Amelie's hair kept its shape after I removed the tiny ponytails.

whew.

Newswise Education News

Elliott and co-author Frank Gresham identified the top 10 skills that students need to succeed based on surveys of over 8,000 teachers and over 20 years of research in classrooms across the country. They are:

1. Listen to others
2. Follow the steps
3. Follow the rules
4. Ignore distractions
5. Ask for help
6. Take turns when you talk
7. Get along with others
8. Stay calm with others
9. Be responsible for your behavior
10. Do nice things for others

Then we spend the next 20 years unlearning them.

Yesterday I asked on Linked in (and on Facebook, more on that later)

What do you consider the greatest challenges in designing for social media/software/networks?

I have gotten many terrific answers, and I'll share a couple now.

When you are designing social media you are not building and designing a product in the typical sense of that word. You are really designing an infrastructure upon which social interaction, and eventually a community, can build. The affordances needed to "direct" and "control" the development of a community are very different from and much more subtle than typical single-user systems that we (as designers, developers) know. I usually compare it metaphorically to a soap bubble: you can gently try to push it in a certain direction, but if if you push too hard, it'll burst. User-centered design takes on a whole new meaning when you are building social media and communities......

-- Klaus Kaasgaard

The greatest challenge is marketing, because marketing determines who your audience will be more than the quality of your product design.

Design-wise, the answer is similar: understanding who your audience will be, as chosen (hopefully) in close collaboration with marketing. If the marketing people don't exist or aren't powerful, then the features and the site design will alone be relied on to determine the audience -- and this will result in a fractured, aimless audience with no sustainability and no strategy except a hope to get lucky with some sort of coincidental generation of audience cohesiveness and thus community.

Clarification: I'm not trying to discount the importance of features or product design. I just happen to think that, especially among Christina's group of friends and contacts, we're more likely to fail to understand the importance of marketing than we are likely to fail to deliver powerful user experiences. Other answer-ers here are thinking along the same lines when they stress the importance of brand, voice, and acquiring users: all of these qualities are the things that marketing experts can really help with in a profound way.

To whatever extent that a UI designer can do this, that UI designer is performing a marketing function.

-- Christopher Fahey

Two things:

1. Not doing one. I find the biggest issue these days is that companies continue to shy away from social networks as something someone else does. The loss of top down marketing control and the perceived liability of open-ended conversations still keeps many companies well away

2. Not looking at what networks already are working and carving out a space in them for yourself. I think a big mistake for a lot of companies is the idea they have to start complex processes like this by always building their own first. I think it would be better to start with a thread or user group or sanctioned community employee team to participate on other well-participated meta-forums first. If the desire is strong enough to create a unique social network that is more targeted to the select group, then the idea will have some momentum from the target community itself to move along.

-- Tod Rathbone

Releasing control to your community. On the two social sites I've worked on, both aimed at narrow audiences (one tech-oriented, the other party-oriented -- assuming those are separate audiences), the site owners in both cases wanted to avoid "The MySpace Syndrome" wherein nearly every page becomes a messy conflagration of plug-ins, run-on sentences, endless scrolling and possible lawsuits. Facebook has been somewhat successful in manhandling its audience into a single interface they can't easily manipulate. But growth seems to depend on freedom of expression, and when you have thousands or millions of users, control goes out the window. Finding the balance between "My Vision" as a client and "Your Vision" as a user is painful, but unavoidable.

-- Lance Arthur

There are many MANY more terrific answers, and since the poll is open for another six days, I recommend you read them and add your 2cents. After  it closes, I'll do a write up of what I've learned, and create some follow up questions to answer some of these challenges.

Tamara Adlin, Author of The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design  wasn't able to make the LinkedIn link work, so I tacked it on here

I think the biggest challenge is having a really good reason to build one in the first place. back when streaming media was new, everyone and their brother was saying 'we need streaming media on our site!' More recently it's been "Ajax! Web 2.0! We need some of that!" No you flippin' don't. That's like saying 'we need more concrete to make this new building excellent!' Social networking applications are becoming part of the infrastructure of the web and technology. They are a commodity, a tool. And they are being applied indiscriminately, which is making them worthless. Unless there is a really good reason for supporting some kind of 'community,' then social networks and community applications just increase noise and diminish the interestingness and goodness of 'real' social networks. So the biggest challenge? Doing the really good thinking up front, before you decide you need one, to figure out who you are trying to help, why, what they need, the experience you want to support, and the best ways to support this experience. Designing social media or networks should only be undertaken AFTER you've done all that hard work. and I think it's the biggest challenge because i think so few people are doing it.

Somehow I've managed to live mylife so far withotu hearing the term Sock-Puppeting. A shame.

Recently yet another case of someone using a second identity to promote their own work has presented itself on a major tech writing listserv. This act is apparently known as sock-puppeting (I'll admit, I had to look it up). As an example, Joe Smith wrote an article, and John Jones (aka Joe Smith) is promoting it as a supposed third party.

There goes life, imitating art again...

When I saw this slide on Josh Porter's terrific preso on Psychology Of Social Design the clouds parted and the angels sang.

There is a desired behavior that we need to create, we have no control over the person but, via interaction design, information architecture and interface design we control the environment.

Perfect, and succinct. I need to make a T-Shirt.

entire presentation:

via Joel on Software's Building Communities with Software

The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments

it brings up the question "Are Social Networks, Media and Software the new third place?"

Where do you go to assuage loneliness or boredom? Do you open twitter? Swing by Facebook? Is email a third place? Is IM?

The impact of social media (like PR) is overdetermined. There are a lot of moving parts. Which is not to say that it can’t be measured. How do we do it? Well, it depends. Here are some things we can measure, some of which may be right for your project:

* Page views
* Feed subscriptions
* Comments
* Quality of comments
* Number and types of user submissions

and it continues... read it all.

a particularly smart slideshow.

I was delighted to see a poster I worked on when I was at MIG referenced in it... made me feel all tingly.

From a hilarious David Pogue column (read the whole thing for more funny anecdotes)

We reviewers aren't supposed to divulge our official opinions until the article appears in print. But years ago, Benjy, a P.M., asked me what I thought of his product, a database, while the review was still in progress. I said cautiously, "Well, I need to keep working with it."

But Benjy continued to prod. "Any ideas for our next version?"

"Well," I shrugged, "a list view would be nice."

Forty-eight hours later, a FedEx man appeared at the door, bearing a new copy of the program: version 1.1. It was identical to the version I'd been testing -- except now it had a list view. Some programmer had had a very busy weekend.

Benjy called. He thanked me for the list-view idea and asked if there was anything else I'd like to see in the program. I hedged; he prodded.

"O.K., well," I managed, "it'd be nice if you could mark and print subsets of your cards."

You guessed it: within two days, version 1.1.1 arrived, complete with mark-and-print features.

This loony cycle went around a few more times, the little company writing the software to accommodate the review. I knew this wasn't quite the way the reviewer-vendor relationship was supposed to work -- but I really thought the software was getting better. At last the review deadline came, and Benjy stopped adding new features. That program was probably the only version 1.1.1.1.1 ever sold.

From Harvard Business Online's Marshall Goldsmith

1. List the names of the key groups of people that impact your life -- both at work and at home (customers, co-workers, friends, family members, etc.).
2. Write down the names of the people in each group.
3. Post your list in a place you can't miss seeing regularly.
4. Twice a week -- once on Wednesday, once on Friday -- review the list and ask yourself, “Did anyone on this list do something that I should recognize?”
5. If someone did, stop by to say "thank you," make a quick phone call, leave a voice mail, send an email, or jot down a note.
6. Don’t do anything that takes up too much time. This process needs to be time-efficient or you won’t stick with it.
7. If no one on the list did anything that you believe should be recognized, don’t say anything. You don’t want to be a hypocrite or a phony. No recognition is better than recognition that you don’t really mean.
8. Stick with the process. You won’t see much impact in a week - but you will see a huge difference in a year.

Nothing will improve every aspect of your life than regularly saying thank you to the people in it.

for example, The Giant Vampire Frog

I'm not sure how to explain how happy this makes me.

 Rosenfeld Media recently did an analysis of user experience mentions in prominent Business Magazines. What they discovered is quite fascinating.

• The Harvard Business Review dramatically differs from its peers in its information focus. Knowledge management (26.7%) and information management (61.7%) combined to account for 88.4% of its results, while the average for all of our business publications is 28.2% (8.5% + 19.7%). Of course, HBR is the most academic publication on our list. If this is the explanation, does that suggest that the research and academic side of the business community is more focused on information management issues? If so, why?


• The Economist is quite focused—at the expense of all other UX topics—on branding: 96.7% of its results, versus a 42.4% average among all analysts. Of all the terms on our list, branding has been in use perhaps the longest. Does The Economist see newer topics as flighty and not worth deeper coverage?


• Conversely, Business Week seems to have the most balanced coverage, with six terms accounting for at least 5% of the results each (branding, content management, industrial design, information management, knowledge management, and user experience).

from Wired

Just 9 percent of the fair sex want products that "look feminine," like a pink Playstation or Hello Kitty keyboards. The remaining 91 percent seek something sleek and sophisticated, more boardroom than teenage bedroom. The data comes from a study, done by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, of 750 British women age 24 to 45.

why is this news?

I am an unapologetic foodie. Left with any kind of free time in my days, I fill it with wandering around grocery stores staring at ingredients, reading food essays and cookbooks, and cooking. The end of the brutal day when everything went wrong, and you want to crack a beer? I want to turn baby artichokes. So it’s not surprising I’m reading The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity when I should be reading Wikinomicsor Designing Interactions.

But as I closed the book on the last page this morning, I couldn’t help but feel the plight he described sounded familiar. Chefs, having struggled for years to perfect their craft, find themselves stuck with two choices. They must either become businessmen in order to open more restaurants, or become master craftsmen so they can charge higher and higher prices for their dishes. In the book this is epitomized by Thomas Keller, opening Per Se and Bouchon in Las Vegas, with plans for more, and Masa charging 350 a person for dinner as a start. Meanwhile Keller sighs over not being able to cook anymore. Does this sound familiar, anyone?

How many times have you heard a design manager complain abut not being able to design anymore? How many times have you heard a senior designer puzzle over going into management. How many large companies now offer “senior practitioner” routes for their best talent, allowing them to have the earning power of managers rather than lose them?

Other chapters, on Grant Achatz’s Alinea (written about here earlier) and Melissa Kelly’s Primo show chef’s pushing their craft toward innovation, seeking to engage their audience in new and more compelling ways. Cross your eyes slightly and you can see the struggle between design innovators and user-centered designers played on on a new field. The book speaks to the challenges chefs face as they grow more successful; how the struggle to define themselves, reinvent themselves, and —hardest of all— make a decent living.

Life repeats itself over and over, it’s called convergent evolution. And in the craft-professions —design, engineering and now cooking—we see the same patterns and the same solutions. Which leads me to the next question: when are we going to see the design channel on TV? Top designer? Hell’s Studio? I’ve got my application ready…

The obesity map is a fascinating tool. Click through to interact with it-- you can see how we've grown as Americans over time.

After reading the NYTimes article on fattest states in the US, I found myself wanting to compare it with a poverty map-- I couldn't find one that did a red-state/blue state normalization, but this still does a decent job illustrating some correlation. (from the marvelous social explorer) I'd love to find a way to explore further...