From Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd, guest blogging at HBR. "Ubiquity First, Revenue Later. Build an audience first and then uncover how it can lead to increased employee productivity or faster time to competence. Since microblogging is a modest expense, (often as low as $1.00 per user per month) there need not be elaborate ROl studies prior to piloting the service. However, you do need to identify key business goals you want to measure as microblogging rolls out across the company, such as increased brainstorming or greater ease in seeking feedback from employees. Then follow the impact on revenue."

A while ago I wrote an article on Designing Collections for the Web. In this article I stated that Twitter was a collection and there are 4 objectives of a collection: To help users easily contribute to a collection (contributing objective) To help users find an item in a collection (identifying objective) To help users easily co-locate similar items (co-locating objective) To surface relevant and interesting items (relevancy objective) In the Chirp Developer Conference, Twitter finally added the two objectives that were missing: surfacing relevant and interesting stuff (promoted tweets, although marketing influenced) and co-locate similar items (Twitter annotations). I am really interested how the Annotations feature will take off. It could really extend the service beyond what we know of it now.

Interesting study suggests that interrogative self-talk is actually more motivating than declarative gumption that business leaders profess. "Why is interrogative self-talk more effective? Subsequent experiments by the scientists suggested that the power of the "Will I?" condition resides in its ability to elicit intrinsic motivation. (We are intrinsically motivated when we are doing an activity for ourselves, because we enjoy it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation occurs when we’re doing something for a paycheck or any "extrinsic" reward.) By interrogating ourselves, we set up a well-defined challenge that we can master. And it is this desire for personal fulfillment - being able to tell ourselves that we solved the anagrams - that actually motivates us to keep on trying."

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

NY times reports that there is no evidence of improved educational performance with having computers at home. "Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts."

Glad to have worked with some very talented illustrators and animators. Here is a sample of our work at PebbleRoad.

We launched a new webapp called Insightico. This online application helps you use and reuse your research data. How many times have you gone back to those interview recordings that you so carefully planned at the start of the project? Or those snapshots you took when surveying how people work? I’ve spoken to many people in the business and they usually say "never". In fact, some of the interviews we did for past projects are still in the audio recorder! We want to go back to research, but the problem is that it is a painful process trying to locate that 15 second clip where you saw something interesting. Insightico addresses this gap by enabling you to add your insights to specific parts of images, documents, audio or video files. Say you are viewing a 30 min audio interview. You hear something interesting, now instead of noting what you heard and the timestamp on a sticky note, you can just select the part of the audio file and directly add your insights to it. Yes, you can tag your insights as well. Repeat the process with all your research data and now you have an inventory of insights but all connected to the relevant bits in the sources. This inventory along with the tags gives a good picture of the research findings. The most important feature of Insightico—you can do all of this collaboratively with your team. Check Insightico out by signing up for the beta.

Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown take on a new challenge - to tell people that it’s time to embrace a new culture of learning. I am reading this book now and I am already excited by the possibilities—possibilities that we can achieve together if only we realize soon enough that "[t]he world is changing faster than ever and our skill sets have a shorter and shorter life". One beautiful aspect that the authors highlight is the importance of learning "how to learn from others". ‘Others’ here refers to peers and the community at large. The reason I find this beautiful is because I’ve come across people who think that teaching is the only way to learn and teachers are the only people who can teach. They seem to gloss over opportunities that lay in normal everyday conversations they have with peers—they don’t pay attention to or build on these interactions. This book should be a must read for managers and leaders—this is where both the challenges and the opportunities lie.

Wonderful article by Ziba rebutting the recent skepticism on the UCD process: When Ziba investigates a specific user as part of a design project, the end result isn’t a set of new products, it’s an internal understanding of what that user is like: The challenges she faces each day, the things that excite and concern her, and her motivations and values. If you don’t come out of a research effort feeling like a different person, you’re doing it wrong.

Brilliant post listing down the things that are changing education. A great read and a whole lot of links to follow.

Nice post by Tyler Tate on how to approach content from the perspective of "learning styles". We learn through our verbal, visual, and kinesthetic senses, and our memories are encoded in these different formats. Each of us likely favors one style of learning over the others, but pithy, concrete text coupled with informative images is a potent content cocktail for people of all learning styles.

A very nice piece by Jared Spool on the art of practicing. Practice is different. Good practice focuses on the process, while work focuses on the outcome. When doctors, musicians, and pilots are practicing, they are not doing the entire job. They are looking at the process of the work, often repeating the same step multiple times. For example, when a surgeon practices their suture techniques, they'll use butcher shop animal scraps to practice sewing up incisions. They don't perform the rest of the surgical procedure, because they aren't interested in the outcomes. They just quickly and cleanly close the incision and do it again.

Our new article on tag bundles is up. Here’s the summary: It’s common for enterprises to have a document library in their intranets that houses all types of administrative and operational content. Such a document library usually has a taxonomy to improve the discoverability and findability of content. However, there is one problem: documents need to get into the library first! Submitting a document to the library involves filing or tagging the document with the right taxonomic terms, a procedure that can make people see red if not done properly. Tag bundles can help simplify this procedure and also improve the use of such document libraries.

When consulting on intranet projects we often found ourselves having long discussions with intranet managers on the many things that would unfold in such projects and how they could be better prepared for the long journey. These discussions would give them the confidence and the time needed to get things in order inside their organisations. Today, we release the Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects— the result of those discussions with intranet managers. This 64-page guidebook (free download) takes the manager through eight stages of a typical intranet design project. Each stage has many activities that go under it. We’ve described the activities and included the insights we’ve gathered over the years. Enjoy!

We just published a new post titled "Observations on use of mobile devices at airports and train stations". We visited airports and train stations and sketched out how people interact with their phones and tablets. We learnt a few things in the process.

Interesting to see what Steve had in mind for higher education when making plans for NeXT Computer. Simulations and the learning experience were high on his agenda.

Nice article from ThinkGoogle on what is going to bring about change in the classroom.  "Though our world is changing, the spaces in which we teach are stuck in a time warp. According to some forward-thinking experts, only by embracing new technology and ideas can twenty-first-century schooling stay up to speed with the kids."

Full documentary on this amazing person.

Another TechCrunch article on Education: We are in a time of convergence: teachers are incorporating technology from their everyday lives to increase student engagement, while visionary administrators are using the momentum of grassroots digital learning movements to move our institutions forward. Hopefully education will catch up before the Singularity arrives.