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.
I find personas virtually useless when it comes to design, and I very rarely reference them in making design decisions. For me, personas aren’t about design, but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly powerful in other ways.
Rather than using them to drive design, she advocates using personas to communicate the user-centered design process to key stakeholders:
Having your clients view user research and testing is incredibly powerful in helping them realise that there is a problem in the way they’ve been approaching things to date (if you’re not encouraging stakeholders to actively participate in observing research and testing you’re missing out on a lot). But to get them to actually understand what user centred design is about – you need personas. … Personas should always be developed collaboratively with key stakeholders – as many as possible.
Personas can be useful in determining the edge cases, but guiding design around that is dangerous:
Personas should define the boundaries for which you will design. It’s a common misconception that personas are about creating a set of ‘typical’ or ’stereotypical’ users. Much more useful is to use personas which incorporate edge cases behaviour or requirements.
…Creating ‘edge case inclusive’ personas and then prioritising personas and their goals is much more useful in helping decide what functionality goes in and what doesn’t.
… If you use the personas to closely guide your design you will end up supporting a series of edge cases. This will invariably mean that your CORE functionality is compromised. That’s bad design.
Personas help to remind us that there is more than one “user” in “user-centered design”. Instead of saying “the user wants to …” we can use personas to explain that “Susan wants to do X, whereas Scott wants to do Y.”
First, the enthusiasts: following is a video panel discussion among representatives of Second Life, MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn (a Commonwealth Club event, via ForaTV). According to them the value of online social networks is immeasurable. No-one blinked when Robin Harper from SecondLife admitted that their power-users average 84 hours a week online, and have absolutely no “First Life”.
And now, the detractors. Since the Kathy Sierra scandal, the Web 2.0 community has started talking about its dark side, albeit hesitantly. Is anonymity really that great? Are we abusing the democratic promise of the Internet by engaging in cowardly flaming wars under pseudonyms? Can you really trust information that is unedited and unattributed? Are people spending too much line creating online personas and online friendships, thereby forgetting how to connect as a real person, face to face?
The infinite desire for personal attention is driving the hottest new part of the Internet economy–social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, MTV Flux, and Bebo. As shrines for the cult of self broadcasting, these sites have become tabula rasas of our individual desires and identities. They claim to be all about “social networking” with others, but in reality they exist so that we can advertise ourselves: everything from our favorite books and movies, to photos from our summer vacations, to “testimonials” praising our more winsome qualities or recapping our latest drunken exploits.
It’s important to remember: just because you have 524 online friends (or colleagues) doesn’t mean they really know you or can vouch for you (or would show up with jumper cables if your car stalled at midnight in the rain).
I got a sneak peek at the Web 2.0 Expo this week by signing up for the free Expo-only pass. It’s fun to see a web event in person, since so much of what’s going on in web culture happens with one person sitting in front of a computer screen. In fact, it was a nice relief to just sit and listen to people talk without looking at a computer screen for a whole day! In part this was forced on me by the very low-fi wireless connection, but it’s still good training to just listen instead of popping open a new Firefox tab every three minutes.
The expo-only ID — the yellow badge announcing that “I didn’t pay to be here” — only allowed access to the “Products and Services” track, which was basically a bunch of pitches that were not interesting to me. So, I opted for the “un-conference” going on in the hallways outside the conference rooms — the Web 2.Open. These sessions were quite interesting and much more intimate than the larger audience-of-hundreds format. In particular I enjoyed Nicole Simon’s talk on a European perspective on Web 2.0, and a roundtable discussion on usability issues led by Chris Cole of Human Factors.
As far as the rest of the conference goes, I heard from other attendees that some of it was quite good. If anyone is interested in what was presented, LukeW has posted a very generous collection of notes from some of the sessions.
In the past week I’ve come across two useful reviews of best practices for designing web forms. The first is from LukeW’s Functioning Form–he writes about the pros and cons of different label placement options (top-aligned, right-aligned, left-aligned). He’s posted about the topic in detail before, but this recent post offers a handy summary of the issues to consider. Print it and hang it on your wall. For lots more detail, scan the pdf presentation.
As the question of top, right, or left aligned form labels comes up often for designers, here’s a short overview of the pros and cons of each method. For illustrated examples and more details, take a look at the full document: Best Practices for Web Form Design (3.9 MB PDF).
Another recent article related to web forms addresses instructional text in the user interface. Embedded user assistance can quickly become more complicated than you might think. Too much assistance clutters the screen, but if you hide the form field explanations under tooltips, your users might never see them.
Mike Hughes offers up the compelling idea that contrary to the logic of flow, instructions should appear below the form element rather than above it. When completing a form on the web, people tend to go straight to the action–so if the help text comes first, they skip over it:
Users skip static elements, such as instructional text, because they focus immediately on downstream actionable objects. Effective user assistance design accommodates users’ natural workflows by providing instruction immediately beside or following interactive elements that constitute points of need for more information.
Now that average Internet users are more accustomed to interacting with web forms, they have higher expectations for usability. Written best practices like those above help to make these expectations explicit, so we can better understand what makes a form easy vs. annoying.
