User Experience – Page 18 – Graham Chastney

Will Enterprise IM Survive

Stu questions whether Enterprise IM will survive, I think the answer to that is – it depends.

Information passed across an IM session may well be corporate information. In order for enterprises to be comfortable about this information being passed across a public network using an external provider a number of assurances need to be in place:

Deliverable service levels, preferably contractually agreed service levels.

Protection from malicious attack; virus, malware, etc.

Encryption of conversations.

Verifiable identity.

Many organisations will also have auditing requirements for a specific set of individuals, so will need the ability to capture and store the information being exchanged.

None of these requirements preclude the use of publicly available IM, but these things are all much easier to control when you are in control of the environment.

The other advantage to operating the environment internally is that you are in control of the end user experience. That control can provide benefits that may not be delivered through the publicly available service.

One example where this might apply in IM terms is in the provision of bots which perform specific business purposes.

Another example would be the creation of an integrated experience for communications. This argument is less clear cut than it used to be. The extensibility of the publicly available services mean has resulted in many enterprise environments being less rich than services that are freely available over the Internet. Many of these services are reaching the point of delivering the entire integrated communications experience anyway.

In conclusion: I don’t see the end of enterprise IM any time soon because the assurance issues are too soft and diverse to be resolved quickly. I do see time, though, when enterprises take more services from external providers over the Internet. I’m not sure IM will be one of the priorities though.

Tags: IM

e-Society Profiler

via BBC

Apparently I have been classified again. This time my household has been classified dependent upon its access to technology services. Each post-code has then been classified into a set of groups and types all made available via a profiler. My area is apparently F19:

Group F : Instrumental E-users

This Group tends to use electronic technologies for purely instrumental purposes, because they provide a practical method of saving time or money. They have plenty of other leisure activities that they enjoy and tend to be light television watchers. However they find the Internet useful for purchasing on line and they are smart enough to realise that they can drive better deals when purchasing goods and services if they fore-arm themselves with consumer information. Generally they use the net to undertake transactions and manage their personal finances rather than to explore.

This Group contains mostly people in well off, middle class, owner occupied suburbia. Many have children.

Type F19 : On-line apparel purchasers

This Type consists of well educated young professionals, many of them women, who are confident users of electronic technologies and communications. They use the Internet for purchases across a wide range of product categories, but in particular for children’s products and fashion wear. They tend not to use this medium to purchase wines or insurance. Many members of this type look after children at home and do not have access to electronic technologies at work. They are not particularly interested in computer magazines.

I’m not sure that this successfully describes me, but perhaps I’m not typical for my area.

Anyone willing to pay me to do this kind of research it sounds like fun?

Another Test

I found another test – this one was different…

Brain Lateralization Test Results

Right Brain (56%) The right hemisphere is the visual, figurative, artistic, and intuitive side of the brain.
Left Brain (50%) The left hemisphere is the logical, articulate, assertive, and practical side of the brain

Are You Right or Left Brained?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Now I’m really confused…

Right Brain v Left Brain Test

Am I left-brained or right-brained? How do i decide? Is it even a valid question?

Did some searching around and came across one of those survey things that people put together. You know the ones I mean, the ones that you used to do in magazines when you were 14 . The ones that consist of 20 multiple choice questions, with little explanation.

So I did the test and this is what is said…

You Are 30% Left Brained, 70% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you’re left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you’re right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Are You Right or Left Brained?

I’m not sure that I’m the right person to judge whether this is correct or not. Does asking the question make me one or the other? It’s very difficult trying to think about your own brain .

Microsoft Changes to Provide Support for ODF: Big Deal?

Microsoft has today announced (information here, here) that it will indeed support the Open Document Format (ODF).

Will it be a big deal, or just another feature that will have very little impact on most users?

What seems to be clear from the information currently available is that users of Microsoft Office will need to think about using ODF, rather than using ODF as the standard format. For starters they will need to download an additional component, and even then it’s not clear that they can make ODF the default format.

Even if users could make ODF the default format what would make them choose it as the day-to-day format that they use?

People tend not to make decisions of principle if it adds to their workload, or the workload of others. In the short term ODF capabilities will not be ubiquitous so sending an ODF file to anyone will be to take a risk that you are adding to your workload because you’ll need to re-send the file if the person at the other end can’t read it. If you do need to re-send the file you obviously gives the person receiving the file a problem.

Large organisations can make a principle decision and then enforce that on the people who need to collaborate with them, but they need to be large enough to be dominant. If large organisations do make a principle decision they just give the little guy (who is collaborating) the problem of working in two worlds; the current file format world and the new ODF file format world. Both worlds will exist for some time because I don’t see any sign that all of the large organisations making a principle decision all at the same time, all in the same direction.

What I do see happening is an ODF based ecosystem being built and potential growing in parallel to the current Microsoft Office file format ecosystem. Building an ecosystem doesn’t happen in weeks or months, building an ecosystem takes years.

I’m not convinced that the ODF ecosystem will succeed though, decision based on principle rarely win when it comes to IT. The simplest and easiest things tends to win.

Is this a big deal? It might be, but it isn’t going to be a big deal for a long time.

Tags: Office, ODF, Microsoft

It's about creating links

That Coyote bloke got me thinking again this morning:

“you need time to see the links between items or areas of knowledge. The brain finds it hard to hang on to disconnected pieces of information. Unlike a computer disc, it doesn’t cope well with large amounts of more or less random data. What it does best is to see connections, linking information together and remembering the patterns, not single pieces of data. Remembering a principle and applying it is far easier to do that recalling some individual “rule” or procedure for handling a situation. Do we see those links instantly? Usually not. It takes time to register them fully and understand them well enough to recall them whenever we want.”

So why do so many of our enterprise information systems do such a poor job of reflecting the links that we have built in our minds between things, and do an even worse job of allowing us to see the links that other individuals have created.

Let’s look at a few example. In the file system I can group a load of files into a folder so that they are all together, but this doesn’t reflect the links that exist between the document. I regularly open a number of files to find the information that I am looking for. I know it’s in one of them because that’s why they are there but there really isn’t any visible linkage. Someone else looking at the set of documents would need to read them all to get a handle on the information contained within.

Document management systems are rarely any better they allow the person who has posted the document to give it a set of key words and to build the taxonomy. Anything information that follows on from this document isn’t reflected and the likely value of each document that has been tagged with a certain keyword isn’t shown either.

Take documents as an entity, particularly technical documents. They are usually a huge blob of data with thousands of internal logical links. The data in this section relates to the data in that section, but we rarely do anything to flag those links. As the links aren’t explicitly shown we need to take in a huge amount of data before we can understand where the links are. It’s rarely possible to structure a technical document in a way that actually makes these links obvious. Lots of people have started making documents out of PowerPoint presentations, it’s something I encouraged initially but now I’m not so sure. The problem with a document is the huge blob problem, the nice thing about a PowerPoint structure is that each page makes a point or a small number of points in this way the huge blob is broken down into a set of smaller blobs. These ‘presentations’ are never going to be presented, they are meant to be read as a set of small chunks which allow people to form their own links.

Blogs are slightly better, assuming people follow the etiquette. Part of the etiquette of blogs is that you do someone the courtesy of referencing their ideas, and rightly so. Because blogs are normally a smaller chunk of data and the links are built in it’s possible to work backward down a subject. Services like track-back and technorati also allow you to follow the links forward.

Tagging services like del.icio.us provide a new way of reflecting the links. They allow items to be tagged by the person consuming the document. Rather than the person who created the item defining the value, the person consuming it does. This capability has taken on the rather ungainly term of folksonomy.

The ability to move beyond taxonomy into folksonomy is rarely available inside an organisation though. Some organisations are getting there – IBM, HP (PDF) (Thanks for the info Stu).

What makes someone tag inside an organisation and how many people does it take. I’m not yet clear about all of the factors that make someone tag, but I can speak from my del.icio.us experience. There are a few reasons why I tag. The main one is a really simple one, I want my voice to be heard. I have valid opinions (or so I think) and I want them to be heard. I’m sure that if I was able to tag within my organisation I would feel exactly the same. Another really important reason is that I tag for my own benefit. As the Coyote says, it take time to register the links in our brains, being able to register the links somewhere helps me to find them in the future. Registering a link also helps me to remember them, I regularly write things down so I don’t forget them, I rarely use the written record because the act of writing it down has implanted the information in my brain, tagging has a similar effect.

We have a long way to go with exposing links, and the value to us humans is in the links rather than in the actual data. The current technologies will take a while to become mainstream in most enterprises, and even longer for the process and social changes to become common practice. There is, however, a new generation who will expect these services to be available and business constrain them at their peril.

Tags: del.icio.us, taxonomy, folksonomy, learning

What makes something popular?

What does make something popular? There are, I suspect, thousands of answers to that question.

Where the hell it Matt has become very popular. It’s a bloke, who dances really badly in all sorts of places. I’m sure that if I wrote that on a piece of paper and went to an advertising agency they would have a little chuckle to themselves and show me the exit; but they would have been wrong. Clearly one advertising agency thought it was a good enough idea to pay someone to do it.

As someone involved in large scale IT projects I am interested in this kind of thing, because we have always struggled to get end users engaged in changes to their IT. I’m not talking here about the few ‘experts’ in an organisation, I’m talking about engaging with the masses. In most instances the changes we are planning to make will have a significant impact on a persons ability to do their job. Changes are normally regarded as a problem rather than something exciting to get engaged with.

I’ve seen all sorts of corporate communication techniques used, but none of them have really resulted in a general interest across the user base. That is, until we come along and change it.

WinFS – so long, far well, enjoy your new position

WinFS finally left the Windows stable (here, here) over the last few days for residence in a SQL Server existence. Being the insightful watcher of the industry that I am , I had just finished the preparation for a presentation I was going to deliver to some colleagues on the subject – now cancelled.

It’s not a surprise, but it is a disappointment.

Anyone who architects or manages a large scale file service knows that they are nearly always in complete anarchy and causing all sorts of problems at every tier in the business. There are compliance people all over the world who are losing hours of sleep every time they think about the file system because they have no idea what is stored there or how incriminating it could be. There are IT managers who would rather do anything other than be buying yet more disks. There are business continuity people who are praying that the feared fire in the computer room never happens, because they know that they have no chance of getting all that data back to where it should be. There are thousands and millions of end users who fear having to try to find a valuable needle among the haystack that is before them.

A number of people have proposed answers. These have normally required the syphoning of data off into another store or application. These additional stores have normally resulted in the data being available in more than one store, rather than the data moving into a the new store, if it got their at all. This hasn’t resolved the problem, it’s just made it worse.

WinFS, had the chance, however slim, of changing this for good. It had the chance to put the business back in control of the data while, at the same time, giving extra functionality to the end user. But alas it was not to be.

The move of the WinFS development work into SQL Server means that it will always be separate from the file service and will be met with the same level of adoption as Oracle iFS. As a Windows function the level of adoption might have been something significantly different, but I can’t see it having anything like the same impact as a SQL Server function.

I don’t think the Web has yet answered this question either.

Tags: WinFS,File System

Working from home worries: Trusting people when you can't see them

Slow Leadership picks up on an article in the Glasgow Herald on “Employees fear working from home may damage careers”.

I tend to work from home these days – so do I fear that is damages my career?

Fear is definitely too strong a word for starters, but I do have concerns about it.

My employer is very flexible and I work from home because it makes sense. I do a lot of collaboration work with teams where it is impossible for the team to physically meet on a regular basis. These teams often span continents and it’s just not practical to have everyone flying around all the time.

There are a couple of office locally and I could go and work in them, but that takes away my flexibility to work when it’s appropriate to work. I regularly receive calls early and have teleconferences late. Being able to work flexibly also means that I treat my home time flexibly too, I treat bloging in a similar way.

So what do I worry about? I worry that I’m not visible.

I don’t think it’s a good thing to be invisible at work. I never want to be in the position where someone is asking the question “what does Graham do all day?” I am trustworthy, I do work hard, I do put in the hours, but is that visible? My role is primarily consultative and advisory so I don’t actually produce very much physical evidence of my productivity and that concerns me. If I was in an office people would be able to see how much consultation and advice I provide, at home it’s invisible. As the consultation is often via IM, email and voice it’s difficult to provide quantitative measures of productivity.

The issue of visibility is largely my issue though. I have to make special efforts to make sure I remain visible. I have to make make special efforts to have those ‘water cooler’ conversations in some other way. When attending teleconference I have to make a special effort to add value and to be ‘seen’. I consciously make more phone calls because I know that anything written can be interpreted wrongly.

My ‘need’ to be visible need to be balanced though. I don’t feel the need to be online all of the time. I don’t get stressed about missing a call out-of-hours that I wasn’t expecting, but I am very conscious of responding to almost every call.

But, yes, I worry.

As we move to a world of self-directed innovators this is something that we are going to have to get used to though.

User Experience Thinking: The Left and the Right

I use my mouse in my right-hand – I write with my left hand. No I don’t know why, perhaps just because I’m awkward .

As I wrote the other day I am experimenting with some working habit changes. These involve me doing far more reading on my tablet and getting to grips with a pen based interface.

It’s only a simple thing, but my ambidextrous working this has lead me to a couple of user experience issues.

When reading, which is clearly what I do a lot of I often need to scroll down, no surprises there. When I am using a mouse I use the scroll bar on the side of the screen or the wheel. The scroll bar is on the right, my mouse is on the right, no problems their then. When I’m using my tablet (in tablet mode) I have all sorts of choices and these are leading to some confusion on my part.

If I use the pen and the scroll-down bar I cover the screen with my hand so I can’t free-scroll to get to where I want to get to. Not being able to see the screen makes free-scroll it a bit pointless as a feature. I have found myself doing a kind of contortion so I can do both but it doesn’t look very professional and certainly not cool .

If I use the jog-wheel with my right-hand I often find myself scrolling the wrong thing because I haven’t clicked on the thing I want to scroll first. This is something I find myself doing naturally with a mouse, but not yet with a pen and the jog-wheel .

If I use flicks I can’t free-scroll and flicks are a bit cumbersome anyway .

It’s a shame I like free-scroll so much.

I have a similar problem when I’m using hand writing for input. The words that are being interpreted from my spidery scrawl are shown on the bottom left of the window where my hand is. This means that I can’t do any kind of live check on the writing without lifting my hand off and out of the way.

I’m a bit bipolar on how this could be resolved though. Part of me would like the scroll bars (and other things) to be down the left of the screen so I can use my pen effectively, but I still use my mouse and it makes sense that they are on the right in that context. I’m not sure my brain could cope with having both . Like any western left-handed person I have dealt with the issue of things going from left-to-right all my life so this is nothing new it’s just a new take on an old issue.

The handwriting recognition in Vista is astonishing though. Like many left-handed people handwriting has always been a bit of a problem but Vista does a wonderful job of recognising it.

Tags: Tablet, Vista

User Experience Thinking: The BBC World Cup Mode

The BBC Web Site is currently sporting two modes which the humble user can choose between:

World Cup Mode: On

World Cup Mode: Off

What a fabulous piece of insight into the needs of their customers. The UK will be divided over the next few weeks between those who care about the World Cup and those that don’t. Most of Scotland, for instance, will only be watching with moderate interest because their team didn’t make it. Millions of us English will be desperate to get our regular updates.

Recognising the different desires and doing something about it is pure genius.

I wonder if it’s the shape of things to come though.

Here’s a few idea for some more modes:

I don’t care what Jordan is doing now mode.

I love cricket.

I’m a news junkie.

Vista Beta 2, Office 2007 beta 2 and Tablet

Well I took the plunge and ‘upgraded’ my Tablet to Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2.

The first attempt was done using the 512MB of memory that came with the Tablet. Vista Beta 2 runs fine in 512MB, just don’t try and run anything useful.

I’ve now added in another 512MB and it’s looking a lot better than I expected. I have the same problem that Steve noticed with the buttons, but I haven’t had any video driver issues. I still want the rotation to go a full 180 degrees so I can use it as most people would expect a left-hander to use it, although I think I might be the one getting the best deal there because I can scroll and pen at the same time.

I’m trying to swallow a huge pull here though. I’m trying to make a whole handful of transitions all in one go.

I’m trying to keep the build as clean as possible.

I’m trying to use the tablet without a keyboard.

I’m trying to switch to Feeddemon for my RSS stuff.

I’m trying to move to a tablet oriented way of working when I’m not at my desk typing something detailed.

I’m trying to loose my various notepads where I write junk and do that in OneNote.

I’m trying to switch to a tab browsing view of the world.

When I get around to it I will put Notes 7 on it.

And trying to do it all on Beta software.

So far it’s been OK, but I have written this in BlogJet because I haven’t yet swallowed all of the changes. I will try Word 2007 blog posting, but there is no guarantee I will stick with it.

(PS: I am going to carry on calling it “Office 2007” and not switch to “2007 Office” until absolutely necessary, who’s ridiculous idea was that anyway)

Tags: Office 2007,Vista Beta 2,Tablet,BlogJet

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