The Ada Lovlaces in my life

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day here is my post.

The early aspects of my technical interests are a co-mingling of gaming and personal computing.   I gamed on Attari Pong,  played variety store Pacman and then went on to first generation Nintendo Zelda at the Royles on Pheasant Lane.    In addition I took a few computer courses in high school (and no, no punch cards were involved! ).  Of particular note,  I spent countless hours sitting in front of what had to be a first generation Macintosh computer in my high school’s library typing and formatting essays .

My teens were largely a voyage of technology self discovery.   I finally met inspiring women #1, when taking a first year information management course at university.

Inspiring woman in technology #1 Teaching Assistant
Information Management TA, University of Guelph

The TA was responsible leading the lab that went with this course.  She explained/demoed  Paradox, Quattro Pro, WordPerfect 5.1 and T-Cosy (our campus email program).  Unfortunately I don’t remember her name, but this women not only taught me every possible keystroke for operating a spreadsheet blindfolded,  she introduced me to the construct of a relational database.

Inspiring woman in technology #2 Sherry Kappel
Arguably the world’s most knowledgeable woman in word processing technology

My first ever business trip took place in the spring of 1999.  I went to Manhattan to attend a seminar.  What a trip!  Not only did I get upgraded into an awesome corner suite at the Omni (to this day the best hotel room I’ve ever experienced), I heard, for the first time,  Sherry Kappel talk about the complexity of a document.  This is the day I was introduced to the concept of cascading styles.   Later that year, Sherry also introduced me to XML By Example,  a book that has framed how I look at data and the Internet in my career to date.

Inspiring woman in technology #3 Patricia Morris
Professional Services Project Management Professional

My technology career started in earnest at a corporate law firm in 1998.  While there I traversed the application spectrum from the desktop to the web.  Starting with desktop applications, I worked on a word processing document migration project, introduced a document management and client relationship management  system and truly began the web journey I am on today with my focus on intranets,  knowledge management, taxonomies and information modelling.  This all started under the guidance and coaching of Patricia Morris.   Pat did not start her career in technology.  In fact I don’t even think she would call herself a strong technologist.  What Pat knows however, knows deep in her core, is the meaning and impact of change.  She taught me that change is tough and uninvited and that the recipients of unwelcome changes aren’t to blame, they are just trying to do their jobs.  Most importantly, she taught me that it is my job to make technology change as easy and as painless as humanly possible.   And so began the development of my strong sense of  user empathy which firmly set me on the road of user experience design and usability.  The two areas that are in the centre of my professional life.

So there you have it.   Three women;  the Ada Lovelaces that set the course of my career in technology.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick

I picked this book up over a year ago and almost immediately loaned to a friend who is an architecture graduate…. a few weeks ago I got it back and have gone through it for a second time – what a great book!

I’ve been struggling lately with the concepts of ‘design’ and ‘architecture’. Throughout my career the concepts of Information Architecture and User Experience Design have been vaguely described and I’ve personally been stumped when asked how to define it.

There is a book dedicated to it and wikipedia pages which help describe what it is we do.

Although, perhaps the page in wikipedia says it all

Clearly there is still a lot of room for interpretation and worldwide acceptance of Information Architecture as a profession.

My tactic over the years has been to always sidle up beside the “USER”. Who is using the website? Why are they there? What are their expectations? and What does a company or organization want to achieve with the site?

Yet, I still find myself defining what it is I do. It seems, that no matter how well you build websites, how much experience you have, how well researched and deep your knowledge in the area of website architecture and design is the role and responsibilities of the Information Architect is not broadly understood.

Anyway, this book, is a great one. Not because big “A” architecture is cool, (and secretly we little “a” architects feel inferior) but because from a virtual architect’s perspective, it conveys the principles and challenges that we face every day. It is a great framework for positioning our role.

I’ve pulled a few of the lessons out of the book. Two that particularly resonate with me.

#19 An architect knows something about everything, An engineer knows everything about one thing – this is probably the biggest challenge a website designer faces. Knowing the business to the right level of detail and how it’s customers interface with it is critical. Getting to know each functions operations, their reach with customers and their business problems, means you can make sure a website achieves a whole lot more than one objective and ultimately make sure that others in the organization buy into the concept. A lot of web teams find themselves in that No Mans Land, between customer service, operations, IT and Marketing. We do all these functions every day and have to work very closely with these groups to ensure the website achieve their goals.

#48 If you can’t explain your ideas to your grandmother in terms she understands, you don’t know your subject well enough. Information architects have a ways to go in this area. What is so bizarre to me is that when presenting ideas to “USERS” the concepts are usually quite quickly understood. Presenting to internal stakeholders presents the greatest challenges.

I’ll leave it there, so thank you Matthew . I *LOVE* the book and am carrying it with me at all times! Off to practice my line drawing…

Drupal at One Big Library Unconference

What I want to know – what are libraries doing with Drupal?   This is note taking during a talk so it is a little rough to read.

MacMaster is converting their site to drupal this summer. Florida State University and famously Ann Arbor run on Drupal.

Drupal at Western

Western is converting their site to Drupal as well launching in mid August.  David Fiander from Western spent some time discussing the Western implementation.  David has been working on the new library website for the last three years.  Mostly spent time in visioning and planning, in January presented wireframes. Drupal was selected in fall 2007 and migration began in April 2008. They did one ‘collection’ a week (locking out content owner in the process).

LIbrary evaluated Drupal, Joomla and a few others.  A lot of the design was based on U of Saskatchewan.

Working hard at only using OOB modules – doesn’t want the headaches of upgrading.   Connects to LDAP for authentication for editors.

Their web developer learned Drupal starting in fall 2007.  Drupal was evaluated by installing on sandbox and playing around.  Drupal was attractive for layout and templating; simplicity of ‘live editing’ and cheap costs.  Drafting of content and publishing workflow were not implemented.

Drupal At McMaster

McMaster are using 73 Drupal modules. Uses module called ‘views’ – ability to view content in different ways.  Mac is using Drupal login not LDAP

Drupal At Queens

Queens implemented their subject guides in Drupal first, then are implementing main site.

Evergreen – the Open Source Catalogue

John Fink from McMaster presents the ups and downs of going with an open source catalogue.

He starts off with a little history.  “Library catalogues were the crowning jewel of libraries in the mid nineties.   Everything the library did went through the catalogue.”

Since this time, new stuff has come into view, the Internet, Amazon and many other places to get information.  ILS (Integrated Library System) marketplace has seen a lot of mergers and buyouts in recent years.

McMaster used Horizon and in spring 2007 when they learned that SirsiDynix was no longer going to support horizon.

They had a few options

1) move to unicorn

2) buy another ILS (Triple I possiby?)

3) do something else

John sees further stratification of ILS products in commercial and open source markets.

Why have an Open source ILS

• Price
• Ownership – a company can’t tell you that you can no longer use it (i.e. horizon)
• Legal and Technical ability to add features and expand capabilities

Koha and Evergreen are two major open source ILS systems.

Evergreen started in Georgia to replace an ILS system.  It uses IM messaging interface to speak to ILS engine.

Support models risks?

Many organizations feel that a support mode provides security to their organization.   Evergreen are responsive through mailing lists etc. and original developers of Evergreen have created a company to provide support – support can be provided service only companies.

Why not Evergreen?

It comes from a public sphere (academic angle is lacking).  It lacks reserves, acquisions, seriels, recalls

• not feature rich at the moment
• data migration is clunky (command line to convert stuff to sql) – not friendly on the backend – and therefore will not be helpful to the average ‘cataloger’ – summer 08 exected release of first gui of back end
• difficult install process

Some good sounding things though…

• json and xml are used to get at the data
• REST like API

Early days on this – I will have to keep tabs on it.

OLA – and so it begins

I am officially indoctrinated into the library world; I am attending my first library conference OLA, the Ontario Library Association.  Over the next few days I will blog my sessions and reflect on where I’m at 5 months into my Library career.  Stay tuned.

Free Public Wireless at Toronto Public Library

I know this is a somewhat shameless promotion of the fantastic Toronto Public Library (where I happen to work ) – but it is amazing news for the citizens of Toronto.

Starting this week, the Toronto Public Library is providing Free Public Wireless Services in 19 of its branches. 

The Toronto Public Library is the world’s busiest urban public library system. Every year, more than 17 million people visit its 99 branches and borrow more than 30 million items. 

The Library already offers over 1,500 public access computers with Internet access for free.

For details on their new wireless services see the Toronto Public Library website.

Helping my kid’s school build a useful website

I’m posting about a project I took on over a year ago.  The project was to help my kids’ elementary school with their website.

I’m proud to announce we finally launched the site last week.  Now, this by itself really isn’t that big of an accomplishment, but I do have some interesting things to write about the process we went through, the audiences (consumers and producers) and the technology involved in this endeavour.

As with any web project, we began with the basics.  An environmental scan  – what other schools are doing online? Why are they (or are they not) succeeding with their website?    Branding information - I know, I know,  it is a public school – but understanding brand attributes and qualities is helpful even when you’re not selling anything!

We also did a brief situation analysis - Who would be involved in keeping this site up and up-to-date?  What existing processes existed in the school?  Can managing web content and a web site actually be integrated into the school?   How, longer term, was this going to be maintained?

Then it was on to figure out who would be the site’s target audience? and their needs?  We planned to do an online poll and were delighted to find out that one of the parent’s ran a company that specialized in engaging interactive polls – thank you Pollstream!

Around this time another parent joined in and we launched the poll.  We got great feedback and it was unanimous – it is difficult to keep track of what is going on at school – everyone wanted a school calendar!  So we did some IA work to determine the layout and organization of the site. 

Warning: confessions of an interactive designer follow…  We didn’t do any IA testing (gulp).   Probably for a couple of reasons, 1) it was hard enough to find time to meet and work on the site, 2) we were the target audience and were also interactive designers – we knew what we needed as parents and the teacher representing the school knew what was needed by teachers.  I think we are OK even though this is not ideal  and 3) there are loads and loads of school sites on the internet, good and bad – we did a lot of research and from our own interactions with others sites, were able to draw conclusions about relevant and good IA – OK, moving on.

From the environmental scan and situation analysis we identified a few key issues.

1. Generally, teachers are not very technical  and the existing tools made available by the school system are very technical (i.e. Dreamweaver) and therefore make managing sites and content extremely difficult
2. Generally, the majority of teachers and clerical staff don’t have a whole lot enthusiasm for this type of activity (Post launch note – there are some very keen teachers – pleasantly surprising – but far from the majority)
3. The off-line processes aren’t pretty to begin with so attempting to piggy back on existing processes was not going to work for content creation

What makes or breaks these types of sites is the level of engagement of the people who control the content.  Without content there is no website as we all know.  The ability for teachers to use the site to manage the content would be critical.  We also payed attention to the fact that teachers, principals and parents move on – so we had to have a solution that could be passed on easily to new staff and new parents for support and ongoing maintenance.   One lesson learned from the school website that existed before we started, was that it was a ‘one man show’.  No one knew much about how to manage it or was involved in content creation.

So our challenge:  make it easy to use for content creation, make the technology manageable, create an engaging user experience that allows parents, staff and students to find what they are looking for – oh and it can’t cost much – today or ongoing – what could be easier than this.

A strategy, which the teacher involved is working on, is integrating the web site’s management into her classroom curriculum.  Students would be responsible for collecting and posting information and would learn about the production process (images, editing), have to meet deadlines and work with other people – all of us are excited about this - we think this would be an excellent way to integrate the website into the school and not rely on the goodwill of parents and willing teachers to make it thrive.

My role was in the up front research and the back end architecture – the other mom, Karen Maxwell,  a creative director, really handled the visual design and for the most part the IA – and as you can see she did a superior job!

So what did we use and why

Site platform - WordPress

• built in content management
• huge free motivated developer network
• easy to use
• content managers can be administer (basic approval work-flow, role specification etc.)
• accessible from the Internet – teachers can do this from home, from they computers in the classroom (no FTP to manage content, no specialized tools like Dreamweaver need to be installed etc.)
• It has built in search

All in all we’re happy with this choice – but we did need some help to get things going.   PHP is a pretty funny language and we don’t know it very well.  Also, suffice it to say, we also didn’t know WordPress that well either. We had to dig pretty deep into how WordPress works to achieve what we wanted.  Since we don’t view ourselves as very technical and we could do this with just the little help that we recieved (thank you Richard Smallbone) then I think we made a fairly good platform choice.

Online web calendar – 30Boxes

We’re OK with this choice at the moment.  It allows RSS of its content and tagging of events – so ultimately promises to work well – we’re still figuring it out – currently we only use it as a single widget on the site; an entry point to 30Boxes to view the calendar.  I would like to see them pushing less ‘get an account’ nonsense at our users – why don’t they just advertise based on the event information that is displayed?

Photo and image management – Flickr

We needed a way to store photos and graphics.  Flickr was familiar and we know it is good at syndication (RSS) and tagging and it also has good long term prospects (e.g. not going belly up anytime soon).

Site hosting – Dream Host

• Have all the supporting technology (MYSQL, PHP etc.)
• Have one click install/upgrade process of WordPress and other tools
• They are cheap (~$10 /month)

Site hosting was a late decision – we explored using the school system services – but they didn’t have the right versions of MYSQL or PHP, they also didn’t have any plans to upgrade these and this would only matter if we could convince them to install WordPress on their servers – an uphill battle that we just weren’t prepared to fight.  In the end, it would be too complicated to try and use the school systems. 

So what’s next for the site

Apart from training the staff on WordPress and basic HTML, add a google map  and fixs some things in the navigation technically.  Other than that we want to see the reaction – what are people drawn to or not?  And what makes the most sense to do next. 

The importance of being earnest on usability

I’ve been meaning to write on this topic for some time and I have finally gotten around to it.  We all agree that usability is important, right?  Everyone wants to make it a priority.  You would be hard pressed to find someone at the beginning of a project who doesn’t agree with this statement.   As an “innie”, someone who works inside an organization evangelizing usability to a group of business administrators, I’m finding the practicality of making tools usable even with a broad awareness of the benefits of usability is still a bit of a battle.

Feature mania

The hysteria generated by software products’ new release, development teams and internal staffers about new features is ridculous.  Utter delirium.  Blurry eyed fanaticism.  Features, features, features – “Can it do this?”, “….it should do that?”.   It is truly euphoric to consider the possibilities and quickly all the logical reasoning we have as normal knowledge workers goes out the window, projects lists of “must haves” grow sharply along with the likelihood of project time and cost overruns.

What we all know, once we’ve had time to reflect, is that features are not the be all and end all.  Feature rich is hard to train, hard to implement (lots of testing, long projects), and hard to manage (where to focus quality).  Above all else, project sponsors see features as more value than usability – and make the feature choice when the two are on the table and one has to be lobbed off – instead the decision should be clear, deliver something that brings actual value to this business, not a long list of features, but something that is actually used – that is a true and in my estimation the only measurement of success.

Poor adoption contributes to project failures 

Poor planning leads to cost and time overruns – I think we’ve all read the stats and attribution on project failure  (scope creep, poor requirements etc.).

But poor adoption also seems to play a significant role in project failure.  A recent study of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems showed that even amongst successful implemenations nearly half of the companies reported serious challenges with end-user adoption, challenges that often put projects in jeopardy [2].  I don’t have any emperical data (disclaimer: this is my opinion) but I assert that:

	Feature Rich = Poor User Adoption

Search is hard – Google is truly gifted

Search is just hard – that is it.  It is hard because all the content we search has little or no meta-data of any use.  Managing meta-data is an uphill battle.  Meta-data is designed by and for professionals searchers – and often is out of synch with a users’ context.  As you have guessed I’m in the throws of a search project.  Progress is steady, but the content is nightmare.  We have created enough scripts to analyse the trajectory of a spaceshuttle’s flight- but in the end it is the content clean up or rather the state of the content that will determine if we succeed.

A promising new tool we are considering is Baynote.  Part of our requirements include fairly extensive reporting – the purpose of which is to manage the search features such as best bets, spell check, sponsored links and are also to learn what our users are and are not searching for.  Baynote meets these requirements nicely by heuristically building contexts around ’search hits’ based on the most fundamental Web 2.0 principle - the wisdom of crowds.  In Baynote a hit gets a better ranking based on the terms searched by others who were seemingly, (heuristically speaking) satisfied with a certain search result;  a result which matched their search term or phrase.  Technology rarely wows me but this tool is seems to be onto something.

Any search or statisical experts will have assumed the reference to Bayesian Probability - and I believe they are correct, although oddly there is no reference to it in Baynote’s collateral – I would have thought they would pay homage to Thomas Bayes but they don’t seem to…!?  Anyway – creating search reporting is one thing, analysing and making decisions on the reports is an entirely different issue -Baynote seems to handily solve both of these issues – by heuristically creating user context around searching.    I’m excited to see how this interesting search product unfolds in the market….

IA, Usability and Interactive Design Associations and Events In Toronto

In response to a comment I am briefly writing about a few Toronto based IA associations, groups and events.  I’m just getting into to these and they seem quite interesting.

Toronto Interacts  – Association of Usability Professionals

BarCamp | TorCamp – group of UX pros who hold ad hoc meetings

TorCamp Google Group - some how related to above (I think)

UXIrregulars – Google Group - I gather a group misfit UX pros

Coming up soon is  a local and reasonable web conference called Mesh which looks quite good

There is also an organization that does training and usability certification in Toronto called Human Factors Interanational.  The are based in the U.S. but hold programs locally.

 There are probably others – so if you know of them, comment on this post and let others know too.