Monthly Archives: February 2013

The Worst Intranet Mistake

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I’ve done a lot of intranet work and, in makeover situations especially, almost always run across the Worst Intranet Mistake.  What is it?  Simply stated, it’s the failure to distinguish between resources that a business unit creates for their own use, and those they create for other audiences.

Without prejudice, let’s use the HR department to illustrate.  The tiniest amount of user research will show something like this: for other audiences, let’s say the general employee, HR will create all those policy and procedures documents, benefits, etc. that we are familiar with; for themselves, HR will have discussions about new plans and providers, meeting minutes, and work-in-progress documentation not yet made public.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen proposals for HR landing pages combining resources for themselves and for other audiences.  This is a huge structural misstep with many repercussions.  Here are some:

  • unclear expectations of what you will find when you click the link to the HR page, and confusion when you get there
  • compromised terminology – HR should talk to employees with different terminology than they use to talk among themselves
  • lack of alignment with the security model
  • lost opportunity for thinking about audiences at an enterprise level.

The last point is especially fruitful.  If we do a “for the department / for others” analysis for all departments, we might not only solve the Worst Intranet Mistake many times, but might find alternative useful ways of presenting corporate information.  For example, we might find that HR, Office Services, MailRoom and IT all offer services to the general employee. Given this, we might propose a Quick Reference area for the general employee, aggregating services from all of these groups.  We might also find segmentation of “others” beyond the general employee, for example “managers” or “construction services”, with specialized content aggregations for them too.

To be honest, I’ve described the most blatant case, but mixed-audience thinking shows up in many guises. So whether you’re doing a makeover or net new intranet work, beware the Worst Intranet Mistake.

New Course “A Modern Introduction To IA”

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I recently conducted a training session for our UX team entitled “A Modern Introduction To IA”.  Based on the response, I thought I would share it with you.  I will tell you the kinds of things I covered, and take it in new directions

Why a “Modern” introduction”?  IA has changed over the last 10 years.  Information that used to be on web pages now ends up, sometimes whole but usually in part, on mobile devices, in blogs, feeds, mash-ups, and in fact I may never know where.  Old-school IA with wireframes and taxonomies wasn’t designed to handle this.  So we need some different skills and perspectives, and this is what we will explore, under the two headings of Information Structure and Information Delivery.

In Information Structure, we’ll talk about different approaches for discovering and/or creating information structures.  Like how information structures drop out of user scenarios.  Or how to parse flat web pages and see what’s going on in semantic terms.

In Information Delivery, we’ll talk about different approaches for presenting information.  Like (if we know the user well) predictable access, predictable exploration, and predictable focus.  And how to reuse common patterns to speed up your explorations with your clients and accelerate your design.

So stay tuned for some posts mixing structural and user based lessons learned from the trenches.  In my in-house session, there was lots of discussion and the teacher-learner boundary changed many times.  Hope that happens here too.

 

A Bad Cross-Channel Experience

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I had a bad cross-channel experience a few days ago, and believing that we learn from bad examples as well as good, thought you might be interested.

I have a problem with my back, bad enough sometimes that I tend to notice when a possible benefit floats by.  So I was intrigued by a radio ad that said back pain could be caused by postual misalignment causing inflammation, and that rather than just treating the inflammation, work on the postural alignment.  Or something like that.  Enough to make me want to check their website.

So I went to the web site, did the two-second scan, and, whoa, where was the word postural? Nowhere.  I scanned other pages. I checked the url as I remembered it. I googled “posture back pain <my home town>” to see if I’d misremembered the URL – I hadn’t.  I dropped out of their sales funnel.

So what could have been done to help me realise that the radio ad and the web site were part of the same cross-channel experience? Obviously have content somewhere on the site relating to posture.  Or maybe the same spokesperson, Dr. Baxter here. But what about some mention of the radio ad on the web site, a little call out saying As heard on radio station ABCD for example.  Or maybe a chance to listen to the radio ad Listen to our recent radio ad about posture.

Ideas?

 

 

 

Content Everywhere [Book]

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Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future Ready Content
Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Now here’s a book that I loved reading.  Lots familiar, lots new.

The author’s thesis is that the “content = web page” model is no longer the only approach to delivering content, and that you need a content strategy if you want content to be repurposed, in whole or in part, in different places within your organization, and even outside it.  Oh, and by the way, here’s how to do it.

A lot of the book talks about breaking content down into smaller chunks that can be managed and deployed in new and useful combinations.  Most IAs who have been a business analyst or developer will understand the concepts and the lightweight notation used.  And team members on the content or visual design side will pick it up easily enough.

The strength is in the examples.  Although not presented this way, they comprise a set of case studies that it is well worth studying and assimilating.

Other sections of the book talk about how to repurpose content in a varity of ways, including discussions of markup, and responsive and adaptive design from the content perspective.  Especially interesting to me was the discussion of web API, linked data, and mashups.  I knew the concepts but hadn’t realized just how far they had come.

I thoroughly recommend this book. I found myself Googling many of the examples and references, making it a much broader (a.k.a. later night) learning experience than I first anticipated.

Excellent job!

Pervasive Information Architecture [Book]

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Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross Channel User Experiences Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati

The jury is still out on whether this is a brilliant book or not, but there is no doubt it is a very different one.  The authors are Italian IA practitioners and academics, trying to give us principles to deal with cross channel experiences.  These are experiences where multiple channels are needed to fulfil  a user`s needs, for example, seeing a TV ad for a product, doing product reviews, checking availability locally, and picking the product up at a store.  How can we design the set of touch points so that they hang together as a recognizable coherent experience.

The authors are trying to give us a vocabulary to do this.  They compare the task with the evolving languages of urban design and film, and the ability of the inhabitants of cities and audiences of films to understand new constructs.

We are not there yet. The authors give hints and concepts from many disciplines, such as placemaking, wayfinding, designing services, and the psychology of creating categorization schemes.  Some of these yielded nuggets upon deep reflection, others not at all.

This is definitely not a how-to book, but if you have an intellectual streak, you might enjoy some of the glimpses of what the discipline might contain.

One other thing.  As far as your reading experience is concerned, be warned.  The book is a mix of stories, theoretical concepts, guest contibutions, lovely illustrations, with the authors not in the background at all, but decidedly mugging for the audience,  with wayfinding sometimes a bit difficult, and relevence often not obvious.

So, brilliant or not? You decide.