The PEP Talks videos
PEP stands for Passion, Experience, People. It's an event where experts share their passions with college students. Nice talks all around. From Chis Rockwell on Mind of Design to Jim Hendrickson on "choosing" vs. "following" your career path.innovation, events Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Attending Devlearn 09 and KM World 09
The good folks at Devlearn have given me a journalists pass to attend Devlearn this year. So I am going. While I’m there I’ll also be attending KM World. I think it will be a terrific opportunity to meet the community and make new friends. If you are going as well and if you like to connect do mail me at maish-at-elearningpost.com. Looking forward to these events.
devlearn09 Add tag Permalink | Saturday, October 24, 2009
Why Are Web Sites So Confusing?
Andrei Hagiu assistant professor in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School tries to rationalize why websites are so confusing:
“Thus, consumers coming to the supermarket to buy daily staples (say, bread and milk) might be induced to also get expensive chocolate if they have to walk past the corresponding aisle anyway. Shoppers visiting a mall for its anchor store (say, Macy’s) may decide to stop by a small design store while walking around the mall. And while flipping through the pages of a magazine in search of the article promised on the cover, readers are exposed to advertising, which produces most of the revenues.”
“In the same way, Google faces a subtle issue in designing its search result pages: consumers are mostly interested in the “objective” (i.e., middle) search results, but all revenues come from the sponsored search ads on the right hand side. The result is a compromise between what users want and what produces more revenues. For any given search, the 11th objective search result might be more relevant than any of the sponsored search results displayed on the right; yet it will be displayed on the second search page only—well beyond the reach of most users.”
information architecture, usability Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Myth of Usability Testing
Robert Hoekman Jr. discusses the reliability of usability tests in the latest issue of A List Apart.
“Usability teams also have wildly differing experience levels, skill sets, degrees of talent, and knowledge, and although some research and testing methods have been homogenized to the point that anyone should be able to perform them proficiently, a team’s savvy (or lack thereof) can affect the results it gets. That almost anyone can perform a heuristic evaluation doesn’t mean the outcome will always be useful or even accurate. Heuristics are not a checklist, they are guidelines a usability evaluator can use as a baseline from which to apply her expertise. They are a beginning, not an end.”
usability, research Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The essence of qualitative research: “verstehen”
Nice post by Sam Ladner on sample size when conducting qualitative research. Ladner says “Folks, qualitative research does not worry about numbers of people; it worries about deep understanding”. I can relate with this because I’m writing a response to a proposal that has stated the problem only briefly but has spent the rest of the proposal describing how they want the research to be executed, along with the exact number of people to interview, etc. This is an example of a quantitative proposal to solve a qualitative problem.
research Add tag Permalink | Monday, October 19, 2009
Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending
NY Times reports on the emerging trend of borrowing e-books from libraries. It’s all nice but there are some cracks—e-books are treated as physical books. “Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.”
social media, school Add tag Permalink | Friday, October 16, 2009
Google Wave’s Best Use Cases
Life Hacker asked people: How would you use Google Wave? They got over 600 responses. Here is a list of their top picks. Cool!
“Dozens of teachers, students, and academics of all stripes wrote in saying that they need better and faster ways to communicate and collaborate in and out of the classroom…”
collaboration, google Add tag Permalink | Thursday, October 15, 2009
7 principles for decentralized publishing
Jane McConnell writes about 7 principles for decentralised publishing on the intranet.
“If you are a large, global organization, you will have many different types of content with varying degrees of ownership depending on the source: business unit, country, function, etc. Ask the different business units and functions to define their own guidelines for what type of content require approval by what level or role.”
content strategy, intranets, content management Add tag Permalink | Saturday, October 10, 2009
Barriers to Intranet Use from Forrester
Bill Ives has summarized a Forrester report on “What’s Holding Back Your Intranet?”. The findings are not surprising.
“They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth.”
intranets Add tag Permalink | Thursday, October 08, 2009
A Look Behind The Curtain At YouTube’s User Experience Research
Jason Kincaid writes about how YouTube tries to constantly test out and understand how its users are using the website.
“To help gauge the Watch page’s ideal layout, YouTube invited in a number of users and gave them magnets that represented different elements from YouTube and other popular video sites. The results were not surprising, but they present an interesting challenge to YouTube: the vast majority of users chose to streamline their page as much as possible, featuring a large video player, a search box, and a strip of related videos. But the site’s heavy uploaders, who are obviously key to YouTube’s success, tended to favor a more complex site with a greater emphasis on analytics, sharing, and social interaction.
YouTube’s task is to figure out a way to appeal to both sets of users.”
usability, research, governance Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 06, 2009
HBR: The Simplest Way to Reboot Your Brain
The Harvard Business Review has an article by Robert Stickgold where he writes about the benefits of sleep:
“A report in the June 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a nap with REM (or “dream”) sleep improves people’s ability to integrate unassociated information for creative problem solving, and study after study has shown that sleep boosts memory. If you memorize a list of words and then take a nap, you’ll remember more words than you would without sleeping first. Even micronaps of six minutes—not including the time it takes to fall asleep, which is about five minutes if you’re really tired—make a difference.”
innovation, interesting, neuroscience Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Large documents: PDF it?
Ginny Redish explores when to PDF large documents, and more importantly when not to.
“However, realize that, with most PDF files, you are providing a paper document on the web rather than web-based information. If the document looks like a paper document or if it is large, people are likely to print it rather than read it on the screen. You have distributed the document; you have saved the printing and shipping cost; you have shifted the cost and effort of printing to your audiences – but have you really met their needs?”
information architecture, content strategy, content management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Fads vs Business Value: Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0
Oliver Marks cautions on using the 2.0 prefix as another way to bottle old wine—for example, KM before and Enterprise 2.0 now.
Like the vast amount of blogs, there’s now a glut of content online with mostly nothing new to say (with honorable exceptions of course) on the topic of using web 2.0 technologies in business, the wonder of Twitter and on and on, in slide format. It’s far from clear who most of this material is aimed at - like the CD Roms ten years ago not many people actually look at this stuff unless there’s a compelling reason to.
knowledge management, social media Add tag Permalink | Monday, September 28, 2009
Google enhances search results to include page sections in snippets
Google announced yesterday that they’ve enhanced their search results page to include page sections of long pages in the snippets area. Here is an example they’ve given.
The rationale is that we can do directly to a section in the page if that’s what we’re interested in. That’s a nice idea—it’s an attempt at auto-indexing the page using page sections. It provides more information on the page, assuming that the page sections are labeled properly.
But what’s really interesting that is the fact that this is another opportunity to reveal sequence, like in a table of contents. Showing a sequence in a page really gets to the guts of what the page is all about. Google already shows a sitemap in the search results, which gets to what a site is all about.
Now the only thing Google needs to figure out is how to reveal sequence across pages and sites. So for example, if I were to search for “diabetes” then I should get a sequence that links to different pages and sites and the sequence includes what is diabetes to treatments to living with a diabetic to home remedies. Guess that was what the Knol was supposed to do.
information architecture, taxonomy, google Add tag Permalink | Saturday, September 26, 2009
1-day Masterclass in SharePoint Collaboration with Michael Sampson
We’re organizing a 1-day Masterclass in SharePoint Collaboration with Michael Sampson. This is taking place on 5th Nov at Grand Hyatt in Singapore. We’re offering an early-bird price of S$420 if you register before Oct 20th (a real bargain folks).
So why are we doing this? There are many SharePoint projects taking shape these days and that’s good in one way—it tells us that collaboration is getting the attention and budget it deserves. But many of these projects are done solely from a technical point of view, and this is a problem. Collaboration as we’ve come to understand demands more than just a technical perspective. It requires asking the right questions, planning to get the right answers and making the right decisions along the way that align with business objectives. This is the gap that we hope to bridge with Michael Sampson in the seminar. So if you’re in Singapore or in the region, this is an opportunity to understand the many paths ahead with SharePoint (or any other collaboration tool) and how to choose the right ones (and how to avoid the wrong ones).
intranets, collaboration Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Zombie home page chronicles
Now this is serious fun. I’ve seen this happen so many times. From Tales from Redesignland.
Read the entire episode.
information architecture, interface, governance, interesting Add tag Permalink | Monday, September 21, 2009
Intranet governance cycle
I’ve posted a new article at PebbleRoad on intranet governance.
This article offers a system view of intranet governance. It is based on a simple strategy that can be applied across different areas. The areas that I’ve covered are: information organization, publishing, collaboration and applications.
This article is based on a presentation that I put together for the KM Singapore conference.
intranets, governance Add tag Permalink | Monday, September 21, 2009
Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product
A good read by Donald Norman on the need to look at the systems view when it comes to designing products—“A product is actually a service. Although the designer, manufacturer, distributer, and seller may think it is a product, to the buyer, it offers a valuable service.”
design thinking Add tag Permalink | Sunday, September 20, 2009
Videos- Mayo Clinic Transformation Symposium
I’m deeply interested in heath care design. I think this is one of the areas that badly needs reform. But I’m confident that reform will come sooner than later simply because of the attention that this area is getting from some of the brightest minds in design. In the last few months we’ve seen many new books on the subject, Designing Care by Richard Bohmer is just one of them. Rosenfeld Media is working on another, Designing for Care with Peter Jones that should be out sometime next year.
Last week the Mayo Clinic hosted a symposium on innovations in health care experience and delivery. I’m watching the videos right now. The speakers include the likes of Tim Brown of Ideo and Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. The topics include the need for richer conversations to design thinking to innovation.
So it seems like the forces are coming together and the conversations have started. Health care is up for reform!
health care Add tag Permalink | Sunday, September 20, 2009
Training intranet editors - the intranet cafe?
J. Boye describes a method that he observed when discussing how intranet editors are trained—the intranet cafe.
An interesting alternative to the usual options was presented by a retailer that had successfully introduced a regular “intranet café”. Every other week on Wednesday afternoons the intranet manager and his team made themselves available in a training room to anybody interested, who could then show up without the need for any prior registration. Some would show up with specific questions, while other occasional intranet editors would show up simply to get intranet work done while knowing that a helping hand was nearby. These intranet cafés had become tremendously popular and really made an impact on training staff on using the intranet. Quite a nice bottom-up approach!
intranets Add tag Permalink | Saturday, September 12, 2009
Design checklist
Mert Tol has created an exhaustive checklist of all design issues that one should consider before going live. There are points from visual design to architecture to content. Useful to have all these in one page.
style guide Add tag Permalink | Saturday, September 12, 2009
3 types of page headings
This is a good article on how to write the 3 types of page headings:
- Question heading: A heading in the form of a question
- Statement heading: A heading that uses a noun and a verb
- Topic heading: A heading that is a word or short phrase
Here is another article on headings by Ginny Redish where she provides many more examples.
content strategy, style guide Add tag Permalink | Friday, September 11, 2009
Quote on tunnel vision
“A tribesman was transported from a remote mountain wilderness (a society that had not yet discovered the wheel) to a large city. When he returned, he reported that the most significant thing he saw was somebody using a wheelbarrow to carry more bananas than he ever thought possible. He literally did not see the significance of automobiles and skyscrapers. He was not prepared to see them.”
By Arie de Gaus as stated by Peter Schwartz in Art of Long View, p.g. 33.
Good to keep this in mind when dealing with the adoption of new ideas or a new way of working.
quotes Add tag Permalink | Friday, September 11, 2009
Content strategy articles galore
Content strategy is really picking up steam. InfoDesign links to 2 articles on this emerging discipline.
I just finished reading Kristina Halvorson’s book, Content Strategy for the Web, which I think should be a must-read for designers. She makes a very good case for content strategy but does not build enough of a case to sell the discipline to the likes of busy managers and the IT department. The case for content lifecycle management will be a tough idea to get across to these folks. This nevertheless must be done. We designers should just be persistent about it.
content strategy Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, September 09, 2009
DITA 101
The Rockley Group has published DITA 101, a guide for authors and managers to understand and use DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). I’m reading it now and so far its been simple and easy to understand.
“DITA 101 is designed for authors and managers. We’ve taken our years’ of experience helping organizations to move to DITA and training our clients in creating DITA content and distilled it into an easy to read and understand format. Combined with our expertise in developing effective reuse strategies and adopting content management, this book covers everything you need to know to understand DITA from an authors or managers viewpoint.”
information architecture, content strategy, content management Add tag Permalink | Sunday, September 06, 2009