The 2006 edition of Jakob Nielsen's Top 10 Intranets is out and my name is in it. Credited by the master himself. Now to be clear, I hate resume padders, and I do not want to overstate my importance on a project that involved dozens of people.
I can also say that I'm very proud that the Object Systems Group found me via Google. It's always fun when instead of looking for a job, a job offer finds you, and it's happened to me twice. I should also say that when I was going through the phone interviews for this position, here's what swung things my way. Sure, I had the experience and all, but what made me different was that I'd been there before. When Capital One first tried rounding up far-flung Web sites into a cohesive intranet, way back in 1997, I was the IA on that project. And now I had a chance to come full circle. My greatest contriibution in '97 was the five least restrictive ways to institute a standard look and feel. I've always been a believer in clarity and ease of use -- which is what happens when you start out writing manuals. Apps should be so easy to use, you don't need a manual. Here's what I wrote '97. "This intranet is not a collection of individual Web sites. This is a business information delivery system. The driving principles can be summed up in two sentences. Mind you, this was before Nielsen was famous and before the O'Reilly Book on Information Architecture even came out. Here's what I wrote in '03. People should use information, not burn time looking for it. One way to cut down on people browsing or searching for content is to know what they need in advance and present it to them automatically. That is the promise of a portal, and it was a wise decision for COF to consider building one. Now note what Nielsen's report said: "Many intranet designers possess both design ingenuity and aesthetic mastery. Yet one skill is less common; the ability to take a task-based approach to design. The designers of Capital One's My One Place intranet have this gift. Throughout this site, designers concentrate on users' tasks and giving them what they need, when they need it. Further, the labels are straightforward: the designers resisted the lure of catchy phrases and obtusely named "features" or "wizards." Couldn't have said it better myself. *** |
But I can state two facts of note: I was the first information architect on the project and my over-riding principles survived.