Jessica Vascellario has written an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal: Social Networking Goes Professional. It describes a professional social network for doctors called Sermo.com, where doctors share information on treatments, diagnoses, and other medical topics.

The Sermo demo video (worth watching) asks “Why consult one colleague when you could consult thousands?”. Of course, to ask this is to assume that all of those thousands of colleagues actually know what they’re doing: they’re not fraudulent doctors who make stuff up. The way Sermo solves this is by verifying every doctor who signs up against a database of licensed physicians…so it is open to anybody, as long as you’re a real doctor. This will help to keep the system at some basic level of professionalism.

Continue Reading: Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks

Here’s a quick list of 16 observations about life that have serious effects on social design. Note that none of these are how people interact with interfaces, per se, but how we interact with other people. Interfaces are an intermediary, an arbiter of exchange between people on either end, and are therefore crucial to how we communicate.

1. Humans are complex social animals.
2. Technology doesn’t change us very fast.
3. Humans constantly search out ways to communicate more efficiently.
4. The primary use of the Internet is communication.
5. People play different roles in different parts of their life.
6. People tend to connect to those people they are similar to.
7. Who we are similar to depends upon our situation and goals.
8. Over-similarity can lead to group-think.
9. Unpredictable behavior emerges within groups over time.
10. People act differently in groups than they do individually.
11. The people we know greatly influence how we act.
12. People usually compare themselves to those in their social group, not society at large.
13. Humans aren’t always rational, but are usually self-interested.
14. When humans are uncertain, we rely on social connections to help us out.
15. We have biases that we aren’t conscious of.
16. Because life in not deterministic, we cannot always predict human behavior.

Continue Reading: 16 Core Observations of Social Design

It’s not everyday that you get to redesign one of your favorites sites, so I’m very happy to announce that Bokardo Design’s first release is the redesign of Publishing 2.0. I’ve long been a reader of Scott Karp’s blog about the massive changes in publishing, advertising, and social media. It’s one of the blogs that kind of sits at the fringe of what I do, not directly about design but surely about the topics that are important to designers of new media. Scott’s handle on the big picture of forces in and around publishing have been incredibly insightful for me over the past year as newspapers have come under immense pressure from blogs and other disruptive media.

(We actually released it live last week, but I was away giving a talk on Social Design at UXWeek and couldn’t squeeze in the time to write it up until now)

Publishing2 was a great project for Bokardo Design because it dealt with a load of social features (being a blog and all). This was both a blessing and a curse, as getting the social features into the site was fun but also difficult because of dealing with so many Wordpress plugins working at once. We tried hard to get lots of useful features without cluttering up the interface. We consciously fought feature creep and tried to keep the site as personally valuable as possible. One way we did this was to use a plugin that allows folks to follow the comment stream of a blog post whether or not they actually comment on it themselves. Scott’s audience tends to comment in-depth, and they often provide serious insight in the comments. (I hope to add this feature to Bokardo in the near future)

Continue Reading: Announcing the Publishing 2.0 Redesign

Last wednesday I gave a 45 minute talk at UXWeek 2007 (photos) called The Psychology of Social Design. Here are the slides:

Download PDF of The Psychology of Social Design

Continue Reading: Psychology of Social Design Talk

Nick Carr picks up on an article called The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0 by William Davies in which Davies builds upon the economic theory of Gary Becker:

“Along with many colleagues at the legendary Chicago School of Economics, Becker’s achievement was to see that economics needn’t confine itself to studying markets. Economics, for Becker, was simply a particular way of understanding any social behaviour. What distinguished it from other social sciences was not its domain of study, but its guiding assumption that individuals will always act rationally to maximise their own satisfaction.

The implications of this are stark. All altruistic, moral, cultural or emotional behaviour becomes reconceived as the outcome of individual calculation. It is no longer just businessmen and traders whose behaviour can be understood in terms of rational self-interest, but that of politicians, parents and neighbours.

This is a novel and unsettling way of viewing society.”

Continue Reading: Friday Rant: Are people self-interested?

While I’m hurriedly working on building out a corporate site for Bokardo Design, I thought I would take a minute and share a little background which led me to starting the company and what services I’m offering.

Many of you know that I worked at User Interface Engineering for 5 years. It was definitely the best and most exciting job I’ve ever had; Jared and the team are fantastic. While I am super excited about what I’m doing now, I am sorry to leave such a unique and wonderful place. Even so, I won’t be leaving UIE completely…we’re still collaborating on several projects and will continue to do so where appropriate.

When I was at UIE I did a mix of usability consulting and web design. Usability consulting for UIE clients and in-house web design and development for UIE itself. So I basically alternated between consulting and designing. In hindsight this afforded me an excellent opportunity to understand the design problem from both sides of the fence: from the view of an objective 3rd party consultant as well as from the standpoint of an in-the-trenches designer. These worlds are incredibly different, and both are unique in their own way.

Continue Reading: Why I started Bokardo Design

4 Reasons why feature creep happens and why it’s an even tougher problem when designing social web applications.

(This is part II of a series on Putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into Practice. Part I dealt with the Cold-Start Problem)

Feature creep affects almost all design projects. We’re all familiar with the bazillion features in Microsoft Word, the countless buttons on our remote control, and the acute difficulty of setting an alarm clock.

When building social web applications, feature creep is especially difficult because there are so many possibilities for social features! We’re always captivated by the potential social value of what we’re building. If we add tags here then people will be able to do that there! …etc. When we begin to imagine the possible social features it becomes doubly tough to focus on personal value, as The Del.icio.us Lesson would suggest.

Less than the Sum of its Parts

So what is feature creep? Feature creep is the process of slowly adding features to a product or interface over time. The result is a design that is less than the sum of its parts. The features may have added functionality, but the overall effect is negative. The complexity brought on by the features has, instead of adding value, made the design undesirable and a pain to use. Simply put:

Feature creep happens when the design team underestimates the burden each additional feature puts on the person using it.

To prevent feature creep from happening, it is useful to explore why it happens in the first place. By looking at the reasons why it happens, we can get a better idea of how to avoid it happening to us.

Continue Reading: Putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into Practice, Part II: Feature Creep

Continue Reading: Comic: Are you adding enough user-generated content?

I’m introducing a new type of post here at Bokardo called “Interface Compare”. I’ll use it to compare interfaces from different services to highlight interesting things designers are doing (or not doing). The first installment is comparing the Invite screens on MySpace and Facebook.

MySpace Invite Screen

The interface for this is pretty straightforward. You can type in the email addresses of all the friends who you would like to invite, separated by a comma. You can also add a message to the invite if you want.

Facebook Invite Screen

You’ll notice one big difference between the Facebook and MySpace invite screens. Facebook allows you to import addresses from various third party email systems. You can grab your contacts from webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail. You can also import contacts from your desktop mail applications as well.

Continue Reading: Interface Compare: Inviting Friends on MySpace & Facebook

The Microsoft Zune and the web site that promotes it are an excellent example of not following The Del.icio.us Lesson as they put social value above personal value. We just don’t get an answer to the question “What’s in it for me?”, and as a result the Zune will most likely continue to fail.

Here is a snippet from the Zune site:

Mama always said to share. Now you have an opportunity to do it with music and photos. With wireless Zune to Zune sharing you can send your favorite tracks and photos to friends.

Picture this: You’re walking down the street. Or you’re in a room with a bunch of friends. Or at a concert. Or at the airport. Or on the bus (you get the picture) and then you whip out your Zune and see all these other Zune devices around that you can choose from. Zap! You’re connected to your best friend and send the new song your band recorded in the garage last weekend. Another friend gets the hilarious podcast your kid brother made at school, plus that song you just downloaded from the Zune Marketplace and can’t get out of your head. And hey, lookee here, your friend wants to send you something that you might like and buy, too.

Best of all, the song you sent isn’t just a 30-second preview­—it’s the whole song! Your friend can sample the song up to three times in three days, flag it on their device and then, if they like it, they can buy it later from Zune Marketplace. It’s all connected.

It’s all connected! Wahoo! Doesn’t it sound like my friends are having more fun than me? Their happiness sounds much more important than mine here.

Continue Reading: Why the Microsoft Zune is Set up to Fail