Software

  In this video, watch the stellar user experience features of Lotus Connections 2.5.

Bringing social software to the enterprise

A lot of people are using the popular micro blogging service Twitter these days. They blog, they use wikis, they participate in groups and other consumer community tools. But what about inside an organization? As more employees get comfortable using social software tools for personal or professional reasons, businesses need to consider how they can use these tools to become more effective, while keeping internal company information inside the firewall. IBM Lotus Software has taken tools such as social networking profiles, on-line communities, blogs, micro blogs, file sharing, and social bookmarks, and brought them together into an integrated suite that customers can use with their employees, partners and customers.

Design Challenges in Web 2.0 Tools

The power in Web 2.0 tools is in being able to take advantage of the network effect of having people contribute to content creation and discussions. The more that people participate, the more benefit an organization derives from the tools. The design challenge for Lotus Connections 2.5 was to create a system that lets people contribute, find information and find other people seamlessly. The IBM team took on this challenge and came up with a number of new interface designs and enhancements:

(Click the image to enlarge it.) • A consistent navigation architecture was created that lets the user move from tool to tool easily. Whether it's a blog, wiki, or an activity, the same pattern is used. Behaviors learned in one tool apply in all tools.

• A key design principle was to keep the focus on people, so that it would always be easy to reach out to the author or to find related information by the same person. Now, wherever a person's name appears, the user can display a business card which includes
(Click the image to enlarge it.) their contact information, and links to their profile, blog, bookmarks and more. A user can move from reading a person's blog, to viewing the latest bookmarks they have linked to, or to seeing what documents they have created.

• Communities were greatly enhanced to enable focused collaboration using the same tools that are available elsewhere in the product such as blogs, activities, wikis, bookmarks, and forums.

(Click the image to enlarge it.) • Sometimes an overview of what is going on "in the network" is all that's needed. The home page was designed to provide a "river of news" which aggregates updates and notifications relevant to the user from across Lotus Connections.

• To invite user participation, the ability to tag and rate content was added. Whether a user creates a blog entry, wiki page, or uploads a file, they can tag the content so that other users can find it more easily, they can rate the content so that users can find the top-rated information, and they can add comments to exchange information and further refine the content.

• The Global Search in Connections not only lets the user find content, but they can also filter search results by people and tags.

Using social software to design social software

Since social software is useful for collaboration and gathering feedback, the user experience team for Lotus Connections used these tools in a variety of ways during the design process. They gathered feedback from end users by inviting them to post comments in discussion forums. Reviewing the blogs of the most active users was another way they learned about people's reactions to real-world experience with the beta version of the product. Some members of the team found that posting questions using the personal status micro blogging updates on their profiles was a good way to request input on some key design decisions.
(Click the image to enlarge it.) The design team is distributed across five different locations including Massachusetts, North Carolina and Dublin, Ireland. They relied heavily on the Activities component of Connections to organize their design activities. This let them easily exchange design sketches and comments on each other's work from across multiple locations. With the new wiki component added to Lotus Connections, they have also begun to organize requirements for future releases using pages that are edited through collaboration.

Engaging with customers

In addition to getting feedback via social software, the Connections design team engaged with customers using a variety of more traditional user experience and usability techniques. They held sessions to discuss the priority of various features that were being considered for the new release. They also held detailed design reviews with customers during the early stages of the design process, and then held usability tests on some early implementations of the user interface. They worked with the coordinators of the beta program to gather the feedback from customers as they deployed the beta version on their own internal networks. With a constant stream of reviews and feedback, they were able to refine the user experience while maintaining a log of improvements that will be considered for future releases.

Looking to the future

As the use of social software continues to explode in the consumer space, there are signs of increasing value for enterprises to collaborate in this same way. New employees coming into the work force expect this approach to communicating for their work just as they do for personal use. Existing employees looking to gather feedback from across their organization, raise awareness of new initiatives, and identify innovative approaches to their work, are finding that in many cases, using social software can be a smarter way to work.