Great article, using travellers as an example, to explain how to apply situational awareness to a mobile app design using Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA):
I know what you’re thinking. User task flow analysis is nothing new. Why is GDTA different? GDTA helps you plan displaying the right content at the right time for the right situational awareness. GDTA maps the best way to combine content and data to help users comprehend quickly–and then make a decision.
Cross posted from the Headshift Asia Pacific blog, this is one in a series of diagrams I’m sharing from my forthcoming report on mobile apps for business. This diagram is an example of what I call a situational map, intended to help designers explore possible scenarios where mobile apps could be used. See the original post for further explanation.
When evaluating [enterprise social software], it’s best not to create “checkbox RFPs” that allow vendors check off all the features they provide, Byrne said. Rather, ask how they address those requirements, seeking to tease out details on the differences between platforms. Focusing too much on software features is a mistake, when you really should be trying to identify a match for the specific types of collaboration you want to facilitate. For example, if your top priority was coordinating project teams, that might lead you to choose a different product than if your biggest need was to get knowledge workers at locations around the world networking and collaborating together.
I have to say I particularly agree with Tony Byrne’s message here. The issue he describes isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but rather something to be aware of. You need to look beyond the labels applied (like ‘enterprise social network’ or ‘enterprise wiki’) to particular products and actually look at how each are architected and the social experience design they support.
You might recall I posted a related draft diagram before. This particular diagram is from the report I’ve just finished on designing mobile apps for the enterprise – for more information, see this post on the Headshift Asia Pacific site.
I’m currently working on an Ark Group report on developing mobile apps for internal business users and the business partners that organisations work with. There is a growing acknowledgement by designers that mobile apps need to be created with recognition of their situated use, however most of the research and discussion I’ve seen is focused on consumer apps.
Business users are consumers too and much of the thinking about how consumers use mobile is broadly applicable to the business users when designing apps. However, the business context does need special attention to take into account elements such as:
This is a draft of a diagram to summarise that situated context for mobile business apps. I’m not sure if this will make it into the report or not at this stage, as the primary purpose was really to help me capture my thinking.
I’ve used a couple of sources to help inform the diagram, which you might like to review too:
Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for additional sources that examine the business context for mobile apps beyond what is presented here.
Last night I presentated at the NSW KM Forum, where I talked about the range of social intranet software options available on the market. While a lot of the subsquent conversation was about being social inside organisations, one of the more practical discussions was about the issue of working online with ‘tables’… you know, like those you create in Word or Excel:
Creating tables and lists etc is a fairly common activity in the workplace. In fact, I suspect many people use tools like Excel more for organising information than they do actually number crunching. So if people are going to work effectively online together in a social intranet, then this type of functionality is an important requirement. Unfortuntely, creating and editing tables in rich text editors online has never been a fantastic experience but recently it has started to get a whole lot better.
Nothing yet beats a spreadsheet in terms of pure flexibility and tools, like sorting and calculations – so for really heavy lifting with tables you’ll need to use a Web-based spreadsheet like Google Docs and Socialtext’s Socialcalc, or embed a spreadsheet.
However, lets have a look at a few leading tools and how well they support tables:
Atlassian Confluence
The whole rich text editor has been given a massive upgrade in the latest version of Confluence and tables are a lot easier to use now that users don’t need to worry about dealing with wiki markup (which has been removed in the new editor). Confluence’s table editing is pretty good although Jive (see below) packs a few additional formatting features. However, as complete package Confluence also offers a range of file embedding, spreadsheet, charting, and task list macros that other platforms don’t offer.
Jive
Jive’s table editor is still essentially based on HTML tables, however the user interface removes some of the complexity of fine detail formatting – you can set the padding, background colour, text alignment (horizontal and vertical), font and colour without feeling you are going anywhere near the HTML code.
Yammer
Not a lot of love from Yammer for tables, unfortunately. You’ll need to make do with sharing spreadsheet files instead for anything more than dot points lists.
“Generic”
Most other Web platforms use a common rich text editor plugin, like TinyMCE or CKEditor. Support for tables has improved in these plugins but IMHO vendors like Atlassian and Jive are still leading the way. Note: the editing experience on a particular platform will depend on the version of the rich text editor plugin supported and how it is configured.
As you can see, on a particular feature (and apparently simple one) like tables there is a lot of variability between different social intranet platforms. Is there a winner? Well, I wouldn’t pick a platform on this feature alone but these are the sorts of requirements I want to understand when helping a client pick a platform. Its may sound like a minor detail, but if you want people to work online in your social intranets then its actually more important than some of the big ticket technical specs.
Alan Lepofsky shared how he uses email to manage the external and internal social media firehouse by creating a rudimentary snapshot view of updates received by email from these systems. Lepofsky says:
So am I interested in getting rid of email? Absolutely not. It’s one of the most important tools I use everyday.
This sounds great in theory, but fundamentally the inbox as it currently functions isn’t fit for purpose for the social media era. We do need an inbox of some sort, but it should be smarter and be served by smarter messaging. Just as most users won’t use RSS, they won’t spend time creating complex rules, filters and labels. And why should they when we could design something better?
Personally, I look at the way most modern email apps (particularly Gmail) deal with meeting invites as a pointer to what a smarter social media ready inbox could look like. Your inbox shouldn’t just receive the notification from a social media tool and dump it in your inbox, it should process it in context of all the other notifications received. This means it would know what notifications you have read, what notifications were related to each other and what period of time they are from. It would also recognise the difference between a notification and a specific message.
You should be able to access a dashboard (like the way your calendar rolls up appointments) and even receive a regular aggregated summary. It should know when you last checked your social media inbox or if you’ve been away (when you set your out of office).
Of course it should still be backwards compatible with POE (Plain Old Email) and even RSS. I reckon some kind of microformat would do the job.
But right now, my inbox is just a bucket for notifications. Its not a useful tool for managing information overload, but it could be.
What do you think?
Image credit: The Meters. CC BY-NC-ND
The benefits of VisiCalc go beyond its humble origins as calculating paper. It represents a way of using computers that allows the user to ask ‘what if’ questions that would be too tedious to carry out by hand. Not only are such questions important in planning, they can be vital to the user in learning and coming to understand his own application.
Both the words ‘serendipity’ and ‘synergy’ are appropriate for VisiCalc. As VisiCalc evolved it showed us how effective personal computers can be as streamlined interactive tools. But, VisiCalc was not simply a lucky extrapolation of the basic ideas. Both authors of VisiCalc have extensive background in using large mainframes as personal computers and in creating systems to be used by large numbers of people with little training. Word processing background was of special importance since it provided experience in designing screen-based, highly interactive interfaces. More important for VisiCalc, it made us very aware of the need for a carefully designed and tuned user interface. This interface was constantly refined during the development process.
via frankston.com
I hadn’t seen this paper by Bob Frankston before – presented in 1979 it introduced the world to a new fangled idea: the Visicalc spreadsheet. Apparently there weren’t a lot of people around to hear the original presentation of this paper, but it is worth reading retrospectively. Diffusion of this innovation was slow to gather momentum, but some people could see the potential.
Why is this worth mentioning?
The personal computer it seams was a solution looking for a problem and the idea for Visicalc came from an idea for improving how individual people currently worked on tedious calculation tasks, rather then affecting the bottom line of a business. I particularly appreciate that the creators of Visicalc thought carefully about how users would interact with it and other software they already used (bearing in mind the limitations of the hardware at the time). In the end Visicalc didn’t completely kill off the idea of either prepackaged solutions for personal computers or enterprise systems, but it is hard to imagine any business today where spreadsheets aren’t still considered to be a critical tool. In many instances you could even argue that spreadsheets are more critical than any of the large, complex systems of record that many organisations invest in.
From this perspective, I can’t but help draw parallels with social software and wonder if its a good idea that all enterprise tools have to solve single quantifiable problems?
BTW if you prefer, you can watch a 2009 re-reading of the paper by Bob Frankston – part 1 and part 2. You can find more Visicalc history on Dan Bricklin’s site.
Hat tip David Weinberger.
“The mobile experience we have today is basically designed for tech-savvy businessmen,” says designer Amid Moradganjeh. This is a mistake, he thinks. There is another group of people out there, a bigger group. They have an “average digital life,” meaning that they don’t have to process hundreds of emails a day while running from meeting to meeting. While many of them do have a rich digital existence on the desktop, they see little need to stay fully connected when they go outside. One explanation for this is that smartphones simply haven’t become cheap enough and that, inevitably, we’ll all come to own one. Moradganjeh wonders if for many people an iPhone/Android smartphone is too complicated and too much power. For his thesis project, he engaged in a program of research and speculative design which resulted in Rimino, “an attractive, invisible and more integrated experience.”
Rimino – A Human Touch on Mobile Experience from Amid Moradganjeh on Vimeo.
The Rimino concept might not be exactly right, but shows why thinking about user experience design from the perspective of different users is so powerful.
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