How to create and manage a website, usable by anyone on any device, with great information architecture and high performance
In addition to the suggested tools and solutions for intranet analytics at this site, we’d also like to point out that the chapter on analytics in the book Intranets ‐ handbook for intranet managers now is freely available. Below is a taste, but the full chapter is to be found at intranetanalytics.com Continue reading “Intranet analytics – get started now”
This enterprise search strategy is a translation of the work I, Kristian Norling and some peer-reviewers worked with for Region Västra Götaland.
This is a summary of Region Västra Götaland’s strategy for enterprise search. Discussing the overall points for orientation of the strategy’s contents and be able to take a decision on its establishment.
The vision is that search “will deliver the right information when it is needed.” Not necessarily is the user forced to seek to find, but also to receive feeds and be notified if anything of importance occurs. The information need to become more intelligent. The business goal for search is primarily to avoid the risk of someone acting on outdated knowledge. Secondarily to offer a complete picture to the information, not to unnecessarily develop or purchase information or things that already exists somewhere within the organisation. We should strive to make the benefits of search known and the platform well-used to realise these goals.
We will focus on user experience and work user-oriented. This is because search is there to help finding information and knowledge – even when there to the user’s not obvious where to find it, or that it exists. Two fundamental challenges to adhere to is that users have varying digital maturity and varying expertise in the material they are seeking. Therefore, search has to take advantage of both the novice and the expert way to express themselves, but also support the usage pattern that distinguishes the digital novice from the digital savvy. Search has to live up to high standards of accessibility and usability, both from a desktop computer and a more mobile scenario.
Search should be continuously improved. By reflecting on operational goals, feedback from the users as well as by insights gained working with search analytics. In addition, the organisation shall have annual priorities of the activities to be carried out and follow up on the efforts made. The organisation intends to gradually move towards a more structured information architecture which naturally affects the curation of information sources. Also, it is important to provide opportunities for personalised search results, which, when appropriate, is also displaying access-restricted material. Continue reading “Example: Strategy for Enterprise Search”
How cocky can I, as a Scandinavian, be of our accomplishments and our impression on the global mobile industry? I’m of course thinking about Nokia and Ericsson! Both previously makers of mobile handsets, and nowadays making magic on the backend of cellular network technology, worldwide.
Do we still have that digital head start that we fought so hard for in the 1990s? Obviously, this blog post won’t give a definitive answer to that question. But this is my contribution to the subject of an eventual Scandinavian lead in the mobile industry and perspective on mobile tech, usability and the need for speed. How do Sweden as a nation compare to the US regarding the, once again, popular concept of “digitization”. Well, this post is a attempt to start comparing, and to give you as a reader some data to begin benchmarking your website against the really big companies of Fortune 500, and the biggest ones of Sweden.
My book, Web Strategy for Everyone, deals with the issues of both speed and user needs when on mobile. Also a lot on design principles such as mobile first, responsive web design, adaptive, single page applications (SPA) and progressive web apps. Buy the book Web Strategy for Everyone directly from the publisher Intranätverk. Continue reading “Mobile performance and usability of Fortune 500 companies”
As an aspiring author it’s always exciting to be quoted just about anywhere. It is assuring that all that work with your book was not for nothing. That you at least got some recognition for the effort made. We all know how many books we buy is not equal to the books actually being read. Continue reading “Quoted on accessibility in Chicago Tribune”
This material on web analytics was left over when I wrote on the book Web Strategy for Everyone, a book now available from the publisher Intranätverk ›
This is an intro for you who do not yet know if web analytics is for you.
Does your website have any visitors? Do you care about what the users do and whether they manage to achieve something beneficial during their visit? If you do not work at all with web analytics or measurability, one can wonder what the point is to publish anything at all. To work actively with web analytics is your chance to know if your website-related work and investments are meaningful – take that chance! Continue reading “Guide to Web Analytics – an introduction”
This material was left over when I wrote the book Web Strategy for Everyone. Rather than throwing it away, it is now published with some editing – though not quite as ambitious as it would’ve been in print 🙂
Search engine optimization is all about optimizing one’s web presence for search engines to take a liking to your site. It is often abbreviated SEO. Something quite different is keyword optimization – the editorial part of the process of SEO. Continue reading “SEO – an introduction to Search Engine Optimization”
If you haven’t noticed already, both Lara Callender Hogan and Ilya Grigorik have released their books on web performance for free. Free as in read-on-the-web, not as in ebook or print, of course. Both Lara and Ilya originally released their books with the publisher O’Reilly Media, also known as “you know, the animal book’s” according to some of my friends. Continue reading “Designing with performance in mind – especially your intranet”
For some reason intranets tend to adopt design conventions a couple of years late compared to the public Web. Going for responsive web design unfortunately is no exception.
Where I work, our public facing website went responsive in 2012, but our intranet is still lagging behind. Well, on the few occasions when I create content for our intranet I manually input code to make my images responsive. Continue reading “Ad-hoc responsive images for your intranet”
In the book, Web strategy for Everyone, I’m writing a lot on different kind of design principles. One of them is Persuasive Web Design, how to design to be persuasive and strive for users fulfilling the websites objective. When trying to be convincing you have to be considerate of the user’s interest, otherwise you might end up designing a so-called dark pattern?
“It is all about lowering the threshold for decisions and guiding a series of micro-decisions towards the goal you have. Here the concept of dark pattern introduces itself. That, by design, you control what happens in a way that is not in the user’s best interest, or intention. It could be moving around buttons so the user happens to give an app a five-star rating in an app store, without warning, adding additional products to the shopping cart, or services sending e-mails to your contacts claiming to be you.”
– Web Strategy for Everyone, chapter Persuasive Web Design
For the first time ever, Firefox is passing Microsoft’s web browser(s) measured globally. This is according to Statcounter’s data for April this year. Their data should be quite credible, despite the sometimes strange local variations in the choice of browsers, since they collect data from three million websites and has had fifteen billion page views. Continue reading “Microsoft lost the second place to Firefox”