on 15-17 August. During the conference, I will be giving an extended presentation on the evolution of intranets, and what this means in terms of the next steps to take. ...

Pete Giraffe has written a blog entry on how to validate an entire site against W3C standards. To quote: Recently I had a situation where I wanted to validate a large collection of pages. A customer has a rather large site and more than 100 editors are involved in content ...

Just a quick note to say that I'll be one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming AGLIN Annual Conference, to be held in Canberra on 12-13 July 2005. This is what I'll be presenting on: The corporate intranet is the one environment that brings together all the disparate ...

Just a quick note to say that the early bird rate for the Usability Testing Fundamentals and IA Fundamentals workshops closes on Tuesday. (It was originally set for Monday, but we forgot it was a public holiday so everyone gets a day's grace.) Workshop details can be found here: Usability Testing ...

Step Two Designs is recognised as a leading usability/IA consulting firm in Australia, with a unique focus on intranet design and management. Our articles and reports are very widely read, and our team participates in conferences and workshops globally. Our business is growing rapidly, and we are therefore looking to ...

At this point, it looks like I'll be traveling across to Auckland (New Zealand) in late March, to run an in-house intranet alignment day for a local non-profit organisation. If anyone else would like me to run a similar session for their organisation (or other intranet/IA/CMS work), just drop ...

Bonnie Rogers, Chris Hamblin, & Alex Chaparro have written an article that compares ways of evaluating technical documentation. To quote: This study compared two evaluation techniques, Usability Testing and Cognitive Walkthrough, in their ability to identify errors in aviation maintenance documentation. The techniques were evaluated to see how much unique ...

Martin White has written a review of the Intranet Roadmap: "There are no current books on intranet development, so this very concise handbook from James Robertson and his colleagues at Step Two Designs is very welcome indeed. The 54 page book sets out with great clarity the way in which ...

Our office reopens for the year today, and I'm extremely pleased to announce that we now have a new consulting team member: Iain Barker. Iain originally hails from the UK, but has been working over here in Australia for a little while now. Iain will be a very strong addition to ...

I'm finally back from all my travelling. It's great to be back home!

The papers-announce list is something that I setup a long time ago now. Joining this ensures that you'll be kept up to date when we release new articles, like the ones published yesterday: What is usability? KM for consistency & innovation How to scope an intranet release This has been ...

I am sending this message on behalf of a successful intranet manager currently working for a large Australian insurance firm. Due to an organisational restructure, they are currently looking for a role in another organisation. The person is question is interested in taking on a Sydney CBD position in either ...

Internally, we have a task-tracking system we use for all our work. Today, we created our 500th task related to the Step Two Designs website. That's a lot of work put into keeping it up-to-date...

Keith Instone brings together some notes on faceted browsing, including his presentation at the recent IA Summit. [Thanks to InfoDesign.]

This is a new-years reminder about our Introductory Usability Evaluation workshop to be held in Canberra on 11 March 2004. With numbers strictly limited to 20 places, you'll want to get in early, as we expect it to sell out. (Special note: we are offering a 40% discount for full-time ...

Happy new year to all! Well, I'm back in the office after the Christmas break (although you will have noticed that I've been using my PC from home over the last few days). Having rested fully, I'm full of new ideas, with the energy to match. Watch this space for a ...

The National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) has chosen us to join a small panel of providers to develop further Better Practice Checklists, and provide other supporting services. The current NOIE Better Practice Checklists stand out as succinct and practical views on a range of issues confronting government agencies, ...

Having been hit by a very unpleasant flood of spam via my blog's comments, I've taken action to put an end to it. Since I didn't want to disable comments altogether, I've implemented moderation for new comments. This is a little more work for me to manage, but should be ...

I've just got back from setting up our new office in Canberra, as previously announced. This is located in Fyshwick, and has plenty of space and natural light. It should prove to be a very pleasant (and productive) working environment. I'd also like to welcome Donna Maurer onto the Step Two ...

Sorry folks for the lack of weblogging in recent times. One reason was that we were having some problems with Movable Type, making it very difficult to post new entries. It turns out that our webhosting organisation was setup to time-out CGI scripts after 30secs. This has now been modified, and ...

While the Techniques for Building a Better Intranet workshop in Sydney later this week is looking good (just a few places left), the numbers for the Brisbane events are still very low. We'll be making a decision on Friday whether we need to cancel or postpone these events. So if ...

Well, I'm off on a short (and much needed) holiday up the coast, to the Coffs Harbour (Bellingen) region. Weblogging may occur, but no guarantees...

When I got into work this morning, I was presented with this message from Slashdot in my news aggregator: Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ link for more information, and if you email ...

The keen-eyed amongst will have noticed that I've posted a mini-flood of entries this long weekend, which is not my normal practice. There's a good reason for this: I've been catching up on my backlog of mailing list e-mails. Some 4000+ e-mails across 5 different usability, information architecture and CMS lists ...

I had breakfast this morning with Gerry McGovern, author of Content Critical, in town for a national speaking tour. It was great to finally be able to finally put a face to the name, and to compare notes on how things are progressing in Europe and Australia. Needless to ...

I'm off at first light tomorrow morning for a week's holiday. Definitely a much needed break. While I will be taking my laptop with me, I'm not promising any blog entries until I return...

I'm back in the office again, having spent three days in Canberra last week presenting. A successful but tiring series of events. I'm just catching up on my e-mails and blogging now, expect to see some entries shortly...

For some reason, when Mark Chillingworth from Image and Data Manager needed a quote for an article on the Slammer worm, he thought of me. So I got a phone call early last night, and had a brief chat. The results of which can be seen towards the end ...

Well, my holidays have unfortunately come to an end, and I'm back in the office. Actually, last week (while the office was closed), was one of our best for business. We made a handful of sales of the Requirements Toolkit, and received a good number of registrations for our ...