User Feedback...Good to Receive?

Sometimes I have a good old grumble at the feedback I receive for the company intranet (and not so often at the website feedback), but today, I was elated to receive an email from one of our CMS users in response to an upgrade email I had sent around. There were four elements to the upgrade, and the response went:

"1. good idea, 2. better idea 3. this is good too 4. this will make things easier"

Now according to this emailer, all we need to add is a wysiwyg spell-checker (in the pipeline) and he'll be happy as Larry.

My question from all this is as follows: should we be honest and say that it is "constructive" feedback (read "negative") that the IA/ID/UX practitioner should pay attention to, or should we say that the odd pat on the back is good for morale, and shows our attention to our users? Given that as Schiller said "Du Kannst nicht allen gefallen" (I think he said this - "You can't please everyone!"), when do you draw the line with a piece of feedback and say it's just not helpful (because it is too laudatory or unnecessarily critical)?

Who needs permalinks?

So far as purple links and perma links are concerned, how's about the Bible for permanence. The Book, Chapter, Verse system has worked for a long time, and still does, as I discovered when guiding my friend Tom to a wedding reading in the Song of Songs (Chapter/Song 2, if you must know). Sometimes the oldies are the goodies, now where's my parchment?

Heuristics only take you so far

I've been at home nursing a fever the past three days, and apart from feeling sorry for myself, and watching the Peter Weir adaptation of Patrick O'Brien's "Master & Commander" (great Boys' Own stuff, and very good when you're down in the dumps), I've started reading "The World of Christopher Marlowe". The great thing about this book so far is that it puts Marlowe's writing into a very clear socio-historical context, including the virtues of a Cambridge education.

What interested me was the emphasis on heuristics for oratory and rhetoric: which reminded me very much of the advice drummed into me by a French lecteur at college - argument, counter-argument, synthesis and conclusion. Having a wayward mind, I found such linguistic corsetry a little frustrating at University, and I've always been of the opinion that rule-based learning only takes you so far. I think this lesson stretches into the world of the Web, and was summed up very nicely on Christina's Elegant Hack site with a posting on "Good Gut", where experience was highlighted over heuristics, heuristics are not enough...    

NB: not sure that I like the new HTML editor on Blogger - wasn't the previous instance sufficient without giving us all the virtues of a WYSIWYG editor? Did I really need to add colour to this post? I liked being able to add HTML in directly without an "edit HTML" option.

Amazon recommendations

I was checking out the IMDB the other day and noticed their Bayesian weighted ranking system

weighted rank=(votes cast/(votes cast+minimum votes to be in top 50)) x mean rating + (minimum votes to be in top 50 /(votes cast+minimum votes to be in top 50)) x mean vote across the vote population

I think I've got this right! Thinking about recommendations engines, I then thought I'd go and sort out my personal Amazon recommendations (as most of my Amazon purchases have been corporate) by ranking items that I own and/or have read/viewed/used. I was pretty surprised at how (simply)comparative the engine appears to be: most of my recommendations so far are for authors I have read before and/or other editions of books I have read/CDs/DVDs and just a little bit of "others who purchased this..." Maybe I'm mis-calling Amazon on this one, as I know other people who say that Amazon second-guesses their purchases, but I would have thought ranking a couple of hundred items would give slightly more interesting recommendations. Oh well, I shall continue ranking and see if I'm more satisfied. Anyway, I seem to remember that there is a recommendations engine expert at Glasgow University (I think he's involved with the Information Retrieval Group) - if I can remember his name, I might send him an email to find out a bit more about the nuts and bolts of recommendations (hopefully it will be comprehensible to someone without undergrad maths).

The Joy of ...User Focus

After months of resource constraints getting in the way, myslef and a colleague have been working on some minor UI and functionality upgrades to our in-house intranet content management system. Small the changes may be, but I'm confident that they will bring fairly major user benefits (including the time I will save from not having to answer repetitive queries caused by the vagaries of the CMS). Hopefully we will continue to tweak our WYSIWYG editor until it writes beautifully compliant xhtml instead of the dog-eared HTML it spits out at the moment, but we'll have to wait and see on that one.

Murphy's Law Revisited

Humph! Having borrowed a power supply to test whether my PC is still alive (it's own power supply being dead to the world as of a few days), Murphy's law struck again. As soon as the replacement power supply was plugged in and switched on, the transformer coil started belching acrid smoke. I'm thinking I may have an inverse Midas touch when it comes to power supplies...

Murphy's Law

Isn't the extended version of this law not just that what will go wrong has to go wrong, but also that it will choose the most inopportune moment to do so? How's about starting work to get rid of a (human) single point of failure in a process, and then the same having to stay off work for two weeks with chickenpox (at his age!). How's about networking some standalone PCs so that they can be backed up to ensure (personal) important data is not lost - then the PC going kaputt before it can be networked. I can think of other things, but I do not want to conjurer le mauvais sort as the french say.

Diff'rent Strokes in Community Building

Reading Nancy White on Many to Many's posting on practical knowledge of social software technologies, and user's of one type (e.g. blogs) dissing other options of which they may have no practical knowledge, I am drawn to add the following: all these social software technologies can support one another, it's a question of horses for courses. Blogs are better for some aims, as are wikis, as are forums (or is that fora?), as are P2P shared workspaces, as are the Grooves, Sharepoints et al of the world. These can be combined to produce different results, and to offer full and enriching online community experience (much as I dislike the phrase "online community" - the community is offline, the glue holding it together is online). People prefer different tyes of technologies depending on their own boases for personal information control and communication - the phrase "one man's meat is another man's poison" springs to mind...

Bakerman, Bakerman, Bake Me a Cake

I wouldn't normally be flagrant in advertising a service, but if you are ever in Garforth (Leeds) or on the King's Road in Harrogate (both places in Yorkshire in England, and a very fine county indeed!), you could do worse than buy a piece of patisserie from one of M. Dumouchel's shops.

The reason this master baker has come to mind was in reading Metro (a free British newspaper for commuters) this morning. One of the stories referred to a Japanese girl who had paid £2,000 for a trip to Garforth in order to take an interview for a job with M. Dumouchel. Needless to say, such dedication beyond the call of duty landed the lady the job, and, if she learns to make a buche de noel (chocolate log) as tasty as those made by her patron, then it is money well spent.

"The Youth of Today" - Seven and Blogging!

Via Business Blog Consulting, I came across The seven-year-old-bloggers, a fascinating piece from the BBC on how early, early adoption of the blogging concept can take hold. I think that logs are pretty ludic in nature, which is one reason why they are appealing to individuals, and probably have taken a hold in the young mind more readily than say the concept of business blogging has. Anyway, you can generally be assured that children will learn how to do anything more quickly and more successfully than an adult if they are given the opportunity.

Community (and not much to do with "The Fall Guy" at all)

Colt Severs sang that he wasn't "the kind to kiss and tell", and personally I prefer not to just stick up a link to a resource on my blog - it smacks of laziness: "I'm not the kind to slap up links", but never say never...

Anyway, this is a very roundaabout way of saying that while trawling a few pages on the wicky wacky web recently, I came across the Online Community Toolkit from Full Circle, which looks chokka with useful links (not that I've had much of a chance to look at any of them yet).

Managing Expectations

Can anyone think of an effective technique to manage expectations for an unexpected 'blip' in the level of service which can be provided to end-customers (regardless of the type of service being provided) - especially when the likely length of the blip cannot be determined. I have some thoughts, but would be interested in hearing the opinion's of others... (more to the point - what about when two unexpected blips coincide?)

Topic Exchange - Topics for the Masses

Not a post about a chocolate bar, so much as one about Topic Exchange, a repository for links/rss feeds with "topics" attached. It means you can attach a blog posting to a topic/topics, and anyone interested in/subscribed to that topic can pick up on it. Nice idea for those without categorisation/in search of topic standardisation/the first steps on the semantic web.

Anyway, I've popped a couple of posts up and will add more, I think, shame it doesn't appear to integrate with blogger...

Moving Beyond a Honeycomb Centre

There have been a few comments and postings about Peter Morville's User Experience Design "Honeycomb", and I must admit - with a couple of reservations - that I like the diagram. My gripes with it - which are not large - are that the hexagons appear as independent facets, where in actual fact there is significant overlap and hierarchy within the terms used. To my mind, and many may disagree strongly, "accessible" and "findable" are just children of "usable" (i.e. to use something, you need to find it and or access it); useful is a subset of valuable, and valuable is the mother of all of the terms - they are all "values".

Criticism aside, like Jesse's Pillar diagram, the benefit of these diagrams is in the simplification. While they may be reductive, they are also seductive: messy explanations while often being more accurate, just aren't so convincing. So to my mind, if I can slap this type of diagram in front of a client and gain buy-in, all the better, even if the reality is slightly less distinct.

I'd kind of like to overlay the content/context/users venn diagram over the honeycomb, as I feel that some of the layers feed one into another to build up a clear 3-D picture of how it all connects.

Yet More Strange Search Referrals

Returning from a cracking break in Provence at the marriage of Romain and Florence - friends of my wife and I - I checked out my web referrals, and was delighted to se yet more weirdness in the search terms being used. How's about "network attached storage iran" and "'small world' +'naomi campbell'" for pulling traffic to my blog. Fantastic.

Strange search referrals

Looking through my search engine referrals for this blog, I saw that the last search directing a user to my blog was "Big T's Wales". I thought this sounded mildly pornographic or at the very least blatantly weird, until I realised that on page 2 of the Google results for the search term, there was a very relevant hit for a posting on new uses for mobile camera phones. Funny old world of search, really.

"Mark T's information blog
Anyway, reading through the venerable Big Issue recently, I ... clipping explaining that Junior Doctors in Wales have been ... beetled over to you "

On which note, I am going to go away and watch the England vs Switzerland match, and hope that there will be no more crowing from the Welsh and Scots. Fingers crossed.

Gold chip social networking

Via The Sunday Times June 13, 2004: "Well connected: the jet set", an article on an upscale social networking service with 2,800 members, called A Small World. Apparently members - including such luminaries as Naomi Campbell and Petrina Kahashoggi - have been using the BBS to discuss such posers as finding a private jet service for one's pets. This is great, as it really puts the "social" and "peers" to the forefront, emphasising what the French call piston, and we colonial types term the Old School network.

Although I read this article with my tongue firmly in cheek, it does highlight the fact that online social networking tools are as useful for communication within closed network groups, as they might be at broadening one's social circle. Alumnus services for universities are like this, and damned useful at putting you back in touch with people from the past (Friends Reunited is like this too!).

Tweaking search

Since there was a "spanner" in our intranet search, we have finally got around to tweaking some of the configuration options, improving the UI and are now looking to start gaming the results based on what we can garner of the algorithms that are used. Luckily, while running through the config, I discovered that we could reveal the actual document scores returned by the engine as opposed to simple matches. In an effort to "improve" our results, we have set up an intricate series of "Lorem Ipsum" documents (so as not to skew search terms for any other intranet searches) with the word "Conundrum" (which returns 0 results at present) secreted in various combinations of location within the document (title, meta etc...). Fingers crossed, when we compare our current results with any tweaks that we make, we should be able to instantly see the effect on our "Lorem Ipsum" search documents. Fun, fun, fun! (hmmm)

Update 14/06/2004

The plan was highly successful, and exposed some of the workings of the weighting process of which we were not 100% aware - for the record, it looks like we are over-skewing results with keyword occurrences in the title (among other things). We have adjusted the configuration files, and will see what results we get back with the same search term tomorrow. At the very least the two sets of results will be cross-comparable.

Accessibility Developments

Via Tim Bray, a link to Peter Korn's weblog, where there is a post on new developements in accessibility - including Adobe Acrobat 6 accessibility features and an Apple Sceen Reader. When I get 10 minutes I might even get the chance to follow one or two of the many interesting links.

Spanner in my search

Our intranet search has blown a gasket - and intensive digging by the team has uncovered that our inability to complete indexing is being caused by one corrupt Excel file. The annoying factor is that we can read some of the contents of the file in the core dump - including the fact that it has teal, gray and aqua formatting and Times New Roman! - but nothing that will help us to identify the file. My love for Excelnow knows no bounds...