Archive for August, 2007

The Persona Touch

Published on August 30, 2007 in information management and JISC. 1 Comment

I buy into the concept of usability..I mean who doesn’t these days to some extent.  I budget for usability work on every web project I work on - big and small…for years I was a devout follower in the Cult of Jakob (though I think he has lost touch with the real world these days..)  I love being behind the two-way mirror at user tests and watching the eye-tracking tools do there thang…I am a believer…except…I just don’t get the concept of personas something about it all just makes me think of slick-suited ad-men rather than the t-shirts and trainers world of the web!

I don’t care if my users eat organic food, watches Newsnight and read Guns’n'Ammo - honestly how does it help? Maybe in an e-commerce environment but we don’t sell stuff - its all free (well if you take out the whole taxpayer issue!)..

BUT (and its a J-Lo sized butt!)

I do need to understand more about the audience of the JISC website.  Who uses it, why they use it, how they use it… we regularly get requests to build in paths through the site based on audiences or tasks..the problem is that despite all our stats [and thanks to Kerry we have mountains of data these days] we still don’t really understand our audience(s) and are probably going for a one-size fits all technique that isn’t really comfortable for anyone..

So will personas help?  I’m still not convinced but need to try something - if it could be a bit more focussed - less of the fluffy marketing babble and more analysis then maybe..I want to know if we have gaps in our content and if so what are they and I really want to know if we are just in one big echo chamber at the moment - JISC folk talking to JISC folk - because if thats the case then we took a misstep somewhere (and I think big parts of it is and we have)

Anyway one way or another I am going to look into audience research in the coming months - maybe someone can convince me of the worth of personas or point me at a technique that fits better with my mind-set…we’ll see.

JISC and the ‘amplified conference’

Published on August 28, 2007 in web 2.0, community and events. 3 Comments

In September I am heading to Lisbon [nice!] to give a talk to the TERENA-PR group about the ideas behind the ‘amplified conference’.

This idea has been getting some traction recently in and around JISC (though it has been a mainstay of the growing number of Web 2.0 related events for a couple of years) and I have pinched the term from Lorcan Dempsey from a post on his blog that was referring to the JISC Digitisation Conference where we implemented alot of the ideas.

We have also recently made attempts to extend the JISC Conference and the Next Generation Environments conference using live (or near as!) blogging and other online tools.

The basic idea is making use if tools like blogs, wikis, photo sharing etc to build a community around an event prior, during and post and event.

As many of these tools are free and use elements like tagging and RSS it is possible to aggregate then using tools like Yahoo Pipes (as ALT are doing for this years conference) and then present an overview of the event beyond the official point-of-view.

Amongst the tools that have been proven to be popular for the extended audience are:

  • live blogging from sessions
  • podcasts with the speakers [and audience]
  • slidecasts
  • using agreed tags to aggregate multiple RSS feeds
  • wikis to enable networking and collaboration
  • streaming of sessions

All of these have been used to some extent in the wider community recently (at the Institutional web managers workshop live streams of the keynotes was offered)  but I think its only when a number of the tools are used together that you really ‘amplify’..

On a related note a few years ago various people and organisations were toying with the idea of a FE/HE combined events calendar.  This never really happened but the need for something that prevents clashes and allows people to plan their attendance is still valid and I wonder if we shouldn’t be encouraging more use of something like Upcoming.org - its owned by Yahoo so its not going away anytime soon and would be a easy solution to an ongoing issue.

Back to our regular programming - at the 2008 JISC Conference I want to explore these opportunities even further - including adding video to the mix.  I am especially interested in uStream.tv as it seems this might offer a lightweight solution to live (and recorded) video streaming.

Believe it or not I have more thoughts on this topic and will be back to this with another post soon…

Everything is (not quite) miscellaneous

Published on August 27, 2007 in information management, web 2.0 and JISC. 1 Comment

David Weinbergers new book definitely brings out my inner librarian but while I generally have enjoyed it [despite its massively geeky nature] I’m not sure I 100% agree with some of its major points [plus it good be a bit shorter - it kind of runs out of steam]

While I do agree that tagging is a great concept and that there is a genuine need [and demand] to find and use more flexible ways of organising information online - completely user generated tagging only really seems to work if you have an audience large and engaged enough to really add value..it works fine on sites like Flickr and Delicious but there seems to be pretty major diminishing returns when its used on other sites and its a risky navigation strategy on its own certainly..

Increasingly though standard information architecture [which I have spent the best part of ten years studying!] seems limited and restricting and in this Google age people turn more and more to search as their first option ahead of browsing which in some way lessens the experience for the user.

Maybe some kind of tagging is the answer but I think it needs to do more than it currently offers.

JISC is funding a couple of pieces of work in this area including Enhanced Tagging at UKOLN and Rich Tags by mSpace at Southampton Uni, both are seeking to add value to the concept of tagging and sync some of the more Web 2.0 concepts with the idea(l)s of the JISC Information Environment and Repositories.

Its the Rich Tags project that really interests me. I think its an interesting way of adding more value to the idea of tagging and sits somewhere between some kind of traditional cataloger task and the open social tagging of something like Flickr. It is also working on a way of actually implementing the system on third party websites and repositories.

Recent usability work on the JISC website has [not for the first time!] highlighted the need for new routes through the site - based on terminology and topics more familiar to our users than our internal terms [believe it or not we have been really trying to do this for a while now!] and maybe tagging is something that can help with that..we’ll see but I have high hopes that something like the mSpace work will be useful..