Help! My file won't fit through the internet's tubes....

We've all faced this problem... because of course, the internet isn't something you can dump things on, it's a series of tubes. And boy does that cause problems when you need to transfer a dump truck-sized file, and it won't fit... (bonus image: person trying to stuff a file folder down those hamster play scapes. Funny!)

Solution! vdropbox.com. It's a nifty little app built by one of the mavens (If you can guess which one I'll let you use the app for free.) Ok the app is actually free. But if you can guess the maven, I'll be really impressed--how's that for a reward? My impression.

Anyway, vdropbox basically does everything FTP does for you, but in any easy format that doesn't involve using anything but the intertube. Just upload your file and indicate who should know about the upload. Your friend/colleage/etc. receives a notice that the file is waiting for them - they just click and download. Easy stuff.

vdropbox.com - let us know what you think.

Obvious, but useful

When I'm working on a new idea, or a usability issue, I find the best person to ask is a person in your client's target demographic.

It's a simple little trick, and it works like a charm.

Ie, if I say to you (example from MBA accounting class, credits to Dr. Granof):

"I'm interested in bonds."

And you are a:

criminal	you think:	bail bonds
investor	you think:	government bonds
baseball fanatic	you think:	barry
fetishy type	you think:	you get my point...

So... if I find myself trying to sort out "what message" or "what placement of this element" or even "what sites should I advertise on," the simplest thing to do is think of your target demographic, find a few of them, and talk to them.

Primary research can be as easy, and as inexpensive, as a cup of coffee.

jakob says, "I'll take mine in vanilla"

I've been seeing a few
posts lately that claim that Nielson is against Web 2.0. I don't really think that's the case... I think he's against most everything when used frivolously (and in his definition, the threshold between frivolous and necessary is reached very quickly).

From his site:

This is not to say that there's no role for new technology. We're currently working with a company that's placing an extremely complicated application online. They can't do this with good usability unless they use several "rich UI" tricks. But that's an application, and a big one to boot. For 90% of websites, it's more important to focus on communicating clearly, whether they're e-commerce sites, corporate sites, government sites, or non-profit sites.

And that's the rub. So many sites are just done so poorly, that slapping some community features in them isn't going to save them or make them places people want to visit.

User first. Bells and whistles later.

Ethics, Connections, and Power to the People

I just spent 3 days in an MBA seminar designed to teach us things we should know in our future careers but weren't important to appear in the regular class curriculum. Guess what one of those classes was? No come on, don't read ahead. Guess. You got it, right up there with "Executive Wellness" - we had a fluffy seminar on business ethics.

You get a B!

It quickly became clear that many of my classmates don't spend a lot of time either thinking about or pondering ethics. This may be because they don't encounter ethically challenging issues very often. Or, it may be that their religion gives them a code to live by. Whatever it is, the time we had clearly wasn't enough - as one classmate shouted out the spine chilling proclamation, "well if it's legal, then it must be ethical." That's pretty par for the course in business today. Well actually - it's more like "it's ethical if you don't get caught and you can rationalize it to the people that need to know what you're up to." "Legal" is just a technicality.

Ok, watch this. Now I'm going to connect this to Web 2.0. No really, I can do it. Hang tight!

In a world where horrific ethical breaches barely make your stock price waver (HP) and you can clearly get away with a lot for a long time and get very rich doing so (WorldComm, Enron), and just about everyCorp is under investigation for accounting creativity of some sort or another... it PAYS not to get too connected to people. It pays to only see the numbers. Creativity in the books means someone is getting more while someone is getting less. As long as you can keep it "us" and "them" and you don't see the people you're screwing around as people with lives and their own financial pressures (I'm seeing those Enron people walking to their cars holding their boxes of possessions), then well, you can do whatever you want to to "maximize shareholder value." But it's the connections that really are the rub.

And the Web 2.0 world allows us to bring those connections to bear in some important ways.

1. It's no longer just the companies that have a voice on the internet. We all do. The presses are in the hands of the people! If you screw me over, or I think you're doing something you shouldn't, I might blog about it. I might comment on someone else's blog about it. And then people will know. And we'll all talk about it. And the media will know... and then you'll be asked some hard questions... and then....

2. Because everyone has a voice, and they talk about what happened inside their companies, we can identify cues that something bad might be happening to us.

3. Because we all have a voice, companies hear us. The marketplace hears us.

Whether companies choose to connect with "us" or not, Web 2.0 has allowed "us" to connect with each other. And that's made us stronger. A blogger onslaught can have the strength of a financially mild yet immediate and VERY public class action suit. And that hurts companies where they feel it most.

Connections = power. Connections in business = good. Connections make it easier to get things done.

Tune in tomorrow, when I talk about Burning Man again.

Let's Get Web 101 Right First

You know, before everyone goes jumping over to "Web 2.0," I'd suggest getting some basics right, like making sure you know how to set the field focus. I mean really, is it too much to ask a programmer to put my cursor in the right place, when the entire purpose of the login form is for me to enter information? C'mon, people.

The Statesman form above is just one of a ridiculous number of examples of usability violations in web applications. Call me crazy, but when I work on usability for an application, this is one of the first things I look at. I'm keyboard driven. When you tell me I have to enter information on the next page, I'm ready to type. Do they not teach this stuff?

[A word before we get to today's topic. We contributors have agreed to post once a week, and that will be about all I'll be able to manage for awhile. I come home from work with all sorts of ideas stirring around in my head, but I'm also brain-dead and dead tired, so writing is going to happen after I've had a day to recover. I start with this caveat in case there are any expectations of immediacy. With that said, we're becoming very web 2.0 at work, and there's a lot to say because we are currently undergoing a complete overhaul.]

I have a few soapboxes at work; I stand on them a lot as we go through the process of redesigning our web site. One of them is that we need to support our technical community in two ways:

1. providing them with information about our systems so they know:
• how to implement them in their specialized environments (creating capability)
  
• what processes we follow for making decisions or changes (creating trust)
  
2. enabling them to share their extensive information with each other and with us (creating community)

Historically, we have very little information available for them. We are a black box. There's some information out there, but someone typically has to direct you to it. There's no findability, and there's no link to what is available from our product pages.

What's interesting is that I get a lot of support for the idea of providing better findability for the information that will create capability. Some aren't sure of the idea of creating community. I think this has two causes. We do have a few in our customer base who like nothing better to take potshots. They lie in wait for the opportunity to arise. The other cause is a fear, I believe, that people will not participate. I'm not too worried--we have good participation on our mailing lists, and I think we can translate that to forums and community generated content.

Where I run into resistance (fear) is creating trust by opening up the black box. We run centralized IT services (network, phone, security, etc.) that others can and often must use. They can also run some of their own services. We have a lot of power, and we can make things difficult for people, oftentimes inadvertently (these usually end up being labeled "communication problems," but that's another post). That makes people upset and more likely to take potshots.

So, we open it up. Listening to our folks complain about the complaints they get and talking to customers tells me that this is what we need to do. As we enter the content phase of the web site redesign project, we will integrate that at several levels of the site--mission level, SLAs, policies, product/service descriptions, and more. Exposing information creates trust.