Enabling User-Centered Navigation

Organizing site navigation based on user needs versus based on internal organization structures is a major step towards creating an effective user experience and enhancing findability.  However, it can create some security/ownership complexities.  This is why organizations rarely bother doing it.  They might understand the benefits to their audience, but they can't stomach what is required to think through these complexities or how to support them.  They would much rather align their content to their internal departments, so they can simply apply security permissions using people from within those departments.  Practically, it can be very difficult to both a) organize content based on user needs/tasks and b) use departments to define content ownership.

In researching this dilemma, I came across some great articles from Step Two Designs:

• Why are intranets structured like the organizational chart?
• Escaping the organization chart on your intranet
• The "all together" rule for intranets
• Establishing an intranet community of practice

Based on these articles and my own experiences, here is a practical approach I would recommend to clients:

1. Identify just a few key roles from each department that will be responsible for content authoring/review
2. Fill these roles with real people (this will change over time as people leave, change roles, or the organization is restructured)
3. Create a 'community of practice' made up of these people and an intranet manager
4. Train the members of this community: a) get them intimately familiar with the task-based organization of the site (what goes where & why it is important); b) grant them fairly significant content authoring access (they need shared ownership of the site content); c) help them understand the implications of their raised security permissions (risks & responsibilities)

So, move forward with that site redesign.  Maybe you already knew that you should organize it based on user tasks, but now you know how to make it happen!

Sketchy Wireframes

I really like using a sketchy visual theme for wireframes. They purposely convey a feeling of roughness. Incompleteness is actually a good concept to leverage when you still have mockups to build later.

Microsoft Visio may not be the best tool for wireframing, but it suffices. To make it even better, Henrik Olsen and Niklas Wolkert built some fantastic templates and sketchy "shapes" for Visio.  Jonathon Abbot created an additional template that improves upon this work. This template combined with the Hand of Sean font (or some of these other web designer fonts), can create great results. I have posted my own Visio file as well.

UPDATE: Per Jonathon's comment, I am now giving proper credit to Olsen & Wolkert.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Presentations & Spreadsheets web sketches

Windows Live Writer

This is my first time using Windows Live Writer.  My friend, Tom Pierce, recommend it to me.  I was reminded of it when I installed Windows Live Messenger, so I'm going to listed to Tom for a change [wink] and give this a try.  In a way, maybe it'll give me that disconnected medium that Radio UserLand once attempted to make prevalent.  We shall see, won't we?

Boutique Dashboarding

Recently, I received a question from a colleague that I found to be particularly stimulating from my point of view:

I have a client who is currently looking at OBIEE and BOBJ (Xcelsius) dashboard solutions. The client recently became aware of another dashboard tool from Adobe called Flex. Do you have any experience with this tool? Do you have any precautions or considerations around leveraging this simplified and substantially less expensive solution?

I do have some experience w/ Xcelsius and a lot of recent experience with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (at my current client). I don't have any direct experience w/ using Flex to build dashboards, but I'm very intrigued and have been meaning to learn more about it.

Lately, I've been turned off by the big players in this space platforms. They make good sense for large enterprises w/ varied business & technical needs, but I continue to get very frustrated by their limited data visualization options, their bloated architecture, inefficient code, and inflexible customization options (for both data visualizations and web presentation [CSS, XHTML, ...]). In turn, meeting the client's business requirements becomes increasingly difficult. I discuss some of these challenges in my presentation on Effective Dashboard Design.

Alternatively, I'm intrigued by the "smaller" & less expensive options. Their high points are the contrast for the low points of the big boys. They don't spread themselves thin by trying to solve every possible problem. Instead, they go deep on what they do best, offer a wide variety of customization options, and allow themselves to be plugged into other clients/platforms (web apps, portals, even office apps like excel). Instead of trying to be the be-all-end-all, they just become plug-able components to a larger architecture. That makes them easier to absorb/invest in, besides the fact that they are cheaper, too. In addition to Xcelsius and Flex, I'd also add the follow to this genre: Google Charts API, Dundas, Microcharts, Juice Analytics, Prefuse, Open Flash Chart. At one point, I'd include Alphablox in there, too, but IBM has buried it since its acquisition over 4 years ago.

The biggest hurdle for these cheaper options is probably distribution. Especially if the tools being leveraged are Excel-based (plugins, macros, hacks, ...) like if the physical dashboard being distributed is just an Excel file. Part of the reason the collective enterprise moved to the web is because it solved a massive distribution and maintenance issues. The thin client removes the need to figure out how to publish new files and/or get software updates required for the thicker alternatives.

I don't buy the "support" argument (e.g. big software vendor "X" has better support than these small niche shops). It sounds like a repeat of a portion of the Firefox vs. MSIE argument (e.g. security patches depend on the desire of a so-called disorganized, unaccountable set of freelance developers vs. a large organization w/ the experience, know-how, and funding to provide sufficient levels of support). Smaller organizations are typically more open, nimble, ready, and willing to respond to all their customers (both to support requests and ideas for new features)...and their user community is better connected and more willing to share learnings. When it comes to support issues, I've enjoyed dealing on these "smaller" scales than waiting for someone to pick up my support request of a bloated and bureaucratic queue.

That being said, you might always feel more comfortable investing in a product from a large vendor vs. something else, for the simple reason of long-term viability. There are no guarantees in life, but the big boys aren't going anywhere. However, this is probably another weak argument, because eventually, even the biggest of software vendors will sunset support for the product you invest in today. Software life spans are incredibly short no matter who's name is on the box.

So, I say go for it. At least go through a trial period and use it to prototype/POC something. If you don't end up using it for a production app, at least the prototype can serve as a requirements gathering tool. I'm a big proponent of high-fidelity prototyping, which is very difficult to do for BI applications. I haven't done this before, but toolsets like Google Charts API might make high-fidelity prototyping more of a reality in BIPM solutions.

By the way, if you want specific feedback on Xcelsius, check out this discussion on Stephen Few's blog.

Effective Dashboard Design

I presented a topic entitled, "Effective Dashboard Design", to the Refresh Dallas group last month. I have uploaded the presentation slides to SlideShare, added the audio from the speech, and embedded it below. I hope you find it to be an informative and interesting topic.