Reflective Expression   Reflections on Experience

Here is a link to the free Microsoft tool for browsing sites with different browsers side-by-side.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6ac106-525d-45d0-84db-dccff3fae677&displaylang=en

I intend getting my blog moving again ….. I noticed that my last post was a significant time ago.

Moving forward I shall try and organise my posts around every day style share’s with the odd reflective thought thrown in here and there.

Stay Tuned!

Today I setup a new user for the web based product we have developed and deployed globally.

The immediate feedback was:

What a great user response, two things in this statement:

1. It’s so important to get that first impression right – you only get one shot; and
2. Users typically may expect systems fail or be difficult to use meaning it’s easier to create that great first impression.

Over the course of my development career the playing field has changed a lot for developing web sites. Lately the focus on sites I have and are currently building has changed to the Open Source approach.

My eyes were opened when using WordPress for my blog platform, once hosting established with simple scripts or Fantastico – setting up a new ‘out of the box’ platform was a 2 minute job.

Out of the box, the framework is setup, full site administration and further more, the ability to manage the site content – all things I would have programmed myself in the past.

So, the next site I put together was a basic static website for a business in the UK, www.Klimatech.co.uk. The fundamental site and content (which was supplied before hand) was up and running in 5 hours. A premium theme enabling immediate site layout and styling.

Passing control over to my client was a breeze and with just an hours training he was up and running with it. Additional modules such as Google Analytics, an image upload and management module (with some tweaking) and some other tools left the site with some pretty good features.

The current site I am working on is a community content publishing site bringing non-profit making service providers together in my local area. For this site, a social component and publishing component with site calendars for events was a requirement.

Drupal has ended up being my platform of choice, again simple set-up and a very ‘module’ orientated approach made it simple to have a ‘SharePoint’ style site up and running in very little time. Naturally these sites have a learning curve – however, I can see that in future the development time is greatly reduced.

I have yet to run into any issues with the lack of modules available to do what I need. The user community out there is huge and the overall stability of the site second to none.

All of the open source style platforms are hooked into PHP as a programming environment with an API style approach. MySQL is typically the database – but to date I have not had to look to deeply into this as the platforms manage the database very well.

If you are in the business of developing web sites, take a peek at the platforms that are available from the Open Source community – it takes a whole heap of effort away from developing the frameworks and allows you to focus on the design and the content supporting your users.

Recently I have started using Microsoft OneNote. Basically it’s great!

It provides a tool that does not require the saving of documents.

There are three levels of structuring which appear as tabs along the edge of the screen area.

What I really like about it is that when you copy and paste images or data from a webpage, it automatically places the ‘copied from’ url against the item being pasted onto a OneNote page.

So, rather than store my bookmarks as text only, I am now finding that my bookmarks stand out visually and enable far better memory recall as to what the site contains!

OneNote itself allows text to be placed randomly anywhere in the white space and then moved around. Each area being essentially an object.

I’ve now been using this tool for contacts, meeting minutes, personal and work related research, ideas capture and so on.

Recently I reached the point of distraction with the lack of control I had over Internet Explorer.

This is our corporate standard and we cannot use Mozilla and Chrome so I’m stuck with IE. Well, that’s what I thought - but not necessarily.

I use a browser for two reasons ….

1. To Browse
2. To Work

The browsing aspect is fine, I open IE, I browse to what I want, I either close it or minimise it.

The Work aspect is not so great, with more and more workspaces being ‘on line’ a number of things begin to become a barrier:

• Page Opening Times
• Many windows/ Tabs all with same icon or limited title identification
• ALT Tab in Windows and IE Tabs not great
• There are others but you get my drift

I have now discovered a wrapper for IE, a different browser called ‘The World Browser’. It simply uses the IE engine but improves on the IE interface. Some key features which I love are:

• You can set only one browser to run at a time
• Closing it moves it to your task tray meaning your pages are kept alive
• When you re-start – the last pages used are presented in a list
• Somehow the interface is ‘clean’ looking and having favourites open all the time is less annoying than IE
• 100% Shared environment with IE – so no duplication or double up management of favourites and that kind of thing
• + Lots of other configuration settings that made life somewhat easier and lots of plugins/skins available!

Some of the features proclaimed on the World Browser website have been implemented by Microsoft, however the issues and the benefits of this browser I have listed above provide me with a tool that is more savvy to working on line in an enterprise environment.

Now all we need is a tool that is capable of extracting out the form component of web pages so we can have a ‘quick launch’ type tool for simply posting data to various services without the need to render the entire page! Now there’s a product idea.

Yesterday I learn’t that size is not everything!

I bought an 8 gig CF card a while ago thinking that it was great, I could use RAW a whole heap more, not worry about downloading files to disk and so on.

Well, on a trip down South I realised two things:

1. My card was chocker with images dating back to Christmas which I had not downloaded – kind of odds and sod shots.
2. Deleting a whole bunch of shots I had already downloaded was painful on the camera.

Luckily, I had a spare card and switching the quality around Andrea and I were able to get all the shots we wanted and knew that we had some great pics.

On returning home the worst nightmare occured: CF Card Failure.

Arrrrr.

I did not panic for too long and as usual Google came to the rescue ….. Combined with the product name and the title of this blog – up came a whole heap more people who had the same problem.

Thankfully, PhotoRescue exists and this tool extracted 1057 images from my card out of 1087 – impressive!

I decided I would not get stuck like this again and take the following learnings away with me:

1. Multiple small CF cards are better than single large ones!
2. Copy, Paste and then format/delete all is less likely to blow your card when downloading
3. Don’t get lazy, always download images you take as soon as possible
4. Naturally – back it all up regularly on your PC, your hard drive may fail when you least expect it to0

I have been struggling to use my blog and intend to use more often with smaller posts, typically my posts have been fairly large and learning one above seems pertinent to my blogging too. I’ll be posting more ‘Reflective Ramblings’ from now on.

It’s been a while since my last post, simply because I have been completely tied up in work overseas.

I am currently reading on and off a book called ‘The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems’. The book explores the notion that current user interface designs are poor and puts forward a number of suggestions.

From my work with what is called ‘Project Lifecycle Process’ and the notion of front end loading a project to ensure the right outcomes, I have decided that any user interface should have a ‘User Experience Design Criteria’ defined early in the development lifecycle.

The principle approach is that before the actual physical design of any user interface takes place, the key user experience characteristics are specified clearly up front.

This post is a good follow on from my last post ‘User Experience Design Anecdote’ which briefly outlined some key areas for consideration, namely Graphics, Workflow Design, Effective Scenario Handling and the use of inbuilt (assumed) intelligence. Design criteria would address these points.

The Design Criteria document can be used to drive important considerations, even where prototyping is used or iterative design, use the Design Criteria as an evolving document which can subsequently be used to test the final design against.

Sarah B Nelson is a Design Strategist for Adaptive Path, she happens to have written a post on using Design Criteria for the user experience, she describes Design Criteria as ‘set of rules a design team can follow’.

I had originally considered design criteria to be fairly rigid and specific interaction requirements, however Sarah’s post has indicated clearly that this is a useful tool beyond my original thoughts and I recommend reading it a few times to understand the approach and perspective.

The design criteria with respect to the interface will also drive physical internal design. After all, if the network is slow, the response is slow and the patience of a user will be tested! I speak from experience here. As an example, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Live Meeting and Communicator product – it is without a doubt great, however …… It’s integration with Outlook cannot simply be turned off! While working in Abu Dhabi, the connectivity to Australia was not exactly lightening speed – as a result, the constant polling of outlook to the live meeting server meant that email no long worked in Outlook. Effectively the primary purpose of outlook was disabled – which actually made my job harder as I really did need email. Thankfully, my company has the Exchange web server setup, so I had another path to success.

In the above scenario, if there was an up front design criteria that stated clearly:

1. The user should have full control over the integration of Live Meeting with other products such as Outlook, use of clear options enabling the user to be in command;
2. Priority to be given to any integrated products to ensure that the integrated products primary service continues to be the primary performance driver; and
3. Live meeting integration will cater for slow networks in an intelligent way.

Do you think that I would have had the problems I did with the final product?

Hopefully I have demonstrated that Design Criteria is an important set of documentation for designing user experience. A Design Criteria template will definitely be in my toolbox in future.

Having recently travelled on a business trip to Abu Dhabi, the unique experience I had on one of my flights reflects quite nicely the user experience I look for and attempt to build into the design of business solutions.

To start with, I guess I was lucky in that my flight was not heavily loaded with passengers which always helps, the transit through check in, customs and the boarding lounge was equally eased by a lack of hectic busyness.

What struck me straight away was that I was allowed to simply ‘amble’ onto the plane, it was ready and waiting for me, no waiting and queuing at the last minute to load the plane in one hit. As a result of this, I did not have a queue of people behind me adding to the pressure of getting myself sorted and into my seat. I could take my time.

The seats were comfortable, the music serene and relaxing, the decor a beige and tranquil design. The mood was being set quite nicely.

The staff had a sort of clean cut Star Trek look to them, extremely pleasant and friendly – also not rushed given plenty of time and ability to engage passengers individually as they arrived.

Immediately I had a feeling that we would depart on time, I was relaxed and enjoying the experience right from the moment of getting on the plane.

The boarding process was closed twenty minutes before departure leaving plenty of time to finalise everything and leave the terminal on time. As it happened we did indeed hit the run way exactly at the time stated on the ticket.

What struck me was that the whole experience was extremely user friendly, the mood of the environment enhanced my experience 110% leaving me confident and relaxed – just what you need to feel when travelling, especially more so when on business. I imaging this is how people in Business Class feel only without the additional cost.

I expect this level of service from the interface to information systems and environment. Does Windows leave you feeling this way? Should users pay an additional business class ticket to deliver these expectations? I think the answer is most definitely that I do expect to get value from the systems we use and that this should be included in the cost.

I use products all the time that leave me wondering if the vendors of products actually contemplate the end user experience which is so absolutely important and fundamental. Focus on pure functionality will lead to a low acceptance and a frustrated user – even though it may do the job! if the experience is poor, I’ll simply use another service.

Ensuring the right user interface design can be accomplished fairly easily by ensuring the following:

• Attention to graphics, colours and language – applying a consistent and meaningful visual interface
• Attention to workflow design – ascertaining how a user would actually use the product to do their job and how to bring the process seamlessly to the user – interfacing with the users focus
• Effective Scenario handling – will the system crash – leaving the user with no safe escape from losing their work
• Inbuilt intelligence to provide the correct information according to the choices the user has made – effectively removing the need to back track

All of the above points have synergy with my experience on the particular flight I described above.

Information and Knowledge management systems must reflect the end user otherwise the service provided is not optimised to it’s fullest potential and runs the risk of reduced acceptance, usability and purpose.

Building a successful team is not a straight forward equation.

During my many experiences in different types of team setup to deal with different problems and create different solutions, the dynamics of each team environment was clearly different.

On reflection, I feel that there are definite fundamental ideas that will improve the likelihood of a highly effective and successful team which can only lead to a more successful product, whatever that may be.

Good leadership has to be one of the main starting points (as well as a good idea or product concept).

Typically vision has been associated with a leader, but I think real vision includes vision for the team that will enable the end result – not just the product – the journey itself.

Shared vision results in engagement and continued engagement leads to greater commitment, trust and collaboration.

A great article I found at The learning Center website describes the process of building a team as:

1. Generate excitement by sharing the vision
2. Gather commitment through establishing an atmosphere of trust
3. Increase inclusion through communication
4. Catalyse consensus  by exchanging ideas

I’d originally written up some notes and titled them as ‘team Engagement – Brainstorming’ after reading Wisdom of the Crowds. The notes read as follows:

Brainstorming is an approach that keeps independent thinking alive within a group that work together.

When facing client issues, engage your whole team to look at the problems and compile ‘facts’ & possible solutions prior to feeding back to the client, the results should follow as:

• Improved knowledge sharing
• Team Engagement
• More ‘facts’ up front rather than emerging during the course of client engagement
• Positive enforcement of process and use of tools such as checklists to continually improve
• Greater team understanding of the business and the clients perspective

By including the group in all activities such as the above example, a great body of intelligence and shared experience occurs. Surely the outcome will be better for the client and thus for the group.

I have often seen developers with different opinions developed through a lack of engagement – sure there is a large amount of ego – but you have to reason that everybody has the ability to understand the decisions if they are involved in the process.

Interestingly enough, I remember a post from John Tropea where he describes a KM 2.0 model. Notice that a huge element of everything related to shared vision is related to greater intelligence in the team generated through collaboration. John describes in a diagram he created the following path:

Participation –> Conversation –> Relationship –> Collaboration

While the above relates to communities of practice – is a team not a community and does it not have a common interest? Therefore the model is indeed extremely similar.

Conversation leads to Inclusion

Relationship leads to Trust

Collaboration leads to Consensus

I’ll be referencing John’s entries a great deal I am sure as he has provided a great deal of discussion and mentorship into the KM world as well as being a good friend.

My role in life now is now far more connected to facilitation within my workplace, bringing things together rather than sitting down and creating from scratch. The bringing together part is all about people and building a strong network of capability through effective and combined knowledge.

I’ve titled this post ‘Leadership and Vision’ – the skill of leadership should recognise the above attributes required within a team and be capable of harnessing such an environment.