Pride of Szeged

Having been deep in the workflow design of the new version of the KMT lately, I've been thinking a lot about how users naturally interact with applications like ours. Obviously I've been thinking about this for a while, which is partly what prompted my audit of the Human Computer Interaction seminar last year. But no matter what workflows or UIs we develop, the users are always going to be constrained by the basic infrastructure- a web application running on a standard PC with a keyboard.
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As an irregular user of instant messaging myself, I'm curious about how it's being used by other folks around campus. I know the library is making use of IM for it's "IM a Librarian" service, and last I heard, the ITRC was following their lead (although I haven't seen any further information about this recently).
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In the ongoing search for a Content Management System solution for ITS, I've been working on a Drupal installation over the last week. There were a few challenges, mostly to do with the .htaccess file that came with the install.
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I haven't been posting here much lately, partly because I've decided that weekly work updates are barely interesting to me, much less the general public. The larger distraction, however, has been my efforts lately to get WordPress installed for a variety of ITS projects.
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While we were at CAUSE, I noticed a consistent theme coming out of several presentations- "how do we reach the students?" When there are communication needs between the IT groups and the students- such as virus warnings, training events, or whatever- how do you broadcast that message?

It occurred to me that one possible answer might be found in the tools that students actively seek out when using their laptops. One such possibility is the social networking site Facebook, which the folks over at Ibiblio have been looking into. If nearly 90% of UNC's undergraduates are using the tool, is it possible for ITS to reach them through it? Well, probably not, unless we're willing to shell out funds to buy advertising through Facebook's Announcements.

However, another solution occurred to me, based on our experience helping the ITRC fight a virus outbreak on campus a few years back. After looking at a dozen different student laptops, I started to realize that most of the students had installed Weatherbug. I asked one of them about it, and suggested she uninstall it (being a vector for spyware). Her response? "well, if I can't have stuff like that, what's the fun in having a laptop?". Hmmm…

So I started thinking that maybe ITS could capitalize on their interests and develop a light application, either for download or as part of the default CCI load, that would take the place of Weatherbug. We could talk to the students and make sure we understood the draw ("I want to know if it's raining!"). Once we have the requirements, we could build the app to provide those features without the spyware. In addition, we could add UNC-specific features, such as a desktop search of help.unc.edu, virus alerts, Perhaps even campus announcements. All available from a toolbar application.

Of course, this idea has some problems. For one, my impression of what students do with their laptops might be dated. Maybe Weatherbug is so, like, yesterday. Another problem is the age-old lack of resources- who's going to develop this (mostly likely C++ or .Net) application? Who will maintain it?

Still, it's an idea, and one that I think could have some traction. Anyway, if you have thoughts or suggestions (or vicious criticisms), feel free to drop me a line. I'd be interested in seeing if anybody has had thoughts along these lines.

It's been weeks since I've been able to get any sort of post up here, but it hasn't been for lack of things to write about. In that time we've been to the ICKM Conference in Charlotte, NC, and UNC CAUSE in Wilmington. The time in between these events has been busy as well, with us catching up on editing concerns and trainings.

The ICKM was truly international – we met people from all over the world, and most of them were academics. We met people working on ways to share agricultural knowledge among farmers in India, and others trying to find ways to use KM to develop collaborative online communities. The approach at this conference was often less than practical ("is it 'Strategic Knowledge Management', or 'Knowledge Strategic Management'? Hmm…"), yet I heard many good ideas over that week.

While ICKM was international, CAUSE was completely local- many of the folks there were from our own school, and all of them were from the UNC system. Our interactions with them felt familiar; these were our counterparts from all over the state, dealing with the same needs and barriers that we do, and eager to share solutions. Our presentation on our 'Information Commons' project and the 'Knowledge Base Suite' was very well received, and I think we have a lot of interest in our plans to develop a collaborative KM solution.

Although it's too much effort to try to report on everything we heard and did during those conferences, I've tried to list some of the highlights below. Ultimately, I think the most substantial benefit from going to them is that we've learned that we're far from the only people working on these sorts of problems (managing institutional knowledge), and in many cases, we're ahead of the game. It's good to see the many ways in which these ideas and technologies are being put to use, and that our ideas of the best way to do KM (open-source technologies, standards compliance, structured information, collaboration) are turning out to be considered 'best practices' from professionals from all over the field.
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A large part of today's seminar was given over to a presentation on "Information Visualization" by Xia Lin on Information Visualization. There was also some initial feedback on the KMT, which I'll summarize again later when more comments come back.

An important point occurred to me during this class, as we discussed relevance feedback, and why users generally don't use it. It's not because it's not effective, but more because they can't be bothered.

I pointed out that it's important for designers to avoid the trap of thinking that this is because users are lazy or stupid. Instead, users are (for the most part) busy and distracted by a dozen different systems with which they have to interact (email, word processing, browsing, etc.). They are actually fairly smart about how to prioritize their time and attention on each system, and they tend to avoid spending more time on one (such as to learn easier/better methods) than absolutely necessary.

The critical bit here is that users don't have time to invest in a given system, so the interface had better draw on their previous experiences to cut the handling time and make more efficient use of the time they do spend learning to use it.
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During the seventh HCI class, I presented the Helpsite and KMT to the group in brief, giving an overview of the goals of Knowledge Management team and the structure of the tools. I asked the group to participate over the following weeks by using the KMT to contribute documents and provide feedback on their experience with the UI.

One of the points I tried to make followed up on our discussions of the essential problem of wikipedia- how to allow for community-based contribution without sacrificing the quality of the content? In the case of the KMT, I argued that overly-strict quality controls in our original design created a bottleneck that was reducing the freshness of the knowledgebase and the usefulness of the tools.
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Week Six of HCI saw a presentation by Cathy Marshall on digital interfaces and archiving, and some general discussion about relational browsing and how to best give users access to enormous numbers of documents (such as on the BLS website, with 17k documents). One attempted solution that we looked at is the RAVE "relational browser" developed at SILS, which uses rollover behavior and scripting to do on-the-spot queries behind the scenes to modify the presentation of the content.
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Week five of HCI class. I left a bit early today to attend an ITRC meeting, so I missed the latter half of the class. Nonetheless, I talked to Marchionini about presenting the KMT and Helpsite to the class, and potentially setting them up as a test documentation group so that they might offer their feedback on the interface. In addition, if I treat this as a user study, I might be able to get Marchionini's feedback on that process, for future testing with students, faculty, etc.
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