After Academic Earth we now have YouTube EDU. This is a initiative to gather and group all academic content on YouTube. There aren't too many videos on the site now but that should improve soon.

I just wish this was mandatory for CEOs. "Jeff Bezos is spending this week working in an Amazon distribution center in Lexington, Kentucky. He apparently wants to see what it's like to be a rank-and-file Amazon employee. More CEOs should try that once in a while."

Jakob Nielsen's new piece tackles donation usability. I'm not surprised at his findings. We found similar themes when we did the redesign for the National University of Singapore Giving website. We found that there was a need to inform donors on why their gifts were needed and how they will be used (the LEARN section). Also we found that there was a need to pay-back in kind by honouring donors (the HONOUR section). It goes without saying the the DONATE section had to be without flaws. So glad to know that the findings are similar across continents.

Key idea from the latest HBR article on internal collaboration: "The problem here wasn’t collaboration per se; our statistical analysis found that novice teams at the firm actually benefited from exchanging ideas with their peers. Rather, the problem was determining when it makes sense and, crucially, when it doesn’t. Too often a business leader asks, How can we get people to collaborate more? That’s the wrong question. It should be, Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value? In fact, to collaborate well is to know when not to do it. "

John Caroll explains how HCI came into being: "In the early 1980s, HCI was a small and focused specialty area. It was a cabal trying to establish what was then a heretical view of computing. Today, largely due to the success of that endeavor, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, loosely bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human concerns as the primary consideration in creating interactive systems."

My new article at PebbleRoad: Reviewing intranet-based collaboration setups "The ability to form groups and collaborate on the intranet is key to making the intranet a place for ‘doing work’. A well-planned collaboration setup allows staff to use the setup easily and effectively. Here are 7 heuristics that can help review existing collaboration setups in organizations."

Jesses James Garrett delivered the IA Summit 09 closing plenary. Some nice pointers. "With perception covered by visual designers, sound designers, and industrial designers, cognition and emotion are the manifest destiny of IA. User experience is not about information, rather, it is always about people and how they relate to information. By structuring the information, User Experience Designers structure the tools that humanity uses. And, as a result, we influence how people think and feel. The final result is that those tools, in turn, shape humanity. We should embrace that responsibility."

Business week has put up a useful list of content strategy links. Good starting points to the growing awareness of content strategy. In addition here is a link to content strategy presentations made during the last IA Summit.

Continuing on the content strategy thread, here is a bunch of checklists that can be used to evaluate the quality of content on the website or intranet. "In my experience, a common misperception of the evaluation of content quality is that its scope is limited to the correction of typos and grammatical errors. Correcting spelling and grammar only scratches the surface. To truly consider content quality, we need to examine its quality along several dimensions."

Every now and then comes a book that makes me think about my practice and shines a light on how to do it better. Ken Watanabe's Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People is one such book. Initially written to teach kids problem-solving approaches, this book became the most popular business book in Japan in 2007. In 120 pages Ken brilliantly describes explorative and iterative problem-solving approaches that make so much sense. Here is his approach: Understand the current situation Identify the root cause of the problem Develop an effective action plan Execute until the problem is solved, making modifications as necessary He describes this approach in 3 fun-filled stories: Mushroom Lovers, a kids rock band, trying to get more people to attend their monthly concert John Octopus on figuring out how to save enough money to buy a computer to pursue his dream to become a CGI artist in Hollywood Kiwi on deciding which soccer school to attend One thing is quite clear: this needs a rapid or iterative approach and will not fit well into a prescriptive approach. The problem that I see is that most clients demand a prescriptive approach. For example, clients want to know upfront the number of interviews that will be done or the number of usability tests that will be conducted in the research study. Such decisions I think are to be made in context and only if there is a need for them. But I also acknowledge that clients need some indication of effort to plan for resources needed. So we have a problem. The rapid development approach seems to be a possible solution (a hypothesis) but I'll need to test it out on a few projects to see if it works!