By the way, despite two recent posts about Google products, I’ve not taken it upon myself to promote Google products. Google and I just happen to spend quite a bit of time together.

Earth Light:

Simplicity is Complex:

I tried it out, and it seems to work pretty well, except that it looks like it doesn’t tell you buses coming within the minute, as my text told me I had six minutes to wait and a bus came in about 30 seconds. So better not to run from the bus stop right away to get your coffee after you get your text.

Very handy for the winter season.

Another is usability testing with a number of different audiences at museum conferences explained in, “ Usability@90mph: Presenting and evaluation a new, high-speed method for demonstrating user testing in front of an audience ”.

The second method, which is done in 30 minutes, is basically this:

1. Introduce the audience to the concepts of usability testing (which is observing users trying to conduct typical tasks on a website to identify usability problems) and site evaluation.
2. Find a volunteer in the audience who is not already familiar with the site to test the site. Take the volunteer out of the room for a short period while showing the site in more depth to the audience.
3. A representative of the site provides a more in-depth (but quick) overview of the site to the audience.
4. Usability professionals, who will observe the tester, identify 4-5 tasks to be tested on the site with suggestions from the audience. These tasks should be confirmed as representative and typical by the representative of the site.
5. While the tasks are being identified with the audience, a facilitator explains to the volunteer outside the room how to participate in a usability test (i.e., explains to the volunteer that the exercise is a test of the site, not of the volunteer, and reminds him or her to explain out loud the rationale for how he or she is trying to complete the tasks).
6. The volunteer returns to the room to test the site by trying to complete the tasks identified. The usability professionals observe the volunteer with the audience and take notes about completion rates, problems encountered, and possible recommendations.
7. The facilitators/evaluators discuss and present the usability issues they identified, sometimes with explanations or clarifications from the volunteer on why certain actions or choices were taken.
8. The audience is encouraged to note any usability issues they observed.
9. Solicit as many design recommendations to address the usability issues as possible from the facilitators/evaluators, volunteer, audience, and the person familiar with the site.

I see a lot of benefits to this method:

The main potential drawback I see is that by testing in front of a large audience (in some cases as many as 200 people), the volunteer participant may behave differently than he or she normally would (using a website while being observed by as many as 200 people isn’t exactly replicating the user’s natural environment) by being more persistent in completing tasks or just uncomfortable. The method also basically excludes testers not comfortable in front of an audience.

However, overall it seems like it could be a great complement to a round of usability testing in a lab or contextual inquiry, and I would be quite intrigued to try it out.

Librarians are also on the list, cousins of usability/user experience specialists (both have strong ties to information architecture).

See the entire list of professions or the the summary for usability and user experience specialists.

That said, here are some overall benefits of intranets for executives and employees:

For executives

1. Dashboarding and reporting—Intranets can support dashboards and reporting systems that communicate the overall health and performance of organizations.

2. Supporting records management compliance—Intranets with built-in records management capabilities can help support compliance.

3. Communicating and engaging with employees—Blogs, announcements, discussion boards, news, and announcements on intranets can all support communication between executives and employees.

4. Staying in touch—Intranets used by employees can be a great way for executives, who may not be in touch with day-to-day activities, to see what is going on.

For employees

1. Saving time finding the right information—This is one of the more obvious benefits, although calculations of the amount of time employees waste everyday finding what they need vary.

2. Reducing time spent on administration—Ideal intranets make administrative things like finding and submitting forms, getting IT help, dealing with employee benefits, ordering supplies, and finding out about relevant procedures easy.

3. Improving capacity and collaboration in areas of expertise—Maturing beyond corporate communication and administrative purposes, intranets support collaborative activities and team work, which helps experts in their fields of work.

4. Capturing knowledge that needs to get passed to new or transferring employees—This is done through a good information architecture, easy authoring tools, and tools like wikis and blogs.

5. Improving transparency and sharing of information—Maintained and up-to-date intranets help support an atmosphere of openness and transparency and are tools for employees to share information with their organizations.

6. Locating the right people—A good people finder and search help people find out who does what, and who they need to contact about anything from how to handle a difficult project issue to getting software.

7. Planning careers—This is especially apparent in large organizations, where easy-to-access and clear information about departments, groups, and people helps people plan careers within their companies.

8. Increasing engagement with organizations—This is also more important in large organizations. Online discussion boards, blogs, wikis, photos, and surveys are easy ways to find out what is going on and can help employees engage more with their organizations.

9. Creating a positive image of organizations—Last but not least, good intranets engage and support employees in the work they do, and are an opportunity to give employees a positive image of where they work.

If you know of other intranet benefits, I’d love to hear about them.

I say this because just this week I’ve been involved in two projects in which restaurants set a good example.

The first was working on a comparison tool for financial products, such as credit cards and bank accounts.

I noticed that many bank websites let visitors compare features of their credit cards. Both CIBC and TD Canada Trust have reasonably helpful tools that let you line up and compare two or more credit cards. But what is more apparent in the TD Canada example is unnecessary repetition in the lists; the same feature may be listed under four different cards. Restaurants do a much better job of this by stating up front, “All entrees come with fries, garlic mayo, and salad.” Banks could save space and highlight differences by noting, “All credit cards come with cheque cashing privileges, 24-hour ATM access, etc”).

The other project I’m working on in which restaurants set a good example is a corporate intranet. It’s almost a given that when intranets have grown organically, department pages are a mix of information that needs to be communicated across the organization and information that is only relevant to people within the department.

But imagine going into a restaurant and getting a menu that included food you could order all mixed up with the restaurant’s produce delivery schedule and the cleaning and staff schedules.

Simply separating out corporate communication from internal department information is a great start to making your department page easier to use.

You could also say that restaurants give you menus to let you browse and have servers to act as search engines if you want to ask for something you don’t see. But maybe that’s taking things too far.

This made me think, not for the first time, that I wish there were less leashes on books.

I’m a big fan of the Vancouver Public Library (VPL). It has a great collection of books, and when there is a book you want it’s easy to go online and get notified by e-mail or phone when it has arrived at your local branch. Pay attention if you read French books though. If you order Power Résumés, you’ll get a deadpan voice informing you “Your book … Power … Resumes … has arrived”.

I’m also a fan of Amazon, but for somewhat different reasons. I usually buy more than I intended just because it’s so easy to find other books that interest me. It’s also easy to maintain lists of books I want to buy later and view other people’s lists. The searching and browsing capabilities are also way easier to use than library catalogues, which often do annoying things like having the default search be an exact phrase search restricted to the title field. Searching solitude auster on the VPL catalogue won’t get you The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, but on Amazon you get the French and English versions right away with reviews and links to similar items by category.

I also like browsing local used bookstores. I recently discovered Abe Books which includes many used bookstores, but I wish it was easier to search by city.

So here’s what my ideal book service would include:

• Amazon’s searching and browsing capabilities. It would be great if they could adapt and sell their software to libraries.
• Showing the availability of a book in my local library, used and new bookstores in my city, and online sellers like Amazon.
• Maintainance of lists of books to read and wish lists for birthdays and xmas.
• Management of book recommendations to and from your friends and family.
• Information on local and online book clubs for the books I’ve read.

That said, it’s pretty cool how easy it has become to get books I’m interested in. And it will be interesting to see how new services to search for books like Google Books and the upcoming Microsoft’s Windows Live Book Search Program try to make books even easier to find.

The idea of rose coloured glasses reducing your ability to see red flags made me think of usability testing. This is especially important when you are testing your own work. Unless you are VERY careful, it can be really easy to bias a usability test when you are writing the script, observing the user during the test, and analyzing the data. I’ve also noticed that when I test the work of a colleague I respect, I need to pay close attention.

Why test your own work? Sometimes you don’t have a choice… There have also been instances when I have tested work on specialized systems I have helped build where my in-depth familiarity of the site was as much of an advantage as my bias was a disadvantage. For example, when testing thematic access on specialized systems (ie food safety standards and legislation) I was extremely familiar with the content that was available. This allowed me to determine whether the lack of relevant results people were seeing was because the system wasn’t retrieving information that was available, or if the system was accurately informing the user that the information wasn’t available.

Some techniques I use when I have to test my own work include having someone less involved proof the usability script and observe a few of the tests to point out where I appear to be biased or not as neutral as I should be. I’ve also found it useful to make mental notes about the things I really like about the site or feel especially confident about before the test. These are areas I try to look at more critically than others…

What techniques do you use?