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Which is easier to use: using a browser to access an intranet, or being able to map directly to it through Windows Explorer and have it operate in an indentical way, with folders and directories?

It might not depend on which is 'technically' easier to use but what kind of legacy systems people are using and how the transition would be perceived. Note that this is about navigation, not the format of the intranet. An intranet could be built in html but navigated through folders. I'm not convinced but feel free to try.

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Gerry McGovern has written a short piece on how web users tend to ignore everything that is not directly related to the task at hand. People visit web sites with a particular task in mind and it is difficult to try to distract them from this task by giving them information or marketing guff not directly related to this task. Hence, traditional advertising methods don't have as much resonance on the web, grab-lines and blurbs have much less impact and in fact can annoy people. As McGovern says, user recall is diminished greatly when information is presented on a screen.

I think this is useful for those trying to design websites to recruit students. Although the traditional way to attract them would be to tell them about all the wonderul reasons they should choose your University, all the attractions of the city in which it resides etc. The reality is though that they are after a certain set of information to complete a set of tasks. The best advertisement you can give them is to enable them to find information easily and not bother them with fluff.

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Via Creating passionate users: a post on the symbols used in design that have become cliches.

This post is about those symbols we use … or rather, those other people use … to indicate common themes, concepts or ideas. Those symbols which have been used so often that they’ve become clichés. I warn against using them: or challenge designers to breathe new life into their rotting corpses. Welcome to the land of the living dead.

Dartmouth are implementing a new security system that may be secure but sure isn't cheap:

Over the course of the next 12 months, Peter Kiewit Computing Services will phase in new security procedures requiring students to use a physical USB device, together with new security software, in order to access information on the Dartmouth intranet including student grades, administrative files and personal data.

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Find out with this beginners guide to blogging and blog software.

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MIT libraries have a brief but useful guide to using RSS for research.

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Thanks to Mark Nearhos for directing us to a paper given by Dey Alexander at the recent Ausweb conference: How usable are university websites?: a report on a study of the prospective student experience.

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It's a website you don't click. See if you can resist.

Browsershots is

an open-source system for distributed automatic production of browser screenshots.

It's free. Use it to test your designs. It's in beta stage. Got that?

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Welie is a site that provides examples of design patterns. It includes web design patterns, handily categorised into (among others) types of sites, types of interactions, navigation, search and user experience. Very useful if you are stuck for inspiration. And as we all know, there's no point in reinventing something that's already been done before. And there's also the minor point of usability - when users become used to something it becomes a defacto standard. (Is that enough reasons to go and take a look?)

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Are blogs the new press releases?

Do I think press releases are dead? No. I think companies will rely on them for years - especially for big news like mergers. But increasingly, you're going to see corporations - perhaps smaller firms at first - gravitate towards blogs and RSS for distributing news rather than spending hundreds of dollars on the wire services.

Web branding is more than skin deep says Gerry McGovern

Web branding is much more about function than image. Great websites put substance before flash. This reflects a knowledge society that has become more rational in how it makes decisions.

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What to include in intranet search results

This briefing is designed to provide a simple checklist that can be used to assess (and then redesign) intranet search results pages.

Step Two review five different intranets and get five different results

This case study presents the findings from five different intranet reviews, with the aim of exposing some of the issues being confronted across different organisations.

These reviews also show that even within seemingly-similar organisations, the intranet issues can be quite different.

This highlights that there is no 'one size fits all' intranet solution, and emphasises the value of conducting meaningful 'needs analysis' activities, such as those outlined in this article.

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urlgreyhot details an experiment with social bookmarking in the enterprise

For the past several months in my group at Lucent we've been testing out a system developed to be a simple self-service publishing application. You might recognize the interface. It follows the model other social bookmarking services have made common.

and

A wiki that explores what you can do with RSS. Quite a lot I would imagine.

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Just a reminder about the University of Sydney Apple Scholarship

to promote teaching initiatives that involve the use of information and communication technologies.

Applications close 29 July 2005.

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