connecting*the*dots

For the past three weeks I’ve been using Measure Map pretty religiously, trying to get a feel for its depth to see if it’ll be useful as a tool for me to use moving forward. My first review touched upon the usefulness of the features, but admittedly, it was much more of a review of the presentation. After pounding on it some more, I’ve a few more thoughts on the service (remember, this is still an alpha release):

Searching For Search
Measure Map presents the search terms that led visitors to my site from three major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Below are the terms the were used between 11/05 and 11/20:

68
boondocks
bo peabody
bush crony appointments
bush lies
"contextual column"
"courtney bolton" new york
"David Reid" Baghdad
Dick Chaney and FBI Leak
DOTs
download ofoto
DUMB AND DUMBER
efrat yardeni
evangelic green card
"farrakhan"
farrakhan syracuse university
"Free Flow of Information Act"
Greensboro Troublemaker
Hadj guestbook 2005   
haiku George Bush
impeach Bush Now
javol
"jon stewart" + crossfire
Louis Farrakhan Rosa parks funeral
measure map
"organ failure and death" bush torture "new york times"
"navy seal"
newsbusters
revolution america
"Rosa Parks childhood"
"solo journalism"
sony apology 2005 for compromising PC
Visual map of shield law placement

While this feature is a common stat in an analytic tool, the data display isn’t complete:

• Technorati, Icerocket, A9, etc. query hits are listed elsewhere as links
• Image query hits don’t even show up

MM has a cleanly designed interface for displaying terms which originate from specific search engines, but it doesn’t include terms that originate across all search engines. If Technorati, Icerocket, A9, etc. can be presented on the link page, they can just as easily be presented on the Search Engine and Search Terms pages.

MM also differentiates text queries from image queries for no apparent reason. When I pause to see where visitors are coming from and formulate my understanding of why people are coming to my blog, images queries round out the story. Unless there are technical reasons for not presenting all search terms in one section, this should be a no-brainer enhancement.

My Blog Is More Than Just Posts
The number presented in the Posts icon on the homepage doesn’t equate with total page views (a common data point across all analytic services). I understand that Adaptive is trying to keep this simple—reducing page views to post views is one way to do it—but I’m losing visualization of a bunch of data. Here’s the problem:

• When a search result or link to my homepage is followed, MM doesn’t present it alongside my post pages (it’s buried on the most granular Link section interface)
• When a search result or link to a category/tag index page is followed, the same happens as above

Here’s a possible solution for keeping this simple and presenting the most data as possible:

1. Re-label the Posts section to become "Page Views" This basic nomenclature and data point isn’t represented anywhere in MM
2. On the first interface in the new Page View section, present the stats in one table and clearly mark each type of page view with a text or iconic descriptor. Then add a simple widget for choosing: All, Homepage, Categories or Posts.
3. Of course, make it smart to remember which view the user last used
4. Back on the homepage, bubble up the number of posts and categories viewed (out of how many exist) within the large icon, directly under the total number of page views.

Now, at a glance, I’d be able to see my total page views, while also being able to dig deeper and get a sense of which pages are being hit. Simple and powerful.

The United States Of America
I fully realize that the Country section is icing on the average analytic cake, but it is so much more than that within the context of a global perspective. So I’m thrilled to have a tool that visualizes for me where my visitors reside around the globe, while providing a fun geography refresher course. But now I want sweeter icing; I want to know where my visitors are coming from within America.

ESPN.com generates this very view when they present poll returns from around the nation. Yes, this is US-centric, and doesn’t provide a peek into granular levels elsewhere around the world, but if the data is available (which it is) expose it. The zoom feature practically begs for it to be implemented, as I’m dying to see if a rancher in Montana is connecting*the*dots.

I’m really looking forward to the beta release.

Back in 1999, I found myself living in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, working in an area tagged as Silicon Village. Yeah, it was a little premature, just like it’s cousin Silicon Forest in Portland and it’s big brother, Silicon Alley in NYC, but the dot-com era was booming and the entrepreneurial spirit had caught both Williamstown and North Adams square in the heart.

(originally uploaded by Original Sin)

It was an exciting time.

Tripod (the company I joined) had just been purchased by Lycos (or as the long-timers liked to refer to them; the Death Star) for more than $50 million dollars. The young, personal web site building company and online community had made it to the big time; now one more trophy brand in Bob Davis‘ portal empire.

But Tripod didn’t start off as a personal publishing website; they flicked on the converted cable factory lights with the intent to provide advice for college students and post-graduates in print and on the internet, while the resume engine and online community all came later. DeWitt Clinton, a Williams student and Tripod programming intern in 1996 tells it like this:

“In the beginning — and this tension carried on for years — Tripod was a content company that just happened to use the Internet. (Recall that they also had a magazine and a book published.) Thanks to some clever people like Jeff Vander Clute and Nate Kurz, a few useful ‘Tools For Life’ such as the Resume Builder, were built. These applications were an interesting synthesis of ideas from the designer(s), editors and programmers.

I would definitely say that Bo was in a position of watching what everyone came up with, rather than intentionally leading them there, saying as much in his recent book. The homepage builder was just one of these organic and surprising inventions.”

So what happened? How did the tipping point occur within Tripod itself? When did management decide to move forward and focus on personal publishing and online communities? DeWitt adds more color from an outside, post-acquisition perspective:

“The traffic generated by the home pages earned them an acquisition, not the editorial content. See the Geocities acquisition just a few months later for evidence.”

Bo Peabody, Dick Sabot and Ethan Zuckerman hired some super smart developers to get their original concepts online. They built the first online resume engine and created a place for community to form the first iteration of Tripod.com. But a crazy thing was happening — people weren’t using their product the way they had envisioned. People were more intent on building their own web pages with the resume builder.

Damn these people!

Bo and company had a choice to make; either stick to their origin vision or evolve to support the needs and desires of their members, moving Tripod towards focusing on homepage building tools.

They made the only choice they could.

In 1997, before revenue models other than advertising came to fruition, stickiness determined the value of most companies. Bo and Dick saw the synthesis of member desires and a business opportunity, usefulness and viability.

It was a no brainer.

The Lycos Years

By the time I came on board, Bob Davis had just scooped up Tripod and Bo was serving his commitment to Lycos, wandering the halls at odd hours.

“Corporate refocus” was quickening its pace.

The first driver I encountered was the order to cut out community all together and focus solely on developing a suite of personal publishing tools. Actually, that became the name of our group within the Lycos domain: Personal Publishing.

The move ostracized many of the original Tripod folk who had joined the company because of the possibilities of online community, as well as a bunch of members that chose Tripod for similar reasons. But the numbers proved that people wanted to build their own web sites, so the machine spit out its orders and rolled on.

My first project was to visualize the current experience in a tangible format, so we could determine where we were going to snip and cut sections and features. After putting together a precise map of page sequencing and explicit sections, I walked into the office of my design director (former Tripod lead designer, Dave Reid) to get his opinion. The direction given to him was crystal clear, so he studied my map for a few seconds, found where the “build” and “community” sections bordered one another, and proceeded to literally rip the map in half on that line.

No questions asked; no questions necessary. That was how the Death Star operated.

It took me about a year into my stint at Tripod/Lycos to really start to question the direction of the group. I mean, the projects I was being assigned to were superfluous at best, such as creating Hello Kitty skins for the Angelfire publishing tool UI.

It felt like the powers-that-be had run out of useful ideas, so they just wanted their paid bodies in motion, any motion, as long as we were being productive.

That’s when I began wondering what would’ve happened at Tripod if they hadn’t been sold to Lycos; if the smart people were still “in charge,” still listening to their members, still innovating based on where they came from and an evolving vision of where to go.

Maybe Technorati would be serving the world of “Tripoders” today, rather than “Bloggers”…

As things would have it, Lycos closed up the Silicon Village web factory to prepare for the Terra merger. I wanted no part of working inside of the Death Star in Waltham, Mass, so I moved down to Brooklyn and picked up a dotcom consulting gig.

It wasn’t the best move, but it was better than Hello Kitty.

Jeff Veen’s post the other day regarding the genesis of flickr placed me in this Silicon Village time capsule. His description of their roots reminded me about choices and their consequences — good, bad or indifferent.

There’s no “right way” to create a viable, useful product; no methodology that is absolutely sound or fool proof. The best you can hope for — as Bo so eloquently points out in Lucky or Smart?– is that if you subjugate your ego often enough, and live your life accordingly, options will be presented to you in a manner that you can act upon with intelligence, vigor and respect.

That advise should be the first amendment for both creating useful products and collaborating with smart people, as in both cases, consistently relying on ones self-referential perspective is rarely ever a spot on decision.

Viva la flickr! Viva la Tripod! No game, no resume… no problem.

I’m now booked with reviewing hours and hours of user interviews, run by Ameritrade’s client experience consultants. I asked for it, and marketing gave it to me. The info is great — hearing the God’s honest truth about your site can be quite interesting — but the format of the interviews is pretty drawn out and somewhat unfocused. Unfortunately, we never get to see what screens they are reviewing at a given time because the brilliant camera operators don’t cut to a fire-wired view of the laptop screen. Details, details…

Technical problems aside, I’m moving forward with my design process as my initial three personae for the trading platform redesign project are being rounded out as the customers open up to the interviewer. Good stuff. Now I just have to roll up the specifics into a document that focuses on the goals of the individual personae and develop a few mental models for the beginning of the redesign of the site/applications.

It’s great to finally have the opportunity to do things the right way. Kinda.

We at Datek are only a few months away (hopefully) from signing on the dotted line and merging with Ameritrade. A major result of that milestone will include a re-architecture of the two discrete sites into one new user experience; a forward-thinking trading platform. In expectation of that date, our marketing group has been doing a great job in gathering user data (video tapes of user interaction with the two existing sites, focus group feedback, etc.) and we — the user experience design team — are about to embark on the first step of the the planning process; creating the first stab of an evolving bible of Ameritrade/Datek personas.

Before I started work on designing Command Center, personas were not part of the software design process at Datek. During the initial stage of the project, I contacted a friend of mine (CCO of Onclave, Dave Reid) to borrow a persona template. After mind-melding with Dave and then internally with our marketing department, I came up with two detailed personas two reflect our active trading customer base. Sure, they’re not based on personal interviews with clients, but as stakes in the ground, the tangible reference of human personas consistantly assisted me in the design of the product and proved to be worth the effort.

The shift of our software design process, from a business centered to user centered, has grabbed huge traction over the last few months, and I feeling that the change in approach will positively affect our customers interaction with the Winter ‘03 site launch.