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Hi! My name is Adrian Liem. I’m an online strategist and web specialist located in Vancouver, BC. I’m currently on a leave of absence from my job at UBC. Here’s what I’m up to in the meantime:

Working

Playing

  • Skiing, climbing, biking, swimming, running and eating
  • Playing hockey and ultimate
  • Dabbling in design, photography, and videography
  • Spending time with my family
  • Writing about the experience
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Archive for the ‘Business Strategy’ Category

Graeme Menzies of VANOC on Planning Online Communications

“The smartest planning for online communications has to include knowing that something else is going to happen four or two or three years from now that you don’t know about yet.” – Graeme Menzies, Director of Online Communications, VANOC

Drupal or WordPress: Why not both?

There’s been some growing chatter lately about what’s in store with Drupal 7. Curious to learn more, I was reading up on the Drupal 7 User Experience Project and as I scanned through the pages, I noticed something: the Drupal 7 User Experience Project site is using WordPress! This may seem innocuous at first, but it signals something that is becoming a growing trend, a move away from earlier days when developers in different corners of the open source community would duke it out and take jabs at one another – we’re starting to see decisions made based on the sound judgement of common sense. And when it comes to selecting an open source tool, for example deciding between Drupal and WordPress, we’re seeing that you don’t always have to draw a hard line in the sand.
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Marissa Mayer at Stanford University

I’m always fascinated by the ways that other organizations, particularly those of the size and prominence of Google, approach the work they do.

Along those lines, here’s a peak into some of the brain trust of Google – a 50-minute presentation, given at Stanford University by Marissa Mayer from Google, on the topic of innovation at Google. I’ve summarized her main 9 points here below.

Google Philosophies

  • Ideas come from everywhere.
    • Look for ideas in different places, find the experts and meld ideas together
  • Share everything you can.
    • Come up with as many ideas as you can, and share them
  • You’re brilliant. We’re hiring.
    • Surround yourself with smart and highly skilled people
  • A license to pursue dreams.
    • 20%
  • Innovation, not instant perfection.
    • You don’t have to get it right the first time, iterate and improve
  • Data is a-political.
    • Data helps make decisions
  • Creativity loves constraint.
    • When you constrain your thoughts, that’s when you see a lot of innovation happen
  • Users, not money.
    • Don’t actually worry about the money in the beginning, users bring money
  • Don’t kill projects. Morph them.
    • In an environment with smart people, usually any project that has made it out the door has some kernel of truth, there’s a good chance there’s something there that’s worth building on

Misc thoughts:

  • Personal Success: Look over previous decisions that led to success, look for the patterns
  • Do something that you’re not ready to do

User Experience Design – An Intangible Talent in the Knowledge-Based Economy

A recent survey feature from The Economist magazine focused on a growing demand for “talent” around the world. While defined in varying contexts, one common theme identified in this special report was the idea that as the baby boomers retire, and as the knowledge-based economy continues to grow, there is, and will continue to be, an insufficient supply of talented workers to meet the increasing demands.

While reading these articles, I tried to relate the idea of “talent” to my world and my career track, and in doing this, the one big question that loomed was this: Where exactly does talent fit into the world of web professionals, specifically for those of us who specialize more in the communication of information versus the intuitive appeal of a design?

Although certainly not clear cut, there is a more obvious case to be made for spotting the talents of a web designer. Aesthetics are a strange thing to get your finger on, but you know a good design when you see one. There are tangible elements to design like colour theory, typography, ratios and the like, that all contribute towards the appeal of a design.

Beyond the looks, though, many of the best-designed websites out there are the result of a clearly thought out information organization and process flow. Sometimes this is the result of tried and true usability testing along with iterating through revisions and improvements. But sometimes this is the result of a talented information architect.

For a long time I was a firm believer that what most “bad” websites or web applications needed was “usability testing”. While this may be the case in some instances, these days I’m more inclined to believe that what these bad sites need is the work of a talented information architect / information designer / user experience specialist or what I’d be inclined to call a “usability designer” or “user experience designer”.

In his article, ia/recon, Jesse James Garrett touches on this same notion:

If you asked an editor at a magazine or a newspaper if the structure of her product had been tested with readers before its publication, she would laugh at you. To her, developing effective structures is a matter of exercising her professional judgment — judgment honed through years of trial and error and hard-won experience with her craft.

To her, the proof of her effectiveness in her discipline is her ability to exercise that judgment. To her, that judgment is the very reason for the existence of her role. To her, the idea of abandoning that professional judgment and recasting her role as a conduit through which research findings become structures would be simply absurd.

And you know what? She’s right.

And in my world, this is spot on.

Usability testing is something of a luxury. While it would be great to be able to conduct tests along with more extensive user research, the reality of my day to day world is that it’s the small decisions that are made everyday that affect the overall effectiveness, ease of use, and aesthetic appeal of a website or web application.

You can dedicate all the time and money in the world to fix up an interface and an information structure, but over time, with each passing change or update, that picture-perfect “information infrastructure” will change. It’s in these small daily changes where the site can diminish and wither into an unusable mess of information, but it’s also in these small daily changes where the site can grow and continue to thrive as well-organized, easy to use, and aesthetically appealing web presence.

What’s the difference? To me, it’s the talent of the people working with the information. It’s a talent that requires an intimate understanding of an organization’s communication goals, it also requires a deep appreciation for the way people interact with information in online mediums, along with the skill to work with the web technologies to create and maintain the overall design patterns that keep this standard consistent.

It may not be the easiest skill to define in concrete terms, but this ability – this talent – to organize and design information in a way that is easy for people to interact with is, and will continue to be, a valuable asset in the modern knoweldge-based economy where talent may be in short supply.

The Potential of a Participation Economy

Earlier this year, Lou Rosenfeld, one of the founders of Information Architecture wrote about Developing a Participation Economy. The concept, while it has its share of complexities, addresses a simple question: how can you provide incentive to encourage volunteer participation within a professional community? My stripped down bare bones interpretation of Lou’s proposition is to create a system for quantifying people-hours into a currency of sorts that can later be used to purchase people-hours from others within the community, i.e. a participation economy.

Isn’t this just bartering?

Or so I asked myself. And at first, I thought yeah it is. This is no different than the Baker baking bread and trading his bread for a horse shoe from the Blacksmith.

There is one key difference, though.

The difference is that in the Participation Economy, the workers are contributing towards a common cause. In the case of IA’s, the cause is the further development of information architecture as a profession. In this sense, it is somewhat of a closed economic system whereby the greater the participation, the greater the overall benefit for the economic community as a whole (at least in theory).

It’s an interesting idea that has been put to the test by others such as Evolt, and that also has many applications.

In a previous life, I was a school teacher (or at least on my way to becoming one). School teachers spend countless hours preparing lessons for their students, especially in the earlier years of their teaching careers.

What if there was a central repository for teachers to contribute their lesson materials, where their contributions result in a certain amount of credit, which they can they claim back to use materials contributed by other teachers?

In my life these days, I’m a web coordinator (a “web coordinator”? what’s that?). I work with a group of other like-minded web professionals directly in my office, and also informally gather once every few months with the other web designers and developers across campus. At the best of times, we collaborate to share tips and tricks, give help and advice, and work together when we share common goals. At the worst of times, three or four of us at any given moment are programming the same widget or tackling the same CSS design problem, but doing it in a vacuum not realizing we are all rebuilding the wheel.

What if we had a means to collaborate in a distributed system (one that lets us give and take on our own schedule and availability), and we had a way to create a shared pool of resources, we had a system to provide incentives to participate, and we had a way to track the different projects being developed to spot the opportunities for collaboration?

That, in my mind, is the potential of the participation economy: increased participation, increased sharing of knowledge, increased collaboration. And there are tangential benefits as well: a greater sense of community among like-minded professionals, a means to communicate, an opportunity to help newcomers to the field and for the experienced professional to gain mentoring experience.

Sounds great, hey? What’s the catch?

Well, for starters you’d need a method for deciding how much certain contributions are worth – i.e. the bottom line is you probably have to “monetize” participant contributions, and how do you go about doing that? Who’s to say what your effort is worth?

You also need the infrastructure to support this type of exchange. Of course the possibilities are endless with all the web technologies available today, but another bottom line is that someone at the end of the day will have to be setting this up.

But are those really so tough? I’ll give it some thought and get back to you!

What do you think? Let me know.

The Valley Formula

A recent issue of Business Week featured some of the new crop of Internet entrepreneurs like the guys behind Digg, Facebook, and Yelp. In this issue, they described what some people are calling the “Valley Formula” – a pattern of special ingredients these new entrepreneurs are using to find success.

Here is my summary of The Valley Formula as adapted from Business Week, August 14, 2006:

The Valley Formula

  • Look for ways technology can fill a gap in your own life
  • Then build the service and share it with friends
  • Once something works, it will dribble out to the world
  • Nothing too fancy that needs money to get started

That’s it. If you can do that, you can join the ranks of the new wave of entrepreneurs! (If only…)