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Random Observations About Intranets 2001

by John S. Rhodes 

I arrived in California on 28-April-2001 and I have to admit, I thought it would smell different than New York. But, it didn't. I'm not an olfactory kind of guy; flowers, for example, don't do much for me. However, on virtually all of the trips that I take, I notice that the smells change from location to location. In this case, the smells were the same. I find it odd that Binghamton (NY) and Santa Clara (CA) basically smell the same. What's the deal? I really expected to be hit with new and exciting smells. I visited San Francisco on Sunday with my good friend Bob Kelly, but that didn't smell much different either. 

Aside: Are you using all of your senses? How often? What if I asked you how California tasted? 

On Tuesday (1-May-2001) I spoke at Intranets 2001. Based on the response from the crowd it seems that my talk went fairly well and I delivered enough value so as to avoid getting beaten to a pulp, or getting splattered with tomatoes. The main idea of my session was that when building an intranet you need to think more about the people that are going to use that intranet and you should probably think less about the technology used to build it. 

I didn't start my session talking about the homogenous smell issue. Instead, I told the folks in the crowd that what amazed me most about my trip was that the time on my cell phone automatically adjusted to the new time zone I was in. I live in New York but the conference was in California. As I explained to the crowd, it would have been seriously painful to try to change the time on my cell phone. It was simply wonderful that the adjustment was made for me automatically. And, it provided me with the perfect segue: Build technology around humans.

I finally had a chance to meet Peter Merholtz. He's a sharp fellow and I wish that we had more time to talk. Perhaps I will be able to interview him. In one conversation with Peter Merholtz and Peter Morville (also sharp), I explained that I thought that Silicon Valley would vibrate with energy. Basically, in the same way that I thought California would have a unique smell, I thought that Silicon Valley would have a serious technology halo. I'm sorry to say that I just didn't see it or feel it. 

One thing that struck me about the conference is that many people still want to be given a information about usability and usability testing methods. I saw people furiously taking notes in almost every session, except for mine. Then again, I wasn't watching to see if people were taking notes. That wasn't my mission. Maybe I am too close to usability to understand that other folks still need more exposure to usability. That's fine with me. I'm here to help.

I'm still having a hard time deciding what Intranets 2001 session I liked best. If I simply had to give an answer, I'd say that Tim Bray's talk on content management was at the top. He is obviously a very sharp cookie, and surprisingly, he talks faster than I do. He has a subtle accent, which made listening all the more enjoyable. I like fast talkers and I like accents. In any event, in his session he talked about the history of content management tools (useful!), current vendor attempts at helping companies grabble with content management, and several other things. Tim was able to field some hard questions and had no problem explaining hard concepts. Oh, did I mention that Tim Bray is a co-inventor of XML? I'm not sure that matters, but it certainly drew a few people into his talk. He was one of the big names at the conference and I'm glad that I went. He is also CEO & Director of Antarti.ca. 

Aside: If I was gonig to re-name this conference it would have called Usability and Content Management for Intranets: What You Need to Know. That's all people talked about. Very interesting, very interesting.

Allison Head and Eric Hards talked about usability, so I attended their sessions. Allison basically gave an overview of usability testing techniques and provided the crowd with a few examples. It was good and people were taking notes like mad. There weren't any radical ideas, but that wasn't the point of her talk. Eric's talk was quite good too. I enjoyed his talk for a few reasons. First, he works at Lockheed Martin in Owego, which is where I live. Second, he spent a lot of time detailing how LM's intranet has evolved. He told us about the pitfalls and the successes. It was a solid talk and gave people something to compare their intranets against. 

Aside: I interviewed Allison Head last year.

That brings me to a key point about the conference and about usability. I didn't hear any new ideas on usability. At all. Nothing new. Jakob Nielsen was a keynote speaker, but he didn't say anything new. I expected some new ideas, but my expectations were dashed. The best part of his talk was his real-time, usability testing with a conference attendee. The crowd loved that. However, there wasn't more juice than that. What a shame.

When I look back over the last couple of years at usability I don't see much that is new or innovative. Where are the fresh usability ideas? I push the envelope sometimes, but mainly I urge people to think in new ways. The usability community hasn't offered much in the way of new tools or techniques. Where is the innovation? Where are the sparks? They weren't many at this conference. This was the same stuff, although it was delivered to a crowd that hadn't heard it before. That's fine.

One future direction of usability will be the crossover of usability and marketing. However, that isn't a very innovative or jazzy idea. (It is kind of obvious, don't you think?) Also, we'll see more of an emphasis on usability around the globe, as I started saying last year. But, again, this isn't revolutionary or innovative. It is just the radiation of existing ideas without much mutation. What's new? Where is the next spice?

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