This is the talk I'm hoping to give at DrupalCon in the UX and Design track. Looks like there are lots of very exciting talks already planned for theming and visual design, so I'm excited to focus my discussion around the topic of User Experience. It's great for me, actually, since it's the stuff I do best and I believe there is a lot that might be gleaned from a discussion between both designers and developers alike on both the site building and Drupal development sides of the spectrum.

Looks like it'll be a great conference. I look forward to meeting my tribe--the many people I've been acquainted with for years, but have never met, who've put their sweat into this tool which I love as equally as I do OmniGraffle and Photoshop. See you in Bean Town.

SESSION OVERVIEW

We all want our customers to be satisfied with our products and for them to sustain their use of them. But have you ever wondered if the design of your product is on the right path towards getting that satisified user? The process of crafting successful user experiences that help achieve these goals isn't rocket science, and need not be painful or difficult. What it does require, however, is: 1) empathy for users, 2) the ability focus design discussions around specific problems and the details that matter in those contexts, 3) the willingness to be open to solutions that are unconventional and which may come from anywhere, and 4) the willingness to edit and remove when necessary.

What we can do to ensure we're on the path to usability and satisfaction is to really take a look at how we might support our design efforts by devoting a wee bit of thought on user centered design process and practices. It's simple stuff and anyone can do it.

TRACK

Design and User Experience

AGENDA

This talk will focus on the following:

1) Respect them or they're out the door: How to bring the user into the design process
2) Make 'em beg for more: How to research, craft, and communicate (sell) ideas that are appropriate to the problem
3) Prove your love: How and when to test and iterate designs
4) Staying for breakfast: How to keep user satisfaction in mind after the product's out the door

You'll forgive the cheekiness, Valentine's Day is around the corner. :)

GOALS

You should come away with a sense of how user centered design principles can fit into your product development life cycle, and a plan for developing a strategy for keeping it there.

I'm considering posting a proposal to give a talk at DrupalCon Boston. The UX track looks interesting to me. I've been using Drupal and have been an evangelist of blogs for business for some time now, having done over a dozen projects using Drupal, WordPress, and Movable Type over the years. Each project was not readily recognizable as a site typical of each platform.

What I was thinking might be interesting to do is to talk through my process for creating these sites, using a specific site I'm working on as a case study, and focusing on user experience and design.

The outline below is what I was thinking of presenting. What do you think? Sound like a good session? I'm still kicking the idea around.

Drupal 4 Designers: Giving clients exactly what they want

Visual designers, now is the time to give up your fear of Drupal and use this powerful platform to express your designs exactly the way you want. This talk will begin to show you how. If you've never used Drupal before, you'll be convinced afterward that this is the platform for you.

The evolution of the platform has improved the implementation experience for designers and front-end site developers with each release. After doing your technology assessment, if Drupal is what comes out on top, and very often it will, you can feel assured that you've got a powerful engine under the hood. Now it's your job to connect that power to a usable experience. I'll show you that a high level of understanding of what Drupal will do for you and a methodology for researching how to implement specific user interface needs (i.e. finding recipes) will get you very far.

What we'll cover

• Plan the user experience
  • Information architecture and UI requirements
  • Sketching and schematics (wireframes)
  • Making it simple and usable
  • Scoping out features and matching up with Drupal modules
• Design with CMS agnosticism
  • Introduction to Blueprint CSS framework
  • Comping with the Blueprint Grid
  • Slicing and splicing graphics
• Theme with abandon
  • Embracing PHP Template
  • Leveraging CCK, Views, and Taxonomy
  • Using recipes
  • Busting up blocks and putting things where you want
  • JQuery for that sophisticated feel when you need it
  • CSS tips to keep it tight

Imogen Heap will be playing at Webster Hall in NYC on 11/12. Tickets are on sale now. I've got 2 to go.

I gave a talk at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the use of weblogs for communication and information management. The talk incorporated components of several of the past presentations I've given on this topic. I covered these points:

1) why weblogs are emerging as a viable replacement for Knowledge Management software and as a supplement to an enterprise intranet portal

2) why weblogs are a good idea right now

3) what weblogs are being used for and how

4) strategy for dealing with weblog growth

5) ideas for sustaining use and measuring success.

A large part of my talk is focussed on case studies at Lucent, describing how we've used weblogs for communications, information sharing and knowledge management.

The LANL information ecology is similar in some ways to the Bell Labs ecology of years past. The CIO works at a high level on planning and funding and a decentralized system of IT organizations exists at LANL. It was great to see that the CIO works harmoniously with the diverse web-based systems that are developed and maintained by the individual organizations around LANL. This is exactly the environment that is perfectly suited to the emergence of weblogs. In my talk, I discuss at length the benefits of diverse "information ecologies" -- a concept taken from Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day's literature on the topic -- and how weblogs created out of bottom-up publishing efforts fit into this picture and provide a sensible, low-cost, high-value alternative to web publishing processes mandated from the top down. The concept of diversity as a key component to ecological health is validated in what has evolved at LANL.

A few people I spoke with at LANL stated that they are already considering using weblogs and wikis for some internal information management. Everyone in attendence of the conference was already aware of what weblogs are. The controversial public blog, "LANL: The Real Story" was more than likely the site that introduced many LANL staff to blogging.

While my talk emphasized the importance of weblogs as a publishing format, I also touched on some of the issues of giving messaging power to the masses because of its relevance to LANL. I pointed to the recent resignations of Jordan Eason at CNN and the demotion of Dan Rather at CBS following some mob-blogging related to statements made by each of these well-known public figures. The "LANL: The Real Story" blog was created to provide a public, uncensored forum for LANL staff to air their concerns and express their views about how the Labs were being run under director George P. Nanos. Nanos closed the Labs because of security concerns when classified tapes went missing. The report of missing tapes turned out to be a clerical error, but the shut downs cost the country an estimated $850 million. Last week, on May 6th, Director Nanos resigned. The story is covered in the New York Times.

These stories about the movement of messaging power away from centralized control to the masses is fascinating, controversial, and a bit unsettling. At some level, it is phenomenal that a technology can be disruptive enough to create a major shift in the control of power within a social system. Essentially, in the cases of Rather, Eason and Nanos, what we're viewing is the democratization of social systems and organizations, although some people would probably call the open criticism that's been appearing on blogs mob-rule. Blogging is surfacing controversial issues to stakeholders that probably would have been hidden in the past -- swept under the rug. In today's weblogging world, the statements and actions of important public figures can be challenged rather than accepted. In the cases mentioned above, when the statements or actions could not be successfully defended, the public image of the organization was affected to the extent that the organizations feared reprisal in the form of pulled financial backing.

I should mention that while I don't believe this power-shift to be a bad thing, there is, of course, potential for mobs to utilize blogs in malicious ways. The first step in dealing with controversial blogs should therefore be more communication, not less. In the case of Jordan Eason, whom I believe should not have resigned, CNN should have reacted immediately, blogging the issue on their own and allowing conversation to happen between CNN and the public. The lesson in all this is that we live in a world where people believe in democratic rule and in ideas around open communication (like those espoused in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty"). The right reaction to these types of disruption is to react to it in kind with open debate and conversation. What these individuals and organizations could have done is used weblogging for their counter-message and as a platform for defending statements and actions rather than simply evading the issue. Has the lesson been learned by the media? We'll see the next time this happens.

But to return to the topic of my talk, which is not nearly as provocative as the talk of the Nanos resignation, there is clearly a lot of awareness of the power or blogs, not only as vehicles for unovering hidden issues, but also as a tool for information and project management. There are reports of blogs being used at LANL already, and many of the web developers in the audience had specific questions about how to select from the various technologies offered in the blog publishing space right now. Some individuals were interested in how we at Lucent are approaching the need to publish blogs. I communicated that my organization's role has mainly been to react to the needs expressed around blogging by providing consulting and developing strategies for dealing with weblog growth. I empasized that I believed in the decentralized approach to weblog implementation because such an approach allows content owners to retain control and decision making power related to their needs and the technologies they choose to fill them. That said, I also believe that a centralized solution may also be successful if well-conceived and flexible enough to allow content owners to control their data and the use of the blog.

I provided some ideas for dealing with weblog growth in the near and long term including the RSSification of enterprise databases and the creation of weblog RSS aggregation and archiving services. I also touched on the idea of integrating some of this output with other enterprise information systems and using applications that allow social behaviors. These ideas were outlined in the presentation I gave at Computers in Libraries, 2004.

The conference provided a good opportunity for me to connect with web developers in a community similar to ours at Bell Labs in the hopes of continuing to discuss how we use weblogs to meet key business needs in our respective organizations. As LANL staff move forward with their projects, we hope to share our experiences. Hopefully the outcome of our dialogue will result in best practices over time.

I'm speaking at the IQPC Corporate Weblog and Wiki Summit, which is being held February 1 - 2, 2005 at The Miami Intercontinental Hotel, Miami, FL. The presentation will be talking a bit about utilizing weblogs for project efficiency and will cover projects I've worked on in the past year. The case studies will discuss briefly the process for designing and implementing weblogs for communication and document dissemination within a well defined community.

I don't plan on reiterating too much of what I presented on last year at the CiL conference. What I hope to do this time is to start out by touching on the "whats" and "whys" for using weblogs for grassroots publishing and then show through case studies why weblog software was chosen as the platform for 2 of the projects I discuss and briefly go over how they were implemented. In closing I hope to touch on some of the issues that may be encountered when embarking on these types of projects and begin to develop some best practices for bringing weblog projects from the evangelization and discovery phase to implementation.

If we're acquainted and you're interested in attending the conference, please contact me to let me know. .

I recently presented at the Computers in Libraries 2004 conference in Washington D.C. You can download the presentation, "Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap", below:

Presentation slide show, PDF (4.6 MB)

Slides with speaking notes, PDF (4.6 MB)

My talk proposed a roadmap for providing weblog-related information services and suggested approaches for dealing with the problem of making weblog output of use to the organization. The idea is that the library can position itself to support individuals and communities of practice that express the need to use grass-roots tools for knowledge capture and dissemination such as weblogs and wikis. I talked briefly about the benefits of using weblogs for individual knowledge creation as opposed to using larger KM solutions selected from the top down, and the implications for IT of an information ecology with a diverse set of people using different technologies for publishing data in a distributed manner all over the intranet. In the near term I suggested first steps towards supporting knowledge creation with RSS. I suggested methods for providing access to aggregated blog output as next steps. And as a far off goal, I discussed the integration of output from sources such as blogs with other enterprise information using social software and social network analysis.

I was concerned, at first, that my talk wouldn't reach everyone. It was my perception from the conference that while many librarians are savvy when it comes to weblogs and RSS, as many are still learning what the value of the RSS format is. Some presentations dealt directly with the problems related to blogging on the one hand or with using RSS for keeping up to date. If these talks were successfully reaching people at the ground level (and that was my perception), my talk in comparison was probably much higher than most people wanted to go.

I talked about far off ideas such as how blogs might relate to social software and after talking at length with a good number of individuals after the session, it was clear that some people were definitely thinking about or actually have librarians weblogging at present in their organization. I found particulary interesting the talk given by Terence Huwe about his organizations' experience blogging at the University of California's Institute of Industrial Relations. Largely, the people I spoke to were interested in the topic of making blog output findable, but would wait until others proved the best directions to take. It didn't seem that the issue of the growth of customer weblogs (blogs external to the library organization) was on people's radar. This may reflect the type of information services organizations people worked in more than anything, but clearly this is also an early stage in our assessment. Even corporate libraries for large organizations, like my own, probably have not found the need to think about making weblog output findable yet. Many others will never have large enough numbers of blogs appearing in the organization to justify these kinds of systems. The issue for me was mainly bring to the forefront the idea that library organizations have the information management expertise to help with some of the problems blog output presents, and that we need to be thinking at this level sooner or later if we operate in an ecology where this type of grass roots knowledge creation might occur -- for example, in large corporations, university and institutional settings, etc. -- and if we wish to have a hand in innovating this new and potentially important knowledge space.

Some feedback received so far on this topic

In a discussion on Lou Rosenfeld's Bloug, Alan Gutierez suggests that an intermediary step before employing social network analysis is to utilize information managers who might serve as filters or recommenders. The idea of using people as recommenders is suggested in the "Mediate approach", which utilizes humans for indexing and supplying additional metadata. He also discusses tools that use ranking algorithms to analyze the frequency of memes and point back to the originators of ideas. I'm interested in this type of analysis as well. All very interesting thoughts.

One person suggested that the presentation should have pointed out more reasons why weblogging is a good thing. He notes that they: take the pain of publishing away; work great for small teams; utilize story telling, a powerful method for disseminating information; and allow multiple ways to publish. All valid points, and I believe I address some of these to a degree. The purpose of the presentation, however, is to focus on information services aimed at making weblog output findable, so I only touched on the main reasons I believe them to be valuable. But these points should definitely be included in a discussion of why weblogs are valuable as tools for KM.

Mopsos provides some additional thoughts about how much Information Architecture is related to the knowledge creation/management process, how innovation is supported by decentralization and re-use supported by centralization. He summarizes bottom up KM in this line: Decentralizing for innovation, centralizing for reuse.

He hones in on exactly the point I make about a mediated approach, which is takes the advantages of the decentralized approach to creation and the centralized approach to aggregation and dissemination. Very nicely put. To extract a few of his points:

bq. Technology is moving fastly into the hands of the individuals. ... What I will need is a common language, grammar and document structure, and I will be ready to forego some of my personal freedom to benefit from the advantages of using corporate standards.

bq. Value is added to existing information through a process of aggregation, simplification and dissemination, which is exactly the concept underlying a web of blogs. In essence, the more decentralized, the richer information is; the more centalized, the more structured it is. Decentralizing for innovation, centralizing for reuse.