Planet Hippo

Bas van Leeuwen (Hippo) — Inspiring: Hippo GetTogether

August 27, 2010



So yes, last Friday we had the Hippo GetTogether, our gathering of clients, developers,  partners, managers and interested individuals all clad in identical cutesy Hippo shirts. Let me give you an (incomplete) glimpse into the day’s events.



The summer day beckoned, yet everyone decided to stay inside in the magnificent Felix Meritis to listen to an exciting day filled with knowledge sharing. People freely came in and left when they desired, according to Gerrit there was a “good informal vibe” which in my opinion helped to foster an environment for open discussion later on.



Hippo’s very own CTO opened the day with a hearty welcome and after he had shown us what the future of Hippo CMS holds in store it was time for client cases. In this speed-dating for professionals each participant had 4 minutes to show everyone a short glimpse of their Hippo implementations.



TDC Lighthouse used Spring to implement the website of the dutch kidney foundation Not only did we see the big, high-traffic sites for which Hippo is known and loved, but there was also a presentation by Indivirtual about their implementation of http://www.landg.nl in 10 days of work.



The program flowed from these non-technical client cases, through technical cool vs. hot talks ending in an overheated hackathon.  Some chose to attend the Usability Sidetrack, in which our User Interface Guru shared some insights into “how we create the friendliest CMS around”. An inspiring workshop in which participants were actively involved in creating ideas for a better product.



Cool vs. Hot focused on using Hippo CMS in new and exciting ways, examples are using Hippo in an “In Memory Data Grid”, integrating Hippo with SAP, SOLR, using REST interfaces, using CMIS, SOAP & Spring, or tips & tricks for running Hippo in a high-performance way.



Afterwards Hippo’s HST expert “Ardcore” gave an introduction into linking with the HST and how to make sure your visitors (and Google!) get where they should be.



We have it all on film, so please have a look at some of the talks, either because you missed them or to review the ideas presented. For example the Liferay-Hippo integration for PvdA.nl



The day ended with a hackathon, complemented with refreshments and pizza. Guys being guys there was no way that the Baywatch-plugin could not have won…



The day ended with a lot of happy faces, see you all next time!

Rolf van der Steen (Hippo) — Usability test: Tab Management

A call to Hippo CMS7 authors, editors and admins! Please join in on the next usability test. This one is about Tab management. Use the following URL to start the test:

http://usabilla.com/rate/8190903884c76

Please don't hesitate to join in and speak up. Your opinion is much appreciated!

Note on Usabilla (the tool I'm using for these tests): Participating is anonymous; It is not possible for me to see who has participated. If you like to get in touch personally, please state your email in a note in the test.

Rolf van der Steen (Hippo) — Results Hippo GetTogether Usability Sidetrack

August 26, 2010

Last friday (20 aug 2010) was Hippo GetTogether. Right after lunch, while the Cool vs. Hot tech-talks were being held in the Zuilenzaal, I ran the Usability sidetrack in the Teekenzaal. About 15 people attended and gave me really valuable feedback on Hippo CMS 7.

The sidetrack consisted of two parts. First I presented a brief introduction on usability. Most of the sidetrack however was a practical workshop. In this workshop participants gave me feedback on Hippo CMS 7. For those interested; you can find the entire presentation on http://www.slideshare.net/rolfvandersteen/hippo-get-togehterusabilitysidetrack (yes, I know, it contains a typo).

Check out the presentation if you'd like to know a bit more on usability. Here I like to go into more detail on the workshop and the results from it. For the workshop I had prepared three exercises; “Top 10 Improvements”, “Personas” and “Today's Design”, so that I had at least enough to fill the planned time (13:30 - 15:30). But in the end I used all the planned time and about an hour extra on the first exercise only; creating a decent most-wanted improvements list.

Top 8 Improvements

I used focus group methods to create the improvements list. First I asked all participants to write down their most-wanted improvements on post-its. This could be things like frustrating interaction, bad graphical design or missing features. Then we went through these improvements one-by-one; the 'owner' explained what he/she meant, and we put all the post-its on a flip-over functionally grouping them as we went along. This resulted in approximately 20 improvements. Next we prioritized the improvements. Everyone got to make two votes by placing stickers on the flip-over: one big sticker  for the most-wanted improvement (2 points) and one small sticker for the second-most-wanted improvement (1 point).

This resulted in the following top 8 improvements*:
  1. Rich text editor (Xinha): frustrating to work with, doesn't give users true text-editing functionality they expect from Office applications they normally use like MS Word.
  2. Performance: Bad performance influences the user experience, users get frustrated, start clicking more than needed, thus creating more errors.
  3. Document presentation: bad typography, unusable alternating color coding, 'technical' design.
  4. Template creation: current way of creating document type templates is too rigid / clunky.
  5. Workflow: communication possibilities between users in the workflow are missing / too little.
  6. Dashboard: perceived as useless because presented information is not relevant to users.
  7. Tab behavior: frustrating interaction.
  8. Drag & drop: missing functionality.

* The top listing is composed of voted improvements and improvements that are mentioned more than once. All other improvements are left out of the top listing.

Hackathon input

After creating the top listing we came to the conclusion there was too little time left to pick up one of the other exercises. We then had a short brainstorm on input for the hackathon, using the top listing as a reference. We decided improvements for the Dashboard nicely fitted the hackathon goals and could be feasible within a couple of hours.

From this brainstorm the following improvements for the Dashboard arose:
  • History improvements: make the history list more relevant, show publication, show take offline show requests and their comments, don't dhow login/logout actions, allow user to hide (some) actions, and group actions per user (within a certain time frame).
  • Chat functionality in CMS: allow logged in users to chat with each other, on dashboard, but eventually across entire CMS, one-on-one chats, but optionally also one-to-many.
  • ToDo improvements: Group per action.
  • Change order of history and todo; to do is more important, so should be on the left.
Structured feedback

Another very interesting point which became clear from the usability sidetrack was a clear need for more frequent and better structured ways for Hippo clients/users to provide input/feedback like in this sidetrack. I pointed out that we're running usability tests and that I would like as many participants as possible to join in. I also mentioned that I'm very much interested in additional feedback and like to enable structured ways of exchanging this. Participants responded enthusiastically to that.

What's next?

I've discussed results from the Usability sidetrack at Hippo internally and these are the steps we're going to take:
  • The upcoming release (7.5) is already fully planned and there are little resources available to pick up additional design and development. However we can fit Tab behavior improvement within this release.
  • For the next releases we have appointed key usability improvements: Dashboard,  Rich text editor, Performance and Document presentation.
  • Also we're going to create a 'UX channel'. We want to satisfy the need of sharing thoughts and ideas on user experience (and separate these from technical discussions). We have to give it some thought on how we are going to do this, but most likely we'll be opening up a UX forum.
Well, that’s it in a nutshell. I'll keep you updated and hope to see you at the next GetTogether!

Rolf van der Steen (Hippo) — Hippo GetTogether Usability Sidetrack

August 18, 2010


This Friday is Hippo GetTogether. Parallel to the Cool vs. Hot tech-talks I will be running the Usability sidetrack.

The Usability sidetrack is scheduled for form 13:30 until 15:30*. In this time I will give a glimpse into how we create the friendliest CMS around.

First there will be a brief introduction on usability; what is it, what is our vision on it and how do we apply it at Hippo.

Most of the sidetrack however will be a practical workshop. In this workshop you can give us your feedback, directly to me! The feedback will be used right there and then to collectively design and evaluate new and better solutions.

Your input is valuable here! Since the workshop is based on your feedback, please bring your issues, examples, comments, etc.

* There is room and time to continue an extra hour if desired.

Mathijs Brand (Hippo) — The little secret about Search Engine Optimization

August 12, 2010

Your average Hippo customer isn't stupid. She's smart. Let's call her Paula. I like that name. Paula. Now let's say Paula is a web analyst and works for a large non profit organization. And because she's smart, she's migrating to Hippo CMS 7. Before she did this, she read some extensive reports on SEO. Her company even hired an SEO consultant to verify her website. But she also noticed a lot of Hippo websites got the highest rankings.

She asked me why. Did I know a little secret perhaps? My answer is yes. I do have a little secret for Paula...

But first I will tell you exactly what Paula knows. So here it goes.

Paula knows

Human Readable URL's are important. Luckily she got it out of the box in Hippo CMS.

Paula knows where the description text in her Google search results comes from. See picture below. Better yet, she knows how she can easily manipulate it in her own Hippo CMS.

A friend of Paula told her about a thing called a sitemap. Although search engines won't promise you they will use it, it is pretty nice if they do: giving visitors an overview of your website in search results. See picture below. The Hippo forge has a nice sitemap plugin using the sitemap standard. The installation is easy. That's why Paula has it now.search results in google with sitemap feature

Keywords

Things started to get a bit messier with a discussion about keywords. Paula knows it can be a lot of work to add well chosen meta keywords to your pages. She used to give the editors guidelines to try and match all the important search queries in Google; adding keywords for higher search rankings. The editors had entered them extensively in their old CMS and I didn't want to migrate them, for they weren't very helpful at all. Even worse, they were always the same.

Why don't you migrate them? She asked. Google likes them, I read it in my report by the SEO consultants.

So I explained her what a nice job it must be, being an SEO consultant. It seems you can basically write whatever you want. Why? The search ranking algorithm isn't public. So a bit of the mystery remains. I'm not saying meta keywords will hurt your search results. But they won't help you either.
Don't believe me? Check this guy's video:
Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

So don't spend your time on keyword optimization for external search engines. Rather spend it on keywords for use within your own website. For example in your own search engine. Try making sure the list of keywords in your article is short and relevant. Then people will find what they are looking for faster and you can influence your website's search results. But searching within your own website is a different topic altogether. I might write about that another time.

Link farms

Very important is the amount of linking between you and other websites. If you link to a normal relevant website and they link back, it's pretty good news for your search results. However a link farming doesn't work. That is bad news for your ranking. Broken links on your website don't help you either, so luckily Hippo CMS has a lot of tooling for that.

Performance matters

Paula didn't know performance mattered for search engines. It does. Check this page by Google about it.

I'm glad speed matters. I like fast websites. And others do too! It will get give your visitors a better feeling of usability. Higher performance leads to more page views. People return more often to fast website. Some people argue it's the most important feature of your website. Anyhow. I'm glad Hippo can provide you with lightning speed.

Nice, nice, nice, but now I want the secret

So you're wondering why Hippo websites rank as high as they do? What is the secret? Is it about all the rules applied above? Partly.

The real secret is your content. There's no smart technical feature giving you high rankings without having relevant content people like. So the amount of pages with nice relevant articles is the little secret I'll give away. And that's exactly what editors in Hippo CMS can focus on. A search term in the title or introduction is more important then a search term in the body. But you don't have to tell people that. They do that already.

And by the way. Paula is very happy and is getting high search results. Are you next?

All characters and events in this blog — even those based on real people — are entirely fictional.

Rolf van der Steen (Hippo) — Hippo GetTogether T-shirt poll

August 04, 2010


To all Hippo GetTogether attendees; now is your chance to determine the looks of us hippotizers. We want you to choose your favorite T-shirt for the Hippo GetTogether (majority rules).

Ard Schrijvers (Hippo) — Relevance scoring your search results with the HST Query

July 28, 2010

Typically, customers like it when a title matches some query, that this item gets scored higher than a match for the query only in the documents body.

Now, without going into the subtle details of Lucene scoring, by default all text in a Hippo Document is indexed with equal weight (assumi