Information Management Weblog

Open Source Education and Government Projects

Phil Windley pointed to two interesting websites modeled after the popular SourceForge site:
SchoolForge lists open-source projects aimed at the education sector.
GovernmentForge focuses on open eGovernment projects.
Neither site has many projects right now, but I hope they grow. I think that open source represents a significant strategic opportunity for education and government. There are plenty of roadblocks (like how best to fund development), but here's to hoping these two projects are successful.

Adaptive Path Presentations

Jeffery Veen mentioned that Adaptive Path (his consulting company) posted a number of materials [ Beyond Usability | Business of User Experience ] from recent presentations. Going on the basis of previous articles I've seen from Adaptive Path, I'm thinking that these materials are probably also pretty high quality. I'm downloading them now...

Design Patterns for Contributors

James Robertson also pointed to a new Jared Spool article on Design Patterns. The problem Spool addresses is a familiar one: how to maintain some level of quality control when you have dozens or hundreds of people building pages on a big site. Spool says that approval workflows, templates, and styleguides aren't doing the job. The solution might be found in design patterns. As he describes it:

A design pattern is a document that describes a specific design problem, such as presenting a login screen or creating a new account. A typical pattern describes the problem, the chosen solution, the rationale behind that solution, related patterns that the designer should be aware of, and other relevant details, such as the results of usability testing.

Sharing Information Between Agencies

From Column Two comes a mention of an interesting little article on sharing information between government agencies. The author, Thomas Davies, talks about an organization's "Information Orientation" (or IO, a term coined by Donald Marchand). One of Davies' solutions:

So what are top state and local executives to do to increase their jurisdictions’ IO quotient? For starters, put the “I” back in CIO. After all, the job title is Chief Information Officer, not Chief Technology Officer. Increasingly preoccupied with technology, CIOs have little, if any, time left to focus on information.

As an aside, this is the second article from Governing.com that I've pointed to in the past few days. I'll have to pay a bit more attention to this publication, I think. Too bad they don't have an RSS feed.

The Trouble with Web Standards

Ian Lloyd wrote a nice guest editorial on the difficulty of getting standards-compliant code written. Short version: it's the people, not the technology. Its a common refrain in many areas, I'm afraid.

New B&A Articles: Card Sorts and CVs

Boxes and Arrows published two new articles:

Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template by Joe Lamantia

Synonym Rings and Authority Files by Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel

When good classifications go bad...

I recently found this menu lurking on the Bumbershoot (Seattle Music Festival) website:

Yikes! I almost don't know where to start with this one.

First of all, stacking tabs is almost always a bad idea. As you can see, there is a whole lot going on there, and I pity the poor user who tries to use this to navigate. Plus, it doesn't look very good. The square little tabs don't fit well with the site's funky design.

But, an even bigger problem seems to be a fair amount of confusion in the classification arena. They've mixed and matched their classifications to the point where its hard to tell what they were thinking. But, I see the beginnings of a nice faceted classification scheme. Let's try to tease out what is really happening here:

The first facet is time. They have a tab for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Next, there is a series of items relating to the type of activity: Art (presumably visual art), Dance, Theater, Comedy (Stand-up?), Film, Literary, and Crafts. We'll throw Food into this list as well.

I'm not quite sure what "Fun" refers too. And I'd be willing to bet that most users to the site wouldn't know what's under that either. A quick click reveals that it's probably the category they used when they couldn't find another category that fit.

Then we have "Kids." I suppose it could be considered a type of activity, but it seems more like an audience. But it is the only audience-specific tab up there. Confusing? Yup.

Finally, we have musical genres listed: Blues, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Electronica, Indie/Punk, Rock/Roots, and Jam/World.

In place of their jumble of tabs, I'd look at creating a faceted navigation system. The facets would be: time, type of event, audience, and genre. Using this system would make things a heck of a lot more clear, and help users navigate their way to the info they need.

Search Tricks

Peter Van Dijck has a nice article on "Better Search Engine Design: Beyond Algorithms". He covers logging, best bets, and controlled vocabularies, and includes some nice MySQL samples. (via currbet.net)

Shared Development

Phil Windley pointed to an interesting article in Governing: Common Code.

In the technology world, it was the equivalent of bumming a cigarette off a friend. Missouri had acquired its system several years ago, in a typical tech deal that took a year to develop and cost a couple of million dollars. Kansas didn’t need all the same bells and whistles. But the basic process for managing grants in Kansas was identical. With the software code in hand — public software is in the public domain — all Kansas had to do was customize it. In all, Kansas is paying only $250,000 for the system, which will launch in August after just a few months of development time. “Missouri’s model did the exact same things we needed,” says Judi Miller, coordinator of state and federal programs at the Kansas Department of Education. “Why reinvent the wheel?”

Read the article, then read Windley's commentary on the article.

RSS Newsreader Reviews

Its interesting to see articles about RSS quickly move from "What the heck is RSS?" to reviews of RSS software. Hopefully this means that RSS is weaseling its way into the mainstream. Anyway, to the point of this post (besides the fact I wanted to use the word "weaseling"): ExtremeTech.com has published a review of six RSS newsreaders. The software reviewed looks to be pretty Windows-centric, but I imagine that most Mac (OS X)-using people already know about NetNewsWire.

XP

Wired's article on Extreme Programming and pair programming:

In a profession known for its lone wolves and silent cubes, in a culture routinely mocked for its social ineptitudes, putting coders up close to each other seems counterintuitive, even risky. Recent research into autism suggests that some software engineers may actually suffer from a genetic disorder that impedes their ability to interact. In The Bug , a new novel by programmer Ellen Ullman, the protagonist works under a tent rigged from a parachute and wears earmuffs as backup for his earplugs. Despite this, Yu is a convert to extreme programming. "XP," he says with a smile that forces his eyes closed, "is one of the luckiest things that ever happened in my career."

Requirements Specifications

Doug Duncan pointed me to what looks to be a nice resource: Volere. This site has a number of free templates that can be used for requirements gathering, stakeholder analysis, and other project-management activities. Looks good.

Intranet Roadmap

James Robertson pointed to an interesting-looking site called the Intranet Roadmap. The site includes a tutorial and a number of articles.

Wired Touts RSS Newsreaders

Wired News has a basic overview of RSS and newsreaders:

Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client. Aggregators, such as NewsGator and AmphetaDesk, allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added.

RSS for Kids

Dave Winer mentioned that Barbara Feldman's Surf the Net with Kids site now has an RSS feed (its at the very bottom of the page). Cool.

Lynx

For those who like their browsing old school, check out lynx. Apple has a link to a nice OS X package.

RSS Replacing Email

Chris Pirillo publishes email newsletters. But he is seeing the end of email as a viable push method. Spam is perhaps the main reason for email's usability decline. But, according to Pirillo, RSS represents a new opportunity for email publishers:

It enables headlines to be distributed online instantly and then interpreted seven ways from Sunday. It opens the door for selling subscriptions to new and existing content. Instead of giving people a newsletter formatted to our tastes and delivered on our time schedule, we can provide them with a means to get the same content in text or HTML whenever they want it.

Update (8/22): Michael Fraase comments on Pirillo's article, and comes to the same conclusion. Barbera J. Feldman, who I mentioned the other day, is also moving to RSS. She even provides a nice analysis of the issues and RSS tutorial.

Microsoft CMS to get cheaper

NetworkWorldFusion reports that Microsoft is planning on releasing a cheaper "standard" edition of its Content Management Server product. Given that the current edition is fairly reasonable at Microsoft's education prices, this new version could turn into an attractive option for many districts.

Inaccessible Websites

Dave Shea pointed to a nice demonstration of inaccessible web design. Check it out.

Breadcrumbs

I like breadcrumbs. That is, those nifty links that often appear on sites that show hierarchy: Home > Section 1 > Sub-section 3 > Page. I think they look good and provide an effective navigation tool.

But, I could be wrong.

At least according to a study published by Wichita State's Usability News. They found that breadcrumbs were not widely used. They did, however, seem to have an impact on the user's mental model.

In this study, we designed the tasks such that navigational efficiency would be optimized through the use of a breadcrumb trail. Despite this, only 6% of the page clicks were accounted for by the breadcrumb. While 40% of the participants used the breadcrumb trail, usage was lower than that of other navigational means, such as the main navigation bar, the Back button, and embedded links.

I'd love to see some "real-world" results. Mining site logs should tell us if breadcrumbs are being used or not.

E-Learning Needs Analysis

Interesting article on e-learning. The take-away? Content is important. :)

Accessibility: Build it and they will come

CSS Zen Garden's Dave Shea has published an interesting article by accessibility advocate Nic Steenhout. Good read for those still not convinced that accessibility is a good thing.

Fahrner Image Replacement

I mentioned the Fahrner Image Replacement technique a few days ago. Today, I noticed the Digital Web just published an article on the technique by CSS Zen Garden guru David Shea. Good read.

Just Say No

Gerry McGovern writes about getting the right people to publish intranet content. I mention this not because he has anything earth-shattering to say, but because what he has to say is nicely summarized in his article.

Websites need to get back to basic principles. Websites that represent organizations should be organized in a coherent and consistent manner. They require strategies and objectives. They need to be measured. Somebody should be in charge. This is management A-B-C. It's often missing.

Distributed content creation seems to be something of a holy grail. Lots of CMS packages tout the ability to allow "non-technical" or "business" users to create the own content. Few of these vendors are going to stop and ask if you actually want these users to be adding this content to the website. I actually think that setting up a system that enables non-technical people to add content is great. But, such a system probably needs to be paired with a strong site manager who can provide direction and editorial assistance. This kind of central "bird-dogging" can ensure the content stays relevant, fresh, and on-topic.

Presentations and Image Tricks

Jeffery Zeldman has posted slides from his recent Web Design World Seattle keynote and accessibility lecture.

Both are, I think, worth a look. Granted, they can't replace actually being there, but they are interesting (and well done).

The keynote focuses on designing with web standards, also the subject of Zeldman's recent book. He includes plenty of good examples of standards-based sites, and a few funny examples of sites gone bad.

The accessibility and Section 508 talk was interesting, as I recently put together a similar presentation. This is a great read for any designer who still isn't quite sure about this whole accessibility thing. Zeldman also pointed to an interesting article about the Fahrner Image Replacement technique.

Jon Udell on Zope

InfoWorld's Jon Udell has written a short article on Zope, focusing on the upcoming transition from Zope 2.x to Zope 3.