I admit it.  Last night, when I attended the 2010 SIIA CODiE Awards dinner I was thinking about having a glass or two of wine, meeting some old business acquaintances, making some new contacts, and enjoying a congenial dinner with colleagues Ross Graber and Meagan Cooke.

We were certainly thrilled to be CODiE finalists in the category of Best Online Science and Technology Service, but we weren’t primed for the win, except when Meagan who is Director of Content Strategies and I, Director of Product Management (Platform delivery) joked about going to the podium to accept the award smiling and holding hands.  During the past year, we’ve developed a symbiotic relationship; Meagan’s stellar management of Knovel’s unrivaled content, and my focus on a feature-rich technology platform combine to make Knovel the product of choice among engineers.

We were up against stiff competition in our category: UniPHY, AIP’s literature-based, professional scientific networking platform; and ChemMobi, an iPhone app from Symyx that provides mobile access to chemical reference information.  The nominees for our category were announced, and  KNOVEL appeared on the screen as Winner.  We made our way to the podium to accept the award, surprised and thrilled.  As we headed back to our seats, a microphone and camera appeared, then the question, “What does the CODiE award mean to Knovel?” Last night, I was overwhelmed, tongue-tied and surprised by the journalistic assault, so allow me to answer in the clearer light of morning.

The CODiE Award is the acknowledgment of a decade of hard work by our dedicated and visionary product development team under the direction of our fervent, zealous CEO Chris Forbes,  as well as the consistent and steadfast efforts of our active customer community and design partners who continue to partner with us to make Knovel a more powerful solution with each iteration.

I’ll admit, I’m still reeling from a 2010 product strategy meeting  yesterday morning, which was heady in itself. Because of the grand plans we’re undertaking this year, the thrill of last night’s CODiE recognition was just icing on the cake.

Happy New Year!  If you’ve been following the Knovel news and visiting Knovel Lab during the past year, I think you’ll agree that things have not been dull around here. In 2009, we made some significant changes in the way we develop our products – namely, making design partners central to our world, and giving you Knovel Lab, where we test the new ideas that result from design partner observations.  In 2009, over 500 of you took time to give us feedback after visiting the Lab, and for that, a hearty Thank You!

Last year, with your help and direction, we developed a new authentication system called Knovel User Registration that has laid the groundwork for the personalization features that we rolled out in My Knovel last November. If you have been upgraded and have registered a profile, you already know about creating a personal space for organizing and saving favorite titles, search queries and content that you can recall with a single click. We’re still working through the upgrade process with our customer administrators, but Profile users are starting to appreciate the streamlined access to their saved content and are organizing and sharing Knovel resources with their colleagues.

Recently, we’ve lit up Knovel Lab with a new feature called Clip to Knovel that expands the usability of My Knovel to any information you find while researching the Internet.  Here’s how it works:

First, you install Clip to Knovel to your browser toolbar.  In Firefox, it’s drag-and-drop; Internet Explorer involves a right-click to add to your Favorites (IE8) or Links (IE7) Bar.  Either way, once Clip to Knovel is installed, you can start collecting Web Clips from anywhere on the net.  It’s easy: highlight text from any website, and click Clip to Knovel. A box pops up capturing the page URL, the snippet you highlighted and a customizable title for easy recall. When you go to My Knovel, My Web Clips are stored in 2 places:

1. In Unfiled Items, where you can move them into one of your named folders
2. Under Aggregated Content, in the My Web Clips folder.

It’s waiting for you in Knovel Lab.  Click on My Knovel, and then on My Web Clips, where you can play around with Clip to Knovel.  We’re very anxious to hear from you, and the Knovel Lab exit survey should take you only a minute to complete.  We’ve got more enhancements queuing up for the Lab, and are recruiting for Design Partners.  If you’re interested, drop me an email.

I’m now back from London Online where I represented Knovel for the first time and was pleased to meet customers, prospects and partners from across the Pond. [The rule is, you can call it that if you have crossed the Atlantic in a small boat.]

This year’s show was somewhat smaller than past years, but it was still bustling with activity and I had some excellent meetings, including a chat with Barbara Byrnko, from Info Today. As she noted in her blog, Knovel did not have a booth, but Marketing Director, Ross Graber and I had plenty of opportunities to check out the scene and meet with some of our customers and partners who represent Knovel outside the U.S.

My goal was two-fold: to introduce Knovel’s new face and functionality, including the personalization features of My Knovel; and to recommit to being a global company by gathering feedback from abroad. So much of the data from which we design and develop Knovel comes from our American (North and South) customers, yet we have a strong and active constituency in Europe and Asia with whom I’ve always craved more face time. After all, the needs and priorities of these international engineers do not always align with the engineers we regularly work with in America.

Aside from the obvious requests for localization — starting with our updated tutorials which will be out at the end of this month in seven languages,  our audience was very interested in news about our API and integrating Knovel into portal applications, including federated search engines.

There was also interest in Knovel’s plans to support Shibboleth, an authentication system that seems to be gaining momentum in Europe, especially since Athens purportedly is in decline. Authentication remains a sticky wicket, especially as users rebel against the proliferation of usernames and passwords, some to the point of boycotting applications that cannot figure out how to remember their identity.   Today, My Knovel users can authenticate automatically via cookie-based storage of credentials, but we’re working to enhance authentication methods to support a true single sign-on that feeds network login credentials securely and efficiently.

I was also reminded about the importance of a direct export feature to bibliographic management apps like EndNote and Reference Manager, and I’m happy to report that this project is getting underway this month.

But, all trips eventually must end. I’m back in the U.S.A. now, visiting customers and trying to stay ahead of the snowstorms, but reminding myself of the value of a global presence and making  New Years resolutions on finding ways to better serve our customers around the world.

Anyone connected to the software development world can attest that the last weeks leading up to a big release are the most stressful. Fifteen-minute daily meetings stretch into hours. Nerves are on edge. Every decision is analyzed and reanalyzed. Marketing activity escalates to a fever pitch. The team is up testing and instant messaging at 7 AM on Sunday morning while the rest of the world sleeps.

Our team has survived the long journey and we’re really excited about finally unveiling the personalization features of My Knovel. It’s the product of nearly a year of collaboration with Knovel’s team of design partners, who patiently cooperated as we observed them working, quizzed them on how they gather and store information, and asked them all sorts of questions along the way that influenced our design and style decisions.

In other words, My Knovel is a data driven response with our engineering users leading the way. The librarians and information professionals were right there too, most notably explaining that our best bet is to label features with names that are clear and unambiguous. My Knovel, which sits prominently on the new navigation bar, is where users can create folders, organize and store frequently used titles, search queries and content – including PDF sections and interactive tables. We also took the advice of users who encouraged us to clarify G.E.T. (Graphs, Equations, Tables) Search, to reflect a simple and explainable name. We reverted to Data Search, which seems to appeal to our wider audience of users.

We also listened to users who were confused by the different filter controls for Browse and Search that reflect All Knovel Content and My Subscription. We have made it a global setting to eliminate the confusion.

Last but by not least, during the past few months, a small dedicated team has been busy developing and working with our customers to upgrade them to our new authentication and reporting system. Knovel User Registration may be less flashy, but without it, we could never have brought My Knovel to fruition. Our Knovel administrators are delighted with the Self-Serve Administrator’s Toolkit and the improved organizational and reporting capabilities. We’ll keep up the pace until we have upgraded all of our accounts because we know that users are going to love the personalization features of My Knovel.

So I’d like to propose a toast to both teams tonight for a job incredibly well done! Thanks to them for all their hard work. And we know you’ll love it too.

Do you know what I obsess about more than anything in the product area?  NAMING. We’re coming down to the wire preparing to roll out the feature set of the year and give users what they’ve been requesting for a long time: a personal space to store their favorites, their saved search queries and their  saved content for easy, one-click access.  Our working title is My Notebook, and if you go to Knovel Lab, you can play with it.

What is it?  It’s a personal space that you acquire by registering and creating a personal profile.  You’ll be able to organize your saved stuff into user-named folders; and create a bookshelf of favorites, a collection of your saved searches, and a folder with frequently-accessed content. A user recently told me that she downloads PDFs to her hard drive so she can organize them better for retrieval;   after viewing Knovel’s new personalization features, she said we’ve given her a better way!

Today it’s personal space, but 2010 is the year of community and we’ve got big plans to address the second-most popular request from users – workgroup collaboration. Which brings me to the conundrum.  Granted, we are not naming a company or even a product.  But to me, getting this name right really matters, hence my questions: Is My Notebook too confining? Too Boring?

Experts say that a good name should:
1.    Appeal to the target audience (engineers, librarians & scientists just to name a few.)
2.    Imply the benefit
3.    Strategically distinguish the thing and convey its uniqueness
4.    Be original
5.    Be legally allowable
6.    Create user loyalty
7.    Motivate customers to sign up

I even held a naming contest. There were some good ideas from our users (my personal favorite was Persaknovel)  but most folks voted to retain the name My Notebook (with or without the silent K).

Late last week, an internal naming team came up with the idea of K-Pod, combining the visualization of a pod as a sort of storage vehicle, with the familiar K of the Knovel brand.

Because we are all about customer feedback (see #1 above) I would really appreciate your thoughts on the name. What do YOU think?

Recently, our own Craig the Rocket Scientist mentioned NASA’s need to “capture the attention of a new generation.” NASA certainly aren’t the only ones who have to keep this in mind. My mission is to capture the interest of Knovel users of all ages by answering their appeals for a better Knovel, so what is our next step?  Your Own Personal Knovel.

Knovel is introducing a whole new set of features enabling users to configure and personalize their Knovel desktops.  What I hear from engineers all the time is: “Could you make a bookshelf where I can store my favorite titles?”  Or “I’d like to have a project folder where I can store complex searches I can re-execute with a single click.”   Or,  “I’d really like to email a Knovel search result to my colleague down the hall. Can I do that?” With our newest release into Knovel Lab, it’s all there for the taking.  But you have to have a Knovel user account to create your personal space.

We’ve been busy contacting our Knovel “champions” (aka administrators) and working with them to upgrade to our new user registration system.  In my humble opinion, implementing this new user authentication system is akin to taking a cruise in a hurricane  (I’m an old sailor). To say that Information Resource admins are protective of their roles and of their end users is an understatement. They have good reason though, they’re trusted with the responsibility of ensuring that their users know how to access information products reliably at any time and from anywhere; and that users are protected from intrusive use of their  identities; all while defending their organization’s investment in the product. We respect and honor these needs.

We’re close. Really close.  The proof is in Knovel Lab for anyone willing to take a look. We’re also holding a conntest to name the personal bucket, currently dubbed My Notebook.  You have another week to check out the new personalized Knovel and submit your naming entry in the Exit Survey.  I have to say that we have some seriously imaginative users out there! I’m enjoying the submissions so far and I’ll share the winner and runners up at the end of the contest, next Friday, (just in time for Halloween). On that note, a search for Halloween in Knovel results in 13 hits (perfect!) and reveals some interesting results including an ANTEC conference paper about new metal-oxide phosphorescence used in – what else? – Halloween costumes.    Trick or treat everyone!

The Knovel product development team will try to get a good night’s sleep tonight after the deployment of the latest round of changes coming from Knovel Lab into the daylight.  Our team is small and that makes us nimble; which is a good thing and what many software development organizations can only dream of.

On the other hand, the news is out that our development team is (and has to be) Herculean in responding to change, and that’s where the project police need to be on patrol.  As the ersatz ‘owner’ of the product, I feel a bit like the Wizard of Oz,  behind the curtain pulling the strings as thousands of decisions are made concerning navigation, functionality, interaction with content, brand and aesthetic design. We answer, not only our customers, but also to a team of executives who have had a long history of wins and a few sidesteps, and who have a personal stake in Knovel’s success.

I am bolstered by the strong showing of customers to Knovel Lab – thank you for all the thoughtful comments -  and I stand behind the design decisions driven by our Design Partners whose willingness to let me watch over their shoulders as they worked resulted in the cleaner, simpler and – we posit -  more aesthetically pleasing search experience of today’s Knovel.

At the most visceral level, there’s functional design and there’s aesthetics.  If we get it right, MOST users will enjoy an overall positive experience. I confess that I am generally more interested in delivering the best answer to a search query, but we can satisfy both.  While the vast majority of our users confirm that we have taken a big step forward, we still have work to do. Not everyone loves the new look; in fact, some even ‘fessed up that change is hard and familiarity is almost always preferable. But in order to progress, sometimes you have to ignore those who fear change, and we believe that this new iteration of Knovel represents progress.

Love the changes? Hate the changes? Need changes for a dollar? User feedback drives what we do here at Knovel, so please leave any and all comments below.

In 1984, when IBM introduced the 80286 microprocessor chip, the MS-DOS operating system was unable to take advantage of the improved speed and address capacity of the new chip.  A popular urban legend has Bill Gates asking,  “Why would anyone need more than 640KB?”  Fast forward a few years and Gates was requiring his engineers to develop on hardware that was two years old – ancient by software developer standards, because the majority of Windows users were still running on 386’s.

Late last century, when I worked for another software development company, we tested our product in no less than 12 different ‘flavors’ of operating systems including UNIX, Windows, local area network systems, and Web browsers. Legacy support cripples product development and the thrill of releasing radical new functionality is laced with paralyzing fear of destabilizing the software.

A similar scenario is brewing today with Web browsers. Knovel is in a much better position because we develop Web-based software. But there, the picnic ends. Our software engineers generally use the latest browser versions, and our engineers typically prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer.  (Not a judgment, just my own informal survey and personal preferences.)  Our users, on the other hand, use browsers dating back to Netscape Communicator, and a majority of our users are still on IE6.  With the advent of IE 8, we are now mandated to test and support a minimum of 6 different browser versions:  IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, FF3.5. And not surprisingly, our defect list tracks more IE6 items than any other browser version.

The engineers say, “Why can’t they just upgrade?  and “These older browsers are far less functional.”

Tom Dahm, writing for NetMechanic, sums it up nicely: “The major difference between two versions of the same browser is their support for newer portions of the HTML language. A new browser is generally better at displaying Web pages than an old one.”

As keeper of the Knovel Product, I grapple constantly with the question of browser version support. We’re aiming high in the product functionality realm and, increasingly, the older browsers are simply not up to the task.

So, what’s the answer? I am painfully aware that most of our users are constrained by strict IT policies that govern what browser(s) are used in their organizations, and how and when upgrades are managed. I am not optimistic that this will change, nor am I under the illusion that Knovel has the clout to force a corporate browser upgrade. What I do suggest is that Knovel will soon add messaging to our product advising users that Knovel is optimized for use with certain browsers [for starters, IE7 and above, and FF 3 and above], and hope to influence customers who use older browsers to consider the benefits of upgrading.

But what do you think? Either from a developer or a user standpoint, what browser related frustrations have you encountered?

The red flag is up! That means there’s something new to see in Knovel Lab, and this time, we’re really psyched about the changes.   This time, we’re showcasing an entirely new Knovel look and feel, with improvements that I predict will be welcome additions to both our engineers and librarian users.

Rather than enumerate the long list of new features, I offer a few teasers and hope that they’ll pique your interest to visit the Lab and play around.  As I promised in my last blog,  the Title and Author search filters are back, with a more streamlined process and a less confusing result display.  Browsing Knovel is easier – by subject topics, subtopics, and A-Z.  Performing a Search Within a Book is unambiguous and available from Search Results display.   In G.E.T. Search (formerly Fielded Search) we’ve restored  Available Range values for users who need this handy reference when creating a search query to retrieve results from Knovel’s interactive graphs, equations and tables.

Throughout September we’ll be gathering feedback from you while we continue to enhance the user interface in the Lab.  These enhancements will be moving to Knovel in about a month, as the next round of improvements move to the Lab.

If you like what you see, thank our team of Design Partners who have given us the ideas and the inspiration for these changes.  We’re recruiting, so if you are interested in joining the team, please contact me!

When we released the first in a series of enhancements to Knovel last week, there were many encouraging remarks including “keep up the good work” and `it’s useful to see the most relevant PDF’s immediately.” Our aim with these product enhancements is to make Knovel more useful and efficient, and we rely on actual user observations to guide our design decisions.

But it wasn’t all positive.  We ran afoul of one of our major constituencies last week – librarians – when we removed the filters for Author and Title searching.

So I’m here to deliver my mea culpa. For those of you who so immediately and passionately responded, I’d like to offer an explanation. During design sessions, we observed over 20 Knovel users, for about 1 hour each. Not one ever used the Title or Author search filter. When an engineer was searching for Perry’s Chemical Engineers Handbook, he entered “perrys” into the [Basic] search box, and Perry’s Chemical Engineers Handbook (8th Edition) was the top search retrieved. If one is looking for a title that has “poisons” or “food packaging” in the title, Knovel returns results with that term in the title at the top of the list. Ditto for finding authors. Our team discussed this decision at length, and did a fair amount of testing before deciding that the results were reliable and that we’d simplified the search experience without putting anyone at a disadvantage.

But our librarian constituents told us that the results are not as reliable, and often require review of multiple results to find the desired title.  A search filter that finds the specific title or author is an efficient and more useful alternative.

Always cognizent of how our changes effect users, we have decided to return this feature with the next round of changes going into Knovel Lab in the coming weeks. This comes with our apologies for the disruption, our thanks to all those who spoke out, and our promise to continue listening to your feedback.

In this past Wednesday’s Dilbert, the boss man (the one with the horns)  says, “I want everything fast and perfect.”*   This week, we’re  introducing some important changes to Knovel that are neither fast nor perfect, but they do signal a new way of driving continuous enhancements to make our rich content and interactivity more relevant and more usable to our engineering community.

I’m in the enviable position of working with our design partners, a dedicated group of engineers and information specialists at customer companies who have allowed me a glimpse inside their world and showed us where we can make some simple (and some not so simple) changes to our software to help them find information faster. The newly renamed G.E.T. (Graphs Equations Tables) Search has always been a powerful tool to find numeric range or materials properties information, but required too much ‘insider’ knowledge of how we categorize search parameters.  Through user observation and some design ingenuity, we were able to redesign this search feature to reveal its usefulness even to untrained, casual users.

This week we also launch the autocomplete feature, in which suggestions appear as you type your search query. This Basic Search feature came as a direct result of user suggestions, though our answer is an evolving one:
Step 1. Today, auto-complete the user’s entry with top 2000 search terms;
Step 2. Tomorrow,  we will evolve this feature by adding more relevant search terms.
Step 3. Ultimately we plan to include taxonomies and thesaurus mapping to help users hone in on the most appropriate search terms.

The new design of Search Results is another evolving feature whose ideas came directly from our users.  Some were confused by search results that yielded titles, but required an extra click to drill down to the actual sections retrieved. While remaining cognizant of the preciousness of screen real estate, we’ve redesigned Search Results view to give users a peek inside the top results retrieved, while retaining the same  “titles-by-relevance” display.  Users can still browse title results, and by clicking the + sign, open the book to see the top (relevant) sections that match the search query; or by using Collapse All, return to the titles-only view.

These features have been in the Knovel Lab for several weeks, and we’re delighted with the positive response from our users.  Design ideas come from you, and with your support, we’ll continue to enhance Knovel.

First, I’d like to thank everyone who read my last post and contacted me with their suggestions for a new name for Fielded Search.  One thing was unanimous:  Fielded Search is not the best name.  But I repeat myself.

One characteristic that unites the community of information professionals is their outspokenness.  One of our users, Kristen Whitman from The Intellogist, wrote, “I feel like I’ve encountered many other search engines with a form called Fielded Search, but they never did anything like searching within tables and graphs, or for ranges of property values, like Knovel can.”  Kristen has updated her information database to point users to Knovel Lab and predicts that our users will be excited about the enhancements we’re planning.  Thanks Kristen!
After collecting the feedback, we huddled together with the name candidates.  Advanced Search was considered first, and rejected as it does not fit the mode: searches the same content with a more sophisticated framework of index and field selections.  Materials Properties Search went down as too confining, as did Numeric Range Search.   How could we convey a search capability that retrieves data that is housed in graphs, equations and tables?   What about Graph, Equation, Table Search? Too long. But the acronym was staring us right in the face; why not GET Search?

We believe that GET Search is a name that does justice to the new and improved design for a powerful feature that delivers results in Knovel’s interactive tools – the Graphs, Equations and Tables.  GET Search goes into the Knovel Lab next week, and, for the next few weeks, we’re inviting our users to come try on the name as well as the new design and tell us what you think.