I don’t really much like Starbucks: I think there are too many of them, and I usually get sick off of their coffee drinks. However, I think My Starbucks Idea is a phenomenal implementation of an social voting and networking, Digg-like — using your customers to generate ideas on how to your company.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.

Want to save the world? You can do it one friend at a time with an application called Causes. You can join an already established cause, or start your own. Helping get friends to join the cause raises its ranking within all of the causes, and the ranking system that shows not only what you have done, but what others have done within the last day, week, month and all time.

More importantly, you can donate to a cause, and the application shows how much money has been donated to particular causes, and add content via videos and comments about that cause. You can also edit the content that is contained within your user profile, and encourage your friends to donate. Because of this, some of the causes have already raised thousands of dollars.

The usability of this application is the best I have seen so far out of the applications — the amount of detail in the application for this outstrips applications by some of the professional companies that are part of the MySpace platform. The only knock against it was the first time I visited the application, it was broken from stability issues.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 3
• Monetization Opportunities: 4

If it’s an absolute requirement, it should be spelled out in plain language

So some of you have probably been following my misadventures with United Airlines. After a few calls, they were awesome at correcting a airline ticket where I didn’t include the full name of the passenger (she has an Anglicized name that also appears with her Chinese name on her passport), and I didn’t find out until later that I needed to include the full name.

Not to throw just United Airlines under the bus (pun intended), but most of the other sites didn’t point out the the following requirement: that whatever name was listed, it should be exactly the name on any identification. This isn’t necessarily the airlines’ fault — all of the airlines are following guidelines set forth after 9/11.

The issue for some of the sites is that this requirement isn’t obvious enough: if someone like me, who never reads the text on a site, misses this, I can’t imagine how many others have fallen prey. And with the frustration over customer service and airlines in general, passing the buck of the travel sites with the airline companies has become almost sport.

Here are a few screen shots from my favorite airlines:

Southwest Airlines

No indication.

American Airlines

Does indicate, but in legalspeak.

Delta Airlines

No indication, but does have an indication that you can refund the flight if there are changes within 24 hours of booking further down the page.

Orbitz

Perfect. Someone at the other sites needs to copy this exactly. An additional improvement would be to add a link to the polices for changing flights. They should have additional text that reads something to the effect “even in the event of a mispelling.”

Other Travel Sites

Expedia does cover this under the rules and restrictions, and on the screen where you have to enter a traveler, but not next to the text entry area (and the rule is actually covered up by a popup window. Travelocity is much like Orbitz, where the explaination text is right next to entering the name.

Where I work at, to say we do a lot of MOSS implementations is asking the question, “Does the pope have a big hat?” Of course, the question is yes, and one of the struggles that we have is structuring the Information Architecture of the site correctly. This is a fairly important issue because moving document libraries around after the information architecture is designed can present all kind of issues, especially for business users that are just barely learning the basics of SharePoint and don’t understand the difference between a list and a document library.

One of the biggest conclusions we came to is that the site map doesn’t necessarily reflect how the information architecture should be structured, and are actually designing to two site maps — one for the information architecture, and other for what the ned user sees. Complicating this is how Microsoft defines information architecture within SharePoint, and how the rest of us think about information architecture.

What to do?

Let your governance be the guide, and have an open communication channel with the SharePoint developer. From this conversation, we came to a few realizations:

• All information wants to be free (and sometimes in the same place). Some organizations need all documents in the same store vs. separate document libraries. That’s fine, so maybe filtering that document store based on personalization is the best approach. If more collaboration is needed, it’s probably a good idea to develop a workflow that promotes from a local document library to the document center.
• Sometimes designing to an organization chart isn’t a bad idea. Departments are still departments, and when they want to use MOSS, maybe they should think in silos (I almost can’t believe I’m saying this). Many times demanding that a full inventory of the site just isn’t possible because the site will evolve over time, so the best solution is to give them a design pattern to follow for the information architecture, and separate the departments enough so one department’s mistakes can’t affect other organizations within the company. When given a SharePoint deployment, some users are going to run with scissors, and you don’t want to have mass casualties because of poor information architecture.
• There might be several levels of navigations, but the user doesn’t have to see them. We’re working on an implementation where there a hierarchy of four levels within the department, however a grand total of 20 users will see all departments within the four levels. So we are designing a mostly flat navigation structure that still has all the levels intact, but the other 6,000 users don’t see the levels — they only see the navigation they have access to under governance policies. In other terms, design to the 80 or 90 percent, not to the 10 to 20 percent.
• It’s best to have completely separate project or publishing sites if they involve users that are from several different departments. This is basically designed around the ideas of audiences that are around projects, and that might be across several departments. A creative solution is designing a site that contains departments and projects in two different site collections, and treating projects more like team sites with some publishing capabilities. That allows different members from different departments to be associated with projects, and no projects to be associated with a single department.

From Sheilah Etheridge:

• Consulting outside their area of expertise.
• Believing that as a consultant they are also a coach.
• Believing they know more without ever hearing the client.
• Believing their client is nodding because they understand, and wanting to appease the client instead of helping the client.

From Copyblogger:

• Why Do I Really Need This?
• Why Should I Choose You?
• Why Should I Decide Now?

Remember The Vault? It was the Web 1.0 version of a message board for reviewing companies. It seemed cool at the time — wow, look at all the messages talking about not-so-stellar management. But like all sites, it’s pretty much a shadow of it’s former self, mainly because it wasn’t very sticky.

Enter GlassDoor, the new entry into the “review your company” sweepstakes. It has a bunch of me too features, but the site is much easier to use (sooner or later they’ll have to add advertising), and there are a bunch of contextual searches.

The most intriguing feature is the salary ranges for each company. Boy, that’s going to make some companies uneasy.

What if you are a really big company, have a good idea, and the implementation is so poor that no one wants to use it? This is what you get when you have an application like Simply Hired. The concept is simple — based on the zip code in your profile, it shows you five jobs that are matches.

The problem is that you really can’t do much with it — it lists only five jobs, there’s no search functionality, and there’s no indication of how to change the zip code or even what the search is based off of. It does launch to a search region, but it would be even better that someone could actually start a search within an application. And there is so little branding with this application you don’t know what it’s for after installing it.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 1
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 5

Where’s The Search Box?

Hulu’s a pretty good site — lots of video from companies that want some kind of control over the content, which is much more than YouTube is giving them. The site’s is version 1.0, so the interface feels a bit clunky. Most importantly, where’s the search box?

I made the screen capture small without a highlight for the primary reason that if you are on a content-heavy site, that search box better be easy to find. Like Google easy to find. Like YouTube easy to find. Like News.com easy to find.

Can you find it?