Last weekend I shook off my Berkeley inertia and took a trip in to the city to attend WordCamp.
I particularly enjoyed a talk by Rashmi Sinha about social networks and popularity. There are some problems inherent in basing a site’s navigation on popularity. A lot of sites like Flickr, Digg, etc. emphasize browsing based on “most viewed”, “most downloaded”, “most popular” tags, etc. The undiscovered posts/images/constributions (the Long Tail) cannot rise to the top in this structure, and ultimately become less findable. The hierarchy reinforces itself. Early adopters of a social network become overly dominant, and their popularity is difficult to dismantle.
Rashmi presented a few ways to override this self-reinforcing popularity mechanism. On her project SlideShare, they set up other navigation panels such as “most recently added”, and they restrict the popularity measures to a specific period of time (”most viewed in the past week”.)
Her presentation from the talk is here (on SlideShare, of course).
Bret Victor makes some salient points in this piece — in essence, rather than desiging good interactive experiences, we should present information in such as way that the user doesn’t have to interact with it to find things. He proposes redesigns of Amazon and Yahoo! Movies that are very information-dense but also quite useable (and not “interactive”).
Abstract:
The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.
Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. I demonstrate the crucial role of information graphic design, and present three approaches to context-sensitivity, of which interactivity is the last resort. After discussing the cultural changes necessary for these design ideas to take root, I address their implementation. I outline a tool which may allow designers to create data-dependent graphics with no engineering assistance, and also outline a platform which may allow an unprecedented level of implicit context-sharing between independent programs. I conclude by asserting that the principles of information software design will become critical as technology improves.
Although this paper presents a number of concrete design and engineering ideas, the larger intent is to introduce a “unified theory” of information software design, and provide inspiration and direction for progressive designers who suspect that the world of software isn’t as flat as they’ve been told.
