I was asking myself this question the other day: “Should all web projects start with research?”. In other words, whenever you start creating a new website, should you always analyze your target audiences and create personas for example?
I always thought the answer to this question was yes. In fact, it depends. Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is just what I needed!
I was discussing a few ideas that should help us move away from our usual approach of design for our websites, which is now becoming a bit … outdated:
(see www.unctad.org or www.unctadxi.org).
We’re building a new site for a Conference, and I wanted to have something more trendy or even sexy. I like this whole approach of using grid-based approach to find the right balance between the layout, the level importance of each element on the page and the general look and feel.
Smashing Magazine just published an article about this technique. I’m sure they’re not the first ones, but it happens that I bumped into this article a few hours after the discussion with my colleagues…
At last, I will be attending a major web development event. I’m going to spend a week at the User Experience 2006 Conference organized by the Nielsen Norman Group (5 - 11 November, London, UK). Out of the 29 full-day tutorials available, I took 4 of them:
I don’t really know what to expect from this training, but from what I’ve seen on web experts’ blogs, it’s a very useful experience, not only because you learn a lot from people who know their subject, but also because you can become part of a network of people who have the same questions, fears and ideas about the web.
I’m going there with 4 of my colleagues, with different backgrounds and experience in web development and web content management. We’re not attending the same sessions, but the idea was to share what we would learn in each of our sessions and start to create a real community of web experts within our organization.
International organizations such as the UN are not known to be very reactive at changes about the web, but I guess it’s partly because people who give directions, plan a web presence strategy or make key decisions don’t really know what to expect from these changes and how they can/will affect the organization. As web designers, content managers, information architects, etc., it’s our role to help educate these people, and I’m sure participating in these conferences and sharing this new knowledge with our colleagues is the first step of this education process.
Has anyone participated in previous editions of the User Experience Conference? What’s the reputation of the speakers? Let me know.
I am talking about my own experience.In November 2002, our organization moved from a static HTML website to a taylor-made Content Management System (cms). At that time, the basic idea was simply to help the Web Unit speed up the web content publishing process, by allowing them to focus on the content of a page, the system taking care of the design through templates. The new cms also had other purposes, such as:
Technically, the cms is in fact a web content management system and a document management system. It is used to create and publish web pages and also as the main repository of official publications and meeting documents. It is important to say that our organization is active in three areas:
At the beginning, we all thought the cms was going to make everyone’s life easier, not only for the Web Unit, the main user of the system, but also for all staff involved in web content creation and updates.In the facts, it’s another story.After a bit more than 3 years of use, we are still facing some major problems in terms of workflow. We did not manage to implement a fully working and thus open the system to the web authors. In other words, the web pages are still being maintained and updated by the 5 staff Web Unit, which is not only creating a bottleneck but also frustrating the users that have been excluded from the process: the web authors.There are many reasons to that:
Although these reasons are crucial when you implement a cms, I will not discuss them here for the moment. Instead, my intention was to ask the following question: when we talk about implementing a tool that helps users to publish web content that needs to go through different steps, do you think that “workflow is the wrong metaphor?”A few weeks ago, I read a a paper entitled “Is workflow the wrong metaphor?“, by James Robertson, of Step Two Design. His main argument was that while workflow is an central component of cms, they often fail in most organizations. The main purpose of a workflow is to help organizations publish information that went through a precise review and approval process.The problem is that usually these workflows fail to reflect the complexity of an organization, leading to a “considerable gap between the vision communicated in cms tenders, and the reality of implementation. Eventually, the organization will only use basic, linear workflows, instead of complex ones. Robertson’s idea is the following: instead of seing the web publishing problem as a content management, with workflows, a solution might be to see this issue as a task management, where instead of having rules as in workflows, a user could “assign a task related to a specific piece of content to another staff member”. Examples of requests are:
Depending on the task, it will trigger either a direct publishing or a longer linear workflow. In other words, steps to be performed on the content will depend on what needs to be done on it. This would allow a wider range of options / workflows, instead of providing only long, non-flexible workflows.I found Robertson’s idea quite new, and it also shows that there’s a new paradigm being built around the issue of actual use of content management systems. A necessary paradigm, because my experienc taught me that, even if you have a perfect system or tool, it’s not guarantee for your system to be 100% efficient. Human factor and existing working habits are also to be taken into consideration when adopting a cms. I might be even more important than the technical side.
Recent Comments