On Producing Knowledge Assets

A knowledge asset is something of value that comes from what you have learned. I have had a small moment of clarity around my attitude to being able to produce these things. This is probably to do with my increasing number of years in my field, and growing confidence in my contribution.

Before I believed that you had to filter other people's ideas and try to consciously mould this into something insightful. Like forcing together pieces from different puzzles, analyse other's work, and present it. That somehow that is where good articles come from. I worried that my experience and ideas on their own would be challenged as unreferenced biased opinion, with no substance.

My new realization is that while I should always be taking in knowledge and other people's perspectives, that this is just one ingredient in what I myself produce.

My own insights are a thing of substance in their own right, because they are the product of my thought processes, experience and work, as well information I have read or consumed from experts. If I give enough sincere attention to communicating effectively, what I produce will be an accurate reflection of what I know, and where I am in my career. This has inherent value.

So it is less about whether I know 'enough' and more about internally having confidence in my abilities and where I am in my career to produce something, and be satisfied that is is a true reflection of my ability to contribute. This can only get better the further I go in my career.

I have a lot of great ideas, and let them pass me by a lot of the time, without capturing them, and building their development into my routine. If however I want my contribution to add up to more than the sum of my deliverables at work, I have to start somewhere, and writing articles for my blog is the first place to start.

I have had some great ideas and insights into community development based on a workshop we did on problem solving and collaborative design. I am keen to develop these ideas further, so this will be my next step on this blog as a project. Other ideas that could have value I will also develop further, albeit in a private space. When they are launched or otherwise publicly attributed to myself as knowledge capital, then I will surface the process, and knowledge here as well. This could very well be the beginning of my 'contribution' part of my career, as seperate from what I do for my employer.

Thanks for reading, and watch this space...

On Productivity

I am currently reading Sally McGhee's Take back your life and thought this quote was quite inspirational

A vision without a task is but a dream;

a task without a vision is drudgery;

a vision and a task together is the hope of the world.

I see the future, or rather, a different way to describe the creative process :)

I read an article (link to follow in update) that said essentially that user research does not lead to innovation, but feature bloat. I had all sorts of problems with this, but the main one that has emerged in my day in, day out user research, is that I CAN SEE THE FUTURE. No... Seriously.

And it makes sense really, when you apply the job description of a user researcher, with what we know today about the way the human brain works. Specifically the way the human subconscious solves problems in the background of your day to day life. Set it a task, and sleep on it, it's really a form of creativity, to connect the dots on all the apparently disparate ideas and come up with a brand new innovation.

There are many scientific links between REM sleep and creativity, and I also (strangely enough) drop straight into dreaming sleep within seconds.

How many times have you tried to work something out consciously and failed only to have the answer miraculously appear in your consciousness at some random time in the future. Most often this is in trying to remember something, where you know you know it, but can't quite think of it, 30 minutes will go by and 'ding!' like the microwave going off, it pops into your head, NOW I remember, Lorena is the name of the vampire that made Bill (True Blood reference).

So the reason that I can see the future of technology, is that through my job talking to users, and observing problems with todays software and technology, all these little puzzles are going into my head, and my brain works on them, like an endless problem solving piece of code. It just loops around and around until it has all the variables it needs, and voila! At some time in the future supposedly with enough rest, and enough raw material of experiences with real users on the topic, the design idea just comes to me in a glorious picture. This happens mostly when I am at rest, or doing something mundane like driving.

It makes sense really, and I would be curious if this happens with other user experience researchers, having a high quantity of really great ideas? I recently won an Innovation quest award for an idea that came to me in just the same way.

Can you put items in more than one place in an IA?

The Situation: Sorting the current sitemap, of a large global intranet portal, into a new more intuitive information architecture, using open sorting, and tree sort validation, and testing.


Items are sorting into multiple categories, because we have a diverse user population (4 big and different areas of the business that do quite different work and have quite different needs, but some are the same).

The problem: There may be concern about whether users will get confused seeing items in more than one place. If in an open sort, an item equally sorts in 2 diverse categories, should we allow it to exist in more than one place?

So the best person to look to to answer this question is Donna Spencer the IA guru. My manager just approved the purchase of her book so I will read about it, just to make sure I have the necessary references to back my work up, but check this link out to see her answer to a question about content that falls in more than one place. Read that real quick before you read the rest of this mail.

I have considered the point that she mentions, that the content is overlapping in the case of one of the high level categories, however my professional opinion is that too many of the primary sorts for the content go in that category, with the items being sorted in others at half the rate, for us to consider deleting it as a top tab, so it stays.

With any top tab set, or chosen classification scheme, you run into lots of redundancies, i.e. the clients item would be under each of the top tabs by area of the business, so we repeat clients for each area of the business. Makes sense, but could also be considered a 'redundancy'.

I think the current strategy that I am working on, based on analysing an open sort of 195 items and use the end user terminology.for that, works fine.

I really don’t want to change what I did, which was to allow the item to exist in multiple places if it makes sense. The users really do sort the items  in distinct buckets, but there are multiple schemes that we could have used (see also Donna Spencer's slides on organization schemes), the one we used is best supported by user generated terminology.

What I plan on doing about the problem:

We are already using the sort analysis spreadsheet and methodology to conduct the open sort, provided by Donna Spencer, the world’s most recognized IA specialist. I am happy that we are using a good scheme based on the days I spent analysing the work.

We will validate our IA recommendations with the target audiences of the stakeholders as each subset of content migrates. This gives the stakeholders a voice when it comes time to migrate their content, and gives them the opportunity to help identify their target audience when validating the content they care about.

This will hopefully alleviate some of the current pressure to question our current broader audience demographics at this early stage, when all we have is a skeleton of an IA before any content is migrated.

We will do this prior to migrating each subset of content, using treejack (to determine if that target audience can find it) and survey questions embedded in the treejack will determine what do they think about the multiple locations.

Question is... what would you do? I have asked Donna Spencer and my good friend from college Mathew Sanders... any other IA specialists, or user experience people that want to weigh in?

The Scrollwheel

This is NOT how I conduct my research... but it is funny :)

The value and cost of simplicity

Check out this blog for a great article on the value of simplicity in a setting other than that of usability...

http://worldeternal.blogspot.com/2011/01/use-2011-wisely.html?spref=fb


I am a usability expert, and 'simple' needs to be highly valued in the field of user interface design, and is beginning to be.

Perhaps, the complexity of 'simple' will start to get a better rap, and we can show the world before it's too late, that simple is often much harder to create or get back, than you think.

We should try not to destroy or change something until we truly understand if it will be a positive impact overall for real future use.

The Joy of Statistics

I am a usability researcher by trade. The link here shows the essence of what I first enjoyed about statistics in college.



It also shows why I focus so much more of my time on presentation and reporting, visualizations and persuasion at work, and less time on over analysis, the topic of my next blog article.

The holy grail of research to me is to communicate data in a persuasive way, so that people see immediately what they need to make a decision, based on truth, fact, the real picture.

We are influencers of design, and of process on our usability research team, sometimes others on the project team wonder why we keep talking about the design and the information architecture, when we are not 'per say' responsible for these things. The reality is, the client will always be the one to make the decisions, and the way I see my job, it is to fully inform of the consequences of these decisions, of the current situation, and what can be acheived in the ideal state.

It is actually how I define success in my role here where I work. Watch this neat little 4 minute video, and you will get a sense of the way I approach my job.