Information Architecture, User Experience & Other Obsessions
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Online Community Basics: Start with Research – The 3 questions to ask – Online Community Report
I hadn’t heard of this blog/site until a colleague pinged me about it. It has some excellent advice on issues to consider when thinking about designing for an online community, especially the idea of an “ecosystem” that’s already there to an extent, that you’re just trying to complement and enhance. Good stuff.
Yeah, I modified the title a bit… but that’s the gist of what I’ve scanned so far. Basically, all this worry over teens naively posting all their personal information for predators to poach may be somewhat overblown. The kids are alright, and savvier than we think.
Pew Internet: Teens, Privacy and SNS
Some 55% of online teens have profiles and most of them restrict access to their profile in some way. Of those with profiles, 66% say their profile is not visible to all internet users. Of those whose profile can be accessed by anyone online, nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Teens post fake information to protect themselves and also to be playful or silly.
Michael Hirschorn has some thoughtful and sobering comments on the “social computing” hype in the Atlantic Online: The Web 2.0 Bubble
The walled-garden attributes of MySpace and Facebook, like those of the subscriber-era AOL, can quickly become liabilities. And as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter of time before the Tila Tequilas of the world, inspiration for millions of page views, decide they might as well go elsewhere. And, just as in high school, where the cool kids go, the rest of us will follow.
Overall, in spite of his breezy/snarky delivery, I think he has a few great points — what we see now as a distinction between something like MySpace and the Web will likely blur, as personal blogs and such have more open architectures for all the same features MySpace provides and the features end up being common commodities.
He also mentions a few sites that I hadn’t heard of yet (I am *SO* out of the loop) for consolidating your online presences (which I blogged about here not long ago): wink.com, minggle.com and socialgrapes.com. Go figure.
I love this quote. When asked if Web 1.0 was about connecting computers, while Web 2.0 is about connecting people, Webfather Tim Berners-Lee said,
“Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this ‘Web 2.0,’ it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0.”
Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0: “nobody even knows what it means”
Colleague Michael Magoolaghan passed along a link to the transcript of Tim Berners-Lee’s testimony before Congress.
Hearing on the “Digital Future of the United States: Part I — The Future of the World Wide Web”
It’s fascinating reading, and extremely quotable. But one part that really struck me is in the first paragraphs (emphasis added):
To introduce myself, I should mention that I studied Physics at Oxford, but on graduating discovered the new world of microprocessors and joined the electronics and computer science industry for several years. In 1980, I worked on a contract at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, and wrote for my own benefit a simple program for tracking the various parts of the project using linked note cards. In 1984 I returned to CERN for ten years, during which time I found the need for a universal information system, and developed the World Wide Web as a side project in 1990.
While TBL didn’t invent the Internet entirely, his bit of brilliance made it relevant for the masses. Even though that wasn’t his intention right off the bat, it became so as he realized the implications of what he’d done.
But let’s look at the three bits in bold:
Imagine the world impact of those three “side projects”?
This really begs the question for any organization. Does it give its members the leeway for “side” interests? Are they considered inefficient, or just odd?
It’s not that every person is going to invent another Web. It’s more that the few people who might do something like that get trampled before they get started, and that the slightly larger group of people who might do something merely impressive are trampled in the same way.
There was a time when amateurs were the experts — they were the ones who dabbled and learned and communicated in excited screeds and philosophical societies. They were “blessed” to have the time and money to do as they pleased, and the intellectual curiosity to dig in and dirty their hands with figuring out the world.
It could very well be that we’re in the midst of a similar rush of amateur dabbling. Just think of all the millionaires who are now figuring out things like AIDS, malaria and space flight. Or the empowerment people have to just go and remix and remake their worlds. There’s an excellent O’Reilly Conference keynote I wish I’d seen, but the pdf of the slides gives a decent accounting. Here’s an abstract:
Rules for Remixing; Rael Dornfest & Tim O’Reilly
Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they’ve built, turning the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services. The massive IT infrastructure of the ’90s is giving way to what analyst Doc Searls calls “do-it-yourself IT.
We see all of this as a reflection of the same trend: the mass amateurization of technology, or, as Fast Company put it, “the amateur revolution.” And it’s these hacks, tweaks, re-combinations, and shaping of the future we’re exploring in this year’s Emerging Technology Conference theme: Remix.
I saw Mark Frauenfelder on Colbert Report last night, talking about Make Magazine and the very things mentioned in the abstract above. Colbert marveled at the ingenuity, and I wondered how many people watching would think to themselves: “Hey, yeah! Why not just take things apart and change them to the way I want them???”
It’s on the rise, isn’t it? Wow. Another sea change, and I’m not even 40. What a time to be alive.
All hail side projects and passionate tangents. Long may they reign.
But for now… I gotta get back to work.
Just a few days ago, I posted about how somebody needs to make something that aggregates an individual’s myriad social networks. And it looks like, around that time, something launched that is aiming to do just that … it’s called Explode.
From their site: How do I Explode?
Explode lets you have a widget which contains your friends on any network or site. This is a great way to share your network with others regardless of where your friends have their site.
You can also comment and view comments made by anyone across any network.
The widget will update to show which of your friends have most recently been online.
I haven’t messed with it yet, and it’s still new and fairly scaled down, but they have the idea right, it seems.
When I posted my missive about mashups last week, I should’ve known others were saying much of the same stuff at least a week earlier.
Adam Greenfield has a great post explaining how you have to design with the assumption that your creation will be remixed and retrofitted into a larger context:
Two things product designers and manufacturers need to know « Speedbird
You can no longer safely assume that your product will stand alone. One way or another, it will be subsumed into an ecosystem, an information ecology.
His ‘second’ thing product designers need to know is that your product has to make clear what it is and how to use it — and he delves into the subtleties of affordance vs. ‘perceived‘ affordance. And that’s a great point as well — as I said in my post, each bit you create needs to somehow bring some context and meaning along with it, and I suppose that also includes an acknowledgment that it will be used by people in ways you didn’t perhaps intend, but that perhaps you can at least forecast.
But in addition to this idea that the product needs to lend itself to the systems into which it is released, there is the idea that we should be designing ‘systems’ rather than merely products. In fact, Peter Merholz goes so far as to say “Stop designing products!”
That’s a fun, provocative way to get people to come see your presentation! But the idea is actually less radical than it sounds. (Which is fine.) Basically, they’re saying that when you have the capability you should design for as much of the context as you can. His examples range from Kodak’s early approach of designing everything: the film, paper and camera, as well as the “Photo Spots” and a whole culture of consumer photography. In recent times, there’s the perpetual poster-boy, the iPod and iTunes.
Frog Design’s Adam Richardson is part of this meme as well, and writes about Why Designing Systems is Difficult. One of his best points is that systems cross over organizational boundaries, which are very hard to breach in most organizations. They have more silos than Lancaster County, PA (and if you’ve never drive on the turnpike through Lancaster, just imagine seeing more farm silos than road signs for about 50 miles straight). Organizations are congenitally adverse to having their membranes crossed; managers have their fiefdoms and have made their careers on what they’ve accomplished there, and it’s very hard to get them to share and play well with others. Much less the cultures and processes of each of those silos.
In a sense, though, I think a lot of this is ‘object-oriented‘ (OO) thinking writ large as design philosophy. Essentially, OO thinking follows the premise that designed objects (chunks of code, usually, but imagine this as ‘products’) should lend themselves to whole systems, and not be created so as to be proprietary and self-limiting. They should be pluggable and easily recontextualized. Even in software development shops, this is still a somewhat new concept; most people, organizations or departments want to put their stamp on something, and they want to make it so their product keeps the customer or user coming back for more rather than being able to take it away and plug it into something else.
I understand the idea that, if you’re a corporation with a website and services to many sets of constituents, you shouldn’t just design one widget after another, but think of your whole ‘system’ and what that means to your customers. That just seems common sense at this point: that ‘brand’ is about all the touchpoints with your customers and partners, not just your logo, and not just the latest RIA gewgaw on your homepage.
But beyond that, the tools you provide your customers need to be created with an inherent awareness of the larger world, and the ways in which people might rather use what you’ve delivered to them.
As for creating whole soup-to-nuts systems like Kodak or Apple: If you can get so far on top of something and control the market in a way that you don’t much have to worry about interoperability with other systems, then creating a whole, walled-garden system is probably fine. At least for a while, until the inexorable entropy of ‘openness’ forces you to start breaking down your walls and being a part of the rest of the world (see AOL and Internet Explorer…which is only starting to show signs of learning this lesson).
I think the opportunity to actually design a whole system is becoming more and more rare these days. The better lesson may be: stop designing products, start designing objects *for* systems, the more open, the better.
I’ve been kvetching for a year or more now about how crazy it is trying to keep up with various social networks online.
The truth is, many of us have stuff we do at MySpace or Yahoo, some we might do on our own blog (either self-hosted or at TypePad or Blogspot, etc), and maybe another more personal journal at Xanga or LiveJournal. Then there are dating sites, as well as professional sites like LinkedIn. Plus the bookmarks you keep up with on Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us, and your pics on Flickr and Videos on YouTube. (Or any of the other competing services.)
But what about when you want to keep up with all of it together? And what about when you make a friend in one, but you want to share something with that friend on another?
Sure there are RSS feeds for a lot of it, for keeping up with one-way content traffic. But the *interaction* which is so vital and valuable for this new Web2.0 world can only be had when you login to each one separately.
If I had more of a code/development background, I’d just jump in and try to make something. But, barring that, I’ll just keep complaining until someone either 1) partners with me on the idea and we make a few million selling it to somebody (ha!) or 2) somebody just makes it happen regardless.
I wonder if these guys at Broadband Mechanics are onto something like this?
Broadband Mechanics: Our strategies
By establishing the notion of an ‘open social network’, millions of end-users will be able to move their personal contacts, groups and ‘social capital’ wherever they wish. They’ll be able to create relationships with anybody on any network, to send these new friends messages, create or join groups or post content – anywhere. This is the way the ‘social web’ needs to evolve – not locked up in old fashioned data silos – with vendors monetizing these captured end-users.
I know I’ll be keeping an eye out. But in the meantime, why aren’t there more startups trying to do this? If somebody can make an offline client for MySpace by scraping the site under your login and reconstituting it into a better desktop interface, why can’t a website do it, and do the same with everywhere else your identity lives?
This video is amazing. I’m not sure how to describe it. Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing said this about it:
“Web 2.0… the Machine is Us/ing Us,” is deeply moving and incredibly smart. The creator is Michael Wesch, an assistant Cultural Anthropology Prof at Kansas State U, and he has strung together a bunch of animations, text, and screenshots in order to tell the story of “Web 2.0” — and why it matters, and how it’s changing the world. This is as starry-eyed as techno-optimism gets, and it might just choke you up a little, if you care about this stuff.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mashups recently. I’ve been asking myself the question: as a user-experience designer, what happens when the experience I’ve designed gets usurped, or disintermediated, by people taking what they want of it and leaving the rest behind? What does that mean to me as a designer: i.e. what is it, then, that I should be designing??
I’ve half-started several blog posts about this, and then stopped when some distraction came up.
And then today, a day or two after everybody else, I hear about this:
O’Reilly Radar > Pipes and Filters for the Internet
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.
Yeah. Yahoo’s new service called Pipes.
I know there’s tons of buzz about this, and I feel silly jumping on the Internet obsession of the week. But this really is big. I agree with Tim O’Reilly: it’s a milestone. It may not be the mashup service that ends up leader of the pack, just like Mosaic (or even Netscape) didn’t end up being the de facto browser.
But it underlines a key truth that’s becoming more and more clear. And it’s a bit of a paradox: in order to keep your audience’s interest, you have to relinquish control of that interest.
Are you “somebody?”
Let me start at 1997: I remember getting out of grad school and how it dawned on me in my first web-related job, that in the post-web world, not having a website was like not having your name in the phonebook. Remember Steve Martin in The Jerk? When he saw his name in the phonebook, he ran around screaming, “I’m somebody!” It wasn’t far from the truth: if you were a business, especially, the Yellow Pages essentially had an extortion scheme — if you weren’t paying to be in there, you might as well not exist. And as a private individual, you were essentially a hermit if you had no phone book listing. Why? Because it was how people found you… your phone number, address, everything.
So, by the late 90s, the web was turning into the same thing. Everybody knew, by about 1999 at the latest, that if they didn’t have a significant presence online, they were out of the conversation. The marketplace would just move along without them.
Staying in the Conversation
Another similar thing has happened with open standards and APIs. Now it’s not enough to just have a web site. If you want to have a part in the larger conversation, you need to open up your content and even your tools, whatever they may be, to be syndicated and reconstituted in other contexts. When Google first saw someone doing a mashup with their maps API, they considered suing them. But, being the new-paradigm-aware folks they often are, they realized they were much better off helping mashup makers create fabulous things with their tools and content.
It only increased their prominence and value in the marketplace — and with a viral swiftness, they’re everywhere, not just at their own domain. You literally can’t get away from Google. I know it’s more complicated than that: they have to make money with advertising, and if someone uses their API without directing traffic that sees Google’s ads, then they lose money… but look at the most successful Google API mashups, and you’ll see Google adwords right there. Why? Because Google made it super easy to use adwords, just as easy as their other APIs, and if I made a mashup that gets millions of hits a day, I want to make money on it… so I up Adwords, and Google and I both share the spoils. (Yeah, if only! Why didn’t I stick with learning XML back in 2000?)
Designing for Survival of the Species
As Dick Hardt said a year or more ago: “Simple and open wins, always.” I suggest we call it Hardt’s Law. The idea is that, just like in the natural selection of organic species, the ecosystem of the Web rewards openness and simplicity. Object-oriented, elegant, universally pluggable… all qualities that help one species thrive over another.
So, what happens when, in 10-15 years (I may be overshooting that; lately, stuff that I thought was going to take a decade happens in the next week… ) Yahoo! Pipes isn’t the exception, but the rule? When everyone (or most people actively engaged in the ‘net) has not only the tools available, but the language — the literacy — of programming their own info-aggregation? If you don’t have something out there for them to aggregate, structured in such a way that they can filter it and parse it however they please, you might as well not exist.
That’s not even touching on the fact that you have to have content or value that they give a damn about. But that’s a whole other challenge.
As a designer, I now see my job as not only to create the best self-contained user experience I can. Now it’s also to think in terms of objects — modular components — and how well they break apart. How well do they carry their own context with them? How might they be useful in other contexts I haven’t thought of? Will that even be OK? (Gut reaction: it had better be — every tool or paragraph that isn’t remixable by someone I’ve never even met is one more chance lost to ‘infect’ the global conversation.)
It’s no longer about whether something is open or not, or if it has a feed or not. Assuming the content is something people want, it’s also about understanding how my users may want to filter or mash what I’m making available. Or how well it might fit into another format that doesn’t even exist in the original context. For example, my blog has an RSS feed, so other people can read it in things like Bloglines. Luckily, the software I use already puts things like comments and such in an open standard so that Bloglines can also syndicate how many comments were made on any given post. It also picks up on category metadata. But what else, in the near future, might readers want to be able to filter for? I don’t have any metadata that says if my post contains a photograph or not, or if it’s an “article” versus just a “check out this link” post. Those are just the first things that come to mind.
For me, and my modest little blog here, it’s not that big of a deal. But if I’m the New York Times, or Forrester Research, or even some low-cost provider of mutual funds that’s wanting to get market information out to millions of financial advisors — it might be very very important.
Design is as much about the remixability of what we make as it is the primary intended experience. Even beyond just content, if I design a tool that helps people count their calories, or keep up with their checking account, the old-school thinking would be: make it great so they’ll come to you and stick with you as long as possible. But the new thinking is going to have to be: make it so elegant and self-contained, and openly compatible with everything else, that people can use it on their MySpace pages and their cell phones.
Simple, open, and letting go. It’s starting to sound downright spiritual.
Austin Govella makes the point razor-sharp in his post on Agile Development and Design:
Agile development won’t give you better design. Design models things to be made. Development makes things you’ve modeled. Agile development methods promise better model-making, but don’t promise better models. Agile development can actually devastate design.
Thanks man. I’m going to quote you in, like, a hundred meetings in this month alone.
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