Debunking Social Media Myths
Insightful post by David Armano on sustaining a social media effort in the enterprise:
Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you'll have to invest to grow your effort into a healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas. People will be required in order to do this.
Feeding. Whether it's a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution you've put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content. Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your participants--but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.
Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this--but in others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive. Weeding can also include creating a separate environment--for example, Nokia's "blog hub" encourages employees to vent freely internally (using anonymous aliases).You can bet that someone is looking at the data and analyzing it. If not, they should be.
Permalink | Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Inspiring video on leadership
Permalink | Friday, June 26, 2009
Intranet offers bright future for internal communicators
Gerry McGovern on new skills for internal communicators:
"Intranet internal communications is radically different from print internal communications. The intranet internal communicator facilitates rather than dictates. They help people find. They guide rather than lead. They support the completion of a task such as checking up a procedure or a job vacancy. They focus on creating clear menus and links... This is a call to arms. You young ambitious communicators, get involved in making search work better, focus relentlessly on the quality of menus and links, simplify the steps and words used in software applications, make policies easier to understand and forms easier to complete. There is so much to do, so many areas where you can make your organization more productive, efficient and effective."
Permalink | Monday, June 22, 2009
Content strategy- content is king
The field of Content Strategy (CS) is galloping forward. Here is a presentation by Karen McGrane where she provides a good framework (slide 80,81) to focus on content strategy.
Permalink | Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Information is a task
Gerry McGovern takes information to task :-):
"The world we work and live in is becoming more information-based. What that means is that we complete more and more of the tasks of our lives as a result of accessing information. This information is active, driven, purposeful, and measured. How is it measured? By whether it has helped people complete the tasks that they have used this information to help them complete."
Permalink | Sunday, June 14, 2009
A market (design) research primer for designers
Brianna Sylver has written a nice overview of design research methods and then summarizes by showing when to use which method. The comments on this article debate the use of the term 'market research' over 'design research'. I won't fret over vocabulary. If you prefer the term 'design research', just use it in place of 'market research'. Confused already?
Permalink | Wednesday, June 10, 2009
GOOD magazine infographic archives
Here is a Flickr archive of their infographics.
Permalink | Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Problem with requirements documents
Just got a tender requirement spec that had around 200 pages for a 3 page web application. Yes, this video sums up the feeling.
Permalink | Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Google Wave mania begins
The just announced Google Wave is getting a lot of people interested. The Wave is not just another application, it's a whole new way of using online information. If you have not seen the demo yet, you should. The Wave takes collaboration to a whole new level. When I was watching the collaboration demo, I felt the entire experience was more like an extension into multiple minds rather than the 'switch-type' collaboration we see in the likes of Sharepoint and Lotus Notes. The engagement just felt more organic, more emergent, more fun. There are many people thinking along these lines, Gabor Cselle, for one talk about how to build a business using Wave, and he has some pretty viable suggestions. There are going to be many more ideas around the Wave in the coming days as more people come to grips with a new mental model of working online. These are definitely interesting times.
Permalink | Monday, June 01, 2009
30 Examples of Attractive Nav
Web Designer Wall has put up a collection of appealing navigation systems:
"Web designers always have to strike a balance between usability and visual appeal when designing a website. Without this balance, a website might be nice to look at or difficult to navigate. Or, it might be easy to navigate, but not easy on the eyes. With this in mind, balancing attractive navigation with usability does not need to be overly difficult. To help you generate new ideas and inspiration for user navigation, here are 30 great examples of attractive and usable navigation."
Permalink | Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Designing site structures for intranets and websites
My new article over at PebbleRoad looks at design of site structures:
"A good site structure makes users happy. They can easily find, understand and use the information on your site. For the business, this makes all the difference. In this article I’ll go through principles behind good site structures and describe a methodology for creating site structures."
Permalink | Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization
Alexis Wichowski traces the emergence of tagging and how it relates to other information organization systems.
"Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies."
Permalink | Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Jump Into The Stream
Erick Schonfeld analyses the changing pattern of content on the web. First it was all about 'pages' and now it is about the 'stream'. It started with RSS and now its galloping ahead with Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and the like.
"Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled."
Permalink | Monday, May 18, 2009
Why content strategy matters (and size doesn’t)
Craig Bromberg writes about the recent blog entries on Content Strategy (CS) and tries to make sense of one angle: big and little CS.
As far as I can see, this is the real differentiator between CS and most other content work: Unlike traditional editorial work, content strategy isn’t steeped in grand narratives so much as in bits, in data. “CS big” isn’t custom publishing (although there are definitely narrative and brand strategies one wants to be aware of). And “CS little” isn’t just those deliverables: content without context, from the container to the brand, is all essential if you want to sell in the Googlesphere.
Permalink | Sunday, May 17, 2009
Top 10 Information Architecture Mistakes
Jakob has grouped his article around two issues: structure and navigation. His views around structure are the same I come across in IA projects: Why focus so much on structure when we have such an fantastic (read 'expensive') search engine?
"The most notable structural problem is when designers treat a site like one big swamp with no organizing principle for individual items. Yes, users can fish the swamp using search or by following links from current promotions or outside sites. But whatever they dredge up is it. No opportunities for understanding the site's other offerings or locating related items."
Permalink | Sunday, May 17, 2009
Lean intranets - part 2
Patrick Walsh continues his analysis of managing intranets the lean way and comparing it to how car manufacturers manage their factories the lean way.
"So, there you have it. Basically, in the Lean Intranet, information professionals will be removing barriers, minimising and assessing content and continually improving their intranet using a customer-focused approach. Hard to achieve? I won't say that the transition to a lean approach in intranets will be without problems but I know it's possible. I've seen ‘lean' working for many years in the automotive sector helping to produce better cars through more efficient processes. Why not better, more efficient intranets?"
Permalink | Friday, May 08, 2009
Issue 1, Volume 1 of the Journal of IA
Issue 1 of the Journal of IA is now available for download. Here are the contents:
- Dorte Madsen's Editorial - Shall We Dance?
- Gianluca Brugnoli - Connecting the Dots of User Experience
- Helena Francke - Towards an Architectural Document Analysis
- Andrew Hinton - The Machineries of Context
- James Kalbach - On Uncertainty in Information Architecture
Permalink | Wednesday, May 06, 2009
The Elements of Social Architecture
An article by Christina Wodkte published in A List Apart on the 3 attributes of social architecture and how to cater for it: Identity, Relationships; and Activity.
"While your designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an equation that explains why people do the crazy things they do. Lewin asserts that behavior is a function of a person and his environment: B=f(P,E). You can’t change a person’s nature, but you can design the environment he moves around in. Let’s explore some of Alexander’s patterns I’ve observed in my work and the design work of my fellow practitioners."
Permalink | Monday, May 04, 2009
Conducting a Knowledge Audit
Here’s another in our series of video tutorials to different practical knowledge management techniques. It’s taken from a workshop we conducted last week on knowledge audits and knowledge mapping. For ease of use it’s split into three short parts: Different types of knowledge; Different strategies for different knowledge types; and conducting a knowledge audit and building knowledge maps.
Permalink | Monday, May 04, 2009
Designing for Faceted Search
A UIE article by Stephanie Lemiux:
"Faceted search lets users refine or navigate a collection of information by using a number of discrete attributes – the so-called facets. A facet represents a specific perspective on content that is typically clearly bounded and mutually exclusive. The values within a facet can be a flat list that allows only one choice (e.g. a list of possible shoe sizes) or a hierarchical list that allow you to drill-down through multiple levels (e.g. product types, Computers > Laptops). The combination of all facets and values are often called a faceted taxonomy. These faceted values can be added directly to content as metadata or extracted automatically using text mining software."
Permalink | Thursday, April 30, 2009
The House That Ogilvy Built
Interesting read from Strategy+Business. In this piece author Kenneth Roman describes the business genius of David Ogilvy and the principles he used to build the enduring firm.
More than anything else, the glue that held together the organization as it grew around the world was training. Ogilvy used the metaphor of a teaching hospital. “Great hospitals do two things,” he said. “They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. Ogilvy & Mather does two things: We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people. Ogilvy & Mather is the teaching hospital of the advertising world. And as such, it is to be respected above all other agencies.”
Permalink | Thursday, April 30, 2009
IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience
Metropolis magazine lists 10 tips that IDEO has learnt creating the Ormondale Elementary School in Portola Valley, California. It seems the items in this list have been around for many years now. So the problem is not about knowing what to do, but how to do it. Jay Mathews's book, Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America is a much better read on how to bring change to the classroom.
Here are some items from IDEO's list:
Change the discourse.
If you want to drive new behavior, you have to measure new things. Skills such as creativity and collaboration can’t be measured on a bubble chart. We need to create new assessments that help us understand and talk about the developmental progress of 21st-century skills. This is not just about measuring outcomes, but also measuring process. We need formative assessments that are just as important as numeric ones. And here’s the trick: we can’t just have the measures. We actually have to value them.
Teachers are designers.
Let them create. Build an environment where your teachers are actively engaged in learning by doing. Shift the conversation from prescriptive rules to permissive guidance. Even though the resulting environment may be more complicated to manage, the teachers will produce amazing results.
Permalink | Monday, April 27, 2009
IA Task Failures Remain Costly
"Although usability has improved overall, IA is becoming a sore thumb that's preventing websites from meeting their business goals... Bad IA is now the greatest cause of task failures because it's the stumbling block for getting anywhere on a site. Users try to find their way around a site, and if they're particularly motivated, they might even try again if they fail. But if users are repeatedly led in circles or dumped into no-man's land by weak search, they give up and leave for another site. That's why deficiencies in your IA are costing you a lot of money, right now. "
Permalink | Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Problem Solving 101
Every now and then comes a book that makes me think about my practice and shines a light on how to do it better. Ken Watanabe's Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People is one such book. Initially written to teach kids problem-solving approaches, this book became the most popular business book in Japan in 2007. In 120 pages Ken brilliantly describes explorative and iterative problem-solving approaches that make so much sense. Here is his approach:
- Understand the current situation
- Identify the root cause of the problem
- Develop an effective action plan
- Execute until the problem is solved, making modifications as necessary
He describes this approach in 3 fun-filled stories:
- Mushroom Lovers, a kids rock band, trying to get more people to attend their monthly concert
- John Octopus on figuring out how to save enough money to buy a computer to pursue his dream to become a CGI artist in Hollywood
- Kiwi on deciding which soccer school to attend
One thing is quite clear: this needs a rapid or iterative approach and will not fit well into a prescriptive approach.
The problem that I see is that most clients demand a prescriptive approach. For example, clients want to know upfront the number of interviews that will be done or the number of usability tests that will be conducted in the research study. Such decisions I think are to be made in context and only if there is a need for them. But I also acknowledge that clients need some indication of effort to plan for resources needed. So we have a problem. The rapid development approach seems to be a possible solution (a hypothesis) but I'll need to test it out on a few projects to see if it works!
Permalink | Saturday, April 18, 2009
Toward Content Quality
Continuing on the content strategy thread, here is a bunch of checklists that can be used to evaluate the quality of content on the website or intranet.
"In my experience, a common misperception of the evaluation of content quality is that its scope is limited to the correction of typos and grammatical errors. Correcting spelling and grammar only scratches the surface. To truly consider content quality, we need to examine its quality along several dimensions."
Permalink | Thursday, April 16, 2009