A Matter Of Degree

Balance Your Media Diet, or Who Has Nine Hours For This Stuff?

Over the weekend I was looking at Pam Dyer's "65 Terrific Social Media InfoGraphics."  There's a lot of thought-provoking material here and I highly recommend checking it out. 

There was one infographic in particular that I couldn't get off my mind - it stayed with me for a few days until finally I had to try to exorcise it with this post.  It's "Balance Your Media Diet," about halfway down the page of the full post.

I'm totally behind the graphic's base concept - based on the familiar Food / Nutrition Pyramid, it's simple and spare, nicely designed, and I love the idea of having a Recommended Daily Allowance around all the different kinds of media we're consuming/producing every day (although I realize this infographic represents the reported average rather than a recommendation).  (Original below - click to enlarge.)

 
 

However - NINE HOURS PER DAY?  Who is this person?  Does he outsource a lot of tasks like housecleaning, cooking, and lawn care?  Does he have kids?  (Even half a kid?)  Does he work from home?  Or if he goes to an office every day, does he have his monitor turned away from the entrance to his cube?

I couldn't resist the urge to update this infographic for my demographic, based on what I know of my friends' and colleagues' usage of current media options as well as my own.  Below please find a version specifically tailored to Thirtysomething Working Parent in the Northeastern United States (again, click to enlarge):

 

If I'd had the time and artistic ability I would have liked to represent the individual with a female rather than a male.  Note the "lack of time" theme reinforced in that last sentence.  Note also, all the sneaking.   That would be an interesting dimension I'd like to overlay on this graphic - overt vs. covert usage, as well as willing vs. unwilling usage (I'm thinking here of the TV monitor over the gas pump that blasts the "news" while you fuel up). 

Just needed to get this out of my system - thanks for reading, and please feel free to drop a comment about your own media usage - does it reflect the original pyramid?  Mine?  Something different?

 

Dispatch from SharePoint Saturday Boston - Afternoon Sessions

If you missed SharePoint Saturday this past weekend, the organizers are posting the speaker decks here on the front page of the site and as meeting resources to each of the individual sessions.  We had great turnout for the event and I want to sum up the experience with just these three words:  learning, connecting, fun!

In the last session of the day, I had the privilege of co-presenting with Chris McNulty of KMA on Data Visualization in SharePoint 2010.  You can view the presentation here on Slideshare.  I talk about this subject because I truly believe in the value of using an enterprise intranet or portal as more than just a document repository - it should be a dynamic system that pulls together content and data from the entire organization, and presents it in ways that make the business not only more efficient but more innovative and insightful.

The session just prior to ours, presented by Mark Miller and Derek Weeks, provided some excellent data on SharePoint use within the organization.  The session was entitled "Survey Results:  How is your company using SharePoint?"  They presented the answers to seventeen questions (you can read more about the genesis of the survey here, see the Slideshare presentation here, and download the full report here) and asked for an audience show of hands before each reveal of the survey data, which made for a really fun and interactive session. 

One of the questions in particular highlighted how little companies are currently leveraging their business data in SharePoint.  Here's the question and the responses:

How do you expose legacy or other application data to your SharePoint users?

Access data through separate native legacy / application interface - 31%
SharePoint Data is integrated into a different system and pulled by users from that system (i.e. data lives in sharepoint, is consumed by other systems) - 9%
Access all legacy and new data through a single, integrated user interface within SharePoint - 11.33%
External data currently not available - 41.00%
Other - 7.67%

Let's just take a look at that graphically, shall we?

 

See that large purple area on the left?  That is one big missed opportunity, where end users can't access business data at all.  And if I understand the question correctly, the large blue area represents a similar opportunity to make end users' lives easier and expose or integrate that data in SharePoint rather than making them use two separate systems.

I'd love to hear more from folks on either:

1. how they are currently visualizing data within SharePoint, or

2. how they aren't but would like to be. 

Please feel free to leave a comment here, or contact Chris or me directly if you have any questions about the presentation, or about bringing business data into SharePoint in general.  We'd love to help!

SharePoint 2010 - Global Navigation Tabs wrap!

I have been working with the beta 2 release of SharePoint 2010 for a few weeks now, and just today realized what I was seeing:  the Global Navigation tabs now wrap when there are enough top-level sites that they don't all fit across the width of the page!  No more scrollbar when you start to have "too many" sites!

 
  
When I think of all the client requests I received about this, and the custom development I saw implemented to achieve it, I'm very happy this is a feature of the new version - although the dark side of this is that folks may now be tempted to leave good Information Architecture principles aside and build top-level sites to their hearts' content.  I think the dreaded homepage scrollbar of MOSS 2007 was a major factor in keeping top-level tabs to a minimum, as well as keeping the names of those tabs short and to the point, neither of which is a bad thing.  With more freedom to build and name sites without the penalty of making the page too wide, site admins may be tempted to stray from the generally recommended 4-8 top-level tabs and potentially cause usability problems (especially if drop-down navigation comes into the mix).

But enough governance.  Global tab wrapping is a seemingly small but often-requested piece of functionality that ultimately makes SharePoint 2010 a more flexible tool.

How the Apollo 11 moonwalk became a tagging and records retention tale of woe

Stepping Onto the Moon's Surface, originally uploaded by NASAImageoftheday.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, and this morning's NPR story "Houston, We Erased The Apollo 11 Tapes" is a classic tale of tagging, search, and records retention policies (or lack thereof). The article and broadcast are really worth a read/listen, but to sum up:

The original recording of the moonwalk was not in a format that was compatible with television, so the recording was converted for the TV broadcast in 1969 - and degraded in the process. Engineers knew there was a better-quality recording from the camera on the moon, but for years they couldn't find it. They had to search a vast repository of content using much-used terms like "Apollo" and "tape." It turns out that the recording was most likely recorded-over due to NASA's increased need for magnetic tapes in the 1980s.

This scenario makes me think of my clients - many of whom have expressed to me, in the process of converting to a SharePoint implementation, the notion that "any content over five (or three, or six, etc.) years old is worthless." I understand the concept - policy and regulation changes, business and market trends, and fresh research and information all change the relevance of older content. But as the NASA story shows, you may not realize now what's going to be gold in 40 years.

If you're managing content (and who isn't, whether on an organizational or individual level?), do you have record retention policies in place to expire content after a certain time, and if so, are you notified to check the content first, or is it automatically deleted? Are you at risk of having files erased due to exigencies like lack of storage space? Are files backed up on a regular basis, and if they are, could you restore those backups successfully? Have "delete" permissions been given to those who may not fully understand the importance of the content? In your search results, are the "gold" files getting buried under layers of more recent sediment?

NASA invested time and resources to restore and improve the quality of the recordings they did have, since they couldn't access the original. While you're pondering these questions, you can see the video here. (Personally, I'm a fan of the grainier original look; by removing noise they've flattened out some of the detail, a metaphor to explore another time...)

And a nod to you conspiracy theorists out there - pretty convenient that they "lost" those tapes, eh?

Visual Display of Information in a Restaurant Menu

20090606 - Alinea - Menu, originally uploaded by sadalit.

This weekend I had a Restaurant Experience where the menu was such a good example of the visual display of information that I wanted to share it.

To give some background - the restaurant offers two fixed price menus - a shorter "tasting" and a longer "tour," plus wine pairings for each. When you're seated, you are given a wine menu but no listing of the food courses. As each dish is brought to the table, the server describes the ingredients as well as how to approach the dish. We found ourselves wishing for a printed guide, because each time, a few minutes after the server left, we weren't able to remember the full list of what was in the dish. In addition, as the evening passed, we wanted to know how far along we had progressed in the tour, and we heard other diners asking the same question. The servers were happy to provide any information we wanted, but we definitely felt the need to have the map in front of us. (The "how far along am I?" question seems to be a basic human need - software installations, surveys, and overseas flights usually provide an indicator for this, and I've heard a recent convert to the Kindle talk about how he misses the clear and obvious way to tell how far you've come in a printed book just by seeing the relative thickness of the pages on either side of the bookmark, even though Kindle books have a status bar at the bottom.)

At the end of the meal, we learned the reason for no map before the tour - we were each presented with a custom printout of the menu we had experienced, including the specific wine pairings we had chosen and at which point they had been served. My dining companion had had to stop the tour several dishes before the end, and her printed menu ends where she stopped. (I would argue that the restaurant could provide both - generic map before and specific after.)

To get to my point about the visual display of information - the circles in the menu (see image) represent the portion size, and their location on the page represents the predominant flavor - savory on the left and sweet on the right.

I'd love to see other information represented here too - for example, prep time, or how local the product is (the source of the ingredients was emphasized throughout the tour). Colors and/or shading could be used (although I understand how the monochrome ink fits the overall design scheme of the restaurant).

As a side note, an idea I had as we progressed through the tour was that the dining table, rather than being black-painted wood, could be an interactive surface (in keeping with my the-future-is-a-table theme) where before each course is brought out, the areas of the table on which the dishes will be placed could light up in the exact footprint of the dishes. There was obviously a great deal of thought and creativity put into the design and variety of servingware; it would enhance the experience to see a sneak preview of the upcoming dish (or dishes) by seeing its unique outline lit up moments before the dish arrives. After the dishes are removed, the diner might have a few minutes to touch the outline to bring up information about the dish (not available before the dish was placed, of course) and even enter comments.

Key Points from The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda

Maeda's SIMPLICITY, originally uploaded by Pretz.

I just finished reading The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. It describes ten "laws" and three "keys," two of which I found particularly striking and relevant:

Law 6 - Context - "What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral."
To illustrate this law, Maeda describes a meal he had at a friend's apartment, where all the furnishings and surfaces were white. When the meal of sushi was served, the bright colors and interesting textures of the food stood out in clear contrast to their surroundings, and Maeda's friend told him, "The taste of this meal is affected by the room we sit in." Maeda expands this notion to doing work - "The 'taste' of any activity we face might be mixed in with the distaste of the clutter of our desk. But coincidentally the uplifting smile of a nearby child can sometimes help us to tune out any messes at hand. Being attuned to what surrounds us in the ambient environment can sometimes help us manage what's immediately in front of us. Synthesizing the ambient experience of simplicity requires attention to everything that seemingly does not matter."
For me, this law captures in words the experience of doing project-oriented work as a consultant. Customers hire my company to achieve a specific goal, and I go in to meet stakeholders, gather requirements and start building toward that goal. In a statement of work it's all pretty basic, but in the periphery of my time with the customer, so many factors affect the work:

• The other demands and constraints on the time of the resources I need at the client site
• The financial health of the company (e.g., recent layoffs and the threat of a second round)
• The general level of training and tech-savviness of the end-user community
• The degree of cohesiveness or dysfunctionality of the customer's IT team
• The work space (nice conference room or storage area?)

I could go on, but it's enough to say that I'm happy to have found a concise way to sum up all the complexity around building straightforward, usable solutions for the client.


Law 10 - The One - "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."
This one applies to life as much as to work, and is self-evident enough that Maeda only spends a page and a half on it. It's a great ruler by which to measure any effort toward simplification.

In searching for an image to illustrate this post, I found this bonus bit of advice (which as a quote returns no results in Google and isn't specifically tagged with its keywords in Flickr):

"Design is not to be poured like gravy over a mistake."

Opinions about the Quick Launch bar in SharePoint / MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0

Note:  the opinions expressed in the list below are not necessarily those of the author, but rather those of a selection of the author's clients.

Regarding the items on the Quick Launch bar navigation on most sites:

1. The People and Groups link is confusing and needs to be deleted.
2. The headings don't fit my organization.  (e.g. We call our locations "sites," so the heading for sub-sites can't be called "Sites.") 
3. The headings are confusing.  I don't understand the difference between Documents and Lists.  I really don't care what the difference is.  And why is there a Discussions heading if there is no content under it?
4. I can't find what I need.  (Translation:  The Quick Launch bar and its contents are invisible.)

As I envision the 2009 release of SharePoint, I'm wondering how these common complaints will be addressed.  In MOSS 2007 it is easy to change the navigation headings on a site-by-site basis (not so for WSS), more complicated and risky to change them globally (i.e., your edits to the onet.xml file that governs these headings could be overwritten by an upgrade or patch).  Are headings needed at all?  Should MS do away with the Documents / Lists / Pictures / Discussions model and let the site owner structure the quick launch bar as content is created?  Or define the headings at the outset, the way the Site Map's categories can be defined and then accessed every time a site is created?

Or, given #4, is the quick launch bar a flawed concept?  I have witnessed end-users look for content on a site and never glance at that section of the window, and I have heard the same story from my content-owner clients - "I told him exactly where the link was but he still came back and said he couldn't find it."  I've worked with SharePoint long enough that I strongly support the local content / global content model, but many clients seem to want static content (e.g., a "hot list") in the left nav as well as across the top of the page. 

The Quick Launch Bar and its headings - useful or not?  What do you think?

Visual Display of Information Meets Web 2.0

20080817 - I feel honored to be included, originally uploaded by sadalit.

I got an email this week from one of the folks at We Feel Fine, asking permission to use one of my photos in a book project. Because of this email I discovered their incredible website. The application is beautiful, engaging, and really moving. This screen capture hardly shows the experience - it's so much better in action.

In the words of the website's creators:

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been studying human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20’s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life."

Gripe about the field description placement in SharePoint

Some of my clients are complaining about the placement of the field description in SharePoint forms, and I agree with them. When you create a field, or column, you have the opportunity to enter descriptive text that will appear on the form, which can be valuable in telling your users how they should fill out the field. However, this text appears below the field data, which is inconvenient for single-line fields, but which really poses a problem when the fields are more complex:

Your instructive field description gets lost, and may even make users have to do double work if they read your instructions after they've already entered data (not to mention the fact that if you're converting a paper form, you'll have to think about the descriptions as you enter them and not use terms like "below").

One of my clients was ambitious enough to create a custom form specifically to solve this problem. She placed the descriptive text below the field name, using a slightly different type style for the description than for the field name. The hitch is that custom forms need to be created from scratch; you can't modify a list's existing New, Edit, or View forms in SharePoint Designer to make a relatively simple change like this. If you want the descriptive text to appear consistently on both New and Edit forms, you'll have to create two forms. In my client's case, the investment of time and effort was justified because her internal customers gave the description placement high priority in their requirements, and because the form is a fairly long one which will be used regularly by every employee in the organization. But smaller, simpler, or less-frequently-used forms may not justify the extra hours it would take to customize them.

Now here's the really maddening thing. Microsoft has placed the field descriptions under the field name on some of their own internal forms, for example, the Change Column form for any list or library:

Which raises the question: If Microsoft's form designers decided that this was a good placement for the field description, why don't end-user list and library forms have the same layout? Why are content owners forced to work with (or around) a less-intuitive design?

This is one of the big items on my wish list for the next release.

Greg LeMond Keynote at the SharePoint 2008 Conference

20080305 - LeMond Keynote at SharePoint 2008 Conference, originally uploaded by sadalit.

This morning I attended the keynote by Greg LeMond. His small company (16 people) uses SharePoint; he believes it is “what the future is for working together.”

Among the many themes of his talk (never give up, have ambitious goals in mind, be confident yet keep your nervousness about the possibility of losing, be passionate about what you do, have a partner that believes in you & supports you), the most notable for me was the concept of averaging your days – some days you’re ahead, some you are behind, but it’s the overall trend that is important.

The Tour de France is a great model of this – the racers are acutely aware of where they stand both on a daily basis and overall - you can “win” an individual day or days but lose the race, and conversely, you shouldn't give up hope if you lose the day - you could still come out on top.

Weight loss is another example – losing a certain amount of weight is an effort that can be tracked with hard numbers on a daily basis, to reveal a trend line. If you slip occasionally and indulge by overeating, your trend can still be toward loss.

What if the achievement of your goal is harder to measure? How can you grasp (and feel good about) the overall if the numbers aren't in front of your face every day? Even if you have well-defined metrics for success (a critical first step toward performance measurement that is often overlooked), how can you increase their visibility?

MOSS 2007 offers tools to make your overall performance trend more visible and easier to comprehend.  If you don't have the time or resources to implement a business data catalog, you can still take advantage of the key performance indicator web parts just by putting together a simple Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list.  Which of your company's goals would be good candidates for a simple graphical display on a SharePoint home page?  On-time employee timesheet submission?  Trainings or certifications achieved across the company?  Number of new projects opened this month compared to previous months?

For me, LeMond's message was an important one to keep front of mind - not to dwell on a failure, but to learn from it and focus on the overall upward trend.  In the future as I work with my customers I'll encourage them to do the same for their companies, using SharePoint as the enabling tool.