Enterprise Knowledge (EK) is playing a central role at this year’s KMWorld Conference. Continuing EK’s principles of thought leadership and industry guidance, EK is playing an unprecedented role at KMWorld, the world’s leading KM conference. This year, EK experts are delivering an unprecedented thirteen different sessions across KMWorld and the related events including Taxonomy Boot Camp, Enterprise Search and Discovery, and Text Analytics.

The virtual conference runs from November 15-18th, with preceding workshops delivered on the 12th. The conference will provide practical advice, inspiring thought leadership, and access to in-depth training and workshops on how KM and related disciplines can provide value for your organization and transform your business. This year’s conference theme, Knowledge Sharing in the Age of New Technologies, focuses on culture, people processes, and the many different types of technologies supporting organizations as they excel in their industries.

To continue our tradition of thought leadership and in order to add a social and interactive element otherwise missing from many virtual conferences over the last two years, EK will also be hosting an open live stream reception on EK’s Youtube channel on Monday the 15th of November from 5-7pm. Over the course of two hours, EK’s CEO Zach Wahl and EK Consultant Adam Eltarhoni will speak with each of EK’s KMWorld presenters as well as assorted other guests. All KMWorld attendees, as well as the wider Knowledge Management community will be able to join the session, ask questions, and participate in the conversation via chat.

On the final day of KMWorld, following the closing keynote, Wahl will also present a live version of Knowledge Cast, the number one KM Podcast in the world, as ranked by Feedspot. This special episode of Knowledge Cast will include several KMWorld attendees sharing a live discussion on the themes from this year’s conference. In addition to EK’s prominent speaking roles and other thought leadership, EK is serving as a sponsor at the conference for the eighth year in a row. 

The full list of EK speakers and topics is below. Register for the conference here. 

• 11/12/2021 9:00–12:00 – Sara Mae O’Brien-Scott, Semantic Engineering Consultant and Zachary Wahl, CEO – Taxonomy 101
• 11/16/2021 2:00–2:45 – Jenni Doughty, Senior Solutions Consultant, Taxonomy & Ontology Design and Megan Salerno, Knowledge Management Consultant – Virtual Tools & Techniques to Promote a User-Centric Taxonomy Design
• 11/16/2021 4:00–4:45 – Joe Hilger, COO – Implementing Search in the New World of AI & ML
• 11/16/2021 4:00–4:45 – Polly Alexander Director, Knowledge Management, HealthStream, Inc.; Sara Nash, Technical Consultant, Data and Information Management – Enabling KM in Health Enterprises
• 11/17/2021 12:45–1:45 – Laurie Gray, VP, Customer Experience and Design, RGP; Tatiana Cakici, Senior KM Consultant – Taxonomy Case Studies: RGP and Health Education England
• 11/17/2021 12:45–1:45 – Helmut Nagy, COO, Semantic Web Company and Joe Hilger, COO – Enriching Knowledge Graphs – A Two-Way Street
• 11/17/2021 2:00–2:45 – Ann Bernath, Software Systems Engineer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); Bess Schrader, Senior Consultant; and Daria Topousis, Software Systems Engineer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – Institutional Knowledge Graph: Leveraging Semantic Tech
• 11/17/2021 3:00–3:45 – Liz White, Senior KM Analyst – Understanding Your Users Through UX Design
• 11/17/2021 4:00–4:45 – Liz White, Senior KM Analyst – Maximizing KM Value With UX & Knowledge Graphs
• 11/17/2021 4:00–4:45 – Zachary Wahl, CEO – Stump the Taxonomist/Ontologist: Q&A with Experts!
• 11/17/2021 5:30–7:00 – Guillermo Galdamez, Senior Consultant – Crafting & Selling a KM Strategy to Your Organization
• 11/18/2021 12:30–1:30 – Aylin Cetin, Senior Analyst and Instructional Designer; Cari Kreshak, Learning Experience Manager, National Park Service – Learning & Culture for Better KM
• 11/18/2021 2:45–3:30 – Amber Simpson, Senior Manager, Learning & Development, Walmart and Todd Fahlberg, Senior KM Consultant – CM, Digital Workplaces, & Information Architecture

About Enterprise Knowledge 

Enterprise Knowledge (EK) is a services firm that integrates Knowledge Management, Information and Data Management, Information Technology, and Agile Approaches to deliver comprehensive solutions. Our mission is to form true partnerships with our clients, listening and collaborating to create tailored, practical, and results-oriented solutions that enable them to thrive and adapt to changing needs. At the heart of these services, we always focus on working alongside our clients to understand their needs, ensuring we can provide practical and achievable solutions on an iterative, ongoing basis. Visit our website to see how optimizing your knowledge and data management will impact your organization. 

The post Enterprise Knowledge Playing Unprecedented Role at KMWorld 2021 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Between the newness of this powerful technology and the limitlessness of how it can be applied, I’ve seen many organizations struggle to define exactly what they want a knowledge graph to do for them. To better communicate all that a knowledge graph can do, I’ve found wireframing/interface design and user experience flow definition activities to be powerful tools in helping our clients define what exactly they hope to get out of leveraging a knowledge graph. These interface designs are all the more helpful when they’re a result of collaborative design sessions with project stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs). 

In this blog, I’ll be focusing specifically on how wireframing can help define knowledge graph-specific use cases from a search perspective, but know that knowledge graphs enhance a wide variety of KM-adjacent efforts at your organization and aren’t solely relegated to the realm of enterprise, asset-based search.

Defining Knowledge Graph Use Cases

As previously mentioned, an organization may be ready for knowledge graph implementation, but may not yet know why they need one or how they may benefit. Most simply, a knowledge graph imparts meaning to data and information, and from that point of view, the possible use cases can seem limitless. Consider the following use cases from a variety of our past clients spanning various industries:

1. As a researcher, I need to identify experts in a particular field by browsing related webinars, publications, conferences, committees, HR data, and other such entities, and be able to determine if I should invite that individual to join a committee. 

2. As a lab equipment purchaser, I need to access all available content about a specific product category so that I can make the most informed buying decision possible.

3. As a data scientist, I need to see how various financial institutions replied to a specific question on the same regulatory form and be able to easily traverse the relationships that exist between the data, institutions, and other such forms.

From the search perspective, facilitated collaborative design sessions can not only define the appearance and interaction points of various knowledge graph-supported functionalities, but can also facilitate the discovery of the types of questions and answers users are expecting to address and access via these functionalities. Understanding the users’ goals allows us to structure, model, and build the data in a way that is best able to answer those questions. Search enhancements like action-oriented results and knowledge panels can serve as a great stepping stone to defining use cases that are increasingly specific to your organization and the particular needs of your users.

Additionally, some of these initial design sessions can clarify what the knowledge graph shouldn’t do. For example, in recently collaborating with a provisioner of scientific instrumentation, software, and services, a design session started with the intention of defining the information assets and data entities to be represented in knowledge panels (meant to appear alongside search results). As part of that same session, search aggregator pages were also drafted and designed to feature any and all information, both knowledge- and product-specific, pertaining to a particular scientific technique. As the session continued, use cases better suited to the client’s goals materialized, and another series of wireframes, this time featuring a variety of page recommenders and topic classifiers, were devised to address those needs.

Identify Knowledge Graph-Supported Functionalities

Similar to use case identification, design sessions can also play a significant role in feature or functionality identification. There are not only many forms via which a knowledge graph’s data can be presented, but a limitless variety of ways of which that data can be collated, organized, and ultimately presented. Oftentimes, feature and functionality definition happens alongside use case definition and interface design, as use cases define the user’s action and its associated goal, and the interface’s built-in functionality maps how that goal will be achieved.

At this step in the process of knowledge graph-focused use case definition, there’s often some necessary data assessment work that needs to happen. Now that knowledge graph-specific use cases have been identified, the quality and availability of the data to be accessed by the graph and presented in the interface must be assessed so that the feasibility of implementation can be measured and it can be ascertained whether or not a data clean-up process is required.

Examples of Knowledge Graph Design in Practice

Below are two abbreviated examples of how EK used design sessions to define and meet user needs as they related to knowledge graph-supported functionalities and features.

Example 1

For a nonprofit and nongovernmental research organization, designs and use cases were iterated upon in parallel. While the project continued, both the designs and use cases shifted as a result of both an iterative approach, which allowed us to surface additional stakeholder thoughts and concerns, and upon discovering that the quality of the featured data was found to be in need of some necessary clean-up or was otherwise missing. Both to ensure that the project was delivered on time and that the expectations of the knowledge graph were defined and met, design-to-use-case mapping became a regular part of the working project cadence. For example, after each design walkthrough where additional requirements were identified or a use case was refined, those changes to the use case in question were mapped to the wireframe, allowing all project members to visually track how the proposed interface supported a use case, regardless of how much that use case may have changed. Mapping the goals of the use cases to specific actions and processes supported by the interface ensured that the project team’s forward momentum remained user focused and feasible. These design validation sessions also allowed for EK to simultaneously train and educate project stakeholders as to how they could use wireframes to demonstrate the values of a knowledge graph throughout their organization.

Use Case to Interface Mapping

Example 2

At an accounting and tax services firm, staff were unable to see any and all content related to a specific client, and this was exacerbated by that content taking many forms, such as survey results and individual documents. To address this need, EK led a series of iterative design sessions to identify the types of data to be featured in both action-oriented results and search aggregator pages. Conducting these sessions in an iterative manner means that each consecutive group of participants provides feedback, and builds, on the inputs supplied by the previous session. At the end of a series of these sessions, the resulting designs have been both refined and validated multiple times by participants’ peers. For example, we worked with stakeholders across the organization to design the client page (featured here) which aggregates information from the organization’s content, HR, and CRM systems to ensure that employees could easily access information like engagement letters, active jobs, survey results, industry intelligence, and more, all as they related to that specific client. Iterative design via collaborating with individuals across the organization allowed us to identify all of these different types and sources of data and information.This repeatable process of refining and validating allows EK to confidently understand how a knowledge graph should be constructed, while also providing a sense of security to project stakeholders in the fact that the recommendations are exactly what the users are expecting and from which they’ll find guaranteed value.

Example of a search aggregator page iteratively designed by workshop participants.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a variety of decisions to make prior to implementing a knowledge graph, and design sessions with a focus on wireframing can help define the use cases, interface, and necessary features and functionalities to be supported by that interface. Design workstreams running parallel or prior to development/integration efforts ensure that those efforts are directed towards a high-value goal and ultimate increased return on investment. If your organization is ready to explore the benefits of knowledge graph implementation but isn’t sure where to start, reach out to us. 

The post Using Wireframes to Define and Visualize Enterprise Knowledge Graphs appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In my last blog, I introduced the how of chatbots: how they work, how they’re implemented, and how they can help your organization, whether that’s through supporting your customer experience team, connecting users to information and research at the point of need, or request mapping. I also closed the blog with a line about the user experience that’s integral to successful chatbot implementation: “chatbots allow for a customized user experience, and not only allow users to get the information they need more quickly, but can be designed and oriented toward each user’s unique intent and interest.” This blog considers four key elements integral to creating a user-oriented chatbot experience. I’ve also included a selection of questions and considerations to ask yourself and your team before beginning the process of designing and developing the user experience of your chatbot. 

Define Your Purpose

At the outset of your chatbot design and development process, you’ll want to define the chatbot’s purpose. Is it going to be oriented towards supporting your CX team or to connecting users to relevant research and publications? Part of your purpose will be pre-defined by the type of organization you are and the services you provide. When deciding what the purpose of your chatbot will be, consider areas of weakness in your organization and if those areas could benefit from chatbot-oriented services. A strong purpose statement can serve as your ‘north star’ throughout the development process and guide decision-making so that the end product aligns with your initial goal. Having a clear ‘north star’ purpose will also be invaluable throughout the necessary content clean-up and tagging process that happens prior to chatbot development. Additionally, the iterations and use case validations that occur during development should consistently be matched against, and support, your purpose. 

Questions to consider:

• If you’re considering a phased approach to chatbot implementation, what do those phases look like? Does your purpose statement hold true during each of those phases of development?
• Some purpose statements include elements of both the emotional and the rational. Decide how you want your chatbot to make your users feel and consider not only what that looks like from a visual perspective, but the steps necessary to make that happen. What processes must your chatbot be able to carry out flawlessly? What is its main job? What is the use case for your chatbot?

AI & Chatbots

Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots have the ability to ‘learn’ in the sense that they’re designed to spot and track trends and patterns in data, like repeat user questions. The programming behind these chatbots is written in a way that not only tracks these patterns, but also applies those patterns where applicable, allowing the chatbot to most aptly service users’ needs without consistent human intervention. For example, consider a company that sells cell phones: user questions about a nonfunctioning power button or a cracked screen would both be routed to a physical repairs webpage.

Questions to consider:

• How ‘smart’ do you want your chatbot to be? Should it be able to notice and document patterns in user queries and adjust its responses in return or should it be designed to answer a set of  targeted, but common, questions?
• What are the more advanced features you envision your chatbot offering? If its main purpose is to connect users to customer service representatives through a series of Boolean questions, you can go light on AI and machine learning capabilities.
• How often and with what resources are you willing or able to dedicate to your chatbot? A chatbot oriented around Boolean questions requires considerably less investment than a chatbot designed to ‘learn.’

Natural Language Interface/Conversational User Interface (CUI)

Chatbots allow users to interact with a computer interface on their own terms and in their own language, regardless of whether the chatbot’s communication process is triggered through Boolean operators (‘Did you want to cancel your internet services?’) or actual queries (‘What publications do we have about bridge development in Paraguay?’). And while Boolean operators limit the questions a user can ask of the chatbot and, in turn, what the chatbot understands, implementing a Boolean-oriented chatbot is an excellent option for a Proof of Concept to prove out a larger, more complex chatbot project.

Questions to consider:

• Related to both the AI section above and the Purpose section below, consider how conversational you need your chatbot to be. Spend some time brainstorming the types of questions you expect your users to ask, and then consider what questions would ‘break’ your bot. Be prepared to spend some time reworking your bot’s logic to address these breaking points. For instance, should your users be able to escape a bot-guided and intent-specific process? In one of our projects, users were finding that they couldn’t request help while looking at publications (i.e. the intent here is ‘view publications’). The bot’s conversational structure had to be reformatted to guide the user through the required steps to complete an intent before returning them to a point where they can choose a new intent.
• When your bot breaks (and it will), how should it respond and prompt the user to try another query? Does it recommend alternative or popular queries submitted by other users?

Personalized Brand Experience

The visual interface of the chatbot should be aligned with your organization’s branding guidelines so that it doesn’t appear to be adversely operating as a separate function of your organization’s user experience strategy. And because chatbots leverage a natural language interface, you’ll want to spend some time crafting the tone and formality of your chatbot’s responses so it interacts with your users in a language akin to your company’s brand and ethos. Your decisions here dictate how your chatbot will look, ‘speak,’ and behave.

Questions to consider:

• Is your organization’s branding up-to-date? Do your design and development teams have access to this branding? While this may seem like an obvious place to start any design process, it’s always a good idea to ascertain that everyone has access to the same, and correct, materials.
• Have you defined the ‘voice’ of your brand? If your brand were a person, how would they talk? Consider the vibe and tone you want conveyed through your chatbot’s ‘speech.’

Conclusion

With some dedicated thought and draftwork, the prompts featured above should help kickstart your organization’s chatbot design process. And while the above points are integral to the chatbot implementation process and can inform your organization’s initial design and development decisions, there’s some necessary data mapping and ontology design work that needs to happen behind the scenes so that your chatbot is both relevant and helpful. Use the prompts above to get a head-start on your chatbot’s design, and contact us if you’re interested in better understanding the chatbot implementation process from an end-to-end perspective.

The post The UX Guide to Chatbots appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Moreville’s User Experience Honeycomb advanced the conversation from just discussing usability and gave designers of web products a more complete tool for strategically analyzing and improving the overall experiencing of interacting with web products. With this increase in completeness came an increase in the complexity of the analysis and discussion. As we decide which facets of the UX honeycomb to prioritize in our product development, accessibility often gets a lower priority than the others (unless we’re developing products for the Federal government). Accessibility is ranked towards the bottom of the UX honeycomb at our peril, however. As discussed below, designing an accessible web product cannot be separated from the other aspects of user experience.

Accessible

IT Accessibility simply means that our web products and content must be accessible to anyone – regardless of disability. In an analysis of the intersection between accessibility and user experience it is important to acknowledge the obvious fact that accessibility is one Moreville’s facets of user experience. If someone is blind and requires the use of screen readers to access the content on our websites, their user experience is going to be poor if we haven’t built an accessible product. But the strategies we employ to ensure our web products and web content are accessible ultimately impact other aspects of user experience beyond the “accessible” facet of the honeycomb.

Findable

One of the core services of Enterprise Knowledge is knowledge management strategy and design, so creating findable content is near and dear to our hearts. One of the key ways we ensure content is findable (sometimes via keyword search, and sometimes via faceted navigation) is through metadata. 508 compliance requires key metadata be associated with any web content. At minimum, this should include:

• Title
• Author
• Subject
• Keyword(s)

If you’re creating content directly in a CMS, this will often be accomplished by “tagging” content (i.e. this blog post is tagged to topic/subject = “Content and Brand Strategy” on the EK website). If you’re creating a document like a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF that will be uploaded to a document management system, you can add the metadata under File > Info > Properties. Adding this information to your web content will simultaneously improve the findability and the accessibility.

Valuable

Take a moment and think about the product value statement for any product you’re developing. Is it:

• To improve employee performance through improved access to learning resources?
• To provide an enticing view of goods and services for sale and encourage consumers to purchase them?
• To raise awareness about the mission of a philanthropic organization?

I challenge you to think of any product value statement where accessible features and content would not enhance your ability to realize that value. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States have a disability. This is not a small market segment – you can’t afford to leave them out.

Useful

As designers of web products we must always be confident and creative enough to challenge assumptions and ask whether the products we’re creating are actually of some use. Web products that are not accessible are inherently less useful. As professionals, we shouldn’t let managers or clients push us to design and build less useful products – it’s not in anyone’s best business interests.

Usable

Often when we talk about user experience, the conversation focuses on ease-of-use (usableness). While making our products more accessible can make human-computer interactions more complicated, a well-designed, accessible system can understand enough about the user to personalize the experience and offer the least-restrictive option to meet that user’s accessibility needs. Barring the level of complexity (or budget) for an automatically personalized user experience, we can allow users to self-select the level of accessibility and assistance that is required. For example, not everyone needs an audio-described version of a video or a companion video transcript, but offering an option to our users can only improve the usability of our products

Desirable

The principles of emotional design (focusing on how a user feels when interacting with a product) can help us use improved accessibility to design desirable web products. Research tells us that we can affect the desirableness of a product through three key strategies:

• Visceral emotional design – Here we design for aesthetic pleasure. When we factor in aspects of accessible product design like adequate contrast ratio, we are improving the visceral emotional design of the product.
• Behavioral emotional design – Here we focus on how well the product performs the desired functions. There’s a lot of overlap between behavioral emotional design and designing a usable product (discussed above).
• Reflective emotional design – In reflective emotional design, we help our product’s users understand the product’s impact on their lives – even when they’re not actively using it. To design for this we really have to understand our users and think about how we want them to feel when they use the product. It’s the most complex of the three tiers of emotional design, but again – improving accessibility, while not compromising style and simplicity, can only improve the emotions users associated with our products.

Credible

Stanford’s Web Credibility Research has resulted in this top 10 list to boost your website’s credibility. It seems pretty credible – supporting research and all. While accessibility is not directly mentioned, a site that is easy to use – and useful (number 7 on the list) repeats two elements of the user experience honeycomb discussed above. In short, good design is good design and a well-designed product improves accessibility, credibility, and overall user experience.

Summary

When designing web products – and creating the content which fills those products – it’s easy to think that the technical experts and leadership within an organization know what’s best. It’s important, however, to prioritize the needs of the system’s users, even if those needs contradict what we think we know. The tension between leadership’s desires and users’ needs already lends a layer of complexity to product design and content creation, and it’s easy for accessibility concerns to get squeezed out by that tension. EK’s consultants can help you balance the tension of these conflicting needs when designing your product and crafting content. Contact us to learn more.

The post The Intersection of User Experience and Accessibility appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge (EK) has released the full course overview for the upcoming two-day Certified Knowledge Specialist (CKS) course in Agile and Design Thinking.

The next offering of the two-day Certified Knowledge Specialist (CKS) course in Agile and Design Thinking will be hosted February 6th and 7th in Arlington, Virginia. The full course overview and registration information can be found through the KMI event page. 

The course will cover Agile, Design Thinking, Change Management, and User-Centered Communications strategies, detailing how elements of each may be harnessed to address common challenges in KM efforts. Check out the Certified Knowledge Specialist course playlist for a sampling of topics that will be discussed during the course.  Registration is open until January 28, 2019.

The post Next Agile & Design Thinking Course Announced appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

As product creators, we should make decisions based on feedback from people who consistently interact with the product, rather than our own priorities and preferences. You may have spent time painstakingly developing multiple end-user personas for both inside or outside your organization. Now that the personas have been developed, it is important to make sure that you consistently weave them throughout your development process to create a great solution for your end user.

Deriving Epics from Personas

Once you have created your product-specific personas, it is now time to take their goals and drill them down into epics. At EK we define an epic as:

Example Epic

Let’s use the following example to demonstrate how a user persona can guide the story writing process:

University-Wide Initiative: Improve the findability of information and experts that students need in order to enhance their learning experience at EK University

User Persona:

Jane’s persona represents one of many students on EK University’s campus that have the same or similar problem. Based on Jane’s goals and frustrations, a digital tool that increases her social engagement and peer collaboration may be created in order to ensure her success because it connects her to other students on the same learning path.

A sample epic may be:

As an active student, I would like a responsive and robust mobile app, so I can engage and collaborate with the other students learning about KM in my class, in real time.

In her persona, Jane is clearly motivated by technology. Her motivation is incorporated into the epic as an app that can be viewed and easily used on her phone. Notice that the epic is high-level yet captures Jane’s goal of being successful in engaging and collaborating with her fellow peers around increasing shared knowledge, quickly and efficiently. Creating a persona-driven epic allows us to center ourselves around the user experience, one where the overarching focus is framed around the user and their needs.

Writing User Stories with Personas

Having developed an epic based on Jane’s persona, you can now break the epic into smaller user stories. Remember that the user stories should be written as problem statements in the perspective of the person who has an issue or challenge; in this case, Jane. So, if you don’t know who the users are and what problem you want to solve then it’s impossible to write the right stories and you end up with a wish list rather than a description of the relevant product functionality. At EK, we describe user stories as:

Example User Stories

Going back to our epic of “develop a mobile app for active students,” we can now break it down to include the following hypothetical user stories:

Sample user stories may be:

As a student…

• I would like to have a tool where I can chat with the peers in my class, in real time, so that I can collaborate on projects and share knowledge
• I would like a space where all relevant course materials are stored for easy access, so that I can quickly get all my documents
• I would like to see my course grades, so that I can quickly check my progress.
• I would like to quickly send and receive emails to and from my peers and from the app, so that I can quickly engage with them about a class.

In her persona, Jane is frustrated by not being able to access class documents easily  and is driven by her goals and motivations surrounding creating positive peer relationships and having goals to maintain at least a 3.5 GPA. Here, using a persona to derive user stories was effective because the user stories were written in a way that identifies the direct user (Jane) and explains what she needs and why she will need it. Using a defined persona allowed us to create a holistic user story centered around Jane and her peers, rather than just a product.

In Conclusion

In order to design an exceptional product, one that is directly related to your end users, you have to understand and utilize your user personas throughout the sprint process. While completing these may seem a bit time-consuming, completing both will serve as the basis for product success and can potentially save you from any major re-designs in the future. One way to keep your epics and user stories centered around your personas, is by keeping hard copies posted on the wall. This way, you will always have a visual reminder of who you are building your product for. If you’re interested in developing personas or successfully applying personas to your product, contact Enterprise Knowledge at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Personas to Products: Writing Persona-Driven Epics and User Stories appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

1. Folders v. Metadata in SharePoint Document Libraries
Clients often ask us why we recommend using metadata over managing folders and subfolders in a SharePoint document library. In this white paper, Tatiana Baquero Cakici explains the advantages of tagging documents with metadata versus simply using folders to organize and navigate through documents in SharePoint document libraries.

2. Knowledge Management in 2017
The EK team focuses on integrating knowledge management with the best principles in Agile, IT, Information Management, and Change Management to achieve tangible results. In this blog, Zach Wahl reflects on this concept and shares critical integration points he hopes to see more of with knowledge management in 2017.

3. Search UX Best Practices Part 1: User Input
Search impacts everything from the way we find a website (Google), to how we find content on a site. But search also puts a heavier burden on the user than most website interactions. Users must locate your search form, enter a meaningful keyword, and sift through pages of results in order to find the most relevant information. In part one of this two-part series, Rebecca Wyatt shares best practices to make search forms as intuitive as they can possibly be for your users.

4. Taxonomy Governance Best Practices
When a taxonomy design is done well, it goes unnoticed, as it enables a seamless connection between the end user and the content. However, as business needs evolve, it’s inevitable that a taxonomy design must also evolve in order to maintain this seamless experience. Claire Brawdy shares several best practices for taxonomy governance, and explains why governance is the key to ensuring a the evolution of a taxonomy happens in a managed, predictable way. 

5. 3 Steps to Developing a Practical Knowledge Management Strategy: Step 2 Define the Target State
There are three key questions to ask when developing a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy: where are you, where do you want to be, and how do you ensure you get there successfully? At EK, we define these as the Current State, Target State, and Roadmap. As simple as these terms may sound, developing a complete understanding of each is no small challenge. In this white paper series, one of EK’s KM strategy experts, Yanko Ivanov, addresses the second step: developing the Target State Definition.

Which EK blogs were your favorites, and what topics would you like to see us write about in 2018? Let us know on Twitter, or reach out at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Top 5 EK Blogs of 2017 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

A few months ago, my colleague wrote an excellent blog about

While this may seem like a straightforward concept, designing for and collaborating with your users is often much more difficult in practice. How do you ensure that your collaboration efforts with users are not only meaningful, but structured enough to be both productive and actionable? This is a challenge we encounter time and time again. Below, I describe several strategies and best practices for eliciting ongoing feedback and co-designing solutions with your core users.

Adopt the Right Mindset

It’s essential that your team members embrace a collective mindset around collaboration and what that can and should entail. Here are some characteristics that are absolutely essential for a team to adopt for effective collaboration:

1. Don’t let egos stand in the way of success – Innovation can come from anyone, especially your users. Be humble, and listen without preconceived notions of what the solution is.
2. Empathy is the basis for success – Empathy allows your team to develop solutions that are both innovative and responsive to real users’ needs and desires. Empathy also helps teammates respect each other’s perspectives and communicate well.
3. Be agile – At EK, when we talk about agile, we say that you don’t do agile, you become agile. Agile carries over into UX constantly, because during your collaborative efforts, you’ll never have all the answers. Embrace the uncertainty and be willing to implement designs in an agile way; in an iterative manner and without knowing all the details and requirements.

Set Expectations from the Start

Your first conversation with end users is absolutely critical for setting a tone that is friendly and open to carry through the duration of the project. Whenever you begin an initiative with end users, engage them in conversations as soon as possible to gather their ideas, challenges, and situations. Doing this results in two key benefits. First, you immediately start gathering critical data and anecdotes to inform your future designs. Second (and more importantly), these conversations build trust with end users, thereby strengthening the understanding that you are working together to address the challenge, which will better ensure engagement, buy-in, and overall adoption down the road. Set expectations about the project, be honest about potential obstacles, and transparent about your processes. Doing so will further build trust and rapport with your users.

Select the Right Approach

There’s never a “one size fits all” approach to user collaboration, so it’s essential for your team to engage users in ways that make them comfortable with contributing. The more comfortable users are, the more likely they are to offer candid, authentic information and feedback, which leads to deeper and more nuanced understandings.

At a high level, here are some guiding questions to help you determine what collaboration approach to use with your users:

1. How often do your users want to hear from you? Every day, week, or only at critical points in the project?
2. How do your users currently communicate and collaborate? Do they prefer more structure and formality, or less?
3. What is the problem or challenge that needs to be collaboratively solved?
4. What results ideally need to be produced as a result of collaborating?

Every situation necessitates a different method, and in some instances, you may combine several collaboration approaches to achieve your end goal. It’s critical to consider the ideal outcome for your collaboration efforts, as this will inevitably shape the format for the exercise. For instance, maybe your team has to gather as many ideas for potential solutions as possible.  A timeboxed brainstorming session where participants are encouraged to write and sketch as many ideas as possible would be a potential fit. In another example, perhaps your team has a slew of potential features for an app and needs a clear direction for moving forward. Here, it makes more sense to collaborate around “sense-making” – grouping and categorizing ideas into themes, with a dot voting exercise to prioritize.

Add Focus and Structure

We’ve all been in meetings that lack clear objectives and direction, and we recognize that it’s frustrating to participate in seemingly aimless conversations. Therefore, it’s essential, especially when collaborating with your users, to create structure in order to ensure progress.

When people hear the word “structure,” many equate it to “rules,” which sounds counterintuitive to collaboration. However, without these parameters, it’s inevitable that group politics and policies will drive the conversations, limiting the group’s potential. To that end, planned collaborations need to balance a range of communication styles and preferences, as well as group interactions. To start, work as a group to collectively define ground rules facilitate good collaborative behavior. Be sure to establish timeboxes to help participants avoid getting stuck, and utilize an array of activities to engage both introverts and extroverts. For example, having individuals participate in a silent brainstorming session followed by report-outs will ensure everyone has a format that is more comfortable for them, and that they each have a voice. In some scenarios it is also helpful to assign roles of note-takers, facilitators, etc. to participants so that everyone feels they have a purpose.

Closing

Collaboration may sound simple, but it’s much more difficult to effectively practice, especially when you and your team are often dealing with a wide range of users, all with varying objectives, needs, and expectations. Despite these challenges, the value of collaborating with your users is clear. When you design with your users, you ensure your team understands the whole picture, and builds out products and solutions that are not only usable, but delightful.

Interested in learning how to more effectively collaborate with your end users? Contact us, we’re happy to help!

The post Collaboration for Improved User Experience appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

• The differences between findability and discoverability;
• Why they’re equally important; and
• How they manifest in successful KM initiatives.

Findability v. Discoverability: What’s the Difference?

Findability is a term for the ease with which information can be found. It means that users can easily find content or information they assume is present on a website. As an example, if I’m looking on EK’s website for information about Agile Transformations, I can search for a specific term (agile transformation), and find information about the topic.

However, users rarely know all of the content on your website. A good knowledge management strategy also promotes discoverability, which involves making sure that new content or information can be found, even if the user(s) don’t know that it exists yet.

Let’s say that after clicking on and reading through the first search result (“Why Agile Fails When Organizations Try to ‘Go Agile’”), I’ve realized that, while this content addresses my initial search, I’d like to find out more.

In the image above, the right hand side of the page has lists of “Related Content” and “Related News”, which enable me as a user to further explore and discover other content that’s, for instance, about the same core topics, by the same author, or of the same type.

Findability and Discoverability for Improved User Experience

Findability and discoverability are important because they address two distinct needs of end users searching for the content they need. A user’s informational needs are not satisfied solely through finding content that they know exists, or exclusively through discovering information that they hadn’t known about previously. A user’s goals constantly change between finding specific information and discovering new information, and any well-thought-out KM strategy needs to accommodate both.

The findability/discoverability challenge is even more critical when considering intranets, knowledge bases, and other internal content/document management systems, where users may need to wade through thousands of documents to find what they’re seeking. Below are three ways that findability and discoverability manifest in KM initiatives.

Well-Designed Main Navigation

Helping your users navigate efficiently should always be a high priority. Simply relying on keyword search will not be enough. A well-designed and prominent main navigation menu acts as a map that directs your end users to the information they’re seeking. Here are several tips that will help ensure that your navigation menu is easily findable for end users:

• Keep it simple. Strip down your navigation menu to the bare minimum and keep only the menu items which direct users to the most sought-after content on your site.

• Give your main navigation menu the visual weight it deserves. Consider font and icon size, and the color contrast (especially as it relates to links within your navigation).
• Consider responsive design. Users increasingly access web content on mobile devices rather than on a desktop monitor. It’s essential to consider how your menu will look on a tablet, and a smartphone. Less screen space means less content, so be purposeful in deciding what information people really need to see in your navigation menu.

Facted Navigation

Faceted navigation is something that sounds complex, but is easy to recognize in practice. Faceted navigation means picking the facets (or filters) that a user will utilize to choose their own search path. For example, if I wanted to buy a pair of shoes, some facets that I would like to use to filter my search results could include shoe size, color, and heel height.

Determining what values to use as filters for your organization’s content can be tricky, because every organization has unique needs and situations which shape how their information should be organized. Through our business taxonomy design workshops, we help organizations to identify and prioritize these facets.

Related Content

Too often, websites miss opportunities to further engage their end users beyond their first click online. However, this isn’t necessarily due to the quality of your content, but rather the discoverability of your content.

One way to improve your content’s discoverability is by offering relevant links to content that is related to the original inquiry. While this process may seem straightforward, there are several tips to consider:

• Keep it simple. Simplicity reigns once again. It’s impossible to be completely accurate when deciding which links to share as related content, so it can be tempting to provide more to address all possibilities. This can easily overwhelm the end user, so cap the related links at five to seven.
• The level of specificity of related links depends on where the user is within the site. Offer a broader range of suggestions for posts on main pages, because they act as a bridge to content that end users may not have considered yet. On a topic-specific landing page, offer only related links which are relevant to that topic.
• Don’t disregard visual design. Typically, websites reserve the right side of a webpage for less important information (e.g., advertisements). As a result, it’s critical to avoid any visual elements similar to advertisements when designing your related content, because content is more likely to be ignored in that format.

Closing

Findability and discoverability are key outcomes for any comprehensive KM strategy, but improving both begins with keeping your users and their needs at the center of your efforts. In turn, you’ll ensure that your organization’s information is findable, manageable, and reusable for those who need it. Need help improving the findability and discoverability of your content? Contact Enterprise Knowledge to learn more.

The post Findability v. Discoverability appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.