connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by wmchu)

I had a meeting yesterday over lunch with a client of mine — Louis Bowles of locally based Louis’ Healthy Breads. Louis, John Ford and I are in the midst of planning a web strategy for his small business; an execution that will include the implementation of a blog and a redesign of his e-commerce enabled site.

At first glance, the scope of the project seemed extremely manageable and somewhat simplistic — essentially, it’s a blog with a product template and a tie-in to PayPal’s fulfillment processing. Over the past few months, though, I’ve come to recognize that the challenge of the project isn’t in its technical complexity or feature set, rather, it’s in pulling off the personable nature of the brand.

When Shiny, Shiny Design Doesn’t Work

Louis didn’t start his company to make short-term killer profits (though, I’m sure he wouldn’t turn them away); Louis took his creation to market because, quite honestly, it saved his life and he feels that people need great tasting, healthy aternatives in their diet.

My challenge is translating that degree of authenticity into the experience design of his web site.

Chris Fahey just posted the sixth installment of a brilliantly focused series entitled Class and Web Design. The ensuing conversation regarding the impact of class on the output of design is fascinating (read the posts and comment threads; I could never do it justice here). While I doubt “class” is the proper signifier for categorizing Louis’ concerns about coming off like a cold, mass-produced food industry giant, to Chris’ point, a company’s outwardly focused brand position is intrinsically tied to their target (and if they’re responsive, their actual) market.

Just take a look at the redesign of (and the conversation surrounding) the New York Post for an example:

As The Post shoots for local readers with specific desires of sports, entertainment and gossip coverage (all big type desires), Louis’ brand needs to register as if he’s your next-door neighbor — someone who deeply cares about your health and just so happens to have a busy kitchen at work to help you make sensible, delectable choices.

Does that mean the design of the site needs to be overly pedestrian? Not at all, but as with the example of The Post redesign, it needs to remain true to its core principles of Louis being Louis. The visual language of the site needs to reflect his engaging personality, while presenting a strong enough degree of credibility for people to latch onto.

The beauty of this project is that there’s enough room to play and enough leeway to iterate.

Design Basics

Subtraction is the standard approach to good design and focused communication — particularly within the interactive medium — so it’s essential that we reduce the brand to a distinct visual language and behavioral model that clearly communicates with the people who benefit the most from the product.

And because we’re adding the communicative element of the blog to the mix — somethat that will improve our responsiveness in meeting customer needs and steering the direction of the brand — the last thing we want to do is bury the product behind a conversation about the product.

With a brand as personal as LHB, we’re going to have to tow the line between authenticity and credibility. Prioritized simplicity, both visual and organizational, is key in making a step in that direction.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Sometimes the biggest challenges come wrapped in the smallest packages.

If you’re an interaction designer, think about the process of generating design personae while listening to Gladwell.

Back in February, NBC made a completely bonehead business move by making YouTube take down the hugely popular video short Lazy Sunday. My instant response was to fire off a salvo at NBC for being old media ogres (NBC: We Get Web 2.0… Sike!) and not working within the limitless parameters of the web to strike a business deal that suits their needs to protect their copyright, while allowing us to continue to enjoy their content when we want and how we want.

Well, today NBC announced that it’s embracing a few of the ideas I previously lobbed into play:

[…]

“Under the deal, YouTube will create a separate channel for NBC video, so that visitors can easily pull up the half-dozen or more items that NBC plans to offer at any given time. It will be similar to channels that other companies, filmmakers and everyday users create.

[…]

NBC and YouTube officials acknowledged the possibility that fans will reject the clips if they appear simply as promotions, but YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said fans would likely embrace the video if it is compelling and not available anywhere else.”

[…]

Promotional video is somewhat of a start — I suppose you can’t expect major change from a major television network without them testing the water first. Give the experiment a few months; if uptake begins across numerous types of unbundled content, I’m sure they’ll be banging on YouTube’s door, attempting more creative ways to “let” people upload their content.

Affecting The Interface

In terms of the user experience, I only ask one thing of YouTube: please refrain from creating a pulldown of “channels” on your interface.

Asking people to assign ripped video to a “media channel” in the upload process makes sense:

• It alerts you (YouTube) to content that needs to be assigned a “shared monetization flag” and
• It automatically assigns network metadata to the video object to help people finding content they desire

Balancing the two-way participation of a user base with the business opportunities of old media is a difficult conversation to manage and execute, for if you transform your main interface too far towards the navigation of paid-for, primary channels, the entire participatory, community vibe will begin to deteriorate.

Remember, your brand is YouTube.

Peter Morville, Information Architect.

Morville classic quote: “Information Architecture: A balance of art and science.” Risk taking, creativity, listening, trial and error. Designers, writers, developers, etc. are all practicing information architecture techniques (i.e. Microformats)

Different types of domain and users need different types of information architectures.

Search is a System

• User query ->
• Search Interface (Query language, builders) ->
• Search engine ->
• Content (metadata, CV) ->
• Results (Ranking and Clustering Algorithms, Interface Design

Searching is not only finding, but learning (discovery)

Findability
Can people find your web site, find content in your web site and find content despite your web site.

Shifting Gears: “One foot in the past and one foot in the future” What are the longer term trends?

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” - Herbert Simon

You know what? Peter is too eloquent for this live-blogging crap. Go buy the book; it truly is a great read.

Adam Greenfield is dealing with Godly AI interfaces.

What is ubiquitous computing?

Well, what happens when computers get cheaper, faster, better? They become invisible, but all around us. The possibilities to crunch concepts, data, information explode. We move into a post-graphical user interface, from gesture to voice.

Multiple users, multiple spaces. Moving away from the one-to-one paradigm.

Human behavior and ubicomp become as one. “The activation process dissolves away into the behavior of people.” Ubicomp is already social. Once devices become ambient, social interactions can meld into a contextualization of backgrounds, ideas and relevance.

• It’s present at the level of the body to world interface, as with data captures of physical movement to track, say, the range of motion of an elbow.
• It’s present at the level of a particular space — a room — to a processor reading the reactions of the room.
• It’s present at the street level, reacting to movement on the street and surveillance of social interactions

Ubicomp can crunch a variety of input or data, all passed through a relational database to construct information or entertainment for digestion.

People live life in real-time, while ubicomp works with their behavior to support their needs/desires. Space is never neutral, as the politics of position can be taken in numerous degrees.

Ubicomp is now. Why?

(His cell phone goes off ;)

The digital home is the next big market and the future is structurally latent. (Crazy meta-meta-meta tagging in the real). Also, public safety comes into play. Post-9/11 mentality has crept in with, “Reduce the publics fear, reduce access and monitor activity.” We need to engage in ubicomp to control our destiny and the degree of misery which could be on the horizon.

Locus of attention disappears with ubicomp, so troubleshooting the invisible become a cognitive challenge. Signage is incredibly important to navigate the explicit behavioral captures of our implicit progression through our day-to-day.

“The challenge of implicitness is… an ethical challenge.”

5 guidelines of designing for ubiquitous computing

1. Ubiquitous systems must default to a mode that ensures their users safety (physical, psychic and financial). Graceful degredation moved towards a default to harmlessness, based on cultural definitions.
2. Be self-disclosing; ubicomp must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, capabilities, etc. Seamless interaction in physical spaces must be optional, as ubicomp could invade the privacy of individuals. “Seemfullness with beautiful seems.”
3. Be conservative of face; allowing people to save face. Ubicomp must not unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users. Humane interfaces must be taken into consideration, especially while designing the experience of invisible ubicomp systems.
4. Be conservative of time
5. Be deniable; allow for the opt out of the program at any time. Alternatives should be provided to people who want to avoid these systems.

Disclaimer: This is live blogging; all quotes are paraphrases.

As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and commerce domains are opening up their information architectures to empower their consumers to tag, creating exponentially greater degrees of faceted, semantic relationships between their information objects.

Amazon is already in the lead to extend this open paradigm into the commerce space with object tagging and Mechanical Turk (a program which could seriously disrupt peasant-class wage pay around the world). Amazon’s past innovation isn’t a guarantee for future success, but their recent moves prove to be a good sign.

How Social Tagging Works

Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by centralizing human perspectives expressed through single or compound descriptive terms into navigable indexes. It’s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus, eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships, as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created and evolving synapses in the brain.

The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database algorithms.

I mean, forget dropping out of my mental model to browse topical navigation or stopping to search for an explicit term or phrase; when I engage with a domain such as flickr or del.icio.us, my desire to stay within the domain is increased simply because the language I use to define my world through tagging simultaneously allows me to peer into the world of like-minded folk (ergo: folksonomies).

Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspective.

While this extends conversation, it can also impact the sales potential of commerce sites by adding another layer to collaborative filtering, which Amazon has already acknowledged through their advancements in tagging. Now, extend this concept further into the realm of consumer contributions with industry and one can envision the incentive for business to slightly open their gated approach of mass manufacturing in this age of personalization, allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by simply tagging their existing objects.

• Tagging builds community
• Tagging increases the findability
• Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of creating services/products/content

Back To The Interface

Try thinking about tagging interfaces on a few distinct levels:

• Interfaces which display common tags from across a particular domain need to be designed to maximize their semantic relationships.
• Object-level interfaces need to be re-crafted to both accommodate the display of previously applied personal tags and tags applied by the community.
• Management screens, which can give ownership of personally applied tags to the people that spend their time generating them, need to be compiled from contributing domains across the web for individuals to manage and, potentially, collect residual dividends related to sales generated from exposed tags.

I recently stumbled across an interesting site that leverages the API of del.icio.us tags. Kevan Davis created extisp.icio.us to scrape user tags and visually represent them using only words or images:

My good friend, DeWitt Clinton, created Delancy, which leverages the open nature of del.icio.us, providing an enhancement with the ability to manage tagged objects by personal click-through popularity:

Kevan’s enhancement focuses on re-presenting information in a way that presents our constantly evolving association with the world outside, while DeWitt’s enhancement focuses on adding feature value, assisting us to quickly find our most used bookmarks.

This type of innovative, open source development reflects the same type of creative energy that non-developers posses — people that are becoming hooked on tagging, hooked on participation.

Sharing Interfaces, Creating A Usable Web 2.0

Now that Silicon Valley is reaping the rewards of innovative open source development—observing hundreds of prototypes across numerous types of applications—how long will it be until these companies begin to act in a similar fashion? Yes, I’m talking about open collaboration.

TypePad enables me to tag my posts by assigning categories, but the management screen is a simple list, one that doesn’t allow me to easily create more manageable sub-categories (I’d probably group my tags by proper names, places, titles, descriptors, etc.). Mena, it’s becoming painful for me to manage my 200+ tags; how about TypePad teaming up with del.icio.us to use their management screen?

del.icio.us does many thing well, including their flexible interface for managing tags by give user created groups of tags nicknames. So simple, but so powerful. Why aren’t domains like TypePad, flickr, Flock, etc. bartering with del.icio.us to leverage this successful interface—one that thousands of early adopters are already using and loving — while providing their own best practice proprietary interfaces or code in return?

This level of collaboration amongst businesses is an example of what would allow companies to focus on developing more focused innovation, enhancing development cycles, reducing resource allocation and most importantly, providing best practice consistency across applications where possible. Toyota recently leased the technology of its Hybrid engines to Ford and other automakers.

How much quicker would a usable and useful Web 2.0 network be created if companies operated in such a manner?

The collective intelligence of humanity seems to be amped to contribute. Are we ready for them?