I’m deeply interested in heath care design. I think this is one of the areas that badly needs reform. But I’m confident that reform will come sooner than later simply because of the attention that this area is getting from some of the brightest minds in design. In the last few months we’ve seen many new books on the subject, Designing Care by Richard Bohmer is just one of them. Rosenfeld Media is working on another, Designing for Care with Peter Jones that should be out sometime next year. Last week the Mayo Clinic hosted a symposium on innovations in health care experience and delivery. I’m watching the videos right now. The speakers include the likes of Tim Brown of Ideo and Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. The topics include the need for richer conversations to design thinking to innovation. So it seems like the forces are coming together and the conversations have started. Health care is up for reform!

Google announced yesterday that they’ve enhanced their search results page to include page sections of long pages in the snippets area. Here is an example they’ve given. The rationale is that we can do directly to a section in the page if that’s what we’re interested in. That’s a nice idea—it’s an attempt at auto-indexing the page using page sections. It provides more information on the page, assuming that the page sections are labeled properly. But what’s really interesting that is the fact that this is another opportunity to reveal sequence, like in a table of contents. Showing a sequence in a page really gets to the guts of what the page is all about. Google already shows a sitemap in the search results, which gets to what a site is all about. Now the only thing Google needs to figure out is how to reveal sequence across pages and sites. So for example, if I were to search for "diabetes" then I should get a sequence that links to different pages and sites and the sequence includes what is diabetes to treatments to living with a diabetic to home remedies. Guess that was what the Knol was supposed to to.

Robert Hoekman Jr. discusses the reliability of usability tests in the latest issue of A List Apart. "Usability teams also have wildly differing experience levels, skill sets, degrees of talent, and knowledge, and although some research and testing methods have been homogenized to the point that anyone should be able to perform them proficiently, a team’s savvy (or lack thereof) can affect the results it gets. That almost anyone can perform a heuristic evaluation doesn’t mean the outcome will always be useful or even accurate. Heuristics are not a checklist, they are guidelines a usability evaluator can use as a baseline from which to apply her expertise. They are a beginning, not an end."

The good folks at Devlearn have given me a journalists pass to attend Devlearn this year. So I am going. While I’m there I’ll also be attending KM World. I think it will be a terrific opportunity to meet the community and make new friends. If you are going as well and if you like to connect do mail me at maish-at-elearningpost.com. Looking forward to these events.

PEP stands for Passion, Experience, People. It's an event where experts share their passions with college students. Nice talks all around. From Chis Rockwell on Mind of Design to Jim Hendrickson on "choosing" vs. "following" your career path.

This research report looks at the IA of sites that are designed to influence behavioral change, for example, giving up smoking. The report identifies 3 types of structure: hierarchical, matrix (hypertext), tunnel (linear) and the hybrid (a mix of the other types). "The Internet has rapidly become an accepted part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. As a result, it is reasonable to conclude that these revolutionary advances will act as a catalyst to expand the scope and impact of both persuasive technology, in general, and of Internet-based health behavior change programs. We have highlighted the important role that IA designs can have upon the design and likely impact of online behavior change programs." Via Adaptive Path’s Signposts.

I’m in cold San Jose this week attending Devlearn 2009. The first day keynote was by Andrew McAfee. He is the author of a recently published book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. I’m not going to describe the subject of his talk; there are many blogs that have done that already (here and here). It was a nice talk and he gave many pointers. But he made no attempt to bridge the gap between Enterprise 2.0 and Learning 2.0. Or answer questions like ‘how Enterprise 2.0 can be used to leverage Learning 2.0?’ Maybe the breakout sessions were meant to do just that - and there were many, many sessions that had social media and especially Twitter in their agenda. This surprised me a lot, in a negative way.  I found that there is a very big hype on using social media for learning. Many are talking about it and there seems to be a divide between those who have experimented with it or have a program for it and those who are just trying to grapple with their day-to-day learning challenges. The 2.0ers feel elevated, hip, trendy and scoff at the those who are still trying to make the best of taxpayer or shareholder money by being conservative and seeking out what works. But all of this talk on social media I heard had a lot to say about the media part but very little on the learning part. There are still advocating the creating and access to content with very little attention on why this is being done and how is it going to help learning and improve performance in the long run. The systems view I think is missing here. The mantra seems to be "get social and you’ll learn". This has a lot to say about the maturity of Learning 2.0. Talking about maturity, there were many talks that were just blasts from the past - "How to grab attention", "How to use video effectively", etc. All I can say is, WOW! Here is my frank opinion on the first day - the talks did not excite me but they did give me a good picture of the e-learning landscape in the US. It shows me what people are busy with and what they are experimenting with and what we can expect to see in the next few years. The total experience is more than the sum of the parts I guess. But I can tell you what excited me - meeting Jay Cross. Here we are, two individuals on opposite sides of the planet, engrossed in each other’s work for over 10 years but never having met face-to-face. Then I finally see him and what a joy it was.

I had a wonderful 3 days at KM World 09 at San Jose. Much of the enthusiasm was in meeting friends. I’ve known Thomas Vander Wal, for instance, only by his blog and so it was good to put a face to all those entries. I made some new friends as well. These were the winners at the Intranet Innovation Awards. Thanks to James Robertson for making this happen. As for the conference sessions themselves there were some good sessions and some not-so-good sessions, as it is to be expected in any conference. Here are my takeaways from the sessions. Social media is here to stay. The keynote speakers including Andrew McAfee, Charlene Li and Vander Wal all spoke passionately about there being real ROI here. People are analysing the success of Intellipedia as a viable knowledge sharing strategy to pursue inside organisations. Here comes the wikis in force? Darcy Lemons from APQC described here research into how organisations use lessons learnt (LLs). The key idea is to understand how the LLs are to be used: immediately in a similar project or program or in the future (for long term benefits). And here’s the killer execution strategy: get the LLs into the flow of work and not as an addition or extension to it. Sharepoint is everywhere. There are many bottlenecks in the 07 version but since many organisations have sunk time, money and resources in getting it to work for them, they will continue to do so with the 2010 version of it, which by the way is getting rave reviews. Talking about Sharepoint, Stephanie Lemieux urged not to let go of information architecture issues when implementing Sharepoint sites. She is absolutely correct. Content types, columns and lists are crucial in ‘correcting’ the user experience in Sharepoint. Stan Garfield put a short and sweet presentation with a whole bunch of resources and topics to follow. His website has more of these topics (books, conferences, consultants, blogs, etc.). I’ve not described much of the other sessions and presentations. The KM blog has got more content in this area. You can also read the tweets on the conference.

I had a wonderful 3 days at KM World 09 in San Jose. Much of the enthusiasm was in meeting friends. I’ve known Thomas Vander Wal, for instance, only by his blog and so it was good to put a face to all those entries. I made some new friends as well. These were the winners at the Intranet Innovation Awards. Thanks to James Robertson for making this happen. (Patrick Lambe, James Robertson, Thomas Vander Wal) As for the conference sessions themselves there were some good sessions and some not-so-good sessions, as it is to be expected in any conference. Here are my takeaways from the sessions. Social media is here to stay. The keynote speakers including Andrew McAfee, Charlene Li and Vander Wal all spoke passionately about there being real ROI here. People are analysing the success of Intellipedia as a viable knowledge sharing strategy to pursue inside organisations. Here comes the wikis in force? Darcy Lemons from APQC described here research into how organisations use lessons learnt (LLs). The key idea is to understand how the LLs are to be used: immediately in a similar project or program or in the future (for long term benefits). And here’s the killer execution strategy: get the LLs into the flow of work and not as an addition or extension to it. Sharepoint is everywhere. There are many bottlenecks in the 07 version but since many organisations have sunk time, money and resources in getting it to work for them, they will continue to do so with the 2010 version of it, which by the way is getting rave reviews. Talking about Sharepoint, Stephanie Lemieux urged not to let go of information architecture issues when implementing Sharepoint sites. She is absolutely correct. Content types, columns and lists are crucial in ‘correcting’ the user experience in Sharepoint. Stan Garfield put a short and sweet presentation with a whole bunch of resources and topics to follow. His website has more of these topics (books, conferences, consultants, blogs, etc.). I’ve not described much of the other sessions and presentations. The KM blog has got more content in this area. You can also read the tweets on the conference.

Peter Bregman makes a wonderful case of highlighting the need to embed the organisation’s culture with stories of change as a way to bring about the change. "I told him not to change the performance review system, the rewards packages, the training programs. Don’t change anything. Not yet anyway. For now, just change the stories. For a while there will be a disconnect between the new stories and the entrenched systems promoting the old culture. And that disconnect will create tension. Tension that can be harnessed to create mechanisms to support the new stories."