We recently began using Twitter Cards for this site – I like to try out new features and it doesn’t take much to get me excited about metadata! Now that we’ve used them, and gone through the frustration of setting them up (a story for another time), I’m starting to wonder what exactly the benefit is to having them.
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In late September I attended the EuroIA (as in, European Information Architecture) conference in Brussels. Here are some of my general observations…
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I just completed a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), specifically Metadata: Organising and Discovering Information, presented by Dr. Jeffrey Pomerantz from the University of North Carolina, via Coursera. As my first MOOC experience, it was a pretty damn good one.
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So I ran across this problem while doing some work for a client where they had added a bunch of Word templates to a document library. The issue was that users would click on these documents and Word would open them fine but then to edit them it would prompt them to check the documents out. This created confusion since the users didn’t actually have any permissions to write to the source library.
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Online user testing can provide useful insights into different stages of a project, and *bonus points* it’s quite cheap and easy! Most of the places I’ve worked (i.e. government) have had minimal budget and time set aside for conducting user testing. So, I had to find alternative ways to test and support (or refute) my information architecture and design decisions.
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There’s been plenty of debate over the years about whether metadata (columns) or folders are better for organising files in SharePoint libraries. And to be honest, I’m still not 100% convinced either way.
With my information architecture hat on, it seems obvious that metadata should be the way to go. Enhancing a library with extra fields, for categorising and grouping files, allows for a lot more flexibility in display and search. But I can understand why some people are still so wedded to their beloved folders. Here I explore my experiences and observations in working with SharePoint libraries.
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I created a web part a little while back as a farm solution that would display a drop-down listing of sub-sites that could then be used for quickly navigating to these areas. More recently I decided to revisit the solution and use it as an excuse to brush up on my JavaScript. Be warned, this most definitely isn’t the best code ever and for me it was mostly just a learning exercise.
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Card sorting is one my favourite techniques for designing the navigation structure of websites and one that I’ve used on several projects. My methods are fairly simple but may be useful for anyone wishing to use card sorting to enhance their information architecture design work.
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SharePoint 2013 provides users with the ability to upload photos directly from pages that they are editing. This is a nice piece of functionality that avoids the user from first having to upload these photos manually.
But what if you want to have finer control over this? From what I’ve found, there is no way to confine images to reside in one library while other file types default to another library. Sometimes this additional choice just confuses users and then you end up with images spread out unnecessarily across multiple libraries.
In this post I will run through a brief example of creating a sandbox solution that works around this issue using jQuery.
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Recently I’ve found myself turning to knowyourmeme.com for answers to some of life’s important questions, like, ‘Where did Doge come from’ (shout out to the name of this blog!), or ‘Where can I find more Business Cat memes?’. And each time Know Your Meme genuinely blows me away with the depth of information it has gathered about each meme.
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