Elliott Masie points to this article in the Armed Forces Journal by T.X. Hammes (retired Marine Corps). In this article, Hammes systematically describes how Power Point is a horrible tool for doing decision-making briefings. "PowerPoint is not a neutral tool —it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them… PowerPoint has clearly decreased the quality of the information provided to the decision-maker, but the damage doesn’t end there. It has also changed the culture of decision-making." Hammes’ argument is that Power Point runs against the grain when it comes to the decision-making process. It just does not allow for deep understanding and does not provide the big picture—big barriers to effective decision making. Hammes however thinks that Power Point is good for information briefs and not decision briefs. But Hammes is not convincing in this position. He hardly spends a couple of paragraphs on the positive aspects of Power Point before going negative again!

The NY Times reports on something we intuitively knew was the case: Teenagers don’t tweet. "Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations."

A Stanford University study seems to suggest that multitasking reduces intellectual efficiency. "Nass [the author] says the study has a disturbing implication in an age when more and more people are simultaneously working on a computer, listening to music, surfing the Web, texting, or talking on the phone: Access to more information tools is not necessarily making people more efficient in their intellectual chores."

Clive Thompson discusses the new literacy in Wired Magazine. He uses a study by Andrea Lunsford of Standford University to base his claims that the Internet is providing a new ground for literacy development. "Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others." Compare this post with the previous post where another Standford study finds that the fast-paced literacy confuses the decision-making process. We’re living in interesting times!

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."

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