Information Architecture for Websites

Without a clear understanding of how information architecture (IA) should be set up, we can end up creating web sites that are more confusing than they need to be or make web site content virtually inaccessible. Here are some popular IA design patterns, best practices, design techniques, and case examples.

Information Architecture Design Patterns

There are a number of different IA design patterns for effective organization of web site content. Understanding these IA models will help you pick the most appropriate starting point for a site’s information structure. Let us talk about five of the most common web site IA patterns.

Single Page

The first pattern is the single page model. Single page sites are best suited for projects that have a very narrow focus and a limited amount of information. These could be for a single product site, such as a website for an iPhone app, or a simple personal contact info site.

Flat Structure

This information structure puts all the pages on the same level. Every page is just as important as every other page. This is commonly seen on brochure style sites, where there are only a handful of pages. For larger sites with a lot more pages, the navigation flow and content findability gets unwieldy.

Index Page

A main page with subpages is probably the most commonly seen web site IA pattern. This consists of a main page (we know this more commonly as a "home page" or "front page"), which serves as a jump-off point for all the other pages. The sub-pages have equal importance within the hierarchy.

Strict Hierarchy Pattern

Some websites use a strict hierarchy of pages for their information design. On these sites, there will be an index page that links to sub-pages. Each sub-page (parent page) has its own subpages (child pages). In this pattern, child pages are only linked from its parent page.

Co-Existing Hierarchies Pattern

As an alternative to the strict hierarchy, there is also the option of co-existing hierarchies. There are still parent and child pages, but in this case, child pages may be accessible from multiple parent pages/higher-level pages. This works well if there’s a lot of overlapping information on your site.

Best Practices for Information Architecture Design

There are a number of things you need to remember when designing the information architecture of your site. Most importantly, you need to keep the user experience at the forefront when making choices about how best to present and organize the content on your site.

Don’t Design Based on Your Own Preferences

You are not your user. As a designer, you have to remember that site visitors won’t have the same preferences as you. Think about who a "site user" really is and what they would want from the site.

Research User Needs

Researching what your users need and want is one of the most important steps in creating an effective information architecture. There are a number of ways to research user needs. You could get feedback through interviews, surveys, user side testing, and other usability testing methods prior to the site launch to see if users are able to navigate your site efficiently.

Once you know what your users actually need, rather than just your perception of what they need, you will be able to tailor your information architecture to best meet those needs.

Have a Clear Purpose

Every site should have a clear purpose, whether that’s to sell a product, inform people about a subject, provide entertainment, etc. Without a clear purpose, it is virtually impossible to create any kind of effective IA.

The way the information on a site is organized should be directly correlated to what the site’s purpose is. On a site where the end goal is to get visitors to purchase something, the content should be set up in such a way that it funnels visitors toward that goal. On a site that is meant to inform, the IA should lead people through the content in a way that one page builds on the last one.

You may have sub-goals within a site, requiring you to have subsets of content with different goals. That is fine, as long as you understand how each piece of content fits in relation to the goals of a site.

Use Personas

Creating personas, a hypothetical narrative of your various web site users, is another great way to figure out how best to structure the site’s content.

In its very basic form, developing personas is simply figuring out the different types of visitors to your site and then creating "real" people that fit into each of those categories. Then throughout the design process, use the people you have profiled as your basis for designing and testing the site’s IA.

Keep Site Goals in Mind

It is important that you keep the site’s goals in mind while you’re structuring content. Pick the right IA pattern for those goals. Use goals to justify why the information structure should be the way you designed it.

Be Consistent

Consistency is central to exemplary information architectures. If eight of your nine informational pages are listed in a section, why wouldn’t you also include the ninth page there? Users expect consistency.

The same goes for how information is structured on each page. Pick a pattern and stick to it. If you deviate from that pattern, make sure you have a very good reason to do so; and make the deviation is consistent in similar cases. Inconsistencies have a tendency to confuse visitors.

Tomorrow, I am going to describe methods and techniques for information architecture design.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Open Text - ECM Suite - Knowledge Management

OpenText Knowledge Management (formerly Livelink ECM - Knowledge Management) is a comprehensive knowledge management solution that enables organizations to search, classify, navigate, and collect all of their corporate knowledge in a single, secure, web based repository.

OpenText Knowledge Management works with OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management, leveraging the power of these content repositories and adding functionality that manages all knowledge from a single interface, regardless of originating source. Open Text Knowledge Management is a completely integrated, web based solution that delivers end-to-end, closed-loop management for all of your corporate knowledge assets.

Knowledge Management enables employees to perform their daily work more efficiently and accurately. The benefits of a centralized knowledge repository and library services ensures that you are working with the most up-to-date information. Specialized tools enable you to identify topic experts; quickly finding the best information resources from anywhere in your organization.

Powerful search, classification and navigation tools to help you find and manage an unlimited number of documents: from files, documents and objects, to project logs, search queries, discussion items, tasks, workflow maps and more in an organized, hierarchical structure.

You can identify subject matter experts and harvest their knowledge from the centralized knowledge repository. Open Text Knowledge Management extends the functionality of Open Text document management foundations - Open Text Document Management and Open Text Content Lifecycle Management. Open Text document management solutions fit your existing security framework, ensuring protection of content through permissions based access rules. Authorized users benefit from full access to all functionality from a single, secure web browser, and the flexibility of Open Text document management foundations allows for configuration of permissions on a group or individual level.

Features

Organize and share knowledge: Knowledge Management manages any type of electronic document in any file format. You can organize electronic documents into hierarchies of folders and compound documents within three types of workspaces that reflect the different ways in which people work: the Enterprise Workspace; Project Workspaces; and Personal Workspaces.

Capture knowledge automatically: Knowledge Management allows you to associate metadata with documents. Metadata is indexed and can be used to more easily find, retrieve, and generate reports on documents based on your custom criteria. Each piece of metadata information is an attribute, and sets of attributes can be grouped into categories that can be associated with any document.

Classify and categorize knowledge assets: multiple taxonomic classifications can be associated with documents in their original locations. This enables you to browse and search documents in the knowledge management repository according to taxonomies that differ from the one implied by the folder structure without having to create multiple copies of documents. You can organize information placed in Open Text Document Management or Open Text Content Lifecycle Management repositories via manual, assisted, or automatic means. Streamline browsing and improve search precision.

Automate knowledge management processes: Knowledge Management's graphical Workflow Designer tool enables you to automate document management processes, such as document change requests and document review and approval processes, to ensure that they are carried out accurately and consistently. You can design processes according to your own requirements or those imposed by regulatory agencies.

Discover knowledge with prospective queries: Knowledge Management provides prospective searching capabilities. You can create special queries to monitor various data sources, including the OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management repositories, shared network drives, external web sites and any integrated databases. When new information is discovered, you are immediately notified.

Single point of information access: federated search enables you to query multiple repositories and brings disparate information sources together. Use powerful search tools to quickly information access locate the right information. View results on a single page in a sorted, clustered format. Show hit highlights, document summaries, relevance rankings and result themes to improve fidelity.

Dynamic, multi-dimensional navigation: create dynamic, virtual folder structures built on pre-defined information taxonomies and document attributes; no pre-defined hierarchy is required. Often, metadata is not visible or navigable when you browse for information. Using taxonomies for browsing and additional context, you can decide which dimension is best to find required documents. Drill down the hierarchy using associated metadata to refine values and corresponding documents.

Optimize taxonomy creation and maintenance: analyze and cluster related documents, and extract and generate key concepts. Create suggested taxonomy nodes based on analyses; import and export in many common formats.

Automatically collect and extract information: crawl multiple Web-based information sources including intranets, extranets, web sites, and more. Create personal entries for crawling, search specific sites and search from the Document Management or Content Lifecycle Management user interface.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a business process for organizing rich media assets such as pictures, images, video, and audio for storage, retrieval and distribution.

DAM is an increasingly important tool for organizations to protect and grow their brands, control the costs of creating and distributing their digital media content, and maximize the return from their digital assets. Many organizations rely on DAM to provide the much needed centralization, workflow optimization, collaboration, digital media management, and distribution solutions that are becoming an increasingly demanding requirement.

Departments in an organization such as marketing, sales, advertising, public relations benefit most from digital asset management. Using DAM enables organizations to address their most pressing rich media challenges such as managing video, presentation slide decks, creative design media, as well as marketing collateral and related processes.

Organizations face these challenges regarding their digital assets:

• disconnected and inefficient production processes;
• lack of unified collaboration and sharing among all contributors, (photographers, authors, editors, designers, marketers and distributors) international offices, third-parties and business partners;
• wasted resources, both human and capital, due to needless searching for media assets, recreating or repurchasing lost images, using incorrect versions, workflow bottlenecks, inefficient file transformation and delivery processes, lack of usage tracking and lack of production automation;
• implementing disaster recovery and archival plans;
• embracing new technologies such as RSS feeds, user-generated content, and Web 2.0 applications;
• identifying efficient ways to move images, video, audio, PDF, InDesign, PPT, Excel, Word, EPS, GIF and SVG files from where they are created and managed to their ultimate destination in web production, printed magazines, mobile devices or a whole host of other delivery points.

The Benefits of DAM

Organizations deploying specialized DAM solutions typically realize the following benefits:

Cost Savings — organizations gain immediate ROI by eliminating redundant asset creation efforts; quickly retrieving, editing, and redistributing assets; redeploying resources to other mission critical projects.

Generation of new revenue streams — organizations derive new revenue by converting and repurposing existing content like book covers to promote their eBooks. Consider an image that costs thousands of dollars to create and recreate multiple times. With DAM, it can be reused. Without DAM, its existence may not be known and the re-creation costs become reoccurring.

Brand and Messaging Continuity — built-in revision control, asset repurposing, and approval processes ensure organizations maintain consistent use and re-expression of digital assets, from brochures and corporate videos to web content.

Digital Media Management and Distribution — DAM systems enable the efficient organization, indexing, and distribution of digital assets. Advanced DAM systems provide a distributed architecture and multi-site asset storage, as well as the ability to provide multiple repositories for self-synchronization of both assets and their associated metadata. This means professionals can quickly and easily find and create what they need and distribute it to their intended audience with the click of a few buttons.

Global Web-Based Access — organizations can distribute digital masters and other types of licensed assets via secure web access. Advanced DAM systems also provide asset ordering and fulfillment modules that can easily integrate with existing ecommerce and transaction servers. Not only can organizations quickly access their files from any web interface, they can create new revenue streams and sell their assets via virtual storefronts.

Full-featured DAM solutions include a variety of tools for organizing, accessing, editing, transforming and working with images, video, audio, presentations, etc. Important features include search, transformation of media into various formats, integration with creative authoring tools, workflow, IP rights functionality, usage tracking, back-up and role-based security.

With a robust DAM solution, organizations can achieve new levels of creative effectiveness and efficiency by enabling marketing teams to quickly find content, easily reuse digital assets, enhance creative productivity, provide visibility into digital asset management usage and processes, improve brand consistency and maintain

security and policy compliance. Digital asset management solutions provide deep integration functionality with creative authoring applications such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Quark.

By enabling secure access and management of all digital media content throughout an organization, DAM tools provides an efficient, centralized, and connected publishing workflow environment right from the creative design stage through to production and distribution to all channels.

There are tools in the market which are specifically designed for DAM. I will describe them in my future posts.

Benefits of Cloud Content Management

ECM has provided an essential service to enterprises, helping them to better capture, organize and track massive quantities of content within their organizations.

Today’s more strategic IT departments are driving businesses to rethink how they approach content management and collaboration in the enterprise. A variety of factors including persistently tight IT budgets, lower headcount, business uncertainty, and unrelenting pressure to grow through innovation have made the advantages of cloud based ECM even more compelling.

Current ECM systems can be delivered in a cloud. Delivered over the web, these new solutions offer the usability of consumer tools and recognize the need for external sharing, all at a cost amenable to today’s IT budgets.

Cloud content management (CCM) is an emerging category that combines many of the core elements and content focus of ECM with the usability and ease of sharing so prominent in collaboration software. As its name implies, CCM brings the benefits of the cloud - low maintenance, elastic and scalable, with access to content anytime, anywhere, across devices.

CCM can fulfill the content management and collaboration needs of small to medium-sized businesses, in many cases bringing content management to companies previously unable to afford it and also provide a layer of value on top of ECM solutions already deployed by large enterprises.

The best CCM solutions have open platforms that allow for easy integration across the systems a company has already deployed, as well as connections into other cloud services such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps. This is particularly useful for those businesses that are considering a full move into cloud-based software. Small businesses are leading the way toward operating fully in the cloud, and even larger enterprises are beginning to see their security concerns addressed by large cloud vendors.

CCM solutions are using the advantages of web delivery to offer additional functionality above and beyond what ECM solutions provide. For example, CCM can make it easy to view any type of content in a Web browser without even owning the software application that it was created in. Gone are the days of being unable to view content you have received because you don’t have the latest version of Microsoft Office, or haven’t invested in Adobe Illustrator. Furthermore, open platforms make it possible to also edit much of this content.

This is still an emerging category in ECM, but there are immediate opportunities to improve how businesses engage with content, and a number of CCM companies are aspiring to address them.

Whether or not businesses are ready to fully embrace cloud solutions or maintain a hybrid approach with existing infrastructure, providing dynamic, flexible collaboration tools with CCM will enhance productivity and ultimately give IT departments more insight into their organizations.

There are several reasons that the cloud’s value proposition for ECM is particularly attractive:

Consume what you need

ECM implementations in a cloud are typically a series of projects over time, each requiring different capabilities on a different scale. On-premise ECM implementation requires to implement all capabilities at the same time. The cloud model, on the other hand, gives you the flexibility to just purchase the capabilities you need at the scale you need today and to then adjust your engagement over time as necessary.

Eliminating technical complexity

On- premise ECM implementations could be complex, requiring IT organizations to assemble software components, install and configure them, apply patches, write integration code, maintain operating system updates, continuously tune system parameters, maintain hardware and manage performance. The cloud model relieves the service consumer of the burdens associated with this complexity. As Gartner noted, cloud ECM "brings with it fewer costs for infrastructure hardware, software and management and less complexity in the applications layer."

Getting Approval

Cloud ECM projects are much easier to get an approval from the company management since with on-premise ECM, upper management has to commit lots of money and human resources to a project up front whereas cloud ECM implementation does not require these resources.

Speed

Cloud ECM implementations typically take 24% of the time of similar on-premise projects. That rapid time-to benefit translates directly into the higher ROI that business managers want.

Cost

With budgets tight, the comparatively low cost of cloud-based ECM is extremely appealing to the business. Plus, CFOs have better visibility into and control over costs when they are explicitly itemized on a vendor contract.

Reduced Risk

Cloud ECM projects don’t require large outlays for uncertain results. And a variety of protections can be written into vendor contracts. For these and other reasons, the cloud fits well into today’s corporate risk mitigation strategies.

Flexibility

Cloud ECM implementation gives the business this flexibility, both in terms of right-sizing capacity and in terms of aligning ECM capabilities with changing business needs.

Cloud offers an undeniable business advantages. And the uptake that we are seeing in the marketplace proves that ECM buyers agree.

Content Management Systems Reviews - FatWire

FatWire Software is web content and experience management software which powers web presence for organizations, allowing them to deliver relevant customer content, build community engagement and drive site stickiness and loyalty.

FatWire Software was a privately held company selling web content management system software. It was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2011, and its products rolled up into Oracle's WebCenter product lines.

FatWire solutions are powered by content server, which combines complete business user control over the creation and presentation of content with a scalable architecture for dynamic content delivery and multi-site deployment.

FatWire Key Strengths

• FatWire provides web content management (WCM) solutions that enable organizations to deliver a rich online experience to users and to simplify management of their web presence.
• FatWire offers a comprehensive web experience management (WEM) portfolio including WCM and targeted marketing technologies, plus enterprise 2.0 collaboration and content integration capabilities.
• Organizations can harness the power of FatWire solutions to rapidly and cost effectively deploy large numbers of web sites and deliver a compelling web experience to customers and partners.
• With FatWire, customers can optimize the web experience while increasing customers loyalty and sales.

FatWire Technology

The product has a strong Java foundation and is J2EE-based, relying on servlet engine support from market leading J2EE application servers. FatWire Content Server supports management of both content and code, allowing organizations to not only manage and deploy content but also stage and deploy an entire Web site. The product provides comprehensive Web services API for the development of dynamic, personalized sites in JSP and ASP.NET.

Products

FatWire includes the following products:

• FatWire Content Server
• FatWire TeamUp
• FatWire Analytics
• FatWire Engage
• FatWire Community Server
• FatWire Gadget Server
• FatWire Mobility Server
• FatWire Content Integration Platform

FatWire Content Server

• Empowers business users to manage content with powerful, easy-to-use interfaces including in-context content editing, drag-and-drop page layout, time-based site management, and more.
• Ensures consistency and accuracy with central management of multiple sites in multiple languages.
• Delivers a personalized web experience for site visitors with high-speed dynamic delivery of targeted and multi-lingual content.
• Organizes and manage large volumes of content including extensive product catalogs, with flexible tools for managing complex product taxonomies and hierarchies.
• Supports high volume, enterprise-class deployments with a highly scalable infrastructure and robust enterprise security and access control.
• Automates the entire process of managing web content, including authoring, site design, content publishing and deployment, content targeting, web content analytics, and user participation.

FatWire TeamUp

• Facilitates both internal collaboration and external website communities.
• Helps organizations to dramatically improve the productivity of internal creative teams, and to build and strengthen interactions with customers and other stakeholders.
• Strikes the perfect balance between freeform collaboration and enterprise needs for scalability, security, and monitoring.

FatWire Analytics

• Offers tracking and reporting on individual assets, promotions, and visitor segments.
• Gives editors and marketers the ability to immediately determine whether a given piece of content is effective for a customer segment.
• Works with FatWire Content Server and FatWire Engage to enable real-time tracking and optimization.

FatWire Engage

• Empowers marketers to set up and manage targeted online campaigns.
• Gives marketers easy-to-use interfaces for defining what content will be delivered to each customer segment online, and to tweak those recommendations as needed, based on the effectiveness of content.

FatWire Community Server

FatWire Community Server offers user generated content (UGC) features to create an engaging website experience. These capabilities integrated with the rest of the WEM suite, for robust manageability and scalability. With FatWire Community Server, organizations can:

• easily implement social features such as comments, ratings, reviews and blogs on new or existing websites;
• employ user generated ratings or reviews to influence and change the content of dynamic sites;
• harness UGC for the benefit of the business by using and re-using UGC assets throughout the site to deliver value for site visitors;
• easily moderate and manage UGC with flexible tools to meet enterprise standards.

FatWire Gadget Server

Web site visitors expect to receive information that is tailored to their needs and can change as their interests change. Gadgets are an important tool for delivering this. Gadgets are small applications that can be placed on web sites to provide a specific function or type of information, and can be personalized by site visitors. FatWire Gadget Server uses the power of gadgets to help organizations:

• enable site visitors to quickly and easily create their own gadget dashboards by selecting the gadgets they would like to use from a list made available to them by the organization;
• offer end user personalization of gadgets so site visitors can tailor gadget content to meet their specific needs;
• enable business users to easily set up their own gadgets made of internal content, based on out-of-the-box gadgets provided with Gadget Server;
• add their gadgets or third-party gadgets to any page of their web presence;
• syndicate their gadgets to third-party sites for enterprise content syndication.

FatWire Gadget Server is built on the OpenSocial/Google Gadget standards so that any compliant third-party gadgets can be incorporated with FatWire gadgets on FatWire sites. And gadgets built with FatWire Gadget Server can be incorporated into any OpenSocial/Google Gadget standard compliant web page.

With Gadget Server organizations can offer site visitors the ability to personalize their own web experience, driving loyalty and repeat visits. Gadget Server also gives organizations the ability to extend their brand and business reach through syndicating out their content or functionality.

FatWire Mobility Server

Enables organizations to deploy their web content seamlessly on thousands of mobile devices. Whether traditional web content or community content, companies can enable their users to engage with their organization via the mobile channel.

FatWire Content Integration Platform

The FatWire Content Integration Platform lets organizations quickly access stored content across the enterprise, publishing it to their public web sites, intranets and extranets managed by FatWire Content Server. The solution employs strict enterprise standards for maintaining version control, access policies, and workflow applied to documents and content shared, and lets FatWire customers utilize Content Server interfaces to access content from throughout their various business silos for online use with minimal effort.

What is Usability?

Usability is the ease of use of a system or a web site. It is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. If users either find a system difficult to use or find problems with it, then user adoption of this system is going to be extremely difficult.

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word "usability" also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.

Usability is defined by 5 quality components:

• Learnability: how easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: when users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
Errors: how many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: how pleasant is it to use the design?

There are many other important quality attributes. A key one is utility, which refers to the design's functionality: does it do what users need?

Usability and utility are equally important and together determine whether something is useful: It matters little that something is easy if it is not what you want. It is also no good if the system can hypothetically do what you want, but you can't make it happen because the user interface is too difficult. To study a design's utility, you can use the same user research methods that improve usability.

Definition: Utility = whether it provides the features you need.

Definition: Usability = how easy and pleasant these features are to use.

Definition: Useful = usability + utility.

Why Usability is Important?

On the web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the home page fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a web site, they leave. If a web site's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave. Did you note a pattern here? There is no such thing as a user reading a web site manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other web sites available, leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.

The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either.

For intranets, content management systems, web portals usability is a matter of employee efficiency and productivity. Time users waste being lost on your intranet or pondering difficult instructions is money you waste by paying them to be at work without getting work done.

Current best practices call for spending about 10% of a design project's budget on usability. For internal design projects, think of doubling usability as cutting training budgets in half and doubling the number of transactions employees perform per hour. For external designs, think of doubling sales, doubling the number of registered users or customer leads, or doubling whatever other desired goal motivated your design project.

How to Improve Usability

There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful method is user testing, which has 3 components:

1. Get hold of some representative users, such as customers for a web site or employees for an intranet (in the latter case, they should work outside your department).

2. Ask the users to perform representative tasks with the design.

3. Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they have difficulties with the user interface. Do not talk and let the users do the talking.

It is important to test users individually and let them solve any problems on their own. If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you have contaminated the test results.

To identify a design's most important usability problems, testing 5 users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it is a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them. Iterative design is the best way to increase the quality of user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with users, the better.

User testing is different from focus groups, which are a poor way of evaluating design usability. Focus groups have a place in market research, but to evaluate interaction designs you must closely observe individual users as they perform tasks with the user interface. Listening to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do.

When to Work on Usability

Usability plays a role in each stage of the design process. Therefore there is a need

for multiple studies.

Follow these steps:

Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize, and the bad parts that give users trouble. Unless you are working on an intranet, test your competitors' designs to get data on a range of alternative interfaces that have similar features to your own.

Conduct a field study to see how users behave in their natural environment. Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better, because you will need to change them all based on the test results.

Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations that run on the computer. Test each iteration.

Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines, whether from your own earlier studies or published research.

Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it again. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation.

Don't defer user testing until you have a fully implemented design. If you do, it will be impossible to fix the vast majority of the critical usability problems that the test uncovers. Many of these problems are likely to be structural, and fixing them would require major re-architecting.

The only way to a high-quality user experience is to start user testing early in the design process and to keep testing every step of the way.

Where to Test

It is best to test users in their own work environment, i.e. at their office. This will make them more comfortable. Also, users are used to their own computers. Be present with them while they use the design and just observe and make notes.

Misconceptions About Usability

Misconceptions about usability's expense, the time it involves, and its creative impact prevent companies from getting crucial user data, as does the erroneous belief that existing customer-feedback methods are a valid driver for interface design. Most companies still don't employ systematic usability methods to drive their design. The resulting widespread ignorance about usability has given rise to several misconceptions.

Misconception - Usability Is Expensive

Usual usability projects are not expensive. You can run user tests in a spare conference room or better yet in participants' offices. The methods are flexible and scale up or down according to circumstances. On average, best practices call for spending 10% of a design budget on usability. That is an inexpensive way to ensure that you spend the remaining 90% correctly, rather than blow your budget on an unworkable design.

Misconception - Usability Engineering Will Delay My Launch Date

Usability need not be on the grand scale. The simplest user testing method would take around 3 days but even faster tests are possible.

One of the main benefits of letting user research drive design is that you don't have to spend time on features that users don't need. Early studies will show you where to focus your resources so that you can launch on time.

Finally, usability can save time by helping you quickly settle arguments in the development team. Most projects waste countless staff hours as highly paid people sit in meetings and argue over what users might want or what they might do under various circumstances. Instead of debating, find out. It is faster, particularly because running a study requires only one team member's time.

Misconception - Usability Kills Creativity

Design is problem solving under constraints: you must design a system that can actually be built within budget and that works in the real world. Usability adds one more constraint: the system must be relatively easy for people to use. This constraint exists whether or not you include formal usability methods in your design process.

Human short-term memory holds only so many chunks of information. If you require users to remember too much, the design will be error-prone and hard to use because people will forget things when you overload their memory.

Also, if you are designing a web site, it will be one of millions available to users and they'll grant you only so much of their attention before they move on.

These are facts of life. All usability does is to make them explicit so that you can account for them in your design. Usability guidelines tell you how people typically behave with similar designs. User testing tells you how people behave with your proposed design. You can pay attention to this data or ignore it; the real world remains the same regardless.

Knowing real-world facts increases creativity because it offers designers ideas about design improvement and inspires them to focus their energy on real problems.

Misconception - We Don't Need Usability, We Already Listened to Customer Feedback

Market research methods such as focus groups and customer satisfaction surveys are great at researching your positioning or which messages to choose for an advertising campaign. They are not good at deciding user interface questions, in fact, they are often misleading.

When a group of people is sitting around a comfortable table having snacks, they are easily wowed by demos of a web site's fancy features and multimedia design elements. Get those people to sit alone at a computer, and they are likely to leave the same web site in a short time.

Seeing something demo'd and actually having to use it are two very different things.Likewise, what customers say and what customers do rarely line up; listening to customers uses the wrong method to collect the wrong data.

Luckily, the correct usability methods are inexpensive, easy to implement, and will not delay your project. Instead, relying on wrong methods or not doing usability work is much more expensive.

Why Any CMS is Better Than Network Drives and Email Attachments?

This might be a trivial question, however, many organizations still use network drives for storing documents and their employees collaborate on these documents by sending them to each other as email attachments.

What is wrong with this picture?

The volume and variety of electronic information is exploding. Organizations are required to analyze new information faster and make timely decisions for achieving business goals within budget. They therefore are becoming increasingly dependent upon efficient access to information. In order to effectively use information, it must be readily available for analysis and synthesis with other information. The value of information depends on two things: finding it, and being able to use it.

Why can't this be done in network drives? Here are just few reasons:

• documents in network drives cannot be searched;
• there is no version control in network drives;
• there is no trail who changed documents and what has been changed;
• there are multiple versions of the same document;
• there are no workflows and so there can be no automatic documents movement between participants;
• few people could be editing the same document at the same time and so there is no control of made changes;
• there is no possibility for the reuse of content;
• permissions cannot be set up.

Further on, your organization would not meet regulatory and legal requirements if it stores its documents in network drives. If you are in a regulated environment, such as ISO 9001 or GxP/GMP, you must have a document control in place. Documents have to be accounted for, there can be no multiple versions of the same document in one place, there has to be a complete control on which documents are used, etc. This cannot be done in network drives. In addition, e-discovery is going to be very difficult and its cost very high.

Sending documents as email attachments is inefficient and time consuming. Sometimes it is even impossible, for example when these documents are too big for the email to handle. It is much easier to upload documents in a central location and for employees go there and update them as necessary. If it is a CMS, you can keep control on who changed what and when.

Content re-use is very difficult or even impossible, because every time a document needs to be changed, a user would have to change the entire document instead of just changing one paragraph and then being able to have the same content output as a brochure, marketing collateral, white paper, etc.

And if you need to translate documents in multiple languages, documents change is going to include tremendous cost because rather than translating just one paragraph that was changed, you would have to translate the entire document.

There are numerous advantages of having a content management system (CMS) in place. Here are just a few advantages. CMSs provide the facility to control how content is published, when it is published, and who publishes it. CMSs allow to set up workflow management thus allowing documents to automatically move between participants (reviewers, approvers, etc). There is version control, audit trail, collaboration features. You can set up appropriate permissions for your documents. Your documents would be searchable and readily accessible in one central location.

The best option is ECM suite. To be considered an ECM suite, the system has to include the following components:

• document imaging – the ability to process and store high volume images of documents like insurance claims;
• document management – the ability to provide library services and version control;
• records management – the ability to declare and manage corporate records;
• collaboration – the ability to share content with team members;
• web content management – the ability to publish and update web sites;
• digital asset management – the ability to manage digital assets like powerpoint slides and movies.

Some content management systems are free, such as Drupal, TYPO3, Joomla, and WordPress. Others may be affordable based on size subscriptions. Although subscriptions can be expensive, overall the cost of not having to hire full-time developers can lower the total costs. In addition, for many CMSs software can be bought based on need. In addition, many CMS can be deployed in a cloud thus further decreasing costs.

CMSs are designed with non-technical people in mind. Simplicity in design of the administrator UI allows content managers and other users to update content without much training in coding or technical aspects of system maintenance.

Many CMS tools use a drag and drop AJAX system for their design modes. It makes it easy for beginner users to create custom front-ends.

Once you have deployed a CMS, your employees are going to be more efficient and productive and you will save cost in the end.

How to choose a CMS? See my blog post on this subject.

User Acceptance Testing

I have mentioned in my posts that if users either find a system difficult to use or find problems with it, then user adoption of this system is going to be extremely difficult. One of the ways to eliminate potential problems and provide user adoption is user acceptance testing.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is a process to obtain confirmation that a system meets mutually agreed upon requirements for the system. Major stakeholders, the project sponsor, and users across an organization provide such confirmation after testing the system. UAT is done using real world scenarios relevant to the users' tasks in the system.

Users of the system perform these tests, which you would derive from the user requirements documents. The UAT acts as a final verification of the required business functions and proper functioning of the system, emulating real-world usage conditions. UAT is one of the final stages of a content management project and often occurs before users accept the system. This type of testing gives users the confidence that the system being deployed for them meets their requirements. This testing also helps to find bugs related to usability of the system.

Prerequisites

Before UAT is conducted the system needs to be fully developed. Various levels of QA testing should already be completed before UAT. Most of the technical bugs should have already been fixed before UAT.

What to Test?

To ensure an effective UAT test cases are created. These Test cases can be created using various use cases identified during the requirements definition stage. The Test cases ensure proper coverage of all the scenarios during testing.

During this type of testing the specific focus is the exact real world usage of the system. The testing is done in an environment that simulates the production environment. The test cases are written using real world scenarios for the system.

How to Test?

Focus is on the functionality and the usability of the system rather than the technical aspects. It is assumed that the system already has undergone QA testing.

UAT typically involves the following:

• UAT planning;
• designing UA test cases;
• selecting a team that would execute the UAT test cases;
• executing test cases;
• documenting the defects found during UAT;
• resolving the issues/bug fixing
• sign Off.

UAT Planning

As always the planning process is the most important of all the steps. This affects the effectiveness of the testing Process. The planning process outlines the UAT Strategy. It also describes the key focus areas, entry and exit criteria.

Designing UAT Test Cases

UAT test cases help the test execution team to test the system. This also helps to ensure that the UAT provides sufficient coverage of all the scenarios. The Use Cases created during the requirements definition stage may be used as input for creating test cases. The input from users can also be used for creating test cases.

Each UAT test case describes in a simple language the precise steps to be taken to test something.

Selecting a Team That Would Execute the UAT Test Cases

The UAT Team is generally a good representation of users across the organization. Be sure to involve major stakeholders and sponsors.

Executing Test Cases

The testing team executes the test cases and may additionally perform random tests relevant to their tasks in the system. Lead the team by executing the test cases with them and guide users as necessary.

Documenting the Defects found During UAT

The team logs their comments and any defects or issues found during testing.

Resolving the Issues/Bug Fixing

Discuss the issues/defects found during testing with your project team and sponsors. The issues are resolved as per the mutual consensus and to the satisfaction of the users. Sometimes you may have to prioritize these issues/bugs. After these issues/bugs were either fixed, allow users to re-test the system. If you decided to prioritize and fix them later, inform your users about it with the estimated date of the fix.

Sign Off

Upon successful completion of the UAT and resolution of the issues the team generally indicates the acceptance of the system. Once users "Accept" the system, they indicate that the system meets their requirements.

Users now would feel confident that the system meets their needs and they feel "invested" in the system. There may also be legal or contractual requirements for acceptance of the system.

UAT Key Deliverables

• the test plan - outlines the testing strategy;
• test cases – help the team to effectively test the system;
• the test log – a log of all the test cases executed and the actual results;
• user sign off – this indicates that the users find the system is delivered to their satisfaction.

SharePoint - Lists and Libraries Management

When a SharePoint list or library has a large number of items, you must carefully plan its organization, taking into account how users need to access documents or data. By planning and using a few key list and library features, you can ensure that users can find information without adversely affecting the performance of the rest of your site.

SharePoint contains a Document Center site template that you can use when you want to create a site that is optimized for creating, managing, and storing large numbers of documents.

Manage large numbers of documents using Document Center site

A Document Center is a specialized site designed to serve as a centralized repository for managing documents. You can use a Document Center site as an authoring environment or a content archive.

In an authoring environment, users actively check files in and out and create folder structures for those files. Versioning is enabled, and 10 or more earlier versions of each document can exist. Users check documents in and out frequently, and workflows can help automate actions on the documents.

In contrast, very little authoring occurs in a content archive. Users only view or upload documents. The Document Center site template supports creating knowledge base archives.

You can also create another type of large-scale archive by using the Records Center site template. The Records Center site template contains features for managing the retention and disposition of records.

Document Center Features

Tree View Navigation

The tree view should be a familiar navigation element for most Microsoft Windows users. A documents library can have folders so you can use the tree view to quickly browse to the document that you want. Be careful when you create folders. It is not advisable to create sub-folders, i.e. folders inside folders because users have to click many times to get to documents. If you need to separate documents inside the folder, perhaps it is the time to create a new library to create more space.

Major and Minor Document Versioning

You can turn on versioning for any document library. Versioning lets you track changes to documents, and it helps you manage content as you revise it. Versioning is especially helpful when several people work together on projects, or when information goes through several stages of development and review.

With versioning turned on, you can restore an earlier version as your current document, or view an earlier version without overwriting the current document.

Check-in and Check-out

The default settings in the Document Center require users to check out and check in files. Requiring check-out helps prevent conflicts and confusion over changes, because only one user can change a file at a time. When you require check-out, a file is checked out automatically when someone opens it for editing, unless another user already has it checked out.

While you have a file checked out, your changes are not visible to others until you check the file back in. This is true whether you are working on your hard disk or on the server. When you check in a file, you are prompted to enter comments about your changes, and the comments become part of the version history. And because the Documents library tracks major and minor versions of a file, you are prompted to choose which type of version you are checking in. Minor version is usually still a draft document, and a major version is a completed version of this document.

Content Types

A content type is a reusable group of settings for a category of content. You can use content types to manage the metadata, templates, and behaviors of items and documents consistently. See my post on SharePoint content types for more details on how to work with content types in SharePoint.

Create Specialized Views

You can create specialized views in libraries which will allow users to see only one set of items at a time. Views are based on metadata fields assigned to documents or data. When you create these views, choose only those metadata fields that you want to see in these views. You can also specify the order in which metadata will appear. You also will be able to filter these views to see only specific items.

Workflows

You can create workflows to automate movement of documents. SharePoint has the following workflows: approval, review, collect signature. You can also set up a workflow to flag obsolete documents - it is called three-state workflow. You can create specialized workflows using SharePoint Designer. See my post on SharePoint workflows for more details on how to set up and manage workflows.

Content Approval

If you set up content approval, you can control the publication of new content. This will help to ensure that only completed documents are uploaded, that documents are uploaded into correct locations, and metadata is populated correctly.

Document Control Systems Reviews - Arena

There are few applications specifically designed for document control. Arena is one of them and it is the subject of my today's post.

Arena has the following modules:

• item management;
• Bill of Materials Management (BOM);
• change management;
• supplier collaboration;
• compliance tracking;
• project collaboration.

Item Management

Item management allows you to have part data, assemblies and documents including drawings and data sheets in one place. This is a centralized product record. You can give your team and designated suppliers controlled access to all the information they need to design and manufacture your product.

You can create a unique record for every part in your item master with customizable part numbering schemes and categories. Customizable categories can be used to determine the layout and sequence of fields in your part record.

You can see the entire revision history of an item in a single place to understand the decisions and changes that brought you to the current design. BOMControl Item Management allows you to toggle easily between the current working revision and any previous revision with one click.

Bill of Materials Management (BOM)

Your bill of materials (BOM) contains the parts and instructions that make your product. BOMControl keeps bill of material data centralized, controlled, and up-to-date.

You can quickly compare multiple BOMs to see what has changed, or what is different. You can optimize procurement and production with side-by-side bill of materials comparisons that reveal component needs across multiple product lines.

With BOM preview panels and where used panels accessible from each line in every BOM, you can move through your BOMs with ease. From top-level assembly to specific subassemblies and components, you can view specific item details, grab files and compliance information and review change order status at a glance—all without disrupting your flow.

You can specify acceptable part substitutions directly in the BOM. BOMControl allows you to designate alternate items and conditions where you might want to use them instead of the primary item designated in the BOM. You can provide alternatives for hard-to-source parts, or specify an earlier revision of an existing item as a substitute to utilize on-hand stock of a part that has been updated.

Change Management

There is a voting scheme that shows changes to one or many key stakeholders as you require their input. There is a notification system that reminds participants to vote when their input is needed. You can send virtual change packages to stakeholders and suppliers anywhere in the world, review and approve engineering change requests (ECR) and engineering change orders (ECO) from any location. With redlines and comment functionality, the BOMControl engineering change management process is controlled and transparent, so you can confidently include your supply chain in your innovation efforts.

You can capture deviations, and send them out for approval and release with a time-based user notification flag on products under deviation. BOMControl supports overlapping deviations and allows you to extend the expiration date or force expiration as needed.

You can document the decisions that led to each deviation, and the associated approval process for a complete product history. For more complete change request management, BOMControl offers detailed notification options.

Anyone with proper permissions can create a documented change request which can include files, supporting reasoning and discussion history and send it to the engineer that owns the product for more timely approvals. You can capture field failures and product feedback from operations, customer care and your supply chain to make better sourcing, purchasing and design decisions.

Incoming ideas are connected to their corresponding items so engineers know which changes affect the items they manage.

Capture the detailed cost, availability, compliance and market decisions that shape your design and manufacturing processes over time. Track approvals in threaded conversations, and control supplier participation in your process by hiding sensitive information in the discussion panel.

BOMControl engineering change management preserves not only the changes you've made, but also the full history of what influenced those decisions.

Supplier Collaboration

Everyone in your supply chain can see the same up-to-date information at all times. You can control what information you share by setting a level of access for each supplier—from read-only or component-level access, to full BOM access for trusted partners. You can even bring suppliers into your change process for more efficient feedback loops. You can protect sensitive information by designating any file as private.

Designated suppliers can view your bill of materials, compare redlines, enter quotes, upload files or even participate in your change process. Automatic notifications let partners know when their input is required, when new revisions are introduced or when a part is deviated.

BOMControl’s export functionality makes sending snapshots of your BOM and other key information an easy, repeatable process. Export in CSV, XLS or PDX format, and save your settings for consistency. You can specify a commonly used export format for key partners, and generate the BOM in the format they prefer.

Compliance Tracking

Meet regulatory requirements and manage compliance information for your products and processes with BOMControl. Track, manage and comply with medical, environmental, safety and process standards and regulations.

You can track product compliance for environmental requirements like the Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive (RoHS). BOMControl compliance tracking helps you ensure that dangerous components of electronic and electrical manufacturing are managed to acceptable levels.

BOMControl enables you to efficiently and accurately track standards and certificates of compliance including UL, CE, CCC, FCC, VCCI and others.

Dedicated BOM views and reporting capabilities for compliance enable consistent conformity assessments, while engineering change management capabilities ensure that compliance can be maintained throughout a product’s lifecycle.

BOMControl has native document control capabilities that enable companies to meet ISO 9001:2000 requirements. BOMs and individual files can be managed under revision control with appropriate approvals and notifications.

You can verify and document any internal testing and standards within BOMControl, complete with approvals and notifications.

Project Collaboration

During the new product introduction (NPI) process, detailed project metrics show you the entire project at a glance and allow you to focus on the issues that most need attention. You can check the dashboard to make sure things are on track, or click through for more in-depth analysis.

You can track thousands of detailed tasks, or just a few critical project activities, so you can advance your products from one development phase to the next, even if your product structure is highly dynamic.

You can easily analyze progress at any level of the product assembly, any step in the project, or across a portfolio of projects to enable fast recognition and reaction to problems, changes and critical points.

You can define project templates that represent your high-level business processes, with milestones and phases for various types of projects such as New Product Development/Introduction or RoHS Compliance.

You can automatically generate detailed plans that keep task lists current and enable consistency enterprise-wide.

You can view late, unassigned and behind tasks associated with a project or tracked item in a project and perform "on-the-fly" problem analysis by displaying the earliest deadlines for parent items and latest deadlines for their child items. You can quickly and easily identify and drill down into problems at the portfolio, project or tracked item level.

You can notify users including suppliers of late phases, milestones and new task assignments and automatically trigger alerts for key task deadlines during the new product introduction process.

Additional Features

Flexible, persistent search - Search for components and assemblies, change orders, requests, etc. using multiple criteria including categories, attribute values, etc., then save search criteria to run the same search any time.

Document search - Locate documents by performing attribute search or by searching associations including items, suppliers, requests and changes.

Browsing history - Return to a recently viewed item with one click.

Bookmarks - Access any BOMControl record with one click from saved links on the main Dashboard page.

Configurable reports - Specify complex criteria to filter, sort and download item data. Save and share report formats, and even allow modification at run-time.

Collaborative access - Work with your authorized partners and suppliers by granting them restricted access to item information and enable them to easily download current product information including items, BOMs, and files.

Help - A help system is available on every page.

Built-In Chat and Calls - Discuss product issues and changes with your local team or your global supply chain with Skype. See who is connected to the workspace at a glance.