Here’s the show post.

Here’s the RSS Feed (love the name of it) The Bungee Line.

Here’s the mp3: Social Design Interview (47min, 22MB)

The interview was part of a series that Ted and Alex are doing for Bungee Labs. They’re stretching out the role of the new community manager, who serves to not only help out with the community but also helps to lead the discussion in and around it. I think this will become a common model going forward.

Anyway, I’m honored to be part of their series, which includes the likes of Jeff Barr of Amazon and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency.

In the podcast we talk about The Del.icio.us Lesson and other topics of social design. The level of depth was meant for everyone, even folks who have never heard of social design before.

If you listen and have any feedback/questions/concerns, I would love to hear it. Either leave a comment or shoot me an email.

So here they are:

1. I’m a twin. I have a twin sister named Jessica. I have a hard time making friends. She makes friends daily.
2. I designed my first web site in 1997 during a computer science class in college. It had those animated eyeball gifs on it and a wavy blue background. It was, in a word, gross.
3. My buddy Bill and I formed a start-up company in 2000 doing online wedding albums. We wrote the app in PHP. We completely fell into the “if you build it, they will come” trap. We built it. Nobody came.
4. I used to study and write a lot of poetry. It was my way of dealing with what I didn’t understand (like failed relationships). Now that I’m in a healthy relationship, I don’t have the urge to write poetry anymore. My favorite poem is Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. It is one of the finest sets of words in the English language. Oh, and the name of this site comes from a poem.
5. I have a relatively bad memory, so writing is important way for me to remember things. My favorite book is the Great Gatsby.
6. I’m a sucker for brunettes. So much so that I married one.
7. I can only remember two times that I’ve ever cried. The last time was when my dog Moose died.
8. The most amazing things I’ve ever seen are Michelangelo’s David and the Na Pali coast in Kauai, Hawaii.

Since this was so fun, I added a few more:

9. I don’t watch TV.
10. I’ve never agreed to one of these meme things before. I’m not going to tag specific people…but I will say that if you have a blog and not much personal info on it, then consider doing this.
11. The best thing about life is my daughter Tessa. Every day she makes me smile many times over. I can’t imagine life without her.
12. I usually root for the underdog.
13. There are three quotes that I live by. The first is “If you love what you do, it’s not work”. The 2nd is “There is always room at the top”. The third is the following classic by Teddy Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

52% of people who shop online do product research at Amazon.com

And, perhaps even more amazing is that what those shoppers are going for isn’t even provided by Amazon: customer reviews. Nope, much of the valuable information on the site is provided by other people who write reviews, describe their experiences, and help others watch out for bad products.

That’s the power of social interaction. While we probably listen to the people selling us products some of the time, what we’re really interested in is what other people like us have to say.

Unbiased, unvarnished, authentic voices. Are you designing for them?

This quote by William Gibson (often reprised by Tim O’Reilly) is bantered about in tech circles whenever people get the feeling they’re glimpsing the future. It was particularly appropriate for the iPhone launch last June, when countless people pointed out that the touch-screen has been around for a long time.

The quote also pertains to web application design and the research teams need to do in order to make great software.

In a talk I gave the other day on social design, I went on at length about how you need to design for personal value before social value. (I’ve long called this the Del.icio.us Lesson). I illustrated how most successful social web applications provide personal value at their most basic, using social value to augment it and make it better. So YouTube is a great video storage application first…and it also has great sharing features if you choose to do that.

(As a counter-example consider Technorati Tags, which provide social value but don’t provide personal value. One word: SPAM)

A software designer from the audience asked the next logical question (a question I get a lot!)

“How do you proceed if you’re considering adding social features to your application but aren’t sure whether or not they provide real personal value?”

The answer is that you have to find out if the problem you’re trying to solve already exists. If, as Gibson might say, it’s here but just not distributed yet.

If it is here, then it follows that people are already dealing with it somewhere, somehow. They might not even be using software to deal with it, but they’re struggling nevertheless. The trick is to find out where and how this happens. (don’t be afraid of Do It Yourself research)

The iPhone, of course, isn’t as revolutionary as it is evolutionary. In fact, the problems of mobile phones were quite well understood by everyone who used them. The situation was simply that we were putting up with them.

The most successful software doesn’t solve problems that don’t exist yet. The most successful software solves problems that nobody else is trying to solve, or nobody else is trying to solve in the same way.

If you cannot find any evidence that the problem your new feature is trying to solve is indeed an existing problem people are already dealing with, then I would seriously reconsider building it.

Interestingly, most people, including the group MoveOn.org, seem worried about a different symptom of the problem than I was. Most people are worried about what happens when the shared information gets back to Facebook, and their Facebook friends see their outside activity. For example, if someone rents Footloose on Blockbuster.com, all their friends on Facebook will see it. I personally think that Footloose is a brilliant movie, but some people might be embarrassed by their friends seeing they rented it.

My main concern was that Facebook and Blockbuster were talking at all.

Imagine this offline scenario. You walk into your local cafe and buy a Maxim (or whatever the woman’s equivalent is). You’re then out with your wife/husband later that day and walk into the nearby Starbucks. The barista says “Hey, I noticed you bought Maxim, how about a nice double-peppermint mocha doohicky as well?”. You then have to explain to your wife that Maxim is completely harmless, no nudity, real beauty, respect women…etc…painful…etc. You also then have to have words with both the cafe and Starbucks because they were sharing information. This is exactly what Facebook and its partners are doing. We wouldn’t accept this in our downtown, so why should we accept it online?

(another thing, this might be what advertisers do all the time with 3rd party cookies. I have them turned off in my browser, but it doesn’t mean I’m 100% protected.)

What Facebook is doing is wrong: It’s not acceptable for Facebook to share information with 3rd parties without explicit consent. For long enough they’ve toed the line…sharing information with 3rd party apps. But you have to explicitly click “yes” to those relationships, and since apps are within the Facebook world we have more of a feeling of transparency (whether or not we should is another question).

When I do business with someone, even if its as simple as renting a movie or buying a magazine, I expect a certain level of privacy. I expect businesses to keep my personal activity to themselves. It’s a common social norm, is it not?

Here’s a simple solution that Facebook might try:

• When sharing information outside of Facebook: opt-in only. The default must be that a person has to give explicit consent. If they do nothing, their information is not shared.
• When sharing information within Facebook, it’s OK to opt-out. The default can be inclusion and sharing, as long as Facebook doesn’t share beyond its walls.

Oh, and of course we need a global “No Thanks!” button that turns everything off completely. Click that once and you’ll never be asked about sharing information again.

For the record, this is the policy that I’ll be recommending when consulting on social design projects in the future.

Now, I realize that Facebook can do whatever the heck their privacy policy and terms of service say they can do. But absolutely nobody reads those documents…its not explicit consent by any means. And, more to the point, it’s just shady business. Doesn’t Facebook want a strong, trusting relationship with the people who use its site? Or is selling information to 3rd parties more important?

If Mark Zuckerberg truly wants to build a system of “trusted referrals”, he needs to make some changes.

In a more general sense, this is the tip of the iceberg. This is one of the most important design issues of the next decade. Facebook isn’t even the first to run up close to the fence. But they are way ahead of most integrated social systems technologically. When others catch up they’ll be tempted by the same fruits.

As Doc Searls says, it’s time we set some clear ground rules now, so at the very least we don’t have anybody accidentally notified that we like Footloose.

There are two messages involved in every web design project. One is the desired message, the message that the site owners want to deliver to their audience. This message probably has something to do with the value of participating, of using that tool or service to make your life better in some way.

The other is the actual message, the one that actually gets delivered. This message is usually some form of the desired message, but often has a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty thrown in. In the worst cases it is actually not the desired message at all but an unintended communication that means something completely different.

The number one problem on the Web today is a mismatch between the desired message and the actual message being delivered.

Remember the game of telephone, the one where you sit in a circle and whisper a message to the person beside you? That person then tells the person beside them, and once you get all the way around the circle you compare messages. Rarely are the messages the same. In many cases it is funny what we end up with. After all, it’s just a game.

But on the Web it isn’t so innocent. The entire industries of visual and interface design, copy-writing, usability, user experience, and all the rest are tasked with playing a gigantic game of telephone. Their job is to communicate the message that needs communicating. Does their design deliver the desired message, or is the actual message completely different? All of these groups, in their own way using their own techniques, are trying to align the desired message with the actual one.

There are a lot of other topics in design that get a lot of interest: technical issues like cross-browser implementation, using semantic markup, and scalability to name a few. There are also an amazing amount of process-related topics: which design method is best, how many users do you test, and when should you get funding, etc. There are a million issues to deal with, but really they all pale in comparison to the #1 problem.

And, to top it all off, the Web is a visual medium, and so we tend to judge things visually. If they look right, then we assume they are right. But just as a smile from a serial killer isn’t really what you want, neither is a web site that looks great but doesn’t support what you’re trying to do. On the other hand, when a message is being communicated clearly, it usually looks good because the way it looks makes sense, so there is some merit in judging by how it looks.

From a 30,000 foot perspective it is easy to see that the web site serves as a function. You take the desired message, run it through the web site, and out the other end comes another message. If the actual message is the same as the desired one, it is a 1:1 function whose output doesn’t change the input. If it’s not, the function is doing something undesirable…it is changing the input in some way before it is output.

So two points become absolutely critical. One is the point at which the desired message is most clear. At what point do you know exactly what the desired message is? Well, you have to talk to the person in charge. The person making the critical strategic decisions on the project. If you’re not talking to that person, then you probably have dirty data. And, if you can’t get a straight answer, or the real answer isn’t best for the audience, then maybe the desired message isn’t the right one.

Here’s an example of push-back. The business strategy of generating increased advertising revenue is often realized as a design strategy by increasing page views by breaking up stories into multiple pages. From a reader perspective this is obviously less desirable. So at this point it’s the designer’s job to say “Breaking up pages arbitrarily isn’t so good for our audience…it provides a worse experience. Let’s not design for page views and we’ll make happier users in the long run”.

The other critical point is the actual message. At what point do you know the actual message that is being communicated? Well, there are various ways to get at it, but the best is to experience it and watch others experience it. Designers tend to deal with this intuitively, and usability folk tend to deal with this by testing. And, to that end, I’m not sure that one method is better than another. I’ve been on both sides of the fence long enough to know that there is no such thing as a single method that always works, and until there is, we’re just going to have to keep trying.

So for those folks trying to make sense of their latest project…if you’re stuck about what to do…try to find those two points: the point at which your desired message is best explained, and the point at which the actual message is most clear. If you can get your message communicated well, in an actual form that is close to the desired one, then all other issues are small potatoes.

What on Earth does “pop” mean? Does it mean that you literally hear a noise when you look at it? Probably not. Does it mean that the logo actually animates a popping action when its loaded? Again, probably not. These two common meanings of the word, I daresay the most common, are not what the person meant.

Non-designers use lots of interesting words when talking about design. They say things like “make it pop”, “it looks sharp”, “it feels cluttered”, “the Web 2.0 look”. All of these things mean something to them, and it becomes the job of the designer to decipher that meaning and take actionable steps.

This problem isn’t limited to non-designers. Everybody has their own way of talking about design. Designers are just more used to translating between one person’s way of talking and another’s.

I’ve come to rely on two design terms that really help in these situations. One term is visual weight, which means how strongly something draws our eye toward it. If a design element is so bold and stands out so well that we can’t help but look at it, it has strong visual weight. In the case of “pop”, the person was asking for more visual weight, not a small explosion.

The second term is visual hierarchy. This means the order in which our eyes are drawn to objects on a page. In a solid design there is a clear visual hierarchy that focuses attention on the right elements and therefore the right message. In a weak design there is no clear hierarchy, so the message is potentially different for everyone and becomes weaker as a result.

If one is to use these terms with clients (as in my case), I have to use them consistently. Every time I use them I must ground what I’m saying to something they can immediately perceive in the design. Showing them good examples of a strong visual hierarchy is an easy way to do this. In many cases they begin to use the same terms after I’ve used them. Most people like using shared terms.

I try very hard to stay away from the teacher/student role. I hate the notion that the designer needs to “educate” the client. When these roles are demarcated it often happens that the teacher becomes the teacher in all parts of the relationship in an effort to satisfy and maintain the role. But, while I may be doing design work, I’m the student when it comes to learning about how they do business. I need to be a student of their strategy if I am to translate it into actionable design.

Instead, I like a partnership role. I may talk about design topics that they aren’t familiar with, and they might talk to me about how their business works. In many cases I discover really important information that I wouldn’t have found out about if I wasn’t in a partnership mode.

I’ve figured out by now that when people say “it feels cluttered” what they are really talking about is visual hierarchy. When they say “pop”, they are referring to visual weight. When they say “Web 2.0″, they are talking about designing with larger, sans-serif fonts, rounded corners, and bright colors: a relatively common style now. And when they say “sharp”, it means they find the design harmonious.

So the next time you hear someone say “make it pop”, don’t think of the loud sound of balloons popping, think of how you can translate that into concrete design terms and a shared vocabulary.

(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)

Another interesting part of the redesign was choosing a typeface for the masthead of the site. We couldn’t find a typeface that we were happy with at first, but then we started thinking about what sort of typeface would represent a site like Publishing 2.0. Was there a typeface that was thematically appropriate? I think there is, and I wrote about it on a special page called About the Design, kind of like an extended colophon where we discuss some of the things we did.

This design writeup was a new genre of information, used to explain a little bit about the thought processes behind the design and sharing that with others. I would love to see this sort of thing on other sites! Since Scott played such a big part in the design it seemed appropriate to talk about how we worked together to come up with the end result. This is the ideal situation for me: to work with a client who has a clear vision and a passion for what they do. It really makes the project that much more enjoyable.

Also, I must also mention Scott’s new venture, Publish2 (here’s the blog). I really can’t tell you how brilliant I think this idea is – a social bookmarking and research platform for guess who?…journalists! It took me a while to consider the implications of this…actually still mulling it over. What happens when the research and discussions of journalists are public? There is already speculation of these implications surrounding the new Google News feature…and that’s exactly what Scott is going to find out with Publish2. I’m really excited to see where it goes…and to get insight into things like what blogs and resources journalists find valuable.

So, there are lots of details to the Publishing2 design that I would love to share with you. If you have any questions/comments/etc, feel free to drop me a line.

Download PDF of The Psychology of Social Design

I’ve also created a set of resources and links for the talk at Del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/bokardo/uxweek/

My focus in the talk was to expose several psychological frameworks that can be applied to social design. The first one is Kurt Lewin’s famous equation: B=ƒ(P,E) which articulates the primary tension in social psychology: that both an individual’s personality (P) and their environment (E) affect their behavior (B)…btw: that was the only equation I’ve ever shown in a talk and will probably be the last.

Here’s an high-level outline:

1. Kurt Lewin’s Equation as the central tension in social psychology
2. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as a precursor to the Del.icio.us Lesson
3. Peter Kollock’s 4 motivations for contributing
4. Robert Axelrod’s 3 necessary conditions to cooperate
5. Duncan Watts’ study on social influence in interfaces

On the Web, of course, our environment is largely the interface we’re using in addition to the social actions that are occurring elsewhere. In many cases the interface is the only evidence we have that anything is happening at all.

The talk went well, I think. I got some really positive feedback about it from attendees, and some great questions afterward that took the discussion further.

I know that it’s not easy to follow a talk by just looking at the slide-deck, but if you have any feedback or comments, I would love to hear them.

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.

But I kept running into the same problem. We would talk to people who have these grand visions for their business, and then you would investigate how people were using their site and there was this huge disconnect. Either their strategy wasn’t clear, it wasn’t being communicated to the designers, or the designers weren’t able to take that strategy and embed it into an actual interface. The chain of communication from business strategy to interface to user was tenuous at best. In many cases there was no direct conversation between these parties at all.

The problem I kept seeing over and over was one of translation. Interfaces were not communicating what their creators wanted them to communicate. It’s kind of like a beginning writer who has a grand fantasy of a story in their head but the words on the paper give you no sense of it. But their interfaces were definitely communicating something, though…unfortunately it was something other than what was intended.

At around this same time there was an explosion of social software, or software that is built around the social lives of users. In testing at UIE we saw the extreme power of this social influence…we would run user tests and find out why people were making the decisions they were making. In many cases they were making decisions based on their social network.

For example, we did a huge user testing study where we tested over a dozen e-commerce web sites. We had 70 or so people actually buy products from these web sites and part of our research was to find out how they made purchasing decisions. In more cases than I can count people said things like “Well, I knew I wanted a digital camera but I didn’t know what kind. My friend really likes Canon cameras and recommended them to me”. People who don’t know something rely on their social network to find it out.

After we heard stuff like this this over and over again, it became clear to me that the future of software is social. And while social networking was taking off like a rocket it was also clear that it wasn’t just about networking with others, it was about finding out what others knew and using that information to help make decisions. That’s why I write about Amazon, Netflix and other sites that aren’t about connecting to new people, but are leveraging our social networks to help us find out what we need to know. The latent information in our social networks is still mostly untapped. If we only knew what the people we know, know.

So I wrote two pieces on my blog, one called The Del.icio.us Lesson and the other called Digg’s Design Dilemma that together outline two important principles of what is going on.

The first (from the Del.icio.us Lesson) is that most people are acting in their own self-interest first: personal value precedes network value. This simple formulation has a huge effect on how to design, what features to focus on, and how to elicit participation and desired behavior.

Second (from Digg’s Design Dilemma) was that the interface is the medium through which this all occurs, and thus acts as an arbiter to behavior. In other words, all that happens happens because the interface either encourages it through positive design or discourages it through negative design. Therefore, the value and importance of the interface cannot be understated.

So these are the factors that drove me to start Bokardo Design. The services that I offer are a direct offshoot of these problems, observations, and principles.

So this is what I’m offering: Interface design and strategy for social web applications.

Interface Design

For some folks coming up with a strategy is the part they’re good at, while interface design is inscrutable. But on the Web, interface design is the execution of strategy. So I’m offering a service to create interfaces that execute on strategy. I’ll work closely with you to figure out the best way to expose a strategy through an interface, and how best to elicit the correct activities from your audience.

For example, I’m currently working with someone whose strategy is to help people find out the best local events to attend (there are many people doing things in this area right now). To do this, we need to figure out how people plan their time in and around events and how they make decisions about which events to attend. Not only that, but the way that people communicate events to each other is also important…and building a tool to help them do could be extremely valuable. Coming up with an interface that actually allows people to find and share events in the way they already are is the goal.

There are two levels of details to consider. One is the screen-level, where we build buttons and layouts that draw people’s attention to the right things in the right order. But there is also the activity-level, where we create flows that support the right activities in the right order. These two levels combine to make up interface design.

My interface design service is about creating an interface that executes an underlying strategy for success.

Interface Strategy

For many folks who aren’t native to the Web executing a coherent Web-based strategy is a challenge. There are a lot of questions to consider. When do you announce your idea? When do you launch? Should you do a complete redesign? How do you know if the interface is working or not? What if we launch and nobody uses it? The questions go on and on.

For example, I’m currently working with a client who has amazing ideas about where to take their service. But right now they need to focus their strategy on personal value because they haven’t articulated that in their interface yet. They’ve focused on the social value so far, essentially putting them into a chicken/egg problem thats promises users “our service will be valuable once a lot of people start using it”. This might be OK if we all had limitless attention span and could try out services like we try on clothes. But the Web environment is brutal, and so this is not a desirable place to be, yet countless people I’ve talked to are in this exact spot.

My interface strategy service is about working with folks who are having trouble formalizing a plan to build and release a focused, Web-based application.

Why I’m Excited

I’m extremely excited by the early interest in Bokardo Design. I’ve heard from entrepreneurs doing social start-ups, established companies looking to add social features to existing applications, and even some visionaries thinking about huge-scale services that could change the way we all look at the Web.

All of my conversations so far have reinforced the idea that building social features into software is really the sweet spot at the moment, as we have collectively realized that software is just an extension of what we already do: it’s not this fantasy land we visit only once in a while. To this end we must keep our software humane, to borrow a word from Jeff Raskin. And on that note, here’s something else that he said so well:

“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.”

Amen. If there is one statement that defines what I do at Bokardo Design, that is it. So if you’re interested in building an amazing interface, head on over to my contact page and say Hi.