brilliant presentation! clear, concise, comprehensible--totally followed the principle of "no-duh" deliverable (an earlier talk today). the presenters provided a wonderful language for breaking apart the tough navigational problems we encounter on a daily basis. ** particularly if you're working at an enterprise web-apps provider (like oracle :-) ** added bonus: the slides were perhaps the most visually beautiful i've seen today...definitely an example i'll reference in my talk tomorrow...
Posted by uday.gajendar at February 28, 2004 09:39 PMAgreed that the Vanguard groups's "Creating a Consistent Enterprise Web Navigation Solution" talk was well-done. It is amazing what good graphics can do to clarify a presentation. Some random notes from the talk for people who did not attend:
- Since Vanguard is client-owned, they are very client-centric
- They have a total of 20-30 IA's and 30-40 Interaction Designers
- They break up the responsibilities for site deisgn along level-of-detail: IA's (site structure) hand-off to Site Architects (section or page structure) to Visual Designers (page design).
- Their topic is part of a larger initiative around consistency but navigational consistency was the focus for today
- Content-to-Content links are the semantic link between pieces of content.
- They have a kind of unique Content Type in their world, know as Object/Attribute. This is because the Object/Attribute content types literally have no content without their attributes. (This might be re-phrased to be less confusing if the Object/Attributes are explained as shoing their metadata to users while other content types use their metadata for indexing or the like.
My recommendation to Vanguard on this initiative is to make sure they engineer in feedback loops and the time to do something about them. Another great predictor of success on a project like this is making sure changes to the Navigation Components are limited more by business process and less by technical constraints (when using systemitized display like a portal or XML/XSL). A slow technical process is a guaranteed way to torpedo the living relevance of a nav system and creates a defensive posture on the designer side of things because they know how difficult it is to change things.
Posted by: Brett Lider at February 29, 2004 08:30 AM