Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve posted the slides from my tuto­r­ial / work­shop Design For Goals at JBoye 09 on slideshare: they’re embed­ded below.

The struc­ture for this tuto­r­ial is part method review (on how to under­stand people’s goals in a struc­tured way), and part shar­ing of re-usable pat­terns found after research­ing goals.   Since the con­text of ori­gin for both the goals and pat­terns was com­plex inter­na­tional finance, some trans­la­tion of the raw mate­ri­als and exam­ples and the syn­the­sized pat­terns into a realm closer to home for ordi­nary peo­ple is likely in order.

As you’re going through the slides, I sug­gest using your own activ­i­ties that involve infor­ma­tion find­ing and mak­ing sub­stan­tial finan­cial deci­sions as a ref­er­ence.  Not all the exam­ples that I selected as the basis of exer­cises dur­ing the tuto­r­ial made across the cul­tural bar­rier between North Amer­ica and North­ern Europe: I was sur­prised at how many peo­ple (in a pro­fes­sional audi­ence) have never bought house or car…  Which proves yet again that this is one of the areas for user expe­ri­ence design to work on as a discipline.

And as we had a small, noisy, and rather warm room right after lunch, I should say big thanks to all the par­tic­i­pants and vol­un­teers — every­one — who made an effort to engage.

Even design edu­ca­tion is a work-in-progress, it seems.

‘Com­pa­nies spend huge amounts of money to be ‘socially respon­si­ble.’ Do con­sumers reward them for it? And how much?’ is the leader for a short piece titled Does Being Eth­i­cal Pay? just pub­lished in Sloan Man­age­ment Review. The quick answer is “Yes”, so it’s worth read­ing fur­ther to learn the spe­cific ways that eth­i­cal­ity plays into people’s spend­ing deci­sions.
Here’s an excerpt:

In all of our tests, con­sumers were will­ing to pay a slight pre­mium for the eth­i­cally made goods. But they went much fur­ther in the other direc­tion: They would buy uneth­i­cally made prod­ucts only at a steep dis­count.

What’s more, con­sumer atti­tudes played a big part in shap­ing those results. Peo­ple with high stan­dards for cor­po­rate behav­ior rewarded the eth­i­cal com­pa­nies with big­ger pre­mi­ums and pun­ished the uneth­i­cal ones with big­ger dis­counts.

At least accord­ing to this research, being eth­i­cal is a nec­es­sary attribute for a prod­uct.
There are clear impli­ca­tions for prod­uct design: ethics should be on the table as a con­cern at all stages of prod­uct devel­op­ment, from ideation and con­cept­ing of new prod­ucts, to the mar­ket­ing and sales of fin­ished prod­ucts.
And these (lim­ited, cer­tainly not the final word) find­ings match with the idea of adding ethics to the set of impor­tant user expe­ri­ence qual­i­ties cap­tured in Peter Morville’s UX Hon­ey­comb.
The (Aug­mented) Eth­i­cal UX Hon­ey­comb

How are user expe­ri­ence design­ers tak­ing the eth­i­cal qual­i­ties of their work into account?

In an ear­lier post on cre­at­ing Goal Based Infor­ma­tion Retrieval Expe­ri­ences, I offered a list of fun­da­men­tal user goals that under­lays needs and usage of four sug­gested infor­ma­tion retrieval modes. In this post, I’ll share the approach employed to dis­cover the fun­da­men­tal goals of the users in our envi­ron­ment, with the aim of offer­ing it as one way of under­stand­ing goals rel­e­vant for other types of envi­ron­ments and user expe­ri­ence archi­tec­tures.
Since the root user goals we iden­ti­fied are poten­tially applic­a­ble to other envi­ron­ments and con­texts, I’ll share the def­i­n­i­tions behind the full set of root goals we dis­cov­ered. Together, the approach and def­i­n­i­tions should help demon­strate how cap­ture a sys­tem­atic and also holis­tic view of what users have need to accom­plish when under­tak­ing infor­ma­tion retrieval tasks more com­plex than search­ing.
Finally, address­ing the per­spec­tive of strate­gic design and user expe­ri­ence method­ol­ogy, fram­ing broad user goals well offers strong foot­ing for address­ing busi­ness per­spec­tives, and engag­ing busi­ness audi­ences in pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sions on the pri­or­ity of capa­bil­i­ties and the func­tion­al­ity of the user expe­ri­ence.
Dis­cov­er­ing Root Goals
Begin­ning with raw goals gath­ered via a mixed palette of dis­cov­ery and user research (inter­views, task analy­sis, con­tex­tual inquiry, or other qual­i­ta­tive insight meth­ods) incor­po­rated into the project, we first called out the dif­fer­ent types or objects of infor­ma­tion users iden­ti­fied.
Our start­ing lists of raw user goals or needs looked some­thing like this (though it was con­sid­er­ably larger, and more varied):

• Read oper­at­ing guidelines
• Review instal­la­tion instructions
• Scan tech­ni­cal sup­port requests
• Review tech­ni­cal specifications

Iden­ti­fy­ing the objects in this set is not dif­fi­cult: tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions, oper­at­ing guide­lines, instal­la­tion instruc­tions, and sup­port requests. The activ­ity verbs are also easy to spot:

• read
• scan
• review

We then com­pared the activ­ity verbs for sim­i­lar­ity and dif­fer­ences, and refined these raw goals into a root goal of “review” that could apply to any of the objects users named.
Recom­bin­ing the root goal with var­i­ous objects yields a set of con­crete goals:

• Review oper­at­ing guidelines
• Review instal­la­tion instructions
• Review tech­ni­cal specifications
• Review tech­ni­cal sup­port requests

This approach is more art than sci­ence, but is sys­tem­atic, and is inde­pen­dent of con­text and for­mat.
Here’s an illus­tra­tion of the process.
Dis­cov­er­ing Root Goals

Final Root Goals For Our Envi­ron­ment
These are the def­i­n­i­tions we estab­lished for the root goals we found for all our dif­fer­ent types of users. [I haven’t included the objects of the goals, or the con­crete goals.]

• To Assess means to make a judge­ment or deci­sion about, con­sid­er­ing rel­e­vant factors
• To Com­pare means to review the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences of two or more exam­ples of the same type of thing by look­ing at them in detail
• To Find means to learn the loca­tion and sta­tus of
• To Iden­tify means to dis­tin­guish by the use of spe­cific criteria
• To Locate means to become aware of where and how a thing may be found, and / or con­tacted. Locate and find are sim­i­lar, so likely reflect dif­fer­ing but sim­i­lar usages and con­texts in the minds of users
• To Mon­i­tor means to track the sta­tus and loca­tion of
• To Obtain means to acquire and retain for other purposes
• To Par­tic­i­pate means to be present and recognized
• To Review means to exam­ine in detail
• To Save means to store and keep
• To See means to be pre­sented with in a man­ner that makes assumed rela­tion­ships or char­ac­ter­is­tics apparent
• To Under­stand means to con­sider all avail­able points of view or sources of infor­ma­tion on a topic / item / sit­u­a­tion, and for­mu­late an opin­ion and frame of ref­er­ence for one’s own purposes.

Some exam­ple con­crete goals for an user expe­ri­ence that addresses travel plan­ning could include:

• Find hotels
• Review hotel accommodations
• Save travel itineraries
• Com­pare vaca­tion packages
• See optional excur­sions offered by a hotel
• Iden­tify full-service or all-inclusive resorts
• Locate the oper­a­tors of scuba div­ing excursions
• Mon­i­tor the price of air­line tick­ets to Sardinia
• Under­stand how to plan and pur­chase vacations
• Assess the cost and value of a vaca­tion package

Sym­me­try and Men­tal Mod­els
We found the con­cept of a root goal insight­ful for help­ing to design user expe­ri­ence archi­tec­tures because it is inde­pen­dent of par­tic­u­lar user roles, infor­ma­tion types, and usage con­texts. Being root ele­ments, they point at com­mon­al­i­ties rather than dif­fer­ences, and so can help guide the def­i­n­i­tion of men­tal mod­els that span user groups, or allow the reuse of an infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture ele­ment such as a nav­i­ga­tion com­po­nent, task flow, or screen lay­out.
Build­ing numer­ous con­crete goals that are vari­a­tions on a smaller set of com­mon root goals allows the men­tal model for the envi­ron­ment to achieve a greater degree of con­sis­tency and pre­dictabil­ity (we hope — we’ll see what the usabil­ity and eval­u­a­tions bring back). This con­sis­tency helps fur­ther efforts toward sym­me­try through­out the infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture. While most infor­ma­tion archi­tects uncon­sciously reach for sym­me­try in user expe­ri­ences by design­ing repeated ele­ments such as com­mon label­ing, rules for lay­out, and com­po­nent sys­tems of fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity — sym­me­try is some­thing we should make more con­scious efforts to encour­age both within envi­ron­ments and across envi­ron­ments.
Speak­ing To the Busi­ness: Goal-based Pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of Capa­bil­i­ties and Func­tion­al­ity
With solid root goals and com­mon infor­ma­tion objects, it’s pos­si­ble to build up a sim­ple and con­sis­tent gram­mar that out­lines the set of pos­si­ble con­crete goals across user types. This set of goals is a good basis for engag­ing busi­ness stake­hold­ers in choos­ing the right set of pri­or­i­ties to guide design and build efforts. Sys­tem­at­i­cally artic­u­lated goals allow busi­ness audi­ences a com­fort­able and neu­tral basis for pri­or­i­tiz­ing the capa­bil­i­ties the envi­ron­ment will offer users. Of course, choices of capa­bil­ity directly affect costs, effort lev­els, design and build time­lines, and all the other tan­gi­ble aspects of a user expe­ri­ence. Ref­er­ence pri­or­i­ties can also help guide longer-term invest­ment and strat­egy decisions.

The Feb­ru­ary edi­tion of Usabil­ity News reports on a usabil­ity study (Where’s the Search? Re-examining User Expec­ta­tions of Web Objects) of user expec­ta­tions for Web page lay­outs that con­tains a sur­pris­ing but inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of page shapes, based on quan­ti­ta­tive user research. (Note: I found the study via the UI Design Newslet­ter, from HFI.)
The study looks at users” expec­ta­tions for the loca­tion of com­mon web page com­po­nents, such as site search and adver­tis­ing. The authors find that expec­ta­tions for page lay­outs are largely the same now, as com­pared to those found in an ear­lier study, Devel­op­ing Schemas for the Loca­tion of Com­mon Web Objects, con­ducted in 2001.
More inter­est­ing is the way the researchers report their results; visu­al­iz­ing them as heat map style grid plots for the expected loca­tion of each ele­ment vs. a blank grid. Here’s two exam­ples, the first show­ing expected loca­tions for ‘back to home’ links, the sec­ond for the ‘site search engine’.
Fig­ure 1: Back to Home Link Loca­tion

Fig­ure 2: Site Search Engine Loca­tion

These heat maps look a lot like page shapes, expressed as scat­ter­plots.
I like the com­bi­na­tion of quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive per­spec­tives at work in these page shapes ren­dered as scat­ter­plots. I think it could allow for grounded dis­cus­sion and inter­pre­ta­tion of user feed­back on design options, within a clear and sim­ple struc­ture that doesn’t require an HCI degree to appre­ci­ate. If I try it out, I’ll share the out­comes.
In a more tra­di­tional style of visu­al­iza­tion, Eric Scheid found another another good exam­ple of page shapes a while back in Jonathon Boutelle’s post­ing on blog lay­outs called “Mullet”-style blog lay­out. Jonathon was advo­cat­ing for a new default blog page shape that increases infor­ma­tion den­sity and scent, but hews closely to pre-existing expec­ta­tions.
Fig­ure 3: Typ­i­cal Blog Page Shape

Fig­ure 4: Sug­gested Blog Page Shape

And that’s the last time I’m men­tion­ing m.u.l.l.e.t.s this year, lest Google get the wrong idea about the sub­ject mat­ter of this blog

This week­end, some of my ear­lier posts dis­cussing the user expe­ri­ence of Lotus Notes sur­faced in the Notes com­mu­nity. Ed Brill — in a post­ing titled Mary Beth has been tak­ing on the crit­ics — ref­er­enced my men­tion of how the head of the Notes UI team was employ­ing user research as a bridge to cus­tomers. Ed com­pli­mented the design team for reach­ing out to crit­ics in pub­lic. This is a well-deserved pat on the back. Yet it falls short of rec­og­niz­ing the more impor­tant point that direct user research should be a basic com­po­nent of any company’s over­all strat­egy and plan­ning for long term suc­cess (or sur­vival).
Why? User research helps build cus­tomer rela­tion­ships, fur­ther design efforts, and iden­tify new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties when applied across audi­ences (inter­nal and exter­nal con­stituen­cies) and per­spec­tives (mar­ket­ing, sales, prod­uct devel­op­ment), and with an eye for needs beyond imme­di­ate feed­back. This sort of engage­ment with cus­tomers of a soft­ware prod­uct (or any kind of prod­uct) should *not* be spe­cial or note­wor­thy — it should hap­pen all the time. Con­tin­u­ously. I’m think­ing of Jared Spool’s remarks dur­ing his keynote at UI10, to the effect that the user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive is most suc­cess­ful when it it is a basic com­po­nent of a company’s cul­ture, and thus an assumed aspect of every ini­tia­tive.
In fact, in a socially trans­par­ent, net­worked, and aware envi­ron­ment like the cur­rent FutureP­re­sent, user research serves as a fun­da­men­tal, indis­pens­able form of research and devel­op­ment that com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions must sup­port as part of their port­fo­lio of meth­ods for seek­ing broad based envi­ron­men­tal feed­back (also here). I’ll go so far as to say that user research may move beyond the realm of essen­tial cor­po­rate R&D, and qual­ify as gen­uine basic research.
BTW: maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit omi­nous that the tag line for Notes 7 is “Inno­vate. Col­lab­o­rate. Dom­i­nate.” ? Sounds like some­thing the Borg might say if you asked them how to make breakfast…

Over at uiGarden.net Don Nor­man clar­i­fied some of his ideas regard­ing Activ­ity Cen­tered Design orig­i­nally pub­lished in the sum­mer of 2005.
I’d like to be com­fort­able say­ing that I’m with Don in spirit while dis­agree­ing on some of the par­tic­u­lars, but I’ve read both the orig­i­nal essay and the clar­i­fi­ca­tions twice, and the ideas and the mes­sages are still too raw to sup­port proper reac­tions or to fully digest. Maybe Don’s work­ing on a new book, and this is interim think­ing?
That might explain why the con­trast between Norman’s two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling’s Shap­ing Things — which also is a sort of design phi­los­o­phy / man­i­festo — is so dra­matic. Halfway throught Shap­ing Things, I’m left — as I usu­ally am when read­ing Sterling’s work — feel­ing envi­ous that I wasn’t gifted the same way.
Ster­ling is speak­ing at ETech, which this year focuses on The Atten­tion Econ­omy. No sur­prises with this matchup, given that Sterling’s devoted a whole book — Dis­trac­tion — to some of the same ideas pro­po­nents of the Atten­tion Econ­omy advo­cate we use as ref­er­ences when design­ing the future.

Prov­ing that a well-developed sense of humor is required for suc­cess in prod­uct design — espe­cially for Lotus Notes — Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next ver­sion of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny com­ment in reply to my sug­ges­tion that the Notes Design team offer cus­tomers a choice of unpleas­ant but related user expe­ri­ence themes. She used this as the occa­sion to invite all mem­bers of the com­mu­nity of Notes to users to reg­is­ter as vol­un­teers for usabil­ity test­ing.
I’ve made three post­ings to date specif­i­cally dis­cussing the Notes user expe­ri­ence: Lotus Notes User Expe­ri­ence = Dis­ease, Men­tal Mod­els, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Bet­ter UI Tops Notes Users’ Wish Lists. I’m not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I’m glad she did, because doing so is smart busi­ness on two lev­els. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly under­stands that while vocal crit­ics may seem daunt­ing to user expe­ri­ence design­ers, prod­uct man­agers, and busi­ness own­ers, engag­ing these crit­ics in fact presents design teams with oppor­tu­ni­ties to build strong con­nec­tions to users and gather valu­able feed­back at the same time. What bet­ter way is there to show the strate­gic value of user research?
I learned this at first hand while work­ing on a redesign of the flag­ship web pres­ence of a large soft­ware firm sev­eral years ago. Some of the most insight­ful and use­ful feed­back on the strengths and weak­nesses of the user expe­ri­ences I was respon­si­ble for came from ‘dis­grun­tled’ cus­tomers. The user research I was doing on site struc­tures, nav­i­ga­tion paths, and user goals estab­lished a chan­nel that allowed unhappy (and happy) cus­tomers to com­mu­ni­cate about a broad range of their expe­ri­ences with PTC prod­ucts and ser­vices in a more com­plete way than by sim­ply buy­ing a com­pet­ing prod­uct, or renew­ing an exist­ing soft­ware license.
Based on these and other expe­ri­ences build­ing user research pro­grams, I sug­gest that prod­uct man­agers, user research leads, and user expe­ri­ence design­ers first col­lab­o­rate to define a user research strat­egy, and then define and cre­ate a sim­ple but effec­tive user research infra­struc­ture (like reg­is­tra­tion gate­ways to vol­un­teer data­bases, com­mu­nity / pro­gram iden­ti­fiers and incen­tives, con­tact man­age­ment tools, spe­cific per­sonas that tech­ni­cal and cus­tomer sup­port teams can learn to rec­og­nize and recruit at all stages of the cus­tomer life­cy­cle, etc.) that will sup­port the cre­ation of chan­nels to users through­out the design cycle.
At the sec­ond level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore col­lab­o­ra­tion meth­ods, prod­ucts, and tech­nolo­gies related to the very com­pet­i­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion suite / inte­grated elec­tronic work­space / office pro­duc­tiv­ity mar­kets in which IBM, Microsoft, and sev­eral other giant firms are look­ing to secure dom­i­nant posi­tions in the new cul­ture of col­lab­o­ra­tion. [Note: I’ve posted a few times on Microsoft prod­ucts as well — Back­wards Goals: MS Office Results Ori­ented UI, and Microsoft’s Phi­los­o­phy On Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture.]
Mem­bers of the com­mu­nity of Lotus Notes users can reg­is­ter as vol­un­teers for usabil­ity tests dur­ing the design of the next ver­sion of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

User Research can be so relent­lessly earnest and pur­pose­ful that it gets to be a bit sti­fling. After a few dozen well-crafted per­sonas work their way pur­pose­fully through a set of mildly chal­leng­ing but inevitably suc­cess­ful sce­nar­ios for the tenth time in one week, a dili­gent user researcher is likely to be hun­ger­ing for some­thing a bit more sat­is­fy­ing; some­thing akin to the per­sona, but more fully-rounded; some­thing that con­veys the ambigu­ous com­plex­ity of human char­ac­ter with hon­esty; some­thing not only insight­ful, but con­sis­tently forth­right across a mul­ti­plic­ity of aspects. Per­haps even some­thing that is gen­uinely mala­pert.
Food Court Druids, Chero­hon­kees, And Other Crea­tures Unique to the Repub­lic is that some­thing. Writ­ten by Robert Lan­ham, it’s a hilar­i­ous col­lec­tion of idio­types — stereo­types out­side the design world, per­sonas within — couched as the out­come of seri­ous sci­en­tific inquiry whose method is called idio­syn­crol­ogy.
I advise read­ing with humil­ity close at hand, since it’s likely you’ll find your­self inside, and it’s only fair to laugh at every­one if you’re included…

Here’s the descrip­tion:
Lan­ham, author of The Hip­ster Hand­book and cre­ator and edi­tor of the Web site www.freewilliamsburg.com, extends his anthro­po­log­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of Amer­i­cans beyond trendy Brook­lyn neigh­bor­hoods to the entire coun­try, where Yank­necks (“rebel-flag-waving red­necks who live out­side the South”), Sig­mund Fruits (“peo­ple who insist on telling you about their dreams”) and oth­ers have existed thus far with­out being for­mally stud­ied by “idio­syn­crol­o­gists” like Lan­ham and his team. Pre­sented with the author­i­ta­tive tone of a seri­ous anthro­po­log­i­cal study, com­plete with an Idio Rank Scale that assesses the weird­ness of each type, many of Lanham’s pro­files are hilar­i­ously accu­rate descrip­tions of co-workers, fam­ily mem­bers, friends and other acquain­tances that almost every Amer­i­can has encoun­tered at some point in their lives. There are the Cor­nered Rabid Office Work­ers (CROWs), who “claim to be poets or play­wrights” when dis­cussing their work with strangers, “even if they just spent the last nine hours doing data entry on the McFlan­nery acqui­si­tion,” and Hex­pa­tri­ates, Amer­i­cans who decry every­thing about Amer­ica yet never actu­ally leave the coun­try (and who “refer to the Loews mul­ti­plex at the mall as ‘the cin­ema’ and the Motel Six by Hard­ees as ‘the pen­sione”). Illus­tra­tions by Jeff Bech­tel, depict­ing the fash­ion sense of Holi­dorks (peo­ple who wear holiday-themed cloth­ing) and Skants (women with shapely butts who always wear span­dex pants), enhance Lanham’s characterizations.

But not the new fea­tures list for the next release. In a pre­vi­ous post Lotus Notes UI = Dis­ease, I cited a SearchDomino.com arti­cle in which Ken Bis­conti, IBM Lotus vice pres­i­dent of Work­place, por­tal and col­lab­o­ra­tion prod­ucts, is quoted as say­ing “Through improve­ments such as con­tex­tual col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­port for com­pos­ite apps, we’ve gone *above and beyond sim­ple UI enhance­ment*”. [Empha­sis mine.] Above and beyond? I think UI enhance­ment — which is often far from sim­ple, espe­cially when the exist­ing user expe­ri­ence is fun­da­men­tally flawed — is exactly what Notes needs.
After watch­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment first hand, I know that many Prod­uct Man­agers under­stand the impor­tance of qual­ity, design, and meet­ing users’ needs, but do not feel empow­ered to work against the per­va­sive fea­tu­ri­tis that leads to unus­able bloat­ware. Good prod­uct man­agers and design­ers often work for orga­ni­za­tions or man­agers who remain blinded by stan­dard prac­tices and mar­ket­ing dri­ven per­cep­tions of pri­or­ity, and thus feel it’s impos­si­ble to step off the new func­tion­al­ity tread­mill.
That is, unless they are armed with infor­ma­tion that indi­cates to the con­trary.
The arti­cle in Ken’s state­ment appears, Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches ‘Han­nover’ user expe­ri­ence, is dated June 14, 2005. Yet when dig­ging it bit more, I dis­cov­ered an ear­lier piece from May 9, 2005, titled Bet­ter UI tops Notes users’ wish list, in which the same author, Peter Blochner, reports on the results of an open request for Lotus Notes fea­tures made by Ed Brill(Brill heads the world­wide sales group for Notes, accord­ing to Blochner). In his review of user responses to Brill’s ques­tion, Blochner says, “the most requested fea­ture was for an improved user inter­face for Notes.“
Sim­ple UI enhance­ment is all that the users want, and they’ve said it them­selves. Yet Notes is going way beyond this? Despite repeated and pub­lic requests for this from com­mit­ted users (Ed Brill’s blog is a pre­dom­i­nantly Notes-friendly forum) in their own voices, and in response to ques­tions from your own team. Why not lis­ten to them?
For ref­er­ence, Blochner’s arti­cle is repro­duced below:
By Peter Bochner
09 May 2005 | SearchDomino.com
IBM is already work­ing on plans for the next major releases of Lotus Notes beyond 7.0. Last week, on May 3, vis­i­tors to the blog site of Ed Brill, who heads up world­wide sales for Lotus Notes and Domino, were asked, “If you could add one fea­ture to Lotus Notes 7.x, what would it be?“
As of May 9, his ques­tion has gar­nered 184 com­ments, although many respon­dents cir­cum­vented the question’s one-feature limit by sub­mit­ting mul­ti­ple posts.
To kick off the thread, Brill pro­vided his own request — multi-level undo — and that was reit­er­ated by seven posters. How­ever, the most requested fea­ture was for an improved user inter­face for Notes. “It’s time to give the Notes client UI a much-needed facelift,” wrote one respon­dent. When peo­ple say Exchange is bet­ter than Notes, said another, “What they are say­ing is that the Out­look inter­face is …nicer than the [Notes] mail tem­plate. A top UI for the next release would top off a lot of end-user com­plaints.“
Only a hand­ful of responses men­tioned spe­cific sug­ges­tions for improv­ing the UI. One asked for “a first-class, richly con­fig­urable Wel­come Panel that resem­bles a Web por­tal.” Another sug­gested UI improve­ments such as “more user-selectable columns in folders/views, hav­ing pref­er­ences all in one place, or rules that can act on doc­u­ments already in the mail file.” Still another requested “a sexy mod­ern mail tem­plate with a sin­gle UI in Notes and on the Web.“
Finally, one user said, “What would it be worth if every part of the Notes mail expe­ri­ence, which …is the Notes inter­face for the major­ity of users, from the tool­bars to the icons to inter­ac­tion and behav­ior, was con­sis­tent, mod­ern, clean and invit­ing? There is no point in hav­ing the supe­rior every­thing if it’s not appeal­ing to look at.“
P.S. Brill has requested a mora­to­rium on sug­ges­tions, because the thread is now so long it has become unwieldy.

Found via via, orig­i­nat­ing in an arti­cle titled Social Infor­mat­ics: Overview, Prin­ci­ples and Oppor­tu­ni­ties from the ASIST Bul­letin spe­cial issue on Social Infor­mat­ics, which, inci­den­tally is one of those very inter­est­ing dis­ci­plines I don’t have enough time to keep up with, but that has much to offer prac­tic­ing infor­ma­tion archi­tects.
On com­put­er­i­za­tion, Sawyer says, “Com­put­er­i­za­tion, to para­phrase soci­ol­o­gist Bev­erly Bur­riss, is the imple­men­ta­tion of com­put­er­ized tech­nol­ogy and advanced infor­ma­tion sys­tems, in con­junc­tion with related socioe­co­nomic changes, lead­ing to a fun­da­men­tal restruc­tur­ing of many social orga­ni­za­tions and insti­tu­tions.“
Add in a client man­age­ment clause, and this is essen­tially my job descrip­tion as an archi­tect / designer / cre­ator of infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments that solve busi­ness prob­lems. I don’t know Bur­riss’ work — does any­one else?
Directly address­ing the role of a con­structed prob­lem Sawyer says, “…social infor­mat­ics is problem-oriented. This work is defined by its inter­est in par­tic­u­lar issues and prob­lems with com­put­er­i­za­tion and not by its adher­ence to cer­tain the­o­ries or par­tic­u­lar meth­ods (as is oper­a­tions research).“
In what looks like a neatly phrased snap­shot of user research, Sawyer says, “The strong empir­i­cal basis of social infor­mat­ics work, how­ever, is com­bined with both method­olog­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal plu­ral­ity. Social infor­mat­ics work typ­i­cally includes an array of data col­lec­tion approaches, sophis­ti­cated large-scale analy­ses and com­plex con­cep­tu­al­iza­tions.“
Here’s a longer excerpt:
The Com­mon Find­ings of Social infor­mat­ics
More than 30 years of care­ful empir­i­cal research exists in the social infor­mat­ics tra­di­tion. As noted, this work is found in a range of aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines, reflects a mix of the­o­ries and meth­ods, and focuses on dif­fer­ent issues and prob­lems with com­put­er­i­za­tion. Here I high­light five obser­va­tions that are so often (re)discovered that they take on the notion of com­mon find­ings rel­a­tive to com­put­er­i­za­tion.
1. Uses of ICT lead to mul­ti­ple and some­times para­dox­i­cal effects. Any one ICT effect is rarely iso­lat­able to a desired task. Instead, effects of using an ICT spread out to a much larger num­ber of peo­ple through the socio-technical links that com­prise con­text. An exam­i­na­tion of this larger con­text often reveals mul­ti­ple effects, rather than one all-encompassing out­come, and unex­pected as well as planned events. For exam­ple, peer-to-peer file shar­ing may help some musi­cians and hurt oth­ers.
2. Uses of ICT shape thought and action in ways that ben­e­fit some groups more than oth­ers. Peo­ple live and work together in pow­ered rela­tion­ships. Thus, the polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and tech­ni­cal struc­tures they con­struct include large-scale social struc­tures of cap­i­tal exchange, as well as the microstruc­tures that shape human inter­ac­tion. An exam­i­na­tion of power often shows that a system’s imple­men­ta­tions can both rein­force the sta­tus quo and moti­vate resis­tance. That is, the design, devel­op­ment and uses of ICTs help reshape access in unequal and often ill-considered ways. Thus, course man­age­ment sys­tems may pro­vide added ben­e­fits to some stu­dents, put added pres­sure on some fac­ulty and allow some admin­is­tra­tors to use the sys­tem to col­lect addi­tional evi­dence regard­ing the per­for­mances of both stu­dents and fac­ulty.
3. The dif­fer­en­tial effects of the design, imple­men­ta­tion and uses of ICTs often have moral and eth­i­cal con­se­quences. This find­ing is so often (re)discovered in stud­ies across the entire spec­trum of ICTs and across var­i­ous lev­els of analy­sis that igno­rance of this point bor­ders on pro­fes­sional naïveté. Social infor­mat­ics research, in its ori­en­ta­tion towards crit­i­cal schol­ar­ship, helps to raise the vis­i­bil­ity of all par­tic­i­pants and a wider range of effects than do other approaches to study­ing com­put­er­i­za­tion. For exam­ple, char­ac­ter­iz­ing errors in diag­nos­ing ill­nesses as a human lim­i­ta­tion may lead to the belief that imple­ment­ing sophis­ti­cated computer-based diag­nos­tic sys­tems is a bet­ter path. When these sys­tems err, the ten­dency may be to refo­cus efforts to improve the com­put­er­ized sys­tem rather than on bet­ter under­stand­ing the processes of triage and diag­no­sis.
4. The design, imple­men­ta­tion and uses of ICTs have rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ships with the larger social con­text. The larger con­text shapes both the ICTs and their uses. More­over, these arti­facts and their uses shape the emer­gent con­texts. This can be seen in the micro-scale adap­ta­tions that char­ac­ter­ize how peo­ple use their per­sonal com­put­ers and in the macro-scale adap­ta­tions evi­dent in both the evolv­ing set of norms and the chang­ing designs of library automa­tion sys­tems. Library automa­tion is not sim­ply about recent devel­op­ments of appli­ca­tions with sophis­ti­cated librar­i­an­ship func­tion­al­ity; it is also about patrons’ dif­fer­en­tial abil­i­ties to use com­put­ers, library bud­get pres­sures, Inter­net access to libraries and the increas­ing vis­i­bil­ity of the Inter­net and search­ing.
5. The phe­nom­e­non of inter­est will vary by the level of analy­sis. Because net­works of influ­ence oper­ate across many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis, rel­e­vant data on com­put­er­i­za­tion typ­i­cally span for­mal and infor­mal work groups; for­mal orga­ni­za­tions; for­mal and infor­mal social units like com­mu­ni­ties or pro­fes­sional occupation/associations; groups of orga­ni­za­tions and/or indus­tries; nations, cul­tural groups and whole soci­eties. This com­mon find­ing is exem­pli­fied by the tremen­dous pos­i­tive response by younger users to peer-to-peer file shar­ing, the absolute oppo­site response by music indus­try lead­ers and the many approaches taken by orga­ni­za­tional and civic lead­ers regard­ing the legal­i­ties and responses to use.