Boxes and Arrows: Comments by laurie kalmanson

laurie kalmanson — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:15:43 GMT

Hear, hear. What you said. One addition:

—For better or worse, we have so grown as a trade, craft, guild that we are now deep inside large organizations, and many of our issues are purely turfological: who owns what, who can sign off on what, and how early can we get to the table so that we can guide and facilitate the decision making in the right direction from the beginning

laurie kalmanson — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 05:45:24 GMT

i think this is the short answer: it depends. i’ve worked with everyon from shops that have well-developed ui/ux/ia methodologies in place and just want a fresh eye or another pair of hands, to shops that were just starting to extricate themselves from the consequences of ready/fire/aim development cycles

much like the prospect of a firing squad, wireframes, user flows and site maps are wonderul devices for focusing attention when there’s more talking than decision making, and more concern for ship dates than what you’re actually shipping. the documentation makes it exactly evident what’s been thought through … and what hasn’t.

and, yes, those tools work for even the richest applications; a user interaction is still a user interaction, and it all comes down to what happens when someone clicks

that said, i am fine with inventing new forms of documentation for new challenges: annotated mock-ups with wireframing laid on top of ui designs for shops that insist on making pretty things before the structure is built, hybrids of many varieties, etc and so forth

i am agnostic re methodology: you can call it xtreme, agile, or my great aunt matilda; we still need to know what we have and what where we are going; ideally, before the coding begins

my .025.

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:33:35 GMT

very brave and funny; an xlent antidote to annoying, fawning “success” profiles in biz mags that editorially nod their heads when someone says they made a bazillion dollars thanks to insisting that the whole team do headstands every day

sometimes, we win

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:58:09 GMT

a recent sharepoint implementation i worked with had many of the issues/questions/metaphysical circles within circles discussed here

—much of what the technology was being asked to do could have been accomplished with a piece of paper and a pencil: people who weren’t taking notes before needed to learn that discipline first; then comes the discussion on whether the doc goes into a filing cabinet or a retrieval system tagged and bagged with taxonomy/folksonomy etc

—the questions being asked around the structure/exchange of info were really larger, org-wide workflow questions: how does group a work with group b and when do they tell group c about what they’re doing … thinking thru and then documenting that (how it is and how it should be) precedes the implementation …

so, many enterprise wide issues, many change management issues, many cultural issues … and some wiframes and user flows, too

and when you get to where you’re going, there you are

laurie kalmanson — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 15:00:08 GMT

I’m going to draw three circles: one is “fashions/trends”, one is “the fold” and the middle, overlapping one is, as always, “what users need”

way back in the beginning, the trend was to divide content into pages with a > or “more” for next; that was back when pageload really really mattered

then the trend shifted to scrolling; loading 500 more words didn’t matter anymore and a scroll was taken to be less interruptive than a click

now, we’re hearing again about “keeping everything important above the fold”

i actually feel that scrolling is common and accepted, and discussions about above/below the fold are actually a shorthand for saying that there are some key design elements that maybe should be rethought

that said, let me just add for the record that the original desgin of usa today the newspaper and usa today the vending box was intended to mimic the tv screen … so clinging too tightly to notions of above/below the fold is actually incorporating a design theory that takes the devil’s box as its guiding metaphor

laurie kalmanson — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 18:47:32 GMT

very smart

tools that facilitate—put back on the people making the requests—decision making work much better than the IA standing up and saying why x y or z aren’t going to work; you get the people who are ultimately driving the train making the decisions on how many cars it will have, where it will stop and where it will go

as always: fast, good or cheap … how many do you want

laurie kalmanson — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:59:02 GMT

this was a great point in a terrific piece, and i can speak to personal experience with making it work:

“For example, if one of the primary initiatives company-wide is to reduce costs by reducing the number of tech support calls, make one of your primary UX goals for the next release improved usability and a higher rate of self-support. Get a current baseline for how many tech support calls are being received on the current product and at the end of your project do a comparative analysis for the reduction in tech support calls.”

yes, yes and yes: make the support staff and their heads your friend; they ***already know*** the ui issues and online stopping points that are generating the most calls; if you can present them ways to eliminate the top 5 banes of their existence, they will turn around and demand that it be done asap … i’ve been there and done that and it was totally roi based and sailed right on thru; and it was deeply cool when the changes were made and the calls dropped

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:04:33 GMT

content strategist? didn’t that used to be called an editor? ok, just kidding.

seriously, though: it’s kind of like the old conversation re little ia vs big ia; from 30k up a content strategist is just someone with a plan, but sitting at a desk, a content strategist could be someone wondering why the CMS tool won’t allow headlines longer than 50 characters

i’d love to read more about this: the role is ever evolving, and changes from project to project; it can be very high concept or very hands on or someplace inbetween

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:06:58 GMT

i tend to go for simple rules over complex theories, and usually offer these solutions when search is the issue:

—redundancy and repetition are ok

—offer users multiple paths

—bring on the faceted search if you need it

—offer “shop windows” as content (highlighted, focused default choices) so people who don’t know what they’re looking for until they find it can get what they need

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:08:15 GMT

interesting idea

for me, i pitch it this way: there’s a point where labelling things for functionality crosses with design and editorial; let’s get there together.

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:20:23 GMT

Smart post, and great comments. I’ve worn a bunch of hats (editor, writer, content strategist, IA, tech writer, user experience consultant) and i think the nub here is this: CS experts in an organization are often the subject matter experts who know that there are 10k widgets, in 1500 categories, and etc

IA’s work with those CS/SME’s to define the structure to present the info. When I wear my IA hat, I say to clients that they know their business, and if they tell me how it works I can offer approaches to making it work better online

Case in point: A very very very large company with many thousands of documents was creating an intranet. I was the IA. I worked with the CS, who had things very nicely sorted into categories and subcategories, to discuss how to tag, bag, and display the items online: a-z list, category list, etc.

That worked really well.

In other roles, I have been the CS and the IA, but those are typically much smaller projects, when I can act as their editor and organize their content to make it ready for applying web strategies against

laurie kalmanson — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:32:47 GMT

isn’t an intranet just a website whose users are internal?

i’ve done a few intranets for biiiiig co’s, and the stickiest issues seem to be the turfological ones: ownership and responsibility, and getting away from a 500×500 photo of the ceo on the homepage

other issues (content strategy, search paths, categories and subcategoreies) get answered for intranets pretty much the way they do on other projects: facilitation, homework for stakeholders, arm waving, lunch, etc

that said, when the client knows what they want, that’s always the easiest; when they don’t, the facilitation is, for me, the most fun and challenging part.

very funny title!

laurie kalmanson — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:41:06 GMT

david—great piece

my favorite part: “Narratives have pacing. We experience that most clearly when we watch a movie. A great movie will have you coming out of a theatre having never looked at your watch. Pace is also a part of interaction design, but in some cases a good experience may have you looking at your watch–hopefully not out of boredom but because you need to know what time it is to complete the goals of the interaction.

that part especially is awesome and important because it exactly the smashes the paradigm of usability testing that consists of asking people to stand on their heads and timing them and putting the results in a spreadsheet … which tells you only that jane did it for 10 seconds and john did it for nine … never addressing whether they wanted to in the first place or whether they enjoyed it, etc.

it’s similar to those airport studies re baggage claim: it’s not how long it takes from the gate to your suitcase, it’s how it feels while you’re doing it

very nicely done.

laurie kalmanson — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:18:33 GMT

i’ve ordered the book—always looking for something new to read. thnx!!!!!

on the continuum between theory and practice, i generally come down on the side of learning all the new methodologies as they come along, and then having new tools and approaches when i actually sit down to do something or invent a process myself.

on a scale of 1-10, if 1 is completely practice driven and 10 is purely theoretical, i think 7 is the place to be: well informed about the theory part, in service of and guiding the doing part.

this poster is up in my kid’s school, and it sums things up for me: “An education is what you remember, after you have forgotten everything that you’ve learned.” – Albert Einstein

laurie kalmanson — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:50:57 GMT

deeply superficial

really good

web 2.0 or web 102.0 > matching user experiences and business goals was and is the name of the game

rock on