The usability focus groups are done, so what was learned? Well, Bogota wasn’t as scary as I feared. I only spent a day and a night there but the folks that I worked with were great, very positive and helpful. Mexico City was similar, and Dallas provided one of the best sessions overall in terms of engagement and interest on the part of the participants.

In terms of the prototype, the reaction to the approach and information architecture was positive and surprisingly universal. We were looking for cultural variations, but there weren’t any major things that have to be accomodated. Despite that, in each session there was at least one suggestion for a feature or an aspect of usability improvement that was unique. This was an enormously valuable exercise and provides important considerations for our self-service approach.

I now feel that I have a much freer hand to build on top of the concepts that I used for the enterprise portal, and I’m figuring on having a model in the next 90 days. I’m going to assume no constraints from a technology/vendor perspective because a) I want an ideal state and b) it will be necessary to get some people’s thinking out of the current application-centric model. I’m also less concerned about how this nascent concept will play around the world.

If things quiet down I hope to dig in between the holidays to model some of this out. But first, I’m taking a little break with my family for a few days of fun in Vermont. I’m about as mediocre as it gets but I love to ski. My daughter is a bit of a skier, and this will be her first time on a full-size mountain, we visited a junior mountain last winter. My younger son has visions of shredding the slopes on a snowboard…so he’s signed up for beginner lessons and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. My wife is the sane one, she’ll be chilling off the slopes. We’re heading off tomorrow morning, so everybody have a wonderful holiday weekend.

Today is the last day to vote for the Recruiting.com 2005 Best Blog Awards. Make sure you stop by and give your nod to the community – and thanks for your readership.

While I was in Texas I stopped to visit the folks who staff our North America service center. They seemed pleasantly surprised to have me visit, and they were more than open to sharing some of their experiences related to employee self-service. All the while, I’m wondering, why on earth we haven’t managed to connect before now? We’ve agreed to have a monthly review of user issues, some of which we probably wont be able to manage away but with others we can surely improve the experience so these folks don’t have to call in their problems.

Another discusstion we had was about the segregation of the knowledge tools they use from the learning materials provided by the application teams and the content that goes on-screen at the interface level. These are three distinct stovepipes and I need to make them come together. Authoria has been orbiting around us on this subject for some time, but I need more languages than they provide and I’m not convinced that there’s a next choice.

Anyway, I have to rank the service center teams with the same status I assigned to the data warehouse folks in my rant below – we’d be dead without them, and they don’t get the respect they deserve.

There are a lot of year-end lists being posted and one thing that’s been on many of them is Web 2.0. This is an interesting meme that has now reached the mainstream. I’ve been drawn to many sites and services that fall into the broad category, and after almost a year of Web 2.0, AJAX and all the others I’m frankly a little tired of the ongoing Deep Thoughts on the subject. Maybe I’m being obtuse but I think that the signal to noise ratio is off on this; one of these days I’ll have to get a look at the Gartner Hype Cycle on it just to satisfy my curiosity. Here’s my simple manifesto: Web 2.0 is a very useful set of tools representing an intriguing approach to interaction design, so let’s get on with it.

The intranet prototype I’ve been doing these focus groups on uses Web 2.0 constructs and approaches at the transaction and interface layers. What I’ve observed in every country I’ve been to is that Just Plain Folks are completely comfortable with using Web 2.0 constructs and interfaces.I have 2 cities to go, and I don’t expect to find anything unusually different by the time I’m done. The revolution is over and we’re the better for it.

Speaking of the prototype, it struck me this morning that degrees of hype and the distractions of shiny new things can make us lose sight of fundamentals. Case in point, I drew the original design concepts for our Employee Portal in the summer of 1998.

Back then we were in the heat of Web 1.0 and the future was going to be amazing! But…couldn’t do it. Why? We were missing a most humble enabler

The voting has opened at recruiting.com’s 2005 Best Blog awards. Vote here – hopefully for Systematic Viewpoints, or any of the great bloggers that have been nominated, and thanks for supporting the community.

I worked with HR systems at one of the world’s largest corporations. These thoughts are my own, however. Now I’m looking to focus on Usability and interactions. Here’s the fine print:

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This morning I arrived home on an overnight flight from Bogota. It’s been a busy day catching up, capped by the very pleasant surprise that I’ve been nominated in recruiting.com‘s Best HR Blog 2005 category. Vote here!

A tip of the cap to good folks at recruiting.com and Jobster for this event and thanks to the kind person who nominated this blog. I’m truly excited and looking at the other nominees, I see that I’m in great company. The fact that we’re sharing thoughts and ideas is it’s own reward.

More about my travels after dinner!

If I thought I’d be able to take it easy and catch up when I got back from travelling, I was sadly mistaken. There’s been a blur of activity, a lot having to do with our recrutiment workstream. They’ve been working to get Taleo out as a global standard for internal and external postings. Again, due to the size and complexity of our organization, deploying any global standard is a hige challenge. Recognizing that, the team was charged with creating something that links to not only Taleo but any de facto job board used within the company. I’m not confident that we even have a definitive list.

To the horror of the workstream lead I proposed that we proceed with a target state definition of an integrated career management environment and use that undoubtedly compelling vision as leverage to convince people around the company that the heavy lifting and pain that it will take to adopt this particular standard will be worth it in the end. I understand their pain, as an escaped technologist I know it would be in their intrests to simplify, not amplify. What I’m fighting is the emergence of a fat new silo created by lashing together a bunch of old silos. In any case I think she ultimately agreed so long as she can deliver something in March to satisfy the basic request. But now I have her attention while I create a picture of a critical part of the overall target state for self-service users.

Noted Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox post “Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time)” I’m in the love/hate camp with regard to Jakob. On the one hand I very nearly engaged him to speak to senior management when I was creating the business case for the latest version of the corporate intranet, on the other hand I sometimes find his positions unnecessarily orthodox/purist. In this case there are some spot-on issues – I watched focus group users struggle with some of the Ajax elements in the intranet prototype, especially around the use of the back button. This is something that needs fixing, like it or not. That said, I believe that the Ajax approach has much goodness, especially as it will apply to a thoughful self-service environment.

I’ve also been asked to put together a short paper for internal use on Fusion as a follow up to Open World. Given the current state, that should be brief.

Sunday I travel yet again, we’re taking our road show to Colombia, I come back Tuesday and then out again Thursday for Dallas and Mexico City. That’s the end of the intranet prototype tour, and I’m glad for it. I love to get out now and again but I’m just plain tired.

Double Dubs has rebranded his excellent blog as systematicHR. We’ve agreed to confuse the world with our similar urls, because it just feels right.