Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Thomas Vander Wal

Thomas Vander Wal — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:27:08 GMT

Webauk, I am happy you were on-time and under budget, but that is not a great measure of success. Use and findability of information is a major need for an Intranet. Measuring these elements and finding vast improvement in these areas would be something worth boasting.

Taxonomies are a strong method for adding to positive experiences, on which many an Intranet’s experience is based on users finding information to get their job done (among many other information sharing tasks). Finding folks that can build a taxonomy properly or adequately is not easy, but it is getting easier as more folks are getting trained. Your customers and the users of the Intranet may thank you more than money back up front. The money saved in the long run is in the lack of lost time trying to find information or better yet having the information needed within easy grasp. Lost time is the killer in any organization and the Intranet where information is easily findable is a great way to cut the missing information money pit that eats profit and resources.

Taxonomies may not be the perfect answer to every situation, but ruling out a great resource from a developer’s toolbelt on one poor implementation or mis-matched solution hurts the clients who depend on us to provide them helpful solutions. Learning why many find great success with including taxonomies in thier solution sets may be very helpful. It could be worth giving taxonomies a second chance as well as chosing other metrics of success.

—Just trying to help.

Thomas Vander Wal — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:43:12 GMT

An excellent article…

In user testing that I have done over the years, very few users look to site maps of site indexes when they get stuck. My current client has been trying to educate the Intranet users to look in these places when they get stuck. This has not been that intuitive, except for the most experienced users.

Is there other research showing users taking advantage of these global site resources? Part of the problem has been very poor site maps and indexes have turned the users off.

Thomas Vander Wal — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:17 GMT

Hopefully this is the tip of the iceberg for rich internet documentation pieces in Boxes and Arrows. We have been dealing with Flash for six years as a major rich interface component (that was Flash 3 or 4 in 1999 that really tipped things). We now have AJAX and very little has changed on the documentation front. Nearly every IA or UX designer conversation the past 12 to 18 months has included a question about documenting rich interfaces.

Now there is one article to point that I feel is worth reading and sharing. It is long past time.