For company intranet homepages I don’t think there’s any question that personalisation will become increasingly common. The likes of Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and even Facebook have raised people’s expectations in this area.

The risk is that companies confuse personalisation with customisation and jump on the bandwagon, rushing to provide all the latest functionality before considering what people really need.

So here are three definitions that should help when thinking about this:

Top-down content

Content that’s there because you work for Company X. Examples include share price information and company-wide announcements.

Personalised content

Content that is there because you’re you. You are in a particular role, in a particular department, at a particular level. How? Either the system knows who you are, or you’ve told it about yourself or a combination of the two.

Customised content

Content (and sometimes positioning and formatting) that you’ve chosen based on a particular set of options. You have subscribed to the latest news about design and have chosen to have the headlines appear in a list on the right hand side of the page. You’ve chosen a particular look and feel for the page.

There is absolutely no reason why the three types of content can’t share the same space. Good interaction and visual design is essential to ensure people can clearly distinguish between them.

If the content is relevant and well presented, intranet personalisation can help make the digital workspace more joined up and navigable, and it can help employees have a better understanding of their overall work environment.

See also: Gerry McGovern’s recent article Intranet personalization: does it work?

Count your opinions

Originally uploaded by Beatnic.

So I thought I’d add my input to the survey being run by London Underground on personal safety at Elephant & Castle tube station.

Unfortunately I didn’t understand how to use this “Opinionmeter” until I’d already started using it – at which point I had already mistakenly answered the first question.

I think the reason I got it wrong is because I expected it to be like a cashpoint (ATM), where the instructional text would appear on the little screen above the numeric keypad.

Only in this case the questions and instructional text are on the poster above the machine.

Being my usual self and therefore not reading the instructions I pressed the “1″ button, because that’s what it said on the screen.

A quick fix would be to have an highly visible label on the Opinionmeter itself pointing me towards the text above.

I really don’t understand the purpose of the screen at all.

I wonder how many other people this has happened to.

Better still, why not build it in to my ticket machine / Oyster top-up experience? Anonymity guaranteed of course.

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking – inspiration, ideation and implementation – and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

As well as being a great way of managing all my stuff on the internet of course.

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.

Researchers [from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada] found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage.

They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion.

[...]

The researchers also believe that these quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.

If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.

Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

Full article on BBC News.

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.

In his latest alertbox, Jakob Nielsen explains how the concept of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) is no longer useful or valid and is evolving into what-you-get-is-what-you-see (WYGIWYS) or “results-oriented UI [user interface].”

He uses the user interface redesign for Microsoft’s Office 12 as an example of where this is happening. There’s been positive feedback in initial testing apparently.

You select from a range of examples roughly what you want your end result to be (letter, book, presentation) and then narrow down to more detailed options.

And rather than drilling down through drop-down lists, your options are presented to you in context (according to the task you’re aiming to complete) and visually.

I guess this works in office-type applications because it lets people focus on the content rather than the formatting.

But I don’t think it’s new, just new to office-type applications. Other software has been based on this concept for a while now.

And there are lots of online products and services offering this kind of contextualised option selection and refinement, first thanks to Flash and now with ajax it’s spreading like wildfire.

Isn’t results-oriented UI just user-centred design by another name?

It already does a great job with routes from A to B (say East Dulwich to Marylebone High Street – my current daily bicycle commute).

Imagine being able to put a shape (circle, say) on to a map and then drag its edges to particular co-ordinates or landmarks until you’ve mapped out your route.

Then you could save this route and send it as a link to someone or link to it from your website.

I was just wondering if anyone has any info on anything like this being developed anywhere?

There are some notable exceptions, but most sites I’ve used are missing a trick. Often the only options are to return to a previous page or close the window housing the application.

This has always struck me as an ideal moment to let me know what else is available.

Most importantly, tell me I’ve successfully completed the transaction. If it’s repeatable allow me to do it again from here.

Having taken care of that, why not take advantage of that “what next?” moment?

What else is there I might want to do here? I’m not talking cynical marketing ploys here but something that might be genuinely useful to me and enhance my overall experience.

This must be especially important as we move to using smaller handheld devices to access the internet where typing in search terms or web addresses is still very cumbersome.

Offer a couple of (ideally contextually related) interesting choices.

Keep it simple, snappy and easy to follow through.

Yesterday I went to the Design Museum in London with some friends from work to see the design of information exhibition “YOU ARE HERE” (now in its last week).

It was full of amazing examples of how we convey complex information through models, signs and symbols, including navigation devices, orreries, maps, graphs, charts and timepieces. There were some interesting comparisons between how information is conveyed in different cultures.

But I felt it missed a trick by only showing the end results.

What I’d really like to learn is…

• Who was involved (not just the accredited designer)?
• What was discarded along the way?
• What was discovered along the way?
• What do the designs that nearly made it look like?
• How was the end result decided on and who by?
• What’s the story behind the design?

Adaptonyms (also known as textonyms and cellodromes) are words that can be typed with the same sequence of keys on a cell phone using predictive text. For example the sequence “2-3-3″ can produce “bed”, “add”, or “bee”.

Source: Wikipedia

Yesterday I texted a friend to let him know we’d “good to pub”. What I meant to write was “gone to pub”. Anyway he got the idea!

It got us talking about the perils of predictive text.

One friend pointed out that when you want to write “Mum”, the phone insists on offering “Nun” first, even though it’s much less commonly used and comes later in the alphabet. “Book” being offered before “Cool” is perhaps more understandable, but not when you think about which age group does the most texting.

The other day I got a puncture on my way in to work and wanted to text ahead to warn people I’d be late. “Got puncture in Canceryell” (hello, I’m trying to write Camberwell, what on earth is this word?)

Andy becomes body… there are loads of examples. Fortunately I don’t think I’ve offended anyone yet but I can see how it could happen.

And even though I must have written my name hundreds of times my phone never learns to offer it first. When I tap 642 I want Nic not Mic.