ia play

From Passion At Work (pdf)

“Blogging helps to articulate and organise thoughts, to make contact with people interested in the same topics, to grow relations with other bloggers that often turn into a joint collaboration, to do research, or to work on a publication. When used in those ways blogging is beneficial for work and yet it is inherently personal, driven by the passions and investment of an individual, and difficult to formalise or control.”

“Archeology is about studying artefacts in order to say something about artefacts or practices…Ethnography would be an alternative: studying practices by living the “life of the tribe”…This research combines both the study of artefacts and of the practices behind them.”

“I treat my weblog as a reflexive journal (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) that documents research choices, personal experiences and emotions in the process of doing research.”

“Studying practices of other bloggers while being one myself puts me in the middle of two conflicting practices when representing them in my reports. In the blogging world, the rule is to attribute any quotes from other blogs, ideally linking to the original post, while in the research world the rule is to anonymise to protect privacy of the respondents.”

“In this work I look at a weblog as a personal knowledge base and take a somewhat narrow perspective on PIM activities, using as a starting point those proposed by Barreau (1995): acquisition of items to form a collection, organisation of items, maintenance of the collection and retrieval of items for reuse.”

“Capturing ideas in a trusted external repository makes one’s mind free to work on a task at hand, and it also creates an opportunity to notice connections and to generate more ideas (Allen, 2005, pp.16 and 72-74 respectively). From the perspective of this study, a weblog is viewed as such an external repository that might be useful as a parking space for ideas.”

Some are respectable; appurtenances, sumptuary, peroration, bildungsroman etc.

But feckless, swine, banal and glut are a bit disappointing. Must try harder.

nytimeswords.pdf

Get a group of UX folks together for long enough and the conversation seems to turn to the challenge/mystery of “how to get at seat at the table”.

I’m not entirely sure that everyone agrees about which table we’re aiming for but I get the impression it is the table where the occupants tell everyone else what to do (I’m imagining an Apprentice style boardroom here).

Most of us have worked closely enough with people who already have those seats so it is surprising that we still seem baffled about how to get there.

I suspect that simply having an excess of self-confidence (inspite of evidence to the contrary) will get you a long way there. Sometimes that comes with talent and sometimes it doesn’t. So I was interested to read this New Scientist piece about how we influenced by the confidence of others. The focus is advice rather than positions of power but it feels connnected.

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge

via Humans prefer cockiness to expertise – life – 10 June 2009 – New Scientist.

This article is part of a series about our e-commerce redesign.

The high-level goals are to re-brand, improve the user experience and improve the back-end processes. The rebrand will be to bring the site in line with the rest of the website which will relaunch in September. The user experience goal is not particularly specific but there is also a product backlog that tells a more detailed story.

The pre-existing backlog provided some of the business requirements but we didn’t know how applicable this was, what the priority of each item was and whether new requirements had come up in the interim.

Stakeholder workshops were set up and I attended the workshops covering catalogue and marketing. We’ve now got a fresh, prioritised backlog and we’ve clarified some of the language.

Some IA bits of the wishlist from the workshops:

• more ways to browse the content, including by price and date added
• a more flexible category structure, allowing polyhierarchy
• search that is less divided by our various stores
• recommendations – lots of discussion here about the various types of related products. We have accessories, variants, alternatives and ‘you might also like’.
• a more ‘personalised’ experience, possibly based on preferred formats. I voiced words of caution here about requiring people to express preferences and about boxing them in.
• loads of analytics were desired but everyone was realistic about how much resource there was to interpret them

We got information about volumes and value of various customer groups. And some more philosophical feedback: unlike most e-commerce projects maximising sales and profits isn’t the absolute goal here. Exactly where the line between selling and helping lies will be interesting to see.

The RNIB intranet project is over but a couple of people have asked me about intranets recently and I’m putting together a intranets special FUMSI ‘folio‘ so intranets are on my mind.

I’ve made a new intranet resources list of the places I go back to regularly. I’ll add to it over time.

Not in the way you are thinking.

Sheena Matheiken  has pledged to “wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion.”  The Uniform Project caught my attention this week as a slightly difference angle on anti-consumerism, compared with all the not buying, seasonal eating projects.

Disappointingly it isn’t the same item of clothing, she’s got 7 identical dresses. And she does seem to wear mores bits and pieces with it than I imagined when I thought of accessories.

The concept’s interesting to me because the IA in the Woods won’t be able to indulge in much clothes shopping.

Kottke mentions some predecessors but Matheiken is unusual in actually making the outfits appealing. Mostly.

This article is part of a series about our e-commerce redesign.

I had some quiet time over Xmas and did some current state analysis of the online shop then. I’m so glad I did this. As per usual, as soon as the project actually kicks off there is limited time to do this sort of thorough research.

One of our business analysts has done a formal “as-is” review of the back-end processes but I’ve been concentrating on the front end user experience, particularly browsing the catalogues.

For my current state analysis I identified all the existing features. To do this:

• took lots of screenshots, of all the screen variations I found
• made a sitemap
• annotated the documents, identifying each separate element

Now just because we have all these features now, it doesn’t mean we want to keep them. That said, during the website redesign we missed things that are working really well on the existing site. The site looks clunky and old-fashioned but there’s some nice features in there. So I wanted to make sure I genuinely knew the site inside out.

The functionality basically breaks down into:

• arriving on site (including via search engines)
• finding and choosing items
• information about purchasing
• registering
• adding to basket and purchasing
• tracking/cancelling

I’m going to concentrate on the first two areas for now.

Within the main shop (i.e. not the book shop) there are

• a store homepage
• category pages (including sub-categories)
• product pages

There’s also a sitemap, terms and conditions, product news, pricing information, contact forms, and help information but the other three are the main page types.

The project already has a product backlog from an earlier attempt to kick it off. After I have annotated all my screenshots, I compiled a list of features and then compared that to the product backlog.

The backlog was missing the following elements:

• link from product page to product instructions
• link from product page to other product guide/pages
• link from category page to product category guide e.g. choosing a mobile phone
• information about product size
• offer product variations e.g. colour and size
• product image
• product image enlargement
• seasonal offers and selections e.g. Xmas
• alternative ordering information e.g. call this number
• vat price + non-vat price
• login as different types of shopper
• links to t&cs
• communicate different delivery prices (free, special + xmas)

This flagged up for me a problem with the way the backlogs were generated. Stakeholders contributed ideas for features they wanted to see but tended to assume they would automatically get all the functionality they already have. Even with this process, I almost missed out search from the list, as it is part of the main website navigation and I was ignoring the standard page “furniture”.

Some of these gaps would indeed be obvious as we built the site but a number are not standard e-commerce functionality and it is entirely possible that the project team wouldn’t have thought of them independently. So for me the current state analysis catches functionality that might otherwise have slipped through the net.

Next: business requirements

This article is part of a series about our e-commerce redesign. The series includes Current state analysis and Business requirements.

When I tell my friends that I’m working on an e-commerce project they look a bit baffled. It isn’t something that people immediately think of in relation to charities.

But we make/publish and sell a lot of stuff: books (braille, large print, audio etc), magazines, watches, telephones, kitchen equipment, mobility aids, remote controls, headphones, clocks, calendars, software, board games, playing cards, lamps, and batteries.

Our resource centres are also shops, and we have a moderately sized warehouse in Peterborough.

I’ve mentioned the bump-ons before, but some other favourite products include:

• Talking tins
• Audible liquid level indicator
• Braille playing cards

The first thing you notice when you go to the RNIB shop is that this page talks about two separate “stores”.

“At present our Online Shop and Book site are separate. You will need to register in each store to buy a product or listen to  book.”

Obviously less than ideal.

Once you get into the stores it becomes obvious that the shop doesn’t feel like a normal online shop. There’s some basic patterns and conventions about how online shops look that the site isn’t consistent with. That makes the site a bit confusing, you have to actually read everything properly… you have to think about what you are doing. The product pages themselves are ok but the lack of images in the browse pages means the site doesn’t scream shop at you.

We’re just starting the project to relaunch the shop now, so I’m going to be digging a bit deeper. The goals are roughly to re-brand, improve the user experience and improve the back-end processes. At the moment it is just fun to be designing a shop.

Next: Current state analysis