 | Whitney Hess on Lay Your Weapons Down and Cele… |
| … on Games in Education | |
 | Semantic Will on Memphis, Here I Come |
 | Victor Lombardi on Desirability Heuristics |
 | Rob Fay on UPA’s User Focus Confere… |
An inspiring ad in today’s New York Times.
Click play and see how the lines between old media (NYTimes ‘paper’ style view of front page) and new mix together beautifully.
In case the ad moves, I tried to do a screen capture of it, but the voice is lost. Just focus on the ad and the paper’s headline.
Tags: [Apple, Leopard, Vista, NYTimes, advertisement, Partial Recall]
Many bloggers are familiar with Flickr, a fantastic photo sharing site. They and many web 2.0 companies use the “beta” label, seemingly to avoid responsibility if there are bugs or customer complaints. Beta is fine, in my opinion, if the service is limited to a specific customer base and if it is free, but once a customer has to pay, all bets are off.
As Flickr has matured, it changed its logo labeling from “beta” to the “gamma” level of maturity. Today I noticed that their logo no longer contains this cautionary label, but now reads “loves you,” as in “Flickr loves you.” See below.
So, what does this have to say about the Flickr? What, no love at first site? Did you have to get customer commitment before you learned to love us?
In all seriousness, have you been involved with products that used the “beta” label? If so, what were the reasons?
Tags: [alpha, beta, gamma, flickr, social software, Partial Recall]
Rashmi is the creator of SlideShare.
[Runtime: 49 slides | Please make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed on your computer to watch this slideshow. To download it, please visit: http://www.adobe.com/ ]
Tags: [Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare, User Experience, PowerPoint, Slideshow, Partial Recall, IASummit2007]
Well, it’s now available and I’m very excited! Think of the possibilities. For teachers. For sharing knowledge in an organization. For sharing knowledge with the world. Sign up now and get started.
Post a Slideshow on Your Site – Part II
Post a Slideshow on Your Site – Part I
Tags: [PowerPoint, slides, Slideshare, social software, knowledge management, Partial Recall]
…or, you could simply use SlideShare, once the kind folks open up the beta to everyone. Below is an example using the venerable Lou Rosenfeld’s recently posted “Enterprise Information Architecture” slides.
Tags: [PowerPoint, slides, Slideshare, Lou Rosenfeld, Information Architecture, Enterprise Information Architecture]
I stumbled across this post which describes how you can embed slides into your website. If you use either a free Flickr account (or Google’s Picasa), you can export your Powerpoint slides as image files, upload them to your photo site, and then insert a bit of code to embed your slides. It takes a few minutes, but it is certainly a useful little hack. Hopefully Flickr (and Picasa) won’t change their code to beat this hack.
Obviously the example shown below is not too pretty because my content space does not have a lot of width. I’ve noticed that this alters Flickr’s functionality a bit. One other note – be sure that you upload your slides in reverse chronoligical order so that your first slide is the one most recently uploaded. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find a way to change the slide order.
The slide example below was created by Ari Weissman after his recent conference experiences. He posted some useful links to accompany his slides. Enjoy!
I know, I know. I’m late to the game. I was not able to attend Adaptive Path’s UX week in DC last month. Fortunately, there’s a wiki containing great sessions notes.
Tags: [wiki, Adaptive Path, ux, user experience, conference, usability, information architecture, interaction design]
Now this free tool from G.E. might be a helpful tool to use during brainstorming meetings…folks can collaborate during the meeting and then be able to print out the results…[Hat Tip to Lifehacker]
Tags: [General Electric, Imagination Cubed, mindmap, brainstorming]
The rage now is converting every MS Office application to the web (web 2.0) so you can access tools and files from anywhere, enabling better collaboration among team members. One suite of tools that comes to mind is Zoho, which includes most of the MS Office tools, but with less functionality.
This morning I read an article [hat tip to Nomad] about Gliffy, a web tool that looks to provide Visio-like functionality. I wonder if it can provide the mind-mapping functionality as well? The cool thing is that you can easily embed the results into any site.
Tags: [Visio, Gliffy, Web 2.0, diagramming, Zoho, Partial Recall]
I stumbled across this yesterday as well. I’m not a huge fan of it, but like the idea of the collaboration of many in one place. It’s definitely a push into the space of socialization and helping to drive innovation down a faster road.
I think it might shine if you think of using it for mind-mapping/brainstorming. For instance, within a meeting, one “note taker” could document what is being brainstormed on a white board. Then others could edit later or it could easily be dropped into a web page or document.
Of course you can do this in Visio as well, but this may lend itself to an easier collaboration process.
The major down side to Visio (in my opinion) is that it is a Windows only app. There are similar apps for Mac and Linux, but few that work on all 3 platforms. The upside of Gliffy is that it allows a common interface on any platform. Oh and you can’t beat the price, especially as compared to the price of Visio.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the voting mechanism in Digg, Netscape beta and others that allows users to rate content as helpful or worthwhile. Think of Amazon’s “Was this rating helpful?” mechanism but with the power to literally elevate content to higher visibility.
I think there are some wonderful uses for this type of social voting for the enterprise, and Kevin and others might consider teaming with CMS providers to include this functionality into corporate intranets and KM solutions. Here’s one idea:
In traditional organizations, innovation and idea generation is a top-down exercise. That is, business leaders drive the services and products based on their own analysis of market needs. In addition, corporate policy is determined by the leaders of the organization.
On the other hand, some organizations allow for the bottom-up vetting of ideas. Why not use a voting mechanism like that employed by Digg to allows employees to participate in a “suggestion box” approach – suggestions to better the company – both in terms of corporate policy/culture and the products and services they offer to the customer? Fellow employees can then rate these ideas and the best ideas are vetted to the top. These suggestions then get on the radar of corporate leaders.
Implementing this functionality on corporate intranets seems like a no-brainer to me. Unfortunately, in my experience, only the large organizations really focus on harnessing the potential of their intranets. The new social technologies of blogs, wikis, feeds and the like have a slow mainstream adoption process, but the need for sharing knowledge in the enterprise is great and these tools are inexpensive solutions for building an innovative knowledge-sharing organization.
After doing a little digging (horrible pun), it seems as though the folks at Digg will be releasing a Digg API around the time of the version 3.0 release next Monday:
“We also plan on launching an API after the next major release of digg (v3). The API will provide users with access to digg DB data in which you can build your own digg tools/research projects around.”
Tags: [Digg, Netscape beta, Web 2.0, suggestion box, knowledge management, intranet, organization, corporation, social software, enterprise, Partial Recall]
Wow, to avoid a dissertation and possible major brain dump in this little box, I’ll keep this brief, well as brief as I can.
Yes, mainstream adoption is slow, but not as slow as one may think. And no, I’m not knocking your perception, but trying to push a little into what is really there and we don’t see it and how potentially take what is already 95% there and push it to the full 100%.
Email, yes email; “labeling” in Gmail, and “folders” in Outlook; it’s already there. We as professionals and personal folk are already doing and we have been doing it for years. Just like when AJAX was first coined, people (mainly us geeks) were all a buzz. Two words: Oddpost and Outlook. Both were online email interfaces that used AJAX and had been around for a while.
This is all inline with the whole Web 2.0 thing. We’ve already been doing it, it’s just now someone has labeled it. The last 5% is the integration and making the usage and findability more public and so private, of course, where doesn’t the line stop and what is considered private not for prying eyes on company equipment?
Now, with all of that said and to avoid more confusion and brain usage of this little comment box, we can continue if you’d like or maybe setup that lunch we had talked about. 
Rob, what seems to be a bigger issue is institutionalizing innovation on a company-wide scale (so that an intranet-based knowledge-sharing solution can then be used to streamline the innovation process). However, an alternative question is the following: can such knowledge-sharing technology be used to help institutionalize innovation?
Stan,
I would encourage you to read my article on culture change. There’s always a question whether technology can change an organization’s culture of if the culture must first be changed before some sort of technology solution can become accepted.
Frankly, I think either method can work. When I was in charge of a help desk once upon a time, I encouraged staff to enter answers to common questions in a knowledge base. I made this part of the staff’s performance review process, so there was obvious incentive for them.
Many people do not want to share the knowledge that they have – perhaps because they feel that their job depends on it. However, if incentives are used to encourage sharing, then tools such as the example I provide might then have more and more people buy in to a culture of sharing…
Alex is a busy man. His “day” job has kept him busy with Netcape beta and now he’s publicizing his resume tool called “Emurse.” I encourage you to check it out.
Here’s Alex’s press release regarding Emurse:
“Emurse.com’s mission is to improve your job hunt.
We believe that your job hunt is a continual process that starts with having an updated resume available at all times. Emurse allows you to easily create resumes and manage your existing ones. You can download them in any format instantly from anywhere in the world. Stay organized and save time by easily distributing your resumes directly from the site, keeping track of all their destinations and when they’ve arrived. When its time to update your resume, Emurse allows you to easily make a change to all of them simultaneously. We’ll even help you turn your resume into a web page so potential employers can always have access to your most recent copy.”
Tags: [Alex Rudloff, resume, emurse]
Seems there’s a buzz about AOL’s venture into user-recommended-and-rated-news. I am not writing this post to berate AOL for moving into a space carved out by Digg. Frankly, I do not think Digg owns the IP to this social news framework. Others like those at Newsvine have produced similar offerings.
Instead, I think AOL’s offering instead targets the Googles and Yahoos of the world, trying to pit this functionality into their broader portal offering.
Most importantly, I want to give props to Alex for his fantastic work on the product. He and his team have a lot to be proud of.
Tags: [Digg, AOL, Netscape, news, Newsvine, portal, Alex Rudloff]
You find NewNetscape to be like NetVines?
I like NetVines … a lot. And that’s interesting because I’ve used other sites that try to do what it does. Maybe that’s it: NetVibes actually does what it sets out to do.
But how is it like NetscapeNew? I’d compare NN more to Yahoo ”Answers” which, at least, is similarly based on user interaction.
Thanks for the shout out Rob, much appreciated. We’re working around the clock to get most of the kinks worked out as quickly as possible.
Did you know you could add chat to your website very easily? With Gabbly you can simply type in to your browser address line (best with Firefox) ‘www.gabbly.com/www.mywebsite.com’ where ‘mywebsite’ is your site. You can also embed the chat tool right into your web page like the example shown here. Note sure about security, but it seems interesting.
Tags: [chat, im, Gabbly, Partial Recall]
I am looking to set up a wiki for my group at work. The idea is to share information regarding conferences, research, or anything else we’d like to share. We decided a wiki would be the best tool, but after a preliminary review of free products hosted by the wiki provider, there were not too many I’d consider intuitive. The two I’ve focused on are Jot and PBWiki. The big plus with Jot is that is uses a WYSIWYG editor and it has a number of template plugins available.
Can you make any recommendations for a free hosted Wiki with WYSIWYG editing features?
I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it since I already use WordPress for this site…I’ve been thinking of moving away from using a wiki and instead using a blog tool like WordPress. WordPress hosts blogs at wordpress.com so I can set up a blog that includes wiki-like functionality using editable pages. There’s also a WYSIWYG editor for those who would rather not dabble in XHTML.
In addition, WordPress offers much more for workgroup collaboration. For instance, it lets you feed XML into the sidebar, so colleagues can easily share articles bookmarked and saved in Del.icio.us.
The biggest issue is intellectual property issues along with security. Pages and posts can be password protected, but it would be much easier if only registered users of the site could read posts and pages. Unfortunately, it does not seem that WordPress offers this out-of-the-box functionality. I can only assume they will add this to their enterprise offferings.
Tags: [wiki, Jot, JotSpot, PBWiki, Partial Recall]
Sad thing is, as long as you go for “FREE”, you will always have things that are not intuitive.
We use MediaWiki
Hi Rob,
Though I haven’t installed and tried this out, EduPress might be what you are looking for. It’s WordPress for educators, also free and open source. Even if you’re not an educator, features like:
“Option to make whole or parts of blog password-protected”
can be very useful.
I’d be interested to hear which tool you finally chose, how you introduced it to your group at work and what your experiences are.
Hi Dorine,
I stumbled across EduPress as well but was unsure how this variation of WordPress set itself apart from WordPress. If it does offer a way for content to remain hidden from the outside world in a universal fashion rather than page by page or post by post, then it might have some utility.
I’ll keep you posted…
One of the problems with EduPress is that it is not a hosted solution. It’s simply a customized WordPress download that you install yourself.
On the other hand, Edublogs is a hosted solution, even bundling a wiki. I’ve taken a peek at it, but they do not offer the blog privacy options that EduPress offers.
It might just be easier to host a new installation of WordPress on this domain and include the plugins that would provide for the needed privacy.
On Saturday May 20, the local chapter of DC information architects got together to recap topics that were addressed and discussed at the 2006 IA Summit. This was a long time coming for me. I’ve been meaning to attend these local meetings, but life has, of course, gotten in the way.
Livia Labate has provided a wealth of useful material, including MP3 recordings of the local DC event, as well as links to material that was presented at the Summit.
Anyway, the following is a brief summary of my notes. Certainly these notes do not codify the entirety of the redux – just my own brain dump based on notes taken at the event. The topics to be addressed are listed below (those in bold are the ones we had time to discuss):
Dan Brown facilitated the DC-IA redux, and one of the things he discussed centered around the format of the Summit. He mentioned that in the past, there was a greater selection of things to attend and a greater variety of topics. On the other hand, he mentioned that there were better opportunities to connect with people outside of sessions this past year. He asked for input on how to create a culture that would both maximize connections outside of sessions and make good use in-session time.
James Melzer addressed the topic of tagging, focusing primarily on using the bookmark tool del.icio.us.
Some discussion revolved around making a distinction between a group versus a crowd. A group, James indicated, is intentional, known, and planned. In contrast, a crowd is unknown and not planned. Del.icio.us embraces both, and James noted that sometimes crowds become groups in Del.icio.us because is sometimes ends up being the same people who are the forefront of tagging, and their aggregate work sets trends for other users.
Nathan Curtis discussed wireframes. Apparently, Nathan worked at K12 for a few months just before I arrived. I’ve heard very good things about him – in particular, how he shared some of his wireframing techniques with current K12 IAs.
Nathan explained that there was a discussion of using different wireframing techniques/tools, including:
Nathan mentioned that IAs need to struggle with representing interactions over time. With the advent of RIAs such as Flash and Ajax, IAs need to be able to communicate how information is to be presented, but how user behaviors will affect the feedback and visual representation of a web application. Nathan mentioned Bill Scott at Yahoo! and how he uses interaction storyboards, complete with interaction matrices to document all behavior changes for a given interaction type.
One technique Nathan mentioned was to segment the “modules” that comprise a wireframe. In other words, reusable widgets can be saved as components to be used over and over again. In addition, Nathan commented on Kevin Cheng’s use of comics to communicate HCI usability issues with stakeholders.
Nathan briefly discussed how new technologies are affecting the profession. For instance, Laszlo and Adobe Flex make it easier to move from a rapid prototype to a working solution. The web metaphor is moving away from “pages” to “mashups,” so IAs need to be able to embrace change and add new skill sets to accomodate for this change.
The group also discussed game design and the use of incentives as a way to interact with the user.
Olga Howard took some more time to cover the distinction of “crowd” versus “group.” With regard to tagging in Del.icio.us, the group discussed how there may be a flurry of different tags used to classify objects, but over time, the number of tags flattens to an accepted assortment.
Next, the discussion turned to Morville’s championing of “findability.” The basic questions to ask include:
Since I have not been able to attend the IA Summit yet, I found this redux to be pretty informative. In addition to getting useful information, I enjoyed spending time with other like-minded individuals who have a passion for creating usable intuitive products.
Tags: [dc-ia, dcia, Livia Labate, Partial Recall, brownorama, James Melzer, information architecture, iasummit, wireframes]
Well, I’ve caved and have to turn off comments for a bit. For the last month or so, I’ve been getting slammed with comment and trackback spam – so much so that it takes me about an hour each day to stay on top of it.
I will turn comments on once I find time to upgrade WordPress, using their Akismet spam plugin.
I’ve upgraded WordPress and have activated the spam plugin. I’d also like to incorporate a “captcha”-style comment (spam deterrent) option as well. Any recommendations?
Today Google launched their own calendar offering. I created a Google Calendar for myself and my initial review is relatively positive, but not enough to make me a convert.
The definitive positives include the ability to manage multiple calendars, sharing calendars and delegating permissions to access these calendars. Also, there are a variety of ways to get notified of events – emails, SMS, etc.
The biggest negative, for me, is that there is no sync capability. Google allows you to import your calendar from another program, but there is no way to sync a localized version of your calendar, either on a client program, a handheld, or otherwise. In addition, it does not publish in the iCal format to allow for subscriptions. Why should I only be able to view the calendar on the site? Shouldn’t I also be able to subscribe to the calendar and view it using a portable device? Perhaps the thought is that all portable devices in the future will have a persistent connection to the Internet, but I for one cannot now justify spending a few extra bucks for my mobile phone provider to offer this option.
I understand that Google starts off with limited features and expands its offerings, but this sync criticism is one that I have with a majority of the web calendar offerings out there. My current solution is to use iCalx to host my calendar. Essentially, it is a site that offers webDAV technologies and uses PHP iCalendar. That way I can use a client like Apple’s iCal or Mozilla Calendar to publish and sync my calendar in the iCal format to the iCalx site. Then I can sync the client with my portable device (Palm).
I have no problem using a web program like Google instead of a client program, but it must at least offer a way to subscribe to the calendar for viewing on other platforms and devices. Google is on its way to solving the problem of sharing and collaborating using calendars, but until they can offer a subscription and a syncing feature, it will not replace my current solution.
I spoke too soon. Google does offer the ability to view the calendar from other applications by offering both an xml feed and an iCal subscription! Yippie! Now they just need to let users create entries from these other applications so they can be synced to the Google calendar.
Tags: [Google, calendar, Google Calendar, iCal, iCalx]
Well, if nothing else, we surely needed another calendar application… 
The biggest thing about google cal is that it kills 30boxes and the million others chances for getting bought.
Haven’t played with it, but it is google, and they do have SMS notifications.. soo.. maybe I’ll give it a whirl
In my never-ending quest to manage my personal infocloud, I came across a great article referencing Foxmarks, a tool to sync Firefox bookmarks between computers. If you are a Firefox user (which you should be!), I encourage you to use this tool. It’s in beta now, but I’ve had no problems whatsoever syncing bookmarks between my work pc, my home Mac, and my laptop.
Tags: [Firefox, Foxmarks, Foxcloud, browser, sync, Personal InfoCloud, information management, Lifehacker]
I understand that one of the big reasons Grants.gov went with its current solution was so that people could fill out forms offline. However, I wonder which stakeholder is more affected – the person who cannot have constant Internet access or the person who has a Mac (or another alternative OS) and has to jump through additional hoops in order to submit his or her application? I am amazed that any research institution would not have constant Internet connectivity. Do we know what percentage of applicants might fall into this category? Dave indicates that as many as 33% of the Grants.gov audience uses a computing platform other than Windows OS. I just cannot imagine that 33% of applicants in the grantee community would not have access to the Internet. As I’ve remarked tongue-in-cheek in the past,
“There are federal mandates such as Section 508 that provide for equal access to web applications for handicapped individuals. Shouldn’t there be an equal access technology policy too?”
My point being that official G2C business systems should allow for multi-platform accessibility. Granted, I’ve spoken about the alternative of using Citrix, but this is not a particularly intuitive solution for many people. At least there are some offers of help.
Frankly, I do not think that it would be such a stretch to create a product that is available on multiple platforms. Sure, perhaps they cannot have something available “for every platform imaginable,” but this is not forging new ground. For instance, a tool like JEdit is Java-based and can therefore be run on multiple platforms. It is a text editor that handles a variety of plugins, including fairly robust XML editing. Now, although I do not know all the technology requirements for a tool to be able to transmit the data to grants.gov, it seems to me that something similar can be created that meets the requirements for offline application creation.
If Grants.gov is unwilling to “host” grantees’ data centrally, then it seems that this saved money could easily be used to resolve this issue. It’s just a shame that they did not think to include the multiple platform requirement when they initially contracted with PureEdge. I guess the saying goes “better late than never,” but it sounds as though there are some angry people – I’ve been monitoring this dissatisfaction for almost 2-3 years now.
Tags: [Grants.gov, grants, federal, government, G2C, usability, UX, PureEdge, Mac, Apple, NSF, Citrix, fair access]
Today’s Washington Post catches on the problems Mac users have identified for a while now – that Grants.gov does not support Mac users unless these users use a Citrix workaround.
Scientists should focus on science, not on how to submit applications for funding. It seems to me that the process should be intuitive and quick – not painstakingly difficult to figure out. The Grants.gov issue starts off with usability problems because it does not support a variety of computing platforms. Why does the grant community gush about NSF’s Fastlane system? Well, you don’t need to get bogged down in instructions to figure out how to use it and it is platform independent.
Perhaps Grants.gov should determine why scientists love this system. Previous posts about Grants.gov here and here.
Tags: [Grants.gov, grants, federal, government, G2C, usability, UX, PureEdge, Mac, Apple, NSF, Citrix, fair access]
Rob, I just responded to a similar comment on the TCG blog, thusly:
There won’t be a platform-agnostic version as long as Grants.gov uses e-forms technology. This is for two reasons. First, I don’t know of a single e-forms vendor that (a) has implementations of their product for every platform imaginable, (b) could guarantee that all those platforms could utilize the same form structures, and (c) could provide tools to make it affordable to produce multiple platform-specific flavors of forms for every kind of form used by Grants.gov.
What’s more, Grants.gov has no interest in hosting grantee’s data. The RFI notes that “The forms should not require the user to be connected to the Internet in order to be completed.” Having off-line access to the forms is very important — not every grant applicant has reliable Internet access.
So we’re left with Grants.gov trying to please as many people as possible, given the constraints of the mission and the technologies available. The FastLane model was rejected early on in the Grants.gov conceptual design. Maybe it will come back as complimentary service to the e-forms…but I don’t see it happening soon.
Rob, I sent a trackback ping to this post, which was accepted, but I don’t see trackbacks displayed. Anyway, there are several related posts on my blog, and the links show up on Dave’s Defenestrated blog.
| Dave Cassidy: “trying to please as many people as possible”
Thank you for trying but I think this experiment has failed miserably. The idea of using federal money to create a submission system that is engineered around the web and is not even trying to be cross platform is simply mind boggling.
| Cassidy: “Having off-line access to the forms is very important — not every grant applicant has reliable Internet access”
No it isn’t. Nobody ever types in proposals directly into a browser using Fastlane either. People use documents, spreadsheets etc. to prepare submissions offline anyway. Then they upload and modify submissions incrementally. This is how the Web works and it works quite well. Grants.gov hinges on proprietary mechanism requiring uploading a proposal as one gigantic file. Then grants.gov server can obviously not handle the traffic consisting of these files. How is this an improvement?
This technology has been a BIG step backwards. The only organization happy with the system must be the one who created it. Please abandon this terrible experiment and give us a real, web-based submission mechanism.
sean, 
Alexander Repenning, 
Dave Cassidy are discussing.
Dave Cassidy 3:48 pm on 10/26/2006 Permalink
It’s about time someone came up with this! But prepare for the onslaught of the Badly Designed PowerPoints!