“When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went again into action. An emergency texting number was advertised via radio. Ushahidi received thousands of messages reporting trapped victims. They were translated by a diffuse army of Haitian-Americans in the United States and plotted on a ‘crisis map.’ From a situation room at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, outside Boston, Ushahidi volunteers instant-messaged with the United States Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search. When the Chilean earthquake struck, Ushahidi deployed again.”

Using personal pronouns may sound like a simple, common-sense web writing best practice. Speaking directly to users with the word “you” is something most companies get on board with easily enough. But those same clients often ask us to avoid self-referential pronouns like “we,” “our,” and “us” in their web copy.

“Like most things today, the world of interaction design moves quickly. Although a pen and notebook may suffice when it comes to simply jotting down ideas, planning a series of website screens can sometimes demand additional precision and cohesion. This is where today’s wireframing tools come in.”

This post is the first in a weekly series called “The Ethnography of Design” about the relationship between anthropology and design and how the ethnographer’s toolkit can be applied to build more effective world-changing, problem-solving products and systems. Each post in the series will be paired with – and will explore – a video or article that highlights an innovative design solution or product that has taken into account (successfully or unsuccessfully – and why) ethnographic research methods and human-centered design thinking frameworks.

I like this award. It highlights how teams are thinking of making their intranets useful and productive. It starts a discussion on ideas and themes. I met some of the winners at the KM World conference in San Jose last November and I could clearly see their enthusiasm and determination in making their intranets work. I walked away with more than a few ideas to try out.

“A collection is a list of homogeneous items. A collection on the web can be as simple as a blog (a list of posts) to as complex as a library collection (multiple lists of different library materials). Collections are an integral part of many websites, but not all collections are designed with ease-of-use and ease-of-retrieval in mind.  In this article, I’ll cover some theory and give practical advice on designing online collections for the websites and intranets.”

“To be relevant today requires understanding context, popularity, and reputation. In the broadcast era, we assumed the disseminator organized information because they were a destination. In a networked era, there will be no destination, but rather a network of content and people. We cannot assume that content will be organized around topics or that people will want to consume content organized as such. We’re already seeing this in streams-based media consumption. When consuming information through social media tools, people consume social gossip alongside productive content, news alongside status updates. Right now, it’s one big mess. But the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides.”

I picked up the math paper and it took me a while to figure out how to do the sums. I’m pretty sure it will take you a while too. Here is part of the math paper.

Were you confused? I was. The instructions are too complex and there are just too many distractions on the page. The sums are numbered, the options are numbered and then the answers too are numbers! And did you find the “brackets”? They are on the right hand side, a trick I guess to test the range of the eyes!

See my daughter’s first answer in the brackets. Now see her second answer. Do you blame her for putting in the right answer in the bracket? Read the instruction, which number do I put in the bracket? The option number or the correct answer?

The point of this test I gather is to help the student better ‘see’ math in abstract and concrete terms. That’s fine, but where does trickery come in to play?

So, I took a shot at redesigning the paper and this is what I came up with in 5 minutes.

I gave the same paper to my grumpy daughter and asked her to try the sums out. She looked at the paper and knew exactly what to do. She had a smile across her face. That is when I decided that I should share my concerns with the world.

We live in a scary world where 6-year olds are asked to do such math sums. The least we can do is to motivate and encourage them to take on this challenge. Giving badly designed papers to these kids is such a cruel thing to do. So, if you come across papers like these then please do something about it.

1. Eliminate Needless Formality and Hierarchy (easy access)
2. Provide One-Click Access to Entire Organization (easy access to everyone)
3. Design Dedicated Physical Spaces for Collaboration
4. Adopt Common Systems and Processes (standard platform)
5. Establish Cross-Functional Mentoring

“The most important thing to understand is this: Content strategy isn’t a bunch of tactics. It’s a plan.”
“It’s a well-founded plan, fueled by your business objectives and user goals. An achievable plan, created with your current business reality, content assets, and limited resources in mind. A future plan, for what’s going to happen to your content once you send it off into the world. And, most importantly, a profitable plan, where your measures of success ultimately have impact on your organization’s bottom line.”

“By breaking up books into different licensable parts, Lessig fears that we are going to encounter the same problem with books that we do today with film. He gives the example of documentary films which are sometimes nearly impossible to restore or preserve in digital form because the rights to every song and clip of archive footage need to be cleared again. This is an artifact of the types of licensing contracts that became the norm for film, where each constituent part of a work carries its own copyrights into perpetuity, making it more difficult down the road to update into digital form or pass along as a piece of shared culture. Up until now, books for the most part are treated as one single work.”