Project Launch: Minnesota Judicial Branch Website

I’m happy to see the new Minnesota Judicial Branch site launched this month (old one’s available for a while here if you want to compare and contrast). Looks like it’s a somewhat ‘soft’ launch – as they migrate content from the old to the new.

Last year, I helped the Court Information Office with the redesign – specifically in the information architecture. Their goal was common – consolidate a number of separate sites – in this case, 10 district court sites and the state court itself – into a single, easy to understand and maintain, information system. All while still being clear about which level of the site you’re at (state or district).

Like all information consolidations projects I’ve worked on, the first step is asking: “What types of information is everyone publishing today?”. In fact, the answer resolved many of the information architecture issues. Asking the sites’ visitors what they were looking for answered some more.

There’s two new bits I’m most pleased to see made it through to the launch:

  1. The find-a-district by ZIP code (also by map or County). Chances are you know your ZIP code more readily than your county or judicial district. Made it easy to use that as a key.
  2. The ‘How Do I….?’ – global menu item for the most common questions asked by Minnesota citizens (Adopt a child, Change a name, etc). When we asked visitors why they were at the site, the vast majority of their answers started with ‘How do I….’. Only natural to have a top-level section filled with those common questions.

Congratulations to the Court Information Office on the launch. I’m glad to see it out in the world.

What’s Wrong with Most People?

I remotely participated in a couple BloggerCon IV sessions this past weekend. I’m still a little in awe of how immersive the combination of IRC and streaming audio – kudos to the Dave Winer and the other organizers for bringing in the rest of the world.

Somewhere in the Niall Kennedy-led ‘Standards for Users’ session a bit about ‘most people’ not understanding technology (specifically RSS) came up.

According to 2005 population counts, China and India have a combined total of 2.3 billion citizens.

Chances are, if you’re reading this right now, you’re not ‘most people’. That’s OK. No one has ever solved a problem for most people. Problems are solved for very small niche groups – sometimes, when we get real lucky – more people (if not ‘most’) benefit. Curb cuts in the sidewalk originated to help those in wheelchairs – baby strollers, bicycles, skateboards, scooters, and grocery carts also benefitted. OXO Good Grips were originally designed to help those with arthritis – they’ve also helped me.

Though BloggerCon is a ‘users’ conference – the distinction between users & developers is horribly blurred. Thanks to technologies like RSS – and unlike automobiles and other electronics – that simplify without obscuring the inner-workings.

It’s not that most people need to intuitively understand a technology – it’s that they can tweak it, build-upon-it, to easily make their specific situation better.

On a related note, ‘Explaining RSS in 5 Minutes’ sounds like an excellent exercise.

UPDATE: Eric Rice wins for the Most Creative explanation.

Treasure Hunters Not an Amazing Race

Of course ever-anxious Tivo recorded NBC’s response to CBS’ Amazing Race – Treasure Hunters. Off the bat, I have my reservations about a program that so obviously is the television version of the 2004 Nick Cage car-accident National Treasure and the Tom Hanks-starred Da Vinci Code.

Unfortunately, it’s much, much worse than that.

Aside from being a straight forward Amazing Race rip-off – complete with Orbitz.com playing the part of Travelocity – it’s like NBC asked the producers of Deal or No Deal to clone last year’s crappy-tacular Amazing Race family-edition. The contestants are completely flat and stereotypical – more soap opera than reality. The pairings made this painfully obvious – ex-CIA with Air Force, Young Professionals with Geniuses, Miss America with Brown Family. The Southie Boys were the worst – stereotypical southern boys edited to be searching Mt. Rushmore as if the hunted treasure was the forgotten batch of moonshine (see Carl’s comment below). I kept expecting David Sedaris’ brother to bring out a fuck-it bucket.

Cause after this, I need one.

RSS Puts Identification in the Hands of Your Customers

I’m listening to the Individualized-RSS podcast over at Marketing Edge podcast. The conversation is an attempt to bring the weakness of email into the strength of RSS (or verse-vica as the case maybe) – unique reader identification.

This is what I alluded to in this post from a couple months ago. There’s nothing in the technology of RSS that prevents people from identifying themselves – just by adding some identifier (another url for example) to the end of the URL string.

Any more registration isn’t necessary or even good (yes, this is a hack.)

Plus, it’s a much friendlier way to build a relationship with people. Registration (of any sort) requires people to make a commitment before they know the relationship will be useful and valuable. Not cool.

On the other hand, there are some specific situations where a locked down, personally-identifiable RSS feed actually adds value to the customer. I’m thinking of communications that needs audit-ability, a high-level of filtering, and guaranteed delivery. We’re not talking marketing communications here – we’re talking Very Serious Business and in that case, I recommend talking to Kris at Pale Groove about CastLock.

Wanted: High Efficiency Washer / Dryer Recommendations

Like Shel‘s, our current washer and dryer is ancient. More ancient than the one we left at the last house. So, our washes aren’t as washed as we’d like and well, damp is not a synonym for dry. I checked.

We were going to wait a year and do a huge home appliance upgrade (fridge and and stove same vintage). Tumbling around in my head Kristin is saying, “… blah blah paying for inefficiency until then blah blah…”

So, we’re looking for recommendations on high-efficiency washer and dryer set, Not a combo, separate machines. Front-loading preferred.

What do you like?

UPDATE 20 January 2007:
We decided on the Whirlpool Cabrio pair from Warners Stellian. We got a good price, and Warners Stellian offers the best home appliance shopping experience in the Twin Cities. Also, it was a super easy decision – these were the only top-loading, no-agitator in the store.

6 O’Rocket News Boom

A pretty big storm passed through town last night. Thunder, lightening, complete down pour for hours. Kinda thing that makes you glad to be inside (we weren’t when it started).

I flipped on the TV, to get some idea of what we should be expecting. This is the first time I’ve watched the local news in…well…um…years probably.

  • Short, out-of-context, video clips from around the world – Check
  • Half-amusing/half-smarmy, politically-loaded commentary – Check

Feels exactly like RocketBoom.

The Bottomless Feed and the Need for Now Context

“I’ve punted on trying to catch up on 19,000+ updated posts in Bloglines. I don’t have the time, or interest, in trying to sift through them all. I picked out a few blogs from a few categories that I’m absolutely interested in and skimmed through them and then marked all as read.” – Ed Costello

I do the same everyday – independent of vacations. There’s no reason to feel uncomfortable coming back from a 10-day vacation and not reading every page of the daily newspapers you missed or watching every minute of the evening news you missed, the same applies to blogs.

So, a couple of notions we all need to get good and comfortable with:

  1. There’s always more to do. I’m not big on stressing out how much work there is to do – work scales, time doesn’t. Work is persistent, time (despite what Dali says) isn’t.
  2. There’s always more to read. If every person you know, would like to know, are interested in, or is connected to you in the slightest way is publishing on any regular interval – there’s too much to keep up with. Especially if you’re also publishing and attempting to accomplish something during the day.

Welcome to the Post-Scarcity world.

We don’t yet have the tools that can actually, really help us. The aggregation and filtering tools we have are extremely simple. In my experience, they all filter the most basic, single-dimension attributes; publisher, date, or some notion of category/tag. Nothing more complex.

The problem we all have yet to solve is deceptively simple:
What should I pay attention to right now?

There’s a reasonable chance that this exact post at this exact time is what I should be writing. Some much much smaller chance says this is the exact time you should be reading this exact post. Yet, here we are.

The best tool we have to determine exactly what we should be paying attention to right now is….our guts, our insecurities, obsessions, fixations, interpersonal relationships, and Google.

The majority of the information we receive during any given day is FYI at best. No action required. Depending on your definition of spam – it can probably be immediately deleted. There’s always one Best Next Action out there – finding it will only become more of a challenge.