Category Archives: IT-Usability

New study finds all-round skills are key for internal communicators

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“Internal communicators need good all-round skills and tend not to specialise too heavily”, according to new research. These findings from Competent Communicators’ Sue Dewhurst and Liam FitzPatrick “challenge common views that the best professionals are focused on providing strategic advice rather than getting involved in delivery work”, which makes sense to me :

Dewhurst and FitzPatrick began researching competencies among internal communicators to support their training courses. In a global survey, which they claim is the largest of its kind, they explored what jobs communicators are doing and the attributes they need to be effective.

“In recent years there’s been a general feeling that all internal communicators need to be high-level consultants,” says Dewhurst. “But when we talk to people, we hear that they’re really doing a much more balanced range of things.”

“Adds FitzPatrick: “What this seems to be saying is that organisations need their internal communicators to be strong all-rounders – writers, planners, advisors and organisers. And what it’s not saying is that IC people can only make a difference if they’re working as internal consultants.”

Introducing 12 model competencies
Their findings are published in a new report by Melcrum, How to develop outstanding internal communicators, which also includes a set of 12 model competencies that can be used to help recruit, develop and promote internal communicators.

The 12 model competencies are:

1. Building effective relationships
2. Business focus
3. Consulting and coaching
4. Cross-functional awareness
5. Craft (writing and design)
6. Developing other communicators
7. Innovation and creativity
8. Listening
9. Making it happen
10. Planning
11. Specialist
12. Vision and standards

These competencies cover the core skills, knowledge and experience that communicators say they need to do their jobs well. As a follow-up to the survey, the researchers interviewed dozens of practitioners and held focus groups to refine these competencies and identify the behaviours that might be displayed at a basic, intermediate or advanced level.

Importantly, the competencies highlight the need for communicators to have both advisory and delivery skills. Says Dewhurst: “We were continually told that IC professionals are most valued when they make things happen and don’t just talk about it.”


Expertise in core areas
The study also showed that there was agreement among practitioners at every level on the core skills that all IC practitioners should display. “Although no one could be expected to be a master of new media and all the tools at our disposal, there’s a clear consensus that IC people need to be able to at least write well and be skilled in the core areas that matter in their workplace,” explains FitzPatrick. “Our research confirms that colleagues expect the IC team to be able to provide expertise in some fundamental areas.”

Wisdom of the crowd?

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With many sites there are rankings these days for products and services. For example Lovefilm.com. Now pardon me but could I request that the ranking is not based on the average, but the median. Kinda avoids one fool bringing down the rating!

PS: In a wider context it’s all about ‘creating passionate users‘ where “being safe is risky, and being risky is safe.”

Altavista vs Google

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Sorry to be (once again) working against the popular trend but has anyone else noticed that Altavista is a rival search engine to Google!? It’s only based on two experiements, & don’t get me wrong, I’m not an expert, just a ‘user’. First experiement, typed in my full name and compared the results. Second experiment, typed in ‘Caroline Celico’ and looked in images for results.

On the first test Altavista found pages on me (including the odd ones) which Google did not. On the second Altavista found the getty images of the wedding to Kaka, which Google did not.

Then again (nice phrase that) when I entered my full name in both and searched under images, ‘AV’ came up with a big fat ’0′ while Google found results from my blog. (And most visitors to my blog come via Google).

It’s all kind of amusing when I think that Altavista was the top dog back in 1997, until I was seduced a couple of years later by peer-pressure to go-with-Google. Sorry, it’s my fault for rely on just one search, so  I’m using Altavista again – at least as a cross-check vs the almighty Google. .

Hardest-to-find problems – intuition & the web

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Having just read Nielsen I was truck by his words: “some of the hardest-to-find usability problems are found by evaluators who do not otherwise find many usability problems”. Reason being is that I seem to have a knack of spotting usability/system problems, (while sometimes missing the easier ones!) To be good at this I feel you need to have worked at the bottom of organisations as well as at the top in order to see problems the top-down mentality misses.

It also reminds me of the concept of  ‘wicked problems‘ which I came across recently on Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: “A wicked problem is an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints. A linear approach to solving a wicked problem simply will not work.” What complicates the issue is that simple linear problems are not so easily divisible from ‘wicked problems’ and vice versa (and here an understanding of complexity can be helpful). Secondy, that on Johnnie Moore’s posting there is a comment basically saying ‘hey, that’s what agile software development is for’. My contention is that by their nature, such ‘techniques’ are at root just that – techniques. And the problem with techniques is that they all share the same ‘fat fingered’ weakness – the division between the system and the user. And it itself is ultimately inherently limiting. Going beyond technique is the ultimate goal to discover ‘hardest-to-find problems’. And that in turn involves a challenge to the individual usability guru which forces him or her to move beyond that traditional technique way of thinking/acting, based on emotional intelligence (or what I called – seeing as I had the idea to present at Berkeley – the ‘non-linear science of empowerment’) not simply traditional IQ-based capability. Full 1999 Chaos Society Berkeley paper here. They’ve got a nice swimming pool at Berkley, btw.

Anyhow, technique is not without its profound uses. At a deeper level it’s also useful for a tester to understand the concept of a system’s dynamical key:

“An attempt to control a complex system, perhaps through natural selection or an organizational or political policy by operating on only one feature of the system, will not eradicate or otherwise nullify the system. The system will mutate and evolve to compensate for the environmental assault. The secret of real system change is to locate the dynamical key that supports or unravels the entire system. The next policy would be to guide the reorganization of the entire system around a new dynamical key (Hubler, 1992).”

So a very brief light-hearted example. Six years ago while working for an award-winning ski holiday company I was presented with a problem. Twin sisters I thought I had booked into a twin room were now told that they would have to share a double bed, as no twin was left. The sisters were not happy at this prospect. So I asked the operator I had booked the holiday with to stand by the confirmation of the twin bed booking. They refused, they said as I had made the booking on the phone rather by the preferred electronic online system (which was down at the time) that they would not honour it.

I asked the company directors for guidance and they were also baffled, suggesting that I might throw human rights at the holiday company to get them to budge. After sleeping on the issue I came back the next morning – and drafted a fax to the company. I asked simply if they therefore regarded the telephone booking and the online booking as two separate distinct systems. A few hours later, they had a ‘surprise’ change of mind, and the twin sisters got their twin hotel room.

PS: I guess it just comes down to recognising the value of intuition in hard usability problems. Which could explain why “some of the hardest-to-find usability problems are found by evaluators who do not otherwise find many usability problems”. Funny, I was at a BBQ in Berkeley, CA back in 1999 and got chatting to a woman who said she’d just written a book on intuition. But that’s a whole other story about how to develop intuition in the first place, referenced in recent UCL research.

Epicentred design

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Like the concept of ‘epicentre design’ for the web – knowing first what is the key element of the page first and foremost and designing with that in mind; not so far removed from my earlier blog on what is the ‘dynamical key’ in terms of macro systems.

More fat fingered fun (olympic standard)

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Loved the story that London won the 2012 olympics ’cause of a button pushing error – another example of fat finger syndrome after I posted about one just ten days ago:

“A leading Olympic official has suggested that London may have won the right to stage the 2012 Games only because one of the 104 members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pressed the wrong button in the third-round vote.

Alex Gilady, the Israeli who is one of the most influential members of the IOC, claimed that the mistake helped Paris, rather than Madrid, to reach the final round against London. Madrid had been widely regarded as the biggest threat to London in a straight fight.

It is believed that the blunder was committed by Lambis Nikolaou, of Greece, who protested publicly at the microphone after the secret ballot in Singapore on July 6 that he had not had time to register his vote. In fact, an examination of the poll showed that all the eligible IOC members had voted in that round.” (The Times, 22 Dec 05).

Fauxonomies

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Great day, started at Headshift, and getting to grips with Confluence and Jira. But let me digress, I also got to thinking about taxonomies, for which Wikipedia nicely makes the link to folk taxonmies as well as scientific varities – and the notion there are ‘fauxonomies’:

“Some have argued that the human mind naturally organizes its knowledge of the world into such systems. This view is often based on the epistemology of Immanuel Kant. Anthropologists have observed that taxonomies are generally embedded in local cultural and social systems, and serve various social functions. Perhaps the most well-known and influential study of folk taxonomies is

Fat finger syndrome

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Loved this story from Tokyo in Japan where human error plus system error cost over £100m.  When will ‘they’ design systems with fat fingers factored in from the outset? The fact is that the two errors are fundamentally rooted in one and the same problem. The implicit concept of a system as separate from the operator/user of that system..<I should add that this error is scalable – that is it occurs at both the very small and the very large>

“Mizuho Securities revealed last week that it had placed an order on Thursday to sell 610,000 J-Com shares for one yen despite intending to sell one J-Com share for 610,000 yen as a result of a trader typing error known as “fat finger syndrome”. The mistake will cost Mizuho Securities an estimated 27 billion yen (£128 million).

“Yesterday Mr Tsurushima admitted that the Tokyo trading system failed to respond to attempts by Mizuho to cancel the order when the broker swiftly realised its mistake.”

Simple AND complex

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Looking at the project focus and listening to the talk at yesterday’s complex science meeting, the focus of the EPSRC project is on the large scale: “Such systems and the organisations in which they are situated are becoming ever larger and more complex and need to interoperate. Large complex systems have also exhibited emergent and unexpected behaviour.”

My response to this ‘large’ emphasis was to be reminded of the value of seeing the role of the simple and the small scale in complex systems and the like. (folk sayings such as ‘for want of a nail’, recognise this fact). But it’s my experience this is easily missed in the culture technology design, though of course usability attempts to overcome this.

Or to put it another way the importance of the simple in design needs to be taken a little more seriously. Let’s here I would like to quote the words of Murray Gell-Mann who specially coined the phrase ‘plectics’ to recognise this importance: “It is important, in my opinion, for the name to connect with both simplicity and complexity. What is most exciting about our work is that it illuminates the chain of connections between, on the one hand, the simple underlying laws that govern the behavior of all matter in the universe and, on the other hand, the complex fabric that we see around us, exhibiting diversity, individuality, and evolution. The interplay between simplicity and complexity is the heart of our subject..”

Wow, big stuff. OK, so what’s the practical value of this? Well consider the direction of the Government’s IT strategy published in early November as scrutinised in the Guardian:

“The drafts contain the phrase: ‘Many of the government’s suppliers have a patchy track record on delivery.’ In the published document, this is watered down to: ‘The public perception remains that many of government’s suppliers have a ‘patchy’ track record.’ Another draft clause, which seems to have been cut, reads: ‘Small, innovative suppliers continue to press for easier participation in government business.’

“Together, these two phrases hint at a different way of doing things. That, rather than handing over IT projects in their entirety in billion-pound deals, the government parcels out work in small chunks, none mission-critical, on a scale that small firms can bid for. Although there will still be cowboys – more, probably – they are less likely to wreck a project. Significantly, this is standard practice in Canada, acknowledged as the world’s leading e-government.”

The moral of this story is that understanding the value of the small and simple also connects with the value of involving small innovative players in delivering public sector IT projects. It’s based on both good science, and good business. For example why not divert some of the UK’s health service IT spend in this direction? As the third largest organisation in the world after the Indian State Railways and the Chinese Red Army the NHS could do with a bit more counter-intuitive thinking?

And the winners are..

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In the best design for communication between users:

1. Google mail
2. MSN Messenger
3. Flickr.

And yes, Flickr won.

Oh, we have some photos to share..