I have compiled archives of tweets from the events which I hope will be useful.

• Open Gov West Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order
  There are 3145 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• Open Gov West Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order with No ReTweets
  There are 1797 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• Open Gov West Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order
  There are 3145 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• Open Gov West Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order with No ReTweets
  There are 1797 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• Accessibility Camp Seattle Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order
  There are 554 tweets in this archive.
• Accessibility Camp Seattle Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order with No ReTweets
  There are 420 tweets in this archive.
• Accessibility Camp Seattle Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order
  There are 554 tweets in this archive.
• Accessibility Camp Seattle Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order with No ReTweets
  There are 420 tweets in this archive.
• GovCamp Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order
  There are 1783 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• GovCamp Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order with No ReTweets
  There are 1136 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• GovCamp Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order
  There are 1783 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• GovCamp Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order with No ReTweets
  There are 1136 tweets in this archive. It may take a while to load.
• Access U Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order
  There are 528 tweets in this archive.
• Access U Tweets grouped by Author in Alphabetical Order with No ReTweets
  There are 372 tweets in this archive.
• Access U Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order
  There are 528 tweets in this archive.
• Access U Tweets in Reverse Chronological Order with No ReTweets
  There are 372 tweets in this archive.

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.

More info on the Seattle World Usability Day 2010 Event at http://www.microsoftwud.com/

I have taken some new pictures for my Toy Comic Toolkit, some Stock Characters. I needed just some simple people shots where I could:

• Crop or extend the canvas
• Change the background colours
• Combine characters into simple cells

That is the update. It is a simple one, check it out I hope you like them.

I’m going to tell you a tiny part of the PowerPivot story which is how the product icon came to be.

A few weeks before the deadline for CTP2 I was asked to create a product icon for PowerPivot — sooner rather than later.

Here is what we thought… in the end :-)

• It needed to look like it could comfortably sit with the Office family of icons. (They changed them for Office 2010 but not too much.)
• We couldn’t really abandon the legacy imagery of SQL Analysis Services, nor would we want to.
• We wanted to portray the idea of the two windows that people would use with PowerPivot and Excel.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First we started with these sketches:

The top ones were done by my friend/co-worker Drew and the bottom ones were mine. I was a little more conservative than Drew.

From those sketches I came up with some initial concepts that we sent out to the SQL Analysis Services team to see which one they liked best. We were still trying to decide on a colour for the icon. At first people did not want to leave the familiar SQL yellow but a yellow icon is not very strong in a taskbar or grey menu, so I’m glad we could move forward with the green version.

This was the one that was chosen, which is good because it was the one I was hoping would be chosen. I liked this one because the two sides of the cube could represent the two screen that you would use for PowerPivot, one side would be the data and the other side is where you would do your analysis.

But we weren’t done yet; here is the final PowerPivot icon:

One morning, one of the designers I worked with at SQL UX, Peilin Nee came in and said she drove by a fast food chain that shall remain nameless and suggested that we try a different perspective on the cube. We changed the angle of view on the 3D cylinder and cube and knew we had a stronger design. There were fewer surfaces to show making the design simpler and easier to shrink to a small size. The edges were stronger and the icon was bolder. The last thing we had to tweak was the Pivot table symbol, which we moved from the right pane to the left one because the sharper perspective distorted the pivot arrow.

There you have it. In about 40 hours of work we went from sketches to concept to feedback to final version.

The images and icons in this post belong to Microsoft®.

If you want to find links to great articles check out PowerPivotor my link blog about about PowerPivot

The Data, Information, Knowledge, & Wisdom hierarchy has shifted. Systems that store and transform data automatically apply simple or semantic metadata to the records they process.

What most consider data is really information in an early stage of refinement. Raw data off the sensor is something that a human will rarely see.

Information architects have the opportunity to extend their purview of information into what most would consider data.

• Information Warehouse not Data Warehouse
• Master Information Services not Master Data Services

The notes above are parts of an idea that has been bashing around in my brain for a while now. Data is Information. Information needs IAs.

Where am I coming from?

I recently worked for the Microsoft SQL UX team; there I was exposed to many things that I had ignored throughout my career because I thought “I’m not a database guy”. Even now I’m not even a novice DBA but at SQL I was exposed to the problems that individuals and organizations have with managing and manipulating ‘massive’ amounts of data (I have massive in quotes because my personal definition of massive has changed dramatically). The challenges that I was asked to deal with was how people dealt with these problems… because I’m a designer. When I stopped thinking about data as a blob and starting thinking about it as information that people need in context then I realized that many of the issues that ‘information workers’ have with data are information architecture challenges.

Many of the people that I’ve met who have been responsible for massive data sets approach it from the supply side: Is it secure; is it highly available; is it optimized; is it clean; …etc. The people who need the data to do their job demand answers to their questions and don’t know, or need to know, the ER diagrams of your database. These people need to find pieces of data, understand how they relate and use it to answer their questions.

After my exposure to the difficulties people have manipulating data because they don’t understand its context, I became fascinated with how we could make this easier on people and provide more value to organizations. After all, my job isn’t to create better information systems my job is to make better information workers.

Who inspires me?

A few months ago I found a podcast where Jon Udell speaks with the Chief Scientist of IBM Entity Analytics, Jeff Jonas, who discusses a set of themes woven through his work, explored on his blog, and captured in a series of evocative phrases: perpetual analytics, non-obvious relationship awareness, sequence neutrality, “data finds data”, and anonymous resolution. I’ve listened to this 50 minute talk about a half a dozen times now and each time I find a new notion that totally blows me away.

When the “data can find the data,” there exists an opportunity for the insight to find the user.

Content, Context, Users + Intent

For even more on this check out Jeff’s blog post or download chapter seven by Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol from Beautiful Data (O’Reilly)

What is the opportunity?

After leaving SQL I was trying to figure out a way to talk about the ideas I had on how information architects could help with the challenges. Early in 2010 Gene Leganza published Topic Overview: Information Architecture for Forrester Research, Inc. In this overview he talks about the 15 hot technology trends that Forrester has identified as fueling the next period of technology innovation and growth and how 5 of them could benefit from better information architecture practices.

I agree with the 5 that he has chosen but I also feel that having someone who practices IA on the team could help improve the user experience of:

• Business rules processing moves to the mainstream
• Collaboration platforms become people-centric
• Apps and business processes go mobile
• BPM will be Web-2.0-enabled

I (mostly) like the article and I can recognize that its primary audience is Enterprise Architects. Keeping this in mind the paper provides great potential to re-imagine what enterprise information architecture could be. Information architects are needed because when exploiting and organizing information questions are more important than answers and, in my experience, designers tend to ask better questions then engineers.

I hope that the Information architecture community embraces this opportunity, I will explore this more in the future but I’m notoriously slow to post. I wish I could have been discussing this with people at the IAsummit, maybe next year.

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.

How To Increase Usability Of Government Websites and Boost Your ROI on Howcast is a very good video. It is easy to understand, the tasks they layout are simple and straight forward to implement. Check out the page to see the steps written for reference.

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.

• Materials being presented by Smartlogic, with product Semiphor — a taxonomy product integrated with FAST search.
• Why are taxonomies needed? Terms have different meanings, is contextual. Expert vocabularies may not match search terms.
• Terms may be in documents that are really irrelevant to the overall focus of the piece and would be meaningless results.
• Taxonomy: Allows for capture of a domain knowledge, vocabulary and topical relationships. Ontology is multiple taxonomies.
• Content as an asset should be organized/managed. Ontologies help with this (what’s missing, what are the relationships).
• Ontologies can help support records management policies.
• [Professional services firm Ascentium now presenting their experiences doing implementations w/2010 including inside MSoft
• 2010 has a utility Term Store Manager for facilitating taxonomical activities.
• Concerns: Rely on users for taxonomies? Preferrably not, but allow them to add their own folksonomies.
• Concerns: If you build a taxonomy, many companies are not willing to add staff to maintain and they must be maintained.
• The manager is extensible, but there are challenges (running into while inside Microsoft via 'eat own dogfood' effort).
• One primary goal: improve findability. Architecture of Term Store: Group, Term Set, Term
• [search for blogs that deal with Term Store Manager -- they offer great advice]
• [BTW Term Store Manager is still in beta and not yet generally released. Great steps forward, but one step back.]
• [Showing UI. Have created two groups: fruits, vegetables. Adding tomato to both. Can 'borrow' but also have multi-terms]
• [Have talked to Microsoft about the issues with disambiguation when multiple meanings are presented for a term.]
• Added Term Set “vine” to house “tomato”. But have different Term Sets of Vine under Fruit and Vegetables. Different GUIDs
• [Issue: Right now anyone with access can change definitions. Governance models needed to manage for disambiguation.]
• [I'm still trying to figure out why they're going to all this effort when FAST does most of this automatically.]
• [I'm guessing this is still 'brute force' version of SharePoint, which still requires 'brute force' search management
• [The dropdown lists can get unwieldy because there is no description in the dropdowns, no way to know which term is which]
• [Back to Smartlogic staff] Small or Large Ontology? Small: Easier to maintain, buckets larger, results less granular.
• Asking users to self-tag against a really large taxonomy requires considerable effort (requires understanding of whole)
• Companies restructure, change clients, add lines of business — all effects the total taxonomy (and existing content base)
• In 2007 there were no real taxonomies available. Keywords are not the same thing. Results can be tuned via taxonomy.
• Smartlogic now demoing Semaphore. The taxonomy is only half the equation. The content itself must have relevant metadata.
• [Semaphore is totally integrated as an add-on to the SharePoint UI, as if it were simply utilities in SharePoint.]
• Adding a document to SharePoint brings up the Semaphore UI for taxonomical additions, via ‘assisted’ tagging.
• That is, there are recommendations made to which edits can be made. Effectively ‘automated’ with overrides.
• This UI is useful for existing SharePoint stores to be reviewed and classified as well. [Again, only relevant w/o FAST]
• [With this level of effort, I'm still trying to figure out why a company wouldn't pay for the FAST licenses instead?]
• [Interesting navigation of topic maps and managing the 'collection' from the whole rather than the discrete elements.]
• Semaphore Architecture: Allows for imports of existing structures and reorganized. Text mining and classification.
• Rules-based approach used for classification server to make recommendations (rules can be tweaked).
• Now talking about the FAST Server and explaining the greater control over the results, multi-content results, etc.
• May 11th there will be another event to cover the FAST Server in more detail.
• Q&A raised issues of cross-cultural-language issues for global taxonomies. See Motorola study http://twurl.nl/f3crub
• Bottom line, assuming that you can get meaningful search results out of the box from SharePoint is erroneous.

Consistency is great.
Predictability is better.

Simple isn’t neccessarily easy
isn’t neccessarily good design.

Testing is vital and unreliable.

wireframes:

Sample sketches exploring alternate ways to access site level commands in SharePoint 2010. (via Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering : UX Design Tools & Techniques)

Veronica and Sadie are on the gondola in Banff, AB

• Compfight.com – flickr search for presenters
• Watch disk 2 of the Incredibles for the documentary
• Checkout yui, welie, uipatterns
• http://Sun.com/webdesign
• Scenarios; actors; touchpoints of interaction; backstage (backend)
• Lookup the double diamond model from matt’s presentation. – See if you can get matt’s presentation slides
• Skillset.org
• Snagit to evernote ELSE flickr
• !!! I kinda need my own laptop… I wonder if a netbook would work for me?
• Braintraffic.com/blog
• !!! Get into healthvault _ even if it is just for you
• Personas – what keeps them up at night?

Kinda pathetic… but then I remembered two of my favourite things community and being lazy. I knew that people were tweeting the conference like mad so I thought I’d get them to take my notes for me. A Save As…, some light Regex and a little scrutiny I have a list of 200 SELECTED TWEETS – From a Twitter Search results for canux on November 15, 2009 20:30PST.

BEST NOTES EVAR! If you want to link to them directly http://www.thechickentest.com/canux2009/.

You should really go check out the Canux site to get more info on the conference so you can decide to come and participate in one of the most intimate and rewarding conferences you will ever go to. I continue to go because the environment that the nForm team and the Banff Centre create re-energizes my soul and the conversations help me grow as a practitioner.

I hope to see you there.

This is a great presentation, definately the best concise explanation I have seen.

A group of Microsoft researchers has built a kind of multitouch for the conventional keyboard… It allows a keyboard to accept pressure-sensitivity data, from which it can infer user intentions. – Chris Dannen for Fast Company

I really love how this looks like it can be a simple inexpensive way to have new gestural interfaces enhance the work and play we do today.

Watching this video is like staring at the incoming tsunami. I’m excited and also terrified by the fact that in my career I will not only be designing experiences for kids like this but his kids.

I took this photo’s URL from Flickr and pasted it into the SeaDragon input box and I was done. The picture is from the Diablo Lake Overlook.

Microsoft Environmental practices video. The next step should be more vegetarian food choices at work.

Years ago I worked on an knowledge portal for a group of hospitals. These slides were the result of interviews with a number of group on what they need in a portal. These are fairly preliminary but it was a very useful exercise.

HealthCare Knowledge Portal Vision Slides

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