dConstruct 2008: part two
(If you’re short on things to do, part one contains fascinating details of my journey and dinner)
Thursday morning brought a slight respite from the high winds and torrential rain of the previous night. Breakfast in the hotel was really, really good: muesli/dried cranberries and yoghurt followed by my choice of Eggs Benedict. Oh, and the Smoothie of the Day.
Looking at the map, I reckoned that Clearleft’s offices (the location of the workshops) were about half a mile away - I estimated a 10 minute walk. The slightly less-than-crow-flying route meant that I breezed in the door on the dot of 9.30, the stated start time. But lo! That’s just the coffee and pastries; no need to panic.
After signing in and obtaining my badge-cum-programme, I was waved at by none other than Adrian Long_eggwhite, who I’d not seen since leaving Uni in 1999. C’est un monde petit.
The actual workshop: Social Web Design - From Strategy to Interface.
The workshop was led by Joshua Porter, who’s ex-UIE(User Interface Engineering) but now runs his own business, specialising in the design of social web apps. He famously (well, in web design terms) wrote The Del.icio.us Lesson blog post, defining how “personal value precedes network value” or, basically, a site needs to be useful to one person over just being useful to many people; it will become useful to many people if people use it because it’s useful to them.
A few aphorisms to start with:
- “What worked in the Industrial Age doesn’t work in the Information Age” i.e. where once each user of a mass-produced product had essentially the same experience, now each user’s experience is highly individual.
- “Your audience is the only thing that matters”
** in-house designers have a massive advantage over consultants: domain knowledge
** there should be no barrier between the design team and the audience - The recent focus on usability is great, but “if ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles” (Douglas Englebart, creator of the computer mouse)
We need usable plus useful. How are we providing daily value to our users?
Strategy: finding focus
There have been countless Web sites whose strategy is mashing up two other Web sites; this is a strategy of mashing up two other strategies and, as a result, is not really a strategy.
Over time, it is likely that your audience tends towards being made up of 15-year-old girls who, because of their lack of inhibition, will sign up for anything. Boston.com’s registration page.do?dispatch=loginpage was cited as an example of a site that, like our own Community Websites, expect sign-up before giving very much value to the user. The big problem is that, if you make people sign up before doing anything, you’ll end up with the wrong audience (the aforementioned 15-year-old girls).
This is a Fuzzy Strategy or, putting it bluntly, “Old-school business thinking”: where making money is the primary goal; the goal influences strategy and therefore influences design.
If the user activity is “create a widget”, the old-school, fuzzy approach can be shown like this:
bc. Landing page -> Sign-up ($) -> User creates widget
In the rearranged, activity-centred approach, it goes like this:
bc. Landing page -> User creates widget -> Sign-up ($)
In the second model, money-making is less of a focus than meeting user needs. [These principles are very much in line with the philosophy of Obliquity, though the word was never mentioned. Obliquity is the idea that “overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly”.]
Design Strategy
Moving to a model of “user-value first, money second” requires long-term thinking, as value is created over time. If we do this, User Experience (UX) must be primary, and drives all other strategies.
To do this, we must optimise for use. If we create something that people love to use, the business will be fine. [N.B. IOPP has a stated aim to be customer-focused]
Why are we still struggling with this stuff?
- competing interests
- political infighting
- short-term thinking
- buzzword bingo
- no ongoing evaluation
- fake strategies
bq. “Software doesn’t usually fail because of a lack of programming talent… it usually fails because the talent is not pointed in the right direction” – Joshua Porter
Joshua then asked us “what’s your favourite software”. The answers were all applications that are very focused on a very specific activity, and do that one thing well. This is consistent with both Unix and the Web: small pieces, loosely joined.
Advocates of User-centred Design often suggest asking “Who are your users?” In social software design, though, it’s better to ask “what are your users doing?” [N.B. On our sites, once upon a time, the answer to that question would have been “reading”, but the list of activities is now much, much longer]. This is Activity-centred Design, or…
- What do people have to do to make you successful?
- What are you making people better at?
- What are your users passionate about?
An interesting comparison was made between “traditional” bulletin boards (giving discussion & support in an unstructured way) with social networking sites (with specific, aggregated data) e.g. Patients Like Me - users input very specific details of their illness and symptoms, and over time the system determines who their “neighbours” are).
Lessons from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
- The Commander’s Intent: “if we do nothing else, we must…"
- Feature Creep can kill strategy
Social Objects
Social Objects are the things that users work/play with on any given site, e.g.:
- Flickr -> photos
- Upcoming -> events
- Last.fm -> music
- YouTube -> videos
On YouTube, greater than 50% of the page real-estate is taken up by these social objects.
To find out what your objects are and the activities users carry out on them, it’s often necessary to conduct structured research. When you’ve discovered your objects (nouns), you need to find your verbs (actions). Social features are verbs that involve more than one person.
To be continued…