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Tag: good information design

Nine Ideas from TEDx Grand Rapids

May 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Back in December I wrote a blog post that included my application to the TEDx event in Grand Rapids. I was in fact selected to attend the event with 700 of my peers on May 10th. It was my first TED event, and it absolutely lived up to its billing. It was a day filled with inspiration, hope, and ideas without the stodginess of a motivational seminar. I’m a convert, and I will contribute to as many of these events as I possibly can.

I’m sure someone will write a recap of the event outlining what each speaker said and what they got from it. I’m instead going to let you in on the nine tangents or ideas I had as a result of where I was, who I was with, and what I heard. However, I have to warn you, when I allow myself to be open to new ideas; the results aren’t always all about business.

  1. Thinking about interfaces, how does silverware affect our relationship with food? Do western food implements increase the efficiency of us shoveling food into our faces? If so, what other everyday interfaces are good interfaces in terms of function, but actually feed undesirable behavior?
  2. There is no such thing as south Detroit. It is a lie perpetuated by a Journey song. No one should ever tell stories about a boy growing up on the south side of Detroit; the notion is all wet.
  3. There is a distinct difference between consulting and designing… and they don’t always complement each other. It’s true there may be a lot of consulting that goes into a design, but if you start to design before the consulting is done you may never find the actual problem. Sarah Bloom from Google wrote a good blog post on this last week, and I thought about it when talking about design at TED.
  4. An Epic Fail is a failure so big it takes the sting out of the failure. In thinking of practical ways to force epic fails consider this: How much and how quickly could we learn by designing something to fail and then allowing it to happen? If it doesn’t sting, we could iterate on all the things logic tells us shouldn’t work only to discover a really great thing that does work. This was talked about in terms of gaming, and games done right can have epic failures.
  5. I want to create a comedic character called TED Nougat. An obvious parody of Ted Nugent, TED Nougat could be the liberal alter ego with a soft fluffy center.
  6. The idea of Insanely Good Process got me thinking about situations where repeating the same thing and expecting different results isn’t considered insane. Good process should always have the same steps, but insanely good process should produce better results each time you engage it.
  7. Curating ideas is worthwhile whether it be material, context, or knowledge. Who said libraries can only contain books full of knowledge? One speaker at TEDx had a library of materials that could be used in packaging. What if we had libraries of stuff that had been tried before at our companies? It goes beyond knowledge management.
  8. This year the number of cell phones will exceed the number of PC’s in the world. In some areas, the availability of phones will be greater than food or water. That means applications developed for mobile devices have the potential to reach more people than the computer ever has.
  9. Fault does not excuse responsibility. I remember as a child thinking things were not my fault and that it just wasn’t fair that I was held responsible for things that weren’t my fault. Either because we choose to accept responsibility or because it is placed upon us, fault only speaks to fairness; responsibility trumps both.

Five Attributes Your Mobile Sales App Must Demonstrate

April 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a little while since I’ve written about mobile, but I committed this week to do a talk at the eLearning Guild mLearnCon, June 19-21 in San Jose; so it’s top-of-mind. My talk is going to be about the design process we used in an actual development scenario for a client of ours. That particular application never saw the light of day, but it got me thinking about the components of that application and why we were so passionate about including them.

Specific to the sales audience, we believe the following five attributes are critical to the successful adoption of a sales-focused mobile app. Your sales app must be:

  1. Relevant everyday – On the surface, this means the content must be kept up-to-date. While that is critical, when you dig a little deeper, it also means the content must also be applicable every day. It has to be more than learning about the future, tomorrow’s product, or the sale they might someday have. It has to help them do their job today.
  2. Improve some aspect of the sales process – Sales has always been and always will be about more and faster. If your mobile sales app doesn’t help them increase or accelerate the sale by letting them access more information faster from different places, or work with other people in your company more efficiently, sales people just plain won’t use it. In fact they will find some other mobile app that will help them, or they will spend that time doing some other activity even if that’s Angry Birds.
  3. Integrated across sites and systems – In most companies, there is no lack of systems or internal sites designed to support the sales team. If mobile devices can even access behind your firewall, chances are those systems and sites aren’t very useable on a mobile device, and you can’t expect your team to ferret out and adapt while they are on the go. Your mobile app needs to be a combined interface to the sites and systems that are most critical to the sale.
  4. Socially connected – Mobile technology at its core is about real-time communication. If your app doesn’t take advantage of this, you are missing something really important. Imagine situations where your app can help sales people get answers in seconds, when it used to take hours.
  5. Intuitive – The reason Apple’s products are so pervasive is because they always put the user experience first, even if that means it doesn’t do everything that you imagined. This isn’t a ringing endorsement of Apple by any stretch, especially for the enterprise, but the point is that it has to be better than easy. It has to be intuitive to the point where it feels automatic to the end user. Mobile apps do not have, nor should they need, training programs. They just work. You are better off not including a piece of functionality rather than including one that needs to be explained.

This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive design guide; just five things you need to consider. Of course, there are big differences between organizations and the processes that they use. Device strategy, even if it’s “Bring Your Own Device” or BYOD, also factors into design. However, if your app does these five things successfully, it will make a difference in the performance of your sales team.

Branding and User Acceptance of SharePoint Sites

September 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

In my last post, Pizza and SharePoint™—Branding and Design, I drew an analogy between presenting your best work to your customers without presenting your best selves to your employees in terms of the systems and sites developed for internal use. But why is it so hard to gain user acceptance and what sorts of things can we do to make it easier on ourselves? Why do we even care if your employees “accept” sites we build for them?

It’s easy enough to operate from the perspective that there is certain information that employees “need” to do their job, and there is certain information that is “nice to have.” In corporate structures, critical information or the “need to have” information is often presented in the most expedient way possible. Very often expediency in design results in the employee having to jump through hoops to get the information. “It’s the best we could do, in the time we had.”

While we may have accomplished our basic goals for a site, it doesn’t mean we did a good job. In fact, if we aren’t careful, we may actually create new issues in the process. If we didn’t gain acceptance of the platform we used for the initiative, chances are we’ve:

  • Poisoned the platform for future use by leaving a negative first impression.
  • Used too much time ($) to achieve too little tangible results.
  • Sent a message that we don’t value our users.

While it is sometimes necessary to compromise good design for expediency, we pay a heavy price for failing to gain acceptance. When we do gain acceptance, we achieve our goals faster, cheaper, and we create repeat visits that give us a viable way to expand our goals and create something sustainable over time. AND, we send a message that we care enough to think things through and value our team.

So why, when it comes to SharePoint sites, is it so hard to design for acceptance?

When building informational or community sites, SharePoint acts as a content management system, or CMS, and allows us to present the data separately and in different contexts. This means the data or information is contained in a different technical structure than the look and feel, or branding of the site. This is wonderful when it comes to keeping the content up-to-date, but requires a little extra planning when designing page layouts that support content that is meant to be changed independent of the layout. That seems to be where many implementations fall short.

I.T. departments are typically charged with implementing systems, such as SharePoint, and while your mileage may vary, they generally do a very good job of implementing the functionality or data layer… and tend to pay very little attention to the presentation layer. The typical result is a perfectly functional data infrastructure with a bone-stock, straight from the vanilla Microsoft set of page templates. Since SharePoint wasn’t designed to fulfill a specific need from a specific audience, not much care was taken with these stock templates. Frankly, I find them ugly and filled with usability issues, and I am not alone. Nonetheless, as SharePoint is rolled out, content owners are very often forced to use these templates either expressly or because they aren’t informed that they have any control over the presentation and don’t have the knowledge of how to change it.

In many organizations, a user’s first exposure to SharePoint is an ugly, usability-challenged site, a “crew pie” to reference my previous post. They may need the information that the site contains, but they are often left frustrated and unimpressed. For organizations that recognize this failing, this typically results in a subsequent project to improve either:

  • Look and feel (branding)
  • Usability

The truth is you need to do both. If you fix the content organization and improve the usability, it’s hard for the user to get past the ugly and truly engage with the site. If you fix the ugly but leave the usability out, you may get your users back briefly, but they will inevitably get frustrated again. User acceptance of a site means they accept both the way a site looks AND the way it works.

Usability is a topic for another article, but for organizations that have already fallen into the bad- or no-design trap, a good design can help them crawl out of the user acceptance hole. It sends a message that this site is worthwhile and important enough to warrant thoughtful design, and likewise the users of the site are important and valued enough to warrant the time and money spent on design. For those organizations that haven’t rolled out their first sites, let this serve as a tip:

Whether you call it branding, look and feel, or design, it’s a critical piece of user acceptance.

In the next entry, we’ll focus on usability some more, starting with setting realistic objectives and how to map those objectives to the functionality you design into your sites.

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