John Brunswick

Design for Developers – 5 Great Resources

September 12, 2011 | Enterprise 2.0, UI, Usability

In the world of enterprise software, design has a tendency to take a back seat. Though to some technologists design seems purely superficial, it’s impact on adoption and productivity is quite objective and can be detrimental to a project’s success if poorly done. People can spot great design, but often struggle to explain why a design is effective, let alone create one...

Mom’s Enterprise Usability Tip #1 – Avoid Option Overload Plague

March 31, 2011 | Enterprise Portal, Usability

At a recent client meeting I was stunned to see the results of user interface designs created for one of the world’s largest companies by an organization specializing in user exeperience. The design was overly complicated and if put into production would create endless confusion for end users. What may have been represented by a series of simple wizards, turned into a complex maze of...

Search Usability Part II – Why Search and Tasty are Similar

January 20, 2011 | AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Experts, Intranet, Search, Usability

Much like "tasty", search is a term that broadly describes the act or capability to locate information. Much like tasty, it can be fulfilled through a variety of means. Some people enjoy steak, others Thai food or Italian. Tens of times per day we sit in front of a web browser concentrating on what to enter into a text box in an effort to locate content that providing solutions to problems or...

Decline of Web 2.0 Pure Plays – Power of Low Friction Interaction

December 20, 2010 | AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Experts, Enterprise Portal, Usability, Web 2.0

There is no doubt that the social web has become a staple of modern society. With this maturity comes change. Just as the automobile industry underwent massive consolidation once some common practices were established around manufacturing, Web 2.0 has seen massive consolidation around functionality like tagging, profiles, news - now inherent to the social web. This is witnessed in a series...

Search Usability – Why Lance Armstrong doesn’t ride a Mountain Bike

October 31, 2010 | AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Experts, Search, Usability

Would Lance Armstrong use a mountain bike to race in the Tour De France? Of course not. Why do we try to do the same with search in our enterprise? When it comes to enterprise search most implementations are fixated on what metadata and what weighting should be applied to documents and other information - without ever stopping to ask “what is driving people to search”? Are people...