• 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 the psychological reasons why sign up is so hard, while showing a boatload of examples of how designers have overcome those hurdles. Use the promotion code BOKARDO to get a discount: $99.00 for the seminar as well as lifetime archive to watch it again and again. (Or, perhaps closer to reality, to show to others who may want to see it)
• Webstock ’09
  In February, I’ll be heading down to New Zealand for Webstock, the Woodstock for the Web Set. I’ll be giving a full-day workshop on social design as well as a short talk. I’m completely honored to be speaking alongside this cast of characters…a bunch of my web heroes. I’ve never been to New Zealand before, and I’m really excited to go, so please let me know what I *must do* while I’m there.
• SXSW Interactive
  In March I’ll be giving a talk about Designing for the Social Web at SXSW, the annual convergence of all things Web in Austin, Tx. I hope to see you there!
• IA Summit
  In March I’ll be giving a full-day workshop called “The Architecture of Social Websites”. This is an updated version of the workshop we (Christina Wodtke, Christian Crumlish, and I) gave last year (which went over well). The biggest change is that we’ve added another speaker, Bryce Glass, to lead a section on reputation systems. (see interview with him here: Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems).
• UIE Web App Summit
  In April I’ll be heading to Newport Beach, California to the UIE Web App Summit. I’m thrilled to speak at this event which I helped put together a few years ago. I’m giving a short talk on Designing for First-time Use, but I’m really anxious to attend the full-day seminars. As usual, it will be hard to choose from this lineup.

Want me to talk to your group?

In the last year or so I’ve put together several talks as well as in-depth workshop material on designing for the social web. The early feedback has been very positive, so I’ve decided to offer them as official services for web teams and design groups. I’ll be posting much more about this in the coming days, but for now I can tell you that the content goes way beyond my book (and I even usually add to it every day). If you’re interested in having me speak with your team or group, get in touch.

That’s all it takes for Tripit to create you an account. After all, they have all they need: your email. But they also have started you using the service. From the email you sent they’ve already created a travel page for you, without you having to do anything. This is a really great way to do sign up because it takes most of the pain out of the equation and gets you started instantly.

I’ve been using Tripit in talks for a while now. In a talk I gave a while back at a New Hampshire UPA meeting, I showed a screenshot of Tripit and described how they use levels of description effectively on their site. Here is the screenshot:

Levels of description is where they give you some information, in this case the How it Works graphic, and ask you to sign up. If you still want more information, they give you another level of description, and ask you to sign up again. If you still want more…the process is repeated until you either sign up or leave the site.

This is usually represented with a “Sign up or Learn More” sequence of buttons. This explicitly gives people a choice: either sign up now or continue to learn about our offering. Sign up/Learn More is the new Ok/Cancel.

One of the people watching my presentation, Jeff Leombruno, pointed out that although the forward an email technique was cool, it might be confusing to someone who expected to sign up like they do on other sites. His first thought was…can I send them an email without signing up? In other words, his expectations have been set by all the other web applications out there…he expects to have to sign up for the service before he can use it.

The answer is that yes, you can send an email without signing up, but that is not made explicit in the interface. The only text is “just forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com”. While the words “just forward” imply that that’s all you need to do, it’s not entirely clear.

So Jeff and I figured that simply improving that text a bit would be helpful. Instead of Tripit’s current copy we might say “No need to sign up, simply forward your emails to plans@tripit.com and we’ll get you started immediately” or something similar. This would make it absolutely clear that the sign up process isn’t required to get started with the service.

Since I took the above screenshot, which was at least 3 months ago (when I first started putting together screenshots for the talk) Tripit has made a change to the homepage. I didn’t realize it until I went back to the site the morning after the talk to follow up on our discussion. Instead of the “Learn More” button being what gets your attention, Tripit has changed it to the very explicit “Sign Up”. Here is what it looks like:

Obviously this is a stronger call to action. It is entirely clear that Tripit wants you to sign up. However, when you click on that sign up button, you’re presented with this form:

This form surely doesn’t have the smoothness of the email option. It directs ones attention to a form instead of a clever way to sign up. If you weren’t sure about the email option before (as Jeff wasn’t), then you surely would be led to believe that you must sign up for the service given that the call to action is so strong. It’s darn near impossible to ignore that huge orange button.

But I wonder: does accentuating the sign up option diminish a great selling/talking point of the service? I say this because several people have mentioned the cool email option feature to me as they tell me about their use of the service. In other words, in explaining how the service works the ease of starting off automatically comes up…as they are one in the same. To use the service you just start using is…it’s brilliant in its simplicity.

So here’s the question: is Tripit hurting themselves (in some small way) by placing more weight on the sign-up call to action instead of the email option? Or is the stronger sign-up call to action more appropriate?

Oh by the way, I’ll be showing many more examples of good and bad sign-ups in a virtual seminar on Designing for Sign-up next week with the fine folks from UIE.

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 over, beginning with a working simple system.”

Yup, seems to hold for the complex systems we know and love: organic life, government, law, medicine…and of course Twitter.

Let’s imagine for a moment that it does hold. This would change lots of things, including much of the software world, which is laden with complex behemoths who frustrate us daily.

1. Building simpler software from the start
   Obviously, if Gall’s Law is true then more teams would start out building really simple software instead of overly complex stuff. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to think that way. Instead, the thinking seems to be, if we’re going to be as successful as (X), then our system needs to do more than (X). But in complex, social software, that may actually be impossible, since (X) didn’t spring fully-formed into life, either. Most of the software people try to emulate quickly took years and years to evolve to where it currently is. (as an aside, my recent argument is to focus on designing to support a specific activity and nevermind emulating success for its own sake)
2. Meeting solid metrics before adding features
   This is an interesting idea: make sure that your software works at some basic thing before you add features to it. I’ve seen on a couple projects in which there was a tension between the current under-performing software and the ambitious engineering plan that adds a lot more features. Which do you do? Stop and get people using the simple software first or push on and hope that people will come flocking after you’ve added a few more features? Well, according to Gall’s Law you get the simple software working first. My question is…are there teams who actually do this? Are there any that have actually said: “we have not reached our initial goals, let’s stop adding features and work on the ones we already have”?
3. Changes by design
   The overall effect of Gall’s Law is that most software would start off simple and evolve over time. So we wouldn’t end up with the software we imagined, but the software that managed to live through the early use and subsequent selection process. Accepting this as a rule, could we somehow plan for this evolution even though we don’t know what it will bring? Can we plan for this change? I think so, by building in feedback and reporting mechanisms and merely acknowledging to change the design based on such feedback.

Of course, the reason why we add feature after feature is because we don’t realize we’re doing it: we don’t see the accumulation of complexity…we only see adding “one more thing”. In the same way that a camel wouldn’t feel the slight addition of weight but ends up with a broken back, we don’t really feel each additional feature until its too late.

Gall’s Law might not be an actual law, but it sure seems like a good thing to keep in mind when you get into those inevitable project debates about improving what you have vs. adding new features.

A new article on Boxes and Arrows, On A Scale of 1 to 5 is a nice introduction to the topic and a good read for folks building reputation systems. The authors provide 5 design takeaways:

1. List the behaviors you want to encourage and those that you want to discourage
2. Be transparent
3. Keep your reputation system flexible
4. Avoid negative reputations
5. Reflect reality

The authors also provide a helpful framework to keep in mind while designing, paying close attention to three questions:

1. Who is doing the rating?
2. What, exactly, is being rated?
3. If people are being rated, what behaviors are we trying to encourage or discourage?

One thing that my research has shown is that people often make up their mind about the trustworthiness of others based on how they write…they get a sense about who to trust from the prose that people use…even if it’s merely a product review. While a Netflix-style “people like me” feature can be valuable…they aren’t trusted outright…and it doesn’t replace what people will glean from their own inspection of the actions of others.

One thing I didn’t like about the article was how they explained reputation systems as helping people manage risk. While this is fine for economics class…this is an incredibly distancing term for design. When I’m shopping on Amazon I’m not managing risk…I’m trying to decide! I’m making a decision, and I’m uncertain about what to do. Using the term “Risk management” confers zero empathy…but when we design to help others make important decisions in their life we’re much more empathic…well I’m quibbling. That small quibble aside…it’s a good article.

I also like how the authors pay homage to the heavyweights in this arena. While reputation and rating systems have been around for many years, Amazon and eBay are only recently getting the credit they deserve. These are massive, scalable, and generally effective designs that have pushed the entire state of web design forward. While we can look at these two sites and recognize what’s happening, we inevitably take for granted the tens of thousands of hours of research and design that led to them. They are the canaries in the coal mine of reputation system design.

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 they assume this from the start, perhaps they develop it the first time they have a wave of traffic come to their site. I can’t tell you how many bloggers have told me “Well, I suppose I have to keep writing my blog now that people have come”, almost as if they weren’t going to continue writing it otherwise. I touched on this some while back in my piece Nine Lessons for Would-Be Bloggers.

But I hadn’t heard that idea articulated clearly until I read this post over at Brian Christiansen’s blog about social interaction in learning environments (I used to work with Brian at UIE)

Brian quotes a paper by John Seely Brown containing the following story from a college professor who explains what happened when he required his students to post their work publicly.

“Because my goal as a teacher is to bring my students into full legitimate participation in the community of instructional technologists as quickly as possible, all student writing was done on public blogs. The writing students did in the first few weeks was interesting but average. In the fourth week, however, I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another’s writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other’s writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community’s discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.”

So the shift to public display, a shift to expected social interaction, changed the way the students learned and the effort they put into their education. If that’s not an incentive to experiment with and use social software I don’t know what is. Social software isn’t just a new way to work, it changes the effort we put into that work. Now there is a sound byte for social media consultants.

The original article (pdf) by John Seely Brown is here: Minds on Fire. It’s a good read on what Seely Brown calls “Learning 2.0″.

What is Learning 2.0? It’s the shift from a Cartesian view of learning where knowledge is treated as something to be transferred to students (that students merely have to learn some set of knowledge) and instead based on a social view of learning where meaning is socially constructed. Says Brown:

“The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”

This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).

Ravelry.com is a social network site for the “knit and crochet community”.

A site for knitters, you ask? What will they think of next…a site for dog owners?

The reason why Revelry.com and other niche sites seem so alien is because they support communities that we often don’t see because we don’t participate in them. My wife is a knitter, and I have often been struck at how often, when I visit a yarn shop with her, somewhere in the back there is a group of women (almost always women) sitting round a circle in rocking chairs chatting and knitting. While knitters and crocheters have likely always gotten together as a community, they usually do so in some quiet environment where non-knitters won’t bother them.

Knitting groups are a classic third place, just like the barbershop or pub.

The simple exposure of creating a web site dedicated to these communities comes across as odd or unecessary because to people outside the community it might be their first exposure to it. Knitters are a community?, we ask. That’s exactly the point of niche communities. They aren’t for everyone, and they are often focused on a very specific activity.

But to the people inside that community, niche social sites are as natural as any software (if software can be natural). So as software infects all parts of our lifestyles, so it will support our various activities, no matter how odd or niche they are.

A few months back Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote a bullish article on niche social networks in The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks and while the points Marshall makes are spot on, I think there is a bigger overarching opportunity for these sites.

Marshall says:

“What is a social network? Typically, it’s just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail.”

This is the generic view of a social network and it fits our perceptions of what they are. But for niche sites, the opportunity isn’t just connecting the people together, the opportunity is making them better at the activity they’re doing.

My favorite example is PatientsLikeMe.com, which was pointed out to me by Adam Darowski in response to an earlier post I wrote: Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks. PatientsLikeMe.com is a site that supports people with diseases such as ALS, AIDS/HIV, multiple schlerosis, and OCD.

Now, PatientsLikeMe is a great connecting tool, helping people communicate and support each other while living with the disease. But while that’s great, and is why forums and message boards are such amazing tools, the site’s value actually goes way beyond it, as it allows people to record their symptoms and match them with the medication they’re taking. Not only does this allow people to track what they’ve done, the site can help compare people’s experiences.

This is where PatientsLikeMe is redefining medicine. Imagine going to a doctor who doesn’t have a cure for your disease. He or she will try some number of medications to help alleviate your symptoms…they might increase your dose or try a new drug…but they’re basically throwing darts…they don’t know the best course of action. What PatientsLikeMe does is to help find what’s working best for everyone in the community…thereby treating the group’s experience as real research data.

So, patients are able to watch each other and see what the best course of action might be, or at least find out what seems to be working for others at the moment. This is incredibly powerful, as it allows the community to come up with better treatments than they had before!

If you haven’t read it, please read the fabulous New York Times piece on PatientsLikeMe: Practicing Patients.

PatientsLikeMe, Ravelry, and Dogster demonstrate the power of niche communities. It’s not just improved communication, it’s improved action. The value targeted, focused software can have is astounding…even as the novelty of the web has long since worn off.

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.

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.

The first step to putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into practice is asking a simple question that serves as the litmus test.

Is your system useful to someone even if nobody else uses it?

When the answer to this question is NO, then you’re ripe to suffer from the Cold-Start Problem.

The Cold-Start Problem

The Cold-Start Problem is when you launch your site and nobody uses it. When this happens, you’re probably focusing too much on the social value and not enough on personal value. You’ve made a bet that you can convince the masses to all sign up for your service at once, so that there is suddenly lots of value for everyone, sharing, commenting, and generally supplying user-generated content by the bucketful. I’ve talked to many folks who imagine this state of nirvana, and it rarely, if ever, actually happens.

Looking at sites like YouTube and Digg might make the Cold-Start Problem seem less dangerous than it really is. We look at YouTube, for example, and it seems like a self-perpetuating system. People upload videos for sharing and then other people come and find the best ones. But, really, at its core YouTube focuses on personal value first. They do this by providing an excellent service for uploading and saving videos…for free. As I mentioned in my series on common pitfalls of building social web applications, YouTube is first a great, free service for storing videos, and second a great place to find those videos shared socially.

Groupware

Now, we must distinguish between groupware and software that isn’t built for groups. Groupware is software built for multiple people to use: it isn’t useful unless there is a group using it. This includes social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, messaging systems such as Twitter, bulletin boards, help systems, collaboration applications, project management software, etc. This software is kind of a middle ground, where the value is communication…the personal value is that you are connected to others. The important thing to notice is that most software isn’t groupware! Most sites aren’t like MySpace and Facebook or even email, even though they might like to be as successful. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of communication-oriented start-ups…there are. But they are still a very small portion of the total web application universe.

Tools for Use

Most web applications are tools to get work done. And as such, they serve to get work done for an individual before a group. So, returning to the original question: is your service valuable if only one person uses it? We know something is valuable if it satisfies one of several conditions: Does it make something possible? Does it make something easier? Does it make something faster? If it makes something possible, easier, or faster then you probably provide personal value. If it doesn’t, then you might consider going back and trying to provide at least one of these benefits.

The best tools do one thing very well. It nails a certain activity to the wall and really makes it simple and easy. Hammers drive in nails. Del.icio.us saves bookmarks. Netflix sends you movies. Photoshop enables image editing. iTunes plays music, etc. All of these tools actually have other uses, but that’s the 1%. We naturally gravitate toward software with a single purpose because its easier to remember and we know exactly what we’re doing when we’re using it.

Apps with Cold-Start Problem Lack a Clear Personal Activity

The Cold-Start Problem usually happens when there is not a clear personal activity supported in the software. In other words, the software is not succeeding as a personal tool for use. Getting over this hurdle is one of the major challenges facing many web applications out there…in a networked world you have to provide immediate, personal value in order to grow from a seed to a tree.

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

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.

Satisfaction’s Lane Becker suggests (and I think he’s right), that streams are as core to today’s social applications as the checkout sequence was to apps 5 years ago. He says:

‘The “stream” — let’s call it that, because “river” just doesn’t cut it — is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one. It’ll show up everywhere, but put to very different ends in different places.’

In addition, many apps are starting to tout the stream as an important feature they offer. In a recent post on Mashable, streams are mentioned several times in relation to the newest social startups: 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles.

The stream trend is only increasing. Anything you can grab via an API or RSS can be a stream.

And because of this, because it feels like we’re really starting to see the emergence of a new interaction paradigm around streams, I keep hearing Pink Floyd singing “Welcome my son, welcome to the stream”.

Update: read Part III

5) Not Appointing a Full-time Community Manager

No matter how prescient your designers and how well thought out your design strategy, there is no way to design a perfect social web site that doesn’t need ongoing management. Yet, some social start-ups fail to recognize this and launch their app without a designated caretaker. The result is a slow failure…the worst kind of failure because it’s not immediately apparent that it’s happening.

In any decent social app, use and users are always changing, always adapting and pushing the limits of your software. So as Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter, says in his excellent Community Tips for 2007, “Moderation is a full-time job”.

The success of many social start-ups proves this to be true. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, when asked about making online communities work, admitted there is no silver bullet, but added:

“A lot of our success came from George (Oates), the lead designer, and Caterina (Fake). Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.”

Stewart’s description is exactly how George described it to me when I met her at SXSW. She could not over-emphasize the value of her and Caterina spending so much time with users…24 hours a day greeting them, showing them how to use Flickr, and generally saying “Hi”. It was clear to her that a huge part of the early success of Flickr resulted from that personal attention, that personal connection that someone on the other end cares about what’s going on. A full-time community manager is crucial to providing this level of attention.

6) Not Building Archived Knowledge

When your social app begins to grow and you start to attract more and more new people to the fold, you begin to see trends in their initial confrontation with the software. The same issues crop up repeatedly. People have the same problems over and over again and the community manager spends more and more time answering the same questions.

For example, uploading that first batch of photos might be intimidating for those folks who have never done it before. Let’s imagine they all run into the same problem: how do you get photos out of iPhoto and into your Flickr account? There are certain steps to do this, but it is not entirely clear, especially if you’ve never had to export pictures out of iPhoto before.

It’s the community manager’s role to help people at this stage. They’ll chat and email with the person to help them along. But their role should also include figuring out when archiving common problems will make a big difference to a large group of users. If the process of exporting from iPhoto is archived at a URL, then the community manager only has to point people to the brand new “exporting from iPhoto” page instead of explaining it over and over again.

One strategy to avoid repeating the same things over and over again is to use these interactions to feed a FAQ or a user’s guide. Whenever you start to see trends in help, add it to your FAQ and add a section to the user’s guide. This will allow the community manager to focus on the latest, more unique problems without having to rehash older issues again and again.

This seems pretty obvious now that we’ve talked about a general case. But it’s not so obvious when you’re in the heat of battle and these issues are cropping up unstructured for the first time. The secret is to observe patterns in the questions people ask but also in the underlying cause of the questions while leaving enough design time dedicated to creating a healthy set of resources that can serve future users.

7) An Over-Focus on Social Value

This may sound counter-intuitive, but it is possible to focus too much on social value when creating social web applications. Why is that? Well, because much of the motivation within social sites is actually rooted in personal value, or answering the question: “what’s in it for me?”. I’ve dubbed this the Del.icio.us Lesson because it was Del.icio.us who gained so much attention for the social value of tagging but it was really the personal value of saving bookmarks that drove the site.

At the beginning, when you’re building the service, is not the time to focus on social value. There is no social value because there is no user base. So adding tags in the hopes that people will discover new things is probably premature at this stage, for example. Instead, focus on how a single person can use your service even if others don’t share or tag anything.

Think about YouTube, a killer social app. Even at the very beginning YouTube was providing personal value: hosting your videos for free. If they had been charging for this feature, no social design in the world could have caused the growth that free video hosting did. So while YouTube excels at getting viral growth out of the sharing of videos, they’re providing a valuable, personal service at the same time.

It should also be noted that altruistic people, or people who do things for the good of the group regardless of personal benefit, are incredibly rare. They’re so rare, in fact, that they make a very poor population to design for. There just aren’t enough of them to make up a significant population in any area. Even Wikipedians, who have been called altruistic at times, are mostly driven by reputation…the reputation they gain from their peers and other Wikipedians.

Continue to Part III

With metadata capabilities built into Mac OS X Tiger, it was only a matter of time before someone started using tags to keep track of their files. The Mac search system, Spotlight, provides ways to attach metadata to files that could help us find them much more easily than searching through our trove of hierarchical folders.

Back in April Nick Santilli wrote this piece at Lifehacker: Metadata as a ‘filing system’, explaining how he used both the built-in Spotlight features as well as the application Quicksilver to create a folksonomy for himself. Here is a snippet:

“I think it took me about 4-6 weeks before I got things ironed out to a point where it became effortless in execution and actually useful to me. Using a metadata filing system as opposed to folders requires a slight shift in the way you think. It’s not difficult, but it is something you have to work at a bit to truly acquire the habit.

For now, get thinking in a metadata frame of mind, because it’s the future of modern operating systems.”

Wow, that’s some serious optimism for the tagging approach.

Nick has now continued his investigation into the matter with this piece: Using Metadata Effectively in OS X

This use of tags is very similar to how people are tagging items online with services like Del.icio.us. There’s a lot going on in this space…and the operating systems are now starting to catch up. Word is that Vista also has a lot of metadata features, but since it only just came out the Mac is where the research is right now.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m anxious to see if it works.

(note, read down through the comments in the second piece: people have lots of suggestions for similar/alternative uses)

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model?.”

Why is this an important question?

This is an important question because of the widely-held assumption that taxonomies are the right answer for most of our information organization problems.

The thing is, I’m not happy with any taxonomy, really. I can’t think of a single one that works well for me, let alone works perfectly. Even a site with as simple a taxonomy as Apple.com confuses me, with some links on the 2nd level nav (like software and hardware) that are clearly a wider scope than those on the top level. I have to remember that this is the case when I want to find the software page…I have to remember the taxonomy, which to me is a mark of a poor one.

Even the taxonomies I build for myself don’t work all the time, though they work much better than those that others build that I have to use.

A reasonable response might be that taxonomies are the best tool we’ve got. Most of that argument rests on these facts:

1. Taxonomies have been around for a long, long time and are the core of several disciplines including library science and are thus trusted by many practitioners as the Right Way to Do Things.
2. Taxonomies are easily implemented without the input of users. This is a bad idea, of course, but that’s a big reason why there are so many of them.
3. Folksonomies are new and therefore scary. Even the best example of them, Del.icio.us, has only been around for a couple years and only been working at a huge scale for about a year.
4. Folksonomies suffer from the Cold Start Problem (CSP). You have to build up tagging datasets over time, so at the beginning there is really no navigation to build on top of them.

Now, I don’t think that it has to be either/or. We don’t have to build either a taxonomy or a folksonomy, necessarily. They might co-exist in some way, as Thomas Vander Wal has argued.

But the question still stands…are there any examples of knock-down, drag-out taxonomies that scale in today’s world and generally work well for those who use them?

UPDATE Donna Maurer at Digital Web has taken me to task for blurring the question, saying I’m asking for a scalable taxonomy while really wanting one that works. She’s absolutely right…I’m assuming that while it scales the taxonomy still has to be useful. Can’t we have both?

Cnet’s Elinor Mills, in a piece describing Digg rigging on a wide scale, writes:

“dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social-media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, at this point. (see Brian Clarke’s writeup) Digg’s gaming issues have been widely known for many months now. In Digg’s Design Dilemma, I pointed out that the design of the site had a lot to do with the gaming going on there. But, I should add, it also had a lot to do with the growth of the site…so there’s no clear answer about what to do.

It’s becoming clear that any successful site sees its share of gaming. Even Del.icio.us, who refused to comment on the Mills story, has seen gaming. And this is the way that media has worked for a long time. Who controls the media controls the story. That’s why we’re seeing so much SPAM/gaming…we should expect it in any successful social site.

Real money changing hands

It’s getting to the point where real money is changing hands to game Digg. Mills writes:

“Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.”

I think the observation is interesting, the inference shaky. There are people who think that all they need to do is to game Digg for their advertising? Is there any example of a company who survives on Digg gaming alone? I doubt it.

(Update…Neil Patel, quoted in the story, blogs about how Mills has inaccurate info)

In addition, Mills quotes Barry Parr, who makes a controversial comment, to say the least:

“Digg and others are working hard to deal with this kind of abuse,” Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr wrote on his blog this week. “But until it is eliminated, the credibility of social-news sites will be in question.”

Credibility in Question?

Hmmm…let’s compare this to another abusive environment where we might have questions about credibility. I wonder if the lobbying in Washington is hurting the credibility of the U.S. government. Until lobbying by Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Insurance goes away, the credibility of our government will be in question. Ha! It may be true, but that doesn’t mean it will be going away any time soon, or that over time it lessens…at this point most people simply accept evil interests as part of the deal. I think maybe we should accept that SPAM will be an ongoing problem for social sites…after all, they’re social sites.

So, let’s agree right now. The credibility of social news sites will always be in question, OK? And, for that matter, so it should be for non-social news sites!

Nobody said that putting the “social” in play on web sites would mean an end to corrupt behavior. In fact, the opposite may be true. As we model real-life behavior better and better online, as we open up communication channels and people increasingly live their social lives online, we’re going to model every part of those lives…the good and the bad.

What to do about it?

But what can we do about it? I think the answer comes from the community of the site. At some point you cannot rely on algorithms to do your SPAM harvesting for you, you have to rely on the wisdom of real people, because SPAMmers are really smart. Hopefully, crowds are smarter.

To this end both Digg and Reddit claim to have strong communities that self-police. They help drive out SPAM when they recognize it as such, burying stories that don’t seem right. Digg CEO Jay Adelson says:

“There is technical information that only we could know that flags us when someone is attempting to manipulate (stories and rankings)…By merging the algorithms and the people I believe we have a foolproof system.”

“Foolproof”?…I wonder what he means by that…

Edgework – Joshua Porter 59MB MP3

“>More details on Brian’s site. Also, check out Brian’s Edgework podcast feed, loaded with some excellent interviews about designing on the Edge…what’s next in the world of design.