connecting*the*dots

First off, thanks to the good folks at Adaptive Path for granting me an invite to review the *alpha* version of their first web service, Measure Map. Onto the review…

Usefulness: Interaction Design

Knowing the Adaptive team, I’m sure they did their homework in modeling design personae and context  scenarios to drive their interface, function and behavioral requirements, yet being that this version of Measure Map is an alpha release, it would be a little unfair of me to review the usefulness of the service as if it were completely mature. That being said, here’s my review as a potential design persona, representing an archetypal mix of blogger, designer, marketer and technologist.

Dashboard

Bubbled up to the surface of the service is a default presentation of:

• Number of visitors who have been to my blog today
• Number of links which been used from other sites to navigate to my blog today
• Number of comments left on my blog today
• Number of posts visited today
• Popular posts for today (with an RSS feed for placement on my blog)
• A dedicated messaging area for presenting upcoming features

While the interface satisfies my immediate need for analyzing recent activity when logging into the service—stitching together the decentralized activity of people across the web into a centralized interface for simple digestion—it fails to give me a quick view of who is accessing the blog and where they are traveling within.

My TypePad stats tool may not be chock full of the features found here, but onLoad it does provide me with a display that communicates a narrative of actors and movement. A potential solution would be to display a sliced view of these stats in the lower half of the interface when clicking on an umbrella icon of the large icons at the top of the screen. That would be a smart use of Ajax.

Primary Sections

If Visitors equates with unique visitors, then I’m pretty geeked already. That qualitative recognition is hard to produce, but it seems as though this is what Adaptive has provided, as on they present a percentage statistic of the number of daily visitors who are return users.

The dynamic graph of visitor traffic is extremely useful for a default quick glance of today’s traffic, or by simply pulling on a widget handle, exposing traffic over n period of time. AP also provides a sweet linear navigation devise, which dynamically shifts the traffic view over two week intervals.

Links are broken up into two categories: incoming (including search terms) and outgoing. Incoming links are standard tracks across all services, while outgoing links nicely differentiates from my basic TypePad stat tool. Outgoing links help me understand the movement of my audience, yet for some reason AP decided against displaying movement through internal links. Understanding where people are coming from and what captures their interest to leave my blog is great, but I need to understand how people are moving throughout my own domain.

Typepad produces this stat and I’ve found it very useful. Session interfaces with a cross section of explicit unique entrances, movement and exits might be too much for the free version of this service, but displaying internal links without the stitching would be very useful.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous section.

The Comments interface displays comments left today, with a link to a page displaying comments, and post that "got comments." I don’t understand what the second stat refers to, as my total number of  comments have been tracked and the number here only reflects the test comment I left today.

That being said, the drill-down visitor comment page is a nice quick view of comment activity across my blog. I can only imagine how useful it would be to an owner of a high traffic blog, such as Daily Kos or AMERICAblog.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

The Posts interface follows the same UI construct of each of the previously mentioned areas. It displays the complete number of posts on the blog, with the number visited today and how the top 10 posts are drawing today (very neat).

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

Secondary Sections

The Browsers page displays stats with browser logos within relatively scaled graphs. Very easy to read and digest. It would be nice to see platforms and resolution stats as well, though.

Stats for the Country of visitor origin are displayed within context a clean world map, with zoom capabilities and rollover country tool tips (a nice feature for a geography refresher, as well as helping bridge global blogging)

The Times that visitors arrived is clearly rendered within a dynamically generated graph, which displays the number of visitors per hour

The usefulness of the overall service is very high, especially for an alpha release. The behavioral and functional foundation is clean, consistent and ready for smart iteration.

Usability:
UI Design | Visual Design | Language| Presentation Layer

The user interface immediately struck me as one with a high degree of clarity, reduced down to a elegant and well structured design. Only primary and secondary colors are used with sprinkled, subtle visual clues, such as the Link area and RSS feeds tying together through the use of orange as a signifier of "connection" or "linking."

Explanatory and functional copy across the service is bold, clearly written and presented with the proper degree of contrast to ensure readability. The Visitor area copy and functionality is a little vague, as it leads me to believe that the number of visitors reflects unique visitors, which would be a great service to provide. I’d only ask AP to reinforce this with more direct copy in the interface if this is actually the case.

Visual displays of quantitative information (previous examples) throughout the service are extremely simple and powerful, both graphically and in terms of pertinent information. The dynamic presentation of graphs and data views doesn’t suffer from latency issues, and the experience is elegant enough to support the future addition of Ajax presentation features when needed. Adaptive did a great job in building this service from the ground up, as each design decision seems extremely well thought out.

How Did Measure Map Measure Up?

Overall, the presentation of Measure Map is a joy of an experience to view, read, manipulate and explore. Bloggers are going to be able to digest this experience with very few usability difficulties. I fall in the advanced camp, so some of my needs aren’t fully supported, but as an alpha release, man, this thing is looking like a home run.

Congrats, Adaptive!

Related reviews:

Flickr & QOOP
Google Reader
Flock
Yahoo! News w/ blog search
A9 Yellow Pages (.ppt | 5.2mb)

UPDATE: Check out some of the other early reviews across the web

So I tried out Google Reader today after reading of its demo at the Web 2.0 conference (another event where I refuse to drop $3,000). If Google truly believes that Reader is 2.0 because it has a bunch of superfluous Ajax, well, they’re spot on. It probably won best in show.

Now, in terms of using/sharing data across a collaborative Web 2.0 network, they’re still playing by proprietary rules. RSS, by definition, covers the using part of the recipricle data equation. As for sharing?

Why can’t I blog a feed directly through my blog tool of choice? (as with flickr) Yes, I know Google owns Blogger, but opting to proceed with a business decision (to close the gates), instead of running with a user need (to keep them open), says a bunch about the Google temperament. Similarly, the goal of sharing feeds via email is a closed venture as well, with that task relegated to Gmail. This isn’t a personal complaint, I use Gmail, but this is a Web 2.0 critique of the application. Where are the open hooks? Where are my choices? Where is the metaphor to my personal, home network?

Google Reader fits the Web 2.0 mold only in that it is a product that leverages other smart aspects of its own network. Presenting a varied use of features from search and Gmail in the user experience (e.g. filters and labeling) doesn’t project Reader over the Google wall and into the world of Web 2.0. Iterating a domain with progressive, interoperable features isn’t 2.0; it’s really good 1.0.

To borrow a term from peterme, Google is still playing within their own sandbox.

UPDATE: It looks like at least a few other people agree with this review. I think the rest have imbibed the “forever beta” Kool-Aid.

UPDATE II: Let me make my position of labeling clear. Assigning attributes, in any file management system, is absolutely the way to go moving forward. The old school, developer-centric, folder-in-a-folder paradigm is completely backwards if the system has a search engine that can properly retrieve and presents object attribute tags. Google’s overall implementation of labeling is very forward thinking, but managing the same degree of a personal label universe found in a flickr or del.icio.us is an interface challenge that hasn’t been tackled in this alpha-beta release.

Peter Merholz has been on a philosophical bend regarding the continued development of Web 2.0 and the role of business for a few months now, and I’m pretty much in agreement with most of his assertions.

Changing a large, old school domain’s approach to interactive product development — specifically, in the Web 2.0 arena — doesn’t occur solely through the availability of smart engineers armed with APIs, feeds and Ajax alone. Unless the business has evolved its underlying approach and culture to facilitate this paradigm shift, the resulting efforts will be futile, or to quote Peter, “they’ll fuck it up.”

The powers that be must believe in and back the philosophy behind the technology.

So when it comes to business — I mean straight up, hardcore, numbers driven business — philosophy better equate with an explicit road-map to profit, otherwise we’re not talking business, we’re talking charity. More succinctly put, corporations won’t structure their annual and long-term corporate initiatives around Web 2.0 “open” principles and the investment in the underlying technology if they don’t explicitly understand how and why it will positively affect both their brand position in the market and the bottom line — both now and into the foreseeable future.

Now, I don’t hold a MBA from Wharton, so my ability to speak to the nuances of business is somewhat limited, but I did have the opportunity to spend the last three-years of my life within the walls of a conservative corporation. During my time there, it was extremely difficult to espouse any degree of change to their approach to design, development and serving their clients without raising agenda sniffing eyebrows — even when only attempting to sell the basic concept of listening to your own users when designing user experiences.

That concept alone took years to gain traction.

So while change within the Earth’s environment is as natural as a sunrise, within traditional businesses the mechanisms that foster change often signifies a threat to both the corporate strategy and the management team alike. One cannot move into traditional areas of business looking to flip long standing product development paradigms and revenue models overnight.

A recent Economist article ("Yahoo’s personality crisis") suggests that there’s a schism developing in the Yahoo! strategic and brand position, while Google is poised to sprint light years ahead. Peter’s latest post," Yahoo!: Walled Garden or Commons," tacks onto that perspective, suggesting that Yahoo!’s internal tugging between an open and closed  web philosophy, and their imminent plans to open a Hollywood office, could become a mission critical issue if not paid proper attention. The Economist even went as far as comparing present day Yahoo! to AOL from back in the days of the first web revolution.

AOL?

If we were talking about Bob Davis and Lycos, I’d have to agree, but we’re talking about Yahoo!, a company that has always been forward thinking, willing to tackle any attribute of traditional media and turn it on it’s head to make it useful on-line. With their soon-to-be-expansion into the mainstream media bastion of Hollywood, Yahoo!, for better or for worse, continues to operate as a change agent in the information age.

Simultaneous focus on open and closed aspects of the web is a solid business approach

Yahoo! has been at this web thing for more than 154 years now (posthumous math courtesy of Dick Sabot). In that time they’ve established a huge member base around the world, while designing a majority of their domain to be accessible to non-members with zero usage fees. A person can use most of Yahoo! without ever spending a dime until coming across a service with direct, fee-based competition already in the market. This holistic business model may seem passe by today’s standards, but that’s only because Yahoo! set the benchmark years ago; they were the early adopters of such an open business philosophy on the web.

This approach has provided Yahoo! with the means to both create and promote very precise revenue streams, leveraging the continuously growing reach of their membership and platform. Simultaneously, their focus on a variety of forward thinking, open tactical initiatives, such as flickr, 360, News, Music, etc. continues to move their domain forward with the best practices of the medium.

To the naked eye, this overarching strategy hints to be a metaphorical form of iterative change management, but not on the project or Yahoo! domain level, though; it’s more like change management for entering untapped external markets and media industries. In other words, Yahoo! seems to make closed moves (i.e. extending its domain by dealing with old school industries) in order to tap and evolve an established sector into a more open and web-centric format.

So does that make cents, compared to Google’s approach? Let’s see…

Google is also made-up of a brilliant group of people, creating forward-thinking user interfaces and search retrieval algorithms, but where Google’s daily operations differ from Yahoo! is their position in the market.

Their underlying funding relies almost solely on revenue established from their AdSense program and by floating company shares into a market that has provided a whopping market evaluation, based primarily on growth potential. So who really has the edge to last, riding through and continue contributing to the infrastructure of Web 2.0?

They both do.

Yahoo! has a consistent, upwardly moving market cap SMA since the bubble burst, whereas Google is on a meteoric rise post-dotcom crash. How much do you think the assertions of this chart tie directly into the two company’s strategic approaches to extending market reach? What about their commitment to open forms of Web 2.0 development? To the non-economist (that would be me) it would seem that each company has it’s own DNA to deal with and make decisions accordingly.

• Yahoo! took its bruises, but made it through the bust and learned their business lessons
• Google’s people felt the crash, but missed it all together as a company with a bottom line and shareholder’s interests to protect, so they’re more aggressive
• Yahoo! has more than a decades worth of experience, so they operate like a surgeon
• Google swings wildly at product opportunities with brilliant, broad strokes and precise algorithms to quickly iterate change

Basically, there’s room for multiple approaches to paving and extending Web 2.0.

Crafting an interactive world, one industry at a time

Take a moment to think about your life before Yahoo! took off. Ten years ago, the average American received their daily news through a newspaper and/or a TV broadcast. Due to Yahoo!’s revolutionary efforts to establish News aggregation for the public, I can barely remember the last time I read the newspaper during the week. Yahoo! forever altered that paradigm, shifting me and countless others in front of their screen for a news upload each morning.

Since Yahoo! News launched, Google raised the bar by expanding indexed sources to include international and local perspectives, while recent feed services like Rojo have cropped up, pushing the information boundaries into gourmet concept feeds.

Yahoo! set all of this in motion and continues to play a major role in how a large number of people (members or not) receive a variety of news items at their fingertips. By iterating the open, tactical aspects of their holistic user experience (i.e. feed widgets, top mailed articles, reviews of articles, etc.) while adding content (i.e. specific opinion blogs such as the HuffingtonPost.com), Yahoo! innovates by keeping one foot in the tactical realm of Web 2.0, with the other firmly planted in the strategic realm of the business philosophy.

It takes two feet to walk the walk.

As DeWitt Clinton has recognized, Web 2.0 is also about working together to reach a common goal across company lines. Forget the feeds and the tagging and the asynchronous display of data; collaboration between progressively run web firms is the biggest open paradigm shift one can imagine. Could this concept of collaboration and strategic balance be something that Yahoo! — a former Google-type firm which did experience the market correction of all market corrections in the bust of 2001 — has mandated itself to follow? Maybe it’s not schizophrenic to play both sides of the Web 2.0 fence; maybe it’s a solid business model.

With their historical record of successful brand extension — creating and/or acquiring useful, engaging experiences to change actual industries (i.e. News, Finance, Jobs, etc.) — I wouldn’t bet against Yahoo! in convincing Hollywood, through either the front or backdoor, to operate in a fashion that is more open than not.

Will the geek-to-media employee ratio be higher in the Valley than in Santa Monica? Sure. When in Rome, hire Romans, but so what? 154 years of Internet experience isn’t going to be thrown out the window because a handful of media executives are brought on-board. Will the output of this venture be as revolutionary as Yahoo! News or Finance? That’s left to be seen, but with Yahoo!’s track record, why be pessimistic?

Yahoo! espouses the tactical and philosophical pillars of Web 2.0, yet also understands business and how to engage in change. They’re no AOL.

UPDATE: AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. Let’s see how long it takes them to assert full control.

Newsweek and Technorati are in bed together and I’m really hoping it isn’t a monogamous relationship.

I’m not sure when this started, but Newsweek is now citing "Blog Talk," creating a contextual column from the Newsweek article page (first image, click for larger image) that links to a full Blog Talk page (second image) which presents the last 10 blogs posts that have linked to the Newsweek article. This is being done automatically, sans any editorial review.

I’m currently working on a project for which I presented this exact context scenario for our blogger design persona. I couldn’t believe the serendipity. So to ensure the API and execution would support our needs, I ran a quick test and posted a response to the "I’m So Sorry" article, linking back to the story URL. Within 10 minutes of pinging Technorati, my post appeared on the Newsweek page. Okay, that’s very progressive. Sure, it’s only a glorified trackback system, but the underlying philosophy has huge implications.

We’re quickly moving to a sustainable model for presenting the individual perspective on the same level as mainstream media’s editorial-driven journalism. It’s a win-win; a site like Newsweek gets an increased blogger readership and bloggers have the opportunity to share their perspectives with people that tend to stay away from the scattered blogosphere.

From my perspective, this is the first step to truly legitimizing the blogosphere. What’s next? Well, if Google, Yahoo! and other mainstream news aggregators began to index blogs for their search queries, we’d be one step closer to breaking through the mainstream media stranglehold on information for the average American that receives their news on-line. All of this is what the promise of Community TV was supposed to provide twenty years ago, but ran into the obvious production challenges.

This is really good. It’s good for business, good for bloggers, and most importantly, good for bubbling the truth of a story to the surface. This is discourse.

So it’s Friday night and I find myself cruising around the web after a night out and a tooth brushing away before a night in. In my travels, I landed on JJG’s blog and subsequently stumbled into his Ajax essay on the Adaptive site. I’ve got to admit something; before tonight, I’ve never read one iota about Ajax. The only real conversation I’ve had on the topic was a recent conversation with a client-side developer pal and after reading Jesse’s well defined description of the approach and the benefits. My initial reaction was pretty much, "well, duh!"

I don’t say that to offend Jesse, nor downplay the great client-side work anyone is doing right now, it’s just that I’ve been immersed in online application design for years now and have always tried to communicate these types of solutions to developers. I say "these types of solutions" lightly, as I’m primarily a designer, not a developer, so from my perspective these communication calls have been screaming to be stiched together for a while now. All said, I refuse to rake engineers over the coals. We’re here now.

Jesse spoke to the difficulties of designing online applications due to the technical workarounds which have been historically necessary to successfully support innovative interface behavior. While I agree with the level of difficulty, I disagree with the approach to design, for while practicing interaction design, I don’t model persona scenarios based on technological constraints. As David Fore of Cooper exhorts, the period of scenario modeling should be a period of making magic. That’s how innovation occurs while supporting user needs. I’d much rather engage an engineer in a position to support a brilliant solution than bland, useless features/interface behaviors. So first, come up with the right behaviors, then encourage technology to make it come to life.

Okay, that could come off as a bit pushy, unrealistic and non-tech savvy. One has to understand the constraints of the media when designing for it right? Sure. But not at the cost of potentially handcuffing a more useful experience by limiting possibilities. So how can one design for the user, while considering possibilities of Ajax?

While at Ameritrade, when the opportunity to start the UX Group came my way, I was lucky to be able to convince management to include our relatively small client-side development team in the mix. That brief organizational commitment created a huge opportunity for me to espouse innovation and collaboration across both designers and developers. I didn’t know how long the group structure would last, so I instantly switched up working from the level of context scenarios and began to approach the issue holistically.

We must have used the phrase "push the browser until it pushes back" more times in our weekly staff meetings than "war against terror" has been used in the White House over the past few years. Come hell or highwater, our (paying) client behaviors needed to be supported in our online applications, so in turn, I refused to limit us to any narrow definitions of client-side technology. Thankfully, my CSD guys (and gal) latched onto my mantra with vigor and did the heavy lifting to evolve our conversations into their domain (code), while myself and the IxD’s returned to the iteration of modeling user needs into interface behavior. Did they use the Ajax approach per se? No, but they pretty much pushed the browser until their SOP—which supported the design team’s further pursuit of forward thinking behavioral patterns—is now reflected in some of the latest Ajax app behaviors, such as Gmail. Business as usual of design and development at Ameritrade started to evolve.

Were the solutions as soundly executed across the board as the current Google attempts in leveraging the Ajax approach? I’d have to say no again, as we were performing Ajax-type workarounds on the fly. But the mere fact that the team addressed dynamic interface scenarios on a case-by-case basis, with dynamic executions on the presentation layer, led our marketing group to center their next campaign around the slogan, "Welcome to the 21st Century. Now trade like it." The ripple
effect of the progressive experience design was contained, as it only applied to the authenticated, Apex trading platform, but Barrons seemed to notice it by giving us a 4 star rating (up from 2.5 stars the previous year).

A switch to a complete Ajax approach at Ameritrade today would entail a short period of refactoring, but would make the current authenticated interface move from "singing" to "harmonizing."

As long as the IT politicians and system managers keep their paws out of coding philosophy, Ajax should mark the sweet spot of the golden age of presenting complex scenario relationships as simplified behavioral experience in the browser. Elegance in action. Personally speaking, I just never want to hear "that’s not feasible" again when proposing the design for such a dynamic solution.

Remember Belushi’s reaction to the insipid acuistic guitar love song in Animal House? Exactly.