Introducing Insightico!
We launched a new webapp called Insightico. This online application helps you use and reuse your research data.
How many times have you gone back to those interview recordings that you so carefully planned at the start of the project? Or those snapshots you took when surveying how people work? I’ve spoken to many people in the business and they usually say “never”. In fact, some of the interviews we did for past projects are still in the audio recorder!
We want to go back to research, but the problem is that it is a painful process trying to locate that 15 second clip where you saw something interesting.
Insightico addresses this gap by enabling you to add your insights to specific parts of images, documents, audio or video files.
Say you are viewing a 30 min audio interview. You hear something interesting, now instead of noting what you heard and the timestamp on a sticky note, you can just select the part of the audio file and directly add your insights to it. Yes, you can tag your insights as well. Repeat the process with all your research data and now you have an inventory of insights but all connected to the relevant bits in the sources. This inventory along with the tags gives a good picture of the research findings.
The most important feature of Insightico—you can do all of this collaboratively with your team.
Check Insightico out by signing up for the beta.
research Add tag Permalink | Friday, March 04, 2011
Guide to Website Navigation Design Patterns
This guide covers popular site navigation design patterns. For each site navigation design pattern, we will discuss its common characteristics, its drawbacks, and when best to use it.
Nice summary of patterns, but I like O’Reilly’s book on Website Navigation better.
navigation Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Changing IT Mindsets From Deployment To Adoption
Mike Gotta makes a nice point about the need to really unpack user adoption when it comes to collaborative apps.
When it comes to collaboration, knowledge management, and E2.0 efforts, “culture” is often cited as the reason results fail to meet expectations set when the project is approved. While some projects might acknowledge the need to support post-deployment activities early in the planning stages, strategists and project leaders have consistently told me that they were surprised (and not in a good way) at how they underestimated the effort necessary to gain “adoption” of their solution.
intranets, collaboration, adoption Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, February 15, 2011
10 Best Intranets of 2011
Jakob Nielsen’s Intranet Annual 2011 is out. He notices big improvements in mobile deployments and in knowledge sharing using social media tools. I think this is just natural progression—catching up with what is available on the Internet. But it is nice to see successful executions.
Knowledge management progressed from cliché to reality, based on simpler and thus more-used features. Mobile intranets doubled.
knowledge management, intranets, mobile Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Testing Content
A good article on how to test the content of a website. Angela Colter lists few methods to test the decoding and comprehension of content. Seems like her preferred method is moderated usability testing.
To find out whether people understand your content, have them read it and apply their new knowledge. In other words, do a usability test! Here’s how to create task scenarios where participants interpret and use what they read:
- Identify the issues that are critical to users and the business.
- Create tasks that test user knowledge of these issues.
- Tell participants that they’re not being tested; the content is.
content strategy, content testing Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 20, 2010
Google’s Nifty Guide To Web Technology
An very nice HTML5 book that reads like an iBook. The book is filled with pictures and small animations that add that little extra that makes the difference. And yes, the most important thing - the topics are short.
interesting, html5 Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 19, 2010
Over 75 Free Rapid E-Learning Resources
Nice list. I found many resources that I can use today!
instructional design, research Add tag Permalink | Thursday, November 11, 2010
2-Day Usability Bootcamp with Christine Perfetti
We are organizing a 2-day usability bootcamp with Christine Perfetti. Here are the details.
Will your website or application be successful when it’s launched? Will people be able to use it easily? Will it meet the business objectives? Will you be able to account for the time, money and effort spent on it? To answer these questions, Perfetti Media’s expert usability professional, Christine Perfetti, has put together a 2-Day Usability Bootcamp to help you learn the skills needed to evaluate and improve your designs, be it for a product, website, web application or intranet.
usability Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Web customers crave speed, not emotional experiences
Gerry McGovern has a point here about web customers craving speed:
People don’t want experiences on websites. They don’t want to emotionally bond with a website. When was the last time you felt delighted after you booked a flight? Did you have a great experience booking that cinema ticket or did you have a great experience at the cinema?
usability, ux Add tag Permalink | Sunday, September 19, 2010
Making common content work on the intranet
Simon Goh has written a thought-provoking piece on managing common content on the intranet.
The intranet comprises broadly of corporate and business common content. Corporate content are stuff such as backoffice processes, policies, templates, news, corporate events and employee benefits. Business content are stuff such as standard contract clauses, services & solutions offerings, project references, document deliverable templates, delivery samples and methodologies.
Regardless of the category, 5 things need to happen for an intranet to be a trusted place for staff to get common content. Common content needs to be:
- available as soon as they are
- at the right place
- well-written
- accurate, current and comprehensive
- rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content
content strategy, content management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web
Gates believes that in five years time you’ll able to find the “the best lectures in the world”. You can now, but its “unevenly distributed”!
“One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is text books. Even in grade schools, they can be 300 pages for a book about math. ‘They’re giant, intimidating books,” he said. “I look at them and think: what on Earth is in there?’”
school, education Add tag Permalink | Saturday, August 07, 2010
25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time
Nice collection by Smashing Magazine.
“We’re all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy.”
usability, ux Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 23, 2010
‘Can I?’ is better than ‘I can’
Interesting study suggests that interrogative self-talk is actually more motivating than declarative gumption that business leaders profess.
“Why is interrogative self-talk more effective? Subsequent experiments by the scientists suggested that the power of the “Will I?” condition resides in its ability to elicit intrinsic motivation. (We are intrinsically motivated when we are doing an activity for ourselves, because we enjoy it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation occurs when we’re doing something for a paycheck or any “extrinsic” reward.) By interrogating ourselves, we set up a well-defined challenge that we can master. And it is this desire for personal fulfillment - being able to tell ourselves that we solved the anagrams - that actually motivates us to keep on trying.”
neuroscience, motivation Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 19, 2010
Some of our work
Glad to have worked with some very talented illustrators and animators. Here is a sample of our work at PebbleRoad.
courses Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 14, 2010
On education
Dennis Littky writes about a new approach to education in the lastest issue of Interactions magazine. (Subscription required).
“The school was broken down into advisories, with a teacher and a group of students who spent four years together. Each adviser, parent, and student developed an individual learning plan. The school had broad goals of reading, writing, applying math, empirical reasoning, communication, and personal qualities. Every student would have his or her own way of reaching those goals with high standards. The teacher—also acting as adviser—would help the student identify his or her interests and then find a mentor and workplace to help make the learning real.”
Sounds like “Gurukul” to me.
school, education Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality
NY times reports that there is no evidence of improved educational performance with having computers at home.
“Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.”
education Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 12, 2010
UX Myths
“Build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs!” This website documents UX myths along with research findings. Nice reference point to bring out in client discussions and to include in documentation. (via ColumnTwo). Here are some good ones:
ux Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 08, 2010
Mind Over Mass Media
Steven Pinker writes a classic piece and clears the smoke over the view that new media and Google is making us stupid.
“The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.”
social media, neuroscience Add tag Permalink | Sunday, June 13, 2010
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
I was looking for this story for a while. Finally I found it, so would like to share it with you. It’s about understanding what people want to get done with products—the job-to-be-done. Often we get lost in the features and functions of the product that we forget about the job that the product is designed to get done. The same principle can be used for designing websites and intranets.
“With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension. If marketers understand each of these dimensions, then they can design a product that’s precisely targeted to the job. In other words, the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy.”
information architecture, intranets, interaction, design thinking, interesting Add tag Permalink | Saturday, June 12, 2010
Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
Clay Shirky takes on Nicolas Carr in this excerpt from this book, “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.”
“Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.”
social media Add tag Permalink | Sunday, June 06, 2010
Research Ethics Guidebook
“The Research Ethics Guidebook is designed as a resource for social science researchers - those early in their careers, as well as more experienced colleagues. It aims to help you find your way through the variety of regulatory processes and procedures that can apply to social science research - signposting you to more detailed information along the way, and acting as a prompt for reflection and questioning at all stages of the research process.”
research, ethnography Add tag Permalink | Thursday, June 03, 2010
Content Migration: the iceberg of CMS projects
A nice introduction to the content migration effort required when doing intranet redesigns.
“For all the reasons to ignore the inevitable, the truth remains that failure to adequately strategize, plan, schedule, and budget for content migration can easily sink your CMS project. Failure to plan can lead to delays as the content migration drags past the launch date. Conflicts can occur as extra resources are called upon at the last minute to attempt to migrate mountains of web pages into the new system. After all of the hard work your team has put into designing and building the new system, content migration is the last hurdle — one that you don’t want to underestimate.”
intranets, content management, content migration Add tag Permalink | Saturday, May 29, 2010
Too Cool for School: What the Valley Is Missing in Online Education
Sarah Lacey writes about the education and training opportunities in the developing world:
“But in emerging markets, modern education is still developing on an elementary, collegiate and vocational level. Burgeoning populations who want better opportunities are struggling under the confines of what young democracies can provide, giving a huge opportunity for private, for-profit education systems to play a bigger role than they’ve played in the West historically. And obviously, the Web and mobile is a big part of this. It’s not just about access, it’s about breaking learning down into affordable, consumable chunks—the same way the Web has broken music and media down into sell-able, bite-sized pieces of the song and the blog post. Some of this is happening inside the classroom and some is redefining what a “classroom” is.”
education Add tag Permalink | Thursday, May 20, 2010
Polyhierarchy in the real world
Snapped this at a local video store. There are multiple Top 1s, Top 2s, etc.
taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Faceted vs. Parametric search
From an interview with Peter Morville:
Peter Morville: The terms “faceted navigation” and “parametric search” are often used interchangeably, but for the sake of comparison I find it valuable to define interfaces that require the simultaneous, up-front specification of all search parameters as exemplars of parametric search. Like the Boolean queries of yore, this forces users to formulate and execute a search strategy without guidance or feedback. Sliders and pull-downs are easier than ANDs and ORs, but syntax is only part of the problem.
In contrast, faceted navigation lets users begin naturally with a keyword or two. They’re rewarded with traditional results plus a list of facets (or fields) and values, usually on the left. This SERP (search engine results page) serves as a custom map that offers insights into the content and its organization. And, this is a map that’s also the territory. Users can take a simple next step to clarify or refine their query by clicking on a facet value. And, by taking several of these simple next steps, users can construct a sophisticated, powerful query. So, not only do users find what they need, but they also learn along the way.
taxonomy, search Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, May 12, 2010