Posts filed under 'Information Architechture'
É o primeiro de vários eventos que o SAPO irá organizar fora de ‘casa’ e abertos a todos os que desejem participar, que é o mesmo que dizer que a entrada é gratuita.
O primeiro SAPO Unplugged é já na próxima semana em na Reitoria da Universidade de Aveiro e o tema escolhido foi Usabilidade, um tema que consideramos ser hoje um dos mais importantes para o nosso trabalho enquanto portal web.
Por isso convido todos os interessados a juntarem-se a nós, e aproveito para vos deixar algumas referências sobre os respectivos oradores:
Vemo-nos por lá 
May 13th, 2008
I’ve been working on a presentation about a special aspect of interface design: the need for PLAY! Boring interfaces don’t go far! And we as Humans have this inner desire for play so the more engaging a service/site is the better especially on the web where our attention span is so scarce!
Although the hard core of the presentation content is done (I’ve made a demo of it at Tecnonov last Saturday), and I’ll be posting it online in a couple of days, but the thing is that I would love to enrich it with a lot of good and bad examples of interface design! My Request for Help here is precisely for that, I would love to hear from your most loved or hated interface designs that you have to work everyday! Please drop me an email with a screenshot and why you actually that particular ’strong’ feeling about it! I promise to give full acknowledge of each submission if it actually makes it to final presentation! 
Email: pedro (.) custodio (at) gmail (.) com
April 8th, 2008
Aqui no blog o silêncio tem sido rei! Enfim, muito por causa do trabalho confesso, em particular pelo facto de desde o mês passado ser o novo responsável no
SAPO pela Qualidade e Usabilidade. Não é tarefa fácil e outros houve que já tiveram esta pasta e em boa verdade desbravaram muito do caminho que agora me é proposto percorrer. Sem perder muito tempo em explicações e em termos gerais passa por integrar um processo de qualidade no actual processo de desenvolvimento que já existe dentro do
SAPO! Só posso dizer que é de facto uma tarefa monstruosa e não é de longe ‘pêra doce’ como se costuma dizer, mas nada como um desafio, certo?
A propósito deste tema, ontem a convite da
Associação de Profissionais de Usabilidade (APPU) fiz uma apresentação no
Seminário de Usabilidade 2008.
A apresentação, até por ser um projecto tão recente foi um bocadinho dar a conhecer aquilo em que estamos a trabalhar em termos de usabilidade (já que era de usabilidade que ali estávamos a tratar) e nesse sentido dei o meu testemunho sobre o processo de integração da usabilidade enquanto factor de peso na qualidade e como é que conseguimos integra-la na já complicada ‘equação’ que é o processo de desenvolvimento de software. Isto é tudo novidade, pelo que não vale a pena falar em sucessos garantidos ou regras de ouro ou sequer dizer que no SAPO somos especialistas nestas matérias, não o somos! Mas estamos a trabalhar a sério para o sermos! Por isso a apresentação acaba por ser um resumo e uma apresentação de algumas das ideias que estamos a usar e uma prova que o simples facto de termos iniciado este caminho já é um sinal de mudança no sentido certo! Digo eu, claro!
Sem mais demoras, aqui estão os slides. No final deste post encontram alguns links para os materiais que eu refiro durante a apresentação:
Documentos anexos:
This blog as been more than quite and the major reason (besides the usual tons of things I get myself involved with) is the project I’m writing about in this post: since last month I’m responsible for Quality and Usability at
SAPO, an Herculean task to re-think and integrate Quality on the already existing software development process. Big indeed, but then again, there’s nothing like a challenge, right?
This post is about just this, and taking the fact that yesterday following an invitation from
APPU I gave a presentation during the
2008 Usability Seminar on the subject, in particular what we’re trying to achieve with the overall quality process. Being an Usability centered event I focused mainly on the usability part of the overall quality process and gave a testimony on how we’re integrating the U factor on the quality process. Much of this work is just starting so I won’t pretend I’m an expert or that we at
SAPO have loads of experience is this matters… as many people would agree there’s a lot of work ahead and even more that desperately need a change. My feeling about it, is that by starting this process and posing the questions we’re already changing in the right direction
So without further due, here’s the slides. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find some links for the materials I mention on the slides:
Supplemental Materials:
March 26th, 2008
It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’s Twitter / jaiku feeds.
See you back in October!
February 29th, 2008
As promised, here are the materials from the workshop I gave out yesterday at LIFT 08 about Online Communities Design Patterns. The presentation as I’ve said before is still a work in progress since I’ve started it for Web2Expo Berlin last November, so they share quite a lot in common.
If you’re interested, you can get the FULL VERSION of the presentation in PDF or you can simply watch the Design Patterns part on SlideShare (sorry, but the 30Mb limit on SlideShare wouldn’t let me post it in it’s full extent):
I’ve also prepared a Patterns Matrix that basically categorizes the patterns in four different classes that you can use to test or plan your own community according to the patterns use or misuse:
- Community Support Patterns: Registration, Login, Welcome Area , User Profile, Users Lists, Buddy’s List, Exit / Suspend;
- Group Support Patterns: Invitations, Shared Artifacts, Reputation, Voting;
- Communication Support Patterns: Messaging, Comments, Chat, Forums;
- Awareness Support Patterns: Neighbors, Activity Logs, Interactive User Info, TimeLine, Periodic Reports, Aliveness Indicator.
Mark Kuznicki took some pretty extensive notes from the workshop, so you might as well gave them a loon if you’re interested.
One special work to the crowd that actually stood up for the 3 hours the workshop took: Thanks
February 7th, 2008
I’m traveling to Milan this afternoon to participate in the Microsoft ENVISION conference. (a special thanks to ‘Canoas‘ who got me in! And of course, to Microsoft for the nice Invitation and sponsoring).
Microsoft Envision is a set of presentations covering subjects around information, communication, minimal user interfaces, adaptive interfaces, emotional design and the dynamics between information and the way that we present it.
I’ll try to blog a bit about the overall event and the different presentations as soon as possible.
Anyone in Milan up for a coffee or drink?
UPDATE:
You can find my short (non-edited) notes here.
BTW, the venue for this Envision event is simply astonishing:
you can get a glimp of it on their website - nHow Hotel Milan:
January 15th, 2008
Being a fan of the so called Semantic Web and knowing the long way we still have to track to reach it, all the things that takes us a bit closer to it has me on board. So it has been with Microformats, I had played a bit with Structured Blogging before but rapidly moved to what was ended up being known by Microformats for their multipurpose and not just for blogging.
A brief introduction for non-geek persons about Microformats and why they’ll became ever so important: The web is full of information, trapped information, hidden relations, hidden contents, consider for instance a simple news article, a review in a product page, that information is trapped under the rumble of it’s page HTML. Not nice, isn’t it? Through the separation of layout/content we already improved, since we can read each one of those examples hiding the details of the document structure focusing on the information thats important!
Being intelligent beings as we tend to consider ourselves, we have the ability to spot which parts of the information are relevant, if I look at a contact page, I immediately search for something that looks like an address, phone or email contact. It’s something we’re used to. Well the problem raises that when it matters with information we really can’t depend on humans! 
To a program reading a regular webpage, all that rumble and layout information, etc. is just the same! That’s were Microformats became essential! They allow us to seemingly “format” that information, so that humans and machines alike are able to extract the REALLY important parts! Microformats are much more than that, but for today’s introduction that the key idea to retain.
After some of the big companies embraced them a few months ago, Microformats seemed to be on the right track for massive adoption, and yesterday the all mighty W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) seems to have given a step the consolidation of Microformats by providing a set of use cases (GRDDL) that provide real-world scenarios and examples of Microformat in use, as they quote it:
(…)
GRDDL is the bridge for turning data expressed in an XML format (such as XHTML) into Semantic Web data. With GRDDL, authors transform the data they wish to share into a format that can be used and transformed again for more rigorous applications.
(…)
Once data is part of the Semantic Web, it can be merged with other data (for example, from a relational database, similarly exposed to the Semantic Web) for queries, inferences, and conversion to other formats.(…)
I strongly suggest reading some of thew3c use cases:
As complementary to the Microformats Website, the nice to have in hand Microformats Cheat Sheet and the book written by John Allsopp: “Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 “
For people reading this here in the Portuguese quarter I promise that in coming weeks you’ll get your opportunity to learn a bit more about Microformats! enough said!
September 13th, 2007
UPDATE: Lee, just posted his own notes plus the presentation PDF file.
Lee Bryant’s actually presented on of the most interesting presentations I’ve watched during LIFT, his presentation was about how to effectively collect and empower knowledge inside companies. Lee is founder of HEADSHiFT.COM a social software consulting focussed on the development of social tools for the work environment.
Most of his premisses are based on a set of general thoughts: we should just be re-factoring the factory, but “we should also be using technology to feed our minds instead of the machines”! Tools should serve people’s actions, not the other way around. People are better and have greater power in activities like pattern matching. Most IT systems (definitely) don’t understand the way we work, the way our brain works! People have peripheral vision and intuition, abilities we’ve always used on our life’s, abilities that aren’t only hard to achieve but their also quite hard to emulate on the computer level. Based on this small set of thoughts we’re simply wasting way to much knowledge on the enterprise and large organizations today!
So the question Lee posed was what can technology do to stop the waste?
The now so called web 2.0, is actually giving place to a more accepted “social web” and with it, we’re witnessing the birth of a new set of tools: The Social Tools: tools like wikis, blogs, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, cms’s, and a whole bunch more tools and websites, what Social Tools have in particular is that they intrinsically harness the network effect to get better along the way, feeding themselves on what people do while using them, in particular with the information people produce by using them.
So what’s the definition of the new enterprise IT working environment, the “enterprise 2.0″?
The IT infrastructure for the next generation of enterprises, those companies that will effectively use employees power as competitive advantage, will certainly for sure master social tools, as a mean to harness knowledge and effectively share it across all their structure dimensions. These social tools will need to create an ecosystem of information, data and will depend on a connected infrastructure that facilitates the idea or notion of information everywhere or ever present information scenario. Participation is mandatory, not only with the purpose of sharing information, but also because internal staff reputation will probably be built upon those contributions.
Lee also mentioned one important feature, these so called social tools must effective have to ensure their success: subscription and aggregation. Together their the only way you can actually be acknowledged and get to know, what’s being made and updated on your enterprise universe.
In general today’s companies are searching for better internal understanding, more effective and better collaboration, better decisions. In general we’re talking about gathering and optimizing the Collective Intelligence. CI already exists in some defined communities today, like Wikipedia, Digg, Slashdot, etc. and it reflects their native cultures and norms, and in large companies, they’re just like most of those communities, they have the “man power” to scale and take advantage of these collective intelligence gathering tools. CI represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the IT departments within those companies. Too much time and knowledge is being wasted today’s, which reinforces the idea of possible massive savings in terms of productivity, effective work, increased peripheral vision, reduce duplication and extend the work relationships in a more closer and personal matter: people might contact themselves directly instead of depending on the rigid structures most companies have to get in touch with someone.
With all this information sharing inside and outside of the enterprise, another problem arises, how can we effectively sort out what to read, or even write?
Individuals, groups and divisions inside the companies work as funnels: on a typical day you might have 100 items suggested by your social network, from those, 10 might be sufficiently important for you to link or tag them, but in the end you’ll only write/blog about one entirely. So social reading and filtering drives relevance! Others can also share what you blog, link or tag, information is most probably finding you these days instead of the other way around if you already take part on such groups.
Lee’s presentation left some nice tips towards the CI in the enterprise: start by deploying some social tools, tools that allow you to have feeds everywhere for everything, so that people might subscribe what interests them and be notified as soon as new information is available. Create ways of adding value to your online library, tools like social news-readers, allowing people to recommend and share bookmarks and documentation between them. Allow people to create internal blogs, as a window to their functions and work inside the company. Tools that not only share collections and remixes of other documents, posts, etc, but also allow some sort of social search driven by attention data and link authority.
So, as you can see, software isn’t enough, to reach the second wave adopters, not you or me, but the remaining working force, we need to actually create localized or situated apps like Lee mentioned, applications that are designed not to change behavior, but to extend the already existing workspaces, in a sense that they facilitate and augment todays tasks, having always in mind the collective intelligence harness that their supposed to collect and redistribute.
In the end, it’s all about context and engagement.
February 18th, 2007
I’ve been following the Microformats project pretty much from the beggining, but we never learn as much from documentation or even by reading their mailling list, as from hearing one of the minds behind it presenting the subject: Tantek Çelik on Microformats at the “Future of Web Apps”.
If you haven’t figure out what Microformats is all about, this should be a first in your reading/hearing queue!
October 16th, 2006
Well, I must confess it was the most refreshing event in Portugal for the last couple of years, and simply for that, thank you Fred and all the WeBreakStuff team for organizing everything!
It was an impressive networking event, we talk about so many different things that would be impossible to write about them all here, so I just leave here a short list about the main projects and ideas we talked about during this barcamp:
It’s impressive what happens when people just sit down, take some time off, talk, share ideas, ask for advices, freely advice and criticize other projects/ideas! Regardless of what most of the portuguese tend to think, ideas just work like that, they blossom and tend to give way to a bunch more ideas, which I think that was the best achievement of this BarCamp.
I’ve met quite a bunch of new people, interesting people with interesting ideas! The main idea was summarized by Fred during his presentation: “we shouldn’t have fear of failing“. To fail is human, and failling is the best learning process we have. By failling we’re not just learning what lead us to failure we’re also learning a whole on how to procede on a next opportunity.
Having this in mind, it’s more than time that we here in Portugal drop the (easy) critic position and just take a part on this web 2.0 idea. Which as many people tend to think has nothing to do with the rounded corners or the gradients as we all laugh about! The “new” web is about the birth of new projects, new ideas, remix of “old” ideas and procedures, as Thomas put it during Reboot, we’re talking about a “New Renaissanse” here…
For all the BarCamp participants, one thing is for sure, not only we’re going to repeat it, you’re sure going to hear a whole lot more from all of us there!
September 4th, 2006
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