10 Best Intranets of 2009
NN group has published a new report on best intranets of 2009. Good to see that there is more focus on collaboration.
"Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint. Improving usability increased use by 106% on average."
Permalink | Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Interview with Eric Schmidt
The McKinsey Quarterly interviews Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Here's what Schmidt has to say about innovation:
"Innovation is something that comes when you're not under the gun. So it's important that, even if you don't have balance in your life, you have some time for reflection. So that you could say, 'Well, maybe I'm not working on the right thing.' Or, 'maybe I should have this new idea.' The creative parts of one's mind are not on schedule."
Permalink | Sunday, January 04, 2009
The power of good defaults
Daniel G. Goldstein, Eric J. Johnson, Andreas Herrmann, and Mark Heitmann in their HBR article, Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices, describe how to design good defaults for your products and services. They provide a decision tree on how to the select from the various types of defaults. This is a good resource to refer to when designing online forms.
Permalink | Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Podcasting on the intranet for training and communications
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) creates podcasts to train and communicate with its 4000 staff. Although this is a case study from Apple on the use of their products, it is interesting to note how podcasting can help with rapid delivery of just-in-time news or just-in-time training. In this example, it seems to make sense using podcasts and not text because of the nature of the information.
"The anytime, anywhere training has helped reduce risks to officers, whether they’re handling dangerous evidence, involved in high-risk car stops, or responding to complicated calls for service. Officers can view the podcasts in advance during their spare time, or in the field. Training created using Podcast Producer extends to other subjects, including helping officers in the field more effectively use their in-car computers."
Permalink | Tuesday, December 30, 2008
10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
Brilliant collection again by Smashing Magazine. This one's one basic UI elements.
"There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here’s my collection of 10 that I think you’ll find useful in your work. They’re not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects."
Permalink | Wednesday, December 24, 2008
The 5 habits of highly effective project teams
Suzy Thompson from Cooper design has written an article on 5 habits of successful project teams:
- Establish structure and discipline
- Act with urgency
- Cultivate a sense of ownership
- Lead
- Be the change you want to see in the project
The "lead" factor is the most difficult to cultivate in my opinion. People associate extra work and responsibility with leading. Well, that is a fact, but there is much more to leading that taking on extra responsibility. Maybe people are just put off by the big kind of leading, the Jack Welch kind of way, but what they really need to see is the everyday kind of leading -- small decisions, small risks, small innovations kind of way. Seth Godin describes more of this kind of leading in his new book, Tribes.
Permalink | Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?
In their article for Harvard Business Review, Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti describe four ways to collaborate:
"there are four basic modes of collaboration: a closed and hierarchical network (an elite circle), an open and hierarchical network (an innovation mall), an open and flat network (an innovation community), and a closed and flat network (a consortium)."
The article goes on to describe how to choose the best model and how to manage them.
Permalink | Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Meetup’s Dead Simple User Testing
I totally subscribe to simple usability testing and setups. In this Boing Boing article, Clay Shirky describes how the folks at Meetup test their website.
"On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed of someone using Meetup. Said user was having a hard time figuring out a new feature, and the product people, riveted, were taking notes. It was the simplest setup I'd ever seen for user feedback, and I asked Scott how often they did that sort of thing. "Every day" came the reply."
Permalink | Sunday, December 14, 2008
Activities, Bluemail, & CoScripter: Sharing and Reusing Work in the Enterprise
A paper on the use of some enterprise 2.0 apps in IBM (PDF). 'Activities' is interesting.
"Activity-centric computing systems seek to address the fragmentation of office work across tools and documents by allowing users to organize work around their purposeful activities. Activities is a web-based application that uses the construct of an “activity” to aggregate the people, resources, and tools involved in achieving a particular goal. An activity in the system is described by a title, a set of tags, and an optional due date. Each activity has a list of members and contains entries, optionally organized into sections. Within an Activity, users can add various types of entries: basic text posts, to-dos, and threads of comments. Any entry can have attachments, links, and tags."Via Portals & KM
Permalink | Saturday, December 06, 2008
Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content
Colleen Jones has written an article on how to write persuasive content for the web.
"This column brings together a collection of practical tips, or recipes, for persuasive content. My goal for these recipes is to help anyone who touches content to bake in some influential goodness. Because of my background and experience, these recipes have an English-speaking American flavor, but I think they are a useful starting point for international content, as well."
Permalink | Friday, December 05, 2008
Educating the Client on IA
Keith LaFerriere has a written an article on educating the client on Information Architecture. He dedicates a large part of the article on the client involvement in various stages of IA. I like his definition of IA:
"I often tell clients that IA establishes the baseline, or foundation, for a solid site structure. It helps create the traffic patterns and navigational routes that get the customer from A to B in language that is helpful and easy to understand. In fact, IA is the first step in meeting customer goals and can therefore increase brand awareness and product or service sales."
Permalink | Friday, December 05, 2008
Tim Brown: The powerful link between creativity and play
Nice talk by Tim Brown of Ideo on why it is important not to fear experimentation and risk-taking. This is what play teaches us.
Permalink | Friday, December 05, 2008
100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work
I'm documenting this link, will go through it in detail during the holidays!
"Working through Screens is an online book for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products. Working through Screens is also freely available in printable .pdf book and summarized .pdf “Idea Card” formats."
[via Soulsoup]
Permalink | Thursday, November 27, 2008
16 User Interface Prototyping Tools
Russell Wilson has written up an extensive comparison of 16 prototype tools for UI development. I just watched the demo for Adobe's Thermo, and it looks really impressive. Omni Graffle has been my staple over the years, but would like to give others a try.
Permalink | Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Web content migration: disastrous strategy
Gerry McGovern says it's no point taking old intranet content and migrating it to a new system. I do agree that it's a waste of resources to migrate content that is not useful. But many intranets do have useful information. The problem is that the useful info is in bits and pieces and present all over the intranet. This is where migration issues become tricky. Yes, intranets can have a clean up during the redesign, even using copywriters to prep the content. But this is not a long term strategy. Unless there is a shared commitment to publish good quality content, any clean up will last only till the next published piece. A shared commitment takes time and does require constant monitoring. And yes, it does require few people to drive the initiative -- the guiding coalition. Only when this is in place that we can expect to address the reasons for bad content that McGovern lists:
- We allow the organization to publish puff, fluff and vanity, instead of focusing on the needs of our customers/staff.
- We don’t hire web content professionals. Instead we find the most junior person in the department and give them the job of managing the website.
- We don’t see the Web as a unique medium-we just take print content and print thinking and shovel it onto the Web.
- We don’t review and quality control. We have practically no processes to take old content off our website.
Permalink | Sunday, November 23, 2008
Business case for deleting content
Gerry McGovern on why it is necessary to get rid of redundant, outdated or trivial (ROT) content:
"Instead, many web managers-particularly the newly appointed ones-want to do a redesign. This is much more fun. It involves hiring latte-drinking, cool-haircut web designers, who will eulogize the brand and dress up the first couple of levels of the website in shiny new graphics. But the rot of out-of-date, badly organized content remains. The organization feels good because it has 'done something'. But what has it done? It has engaged in the classic, ever-popular pastime of putting lipstick on a pig."
Permalink | Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Newspaper website design
Smashing Magazine has another fantastic collection: designs and trends in newspaper design. The article lists header and sidebar banners, navigation, tabbed content areas, etc. Interesting to note that tabbed content is part-and-parcel of newspaper sites.
Permalink | Friday, November 14, 2008
Teach the People- Facebook app for creating learning communities
From techcrunch:
"Teach the People is a Facebook application that provides a platform for online education. The application lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set share it by setting up a Teach the People learning communities with 1gig of free storage. The learning communities provide educators and students with all the standard learning management system tools that are standard on existing systems (Blackboard, Moodle), and some not so standard like video chat and VOIP."
Permalink | Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Blog on Design Research
Sam Ladner teaches the Research Design and Qualitative Methods course at Ryerson University. She uploads her slides on SlideShare regularly and blogs about different research topics. Check out posts like, Qualitative versus quantitative research, Design research, step by step. Nice stuff.
Permalink | Friday, October 31, 2008
Intranet metrics and measurement
When doing intranet projects, you either face situations where there are too many requests for metrics or where there aren’t any. I fear the latter. It means that there is no real pain guiding the project. In such cases it is usually playing catchup with another agency’s “cool social app” or with one person’s ideology that “everything should be wiki”.
What we need in situations where metrics are discussed is a dose of “business value thinking”. It is about discussing how to take what we know now and raise it a level or two to provide greater business value. James Robertson has written two excellent articles that point in this direction.
Business value thinking is not a separate process; it is a mindset that must be embedded during the project. It is about seeing the need for real improvement. And this can be done quickly with few resources as James mentions in his article.
Permalink | Thursday, October 30, 2008
Wisdom from Woodrow Wilson
"If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now."
Now, let's go for that 3-6pm meeting.
Permalink | Monday, October 27, 2008
We’re hiring - User Experience Lead
My company PebbleRoad is actively looking for a User Experience Lead to join the team in Singapore. PebbleRoad is a design firm specializing in design research and strategy. Projects include intranet redesigns, large corporate websites, web applications and e-learning.
The person should be able to:
Plan and conduct design research activities
Sketch and brainstorm ideas and scenarios
Create prototypes and test them out
Present design to clients
Experience in information architecture and interaction design is definitely a plus. But what is more important is having a passion for problem solving and learning and taking the responsibility to engage the client and deliver a quality service.
If you are in Singapore or even in the US or Europe and looking for a fast-paced and exciting stint, send a message to maish-at-pebbleroad.com. Here's more about Singapore.
Permalink | Saturday, October 25, 2008
What did you use the intranet for today?
The review and study phase of an intranet design project is the most grueling. We meet many staff from different departments and locations. One activity we find useful in this phase is to ask every staff we meet: What did you use the intranet for today? After a week or so we can get a good understanding of how the intranet is being used. Really!
Permalink | Thursday, October 23, 2008
Design methods for everyone
John Chris Jones gives insightful answers to this list of questions:
- designing your design process
- what to do first?
- what if I can't think of a solution?
- what if I have too many ideas?
- what if my ideas seem good but do not fit 'the problem'?
- what if my perception of the problem changes?
- what if I get into a muddle?
- how can a first attempt be improved?
[Via Perspective 2.0]
Permalink | Sunday, October 19, 2008
Metadata fundamentals for intranets and websites
James Robertson has written a simple and clear article on the use of metadata for intranets and websites.
Metadata is one of the key elements of site design and management, and is often a driving factor for the purchase of a content management system (or other similar publishing tools).
While metadata can be used in many complex and powerful ways, most sites benefit from keeping it pretty simple.
Only capture the metadata you need, and make it very simple for authors to enter it. Recognise that there is a cost (in effort and usability) for every metadata field established, and therefore focus efforts on clear business or site needs.
Permalink | Sunday, October 19, 2008