What The Thompson Twins can tell us about intranet management

…or how to cheat when trying to assess stuff from design agencies.

In the late 70s - early 80s, I was living in Edinburgh and was a serious music fan, in between occasional studenting I went to see a lot of bands, maybe 3- 4 every week. Many of them were amazing, local bands like Josef K, Fire Engines, Scars, The Associates, The Visitors, The Freeze… and also touring bands like Joy Division, Magazine, Pop Group, Fad Gadget, Birthday Party, The Cramps… I could go on…

But one thing I noticed is that I was useless at spotting which bands would later have success. I once saw a band called The Young Marble Giants who I thought were just gorgeously life-affirmingly special… a band that never troubled the compilers of books of chart placings. They were supported by a band I thought of as wretched, obvious and talentless; The Thompson Twins, soon to be Smash Hits and TOTP regulars.

I’ve been going to see bands for well over 30 years now and I still can’t spot a winner.

I’m better at spotting good intranet designs, but only because I cheat by having a short mental checklist of things to avoid. All intranet managers should have such a checklist for rejecting things that are probably a bad idea. Quite often you will be asked to judge a site based on sketchy details from a design agency. A pdf of a screenshot or a few pages of ‘greeked’ text so that means you have to cut corners and play the odds.

Here’s another comparison: movies - I’m useless at spotting box office success too - if a movie stars Chuck Norris, it’s a safe bet I won’t like it, my checklist then -my heuristic- is that it’s not a good movie if Chuck is in it. Now maybe I’ll be wrong one time in 100 - and I’m not saying that this tells us anything about that movie’s popularity - but it’s a good rule when there are too many good movies and not enough time.

Here then is my checklist:

1. Will it be easy if I need to add or remove something?
2. Is there a page heading about one inch down, one inch in?
3. If I screw up my eyes so I can hardly see, does it look balanced (define balance how you like).

And that’s it really. There are other things I’ll look for in a finished design, valid HTML, semantic markup, headers in sentence case, alt attributes in images etc, but they can be fixed.

The first point is maintainability. You will have to change that design… A real red flag is Flash used as navigation - I know its possible to do this well, just as theoretically it’s possible that someday Chuck Norris makes a good movie. But the flash navigation sites I’ve seen are usually a maintenance headache and an accessibility nightmare.

The page heading thing is basically to cover what I think of as predictability. Every time you click something the most common thought nearly everyone has is ‘ did I click the right thing’ confirm that (by a page title that explains the page) and you’ve won half the battle.

And the screwed up eye thing, well - not sure what the point is, but it seems to work.

Could I have used a checklist to tell if other people would like a Chuck Norris movie - or indeed the Thompson Twins?

Yes and no, I’ve weeded out the dodgy stuff, but I need to now pick the best stuff. The next thing to do is define a “persona” of a person that likes movies with Chuck Norris in them and work out how typical this persona is to my overall audience. For an intranet site I need to think about what typical users know, what their goals are, what else they use. A lot of this stage is less about overall design and more about arrangement and organisation and content creation. Define your personas, check they are accurate representations of your audience, check your personas can achieve their goals. Oh and don’t give them silly names.

But personas and their users stories aren’t a magic bullet see this discussion (via Phillie Casablanca, esp Kerry’s comment - cheers!) you eventually need real people giving you real information. I mentioned the Thompson Twins, I first saw them as a raggle taggle sub scritti politti band… but a year or so later I saw them again, supporting David Bowie. They still sucked, but I could see the rest of the crowd liked them, they had radically changed into a glossy electro-pop confection, they were getting very good (if you like that sort of thing).

The key point here is they evolved after they launched… I don’t know how difficult it is to work out you need to change if even the 50 or so people who saw you supporting Young Marble Giants one rainy night in Dunfermline, and who look like the sort of people to go see almost anything, still think you suck.  But they did work out they should change, and did. Intranet site ‘hand offs’ happen too quickly too often, the site is launched the same day the development guys finish, but you are going to get the most, and best, user information in the first couple of weeks you launch, especially if you don’t have a public beta have a development period that covers the period after launch. Use that period to improve your site, improve you personas and re-write your user stories.

Summary, in case you can’t be bothered reading all that stuff about CHuck Norris and obscure welsh post punk groups.

1. Assess design quickly based on maintainability, predictability and the screwed up eye thing.
2. Define user personas and their associated stories, optimise the site for them.
3. Get it out there and be prepared to fine tune it often during the post-live launch period.

No chance of a Thompson Twins link - sorry, but here’s the Young Marble Giants.
Despite having little success in their lifetime the were pretty influential, Kurt Cobain liked them a lot and Boards of Canada / Ghost Box owe quite a lot to them. This is ‘Final Day’ the sweetest song ever about the end of the world…

Give me a reason to love you

Agile software development is a collection of principles about the development of software.

It’s much discussed and has many enthusiasts and detractors, I’m fairly keen, though I am concerned about the usability of the output; that’s been much discussed too.

A long time ago I came across a book which suggested that the principles of software engineering (at the time mainly a linear process called “the waterfall model”) could be applied to website design, and suggested that this be called “media engineering” - I liked the book a lot, but the concept never really caught on.

I guess it didn’t catch on because the majority of people involved in internet / intranet production come from a different background and didn’t want to go through the rigours of formal software engineering processes just to get some web pages created. But also because formal software engineering methods didn’t have a good reputation, they were slow, bureaucratic and failed to deliver, so suggesting they be applied to web site design felt a bit like suggesting in 1969 to the newly formed Led Zeppelin that they wouldn’t be successful unless they followed the techniques of the previous years best selling artist - Engelbert Humperdink.

However software engineering has changed since then and there are many great ideas for ways of working that are ripe for re-use by intranet managers.

Here is my first stab at suggesting a few things an agile intranet manager should do:

Agile intranet management

What will agile intranet management look like?

1. Much shorter design iterations. Have reviews of content every month.

It need not be - indeed it should not be - an extensive analysis, merely a trawl through available information to find out if anyone can improve anything. You want to answer the question: “What problems are people having and how can we fix them?”

2. Don’t talk to users, observe and measure them.

Agile methods use many techniques to remove themselves from the old ’statement of requirements’ built-in-stone binding agreement that is out of date before the software is finished. You need to measure (automatically if you can) how successfully people can achieve their goal when using your site. You only get that information once you have something out there and working, so get something out there quickly and lead the folks using your site to help you improve it.

For instance, if you have a ‘help’ or a ‘FAQ’ or a ‘feedback’ or a ‘contact us’ link, get rid of them. (A lot of people like FAQs, but I think they are an admission of defeat - the goal is not having people asking questions frequently!) Instead have a link saying ‘Can’t find what you want? Tell us’. This is very similar to the agile software development discussion about not listening to users (via Jermoline / FND ). Never ask your users (and especially not ‘key stakeholders’ “What do you think?”.

Agile intranet management is going to be important, as more and more social and collaborative techniques make it into the enterprise. The reason for this is that these technologies require the user to actively want to use the features or the system fails, being obsessed with end users and delighting them is the only way they can work. When it comes to ”social/web2.0/collaborative” platforms agile software development isn’t agile enough.

Which leads to the choosen pop music to go with this post. The new Portishead album P3 is fantastic, but the title of this posting is a quote from Glory Box from their first album ‘Dummy’, and if you’re searching for a manifesto for the agile intranet manager, then forget the cluetrain, all you need are the lyrics of Glory Box.

“we’re all looking at a different picture,  through this new frame of mind, a thousand flowers could bloom, move over and give us some room”

 

Give me a reason to love you indeed.

How to solve the ‘make it less boring’ problem.

Actually, I’d really like folks to contribute this time, I’m getting an OKish hit rate of about 20 a day (I’ve not publicised this blog much and I won’t until I build up a few more archives) but getting few comments. C’mon folks feel free to chip in.

The ‘make it less boring’ problem, is the most important thing facing any intranet manager. At conferences it regularly features as the most common moan. I’ve suggested before that its such a problem that you should go to great lengths to avoid letting people make the comment. And the reason it’s a problem is that almost always, the knee jerk fix is to make the site worse.

Things you could do to make a site less boring:

• reduce the text so that the good stuff is easy to access
• refresh the content regularly, with a newsdesk or even a blog type feature
• split up the text and use ‘pull quotes’ to aid scanning
• measure the efficiency of typical users finding the information they want and prove the site isn’t boring at all, merely efficient.
• Have little interactive elements such as ‘coffee time quizes’ (but its a fun quiz not an exam!)

Things you shouldn’t do to make a site less boring:

• Add a flash animation - or any type of animation
• break long pages into smaller ones with a next link- we’ve all worked out how to horizontally scroll thanks
• Replace text with images of text

I could do with more user stories here from intranet managers - how did you solve the ‘make it less boring’ puzzle?

The musical piece I’m adding to this is the only you tube track I can find from the mighty Rothko. Its not at all boring.

Rothko were originally a group of three bass players, using this restricted line up the provided several amazing albums of lush and staggeringly beautiful music. Indeed I wish I hadn’t used the phrase ‘restricted line up’ because it wasn’t. But they did get lots of critical comments about why not add vocals and a drummer and a kazoo player… Mainly from people who didn’t notice that it didn’t need those things and adding them would have made the music less special.

Here’s a link to their first album on emuisc

What I wish I could make rule number one for intranet governance.

Intranet governance is a curious activity, basically you are trying to set generic rules that apply in too many different situations. Trying to apply a one size fits all regime to too many sizes. It’s all done with the best of intentions, you want to make all the users, the consumers and contributors to work to best practice.

But you also need to make the rules objective, to have a checklist and tick the boxes.

The rule I really wish I could make would be ‘Don’t be annoying’.

That’s it. I’ve no idea how to put this on a checklist, how to objectivise it, how to get an automated process to evaluate it…

But in my head it’s rule number one. Don’t make me watch a flash animation you put on the site to make it ‘less boring’, don’t make me hunt for a submit button because you stuck it in the wrong place, don’t make me see an error message because you mislabelled an input box and I failed to work out what to put in it, don’t make me put in information that you don’t really need, or put it in twice…

Anyway - as I said, its pipe-dream, because it’s too hard to be specific, and what annoys me might actually help somebody else.

And that leads nicely to Joanne Newsom. Responsible for one of the best gigs I saw last year, where she played in full the stunning full orchestra version of her ‘Ys’ album at Glasgow City Halls. Joanna has a voice that sounds like cats doing it. Part child, part mad old lady… and to many people, very annoying. But not to me,  her albums and EPs are near the top of my desert island discs and when she did this version of a old Scottish ballad as an encore in Glasgow it was just sublime.

Treat concepts imported from the external web with caution

We all need to be careful thinking that emergent Internet behaviour will also work within an organisation. We should, of course, examine such emergent behaviour and use it where we can, but it’s important to dig deeper and try to spot if the different environment means that different rules apply.

I’ve mentioned before that I think wiki’s need ‘managed’ and that the unforced organic growth seen on Internet wikis is problematic, it’s just too wasteful if the contributor resource is limited. This seems to tie in nicely with JPs pearl analogy. Sure, natural pearls are better than cultured ones, but cultured ones are better than fake pearls or no pearls at all. And natural pearls are rare.

Another Internet concept in web design to be careful about is stickiness.

Stickiness really means trying to manipulate a user to stay on a particular site. When done crudely it means sites didn’t link to other sites, or ‘windowed’ other site’s content. It is a very bad idea, and it’s thankfully less common than it used to be. If your site doesn’t have what someone was looking for the best thing to do is to link to something that does, you get the props for directing people to the info they want.

We’ve come a long way from crude ‘pop up’ tricks, but there is still a desire for stickiness - the motivation for a site provider is that you get the ad revenue and the ‘eyeballs’. Sites like facebook and myspace are quite sticky, but sites like YouTube have learned a better way, allowing embedded content rather than forcing you to go to you tube and navigate down.

On an intranet, the desire to be sticky needs to be resisted, the desire is still there, departments want the credit for the content they provide, and can be slow to add in features equivalent to You Tube embedding. Ask people not to use ‘open new window’ links (it’s stupid in the days of tabbed browsers anyway) never use javascript links to control the users browser, encourage cross divisional linking, and encourage RSS or data feeds for applications. I know there is still a lot to be done on the usability of applications, but the next wave of collaboration activity needs to dealt with in applications too. Stickiness is the enemy of collaboration.

My pop music choice for illustrating this is one of my all time favourite tunes. It’s a very curious song. One of the last songs produced by the maverick producer Joe Meek it has a haunting tone, the ‘neediness’ in the voice is nearly pathetic (just like over controlling stickiness in a web site!), the instrumentation is heavily treated, like its being heard from some ghostly dancehall, and the vocal style - is that a lisp of poorly fitting dentures?- adds to its charm. 

the first thing you should do when you become involved in intranets

The first -and best- thing you can do when you first become responsible for an intranet site is to get connected to any support groups for people with disabilities within your organisation.

Obviously it’s just the right thing to do, to ensure that your intranet supports everyone within your organisation, but there is an added benefit; the usability dividend.

You should seek out people who have limited hearing or vision or who have restricted mobility and find out what problems they are having. This is also a great way of revealing problems that all users will be having and driving up the quality of the intranet.

And don’t forget cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia, here’s a great article on the problems people with dyslexia face. Ensuring your intranet is written well enough to support user stylesheets means that it has good semantic markup, so you may find your search engine works better for everybody.

Intranet managers often get bogged down with ‘the governance model’ or trying to prove abstract values like ‘employee engagement’, but underlying all that is always resolving the basic question ‘what problems are you having’ and that’s something worth fixing, especially to people who may be having significant problems.

Wanted! Does anyone have a good example of a Dyslexia friendly user stylesheet that works well with IE6?

I wanted to keep adding in pop music oddities, and its tempting to tie this particular song into comprehension problems…

I loved this song when it came out, in the long hot summer of 1976 - hope you like it too.

What Althea and Donna can teach us about developing websites.

Recently, watching an old clip of the late 70s one-hit wonder ‘Up Town Ranking’, I said to my partner that I preferred Althea to Donna. I just thought she had a nicer voice, especially the ‘ooo’ bit as they repeat the title. My partner usually ignores my pontification about pop music, but this did bring an exasperated retort; “No one else in the world, when hearing Althea and Donna, try to analyse which one is the best, and anyway what do you know about singing?”

It’s true I can’t sing a note, but just as I was framing a reply in my head to prove my knowledge - quite extensive knowledge actually- of 1970s female reggae vocals, (take sides! Janet Kay or Susan Caddogan?), I wisely perceived that this was a debate I would lose by the mere fact I wanted to have it and my partner didn’t.

Asking people what they think of a website leads to a debate you can’t win either.

Within an organisation you are usually asking a senior manager, or key stakeholder ‘what do you think’ - in other words you are asking someone who won’t be an intended user an unstructured question about which, really, they aren’t skilled enough to answer. If you were deploying air conditioning would you show them the blueprints and say ‘well, what do you think?’, or a complex legal policy document and ask them is its OK?

Maybe it’s because people are so familiar with websites they think they are experts.. how hard can it be?

So my only advice is to never get into a position where you are asking an open ended question - sure, ultimately you’ll have to make your decision makers happy, and you should find out what makes them happy and then swallow your pride and make them happy, but as a professional you need to lay the groundwork, explain how the site is brilliantly optimised to deliver business benefits and so that cool gimmick they saw on another site isn’t appropriate. You need to do that before you ask them what they think.

Oh and the next song on the TV was The Proclaimers… I kept quiet.

While you were sleeping.

My favourite tune from last year was ‘While you were sleeping’ by Elvis Perkins.

http://www.elvisperkins.net/site/music.shtml (click on song title)

There are a couple of reasons it stood out; it’s structured very unusually, starting with minimal instrumentation, and slowly adding in more and more instruments, it builds into a great complex layered piece of music that is endlessly enjoyable to listen to, following the melodic threads as they work together.

The impressionistic lyrics list the things that can happen while you aren’t paying attention, from mundane domestic events to the world spinning… and even more powerfully words that seem to reflect Elvis’s own life (’my fathers widowed wife’…’reaching for the plume of smoke’…’were you falling or were you flying’). A quick google should find what I think this refers to. Oh and don’t let the name put you off, it is his real name.

Of course, I can’t resist making this into some analogy about intranet design.

I was thinking about this when I was listening to the this week in tech podcast. Leo Laport had some ‘A list’ web pundits on. Jason Calicanus and Robert Scoble. Some of the recent tech company mergers were being discussed, and Leo, Jason and Robert enthusiastically speculated about yahoo, audible and the rest and then the 27 million dollars funding for etsy was mentioned. Etsy is a really interesting site for crafters selling their goods, it is miles better that eBay and seems a step forward in how we use the web for interaction… Jason and Robert has no comment to make on it though (I felt like they kinda smirked about the ‘crafters’ and couldn’t wait to get back to talking about stuff that was for them).

Similarly, I’ve been waiting in vain for the usual web pundit suspects to start talking about Ravelry. Ravelry is Facebook for people who knit. Now I’m not a knitter, but what Ravelry does that is that it optimises the social interaction around things people are actually doing, and this means it builds up a collection of knowledge by doing so. It’s not a wiki, it’s better than that, as a technique for engaging people to contribute to the common information space it’s the best model I’ve seen and should have direct implications about how we all use social technology in the enterprise.

The 1 minute accessibility check for the busy intranet manager.

This check isn’t comprehensive but it will cover the most common problems. As a bonus, fixing an accessibility problem usually helps everyone using the site.

1. Take your hands off the mouse.

You’ll have to use tab and shift-tab to move through the page, and press enter to select a link.

What this shows: If people with restricted visibility or mobility can use the site.

Embedded flash, especially if the flash has a navigation elements, will probably fail unless the flash designer has been very smart (IE is actually better than Firefox at working with flash and non mouse users).

Usability dividend: It shows that there is a good logical navigation scheme in place.

2. Switch off your speakers.

Mainly applies to things with embedded multimedia, or flash. Is there alternate text or transcripts of videos?

What this shows: If people with hearing difficulties can get the information they need.

Usability dividend: Transcripts are searchable and an audio track isn’t, so if there is useful info in an audio track always have a transcript anyway for returning visitors. Many browsing situations - open plan offices for instance - mean audio is probably a bad idea anyway.

3. Print a page with the printer set to black and white.

What this shows: If people with limited ability to distinguish colours can use the site.

Usability dividend: Colour is not as good as you might think for conveying information, particularly icons next to text, if something is important the best way to highlight it is to separate it from the other items.

4. Click the labels on form elements and check it moves the cursor to that input element.

What this shows: If the form has been properly coded for use with assistive technology.

Usability dividend: it gives a much better target area for radiobuttons and checkboxes, so it makes the form easier to fill in.

5. Read out loud only the link text on a page.

What this shows: If the linking text makes sense out of context so that the link summarisers feature in talking browsers will work

Usability dividend: Using good link text helps scanning users pick the right link.

So what use is this test? Well, you know if have a problem or not, this check catches 99% of all the problems I’ve seen, and gives a good hint about what to look at more closely.

It’s also a check you can do on any browser. If you want to do a deeper analysis, (the five minute check!) then try the following, you can get browser extensions to help you do these ones - more details on that another day.

• Check with images off
• Check with javascript turned off
• Load a user stylesheet
• Validate the HTML.

And if you have the time for a thorough and systematic test then read WCAG 1 priority list and also ask folks with a range of difficulties if they can use the site OK.

What can Lesley Gore teach us about intranets?

Lesley Gore’s body of early 60s teen-drama girl-pop may seem a curious choice for an intranet web design guru. But before you check up the usual Neilsen’s and Krugs, you might just find that listening to her The Essential Collection is all you need.

Her best known song is ‘Its My Party’

It’s a heart rendering tale of, erm, some bloke going of with somebody else, and this is an important lesson for web designers, namely that you’ll never get the girls at parties… No actually its not that lesson I want to mention, its that your customers, the departmental heads and ‘key stakeholder’ project managers will be emotionally attached to their web site design and will not be making the best choices. But, you need to be careful applying cold logic (and appeals to Saint Jakob) aren’t persuasive. Its their party and your job is to listen to them not to point out that Johnny wasn’t much of a catch anyway. I don’t know why its so common for people to think they know about web design and demand that people much more knowledgeable than them make some beginners mistakes, but it seems a common phenomenon,

There is more is Lesley’s ouvre than Its My Party though, here insanely perky ‘Lollypops’ should be on a constant loop while your users view your site… OK maybe not…

Lesley Gore - Sunshine, Lollypops and… (Link to video on ‘Daily Motion’)

This song really is on insane side of insanely perky. You can almost feel your teeth decay as it’s sugary sweetness envolpes you… Its just way too much of a good thing and thats the lesson here, don’t over do the good stuff, its just unpleasant.

One last teen anguish mini soap-opera

Sing it quietly to yourself sometimes…