One of the things I've been thinking about and watching for is how Social Spaces change depending on the size of the community. For example, LinkedIn's news has the comment field at the top (it adds a second one at the bottom once there are three comments). This is fine when you have a small community leaving very few comments. However, if you had a slashdot sized community, this would encourage idiots to post before they read what other's said.
Too often we treat all practices as if the fit all communities, but the fact is size matters. For instance, Joshua's favorite example of the top diggers page, recently removed. What motivated folks at the beginning became a gamed liability once they got big. Much as we are reluctant to change UI's and remove features, there is a reasonable strategy for it....
A nice reminder of the wisdom of "You are not the user" at a product manager's blog: Eating Dog Food?
The real issue is that this is just another symptom of a big problem we have in our industry, but especially here in the valley. We tend to believe that our customers and users are much more like ourselves than they really are.
and even better, a reminder that there ar ea number of people you shouldn't consider your user either
Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed
Has it ever occurred to Arrington that he is, in the argot of product managers, an "edge case"? Entrepreneurs desperate for coverage, and aware that he never reads email, are trying a new way to reach him -- and Arrington, in his compulsive neophilia, actually tries out the new medium, for a while. He then quickly tires of it, and throws a tantrum. Catering to such a person's whims is no way to run a company.
To that list I add Scoble and your CEO. And no, Steve Jobs is an exception, not the rule.
As of late, I've been extremely focused on how we motivate behavior via our design choices; that theme is reflected in most of the talks I've been giving. Social spaces are particularly critical because of their complexity, subtle clues in interface make a big difference.
Often panels can be a bunch of folks sitting in the spotlight congratulating themselves for begin smart-- I prefer it when it's a chance for a series of lighting talks on a theme, then hopefully some discussion. Joshua's short talk from SXSW is a good guide to behavior in a compact form. I hope my panel form IASummit complements it.
Bernardo A. Huberman has been, so far, the most impressive speaking in a very impressive series. and, lucky you, they just just posted the video of his talk.
The web mediates interactions among distant people on a scale that was never possible in the physical world. From vast social networks, to grass-root amateur creativity and the creation of encyclopedic knowledge, a collective intelligence is at work in ways that differ from traditional communities in style, intensity and effectiveness of interaction. I will present the results of several studies of social dynamics in the web, as well as mechanisms we have designed to access this collective intelligence while improving users experiences with digital content.
On TED's website, Gladwell tells the story of how Prego discovered to their great profit that not all taste buds are alike.
This is not only entertaining, it's a critical reminder to all designers that there is not one UR-design, but that sometimes you have to provide choices. It's obviously an offshoot of his research from the fascinating and important The Ketchup Conundrum on the same theme.
Of course, in that piece he points to the fact that there *is* an ur-ketchup. No one wants extra-chunky or zesty ketchup, despite endless efforts from the food industry to break Heintz's hold. It's strange there is one true ketchup that you succeed or fail depending on how well you adhere to the design of it, just as it's strange there is only coke and sometimes Pepsi, and pretty much no one else successful in the Cola space. Not quite the level of lock-in to ketchup, but close.
I saw a taste test of Mayonnaise on America's test kitchen in which they concluded that, unlike other tests of other products, mayonnaise had to taste like what you grew up with, and it tastes different on the west coast, east coast and midwest. So there are regional ur-mayonnaises, based on familiarity.
This struck me as particularly relevant as we discussed threaded and nonthreaded discussion software at Linkedin, which led us to ponder other "religious wars" such as Mac vs. PC and VI vs. EMACS.
LukeW and I have often discussed conservation of effort; which means a certain amount of effort is always made in software usage, and you can take it on yourself on the design side, or push it off on the user. For example, how many times is personalization actually a way for a team to avoid having to make hard design choices?
Simple as possible, and no simpler. Sometimes you need an extra-zesty interface as well as classic, sometimes you don't.
And dont' forget to check out Jim
Design
watch the alpha geeks
- new tech moves through hackers, then entrepreneurs then platform players
examples include screen scraping and the peddle powered internet presaging data platforms and interest in alternative fuels
On Facebook (they have a new report coming out)
facebook is growing 1.14% a day
aps are growing 2% a day
87% of usage goes to 2% of aps
top 50 developers by usage looks like a more traditional long tail, but all 5K and the tail is way long
compares it to chris anderson's research, including book sales.but facebooks long tail is essentially useless right now.
the power law is skewed, that may change, but thats the bad news.
many applications competing for the same users. dating aps have the best uptake, then messaging and chat, just for fun as a category isn't strong.
the most successful category with active users is sports then gaming, chat, fashion, just for fun)
most active categories (what are people building) just for fun, then messaging, then gaming, then video (multiple categories, so may not be fully accurate)
aps with over 100,00 users messaging, dating, gaming, video, just for fun, (sports weaker here)
top 40- top friends, funwall, superwall, superpoke, video, x me, ilike, movies, graffiti -- top aps seem to be topping out, growth slowing.
a web 2.0 refresher
the more users, the more value
building a collective database
* building on top of open source, yahoo pays people to extend
* learning from open source, wikipedia uses volunteers
* p2p sharing users build song swapping tools as a byproduct of their own self interest
* google works this way, and to some extent facebook too
key concept: harnessing collective intelligence. ajax doesn't matter, what matters is value grows wiht userbase.
a network-effect-driven data lock-in, with accelerating returns. red-shift companies
Yahoo started with user generated content, and picked and chose best. google figured out how to automatically extract meaning from activity. They coudl automate what yahoo was doing.
page rank as true start of web 2.0
wesabe uses it too, with fan scores, recommendations, and data information being gathered and used for advice.
facebook is picking up data but you don't have much control over it, there is not much intelligence in the data.
for example, a list of facebook invites
* geni.com knows sean is my brother
* my company directory knows I work at oreilly
* google knows I worked with Danese
* amazon knows who's written books for me
- why should I confirm? can't facebook learn to use databases?
How ridiculous is this? my phone company knows everyone I ever called, but my phone only knows the last ten. Phone companies suffer from churn-- data could create lock in.
"are you my friend" anyone with email, phone, IM already knows who my friends are (Yahoo, are you listening???)
xobni is extracting data such as phone numbers and email, click to call, statistics on how often you communicate, let you know when you haven't talked to someone in a while.
The Internet Operating system
the subsystems will not be devices, they will be data subsystems. facebook describes itself as a platform, it's really a subsystem platform, not a platform yet. if you study history, a platform beats an application every time. lotus 123 to excel... wordperfect gets beat by MS word.
two types of platform
* one ring to rule them all
* small pieces loosely joined
facebook can't do it all. hopes they will help open it up to a small pieces model
=> thoughts on the social graph read it!
questions you should be asking
* am I doing everything i can to build applications that learn form my users?
* Does my applications get better with more users, or just more busy and crowded
** consider filtering, smart filtering
* if ""data is the intel inside":http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/data_is_the_int.html" of web 2.0, what adata do I own?
* what user facing services can I build against it?
* does my platform give me and my users control, or take it away form us?
** you have to create more value than you capture
Random thoughts about what I want form the social grpah
* I want social networks to reflect my real social network
* I want it to help me manage those contacts (how to reach them, updated status)
* I want it to manage my groups of people
** I need to put java people together, or facebook people, if I know them or not.
** people I know, people I don't know, people I regret knowing
* I want it to recognize asymmetry in relationships
** how can I reach out to superstars in a field I don't yet know
** I don't want to just manage my friends. In fact, the closer they are, the less I need to manage.
* I want fine grained control over what I see and what I ignore
** some people I just want flickr feeds, other ones I want everything. I want to see this persons blogs, but not their tweets.
* I want to discover interesting people
is Tim normal? Probably not, but good ideas here.
geni.com .. mothers maiden name no longer a good security question ;)
I can't recall if he had a point, except smart understanding of relationships
facebook doesn't fit my relationships -- steve case: i sold him a company, what am I going to say, we hooked up? might be accurate.. yes, that was a quote.
FOWA, should look at different tie describers
what do people want to say about themselves? What do I want to say about them? What if I could adjust my view of the people. How do I want to see them? could I rearrange modules to shape how I want to be updated?
jaiku has done great things, and just got acquired by google. takes idea of smart presence to mobile. your phone knows where you are. your phone should tell you if a friend is in berlin and you are going to wake them up. Or if a friend ins town, you cna ping them. I do this with twitter, but obviously not as effective. But do I want my movements tracked?
I'm and inventor. I because interested in long term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which is finished, not the world in which ist is started." ray kurzwell
think far along the curve, think about new platforms, think about future of applications, think about taking the platform forward so we can say, wasn't that platform quaint?
QUESTIONS
Q: criteria in companies distribution channel?
A: one of my fundamental beliefs about web 2.0 - it's distribution, creating interfaces with your customers. The best use all channels, web facebook, etc. They want as much contact as possible. The need to understand each of those channels, and there may not be much overlap-- ilike says only 4% overlap between web and facebook uses, they tend to choose. thinking of twitter, everyone has a favored interface the uses is the asset, and the services you can offer to them, and you can figure out how to offer that.
Q: If Facebook will dominate, won't they fight to keep their uses to themselves? Even if everyone wants it?
A: I'm ont sure, there are a couple answers. If you become truly domainate, no need ot share- facebook isnt there. Google is a good example. they own a lot of data they don't share BUT they also share a lot as well. They spider the same sites as yahoo and ms. you can share and still dominate. if large graphs cooperate, say geni and facebook cooperate both sites become more valuable. There is value in openness, if you focus on building services for users, then you choose ... it ultimately depends on the services and applications you build. Right now there is way more for facebook to gain by being open, as they try to crack open these deep mines of data. For now and for many years to come, all the trends say openness is good for you.
Dave McClure is useing fun movies ot intro folks. this was at the end of Tim's talks
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......
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.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 FaheyTwo 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 RathboneReleasing 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
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.
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:
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.
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).
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
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…
delightful slideshow on design
Monday I listened ot a pretty terrific forum, a radio program on my local PBS station. Because their site behaves in a way I can best describe as erratic, here are the relevant links:
The show discusses the lure of "the dark side" with Philip Zimbardo. What makes good people do bad things? Where is the line between good and evil, and where does this line become blurred? Can we curb this seduction to commit immoral deeds?Philip Zimbardo , professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
Download (MP3)(Windows: right-click and choose "Save Target As." Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose "Save As.")
I've long been fascinated by the Stanford Prison Studies, and the effect they had on research, but more so on the learnings they gathered so very quickly and so very deeply. In this talk, one thing I couldn't help but fixate upon was the details-- his choice of military-style outfits for the guards, including reflective sunglasses, or the hospital-gown style uniforms for the prisoners.
Because I spend most of my time considering which features affect community behavior, I wondered what is the online equivalent? What are those aspects of the fixtures of our design that create or dissuade evil (and how could it have affected the situation that led to Kathy Sierra's life threats) Is anonymity on the web something we want to discourage? How can we continue on without flagging (which obviously PublicSquare has.) I've been told that people feel more kindly to me and respond more gently when my avatar includes my baby. How can photos change our communications? Does a icon carry the same weight as a photo, does a photo carry the same weight as a photo of a face?
Good and evil are not something we as designers think of all that often. In fact, fairly often we hand wave and point to Leni Riefenstahl as our icon of beauty in the face of evil (beauty as the face of evil?). But we are not just recorders of life who can choose to do so with or without style, we are the architects of life, just as much as architects of buildings or urban planners.
I think every design choice in PublicSquare is built with conscious or unconscious implications on user behavior. You are responsible for your actions. Your bio carries every comment, every story you write. Your photo hangs out next to your words, as does your reputation. The reputation on each comment reflects passer-by's reactions. People don't approve when you make a snarky comment, or even when spelling errors are publicly mocked. The community decides what's acceptable and what's not, if you give them the tools to do so.
I wonder what tools create abuses of power. The theory in Zimbardo's book is most people have the capacity of evil within them, they just need the right situation to bring it out.
We can't hand wave if there is even a slim chance he is right.
If we design community spaces, we must design with community mores, be it a small community or the community of man.
My pal Jonathan Boutelle calls this a "mullet" when a blog lists less info about its posts as they get older, but still lists many many posts. Valleywag has the same configuration. I love this name.
Conference Program | ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2007 suggests that this year, like every preceeding year, the summit will be my favorite conference. If you are on the fence, get off it and register.
No since Budd Uglee have I see such a "design" website.
Theous Logo Designers - Unlimited Award Winning Logos.
Rouxbe claims to be "The Recipe to Better Cooking" but is it?
The concept is simple: technique is better communicated by video than text. Recipes only workif you know what you are doing.
It is beautiful, no doubt, with a dean & delucca-like clean and airy design. In many ways it is a shining example of desing best practices - recipes are broekn out step by step, so you can watch each part once or twice before tyring to coopy. And the food videos are gorgeous, shot in that soft-porn style that has made food-peddlers from saveur to rachel ray sucesses.
But of course they have their weaknesses, disguised by elegant user expereince and a lightweight airy desing that owes as much to Getty Images as it does to Dean and Delucca.
First off, I don't want to cook from my laptop any more than I have to. I have a small enough machine and a big enough kitchen (barely!) my laptop can come onto the counter. But this is bad news:
A simple solution might be just to unpack the videos into printable recipes with screenshots. But this raises the real problem of Rouxbe. They are too pretty.
Those video recipes are gorgeous. They will take too long and cost too much to light, shoot and cut (not to mention the need for a 'food stylist'.) The addition of making illustrated text versions will further drive up cost. This is an unhealthy proposition for a start up.
It also hurts their ability to gather user-generated content. They set the bar too high-- how am I going to feel posting my "how ot prepare fava beans" shot on my digital camera with its video feature? Boom, they've just locked themselves out of both a source of free content and a way to deeply engage their audience.
Design is not enough. But for now... look at that sexy halibut, scantily glad in frisee. Oooh, baby!
During the B&A redesign contest, we struggled mightily with the question "What makes a publication scream 'magazine' rather than 'blog'"?
The First Post certainly knows the answer.
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Christopher Allen rocked the house tonight with many vital insights on group size. But don't beleive me, do
MORE...
Goofing around with the new Google trends (very nifty!)
Makes me want to start mapping events against these trends-- information design, which is much older a practice seems to come out of nowhere, and rather later than I would have guessed... and I wonder what IxD and IAI did for the terms, if anything.
Now before you get all upity, and start puffing out your chest in pride, try adding "usability" to the equation.
You may have come a long way baby, but Jakob's kids have come farther.
What the heck is this, and why do the lawyers think it is common enough to need to be represented iconicly?
Looking at new site The Conversations Network and redesigned The Long Now Foundation, I realize something I've been noticing steadily growing: the technical constraints of blogs tools have changed how *all* web pages look.
Neither of these sites needs to look like a blog. And yet, they have all the traditional earmarks: the banner like art element, the long narrow floating body, the main content body and the suplementary links on the right, and almost no navigation.
Has the ability to design a site been reduced to deciding how big your fonts will be? After the css zen garden, why is everything so the same?
If you have been living under a rock, like me, you may have missed Jess's model for design maturity (pdf) .
If you ever were thinking of abandoning your title in favor of living design, now is a good time, a better time than ever. Check out his blog post as well.
RSA Journal - Better by Design
John Zapolski, a San Francisco-based principal of the Management Innovation Group, believes there is 'increasing importance in using design as a framework for organising decisions that people make", citing, alongside the work of his own company, that of innovation consulting group IDEO. He is keen to differentiate designers from design, implying that the people who use these methods may not be called designers.
I worked with Sasha at Y!, and was impressed with how well this system cured many waterfall ills. You should try it at home!
When VC's start thinking about design-- well, penetration has happened, baby.
Northwest VC: Following the value trail...
"Value is all about the brand and product design. Bose has a great brand and these headphones are pretty cool and comfortable so people are paying up for them."
You can hear part of the talk I took notes on-- the ideas are very much the same.
Listen to this commentaryBusiness schools will be launching their graduates into the real world over the next few weeks. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan speaks at Wharton's commencement this Sunday. Pepsico's president will do the honors at Columbia Business School next Wednesday. General Electric's CEO Jeff Immelt shares his thoughts with the graduating class at the Harvard Business School in June. These stars are all at the top of their game. But commentator Dan Pink says an MBA won't necessarily get you there"
from Online Extra: Commentary: Apple's Blueprint for Genius
"Designed in Cupertino."The words are printed in such small type on the back of Apple's (AAPL ) tiny new iPod Shuffle MP3 player that you have to squint to read them. But they speak volumes about why Apple is standing so far out from the crowd these days. At a time when rivals are outsourcing as much design as possible to cut costs, Apple remains at its core a product company -- one that would never give up control of how those products are created.
At first I recoiled: I can't say american design is inherently superior. But that's not the point... keeping design close to home is.
Even more telling is this quote
"I've been thinking hard about the Apple product-development process since I left," says design guru Donald Norman, co-founder the design consultants Nielsen Norman Group, who left Apple in 1997. "If you follow my [guidelines], it will guarantee good design. But Steve Jobs doesn't want good design. He wants great design, and my method will never give you that. That takes a rare leader, who can bring both the cohesion and commitment and style.
It's not usability that makes great design but a complete approach to the product that spans approaches as well as components. from business strategy to physical design, from software to plastics, the gestault of th product is the secret-- and it's a secret most companies simply aren't willing to emulate. Outsourcing, waterfall development, overfunding a single approach -- anything that piecemeals the design process weakens it.
Adam Gopnik rants against a new signage system in TOO MUCH INFORMATION
"Worse than merely unfamiliar, though, the signs are infuriating -- first, because they are there for the convenience of cars, and thus violate the first Law of Civilization, which states that nothing must ever be done for the convenience of cars (the mark of a city worth living in is that there are never enough places to park); and, second, because they eclipse, as decor, the jaunty, jazz-era syncopation of the classic New York street-corner sign pair, each sign gesturing toward its own street, but with the two set at slightly different levels, so that they have a happy, semaphoric panache. "
The city's comissioner of transportation argues for the signs by talking usability, but I think Gopik's rebuttal is sound on both a use and a aesthetic platform. It's a fine reminder that a system is more than its parts, more than a single homogenous solution that fits all, it must embrace the soul of a place and the nature of its people.
Reading MSNBC - Does Your iPod Play Favorites?
But just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites.
I have to ask-- do you really want true randomness? Because I don't. I want my shuffle to learn. I want it to notice when I fast forward in the first ten seconds of a song, and when I fast forward toward the end, or through the rest of the album. I want it to read the tempo and genre,a nd make decent mixes for me. I want it to stop putting chapter five of Art of War between Bireli Langrene and Abba.
The fetishization of true randomness is such a engineering thing to do. True serendipity comes from designing a user experience not calculating an abstract one, and a great algorithm comes from studying humans, not studying math.
In Concept Cars Don Norman writes
Want to design properly? Take concept cars seriously as design prototypes. Explore those constraints. Playfulness is a wonderful design stance that can produce out-of-the box breakthroughs. But there is playful and silly. Ford seems to have confused the two. Too bad -- there are excellent ideas hidden away inside the SYNUS armor-plated exterior.
No Don, no.
The point of the concept car is to design properly but not to design for use, and the two are not synonymous. The point of the concept car is to create a shift in cognition in the viewer, to help him or her imagine something that was not possible before. We can all imagine a useful ergonomic car (and some of us spend huge amounts of time doing so) but it's not so easy to picture the role of wifi in a car. And because a mental status quo it is almost impossible to break mental models with timid steps.
A certain foolishness, a certain grandness is needed in a concept car. It's physicalized science fiction. It's made to make you dream of going to the moon, not made to carry you there. When pragmatic car designers who prototype the real cars see the concept cars, the spark of innovation in their mind is fueled, and they can press against the many well know constraints of car design to create a surprise. Do you remember the first time you saw a Bug on the road, or a PT cruiser? The design concept that gave birth to that initial moment of pleasurable surprise was born first in an unbuildable concept car, when its very unbuildablness gave the designer the freedom to dream. Only later would it be dialed back, the most useful ideas harvested and put to work in a real car.
from The Origin of Things
Concept cars are also made to a certain degree to help the consumer get excited by cars again-- something that's hard to do with normal SUV's and midsize cars, no matter how many mountain roads the commercials show you. Concept cars are thusly comic book cars, ridiculously endowed with extreme qualities to entice and arouse interest, and sometimes repulse. The thrill of the impossibleness makes you dream of being a hero, capable of great feats due to the wonders of technology.
from The Origin of Things
It's hard enough to to get an industry to look forward, it's hard enough to say "lay down your rulers, we're gonna dream now" but to try to make the concept cars really work in today's world would lengthen the time it takes to create a vision of the future, make it less practical as an exercise and castrate the results.
If you make the concept car practical, all you are doing is making everyday design slightly more edgy, and simply creating another design team like the others. The concept car must be an unbuildable dream, because dreaming is what makes innovation possible.
Of course, it's pleasantly ironic to remember that making cars more suitable for humans was once driven by a concept car. Freed of the constraints of making concept cars all about sex and science, Marc Newson designed the 021C in 1999 that was all about having a good trunk, making it easy to get in and out of the car, and making far more readable dials and usable switches. Sometimes the wacky idea is to make things usable. But that should make us protect the concept car's inherent unshipableness even more fiercely. Only in a dream, sometimes, can we dream of better products. And yesterday's foolishness is today's best practice.
 from Marc Newson's site |  |
Do check out The Origin of Things. It's always good to remember where stuff comes from.
From Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger"
"I think it sucks!" said Jobs.His vehemence made Tim pause. "Why?" he asked, a bit stiffly.
"It just does."
"In what sense?" said Tim, getting his feet back under him. "Give me a clue."
"Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic," said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.
"You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional." The last word delivered like a stab. Doug Field and Scott Waters would have felt the wound; they admired Apple's design sense. Dean's intuition not to bring Doug had been right. "There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of," Jobs continued, "things that would make you shit in your pants."There wasn't much to say to that, so after a pause Tim began again: "Well, let's keep going, because we don't have much time today to-" "We do have time," said Doerr curtly, changing his own ground rules. "We want to get Steve's and Jeff's ideas."
"The problem at this point is lead time in our schedule," said Tim.
Jobs snapped his head from Doerr on one side to Dean on the other, as if he'd been slapped. "That's backwards," he said, his voice rising.
"Screw the lead times."
I keep returning to this article. I love Job's stellar ADD and vivid vocabulary, both loosely disguising a superlative design and business sense. I am not an Apple person, nor an apple user (except my recently acquired ipod), but I am becoming a Jobs fan. He knows who he is.
Redesigning American Business shows why outsourcing shouldn't scare designers....
"Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate. IDEO, ZIBA Design, and other players run workshops to help business people better understand and meet their customers' desires. Companies are creating "chief design officer" slots, and designers are helping corporations build their own innovation centers. The hot design firms in the U.S. today call themselves "design innovators," not "product designers""
From MSNBC - Women snuggle up with 'Boyfriend's Arm'
"A new product on the Japanese market has been designed for the single girl in need of some manly comfort while she sleeps."
Actually I suspect the real audience is girlfriend/wives of travelling men, who need the status quo to nod off. Single gals need a extention to the bed where they can place visitors so they can return their spread-eagle-diagonal-take-up the-entire-bed-through-sheer-force-of-cold-feet.
Happy friday!
According to Michael Porter, there are essentially two ways to compete: cost and differentiation. A Dry Cleaning Story explains how one small company choose the trickier course of differentiation and suceeded.
"A local dry cleaning company has taken the leg up on competition, and I've happily given them all my business. Not only that - they convinced me to pay more money than I was paying at the previous cleaner I had used for 3 years."
Not small multiples, but rather multiple small... Bullet Madness is a collection of teensy bullets, arrows, icons and such not. Cute enough to make a japanese preteen girl squeel. Well, if she was an interface designer....
Like most folks, I get envelopes full of coupons all the time. So far, the only ones I save are the ones for Chicago Pizza, and I've been reconsidering that since I went on the South Beach diet (after all, why torture myself? I could eat the coupon before I could eat pizza these days...)
But getting an envelope from Target these days is a lot like getting mail from the AIGA. These coupons look like IDEO's idea cards, like a AIGA fundraiser, like a tarot deck predicting the future of my nose... these coupon-art-cards came three days ago, and I can't quite recycle them yet. I have them spread out on the dining room table right now, because I like how they look.
They may actually be around when I run out of detergent. Which would be a win for Target, and a win for Tide. And won via aesthetics, and won by a designer smart enough to question the ink-on-your sweaty-fingers thin-newspaper-glossy coupon. God bless 'em, whoever it was.
I'm doing a lot of defining these days, between widgetopia and a project I'm working. This defintion of "icon" is worth a honorable mention.
"Ultimately from Greek eikon (likeness, image, portrait), an icon (or ikon) is an image, a representation, a simile. Accordingly, 192 iconicity in a semiotic sense refers to signs where the motivation is due to some kind of physical resemblance or similarity between the signified and signifier (see section ); 193 a Christian icon is a picture of a sacred or sanctified personage, traditional to the Eastern Church, which can be seen as hand-made (painted) or non-manmade (archeiropoietos). 194 Semiotically incorrect, but nevertheless widely used, is the denomination of the symbols on the GUI desktop and in WWW documents as ''icons''. In this paper, I call the graphic representations of hyperlinks Graphical Link Markers (GLMs). "
BW Online | May 17, 2004 | The Power Of Design
After just seven weeks with IDEO, Kaiser realized its long-range growth plan didn't require building lots of expensive new facilities. What it needed was to overhaul the patient experience. Kaiser learned from IDEO that seeking medical care is much like shopping -- it is a social experience shared with others. So it needed to offer more comfortable waiting rooms and a lobby with clear instructions on where to go; larger exam rooms, with space for three or more people and curtains for privacy, to make patients comfortable; and special corridors for medical staffers to meet and increase their efficiency. "IDEO showed us that we are designing human experiences, not buildings,"
An excelelnt article. The magazine version is worth buying, as the photos and charts are rather nice. I had to go to a couple stores to try to buy it-- it's selling out across the silicon valley.
A recent article on document design in the WSJ shakily raised the question:
Is a poorly designed memo at fault for not warning the president the nature of the terrorist threat.
In many ways it's a retread of the butterfly ballot controversy, and the Challenger controversy, but I think it's a controversy worth raising again and again until careless attention to design stops killing people.
Here is the article (PDF) (html). Here is the redesign of the memo.
Here's what wasn't printed from my interview (lightly edited for coherence):
Q: I'd like to talk about the PDB and the redesign - especially what wasn't working in the original
A: I can't blame the president for having a hard time with the memo: it's a mess. Everything is wrong with it: bad writing, bad design and no sense of hierarchy. Presidents of large companies can only give a few minutes to most issues brought before them; it must be far worse for the president of the united states. Bush has to be able to judge in a few seconds how much of his precious time needs to be devoted to an issue in a memo: this one wasn't helping him.
People scan newspapers for a number of reasons: too much daily information, difficult reading conditions such as subways and buses, etc. Journalist like yourself write using the inverse pyramid. This allows the reader to immediately understand what the article will cover and if it is relevant to their lives. It's the same with writing for executives; they are so deluged with information they have to scan as a survival trait.
Imagine if that first sentence was "Data from reliable internal and external sources indicate Bin Ladin planning a large scale attack on an US target." from there you can move on to bullets
This way the president can glance over the memo to understand the threat and then dig in to richer information that can help him decide how to act.
Adding color and graphs would improve both scanability and impact. Imagine if every memo had bargraphs displaying a scale of how severe the threat was, how urgent the issue was and how trustworthy the data sources were. Bush could then compare that memo to those on corn production and diplomat dinner schedules and know where to place his attention.
In a strange way it's like designing a comparison shopping site like Yahoo! Shopping-- you know when users are searching for a camera, they want to be able to look over a number of stores who are selling the camera and quickly see if it is a brand they know, what is the user rating, how much is the price... the president may need to know how severe is the issue, how much time does he have to respond, how trustworthy is the information.
And he has less free time than an average shopper.
(I'm not a presidential adviser, so hard for me to say what he needs to know, but let's use those factors as strawmen)
Q: "what is information architecture?"
A: A profession devoted to making the complex clear, via information design and content organization. It requires an understanding of human nature when faced with mountains of data.
Some good definitions here
http://www.aifia.org/pg/about_aifia.php
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets,
online communities and software to support usability and findability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of
design and architecture to the digital landscape.
Q: What is the growth of the info architecture field since you've been involved
A: When I first started, there were very few IAs out there. But the growth of data has resulted in information overload, and trouble means opportunity. There are hundreds of dedicated practicing IA's, and thousands of people who make IA a part of their work. Data is useless, knowledge is invaluable, someone has got to make one into the other.
Q: Have you ever heard of/seen a company that tries to apply usability principles to internal communications.
Yahoo! does. During a major Yahoo! property redesign, every single day the product manager sent out html email updates. Each item was a bullet point, and each item was color coded green, yellow or red depending on how much danger it was of slipping.
The Senior VP could take a look and in a second he knew where he needed to spend his time straightening matters out, and where he could relax. It was a very successful project, and those simple daily memos made everything run a bit more smoothly. I bet Bush would have enjoyed a similar design. After all, shouldn't a red flag be red?
Q: Do you know what the readership is like for "Boxes and Arrows"? Any sense of how many readers you've got, and whether it's grown during the two years it's been around?
A: In our first year, we had 1001117 page reqs, in 03 we had 2337704, and this year's numbers suggest we'll grown by another half. (aka half again each year.) our mailing list went form 2000 in year one to 6000 to year 2.
Q: What are big topics in IA circles right now?
A: IA is going in two directions right now. Many folks who are "hands on" IA's are becoming master craftsmen of taxonomy design and navigation systems. Others are going in a slightly tangential direction-- working on complete user experience strategies that encompass multichannel design based on business priorities. Both are thrilling: the hands-on IA's are embracing things like topicmaps and emergent classification tools like Wikis, while the big-picture IA's are becoming involved in organizational innovation and user experience strategy. Overall its an exciting field, with a lot of innovation and experimentation.
Q: What's going to be the challenge for the next few years?
A: The challenge in the next few years is two-fold; one is how do we push forward to the next generation of knowledge management. By that I mean how do we harness the vast amount of information that is out there-- every day physicians prescribe the wrong medicines because as humans they can't keep up with the massive amount of new knowledge flooding the field... sometimes this limitation results in a less than effective treatment, sometimes it actually result in death.
The information space is growing so rapidly its becoming harder and yet more crucial we keep it human-manageable. I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing search get so much attention-- its one potential solution to the problem.
The second challenge is exactly what you spoke of earlier... how are we making sure what we've learned is getting out there. That's one of the reasons I founded Boxes and Arrows-- it's critical that as advances are made, they are shared. That way we are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, instead of reinventing the wheel....
Also see: every breath death defying: IA in the WSJ
Correction on the WSJ article: I am no longer President of AIfIA, that role is now Peter Morville's. I was AIfIA's first year president.
I'm catching up on blogs.
I suddenly wondered what my world view would be if I read nothing but slashdot and design is kinky.
I was just thinking that the netflix queue is a great design problem for any design class.
Queue management is fairly complex, especially in a two-person household like mine. For example, I went out of town. Suddenly philippe needed to get all "his" movies to the top of the queue. However, once I get back, we want to sprinkle a combination of his, mine and ours. We also go through moods-- comedies, classics, french. We also watch old series sometimes, like the avenger, and unlike other movies, it is *not* okay if the second disk comes before the first.
Really, once the queue grows to 200+ proportions, the problems are very different. You don't actually care if a movie is 57 or 62 in the queue-- what matters is "right now" and "someday" for a given film. How could this be handled?
Plus, as you can see here, the page gets very long. How can someone cognitively hold all that data in heir head well enough to manage it's organization?
radio vox populi: live from the commons is notable both for its crisp infographic, tasty design, as well as the curious nature of the experiment it's running (aren't all web pages experiments, really...)
anyone enjoying it?
I was able to register www.widgetopia.net. I feel cool about the .net, since so far it's me, manu and josh all doing widgetopia. and maybe more folks will join us. widgetopia's power will be, I think, in volume over time.
I also tripped over this useful collection while catching up on CHIWEB reading.
widgety!
from Life StyleMaven. Bring Your Target Market to Life
"A Mood board is an innovative and fun tool that translates market research data into a visual representation, providing a unified and inspirational kick-start for creative teams."
For a breif time, you can compare the new Yahoo! Autos to the old .
So Zap sends me this wonderful Rich Gold talk The Coast Guard and its Borders and tells me to read it. And I do. And I find this gem (as well as many others)
"I had gone to a college with both an art school and a design school. And the artists and designers always sat at separate tables and didn't like each other much. These guys had sold out according to these guys and these guys were kind of flaky and didn't really want to make a living according to those guys.
And the way I think about it, the difference between the art and the design is that an artist paints a painting, and he goes, "Oh, it's beautiful. It's me. It expresses myself. There I am. There's my vision." A designer paints a painting and in the end, turns it around and asks: "Do you like it? No? I'll change it." "
Zap actually sent me the second part of the quote, but I wanted to include the first part, but there exists this art/design cultural uneasiness in schools, and later we pay for it no matter what side were on. As artists we are taught arrogance and starvation mentality, as designers we are taught to be pliant to the power of the buck. And we constantly suspect the other side might be having a better time of it, but we don't dare cross because we are holding on to our dream/sense what-have-you.
As designers we ought to be strong but not arrogant, and be willing to do the right thing isince we are here to help our clients, and "help" and "obey" are not synonyms; and as artists we need to stop being bellybutton gazing sycophants and say something some one can hear.
From an interview with Wim Gilles in Origin of Things, reviewed previously (line breaks mine, to aid reading):
"How did you Design then, at the time?
Do you know the term heuristics? In science you pose a hypothesis, and it is true as long as you cannot prove that it isn't (this is Karl Popper's theory.) Science is therefore a process of verification. That is a bit of traditional scientific thinking, to draw a conclusion on the basis of establishing a few facts, and to deduce from all the facts that there appears to be a general rule. We call that a law.
Heuristics is based on a known piece of information. If you're a carpenter, it is known (by passed down information) that you don't hold a nail by its point, but rather with the point downwards. That has never been proved scientifically. You just do it like that. You'll discover if it doesn't work.
That is heuristics, an ancient Greek way of doing things that has been denied by science for centuries. You just do something. It's a matter of trial and error. These is therefore a heuristics school and I belong to that school."
Can a book be deeply flawed and still be worth having? The Origin of Things delights and disappoints with every page. The book consists of a collection of design objects across the years, along with the sketches and related items used to achieve their final design, and the images are fascinating. The lowly paperclip is photographed as lovingly as the Frank Lloyd Wright vase, giving the paperclip the warhol-icon treatment and revealing its inherent beauty.
The text, however, fails the magnificent objects. It's often incomplete, obtuse, or dry. The result is a tease that either makes you hunger for more, or mystifies, leaving you alone to decifer the drawings and results. Sometimes reading a dry but more complete text, one sense a thrilling story behind the design process-- such as with Wim Gilles scooterette project, in which he fought to do a personal project to build a lightweight folding scooter/moped that got to final prototype then was killed preproduction-- but the story doesn't keep up with the photographs. Not bad, but unsatisfying.
However, I've really enjoyed the book, no matter how disappointed I've been with an incomplete story, because it is so neat to look at beautiful, well crafted objects and their creation artifacts: the prototype kettle made of two pans soldered together, the x-rays that informed a silverware set, the raw and elegant drawings that became Lloyd Wright's vases.
Decide for yourself.
