My fellow information architect Mack Reed pointed me to this cyber event, which he’s participating in. You can check it out at Twitter.

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CleverWorkarounds has an insightful post are an South Australian goverment project that’s being scrapped after spending $5 million on IT development. What’s notiable about this is that this reflects how many SharePoint engagements go: projects failing because the approach taken was too complex for proper implementation, and many of the difficulties would have discovered early on with a proof of concept.

Projects fail for a number of reasons, but the main point here was the lack of high level systems thinking. Sometimes, it’s best to figure out ways to simplify the complexity, and that isn’t always an easyr thing to do.

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You open up your consulting business, start posting to your blog, and wait for the millions of visitors to come in. Or don’t come in.

I personally have a three year plan for this blog, and I know it’s a journey, not a destination. It’s about the quality of the traffic for me (and who I want to promote to), not the quantity.

Along the same lines, proBlogger has a great post about the psychology of blogging. Read on…

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Marketing budgets are slashed.

Development projects are shelved.

New initiatives are put off.

So why is this the perfect time to rethink usability of your applications? Here’s a few reasons.

Most usability changes are small improvements, not drastic changes

If your application or website is surviving and making revenue, but not increasing in revenue the way that you want, this is the prefect time because most changes are small tweaks versus massive redesigns (or, if you are having to do a massive redesign, you’re probably not going to be around much longer anyways).

Some suggestions:

• How does your help text read?
• Do your emails communicate the message plainly enough to encourage better conversion rates?
• Can you remove screens from the process?
• Are there bugs that are affecting the user experience?

Making user experience improvements versus development changes is cheaper

The ratio of time on projects of developers versus user experience architects is about two or three to one, and developers are very expensive. Thus, taking on large-scale projects that may or may not improve your website or web application is a risky proposition, but making changes on a smaller scale where you can measure the results in short, iterative development cycles in much easier to demonstrate to upper management and customers.

Plus with limited resources, you can also cut down the amount of requirements gathering you are doing and have user experience architects work directly with the developers.

User experience changes help keep your current customers happy, and retention is the key to survival in a recession

During periods of a good economy, the key is growth. During recession periods, the key is keeping the customers you do have, because you don’t have to convert them.

It’s best to talk to your customers directly (especially the high value clients), and ask them about your service. Put together a survey of five or six simple questions that are open ended, like:

• What do you like about the  website?
• What do you dislike about the  website?
• How often do you use the website?
• Do you use it in conjunction with other services?
• What are websites you like?

Interview ten or so customers, and you’ll be surprised at the insights they gave. One of the insights we got from customers at Escrow.com during a time of recession was that they were familar with eBay as an application. As we redesigned the Escrow.com site to fit the eBay style, revenue went up without any marketing spend.

Thus, we kept our customers happy.

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I have a love, hate relationship with blogging — like the promotion I can do with it, don’t like the amount of work it takes sometimes. But a site like ProBlogger is a perfect example of what a blog for business should be.

Darren Rowse is a full-time blogger and runs the site. Most imporatntly, he’s figured out how to make a full time living out of it, and live life on his terms (or the terms of his readers).

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This came up at work during a conversation about browser sizes and screen resolution: just what is the usable area of real estate in a browser?

That’s changing a bit with the advent of Google Chrome and minimalist browser user interfaces, but here’s a straight forward chart as compiled at My Own Shit (not kidding about the name), with some of my own notes added:

• 640 by 480: 618 by 310 actual, 600 by 300 safe
• 800 by 600: 778 by 430 actual, 770 by 420 safe
• 1024 by 768: 1004 by 598 actual, 950 by 550 safe
• 1280 by 1024: 1259 by 853, 1200 by 840 safe

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If you have an action on your site that a user can click on, the page should be primarily around that action

Sorry to pick on Technorati — it’s fun — but one of my pet peeves is when I click on Sign In in the top navigation, this is the screen I get. Over in the right corner, small, is a sign in panel for members to use. For people that clicked on Sign In and didn’t realized they have never been a member of Technorati (and mind you, why would someone click on Sign In if they weren’t a member already?), those users get a huge registration screen where they can create an account.

Users who don’t have accounts that didn’t understand what Sign In means would click on it, thinking they would have the ability to Register. Read that again for emphasis, because it’s supposed to be as confusing as it sounds.

The issue is that both Register and Sign In take the user to the same screen. It was probably a conservation of development resources on the part of Technorati, but I would think they could take the extra week to separate the functions. However, front and center is a registration form. Is it to increase user membership? Is it to confuse existing users?

Keep it simple. If it says Sign In, make that the primary action, and provide a link to the registration screen. Of all the functions that we do over and over again, you would think that registration and signing in (and the design patterns around that) would be fairly straightforward.

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All Flash. All fun.

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We’ve been playing with faceted search for use with a few of our clients. It’s a great tool, and I believe it’s a replacement for the overrated and underused Advanced Search (i.e. if there are 200 users using it a month, is it really worth the return on investment?).

However, faceted search requires extra information architecture and meta data planning that most SharePoint Administrators don’t want to do, or don’t know how to do. Again, extra power, but requires extra work and planning; you also have to remember that you really need enough pages (over 5,000) to make it effective for end users.

Local SEO Guide has an awesome post on straight forward strategies about faceted search. And a question, what do you think of replacing faceted search with advanced search?

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I know it’s tough, especially if you are looking for a job right now, to carefully select where you want to work next. However, Seth Godin has a great post about the effects of working somewhere that doesn’t fit who you are and what you need to get out of your day job. Even though we aren’t supposed to like work (that’s why it’s not called fun), we spend over a third to a half of our waking hours there.

He made a few really good points that resonate. You should take a job only if:

• If makes you better at what you do
• If it makes you more marketable
• If you can learn something there

The best quote from his article:

Great marketing involves having a great product, and not every job (or every client) is worth your time or attention or love.

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