October 2006 Archives

Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.”

This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting email message about how she became a community advocate and what the job entails. I asked for her permission to reprint it here on the blog and she agreed:

It’s a really interesting question because it’s one that those of us in these roles are asking and answering for ourselves as we go along. I know another person who does a similar job at another site, and what she and I both have in common is that we were underemployed, educated moms for a couple years, spending way too much time on social networking sites and blogs and such. We are online community junkies. I was a latecomer to the internet, partly because I lived in France during the 90s and partly because the internet never really seemed that compelling until I found my first online community (an egroup of friends of a friend, all from Iowa like myself). Email? I was and still am an avid epistolarian (is that a word?). Buy train tickets online? I pass the SNCF outlet every day. But yack it up with a bunch of new and old friends, gossip, tell secrets, discover that the imaginary people are actually real… that’s compelling. Both myself and my friend got our jobs by writing a lot of free feedback for friends’ websites and having the friends say, “Hey, want to work on this project with us?”

There’s an interesting problem in the social web boom. Often the people who are most knowledgeable and savvy about the politics, functioning, and workings of online communities are people who have been spending a lot of time slacking off in front of the computer in recent years. How does a new blogging network service, for example, go about recruiting these slackers? Or even understanding that it would be a good idea to have one on staff? I know of one site that had a guy in my role whose background was in e-commerce. He had never belonged to or even heard of any major online communities except for Friendster. He didn’t even really use the site he worked for that much! But he was recruitable.

I do a lot of different things at Platial. Marketing to be sure, but specifically grassroots-style, relatively low-impact marketing. I contact people who have great content and try to help them make maps. I write to online community mods and ask them to post about maps that I think are interesting to their communities. I write to bloggers.

The most important thing I do in my job is I communicate with users. That’s the community I’m advocating for. I make more maps than anyone and know how to use the site best. I gather feedback, I chart feedback, I follow up on feedback. I’ve got some kind of friendly relationship with most of our main power users. If I notice someone on the site having trouble with their images or something, I send them a message offering help. I answer ever single feedback email we get within a week, usually faster. I listen to people and I advocate within the company for what the users are asking for. Because I use the site myself every day, I know their frustrations when things are broken and I know the excitement when a long-awaited feature gets added.

I also try to make connections between users sometimes. We have a beta tester club comprised of people I’ve chosen to invite because of the high quality of their feedback. These people get early notification of new features and often get to test drive stuff on a testing site we set up. It’s great having a bunch of extra hands on the site looking for glitches in the hours before a new site launch, and we really appreciate how much those people care about what we do.

I keep the faq updated, I make how-to screencasts and instructables, I blog, and I do a ton of qa. We’re a small company (5 full time, one part time, and a design intern), so everyone ends up doing a lot.

Thanks for your time (if you made it all the way to the end—I know it’s long). When I read your post it set me to thinking.

So there you have it.

Google is getting serious about its online groupware offerings, adding JotSpot to Writely (now part of their Docs and Spreadsheets offering). CNet has more as some analysis including a mention of Wetpaint the hosted wiki service that drives our client HTC’s user-community site.

Last year I did National Novel Writing Month and managed to bang out 30,000 words of my novel For You, The Stars.

I wrote nearly every day of the month and averaged slightly more than 1000 words a day, short of the 50,000 word target for NaNoWriMo participants but still a heckuva lot more fiction writin’ than I usually do.

In fact, in the elevent months since I’ve added just one or two thousand word installments to the pile. So this year I’m going to do it again. I estimate that the first draft of this novel needs to be about 80-100,000 words, so if I keep up the pace I managed last year I’ll have the draft 2/3rds done by the end of the month.

For those hooked readers who occasionally send me “what happened next?” comments, thanks! Your encouragement - while not sufficient to drive me to the keyboard much since January - has definitely contributed to my desire to keep writing this occasionally very dirty novel.

Tim “Invented the Web” Berners-Lee on a way to evolve HTML without the abrupt disorienting changes characterized by the switch the XHTML: Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco families, neighbors and concerned citizens across the City.”

Here’s more about the series:

Offered 4 times during the school year, the series seeks to grow a sense of community and demonstrate Grattan School’s commitment to being a place where the well being of children and families are addressed at the highest level, where dynamic thinking occurs, and where community is engaged. The talks will be held in the school’s auditorium and a suggested donation of $8 will be asked for at the door, with all proceeds benefiting the school. No one will be turned away.

In addition to the evening adult audience, each speaker will also be asked to commit to time with Grattan kids during regular school hours, thereby integrating the speaker themes into our student community. These kid forums may take the form of general assemblies or small classroom audiences and will be offered at an age-appropriate level.

Dates:

• Thursday, September 28 - Tim Redmond, Editor-in-Chief of the Bay Guardian
• Thursday, November 16 - Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist
• Thursday, January 18 - tbd
• Thursday, March 1 - tbd

Newmark will be speaking on the topic “craigslist (community in the 21st century).”

When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone” and gmailed to myself:

warner:
tech change cuts through everything

fundamentalist fear of sweeping change… how to prepare people for the inevitable change?

beyond tech industry policy issues

how to help people get their voices heard

most politicians lesson from Dean is fundraising, meetup, and something vague about blogs

danah:
media, always a generation gap

natural to kids, unnatural to parents

adina:
industry issues more about incumbancy vs innovations

warner:
i fought the incumbents on the telecom issues

i think we need a national policy re broadband and need to protect innovator’s ip

??:
a creative commons model plus individual choice

adina?:
principles going back to the founders

anil:
tech industry is politically incompetent

we look to politicians for leadership

tech change not inevitable

warner:
i would argue america got seduced by the tech bubble

but it’s happening now… evangelism is called for

jon:
and education

danah:
we are behind in mobile because of carrier lock down

politics needs to get beyond money

me:
how to get politics beyond money???

warner:
tech = economic promise but the issue got elevated beyond national leadership

mary:
i disagree

craig:
i strongly disagree

mary:
1890s railroads bubble (analogy), then carnegie

was approached by a candidate in 2004 but not interested in campaigns… unless it’s taken straight into governance… but they were scared

craig:
acceleration… viet nam 8 yrs, iraq 3 yrs
in the next 3 wks i’m scared of a gulf of tonkin

i believe just get the bad guys out of the way…

kaliya:
overarching theme is freedom

anil, wagner james:
techies exhibit real unseriousness about terrorism and predators

wj:
partisanship

space race target analogy

cultural not political the 30s

danah:
parks analogy

me:
freedom opportunity national greatness

Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly:

It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model.

The key ideas are

1. using tags (no groups)
2. +/- feedback (no moderators)
3. browsing (tagged) users (social networking potential)

Hopefully it would reach some kind of critical mass, prove some value and take 1 of 2 directions:

1. a delicious-like database. Ideally this would make niche discussions possible, something like a long tail of discussions.
2. an open source piece of software that would compete with current message boards. In this case the news would be that discussions and users could now (at least theoretically) be aggregated thanks to tags.

It’s online since 4 weeks. It is currently just a prototype with about 30 users.

Sounds like an interesting experiment.

According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.”

Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set, viewable by any browser; it also has the option of creating a simple prototype from all your wireframes.” It’s suited for collaboration by teams of multiple IAs and it doesn’t require any special plugins to view the HTML prototype output.

Niewland suggests that the prototypes created by swipr are suitable for early usability testing, and that the documents print well from Visio.

At swipr.com you can download the software (still in beta), see examples, and contribute to a forum.

Thanks, Jacco!

Austin Govella posted a link to the IA Institute mailing list the other day pointing to Yahoo Time Capsule, an intriguing project for gathering memories from users and making them browsable in interesting and innovative ways (that may break the browser in some use cases, but still… pretty cool).

For pictures of information architecture in everyday life, check out the Everyday Information Architecture group on Flickr.

Users can create customized search engines for their sites to focus on any kind of content.

In another round of battle against Yahoo, Google has introduced a customized version of its search engine that will enable bloggers and other web site operators to offer a specialized form of Google to search for specific kinds of content, like a favorite sports team, actor, or hobby. The service, dubbed Google Customized Search Engine, allows users to select which web pages they want to include in a Google index, how the content should be prioritized, whether other users can also contribute to the index, and what the search results page will look like. The Mountain View, California, search giant is upping the stakes in its rivalry against Yahoo, which offers its own customized search engine, Search Builder. Other search vendors also offer such features, like blinkx, which recently introduced a customized version of its video search engine.

This article in UX Matters talks about designing breakthrough products and offers some interesting ideas on innovation and solving problems that sometimes people don’t even realize they have. Bonus Extractable content: One of the case studies is Vocera, a client of ours that makes a Star Trek-like ubiquitous communication system. The homepage of the website we redesigned for them serves as an illustration for that part of the article.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen defuses Apple’s large display sales ploy with an insightful article here. So much for my new 30”-er on the company tab.

Extractable’s Director of Strategic Services, Christian Crumlish, was recently named to the board of directors for the Information Architecture Institute.

The Information Architecture Institute is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. Founded in 2002, the Institute has over 1000 members in 60 countries.

Christian will serve on the board from 2006 through 2008. He will be the primary owner of IT and Web Operations for the group.

Rich Internet Application (RIA) formats, such as Ajax, Flex, OpenLazslo, XAML, and so on, are all the rage on the Web these days, but sometimes the tradeoff involved in moving from a clunky-feeling page-at-a-time forms-driven web interface model to the more snappy thick-client feel of RIAs is a loss in accessibility (as well as issues like breaking the back button and, as we saw with frames back in the day, the difficulty of bookmarking specific states in the middle of an interaction).

Now it looks like the W3C is taking the bull by the horns: W3C Announces Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

Dynamic Web Content Currently Excludes Many Users: Assistive technologies, including screen readers, speech dictation software, and on-screen keyboards help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities. To accomplish this, these tools require information about the semantics of specific portions of a document in order to present those portions in an accessible form. For example, to provide reliable access to a form element, a tool must also be able to recognize the state of that element (for example, whether it is checked, disabled, focused, collapsed, or hidden). Web sites are increasingly delivering applications with capabilities comparable to locally-installed software. These rich Internet applications make heavy use of scripting, and developers often improvise hybrids of existing technologies, including AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript, and SVG. These applications do not always provide the semantics needed to support these technologies. People with disabilities are therefore at risk of being left out of this new world of information.

TechCrunch tells us:

Google will soon begin offering AdWords advertisers a new tool to experiment with a variety of different landing page layouts in order determine which one gains the most conversions from site visitors. Google Analytics Senior Manager Brett Crosby unveiled the tool, called Google Website Optimizer, this morning at the eMetrics summit in Washington D.C. If you find web site traffic heat maps like CrazyEgg, ClickDensity or Google Analytics’ own heat map interesting, this looks like the next generation of that kind of tool. If Google’s Website Optimizer can score high on usability, I expect it to be a big hit with small and medium size website publishers.

I’ve been hearing rumblings about a bunch of books in the pipeline of various publishers on designing for the mobile interface, including one to be called Designing the Mobile User Experience and another called Mobile Web Design. There are others too, but I don’t have links handy (yet).

Update: Scott Weiss just posted about a few more to the IxDA list, including his own Handheld Usability, Mobile Interaction Design by Matt “Blackbelt” Jones amd Gary Marsden, and a book by Nokia called Mobile Usability that Weiss says “is more an inside look into Nokia than a design tutorial.”

One more that was mentioned in the same list thread was Designing for Small Screens by Carola Zwick and Burkhard Schmitz.

Any others?

Today Microsoft is intending to release the latest version of Internet Explorer. IE 7 features a cleaned up appearance, tabs (a favorite feature of Mozilla Firefox), RSS feed support, better printing and most importantly, improved support for HTML and CSS standards.

CNET reports that Yahoo! has beat Microsoft to the punch by release their own customized version of IE 7 already.

Scott Berkun writes about Why innovation efforts fail, citing a few common problems (“task forces and committees are separate from the real teams,” suggestions are vetoed, innovation must be a core value and not an add-on). He also identifies a few factors that help innovation succeed (startign with a pilot project, willingness to accept risks, “avoidance of innovation for innovation’s sake”).

We’re not the only shop working on mobile user interfaces these days and we’re learning quickly as we go and absorbing advice and insight from multiple sources and directions. Here’s an article published last week in UX Matters called Designing the Mobile User Experience with some good food for thought.

Nice article (well part 1, at least) on the sudden rise and total domination of Flash video over the last year or so: The Rise of Flash Video, Part 1

John Kolko, a teacher at Savannah College of Art & Design, is writing and self-publishing a book called Thoughts on Interaction Design. He’s also blogging the process as he goes along. (It’s his first book, his first attempt at publishing, and his first business, so he’s treating the entire experience as an experiment.)

His book will join Dan Saffer’s recent Designing for Interaction (Wiley, 2006),

Bill Moggridge’s recent Designing Interactions (MIT Press, 2006), Jenifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces (O’Reilly, 2005), and Future Interaction Design (Springer, 2005); as well as older tomes including Barbara Mirel’s Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving: Developing Useful and Usable Software (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2003); Jenny Preece’s, Yvonne Rogers’, and Helen Sharp’s Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (Wiley, 2002); Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann’s About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design (Wiley, 2003), which was the second edition of a book originally published with a slightly different subtitle seven years earlier; and Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface (Cambridge, 1991).

Film at 11: Official Google Blog: About that fake post

Dan and I flew into JFK on JetBlue last night and we noticed that JetBlue offers free wifi in their waiting area, but while trying to access this service we noticed several open peer-to-networks labeled “Jet Blue hot spot” or variations on that name. None of these were the actual free access point (which was called something generic, like “default”). We speculated that hackers were trying to lure people into these pseudo connection points. If so, someone ought to tell JetBlue. If not, what were all those p2p access points?

Digital Web has now published the second part of the Competitive Analysis chapter from Dan Brown’s book, Communicating Design.

Todd Warfel reports that the inevitable bakeoff inside the Adobe-Macromedia merger has resulted in the winding down of FreeHand (in favor of Illustrator) and GoLive (in favor of Dreamweaver).

(btw, I know this was in May - so I’m slow on the uptake - so sue me!)

This Slashdot article on an IE/Y!IM clickfraud exploit makes me wonder if the whole basis of online advertising is under assault, if there’s a chance we could see the sort of collapse that followed the banner-ad kiting practices of bubble 1.0, and if some new models of search engine ad-word placement are going to have to emerge to continue to fight this arms race.

I was perusing my friend Levi Asher’s digg page (he is “asheresque” there and elsewhere online), and I stumbled upon this nearly not-safe-for-work blog entry about a particularly unhappy juxtaposition of banner ads.