Technology Consultant

Craig has been on the DPCI team since 2001, and in that time he has participated in building content management applications for some of DPCI's key customers. Most recently, Craig has been on the core Drupal development team, implementing Drupal solutions for DPCI customers.

A graduate of University of Michigan, Craig heads up DPCI's west coast offices. His blog is focused on business and technical topics in content technologies.

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May 26, 2009

What TweenBots Can Teach About Federating Tasks

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So here’s the short version: Artist makes a cute little robot. Robot carries a flag with a destination written on it. Robot is set loose on the streets of New York City. Passersby see the little robot, figure out where it is going, and help redirect it towards its goal. Unfailingly, the robot always made it to its specified destination.

How does this relate to content workflows and federation of tasks? While I realize that picking up a little robot and pointing it the right way as it rolls down the sidewalk is very different from preparing a piece of content for multi-channel delivery, there are three main lessons I take away from the experiment:

Intuitive, Efficient and Streamlined User Interface
Users must immediately be able to grasp what can/should be accomplished, and how to accomplish the task(s) with the interface provided
It is important to enable the people performing your tasks to go from thought to action quickly. There were no instructions on the TweenBot-- as a passerby you could immediately grasp how to interact. At every step in a workflow, the UI needs to be streamlined to help the operator accomplish their task(s) as efficiently as possible. It should present the user with as little information, and as few tools as are necessary for them to be able to successfully accomplish their task. There are a wealth of ways to provide task and context-specific user interfaces with today’s technology tools, so it is worth spending time and effort optimizing the UI to make the team more efficient.
Atomic Task(s)
Task requires no delegation/interaction with other stakeholders, task(s) can be easily/quickly accomplished, and next step(s) are immediately apparent at the handoff point
When looking at each step in the workflow, it is important to make sure tasks can be meaningfully completed without needing to travel back up or down stream. Even in iterative processes (such as editorial workflows) it is important to structure the process so that every touch point somehow captures the work done, enriches the content and thereby limits repetition and re-work. If there are steps that require significant input from multiple parties, it might be worth breaking them down into subtasks, and doing some soul-searching to determine who the ultimate stakeholder is for a given component, and assign the task (and authority over the task) entirely to them. This will help eliminate bottlenecks in the process and make sure the team’s time and efforts are optimized.
When looking at tasks, it is also important to make sure to capture all possible outcomes. In the TweenBot example, a passerby could redirect the robot’s path, or if they saw the robot heading for peril, they had the ability (and authority) to redirect it out of harm’s way. It is important to consider all possible outcomes and the next step(s) that can follow, and to give the team member responsible for that point in the workflow the ability (and authority) to take any possible branch away from their task. The better you can plan in advance for what the possibilities are, the less time you need to spend figuring out what comes next.
Capture the Power of Crowds
Many hands make light work, and every touch point in a workflow can (and should) enrich the product, and contribute to a successful outcome
Finally, take advantage of the tools available to capture the work people do. This applies at any step in the workflow, from content creation all the way through user consumption. For example, if a photo editor does a select on a huge photo set, decides the short list for print, and has a few ‘maybes’, make sure to capture that information. Better yet, present them with a UI that lets them quickly add keywords and/or set some metadata values that will make that content easier to find, more easily reusable, and thereby more valuable. Likewise, leverage your end-users. Give them content tagging abilities, let them comment or share content, or if those don’t fit your business objectives, analyze (and capture) their consumptive behavior so you can track how your content is being used and measure that against your business goals.

There’s plenty of room to drill down further and take this ideas to specifics in different business environments, and we’ll explore these in the weeks to come. In the meantime, though, think about how a TweenBot lost in the streets of New York can help you more efficiently reach your goals.

Posted at 06:53 pm by Craig McEldowney