Just a quick update on the various speaking events I’ve got coming up. UIE Virtual Seminar: Designing for Sign Up This thursday, December 9, I’ll be giving a UIE Virtual Seminar on Designing for Sign Up. This presentation is for folks struggling with getting people signed up for their product/service. I’ll go over some of […]

Continue Reading: Upcoming Speaking Events

One of my favorite examples of sign-up is from Tripit.com. They have a unique way of signing you up for the service. Instead of filling out a form to sign up, which is the norm, you simply forward them a confirmation email from a travel service. So you book your flight on Orbitz, they send […]

Continue Reading: Tripit’s innovative design evolves (but is it for the worse?)

An interesting bit came across my twitterstream the other day: Gall’s Law “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start […]

Continue Reading: What if Gall’s Law were true?

As more and more companies “go social”, we’ll see a growing need for well-designed reputation systems.

Continue Reading: 5 ways to improve reputation systems

The mere threat of social interaction changes our behavior…if you know your work is going to be put on public display, you’ll be much more motivated to make it good. There is a moment in every blogger’s life when they realize that yes, other people are going to read what they have to say. Perhaps […]

Continue Reading: Learning 2.0: The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction

The power of niche social sites isn’t just in connecting people, it’s in providing tools that allow people to do something better than they could before…or, the reason why PatientsLikeMe is an amazing web site. Ravelry.com is a social network site for the “knit and crochet community”. A site for knitters, you ask? What will […]

Continue Reading: The Power of Niche Social Network Sites

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

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

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

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