Behind the Firewall

Twitter memes are the tweets being posted right now that are tagged for particular topics. The "right now" part is important. This is the real-time flow of ideas spontaneously emerging through multiple, dispersed Twitterers on any given topic. They can move quickly, like a fresh water stream.

In addition to following other Twitterers, you can follow memes, or topics. In the right hand side bar of your Twitter home page is a search box. Type in a topic, prepending a hash (#) symbol. That will display all the tweets tagged for that topic.

Example: #windpower

This will give you what anyone anywhere on Twitter is saying right now about wind power (provided they've included the #windpower tag in their tweet).

If this is something you'll want to check on a recurring basis, you can save the search and a "#windpower" link will appear in your sidebar for future use.

Your home page side bar also displays "Trending Topics" which are the currently most active memes. You can see more by logging into www.twitscoop.com with your Twitter login. (The same live feed of trending topics is also available from Twitscoop on your desktop TweetDeck application.)

I've been trying to find a comprehensive index of Twitter memes but haven't yet -- please let me know if you do.

One of my most persistent challenges as a Web producer is helping my clients separate business requirements from design specifications. For example, I was designing a Web-based search page for a clinical trials database. The content was complex with lots of associated data points: disease name, organ site, doctor, government-assigned research category, trial number and patient population demographics. The audience for the content was compound: doctors, patients and administrators. My client was the veteran director of clinical trials administration and I was glad to have her perspective to help model the user experience. But, when I asked her how she expected users to query the database (searching on disease name or on doctor or on trial number, etc.) her reply was "I envision a green box at the top of the page."

To help clients articulate their business objectives I sometimes use a three column table. During a discovery meeting, I whiteboard the three columns: Business objectives; Content; Design. As the client talks about the product they're requesting, I capture the features described and sort them into the appropriate columns which we can view together on the wall.

Clients understand their business needs, but often they try to communicate those needs to me in graphic or interactive design terms. They imagine the final product that will solve their problem, support their process, address their business needs and the inclination is to describe that product's graphic and structural features. My job is to plumb their business expertise and help them articulate their business objectives. The key is making space to facilitate both their creative ideas and their business requirements.

Recently I've noticed a trend from content contributors for our enterprise Web site. When submitting a PDF brochure or fact sheet to be linked on the site, they've been identifying the pages that they, themselves, visit most frequently--as opposed to pages with related subject matter or even pages most frequently visited by their targeted users.

My hypothesis is that this tendency is influenced by social networking sites. People have become used to personalized home pages on portals like Yahoo and account-based home pages on social networking sites. "I uploaded the letter from my friend in Iraq. Go to my MySpace page to read it."

Here at work, one of these content contributors is accustomed to directing online users to the contact page for their business unit. Their business unit recently published a handout on a specific business topic. There are pages on the Web site focused on that topic. Yet, when the handout was submitted to our Web team, the request directed us to post the handout on the business unit's contact page. When I asked about the business objective, the answer was "that's the page they're used to going to."

I managed to persuade the contributor that the stronger business case would be to link the handout to pages with related text and graphics that supported the message of the handout. That may seem like a no-brainer, especially when you're reading the scenario laid out here. But we are creatures of our environment. We are influenced by the media surrounding us and the forms it takes. It's a simple but important part of Web producing to be aware of those forms and influences.

GUI
We have been converting all of our digital video files to Flash and I'm finalizing specs for presenting them on the Web. I've customized standard controls to match our style guide color palette, keeping it simple. I used the combined play/pause button, seek bar for navigating back and forth between frames, volume slider control and mute button.

IA
Next step is implementation. This includes figuring out the best back-end file organization within the MOSS 2007 WCMS. Because of our customized template and the content authoring editor, we need to put the code into an html file and display that within an iframe in the WCMS-generated Web page.

Project scope
The current phase is just to get the video clips we already have online in WMV format converted to Flash. Planned enhancements include poster frames and possibly a full-screen display option.

In the next phase, we'll be integrating a new subsite for centralized presentation of all the multimedia content on the Web site. This will include a Flash photo gallery template for collections of still images, as well as a Flash video gallery template for clips.

New media means new ways of doing business within an organization -- not just in terms of tools and systems, but also in terms of cultural dynamics and work processes. The model I advocate for any organization with an Internet presence mirrors the nature of the technology. New media, digital media, web-based enterprise applications are interactive and multifaceted. The business teams that support them should likewise be dynamic and diverse. This calls for an interdisciplinary, collaborative product team model, centered on a common, holistic objective.

A product team model brings together application developer, information architect, graphic designer, content editor, business analyst and project manager, working as an integrated unit to produce a Web site.

The Internet is first and foremost a communications medium. Although it's infrastructure is based on computers, it is not simply an engineer's domain of binary calculations and electrical cables. It is a channel for messages and a platform for multimedia production and delivery. The Internet and the World Wide Web produce a convergence of diverse media that requires interdisciplinary collaboration. These are broad concepts that most people in business today have already understood. Application of these concepts at ground level within a business organization, however, is not ensured without savvy management.

An enterprise Web site is not simply a programmer's domain of custom event handlers and asynchronous services. The adage that "content is king" refers to the value of a Web site as a communications medium. It requires a clear understanding on the part of management to organize resources in support of an organization's Web site in a way that optimizes the true character of this medium. That character is convergent, not compartmentalized like most corporate environments. The structure and content of a Web site are interdependent, interrelated as form and function. These elements should be managed separately in the application code, but not in the functional design and production of a site. Having one department developing structure while a different department generates content, in isolation from each other, will result in a weak user experience -- which means a weak Web site.

Working separately on core components of a Web site, an IT application development team will be compromised when their task runs into presentation design and content organization issues. Developing text and images in isolation, a communications or marketing Web team will be disadvantaged in optimizing technology strategies.

The convergence of media on the Internet is the essence of Web publishing. The convergence of technical and creative experts around the same table for a meeting of minds on business requirements and design specifications, user acceptance testing, and product enhancement is critical to viable Web publishing in business today.

Accessibility. The term is creeping into the corners of mainstream software documentation and onto the agenda's of corporate steering committees. But the standards and practice haven't yet come into demand enough among the "deciders" to be prioritized into development schedules. On the open source Web and non-corporate Internet, developers and designers have long understood accessibility as a basic value and incorporated it into architecture and code. That has not been the case in the rest of the maintstream, corporate business world.

Even with litigation inching the topic into executive's weekend reading, the mandate is only for discussion -- by business managers far removed from technical application. I find this frustrating since, as a developer I've been coding accessible Web sites for years and I know how simple and basic it is.

As an employee of a large organization I was assigned to build the HTML template for a new online application to be hosted as part of the enterprize Web site. I mentioned to the business manager in charge of the project what a great opportunity it was to make at least this part of the Web site accessible. "We don't have time for that," she admonished. "But, that's the beauty of it," said I. "It won't take any extra time. Because we're starting from scratch we'll just code it for accessbililty as we go -- doing it right, from the beginning." "No. Don't do it. There's no time." She marched off in her stressed-out, ignorance. Ironically, her job and the purpose of this application were to provide support resources for Cancer patients -- a population especially suited to the need for barrier-free access.

Anyway, I've noticed a lot of support from business executives for blogs and wikis and anything referenced as Web 2.0. This makes me think that if we sex up accessibility by referring to it as Web 3.0, we might make some headway in mainstream business Web production environments.

Labels: web accessibility

The discovery process at the beginning of a Web development project should be expansive, like a balloon. This is the time to brainstorm and get as much information as possible onto the table. The goal is to capture all requirements up front in order to plan an efficient implementation. The users of your intranet site, both contributors and consumers, are your best source of information about content requirements.

Ask questions
Since your intranet will be a business tool, base your questions on your users’ business objectives and functional roles. Think in terms of the communication between users and the relationships between work processes. The following three sets of questions will help you build a model of your intranet content.

First: Process questions
It is helpful to begin with guided brainstorming about the functional roles of your users. Resist the temptation to brainstorm about “what should be posted on our intranet.” Instead, take a few minutes to focus on the day-to-day objectives of the people who will be using your intranet and their current processes for accomplishing those objectives.

ASK:

• What is your team or group membership within your larger business unit?
  
• What is the mission or function of your team?
  
• What is your individual business role?
  
• What are your business objectives?
  
• What questions do you ask in the course of doing your job?
  
• Who provides the information you need to meet your business objectives?
  
• To whom do you provide information in order to accomplish your objectives?
  
• What questions do colleagues and customers ask you?
  

Map the answers
Capture this high-level view of your business processes using a concept map. Draw a bubble for each person or role identified as part of the business process. Draw lines connecting the bubbles to show communication patterns. Next to these lines, list the questions and answers identified as common to these business processes. You may want to flag each item with a label indicating associated business objective(s).

Ask more questions
After developing the concept map of your business objectives, processes and communications, you can begin identifying the resource materials that support these interactions.

Second: Resource questions
In a new brainstorming session, invite your users to name every document and service they access in the course of their work. Remember that the goal is to capture all of the requirements now to limit surprises mid-production.

ASK:

• Name every document you touch during the course of your work.
  
• What type of document is it (spreadsheet, Word document, PDF, input form, etc.)?
  
• Briefly describe its function (report, newsletter, glossary).
  
• Name every online application or service you access to do your job.
  
• What type of resource is it (public Internet, internal application, etc.)?
  
• What purpose does it serve?
  

Remind the users to name every file, library and online application they can think of, regardless of how relevant it may seem at the moment. Write each item down in a list.

Look for patterns
Now that you’ve collected the data from your two brainstorming sessions, your next step is to arrange the data in a meaningful way. This will give form to your intranet.

Third: Analysis questions
Take a look at all the data you’ve collected and see if any patterns stand out. The key is going to be revealing the way your users interact with each other and how they use available resources.

ASK:

• How often do you access each resource (document, service, etc.)?
  
• List who uses each resource (consumers)?
  
• Who owns/produces/manages each resource (contributors)?
  

Document your findings
Combine the information you’ve gathered from these three activities into a content model for your intranet. For example, you might use a spreadsheet with columns for contributors, business objectives, content, content type, frequency of use, and consumers. The resulting document will be a reference source and communication tool for your intranet project going forward.