Wanderjahr

The old German tradition of the “year of wandering” is just what I need right now. A sabbatical. I’ve finally quit my job at BT INS, after the eighth year in that company, to explore other things. And to recover from the constant state of quasi-burnout I’ve been in the last few years.

We’ll kick it off with a Mexico vacation, go visit my mother and father in France and Reunion Island, and I’ll finally have time to put together “The Ten Buddhist Tales”, the play that the Department of Redundancy Department has been working on for four years.

It feels good to be free.

Rallying the troops…

Had a good day. I delivered a presentation to a new client in Colorado Springs, and I’m pretty sure I blew their minds.

UX Presentation thumbnailIt’s all pretty hush-hush, but this is basically an old media company trying to break into a lucrative new growth market through the web… and I was brought in to assess their efforts.

I walked in with my 30-minute presentation, and was told the President could give me 10 minutes. So I crammed through, with more passion and less detail, and he stayed in the room for 20 minutes. Then he left, and I re-started the presentation for the executive who was the intended audience, and who had come in late. Ten minutes later, the president re-enters, along with his Senior Marketing VP, his Senior VP of Ops, and a couple of others. I felt quite vindicated!

A passionate discussion ensued. Clearly some people there were ready for change, and emboldened by my talk. Clearly the President was enjoying this.

I look forward to going back in there and stirring things up some more!

DRD v3 is live!

Thumbnail of the DRD websiteThird version of the Department of Redundancy Department’s website, this time using WordPress. WordPress is a beautiful piece of software, highly discoverable… of course, it’s targeted at geeks, but I think it broadens the target a bit.

For the DRD’s site, I chose a simple theme, and tweaked the typography. Videos will be hosted on YouTube, which will keep things simple as well.

If you have a high opinion of me, and a strict sense of appropriateness, please don’t look at these crazy, NSFW videos. Thanks!

BT DiamondIP is live!

BT DiamondIP WebsiteA whopper of a project!

I was able to set a good direction on the information architecture, and to keep everyone committed to a more-or-less standard navigation scheme. There was little I could do to influence the tone and tenor of the copy, but I did help cut down the marketese to a manageable level. In terms of the visual design and branding, I got to work again with my good friend Peter Alexander, who took in the strict constraints that I was imposing and provided me with just the clean look and photo-graphics I was looking for.

I was committed to building a good modern website, with as little compromise as possible in the quality of the code, design, and trying to stick close to semantic HTML. Noble goals. But I didn’t get a choice in CMS packages. EktronCMS it would be. Ektron is an ASP.NET CMS package with all the features you could want. Smell a rat yet?

It was a constant struggle to get it to work, to get it to work as it should, to get it to work well with clean code. I based the site’s HTML structure on the BluePrint CSS Framework, but that got partially butchered by the junk code ASP.NET wants to inject, and the spaghetti code that Ektron gleefully injects everywhere.

Of course, as a CMS package, Ektron fails as many do: by making GUI editing as complex and counter-intuitive, if not more, than HTML itself. Which means, of course, that the webmaster will have to do the updates anyway… and I could do them faster in Notepad! Also, as a typical ASP.NET application, it breaks all the time. And as a typical enterprise application, it’s also very slow, and ugly as a pig farmer in a cocktail dress.

Nevertheless, I soldiered on through. I used an XML sitemap to drive the navigation dynamically, Ektron collection controls and content placeholders and other god-awful components to put together a site that looks good and doesn’t suck. And custom-coded a bunch of tools and forms. I worked through my Christmas vacation in Paris to get it done. And now it’s done.

I’m proud of the result, yet I can’t say that the process made a lot of sense. I’m an excellent swimmer, but I don’t like to be forced to swim with a backpack full of rocks, especially when nobody needs the rocks or the backpack.

Stratification Tool

Thumbnail of the stratification toolBuilt a flash-based complex data visualization and stratification tool for a higher education consultancy. The company helps higher ed institutions to recruit and retain students. This tool is aimed at targeting outreach and marketing efforts to the right populations of high-school students, to maximize recruitment success.

In technical terms, it’s a statistical analysis tool. Likelihood to enroll is calculated for a body of applicants, and the tool gives a visual and interactive interface to the process of dividing that body into sub-groups.

This was a dense app, with lots of complex actionscript. I started with the data, building a visual representation that can be rendered as a histogram or smoothed line chart, with arithmetic or logarithmic scale. The user can then add or remove stratification bands, and set the bounds by sliding a knob along the y-axis. Each band reports its totals and percentages in real-time as the bounds are slid around, allowing the user to quickly create a 50-student band, or a band of 50 likely-to-enroll students.

My main goal was to take a complex decision-making process and make as much of it as possible as intuitive and tactile as possible. I did leverage some of the built-in actionscript animation libraries, using them sparsely and quickly to indicate pliancy of the UI, and give an overall feeling of responsiveness.

This was the most technically dense and complex Flash project I’ve done to date, involving XML/SOAP, handmade graphing routines, GUI design and lots and lots of math. I enjoyed it immensely.

Back to my roots…

Well, it’s official! After seven years in the consulting business, I’m returning to my roots in the marketing department: I’ve switched positions at BT INS, and will be maintaining all our corporate websites. My new title: Internet Marketing Manager…

It’s going to be fun to get back to creative work, and to service. Most of all, what I’m looking forward to is being able to work in depth on a single project, for the long haul. And a whole lot of creative freedom, as long as I deliver the goods.

It’s also an exciting time to be a corporate webmaster: With blogging and podcasting coming of age, there’s a big strategic difference to be made in how this company communicates. That’s something, isn’t it? Best part, though: I get to work from home again!

Got Much Think Work

An interesting web-based tool for exploration of the english language, WORDCOUNT by Jonathan Harris shows you all the words of the english language, ordered by popularity. Skip over to the 100th word… 

…and you’ll find this:

WORDCOUNT screenshot

#100: Got #101: Much #102: Think #103: Work Coincidence? An interesting commentary on the blogosphere’s gestalt? Or a rorshack joke on me? Whatever, it’s Saturday.

Silly Popsicle podcast

I was playing with Apple’s Garageband and iWeb today, and made a quick podcast with my daughter. Total time from start to finish: 2 hours, and that’s learning as I go. Apple really gets it!

Anyway, if you want to hear some stories by a very verbose three-year old, please check out Silly Popsicle, and hit the subscribe button to get new episodes on your iPod whenever they come out!

Breaking through at BMGi

A slide from the BMGi training sessionsDelivered a series of Lovable Sharepoint training sessions for Breakthrough Management Group. BMG is an exciting company, that does what I do: Consult on process. They do it mostly with large industrial clients, where a little process can save a lot of money. I was out training their staff on the user-directed approach to SharePoint. We developed Personas and Goals, explored user-centered information architecture, developed an exquisitely goal-oriented site. 

The message of Lovable SharePoint really hit home at BMGi, where they are acutely aware of the pitfalls of over-engineering. I looked at their resource plan, their scale, and their pressing needs, and basically told them to turn most of SharePoint off, for now. We focused on a high-value, easy-adoption, community-driven approach, and solved some thorny issues with as little new technology as possible.

We had a blast. Over three training sessions, I saw hesitant and overwhelmed team members gain confidence, interest, and more than a glimmer in the eye about the changes we were planning. I left them excited, enthusiastic, and hard at work on this new approach. 

Then I started driving home in the worst snowstorm in over a decade. The one-hour trip from Longmont to Denver turned into eight hours stuck on the freeway. Still, it was a great day!