Luke Wroblewski shares a discussion on the ambiguous role of the designer:

Client: “Performance metrics, market landscape, product strategy? You don’t sound much like a designer. Shouldn’t we be discussing color options and page templates?”

Designer: “Design is the physical, or in this case digital, manifestation of your product strategy. Of course we could define your customers’ experience with ‘paint by number’. But I think you’d agree we should figure out what you want to say to your customers and why before we dive into how we’re going to say it.”

There are two ways to view Design here.

If you view it as creating interfaces to content, then you might stop short of talking about strategy. Instead, you would focus on how to display what you’ve got. Typography, grids, information hierarchy, big buttons, huge fonts, navigation bars, etc.

The other view that Luke alludes to is one that I believe we are moving toward, necessarily: having the designers in the strategy discussion alongside the “business strategy” people talking about the “what” as well as the “how”. (btw: this is the “strategy” part of the Bokardo Design: Interface design & strategy for social web applications). I would be doing both myself and my clients a disservice if I ignored how their business strategy can drive the design. A designer has done their job well when they have created an honest implementation of that business strategy.

Continue Reading: How does Strategy affect Design?

I’m speaking about social design at a few events in the coming months. Hope to see you there!

User Experience Week 2007
August 13-16, 2007 – Washington DC

Under the guidance of experienced practitioners from Adaptive Path and other top companies, this four-day conference introduces user experience practitioners to new rich internet application design approaches, practical prototyping techniques, effective cross-organization communications strategies and more.

Use the promotion code UXJP to save 15% on the registration rate.

User Interface Conference 2007
November 5-8, 2007 – Cambridge, MA

Get ready to learn side-by-side with world-renowned experts at User Interface 12. Nowhere else will you have the chance to spend full days learning from top design and usability authorities. UIE’s Jared M. Spool and his team of usability researchers created User Interface 12 for designers, information architects, and usability professionals who need to tackle their biggest design challenges.

Continue Reading: Upcoming Speaking Events

One of the emerging principles of social design is what I call The Del.icio.us Lesson, which can be summarized as “personal value precedes network value”. Since I wrote about the Del.icio.us Lesson last year, it has become one of my most read and cited posts.

Other evidence would suggest that there’s something to it as well, that it is indeed a strong principle that helps us build better social software. Several of the social design folks that I regularly read, including Thomas Vander Wal and Rashmi Sinha, have observed similar phenomena. In a talk she gave about social design at Wordcamp, Rashmi’s first principle was “Make the system personally useful”. You can see her slides here.

Now, it’s one thing to talk about the importance of personal value and how that personal value precedes network value, but just what does the Del.icio.us Lesson mean in practice? That’s what this series of posts is about…

Continue Reading: Putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into Practice, Part I: The Cold-Start Problem

It’s not everyday that Seth Godin writes something that has anything to do with social web apps, so his post today got me really excited. In Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer he writes:

“What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? Like being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium…

It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.

Continue Reading: Seth Godin’s Job #1: Community Management

You’ve probably heard the term “stream” in relation to attention, as in “attention stream”.

The usage of the word is spreading, however, and is now finding its way into web application vernacular. It is called a “lifestream”, “socialstream”, “friendstream”, “contentstream”, among others.

It has come to mean a list of the always-updated items in a system. Here are a few examples:

• Twitter
  The stream in Twitter is the list of latest sms messages from your friends
• Facebook News Feed
  This stream has lots of different types of items, made up of activities like adding friends, joining groups, and adding applications
• RSS readers
  Your RSS reader displays a stream of the latest posts from the blogs you subscribe to
• Del.icio.us Links
  Your list of links submitted to Del.icio.us is a linkstream
• Digg Spy
  The latest items added or dugg in digg

It should be apparent that almost any items updated in real-time can constitute a stream. And therefore a stream can be used in almost any application that people use. The question is: is it useful to see a list of what you’ve done or what you’re friends are doing? In many cases, it is at least interesting, if not useful.

Continue Reading: Welcome to the Stream

Guy Kawasaki wrote a nice post The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing, about an interesting book called Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. The book outlines 9 major themes of the topics that people talk about, write about, and care about.

1. Aspirations and beliefs (what we are and what we could be)
2. David vs. Goliath (fighting the powerful, common enemy)
3. Avalanche about to roll (excitement about being up with the latest trends)
4. Contrarian/counterintuitive/challenging assumptions (truth to power)
5. Anxieties (our rational…and irrational…fears)
6. Personalities and personal stories (interesting or inspirational people to emulate)
7. How-to stories and advice (practical advice)
8. Glitz and glam (promising to be like those who seem to have it all)
9. Seasonal/event-related (contextually based on what’s happening now)

Continue Reading: What Do People Talk About?

Over the past several months I’ve been receiving many requests for designing social web applications. After all, designing social web applications is the topic of this blog, so it makes sense that folks would assume I do design work. Since I’ve had a full-time job, however, I haven’t been able to offer services…I’ve only been able to write about my observations and ideas with you all.

It was frustrating, however, because social web apps are the future of software and I felt sort of on the sidelines from a design standpoint. At UIE we work on some great projects, such as a recent social web app where we’re doing some cool research on how people are using it, but I still heard the call of those Bokardoans who would ping me and say “Hey, we’re working on this cool thing…” The responsibilities of my current job (which is a great job, btw) forced me to say “Sorry, I can’t help” over and over again.

But that’s about to change. I’ve decided to start a company: Bokardo Design. I’m going to offer the exact services that I write about here at Bokardo: Interface design and strategy for social web applications. For those of you who have read Bokardo for a long time, nothing that I offer will be a surprise. I’m simply putting into practice what I’ve been preaching…so to speak.

Continue Reading: Seizing the Opportunity: Bokardo is becoming a design company

Netflix.com is one of my favorite sites, both for the valuable service they provide but also because they do really great web application work. From the Netflix Community Blog:

Question: “If we KNOW something is a feature you want, or a feature we want, why isn’t it on the site already — or why is it taking so long to release?”

Continue Reading: Why is the Netflix Site Good?

Every once in a while we get a glimpse of how amazing people view the world in such a way that we can’t help but see the world with new eyes ourselves…

“There is a disproportionate capability among people on this planet to solve problems. We certainly can’t expect most of the people who don’t have the resources to be the ones who supply the solutions. That makes you a very small minority. I heard different definitions of “minority,” but educated people who understand the laws of nature, the rules of engineering, or the laws of man and economics and finance and politics and democracy are an incredibly small minority on this planet, and they have a huge advantage in the leverage and the control they have over the world’s physical and political environment. You don’t have to be an historian to know most of the time that leverage is used to help the rich get richer. You are able to think about how your education is going to enrich you.

You also ought to remember that if you are going to solve all problems that we’re facing in this world, it’s unlikely that the people and ideas that got us to where we are, are either the people or ideas that are going to get us to a different place. It’s going to require new people with new ideas [applause]. And that would be you.”

…

Continue Reading: Dean Kamen on Design Responsibility

In case you missed this little nugget from Thomas Vander Wal, I thought I would point your attention to it now.

Folksonomy Provides 70 Percent More Terms Than Taxonomy

The result comes from the Steve Museum, an amazing project in which people apply tags to…art. The early results from their research suggest that the words people use differ quite a bit from what the terms a museum uses.

As Thomas suggests, lots of folks are going to use tags to supplement taxonomy…but I’m wondering if that’s not a fool’s errand. More specifically, I think a taxonomy might be too rigid a tool in many cases, where a flexible navigation system, fed by the terms exposed in a folksonomy, might be a more reasonable road. Call it a taxonomy if you want…but what I’m thinking of isn’t nearly as static as most taxonomies.

Continue Reading: Taxonomies and Tags