On May 3, I hit the Shut Down button on Flying Dutchgirl and joined Adobe Systems as a senior technical editor. My group is a kind of SWAT team for help and support content for Adobe software and Adobe.com. It’s interesting and fun to be part of the company that changed so much by putting digital tools into the hands of designers and artists. I’m extremely pleased to be working with some very smart and talented people.

My cubicle (it’s a really nice cubicle) is at 7th and Townsend in San Francisco, in the stunningly redone Baker & Hamilton building that Macromedia moved into before Adobe acquired it in 2005. Now on the National Registry of Historic Places, and built in 1904 for a steel and hardware company, it was the building that established the neighborhood as a manufacturing and warehouse district. Read more history in John Dowdell’s post about the building. It’s the second pre-1906 building where I’ve worked in San Francisco (the first was the Call Building at Third and Market).

In Adobe’s ground-floor atrium, a post milled from an ancient Douglas fir

Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning, music, arts, science, and technology; this little sculpture was a gift from a friend who went to India, and she sits on my desk (Saraswati, not my friend) watching over my work

Client: Jeff Johnson, author (Morgan Kaufmann, publisher)

Task: Edit the manuscript for Designing with the Mind in Mind: A Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules .

Dutchgirl’s solution

I provided light editing for this illuminating book. First, Johnson (author of GUI Bloopers, a manual for software engineers on avoiding common mistakes in user interface design) outlines up-to-date research on cognitive psychology. Then he shows how the design of human beings determines the rules of usable design for software and websites.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

Recently I edited Building Web Reputation Systems by F. Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass, to be published by O’Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press this March. Think of a star rating for your favorite consumer product — that’s a familiar example of a reputation system at work. But star ratings are only a small part of the story that a reputation system can tell.

Through artful construction of algorithms that process combinations of data types, it turns out that you can uncover surprising and powerful information about users’ motivations and intentions and the quality of user-contributed content on a social media site.

As an example, suppose that you’re managing an online community for parents, and you notice that in the last few days, you’ve had to delete a growing number of posts that are just advertisements or rants unrelated to the topic threads. The posts come from a number of different users, and you’ve banned some of them (the technical term for them is “trolls” ), but the problem persists.

By itself, the user ID — one type of data about people using your website — probably won’t tell you much about what’s going on. But suppose that in addition to the user IDs of the trolls, you also know the IP addresses of the computers where users are signing up for the site. When you look at the IP addresses alongside the user IDs, lo and behold, you discover… the trolls are all using the same computer! You shut down all access to the site from that computer. The problem goes away.

That’s a simple example. Through iterative design and testing, it’s possible to design complex, powerful reputation systems to handle many kinds of business problems. Depending on their purpose, these systems may have obvious, public user interfaces, or they may sort, prioritize, and act behind the scenes, unnoticed by the average user.

Author Randy Farmer, one of my colleagues at MSB Associates, coinvented many of the basic structures for both virtual worlds and social software. Bryce Glass works on Internet community products and platforms with well-known brands. Both were on the team that developed Yahoo!’s reputation platform. Read chapters of the book at buildingreputationsystems.com.

Client: F. Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass, authors (O’Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press, publishers)

Challenge: Enhance the value of input from expert reviewers of the manuscript for Building Web Reputation Systems by editing the manuscript before review.

Dutchgirl’s solution

In this book, coauthors Farmer and Glass show — with architecture and system diagrams, formulas, and a detailed case study — how to build a system that reveals surprising and powerful information about users’ motivations and intentions and the quality of user-contributed content on a site.

My edit of the manuscript allowed expert reviewers to focus on reviewing the book’s content without being distracted by problems with clarity, usage, style, spelling, or grammar.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

The Cascadia Community College website won a bronze award at the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations District 7 conference in October. The NCMPR is an association for marketing and PR professionals at community and technical colleges.

Read more about my work on the Cascadia.edu website redesign.

Client: Cascadia Community College

(This page shows one part of the work I did for Cascadia. For an overview of that project, see Cascadia.edu website redesign.)

Challenges: Help Cascadia develop usable, professional-looking web content for a website redesign, and leave the marketing department with tools for maintaining the college’s voice and the content’s usability over time.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

After designing a modular, flexible site architecture for Cascadia.edu, I delivered content templates, guidelines, and standards and tutored content authors (administrators from departments across the college) in applying the guidelines and standards to their content.

The guidelines included special instructions for updating the homepage, calendar items, news items, promotions, and images. In the style guide, I included both editorial style standards and a 1-page cheat sheet of basic web writing guidelines.

» Cascadia style guide contents (PDF)

» Basic web writing guidelines included in the Cascadia style guide — see next:

Three rules for writing webpages

For Cascadia Community College web content authors

1. Make it short and simple

2. Put the most important information first

3. Be polite and straightforward

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

“Cate transformed a traditional piece of sequential learning into a dynamic online experience.”

Client: Northern California Grantmakers, San Francisco

Challenges: Northern California Grantmakers was publishing an online toolkit of guidelines and checklists to help foundations prepare their facilities and grantmaking capabilities in case of a major emergency. NCG’s staff had compiled useful content, but the content needed adjustment to meet basic guidelines for website usability.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

To make the toolkit “web ready,” I provided these deliverables:

I also provided content guidelines to help NCG produce more consistent, user friendly, and searchable content while keeping budgets for future website updates to a minimum.

New homepage for toolkit

Live page:
NCG disaster preparedness toolkit

“Thank you for all you have done during this project! Your knowledge and skills, your patience and persistence, your continual search for information about effective sites, and on and on… We’ve learned a lot from you and have appreciated your commitment to quality.” —Linda Hendrickson, Cascadia Community College

Client: Cascadia Community College is a feeder school for the University of Washington. It shares its state-of-the-art, wetland-lined campus with UW Bothell. The magazine Washington Monthly named Cascadia the No. 2 community college in the United States.

Challenges: Cascadia’s old website got little traffic because users found it hard to find what they needed, even if the information did exist on the site. The site did not communicate the college’s strengths or provide much information that prospective college students commonly look for. The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

To plan and create Cascadia’s new website, I worked with Cascadia’s marketing and communications department and dozens of members of college staff and administration, providing these deliverables:

I worked with Lisa Galley to decide what keywords to include in page titles and navigation on the redesigned Galley Eco Capital website. Here’s an example of those keywords at work in the outside world:

Lisa’s post of May 20, 2009 , on her blog Our Green Journey, links to a post on sustainability as investment at One Block Off the Grid (1BOG).

On the 1BOG post, look for the phrase “commitment to sustainability,” which we identified as a keyword phrase during the redesign of the Galley Eco Capital site. The 1BOG post links that keyword phrase back to a page on Galley Eco Capital site titled — what else — Our Commitment to Sustainability .

This keyword loop increases traffic to Galley Eco Capital’s site, improves search results, and enhances the site’s usability (by reinforcing phrases that are relevant to the site’s audience).

» More about website strategy for Galley Eco Capital