Corvus Consulting

Today at Ma.gnolia, we released a great feature called Roots. Put simply, it’s a link that brings you the collective assessment of the website you’re looking at, as determined by Ma.gnolia members who’ve bookmarked that page.

Part toy, part research tool, part info-voyeurism; Roots is among the first tools to build on social bookmarking as a platform for enriching the way we use the web instead of merely supplementing it.

This is much easier to understand when see for yourself, so give the icon below a click:

As you can see, not a huge number have bookmarked this page, but with the Roots bookmarklet, you can apply this trick to any page you’re looking at, and get a quick measure of what Ma.gnolia members think. One of the best things about Roots is that you don’t have to be a member to use it, either. It just does more if you are.

Find out more and get the Roots bookmarklet and badges here. To learn more about Roots’ talented designer, Bill Lindmeier, check out his blog.

Ma.gnolia.com is an innovative social bookmarking website based in San Francisco and staffed by a small, agile and passionate team. This entry into the busy and fast-paced web 2.0 space allows both technical and non-technical people to keep track of their favourite websites and to share them with friends and colleagues.

Ma.gnolia’s strengths are its professional polish and its emphasis on both personal and social discovery and knowledge management. Developed in just over six months, Ma.gnolia launched to wide acclaim and quickly began running alongside the dominant players in a space with over 80 comptetitors.

For this project, I filled the role of Product Manager, and guided the team through the intial exploration of market needs and development of the brand, feature specification and implementation of a complete and effective product launch. After launch, I participated in discussions with members and non-members, designed new features and changes to existing features based on member feedback, and laid out a roadmap that will help Ma.gnolia maintain and grow from its place as one of the premium social bookmarking services on the web.

Site Note

Ma.gnolia is one of the few projects that I help bulid where I can also use it in my daily online life. When you come to the Corvus site, you’re using Ma.gnolia, too, without even knowing it. The links that appear on the left side of every page here are dynamically pulled from Ma.gnolia, which selects only the bookmarks I’ve tagged with ‘work’. The genius of this is that Ma.gnolia allows me to set it up once, and never need to think about it after that for new links to appear every day.

Based in San Francisco, _blank">Trigger Consulting produces innovative web-based business software for small to medium sized clients. I’ve worked with Trigger on several projects, establishing product visions, developing information architectures and product specifications to suit each project.

Capulet Communications, based in Vancouver, helps small to medium sized IT companies reach their markets with effective communication effective market strategy planning. Capulet will at times develop or re-make the entire web presence for their clients, and on one particular project they contracted me to develop an information architecture for a client with a complex and compelling product offering in the electronic banking field.

After reviewing the existing product offerings and getting an understanding of where the business needed to go, I developed a site architecture that streamed visitors into one of three sub-markets served by the client. In doing so, potential customers were guided through the steps they needed to take before Capulet’s client would step into the process to complete the chain, thereby dramatically reducing the overhead of pre-sales effort.

By designing self-service support features that recognized the different needs of the client’s sub-markets, and by adding new technologies such as RSS feeds and aggregated news pages, the number of unnecessary support contacts were also reduced, leaving Capulet’s client better able to focus on product development and expansion.

Based in Vancouver, Atimi Software creates an incredible diversity of custom software for both the Mac and Windows platforms. In early 2006, Atimi contracted me to create a functional spec and user interface wireframes for a custom colour management plugin for use in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat products.

On a very tight timeline, this project required me to become an overnight expert in colour management, and to turn a set of use cases into a specification that would get the development team coding as quickly as possible. Without the smart and friendly team at Atimi, this would not have been possible, but we pulled it off not only on time but also under budget.

Sometimes after working so long on building a business, you can lose sight of the big picture view of what your product actually offers and means to the people who will get the most from it. This was the problem faced by C Jacobs Consulting, as the company had outgrown its origins as an implementor of property management software to offer a range of custom products and services.

At issue was the ability to bring the range and diversity of products and services that C Jacobs had come to offer into a coherent message and product architecture. Working remotely with the the principal and key partners, I unearthed the core values and the essentials of what unique value the C Jacobs team brought to its clients.

The resulting documents provided a basis for the company to articulate its offerings to potential clients, and to use as a touchstone in the development of roadmaps for future expansion.

CES Data is a small consulting firm in Toronto that specializes in delivering financial management software for world-class institutions. The projects that CES Data takes on can range widely in scope and complexity, and establishing understanding with clients is, of course, a high priority.

Without a dedicated business analyst or spec writer on the team, they needed a process for discovering and documenting requirements that would form the contract between the client’s needs and the implementation team.

After getting to know the team, their backgrounds and individual skills, I developed a simple process and a number of templates for gathering and documenting the requirements of each project. The key challenge was to create a process that would fit in with the existing skill set of the team, would foster collaborative requirements discovery and remind everyone of the important checkpoints in specification developmetn without dragging down the schedule.

Achieving this balance left the CES Data team with a set of tools and methods that they feel confident taking to clients and using as a contract of software expectations.