Archives for August 2006

Good God… I’m wracking my brain to remember just who gave the keynote! Ah yes, Jeff Veen, now of Google and formerly of Adaptive Path, gave a keynote on Designing the Next Generation of Web Applications. He contrasted some of the emerging systems with their older counterparts, such as traditional (and expensive) content management systems (CMS) like Vignette vs. Typepad. As it turns out, most people don’t need a big, heavy, expensive tool–they have simple needs.

One of the key qualities of next generation web apps? Participation. Rather than the site dictating a stringent hierarchy, the users define the information architecture. You can see this in action at sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, where users create the categories using tags.

You can download Veen’s slides here.

Another good, tactical session was Ryan Freitas’ Facilitating Collaboration: Web Technologies That Work. Freitas described the tools that he actually uses when he’s working on a new project. His toolkit includes: his work email, his secret IM address, his mobile number, del.icio.us, secondverse (his blog), a wiki, flickr, his twttr name (for group SMS), vyew.com for online conferencing, and Writely for realtime collaborative editing (which Google has now opened up for anyone to use again).

The toolbox approach was interesting, but Freitas admits that it’s a lot of disconnected parts to keep track of. I would consider using a web-based RSS aggregator such as Netvibes to create a virtual control panel for the project. I also challenged him and suggested that in addition to blogs and wikis, a project can and should use forums (he agreed).

But the highlight of Day Three was Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, speaking on building community on the web, and lowering the barriers to participation. His talk was fairly high-level, and if you’ve read his blog, you’ve heard the concepts before. Horowitz shared usage patterns he’s seen on some popular Yahoo properties, including Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, and Yahoo! Answers.

In Yahoo! Groups, 1% of the community are creators, organizing and creating groups; 10% are producers, replying to discussions and interacting; and 100% are consumers, reading and theoretically benefiting from the user-generated content from the producers.
They key to getting more users to participate is to enlist them without really requiring them to do anything other than use the website. This was best explained by something called interestingness on Flickr. Flickr is a fantastic photo sharing site, but it’s not for everyone (one of the reasons they have no plans to merge it with Yahoo! Photos). The audience tends to be a bit more technically savvy, even though you don’t really need to be for the basic sharing stuff.

So just what is interestingness? He couldn’t tell us exactly (trade secrets being what they are), but in general terms, it’s a way of identifying photos that are, well, the most interesting. This is calculated by algorithms that use a number of factors. How many people have viewed the photo? How many have marked it as a favorite? How recent is it? Who has viewed or favorited the photo? How many comments has it received? They all factor into the equation. And the interesting thing (no pun intended) is that many of measures are captured without any explicit action on the part of the users. The simple act of viewing a photo makes me a participant in the process.

Yahoo doesn’t have a monopoly on this concept. Digg is another site that provides simple ways for people to participate in the process of ‘digging’ for the top stories on the web. It’s a bit more work; you have register for an account and sign-in, but once you’ve done that, it’s easy to click the ‘digg this’ button to register what you find interesting.

These simple mechanisms for implicit and explicit participation create value by gathering feedback an opinions from a wider group. The producer pool grows from 10% to something larger.

Horowitz finished with a discussion of Yahoo! Answers. This service really isn’t something new, but it provides a question-and-answer format for information that may or not be easily found by search alone. Launched in December 2005, the service has grown to over 5 million users in nine months. I need to take a closer look at this.

The evening’s networking event was held at Heritage India, hosted by the rather hilarious Jared Spool. If usability work ever evaporates, Jared could easily find work as a stand-up comic.

technorati tags:uxweek, ux, veen, horowitz, web2.0

Somebody is going to give me grief for not posting this actually on Day Two of UX Week, but I hadn’t counted on two things, and therefore ask for a bit of slack. First, the free wireless connection here at the Hotel Palomar sucks — there is no polite way to say it. It’s slow and constantly drops my connection. So I gave up trying and packed the laptop away. Secondly, I hadn’t counted on the amount of time I’d spend networking (ahem) in the evenings. And so, here I am on my flight back to Calfornia, writing a summary that’s a few days old. Such is life.

Day Two of UX Week started with a bang. Designer Michael Bierut gave the keynote, describing one of his notable failures (well, not quite, but the project did get started poorly). As part of a pro bono project designed to revitalize inner city school libraries in New York City, Bierut was to come up with a visual identify. The problem? He assumed he understood the problem, rather that actually meeting and discussing with the end users (kids and their librarians). As a result, his “great ideas” (which had been developed in a relative vacuum) fell flat.

In then end, he did end up meeting with the users, and began to truly understand what was important. There were some great lessons, but chief among them was this: know thy audience. Yeah, it’s the sort of common-sense credo that we’ve heard many times before, and yet how often to do we forgo this critical step, assuming (for example) because we ourselves use websites, that we somehow already know what the audience needs and wants. This may work fine if you’re building a website for an audience of one: yourself. But hopefully you aren’t so boring… you’re unique! And therefore, you really need to get the audience perspective.

Bierut’s key was communication. Often it’s just that simple, but when the problem is more complex, the audience may have a tough time verbalizing what they need. This is where usability tests come into play. More on that later.

The best session of the day came Tuesday afternoon. Dan Brown (no, not the DaVinci Code guy–the IA guy). His book–Communicating Design–is all about documention. Documenting content collection; use case scenarios; usability tests and functional specs. Sounds boring, but Dan’s delivered the goods with a great sense of humor and, frankly, it’s a topic that is really useful in a very practical way. Whatever. He sold me — I bought his book.

Adaptive Path’s Dan Saffer held a book signing party at Nanny O’Brien’s Tuesday night. Afterwards, a few of us went hunting for a bite to eat, settling on a sushi place with a really good sake sampler. Represented were folks from the Washington Post, Nationwide, Allstate, some sports website whose name I forget (not one you’d recognize), a home builder consortium, and moi.

technorati tags:uxweek, ux, adaptive_path