Information is indeed power

When a child is young, she happily wanders around her world, unaware of the dangers she faces or how to avoid them. She relies on her parents, her instincts and as she gets older, her experiences to guide her and help her learn what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s safe and what’s unsafe. She develops a behaviour and knowledge to stay safe and grow safely into an adult.

She relies on her ability to recall past events, the lessons learnt from those event and associated activities or incidents that allow her to make decisions based upon passed learning.

The mind creates association between actual and potential situations, and develops a behavioural response that allows us to be safer, cleverer and more aware of our surroundings. Added to the direction of our parents, and instinctive knowledge passed on through generations then we have a learning and information system in our head that allows us to access an ever growing pool of sometimes only loosely connected information and use it efficiently in our day to day lives.

Knowledge, information and data is constantly being collated updated and created as we go through each day, just as you learn new things and store them, your organisation creates document, emails data in databases, spreadsheets, web content, paper documents in an ever expanding store of information. It’s saved in a myriad of applications, file locations and web solutions.

But how do you relate one piece of information (knowledge) to another, and how do you recall it.

Recall and retrival are increasingly important when you consider that new information worldwide increase on average by 30% every year, you and your colleagues face a 100% increase in the document you need to search through every 3 years…

Think you have a lot now? Just wait…

And yet we store this data in silos, separate applications that don’t talk to each other, they separated data from data from users from all our other ‘stuff’.
We create barriers to knowledge share and expect our colleagues to find these disparate knowledge chunks, how many organisations create new documents in and file them on file structure, and save them as:

Some random file name.doc

In

file://my location/another folder/yet another random name/misc/

And how much of that data is audited…ever?
Now add to the mix, just for fun, those additional applications an organisation will have in their infrastructure that are used to store, create and, if your lucky, share information on the same subjects or related to information in that other application or the documeng saved in randomfolder_name/ that guy over there just created.

Result?

Your staff members unable to find relevant documentation on a particualr subject, repeat the mistakes of others, they duplicate documents and knowledge already created and worse create updates it in alternative locations so there is no single authorative verion of any document in your organisation…

And this isn’t rocket science.

Structuring your content (knowledge ) so that you can find, use and manage it across the entire organisation does not take long and will take considerably less time than the hours spent looking for it in any number of locations.
Implicit metadata (taken from the document you’re creating) makes structuring and categorising much easier for the user, and can be used to suggest tags.
Training and demonstrating the process of ‘tagging’ alongside the retrieval process and benefits can help convince detractors that the process is indeed worthwhile, and allows VAS.

Search

Ok so what about search…it works, we can search our repositories and document stores, so we ca do this instead of categorising content right?

True but, if you search your content for a string “document_type my_customer” you get all documents with those terms.

So you get clever and use the AND statement to join your search parameters, now you get just documents that have both terms, but not the ones that use the customername or the project_title. And you will still get all documents all versions even if they just mention the document you need. In short it’s a simple fact your search returns are only as good as your content, and don’t forget all those knowledge silos that you can’t index….

Search plus is a retrieval technique that lacks relevance for this reason you can only ever rely on return quantitative as opposed to qualitative response, by adding some aboutness information to your content you can vastly improve the quality of the returns given and thus cut down on the number if searches make and time spent making them.

Conclusion

1. Don’t limit you options
2. Think about your content and how it’s organised so that your users (Staff) don’t have to.
3. Time spent preparing content is time saved (magnified) retrieving it
4. Use control vocabularies alongside folksomic tagging (see point one)
5. There is no ‘single solution’

Reading Robert Scoble ‘s friend feed conversation list, he posted a notice that got some traffic regarding the use of twitter as a conversations tool

His argument was that twitter was not and should not be used as a tool for conversations, but more for ‘announcements’. Now his argument is not without merit, if you follow many followers or take your eye of your twitter app for a second then you can quickly lose the conversation thread,  however he seems to be implying that you should not use twitter in this way, full stop. Problem with that is his argument suggests that there is a set if rules for using twitter and these should be followed by all users, this is wrong, for twitter and all other products or services being developed. There are no rules there are however behavious patterns that define how users adapt a service to their needs, and its this that makes the web(2.0?).

If twitter or any service is to survive then it has to evolve, just like people.

Argument is as follows:

As you build a site( for site you can substitute webapp /service /product/whatever but I’ll use app for ease of use) you have an idea of the users that you need to talk to. If your smart you talk to these users and ask them what they want, try to use this to identify what they actually need and design a solution that fits this need, you of course test it with representatives of these users and make adaptations to the site before go live.

On go-live you are confident you have a successful site in the making and sit back, update content maybe add functionality in later phases of the site as per the development roadmap and generally watch the site grow.

Trouble is the users evolve, they mature in their use of your site , their needs develop as they get comfortable they develop new ways of using the what you have delivered in ways you never considered, and, if you don’t adapt to these needs then your site will whither and die, and your visitors find a new site that fits their new behaviour better.

you need to monitor how your users try to *abuse* the functionality you have supplied and adapt the site to make it easier for them to achieve their new activity.

This is <tech-volution /> (yes i made this up)

So back to the original point, and Roberts assumption that Twitter is to say that twitter is not for conversations, this is a mistake and I’m afraid, wrong, if this where true then no-one would use twitter for conversations, the problems with using the service in this way would make it unusable, in the same way as you don’t use a fork to eat soup.

Twitter may not be ideal for conversations , it may be tricky but its not wrong, and it would not surprise me to hear that the folks at twitter are planning spend some of their $50 million to release new features for the service that allows threading for conversations, that is if tweetdeck or twhirl (insert twitter client here) don’t get there first,

That’s tech-volution.

Technorati Profile

Like most medium-sized companies (we have a little over 100 people working here), Eduserv has a requirement to communicate effectively with staff on a regular basis. I should re-phrase that: EVERY company has a requirement to communicate with staff, but once you become bigger than maybe 10-20 people, things become more complicated than just sitting down face-to-face and having a quick daily update.

We have an intranet of course but this is built on top of Sharepoint and as such does document management and Office integration reasonably well, but fails when it comes to usability or rapid updating. Also, like many intranets, ours has been built organically rather than with a strategic direction in mind, and has the usual strangely complicated IA to boot. We also have a monthly / bi-monthly internal newsletter which is sent around as a PDF file. This too does its job, but performs a different function again. The newsletter is managed by a member of the Marketing team, but we don’t have a full time internal comms person.

During December last year, we got the ok to put together a prototype for rapid dissemination of internal information (hey, a rhyme..). We looked quickly at the various options available to us and decided - rather unusually for a .Net house - that we’d install Wordpress on a virtual machine and set up an internal blog. Anyone who works with me knows that I bang on endlessly about the merits of WP as a means of managing simple content, so this decision sat rather well with me.

As per all rapid development projects, we spent a smallish amount of time thinking and much more time doing, and certainly didn’t go out to the business to ask about IA or strategy, instead relying on our gut feeling about the best way to structure stuff. We figured that a lightweight environment such as Wordpress would enable us to react quickly to change requests.

The first couple of days were spent working on the top level IA and categories, and also firming up the beginnings of a “mission statement” for the site. We also came up with a name - “Inform” - and sorted out the subdomain inform.eduserv.org.uk (obviously, only viewable internally!). 

Here are the top level labels:

Essentially, we wanted to make Inform sit alongside the other communications tools we have at our disposal. We articulated the positioning like this: the intranet would remain as a place where we manage documents, projects and bids, but any news or social items would be displaced to Inform. The PDF newsletter would remain, but used less as a tool for disseminating information and more to round up and provide deeper insight into the lives and work of Eduserv staff. 

Here’s a screenshot of the site (click for bigger):

We were very clear about the editorial policy on Inform: it was absolutely key to us that anyone from the company should be able to contribute articles or comment - first and foremost, we wanted the site to be truly *owned* by staff rather than a “top-down” resource; secondly, as mentioned earlier, we have no internal staff to manage the site full time, so wanted to spread the editorial work around as much as possible. 

We decided to take a “light touch” approach to editorial, with a key team of 3 people managing the publishing of articles (obviously, as well as doing their day job!), but letting anyone submit one. This publishing stop-gap allows us to quickly review a document and check for broken links or typos, but is rapid enough that we can publish within minutes of article submission. Wordpress lets you manage a simple workflow like this very easily, sending an email to administrators when a new article is submitted, and providing other tools like content locking and so on.

After a couple of weeks of running, it became clear that we’d need some integrated forum software in order to manage conversations that were of interest but weren’t quite articles, so we set up SimplePress as an item in the main IA and - after a bit of wrangling - managed to get both it and the main Wordpress login to link to Active Directory. Again, we were looking for the slickest way of logging people in to the site, reducing effort required wherever possible. Here’s the forum:

One of the interesting issues for us has been how to describe the difference between posting to the forum and posting an article. Several times, we’ve had staff who have submitted posts which are better positioned as forum items. The content in question was generally very specific so we now suggest that post content is that which would be of interest to *all* staff, wheras forum postings can be more pitched at teams or individuals.

Inform has been running for for 8 weeks now, and we’ve just taken a bit of time to look back and evaluate the successes and issues we’ve had. Right from the beginning, we’ve had Google Analytics running on the site and have used it to try and understand how people are using it. 

For starters, it is very clear that Inform has begun to be embedded into people’s daily working lives. We took the - reasonably unpopular - decision to send an “all-staff” email with the latest 3 articles highlighted on - at most - a daily basis. A few people complained about in-box clutter but when we pointed out that the email is sending around 60% of all traffic to the site, most people understand that this is a useful service. To do this, I built a custom emailer in ASP which sends a templated XHTML email. The template is extensible, and includes BBC news and local weather as well as a feed from the discussion forum.

The stats for the site are showing us that we’ve averaged 60 visits a day since launch at just under 5 pages per visit. People are spending around 5 minutes per visit on the site and the average bounce rate is around 29%  (a good web average is 35-50% - lower is better..). 

The most popular area of the site after the homepage is the forum.

Most impressively, however, is the extent to which the site has been populated with content by people who aren’t on the 3-person Inform administrator group:

• 23 people have written 82 blog posts
• 137 comments have been left
• 71 people have created logins on the site
• 15 people have posted 72 forum posts

Just to close, I’d like to share with you some of the tools and techniques we’re going to be looking at for Eduserv Inform development over the coming months. Most of these are about finding ways of further embedding use of the site in the lives of staff by investigating alerting techniques and so on:

1. We’ve started building an Adobe AIR application which will run in the background on staff desktops. It will alert staff members when new content that they’ve shown an interest in is made available on the Inform site

2. We’ve created an internal IM (Jabber) server which we intend to use for people to set preferences and receive alerts via Inform and other sources.

3. We’ve built a staff directory API, based on our internal Active Directory. This search is available in one channel via a page on Inform, but we have also built a “OneBox” API implementation of this for our internal Google Enterprise search box. The eventual idea is that staff will be able to search all resources throughout the company - documents, articles, directories, news, etc - via a single, “access everywhere” search box.

4. We’re looking at ways in which we can overcome the fact that the Inform RSS feed is only visible inside the Eduserv LAN. This obviously causes problems for staff who use web-based feed readers (ie. the majority) rather than desktop ones. We’re thinking that we will create an “alerts” feed which won’t pass any (potentially sensitive) content out to the wider web, but will “ping” people with feed readers when new content has been added.

That’s it, for now. Overall, our experience has been extremely positive. We’ve implemented something that is well liked and - more importantly - actually useful to Eduserv staff. We’ve done it quickly, with minimum cost and effort. We’re seeing users actually engaging with the content. Last, but not least, we’re starting to demonstrate that the key to sites like this *isn’t* the technology - although WordPress rocks! - but the rapid turnover of interesting, easily available content which anyone can contribute to.

In a recent discussion / interview with a member of the Eduserv research group (previously known as (Eduserv foundation) which focused on a study soon to be proposed into CSM and HEI, I was asked to define the ‘user requirements’ for content management system project.

Users.., what are ‘users’ when discussing CMS requirements, and are they the same as website users?

In a traditional sense users are often regarded as the ‘users’ of a website, UX professionals talk about user testing and user centered design processes, but when it comes to CMS the user can be seen as the ‘site; user or the CMS user, each with very different needs and thus differing impacts on your requirements exercise. It’s important therefore to make sure that you are talking about the same ‘audience’ and that you accurately address their needs.

Site users, (visitors) need to be able to find information quickly and need navigation accessible content, they may ‘use’ the functions of the site in the process of finding content but referring to them as users (in the CMS context) clutters the message. Navigation, clarity, language findability structure and design make for the site visitors experience.

The needs of the CMS user however is concerned with editing interfaces, categorization and linking, they need workflow and accessibility checkers, they need to know who did what when and how, the kind of stuff that CMS (WCMS) should do well.

Most of the time the description of the feature needed will be itself explanatory. However you should never allow ambiguity and assumption into your requirements study. (Similarly words such as ‘solution’ ‘system’ and ‘service’ should also be avoided in this context.

For example

“The solution should be accessible to users with disability”…means what exactly?

Then we get to audiences, now these are different again. An audience, in this instance, could be defined as category or group of users (or visitors) who share characteristics, interests or experience levels.

Parents, teaches and students are all audience types, as a parent I am a visitor to my boys school website. The teacher’s who create the site with their CMS is a CMS User,

Users, visitors and Audiences are therefore interlinked, but have differing views of the solution you are defining, if you are going to meet these needs you need to make sure that you and your project sponsor / customer have a shared understanding of these differences and needs to avoid the ambiguities and, even worse assumptions that add risk to your project.

We spend a lot of time considering the technology of a particular site, customers are always keen to point out the fact that they ‘need’ features and functions to make their site ‘useful’ and attract users, plans involve the development and design of forums, blogs and web 2.0 features that are a must for the new site that will move them into the 21st century, and then as a by line there is content …

I forwarded an article from giraffe forums, which was later twittered to the community regarding the importance of content in the procurement of a CMS for any organisation. it suggested that migration of old content into a new CMS and web design, with the added function and features that a new system offers, but the same content, will effectively achieve nothing,

Content makes a site.

It should be thoughtfully written with the reader in mind and use language that they can will understand, use common language, and avoid industry acronyms.

It should be long enough to inform the reader, but not so long that they don’t want to read the piece. Add a ‘contact us’ link so that the reader can get in touch should they need more information.

Structure the content in a sympathetic manner, the reader dies not know your companies internal structure and probably doesn’t care, structure content in way that the reader will expect.

In a recent thread on the information architects institute mail list, the procurement of a CMS was again the subject of discussion, in this thread, one contributor suggested that the IA focus on the ‘Goals’ of the CMS rather than the features, again positioning the procurement away from the technology and more towards the desired effect.

Informing the user, allowing them to interact with the content and thus the organisation,

Web2.0 is about user generated content not technology, so don’t muddy the waters with unnecessary features, moderate them to the user, what they need and how they expect to be able to interact with you.

Many websites will go to significant lengths to mage sure that their navigation is put grouped in a meaningful and logical way, (not always logical to the user but logical none the less)

Others however just don’t get it.

Amazon, a huge success story and still my favourite online retailer, is on my opinion guilty of two major no no’s.

Firstly the criminal use of massively over complicated Captcha images and secondly information grouping.

Where you place links and how you arrange them is extremely important if you are to avoid the ‘oops’ factor, the accidental clicking on a web link that does the exact opposite to the action the user intended

Take for example the illustration below

image showing wish list grouping

the links view your wish list and delete your wish list couldn’t be closer, true a simple are you sure message can help avoid the accidentally deletion of a users data, but why add the risk at all?

The way these links are grouped asks for trouble a user in a rush will see wish list, users don’t read but scan pages so there is a high possibility that they will click the wrong list

click the link (yes I tried, nervously) and you are asked to login, odd as I already logged in to view my wish list, no mention of the action you are about to undergo..(I stopped there, yes chicken)

The logical structure of the links is also odd with delete your wedding list in a complete separate screen area to the view your wedding list,  

wedding list grouping

This make more sense separating ‘delete’ actions from ‘view’ actions but it lacks consistency.

The grouping of these links adds to the potential for user error,

Be aware how you group links, group them order or importance and use, user are more likely to want to view their data than delete they whole lot, so why put them together?

actions should implient each other

sign out grouping

Clicks on the won link here and you off the site rather than viewing the security notice, only a minor issue but not what the user expects.

Be consistent; make sure that if you follow a logical group for one area of the site, you continue to use the same logic,

If an action for a link may cause user distress, make sure that it’s clear that this link will delete your profile /data

Finally check, then check again “are you sure?” and “An email will be sent to your profile email address to confirm this action”

I recently installed Aptana studio (today) just to see what it was, I regularly do this it look at tools and see if they are any good or may help any of the guys here develop richer apps or work in more creative way. usually they FAIL massively and are deleted as quick as they are installed.

Then I found this baby.

Now, I don’t code any more, indeed some of those I have worked with in the dim and distant past may argue I was more of a hack than a coder;) but I still like to dabble occasionally, inspiration being the main problem. So when I installed this I wasn’t expecting to see anything much of interest.

wrong.

Firstly is a code editor extreme, with plug-ins for Ajax, Air,  PHP, radrails, iPhone development….it comes with Jaxer a built in Ajax server for local development and the release candidate, (1.2) introduces cloud development with an integrated dashboard and collaborative working tools and a dashboard for keeping up to date with your project progress.

With associated video tutorials, documentation and what seems to be a fairly active community there is a good deal of support for the new user..and we still haven’t upgraded to the pro edition!

We’ve been having a look at this today and so far we are all seriously impressed.

Check out http://www.aptana.com/ for more

source : E-Government Bulletin, 30 September 2008 - Participatory budgeting - astonishing results; web accessibility guidelines update

available from http://www.headstar.com

A long-awaited updated version of the main international standard for making websites accessible to people with disabilities is set to be published in mid-December, E-Government Bulletin has learned.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C - http://www.w3c.org) have been in development for several years.

Creators of public sector websites have been using version 1.0 of the guidelines, adherence to which is written into various government guidelines. However they have long been seen as over-technical and complex and unclear in many situations.

Version 2.0 is set to address many of these problems by moving away from rigid technical ‘checkpoints’ to more flexible ’success criteria.’

This week, the responsible World Wide Web consortium working group is due to meet in Boston, US to finalise the current ‘Candidate recommendation’ phase of WCAG 2.0 in which the new guidelines have been tested on real web sites to confirm their applicability.

The group will debate which success criteria can be considered sufficiently stable to be implemented, and some of the requirements previously marked as ‘At risk’ will be reviewed to ensure the guidelines can be met in practice.

A W3C spokesman told E-Government Bulletin this week that publication before Christmas was now expected, and that if the deadline did slip any further it would be a matter of weeks, not months.

I admit I had started to lose interest in Facebook, it was fun to start with but it seemed that, with the latest redesign fiasco and the emerging offerings that twitter et al has to offer who has time to poke superpoke and tag all your virtual friends?

What’s next?

Trouble is I forgot something, as mje pointed out  ‘ we are not normal (ok slightly out of context but it read well) I / we are immersed in the web, we live there, shop there and play there, and in that respect we are not ‘normal’.

There are vast swathes of people in the real non virtual world who are only vaguely aware that there is a Facebook, have (shock horror) no idea what a tweet is (vague references to an American RnB singer..No? I’ll move on) and check their email, once maybe twice ..a week!!!

People like….my partner.

She, until recently only had a ‘Bodyspace’ profile (social site for fitness professionals and interested others) which she rarely used and to be fair was not really interested in, then as a result of a  conversation with a friend in the USA she asked me how she could get a Facebook..

Background, my partner is from Zimbabwe a large (very large) percentage of the Zim population now live abroad, and it seems are extremely active on Facebook.

Within 5 minutes (no literally 5 mins, no word a lie) of setting her page up, adding a few common friends, etc.  She was getting requests from old school friends, people she grew up with in Harare, and telephone calls, friends contacting friends calling friends adding friends….

We, the guys and gals that work in this industry forget too easy that we get play with these toys a lot and sooner that real people. Maybe we need to sit down with more grounded folk and watch them discover our world once in a while to remind us that yeah it really is quite cool and clever and fun, and yeah we are lucky really.

Because ultimately it still all about people, ordinary people meeting people, talking to people.

We / I may not like the new Facebook design, and there may be a million users who agree, there is (as pointed out to me by a colleague last week) for each of who don’t like the design 10 who don’t care, as a platform it still works.

And when we, the guys who build and live in this virtual playground get it right, it’s really *really* good.

Technorati Tags: facebook,social networking,web2.0

since my post discussing Gmail security, or the lack of, Google have done, well, nothing to address the situation.

Actually that’s not entirely true they have posted this article stating that users cannot register addresses similar to yours, but with a dot in it

therefore, according to Google

another@gmail.com also regsiters a.n.other@gmail.com

at least that’s what they say…today i received the full details of a purchase someone with a similar but subtly different email address