Team New Zealand's boat broke in yesterday's America's Cup race (the mast snapped in half...not a good thing). Turns out their website is a bit broken, too. Looking for more information on the story, I surfed over to Team New Zealand's Official Website. Once the page loaded, portions of the page started to dance up and down on my screen. I'm pretty sure this wasn't the the developers intended. And, it looks just fine in Internet Explorer. But I'm using a Gecko-based browser (Chimera). I did a screen capture so you can see what it looked like: 1MB QuickTime Movie.
It looks like the horizontal scrolling text somehow caused the size of some elements to change (and bounce up and down). It made it a bit challenging to click on a link!
On the heels of my Simple Steps: Know Your Audience presentation comes Peter Merholz's article entitled Casting Your User Research. Merholz has lots of great tips about finding users for interviews, focus groups, or usability tests:
There's an old adage that 90 percent of filmmaking is in the casting. Throughout the process of making a movie, doing the work up-front to get the right performers pays off and ultimately leads to a superior result.
We talked about search engines for a bit during yesterday's Simple Steps workshop. I worked up a quick list of resources on the subject...
http://www.htdig.org/ ht:dig is an open-source search engine that we're using here at the ESD.
http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html Lucene is a java-based open source search engine from the Apache (webserver) people. I haven't tried it out, but it looks interesting.
http://www.swish-e.org/ Swish-E is another open-source search engine. I recall taking a look at this a year or so ago, and picking ht:dig instead.
http://www.atomz.com/search/ Atomz is an application service provider commercial search engine.
http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/09/champeon/ Steve Champeon has an article about finding a search engine in the late WebTechniques/NewArchitect.
http://www.searchtools.com/ SearchTools has a variety of search engine resources.
http://www.webreview.com/2001/10_22/authors/index01.shtml Meryl Kaplan Evans has an article in WebReview about the many search engine options.
We had our first Simple Steps workshop yesterday. I've posted resources from this session, Know Your Audience. This page has a downloadable copy of the presentation, some example files, as well as enough links to keep you reading for weeks. Topics covered included: server logs, search engine logs, surveys, interviews, card sorts, usability testing, demographic research, style guides, and personas.
Thanks to all who came and participated.
If you'd like to try out Silva, you can use the demo site set up by zettai. Use the username "demo" and password "demo" to get access to the system.
Silva is based on Zope. It tends to focus more on structured XML content. This really comes through in the interface. When writing a new piece of content, you have to first add the "paragraph" content type (or whatever you want to call it), then write out that paragraph (makes more sense if you try it...). This really forces some serious structure onto your documents. This is great in terms of managing and storing this content, but I have serious concerns about turning end users loose on an interface like this.
AppMac just introduced three new web browsers. These are specialized browsers aimed at children (with parental controls), office use (with controls for the company to stop downloads, etc), and a kiosk browser. Fortunately, all of them are based on the Gecko rendering engine, the HTML engine developed as a part of the mozilla project. This means that the three new browsers are essentially the same (at the core) as Netscape 6/7, Mozilla 1.x, Chimera, and other Gecko-based browsers. Since Gecko has good standards compliance, developers just need to write to standards and not worry about which browser gets used to view the content. Very cool.
Christina Wodke has an interesting response to an article about the trends in online help. Both make for good reading.
Digital Web has a comparative review of the two heavyweight HTML editors, Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Both have pros and cons. The author gives a slight nod to Dreamweaver, but I'd recommend reading the article to see which product best fits your needs.
As for me, I'm going to stick with BBEdit. As they say, "it doesn't suck."
A number of sites have commented on ESPN.com recent standards-based redesign. One of these sites is What Do I Know. The feedback is worth reading, if only for the comments that users have posted on that page. It turns out that Apple's new Safari browser is the fastest when rendering ESPN.com. Some posters took issue with the developers "wasting" time making the site work with Safari. Mike Davidson, one of the ESPN developers, responded:
Care to guess how much money we spent for QA to make sure our site worked in Safari? If you guessed $0.00, you are correct.How about our QA budget to make sure it worked great in Mozilla, Chimera, and Netscape 7? Also $0.00. I think you’re missing the reason why people are so excited about Safari. *It just works*. It really does. When you write standards-compliant code, you have a pretty good idea what your pages will look like in every standards-compliant browser before you even test them. Safari just plain works, and there’s nothing on our site which you are missing because you decide to use it.
James Robertson pointed to two weblog posts (1 and 2) about Social Network Analysis (SNA) Software. Last fall (2001) I took a course that focused on SNA. At that point, there wasn't much of anything out there in this space (and what was there was so hard to install/use, it just wasn't worth it). Now, there are at least 5 applications that do SNA visualization stuff. Cool.
Another interesting looking RSS aggregator: Aggie. Aggie is a .NET application...it runs on Win 98, ME, 2000, and XP. As well as handling RSS, Aggie can also read "strutured" HTML pages. Aggie is open source.
The Aggie page pointed to a State of Utah page about RSS. Its basically a tutorial on publishing RSS content. Looks like a nice resource.
On the client side of things, check out Syndic8. They offer a large number of RSS feeds, nicely categorized. Hmm..."computers" seem to be pretty popular.
It might take a while yet (6-12 months...maybe longer), but I can see a time where a variety of content is published using RSS. At the ESD, we have hundreds of people who need to keep up with the latest news in a wide variety of fields. These people are also really, really busy. One solution is RSS. Imagine being able to scan the latest journal articles in your field in a few moments, flagging the ones that you want to read. I'm lucky...my field is technology, so there are plenty of RSS sources that let me keep up to date. At this point the technology is there. There are plenty of RSS readers for every platform. Weblogging software and CMS software make it easy to generate RSS. Now all we need is quality content (like the PSESD weblogs)...
Jakob Nielsen's latest column: Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines:
As we have seen in testing intranets, using one search to find documents from the document repository and another search to find answers in the knowledge base is a big problem for users. Most people won't know which is which, and they'll waste much time trying to puzzle out the difference. But, when you want to find Mary's phone number, you don't think of it as a document retrieval operation. You think of it as looking up Mary in the employee list. For both needs, the action to take is clear, so users have only one command to consider in each case. Exactly the outcome the simplicity principle aims to achieve.
I think Jakob got this one wrong. It's not an either-or case. You don't have to choose between offering a single search box for everything and a specialized directory search. I'd make the main search box (shown on every intranet page) search both documents and people. Then, I'd make a link to a directory search interface. This box can search the very same directory that the main search does. I bet people figure out real quick that they can get people results from the main interface. This will become even more natural when people start to see people displayed in other search contexts, like expertise location.
UPDATE: Christina Wodke wrote an interesting response to Nielsen's article, mostly focusing on the concept of usabiity "guidelines." To quote: "my point is that design matters, and guidelines are not to be relied on solely." Anyway, it's worth reading.
The Usabiity Special Interest Group has a page of Heuristic Resources. Well worth checking out if you're interested in this low-cost usability method.
Intelligent Enterprise Magazine has an article on Python called The Major Leagues. Its a basic overview of the language, including some advantages when using it to develop enterprise apps.
The article mention's ActiveState's Visual Python tool, a Visual Studio .NET plugin.
I've noticed a couple of big sites have recently moved to a CSS layout:
Netscape's DevEdge (article about the change)
ESPN.com (Zeldman's comments).
James McNally reviews Hillman Curtis' "Making the Invisible Visible" in the new issue of Digital Web Magazine.
In the book, Curtis lays out a seven-stage process that he uses on projects:
1. Listen
2. Unite
3. Theme
4. Concept
5. Eat the Audience
6. Filter
7. Justify
Given my upcoming talk on "Knowing Your Audience," I'm especially interested in #5, "Eat the Audience." Here's what McNally had to say about it:
“Eating the Audience” is a clever way of restating the concept of understanding who designers work for. There’s no substitute for research, and this information gathering should take place at every stage of the project’s development. Curtis makes a valid point that Web designers do not have the luxury of thinking like fine artists. The art designers create is commercial. It is designed to meet the needs of clients and their audiences, so designers need to constantly crawl out from their own creative spaces to listen to others.
I see a lot of resistance towards the notion of learning about the audience. Many people, I think, don't bother to take a systematic look at their audience. Its nice to hear a design star like Curtis focus on audiences.
In his latest article, "A User-Centered Approach to Selling Information Architecture,"
Jeff Lash argues that clients don't care about the nitty-gritty details of how a website gets made:
A good IA should act like a good car salesman and work with the client to understand what their needs are. Find out what the bottom-line goal is.
If you read just one article on faceted classification (and you should, if only for the eventuality that someone mentions S.R. Ranganathan at a dinner party and you don't want to be the only one to not get it), read this one:
by Dr. Louise Spiteri (republished by the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA)).
Jesse James Garret (of Elements of User Experience fame) has a nice article in New Architect:
All Those Opposed: Making the case for user experience in a budget-conscious climate
Using a Web site for the first time is an awful lot like going on a first date. It's a one-on-one interaction, and it doesn't always go as planned. Consider the difference between these two first dates: Bachelor #1 spent most of the night talking about things that he thought were important, asked a lot of prying questions for no apparent reason, and kept forgetting your name. Bachelor #2 tried to anticipate your needs, seemed interested in your perspective, and helped you decipher the menu at the French restaurant. Which bachelor would you prefer to date a second time?
Um, #2?
Two articles from the final issue of New Architect Magazine:
Review of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002
Review of Macromedia Contribute
Heh. Interwoven patented content management. Its patent number 6,505,212, for the record.
A system and method for file management is comprised of hierarchical files systems, referred to as "areas." There are three types of areas: work areas, staging areas, and edition areas. A work area is a modifiable file system, and, in a work area a user can create, edit, and delete files and directories. A staging area is a read-only file system that supports select versioning operations. Various users of work areas can integrate their work by submitting the contents of their work area to the staging area. In the staging area, developers can compare their work and see how their changes fit together. An edition is a read-only file system, and the contents of a staging area are virtually copied into an edition to create a frozen, read-only snapshot of the contents of the staging area. One use of the system and method for file management is as a website development tool.
It'll be interesting to see how they enforce this. Someone should be able to pull up some prior art on this one...
Insert obligatory "patent system needs reforming" comment here.
From the trenches, its often hard to see the positive impact that technology can make. InformationWeek's Mary Hayes shares four stories about "High Impact" tech workers:
a professor striving to turn out socially responsible computer scientists; a former Silicon Valley executive using his industry influence to protect the environment; a technology staffer who got a large company thinking about online privacy; and a dot-com entrepreneur who thinks E-commerce can help the world's poor make a living. While none could be called heroes--each one is simply following a personal code of values--they demonstrate that people in IT can make a difference.
What are you doing?
James Robertson has published two new content management articles:
Is it document management or content management? There is an often blurry distinction between CM and DM. I've struggled to explain the differences to others in the past. This article gives a nice clear overview of the two types of systems.
A better approach: requirements-focused CMS selection. Robertson's description of the "requirements-focused" approach isn't fully developed in this short article. Basically, it looks like focusing on the organizational needs rather than just technology needs. And it involves talking to a variety of stakeholders up front. I'm not saying that these aren't good approaches (they are), but I think I'd like to see more examples from Robertson in this article.
In other news, I noticed that Robertson has been added to the advisory board of the UW iSchool CMS Lab. Sounds like a good fit for both parties.
I've mentioned a number of RSS readers in the past, and I ran across another one today. NewsMonster is different becaused it runs on Mozilla and/or Netscape 7 (on all platforms). Its still in beta, but its an interesting application...
Update (2/20): Mark Pilgrim has an interesting discussion about NewsMonster, most notably its feature to download non-RSS content...
It looks like someone is working on a "near-seamless integration of the CPython runtime with the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR)." Its still in an "experimental" stage. Still, there are some interesting possibilities if it can be made to work...
Ever wonder how Amazon.com runs their recommendation engine (the part of the website that suggests items you might like based on previous purchases)? They're using Bayesian analysis (I'm assuming, having never actually seen the inner workings of Amazon). This process is based on work by an 18th century mathamatican and clergyman, Thomas Bayes. News.com has a story on Bayes, and the types of tools his equations are powering.
Plone, the open-source CMS based on Zope, has reached 1.0 status.
I've come across an interesting interview with Adaptive Path's Indi Young. Adaptive Path is one of the well-known IA firms. Young explains some of the steps she takes in an IA project:
Discovery
Audience segmentation
Interviews
Data analysis
Mental model diagram
Content gap analysis
Architecture and navigation
A followup to an earlier post about using scripting languages for large systems: Jon Udell's column entitled "Refactoring the business." Jon interviews Ward Cunningham, one of the founders of the eXtreme Programming technique, and the inventor of the Wiki. A quote (from Udell):
There is, of course, a vast gulf between the process mappers who model business systems pictorially, and the programmers who grind out the C++ or Java or .Net services that support those business systems. Between the two camps lies a fertile land of opportunity. It's time to jointly explore it.
Also, don't miss Jon's weblog, which has "outtakes" from the interview.
I've been using NetNewsWire Lite for a few months. The software downloads RSS feeds from a variety of sources (mostly other weblogs, but also some news sites, like News.com). Its a great way to keep on top of a wide range of information very quickly.
Ranchero Software, the makers of NetNewsWire Lite, have released the "full version" of NetNewsWire ($30). The big addition for me is the ability to use the software to add posts to my weblog. I'm writing this entry within the full version. Its much nicer than writing in a browser, mostly because it includes spell-check, and the formatting buttons (link, bold, etc) work on my Mac. The only downside is that the software only runs on Mac OS X 10.2.
I've been looking for a good weblog posting tool that runs on Mac 9 and/or Windows. We have a number of people here at the ESD that would benefit from an easy to use weblog tool, but I haven't run across one that works well enough to let it loose on the masses. If anyone knows of some good software, let me know...
Some points to ponder: The Ten Commandments of Content Management. Some of these "commandments" lead to fairly high-end solutions, so your milage really might vary on this one.
There is a thread on the SIGIA-l mailing list devoted to the question of where content management should live in an organizational structure. The consensus so far is that CM should be "owned" jointly between the IT (technical) side and the communications/PR ("business") side. I strongly agree. Without both of these perspectives, any big CM initiative is doomed. Also, at least one poster has mentioned the need for senior management buy-in. Again, I strongly agree. Pulling off a big CM project is hard enough with management buy-in. The challenge here is making sure management understands the value of a CM system (and the potential pay-offs).
You can find Heuristics on the low-cost side of the usability spectrum. In a heuristic evaluation, the evaluator(s) compare a product (website, software, etc.) to a list of criteria (the "heuristics"). The technique was pioneered by usability guru Jakob Nielsen (see his page on heuristics) and the most well-know set of heuristics is Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics. However, many people have found that this list doesn't exactly meet their needs. Addressing this point, Todd Zazelenchuk has compiled a list of alternatives to Nielsen's heuristics.
"What if you could graft the best features and attributes of individual Web content management packages into one single, ideal offering?" asks CMS Watch's Tony Byrne. The answer is explained in The Ideal CMS -- 2002.
The result?
So you can see that my ideal Web content management “Supergroup,” circa 2002, would require me to integrate components or attributes from no less than 15 different companies across the 21 categories.
What does this mean? No one product is the perfect solution. As Byrne mentions, CMS implementations are very specific to an organization. Still, its hard to find a good system to build on.
Four articles about the value of HR automation and intranets:
Three Stories of Self-Service Success
Open Enrollment Is a Non-Issue, Thanks to Self-Service
Self-Service Causes Call Volume to Drop 75 Percent
Self-Service Eliminates 80 Percent of Paperwork
(via James Robertson.)
Volvo's Dick Stenmark has a very interesting article in the Dec '20 issue of CIO Magazine: Finding the Future. Stenmark writes outlines some interesting possibilities in intranet search technology. Some of these ideas include:
Stenmark notes that the technologies needed to add these features already exist. But, they haven't been pulled together with search engines to form a useful whole. Simple indexing won't cut it anymore, and Stenmark points in the direction of a much more powerful searching method.
Scripting languages don't get no respect. But they should, argues Jon Udell in an InfoWorld article entitled Shipping the prototype:
Years ago, when the paint was barely dry on Visual Basic 3.0, a developer showed me a CD-ROM-burning application he'd written using that toolkit. The idea was to prototype the UI in Visual Basic, then rewrite in C++ for performance. But in the end, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, "we shipped the prototype." I saw nothing to be ashamed of. It was -- and is -- a brilliant strategy. My only regret is that it hasn't been adopted more widely.
Good article.
New on Digital Web: Peter-Paul Koch on Form following function. He shares a couple of horror stories about web designers who put the aesthetic aspects of a design above the functional ones:
Her Web site was shockingly bad. The only signs of creativity were the GIF animations of the hind parts of a running tiger, which turned out to be the main navigation.
On the Usability News site, Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usage:
This exploratory study was conducted to determine whether participants used the breadcrumb trail as a navigational tool within a site. We found the overall usage of the breadcrumb in site navigation to be low. Breadcrumb users were not found to be more efficient than users who did not use the breadcrumb. Participants used a variety of navigational means, such as the Back button, left and top navigation bars, and searching to find the information instead of or in addition to the breadcrumb tool.
Interesting findings. Note that this is an "exploratory" study, and they only tested two websites. Clearly, more research is needed in this area.
I'm generally a big fan of breadcrumbs, especially for larger sites with more complex navigation. I also think they can help "ground" users by clearly showing where a page sits in relation to others on the site.
A side note: there are a number of other good articles in the Feb. '03 issue of Usability News. For example, Cascading versus Indexed Menu Design.
A quick plug for an upcoming series of workshops: Simple Steps to Improve Your Website:
The Online Development Center presents Simple Steps to Improve Your Website, a series of five workshops covering topics important for creating and maintaining effective websites. Each workshop is designed to provide practical tips to help improve your website immediately. All workshops are free of charge and will take place at the PSESD main office in Burien.
For those interested in metadata, the W3C has published an RDF Primer. RDF can be a tad on the confusing side, so documents like this are quite useful.
Online Journalism Review has an interview with Chris Mandra, executive producer of NPR Online. Mandra talks about the process of redesigning the site. At the start of the process, he described the site like this:
We hadn't done anything to the site in quite a while, and we felt that the decisions we were making were haphazard. We hadn't grown instantaneously and exponentially. Over five or six years we'd grown from having a gopher site to this site with eight hours of audio every day and an archive going back five or six years. It was just stumbling forward. We knew we had some of the best content in existence.
This should sound pretty familiar to many of you. We see lots of sites that have just grown up over the years to the point where they are these lumbering masses of content. NPR, working with a consultancy, started with the basics. They studied the users and used this data to build a much more successful site. Its a good place to start.
Lots of open source unix software has been compiled for Mac OS X. The easiest way to install this on your Mac is through Fink. But, this is a command-line tool that can be a bit user-unfriendly. But, I've just run across a GUI frontend for fink: FinkCommander. This should make downloading and installing this software a bit easier.