Enterprise Search and Usability

Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience

2011-04-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

This article takes a detailed look at a successful, engaging product and breaks down why it is engaging across 6 factors. The author discusses the use of response speed, short term memory management, visual design and cognitive theory within the game to keep and maintain interest. It would be interesting to hear from the game developers if they used this approach, or if they were guided by their intuition.

This is a great way to think about products and how to engage users through system and visual design. The article will require a few minutes to read but is worth the investment.
http://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/2011/02/why-angry-birds-is-so-successful-a-cognitive-teardown-of-the-user-experience/

Enterprise Search what is it, why is it important, how do we measure it?

2011-03-22T08:01:00.001-07:00

Search is important for knowledge management.

Knowledge management is the process of converting tacit information into explicit information.

This incorporates the concepts of content creation, content storage and content retrieval.
This embraces the ideas of content strategy.
Content strategy is the process of determining the important content within an organization.
Content is format agnostic, it includes text, speech, audio, video, media.

Challenges of knowledge systems are acquisition, curation and findability.

Acquisition is the process of bringing in new content.
Curation is the process of applying content strategy at the tactical level.
Findability is a descriptive term for enabling the finding of content, via navigation and search.

Information retrieval (search) is required to be able to find the methodology, the sample deliverables, the thought leadership, and other content for search dominate users, and for other users when navigation fails.

Goal of information retrieval is to provide the right document to the right person at the right time.

Right document might depend on the role of the user, the application launching the query, the profile of the user (area / subarea / country / city, the industry, service line / sub service line, service) or the time of the year.
Right person might not be the user launching the query.
Right time may be when they ask, before they ask, as it is created, when connected, or when on other devices.

Measure of information retrieval is the first page of results.

Right document must be on the first page of results.

Right document must be visible to the user as the right document through good title, good summary, and a clear relationship between the document and the users information need.

This requires a relationship between information retrieval and content storage to identify the right data for the title, summary, keywords, and other metadata. This includes incorporating the right fields in the storage area and the concept of a connector between the search engine and the repository.
This requires a relationship between information retrieval and content creation to ensure content that answers the users information need exists, and is findable. This is sometimes known as enterprise search engine optimization.
This requires a relationship between information retrieval and content strategy to ensure the best content is found. This could be relevance adjustments, query cooking, best bets, any tool to ensure the right content is moved to the top of the list.

This can be measured by:

Calculations of precision and recall leveraging an expert assessment of content and query.
Calculations of mean reciprocal rank of the best document for a query, leveraging an expert assessment of content.
Evaluation of frequent query results by users. (70% of first 10 results being “relevant” seen as good).
Penetration rate of user population (indirect measure, should be ~30%).
Feedback of end users via survey, feedback forms, interviews, etcetera.Feedback from primary stakeholders.

Google changes the search landscape, again

2010-09-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

Google is now offering a new feature called Google Instant. As you type in your query, you start to get results instantly, from the first few letters. Here is a video demo of this feature. This feature is only available, currently, to registered Google users, using the latest HTML 5 compliant browsers, in the US. They will be expanding the coverage shortly. Computerworld covered the launch well. The New Idea Engineering team has some thoughts on how this works, behind the scenes.

I like how this new feature reduces the feedback loop in search. I particularly like how the feedback you are reacting to is search engine results pages, not just the suggested search terms from type ahead. Some bloggers are saying this makes SEO irrelevant. I disagree. For content creators, this means it is even more important to have your good content at the top of the right key terms and phrases search results. I am more likely to try different phrases and searches, since results are "instant". I am less likely to click on a result that does not have a strong "scent of information". A new result is only a letter away, why try something that does not appear correct? Having good content, content that looks correct to the user, has become even more important. Ensuring that this content is found by the user has become harder. The SEO challenge has changed, and increased in difficulty, but it is *not* irrelevant. This makes content even more important to your search results, not less.

What it does seem to effect significantly is SEM. My cost per impression just changed. Google will be rendering my ad more often, but users will be clicking on the ad less often - this should mean that I get more impressions for my cost, assuming I am paying per click. I think it makes the top line of SEM better - I, as an advertiser, get more value for my money. Assuming exposure offers some value. If my only value comes from clicks, the top line stays the same.

What I like about Google Instant is the fact that this leverages Google's traditional strength, SPEED. It does it in a way that Microsoft will have trouble responding to - due to the infrastructure costs that speed requires in terms of local servers to reduce response time. Google has already made that investment. I do not think Microsoft has to the same extent. This innovation leverages Google's massive dataset of user behavior as well. It puts the work on the computer, and not the user - which is always the right place to put it.

I'm not sure how much this will impact the enterprise search arena, however. Most enterprises are unwilling to support the infrastructure needed for millisecond response time in the search results page, both in terms of network and in terms of hardware. I wonder if the GSA is going to support this feature, and if so what they will specify for the network and hardware requirements.

Great model for improving expert reviews

2009-11-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

Conducting Expert Reviews Using the VIMM Model

View more documents from Michael Rawlins.

Business value of social networking tools

2009-07-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

The question keeps being raised about the business value of social media tools. As we work with facebook, twitter, yammer etcetera - what value are we driving? I just got a free book on search engine interfaces, through twitter. If I was not on Twitter, I would not have this interesting book to read months prior to publication. Imagine that these networked tools did not exist. So I can only interact with the people near me, in close physical proximity. I talk to people in Cleveland. I sell to the people in Cleveland and I learn from the schools in Cleveland. I'm doing pretty well for myself. Someone I know tells me - you should go to New York, they have more people, and more opportunities to sell, and more clubs, more museums, more of everything. Is it worth it? What business value will I gain from going to New York?

Until I go to New York, I cannot understand the difference in scale. Once there, I see many different distractions - shows, plays, clubs, museums, what have you. But there is also much more opportunity there. I think social networking tools are like New York - if you are there, you can't understand why anyone would not be there. If you are not there, you really can't see why anyone would want to be there.

Yes, there is a lot of non-work related things that happen on these tools. There is a lot of non-work related things that happen in the office, from the water cooler conversations to the quick coffee run. But if you are not taking part in the conversation, you will miss the serendipitous moments that happen because you are part of the conversation. Like when a water cooler conversation leads to a new idea or a shorter process. Similarly there are things that happen in Twitter or Facebook that will add value.

This is only a half formed analogy, comments are welcome and needed. Anyway, I need to get back to work.

The burger joint and the mini

2009-05-12T19:37:00.001-07:00

So, the burger joint. It is a hotel restaurant done up to be a small hole in the wall place. They got the atmosphere right, and the burgers were great. What made this the best dinner I have ever had in NY though, was the company. Because the place is small, recently reviewed in the New York Times - it was packed. I ended up sharing the table with a couple who had been married for 32 years, but were now divorced, and a girl from Long Island now living in the city. This random meeting of total strangers made the dinner great fun. The burger was good, but the company was better.

The mini surprised me. I have not played with one before, since our local Apple store would have to order one for me. It was fast. It did not bog down playing two movies, one in HD and one in SD. Each application opened quickly, ran smoothly and was very responsive. Even with iTunes playing music and the HD movie running. All on 2 GB of RAM and a 2.0 ghz processor.

Something on this Mac was configured differently, and it had a right click on the mouse. Not sure how, since the whole top moves, but if you push on the left it reads a left click, right reads a right click.

I think I may bite the bullet and finally buy a Mac. Only a couple decisions left to make. I need to decide if I want the wireless Apple keyboard, or if I should go with the Logitech dNovo keyboard with the built in click wheel. And, do I want to put in the 4 GB right away or wait till I need a speed boost? Apple RAM is a rip off, but the thing is hard to open.

Enterprise Search Summit 2009

2009-05-12T17:19:00.001-07:00

Attendance is way down, the economy seems to be hitting this event very hard. I am not able to blog from the conference itself as the wireless is very flaky and there are not many places to plug in. This is the first time I have seriously considered the need for a netbook. Something very small, with a very long battery life would be helpful right now.

I'm heading out now to try the Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridian, then maybe off to the Apple store to look at the Mini again.

Search, Scent and the Happiness of Pursuit

2009-05-12T17:10:00.002-07:00

Jared Spool gave a key note on search and e-commerce. There were a number of interesting points he made. In his studies of e-commerce sites, he found that the most successful sites, used search the least. Search is our tool to be used when navigation fails. Improving the "scent" of the links on the main page, or within the navigation hierarchy, will decrease the need to use search.

UIE collects 2000 pieces of data per participant. In their studies they found that the #1 predictor of success was the # of pages the user visited between the home page and the sales cart. Fewer pages led to greater success. The best way to improve scent is to build the trigger words into the link titles, or the description of the tool. To find the trigger words, examine the search logs - those words are the words the users are scanning the pages to find. Referring again to his studies, he found that no one only went to search. Everyone started by scanning the page, looking for categories or links that contained the trigger words. They only went to search when nothing could be found.

An interesting point he made, if you can follow the users click path and know when they leave the page through search, then you can know when the trigger words dried up. Adding a link on that page that takes the user to the search term will increase success for that one trigger word.

Search works well for known item location. So it is easy to find "The Princess Bride" or "Tom Clancy". Search does not work well for less concrete items like "an inexpensive yet high quality SLR" or "Novels written by Nobel Prize for Literature authors". To solve this issue he recommends using editorial capability to improve content finability.

Looking at 77 installed versions of search engines on e-commerce sites, the same vendors that were the best, were also the worst. The difference is the implementation, not the technology. Focus on doing a good job on configuring the installation.

Emergent Social Search Experiences

2009-05-12T17:10:00.001-07:00

This was a moderated panel discussion around social search. The panel discussed the definition of social search, why to do it and how.

They defined social search as social tagging.

You do it because it enhances the findability of an object.

There is a psychological burden of asking a question within an organization. "Didn't we hire you to know that?" There is also a cognitive load on asking and posting within an organization as people take the time to format the question well. People don't share because they don't want to tip their hand.

The Steve museum project explores leveraging social tagging to help identify and find art. They build the tools internally, but examples are on the web at www.steve.museum.com. They included a statistical analysis tool set to help tell when tags were useful. They found that the tags were useful for 80% of the time.

In a study with ACM, they found that when authors post tags themselves, they are precise but they are not very broad. They recycled the authors tags, added them to a pseudo controlled vocabulary and found more use of the tags that were created, and more tagging on the documents as a whole. Providing the leverage to reuse the tag, increased the usage of the tags. People saw the reuse as a value, giving them a reason them to tag in the first place.

In the Steve museum project, they had a two part study where some users know that they are helping an organization and others did not see a connection to a organization. The users who knew and saw the value they were adding were more than twice as likely to help.

Vendors:
ConnectBeam seems to have closed. They discussed it as a good product, but there does not seem to be any new products, and people have left the firm.
"Knowledge Plaza is interesting." No other data given on the product.
Arrdvark - ask a question, be routed to someone to answer it. Most of the QA is private.
Hunch is a system to find previous questions.

Panel sees these tools as a way to pull tacit knowledge from users.

Another interesting slidedeck ...

2009-05-12T17:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.slideshare.net/lrosenfeld/marrying-web-analytics-and-user-experience

Search Analytics

2009-05-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

This presentation was an interesting overview of leveraging your metrics to help improve search and the overall web site. Lou spoke to working with metrics from the bottom up and from the top down.

Bottom up, he suggests, is working with the information and asking questions. Do not get caught up in specific statistical analysis methods, instead just look at the metrics and see what questions you have. Examples of these are:
- What are the most frequent search queries?
- What are the most frequent results clicked on?
- Which pages are referring the most queries?
- Which pages are launching the most 0 hit queries?

He suggested that you should look at your search results to create better metadata. This involves looking at your top 50 to 100 queries, developing a set of categories that these queries might fall into, then seeing what percentage of your queries fall into each category. Once you have the values for the categories, you can also look at the attributes.

You can also scan your data for content types that people are searching for. If you track this data over time, you begin to see the seasonally of the queries and the adaptations that the enterprise makes to its environment.

He suggests digging deeply into the failure states, specifically for the pages within the site that are not working. Look for where the *content* is failing as well as where the search is failing.
His last suggestion was to leverage your best bets to become a A-Z listing for the site. He showed an example from the University of Michigan where the list was of the terms the best bets were created, paired with the best bets. Seems a simple, quick win.

Top Down is the process of thinking about the larger business issues and seeing what the metrics can tell us about them. So if the bottom up is thinking about the most common queries, top down would be the question "can users find the items they are looking for, with these top queries?" His actual example was e-commerce conversion for the top queries.

The slide deck will be available at SlideShare.net, but here is a similar one from a few years ago

Enhancing Findability and Usability through taxonomy and search

2009-05-12T16:40:00.001-07:00

This presentation was on the specific IA methodology of the presenter and the tools she uses in her state to ensure a consistent taxonomy across all of the web sites. The IA methodology was consistent with the best practices we employ with our CHS PM's. There was a succinct definition of IA - the goal is to have information be findable, manageable, and usable.

The methodology starts with establishing the goal of the web site, it's users, and it's content. They then use this information to create a taxonomy, a labeling and naming structure as well as the navigation of the site. This process is similar to the one outlined at http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/better-practice-and-collaboration/better-practice-checklists/information-architecture.html. She referenced this checklist as a good example for anyone to follow.

Social Search for Knowledge Sharing

2009-05-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

This was a presentation on a interesting community of practice development program run by the UK government. The project created a NING / Lotus Connections like environment for the 410 local community governments. These represent a workforce of 2.1 million people who deliver 700 common services to the population. The services range from marriage to road improvements and a total budget of 160 million pounds.
The goal of the project was to enable knowledge sharing across the local governments. This would allow a person in Chichester to learn from a similar project completed in Yorkshire. In addition, the groups would create a sense of community across the UK on various topics of interest. The tools provide a blog, a wiki, a library, a discussion forum, and search. There is no governance of the social networking application, communities have formed around the Cornish language as well as around road improvements.

The search implementation is interesting. It allows a community to identify the top 20 web sites for the community. It leverages Exalead's external Google like search engine to then search those web sites via a typical search box. From the results screen the user can further narrow the search by eliminating any of the web sites from the results. This gives the community the ability to dynamically create a custom domain of public web sites. This is similar to the functions EY has embedded within the Community HomeSpace product for internal search, but focused instead on the greater world wide web.

They are now able to leverage the social intelligence of the entire group, the "wisdom of the crowd". The feature has been taken up by 15% of the communities and the self reporting is very positive. Overall they find that the strength of the community reflects the skill of the community manager. A good community manager who keeps the conversation alive, ensures that discussion posts are followed up on, that the content added to the site is fresh, and who "weeds and feeds the garden" will have the strongest communities.

Enterprise Social Bookmarking at MITRE

2009-05-12T16:12:00.000-07:00

This presentation was an overview of the Onomi product development and deployment at MITRE.

The initial project goal was to understand the use of social bookmarking within and enterprise. Specific sub goals were on social bookmarkings ability to provide an environment for knowledge sharing, ability to feed expertise finding or user profiling, ability to form networks and to enhance the value of information retrieval.

Features of Onomi:

Based on a open source product called Scuttle
Similar interface to del.icio.us
People create the bookmarks with a title, URL, description
Bookmarks can be kept private
RSS feeds are available
It is integrated with e-mail subscription service
Incorporates broken URL checking
Incorporates a people network section
Related tags
Related users

Some interesting data points on the Onomi implementation:
-83% of the tags are from external web sites.
-86% of the tags are shared
-50% of the company uses the software
-23,676 bookmarks total in the system
-130,310 total tags
-16,371 unique tags

The search engine indexes all of the public bookmarks in the system and presents the bookmarks as search results. The result indicates which tags have been applied to the term. The integration is done via XML feeds. It is still not 100% complete, a separate capability to search only tags has not been created. They integrate the bookmarks and tags into a separate search ala OneBox on some of their different enterprise searches experiences. They are planning on leveraging the items that are bookmarked for relevancy improvements in a future release. The bookmark search results include a presence awareness to allow users to IM or call the author of the bookmark.

An interesting capability they have is around best bets. They enable anyone to identify a bookmark as a potential best bet. This automatically populates a database of potential best bets which is searched. Results of the search against this database are presented similar to our EY Professionals Recommend. It is different from our approach of specifically identifying promotions for key words.

Free keynote

2009-04-30T11:57:00.001-07:00

The Conference is May 12 & 13 at the Marriot in NY.
Anyone who registers using this link ( https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=ess2009&priority=COVVIP3 ) will have the option of joining us for one or both keynotes for free, as well as visting our exhibits hall.

In case you want to include details, this year's keynotes are:

May 12 Keynote: Harness Information to Deliver Enhanced Business Performance
9:00 am – 9:45 am
Ramesh Harji , Head of Information Exploitation, Capgemini UK
Despite the billions of dollars invested in information technology, organizations are still failing to realize the latent potential of their information. To be successful, organizations need to take a different approach—one that views information as a critical business asset, not an afterthought. Organizations must put exploiting information at the heart of the way they do business. A recent Capgemini research report concludes that poor information exploitation is costing the U.K. economy over $100BN/year in lost profits, representing an average 29% suppression of business performance per organization. Better information exploitation is one of the last bastions: an opportunity to both grow revenue and improve profitability.

May 13 Keynote: Improving Security Through Information Awareness
9:00 am – 9:45 am
Wim van Geloven, VP Information Technology, National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, The Netherlands
Approximately 20 agencies in The Netherlands are involved in combating terrorism. To boost the effectiveness in understanding terrorism and serious crime, four organizations decided to join forces in a unique venture, dubbed Improving Security by Information Awareness. The Program strives to improve the quality of intelligence and investigations within the public security sector. The approach revolves around the collaboration of the different agencies, operates from the perspective of the operational cases, and defines the IT case from these basic principles. Over the past 3 years, the Program invested in pan-organizational change, as well as IT techniques and also the (scientific) development of methods and techniques that improve the exchange, presentation, analysis, and storage of large quantities of data. This keynote will address the background and problems faced, the technological and organizational challenges, encountered, and the way in which this new approach has reformed information awareness.

Enterprise Search Summit 2009

2009-04-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

As a speaker, I can offer you a $200 discount on the Gold Pass or Full Two-Day Conference Pass, with the option to attend the Showcase for free.

For this offer, please use this URL: https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=ess2009&priority=SPEAK3 file://localhost/forms/default.aspx.

Or use discount code SPEAK3 when registering.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Enterprise 2.0 can be funny!

2009-03-27T14:35:00.001-07:00

How Great Ideas Are Killed

View more presentations from someguy05896.

Developing engagement with our users

2009-03-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

I have been wrestling with how to develop a sense of engagement with my users for a while now. Overall, we have improved our intranet. People find things faster. The site is easier to use. But the overall experience is ... boring.

I found a brief blog post from JMC referencing a TED talk to be very interesting.

What I really want is a synopsis, a brief set of 15 things I should do to create a sense of engagement. I think a start on this is available from a IA Summit presentation from Stephen Anderson starts to get to a more tactical approach.

The real issue is culture. I will need to adapt these techniques to match my corporate culture.

Great article

2008-11-19T13:53:00.001-08:00

This has nothing to do with search or usability, but it is the best description of the problems we have in Wall Street I have seen yet.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom

Feedback form failure

2008-11-17T15:22:00.000-08:00

I just had an experience with a feedback form that failed. I'd like to give you some background, discuss the failure, it's impact on me and challenge you to look at your own user experience and how you may be doing the same thing to your users.

I have AT&T as both my telephone and high speed broadband provider. They have a new product called Advanced TV that I am interested in. I'm currently a DirecTV / TIVO customer and am enthusiastic about both products. Advanced TV has some features that are interesting to me - they might even be enough to get me to leave my DirecTV / TIVO. So when I received an email that offered a chance to see Advanced TV in action, I was interested. I clicked on the link, only to find that the nearest store was a 100 mile round trip for me. I am interested, but not $20 in gas interested.

I determined to tell AT&T about this failure in marketing on their part. It seems like a simple enough thing to target their email - they know my address, they know the location of the store - how hard could it be to cross reference the two and eliminate me from the mailing? So, I went to the AT&T site to send them a quick feedback note. I had to do this as the email they sent did not have a reply address.

First, can you spot the contact us link on this page?

It is in light grey text, on a white background, at the very bottom of the page. It is hard to spot. This may be intentional, as they have several very clear help sections on the page. This may be an attempt to drive traffic to the help pages, rather than the generic contact us area.

Once I found the contact us / feedback form, I opened the page to find what looks to be a nice easy form to fill in, set up as a wizard, starting with your subject line.

Entering a subject, does not start a wizard. It instead sends you to a list of pre-selected subjects. This is where I started to become frustrated. None of these pre-selected subjects is related to my email. I tried several different terms and subject lines, I opened all of the suggested subjects. Not one related to marketing, nor was there a "I have a different subject" for the email.

In the end, I randomly selected a topic and gave them my feedback. It likely will not reach anyone interested in my feedback, and the marketing department will be wondering why their promotion is not working. They sent it to people who said they were interested in Advanced TV. Why is the conversion rate so low?

And the result of all this work on their part? I now regret having AT&T for my phone company and my Internet provider. I am concerned that I will not be able to find help when I have trouble with my service. I am no longer sure the features of Advanced TV are worth the trouble of changing television providers. Do I want to trade DirecTVs award winning customer service for this?

Overall, an attempt to sell me on something I was interested in has left me with a less favorable impression of the brand.

Why did this happen? Because each interaction did not focus on my needs as a customer, instead they focused on their needs as a company. The company wants to get the word out about Advanced TV. Who cares if some people who get the email are unable to buy the product. The company wants my email routed to a specific department. Who cares if that adds time before we satisfy that customer?

We, as interaction designers and usability professionals, need to remember that the value the user derives from the experience needs to be paramount. When we forget that, we drive people away from our sites and away from our brand.

NEOUPA Event

2008-11-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Cathleen Zapata
President, NEOUPA
NEOUPA
P.O. Box 24503
Cleveland, Ohio 44124-9998
Phone: 440-320-1084
president@neoupa.org
www.neoupa.org
NEOUPA Celebrates World Usability Day in Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, OH -- November 1, 2008 -- NEOUPA, the local chapter of the global Usability Professionals’ Association, is celebrating World Usability Day Thursday, November 13 from 6-8:30pm at KeyBank’s Tiedeman offices by discussing how professionals in the community are infusing and advocating usability in the companies they work for and the Web work they do. The panel of presenters is from a variety of local organizations, including Ernst & Young, Cleveland Institute of Art, KeyBank, Progressive Insurance, American Greetings, and more. Additional details and registration can be found at www.neoupa.org.
World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 225 events are organized in over 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and to train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.
"Web users today are task-oriented. They don’t have time to waste and they’re on a mission to get done what they’re trying to do," says Cathleen Zapata, President of NEOUPA, "Usability is the fundamental foundation of creating an outstanding customer experience that meets both customer needs and business goals."
The event is FREE but registration is required at www.neoupa.org. Food, networking, knowledge-sharing and the chance to win over $300 in prize giveaways are all part of the event.
This year’s platinum sponsor is Brulant, Inc./Rosetta, with additional sponsorship by SMI: Eye & Gaze and Progressive Insurance. The event is being held at KeyBank, 4910 Tiedeman Road, Brooklyn, Ohio. Registration is required at www.neoupa.org.
About NEOUPA
NEOUPA is the official Northeast Ohio chapter of the international Usability Professionals' Association. NEOUPA was started to educate, motivate and promote usability throughout Northeast Ohio for individuals interested in, involved in or responsible for Websites, applications, software or any other type of user interface where usability is a key to success.
For information: http://www.neoupa.org or
Contact: president@neoupa.org
Phone: 440-320-1084

ASIS&T 2008 - Connie Yowell Plenary Session

2008-10-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

This is the second plenary session with Connie Yowell discussed the MacArthur Foundation's $50 million digital media and learning initiative. This was a five year look at how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

Typically, children list video game or PC activities as their most popular activities. She demonstrates the great number of variables children need to manipulate to play Pokeman. Showed a video of kids playing Pokeman together, and their activities they do around Pokeman - blogs, web searching, comics, and fan fiction.

Some statistics:
97% of kids play video games
60% of teens use a computer
72% use instant messaging
50% have created media content
33% have shared content via the internet

Ethnographic study
700 participants
25 researchers
5000 hours of observation
www.futuresoflearning.org

Types of participation
1. Friendship driven participation
2. Interest driven participation
These interactions are the same as "real life" interactions. It is not a place for adults. It is not a place for strangers. Young people do not interact with strangers in social networking.

Interest driven networks are highly social. The worries about these interactions being socially isolating is incorrect. Social interactions tend to be very individual based. They tend to be very participatory and productive. They use these networks to create content. The networks are peer based. This is where adults and strangers interact with young people, because of a similar based interest. These networks have converging media, so TV works with PC works with books, not competing. For the young people it is about the content, not the technology. So they are following their interests across different media. The learning is networked.

Learning is happing outside of school. School becomes another node in their learning, not the primary node. Rich array of learning opportunities, with low barriers to participation and production.

Some of the pitfalls are around developing expertise in areas that are harmful, there are strong commercial influence. There is a concern that there will be a different set of skills with each kid, worse than the digital divide, as the set of skills needed are growing. There is also a fragmented experiences, not every kid has the same set of experiences, creating different behaviors. Each experience stands on its own, and there is not a strong interrelation between one experience or the next.

Four core skills in detail out of eleven identified for the future, over and above traditional literacy

Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. People will need to be able to adopt roles to explore and understand environments instead of the traditional positioning.

Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. Otherwise known as plagiarism or piracy. Think instead of the way Shakespeare reused or remixed classic tales in new ways with his plays. Digital media makes this easier.

Collective intelligence: ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. Everyone knows something, but no one knows everything. This is about the ability to tap the community at the right time, and to get answers from everyone.

Transmedia Navigation: the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modality and different forms of media.

How do people pick up these skills, especially as schools ban the use of these skills?

Places to stay up to date on this work and the findings:
www.spotlight.macfound.org

www.digitallearning.org

www.holymeatballs.org

www.newmedialiteracy.org

www.idiit.edu/thinkeringspaces

ASIS&T 2008 - The effect of page context on magazine image categorization.

2008-10-29T08:24:00.002-07:00

Stina Westman of the Helsinki University of Technology presented on a image categorization study she completed. This work was on the contextual factors on categorization, specifically the context of the page on image categorization. Prior research has shown that people evaluate images with high level semantic descriptors, and that people describe image content on interpretational, as opposed to perceptual factors. The goal of the study was to determine if there is an effect on categorization based on context, and if so, how strongly does it work. They worked with professional magazine image archivists and split them into two groups, one with context, one without. The participants began with a free sorting exercise followed by reassignment to multiple categories.

The number of categories, the time taken to sort the photos and the number of times a image was placed into a category were all not significantly different. When you look at the types of categories that are created, there was a significant difference. Added context resulted in more categories based on theme and story, versus functional, or of the objects in the photo. People were grouped by fictional or real, and nonliving items were grouped by symbolic, object or scenes when context was present. Without context, people were grouped by posed photos versus action photos (context) and non living items were grouped by interiors, objects, or scene. Without context, images were more often set into multifaceted categorization, more hierarchy to the structure.

Text was seen to anchor the image, explained the image and why it was published, or the text was seen as elaborating or extending the image. This means we can manipulate the categorization of images by the archivists, so can determine how we want the image to be categorized. This implies that text data mining can be applied to image categorization through automated / software.

ASIS&T 2008 - Revisiting search task difficulty: behavioral and individual difference measures

2008-10-29T08:24:00.001-07:00

Jacek Gwizdka of Rutgers University presented on a series of studies he completed on task difficulty and search. The dependent variable on the level of difficulty were relevance, so the more documents found the higher the task difficulty. The strongest predictor was the number of pages visited, so the more documents people opened, the harder they found search to be. This seems to follow my intuition, that if we can return the best documents, higher in the results and give the user a clear good document, they will find search easier, and better.

He found that there was a correlation between objective and subjective task difficulty. He found that subjectively difficult tasks were related to more search actions, greater than objective difficulty. So if people think the task will be hard, they do more work, regardless of the objective assessment of difficulty. He also found that better search task outcomes are associated with lower levels of objective difficulty. In terms of the efficiency of the systems, people are slower on more complex systems. They find more complex systems to have a higher level of subjective difficulty.

ASIS&T 2008 - Values and Information

2008-10-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

This panel discussion was on the value of information.
Discussion covered the difference of value of real objects versus digital objects, such as pictures, books and music. Generally the digital objects were seen as easier to have, but not as valuable.

Another study ran a value survey against three different groups, one in corporate, one in academia and one in government. This survey showed significant difference in the values of curiosity, loyalty, and obedience. The studies show a difference in adherence to values by different organizaitins. Differences in organizations lead to different values wihch in turn lead to different priorities and potenetially different designs.

ASIS&T 2008 - Google on-line marketing challenge: A multidisciplinary global teaching and learning initiative using sponsored search

2008-10-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

Panel with Bernard Jansen of Pennsylvania State University, Mark Rosso of North Carolina Central University, Dan Russell of Google, Brian Detlor of McMaster University.

Jim Jansen jjansen@acm.org
Mark Rosso mrosso@nccu.edu
Dan Russell drussell@google.com
Brian Detlor detlor@mcmaster.edu

The Power of search and the web - Jim Jansen's slides, Mark Rosso presenting.

Search drives on-line activity. Search drives over 5 billion monthly queries in the US. People are spending less time with their family, the TV and less sleep.

Looking at the search marketplace, Google has over 60% of the market, with no other company having even half as much market share. On-line marketing is a large business, and keyword advertising is the fastest growing advertising business. Google earned 16 billion from advertising, mostly keyword advertising. The sponsored links are the main drivers of revenue and are the business model of all search engines. Key differentiator is that it is targeted, pull aligned and has the lowest acquisition cost of any advertising.

The Google on-line marketing challenge was a world wide project. The challenge consisted of 1) register the class 2) recruit the client 3) Students develop a pre - campaign proposal 4) Students run a 3 week AdWords campaign 5) Students develop and submit a post campaign summary 6) Google judges teams on a algorithm to narrow to 150 teams 7) Academics judge teams on written reports 8) top ten teams fly to Google headquarters.
A campaign consists of one or more ad groups. Ad groups should be based on a theme. Each ad group has a set of ads and keywords that generate the ad. Each keyword has a bid, how much are you willing to pay for that keyword. For each keyword you supply a matching criteria - exact, partial, broad, negative.

Ads display, the rank and the cost per click depend upon: keywords in query, ad title and text must be relevant to query, content of landing page must be relevant to query, past click through rate, bid on keyword, other configurable factors.

The Google on-line marketing challenge - experiences from the course. - Mark Rosso presenting.

Public school, evening MBA program completed as part of a Management Information Systems course. Class consisted of 10 students, so two teams entering the challenge. Clients were a small law firm and a African American cultural center. Entered into the course as a experiential learning opportunity and to answer common criticisms of MBA IS courses, too theoretical and not adequately conveying "know how". Students took from this class real world experience in on-line advertising will work, or not work. The on-line advertising did not really work for the cultural center, as they were not selling anything on-line and did not have a way to measure the value from a click. It did bring home the need to coordinate their projects with the information systems function. Both teams conflicted with client scheduled web site outages. It also brought home how the design of the web site impacted advertising costs. The cultural center had a single page design that kept them from targeting a page for the ad. The law firm did not have this same challenge.

The Google on-line marketing Challenge: an outside commentator's opinion. - Brian Detlor presenting.

Three main wins - Students love the challenge, they get job offers. Teachers love it, Students are engaged and there are real world evaluation of student work. Participating businesses love it, they get free work and a chance to screen potential employees.

Brian's school does other experiential learning courses, but not this specific one. He sees some challenges, but thinks it is worth while.
Google on-line marketing challenge: a view from inside - Daniel Russell (the search quality, User Experience Research, Ads Quality & Search Education person)

www.gomcha.com is a social networking site for the challenge. Place for the students to continue to work together. Google wanted to do was teach students the in and outs of marketing in the internet age, giving them real world data on what is good, what is bad. They should also understand how web readers look at + understand web pages. Plus they begin to understand the consumer versus reader psychology. They wanted to inject these ideas, about how large the search marketing market is. As an example, specific keywords are better than generic keywords. Negative keywords are important to learn as well - when not to bring people in. Ad quality is about the same as Search quality. Having good sponsored links will cause users to see it as valuable. Search query length in the US is typically 2 words. Most queries are multiple words.

Web Site Optimizer allows you to do trade offs between multiple versions of pages. This allows you to understand and optimize your conversion rate. You can do this with only text changes, or larger site changes. Nice tool for learning how your site works, our EY.com team should leverage this.
The impact of the study was that the students left with a better understanding of the web ecostructure.

Advertising & Awareness with Sponsored Search - donturn@ischool.utexas.edu.

An Alternate study. Examine the idea of advertising for awareness of the UT iSchool. Ads for graduate studies, not driven by click through revenues. They developed an ad campaign to evaluate the Google Ads application. Goal was to build on models of web information seeking as part of the larger web experience.

Planned global & local search campaigns using statement and question ad copy for comparison. About 208000 impressions, 200,000 global. 160 click through rate (CTR). Their average position was 4th. The best click through rate was on the local campaign. The statement ad copy out performed the question ad copy. Gave them a large dataset from sponsored search services and tools. Start to understand more complex search tasks is of growing importance.
donturn@ischool.utexas.edu

Gave an example of how words matter. Changing the word on the link from Sign up to Start using caused a 5x improvement in conversion. This has interesting connotations for our work on site design and metrics. We need to track button clicks, and be able to change things fairly quickly, so we can determine which links work and which do not.

ASIS&T 2008 - Better to Organize Personal Information by Folders or by Tags? : The devil is in the details.

2008-10-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

The presentation was by Andrea Civan of the University of Washington.

Examining the two different models of organizing information: hierarchical folders and tagging with labels. Does placing with folders and tagging make any difference in the ability to find things. The faculty advisor on this project was William Jones. Had people use two real world systems, for a period of time, then had them relate their experiences back to the project. Used Hot Mail and gMail as their study, as they are two different tools, achieving the same function, via two different mechanisms.
Initial interview to explore their use of folders and tags in the past. Selected two topics of 25 item collections. Each day the participants received 5 articles in their email, in each product. They then spent 5-10 minutes organizing the information. They self reported on the experience via email, as well as data capture by the project team. After the project they gathered recall details, re-find 5 articles, and had them sketch their collection. Each participant was exposed to both environments, serially.

Results - a number of similarities, from a retrieval performance, recall, time to retrieve, number of places looked and in terms of the organizational schemes both systems worked about equally well. In both conditions the participants were unable to express the complexity of their internal map of the information, as expressed in the sketch. In general, there were multiple categorization activities going on in each environment. Some participants had a workflow orientation, others had a hierarchical orientation.
Tagging required less cognitive effort. Participants found the tagging to be easy, whereas they felt a strong need to be choosy with the folder names. Tagging required more physical effort. Tags needed to be applied over and over again, where as the folder structure only needed to be placed once. Folders made it easy to hide information, easy to move items out of the in-box. Tagging was seen as more cluttered, as everything stayed in the in-box. Folders were better for systematic search, each time they could look through each folder and be confident that they had correctly cleared a folder. Multiple tags were applied to an item, making it harder to do a systemic search, but easier for serendipitous finding.

The conclusion is that there is no clear winner. Each structure offers tradeoffs. The implications: don't leave the good stuff behind. Filter for untagged items, support hierarchy. Support collections of tags that are content and format oriented.

ASIS&T 2008 - Social Tagging in China and the USA: A comparative study

2008-10-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Chen Xu of the Long Island University and Heting Chu of the Long Island University

USA usage of tagging 28% of on-line Americans have tagged on the internet.

The study used two web sites to compare tagging, both the action of tagging and the interface used to tag, in US and China. del.icio.us and 365Key were the two sites studied. 365Key is the first, and most popular, tagging site in China. Study was done in January 2008. The study gathered site visits and extracted the tags from the News category. They specifically narrowed the study to tags used more than 10 times.

The sites are similar in functionality, although 365Key adds two fields: Comments and Evaluation. Evaluation gives the ability to "star" a URL. 365Key also adds two metrics: viewing frequency and bookmarking frequency. In terms of tag management, Delicious gives users more freedom to create tags, ability to bundle tags and to rename or delete. Tag bundle allows you to create a second level in your tagging, creating a hierarchy. 365Key offers predefined categories, meaning their tags tend to cluster around the predefined categories.

Users in Del.icio.us create 5 tags per record, while 365Key create about 3 tags per record. This means that Del.icio.us will have more unique tags, with less consensus. When we look at the tag frequency distribution of the two sites, they are very similar. When we look at the parts of speech of the tags, they are mostly nouns in both sites. 365Key showed more foreign terms for tags, specifically English. This is seen as an indication of English as the "world language". Del.icio.us have more term variants, and more "net words".

When looking at tags with the same meaning, we see that there are a number of terms that appear in both sites, but the ranking of the terms is significantly different. This is seen as showing the different issues of importance amongst the different user populations. When looking at the top tags in each site, we see cultural differences.

The main difference between the two sites is in the functionality. 365Key is more restrained, with defined categories. Del.icio.us offers more freedom to the users. This difference in functionality is reflected in the tags. Interestingly, there were more tags applied in 365Key than in Del.icio.us. This is attributed to the time period when they gathered the data, it was not an active time in the US. There is strong clustering around the predefined terms in 365Key.

ASIS&T 2008 - Proflection in Cyberspace

2008-10-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

Gary Marchionini
UNC School of Information and Library Science

We have a number of identities in cyber space, some under our controls, some not. None of these are actually me, they are reflections of me. My reflections on intentional and ambient. Intentional are reviews, friending, replies and so on. The ambient are vendor profiles, citation or credit rating. There are also projections of me - what I put forth, my intentional and ambient projections. The intentional are web pages, facebook profile or email. The ambient are click streams, records of purchase, sensor streams.

Together, the projection and the reflection make up my "proflection".

We should think through how to control these items, how to protect ourselves. What kind of "digital condom" do we need to protect and control our proflection on the web? These tools might be monitoring tools, might be warnings - might just be awareness tools.

ASIS&T 2008 - 3 Digital archiving myths

2008-10-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

Cathy Marshall
Microsoft Research

Three digital archiving myths - keep everything, kids will know what to do, it is all a matter of repositories and access control.

Storage is cheap. We should keep everything.
Digital items are very small, so more material can be stored. Storage is cheap, but human attention is not and it is not legally, emotionally or intellectually viable to keep everything. It is easier to keep than to cull, but it is also easier to lose items.
Flicker has 3 billion photos, Facebook 5 billion photos - this is overwhelming.
Much of what we keep today, does not have much value - benign neglect has its virtues in how it automatically culls our stuff.

Today's kids are all-digital, they will know what to do.
Kids are fearless.
Kids are still likely to rely on a family to handle archiving.
They are better at creating, but they are no better at keeping stuff around.

Digital stuff is not just distributed over multiple stores, it is also distributed over time and over people - and system design has to allow for this.

She ran out of time before completing her exploration of all 3 myths.

ASIS&T 2008 - Old People Facebook Disasters

2008-10-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

Old People Facebook Disasters
Fred Stutzman, SILS UNC - Chapel Hill

Fred has been studying privacy for years, and been a bit concerned about the news coverage. The narrative has been about the loss of privacy on the web. He has been doing studies on privacy and usage of the web. When we look at people who have been using facebook for more than 3 years, people are more likely to make their profiles friends only, and have set more privacy.

As older people join Facebook, they are having to learn these privacy norms that earlier users have already learned. "In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes."

Step away from making broad based generalized assumptions, and towards more of a nuanced understanding of privacy.

ASIS&T 2008 - Tagging as a Communication Device: Every tag cloud has a silver lining

2008-10-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

Heather D. Pfeiffer is the moderator of the panel.

The panel will present on, and discuss:

Outcome and processing of tagging
Relationship of tagging to social networking
Connection to language and its constructs
Tag use in Ontology building

The panel consists of:
Heather Pfeiffer - New Mexico State University
Emma Tonkin University of Bath
David Millen IBM
Mark Lindner University of Illinois
Margaret Kipp Long Island University

Tagging as Metadata
Heather Pfeiffer
Knowledge in language - explaining how we can community knowledge through Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatic or context.
Syntax and semantics are the two parts of language, where as pragmatic is the use of the language.
Conceptualization of Ontology.
Concepts on the surface are labels or terms.
Underneath have a meaning.
Meaning grows out of the context of how the concepts are used.
relationships are built between concepts.
Building a hierarchical structure called an ontology.
Tags are concepts which need context to have meaning. Do we have a change in our language?
This presentation really did not talk to tagging as metadata, but instead talked to the use of language. Not as much as I would have liked.

Ten minutes of language development
Emma Tonkin

Started by talking to the development of language, looking at the etymology of country names. Village = Canada, Little Venice = Venezuela.
The three step ontology development plan - identify concepts, label the concepts, identify relations, document then use them.
This assumes perfect accuracy in the identification and labeling processes. Realistically, collaborative identifying and discussion something is hard, even something as simple as location.

Labelling locations, some positions are important temporarily or permanently. Place versus space, position versus location.
Simulation design - concepts are physical positions in space, labels are the names for the positions, Agents negotiate labels for shared concepts, sharing.

Example of a pharmacy versus drugstores. Talking towards the differences in languages, the possible ways of naming things, coming to consensus.

Discussed mainly how the language will be different over time, over place and as we change our understanding of the world.

Patterns of Collaborative tagging in a large corporate environment
David Millen

Social bookmarking behind the firewall is different, in that the links are behind a firewall, which can be linked up with enterprise search. This leads to social discovery and search. We believe there will be a difference in use depending on the goal - community browsing, personal search, explicit search.

There are multiple paths to information. Showing how the amount of click through on links, search and so on for tags. Search has a high percentage of click through, as does my tags. Community tags have a lower percentage of tag click through as compared to views.

Focus of this study:three groups - bookmarking behavior over time, different sharing (public versus private), focus on internal versus external. Looking at participation rates showed a continued increase in number of new users, with ~50% of unique posters over time. Unique posters are the number of people adding new terms to the tags versus people using existing tags. So about half the people actually add new items and new tags, the other half just use existing.

More people tag for internal resources, than external resources. They classified tags by topic, content and owner. Each user group used group based tags on both the internet and the intranet. Low percentage of private bookmarks. The private bookmarks had a very low number of tags, while the public bookmarks had a higher, closer to public internet level of tags.

Roles in Social Tagging: Publishers, Evangelists, Leaders.

The emerging role as the evangelist - this is a person who is trying to raise visibility of a topic through the use of tags. A self serving use, to draw attention to their own personal material.

Publishers are using tags to drive traffic to a particular set of resources.

Small team leaders are using tags to share resources within a team, so that the team can find resources. This is an additional, not only, method for doing this and it is done by convention, not thorough system uses.

Tag similarity in use ( within enterprise ) - terms that we expect to cluster together, do not when actually looked at. When they asked users why they used a different term for the tag. People fell into different groups - some agreed they should have used the alternative, some strongly felt that the terms were different, others were using them to drive search results, or they were thinking in terms of future use for finding.

Tagging games used to induce tag creation within the organization. Wordel.net has some interesting tag clouds.

Integrating tagging: tagging as integration
Mark Lindner

Is talking about the difference of linguistics in tagging.
Quick overview of integrationsim.
Community as macrosocial.
Towards integration.
Tagging as integration.
Integrationism.
Theory of linguistics and communication.
Opposed to segregation accounts
Spoke to tagging as a integration process that gives us the ability to bring together language. I did not understand how this presentation fit in with the overall panel.

Communication in Tagging: Collaborative Classification
Margaret Kipp

Tagging as a collaborative classification.
Tagging is often examined as a form of collaborative classification.
Multiple studies have examined the consensus shown by frequency graphs.
Studies have also looked at tagging as a form of user classification.
Or as personal information management.
The majority of tags are subject related. The other tag categories are affective, time and task tags, project tags, conference tags.
Most frequently used non subject related tags are : fun, toread.
Tagging as a discussion of about-ness.
The frequency graphs of tags shows convergence, but detailed examination shows that everyone is using very different tags, with a different sense of agreement.
Tagging is also used as a form of review or criticism. You see tags that are mini one word reviews of the site, like boring, stupid, interesting. This is an interesting use of tags, but is not a good candidate for information retrieval. Mixed with other terms and other uses, they may be more fruitful.

ASIS&T 2008 - understanding and supporting multi-session web tasks

2008-10-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

Bonnie MacKay of Dalhousie University is presenting on a study she completed as part of her PhD program.

Multi - session tasks are goal based, require more than one session to complete, may be expected or unexpected. An example of a multi-session task was the scheduling of the trip to ASIS&T.

The objectives of the research task was to identify the characteristics of multi-session tasks. To understand how users perform multi-session tasks, to determine tools or processes that might be a better way of completing these tasks and then developed three prototype tools to improve. The study was a diary study and a field study.

In 2006 Melanie Keller gave a similar talk on this same topic. I am hoping that this will expand upon her thoughts and findings.

The study resulted in three main suggestions for browsers tools for multi-session tasks.
1) Tool should keep a list of current multi-session tasks.
2) A reminder to support multi-tasking during web sessions.
3) Support multi-session tasks between sessions.

They created three protoype tools within Firefox.
First tool keeps track of your task, putting a reminder of the task you are working on in the tool bar.
Second tool automatically manages pages between sessions, highlighting the ones that are related to the task at hand in bright yellow.
The third tool added a to-do list with a reminder function to the browser. This third version included an archive function ( stores the data and the forms for future use), a tool to manage pages between sessions, a landmark feature to take the user to where they left off in the form.

The next step was to run a study with the prototypes, having participants use these prototypes. The study showed that the prototypes helped users stay on task during multi-session tasks. Interestingly, users were willing to trade off ease of use for features. The first prototype was the easiest to use, but prototype three was highest rated, due to the additional features of the third prototype.

ASIS&T 2008 - Concept Theory and the role of conceptual coherence in assessments of similarity

2008-10-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

Louise Spiteri of Dalhousie University.

The presentation is on how we determine similarity and difference. She began with a dog and cat conversation. From the perspective of a alien, the clear differences we can see between a cat and a dog, are not as clear without the same frame of reference.

The notion of similarity or likeness underlies most approaches used in the design of bibliographic classification systems. In its simplest sense, classification is the arranging of things according to likeness and unlikeness.

The presentation now goes into the different classification systems and theories, discussing the differences between the theories, and the drawbacks of each.

She has been researching better ways of applying attributes to Folksonomy by using facets that are salient to the end users. These facets would be related to the original tags, not a predetermined set of tags. This was the most interesting and applicable point in the presentation, and it came as a off handed comment without any further detail.

ASIS&T 2008 - Plenary Session

2008-10-26T11:21:00.000-07:00

Speakers are Genevieve Bell, Howard Rheingold, Andrew Keen.

Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist who works for Intel, on studies on how people use technology.

The many future of the internet. The intranet is more than just the technology. Democracy, transparency, openness and accessibility of all information are cultural values, but they are not everyone's values - nor are they any one area or locations values. They are unique to the internet.
We are at a pivot point of technology, as it moves off the PC and into the mobile area as well as consoles, and so on. These changes are impacting want can be done, and what we want to do with the internet. Applications are becoming more transacting, not immersive.

Interesting story on internet use in Africa. She spoke to a woman with no power, no PC and no mobile phone who used the internet every day. She had her son come in every morning, tell her about her incoming email and take her outgoing email. He then went and sent the email to her recipients. So even though she never used the internet herself, she uses it daily.
Bulk of the TV viewing on PC is done by women between 25 - 45, not the typical vision of a technology first adopter.

There are a number of examples she gives that demonstrate the new internet. In particular, there are more Chinese people on the net now, than American. This will never change, given birth rates. This means English is no longer the dominate language, which raises questions for translations as well as culture. There is a lot of issues that exist in Chinese and Hindu versus English, particularly as Chinese and Hindu are more poetic languages where words are often used for multiple meanings depending on the context, the simile, or the metaphor. Think Cockney Rhyming slang.
Infrastructure has a extraordinary impact on how people use and experience the internet. With people having the same speed up and down, people tend to submit more and when the speed down is faster than the speed up, people tend to consume more. Gives an example of iPlayer in the UK, which single-handedly degraded the internet for the entire UK due to demand for IP TV from BBC.

Talked to several different cultural clashes over application of technology, who wants to be in the conversation, what the conversation means.

Government, technology, society and religion all intersect in the application of internet and technology.

The things that worry us about technology have changed. We are now more worried about authorship, ownership, reputation, authenticity, access, digital literacy.

First challenge is there may never have been a single internet, but looking forward there are multiple different internets in the future - differentiated by access method, country, desires.

Second challenge is that there are people trying to get unplugged from technology. People consciously choosing to be disconnected.

Howard Rheingold begins the discussion response to Genevieve's presentation. We need to teach our children how to access content, and tell what content is valuable. Knowledge transfer is not about taking notes and spitting the notes back out on the test, but is instead about learning what you need to know to accomplish a task and survive in the world. Note taking doesn't automatically create that knowledge transfer.

Andrew Keen gives a response to Genevieve's presentation. He wonders how Intel wins on the basis of the information she presented. The internet is a philosophical movement. A book by Fred Turner called from Counter culture to cyberspace lays out the philosophical movement of the internet and its ideology.

The internet is not the real world. The real world is increasingly ugly. Battles are brewing on the internet, as an example the Chinese versus English internet. The real world is worse, there are people are losing their lives, losing their freedoms and losing their livelihood in the real world, and the internet is not helping.

Digital Fascism - similar to the industrial revolution, there are people who are disenfranchised by the information revolution. What will happen with these people?

ICKM 2008 - A taxonomy model for a strategic co-branding position

2008-10-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

Kuan-Chi Chang - graduate student Tamkang University
Discussed a taxonomy model he created to classify different co-branding situations.
Had objective indications and subjective indicators for evaluating the taxonomic term to be applied to the cobranding M&A.

The discussion around how to leverage the taxonomy information to determine in advance where culture and business factors are likely to cause a failure of the merger was more interesting, in my opinion, than the presentation.

ICKM 2008 - Search Fallacies

2008-10-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Jay Ven Eman - CEO of Access Innovations.
www.accessinn.com

Search - doesn't work!
People are spending more time looking for things, and less time analyzing the results of that time.

Mismatch between search software, audience and contents. Lacks the context of the environment.

The Holy Grail of computer science is understanding human language.

Taxonomic strategy can save search.

Taxonomy is like a map, giving the latitude and longitude, or like the Rosetta Stone.
Search is like a treasure map, fun - but not always accurate.

Taxonomies in action
www.mediasleuth.com
www.ask.com

Information strategy
User needs
Business drivers
Information flows
Metadata strategy
Taxonomy
Indexing
Structural elements
Promotion, advertising, training
Maintenance, upkeep

Information strategy must be done first!
Then shop for the search software.

Select search software with the features and functions that will drive your business.

ICKM 2008 - Integrating Folksonomies into cultural heritage digital collections: the challenges and opportunities of Web 2.0

2008-10-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

The speaker was Daniel Gelaw Alemneh of the University of Texas.

Daniel spent time defining Folksonomy and the advantages and disadvantages of Folksonomy. I've asked Daniel for his slides, and will incorporate his points if / when he sends them to me.

The question Daniel wanted to explore was "How do we work to bring together Folksonomy and taxonomy?" The concern of the classic taxonomist is that the weaknesses of Folksonomy will infect our taxonomies.

There are examples of libraries that have embraced Folksonomy, such as the PennTags system at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a library tagging system. Another example is the MBooks Collection builder, the University of Michigan's interface to allow students to create their own collections of books.

Commercial examples are Bibliocommons, a social discovery system for libraries and CiteUlike a social bookmarking site for academic system.

If we have these examples, can we be inspired by their work to better integrate folksonomies in our taxonomies?

We should also look at external tools that exploit the structure of the Folksonomy - FolkRank: a ranking algorithm for folksonomies.

ICKM 2008 - Open Source tools for Knowledge Management

2008-10-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

Study was completed by Anne Gregory and Dinesh Rathi. Dinesh Rathi presented the results.

They started specifically looking at small non profit organization. The challenges of knowledge management is the same in these organizations, but they have smaller budgets, smaller staff. The study worked with a single small NPO. They began with a knowledge audit to identify the existing knowledge and processes. The audit was done with a open ended interview to gather the information, identified significant gaps.

The organization lacked the organization and storage of digital and paper based documents, past activity details, any tools to organize dataset or sources. They lacked details on their volunteers, their donors, or a way to get details on the particular events. No past knowledge of process for permits.

Two components to KM solutions :
1) Physical Organization and storage system
2) Digital organization and storage system.

The team offered open source products, because there is no budget and no physical space.

4 key identifying information is required to be associated with each document.

Topic
Event, or type of event used for
Format
Title

Proposed a technology and tools based on:

Wiki
Provide an excellent means of organizing and sharing information.
Openness and flexibility of a Wiki helps with adding and editing the new content.
Supports version control.
Becomes the electronic list of all physical documents.
Centralized location for links to resources, FAQ, event planning details, and statistics.

Collaborative Writing and Data Manipulation tools
Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet.
Centralized single storage point.
Easy, secure access to documents.
Anywhere and anytime access.

On-line Bookmarking
On-line is a vital source of information.
Currently relevant website links reside on individual volunteers computer.
Moving to del.icio.us allows for sharing on-line tools and sources of information.
Bookmarks could be saved with consistent tagging.

On-line Multimedia Solution
Group takes lots of photos and videos, but are lost all the time.
Post photos on Flickr and videos on Youtube.
Add links and metadata along with descriptions stored in Wiki, so you can find them later.

On-line Forums, Blogs & Calendar
Continue to use the current on-line forums, as used currently.
A free blog with RSS capability for updates.
On-line calendar via Google or Yahoo for schedules.
Implementation.

The team recommended using these tools for the new content, and not to concentrate on reentering data.

The archive should be updated and moved to the new tools, when there is time and availability.

Core members will set the tone, and establish the new knowledge sharing culture.

Create good "how to" documentation for training volunteers for effective use of the tools.

Looking back at the event, this was about using free web tools, not open source tools. There are some concerns about the plethora of interfaces and tools that are recommended. The team will present the results of their recommendations at the next ASIS&T session.

ICKM 2008 - Knowledge Management The psychology of hearing and the sociology of listening

2008-10-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

Brenda Lloyd - Jones Professor of HR and organizational leadership

Goal
To identify contemporary stressors and their adverse impact on community members' overall sense of well being.

Use concepts of KM to explain the need for communities to be responsible for their growth and learning.

Suggest sharing professional knowledge on listening in communities - teach people to listen better.

Psychology of hearing - sometimes we hear without listening. People are heard, without being understood.
Sociology of listening - refers to studying the meaning of words and nonverbal behavior of others. Active behavior of understanding what you hear.
Community - set of interactions and human behaviors that have meaning and expectations.

Empowerment Theory: Increasing community empowerment
Sharing professional knowledge on listening in communities.
Teaching listening techniques as a method to create a community of support.

Society teaches and reinforces speaking, not listening.

Specific techniques taught were: Active listening, Empathic listening, Relationship listening.

ICKM 2008 - Towards a consensus on KM capabilities concepts: evidence from a Delphi study

2008-10-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Jean-Pierre Booto - Professor of IT, owner IBI Canada.

He defined three pillars of discussion within knowledge management, KM process, KM infrastructure and KM skills.

The goal of his study was to define these three pillars and to determine which terms we use in KM best fit under each pillar. The entire scope would be considered as KM capabilities.

Study found that there is consensus on KM process and KM infrastructure, but no consensus on KM skills.

He gave a detailed overview of the Delphi process and his criteria for selecting the experts.

More interestingly, he described a Capacity Maturity Model he is developing for Knowledge Management. It is currently only available in French, but he promised to forward it to me for translation.

ICKM 2008 - Experience in knowledge management measurement: Ecopetrol Story

2008-10-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

The speaker is Sonia Castro a 21 year employee of Ecopetrol, with a master degree in Chemical Engineering.

Company moved from a State run monopoly into a independent company. As part of this change they moved to a single KM platform.
4 questions:
1) What is the technology?
2) What do we want to incorporate in the company - what are our principles?
3) Who does what?
4) How do we communicate?

Created a new single corporate program to achieve the answers to these questions, with a new set of tools.

Started with the premises that knowledge sustainability is not a fact, but a process.

5 steps to the process of sustaining knowledge.
1) Agree that there is a better practice - something needs to be changed.
2) Update and develop a the better practice, including documentation
3) Update people's competencies
4) Implementation
5) Sustain - systemic training.

This process helps identify measurable instances. These were used to develop a model, with landmarks and measurement of those landmarks. Strong measurement process, with verification and dashboard for following the process.

They have now implemented story telling as an additional method of gathering data.

Conclusion
How to measure the impact on business of KM is still a concern.
Corporate policy has made it less difficult to implement an efficiency process measurement.
Having a simple and daily model allows people to share a common language which facilitates the communication between the business and the KM group, or the strategy and the tactics.

ICKM 2008 - Knowledge Management at Continental - an integration story of former Siemens VDO

2008-10-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

Speaker is Christoph Hechler, a former Seimens VDO knowledge management professional now with Continental in a Project Management and Knowledge Management position.

Need for KM at Continental
Available knowledge for everyone: in time, in place, in quality.
The decentralized organization needs a central knowledge management system.

Started in this role because he saw, in his former position, the problems of not having the right information at the right time. An example he gave is that he was in the middle of a study and discovered that another group had done the same study, on the same microcontroller, a month previously. This could have been solved with a better KM system.

ExAS is the name of the program - Excellence Achieved by specialists.

Three main systems:

Corporate Yellow Pages. This is a people page, that is entered by the user.

Communities of practices - controlled by the organization, limited number of communities based on knowledge review of request, similar to our CHS process. This is deliberate because he has seen uncontrolled communities of practice leading to too many communities on a particular subject matter.

Wiki - very new product for them. Having a cultural problem, German company and they are uncomfortable with the open nature of wikis.
None of the content is anonymous - when you upload information your name is attached, thereby helping ensure a good level of professionalism.

Specifics of Corporate Yellow Pages
ExAS contacts - search engine delivers relevant profiles, contact data, specialists profile, experts profile. About 6,000 of 150,000 have completed this so far. Information presented is similar to our planned P2P pages.

Specifics of a community
A community is a group of people with a common interest in a defined subject. Who are working on business relevant topics, exchanging information and knowledge using one common language, providing a set of useful documents, beyond organizational boundaries of time zones, with a motivation to develop best practices and increase core competencies between members.
Every community is closed, you have to apply for membership.
The company uses English as their lingua franca. Even though they are a German company - English is their company language. Functions included within a community include: discussion, announcements, search on community (includes full document search) and a subscription model.
Interestingly, they have a consistent left hand navigation for every community.
~ 100 communities at this time.

Corporate WIKI

Sharepoint platform.
8000 pages so far.
Links to norms, standards, guidelines, and other documents.
Glossaries.
Terminology.

Next steps
Develop a single overarching environment.

Lessons Learned
Lessons learned is a tool that gathers the experience from each project within the company. Instituted a structured process to avoid two issues, 1) unstructured data and 2) not generally applicable lessons or too simple lessons.

The process begins when the lesson is entered by the user, it is then forwarded to a expert in that area, only then added to the lessons learned.
The process is similar to our Knowledge review process.

I wonder if we talked to our "knowledge" as lessons learned if it would have more resonance and impact on our users?

ICKM 2008 - 2nd day keynotes

2008-10-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

First speaker had an interesting way of viewing knowledge management.

He views knowledge management as the curation of resources, the design of spaces for information retrieval, the examination of the value of information in the discovery process.

This different perceptive leads to interesting set of responsibilities:

The protection of citizens' rights to access and share information.
The analysis of how appropriate information access benefits a society.
The support of dynamic ecologies for learning, wherever they are.
The examination of policies and procedures governing access and use.
The examination of the value of information in the discovery process.
The curation of data collections for quality hand detail over time.
The design of data human interfaces that enable exploration.
The organization and presentation of data for exploration and use.

The second speaker is Tom Froehlich from Kent State University.
He reviewed the Information Architecture Knowledge Management program at Kent State University. He discussed the program, its challenges and its growth.

He discussed some of the interrelations between tacit and implicit and explicit knowledge. This impacts directly to knowledge "transfer" in a university course. They are trying to change this by aiming the courses to be 1/4 theory and 3/4 practice.

The material he covers is not as applicable to us, although it is an interesting perspective on the education Sarah Bond and Jason Richardson have gained.

ICKM 2008 - End of Day One

2008-10-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

That wraps up the first day of the event. Overall, I found it very stimulating. I have a number more session posts, but I am headed out for dinner and don't want to sit here copying and pasting. I'll do that later.

I found the PM and KM sessions right at the end to be a bit simplistic in their view point. They stressed the lack of collaboration in a typical project. I find that the projects we run in the KWeb are very collaborative, without any of the overwhelming bureaucracy discussed.

I did think that the project recap / post mortem conducted with video and audio taped discussions was a good idea. I wonder if we should add something like that to our process.

The metadata / tagging discussions were a bit of a let down, to be honest. The titles sounded very exciting, but the actual work they were doing was not as interesting. The data on China and tagging will be useful. The taxonomy management reports described were interesting, and could be a good GMMS point release at some time - although they may already be in there.

I have to say that I really enjoyed the keynote speakers. They both gave very different takes on knowledge management.

Looking forward to tomorrow. There look to be some good sessions on communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing, knowledge management strategies and around managing the challenges of complexity in knowledge management.

One of the very nice things we received from the conference is a book, hard bound and clearly of nice quality, with the papers the talks are based on.

It is interesting to compare this to the IA Summit. At the IA Summit everyone has a PC out, there are powerstrips everywhere and wireless is free. Here there are no provisions for people with lap tops. The IA Summit blogs the conference officially, all of the decks are on slideshare right after the speaker is finished and the entire conference is podcast as well.

Here, I need to beg for the slides, the handouts are higher quality and there are few blogs on the conference. Very interesting how this highlights the differences between the two conferences.

ICKM 2008 - Quality issues in Metadata Management

2008-10-23T16:24:00.000-07:00

Maintaining Quality Metadata: toward effective metadata management.
University of North Texas library Digital Initiatives program.
Started a number of collaborative projects with other state libraries and museums.
e.g. CyberCemetery
Congressional Research service archive
World War Poster Archive
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
http://www.library.unt.edu for others.

Built a metadata management sustem to establish a standard for all of these different tools. Started with a qualified Dublin Core based descriptive metadata.

Saw two aspects of digital library data quality:

The quality of the data in the objects themselves
The quality of the metadata associated with the objects.

Focus on metadata quality.

Poor metadta quality:

Ambiguities
Poor recall
Poor precision, Inconsistency of search results

Most common errors

Incorrect data: due to letter transposition, letter omission, letter insertion, letter substitution or mis-strokes.
Missing data: elements and values not present at all.
Local requirements
Objects heterogeneity
Granularity
Functionality

Other issues they faced were around the collaborative requirements.

Very diverse user group
Interoperability
Digital rights issues
Training issues - necessary expertise to create and manage metadata

Metadata quality most effected by their knowledge of the source, and their knowledge of the methodology.

All of these issues led to a metadata quality assurance mechanisms and tools.

Two main tools:
pre injust - metadata creation tools, validate the mandatory elements, establish templates, use a controlled vocabularies (UNTLBS)

These templates are applied from the outside onto the content. Uses a web template creator, a outside set of rules and ability to link each field out to guidelines for how to apply them.

Have different templates for each collection, and a set of 5 attributes that are applied to all entries regardless of the collection.

post injust - metadata valuation tools. These tools examine all items in a collection and identify which metadata fields that are not being completed. This allows them to target training and so on. These tools give them a look at how the metadata is being applied. Depending on the quality of the metadata they can establish different services on each metadata fields. Areas tracked are null values, records added per time period, by a clickable map of Texas, clicking on area brings back all items submitted in that area, tag cloud based on terms.

To implement this, be sure to look at the level of quality required, the nature of your gap and how to close it, compromise when needed.
Total size of collection is ~90,000 items.

ICKM 2008 - Is KM Dead?

2008-10-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

The presenter defines KM as the process of creating the same set of tools and practices that allow for good research for the knowledge worker. This is an interesting perspective on KM, as it moves the focus off submission and on to the process of using knowledge.

One way he defends that KM is not dead, is situations of the term within articles and publications. For Business, this does not look like a fad. Fads (BPR, TQM) show a hump like curve on this chart. Business still looks like it is climbing, with some peaks and valleys, but not a hump. Education shows it as a fad, so it is not catching on in the education arena. Why? Because they are already doing this today.

ICKM 2008 - Accountability, Professionalism and Performance in KM

2008-10-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

The second Keynote speaker at this conference was Patrick Lambe, president of iKMS in Singapore.

He addressed the need of the knowledge management as a discipline to mature as a practice. To demonstrate what he means, he spent a good amount of time defining the terms and how they work in other disciplines, and how they do not work within knowledge management.

Starting with performance, he defined it in two ways, first around operational performance, second around strategic performance. Operational performance deals with consistency, coordination, compliance and cost management. Strategic performance is around intelligence, innovation and capacity building. In each case, he challenged knowledge managers to tie their work back to their companies operational and strategic performance. In real ways, not soft targets.

He explored professionalism through three questions: Is there a coherent practice community? Is there a professional ethic? Is there a reference standard? Comparing knowledge management to medicine, he placed our practice in the middle ages, when doctors never looked at a human body. They had no coherent practice, no reference standard. He then talked to a survey iKMS completed of knowledge managers, showing that on average people spend less than 2 years in the role, are offered no education and seldom come into the role with education in knowledge management. These underscore the lack of true professionalism in knowledge management as a discipline.

When talking to accountability, he stated that it is inconceivable that a knowledge manager would be held accountable for their failures. The excuse that KM is too complex to measure, or that we are infrastructure, not front line are just that excuses.

We need to be accountable for our work.
We need to build a history of experience, with repeatable actions and situations, and incorporate feedback loops for learning.

We suffer from something he called the " teleportation syndrome". People come in, then leave. They become knowledge managers without experience, without training and are asked to go ahead and get on with it. By the time they learn the job, start to see results from their first changes, they move on to a new environment or a new role.

Building performance requires:

scrutiny of failures
sensitivity to the detail
observability of practice
observability of outcomes
a focus on the outcome
and rewarding based on performance.

Not performance on measures like through put, number of items submitted, and other KM process based measures. Instead, performance based on KM's ability to impact the business.

Building professionalism requires:

continuity
progression
succession
authority
integrity
sanctions
visibility
developing ongoing relationships with other KM professionals

To mature knowledge management we need to:

Foster career stability and progression
Accelerate the study of the practice via the community
Incentives for peer learning and peer review
Disincentives for theory driven research
Recognize the neighboring practices and disciplines
Agree and set standards for knowledge management

ICKM 2008 - EMR systems and KM

2008-10-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

EMR - electronic medical records.
Problem - low adoption rate of the tools.
Why? assumptions are that Doctor's will not use the tools.
Study shows that the tools are designed without input from the users of the systems. This leads to a system that does not match the Doctor's needs and normal work habits. Additionally, there is a lack of standardization and interoperability.
Recommend that future EMR tools developed using collaborative design.
Collaborative design includes:
Collaboration
Knowledge Sharing and interaction
Sense - making by community.
This leads to tools that are accepted by the community.
Process is based on Open and in-context design, leveraging a small core group, using synchronous communication and asynchronous interaction.
This process is predicted to enable a lower cost, standard product which was trusted by the users as they were intimately involved with the design.
User engagement includes a sense of mutuality, pro-active knowledge for physicians, reducing medical errors.

ICKM 2008 - Knowledge Management in Health Care

2008-10-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

This is a case study on using KM in Health Care, specifically diabetes care.
Started when a physician looking for solutions for improving health care. Formed a interdisciplinary team with Rutgers University to develop a theory based practice. They developed a social and technical model of KM, looking to impact both the process management and the social relationships.
Phase 1 : modeling and taxonomy
Phase 2 : Case Studies and Hypothesis Formulation
Phase 3 : Pilot & Full study
Theoretical base - Theory of reasoned actions - what factors predict a physician's intention to perform a behavior. Theory of planned behavior - how do physicians perceive their ability to perform a certain behavior.
People's expectations, and the expectations of their social network, influence their behavior. People's environment influences their behavior.
Research sample-> 4 health care practices located in NJ. They were interviewed, observed and surveyed. These observations were used to develop hypothesis.
The 4 were broken out into high performing and low performing groups. One key differentiation was the introduction of the researcher into the organization. The high performing practices introduced the researchers through a series of scheduled meetings and in a organized way. The low performing groups did not have a organized, in person introduction. Instead, the researcher was introduced in a impersonal note included in the pay packet.
Other differentiating factors were: use of manuals and procedures, meetings, face to face communication. High performing practices use manuals and procedures, have less formal meetings and more ad hoc meetings, and use face to face communication more frequently.
Found that Knowledge sharing is being done in practices, but it is not being done well in even the high performing office. So even within the high performing practices, there was not a consistency of practice and procedures. Your level of care varied greatly from one doctor to the next.
Interestingly, coders were not told which practices were high or low performing, but were able to predict them based on KM practices.
The work they are doing indicates that the Doctor's are trained to work as individuals, not as a group. The plan is to intervene through practice changes, actual changes will be measured via medical records, customer surveys and KM throughput measures.

http://www.scils.retgers.edu/~clairemc
http://knowledgeinstitute.retugers.edu

ICKM 2008

2008-10-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

I am attending the International Conference on Knowledge Management in Columbus, Ohio. This conference covers many different areas in KM, extending from the theoretical to the practical. I'll be posting on the sessions as I attend them. The key note speakers really showed this dichotomy. The first speaker was a CEO of a consulting company, talking about a new KM system his firm has created. The second speaker was a KM theoretician, who spoke about the need for accountability, performance, and professionalism within KM.

not as radical as I thought. . .

2008-07-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_V

It looks like my boss might have been surfing the web . . .

Generation V

2008-07-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

My boss has a new buzz word he is using "Generation V" . He sees that there is a new class of people, a generation not bounded by age or birth - but instead bounded by the experience of using computers. This is an interesting idea. There are people who are active users of the Internet, blogging, social networking tools, and so on. There are other people who are not, and likely never will be. This set of differences is larger than the similarities that might exist across a age group.

Any other opinions on this concept?

Improving internal search

2008-04-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

I think that it is critical that our people have tools to find information inside and outside our organization. The more high quality information we can place in the hands of the practitioner, the better they can do their job. I believe that intranet search is an area where we can improve on this capability. The first step towards improving is to measure where we are today. If we do not know where we are, we cannot know if we have improved. We have taken that baseline. We have started to "tweak" our environment to improve on that baseline. As we prove out improvements in the lab, we are moving those out to production as Beta implementations. As improvements are proved out in Beta they will be moved into production search.

How did we take that baseline? The standard for measuring search is based on a subjective, human understanding of relevance. The standard was set by the NIST. The NIST holds an annual event where they test and tweak search. They use a standard set of content, fairly small. They have experts evaluate the content and determine the ideal documents within that standard set. They then use complex queries supplied by those experts to bring back documents from the search engine. They measure how many documents within a number of results are from the ideal set - precision. They measure how many ideal documents can be found by the search engine - recall. This seemed like a reasonable process, so that is how we measured our impact on the search engine.

We established a test environment – a new instance of the search engine, indexing the production content. We asked for volunteers to act as our experts. We asked them to establish an area of expertise for themselves. We then had them identify the "top" 25 documents within that area of expertise, given a query that they suggested. This became our ideal set. We used that ideal set to measure precision and recall at 3, 10 and 25 results.

Usually search engine vendors apply more than one approach to search and combine them together to create a relevance ranking. Generally, the various approaches to calculating relevancy - Vector, Probability, Language Model, Inference Networks, Boolean Indexing, Latent Semantic Indexing, Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and Fuzzy Set Retrieval - are all capable of retrieving a good set of documents with a query. On a similar set of content, with a similar query, they will each retrieve the same documents in about the same order. The difference comes in with the work done to "tweak" the engine to particular content collections.

One thing that can improve search relevance is a set of known good documents for a particular query presented either as a "Best Bets" or used behind the scenes as a "golden sample" to refine relevancy. This presupposes that your queries follow a Zipf distribution and you can target most of your users by tuning a relatively small set of queries. Unfortunately our current search logs do not follow a Zipf distribution. Our top 100 queries do not represent 10% of our total queries. To reach a 80% penetration rate we would need to generate 20,000 separate "golden samples". This is a tuning method that is dependant on the Zipf distribution to make it effective. When your logs are flat, like ours are, it does not scale.

We are also investigating other search technologies and evaluating them on our current content to see how well they retrieve documents with the same queries. What we are seeing is that these other search engines are not significantly better against our content than our existing implementation, according to our measures of precision and recall. What other search engines offer is significantly improved tools for tweaking the search engine based on our content collection.

I hope all of the above has been of interest to you. I have found it interesting to compare vendor claims to reality as we have been working through these projects. The difference is quite large. Nothing is ever simple, or easy. I'd rather have a "silver bullet", but recent evidence shows that one does not exist. The only silver bullet is to invest hard work, pay attention to the details and persevere. I think improving search is worth hard work, attention to detail and perseverance.

Response time effect on our users with Search

2008-03-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

Looking across the industry, we see some consistant information about system response time.

Generally speaking, when a page takes more than 8 seconds to launch there is a significant impact on the users perception of quality.

Neilsen says in this article:

The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:
0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

So - what is your ideal search response time?

Usability Techniques

2008-02-08T14:42:00.001-08:00

We have a number of core techniques we employ in our usability program. This post is a brief overview of the techniques. In future posts, I'll dwell on each technique in more detail and discuss how we employ each on a project. The three core techniques are Card Sorting, Expert Review and Lab Testing.

Card Sorting – uncovering the mapping of the computer display of information and the user’s conceptual model of the information; each concept is written on a card and the users sort the cards into piles.

Expert Review – a formal review conducted by usability specialists according to common, pre-established usability principles.

Lab Testing – while being observed by usability specialists, users attempt to complete scripted tasks, which take advantage of the functionality of the system.

What do users want from a search engine?

2008-02-08T14:38:00.000-08:00

This post is going to be just a quick bulleted list of what I know my users want from a enterprise search engine, based on my study of our search logs, usability studies, profiles, recent research in the field, information retrevial studies and some conference presentations. If you have additional suggestions, please include them as comments.

A single search box, persistently placed on all pages. Wide enough to avoid typos.
Google - everyone knows google and wants internal search to be google. This doesn't mean the google appliance. This means quick, accurate and comprehensive search. Quick means sub 5 second response time. Accurate means the right document in the first 3 documents. Comprehensive means every possible document - regardless of which firm silo created it, regardless of which technology holds it, regardless of if "it" is a word document, a zip file, a email, a document on their hard drive or a documentum folder.
Some kind of advanced search, even though they will not use it.
An ability to narrow the search to specific areas of content that is contextual to them. Sometimes this is content types, like Policies, People, Sites. Other times this is my country, my service line, my language, my industry - taxonomy, but without having to call it taxonomy.
For the tool to allow them to type in "How do I do an internal audit?" and bring back documents on audit methodology. This doesn't have to mean natural language queries. If you ignore the "How do I do an" and the "?" that query is "internal audit". The system has to ignore ? and "How do I do" to run correctly. But it does mean that there needs to be a relationship between internal audit and audit methodology.
People expect the system to find things using an - not a PHRASE and not a . People looking for Risk Management in Technology Companies in the UK type in Risk Management Technology UK. The tool needs to understand that behavior and correct for it.
People expect that the system will correct their spelling.
People expect that documents with some of the words they searched for in the title will be more relevant. That documents with some of the words in the summary will be more relevant. That the system will know that TAS and Transaction Advisory Services are the same exact thing, even though they are not to the computer. People expect that more recent documents will be relevant, except when they are looking for older documents - and they want the tool to know the difference.

Those are some of the things that I know people want from search. What do you want from search?

How do you evaluate a enterprise search engine?

2008-02-08T14:32:00.000-08:00

I am not going to claim this is the only way to evaluate a enterprise search engine. But, early on in my search program we started thinking about how we could measure our progress with search. How could we tell if a search engine tweak caused the results to improve, or get worse, or stay the same? Seems like a simple question, no? How do you evaluate a search engine?

Companies have been selling search engines for decades. IBM started with a product called STAIRS in 1960. Given that long history, you would think there would be a simple answer - do x, look at y and if it is larger than z, you have a good search engine. Evaluating a search engine is actually a complex question. Search is a very context sensitive behavior. In a knowledge environment, the documents that are of interest to you are not the same as the documents that are of interest to me. Search really can only be evaluated within a specific context for a specific user.

There is, however, a standard for search evaluation. The standard is based on a subjective, human understanding of relevance. The standard was set by the NIST. The NIST holds an annual event where they test and tweak search. They use a standard set of content, fairly small. They have experts evaluate the content and determine the ideal documents within that standard set. They then use queries supplied by those experts to bring back documents from the search engine. They measure how many documents within a number of results are from the ideal set - precision. They measure how many ideal documents can be found by the search engine - recall. This seemed like a reasonable process, so that is how we measured our impact on the search engine.

We established a test environment – a new instance of the search engine, indexing the production content. We asked for volunteers to act as our experts. We asked them to establish an area of expertise for themselves. We then had them identify the “top” 25 documents within that area of expertise, given a query that they suggested. This became our ideal set. We used that ideal set to measure precision and recall at 3, 10 and 25 results.
We also established another way of measuring the impact of our changes. We asked for real users to tell us how we are doing – have we improved, declined or stayed about the same - by creating a Beta site.

From this testing we determined that we could improve relevancy, and that these improvements would be noticible to the end user.

What is usability?

2008-02-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

Usability is a process for measuring and improving the user's experience with a web site or application. Within the KWeb team, Usability begins with a focus on users’ needs, tasks, and goals. Usability requires that you change your mind set, and spend more time on initial research and requirements. Instead of starting with the design of the system, you start by identifying your target audience and observing them as they use an application to accomplish their tasks. You use this research to identify what the users needs are, what they want to accomplish, how their environment affects their behavior and identifying their priorities.
This process creates an emphasis on iterative design process. You need to develop applications in a prototype form, test the application with the end users – have them try to accomplish tasks using your prototype. Once you see the pain points, change the prototype to address those pain points and test again. Through a series of iterations you develop a product that solves real end user’s problems in a simple and intuitive way.
One way to describe a usable system is that it is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to explain and hard to forget. Think of a tool, software or hardware, that you enjoy using – which works well. Usability is a way of developing new tools that hit that sweet spot. It all comes back to measures – in order to make effective change you have to know where you are, know the effect of your changes and have a target goal in mind. We target improvements in task completion, task time, user satisfaction as measured by the System Usability Scale and a reduction in way finding errors.

The great search experiment

2008-02-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Back in 2007 I tried an experiment with some coworkers to see how well other search engines worked. We wanted to know, from experience, how well faceted search, guided navigation, search presentation layers and so on were in day to day life. If you are interested, you can see the entire experience here: http://30daysgooglefree.blogspot.com/. In the end, we determined that if the search engine gives you a good document on your first page of results, you won't need these other search tools. If it does not, then you will not see a great improvement.

I was a bit disappointed, really.