Documents suck, information is cool

By jmorse | Published: December 28, 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.

Posted in information architecture, information management, web 2.0 | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

All change

By jmorse | Published: November 23, 2009

Its been a while, I know, thing is its been a period of change, no longer do work as a Information Architect at Eduserv, after a period of upheaval, the word came down and I moved to the project management team to look after the shortfall.  I’m still there.

The jury is still out as to whether this is a good thing, PM’ing isn’t something hard to me, and i do get to expand into scrum, as opposed to Prince2 methodologies, I’m not convinced that Prince2 works, in fact, I kind of have a sneaking suspicion that a methodology that focuses on the documentation, where the methodology is one of the (if not the) deliverable, is seriously flawed.  Done right it can work for certain projects, done wrong, by the letter with too many ‘controls’  its all too easy for the methodology to get in the way.

Scrum may be interesting, so far its not been boring.

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Posted in Prince2, project management, scrum | 1 Comment

The Netflix Approach

By jmorse | Published: August 7, 2009

The web has been buzzing with discussion over the ‘leaked’ internal presentation from Netflix discussing their approach to business, if you’ve not seen it then spend a few minutes reading through it (its meant to be read not so much presented)

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

No doubt this approach is genius, there may be some suspicion that its more viral PR than a real HR presentation, it sure makes me want to work there, or somewhere similar.

We all know brilliant jerks, we all get bogged down in process that slows down our ability to do work and we all recognise the ‘silo’ environment…unless you work at Netflix that is.

The response from any offending business man will be that in these tough times they cannot afford such luxuries, but anyone that has read No Logo – Naomi Klien knows that successful business invest in times of crisis.

Read the presentation see what you think

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Usable or accessible?

By jmorse | Published: July 23, 2009

The following article first appeared in Public Sector Executive in August of 2008, http://www.publicsectorexecutive.com/dataview/News/News_Article.aspx?KeyValue=438 

I revisited the article to see how relevant it is today and whether progress had been made in the subsequent years.  The first thing i notice it the lack of references to social web and participatory culture of the web, I touch, lightly on pervasive media. Have things change however when considering accessibility and usability?

I’m not convinced…

Original copy

Ensuring a website can be accessed by those with disabilities has been widely discussed, and many public sector organisations are following the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) guidelines on accessibility when developing their web-based services. However, how does accessibility impact usability? Is there any need to distinguish between the two? What about the wider experience of interacting online?
Web accessibility is synonymous with the provision of web services for individuals with disabilities and usability is considered a more general concept, relating to the ease with which everyone can use web-based services. However, the two are intrinsically linked. Although improved web accessibility is important, web developers need to take into consideration the needs of all visitors, rather than just those who need to use a screen reader to navigate web pages for example. Consequently, the key to the provision of both usable and accessible web services is that web designers think of the users’ needs first and foremost, and adapt the design accordingly. By doing this, they are able to create web services that all users can benefit from.
Focus on users
When developing a usable web service, public sector decision makers should first identify all target groups – not only those the organisation is currently interacting with. Who are they? How do they want to interact with you?
For example, a local government body may wish to raise its profile among the teenagers living in the community. One way of engaging with this particular segment of the population is via the web.
Due to the rapid pace of web technology development, the public are now using a variety of platforms to find information, access services and interact with public sector bodies. These include games consoles, PDAs and mobile phones, as well as assistive technologies such as screen readers and voice browsers. In addition, individuals may wish to have access to public services at their convenience, so it is important that a website is easy to use not only with a PC or Mac, but also with a mobile phone, public kiosk or other appropriate platforms.
To ensure that public sector organisations are able to interact effectively with their communities, and their individual preferences, it is vital that they keep abreast of technological developments that deliver websites quickly and easily. By improving usability and accessibility, organisations can also demonstrate that it is socially responsible, enhancing its public profile among its different target audiences.
Getting started
There are a myriad considerations when building public web services. It is easy to focus too much on the technical issues, at the expense of design, and vice versa. It is content however that is most overlooked.
All content should be structured clearly with headers and paragraphs, and any particularly important information should be positioned at the top of the page so that users do not have to read through, or listen to, the entire page before getting to the section containing the information they are looking for. To illustrate, it is commonplace on private sector websites that the “contact us” section is located at the very bottom of the page. Some private organisations may not wish to be contacted by the public, and therefore attempt to hide their telephone number or email address at the bottom of the webpage. However, all public sector bodies should encourage a dialogue with their audience and, as part of this, make contact information as easy to find as possible on the website.
Additionally, language should be simple and consistent, and free of unnecessary jargon. By following the guidelines of the Plain English initiative, an organisation can become known as a reliable and useful source of information. Ensuring that language used on the site is easy to understand is important not only because information should be accessible to those whose first language is not English, but also because if the public is able to find information easily online, it is less likely that they will have to resort to customer support services. In essence, improving usability leads to cost savings and makes more funds available for improving the overall effectiveness of the organisation.
To ensure that an organisation’s website meets general usability and accessibility requirements, it is worth investing in user testing during the planning stages and upon completion of the site. Despite the wide range of automated testing tools available, they are not nearly as accurate and reliable as actual user testing. Moreover, a site can be technically compliant while being difficult to use or functionally inaccessible, which is why user testing is crucial in measuring the degree of ease with which users are able to find information and interact with the organisation in question. In addition, once a usable and accessible site has been developed, organisations should remember to monitor the way in which content is added and updated on the site to ensure that the site will not become unusable or inaccessible.
There are some public sector websites that have been designed in a way that enables the public to access information easily using a variety of platforms and with the vast majority of widely-adopted of web browsers. The DVLA (www.dvla.org.uk) and the Training and Development Agency (www.tda.gov.uk) are good examples. These organisations have realised that making their websites more usable and accessible for all is not only beneficial for the organisation from a financial and administrative point of view, but it also enhances their public image. Above all, it enables individuals of different ages, lifestyles and levels of ability to easily access public services online.
Following W3C guidelines is the first step towards improving a website, but it is not enough. Public sector organisations need to think beyond that and take into consideration the needs and preferences of everyone they wish to reach, to guarantee that their web-based services are both usable and accessible for all.

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Structure your information – a little at a time

By jmorse | Published: July 15, 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’

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Evolving sites – tech-volution

By jmorse | Published: June 15, 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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Users, visitors and audience types

By jmorse | Published: May 15, 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.

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Content is still king

By jmorse | Published: April 15, 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.

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Information groups

By jmorse | Published: March 15, 2009

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

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,

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

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”

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