archive.Joe Lamantia.com

In case you couldn’t make it to Amsterdam for EuroIA 2008, or if you were in town but preferred to stay outside in the warmth of a sunny September Saturday than venture into the marvelous Tsuchinski theater, I’ve posted the slides from my talk Frameworks are the Future of Design.
Enjoy!

Understanding Juicy Rationalizations, part 3 of the Designing Ethical Experiences series, just went live at UXMatters.

Here’s the teaser:

From “The Big Chill”

Michael: “I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations.”

“They’re more important than sex.”

Sam: “Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.”

Michael: “Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”

Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.

Understanding Juicy Rationalizations is the first of a pair of articles focused on the ways that individual designers make ethical choices, and how we can improve our choices. This second pair of articles is a bit of eye-opening window into how people make many of the choices in our daily lives – not just design decisions. Or, at least it was for me… Readers will see connections much broader than simply choices we explicitly think of as ‘ethical’ and / or design related.

The final installment in the Designing Ethical Experiences series is titled “Managing the Imp of the Perverse” – watch for it sometime soon.

With the publication of these next two articles, the Designing Ethical Experiences series consists of two sets of matched pairs of articles; the first article in each pair framing a problematic real-life situation designers will face, and the second suggesting some ways to resolve these challenges ethically.

The first pair of articles – Social Media and the Conflicted Future and Some Practical Suggestions for Designing Ethical Experiences – looked at broad cultural and technology trends like social media and DIY / co-creation, suggesting ways to discover and manage likely ethical conflicts within the design process.

It’s a nice symmetrical structure, if you dig that sort of thing.  (And what architect doesn’t?)

For commuters / multi-taskers / people who prefer listening to reading, Jeff Parks interviewed me on the contents of this second set of articles, which he will publish shortly as a podcast.

Thanks again to the editorial team at UXMatters for supporting my exploration of this very important topic for the future of experience design. In an age when everyone can leverage professional-grade advertising the likes of Spotunner, the ethicality of the expressive tools and frameworks designers create is a question of critical significance for us all.

I’m happy to announce I’m speaking at EuroIA 2008 in Amsterdam, September 26 – 27. My session is titled ‘Frameworks Are the Future of IA’. If the exciting title isn’t enough to sell you on attending (what’s more compelling than a case study on an open structural design framework for self-assembled user experiences and information spaces…?), here’s a description:

The Web is shifting to a DIY (Do It Yourself) model of user experience creation, where people assemble individual combinations of content and functionality gathered from many sources to meet their particular needs. The DIY model for creating user experiences offers many benefits in public and consumer settings, and also inside the enterprise. But over time, it suffers many of the same problems that historically made portals unusable and ineffective, including congested designs, poorly planned growth, and inability to accommodate changes in structure and use.

This case study demonstrates a simple design framework of standardized information architecture building blocks that is directly applicable to portals and the DIY model for creating user experiences, in two ways. First, the building blocks framework can help maintain findability, usability and user experience quality in portal and DIY settings by effectively guiding growth and change. Second, it is an example of the changing role of IA in the DIY world, where we now define the frameworks and templates other people choose from when creating their own tools and user experiences.

Using many screenshots and design documents, the case study will follow changes in the audiences, structures, and contents of a suite of enterprise portals constructed for users in different countries, operating units, and managerial levels of a major global corporation. Participants will see how the building blocks provided an effective framework for the design, expansion, and integration of nearly a dozen distinct portals assembled from a common library of functionality and content.

This case study will also explore the building blocks as an example of the design frameworks IA’s will create in the DIY future. We will discuss the goals and design principles that inspired the building blocks system, and review its evolution over time.

The conference program includes some very interesting sessions, and Adam Greenfield (of Everyware reknown) is the keynote.
Amsterdam is lovely in September, but if you need more reason to come and say hello, Picnic 08 – with a stellar lineup of speakers – is just before EuroIA.

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 Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience, part 5 of the building blocks series that’s been running since last year. This installment covers how to include high-value social and conversational capabilities into portal experiences built on top of architectures managed with the building blocks. Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience also provides an explicit user experience vision for portals, metadata and user interface recommendations, and as tips on making portals easier to use and manage / administrate.

Thanks again to all the good people who volunteer their time to make Boxes and Arrows such a high quality publication!

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 has published part 3 of the Building Blocks series, describing the Container blocks in detail. Next in the series is part 4, which describes the Connectors in the building block system in detail.

If you’re working on a portal, dashboard, or tile based design effort of any kind, the building blocks readily serve as a common language and structural reference point that allows effective project communication across traditional discipline boundaries. These two articles in tandem (parts 3 and 4) provide details on how the Building Blocks can provide a strong, flexible, and scalable usr experience and information architecture framework for the long term.

My current plan is to release a toolkit at approximately the same time as part 4 of the series. Part 4 is in the editing stage now, so this a good time to ask readers for suggestions on what should be part of the toolkit, and what form it should take. Suggestions?

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.