Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category
December 28th, 2009
(With respects to Aarawak for messing with their tag line)
I’ve been thinking recently about the role of documents in an organisations process, and the slowly dawning realisation that they are increasingly irrelevant, barriers to information sharing, and possibly damaging to all that come near them. Ok that may be a little strong, but let me ellaborate.
When the ”document’ becomes the focus of your efforts, and not the information in them then they become a problem, not a solution. You’ll need document management, audit and access control. when all you really want is the latest info, in an easy to find and use format, also know as ‘a Wiki’.
Worse, documents, when created to satisfy the needs of a process or procedure are often resented by the creator, written after the fact and as quickly as possible, and as a result can include inaccuracies, disinformation and missing details that are needed, in short document suck and act as a barrier to information sharing.
Develop a wiki as part of your project, allow all the actors in your team to contribute as needed, and not only do you have a record of the activity, discussions and decisions made on the project, you have living documentation to support the product once its released.
Now in order to make sure that the information being added to the site is findable, you still need to have some control over the the structure, language and fair use of the wiki. The idea is to make sure that on any product wiki, any one type of information (IA diagram for a web site for instance) will always be in the same relative location. (mysite/ia/diagrams). How you manage this is up to you, either build the structure and contributors follow it, or you do a little post editing, the end results are the same.
In any event ditch the documents, focus on the information instead.
July 15th, 2009
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 version 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’
June 15th, 2009
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.
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May 15th, 2009
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.
April 15th, 2009
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.
