Christina Wodke pointed to a great article: "Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management" by Thomas H. Davenport and John Glaser (in the Harvard Business Review). I read this article when it came out (one of my iSchool colleagues forwarded it to the entire class), and it really shaped my thinking about Knowledge Management.
The University of Washington (right here in my own backyard) has a nifty-looking Java-based open-source calendaring system.
Peter Van Dijck writes about "nested facets" in a recent post. The concept is, as Peter notes, not new, but worth making explicit. In a nutshell, the idea is that you can include a faceted classification system in a small part of a larger taxonomy. Peter's diagram makes this a bit more clear, so head over there and check it out.
Every once in a while I check out my weblog's "cosmos" on Technorati. Its fun to see if anyone has pointed to me; there are usually at least a couple of other websites that mention mine (often in the blogroll). I'll usually follow the links and see if the other sites look interesting (and maybe subscribe to their RSS feed).
A couple of interesting finds from my last Technorati fishing expedition:
Okay, enough navel-gazing. I'll get back to the interesting stuff now...
Elearnspace points to an interesting discussion of the uses and impact of weblogs in schools.
This has been widely reported, but its worth another mention: the AIFIA has launched a library section of their website. As might be expected from an IA organization, this is well-organized collection of information architecture resources.
The Web Standards Group has a very nice checklist and Powerpoint on performing usability tests aimed at improving accessibility for blind and vision impared users. I think I'll try to work these tips into our (forthcoming) accessibility testing program. (via ColumnTwo)
Ben Galbraith has posted a very interesting note about Avalanche Corporate Technology, an attempt to have large corporations develop enterprise software in a cooperative way. Quoting Galbraith (who is quoting the WSJ):
According to the WSJ, Avalanche sees a future where its members band together to write their own commercial-grade enterprise software (e.g., call center applications or even office suites) and giving the product to themselves for free.
When I was at Puget Sound ESD, we kicked around the idea of setting up a similar co-op among K-12 school districts. Nothing had left the ground when I left, but there might have been action since then. I still think its a great idea.
Update: Ted Leung responds to Galbraith's comments about open source.
All of a sudden, I'm seeing Mike Kuniavsky's excellent Observing the User Experience everywhere. Okay, two places.
First, a copy of the book that I ordered arrived.
Second, Andrew Hinton's review of the book appeared in the latest Boxes and Arrows.
I'm not going to subject you to a full-blown review of the book--read Hinton's article for that. But, I can tell you that this is a must-have book if you're doing anything related to user-centered design.
I read Elements when it was first published, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Kuniavsky writes authoritatively about a wide range of UCD methods, from focus groups to usability studies and beyond. Many of these techniques are covered in other books, but having them together in one place is valuable. Kuniavsky also shares hard-won experiences in the field.
The copy I first read stayed at my previous job, but I ordered a new one because there are some areas that I'd like to brush up on. At this point, I'm using the book almost as a reference text. I'm looking at doing a focus group or two, so I'll hit those sections first.
Its time, once again, to clear out my list of "interesting links that I don't have time to put into proper weblog posts":
I'm going to try to do a better job staying on top of these so they don't pile up like this...
Joe Di Stefano's A List Apart article "The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House," is a nice little piece on project management and the importance of planning. If anything, the article is far too brief. But Di Stefano has some nice stories from the trenches.
Peter-Paul Koch's most recent Digital Web article focuses on "Separating behavior and structure" when using Javascript:
These anti-JavaScripters make some good points, but they are not well informed of recent advances in JavaScript theory. The time has come to concede that in some respects they are completely correct, to propose a change of coding habits, and to end the "JavaScript is Evil" nonsense once and for all. We’re going to separate behavior and structure. That should convince even the die-hards.
I've never used a ton of javascript in the sites I've done, but I think Koch's approach seems quite sensible.
Update: Similar article, more focused on accessibility: Let Them Eat Cake by Aaron Gustafson.
NPR is doing a five-part series on search engines. For a piece aimed at non-technical users, it seems quite thorough and well done (I often cringe at technology-centered reports in mainstream media). There isn't anything in the report that will be news to those who have followed the search industry, but its a great overview.
37signals (Matthew Linderman with Jason Fried), Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points, New Riders, 2004.
If you work on web applications of any type, this book is a must read to improve your contingency design skills.
I’ve spent more than my fair share of time creating web forms. Getting the forms functional is usually fairly easy; doing them right, well, that’s a different story. Successful form interaction hinges on the details. Get the details right, and your audience will love it (or, it will be so easy they don’t even notice!). Get it wrong and you can easily frustrate and lose your audience.
Defensive Design is a book about the details. The 37signals team (the same folks behind Basecamp, a great example of a web application done right) focuses on “crisis points”—the times when something doesn’t go right. They not only explain how to design so people can successfully recover from errors and other glitches, but they focus on how to avoid putting your visitors in those positions.
The book is broken up into a number of topics:
Linderman and Fried offer forty guidelines within these topics. Each guideline is illustrated with a number of short examples or case studies. Guideline number 3, “Always identify errors the same way,” has two examples. Two screenshots from E*Trade show inconsistency in error messages, while Priceline’s site is held up as an example of how to follow the guideline. The text is punctuated with customer quotes and interesting analogies (“It’s as if the stop signs in one state are red octagons but in the next state they’re blue rectangles.”)
For the most part, the guidelines are right on. They’d be quite useful as a set of heuristics to analyze a website. Apparently Linderman and Fried agree, as they’ve included just such a tool in the form of a “Contingency Design Test” at the end of the book. But, as with all “guidelines” offered up by experts, the final judge should be you. Don’t use the guidelines as a substitute for critical thinking and user testing. Your audience, goals, or resources may dictate a direction that differs from that laid out in this book.
Having said that, I found only few guidelines to quibble with. And in these cases, I wouldn’t say the guidelines were wrong, only that there might be another approach to that issue, or a valid reason to reject the guideline.
This is not a technical book. The focus is on design, not coding. This helps extend the useful life of the book, as code-heavy books can often stale quickly. And, it makes the book more accessible to non-technical members of a web team. This approach can also be a liability. Some tips, especially surrounding search query modification, are predicated on a fair amount of programming work. The book almost completely ignores the implementation issues. This approach is fine for those who understand the behind-the-scenes details, but it could leave other readers with a false impression.
Technology books are often corpulent tomes, contributing to widespread deforestation. This is not one of those books. It weighs in at a svelte 246 pages, including index. The writing style contributes to the featherweight feel of the book. Linderman and Fried have taken web content best practices to heart and cut the prose down to the bare minimum. Often, a paragraph is all that accompanies each example screenshot. Whitespace abounds. This makes for a very easy to read book; I finished it in well under three hours. For the most part, the brevity was welcome. However, there were cases that could benefit from additional discussion.
All in all, I heartily recommend this book. If your work involves web applications or web forms, the guidelines offered in this book will, at the very least, make you think about some of the things that might be missing in your work. Reading the book sparked a number of good ideas that I plan to put to use in a future project.
Phil Windley nicely summarizes many of the document management options for small organizations.
This is, in my opinion, a real problem space. I've seen document management issues arise in organizations of all sizes, and few of them know what to do about it. What's needed is a tool with the ease-of-use of a file server (drag-n-drop; folders and files), the structure and organization imposed by metadata and controlled vocabularies, and a version control tool that can be used by mere mortals. Make it easy to set up out of the box (just plug in an organization scheme), and you've really got something...
And now for something from the "management" side of "information management":
Rumsfeld's Rules: Advice on government, business and life.
The article is a collection of quotations and short snippets on, broadly, leadership and management. Much of it covers Rumsfeld's period in the White House and on other government posts. Fortunately, you can easily generalize to other management situations. Its a good read, regardless of your level of agreement with the man's politics.
Phil Windley started an interesting discussion on using PHP in high-volume websites. One interesting pointer was to this presentation on Yahoo!'s use and optimization of PHP. Right now, we have a low-volume PHP-based site that I hope will become a high-volume PHP-based site...
Conn McQuinn is reviewing the Educational Technology research landscape. Some themes:
What was informative was how important it is to have strong leadership, a school or district-wide shared vision of the use of technology, and tying the use of technology directly to desired learning goals. As an overall finding, the use of technology has the greatest impact on student achievement (yes, even on standardized tests and the WASL) when it is used in constructivist/student-centered/project-based learning. Then again, students learn better in that kind of environment without technology, so again this shouldn't be a big shock.
Update: Conn has added Part 2 of his findings...