Articles

2003 and Beyond: This is the best time to revisit EPSS.

If the word performance in performance support means business (or organizational) performance through human performance, then success of EPSS is influenced as much by the business climate as it is by the human factors and the means to deliver knowledge. The best solutions, tools, and techniques today are those that provide organizations with the means to quickly and efficiently meet business goals and the needs of the real people who have to get the work done and do so in the climate of the “new normal.” This article introduces Gary Dickelman's "EPSS Revisited," an ISPI publication for which he served as editor. (ISPI's Performance XPress, Nov. 2003)

Strong Medicine - by Clark Aldrich

Clark Aldrich, an independent elearning analyst, has developed a visual map that plots eLearning Content, Infrastructure, Process, Results, Source and Other Content into an interest visual which summarizes the eLearning space. Clark's contact is clark.aldrich@att.net

1998 Learning Technology Research Report - by ASTD Research

Gloria Gery, a pioneer in conceptualizing electronic performance support methodologies and, more recently, learning objects, speaks of radical shifts needed in how trainers view their roles to accommodate the shift to knowledge conservation of the sort embodied by learning objects. She says, "Training professionals are creators of knowledge through their methods of knowledge acquisition and representation. To date, the use of the content has been through training courses. That must change."

Does eLearning Equal eTraining?

- by Marc Rosenberg, Consultant. www.marckrosenberg.com, January 1, 2002. Volume 1 Number 1. People often equate eLearning with instruction. In this thoughtful article, Marc Rosenberg, author and consultant, discusses the range of learning alternatives that technology provides that may not look at all like what we think of as Training.

e-Learning Trends Today and Beyond

- by Mark Brodsky, President, Ulysses Learning, Learning & Training Innovations (formerly eLearning Magazine). May 2003. New developments are occurring in e-learning training at a breakneck pace. What trends are hottest, and which will impact your business most? Find out what three leading experts have to say as they turn on their high beams and look into the future 18 to 24 months out.

When Doing Equals learning

- by Mayor, Tracy, CIO January 15, 1995. At their most ambitious, performance support systems seek to wipe out the distinction between learning and doing by embedding the user's work requirements into their underlying structure and design interface. "Training and documentation are compensatory for badly designed applications," declares Gloria Gery, the Tolland, Mass., software-design consultant credited with developing and naming EPSS. "If you design around the work process and embed knowledge into the application, far less training is necessary."

The Brave New World of Learning

by Sam Atkins, T&D (Training and Development) from ASTD. June 2003. Adkins challenges training professionals to evaluate traditional courseware as a performance improvement intervention by explaining the new wave of Enterprise Application Integration that is on the way. His statements such as "just in time is too late" make us realize that fusing knowledge into user interfaces that support workflow is inevitable. Unfortunately, most people think of Enterprise Application Integration as a technical and logistical improvement. Adkins reminds us that it is really performance that it's all about. I wasn't sure whether to categorize this as a learning or performance support article... so it's under both! Definitely worth a read. bring it to your IT folks to further your involvement in workspace design.

Spot Learning, An Interview with Jonathan Levy

By Lisa Neal, Editor-In-Chief, eLearn Magazine (04/09/2004). Jonathon Levy is a visionary in executive education, advocating an innovative approach that combines knowledge management with e-learning. He is the Senior Learning Strategist at the Monitor Company Group. Previously he was Vice President for Online Learning Solutions at Harvard Business School’s publishing corporation, where he created a profitable business providing executive performance support modules to over two million managers worldwide. Before that, Jonathon was founding Executive Director of Cornell University’s Office of Distance Learning, the first such program in the Ivy League.

What Lies Ahead: Roundtable with Gloria Gery, Warren Bennis, Noel Tichy and others

- by Patricia Galagan, Editor. Training and Develpment. January 1, 2003. Volume 57 Number 1. ASTD and Training and Development editors conducted a roundtable discussion with industry leaders to get their views on what lies ahead. The knowledge economy, the training supplier market boom and the corporate leadership crisis, along with the rise of eLearning, have changed things. What do leading thinkers in our field make of the situation as the economy fizzles, corporate leaders do the perp walk and technology encroaches on learning and work? Lots of interesting perspectives here.

One on One: Gloria Gery Performance Support - Ten Years Later

- by Warshawsky, Jon. Cappuccino, an internal news magazine for Deloitte Consulting (now Braxton Consulting).. March 2002. In a Deloitte Consulting (now Braxton Consulting) newsletter, Gloria Gery was interviewed to get perspectives on performance support ten years after her book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, was published.

Content Management Q&A with Matthew Berk

- by Intranet Journal Staff.Intranet Journal. June 2003. Matthew Berk of Jupiter Research follows Content Management Systems. He provides interesting context on this increasingly important topic.

The Seven Myths of Knowledge Management

- by Marc Rosenberg, Diamond Cluster International. Context Magazine. January 1, 2002. Volume 1 Number 1. Marc delineates the myths of KM and the risks associated with buying into even one of them.

The XML FAQ's

- by Peter Flynn. January 2004. XML is the next major standard in content mark up. This FAW maintained on behalf of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Special Interest Group is an excellent resource.

On the Trail of Knowledge Management

- by Philip Gil. Knowledge Management. January 1, 2002. Many business executives now understand that they need to manage their organization’s knowledge assets and facilitate knowledge sharing among their employees. But the buzz around the term "knowledge management" sometimes generates more heat than light, and people feeling pressure to react to it should take time to discover what it all means. Gill describes the various types of knowledge and discussions the responsibilities for structuring it.

Knowledge Management Resource Guide

The field of knowledge management has reached a stage of growth and maturity where we are able to discern the main concepts and practices that give this field its special character. This Knowledge Management Resource Guide is an attempt to bring together in one place material on the Web that elucidates these concepts and practices. In creating the guide, we have been highly selective, seeking to provide a 'best of the web' for students, researchers, as well as practitioners. There are two ways of navigating the content in this guide: a CONCEPTUAL view that focuses on theories and concepts; and an APPLICATION view that highlights practices and case studies of organizations. Both views are based on a Knowledge Management Framework that the faculty has developed and applied in its projects. The framework identifies three types of organizational knowledge (tacit, explicit, and cultural knowledge), and four levels of organizational enablers (vision and strategy, roles and structure, practice and process, tools and platforms). Together, these elements provide a systematic way of looking at KM, which we define as: "A framework for designing an organization’s goals, structures, and processes so that the organization can use what it knows to learn and to create value for its customers and community." - Professor Chun Wei Choo

A Comparison of Large Scale Systems and Consumer Software Development

This chart illustrates the differences in assumptions and goals of consumer-oriented software that is easy to use without training with traditional large-scale systems that require huge amounts of training and support. These assumptions and goals drive design and the significant difference in outcomes.

Attributes and Behavior of Performance Centered Systems Chart

- by Gery, Gloria. 2000. The chart summarizes the characteristics of performance centered systems and provides descriptive criteria against which to either specify or evaluate requirements. The attributes themselves are listed in the first column. The 1, 3 and 5 point scale indicates the degree to which these attributes are required or implemented. Level 1 indicates a low level of implementation or representation of the attribute; Level 3 an intermediate degree; and Level 5 a high level of implementation.

Why Don't We Weigh Them?

- by Gery, Gloria. CBT Solutions. 2002. This article, by Gloria Gery contains a list of employee performance measurements that can be used to assess the usefulness of various types of performance support interventions, including electronic performance support systems (EPSS).

Granting Three Wishes through Performance-Centered Design

- by Gery, Gloria. There are some very specific things that must be incorporated into software to generate immediate performance by all. It's critical to be able to describe and demonstrate these attributes and behaviors in order to build the requirements into functional specifications and to provide explicit models for design.

Review of Amazon.com

- by Gery, Gloria. 2002. A series of screen shots and comments about the performance support features in Amazon.com. Completed in 1999.

Technology Trends for 2004

- by Sam Adkins and Jay Cross. Workflow Institute Newsletter. December 23, 2003. The top ten technology and software design trends are summarized in this debut issue of the Workflow Institute newsletter. Many of these trends such as enterprise application integration and "The battle for the single business process interface..." relate to performance support. This article is worthy of consideration and will be useful in selling various epss ideas and concepts. It also suggests that readiness and technological capability are increasing by the day.

Strong Medicine

- by Clark Aldrich. Training. April 2003. Clark Aldrich, an independent elearning analyst, has developed a visual map that plots eLearning Content, Infrastructure, Process, Results, Source and Other Content into an interest visual which summarizes the eLearning space. Clark's contact is clark.aldrich@att.net

1998 Learning Technology Research Report

- by ASTD Research. ASTD. 1998. Gloria Gery, a pioneer in conceptualizing electronic performance support methodologies and, more recently, learning objects, speaks of radical shifts needed in how trainers view their roles to accommodate the shift to knowledge conservation of the sort embodied by learning objects. She says, "Training professionals are creators of knowledge through their methods of knowledge acquisition and representation. To date, the use of the content has been through training courses. That must change."

Six for the Century: Gloria Gery

- by . Inside Technical Training. 2002. This articles profiles people if the field of Training and Performance Development who have made a real difference.

Business Process Integration: The Next Wave

- by Anders Gruden and Peter Stranegard. Enterprise Application Integration. January 2003. The next wave in Enterprise Application Integration will be based on information needs defined by business processes. This represents a shift from a technology-led approach driven by a need for a faster, more flexible, less costly integration. Business Process Integration provides intelligent tools for designing business processes while simultaneously connecting them to underlying applications. This article does not deal with integrating resources other than data... but it can help frame the technical issues.

Ariel's Knowledge for Results Symposium Report

- by Ariel Performance Centered Systems. Ariel White Paper. March 2003. On December 13th 2002, Ariel Performance Centered Systems, Inc. (Ariel) conducted an executive summit titled, “Knowledge for Results”. The event targeted the issues and challenges associated with integrating knowledge and support into people’s work context, specifically via the information technology systems employees and customers utilize (also known as performance centered design). This interactive forum produced insights which are summarized in this report. Go to www.arielpcs.com for more information about Ariel and its work.

What an Information Architect Should Know About Prototypes for User Testing

- by Chris Farnum. Boxes and Arrows. July 29, 2002. Volume 1 Number 1. There are several important factors to consider when you are planning to do prototyping for user testing. You will want to make careful choices about fidelity, level of interactivity and the medium of your prototype.

What Can We Learn from 5 years of EPSS/PCD Competition Award Winners

- by Craig Marrion. Technical Communications. November 1, 2002. Volume 49 Number 4. This article received the 2002 "BEst Article" award by Society for Technical Communications. The honor is well deserved. Craig Marion, consultant and "keeper" of the interesting Software Design Smorgasbord website(http://www.chesco.com/~cmarion/) looks at winners of the awards competition for EPSS and Performance Centered Design and evaluates them against the 19 Attributes Gloria Gery identified in her 1995 article on Attributes and Behaviors of Performance Centered Systems. This article is available with permission of the Society for Technical Communications. http://www/stc.org

HR and IT in Wedded Bliss

- by Davenport, Tom. CIO. May 1, 1999. Ah, here's the preacher: It's Gloria Gery, a pleasant-looking cleric with a strong following among the "integrated performance support" faithful. She's been giving sermons on the topic for more than a decade; the bible of the movement is her book Electronic Performance Support System. As explained to me by Phil Tierney, a Gery devotee at Intel who designs performance support systems at Intel Corp. and who also forswears the "T" word, the concept requires technology to support learning on the job at the time when the learner needs it. The learning should not remove the learner from the business transaction but should be integrated with it through the system interface. The knowledge presented to the learner must be appropriate to the task and the worker.

Performance Support in Internet Time

- by Dickelman, Gary J.. PCD Innovations. December 27, 2002. December 27, 1999 marked a reunion of sorts for a group of professional colleagues who have paved the way for, defined, and are actively engaged in the performance support practice. Gloria Gery, Stan Malcolm, Janet Cichelli, Hal Christensen, Barry Raybould, and Marc Rosenberg spoke with me via teleconference about the state of performance support (PS). My goal was to uncover the latest trends - associated with the latest organizational performance pain - borne of the e-revolution, the monster enterprise systems (SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, etc), and the emerging awareness that usability means business (pun intended). A number of questions were posed on the topics of learning vs. performance support, knowledge management, performance support models, the role of the internet in performance support, enterprise application integration, and intrinsic performance support. This lively, insightful discussion will surely add to your personal knowledge base and enhance your performance support activities.

Out of Mind, Out of Sight

- by Gery, Gloria. CBT Solutions. 1998. Your point of view provides the primary filter for whether you see things or not. Point of view is a significant thing in deciding how to design software interfaces and dialogs.

Attributes and Behaviors of Performance-Centered Systems

- by Gery, Gloria. Performance Improvement Quarterly. 1995. Volume 8 Number 1. This article was Gery's original work in defining the attributes of systems that provide intrinsic or inherent support for doing and learning. She defines the characteristics and provides examples.

Spinners vs. Weavers? Which skills will be more important in the forthcoming 'Age of Integration'?

- by Gloria Gery. ISPI's Performance Express. March 2003. When bringing things together from a performer or task perspective, synthesis or weaving skills will becoming increasingly important. Gloria Gery describes why in this article. Posted with permission of the International Society for Performance Improvement. Copyright 2003. www.performancexpress.org

Factors in Determining Electronic Support Options: Task Support, Reference, Instruction or Collaboration

- by Gloria Gery, Gery Associates. Technical Communication. November 2, 2002. Volume 49 Number 4. Gloria Gery focuses on understanding how powerful learning in context can be. She discusses the theories of Situated Learning and then summarizes considerations in determining how best to support performers while working in context. Criteria for making decisions are summarized in a useful table. This article appeared in the award winning special issue of Technical Communications edited by Professor Saul Carliner. This article is available with permission of the Society for Technical Communications. http://www.stc.org

Achieving Performance and Learning through Performance Centered Systems

- by Gloria Gery, Gery Associates. Sage Publications. November 2002. Volume 4 Number 4. Although technology is being used to support learning through electronic versions of traditional instructional programs, its most direct effect on work performance is through interactive tools that structure work processes and provide links to supporting resources. This article focuses on the role of HR professionals concerned with developing employee performance. Citation: Advances in Developing Human Resources, Vol. 4, No. 4, November 2002 464-478 DO: 10.1177/15434220237523. Copyright 2002.

Back to Fundamentals: The Business Realities of Funding for Performance Support Projects

- by Margaret Driscoll (IBM) and Colin Hynes (Staples, Inc.). Technical Communications. November 1, 2002. Volume 49 Number 4. Driscoll & Hynes provide general guidance on building a realistic and persuasive business case for performance support. The article includes a detailed case study to demonstrate how to prepare the different components of a business case. Additional issues to consider are explored.

Ten Best Intranet Sites of 2002

- by Neilsen, Jacob. Nielsen Norman Group. 2002. A $64 downloadable report with 104 screen shots and a report on why these designs are so good!

Enabling Composite Applications by Reusing Legacy Data and Logic

- by Scott Rosenblum. Business Integration Journal. October 23, 2003. Much of what we are trying to do with performance centered design is to hide the complexity of numerous underlying applications -- and to surface data that is specific to a workflow or context. This article discusses some of the issues from a workflow and technology perspective.

Critic to Creator: Recognizing Good Design

- by Steve Calde. Alan Cooper's newsletter. May 2003. What's a well-designed product? As strange as it sounds, Interaction Designers often come up blank when posed with this question. Why is it so much easier to focus on the bad than the good in design, and how can we avoid this?

The Logic Underlying the Intelligent Technologies Used in Performance Support. Who is in Control?

- by Whitney Quesenbery. Technical Communication. November 1, 2002. Volume 49 Number 4. There are lots of issues and considerations in determining whether and how much to structure performance using intelligent technologies. In this thoughtful article, Whitney Quesenbery of Cognetics, Inc. delineates and discusses many of them. She surfaces the issues about performer control so that designers can consciously consider the alternatives and trade offs. This article is available with permission of the Society for Technical Comunications. www.stc.org

Overcoming Barriers to Performance Centered Design

- by Wisener, Greg. BSU IPT 563: Job Performance Aids and EPSS. 2002. Sometimes good ideas are difficult to implement. In this article, Greg Wisener offers a summary of the Barriers to Performance Centered Design. He interviews Gloria Gery, Stan Malcolm, Janet Cichelli, Gary Dickelman and others and provides his own perspectives in this paper for his university cource on Performance Support at Boise State University. Greg can be reached at seaward@sbcglobal.net

Designing Wearable Performance Support: Insights from the Early Literature

- by Danielle Gobert, Usability Specialist, Fidelity Investments. Technical Communications. November 1, 2002. Volume 49 Number 4. The feasibility of wearing performance support systems is increasing... but there are still issues. In this article, Danielle Gobert surfaces the issues, discusses design considerations and outlines issues around collaboration in these environments. This article is available with permission of the Society for Technical Communications www.stc.org.

Performance Support Matures - Special Issue of ISPI's Performance Improvement Journal

- by Gary Dickelman, Editor. Performance Improvement Journal. November 1, 2002. Volume 41 Number 10. This Special Issue of Performance Improvement includes interesting and quite different articles on aspects of Performance Support.

The Enterprise Nervous System

- by Johnny Henkel. Enterprise Application Integration. June 2003. Performance Support can mean many things... and integrating resources so that people don't have to map processes to software applications and components is one of the most important one. Johnny Henkel begins a discussion of a concept called Enterprise Nervous Systems. It's worth a read.

The Janitor Stole My Job

- by Longman, Phillip J.. U.S. News and World Reports. December 1, 2002. Pioneered in the early 1990s by Gloria Gery, an educational-software guru based in Tolland, Mass., EPSS programs are distinguished by their ability both to automate many job-related mental skills and to provide instant instructions to help users make whatever human judgments are still necessary.

Workspace Portals: Desktops of the Future

- by Peter Cheese and S. William Ives. Accenture Outlook 2002. January 1, 2002. Volume 2002 Number 2. Once used primarily as commuinication and knowledge management tools, portals can now transform workforce performance and link that performance to business value. In this article, Cheese and Ives advocate looking at the work process and context and organizing portals to aid in work performance rather than simply serve as resource repositories.

Radical Learning Technology Happening Now

- by Sam Adkins. Training and Develpment. November 2003. Volume 57 Number 11. In this follow-up to his June article, “The Brave New World of Learning,” Adkins takes us farther into the future, explaining how enterprise application integration products are changing the landscape of learning technology, content, and services. Vendors are marketing a variety of EAI products that can be categorized by functionality: resource management, collaboration management, process management, and product management. Each vendor brings a unique core expertise into the equation, and innovation is widespread. It’s important to note that few of these suppliers label their innovations as learning technology; they tend to market them as a core business process that must be modeled, managed, and measured as a key performance indicator. On the surface, this expression appears to be just a market positioning tactic. But Adkins explains that it’s just the beginning of a strategic move to integrate learning with the other enterprise business processes. Lots of interesting tools are cited for your research and follow through. Gloria

The Top Ten Portal Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

- by Craig Roth, Meta Group. ZD Net. May 24, 2002. Indeed, each of the 10 most common portal pitfalls can be linked directly back to a failure to properly execute one of these six steps. Currently, the two most common pitfalls that have emerged are technically adept portals that are never accepted by the enterprise and failure of a portal due to a lack of supporting infrastructure (generally directory or security services).

Why Enterprise Portals are the Next Big Thing

- by Dana Voth. eLearning. October 1, 2002. Volume 3 Number 10. Sure, your company has Web portals-maybe a hundred of them. But there are real advantages to having only one. The trick is to build it extremely well. Voth discusses new criteria for Enterprise Portals, a major form of Knowledge Management.

Service With a Smile: Developing a knowledge-aware service and support portal is a team effort

- by Gery, Gloria. Knowledge Management. July 2001. Too many organizations spend lots of time and money developing knowledge and support resources without getting the business and performance outcomes they need. There’s no mystery as to why: it results at least in part from the way organizations historically have approached knowledge organization and delivery. Support tools typically are developed by functional groups that operate in organizational silos--documentation, training, business management, information systems or support services and help desks. While each of the resulting knowledge resources may be well structured, none alone is sufficient to allow the company to realize the bottom-line value of knowledge synergies. That’s because each tool has a different goal and is designed, independent of any larger considerations, to achieve it.

Portals and Performance Support: A White Paper

- by Gloria Gery, Gery Associates. January 1, 2003. Volume 0 Number 0. What are portals and how must we think about them when we are thinking about performance support. In this extensive and researched white paper Gloria Gery defines, describes and advocates a design perspective. The white paper is available as a .pdf file and can be downloaded.

INCITS Launches New Initiative for E-learning Technical Standards

eLearning. October 28, 2002. Volume 3 Number 10. The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) has formed Technical Committee V36 to support national and international standards efforts for learning, education and training. Projects will fall into four specific areas: vocabulary, collaborative technology, learner information, and management and delivery. INCITS, based in Washington, D.C., is an organization of information technology developers, producers, and users devoted to the creation and maintenance of formal IT standards. It is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and operates under rules designed to ensure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of directly and materially affected interests. For more information visit www.incits.org

Adaptive Systems: A Primer

- by John Larson. Infomedia Designs Whitepaper. November 1, 2002. Volume 1 Number 1. Systems that can change or adapt to dynamic conditions are increasingly important in situations where knowledge is short-lived or process is a function of the data at hand. John Larson elegantly summarizes Adaptive Systems, an important part of performance support.

Sustainable Learning and Support

Global Learning Alliance has produced a paper discussing the need for and merits of electronic performance support systems: 'Sustainable learning and support in 21C enterprises'. The paper, which is available to learning professionals and the media, considers the use of electronic performance support systems to sustain learning for tasks, procedures and processes, and provides a functional and financial study for managers of learning.

Making Time to Learn

Lack of time is the major impediment to learning. Those of us who are active in the field of professional development - whether a buyer or creator of training programs, a classroom facilitator, or a learner - are all aware that the critical impediment to learning is time - or lack thereof...

Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog like Kottke’s or a list of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information, you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of understanding those. After you’ve done that, you can apply what you’ve learned to the whole, or even just a larger subset.

Perfecting Your Personas

A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behavior patterns you understand very well—you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.

Prioritize Usability Testing and Web Analytics

If you've performed usability tests and tried to reconcile those results with your current site metrics, you've probably been left scratching your head. Usability respondents find something wrong on a particular page, yet the same "problem" isn't evident in the site analytics.This leaves you with a rather big question: How do you justify Web analytics and usability, and what role does each play in the conversion equation?

Ads Are Here To Stay: Planning For Ad Placement

“What must be developed… is not a way to make ads go away, but rather a better way to incorporate ads and ad content into our sites.” Ads: IAs dislike ‘em; I dislike ‘em. And, as an information purist, I believe everyone dislikes ads. They interfere with navigation. They flash annoyingly. They disrupt the flow of content, awkwardly placed, as so many of them are, right in the middle of the content we want to read. Even worse is when they have been somehow blended into the content, as if we wouldn’t notice. Ads, in short, dilute content and diminish the effect of a page.

Identifying the Business Value of What We Do

Imagine we're starting work on the user registration functionality of a web site. After conducting a thorough set of user tests, we discover that half of all users who attempt to register can't successfully complete the process. Those who do register find the process very frustrating. Fixing the registration process to eliminate any frustration would be important, right? Not necessarily.

Improving Usability: Principles and Steps for Better Software

When many people think of usability, they think of "interface guidelines." Guidelines are a key element to any solid approach to software usability. However, I find that they are dwarfed in importance compared to open and intelligent engagement in design. There is simply no list of rules that can, by itself, make software usable. In the end, it comes down to smart people paying attention to the right things. On the other hand, it is not always clear what these important things are. Even roughly following a good design process can avoid common mishaps. In the first section, I discuss several principles of good design. In the second, I suggest a practical design process.

Evaluating the Development of Online Course Materials

If online courses are to become a permanent feature of higher education—not merely a fad of the dot-com era—college faculty must believe that developing online materials has academic value. In addition, such online education requires certain resources to be in place.

Paying Attention to Attention

One of the more significant challenges we face in online learning is climbing the wall that blocks our view of learners responding to a course. In a classroom we can see who is making eye contact, nodding in agreement, or sighing with frustration. Above all, in a classroom, you can (usually) tell if somebody is tuning out. Without these cues, we are really just speaking into the void, hoping somebody hears us.

What Makes Users Unhappy: Share-Point Team Services Web Server Security

Computer & Internet Security is very important but sometimes it is so confusing and frustrating that it makes users very unhappy— to a point where the system is so secure that it cannot be used by its most legitimate users, like system administrators

Time Budgets for Usability Sessions

Up to 40% of precious testing time is wasted while users engage in nonessential activities. Far better to focus on watching users perform tasks with the target interface design.

Disruptive Technologies: Semantic Web

... For manufacturers, taking advantage of these technologies would bring significant -- even disruptive -- competitive advantages including better integrated and less costly supply chains as well as more seamless engineering, production and distribution processes. Key to all of this is the Semantic Web, whose technological underpinnings have been in development since the mid 1990s when commercial Internet applications were still a gleam in the eyes of many business people...

Characteristic, uniqueness, and overlap of information sources linked from North American public library Web sites

This article reports on the availability, domain distribution, percentage of Web sites versus Web pages, perceived value, and category of 31,400 Web–based resources selected by 50 public libraries in the United States and Canada. Eighty–seven percent of these resources were available, 60 percent were Web pages, and resources selected by 20 percent of the sampled libraries were finding tools such as general or subject specific search engines. Ninety–three percent of the resources were selected by just one of the 50 libraries; only 17 percent of the resources appeared to be primarily of local interest. The public may be unaware of these unique resources. The public library community must develop programs to increase the awareness and sharing of these evaluated resources.

Open source software development: Some historical perspectives

In this paper we suggest that historical studies of technology can help us to account for some, perplexing (at least for traditional economic reasoning) features of open source software development. From a historical perspective, open source software seems to be a particular case of what Robert C. Allen has termed "collective invention." We explore the interpretive value of this historical parallel in detail, comparing open source software with two remarkable episodes of nineteenth century technical advances.

Measuring the Benefits of Ajax

There's a lot of hype surrounding the latest Web development craze, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and a considerable amount of skepticism about its usefulness in the business realm.... Ajax is a method of employing JavaScript, DHTML, and the XMLHttp behavior in the browser to provide truly dynamic content on a Web page without a page refresh...does away with the traditional "Click-and-Wait" Web-application architecture of yesterday, making it possible to provide the responsiveness and interactivity users expect from desktop applications.

Extreme User Research

Clients don’t know a thing about their users, and designers think that if they like it, everyone will. Sound familiar? Daniel Lafreniere's 30-minute "extreme user research" plan comes to the rescue for those of us facing this exact situation. With this practical method, you can generate loads of useful data that will have a real impact on design, thus making the website more effective and profitable.

Four Bad Designs

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

3 Important Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps

Matching the user's natural flow is just one challenge a web-based application developer needs to address during the design and development process. To help our clients, we've compiled a list of three challenges they'll want to keep their eye on.