Performing a project premortem
Gary Klein provides a nice summary of the pre-mortem concept:
"A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure."
Permalink | Thursday, August 30, 2007
Forrester Research: Taking Web Sites Beyond Useful And Usable
Forrester Research extends useful and usable website metrics to include desirable:
"[M]any Web sites make users struggle to complete simple goals, have little to no emotional punch, and fail to embrace the diversity of consumers' wants and needs. To make matters worse, today's Web organizations must often backburner projects that would improve their sites' desirability factor in order to fix more pressing problems. As a result, the topic of desirability largely remains a mystery in the user experience community. We've explored three tactics for creating desirable online experiences: 1) providing engaging content and functionality, 2) focusing on aesthetics, and 3) incorporating elements of game design."
Permalink | Thursday, August 30, 2007
Zeldman: don’t design on spec
Jeffrey Zeldman elaborates his stance on not to design on spec:
- It's a lot of unpaid work
- Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving.
- t’s unsafe for agency and potential client alike.
Permalink | Thursday, August 30, 2007
Intranets: what staff really want
Gerry McGovern did a survey and found out that staff really care about a few things that matter to them: finding people and finding forms and procedures.
"First and foremost, staff see the intranet as a practical place that should make it easier for them to do their jobs. While things like wikis, blogs and personalization got some votes, they were way down on the list when compared to finding people and forms."
Permalink | Monday, August 20, 2007
Corporate web standards
I'm quite late in spotting this one, but I think the concept of corporate web standards has legs:
"Now that web standards have become the norm for corporate websites, many in-house developers are discovering a new phase of acceptance and implementation within many large online organizations—corporate web standards."
Permalink | Saturday, August 18, 2007
Users cut back on using Web for communications, e-commerce
"Internet users spend almost half their time online reading and watching content, dwarfing the time spent searching for information, communicating with others and buying products, according to a four-year analysis of Internet activity released Monday."
This report has significance on the design of pages, especially destination pages, which is where the actual content is presented. If the purpose is for reading, then destination pages need to be simple, clean and clear. Some websites are already implementing such designs, including CNN.com. But if you want an excellent example, take a look at Garrett Dimon's website.
Permalink | Tuesday, August 14, 2007
WNYC - Radio Lab
This is a really good podcast on everyday science topics such as time, stress, morality, etc.
Permalink | Sunday, August 12, 2007
Cases2.0 - A repository of Enterprise 2.0 case studies
Andrew McAfee along with Social Text are building a repository of case studies on Enterprise 2.0.
Permalink | Sunday, August 12, 2007
It’s not about creativity, it’s about curiosity
Einstein: "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
From Jim McGee's post on harvesting curiosity.
Permalink | Sunday, August 12, 2007
Using research to end visual design debates
Nick Myers from Cooper gives us a strategy to deal with those never ending debates about this shade of blue or that gradient of red, especially from project sponsors and stakeholders:
The visual design process is essentially composed of a series of decisions that establish a strategy, then define a visual system in increasing degrees of detail and clarity to optimally satisfy that strategy. Relying on subjective feedback to make these design decisions can be disastrous and will result in a design that may be acceptable to your team but has no appeal to users.
Permalink | Thursday, August 09, 2007
Better Writing Through Design
When building websites, information architecture is not the only structure there is. There is also the visual structure and then the most important of them all: the structure of the copy or the written text. A good IA may support a bad visual structure but it surely can't support a bad copy.
Good copywriting takes time. It is a design process. And like all design processes it requires one to do the research and build a strategy. This is why a copywriter should be involved right from the start, and not as an last-minute add-on when everything is complete. I still believe the it is much better to teach subject matter experts good copywriting skills than hire an external copywriter for short durations to fix broken content.
This article got me thinking on the role of the IA in supporting the visual language:
Ideally, you should work with a writer from day one to design the voice of the copy in conjunction with the visual language of the site. And getting a writer involved early can help you solve lots of other problems—from content strategy issues to information architecture snags. Remember that writers are creatives too, and they are, in many cases, the keepers of the content your design ultimately serves.
Permalink | Saturday, August 04, 2007
Blasting the Myth of the Fold
Did not want to miss this one. The article busts the common manager or website sponsor perception that there should be no scrolling and that if there is then much of the content must be above the scroll-line or "fold". The author backs up her stance with data from AOL websites.
Permalink | Saturday, August 04, 2007
Gerry McGovern: Website redesign is a bad strategy
This man says it well and says it direct:
A redesign is nearly always bad strategy. In fact, website redesigns are often pursued by organizations who don't have a web strategy.
Permalink | Saturday, August 04, 2007
It’s time to drop e-learning
Training zone has published an article urging that we drop the "e" in e-learning:
It’s time to drop e-learning. Let’s be specific. It’s time to drop the ‘e’ in e-learning.
It’s time to recognise that the ‘e’ carries the stigma of past hyperbole, puts some potential learners and managers off and smacks of a love of technology that has everything to do with content delivery, rather than individual learning.
I agree that change is required, but I don't think that a change in name is going to have an impact. What is really required is for those responsible (managers, trainers, etc.) to undergo some learning themselves.
Reminds me of the lyrics of John Lennon' song, Crippled Inside.
You can shine your shoes and wear a suit
You can comb your hair and look quite cute
You can hide your face behind a smile
One thing you can't hide
Is when you're crippled inside
Permalink | Monday, July 23, 2007
15 productive uses for a wiki
WebWorker Daily has a post on uses for wikis in the workplace. There are the usual suspects: to-do lists, checklists and documentation manuals. But there are others like planning events, logging client work and tracking invoices that make this post an interesting read.
Permalink | Monday, July 23, 2007
Write Articles, Not Blog Postings
Jakob Nielsen's alert box: "To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers."
I believe that both postings and long articles can go together. That is how I started with elearningpost. The short blog posts kept the ideas coming in and once I saw a pattern I wrote about it in an article format. I don't think I could have written all those articles without the short posts.
Permalink | Friday, July 13, 2007
Open Space video
Anecdote points to a YouTube video briefing showing how Open Spaces are conducted.
Permalink | Thursday, July 05, 2007
Positive Deviance
The FastCompany blog has a post on Atul Gawande's new book, Better. The post describes Gawande's 5 suggestions to become better at work:
- Ask an unscripted question
- Don't complain
- Count something
- Write something
- Change
I'm 150 pages into the book and I've already picked it as one of my best reads this year!
Permalink | Saturday, June 30, 2007
Waterfall bad, washing machine good
Neat presentation style used by Lesia Reichelt to explain why the linear design process is dead and why we need a more sense-and-respond approach to design.
Permalink | Friday, June 29, 2007
Intranet Governance Guide
I've written an article on intranet governance over at PebbleRoad. Here's the summary:
Getting an intranet is just a start, keeping it going is what matters most. Long term benefits and efficiencies can only be realised when the intranet is responsive to the needs and requirements of business and staff. This guide gives pointers to creating a governance structure that can help sustain and manage the intranet for the long term.
Permalink | Sunday, June 17, 2007
236 Open Courseware Collections, Podcasts, and Videos
The Online Education Database has published an extensive list of open courseware, podcasts and videos that can be used for learning different topics. Now this is a true resource.
Permalink | Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Informal learning is preferred
Here is something we've known for a long time, but nice to have some figures supporting the lines:
For the survey (Practice Makes Perfect), a sample of 2,076 workers in the UK were asked which of ten ways of learning were helpful in learning to do the job better.
Learning by doing the job on a regular basis was the favourite method - overall, 82% found this quite or very helpful.
This was followed by being shown how to do things by others (62%), and watching and listening to others (56%).
Just 54% felt that taking a course paid for by the employer or the worker was helpful, followed closely by reflecting on your own performance (53%).
Reading books and manuals (39%), using trial and error (38%) and using the internet (29%) were the least favourite methods.
Permalink | Monday, June 11, 2007
Wireless electricity
This is the news I've been waiting for: A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research team has figured out how to wirelessly illuminate an unplugged light bulb from seven feet away.
Permalink | Saturday, June 09, 2007
Experience IS the Product…and the only thing users care about
Peter Merholz reviews Kodak, iPod, Tivo, Target Pharmacy, and Flickr to support his stance that the experience is the product and that we should stop developing just products.
Permalink | Thursday, June 07, 2007
Organising Knowledge (book review)
I used to feel dizzy when taxonomies and knowledge management (KM) were mentioned in the same sentence. And I tried to understand why my feelings were so biased. Was it because, despite having attended numerous talks on KM and read numerous journal articles on taxonomies, I still could not grasp that damn concept? Or was I trying, in vain, to connect the world of KM and taxonomies to design, a world I’m more familiar with. Something was telling me there was a connection – that taxonomies will help me better understand my world of user experience and design. But I just could not find the clues.
That all changed when Patrick Lambe asked me to review a draft copy of his new book. I’ve known Patrick for quite a long time and the placeholders I’ve developed around KM and taxonomies were largely a result of watching him deliver workshops and speak practically about wide ranging topics, from social network analysis to brand to customer service, and yes, on KM and taxonomies as well. His book weaves through all of this and more to explain, in a practical manner, what taxonomies have to offer and how they can be used for different purposes and in different disciplines, be it for information management or for project management.
Patrick treats the subject in a practical and pragmatic way. Right upfront he tells us that organising knowledge is not all about logic. That there is both a logic-part and a magic-part to it. The logic tells us what needs to be done, and the magic comes from how it is done.
“Taxonomies are products, things that can be used. But in many ways, the processes that produce our taxonomies are more important than the things themselves.”
For me, Chapter 2: Taxonomies can take many forms, was important for setting the baseline for the entire book. In this chapter, Patrick tells us that taxonomies do not always have to take the form of a hierarchy. There are other representations such as lists, trees, matrices and facets that work better in different situations. This cuts through several disciplines such as information visualisation and information architecture.
Chapter 6: What do we want our taxonomies to do, was one that gave me the confidence to discuss knowledge and taxonomy work openly, with friends and colleagues, and more importantly to spot and identify the many charlatans in seminars and conferences.
Chapters 3-5 deal with how taxonomies actually benefit the organisation, from setting up the right infrastructural connections to managing knowledge assets. The chapters come with plenty of cases and examples. The case on Victoria Climbie tragedy is something that will stick with me. This case is about how, despite having clues, hints and information on persistent abuse and battery of an 8-year old, the healthcare and child protection agencies could not stop her eventual murder. And all because they could not share the information they had.
The last section of the book is on preparing, designing and implementing your taxonomy project. I found this section useful even though I’m not in the hardcore taxonomy business simply because the process taught me several things about incorporating and using knowledge in my own work. This goes back to what Patrick mentioned earlier on the process being more important than the “thing” itself.
There are other reviewers who have mentioned that they finished the book in a day or on a long haul flight, this was not the case with me. I took my time. There were sections that were hard going, where I had to refer to previous chapters, or go through a few times. I read the book twice already. But that’s just me.
So, all in all, I would recommend this book to those who want to know how to make use of the knowledge they find around them.
Permalink | Saturday, June 02, 2007