Blogs

Angelo K. on our ibm.com team just found this interview with our VP Lee Dierdorff that includes comments on ibm.com from Jakob Nielsen:

The site has deep information, as required by these highly complex IT products. And yet, as you move around the huge number of pages, the page design stays consistent, with a standardized navigation system encompassing global options, a local menu, cross-references to related links and nice breadcrumbs that make it easy to move to a higher level of the site. Even though it looks easy, it takes a lot of work to make the various divisions of a huge company comply with such design standards, but it's required in order to present one face to the customer.

How we accomplish this with design standards was the topic of my talk at the Internet user experience conference earlier this week. If/when I get clearance to share that presentation more widely, I will let you know.

More Jakob/IBM connections: Jakob included the IBM home page in his book and he used to work in our research division long ago.

I will be presenting next week in Ann Arbor at the 2nd Internet User Experience. I hope to see someone else from Toledo there.

I will be presenting on ibm.com standards - but the bad news is my colleague Will Smith cannot join me. The good news is he will instead be home in the Cincinnati-area with his new son Evan. Congrats Will and Kelly!

Which IBMers (or former IBMers) are attending the Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver in late March?

So far:

• Dmitry Nekrasovski, an IA with the Vancouver Innovation Center, and fellow UXnet local ambassador.
• Lada Gorlenko, IBM Warwick, is part of the team giving the pre-conference Interaction Design Symposium.
• Alex Wright, founder of the ibm.com user experience team (which I am on) but no longer with IBM, is presenting "Stone Age Information Architecture".

I will be there - who else? How about an IBM gathering? There were 7 of IBMers last year!

I have nothing to do with IBM's intranet, but I am happy to announce that it has won an award.

• IBM's Intranet One of the World's Top Ten

So, of course, I am obligated to provide a link to the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design annual report that you can buy to learn the details. And don't forget the Alertbox article for more information.

Consider this the virtual equivalent of the "I voted" sticker: in this case, I just voted for 2006 SIGCHI officers. March 27th is the deadline.

SIGCHI members should have gotten an email from ACM 2 weeks ago. You will need the following in order to vote: the URL of the voting site, your 7-digit membership number, the 10-digit unique PIN (assigned by ACM), and the SIG you are voting for ("SIGCHI", of course).

You can learn about the candidates ahead of time (PDF format for the information, one file per person, arg). Once you get through the hoops to the ballot, you can also do "just in time" reading about each candidate (good use of pop-ups so that I do not lose my existing ballot choices).

In case you are wondering how SIGCHI got here, the call for nominations was in August. The slate was announced in November where additional candidates could have been added by petition. Thanks Kevin for chairing the committee - and thanks to other committee members. And an even bigger thanks for the people running!

I was hunting for sites about "innovation" this weekend and stumbled across BusinessWeek's Innovation section. Quite literally, out of the corner of my eye, a familiar face registered in my brain...

Jesse James Garrett. It was a nice surprise to see him writing there. After "sticking the pointer up his nose" and clicking, I enjoyed reading about ugly visual design and poor usability being worth $580 million.

Seeing Jesse's photo there, cropped to focus on his face, and then seeing his missing-top-of-the-head-and-open-collar photo reminded me of something I read over the summer about "face-ism".

My local paper reported that Bigger heads lead to better perceptions, research finds. The higher percentage of pixels devoted to the face, the more highly we think about the person. Face-ism is one of those Universal Principles of Design. Visual Framing: Study of Face-ism from the websites of the 108th US Congress (PDF, 300K, Master's thesis, 2003) appears to be the first face-ism study applied to a web site.

Anyway, based on the research, I subconsciously think more highly of Jesse from his BusinessWeek photo than from his Adaptive Path photo. Go figure!

I enjoyed this interview with Mike Beltzner where describes his start in UCD at IBM's Toronto Lab before he moved on to Mozilla to be the user experience lead.

Mike's comments about Firefox usability reminded me of Scott Berkun's note on why he switched.

I presented at the CASE V conference in Chicago yesterday. I went into detailed IA issues such as specific-to vs. relevant-for audiences, org-chart-itis, faceted browsing and navigation frameworks. Actually, there was so much good discussion on the audience organizational scheme (central to university sites) that I barely got to cover the rest.

Attached (way) below is a PDF of my slides. Here are links to items covered in the presentation.

• IA institute
• IA WWW (2nd edition)
• Elements of user experience
• ibm.com, SMB, Solutions, A&D, E&U
• Northwestern
• U. Michigan
• Ball State
• U. Cincinnati
• IGS, Systems, Software services, E&TS
• OSU colleges & schools, index, Alumni
• U. Chicago
• U. Toledo Colleges & departments
• Finders: Server, Workstations, Training
• Epicurious
• Amazon diamonds
• MSN TVs
• Yahoo! Farechase
• Yahoo! Local
• Courses: Owens, Ohio U.
• Calendar: Purdue
• Navigation stress test
• Bradley
• Path breadcrumbs: Sweater, New for holiday, Ones to give
• Attribute breadcrumbs

The best part of the trip: attending other sessions the day before, hearing about the user experience challenges being faced by others. And picking up the "CASE lingo" to help me frame my presentation better. I like being the last talk on the last day.

On Saturday, November 19th, I spent the day with other ACM local chapter leaders. We met with ACM staff and talked about how we can work together better. I guess it was an historic event - it has been over a decade since ACM staff and local leaders had gotten together. I was there representing ACM's newest revitalized chapter, NWOACM.

Local chapters and their representatives:

• Atlanta SIGCHI (CHI*ATLANTA) - Molly Stevens
• Chicago SIGCHI (CHI-Squared) - Brian Maggi
• Ft. Lauderdale SIGGRAPH - Markus Vogl
• Greater Boston - Peter Mager
• Greater Dayton - Bill Davis
• Los Angeles - John Halbur
• Los Angeles SIGGRAPH - Sharon Eisenberg
• Minneapolis/St. Paul SIGGRAPH - Murray Holloway, Susan Holloway
• New York City SIGGRAPH - Michael Hosenfeld
• Northwest Ohio (NWOACM) - Keith Instone
• Portland SIGCHI (CHIFOO) - Anne DeRidder
• Poughkeepsie - Bill Collier
• Princeton (Princeton Joint Chapters - ACM / IEEE Computer Society) - Dennis Mancl
• Rocky Mountain SIGGRAPH - Monika May
• San Diego - Peter Fryscak
• San Francisco Bay Area - Martin Stein, Greg Weinstein
• San Francisco SIGCHI (BayCHI) - Steve Williams
• Silicon Valley SIGGRAPH - Ken Turkowski
• Syracuse - Phil Murray
• Washington DC/Baltimore SIGAda - Thomas Panfil

ACM representatives (staff and volunteers):

• John White, CEO
• Pat Ryan, COO
• Lillian Israel, Director of membership
• Terry Coatta, Chair, Membership services board
• Steve Teicher, Membership services board
• Wayne Graves, Director of Information Systems
• Lauren Ryan, Local activities coordinator

I'll have to go thru my notes later and summarize, but one thing that struck me was that several of the things we local leaders were asking ACM (wikipedia) for were already available in some form. We just did not know about them, could not find them, or they were too hard to use. Let me point out a few of them in the short term just to help us all see what ACM is already doing to help local chapters.

• Wiki, blogs, mail, etc. - local chapters can use ACM resources for their web site and mailing lists
• MemberNet - online publication where local chapter news can be shared
• Professional chapter listings - find general interest and SIG chapters, by state / country
• Local activities calendar - local leaders can submit their events, but the calendar is not very useful until we can have local views (e.g., show me all of the events within 100 miles of Toledo, Ohio)
• Distinguished lecture program - get ACM to pay for a great speaker at your local chapter (a new program is in the works)
• More 'for' and 'about' local chapters - includes link to admin user interface, where local chapters can manage membership lists

Stay tuned for more, especially after the final report is issued.

I have not been tracking intel.com but a colleague (thanks Brian) just pointed out their current home page.

Screen shot of intel.com from today (click to enlarge):

Compare that with last year's home page (from way back).

And then compare with ibm.com.

I wonder if they read our poster (big file, save to hard drive, may crash your Acrobat plug-in) from the 2005 IA Summit? Anyone know when the change took effect? Just curious.