Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Paula Thornton

Paula Thornton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:22 GMT

Online Surveys: I’ve been exposed to WebIQ (Usability Sciences) and ForeSee. Will be looking at iPerceptions in 2006.

Paula Thornton — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:23:12 GMT

I interact with (or see the back side) of a lot of companies. Sadly, those who even have dedicated resources aligned to the web site are far fewer than those who do (what they ‘say’ and what they ‘do’ are far different behind the scenes).

Paula Thornton — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:03:16 GMT

One of the challenges is that our whole discipline would have been a lot further (as would have been many of our careers) if IT would have had both Project Managers and Product Managers in their methodologies years ago. I’ve struggled in my career in IT ‘not’ to be a Project Manager because I was always by default doing product management activities, but had no career path to make that formal. Because all project work is not seen as inherently creating a ‘product’ (or service) our challenges start way down at the organizational work structure.

Paula Thornton — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:20:32 GMT

There’s the simple and then there’s the really complex. The example I always turn to is the Texas Instruments parametric search (powered by Endeca). The search begins once you’ve clicked on a product group (the visual design is not optimal): http://focus.ti.com/tihome/docs/paramsearches.tsp, the data is fully displayed at the bottom, if you scroll down and start selecting parameters you can see how the dynamic relation between the parameters affect the results.

What’s interesting about TI is that they don’t drive their main site search with Endeca, just the parts search—but TI has a great understanding of the need for designing a variety of specialized searches (http://focus.ti.com/tihome/docs/allsearches.tsp?DCMP=TIHo…, not that all of these have been ‘optimized’). A great piece on searching in general (http://www.intranetjournal.com/features/cadis-2.shtml) notes semiconductor catalogs as one high-profile use of parametric searches. The real issue is LOTS of data/attributes to sort through to get to what’s relevant to you. If the kind of content that Google returns had more parameters in the metadata then we’d see a lot more parametric searching going on. Otherwise it’s a must-have where there are lots of attributes and large data sets (Home Depot’s products are navigated via this approach, again using Endeca).

Paula Thornton — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:50:57 GMT

A reference was made in comments above to checking out Euan Semple’s work at the BBC. You can do that and more at the location where the best collection of Enterprise 2.0 conversations are happening: www.fastforwardblog.com

Midway through this post there are references to Euan’s work and a link to a webcast (from an Enterprise 2.0 Rave) where the details of Euan’s comments can be gathered directly: http://fastforwardblog.com/2007/06/15/km-nerves-are-raw/

Paula Thornton — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:16:25 GMT

There have always been, three types of personas: actual, factual and fictional. Which you use is tactically determined based on a number of situational-specific factors.