Microsoft was proud to host World Usability Day at our Redmond, WA, campus on November 11, 2010. This year the them was divided into the following subthemes:
PEOPLE The psychology, philosophy and sociology behind a rich and meaningful communication experience between people.
USER INTERFACE The fundamental principles, best practices, explorations and other lessons about designing the user interface to bring communication to life.
TECHNOLOGY Understanding and leveraging the software, hardware, and services that enable and enhance communication for work and play.
Having a website people can easily navigate is common sense. It can save taxpayer dollars and help your agency achieve its mission. Here’s how to dramatically improve your website by focusing on your customers’ needs and adopting some basic usability techniques.
Now that that has been said I can tell you the picky grumpy problems that I have with it :-) It’s so simplistic it obscures the reality that some of these tasks are hard and need specialists and real buy-in from all the members of the team. Their ROI calculations are ridiculous vague and if this is the kinda logic that our government uses I think I understand why we are in trouble.
Still it is very nice, well put together introduction that I think every government site owner should look at.
So I just finished doing some mandatory e-learning for a new project I am working on for a large enterprise. (Seriously just finished… I’m writing this in notepad) The topic was Information Security and it was honestly really interesting… as I did it I could not stop thinking about how Enterprise 2.0 will tackle the issues of securing an organizations’ information.
These concerns will have to be addressed for wide adoption of social software on the Enterprise; I’m not going to even get into Software as a Service (SaaS) because honestly that is a whole other conversation.
Large corporations need to keep their information secure to earn and maintain the trust of customers, regulators and business partners.
The issue is though that information needs to be available and easy to access when it is needed. As a third stage Guild Navigator says, “the spice must flow†:-P
A companies employees, customers, and business associates frequently use information on the enterprise to conduct their business. If access to relevant information and systems were interrupted, they would be unable to conduct their business properly.
I once talked to a team that was working on an extranet for an institutions board of directors. So while this was a simple information sharing extranet they had INSANE security requirements. Each board member had to remember 3 unique login credentials: one for access to the network, one for the extranet, and one for the document level security on the encrypted files.
So the problem was that this information was extremely sensitive and needed to be protected but board members had difficulty using the system because they had to remember three sets of login information and it was not like they were accessing the extranet every day. The board members said that the system was too hard to use so the team had to address this while ensuring that the corporations information remained secret. We went through many scenarios and technologies to try to solve this difficult problem and I left before the project really went anywhere.
Making sensitive information available while at the same time protecting it from unauthorized access and inappropriate disclosure is, of course, a delicate balancing act. The basic idea is to give authorized individuals access to the premises, systems and information they need, while keeping the unauthorized people out. These are difficult issues and one that the enterprise 2.0 community will deal with soon, but it will be a rough ride. — I’m looking at you Vista ;-) which isn’t really enterprise 2.0 but a upcoming thorn in my side.
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Oh I found this in my training and I found it kinda funny in a Lord Nikon, Angelina Jolie kinda way. From Social Software to Social Engineering
Social engineering – what is it?
Social engineering is the process of getting sensitive information, such as passwords, access rights and other sensitive information, by tricking employees.
Social engineers will use many different ways to get sensitive information from you. The best way to defend against social engineering is to ensure that you can recognize potential threats when they are happening and know how to deal with them.
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Preparing For Apollo Adobe Apollo platform, a cross platform run time that will allow developers to take rich internet applications, whether they be built on Flash, HTML, JavaScript and/or Ajax, and turn them into desktop applications. It could be the technology to watch for… ( Tags: apolloadobesoftwarewpf/e )
Someone recently posted on the IAI list that they were seeking case studies on city websites. Two years ago I finished a report of the User Research Navantis did as part of developing a community portal for the City of Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton is almost 500,000 people so roughly the same size as Atlanta or Cleveland. The material of the project was public domain as it was a public project and two years have past so I think I can post the report.
Some of this stuff is a little awkward in hindsight but I still think there is some interesting stuff in there.
So one week later I thought I would talk about what a great experience BarCamp Ottawa was, I hope to do more events with the people from Ottawa [BarCamp Montreal : The Invasion] ;-)
I think the most valuable thing I took away from Ottawa (besides all the new friends) was a greater understanding of development beyond my software service industry world. I’ve got a taste of that in Toronto through TorCamp but the fact is that servicing government, financial institutions and other major corporations is still the driving force of the software industry in Toronto, IMHO. I was talking to my friend Jason who is an Ottawa ex-pat and he told me that he read that tech industry jobs are back to the levels they were at during the boom, but instead of these jobs being with large corporations (Nortel, Corel, etc.) these jobs are now dispersed over many small firms and start-ups. Getting to interact with the people who work in these companies and people who work for the federal government was tremendously insightful.
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information that I present will often be created by others and they would be the owners of that content, I do not presume any ownership of their content.
