Farewell to the Catalyze Community

Goodbye Catalyze - It Was Great To Know You

The announcement from iRise yesterday today that the Catalyze Community was merging into the ModernAnalyst.com Community probably didn’t even register a blip on your radar.  But the announcement has more than a touch of melancholy for me as I was the founding community manager from the conception of the community in late 2006 through its growth to over 4,000 members in July 2008 and I want to give the the community a proper send-off.

Giving birth to and nurturing a community is not unlike the experience of raising children as I lived and breathed the Catalyze Community for almost 18 months.  I cut my teeth in community management, tried to set the standard in what professional B2B communities could be, and got started on my journey into social media through my efforts with the community.  I learned a great deal and had a chance to develop many friends in the community space including the team from Mzinga who provided the white label social media software that powered the site (a special thanks go out to Jim Storer, Derek Showerman, Aaron Strout, Isaac Hazard, Mark Wallace and Barry Libert).  I am sure I drove the Mzinga team a little bit crazy as I pushed the envelope to ‘mold’ their software into my idea of what a community experience should be.  I also enjoyed hosting the monthly webinars we held with a wide variety of knowledgeable experts.  Most of all, I discovered my “blogging” voice, and was able to experiment with the new and emerging (at the time) social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, and LinkedIn.

Of course, a lot of credit also goes out to iRise who was the founding sponsor of the Catalyze Community.  iRise’s funding of  the Catalyze Community and mission to keep it ‘commercial-free’ is what drew many of the members into the community.

The demise of the Catalyze didn’t come as a surprise to me as the community has floundered without a community manager for the past two years – and the site had become a virtual ghost town with very few visitors and sadly, very little fresh content.  Anyone who understands community building realizes that a site that is not actively managed with fresh content cannot be sustained and is destined for failure which ended up as one of my blog posts in January 2009.  In fact, I shared many of my experiences with the Catalyze Community in a number of blog posts.

The original goal of Catalyze was to unite and “catalyze” the disparate factions of  business analysts, usability professionals, user experience (UX) and information architects, designers, software developers and others who define, design and create software applications.  The ModernAnalyst Community is a very robust community and boasts over 38,000 members – and most of the Catalyze members will be nore than well-served by the merger.  I hope that the analytical “left-brain” analysts continue to reach out to the creative “right-brain” designers and usability professionals, and that they can continue to find a common ground in defining and designing better software.  I send best wishes to Adrian Marchis and the rest of his ModernAnalyst.com team on continuing the Catalyze tradition.

Catalyze Community Home Page from March 2008

ModernAnalyst.com

30 Usability Issues

If you are a usability fan or just want to learn more about the key topics in usability, you need to check out the article on “30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of” from Smashing Magazine.

The exhaustive list includes definitions for 30 usability issues, including my favorites — the Baby-Duck-Syndrome and the Zeigarnik Effect.

-7±2 Principle
-2-Second-Rule
-3-Click-Rule
-80/20 Rule (The Pareto principle)
-Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
-Fitts’ Law
-Inverted Pyramid
-Satisficing
-Baby-Duck-Syndrome
-Banner-Blindness
-Cliffhanger-Effect (Zeigarnik-Effect)
-Gestalt principles of form perception
-The Self-Reference Effect
-Eye-Tracking
-Fold
-Foveal viewport (Foveal area)
-Gloss
-Graceful Degradation (Fault-tolerance)
-Granularity
-Hotspot
-Legibility
-Minesweeping
-Mystery-Meat Navigation (MMN)
-Physical consistency
-Progressive Enhancement (PE)
-Readability
-User-centered design (UCD)
-Vigilance (sustained attention)
-Walk-Up-And-Use Design
-Wireframe

Perspective in Design – A Presentation by Jay Morgan, Information Architect

I had the chance to listen to Jay Morgan’s presentation on user-centered design at the World Congress of Business Analysts today in Boston.  Jay addressed three key areas:

• Seeing the customer
• Seeing the product
• Seeing the total experience

Under Seeing the Customer, Jay examined three techniques:

• Scenarios – Scenarios are short stories that describe a user’s behavior and interaction with a system.  Scenarios have a beginning, middle and end – and are written in the first person.
• Mental Models –  Mental Models are maps of user goals to a product’s features and they describe how your users see the experience.  Indi Young from Adaptive Path has been one of the leading proponents of Mental Models.
• Personas – Personas let you discover the archetypes or idealized models of your user population.  You can analyze reasearch data from qualitative studies to form the ideal personas for your application.  Alan Cooper has written extensively on Personas.

Under Seeing the Product, Jay discussed the three key techniques:

• Heuristic Evaluation – The concept behind heuristic evaluation is to evaluate your product or website against a scorecard.  Forrester’s Web Site Review checklist provides a good list for evaluation.
• Usability Testing – Usability testing involves having real users evaluate the product to achieve real goals.  Usabiltiy testing lets you explore, assess and validate.  Open and close card sorting are two methods to do some low-end usability testing
• Prototyping + Simulation – Under prototyping and simulation, you build a functional, interactive model of the product.  Jay stated that “simulating changes the game in a big way, so you should expect significant returns”.

And under Seeing the Total Experience, Jay discussed:

• User + Product Perspectives
• Iterative Design

In summary, Jay made three key points:

• You will bring a new perspective to work that will improve your products and your process.
• UCD is a way of “Getting the right design” versus merely “Getting the design right”
• Designing the total experience is based on an adaptive process of iterative design.

Jay is also one of the community leaders for Catalyze, so I know he will be posting more insights and will be available to answer any community questions on user-centered design.

The Scott Adams Meltdown: Anatomy of a Usability Disaster

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group, the “dream team” firm specializing in human-computer interaction. Tog was lead designer at WebMD, the super-vertical start-up founded in February, 1996 by Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

He write a semi-periodical free webzine called AskTog and this is his amusing and interesting “post accident” evaluation report of what happened when Dilbert comic strip author Scott Adams permanently deleted a number of comments to his popular blog.

Just like an aircraft accident, it is never just one factor – but a combination of factors that contribute to an accident.  Tag actually identified five errors in this ‘usability’ accident:

1. User Model didn’t reflect the Design Model
2. Misleading metaphor
3. Confirmation Dialogs Ambiguous
4. Confirmation Substituted for Undo
5. No Usability Evaluation

Per Tog, “the first four errors, in this case, are pretty fundamental, and no human-computer interaction designer should have made any of them. Still, errors, particularly in failing to recognize ambiguity, are going to creep in. Our safety net is user testing, something obviously missing in this case.”

He also goes on to state “it is never, ever useful in the design of software to blame the user. We know that almost all users are not going to even start a tutorial, let alone finish it. We know that no one but users new to computers RTFM. If they did RTFM, we wouldn’t even have such an initialism. In fact, the more experienced the user, the less likely they are to read the manual. (Power users don’t even read the instructions on the screen, let alone seek on-line help or a manual.) Experienced users only seek help when they become aware of a problem, and, in this case, a highly-experienced user did not become aware of the problem until it was already too late.”

Read the entire analysis of the accident at this link.