Andy Hertzfeld, of the original Macintosh team, writes about the prototype of Vista: a prototype for OSAF’s Networked Personal Information Manager. As a view into a development process that must integrate many different modules into one flexible interface it’s a must read.
I’m also glad to see he landed somewhere that has a good chance of releasing a useful product.
Sometimes pushing, via email, still wins over pulling via websites. There’s a handful of sites I want to monitor but lack the time or attention to surf, even as an RSS feed. Lately I’ve been using iMorph’s Infominder service. They basically check a site for changes and send you an update. Nice touches are thrown in, like a digest mode and the ability to check RSS feeds. The first ten feeds are free.
I had a good laugh when I was looking at Jesse’s book site and came upon a section titled The obligatory fake FAQ. This touches on one of those seemingly innocent requests that drive me up the wall: people who want to ‘create’ frequently asked questions. The original format was a beautiful thing, a bottom-up list grown organically from questions that need answers. But now that the format is popular, people sit down and make up what they think people will ask. Ugh!
Has anyone written about what it’s like to create controlled vocabularies (CVs) in the context of actual project work? I can’t think of any. Below are some spurious notes of my recent experience, probably not understandable to anyone else ’cause I don’t have time to instruct. We’re racing to deadlines and I’m driving as fast as I can…
The exercise and deliverables can be rather abstract for some folks, especially if they view the world through a technology lens. It helps to create illustrations and screen shots to show what is meant and how terms are used.
CVs become a very helpful as a way of recording the tacit knowledge of an organization, helping everyone communicate and use their information. The process of creating the terms helped clarify their use for the team in understanding the business. (It’s tempting at this point to ramble on about language being symbols for meaning, so we’re actually controlling meaning, and those who control meaning have the power to define reality (the power to name – Jansen)).
If the CV is just informing other artifacts and not something that will be maintained or otherwise carried forward, state that so there is no confusion (e.g. do users of a CMS have to look at a thesaurus to discern meaning, or some other more user-friendly artifact?).
Illustrating the CV within the process: Business’s understanding of reality -> CV -> CMS Manual and CMS user interface -> data and metadata -> UI (e.g. web pages). The CV helps build a bridge between the organization and the user interface.
In all the talk of technology, IA, etc., ultimately people are coming for content. If the content sucks, the site sucks. (Content is king). Given that content creation and migration is also expensive, to properly honor the content developer’s work we need to put considerable thought into how content is created. A CV helps ensure the builders understand the subject domain and can communicate it to future content authors.
There’s never a perfectly controlled vocabulary; the number of terms is finite and language can only be clarified to a certain extent. It may be necessary to state this fact to set expectations. It involves judgment calls regarding which terms to control, how to control them (e.g. supplying the definition vs. restricting use via the user interface), and how to define them.
As with any design exercise, you need a scope, users and user intentions to guide the work. When defining the scope of the CV, determining the number of terms may seem arbitrary, but may be necessary given the other factors like time, money, and user response to the system.
CVs for CMS may be used in various ways: to populate menus in the UI (“hard” control), to offer examples, to define terms for a manual (“soft” control), to determine metadata relationships, etc. Specify what you’re using it for explicitly to show its value.
Not creating a CV before building a system can lead to expensive design and technology changes later if the designer’s conception of reality don’t match the users.
Pleasing writing on the MetaDesign site…
Information needs design.
You cannot not communicate.
It looks good and it makes sense.
MetaDesign…an international network of visual engineers, bringing a broad perspective to the complex challenges of everyday communications.
Homeless man sits and reads newspaper behind Metropolitan Museum of Art
Descriptions of beautiful day in New York.
Museum patrons don’t seem to notice.
How rear of museum borders Central Park.
A giant grid of modernist glass forms backdrop.
Just inside, figures and busts from Romans and Greeks.
A user experience idea, part of the LazyWeb
Positioning
BlogReader is a useful, everyday tool for many people. While other content tracking, reading, or ranking applications came and went, BlogReader has consistently provided the content readers wanted in an easy and flexible way, and in doing so has become an ingrained part of many people’s everyday lives.
BlogReader is essentially the Google of news readers: fast, smart, hip, leading edge, Net-savvy, in touch with the grass roots, and profitable.
Personas
Designing to user personas is a time-tested user-centered design process. Personas should be based on research that verifies our assumptions, but for now here’s a best guess of BlogReader users.
There are two main personas: The Occasional News Consumer and the Extreme Blog Aficionado:
Nancy the News Consumer
Nancy is an analyst with J.P. Morgan. She focuses on the manufacturing sector and needs to provide insightful information to her clients. She juggles numbers all day and wants to spend her time finding answers to her problems, not searching for information.
Nancy knows the big media companies suffer from groupthink – always regurgitating the same ideas. She’s hoping there’s blogs written by industry insiders who she can look to for honest, unique ideas.
She has previously set up BlogReader and visits the site in the morning during the first sips of coffee to see what’s new.
Barry the Blog Reader
Barry is a programmer at Accelerate, a small IT consultancy in Seattle. After work he enjoys developing Linux modules and conversing with other developers about open source issues. His blog community includes specific individuals whose point of view he respects, and looks to them for links to other people with innovative and trustworthy opinions.
Barry starts, like Nancy, by going to BlogReader and reading his favorite sites. Unlike Nancy, links help him find new sites that he actively adds to his list, specifying how he wants BlogReader to analyze them. Because sites can differ so widely in editorial approach, he likes to create categories to keep them organized.
Frank Lloyd Wright spent three months ‘doing nothing’ (I would imagine he was thinking) before sketching for three hours to produce the drawings for Falling Water. He could imagine the entire structure, and subsequently furnish the details. With each work he was allowed to experiment and push the boundaries. And clients came to him for his work, though of course he, as most famous architects do, relied on a staff of ‘apprentices’.
Could an information architect – or an experience strategist or systems architect for that matter – become famous in the same way? Having three months to consider the user experience and design, defining the state-of-the-art with each project, being sought out for her ideas with a staff to assist with the work?
We have gurus, but they often exist as our best critics and consultants, not designers. And we have fine design groups, but these don’t inspire the imagination like a single brilliant personality. This case study of Nathan Shedroff’s work teases me with the idea. Some foster the vision, but we’re certainly not there yet.
I don’t expect one person to imagine and build everything; even the best architects rely on (brilliant but anonymous) engineers for collaboration. But one person could conceivably imagine the entire experience and design, from an enterprise information architecture down to the detailed interaction design. It might be on the scale of, say, designing Amazon.com from scratch.
Does anyone even want this? Regardless, aspiring to this – as designers, as educators, as patrons – might change our work in countless ways.
Later…draftsmen! They had draftsmen! Jeez. Imagine having someone to make the beautiful drawings for you.
I’m designing a site for my sister’s fiance’s business, he does interior design and construction contracting. While my idea for the IA and navigation is simple and workable, it just ain’t compelling. About Us, Services, Portfolio [yawn]… I asked the designer to spruce it up and she was like, um, ok…
What do customers get from him in person? I think they get something like a story. Not told in the fashion of a story of course, but he tells them about what the company does (plot), where they do it (setting), who they are (characters), and – since he’s good at what he does – a happy ending.
I’ve attended an IBM seminar on using storytelling in design and caught the flavor of it, and thought it might work perfectly here. So, what do I need?
Some characteristics:
Dan Gruen from Lotus describes them as
Whereas he applies them as user-centered designers would use scenarios, I’m more interested in how the knowledge management people would use them, to actually convey information quickly and effectively, as well as compellingly. For example, I’ve heard that when the U.S. Secret Service needs to convey a lot of important information quickly – say, briefing the Secretary of State during a ride across town – they use a storytelling format.
I’m imagining the general storytelling format might make it more interesting and perhaps easier to digest the basic information even if the actual presentation – a few web pages in my case – don’t actually build up a whole lot of “dramatic elements”. I’ll retain the usual navigation so the visitors can bypass the story or get more details at the end.
A simple mapping resulting in four web pages:
Michael points to the article on narrative voice and I remember the advice I’m always giving others: remove that cold, corporate tone by writing in the the first person. (It’s harder to write ridiculous happy talk in the first person because it sounds ridiculous even to numb marketing types.)
“There is an assumption about meetings and gatherings that’s so old it’s almost genetic. Conferences ask people to come as passive information gatherers. We’re drawn by big name speakers and then sit and wait for information to flow downwards. Yet when you ask people where they learned and contributed the most, they’ll inevitably say it was dinner with Tom or a passionate discussion over drinks with Katie and Jack. We need to re-evaluate how we create large group events to take advantage of the way we’re beginning to see, create and connect the world today. Our old style hierarchical models just aren’t as effective anymore, and current conferences are still based on them.”
New Underground Gatherings: No More Conferences
Alternate career idea #51: Form a small team of crack Internet peeps to provide quick and simple services in the developing world. For example, imagine a SWAT team dropping into Afghanistan to set up a simple website to disseminate information within the new government, complete with no-nonsense hardware and training. Then we’re off to somewhere else. Of course, the usual we’re-here-to-build-a-website-but-first-we’ll-help-prepare-the-organization activities would happen. It’s all funded by grants, donations, etc.
I was going to call it Designers Without Borders, riffing off Médecins Sans Frontières, but they already exist, albeit in more of an educational capacity. I want a SWAT team.
You’ve probably seen the Mindset List, published each year by Beloit College. It goes like this…
Most students entering college this fall were born in 1984.
It’s always struck me as a nice little design document, grounding the instructors in the mindset of their students. What’s more, the items chosen appeal to people of different generations. For example, ‘Women have always been members of the Jaycees‘ didn’t resonate with me, but probably does for older Americans.
I’m thinking about how to use this with my clients.
Link courtesy Chris Pepper.
Cisco just posted a demo of the new Cisco.com site that will launch soon. It’s a good little overview of what customers will notice in the redesign.
I was lucky enough to spend time with some of the design team a few months ago. The site will be a fascinating study for several reasons, including semantic metadata-generated pages and navigation, navigation that allows access to any one of hundreds of thousands of pages within five clicks, and enterprise-wide GUI standards.
Cisco.com has been pounded in the past for its poor site. For such a large company that is the result of many merged companies, the redesign is a huge achievement. I look forward to seeing the final work.
Update: the site went live yesterday.