Yesterday’s UIs required clever development and cool design. Today’s successful apps demand much more – an approach that requires us to integrate digital world with the requirements of the physical, from desktop to mobile. Personas can help with this endeavour, reminding us of the human need we’re working to improve, but as the industry continues to move into more Agile approaches, is this design tool still fit for purpose?

M

With digital strategy now embedded into their DNA, a new breed of business is rapidly evolving to meet the challenges of the vastly unknown and changing future of business.

This presentation highlights how the best approach to increasing capability in this space is through an understanding of people and their behaviour, rather than from a purely technology-driven perspective.

M

What either of the ISO standards don’t tell you is how to actually embed it into your work practices. What I’ve tended to do as a result, is interpret the ISO standard in terms of change management and get those from the business side of the project together with the people who will actually use the project’s products, in order to lead them through the change process that will, as it proceeds, gather their thoughts and ideas and help to frame them in such a way so as to:

• Contribute requirements to the final solution
• Help them understand the solution requied to make the project a success

I’ve discussed some of this approach in my last blog post, but I thought I would answer Erietta‘s question regarding how to get these people together.

The essence of this approach looks at combining the stages of the change management framework, ADKAR (awareness-desire-knowledge-ability-reinforcement), with the ISO standard.

The main reason I like ADKAR is that it is based on psych — the Transtheoretical Model of Behavioural Change by James O. Prochaska. Ultimately, it reinforces that there are several stages that people need to go through at both a cognitive and behavioural perspective in order to change. When aligned with UCD, ADKAR provides a rationale for raising the awareness of the project’s business owner and his stakeholders of the needs of end-users and, through a series of collaborative exercises typically employed during collaborative design workshops, prepare workshop participants for the solution that I understand will need to be put into place by giving them both the desire to fix the issue and the knowledge and ability to know how to do it. When this way of working has both the business owners/stakeholders and end-users in the same workshop the change that occurs is all the stronger because they get to hear the issues not just from me, but also from those who will use the end solution.

Recruiting End-Users

When I was working with CHOICE on their last website redesign (I’m very proud of the UX that I did for this website), we used Facebook to recruit people to our workshops. The people who joined the group in the first place were those who used the CHOICE website and would ultimately benefit from the end product of the redesign so they were interested in participating. If you go down this road it’s good to give them a gift to thank them for their participation.

We explicitly involved people internal to CHOICE with the workshops and what end-users said in the workshops provided a very powerful message regarding specific contexts of use, their requirements and the solutions they felt would meet their needs — both in relation to the information architecture and the user-experience.

Workshop Design

There are a number of things I now do both before and during workshops which I should one day present at a conference or something, but I might as well share them with you here.

1. Prepare data-driven Personas

You need to do your homework to know who the end-users are most likely to be. This will help you define the criteria for recruitment of external participants. You can get lots of data about user behaviour from sources like Forrester, Nielsen and (since I live in Australia) the Australian Bureau of Statistics. I make sure each Persona fits on an A3 page so it looks good when printed and I take those to the workshop.

Note: If you’re attending webdu2011 you’ll see much more of this in detail as applied to agile projects.

2. Pre-workshop Communication

Quite a few people are used to coming to workshops where everyone provides a laundry list of requirements. I find that the loudest people get heard and important things get missed.

I don’t run workshops this way and I let potential participants know that they’ll be doing a numder of structured exercises designed provide input into both requirements the solution.

I do a social network analysis (SNA) so that I know who are the power brokers and who are the people who are best connected within the project’s organisation in order to extend the workshop invitation to them. Even if they don’t come, at least I’ve given the opportunity to participate, be heard, and contribute.

Typically, all these people, including the ones the project’s business sponsor wants to invite (a good thing to do for the sake of politics), get an email invite. Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to also use a project blog to communicate what’s about to go on. Later, I also use the blog to relate a few bits of knowledge about research we’re doing, requirements and design outputs, and finally the outcomes of the workshop, final requirements and any final designs (or designs/prototypes as we undertake each Sprint if we’re working Agile).

3. The workshop

Tip: bring chocolate to put on each table of the workshop … it helps to increase people’s energy levels and makes them feel happy!

I like to use 4-5 groups in my workshops each with approximately 3-5 participants. This means I can have about 25 people in the room at once. The more participants per group the more time each group needs to resolve their differences and complete each task. The more groups per workshop the longer it takes for each group to present their completed activity to the other groups.

When people arrive at the workshop they normally sit with their friends. Because I want different opinions and ideas at each table and for people to have to work through their different opinions in order to collaborate effectively on activities, I just randomly allocate people to a group. It’s pretty easy, I just go around the room and give each person a number … 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 1 … 2 … etc. Once they get to their table I ask them to write their name on a sticky label so everyone (specifically me) can know their name.

Activity 1: Personas

Give one of the A3 Personas to each table and get them to write a list of the Persona’s wants, needs, issues & pain points. Note that wants and needs are very different. The way to think about them for the purposes of the workshop are that wants are about the Persona’s motivations, e.g:

“I want a car. I want a DB9“.

Needs are typically about an authority figure, professional, academic, etc, telling them the solution, e.g:

“You don’t want a DB9. You need a Ferrari“.

Essentially, people often know what they want (even if it’s unconscious) — it’s the thing that drives them and motivates them to look for content on the internet in the first place. If you’re going to lead them to your website you not only need to know what they want, but also provide them with the opportunity to find out what they might need once they get there.

I’ve recently addded a new secion into the Personas — trust of information sources. The research done by Edelman looks at how much trust people place in governments, NGOs, the media, etc. The research normally finds that people trust those who they identify as like themselves. I attempt to write some of this idea into the Personas’ narative, suggesting who they might look to for help, but most experts will suggest that experts are the msot highly trusted, followed by family, friends, etc. Those who are switched on, though, understand that one of the best ways to relate information and ensure that it’s most easily remembered by people, is to use a storytelling format that depicts a person in a situation that the reader can easily identify with. Edelman’s research is also a reminder that if you put a human face to content, a link to their bio, and enable end-users to interact with authors via discussion threads and/or comment sesions, the interaction is more likely to lead to identification with the author and build trust as a result. Overt symbols on a page of content, like rating, help to provide a filtering mechanism for readers that suggests how much others trust the source of information. Part of what I do as I walk between tables and talk to them about what they’re doing is to raise the awareness of these issues.

This activity extracts the context of the Persona’s issues and covers the ‘awareness’ part of ADKAR and begins to build requirements to help mitigate agsinst the Persona’s pain points resulting in a ‘desire’ (from ADKAR) to help them. I then start to provide ‘knowledge’ as I interact with each group, challenging their thinking, in order to help them more easily complete their tasks.

Activity 2: Card sorting

If you’re not familiar with this technique, the Wikipedia article on card sorting provides a good overview. Here’s what I do as an open card sort:

• Give each table a list of cards.
• Ask each table to take out the cards that they think will provide their Persona with information to meet their wants and needs. I use a sample of 200 cards and leave it up to each table to take out the ones they think are appropriate, get them to sort them into piles.
• Get them to label each pile.

From psych we know that the cards people take out of the pile and start to sort first will be placed on the left-hand side of the table (since Western culture is left-to-right writers). This typically represents the most important/valuable content and when you’re designing navigation should go on the top left-hand side of a page.

This activity attempts to get participants to identity with the Persona to the point where they can make an educated guess about what information (content) might meet their needs/wants. This covers the ‘desire’ and ‘knowledge’ parts of ADKAR.

At this point I get each table to present what they’ve done to the room — talk about their Persona, their wants and needs, and what information they believe will help them.

Activity 3: Channel preference

So how do each persona prefer to get their information? I’ve found leveraging Forrester stats in infographics on the Persona’s A3 useful for this activity. This part is also something quite new I’ve added to my workshop.

I get each table to use the Persona, their needs, wants and topics from the card sort to determine how best to deliver information and/or services to them. This is important because today with social media, wikis, twitter and blogs, there are more things to consider than just building a website [1]. I’ve used my web 2.0 channel cards quite a bit since creating them a year or so ago. I’ve now got versions that include a number of physical as well as virtual channels, including fridge magnets and face-to-face (I really need to update the download to include these new cards one of these days!).

Activity 4: Storyboards & scenarios

Now that each table has worked out the best delivery mechanism (channel preference) for content I get them to draw a scenario that depicts the Persona’s pain points and looks to describe their behaviour in seeking to meet their wants through delivering the information to them by the channel they’ve identified.

When I’m running a workshop with both stakeholders and users this is when the users start to tell stories to stakeholders about specific experiences. It’s great for expanding the ‘awareness’ of stakeholders because they are often so far removed from the people they serve that, alone, they rarely know specifics about context or scenarios. They are often so fixated on delivering their experience, and that their expertise is so superior, needed and valued, that they forget the wikipedia experience — that for most users “close enough is good enough”.

Once each table has finished their scenario, I get them to present it to the rest of the room

Activity 5: Collaborative design

I usually finish with getting each table to use their creative flair and create a web page, app or even set of fridge magnets (depending on the channel for delivery they identified) that appears in their scenario. Specifically, the labels they’ve used in card sorting must appear in the navigation of their design.

Most people just make a website home page. For the first time in my last workshop, people made an iPad app.

Once they’re done, each table presents their final work to the rest of the room. All the tasks before this one create the ‘ability’ to complete this task as well as similar tasks when they return back to their own organisations.

4. Champions

ADKAR promotes the use of champions in assisting change. In engaging people in the way I’ve described I create change agents who can then go back to their own organisations and relate what they’ve done, how they’ve participated and contributed their knowledge, and how it was used. They typically feel good about the experience because of all the sharing that has occured and the opportunity to interact with others in order to create a solution designed to meet the needs of others. They’ll also take back this new found ‘ability’ and apply this in their own organisations.

Overall, the experience tends to make them look to this style of workshop when it comes time to build their own websites.

5. Closing the loop

Getting closure is important for my UCD workshops. I relate that the task ahead for me is to take all of the disperate designs (which is obvious given everyone has produced different things) and create a single user-experience and information architecture. The job for my client is then to communicate when this is complete and provide people the opportunity to comment on wireframes and prototypes that are produced. This type of user acceptance testing (UAT) ‘reinforces’ that their effort has led to something tangible, that their contribution has been effective, and prepares them for the final delivery of the product. Typically, once they see it released, it’s sort of an anti-climax. This reaction is *exactly* what I’m hoping for because it suggests I’ve prepared them for that change and made them own it.

6. Additional workshops?

I’ve started to add one more workshop into the mix to further validate my concepts. I do use scenario-based testing and online (closed) card sorting through Optimal Sort as part of UAT. In my last workshop, though, I created formal storyboard elements and invited the partipants from the first workshop to create a user-experience for their original Persona based on:

• The storyboard elements
• Print outs of the wireframes
• Blank template cards of browsers, iphones and ipad/tablets

This workshop activity provides the original participants the opportunity to return and put into practice all that they learned during the first workshop and provide further feedback into the logic created to support end-users’  needs in context with the solution (wireframes) created.

Last thoughts on UCD

For me, UCD is much more than just getting users to create a solution to serve their needs. My experience tells me that they rarely think outside what they know. Leading them through a number of structured activities, though, helps me to provide them insight into the issues facing people today in meeting their needs through discovery of information and services, and helps my client and their stakeholders consider the people that their project is designed to serve. Throw actual end-users into the mix and you get some insight, but more over, provide everyone with the ability to contribute to the solution and educate them on how they might go about doing that.

Give it a try.

M

- – - -

1. In fact, a friend was talking to me the other day about a bunch of experts who felt people could benefit from their knowledge, so they decided that building a website was the thing to do. Often, unfortunately, its the wrong choice, particularly given that Google likes it when websites continue to have new content — it makes Google return to index it and means the website is more likely to be found when someone does a search.

Companies must become user-centric. But there’s a problem: It doesn’t work.

It seems that when you ask Apple about UCD, the answer is:

“It’s all bullshit and hot air created to sell consulting projects and to give insecure managers a false sense of security. At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.”

The reaction from the UCD Twitterarti, IMHO, was best summed up by this tweet from Marco Van Hout (@demandera):

Some then attemped to define what UCD was in order to dispel any missconceptions about the value of involving users, including articulating the alternatives — designing for systems or designing for the business.

Casting my mind back to IA Summit a few years back, the openning keynote addressed the same perceptions. It warned of believing in a UCD dogma that promotes it as a solution that will cure all ills. After thinking about these facets of the argument to use UCD or not to use it, my take on th issue was rather simple:

• UCD is about understanding your users – Apple understands who it is designing for. So does Ikea. They have lots of research on their attitudes, behaviours, capabilities and expectations and (tend to) design with them in mind. I know lots of organisations, though, who don’t understand their users. These places design without knowing that what they create might seem perfectly logical to themselves, but it unusable for the people it’s intended to be used by. The more insight you can gain into users’ mindsets, their needs and wants, the more value you can put into your designs.
  .
• Involving users isn’t a waste of time but an opportunity to engage, share ideas, and about change management – I don’t tend to use UCD workshops to actually *generate* ideas or gather requirements. If I did, I’d only end up designing things like Homer Simpson’s car.

  

  I use UCD methods primarily as a means of getting imporant stakeholders and end-users togther and provide a forum so they can understand the nature of the project I’m working on. This provides them the opportunity to comment on what’s going on in a safe and supportive way through structured design activities that everyone can participate in.

  That said, though, if I have formulated some ideas already I test and validate these concepts with users. Once in a while users do provide me with an idea or two that I can use. Recently, when I was doing some IA work, one user made the comment that online articles should have a place for references so tend credibility to its article. When I got back to the office I then added that space to the wireframes I was working on.

  In leading users through a focus on Personas, then onto Card Sorting, and then onto web page (or apps) design, I can lead users through the same steps that I’ve taken to create a design. More recently, I’ve built storyboards into the mix and get participants to begin to structure scenarios that depict Personas in the context of use of the products being designed. This builds an expectation of the end result and buy-in to my process. When the end result is shown to these users I have very little arguments about the final draft designs.
  .

• UCD is a philosophy — You could design in such a  way to ensure it’s very easy to code. You could design in such a way so that it suits the way the sponsoring organisation wants to support the product and focus on minimal risk and minimal cost. UCD is none of these things.UCD is just a way of working. Much like Agile is a philosophy for teamwork and focussing effort to ensure it adds value to the end product, UCD is not too dissimilar. It’s a means by which work focusses effort to maximise value to the end-user.

Yes, UCD is *that* simple.

Yes, Apple works this way.

Yes, Ikea works this way.

It’s not my expectation that UCD specifically elicits innovative ideas from end-users, but I do expect to use it as a way of working, a way of thinkin about users, and a philosophical approach to ensuring that work effort adds value to te final product that users will use.

M

“Yesterday’s UIs required clever development and cool design. Today’s successful apps demand much more – an approach that requires us to integrate digital world with the requirements of the physical, from desktop to mobile. Personas can help with this endeavour, reminding us of the human need we’re working to improve, but as the industry continues to move into more Agile approaches, is this design tool still fit for purpose?”

WebDU continues to grow more interesting each year, with three streams in 2011 — Beyond HTML, Experience and Team. While from my perspective the focus seemed to used to be on code/development, today the mix of designers, business analysts, experience designers, information architects and agilists, as both attendees and presenters, makes it a must-attend event for me as I continue to learn and grow in my professional life.

You can read more on the WebDU website. Hope to see you there!

M

“Agile has been the province for developers for the last decade. Designers, it seems, have only just caught up and are now learning how to integrate user-experience design (UX) into agile projects with concepts like ‘Time Travel’ and ‘Washing Mashine‘ in order to work ahead of sprints and stories. These methods, though, continue to create Waterfall-like divides with weak interaction points between design and development teams to create seamless, intuitive solutions. The result is a veritable clash of the titans — butting of heads, us vs them, designers complaining that agile is nothing more than a developers’ methodology and developers simply wanting to pair with users and get on with the job. What then is the solution? How can the imagination and mechanics engines of agile projects work in harmony?

“Matthew will relate his experience of a project run using the UX ‘Washing Machine’ method, Scrum of Scrums, the design and analysis collaborative methods employed, and its lessons learned. Moreover, he will relate how these issues created a need to explore a more effective means of collaboration and integration of ways of working that leveraged the strengths of UX user-centred design approaches with the power of Agile and Lean thinking. Specifically, the talk will include incorporating data-driven Personas into User Stories, creation of A3s from Lean thinking, and skinny documentation for traceability and sign-off gateways.”

You can comment on my proposed abstract to help me get a speaking slot by telling the organisers what you think of my ideas at the Agile 2011 website.

M

My presentation for Oz-IA this year.

For our ancient ancestors being social was a means of improving survival. Today, survival is often equated with our capability to filter and assimilate vast quantities of information from a plethora of channels. While developing usable IA solutions typically involves understanding this requirement our methods often only takes the perspective of the one over the many. This process is further complicated because IA solutions are approached from many perspectives – a visual designer approaches IA from one point of view, the interaction designer from another, and the programmer from yet another.

How then can we incorporate the needs of the crowd and yet still provide comprehensive information architecture for the one? How can we understand and even experience the solution that other practices posit to deliver a usable IA from all necessary perspectives?

M

Last years conference was outstanding with lots of new faces and a few cherished old ones. This year, we see the return of Alex Johannesen from Norway who first introduced me to the concept of semantic (topic map) layers in information systems design, Jodie Moule the Queen of Priming, and Matt Moore from the KM side of our community.

If you’re new to the concept of Information Architecture it is, to use the words of the rock star of the IA community, Jesse James Garrett, the practice of making information usable for people as opposed to information stems architecture or database architecture which makes sense out of information for computers. Whether you’re a web geek, BA, librarian or user-experience designer, this conference is not one to miss.

I hope to see you there.

M

While it’s one thing, though, to leverage social media in order to interact with stakeholders, people often forget that there are a number of other channels that need analysis also to ensure that, regardless of the point of entry, stakeholders receive a good user-experience.

This requires an organisation to not only have considered who is going to use social media to communicate with them, but also to follow these simple guidelines:

• Communicate consistently across all channels
• Align the channels you use with your stakeholders’ preferences — e.g. don’t advertise in The Age when you want to interact with Gen-Ys, for example.
• Ensure people have equal access to information through all your channels, e.g. call centres, sms messaging, telephone, mobile apps on the iPhone, mobile browsing, and print-media
• Ensure you communicate consistently with the same language — allow your information architecture (IA) to permeate all channels and not just to categorise the website
• Ensure that clients have a single view of you, your staff, and their interactions across all your channels
• Enable staff to interact, be responsive, and not just shuffle people off to another channel for information (personally, I hate calling a company only to have them tell me to go to the website!)
• Enable data to be collected through all channels so that you have a single view of your stakeholders/clients, not just a siloed view based on specific business interactions — this ultimately means allowing people to have profiles (and personalisation) that you can use to see behaviour and note behavioural change over time

Of course, ignore these guidelines and you’ll only end up with a siloed, inconsistent, fragmented approach to interaction that will only debit from trust relationships (remember Eldeman’s research on trust?)

The best way forward, therefore, is to take account of user-interaction design and user-experience design beyond the real of the website in a way that will take account of a single means by which you can build trust with clients and stakeholders regardless of the channel employed.

M

• A simple display when you arrive tells you how many parking spaces are available on each floor
• When you get to the floor a display hanging from the ceiling beside each row tells you how many free spaces in that row and the next row
• Lights above each parking space tells you whether it is vacant or not — red for occupied and green for vaccant

I know it must have cost a lot of money, but this simple system means that when I go to the Civic Mall I always go to this multi-story carpark. It takes away the hassle of driving around, trying to find a free space. For the owners of the carpark it means more revenue for them. This is the ROI of good user-experience design.

In essence, understanding users frustrations, expectations, wants and needs, and then incorporating it into a product or service, means alignment between what they want and what you’re delivering. A good experience simply means repeat business — business you take from your competitors. One problem I’m facing lately on some of my projects, particularly in government, is the question “why bother”.

I’ve heard the phrase “I don’t care about users” a lot recently and even “we’ll tell them what to do and they will do it”. This attitude results in a poor understanding of what users actually want or need and missalignment between expectations and what services government agencies actually deliver.

One example in particular comes to mind. One government program I was working with delivered an IT system that was simply un-usable by its constituents. When it came time for them to enter the data they were required to collect (for which they were paid) the users found the task very difficult and began to call the staff in the program area for help. At one stage the call volume was such that even the program managers were taking calls to assist users enter data. Paying users did result in an attitude “we’ll tell them what to do and they will do it”, but the program area simply wasn’t expecting that a poor user-experience would result in them having to do more work.

So what if it’s not a system that you’re developing? In areas of regulation, though, missunderstanding of users can lead, essentially, to non-conformance with regulatory environments simply through not knowing how to deliver information products in ways that end-users actually need them. Missunderstanding leads to non-compliance, breaches of codes and a greater burden on investigation activities. Paying attention to the experience had within stakeholder interaction is, therefore, vitally important.

• A good interaction with a citizen on any level produces higher level of satisfaction with services provided — essential for performance indicators.
• Understanding citizen needs enables products and services to be delievered that will actually be used. This means less waste.
• A consistent interaction over time builds trusted relationships. When entering negotiations with stakeholders and citizens over government programs trusted relationships are vital to acceptance for reform. The outcome is that they know you’ll have their interests in mind and that acceptance will come sooner rather than later.
• A consistent interaction relies on more efficient business process architecture across the organisation — one way of handling customers, clients, stakeholders and citizens, rather than one localised version for each business silo. Lean process engineering philosophies focus on achieving these sorts of outcomes through asking the question “does this add value to the end-user”. In essence, leaner processes mean a more efficient, smarter way of working. The return is the ability to focus resources where it counts.
• With trusted relationships comes a corresponding commitment of behaviour from both parties. Again, on the side of citizens (or industry in the case of government regulatory bodies) it results in more compliant behaviour and fewer complaints. The return is more time to spend on higher value activities, less money spent on investigations and breaches of codes of practice

Understanding users and delivering a good user-experience, one that aligns with their needs, is important regardless of the industry you work in. It might not result in return business and greater revenue, but trust is a powerful tool that has a number of flow-on effects that may not be evident unless you know where to look. If you know where to look, and how to measure it, then the return — the power to affect change and influence stakeholders — is quite substantial.

M

The issue at hand (putting on my psych hat) is that training only serves to equip people with skills but it does not change their behaviour. Ultimately, if any system doesn’t work in the way that people like to work, if they find it un-usable, then they’ll develop work-arounds so as to not have to use it. No amount of training will help in such a situation.

I’ve found this behaviour in numerous projects over the last decade. I recall one in particular where the business had a reporting requirement and asked its end-users to enter data on a quarterly basis. End-users delivered the data in all sorts of formats — Excel, tables in Word, faxed paper reports, and even written by hand and posted. I was asked to help deliver requirements for a web-based system that would deliver a more streamlined process of collecting the data.

I employed a user-centred design approach, one very similar to the one that forms part of ZenAgile, and what I found was rather interesting. When I incorporated analysis of end-user behaviour — wants, needs, attitudes and capabilities — I discovered that while the business wanted a reporting system the end-users wanted something to assist with their business management. As I proceeded down this path of analysis the underlying user behavioural reasons why reporting was so hard from a business perspective became obvious.

Firstly, I documented each of the user types as a Persona. This is technique that documents an archetypal representation of a user type on a single A4 piece of paper.

I then began to collate the users’ requirements and noted the following themes:

• There was no governance for quality control of reporting — so people just did what they felt was the minimum with no one to really enforce a standard quality for reporting
• There was no knowledge framework — so no one understood what they needed to do and how they needed to do it
• There was no universally accepted way to do reporting — so people just did what they felt would be acceptable

What I didn’t have, though, was a good way to represent these issues. So, I developed the “Want Map“.

A Want Map is a tool that takes the needs and wants of Personas and groups and categorises these human-centric issues visually with each of the speech bubbles starting with “I want …”.

I’ve found it a powerful method of showing project stakeholders what the human issues are so that:

• Risk strategies can be put into place
• Pain-points can be addressed by new system features resulting in higher-levels of system adoption and ease of transition to business-as-usual
• A higher level of traceability is had between users’ needs and system features
• You don’t have to write ‘the system must be usable’ as a system constraint (non-functional requirement) — you now know exactly how to make the system ‘usable’ through creating system features that support the issues in the Want Map

Ultimately, using Want Maps gives me specifics regarding how to align the end-user, human issues with the business requirements to produce a more ‘usable’ system. For this project in particular, I could begin to state requirements like:

• The system must deliver support for end-user processes (for example, in this case, managing the budgets of their programs)
• The system must collect data ‘invisibly’ based on end-user behaviour in day-to-day business processes
• The system must collect FAQs (a knowledge-base) to help all users know what to do and when
• The business must create and reinforce a governance framework to help assure a high-quality of data is collected

For those engaged in Agile projects, Want Maps ultimately assists in transition of users’ needs/wants into Story Cards as the first part of sprint planning.

Overall, Want Maps are now part of my ZenAgile way of working. When collecting requirements for your project using Want Maps will help enable your project to focus on the user as the beginning of the project which results in all activities being aligned to Agile and Lean philosophies — ‘does this add value to the end-user’.

M

Where is that damned dragon?

Originally uploaded by magia3e

I don’t often get the chance to do some graphic design, but felt that my roleplaying website was overdue a graphical refresh. So I took some time over the weekend to mockup the next iteration of the website.

Would be interested to hear what you think about it.

M

“The iSlate name originated from a trademark filed by Slate Computing, LLC, an apparent shell to obfuscate Apple’s ownership of the name for … its tablet computing product. ” – gdgt.com

iSlate.org have collected a number of patents now registered and conceptual images that point specifically to a slate device without keyboard at two sizes — 10″ and 7″. Overall, the rumours point to a device that appears like a large iPhone, will function something like the Apple TV with respect to music and multimedia capability, and have access to an iPhone-like store for specialist applications.

Archos has already created an internet tablet based on Google’s Android software …

… and Microsoft’s latest tablet prototype, codenamed Courier according to rumours, is a tablet that looks more like a book with two 7in multi-screens side by side.

It’s great to see these devices come of age. I’ve used a tablet PC as a replacement for a standard laptop for two years now and will never buy a normal laptop ever again. The combination of the ability to write using my own handwriting in applications like OneNote (possibly the greatest Microsoft application ever made) and then switch into normal laptop mode to write documents, create prototypes and use typical business-type apps makes for an awesome machine.

It saddens me, though, that Apple seem to be limiting itself to a niche market with an iSlate that does little more than extend its existing product offerings in multimedia and fails to deliver something more substantial like a tablet Macbook Air (which could do with being converted into a tablet rather than just being little more than another lightweight, underpowered, and under-featured notebook). But I guess we’ll just have to wait for a month or so more to see what they end up delivering.

M

M

Last year I delivered about a dozen conference presentations. One was in London, quite a few in Sydney, some in Canberra, and a handful in Melbourne. A few times I’ve also asked about financial compensation for the conference and have also been told, like Darren:

“we’d be happy to give you free entry to the conference but don’t have budget for speakers.”

I’ve always found this response a little strange given they make money on the conference by charging people to come — people who come because people like me are presenting. Now I do get a lot of networking value out of most conferences, but I attend to help other people in my profession by relating some of my own experiences. I don’t peddle my wares and I don’t do a ‘sell job’ for the company I work for. That’s not what I think people have come to hear and I consider it in bad taste when happens. They’ve come to listen and learn and hopefully be entertained in the mean time. I go and speak, essentially, because I feel loyalty and an obligation to the professional communities I belong to as one of their thought leaders.

So how much does it cost me to speak at a conference anyways?

• The company I work for typically charges about $2000 per day consulting rates for my services. Conferences are usually two days and I stay to add as much value to the conference as possible and its attendees. As an employee that means my organisation is loosing $4000 for me to go to a conference.
• The ratio from delivery-to-preparation is typically 1:10. I never just redo a prezo. I always customise the content to ensure its aimed at the right audience. So a 1hr prezo equals about 10 hours prep time.
• I do my own video which mixes up the presentation medium and keeps it interesting for the visual people, and while the audience seems to like it it tends to take a day to produce
• Then there’s airfares — about $300 for a round trip to Sydney or Melbourne if I fly Virgin and get in on the cheap fares early enough
• I fly in the night before so I don’t have to wake up at 4am to catch the first flight out of Canberra and spend the whole presentation yawning in front of the audience … so there’s a couple of hundred dollars accommodation expenses as well

… that works out to be 6 days effort @ $2000 … and then $500+ for flights and accommodation … that equals $12,500 per conference … and if I did 12 conferences last year … that’s about $150,000

As Owen Kelly wrote, responding to Darren’s post:

“Asking you to speak at a conference where the payment is ‘free entry’ is like asking a band to perform at a festival with ‘free entry’”

And this from Justin Locke:

“that whole ‘it’s great exposure’ argument is classic . . . we all make errors and occasionally get used by such people”

And, lastly, this from Drew McLellan:

“… just like if someone wants to hire my agency — my expertise has been hard earned and worth something”

Yes, I do love to present. Yes, I do love to share my knowledge with my peers. And yes, I consider it a privilege to travel around to the other side of the world to do it. But if you think someone is worthy enough to come and speak at your conference and lend their considerable experience and expertise to your audience then please show them you care. Pay their accommodation. Pay their travel expenses. Buy them a gift worth giving (not just a 128KB USB thumb drive). Buy them dinner. What ever you do treat your presenters with the respect they deserve for giving up their time to help your business. In the end, it’s them that results in your conference being a success or failure.

M

Here’s my tips for doing your own storyboards:

1. Do your personas first. This way you’ll know, even at a basic level, who the people in your stories will be, how they think about their work and their behavioural attitudes.

2. Put the persona into the scenario: From the persona’s perspective describe their thoughts and actions as they try to undertake the actions required of the scenario. This is where the user stories written on your agile story cards meet your personas on agile projects.

3. Stick to a single scenario: You’ll be tempted to start to include a whole range of other things in your storyboard. Just keeping it simple will help. The only rule is that the storyboard must be logical and tell a user’s story from beginning to end.

4. Stick figures are ok to! Many people shy away from storyboards because they think they can’t draw. But if you can draw speech bubbles, thought clouds, and a stick figure then you can draw storyboards. If you draw some hair on the stick figure then you can differentiate between Steve and John — which is very useful when one user in the storyboard is, for example, sending a message to another because then you need include both of them in the story.

5. Include thoughts and feelings: It’s easy just to describe the logical sequence of events. The story becomes more personal, though, and thereby more real, if you include thought clouds and speech bubbles. This will ultimately mean people will be able to identify with the story and thereby make your storyboards more effective.

6. Post-its and pens: I always use storyboards because I can do it in a moment’s notice with a Sharpie and post-it notes. This makes it very easy to swap post-its around, draw new ones, until I get all the logic right.

I then take a photo of the storyboard sequence (everyone has a camera on their phone these days) as a baseline and take the post-its into a workshop where I validate my logic by comparing it to the way users’ sequence the elements.

If necesary, I’ll then take the storyboard and convert it into a workflow diagram in Visio as a communication of the user-to-system interactions that helps to clarify use cases for the BAs and developers … but that’s a blog post for another day.

M

Web 2.0 and Workforce Planning: Why an understanding of how people work in a modern, web-savy workforce, is important to the survival of your organisation.

M

1. Do we need standardisation?

I’ve heard a lot of organisations over the last decade proclaim that standardisation brings certainty and a level playing field to the market. It is suggested that it means an instantly recognisable criteria for recruitment and measurement of skills along with which comes measures of market values and salary. It also provides a means by which trainers can make a living. The principle of standardisation is a good one, but unfortunately when ‘owned’ by a professional organisation it becomes hard to adapt and change as the professional community begins to move in different directions and takes on board new techniques and tools from closely affiliated disciplines. One only has to look at the Scrum movement to see how some areas, like traditional project management, have become unable to incorporate ‘agility’ into its methods. It also means professional bodies may be turning away the very people who are able to transform their organisations. Take Information Architecture, for example. The president of the Information Architecture Institute during 2008, Eric Reiss,  has no formal qualifications in IA yet is regarded as one of the organisation’s most brilliant thinkers.

In the end, standardisation by a professional organisation only serves to reinforce normalisation, the status quo, within its organisation, ensures that its members can memorise and recall off the tops of their heads in an exam situation the principles that the organisation adheres to (e.g. the IIBA’s version of business analysis, or PRINCE2′s version of project management, but not your own thoughts on project management), and thereby stifles growth and innovation by the very thinkers it should be seeking to engage.

2. Do we need definition?

Again, we just need to look at project management to see what definition does to a profession — it fragments it. This is the time old problem with taxonomical classification that goes back to the time of Aristotle — definition means classifying what a thing is and what it is not. In relation to professional organisations, what follows is that people will either identify with that definition or will not. If they don’t identify with how you define what they do then they’ll look elsewhere or create their own group. We only have to look to project management organisations to see what definition has meant for their profession. Now we now have many different flavours of what projects manager do, from PMI and PMBOK, PRINCE2, to MSP and most recently P3O. The Business Analysis community is not immune either, with an American-made international body called the IIBA and an Australian one called the ABAA both with their own ideas as to what makes a business analyst and what does not. Which one is the One True Faith? Does it matter? I always look to Jesse James Garrett’s essay IA Recon when debating the need for definition by a professional organisation for the sake of its professional community:

“Definitions based upon the role tend to creep naturally toward broadness. Because the responsibilities that correspond to the role vary so greatly from organization to organization, the definition of the role (and thus the discipline) grows larger and larger.

“The opposing approach is to define the role based on the discipline. Whatever the field of information architecture is, an information architect is the person who specializes in it …these definitions tend to creep naturally toward narrowness …but when this definition (intended for the discipline) is applied to the role, it creates for some the fear of being ‘boxed in’, trapped in a role so narrowly defined that many of the elements essential to the success of any given architecture are outside the control or influence of the architect.”

For me, personally, this is how I feel about where Business Analysis is headed. That BA is being so  “narrowly defined that many of the elements essential to the success” of business analysis is starting to become outside my control or influence. And I hear this often from PMs who claim that it’s not a BAs role to do X or Y, and I’m starting to hear it from the ABAA who suggest that business architecture has little to do with being a business analyst.

3. Who owns the body of knowledge?

Once you create a publication you can sell it and make money. When it comes to creating a tome of knowledge, capturing it as a book and selling it turns knowledge into a commodity for which there are gatekeepers. Someone must decide what is of relevance and what is not. The logical decision is to reach back to a definition and a standardisation to choose. The result is a subjective call, not an objective one, as to whether an individual, or a set of empowered individuals consider to be worthy of documenting. This is the gatekeeper version of knowledge management, rather than assuming that collective knowledge resides within the community itself and changes and evolves over time.

Again, I’ll take a leaf from the IA Recon and note that “only by being generous with our knowledge can we reap all of its benefits. And only by creating a culture in which these principles are fully embraced can we foster the growth of our field, and ensure our continued success.” Peter Morville goes further to say that community is of equal value, that a profession’s role in order to evolve is to take the role and discipline to those who undertake similar activities to aid them with their work. I’d like to suggest that knowledge for profession is the intersection of all the areas of role, discipline, and community.

In essence, knowledge must be an emergent quality of all three areas, not prescribed by a professional organisation or described by a select, powerful few. This is what makes wikis such a powerful medium for sharing knowledge , either within organisations or by the public. To me, therefore, we need professional organisations to support the community and through the community influence role, discipline and knowledge.

This means we don’t need professional organisations to define the community and all aspects of the profession, but support the community to explore and influence the aspects of role, discipline and knowledge that are of relevance to them.

Hopefully, food for thought.

M

When the Project Management Institute (PMI) was established in 1969, the world was a different place. Baby boomers ruled the landscape and knowledge was power. The model of spend money to join and we’ll give you access to our professional Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) seemed like the right business model. Today, with Baby Boomers nearing retirement and Gen-Xs and Gen-Ys being the predominant workforce demographic, is the ‘buy now before you know our secrets’ business model likely to work?

The world of the internet means knowledge is free and is a resource to share — this is what Gen-Ys in particular believe and demand. We have Wikipedia that holds the worlds knowledge as a result — much more than the ‘professionals’ would ever put into standardised tomes of knowledge like Encyclopaedia Britannica for example. Academics blog about their research so they can share it with others immediately rather than waiting for a peer review process that can take years. Professional bodies like the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) turn to wikis and blogs to share their knowledge freely. In this landscape, though, professional communities of practice like the IIBA continue to adopt PMI’s 40 year old business model. Their self-professed experts create what they believe to be the definitive body of knowledge in much the same way as Encyclopaedia Britannica is written. In fact, the president of the IIBA defined business analysts as people who did what was inside the BABOK, and defined the BABOK as the body of knowledge for business analysts …. the definition seems rather circular, no? They the IIBA asks you to join before you can see what a business analyst is or does. So I can only know if I’m a business analyst by reading the BABOK? What if I do something different to your definition? Am I no longer a business analyst?

Where’s the value proposition in this business model? Where’s the community in that?

Typically, when I twitter about these things, members of the IIBA immediately jump on me. I even had @IIBA_Australia suggest that asking to read the BABOK without becoming a member or buying it first was like going to a book store and asking to read a book before buying it. Strangely enough, that’s exactly what you can do. You can always take a book off the shelf, read it a little, see if you like it, and then buy it. And if you go to Borders you can order a coffee and sit down and read it.

Jesse James Garrett in his essay IA Recon posited the issues of community, definition and discipline back in 2002. It had a profound effect on me when I first read it only 2 years ago and shaped the way I now feel about these professional communities and turning into a not-for-profit business what is rightly the job of the community not the professional body. Definitions change over time. Practices grow and evolve. Disciplines overlap with others in messy ways. But it’s always the people themselves who need to consciously or otherwise make that decision. To the IIBA and other bodies who attempt to ‘own’ this knowledge and definition I say this (in a tone that reflects my rantiness about this whole issue of course):

• Open your so called bodies of knowledge to the community. Let the community contribute directly. Contribution engenders ownership and shared ownership builds trust and trust builds communities.
• Let the body of knowledge reflect the community’s direction, not the one you’d prescribe.
• Stop defining and prescribing the profession, the role and the discipline. Your efforts only serve to alienate the very people who you should be encouraging to join your communities.
• Start sharing your knowledge openly and freely. Become mentors and thought leaders, not gatekeepers of the BABOK.

M

ps – as a rant, so as to not incite riots and flame wars, comments and trackbacks have been disabled on this post

I’ve been reviewing an organisation’s business analysis capability these last few weeks, so I felt that rather than do a standard interview, I would get people to do a priming exercise instead. I simply asked them to create a mind map — a collage of words and pictures — to describe themselves and their personal feelings and experiences in relation to their work environment.

Each person’s A4 page was quite different. Some approaching the task from a completely creative perspective, some logically setting out and categorising their thoughts and experiences. Some used colours. Some just used black pen on the white page. At the beginning of the interview we discussed their A4 page and they explained each of the different parts they had created. It was a surprising insight into their work context and revealed much of the emotion they feel — their pride in their job, their work conflicts with other areas, frustrations with process, and their relationships with their colleagues. After this discussion, we then went through the standard questions. Even through these I felt that the personal exercise had openned them up somewhat, their responses were a little more personal, a little more emotional, and a little more honest than I would have normally expected.

When undertaking any form of analysis of people and their context I can see priming as a tool I will continue to use — whether in order to create a good user-experience as an Information Architect or just as a consultant eliciting requirements and creating a business solution for a client. In the end, it’s all about helping people and if we can gain a more holistic understanding of them I’m all for that!

M

Delivering the keynote at this years Oz-IA was the first time I’ve used Prezi. If you’ve not heard of Prezi, it’s is a new online presentation and mind-mapping product that they call the ‘zooming presentation editor’. It runs in a browser, but you can download a desktop version that is powered by Adobe Air so it will work on both Mac and PC. A friend at ISKO Conference suggested I use it and then I saw a colleague use it at BA World Symopsium. It looked like an interesting tool to use so I thought I would just give it a try.

Learning to use Prezi

Prezi was pretty easy to use and learning the basics only took me about an hour. Unfortunately, learning how to best resize things, place them, add images, and then tell Prezi to follow a specific path, and make it all look good, took me about a week.

Prezi uses a unique interface that sits in the top left of the window and rotates and zooms to the item you select. Because you can always see all the options identifying what feature to select is pretty easy, rather than having to delve into a deep navigation structure like Photoshop (I still get lost in its navigation even after some 10 years of using it). By simply selecting the ‘place’ icon you can move, resize, and rotate it with ease with your mouse. When the presentation comes to that item, or when you select it, Prezi will automatically zoom to fit that shape to its window. Obviously, learning the right size is critical because you don’t want to give people motion sickness with all the zooming in and out and around the presentation.

The good

• When done well it looks awesome! It certainly made the right impact in delivering the keynote. The very first question someone asked me was ‘what software did you use’?
• It has undo!
• It doesn’t take long to use, but it takes a week of use before you’ve got the nack of making it look great
• There are a few templates to start you off with colours, fonts, and three levels of headings

The bad

• It can look a bit gimmicky
• There are only a few, non-editable, templates — I’d like more please or at least the ability to make my own and then edit/modify the headings, fonts, and colours
• You can’t group objects, so moving around a collection of objects and then re-sizing them is a terribly painful manual process
• You can’t create your own template or clone a presentation, so you’ve always got to start from scratch
• Once you’ve got an object — a pic or a video — inside Prezi there’s no way to export it to use it elsewhere
• You can only embed swf or fla video files — this meant I not only had to edit my file and export it as divx or wma (which is what my normal working and production files end up as), but then find a tool that would convert it into an fla. Sure, YouTube uses fla, but given how widely divx is now used I was surprised it wasn’t supported 
• It crashed on ‘undo’ once the filesize got to around 80MB (by then I had embedded about 3 videos)
• Resolution of images can suffer a little when you import them
• You’ll give people motion sickness if you zoom in and out and around too much
• You need to have a creative flair gene in order to make it look any good
• No ‘save to’ feature. That means when I work on my desktop (my nice powerful dual quad core Mac Pro running Vista) to do all my editing I then have to sync the presentation online, and then download it onto my laptop in order to take it with me and tweak in the few hours leading up to a presentation. Once the file gets pretty big this process can take some time to do.
• It only works with some presenters. I had a Targus presenter with laser pointer and an SD card slot for recording, but it didn’t work. Luckily, it did work with the Logitech presenter I gave to my friend Mia so all was not lost!

What I’d like to see — My Top 5

• More video support — especially divx and wma
• Finer motion control — so I can control the rate of acceleration and zooming
• Export objects — so I can have greater reuse of the Prezi
• Grouping of multiple objects
• Create/edit template

Is Prezi for you?

Now that I’ve done two presentations in Prezi I think it’s more a design tool and not really a replacement for PowerPoint. For people who have difficulty with PowerPoint and use slabs of text this is not the tool for you. For those of you with lots of design flair and know how to pace a presentation with both graphics and text then this tool could be for you.

M

What: NSW Public Sphere: Government 2.0

Where: The Theatrette, Parliament of NSW

When: 4 September 2009, 7.30am to 5.00pm

And just for the occasion, they’ve asked me if they can use my gov2.0 YouTube video that I created for the ACT Chief Minister’s Department. However, I figured I’d just create a new one just for them . . .

M

Where: StarCity Hotel & Casino

80 Pyrmont Street, Pyrmont NSW 2009 Australia

When:

Friday 2nd to
Saturday 3rd October
at the StarCity Hotel & Casino, Pyrmont NSW 2009

The website is close to up and the program is already being finalised. Here’s their Wordle picture for this year’s prezos!

I wonder if you can see your proposal in there!

M

• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).

Source: Nielsen, 2006

This comes originally from Hill, Hollan, Wroblewski & McCandless’s research [1] that suggests user participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule. Nielsen goes further to examine a number of online behaviours:

Usenet [2]

• 2 million messages
• 27% of the postings were from people who posted only a single message
• Most active 3% posters contributed 25% of the messages

Causes app on Facebook [3]

• 25 million users in April 2009
• 185,000 users gave a donation, even though the application offers the ability to give to 179,000 different non-profit organisations
• Suggests 99.3% lurkers and 0.7% donation contributors

An analysis of statistics of types of online behaviour from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), however, paints a different picture [4] of Australian adults [5] who are online:

• 26% publish a blog/web page, upload music and video at least monthly
• 35% post ratings on a product, comment on blogs, contribute to a forums, edit wikis

Traditionally, these sorts of behaviours would adhere to Hill et. al.’s concept of involvement and engagement but don’t adhere to his 1:9:90 rules. Futhermore, it fails to recognise the wider range of activities and behaviours that people can now undertake in modern online Web 2.0 environments. For example:

• 16% of Australian adults who are online use RSS, vote for websites, and add tags to content, from video to photos
• 45% of Australian online adults maintain a profile on a social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn — an important aspect of allowing newcommers to online communities to understand who makes up that community, enables them to identify with those people, and determine whether or not they want to interact with them. Without this type of activity occuring it is likely that other types of online interaction with communities would not be possible (or would at least be significantly reduced)
• 63% are just spectators — those who typically read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video, read forums and ratings — again important behaviours that encourage continued creation of content by the 1.8 million of Australians who create content. I know that without these ‘spectators’ and the views I get on my own photos on Flickr as a result I may not be as motivated to contribute my content.

Proclaiming the 1:9:90 rule, therefore, without an understanding of the variety of roles, behaviours, the relationships between them, and the actual statistics, dooms us to a view of the world that social media will only be attractive to a very small proportion of citizens online. But given there are 11.2 million Australians currently online (out of 16.4m), and a whopping 8.5 million who do use social media at least monthly, I think the future is rosier than this 20 year old rule would otherwise suggest [4].

M

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1. William C. Hill, James D. Hollan, Dave Wroblewski, and Tim McCandless, 1992 “Edit wear and read wear,” Proceedings of CHI’92, the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, CA, May 3-7, 1992), pp. 3-9. 

2. Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, and Lynn Cherny, 1998: “The dynamics of mass interaction,” Proceedings of CSCW 98, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Seattle, WA, November 14-18, 1998), pp. 257-264.

3. Hart, K and Greenwell, M, 2009. To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green: Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising. 22 Apr Online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html

4. Analysis of ABS cat no.  8146.0 and ABS cat no.3201.0

5. According to ABS definitions, adults are those 18 years and over

Where to start?

An understanding of the following is a good starting point:

1. User-centred design – it’s all about them, so you might as well design around their needs
2. ISO13407 – Human-centred design processes for interactive systems
3. Jesse James Garrett’s ‘Elements of User Experience ‘
4. An Agile mindset is a bonus — ZenAgile, FDD, XP, Scrum, Lean — which puts the ‘user’ and ‘value’ at the fore of the project

What qualifications?

Information architecture does have a lot of theory and science behind its application, even though some may consider it more of a discipline involving design.

1. Library science
2. Psychology – both the cognitive and behavioural aspects of information categorisation, information discovery, memory
3. Information science
4. Linguistics – and we can’t forget language, how its used, why its used, style, and form

There are a few Masters of IA at various universities, including Australia and the USA. However, just having a qualification doesn’t necessarily mean you’re any good. I know certified PMs who are terrible PMs.

What experience makes the grade?

Variety is the spice of life for many IAs I know. They tend to beg, borrow, steal ideas, tools and techniques from many other disciplines. The result is a sort of collage of practices that all result in them being able to expertly elicit requirements of information design from those who will use the end product and document it in a way that has most value to the project’s stakeholders.

1. Experience with web design (from HTML to CSS), navigation design, user-experience design, visual design, data architecture, database design, topic maps, conceptual design, solution engineering, usability engineering
2. Experience producing paper prototypes, HTML prototypes, wireframes, taxonomies, metadata thesauri, logical data models, mind maps, business classification schemes, site maps, personas, card sorting, storyboards, business process (re) engineering, , usiness process design
3. Experience with workshop facilitation
4. Experience in working with a multidisciplinary team — PMs, BAs, UXDers, developers, enterprise architects, and end-users
5. Stakeholder liaison and negotiation

Overall, IA as a profession continues to evolve. It’s not something that seems to ever stand still. As such, keeping in touch with the IA Community is of incredible value. They love nothing more than to share their ideas and experiences, particularly those who may not call themselves IAs but undertake tasks that involve information architecture. Ultimately, this means that my idea of information architecture may be quite different from others perspectives. All that I know for certain is that it’s a great profession to be in!

M

1. Group Design

Design each group so they have some similar needs and some very divergent ones. Using an example project that participants can relate to will help set the scene for their choice of cards. When I last ran this workshop I had three groups with different needs and different agendas — the project delivery team, the project’s leadership group, and the project’s strategic stakeholders.

2. Choosing cards

Each group gets all 30 cards and $10 to spend. The members of each group simply need to work out a way of negotiating amongst themselves as to how they will decide on what cards will meet their needs in accordance with the scenario.

3.  Getting all groups together to negotiate

When my own three groups got together they had to work as a single group to determine what cards they would keep. I did this unfacilitated and simply left them to work out how they would go about this themselves. I could have left the room, but I wanted to see what negotiation method they used and their decision process as individuals and as a group for their final set of cards. They could have chosen to vote, or they could have just argued about whose needs were more important and ended up with no result.

In her comment, Daniela asked suggested swapping cards like kids to with footy or baseball cards might be a good approach. This is definitely a good idea as you would see what cards were highly valued by specific individuals. In this instance, though, you would probably need to give each group a subset of the 30 cards, a complete list of all the cards, and then have individuals go out from their groups to interact with other people from other groups, and swap cards to get a final set. It’s a technique that I might use next time!

If you’ve got any ideas on how to use the Web 2.0 cards, or any experiences with similar tools, I’d love for you to share them with us. 

M

The current gossip on the Apple Tablet:

• Marketed somewhere in the $699-$799 USD range
• 10″ screen
• Wireless connectivity similar to the iPod Touch, with the ability to download media through iTunes
• Touch screen similar to the iPod Touch and iPhone — a graphics pen for writing, though, would suit me more
• Available in September — just in time for Christmas — although some speculate arrival as late as October
• Possibly made by Asus
• It may not have a keyboard, acting more like a slate, as per the iPod Touch and iPhone

Media PC? Gaming device? It’s a pity that this tablet may just not be the tablet I thought it was going to be.

M

During the start of the workshop exercise individuals showed a preference for Web 2.0 tools. As the exercise progressed, and participants began to work more cooperatively, individual’s tended to retreat from their original choices to a preference for more traditional means of building knowledge and communicating, that is, through use of Word documents, face-to-face meetings, and email. This behaviour is called “Group Norming” and is typical of the social psychology of group dynamics [1].

Essentially, participants adjusted their behaviour to each other and the task by withdrawing from their personal opinions and realigning them to the expected rules, values, professional behaviour, shared methods, and working tools often seen in public sector organisations. Even the taboos, for example, operating in an environment where all material must be vetted and controlled, began to creep into the selection criteria of tools within the workshop activity.

These observations suggest that while there was a readiness to begin to explore Web 2.0 tools with the organisation, the wider organisational culture was not yet ready for these to be used as a standard means of sharing knowledge, communicating or building trust in people and their work-outputs. This observation was reinforced by the final count of the features of the tools selected – a preference for tools that support knowledge first, followed by communication, and those that can be used for enhancing the social aspects of the organisation, trust and team cohesion, were considered a much lower priority.

Ultimately, the cards worked perfectly. I got some great feedback on some cards and have already formulated some ideas on how to improve them.

If you use the cards, please share your own experiences with me (and everyone else) so I can continue to improve them.

M

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[1] Tuckman, B. 2001. Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin 63 (6): 384-99

“The talks come as Apple is separately racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution. The device could be launched alongside the new content deals, including those aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project.”

I do love my Toshiba tablet. And I find the 12″ screen about the right size — not too big (to be portable) and not too small so that you can’t do Photoshop or Axure prototyping work. It might only have an ultra low power Dual Core processor, but it seems to do the job pretty well with Vista. But I did want something sexy and Apple always delivers those goods. The build quality, the design, the aesthetics are all reasons why I bought my Mac Pro Cheese Grater. Now I’m starting to drool over what might be just around the door.

Screen size: “may be up to 10 inches diagonally”, touch sensitive (of course)

Wireless connectivity: Same as the iPod Touch, with the ability to download media through iTunes.Kindle Rival? May provide the ability to read books, creating a rival to Amazon’s Kindle.

Launch date: By Christmas, possibly as early as September.

Will I give up my Toshiba for the Apple? I think we’ll just wait and see whether Apple deliver the goods or not … and then, of course, I’ll just install Windows on it like I did my Mac Pro

M