Tiny clickable areas (a problem that's exacerbated when the user accesses a website on a mobile device)
Pagination of running text simply to increase page views (but note that spreading text over several pages can reduce the likelihood that the web page will cause a crash on a mobile device)
Duplicate page titles
Content that is formatted and laid out in a way that makes it difficult to scan visually
No contact information
No search function
Placing too much of the website's content behind a wall that can be breached only by registering
Out-of-date permalinks that do not automatically redirect to the content's current location
Long registration forms
Not only is Fadeyev's post itself worth reading — as fundamental guidance for people just taking up Web design, and as a refresher for more experienced designers — but so is Comment #78 from a certain Dr. Girlfriend, who explains how Firefox and Firefox plug-ins can mitigate each of the nine mistakes on Fadeyev's list.
The May/June 2009 issue of Communication Arts presents the results of the magazine's fifteenth Interactive Annual competition. Editor Patrick Coyne introduces the thirty-five winners with an Editor's column that is basically an anthology of comments on likes and dislikes from the competition's jurors.
Coyne's thought-provoking column doesn't seem to be available online so, with the advice that you try to get your hands on a copy of the May/June issue, I'll provide something of a teaser by citing some of my favorite passages.
"A common thought that pervaded all discussion among the judges was that we really appreciated the minimalistic approach to design, user experience and navigation this year." (A comment from Amber Bezahler, managing director of an ad agency in Vancouver.)
"I was really excited to see some of the mobile stuff, like the iPhone Apps and the smaller Web sites, because they take the other extreme [from info- and media-heavy sites]. They're very small, very efficient experiences, and some are really beautiful and meticulously done." (A comment from Michelangelo Capraro, co-founder of an interactive design firm in San Francisco.)
The dramatic increase in the use of video has been the big topic over the last several years, and this year's jury was particularly critical of its overuse. . . . "People still don't know how to handle [video] properly because we're experiencing these crazy-long wait times. For what? As a user, the impact that you're getting in terms of what you're investing timewise isn't quite there yet." (A comment from Stacey Mulcahy, a Flash designer)
"A lot of companies are trying to engage audiences and they thought games would be a good way to do it. In the end I voted most of them out because they were trying too hard, and the amount of fun that you actually were able to have wasn't worth the effort." (A comment from Jason Ring, creative director of an ad agency in San Francisco)
"It goes back to that basic question we ask ourselves a lot, 'Why does this brand need a Web site and who would ever want to go there?' That's not to say that people don't want to interact with the brand or the brand doesn't have something to say to them, but it's really looking at where the right place is for that interaction to take place — with the idea of reaching people where they already are as opposed to driving them to a place where they're not." (A comment ftrom Jay Zasa, executive creative director at a New York ad agency)
You can see the winning interactive projects here.
Yesterday's Washington Post had an article about the inauguration of the World Digital Library (WDL), on online archive of primary sources being continuously expanded under the sponsorship of UNESCO.1
As explained at the WDL website, the mission of the WDL is to make "available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." The principal objectives of this endeavor include expanding "the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet," providing "resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences," and building capacity in partner institutions (generally, libraries and archives) "to narrow the digital divide within and between countries."2
The image below is just one example of what you will find at the WDL, which currently has upwards of 1200 items.
"Basic and Advanced Flying School for Negro Air Corps Cadets, Tuskegee, Alabama... In the Center is Capt. Roy F. Morse, Air Corps. He is Teaching the Cadets How to Send and Receive Code." (World Digital Library)
When you visit the page on which this image is displayed, you can see the care with which the archivists have assigned categorized tags ("consistent metadata") to assist visitors in finding the image when searching using various filters, such as location, time period, topic, type of item (book, photo, musical score, etc.), and home institution.
__________ 1 The WDL website is hosted at the US Library of Congress. The plan is to establish mirror sites elsewhere in the world in due course. (Note that the Library of Congress maintains an analogous program of digitized primary materials relating to the United States — the National Digital Library Program — which you can read about here.)
2 The languages in which navigation tools and item descriptions are available are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The plan is to add more languages over time, but doing so is at a lower level of priority than "increasing the volume and diversity of content from and about all countries in all languages and building digital capacity in developing countries."
Back in September 2006, an interesting English-language e-zine was founded in Lübeck, Germany. Smashing Magazine is addressed to designers and Web developers.
John Halamka, CIO of the CareGroup Health System and Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, among other responsibilities, maintains an active blog called "Life as a Healthcare CIO" in which he covers a range of topics, most but not all related to healthcare IT.
I came upon the blog as I was researching the question of how providers are trained in the use of electronic medical records. Once I arrived at the blog, I couldn't resist reading through Dr. Halamka's recent posts, and would suggest his October 28 post "Removing Complexity" as a sample of how he shares the benefit of his experience.
The basic proposition is that if the IT team goes too far in accommodating user requests for various features, the software that IT installs (whether written in-house, or customized after purchase from a third party) tends to become so complex that it presents daunting usability, security, and maintainability issues.
After offering several examples of how complexity degrades the value-in-use of software, Dr. Halamka outlines the steps he himself takes to resist creeping complexity:
Using the fewest number of vendors possible
Minimizing customization of commercial software
Using enterprise-wide generalizable tools whenever possible
As you can see from reading Dr. Halamka's predictions concerning "Winners and Losers in 2009," he expects controlling complexity to be a theme.
As a follow-on to my recent post on how to write white papers, I'd like to cite another example of good practice.
This is a white paper (pdf) Oracle published in November 2004 that I came upon as I was looking through material dealing with operation of contact centers, an area of particular interest for me in the coming year.
"Usability in Enterprise Customer Service Applications: The Impact to Productivity, Customer Satisfaction, and Profitablility" addresses the usability criteria that are central to the design of the software that customer service representatives use:
An interface that is intuitive and easy to navigate
Access to complete — enterprise-wide — customer information
Convenient creation and updating of an easy-to-use knowledge base
Intelligent guidance to the CSR on how to work through the steps in a task
From these criteria, the paper derives the questions a company investigating options for CSR software (or customer relationship/experience management software) should investigate: How was the application designed? Who was involved? Users?
How easy is the application to learn and use?
Does the application support enterprise-wide business processes?
Can the application support your specific business processes? Is it configurable to match your processes (as opposed to your having to adjust your processes to fit the software)?
Does the application provide intelligent guidance to the CSR as he/she works with a customer?
Has the application been thoroughly tested? What were the results — in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction?
The final section of the white paper makes the case that the Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM products fulfill the aforementioned usability criteria at a high level of fidelity.
As a follow-on to my recent post about Wordle, and an earlier post about Many Eyes visualization software, I'd like to mention that Wordle is now included as one of the visualization types offered at Many Eyes. Also, you can access a 6½-minute Many Eyes tutorial written by Rich Hoeghere. This tutorial complements the Gallery & Tour available at the Many Eyes site.
A brief article in the August 29 – September 4 edition of Mass High Tech provides a good overview of how companies are borrowing from the world of gaming to conduct some of their business.
The article's author, freelancer Dann Anthony Maurno, gives particular attention to IBM, which last year issued a report (pdf) on the subject of what business can learn about leadership from watching how people participate in massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). In a sidebar (here slightly edited), Maurno summarizes the points of similarity between business and online gaming described in the IBM report, namely, both environments:
Bring together large numbers of participants in highly complex virtual environments.
Enable participants to self-organize, develop skills, and take on changing roles.
Require constant risk taking, iterative improvement, and willingness to accept failure.
Provide incentives that are clearly linked to contribution and performance.
Make participants' capabilities openly known.
Require collaboration and a leader who can influence collaborative approaches.
Provide sophisticated and varied communication channels (e.g., instant messaging, online chats and forums, voice over IP [VoIP]).
Maurno quotes George Dolbier, CTO of IBM Games and Interactive Entertainment, who observes, "The online community is teaching us you can accomplish large and complex goals" via teams working together with little supervision. Other achievements of game designers that have direct application in the business world are intuitive design and embedded support, which together contribute mightily to usability.
There is a wealth of detailed documentation of computer how-to's at various IBM websites and pages. One series of articles I particularly like offers guidance on website design using open source software (such as the content management platform, Drupal). As long as you don't need edgy aesthetics and unusual navigation at your site, the IBM recommendations provide a solid grounding in how to achieve user-friendliness.
(click on image to enlarge)
The four phases of website design: analysis, design, prototype, and development
The above graphic gives you an overview of the website design process à la IBM. The article in which the graphic is embedded provides detailed recommendations for each of the four phases of the process.
There seem to be plenty of places where one can find guidelines for brainstorming, but in my experience, expert advice on how to evaluate the ideas generated is less common. A few days ago I came upon an essay by Scott Berkun, self-styled "expert in project management, creative thinking and managing people," that is quite useful.
Berkun's essay is geared to designers, but his guidelines and tips are generally applicable to any team working on developing innovative products and/or services. I recommend reading the entire essay. To give you the flavor of what you'll find, here (in somewhat edited form) are the "general rules of order" Berkun suggests:
Start with clarifying questions. Clarify any assumptions about what the presented design is intended to do, or what kind of experience it is intended to create. Hopefully, this intent is derived from the overall project goals, which is already agreed upon.
Listen before speaking. Many times in work environments, we confuse conversations, which should be exchanges of ideas, with opportunities to inflict our opinions on others. If you take a moment to listen and understand before voicing an opinion, you’re open to hear something new that might challenge your old thinking. So don’t just wait for other people to finish; actively try to understand what’s being said, and reflect it back to the speaker.
Lead into explorations of alternatives. Ask questions that surface other choices the designer might not have recognized. Postpone judgments, unless there are obvious gaps between the designer's intent, and the designs you are critiquing.
If it fits with the goals of the critique, point out situations, sequences, or elements within the design that may be problematic given what you know about your customers, the scenarios involved, or the project goals.
Avoid statements that refer to absolutes (e.g., "This is dumb and ugly"). Instead, make points that relate to the goals of the design (e.g., "If the goal is to make this feel friendly, black and flaming red doesn’t convey that to me”).
It’s fine to have a personal opinion, expressing your own preferences, but don’t confuse this with your perception of what your customers need or want. I.e., make sure to specify which of these two kinds of opinion you’re offering. Hopefully there are data and research to help everyone agree on the likely customer perspective on different ideas.
Berkun concludes his discussion of the critique meeting proper (he has some further thoughts concerning pre- and post-meeting work and frequency of meetings) by noting that the meeting "should feel like an informal conversation between people with the same goals, all trying to explore and surface good thinking. The person running the meeting has the responsibility of setting the right tone for this, preferably by example, and doing everything in their power to maintain that attitude and spirit in the room throughout the meeting."
Since January 2007, IBM's Visual Communication Lab, which is part of the company's Collaborative User Experience research group, has offered public access to many-eyes.com, a site that makes it easy to convert data sets into meaningful visualizations. The visualization types currently offered include:
High-frequency words in a text Tag cloud (example) Word tree (example)
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas of the Collaborative User Experience research group, offer a helpful discussion of Many Eyes and of its usefulness in collaborative problem-solving in a short article in the May 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review.
If you're interested in learning about the basics and/or the finer points of Web design, A List Apart, a zine that has been publishing more or less weekly articles on various topics in this area since 1998, is a great trove of accessible expertise.
The topics A List Apart uses to organize its articles — over 500 have been published at this point — are summarized here. A sampling of articles that I've found useful would include:
"Designing For Flow," by Jim Ramsey (December 4, 2007) — "Flow, as a mental state, is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites."
"Reviving Anorexic Web Writing," by Amber Simmons (July 31, 2007) — "We’ve starved all the life out of web writing. The kind of writing we encourage is lifeless, insipid, and calorie-free. If we want to get back on track—to allow writers to write wonderful user experiences—we have to change our expectations and our rules."
"How to Be a Great Host," by John Gladding (October 24, 2006) — "Anyone who can host a great party can start a successful forum."
"Your About Page Is a Robot," by Erin Kissane (August 22, 2006) — “An About page should provide context and necessary facts, but should also give the reader compelling reasons to do what you want them to do.”
"Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters," by John M. Grohol (April 4, 2006) — “While anonymity may allow people to feel more free and disinhibited to discuss otherwise embarrassing or stigmatizing topics, it can also be a community’s biggest enemy.”
"Home Page Goals," by Derek Powazek (January 30, 2006) — ”...home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals.”
In September 2006, Erin Lynch, A List Apart's production manager, provided her own very helpful list of articles new visitors might like to peruse.
Aresearch paper (pdf) published in 2006 by Rachna Dhamija (Harvard), J. D. Tygar (Berkeley), and Marti Hearst (Berkeley) indicates why even well-informed and experienced Web users can be fooled by phishing sites. As the paper's abstract explains,
To build systems shielding users from fraudulent (or phishing) websites, designers need to know which attack strategies work and why. This paper provides the first empirical evidence about which malicious strategies are successful at deceiving general users. We first analyzed a large set of captured phishing attacks and developed a set of hypotheses about why these strategies might work. We then assessed these hypotheses with a usability study in which 22 participants were shown 20 web sites and asked to determine which ones were fraudulent. We found that 23% of the participants did not look at browser-based cues such as the address bar, status bar and the security indicators, leading to incorrect choices 40% of the time. We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users. These results illustrate that standard security indicators are not effective for a substantial fraction of users, and suggest that alternative approaches are needed.
I would echo the authors' recommendation that we give up on preventive measures of the "be careful" sort, and move firmly in the direction of hardening Web sites, and the way in which they are accessed, so that people don't have to play the internet equivalent of Russian roulette when using sites to conduct business and obtain information.
The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) has had a "Design for Democracy" initiative underway since 1998 that aims to use "all the tools of design to increase civic participation by making interactions between the U.S. government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy."
In June of last year, the Design for Democracy team delivered a detailed report to the US Election Assistance Commission on how ballots and other polling place materials can be improved. This report, Effective Designs for the Administration of Federal Elections, includes guidelines that can help local jurisdictions "benefit from information and interaction design principles in order to make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens."
I looked at Section 3 (pdf), dealing with optical scan ballots, which are the type used in my state of Massachusetts. This section covers:
Planning — Guidance on "how to incorporate resources into your ballot development and production process; in what areas those resources may be of assistance; and when those activities should occur." The resources in question include experts in simple language, information design, usability, translation, and cultural considerations.
Design — Best practices for both one-language and two-language ballots.
Samples — Illustrations of how the best practices would apply to actual ballots.
The project's specific recommendations for ballot usabiity were validated in
54 usability evaluations with voters in seven States using prototype samples in interview settings. In-context voting feedback revealed how users actually thought and behaved while interacting with evaluation materials.
The best practices derived from the team's research include:
Emphasize voter needs over administrative and vendor requirements.
Use simple language for all content.
Use one language per ballot. If this is not feasible, display no more than two languages simultaneously.
For readability, use upper- and lowercase sans serif type, left-aligned. Minimize the number of fonts used. Set at a minimum of 12 points all ballot content voters will read.
Use color functionally and consistently. Color can draw the reader’s attention and emphasize important information. The use of color cannot be the sole means of conveying information or making distinctions. Another noncolor mode must complement color use, such as contrast, icon, text style, etc.
When clarifying instructions and processes, use accurate diagrams to describe voting technology and equipment.
Use instructional icons only. Universally recognized icons such as arrows are acceptable and encouraged.
AIGA Chicago president Marcia Lausen led the Design for Democracy team that redesigned election materials for Cook County IL and for the state of Oregon. She has now published Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design (University of Chicago Press, 2007) discussing usability principles that apply to election materials and recounting what can be learned from the Cook County and Oregon examples.
Via BNet.com, here's a video created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, that — in about 4½ minutes — reviews the trajectory that has brought us to the possibilities embodied in the phenomenon known as "Web 2.0" ...
(Note that this video is an updated version of the video embedded in this post from February.)
Among African countries, Botswana has done especially well in pursuing development policies that are broadly beneficial to its population. In the training arena, the Botswana Training Authority (BOTA) has a primary role.
BOTA was established in October 2000 as part of the implementation of the 1998 Vocational Training Act. BOTA's main responsibility is to monitor and regulate vocational education and training, hence their mission statement:
We coordinate an integrated vocational training system that meets the needs of learners and industry through the development of standards; quality assurance; policy advice and monitoring and evaluation.
After consultation with stakeholders — business and industry, training organizations, and community representatives — and with a view to matching global quality standards,1 BOTA established seven value principles (pdf) for Botswana's vocational training programs (slightly edited):
Foundation — Learning materials must be guided and supported by the aligned or outcomes-expressed curricula and they must be relevant to industry needs so that they are capable of preparing the learner for current and future trends in the world of work; be challenging but still appropriate for the level of the target group; adapt rather than duplicate the existing materials – e.g., reference materials and manuals; be internationally comparable; not violate copyright laws; and indicate notional learning time.
Scope (breadth and depth of the learning material) — In order to ensure that the scope is fit for the training's purpose — i.e., suitable for the target group and addressing the expected outcomes of learning — developers need to: identify the relevant outcomes of learning or competencies, and support their acquisition; relate to the appropriate target group(s) — i.e., be flexible enough to accommodate varying abilities and backgrounds; provide clear examples, explanations and illustrations; indicate resources needed; provide an accurate industry context to suit current and future work environments; emphasize the purpose of learning in terms of employment opportunities; and provide a list of recommended further reading.
Structure and Design — Learning materials must not only promote effective learning and assessment strategies but must also have a clear structure and be sequenced such that the target group can easily explore them. They must: be easy for the learner to navigate; present a visually attractive design; be usable by the hearing, visually and physically impaired; provide activities and learning strategies designed to motivate learners; and use words / language appropriate for the level of the target group.
Flexible delivery — Learning materials must consider that learners (as well as trainers and assessors, as appropriate) have varying needs, preferences and entry levels, therefore must: provide a variety of learning methods; provide for use in a variety of training / learning contexts, e.g., on-the-job, off-the-job, and simulations; provide guidance on entry requirements (especially for learning packages / self-access materials); be adaptable for use under different but similar conditions — e.g., making coffee is different from making tea but the process is more or less the same; provide adequate user guides; provide guidance, as necessary, on safety, health and environment requirements pertaining to the learning event; be challenging to cater for the target population (e.g., should challenge both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups); be linked to industry minimum performance requirements / standards in order to adequately prepare the learner for the world of work; and highlight issues pertaining to modes of delivery – e.g., distance learning.
Access and Equity — In order for learning materials to be inclusive, they must: accommodate learners from different geographical locations — e.g., using relevant examples and contexts — for workplace learning taking place in remote areas; accommodate cultural diversity; challenge stereotypes of gender, ethnicity, creed and ability status, which can be corrected / reversed by use of non-discriminatory words, pictures, illustrations and examples; be affordable in terms of purchase price / procurement; be moderately colorful but attractive — not boring but not too colorful; be produced in a way that is affordable by producers; take information technology needs into account; provide guidance on training / learning and employment opportunities.
Content — Well-balanced content must: be interactive, keeping the target group engaged — i.e., tasks must adopt a practical approach, — e.g., role plays, projects, drama and surveys of living examples; be presented in a language appropriate for the level of the user — e.g., the lower the learner’s educational background, the simpler the language; be simple but yet challenging to the learner in order to sustain their interest; simulate reality in terms of work requirements and problem solving — i.e., be realistic; assist the trainer’s effort in delivering / implementing the curriculum; be sufficient in parameters guided by the curriculum — not too much and not too shallow; internationally and locally comparable and up-to-date; provide the notional learning time frame; and integrate and correlate theory with practice.
Feedback and Evaluation — Learning materials must promote self-assessment for the learner and provide feedback to both the learner and the developer. They must: show the date on which the material was produced; show the date of next review of the material; provide a list of assessment questions / tasks / activities for the user; include a questionnaire to evaluate the material; and state the contact details of the producer.
I have done some preliminary investigating of how BOTA's efforts are working out, but have not come up with anything very informative. I will continue to watch for reports of what BOTA is accomplishing.
__________ 1 BOTA hired Peter R. Fleming, an expert from New Zealand, to direct the group charged with promoting effective structured work based learning.
The Usability Professionals' Association's (UPA) website is of interest both for the wealth of resources it provides access to and as an example of usability principles in action.
As you would expect, the organization of the material included on the site, or linked to from the site's pages, is clear from screen layout.
The main sections of the site are listed on navigation tabs arranged horizontally below the home page header.
The rest of the home page is devoted to a brief explanation of UPA's purpose, a prominent search box, news, a list of most-visited links, membership links, a link to a SurveyMonkey feedback page, links to UPA publications, a link to information on the value of usability, several links aimed at helping organizations access the services of usability professionals, and links to UPA's sponsors.
Once you click on a particular navigation tab — say, "About UPA" — you are taken to the appropriate overview page, where you find that navigation to subsections is handled by a vertical menu on the left, below the search box.
Links are used judiciously. For instance, since the meaning of "usability" is of central importance, a link to the "What is usability?" page is one of just three links included in the main portion of the page giving an overview of UPA.
You are never surprised by finding a link opening in a new window rather than overwriting the window you are already in.
Browsing the UPA site is well worth the time required to become familiar with the types of information they have assembled. I'd particularly commend attention to the ROI tools.
You can shell out $279 for a recently issued 17-page report on web site design from Forrester Research, or you can take advantage of the fact that highlights are available in a short interview with Bruce Temkin, the report's main author, that was published in the June 12 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Forrester evaluates web sites along four dimensions: value, navigation, presentation, and trust (more below). In the Wall Street Journal interview, Temkin reports that value used to be the major area of weakness, but that now problems typically involve navigation: "As sites get bigger and more complex, they have much more value, but it's harder to have people get to what they want."
Another common problem Temkin mentions is sites' failure to give visitors confidence that they will find it easy to complete the tasks they're interested in carrying out. Temkin says,
A basic usability principle is that if you want someone to continue with a process, such as buying something, two fundamental things should happen: Users should feel there is a high likelihood they can accomplish the task, and they should be given clear evidence that they are making progress along the way. A lot of sites don't design their home pages for that to occur.
Temkin advises that the home page include links that make it obvious how visitors can get started on accomplishing key goals.
To ensure that your web site works well for visitors, Forrester recommends using three questions as your basic design guides:
Who are your users?
What are their goals?
How are you going to help them achieve those goals?
The technique Forrester recommends for answering these questions leans heavily on creating what they call "personas" — representative customers synthesized from research concerning what types of visitors it is most important for your site to cater to. As explained in an earlier Forrester report (pdf),
To truly qualify as “personas,” customer models should be based on user research, formatted as a narrative, include details about motivations, goals, and behavior (at the appropriate level), include contextual/environmental insights (where they use the channel, when they use the channel, channel alternatives), and have a human name and face. See the December 18, 2003, Report “The Power Of Design Personas.” [p. 13]
Once the personas have been defined, it is time to begin the iterative process of designing a site that straightforwardly helps these representative visitors achieve their goals. Forrester provides questions (pdf) to use in assessing your site along the four key dimensions mentioned earlier:
Value
Does the home page provide evidence that user goals can be completed?
Is essential content available where needed?
Is essential function available where needed?
Are essential content and function given priority on the page?
Navigation
Are category and subcategory names clear and mutually exclusive?
Do menu categories immediately expose or describe their subcategories?
Are items classified logically?
Is the task flow efficient?
Are hyperlinks clear and informative?
Are keyword-based searches comprehensive and precise?
Presentation
Does the site use language that’s easy to understand?
Does the site use graphics, icons, and symbols that are easy to understand?
Is text legible?
Does text formatting and layout support easy scanning?
Do page layouts use space effectively?
Are form fields and interactive elements placed logically on the page?
Are interactive elements easily recognizable?
Are interactive elements consistent?
Does the site accommodate the user’s range of hand-eye coordination?
Trust
Does the site present privacy and security policies in context?
Do pages provide location cues?
Does site functionality provide feedback in response to user actions?
Is contextual help available at key points?
Does the site help users recover from errors?
Does the site perform well?
Temkin comments on the new Forrester report in a post on his own blog.
As an outgrowth both of training I've worked on for a large advertising agency, and of discussions with a friend who is interviewing with various marketing-oriented high-tech businesses, I've been following for some time the growing use of sociologists' techniques by businesses bent on strengthening their ability to appeal to customers' tastes and to optimize technology.
Among the specialists in business use of sociology is Marc Smith, senior research sociologist at Microsoft Research. In a March 2007 interview with Kate Greene of Technology Review, he offered insights into how analysis of data relating to the social phenomenon of online communities can help in making such communities more valuable for participants and for businesses.
Smith starts with the question, "What makes some collective actions more successful than others?" Or, specifically with respect to online communities, what are the important behavior patterns and structural aspects of such communities that determine how healthy they are?
Smith uses Netscan data1 to develop answers to these questions. For instance, a project called Community Buzz
uses the data to help us see the network structure of the community and [the] main ideas that are generated from the community. The idea is that Community Buzz takes data from Netscan and indexes it according to the behavior of people in the community, [based on] the patterns of message creation.
Participants are segmented according to the roles they play in the community. This is done using social networking concepts, i.e., by looking at whom they talk to and how often.
The role that is most important for building the community is that played by "answer people," a typically small cadre of knowledgeable individuals who care enough about the subject or product under discussion to go to the trouble of answering questions raised by other members. Other segments Community Buzz tracks are newbies and spammers.
To analyze the actual content of messages and how the content changes over time, the Community Buzz analysts use data visualization techniques, such as tag clouds and trend lines.
Trainers and documentation specialists need to be familiar with research into the behavior and conversations of online communities. Such communities are increasingly important for performance support and for facilitating collaboration. Therefore, knowing how to assist them will pay off in terms of keeping employees' knowledge and skills up-to-date and in terms of expediting conception and completion of work projects.
__________ 1 "The Netscan System provides detailed reports on the activity of Usenet newsgroups, the authors who participate in them, and the conversation threads that emerge from their activity. Using the Netscan tool users can get reports about any newsgroup for any day, week, month, quarter, or year, since September 1999."
One of the more frustrating documentation projects I've worked on involved trying to help a client improve their intranet. There were two basic problems: the project leader declined to devote time and attention to the project (computer literacy was not his strong suit), and the IT person who was responsible for handling updates always had other things to do. It was a hopeless situation because the client was not able to replace this obviously inadequate duo with people genuinely committed to getting the job done.
I take some slight consolation in knowing that my experience was my no means unique. On May 14 the Wall Street Journal, noting how widespread the problem of user-unfriendly intranets is, published several articles offering advice on how to correct the situation. Two of the articles were particularly useful.
In the first article, Andrew Blackman lists typical intranet problems — missing information, duplicate information, information that is out-of-date, and information that is less-than-easy to find — and then describes some of the tools and strategies companies are adopting to mitigate these problems.
A key goal is to establish a virtuous circle in which people use an intranet, find it helps them with their work, are motivated to contribute themselves, and thereby make the intranet more appealing to others. It's important to ensure that contributions are easy to enter into the system (though there does need to be a level of oversight for quality control).
Improvements to the intranet search function are centered on returning both relevant documents and the names of people with relevant expertise:
For example, when users of Microsoft's intranet product, SharePoint Server 2007, type in a query, they receive not only a list of relevant documents and articles, but also a list of people who are experts on the subject. The people are presented in order of "social distance," with people you've named as your colleagues appearing at the top, followed by your colleagues' colleagues and finally everyone else.
A neat adjunct is a presence awareness feature that lets you know the availability of an internal person whose name comes up in response to a search query.
Finally, a hugely valuable feature — providing work teams with collaborative workspace — is increasingly built into intranet software.
The second article is an interview Vauhini Vara conducted with Kara Coyne, director of research at Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting firm that conducts a contest each year to find the world's best intranets. Along with the informational value of a good intranet, Coyne touts its motivational value:
... managers or leaders on a team will put videos online or announcements. Employees really watch these things, really read them and get motivated by them.
When asked about common intranet shortcomings, Coyne cites clutter, unintuitive navigation, and weak search functionality. Her suggestions for relatively easy improvements include posting daily news items and making sure content is interesting and current. Coyne's hope for intranets of the future is that they will be
much cleaner, much more beautiful, and much more straightforward — getting rid of all the headings and categories and boxes and branding.
She also points out that some of the most popular features on intranets are not necessarily what would first come to mind. It turns out that employees really like things like being able to post classified ads, request a special meal at the cafeteria, and check the schedule of recreational activities.
