November 2006 Archives

The novel isn’t done. Well, the month isn’t over until midnight tonight, and I haven’t hit “The End” yet but am aiming to do so sometime today. But I crossed the finish line from the National Novel Writing Month perspective last night when I exceeded 50,000 words written in November. w00t!

It only took my two nanos and just over a year to write the entire first draft of For You, The Stars and I did it without ever looking back or re-reading, so I have no doubt there are continuity problems, crutch words, hemming and hawing, rambling, extaneous scenes, too many characters, pointless digressions, and so on.

I expect I will take a little vacation from this story in December and then in the new year actually read the novel myself for the first time. After that I expect to embark on a revision process. I’ll reorganize the chapters, fix the timeline issues, probably reduce the number of characters and possibly combine some. I may also have to write some new material. Who knows?

If I can get a coherent second draft written, ideally by the early spring of next year, then that’s when I’ll send it around to trusted friends and colleagues for their feedback. If that works, I’ll do a third revision and then the goal would be to send that out to a few agents and editors, possibly sometime next year.

We’ll see. Right now I’m just glad to have the final page in sight.

Over at Juxtaprose (just added to our blogroll), Jay Fienberg recently wrote about the danger of making a fetish of any one particular tool in your toolkit:

But, no matter how magical a saw, it’s not so great for the people who need to drive nails. And, it’s not like hammers work and saws don’t - theyÕre just different tools that do different things. Working from the strategic, information architecture-informed approach, we aren’t tied to one information tool over another. We get to see firsthand (and, otherwise, we study secondhand) all kinds of different tools in different environments, used by different people for different tasks. And, we get to use this approach to find and design the right tools for specific people to get good information (where “good information” is, in itself, often something specific to those specific individuals).

I wrote a little blurb for the IAI Newsletter this month introducing the information architecture deliverables we’re using to guide the relaunch of the Institute website:

WEBSITE REDESIGN We’ve all heard the cop out about the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes. Most of us have probably made that excuse about our own neglected personal websites as we spend all our time working for clients or doing paying work. But everyone agrees that the website for the IA Institute needs to be exemplary. It should exhibit solid IA fundamentals, a great user experience, and seamless usability. We all know that the current site falls short of these targets in several respects. There has been a site redesign project underway as long as I’ve been a member of the Institute. When I joined the board of directors this fall I expressed some interest in the progress of the website relaunch and was rewarded with the role of IT/Web director. I began reviewing the documents associated with the redesign project and was impressed by the depth and thoroughness of the process and deliverables. I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me, given the core capabilities of so many of our members. (The site relaunch, just like the original site, relies entirely on the volunteer efforts of our members.) So, in the interests of transparency and as a way of sharing with our stakeholders some insight into the redesign process, we’re including a link to our IA concept documents for the site redesign in this newsletter (and we plan to continue posting our documentation as the project continues to give our membership some visibility into the progress we’re making.) View the concept map on the IAI website. Note that these are final deliverables and we are not circulating them to seek amendments or suggestions. The project is well on its way based on these IA documents. We are close to selecting a final design approach and volunteers are busily implementing some of the new technical features and grooming the old site content. In fact, we are seeking a volunteer to help review and revise the content in the Education section of the site, so if you are interested, please contact Melissa Weaver at volunteer AT iainstitute DOT org to volunteer. Christian Crumlish, IAI Board of Directors Information Technology/Web

The deliverable includes some conceptual maps, some use cases, a navigation map and a set of wireframes. Hat’s off to Wolf Noeding, who created the documents based on research, surveys, and input from the members and board of the Institute.

Congratulations to Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville on the release of the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web!

At a time when people who do information architecture (please don’t call them information architects!) are having yet another one of their many identity crises, questioning the value or the future of their chosen discipline, it’s nice to see the classic Polar Bear book chugging along and updated for the post-millennial, post-dotcom-bust, post-Web 2.0 world.

Dan Brown, author of Communicating Design points us to this interesting example of a search interface for navigating a children’s library.

A recent discussion on the IA Institute mailing list revolved around selling the value of IA to executives. One reason why we address IA and other user experience concerns within the context of web strategy here at Extractable is because it helps communicate the value of the planning process in terms of aligning with business strategy and goals, something an executive can understand without having to keep up with the latest changes in Internet jargon (user interface design, content strategy, usability, information architecture, user experience, interaction design, customer experience, experience planning, and so on).

This led IAI board member Stacy Surla to point to an article by IAI board member Samantha Starmer on the topic Selling Information Architecture: Getting Executives to Say “Yes”. The whole article is worth reading, of course, but here are Samantha’s top five recommendations to sell IA:

1. Show the problem (and how you can help fix it): This point seems obvious, but lots of people forget to do it. Instead they go on and on about why information architecture is a good thing….
2. Benefit the bottom line: You wonÕt be able to define hard core ROI (return on investment) for every project, but it is important to employ the rigor to think about the benefits of IA or any user focused work from a financial perspective….
3. Play the politics: Managing politics in an organization is often critical to getting any work accomplished successfully. You will want to figure out how the politics game is played in your organization and how you can enjoy playing it. In many ways, politics is simply thinking about the best ways to get along with different types of people. A few tips:
   • Pay attention to organizational culture and how decisions are made.
   • Pick the most important battles.
   • Talk to the right people at the right time in the right order.
   • Accept help.
   • Listen, listen, listen Ð what you say will be a lot more valuable if you have made a sincere effort to understand other points of view.
4. Don’t promise a silver bullet: It is best to promise only what is realistic and under your control….
5. Pay attention to style: Tailor your style, language and presentation towards the audience you are trying to persuade…. Some people want numbers and data and facts, others prefer verbatim quotes from users, while others respond best to inspirational big-picture vision. Think about who you most need to sell in each pitch and adapt accordingly. This may mean extra preparation, but considering your audience and their needs will be well worth it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Via the IxDA list I noticed this item on the Jensen Harris’ An Office User Interface Blog explaining how application developers can license and implement the new Microsoft Office 2007 interface, “including the Ribbon, galleries, [and] the Mini Toolbar.”

Here are more details on the licensing process and the place where you actually go to download a license.

There is one fairly reasonable exception:

There’s only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can’t obtain the royalty-free license.

On the IA Institute mailing list Patrick Walsh recently asked, “Is Stakeholder Analysis/Mapping a commonly used tool by IAs? It helps to identify all relevant stakeholders at the start of a project and can help ensure that they do not get overlooked.” He also pointed to a 2004 article in Boxes and Arrows by Jonathan Boutelle called Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success.

As long as I’ve been doing IA and related work I’ve understood stakeholder interviews, at the very least, to be a cornerstone of the discovery process. I had just assumed this was par for the course. Isn’t this how everyone does it?

Often the challenge is getting beyond the obvious stakeholders and getting access to the external stakeholders. There are a number of techniques for doing this, some qualitative (surveys, focus groups, interviews) and some quantitative (traffic analysis), but often I find that we need to rely on internal people, such as customer-support representatives, as proxies for external stakeholders because they at least have direct contact with them and are aware of some of their most pressing concerns.

Via Scot Hacker’s foobar blog I landed on this interesting set of interface musings at Information Architects Japan, starting from the universal cheeseburger interface and meandering on through iPod and Zune.

I like the quotation Scot selected:

The cheeseburger has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no plates, no chopsticks. Like a sandwich, but softer and sweeter and above all: Standardized. No alarms and no surprises when eating a cheeseburger. Almost as simple as Òthe only intuitive interfaceÓ - the nipple. Sandwiches can be complicated at times.

What a surprise! Just a few weeks after launching the first update to Internet Explorer in years, Microsoft has announced that it has purchased Firefox from the Mozilla foundation. Bill Gates says that this is part of Microsoft’s plan to open source all of their software and move towards an MS Linux 2007 platform.

:-)

Joshua Porter wrote a terrific article about Netflix and their Fast Iteration process. Since UIE is more of a design and user experience shop, the article focuses primarily on creative designers, but I think that the concepts apply equally to developers. At Extractable, we are always trying to move away from a classic waterfall process and towards a more agile/iterative process with each new project.

So how often does Netflix update its site? Every 2 weeks.

Every 2 weeks they make significant changes. They understand that some of the changes will work, but most won’t.

At first, this sounds like a frustrating design constraint. In talking with the team, we realized that it doesn’t frustrate them at all. Instead, it frees them up to be flexible and adaptive, so they can react effectively to customer needs. As a result, they don’t deal with the many “when we redesign” issues that so many of us deal with in the design world. They’re building for the present — all the time.

Terry let us all know that today Yahoo, MSN and Google have agreed on a standard Site Map format. Using a sitemap.xml file will facilitate search engine crawlers to index your site and help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

I meant to post this a week or so ago, but Peter Merholz has put up the audio from presentations at this year’s inaugural IDEA conference in Seattle on the conference blog, saying

If you have only 30 minutes, then listen to Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote. Honestly, though, there’s lots of great stuff here. Interaction designers will be keen on Dave Cronin, Jake Barton, Stamen, Fernanda Viegas, and Robert Kalin. Brought to you by the IA Institute!

On the IxDA list, LukeW asked which metrics or criteria can be used to judge “good” interaction design. Kim Goodwin wrote an excellent reply, saying “A few of us at Cooper were kicking this question around with Hugh Dubberly several years ago. We came up with 4 criteria we felt applied to all sorts of design, not just interaction.”

Here four criteria boil down to some excellent ideals to shoot for:

• Ethical: Do no harm
• Purposeful: Help users accomplish their goals
• Pragmatic: Meet constraints and accomplish business goals
• Elegant: A good design is the simplest complete solution

The first rang a bell with me. I’ve been telling clients for years that I like to follow a sort of Hippocratic oath with web strategy. First of all, do no harm. Do not take away features the customer likes because you have something “better” coming. To quote Dave Winer, “don’t break users.”

Kim Goodwin elaborates this way:

Ideally, a designer’s first rule is the same as a physician’s: do no harm. In the case of surgery tools, car dashboards, and airplane cockpits, this is obvious: don’t kill people. However, even business software can do harm by wasting a user’s time, leading to errors, contributing to repetitive stress injuries, or just making people feel dumb. Of course, there are likely a few situations where this principle is challenging, such as a missile guidance system - if you had to design something of that sort, the principle might have to be interpreted as “minimize harm by making darn sure you hit the intended target.”

Engadget posted a video showing a complete interface walkthrough for Zune, demonstrating its UI and wireless sharing feature (via Edwin Booth, who posted the link to the IxDA list, saying, “If you’ve used Windows Media Center, it’s very similar”).

Chip Gettinger of Astoria Software interview Rahel Bailie about World Usability day, noted via Scott Abel, the content wrangler, who writes:

In addition to providing a succinct overview of usability, Bailie discusses why understanding the user experience is critical for information experts, content management professionals, and content management technology vendors alike. Is usability related to content management? “Absolutely!” Bailie says. “Content management is about usability in two ways. First, the content management system itself has to be usable. The system developers need to understand the mental model of users in order for clients to be able use the system efficiently. Usability testing is critical here, to understand how the system can support business processes, instead of contorting processes to fit the system - which still happens all too often, I might add. Then, the CMS output has to be usable by the front-end users.”

Todd, our resident Windows guru, directed our intention to the Xbox Live Video HDTV and HD movie download platform written up at Engadget recently.

Todd says, “See how simple it is? It doesn’t have a lot on the screen. There are muted colors in the background making it easy to identify the things that are focusable. It is easy to tell which item is in focus. It also doesn’t try to do everything, and it doesn’t keep all of the menu possibilities on the screen.”

One of the two panels I proposed for SXSW next spring garnered sufficient votes to make the cut. It’s the one on identity, presence, attention, trust, privacy and so on, called “Every Breath You Take.” I’m excited about moderating this panel and I’m in the process of pulling together the other panelists, which I’ll announce as soon as everything’s settled.

Meanwhile, the deadline for proposals for the IA Summit (also next March) just passed and I managed to get in one for a presentation on Mobile IA and another for a panel on Lessons from Failure. Additionally, I’ve signed on as a panelist for two other cool ideas proposed by other people that I’ll discuss here if and when they are approved. As a director I’ll be involved in the annual public meeting of the board of the IA Institute at the Summit as well.

Looks like March will once again be a busy conference / travel season for me, with SXSW in Austin as always and the Summit scheduled for Las Vegas later in the month.

Gmail works pretty well on mobile devices already, but Google just announced a Java client application for mobile (Official Google Blog: Gmail mobile client is live) that runs on hundreds of devices. I visited the download page on my phone and it automatically detected that I was connecting via an HTC 2125 and supplied me with the correct Java “midlet” for my device.

It seems to work great, once I turned off the itsy-bitsy text-size option, although I’m not sure I really need it, since - as I said - the regular Gmail website already adapts itself pretty well to my device. Cool wow factor, though.

I’ve often said that game interfaces tend to more forward-looking than those of productivity applications and that younger people are having their expectations set by the experiences they have playing games on their computers, on their TVs, on their playstations and mobile devices, and online in general.

Usually I haven’t pushed this idea too much further, though. How can we best capture these innovations coming from the game space and apply them to the nongaming part of the Web?

This blog post suggests a few ideas about what the online multiplayer fantasy game World of Warcraft can teach people developing “Web 2.0” sites. I’m not sure all of the suggestions are particularly compelling, but I fully agree with the last two:

• User Feedback: The WoW Community is both strong and vocal and its good to see when a lot of people agree on changes that should be made, many times Blizzard (the creators of the game) implement those changes in one of their weekly patches. Which brings us to…
• Frequent Updates: Updates don’t necessarily mean features, but even small tweaks allow your users to know that you still care about your site and are working on things. However, don’t tweak just because you want to look fresh, tweak for improvement.