The AIFIA has released the results of a survey entitled The Problems with CMS. Its worth a read, especially if you're starting the process of aquiring a CMS. Clearly there are big issues out there, but I'd rather go into a process with an idea of what to look for...
"Ultimately, I don't see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution," writes David Heller in his Boxes and Arrows article ("HTML's Time is Over. Let's Move On.). Heller argues that HTML, meant as a way to represent documents electronically, is not adequate for application development. He is looking forward to a future of rich clients. Unfortunately, as he lists the HTML alternatives, it becomes clear that none of them are quite ready yet. The best option, Flash, is still more of an animation tool than a application tool.
I think in some respects, Heller is right. HTML isn't quite right for many advanced application development needs. But, on the other hand, it is lightweight and it works all over the place (although there are still big compatibility issues). As he mentions, Flash isn't there yet. And I'm hesitant to make users download big runtime environments to use some of the other options (not to mention the compatibility issues that this brings). So we keep developing in HTML for the time being. Its not perfect, but it is good enough for many applications.
James Robertson points to a newer RSS newsreader that I hadn't heard of yet: Syndirella. Looks really interesting, despite the fact you need the 20 MB .NET framework...
CMS Watch has an article entitled 5 Biggest Mistakes in CMS Selection. The mistakes are:
1. Letting a software vendor tell you what you need 2. Not establishing a broad-based selection team 3. Not understanding the total cost of ownership 4. Not thinking strategically about content management 5. Not understanding the parameters of Web content management
I've been doing a fair amount of interviewing lately as a part of the information audit I'm conducting. As I result, I was pleased to read two articles on non-directed interviews by Adaptive Path's Mike Kuniavsky:
Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions
Face to Face With Your Users: Running a Nondirected Interview
Kuniavsky is writing about interviews used as a part of user experience design, and my own interviews tend to be even more general. But, nearly all of the principles he mentions are good ones.
[2/14/03: fixed back link]
Peter Seebach has an interesting commentary on the dangers of categorizing users. We've all seen sites that have navigation based on user categories ("For Teachers", "For Parents", and so on). Seebach recounts his experiences when looking for a laptop:
What am I? Am I some guy who just wants a laptop (Home & Home Office), or am I an employee of a Medium & Large Business? Are the product lines and pricing the same? If I want to buy a laptop that's in the business list, but not in the home list, will the company try to sue me for committing fraud? Why, exactly, do they need to know this?
I thing using categories for navigation can be useful, under some circumstances. Of course, one great way to find out if your categories are right is to have some users perform a card sort. Organizational patterns should emerge quickly.
Builder.com offers some high-level tips for managing Section 508 Accessability testing.
Two resources relating to Communities of Practice (CoP):
iane Le Moult on How to make a CoP fly. This article is a collection of the major dos and don'ts surrounding starting and running a CoP.
Mark Notess and Josh Plaskoff offer Preliminary Heuristics for the Design and Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice Systems. The authors pulled heuristics from a variety of research articles.
Martin White has an interesting weblog entry about Intranet return on investment. He (wisely) advises against either doing a solely numbers driven analysis and doing no analysis. To quote:
I have a huge problem with any justification for an intranet that requires a quantitative business case to be made. I am not against doing so for certain projects, but in my view if a senior mangement team does not have the vision to see what the benefits of an intranet can be, then it's time to find a job elsewhere before the intranet implodes.
White advises intranet managers to complete an information audit. I couldn't agree more. He even mentions a book I've used, The Information Audit by Sue Henczel.
A XML.com introduction to XFML, a method of expressing faceted metadata in XML.
USC's Online Journalism Review has an article about RSS Newsreaders. I've been using aggregators in one form or another for a while now, and I don't think I could go back now...
Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN.
Wireless networks fall outside the scope of this weblog, but I am interested in the subject. I've run across a very interesting weblog entry by Phil Windley, the former CIO of the state of Utah. In the entry, Windley outlines some of the "Total Cost of Ownership" issues surrounding WiFi. Windley offers some smart advice from someone who has clearly been there: "Its pretty easy to ignore some pretty significant costs when you get emotional about a new technology and can't wait to deploy it."
Some persona-related materials:
From the benry blog, a discussion of profiles and personas. Especially interesting is a list of persona-related resources at the end of the entry.
Chapter 7 of Christina Wodtke's Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web has a lot of practical how-to advice about creating personas. Its also a great intro to IA book as well.
It's less about creating personas than it is about the effects of personas, but Usability News has a short item called "Personas used as Means of Motivating Design Teams." It also points out some of the risks in using this process.
Another weblog entry about personas, this time from Donna Maurer. She has a short list of resources, too.
From Cooper, an article about "Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data." Cooper also has a short section with Persona-related articles.
For those that need more conflict in their lives, a should do the trick. Sinha argues for using more quantitative methods in creating personas. Alan Cooper jumps in to argue against this. Sparks fly. Enjoy!
Someone recently asked more some usability resources. This is the brief list I put together:
Start with usability guru Jakob Nielsen: http://www.useit.com/. His classic book on usability is Designing Web Usability. Good book. His articles can get a bit preachy and self-promoting. Your milage may vary.
Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a pretty good book, too.
Usable Web has lots of resources, but it hasn't been maintained much in the past year or so. There is plenty of good stuff, and well organized. Its not like these methods go out of date or anything (for the most part).
Usability News has some info, but its not catagorized, and thus hard to find. I'll let you decide how ironic that is.
Usability Views has lots of articles categorized.
Webword is great for keeping up on new articles that are usability-related.
Some recent articles I've seen are:
Usability Testing: Myths, Misconceptions and Misuses
Gorilla Usability (I think he meant "Guerrila," not "Gorilla": see Nielsen's article Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier
Setup Instructions for Tapeless Usability Lab
Boxes and Arrows recently published a list of books about IA, Usability, and other stuff. Any of these sources would be good, too.
I'm a big fan of style guides. By gathering all of the information about the site in one place, they act as a great reference for anyone working on the site. They help out with maintaining consistency, both in terms of the look and the content. Every big site should have one, if only to document the design decisions that were made.
James Robertson has collected a number of links to style guides (page 1, page 2). Worth a look if you work on a large site.
Following up on today's earlier post about Intranets, I just read a brief weblog entry by James Robertson about intranets. He has a number of good thoughts. In particular, he talks about how the right intranet project can "provoke cultural and process changes":
This last point suggests that the initial intranet projects should be very carefully chosen, so as to have the biggest impact on culture. A good intranet project will generate a "buzz", and support intranet marketing and change management.
Digital Web published Shiv Singh's Building Intranets that Matter. Singh, an Experience Lead & Information Architect for consulting company Razorfish, outlines four of Razorfish's "best practices" for intranets:
I think all of his points are well made, and should be taken to heart by anyone involved in intranet development. Singh's first two points are especially important. An organization should not just have an intranet for the sake of having an intranet. It must solve problems, and it must solve them effectively and efficiently. Of course, to figure out what the problems are, you have to have a solid understanding of the users and the issues. Doing this right is not for the faint of heart, but doing it right can have a hugely positive impact on an organization.
James Robertson has posted three CM "Briefings"--short articles on content management:
The last two articles are more useful if you aren't already knowledgable in content management. They are good articles to forward to colleagues who are looking for more info on the subject. The first article, however, is interesting. Robertson writes about how he sees the industry changing in the next year or so.
You can see how your designs will look to the colorblind by visiting The Colorblind Web Page Filter. Looks like a neat tool to make sure that all of your users can access your site.
Two new articles from my favorite online rag, Boxes and Arrows:
Using Site Evaluations to Communicate with Clients by Dorelle Rabinowitz. Rabinowitz provides a methodology for assessing websites. The article is aimed at consultants who would perform this activity as part of a pitch to a potential client, but I think that anyone could use her method to do a self-assessment.
In Printing the Web, James Kalbach provides a number of tips for creating pages that print well.
I've just come across Silva, a open-source CMS built on top of Zope. (Other products built on Zope include the open-source Plone and commercial products from EasyPublisher and Icoya.)
I haven't tried Silva yet, although I'd like to soon. It is apparently based heavily on XML, which could be quite interesting.
One of the most powerful features of a weblog is syndication. You'll notice that all of the PSESD weblogs has a link in the left hand side that says "Syndicate this site (XML)." If you click on it, you'll probably get a page full of code. That's okay, because that syndication link isn't meant for humans. The link is mean for aggregators. An aggregator is a little program that you can run on your computer. It has a list of these syndication feeds. The program then downloads the data (that you saw as code on your screen) from each link and displays an abstract. In short, it is a quick way to view abstracts from many sites at once. If you find an abstract that looks interesting, you can visit the site for the whole story.
There are a couple of nice aggregator programs you can use. NetNewsWire Lite is a very slick Mac OS X-only program. AmphetaDesk works on Windows and Mac OS 7/8/9. Both are free downloads.
You can find syndication feeds on many weblogs (they are sometimes called RSS or XML feeds, too). Both programs come with a number of feeds already set up from a variety of sites. Once you find a few feeds you like, you'll find it to be a very quick way to keep on top of news in a given field.
Macromedia is releasing a version of its JRun J2EE server for Mac OS X. This means that you can now run ColdFusion on OS X. I spent a few days last summer trying to jury-rig ColdFusion to run on X. It wasn't pretty (but it was possible). This is a much nicer solution.
The new Boxes and Arrows articles cover HTML Wireframing, a useful technique for describing functionality at the early stages of a design. After all, the eariler you can get users to test a feature, the better.
Apple released a new browser today: Safari. I've been using it for all of about ten minutes now, so here are my very informed first impressions.
Pros:
Cons:
All in all, it looks good. I don't think it willl make me switch just quite yet. It is still Beta software.
It will be interesting to get a closer look at the KHTML rendering engine that is the heart of the browser. Hopefully it doesn't have too many quirks and bugs, and hopefully they got the standards support right.
UPDATE: Mark Pilgrim has a review of Safari. The highlights: Safari identifies itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48." The "like Gecko" part could trip up browser sniffers expecting it to be a Gecko-based browser (NN6/7, Mozilla, Chimera). Text is defaulted to 72 dpi, unlike pretty much every other browser on every other platform (96dpi), making text seem small. And there are a host of CSS-related bugs. Mark also complained about the lack of tabs...
Another Update: Mena Trott ads her comments about Safari. She noticed a very cool feature: spell check in text entry boxes. This is a great feature for anyone writing in a web browser (like I am right now!). Very cool. Has Microsoft done this for IE? Why not?
Other places where folks are talking about Safari: Webgraphics, Asterisk*, Awholelogofnothing.com, and Macintouch. A good quote from the conversation on Asterisk*: "The developer/designer part of me is groaning, but the user part of me is excited." I agree.
Yet another update: Dave Hyatt, one of the developers of Safari, Responds to some of the early reviews of the beta browser.
According to MacNN, MySQL will soon start releasing binary builds of mysql for Mac OS X. This is good news for anyone who has tried to install the open-source database system on OS X. Until now, its been a bit of a pain (I've used both Marc Liyanage's packages and fink).
Lou Rosenfeld mentioned some interesting work coming out of BYU: Web-based Card Sorting for Information Architecture. Using Flash, mysql, and php, the researchers created an application for doing card sorts online. For anyone not familiar with the card sort, it is a tool used when organizing content. Basically, users take index cards with subjects on them and group them together. The results can help inform a site's information architecture. There have been some attempts to use technology to assist this low-tech process. IBM released a free set of tools called EZSort. I've used EZSort a couple of times. The analysis features are nice, but the end-user interface is prickly at best. The web based version mention above is similar to EZSort, but with an improved UI. Also, making it web based means that you can administer a card sort to people without them actually being there. Very cool. I didn't see a link to the actual software. Hopefully that is forthcoming.
I've been looking through some of the materials I prepared for the Content Management forum we held in November. I realized that I never posted any of this material once we got the weblogs going. So, here are some of the materials from that session:
First, here is the PowerPoint Presentation I used to explain what CM is.
Next, I have a list of resources:
Books
Websites
CMS Watch: http://www.cmswatch.com/
CMS Watch features occasional articles on the CMS industry, a list of vendors, and a for-fee report on content management.
CMS List: http://www.cms-list.org/
The website for a mailing list focused on content management. The list has moderate traffic (5-15 messages a day).
Metatorial: http://www.metatorial.com/
Bob Boiko's (Content Management Bible) website, featuring information on the Content Management Bible and other projects.
CMS Info: http://www.cmsinfo.org/
CMS Info has a directory of products and news about the Open Source CMS world.
Clueful CMS Directory: http://www.clueful.com.au/cgi-bin/cmsdirectory/browse/Products
A list of CMS products, categorized by technology or price.
List of CMS Lists: http://www.steptwo.com.au/cm/vendors/list/index.html
A list of lists of CMS.
Managing Enterprise Content: http://www.managingenterprisecontent.com/
Companion site to Ann Rockley’s book by the same name.
Joel Aufrecht provides instructions for setting up a tapeless usability lab. Many of the times I've done usability testing, I've set up a digital video recorder to capture the test. This has a few downsides: its a pain to set up, it can be bulky (we have a big tripod), and it can intimidate the users. By simply recording the screens, you can get around these problems.
On the other hand, I've only rarely bothered to go back and review the tapes I've made. I am able to gleen enough information through observation. If I needed "proof" when discussing an issue with another developer or client, then the topes/files might be useful, but so far this issue hasn't really come up much.
We're offering a number of web-related classes in the next couple of months. We generally only offer these classes once or twice a year, so now is your best chance to take them. As an added bonus, participants in the first three classes will walk away with a book. Feel free to contact us at odc@psesd.wednet.edu with any questions (or follow the links below to sign up).
HTML with Style Sheets
Jan. 14
This class will teach you how to write standard HTML, the building block of the web. You will also learn how to create cascading style sheets, a technique that makes your pages look great. If you've used a HTML editor like Dreamweaver, GoLive, or FrontPage, this class can help you understand what's going on "behind the scenes." Or, if you've never created a web page, this class can give you a great jump start on your way to becoming a webmaster. The course fee includes a copy of the CSS Pocket Reference by Eric Meyer. This handy book contains details on the most commonly used styles, and we'll be using it throughout the class.
Visit http://reg.psesd.wednet.edu/classes/record_detail-new.lasso?search=TM8224 for more information and registration.
Introduction to SQL
Jan. 21.
SQL (Structured Query Language) allows you to access data in a variety of relational database systems, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, My SQL, and Oracle. This class covers the basics of inserting, updating, and retrieving data. We will work directly with a relational database system, and also get some hands-on experience with embedding SQL into popular middleware languages such as ASP or ColdFusion. Course fee includes a copy of O'Reilly's "SQL in a Nutshell" reference book.
Visit http://reg.psesd.wednet.edu/classes/record_detail-new.lasso?search=tm8223 for more information and registration.
OS X Basics
Jan. 16
Learn how to use Apple's next-generation operating system, OS X. Whether you are an experienced Mac user upgrading to OS X, or are new to using a Mac, this class will get you started. Throughout the course, you will be presented with features and applications to make your OS X experience easier.
Visit http://reg.psesd.wednet.edu/classes/record_detail-new.lasso?search=tm8227 for more information and registration.
Professional Web Design: Flash Animation
Feb. 20-21
Spice up your web pages with low bandwidth, dynamic media elements using Macromedia Flash. This is an introductory course exploring the use of Flash tools and vector art on web pages. Participants should have a strong understanding of computer use on the Mac or PC platform.
Visit http://reg.psesd.wednet.edu/classes/record_detail-new.lasso?search=TM8226 for more information and registration.
David V Rodriguez is writing an online book on building a CMS: Content Management Design. He includes code samples in PHP and SQL, allowing you to play along at home.
Zapthink has a free report called The Pros and Cons of XML. They list a variety of points, and counterpoints:
Pro: XML is a structured text format
Pro: XML is designed with the Internet in mind
Pro: XML processing technology is widespread, easily available, and cheap
Pro: XML is Human-Readable
Pro: XML is very flexible – you can define other languages with XML
Pro: XML separates process from content
Pro: XML documents can be validated using a Validating Parser
Pro: XML systems are lower cost than other alternatives. They finally enable small and medium-sized organizations to participate.
Pro: XML is open. It is influenced by a number of standards organizations
Pro: Agreement on a common DTD or Schema results in exchangeable documents
Pro: There are an increasing number of individuals with XML skills.
Pro: Business and technical management positively view XML technologies.
Pro: XML can leverage existing security solutions.
Pro: XML is license-free, platform-neutral, and widely supported
Pro: XML can be viewed with simple tools such as browsers
Pro: XML supports complicated and focused searching needs
Pro: XML enables e-Business
Pro: XML is easily internationalized.
Pro: The Time is Right.
Con: XML is a space, processor, and bandwidth hog
Con: XML is just a document, not a programming language or a solution for world peace.
Con: If XML is so similar to HTML and SGML, why aren’t those languages sufficient?
Con: Every XML format can become a "proprietary" XML format
Con: XML is great for text, but awful for binary data
Con: XML is a regression from centralized, efficient database systems to inefficient file processing
Con: XML specifications are not yet complete or tested
Con: XML DTDs are insufficient for most business and industrial-strength applications, and XML Schema is too complex
Con: XML will never completely replace other technologies, like EDI.
I'm not going to address any of the specific arguments, but I do have a couple of quasi-random thooughts: