I like how the intranet conversations are shaping up these days. It’s all about thinking ahead. James started it with this article on future scenarios. Now we have Sarah Bates on Intranet 3.0. I hope this is a start of something new and a push that will take intranets into the next level of business integration. "If anything, intranets are driving services forward at such a great pace that, post-recession, the organization that emerges will be fitter, leaner and more adaptable. Prior to the downturn, the rate of development was already intense, but market conditions have caused a new wave of intranet acceleration to arrive."

After reading Switch (highly recommended) by Dan and Chip heath I headed to their website to get more resources. I was pleasantly surprised by the range of resources they have there. From a short summary of the book to how-to guides on using the principles in different settings. The one that caught my eye was Teaching that Sticks, a resource from their previous book, Made to Stick. It is a wonderful article-length read that gives a handful of strategies that you can try immediately, such as using the unexpected to create focus and interest.

Wonderful article by Venkatesh Rao, a researcher in the Xerox Innovation Group. He says that outdated conceptual metaphors such as ‘document’ is slowing down our thinking about new innovations such as the live web. New conceptual metaphors are needed such as ‘stream’ and ‘trails’.

Great piece on teaching math that is fun and memorable by Dan Mayer. His blog has more.

A nice introduction to the content migration effort required when doing intranet redesigns. "For all the reasons to ignore the inevitable, the truth remains that failure to adequately strategize, plan, schedule, and budget for content migration can easily sink your CMS project. Failure to plan can lead to delays as the content migration drags past the launch date. Conflicts can occur as extra resources are called upon at the last minute to attempt to migrate mountains of web pages into the new system. After all of the hard work your team has put into designing and building the new system, content migration is the last hurdle — one that you don’t want to underestimate."

"The Research Ethics Guidebook is designed as a resource for social science researchers - those early in their careers, as well as more experienced colleagues.  It aims to help you find your way through the variety of regulatory processes and procedures that can apply to social science research - signposting you to more detailed information along the way, and acting as a prompt for reflection and questioning at all stages of the research process."

Clay Shirky takes on Nicolas Carr in this excerpt from this book, "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age." "Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech."

I was looking for this story for a while. Finally I found it, so would like to share it with you. It’s about understanding what people want to get done with products—the job-to-be-done. Often we get lost in the features and functions of the product that we forget about the job that the product is designed to get done. The same principle can be used for designing websites and intranets. "With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension. If marketers understand each of these dimensions, then they can design a product that’s precisely targeted to the job. In other words, the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy."

Steven Pinker writes a classic piece and clears the smoke over the view that new media and Google is making us stupid. "The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of "you are what you eat." As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings."

"Build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs!" This website documents UX myths along with research findings. Nice reference point to bring out in client discussions and to include in documentation. (via ColumnTwo). Here are some good ones: All pages should be accessible in 3 clicks People don’t scroll