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I’ve posted slides for my recent Effective IA For Enterprise Portals presentation at the IA Summit in Miami. Portals are not a traditional space for user experience practitioners, so many thanks to the packed house that turned out, and stayed as we both started late to accommodate the crowd, and then ran long.

These slides include a substantial amount of case study and example material that I didn’t cover directly in the talk. For the repeat session on Sunday, I showed additional examples beyond those included here in the starting slides.

Stay tuned for a more detailed writeup of both published and unpublished example material – one that shows the building blocks in action at all levels of a multi-year portal effort from initial strategy through design and into governance / evolution – in part six of the Building Blocks series running in Boxes and Arrows, due out once the post-summit flurry settles down.

Boxes and Arrows just published Part 4 of the Building Blocks series, Connectors for Dashboards and Portals.

We’re into the home stretch of the series – just two more to go!
Stay tuned for a downloadable toolkit to support easy use of the building blocks during design efforts.

Boxes and Arrows just published part two of the Portal Building Blocks series – Introduction to the Building Blocks. This second installment covers the design concepts behind the portal building blocks system, and guidelines on how to flexibly combine the blocks into a well-structured user experience.

If you are working on a portal, dashboard, widget, social media platform, web-based desktop, or any tile-based design, this series should help clarify the growth and usability challenges you will encounter, as well as provide a possible solution, in the form of a simple design framework that is platform and vendor neutral.

Stay tuned for the third installment in the series, due out shortly!

I’ve created a suggested (and highly original) tag for bookmarking items related to the building blocks:

ia_building_blocks

I’ve tagged a few items on del.icio.us – my default bookmarking service – and will monitor tag streams from some of the other bookmarking services.
http://del.icio.us/tag/ia_building_blocks

Janus Boye (of CMSWatch) just published an article called The trouble with portal dashboards… in Enterprise Information, in which he discusses the usability problems of enterprise portals.

Janus identifies the essential problem of current portal design approaches built on flat tiles:

Today most organisations blindly adopt the default ‘building block’ approach to layout found in enterprise portals – a relic from the early days of public internet portals. But users complain that while such an interface may look slick in early sales demonstrations, in production it typically only facilitates work for technically adept super-users. The occasional user easily gets confused and frustrated working with a cluttered screen of little boxes showing many different portlets. Getting adequate value from the portal typically requires substantial training.

This is a good snapshot of the long term weaknesses of a flat portal user experience, what Janus calls “the default ‘building block’ approach” [emphasis mine]. It strongly parallels my recent post outlining some of the inherent usability weaknesses of portals, and is a great lead in for the building blocks. (Note: Janus uses the term building blocks differently.)

In another highlight worth mentioning Janus identifies six distinct types of portals, referring to them as use cases. I think of these as types of information environments. The difference is a semantic one that’s shaped by your context for the term portal. Janus is speaking from the business perspective, thus his focus on the business problem solved by each type of portal.

They are:

• Dynamic web publishing; the simplest use case and a common entry point for portal developers
• Self-service portal; enabling staff or customers to help themselves and obtain service on their terms
• Collaboration portal; enabling dispersed teams to work together on projects
• Enterprise intranet; helping staff work more efficiently, often via multiple specialised portal applications
• E-business portal; enabling enterprises to extend commercial information and services to external trading partners, suppliers and customers
• Enterprise integration; linking systems to achieve greater efficiency and agility.

What’s important to understand from this list is that the default flat tiles approach underlying these different environments is the same, and so are the resulting usability problems, with their attendant business costs. The building blocks will support all six portal types handily.

In a recent comment, Joe Sokohl asked about usability in portals, specifically if designing with the building blocks improves usability.

Here’s his question:
One topic I hope you cover is any usability testing results you might’ve come up with. How usable is this approach, for example? How successfully are execs using these tiles? I think it’s a neat way to shortcut the dev process, too.

Portal user experiences suffer from a number of inbuilt usability weaknesses that the building blocks are designed to eliminate. For instance, flat tile schemes assume all tiles are structurally the same, and that they have no relationship to any other tiles. This makes all tiles of equal importance to the portal’s information architecture. [Welcome to Flatland…] Yet any designer or information architect addressing diverse user needs and goals knows that the priorities of users make some content more important than others, and that the structure of the user experience should reflect these priorities and any necessary relationships.
Flatness also hampers interaction design and information design, obstructing the establishment of good visual flows and pathways leading the eye to the right areas of a portal page. The eye and brain (visual system) interprets the features and “terrain” of the current field of view, a process that occurs when users look at a portal page. The absence of conceptual differences between tiles in flat portal experiences makes it difficult to create supporting visual cues that direct the eye to the appropriate features of the field of view. Effectively, it’s a featureless landscape lacking depth that the eye and brain cannot easily interpret, an effect similar to driving through whiteout conditions (an extreme example).

Further, tight scheduling and budget realities often mean design teams inherit the default user experience aspects of tiles from the portal platform, with limited or no leeway for change. In these situations cases, the default designs and navigation become a technology constraint, instead of a point of departure, as intended!

The most common solution to these inbuilt weaknesses is to rely on the contents of tiles to solve all three problems at the same time: indicate structure and relationships, lead users to the right area of the page, and overcome the user experience design constraints of the technology platform or presentation framework.

This is the wrong approach, for many reasons. It counts on content to do the job of structure. It contradicts the purpose of independent tiles. It decreases usability overall, because in many portals, syndicated tiles appear in many different places and contexts where the relationships assumed and expressed in their content are neither present nor valid.

By contrast, the goal of the building blocks is to provide a simple vocabulary for creating useful structures and relationships obviating the need to overload tiles. Using the building blocks eliminates these sorts of emergent usability problems rooted in the weaknesses of flat portal user experiences.

Time and space allowing, I’ll talk more about some of the usability findings in the case study / example material that’s planned for the series. A brief note about executive dashboards, as opposed to portals: Dashboards often serve very small user groups, which means that usability concerns and findings end up being closely tied to the usage patterns and preferences of that small group (sometimes a single user). In several instances, after some very puzzling usability feedback, we discovered the preferred way of using the dashboard was to have an assistant print out a page assembled from a complex set of tiles structured with the building blocks.

Hurray for volunteer publishing: Next week, Boxes and Arrows, is publishing the first installment of a series of articles on information architecture for portals and tile-based user experiences. It introduces a system of reusable building blocks that provides consistent structure for and lowers the costs of designing and maintaining portals.

The building blocks are a portal design toolkit I developed while working on several executive dashboard projects in close succession. I’ve used the building block system in portals, Web applications, business intelligence tools, dashboards, and content management systems: essentially any design relying on or incorporating tiles or portlets. The building blocks play nicely with RIA, AJAX, and other evolving user experience and development approaches, because they address information architecture concerns without requiring any specific technology or platform.

Follow up articles will explain the building blocks in detail, and how to use them quickly and efficiently.

The series will cover:

• Basic principles and assumptions
• Guidelines for assembling blocks into larger units
• Modular building blocks of all sizes (Containers)
• Modular navigation components (Connectors)
• Standardized Convenience Functionality for blocks
• Common Utility Functionality
• Suggested metadata attributes for blocks

Assuming the response to the first pieces is positive (be sure to read and comment!), we’ll provide a case study, and create a set of supporting materials to make it easy to use the building blocks for your own projects. The goal is to offer a complete package for someone who needs help creating an effective and scalable user experience for a portal or tile-based environment.

Aside from being a resource for the design of portal user experiences, the building blocks are the first attempt (disclaimer: that I know of…) at creating a reusable IA design framework for a common type of business problem / user experience / information environment. It’s not as broad in scope as Jesse Jame Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary, because it works at a more granular level of detail, but it should support design efforts in a wide variety of settings.

Those who enjoyed the 2005 IA Summit in Montreal might remember I presented a poster on the building block idea. The poster is essentially a preview of what the series will cover fully.

And it’s a perfect excuse to try out Rashmi’s new Slideshare service.

I’ll be on holiday (in Jamaica: did someone say Red Stripe…?) next week, but will try to log on to catch up on comments and questions.

Hope everyone enjoys the articles.

Update
The first article The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals is live as of December 14th

I’m working on a portal project at the moment for a healthcare client, so I’ve heard a great deal about how the concept of ‘portal’ is so diluted as to be effectively meaningless. Following a series of surprisingly muddled conversations with technologists, business types, and end users representatives around the concept for this new portal, I realized that much of the hand-wringing and confusion comes from simple lack of perspective – on the different perspectives represented by each viewpoint. Ambiguity or disagreement about which perspective is the frame of reference in any given discussion is the biggest source of the confusion and friction that makes these projects needlessly difficult.
There are (at least) three different perspectives on the meaning of the term portal.
To technologists and system developers, a portal is a type of solution delivery platform with standard components like authentication, an application server, integration services, and business logic and presentation layers that is generally purchased from a vendor and then customized to meet specific needs. Examples are Plumtree, BEA, IBM, etc.
To users, a portal is a single destination where it’s possible to obtain a convenient and – likely, though not always – personalized combination of information and tools from many different sources. Some examples of this sense of the term include Yahoo, MSN, and a well-developed intranet.
To a business, a portal is a bounded vehicle for aggregating information and tools to address diverse constituent needs in a coordinated and coherent way, with lowered management and administration costs realized via framework features like personalization, customization, and role-based configuration.
One case where all three of these frames of reference intersect is with Executive Dashboard projects. A dashboard is a portal in all three of these senses (unless it happens to rest on a different architecture / technology stack, in which case I maintain that it’s something else, so as an IA it’s prudent to keep in mind the differing implications and assumptions associated with each perspective while dealing with their representatives.

Related posts:

Thanks to all who stopped by to ask questions and express interest in some of the concepts central to executive dashboards, portals, or to simply say hello during the poster session at the IA Summit in Montreal. Many of you took cards, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Based on the level of interest, I’m talking with the good people at Boxes and Arrows about how to share some of this experience and these ideas in more depth. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, until the summit site offers a full set of presenter materials, you can find the.pdf version (it’s a largish ~6MB) here.

The published description of the poster is below:

Executive Dashboards: Simple IA Building Blocks Support A Suite of Sophisticated Portals
This poster depicts how a small set of standardized Information Architecture structures and elements was used to create an effective suite of interconnected Executive Dashboards at low cost and without substantial redesign effort.

This suite of dashboards meets the diverse information needs of senior decision makers working within many different business units in a global pharmaceutical company. These dashboards incorporate a wide variety of data types and functionality, but present everything within a consistent and usable User Experience by employing modular tiles and navigation structures.

This set of modular tiles and navigation structures met the diverse information needs of senior decision makers operating within several different business units.

The poster shows how the basic IA component or ‘atom’ of a tile or portlet, with a standard structure, elements, and labeling can contain a tremendous variety of content types. The content types include qualitative and quantitative visual and textual data displays, as well as complex functionality syndicated from other enterprise applications. It also shows how tiles are easily combined with other tiles or portlets to create larger scale and more sophisticated structures that are still easy for users to comprehend, allowing them to synthesize and compare formerly siloed information views to guide strategic decisions.

The poster shows how simple information architecture components common to all the dashboards allow rapid access to a tremendous amount of information, from many sources. The poster shows how this IA framework scaled well and responded to changing business needs over time, allowing the addition of large numbers of new tiles, views, and types of information to existing Dashboards without substantial redesign or cost.

The poster demonstrates how a set of IA components allows designers to present critical business information by operating unit, geography, topic, or specific business metric, at varying levels of detail, based on the needs of specific audiences.
The poster shows how this set of IA components allowed numerous design teams to innovate within a framework, thus creating an extensive library of reusable tiles and views available for syndication throughout the suite of Executive Dashboards.
The end result of this approach to solving diverse design problems is a series of well integrated User Experiences offering substantial business value to a wide audience of users.

After missing the first four IA summits, I’m very much looking forward to this year’s IA Summit in lovely Montreal.
For this year’s gathering, I’m presenting a poster on how a simple set of IA building blocks can support powerful information architectures, in the context of interconnected exeuctive portals. Aside from benefits in terms of user experience consistency, learnability, and increased rates of user satisfaction and adoption, the true business value of a system of simple information objects that conveys a tremendous variety of content is in meeting diverse needs for decision making inputs across a wide variety of audiences and functional requirements.
This is a follow-on to the better part of a year spent working on the strategy, design, and development of a suite of executive dashboards and portals for major pharmaceutical clients.
In the look-over-your-shoulder-as-you-run-forward mode typical of most consulting roles, it’s quite a bit different from the semantic web / semantic architecture work I’m engaged with now. But that’s the joy of always being on to new things

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