Only a few years ago, most businesses felt the pain of being software licensees. The cycle went something like this: 

1. Issue an RFP, then pay big bucks for proprietary software.
2. Pay annual service agreement fees so the software company will provide tech support.
3. Assign IT resources in your company to install, configure, and customize it.
4. Pay for trainers from the software company to train staff how to use it.
5. Endure endless installs of patches and upgrades.
6. Find out, a year or two later, that another company has a better software product now that wasn’t available when you purchased the other software. But now you’re too invested in the original software to switch to another. 

Sound familiar? That’s why Software as a Service, or SaaS, has become so popular over the last few years. Also known as Cloud Computing, ASPs (application service providers) or On Demand Software, some say SaaS is just a trendy new tech term for something that’s been around as long as the Web has been around. In the last coupld of years, however, there has been a cultural shift in the way businesses evaluate their software needs. And SaaS is looking like a better option, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the IT resources and infrastructure of larger-scale enterprises. 

The principle behind this is an application service provider can take advantage of economies of scale to offer cheaper, more reliable, and often better applications than companies could afford themselves. 

One example of this is Web content management systems (CMS, which provide a platform to make Web content changes less technical and more manageable. Typically, large companies who want to purchase enterprise-level CMS software pay capital costs of anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000, not to mention implementation and training costs, followed by ongoing operational costs for support, training and enhancements.   

A Vancouver-based company A Vancouver-based company (with offices in Miami as well), Sitemasher (www.sitemasher.com), offers an attractive and award-winning alternative. Their Sitemasher platform enables companies to design, develop and host a Website on Sitemasher, which has an integrated content management system that makes it easy for even non-technical staff to make content changes to the site. And it’s all offered for a basic subscription price of $99 a month for three seats (users). 

Kevin Kinghorn, Director, Website and New Media with the Vancouver Canucks, says Sitemasher was a clear choice for the redesign, hosting and management of their GM Place site (http://generalmotorsplace.com/), which will be completed later this year. 

“We’re very excited about getting our hands on (Sitemasher) and really figuring out new ways to leverage the power of the SiteMasher environment, and possibly developing some new features with the team. 

“It was easy to see how Sitemasher would help us in an environment where several different users of various skill levels are relied upon to maintain a corporate website.” 

Of course, one of the challenges with SaaS can be the level of support you receive. Some services provide real-time chat on their Website, a toll-free number, a peer-to-peer forum for users to post questions and get answers from other users, or an email address where you can send inquiries. But with some SaaS providers, levels of service can be, shall we say, less than desirable. 

Not so with Sitemasher, says Kinghorn. When asked what advantages they saw in using an SaaS instead of buying content management software and running it on their own servers, he cited their customer service experience. 

“That’s easy: the support and the development,” says Kinghorn. “The SiteMasher team has really gone out of their way to help make the transition easy – including conducting on-site training. And where a purchased CMS might fall short of our needs, they’ve developed the product to suit. Not only that, but their hosting environment is second-to-none, which takes a lot of strain off our IT department.” 

Although the Canucks team Website can’t switch to Sitemasher because all NHL teams are being hosted on the NHL’s CMS, Kinghorn says  there are several different applications for a product like SiteMasher within their organization 

“The SiteMasher team has been unreal. We’ve got very specific needs on this project. Whenever we’ve run into an issue, they’ve simply developed the product to accommodate them. It sounds like a line from a marketing brochure, but they’ve really blown us away.” 

The main risks in going with an SaaS provider are when a company’s IT systems require extensive integration with an SaaS application, when a company requires a large amount of customization from the vendor, and also when an SaaS company becomes financially unstable i.e. what happens if the system you’re relying on goes out of business overnight? Or is sold to another company? Or what if subscription prices go up drastically when it comes time to renew the contract? Each SaaS provide should be evalulated with these risk factors in mind.   

SaaS applications are usually priced on a per-user basis, often with a small minimum number of users and scalable plans for additional users and extra bandwidth and storage.  The types of SaaS applications available on the market right is very broad (see this site to look up SaaS providers by category: www.saas-showplace.com/saasproviderdirectory/saasapplicationcategory.html), and here are some examples of popular SaaS applications in some of those categories. 

Office productivity and tools: Zoho (http://zoho.com/) is a reputable SaaS company based in India that provides a wide range of office applications online at cheap or reasonable prices. There’s an online Word processor, spreadsheet application, document management, customer relationship management, project management, business intelligence…the list goers on and on. Free versions are available with limited features, and prices for additional service levels start from a few dollars up. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com/) bills itself as “the world’s favorite CRM,” and it is indeed one of the leaders in providing a customer relationship management database to organizations for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations. The company offers a full-featured CRM for as little as $9/month per user for their Group Edition.  

Online Invoicing: Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/) takes the challenge of invoicing off your desktop and onto the Web.  It can create, manage and send invoices, track time and expenses, and even accept payments through PayPal. There’s a limited free version and after that pricing starts at $14 per month. 

Media Monitoring and Collaboration: DNA13 (http://www.dna13.com/) helps companies manage their communications, public relations and media management processes online. It was recognized last December by IDC as “One of 10 Canadian New Media Companies to Watch.” It’s used by RBC, Westjet, Scotiabank, City of Calgary, L’Oreal and Nestle, to name a few. Prices for the service are not available on their Website. 

Internet Payroll: Ceridian Canada’s Powerpay Web (http://www.ceridian.ca/)  is an Internet solution that allows employers to input payroll data and process payroll on the Web. Pricing details are not available on the Website, but there is a base charge per payroll run plus a nominal fee for each payment produced. 

Performance Management and Compensation: Salary.com (http://www.salary.com/) offers on-demand software for talent management and compensation data for personal use, small business and enterprise level organizations. Prices are not available on the Website.

This article was originally published in Douglas Magazine. Garth A. Buchholz (Garth@DigitalPractices.com) is the President and Chief Usability Analyst at DigitalPractices Media Inc.

What if you could share your own private network with the people and organizations you trust, exclude all other Internet connections (Web, email, etc) unless it passed your own criteria for inclusion, and could police your network by blocking any sites or emails that violated your rules in any way? What we think of as “the Internet” could fast become “the Intranet (capital ‘I’)”.

While everyone’s still garnering an understanding of what Web 2.0 means, a Web 3.0 could creep up and overtake it because of bandwidth, security and proprietary content drivers.

EXAMPLE 1: BANDWIDTH AND ACCESSIBILITY

SavetheInternet.com is a coalition that has “banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” Their site defines Net Neutrality thusly:

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It’s why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech. The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies – including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner – want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video – while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Their concern is that the open playing field of the current Internet, where everyone gets equal; bandwidth consideration, will be lost in favor of a Web 3.0 where private enterprise offers a faster, but more exclusive Net for those who can afford it.

EXAMPLE 2: SECURITY AND USABILITY

Personal InfoCloud, by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, talks about about how users have a kind of preferred way of accessing information online, what he calls the “Local InfoCloud”:

As the my understanding began to lean toward familiarity as a core component of the definition of Local InfoCloud, the term began to embrace the social and community aspects (I am working on shying away from the term community as it is a broadly used term and I am trying to be a little more precise). Interactions with people, services, networks, applications, etc. that are familiar are means of bringing information closer to us as people with data, information, and media needs. The Local InfoCloud eases access. It eases the ability to find and refind information. It is information that is closer to us, not necessarily in physical proximity, but in the ability to access, in which familiarity is bread. I spent much time considering changing the label from local to community or social, but there were elements that did not perfectly fit that either.

Location-based services may be created by a service, but understanding the mindset, terminology, dialect, and cognitive frameworks that are germane to that physical location the information can be structured to resemble or mirror the social elements of understanding in that place. I will get to a better understanding of this when I talk about the Location aspect of the Local InfoCloud. As well, thinking in the Model of Attraction framework the Local InfoCloud is that which is attracted closer to us than the Global InfoCloud.

What I extrapolated from Vander Wal’s blog is that the Internet, or the “Global InfoCloud”, could become much less appealing for users than their own private network where they could control how they find and refind information, and how they interact with more familiar people, services, networks, applications.

EXAMPLE 3: PROPRIETARY CONTENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Back in the late ’90s when I wrote a weekly Internet column for our local newspaper, one of the things I predicted was that the Internet would become more proprietary, just like how online subscription services such as AOL, Compuserve and so on used to operate a few years earlier. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to access any content on the Net, but any content worth accessing would be fee-based.

In a recent New York Times book review, the issue of digital publishing is given another spin. When all books are digital, it makes it easier to combine and recombine information like never before:

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together,” wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. “The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.”

Of course, that should alarm the entire publishing industry, especially authors. Up till now, a book with its two sacred covers was a complete work, a product, a publishing unit of sale, a reference and an ISBN number. But if your book simply becomes a part of the swirling maelstrom of data on the Web, integrated into other databases and chopped into fine bits like the old K-Tel food processor infomercials we used to see on TV, who makes money on it? And who gets the credit if your content is simply hashed up into other dynamically generated pages of material?

Again, that’s where a network of private intranets would appeal to those who want to preserve the integrity of their intellectual properties. You control who can access it, who can buy it, and what they can do with it. I can think of many other reasons why Web 3.0 may happen sooner than we think, but I’d really like to hear from others on this subject. Post your responses here, or email me  and I’ll share your thoughts in this blog.

We’ve all read in Wired Magazine and other publications about how you founded Wikipedia. What’s something we didn’t know about how it all began?

My daughter was born December 26, and Wikipedia was founded January 15. Her birth was a life-changing experience for me, which drove me personally to become radically committed to the goals of Wikipedia.

How will the new partnership with Yahoo! extend the reach of Wikipedia?

I don’t know if the partnership with Yahoo is an important step in extending our reach or not, but I’m optimistic about it. Our traffic has traditionally doubled about every three or four months. I don’t see any slowdown in that, and of course getting more traffic from people like Yahoo will help to continue it.

Wikinews is a newer offshoot of Wikipedia. Do you ever lay awake at night wondering about whether someone is posting something defamatory, uploading content that can’t be considered fair use, or posting some unattributed “news” item that’s a bunch of bunk?

No, I’m a good sleeper. The community is smart and takes care of itself.

Why doesn’t Wikinews offer an RSS or Atom feed?

It’s a simple technical matter, which will be addressed soon enough.

Wikinews scares some journalists the way news media were scared when they were told that blogs would replace newspapers. Is Wikinews a new revolution in grassroots journalism?

Not yet, but is has the potential. There are a lot of experiments going on now in the citizen/grassroots journalism world, and Wikinews is one of the important ones. We know from Wikipedia’s coverage of current events that this can work really, really well.

What’s in the future for the next version of Wikipedia? Is the main effort going into knowledge asset management on the site, or into systems that help verify the user’s identity to reduce graffiti and vandalism?

I am a carpenter, not an architect, so I don’t understand the meaning of phrases like “knowledge asset management”. I have no idea what that means.

There are no efforts underway to “verify the user’s identity” and we don’t feel that such efforts are a productive way to deal with behavioral problems.

Do you identify at all with the character Don Quixote de la Mancha? If so, are Wikipedia editors a kind of collective Sancho Panza?

Oh, well, hmm… I am very idealistic but I don’t think I’m impractical – Wikipedia is more popular than the New York Times online now, after all. And the community isn’t really my humble sidekick or anything like that.

Linus Torvalds has a famous line where he says that he’s really just a very lazy person who likes to take credit for what other people do. Like everyone, I laughed when I first heard the line, but now it’s actually the story of my life. Everywhere I go people thank me for my work but frankly, it is the community who does the real work and deserves the real thanks.

There’s an “open access” movement in academia to promote unfettered access online to sources of academic knowledge. Will Wikipedia ever be extended into academia for this purpose, and are there other communities on the Net that could use their own kind of Wikipedia or Wikinews, too?

Yes, Wikipedia will play an important role in the open access movement. There are many, many communities that can learn from the success of Wikipedia to generate high quality work from collaborative efforts.

I think there could be a similar model for that sort of thing, but it would have to be different from Wikipedia. As an example: one of the firm rules of Wikipedia is “no original research” – we simply aren’t qualified to evaluate it. That’s what academic journals are for. So, why are academic journals written in such an old-fashioned way? Can’t there be some dramatic improvements in that process now that we have collaborative authoring technologies? I think so! But exactly how to do that? Hmm, it’s an interesting problem.

You’ve said that Web designers should think of the Web as a publication and think of themselves as editors. What about those who are trained to think more in terms of application development and database-driven content rather than the front end?

I think there’s obviously a strong role for application development on the Web. However, I feel that overseeing everything should be a publishing approach. Someone needs to ask the question about whether we need this application in the first place, whether anyone is interested in reading this piece of content.

How can organizations develop a Web publishing strategy, and who should champion it? Traditionally this was within the purview of the IT folks, but should it now be led by a Web manager, a communications manager, a business manager or an IT manager?

Developing a web publishing strategy is really about figuring out what content you have that can drive value for your website. It’s about focusing on content as an asset, not a commodity.
I think there’s a big trend away from IT having responsibility for the Web. The intranet is coming under the responsibility of communications, and the public Web site tends to go to marketing.

How can teams of people from different backgrounds learn to work effectively and collaboratively on a Web team?

Web teams are no different than other teams, except that then tend to be a bit rudderless. I think there’s a relatively simple way here: put someone in charge. Nobody is really in charge of a great many Web sites I come across, and that results in all sorts of delays and compromises. Somebody needs to be able to make decisions that stick.

You wrote an interesting article called Words Come Before Looks in Web Design. In spite of the old maxim that “content is king”, an interesting study done at Stanford University in 2002 found that the “look and feel” of a Web site was the prime factor participants used to assess the credibility of sites. Do you think people are drawn more to content or to functionality, e.g. Google?

I think that graphical design is important but good functionality is far more important. Why is Google worth 25 billion? Because it has a nice logo or because it has a great search? Examine the homepage of eBay. It looks like it was designed for a kindergarten audience, but it is very simple, very straightforward: “Find, Buy, Pay”. First and foremost, Web sites need to be useful.

What’s the best strategy for creating metadata? Should you have a Web editor assigned as a metadata specialist to summarize content for search engines and browsing, or should there be a more distributed approach whereby you train Web publishers and SMEs how to create effective metadata?

Depending on the size of the organization it could be a combination. I do think that writers should be trained in creating quality metadata for their own content, but there will also be required an editorial oversight.

Let’s play futurist for a minute. How do you think content will change/evolve as we draw towards the end of the first decade of this century? How will content management improvements in technology change the art/science of information design? Any predictions on what kind of networked environment we’ll be living in?

I think the Web will get smaller. There’s been an awful splurge of content on the Web over the last 10 years, and most of it is useless content. I think by the end of the decade we’ll see less content of higher quality. The future is about back to the basics: learn to write compellingly, clearly and concisely.

The Elements of User Experience got its start on your Web site. What are the origins of that book?

The model described in the book really grew out of my need to explain the work I did to the people I had to collaborate with. I was the first information architect in a rapidly growing design firm, and many people there weren’t familiar with IA. I drew up the model in a single-page PDF document, and when it was finished I thought maybe some others in the field might find it useful. I posted it to my site, and it was the popularity of that document that led to the demand for a whole book on the model.

Do you have any new books coming out, or are you working on a new book now?

I’m not working on a new book at the moment. My company, Adaptive Path, has been in high demand since my first book came out, and managing that growth is really consuming most of my attention lately. I do have a couple of ideas for books that I’d like to tackle; I hope to be able to turn my attention to them sometime next year.

How would you define “user experience” to a non-techie?

I define user experience as the way a product operates and behaves in the real world. In other words, what’s it like to use the product? What kind of an experience is that? The philosophy of user experience design is that we can plan that experience before it happens and build certain qualities into it.

There are professional firms that call themselves information architects (ia), usability specialists, user experience designers (uxd), or just Web designers. Is this a sign that as the Internet evolves, expert roles are changing as well, or are Internet experts are gradually coalescing into specific fields of expertise to create professional standards and self-governance, as in other professions? Are all of these different titles confusing for clients who are paying for those services?

There are certainly more experts and specialists than there used to be. But I think it’s important to remember that for every specialist, there are a dozen generalists who have to handle many aspects of site design. Most information architecture work is not done by an information architect. I think the specialist community is missing an opportunity to raise the bar for the entire field by neglecting to find ways to help non-specialists do better work.

Are many user experience designers following your five-tiered model, generally speaking, or do you see many variations of it in the field?

I think there isn’t a strong impetus for people to come up with new models these days. One of the reasons the Elements model was so popular right from the start was that it was really filling a vacuum. A lot of people were wrestling with these ideas, but there hadn’t really been a concise, visual articulation of how the pieces fit together. These days, people don’t have the same motivation because these ideas have been much more fully explored over the last several years.

Your Visual Vocabulary Model for describing information architecture and interaction design has become a standard modelling language because of its logic and clarity. Do you anticipate having to make any changes to the current version 1.1b, and if so, what sort of changes do you anticipate and why?

The current version has been stable for a few years now. For the problems I designed the vocabulary to address, I haven’t encountered anything about the system that needs to change, and I’ve been using it longer than anybody! Of course, I may find myself wanting to extend the system to tackle new kinds of problems. So any changes would probably involve a significant leap forward – a Visual Vocabulary 2.0 – that would take the system into new territory.

In your book, you talk about the pitfalls of “design by default” (when a design structure follows the organization’s existing technology structure), “design by mimicry” (when the user experience inappropriately follows conventions used on other sites) and “design by fiat” (when someone’s personal prefernces drive the user experience decisions) — what strategy can designers use when a client or (worse?) a company executive is determined to stray down one of the above paths?

It all comes down to having reasons for the choices we make, being able to articulate those reasons, and being able to trace our choices back to the needs, expectations, and behavior of the people who will be using our product. Executives are all too often satisfied to see that a product works. The question we should be asking – the question I think every designer is ultimately charged with – is not “does it work?” but “does it work well?”

How can user experience design positively impact eGovernment projects and other public sector or non-profit organizations where issues like accessibility and universal design are important?

I think the various eGovernment initiatives are very encouraging for the field of user experience. Right now, the public sector unquestionably has its hands full meeting accessibility standards. But once they’ve made substantial headway there, it seems inevitable that they’ll turn their attention to user experience. It’s just a matter of time before agencies discover that accessibility is just one part of fulfilling their public mission, and that their sites aren’t serving the public if everyone can access them but no one can use them.

Taking a longer view, where is the Internet going and will user experience issues be overshadowed in the future by purely IT developments?

If anything, the role of user experience is only going to become more important as the sophistication of our technology increases. We’re never satisfied with what our technology does for us – we’re always pushing it to do more. That ever-growing complexity means that user experience designers are going to be busy for a long time to come.