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I work in a big organization, spread around the world, about 17,000 people. Have to ask for money wayyyyyy in advance for projects before even really knowing what they are.
So we're redesigning an old intranet. Spending a chunk of money we have on user research and UX design phase. More on the 1.0 and piloting it and dealing with content migration and all that fun stuff.
Any ideas (insane ballpark here) about how much $ to ask for the next phase (rolling it out, more testing, actually replacing the legacy intranet)? I know details are sparse but there are some silly budget deadlines that require me to pull a figure out of thin air before I even really know what our end users want. If I don't come up with a number, we get nothing and have to hunt around in various budgets to get cash.
What would you throw out for low / medium / high numbers here? Low being open source, out of the box functionality, not insane customization, no more UX research beyond what we're already doing, and off we go. Medium being a nicer step up, and high being paying someone like Igloo $400k to use their out of the box platform, and then another bunch of custom plugin development and design work on top of that.
Right now I'm thinking 250k, 500k, 750k. Am I in the right ballpark, or am I over in some other arena that's not even in the same league and hasn't seen a baseball game in years?
As you've all but acknowledged, it's an impossible question to answer. You are constrained by an illogical system which seeks to reduce risk by increasing control in the mistaken belief that accounting for all spend in advance will increase return on investment. Your challenge is to learn how to play that system to your advantage, secure your funding and achieve the freedom to deliver your project with minimal interference.
Support
Fortunately, you are the best-placed person to do this. You have the best understanding of your organisational context and if you look at broadly similar (global, cross-functional) internal projects, you can get a good idea of how these projects are regarded and how they secure and maintain support and funding. Talk to colleagues and learn what you can. Ultimately you aren't looking for a right answer - you need to know what constitutes an acceptable answer and how to proceed when your guess proves to be "wrong".
Start looking externally to learn what you can about projects in similar organisations. Listening to others' experiences will give you a better understanding of potential risks, so dig deeper than the run-of-the-mill success stories. You might consider attending conferences, intranet-focused meetup groups and participating in online communities.
Vision
What is important is that you have a vision for your intranet project. As you go on, this vision may change. You will hear lots of assumptions about what people expect to be on the intranet. It's great to read you are conducting UX research as it's vital to understand what people actually need and use.
Needs
A guest presenter at a recent intranet event I ran showed us an intranet she'd built in-house over a five year period which was designed solely to help employees do their jobs effectively.
There were no generic calendar tools, no pages of content that no one ever looks at and no fashionable social features. Instead there was a lean, focused business tool, written in PHP, on which she'd spent GBP20,000 each year.
Equivalent value? Probably a month of Sharepoint consultancy.
It takes careful leadership and communication, but once you stop trying to deliver mediocre generic solutions based on what everything thinks "should" be on an intranet, you can ditch out-of-the-box tools and start focusing on your users' real needs.
What are your best usability testing tips?
I need quick & cheap.
While aimed at web design, Steve Krug's excellent "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach To Web Usability" features (in the second edition, at least), a great chapter entitled "Usability Testing On 10 Cents A Day", which I think is applicable to a much wider range of platforms.
The chapter specifically deals with usability testing done quick and dirty, in a low-budget (no money and/or no time) environment, and illustrates some of the most important considerations for getting an initial "feel" of the thing.
Some of the points I like in particular are:
You don't need to test with a huge number of people (a sentiment also echoed by Jakob Nielsen)
A live reaction is worth a lot; if possible, make sure the developers can see the reaction (perhaps using a video camera and a TV; it doesn't need to be an expensive one)
Testing a few people early is better than a lot later
Joel Spolsky is known for advocating "hallway usability testing", where you grab a few passing users and ask them to complete some simple task. Partly inspired by the "a few users yield the bulk of the results" philosophy, it's also relatively convenient and inexpensive, and can be done every so often.
Ask someone non-techy and unfamiliar with it to use it.
The archetypal non-technical user, one's elderly and scatterbrained maiden aunt. Invoked in discussions of usability for people who are not hackers and geeks; one sees references to the “Aunt Tillie test”.
The Aunt Tilly Test (Probably needs a better name in today's day and age, but that's what it's referred to)
You have to watch people use your application. If you work in a reasonable sized company, do some 'hallway testing'. Pull someone who is walking past your door into the room and say something like, 'Could you please run the payroll on this system for the next month? It should only take two minutes'.
Hopefully they won't have any problems and it shouldn't be too much of an imposition on the people walking past. Fix up any hiccups or smooth over any processes that are unnecessarily complex and repeat. A lot.
Also, make sure you know what usability is and how to achieve it. If you haven't already, check out The Design of Everyday Things.
Some good tips here.
One mistake I made earlier on in my career was turning the usability test into a teaching exercise. I'd spend a fair amount of time explaining how to use the app rather than letting the user figure that out. It taught me a lot about whether my applications were easy or hard to use by how puzzled they got trying to use the app.
One thing I did was put together a very simple scenario of what I wanted the user to do and then let them go do it. It didn't have step-by-step instruction ("click the A button, then click the B button") but instead it said things like "create a new account" and "make a deposit". From that, the user got to 'explore' my application and I got to see how easy it was to use.
Anyhow, that was pretty cheap and quite enlightening to me.
Quick and cheap won't cut it. You have to invest in a user experience framework, starting with defining clear goals for your app or website. I know it's not what people want to hear, but after supervising and watching a lot of user testing over the years, using Nielsen's discount usability methods is just not enough in most cases. Sure, if your design really sucks and have made huge usability errors, quick and dirty will get 80% of the crud out of the system. But, if you want long-term, quality usability and user experience, you must start with a good design team. And I don't mean good graphic designers, but good Information Architects, interaction designers, XHTML/CSS coders, and even Web Analytics specialists who will make sure your site/app is measurable with clear goals and metrics. I know, it's a lot of $$$, but if you are serious with your business (as I am sure most of us are), we need to get real and invest upfront instead of trying to figure out what went wrong once the whole thing is online.
Another topic to research is Heuristics for usability. This can give you general tips to follow. Here's another use of heuristics
If you don't know where to begin, start small. Sit a friend down at your computer. Explain that you want them to accomplish a task using software, and watch everything they do.
It helps to remain silent while they are actually working. Write everything down. "John spent 15 seconds looking at the screen before acting. He moused over the top nav to see if it contained popup menus. He first clicked "About Us" even though it wasn't central to his task." Etc.
Then use the knowledge you gain from this to help you design more elaborate tests. Tests with different users from different knowledge realms. More elaborate tasks and more of them.
Film them. A web-cam mounted on the monitor is a good way to capture where their eyes are moving. A video recorder coming over their shoulder at 45 degrees is a good way to capture an overview. Bonus points if you can time-sync the two. Don't worry if you can't do it all. Do what you can do.
Don't plan your test as if it's the last one you'll ever need and you want to get it perfect. There is no perfect. The only thing approaching perfection is many iteration and much repetition. You can only approach 100% confidence as the number of tests approaches the number of actual users of your software. Usually nobody even gets close to this number, but everybody should be trying to.
And don't forget to re-test people after you incorporated the improvement you saw were needed. Same people, different people, either is ok.
Do what you can do. Don't lament what you can't do. Only lament what you could have tested but didn't.
I am answering very late but I was thinking about asking a similar questions about some ideas. Maybe it is better to keep everything in this question.
I would say that:
Do not teach people about your app. Let them have fresh eyes.
Ask them to make some tasks and record their actions with a tool like camstudio http://camstudio.org/
After the test, ask them to answer so simple questions. Here is my list:
What was your first feeling when you accessed the app?
Can you define the key concepts that are used by the app?
What are the top-3 positive things about the application?
What are the top-3 negative things about the application?
What do you think about these ideas?
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I'm not a full-time software guy. In fact, in the last ten years, 90 % of my work was either on the hardware or doing low-level (embedded) code.
But the other 10% involves writing shell scripts for development tools, making kernel changes to add special features, and writing GUI applications for end-users.
The problem is that I find myself facing significant holes in my knowledge, often because it's been years since I've done "X", and I've either forgotten, or the environment has changed.
Every so often, there are threads on TheDailyWTF.com along the lines of "WTF: the guy spent all day writing tons of code, when he could have called foobar() in library baz". I've been there myself, because I don't remember much beyond the #include <stdio.h> stuff (for example), and my quick search somehow missed the right library.
What methods have you found effective to crash-learn and/or crash-refresh yourself in programming environments that you rarely touch?
Ask developers you know that work in the environment that you are interested in.
Search the web a lot.
Ask specific questions in relevant IRC channels (Freenode is great).
Ask specific questions on StackOverflow and other sites.
There really isn't any substitue for being "in the daily flow" of the programming environment in question. Having a good feel for the current state of the art is something you only get from experience, as I'm sure you can verify in you own areas of expertise.
i try to keep up with general news about languages i'm interested in but aren't necessarily using at the moment. being able to follow the general changes helps a lot for when you have to pick it up again.
beyond that, i personally find it easiest to grab an up to date reference book, and code a few basic things to get me used to the environment again, ie as a web programmer i'd make a simple crud app, or a quick web service/client.
For frameworks/APIs (such as a JavaScript framework or a widget library):
Quickly scan through the entire API documentation; get a glimpse of all that's out there instead of picking the first method that seems to fit your needs.
If available, glance at the source code of the
framework to see how the
API was intended to be used. Seeing what's behind the curtain helps. And also
some of the methods will have been used
internally, showcasing their true intents.
Don't necessarily always trust existing code (Googled, from co-workers, from books) since not everyone does the due diligence to find out the most proper way to use an API. Sometimes even samples in API documentation can be out-of-date.
In newer full-featured environments like Java, .NET, and Python, there are library solutions to almost every common problem. Don't think "how can I program this in plain C", but "which library solves this problem for me?" It's an attitude shift. As far as resources, the library documentation for the three environments I mentioned are all good.
The best solution I think is to get a book on the topic / environment you need to catch up on.
Ask questions from developers who you know who have the experience in that area.
You can also check out news groups (Google Groups makes this easy) and forums. You can ask questions, but even reading 10 minutes of the latest popular questions for a particular topic / environment will keep you a little bit "in the know".
The same thing can go for blogs too if you can find a focussed blog. These are pretty rare though and I personally don't look to blogs to keep me "in the know" on a particular environment. (I personally find blogs most popular and interesting in the "here's something neat" or "here's how I failed and you can avoid it" or "general practice" areas.)
In addition to the answers above, I think what you are asking for will take a significant amount of your time, and you must be willing to spend that time to achieve your goals. My method would be pretty much the same as Owen's answer; get a reference book or tutorial and work through the examples hacking in changes as you go to experiment with how any given thing works. I'd say as a bare minimum, allocate a hour to do this every other day, in a time that you know you won't be interrupted. Any less, and you'll probably continue to struggle.
The best way to crash-learn is simple, simply do it, use google to search for X tutorial, open your favorite browser and start typing away. Once you reached a certain level of feeling with X, do look at other people things, there is lots of open source out there and there must be someboby who has used X before, look at how they solved certain problems and learn from this, this is an easy way to verify that you are 'on the right track' or that you're doing things or thinking in patterns that other people would define as 'common sense'.
Crash-refreshing something is much easier since you have a suspended learning curve already, the way I do this is to keep some of the example you did while writing or keep some projects you did. Then you can easily refresh and use your own examples.
The library issue you mention here well, only improving your search skills will improve that one (although looking on how others solved this will help as well)
Don't try and pick up every environment.
Focus on the one that's useful and/or interesting, and then pick a few quality blogs to regularly read or podcasts to listen to. You'll pick up the current state of the environment fairly quickly.
Concrete example: I've been out of the Java world for a long time, but I've been put on a Java project in the last few months. Since then I've listened to the Java Posse podcast and read a few blogs, and although I'm far from a Java guru I've got back up to speed without too much trouble.
Just a though. While we are working on our code we know that we need to work very hard to optimize the critical path, but on non critical path we usually don't spend to much effort to optimize.
From your description you are working 90% on embedded and 10% on rest, lets assume that in 50% of the rest you are spending more time that needed. So according to my calculation you are optimizing about 5% of your work flow ...
Of course the usual google/SO/forums search is useful before you doing something new, but investing more than just that is waste of time for my opinion, unless you want to waste some time just for fun or general education ... :), but this is another story.
By the way I'm in same position and last time i needed some GUI and used MFC (because i used it sometimes 10 years ago :) ) and i perfectly understand that i probably will get better results with C# and friends, but the learning curve just not justify this especially knowing that i need mix the C code with GUI.
How do you guys manage the information overflow?
What are the tools that you guys use?
One of the usefull tool is RSS feed reader.
Does Any body uses any other tools or any other ways to effectively manage the information?
Be an information snob.
If the blog doesn't absolutely rock your world, don't read it. It's so easy to get bogged down, even obsessed, with too much information. No matter what tools you have, you're still human and can only read so many words per day.
I use Evernote to keep notes and search through them.
I use Google Reader for the feeds. Split it up in multiple categories, 'A' with the more unique stuff, 'B' with the spam (Digg for example, easy to ignore because the important stuff shows up in 'A'), 'C' for my webcomics.
I always read the stuff in 'A', when bored I read 'C' and 'B' when I have spare time. It happens a lot of time that I'll mark 'B' as read just to get rid of it.
For work I'm stuck with Outlook, so I use the 'Tasks' function of Outlook a lot to get things sorted. Also a big believer of 'Inbox Zero' (http://www.43folders.com/izero).
I use a small number of tools and techniques, because it is easy to get distracted managing the information management tools, rather than managing the information.
Google Reader - The key for me was creating #work and #home labels, for the appropriate location.
TiddlyWiki - I keep track of all my notes for work projects in a TiddlyWiki file.
Delicious - I keep my bookmarks here. When I come across a link I want to read later (usually in my RSS Reader), I tag it #readreview. When I read it, I delete it unless it is useful reference, then I retag appropriately.
Local bookmarks - I store bookmarks on the browser toolbar in folders so I can middle-click and open all in tabs. Obviously these would be limited in number :-). I also have a bookmarklets folder.
I don't have a PDA. I have a pad of graph paper on my desk that I use for writing temporary notes and diagrams (permanent notes go into the TiddlyWiki). A lot of "productivity blogs" like to promote various tools, and some of these caught on for people, but I find my system is pretty simple and easy for me to manage. This makes it useful.
Well, this is an obvious one, but iGoogle seems to do a great job for me.
Depends on what information you are looking to manage. Can you be more specific?
I use google reader to handle things i read, RememberTheMilk to remind me of what i have to do, and gmail overall to quickly store and search data/correspondences.
Oh and i use the hipster PDA too!
You should probably check out Lifehacker for more tools and Getting Things Done apps.
Like you say most sites have a RSS feed today. Get a RSS Reader that sync between computers if you use more than one computer, so you don't have to mark alot of post as read. A good program is FeedDeamon, its free and sync between computers, there is even a online version as well, if you are on the road. FeedDeamon also have tools to help you identify the feeds, that you dont really read, and gives you a top 10 of feeds that you look on alot. This can help you delete bad RSS-Feeds, and also help you organize you're feeds.
I also use Delicious, to keep my bookmarks in sync, and is very handy if you bookmark alot.
Other than that, I don't really use any more tools - just the common sence that there is only 24 hours in the day, so dont use it to just read information that you don't need - bookmark interesting blog post from RSS, and read them later when you need to.
I've been using Delicious quite a bit over the past 2 years and it's been a great help.
If you're primarily interested in blogs, what I think we need is a way to prioritize the information that we, personally, are interested in. There used to be an RSS reader called wTicker (now demised) that used Bayesian filtering to rate articles for you. Another product under development, Particls, would similarly watch what you read and highlight similar content.
What about other types of information, though? For example, the tasks that OneNote or EverNote, or more obscure tools like Zoot aim to facilitate?
It depends on the type of information you meant. The answers above contain most of the tools. But if you use ms office you shall explore Office OneNote.
iGoogle: News, RSS, Wether, New Films, E-Mail widgets
ToDoList: every day work aspects
Local MediaWiki, for local company knowleges
Smartphone MS Excel for personal finances.
I still read news and blogs from RSS feeds. Feedly is the best tool for that right now.
When I find something interesting in Feedly, I add it to Pocket and read later. A Premium account allows me to highlight paragraphs I would like to save.
I also set up a receipt on IFTTT that monitors my likes on Twitter and adds links from the liked tweets to Pocket too.
As Substack grows, there is the new email newsletter boom. But my inbox is also a place where I do my work. So, I wrote an apps script file to receive newsletters once or twice a day and prevent them from distracting me from work. And then, I published it as Silent Inbox add-on that plugs into your Gmail.
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I work on a complex application where different teams work on their own modules with a degree of overlap. A while back we got a Mediawiki instance set up, partly at my prompting. I have a hard job getting people to actually use it, let alone contribute.
I can see a lot of benefit in sharing information. It may at least reduce the times we reinvent the wheel.
The wiki is not very structured, but I'm not sure that is a problem as long as you can search for what you need.
Any hints?
Some tips:
Any time someone sends information by email that really should be in a wiki, make a page for that topic and add what they put in the email. Then reply "Thanks for that info, I've put it into the wiki here so that it's easier to find in the future."
Likewise, if you have information you need to share that should be in the wiki, put it there and just send an email with a link to it, rather than email people.
When you ask people for information, phrase it so that putting such documentation in the wiki should be considered the default or standard: "I searched in the wiki but I couldn't find it. Have you put that info up there yet?"
If you are the "wiki champion", make sure other people know how to use it, e.g. "Did I go through how to create a new page with you yet?"
Edit the sidebar to make sure it is relevant to your work.
Use "nav box" style templates on related pages for easier navigation.
Put something like {{Special:NewPages/5}} on the front page, or recent changes, so that people can see the activity.
Take a peek at Recent changes every few days or week, and if you notice someone adding information without being prodded, send them an email or drop by and give them a little compliment.
As I mentioned before, a Wiki is very unorganized.
However, if that is the only argument from your developers, then invest some effort to create a simple index page and keep it updated (either do it yourself or ask people to link their contributions to the index). That way, the Wiki might grow into a very nice and quite comprehensive collection of documentation for all your work.
We've been using a wiki in some form or another for a while now, but it does take a while for people to get on board. You might find that you will be the only one writing articles for some time, but bear with it, other people will come on board eventually.
If someone sends an email around that contains information related to the project then helpfully point them in the direction of the wiki - and keep doing that - they should get the hint.
We have a SharePoint portal and use the wiki from there - we customised it with our own branding so that it "looks the part" - I really feel this has helped to improve the uptake of it.
Make sure that everyone is aware that the wiki is even more informal than email.... because there will be a "fear factor" that people may think anything they add to the wiki will be over-analysed.
I think most of the answers so far are spot on - the more you plug away at it yourself, the larger the body of useful information will become, so slowly but surely people will naturally start to use it.
The other approach you could use is this: Suggest that every time someone asks another team member a question about the project, they should answer the question as normal, but also add the answer to a section of the Wiki. This may take a few minutes extra, but it will mean that the next time someone asks the same question (which they inevitably will), you can save time by pointing them at the Wiki. This, in turn, should help people to start using the Wiki as a first source of information and help overall up-take.
You can't force developers to do something they do not have an incentive of using for; unfortunately wikis, like documentation (well, in fact wikis are documentation) rarely have any "cool" value for developers. Besides, they're already deep into dev work -- could you really bother them with a wiki?
That being said, the people who pushed for the wiki (e.g., you) should be primarily responsible for updating it, and you really would have a lot of work cut out for you if you're serious about it.
You might also try the ff:
It's not very structured you say -- a lot of people get turned off from ill-structured (hard-to-search/browse) wikis. So maybe you can fix that first
Maybe you can ask lead developers/project managers to populate it with things that are issues for them: things like code conventions and API design for your particular project
Lead by example: religiously document your part of the system. Setting a precedent may encourage others to do the same
Sell the idea of using the wiki to the developers. You've identified some benefits, share those with the developers. If they can see that they'll get something of value out of it they'll start using it.
Example advantages from What Is a Wiki
Good for writing down quick ideas or longer ones, giving you more time for formal writing and editing.
Instantly collaborative without emailing documents, keeping the group in sync.
Accessible from anywhere with a web connection (if you don't mind writing in web-browser text forms).
Your archive, because every page revision is kept.
Exciting, immediate, and empowering--everyone has a say.
I have done some selling and even run some training sessions. I think some people are turned off by the lack of WYSIWYG editing and ability to paste formatted text from Word or Outlook. I know there are some tools to work around these, but they are still barriers.
There are some areas where the wiki is being used to log certain areas, but people who update those are not doing anything else with it.
I will use the wiki to document my specialised area regardless as it acts as a convenient brain extension. When starting a new development I use it as a notepad for ideas that I can expand on as it progresses.
It would help if management would give it some vocal support, even if it is not made mandatory.
I have a hard job getting people to actually use it, let alone contribute.
One of the easiest ways to get people to contribute to a wiki, is to actually have them provide contents in a wiki-suitable fashion, i.e. so that whatever they post using their usual channels of communications (newsgroups, mailing lists, forums, issue trackers, chat), is basically suitable for inclusion on the wiki.
So that others (users/volunteers) can simply take such contents and put them on the wiki.
This sounds more complicated than it really is, it's mostly about generalizing questions and answers, so that they are not necessarily part of a conversation, but can be comprehensible, meaningful and useful in a standalone fashion.
For example a question like the following:
how do I get git to clone a remote repository???
Can be answered like this:
Hello,
Just use git clone git://...
But questions can also be answered in a less personal style:
In order to clone a git repository, you will want to use the clone parameter to git:
git clone git://....
What I am trying to say is that most discussions in a project can and should be easily used to become documentation eventually. With this sort of mindset, your documentation can actually grow rather rapidly. You only need to get people to keep in mind that useful information should be ideally provided in a fashion that is suitable for wiki inclusion.
I have witnessed several instances where open source projects started to use this approach to some extent and while some people (largely new users) complained that answers were not very personal, the body of documentation was increasing steadily, because other people simply monitored such discussions and started to copy/paste such responses to the wiki.
Basically, this is one of the easiest ways to get people to contribute to a wiki, without requiring them to actually use it themselves, the only thing that's required of them is a shift in thinking.
If the developers still need to maintain 'real' documentation (s.a. Word documents), I see no way to meaningfully duplicate that on a Wiki.
It does not make sense for people to write twice
Any duplicated data is prone to get out of sync, soon.
What my current customer has done is move all this to Wiki. So I only document once, and I do it on the Wiki.
This is okay. Working with Wiki is more tedious than with Word, but at least the doc is online and others can mix-and-match with it.
Another working solution (imho) would be to store docs alongside the source, on subversion. But then the merging system needs to be able to cope with rich text etc. as well. I don't know, if any solution for that exists (other than using HTML or LaTex, which actually would not be bad picks).
Find "sticky" items (sub-3 pg. docs / diagrams / etc) something that the team seems to be creating again and again & post it on the wiki. Make sure everyone has access to the wiki and knows its there - set up a notification mechanism if possible. With some luck, the next time they have to access, rather than dig it out of version control or their machines - they should hit the wiki.
If they still don't, try to see if the team has enough slack to actually use the wiki - Subtler issues may lie beneath their reluctance.
Take a look at the advice at http://www.ikiw.org/ Grow your Wiki
Just to add to some of the excellent advice being offered here...
As a dev in a small company that does largely gov't contract work in the 6-24 month range, I find that my time is often split between development and writing status reports (right up there with writing documentation, only worse!) Having a wiki to slap down unorganized thoughts and notes as we go along has made report-writing a lot less painful (not pain-LESS, but better all the same).
Further, if you're already in the Mediawiki world, you might want to look at SemanticMediawiki. It allows you to take the organization of your data to another level by semantically tagging it. That doesn't mean a lot on its own, I know, but I can tell you (for example) that it can drastically improve the relevance of the data returned from searches. It is definitely worth a look.
Generally good advice here. I'd like to add:
You really need a champion - someone pushing this to developers and management (without being pushy - that's a challenge!) and providing support & tutorials when possible. This person also needs to be a peer (so a fellow developer, not someone in a remote IT department) and really customer focused i.e. ready to make changes when requested.
Speaking of changes, some people here say wikis are unstructured. I disagree. Our MediaWiki installation is structured using categories, particularly with two extensions:WarnNoCategories (to require users to add a category when saving a page) and CategoryTree to show how all the categories fit together (this can be linked to from the sidebar). I've got more tips on how we keep this low threshold, if you're interested.