Tag Archives: BT INS

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!

Lovable SharePoint Event

Over the last few months, I’ve been making a big splash around town with my latest crazy invention: Lovable Sharepoint. It’s a new service offering, that proposes to take a behemoth of a gas factory, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, affectionately known as MOSS, and implement it in full-scale, gas-factory enterprise environments… with UX spearheading the effort. 

 

Title slide for LSP. Image by Peter Alexander.

Title slide for LSP. Image by Peter Alexander.

I’ve put together a presentation, most unlike the typical Microsoft-Gold-Partner Bullet Monster, consisting mostly of one image or word per slide. I’ve worked together a nice 30-minute speech, worked in some blocking and staging, and performed it, first at an INS sponsored event at the Microsoft offices in Denver. We had a full room, while most of these marketing events usually draw about ten people. I had set a single red rose, and my business card, at every seat. Warm breakfast was steaming at some tables in the back. Lights were dimmed a little.

 

It went very well. My friend Cliff Burton was opening for me, with a review of the MOSS feature set, and he was wonderful, turning this dry subject interesting with his deadpan self-deprecating humor. He rammed through the feature set in twenty minutes, connecting everything to what I would say next. He left the audience awake, in a good mood, and expecting more bullet points and clipart.

Then I went up, and I killed, man! I killed! 

I appealed to the grand vision of freedom and joy: enterprise transformation. I showed pictures of a peace march, and described adoption as a very passive-aggressive form of protest. How can we miss the mark so much, with such great intentions? I showed the tower of Pisa. I stressed that an intranet is a process, not a product, I described the user-driven process, the focus on goals, not tasks. Expanded it to a new vision where top-down and bottom-up feed off each other.

User-driven process, Goal-directed approach, Community focus.

I finished with a plea to approach this work with love. The lights came up and everyone was still awake. They were quite alert too. Hands shot up and I took questions, good pointed questions. Handshakes happened with our sales guys. Cards changed hands. I got some personal thanks and good-jobs. I also got the best set of speaker evaluations to date. And my sales guys were drooling at the leads. In the room were IT and Project managers for a large Christian charity, and I think the “love” message struck a chord.

I love it when that happens. When I can be passionate in a business setting, and the reaction I get. People are starved for authentic genuine passion, in the tech world, but it’s as necessary, if not more, as good requirements and functional specs.

Extranet with secure webmail

Extranet with SafeMailSometimes all a complex problem needs is a better metaphor.

This higher-ed consultancy, client of ours, has been struggling for years with transfers of large data files to and from their clients. Statistical analysis works best on large data sets, and in this case, the files reach in the dozens of megs, and they usually are burnt on CDs and sent in the mail.

Some more courageous institutions had been uploading files through a web interface, but that was fraught with problems, mostly with dropped connections and uploads. Also, there was a lot of back-and-forth on the phone with clients, trying to determine which uploaded file was which, which was outdated, which had changed.

We had finally come up with a semi-reliable way to allow web upload, and decided to revisit the whole user experience before we implemented it. The developers had a clear vision of an online file manager, but I insisted we look at the actors, context, and goals.

It turns out that these files are always exchanged in the context of customer service, always accompanied with conversation and clarifications. And there is a better metaphor for this kind of file exchange: Email attachments.

I proposed a prototype of “Safe Mail”, a new set of pages on the extranet where clients can check their mailbox for messages and announcements, send messages with secure multi-meg attachments, and keep track of the entire process. I made sure to include thumbnail photos of the client’s consultants with their email, and to demo an announcement from the big boss, to highlight the customer service, marketing and sales value of this relational tool. 

The client loved it. The entire office has been abuzz about it since the demo, and the developers are working hard to make it real. It’s going to simplify a whole lot of things around here, and everybody’s very busy trying to find the right photo to use on their profile.

I love it when looking at context and personal goals allows for a complete mind-shift into a better metaphor. We’ve done more than solve an issue here; we’ve changed the nature and tenor of customer service, making it both more rational and more personal.