wake up!

My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson. Here are my slides.

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UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):

At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)

I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.

In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.

For now, here are my summit talks:

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and

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Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:

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When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.

Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.

This made my day
Originally uploaded by xian.

When I saw someone was using twitter to send out quotations from Buckminister Fuller I was all over that. Getting this email message was just kind of an unexpected side treat.

Now, if Bucky Fuller really was following me on twitter I might feel a little more pressure to be brilliant and cosmic. Like a dweeby Merlin Mann.

Next Tuesday (April 8, 2008) I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on the topic of social patterns in a talk called Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library:

Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty “antipatterns”). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted “in the wild.” The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo’s open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.

I’m still trying to figure out what I can share and what I can’t, so I may focus on social design patterns observed “in the wild,” as well as my current favorite topics of presence, identity, and attention.

BayCHI talks typically have two speakers back to back, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain, who is speaking before me on the topic “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software”:

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, I’ll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.

I don’t want this blog to turn into just a litany of upcoming speaking appearances, but then again it would be foolish not to post these announcements, right?

If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program.

Here are the basic facts about the two workshops (more details in the title links):

• Design patterns: from interaction to design to build is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, colleagues of mine from the user experience design team of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Erin founded the pattern library and has captained it throughout its entire existence (going on four years) with the help of three curators, me being the third. Lucas is the lead designer on the YDN redesign project and works directly with the Yahoo! User Interface library team, so he’s intimately familiar with the development challenges and issues involved with implementing design patterns in the real world.

• Design and architecture of social web experiences is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter. Christina is a director of product management at LinkedIn, a co-founder of the IA Institute, founder of Boxes and Arrows (the leading online user experience design magazine), and founder of Cucina Media, the makers of PublicSquare, the publishing/community software B+A now runs on. Joshua Porter is a former associate of Jared Spool’s UIE and writes the popular Bokardo blog on social web design.

And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:

• Designing with Patterns in the Real World is a presentation I am giving with Austin Govella, a senior information architect at Comcast Media. We both have plenty of hands-on experience with the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs that stem from applying design patterns to real world interaction, information, and interface design problems and we plan to let it all hang out.

• Presence, Identity, and Attention in Social Web Architecture is a panel I’m moderating featuring a “murderer’s row” of some of the leading thinkers in user experience and social web design: Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn, Andrew Hinton of Vanguard, Gene Smith of nForm, and Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing. I’ve been talking to all of these folks for some time about my latest hobbyhorse (presence) and the rest of the “human OS” stack that social web applications are built on. I plan to run a tight ship and am expecting a great multi-perspective dialogue to ensue.

I’ll devote a whole blog post to each of these items as the Summit gets closer, but wanted to mention it now while there’s still time to sign up for the conference at early-bird prices.

See you in Miami?

As the third curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library I often receive a lot of thanks and praise from website designers and developers for the way we at Yahoo! have offered this resource to the world. I usually try to explain that much of the goodness happened before I came on board and that I can’t really take credit for it, but when my ego needs a boost I just smile and nod.

When Erin Malone and Matt Leacock and others first launched the internal pattern library, they presented a talk at the IA Summit, called Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Case Study (and subsequently the linked article on the same topic at Boxes and Arrows). Then Erin and Bill Scott took the library to the public on the Yahoo! Developer Network website and Bill enriched the library with tons of Ajax-y goodness, closely tied to the YUI Library.

Since that time, I came on board and I’ve worked on reorganizing the library, updating the patterns, and shepherding a new generation of patterns through our internal refinement and review process, with an eye toward identifying useful social and openness patterns that we can share with the whole Web. So when people come up to me at conferences or find me on mailing lists for information architects and interaction designers frequently the are curious about how the library has evolved in the years since it was founded, what our internal process looks like these days for writing, reviewing, approving, and rating patterns, and how we decide which ones to publish in the open library.

Recently, I gave a talk at Yahoo! as part of our UED Brown bag series, called The Pattern Library Wants YOU!, intended to update oldtimers on changes and improvements to our process and infrastructure and to orient new designers about the library, and of course to encourage people to get involved. Ricky Montalvo, our ace videographer for YUI Theater and YDN Theater, recorded my talk and edited it together with my slides, and we just spent a week or so removing any too-sensitive information and getting our friendly legal folks to sign off on releasing the talk to the public.

So, without further ado, here is the public version of my talk, which should answer a lot of those questions I’m hearing these days.

(This post was adapted from the YUI blog by sticking it on a block of wood and banging a nail into it.)

At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.

These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).

The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.

Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.

In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.

When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.

Thanks, iTunes!
Originally uploaded by xian.

Not really sure how to respond to this.

Well, actually, I do know how to respond. I had to click Yes.

I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design.

IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea folks together to share their ideas about design, architecture, shared information spaces, visualization of dataa, and what it means to be human in an internetworked machine age. I expect this year’s conference program to be every bit as stimulating.

IDEA stands for Information, Design, Experience, Access, and its presented by the IA Institute, an organization on whose board I have the privilege of serving at this time. My involvement in the conference planning has been focused on getting the website up and recruiting volunteers for the technical tasks required (my portfolio, as it were, on the board of directors of the IAI is technical matters). Events director Sarah Rice, IDEA founder Peter Merholz, and volunteer event coordinator Greg Corrin deserve the credit for pulling this year’s conference together.

Technical volunteers Beck Tench, Chi-chi Oguekwe, Grace Lau, Susan Wong, and Gordon McLean have all chipped in to build and maintain the site, with very little supervision or input from me, so they deserve a great deal of credit as well.

For anyone attending (or thinking of attending) IDEA this year, consider signing up in addition at the Crowdvine social networking site. There’s still time to register (the conference runs on October 4th and 5th, with an optional pre-conference event on the 3rd), and if you do manage to come to New York, look me up at Parsons and say hi.

Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.

According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?

Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.

I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.

Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:

(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)

And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:

John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Blog Merchandising Problem, or, Blogs, V 2.0 (2.1? 3.0?)… (via Jay Fienberg)

The great power of blogs has always been simplicity, but are we ready to go to the next step?

A while back I wanted to comment on Elton’s entry, Information Architecture updated to 3.0, and draw on a post to the IxDA list by Jay Fienberg, talking about the Venn diagrams that might show how the various user experience roles and practices tend to overlap. It seems that each type of practitioner has a tendency to see their own specialty as central and the other practices as peripheral. This isn’t limited to UX folks. You can encounter this with developers and visual designers as well.

One thing I really love about Extractable is the collaborative nature of the people here. No one seems to exhibit the sort of hubris that says “my practice is central - the rest of you need to follow my lead.” Instead there’s a true recognition that a fine user experience (based on a sensitive information architecture, incorporating engaging and immersive visual and interactive design, driven by a stable and responsive application) can only emerge from a process that enables a multidisciplinary team to collaborate as equals.

So, back to Jay’s point. He was responding to a list post by David Fiorito (itself in response to a thread following about the IA 3.0 blog entry by Peter Morville linked in Elton’s piece), in which David said, “Imagine a Venn diagram - one circle is IxD, one IA, and one ID,” as well as, “usability is the means by which we validate IA, IxD, and ID.”

Jay responded (and now I’m going to quote him in full because, well because I don’t think he’ll mind):

I’d add to that Venn diagram:

• content strategy / management
• visual design / graphic arts
• taxonomy

I’m thinking of a Venn diagram that represents possible approaches to dealing with “information challenges” (starting at a level or two up from requirements and objectives / needs*). The areas of overlap in the diagram represent approaches shared by many or all of the disciplines. These common approaches tend to be sufficient for smaller challenges, e.g., there are zillions of web designers who design simple sites, and whose design encompasses IA, IxD, ID, and graphic art. But, each discipline has special approaches that are unique to itself. These unique approaches are either important or essential for dealing with bigger information challenges. I recently worked on a project that had at least one person doing each role of: IA, taxonomy, IxD, visual design, and usability. We also could have used a dedicated content strategist and a dedicated content manager. And, some time from a dedicated ID would have been nice too. We needed each person to do things that the others could not do - or, would not ever get to do, given the range and priority of issues. * Jesse James Garrett’s “The Elements of User Experience” diagram still stands as a pretty good model for of all of this stuff. We might imagine this Venn diagram we’re talking about as a flattened version of Jesse’s diagram. Note that Jesse is probably smarter than all of us for looking at this in two dimensions rather than one - the IA / IxD dichotomy seems like a very minor division in the total scope of factors accounted for in Jesse diagram!

I’ll follow up by noting that Morville has his own honeycomb diagram that places findability in among usability, accessibility and other -bilities. Another famous IA Peter, Peter Boersma, has also popularized the concept of T-shaped people to help explain the sort of well rounded people who often end up architecting information, designing interactions, making interfaces easier to use and so on. They may tend to have a specialty (the “leg” of the T) but they are also broad and have some familiarity with and interest in a series of other “pillar” disciplines (the crossbar of the T - it’s easier to visualize with Peter’s diagrams).

I expect to see these conceptual discussions continue, perhaps at one degree of abstraction (we are all diagram people after all), where instead of practices competing for centrality we’ll see models of how the practices relate to each other competing for supremacy. Good times.

A while back Erik Guttman posted an item to IxDA list discussing the role user research plays in product design:

I have repeatedly attempted to explain how user research can serve to identify, prioritize and clarify product requirements. I have difficulty for a variety of reasons.

• people confuse or fail to see the distinction between inbound marketing research activities with user research
• people fail to distinguish between customers and users
• people do not understand the qualitative methods used to perform user research
• people often confuse user research with usability studies

To clarify these relationships, he created this user research context map, and he’s interested in getting feedback on the subject.

Information Architects Japan has put together and posted an intriguing diagram in the style of a subway map showing many of the key “Web 2.0” players and how they’re related to each other, with subway lines connecting them labeled Main Sites, Hype, Advertisements, Social Networks, Marketing, Blogs, Technology, Content, Usability, Design Openness, Acquisitions, Democracy, and Humor.

Read this, Experience prototyping, a PDF of a paper from the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems in 2000 (sponsored by SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction):

In this paper, we describe “Experience Prototyping” as a form of prototyping that enables design team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future conditions through active engagement with prototypes. We use examples from commercial design projects to illustrate the value of such prototypes in three critical design activities: understanding existing experiences, exploring design ideas and in communicating design concepts.

At long last, just in time for the holidays, I received a review copy of Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning and the book has more than lived up to my high expectations of it. I tore open the envelope and nearly devoured the book in one sitting. If you design or develop websites, if you do information architecture, interaction design, or content strategy, if you care about making online and digital experiences more engaging and easier to use, then this book is for you.

This is not a theoretical book. It is incredibly hands-on, walking the you through some of the most useful user-experience design “deliverables” you’ll need to create for nearly every project you work on. Brown discusses three broad categories of deliverables: user needs documents, strategy documents, and design documents. In this scheme user needs docs include personas, usability test plans, and usability reports; strategy docs include competitive analyses, concept models, and content inventories; and design documents include sitemaps, flow charts, wireframes, and screen designs.

For each deliverable, Brown introduces them with a layer metaphor, first talking about the most impotant elements in each doc, then looking at how to enhance the document, and finally addressing how to fine-tune each document for the project at hand. This layered approach helps the reader see what is essential about each type of document and how to fit the work to the scope of the project.

Brown also recognizes that these deliverables do not operate in a vacuum but rather need to complement and support each other and for each one he explains how they can best work together.

The book includes many real-world examples gathered from Brown’s own work as well as solicited from his vast and deep network of IA’s and other UX professionals. (I submitted a few sitemaps and content inventories to Brown when he was finishing up the book but none made the final cut.)

I probably learned the most from his discussion of concept models, because I have the least amount of experience preparing these types of documents and I’ve always found them to be somewhat intimidating. He explains how to build them up from granular bits and also helps clarify a number of different approaches to connecting the nodes in such documents. He also includes as an illustration a version of Bryce Glass’s after-the-fact Flickr user model, an instant classic of the form.

When talking about wireframes and sitemaps Brown tackles some of the thorniest issues, such as whether and how much to show layout and design elements in wireframes and how best to communicate site flows in an age of increasingly dynamic, application-like websites often built on user-contributed content.

Brown also conveys the complexity and challenges inherent in developing a good content inventory better than I’ve ever seen it discussed before anywhere. He doesn’t gloss over the aspect of drudgery involved in this type of work, and he makes it clear that there is no single cookie-cutter template that is appopriate for every site (nor any useful tool out there to help automate the process), but he equips the reader with the right questions to ask and the right tradeoffs to consider in assembling what is in some ways the most crucial document an IA or content strategist will deliver for any large complex site.

Just to prove I’m not gushing just because I like Brown personally and admire his tremendous contributions to the field, I will say that the weakest chapter is the last one, in which he addresses screen designs (what our visual design colleages typically call “comps”). It may be that because comps are not typically created and delivered by information architects that they perhaps don’t belong in this book. Although the title of the book speaks only of design in general, there are entire realms of visual design that are out of scope here and it may have been better to leave comps out as well. The comp examples are reasonable and inoffensive but uninspiring. The best part of this chapter covers context surrounding these deliverables.

In fact, it is another strength of the book that for each deliverable, Brown describes how best to present the documents: How to run a meeting, how to manage expectations, and - as the book’s title implies - how to communicate the value and meaning of the design documents to your clients. This advice alone justifies the inclusion of this book in any user experience professional’s library. I expect I will continue to refer to this book regularly as long as I’m involved in the planning and design of websites and web-enabled applications.

Kimmy Paluch at Paradyme Solutions has a good article up that helps clarify the meaning of User Experience Design in regard to those other buzzword disciplines such as interaction design, information architecture, usability, and so on.

Scott McDowell has written an article for Boxes and Arrows called Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge about tools for prototyping rich interaction designs. We recently adopted Axure here at Extractable and we’re very jazzed about the way it’s enabling us to do IA work and interaction design and tie together wireframes with sitemaps and process flows and then export them all as a clickable HTML prototype (even if the HTML is still spaghetti).

In this article Scott compares Axure with a number of other products, all of which he calls simulation tools (comparing them to aerospace simulations):

User experience professionals who leverage simulation technology are able to visualize projects much earlier within the development lifecycle, while producing requirements that are much clearer than those generated through traditional requirements gathering processes. In fact, two of these packages, iRise and Serena, were actually created to help business analysts visualize requirements when they didnÕt have access to user experience professionals for that part of a project! One key feature that static wireframes lack is the ability to interact with the interface; by using a simulation tool, this limitation is removed. Software interactivity and ease-of-use, in addition to the portability and reusability of the simulation, are key points to consider in choosing the right simulation software for your company. The next several years should be quite interesting as each of these products continues to improve, adding new features and offering tighter integration with third-party products.

This one, Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design is new from Peachpit:

In this unique book, Dawes invites readers inside a series of his personal projects to get a view of his process—his creative seeing, making, and playing. He encourages designers to look beyond the normal tools of their trade to find inspiration in the most unlikely of places: tubs of childrenÕs clay, anonymous notes, household plumbing fixtures, jazz music, snow globes, fast-food take-out bags, airport departure gates, and more. Brilliant, original, and always grounded in the needs of users, Dawes shares both the techniques he has created and the key lessons he has learned in design: why comfort is the enemy of creativity; how mistakes can be celebrated instead of feared, and how to strip design to its purest and most powerful forms.

The legendary Lance Arthur, missing in action from the web scene for half a decade now (he was spending much of that time with some complicated email service scheme I don’t understand and more recently has been helping to launch Squarespace, the magazine/community CMS Christina Wodtke and company have productized via the revamped Box and Arrows ‘zine), is back and in his inimitably way he makes it clear that he’s not happy with the current state of web design:

Ugly may be too strong a word, actually. MySpace is ugly. Butt ugly. Bufugly. Google is simple. YouTube is somewhere in-between. And you may want to point at them — Google in particular — and argue that it is designed, and designed perfectly. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the success that it is, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue the point, other than to say that if I were a competitor, I wouldn’t do it the same way because if you’re trying to differentiate yourself from someone else, you don’t do it by looking exactly like them. There are definite differences between the sites on the attainment of their goal, but they all have the exact same goal in mind and it is the same goal as any other public web site, and that’s to get and keep the attention of as many people as possible. Perhaps death is too strong a word, maybe it’s merely in a coma. Maybe the pastelization and rounded-corner floaty bits signals a tidal change that there’s no recovering from, maybe that look that’s becoming so damned prevalent everyone one looks is merely how the web is going to loo because people like it and it lends a sameness to everything that accompanies a kind of comfort factor that everyone, seemingly, has been wanting all along but never managed to find.

Mark noticed this Businessweek article on how Yahoo! mined their user-click data to inform the redesign of their home page (How Yahoo! Gave Itself A Face-Lift):

To avoid design by committee, Yahoo deferred almost every decision to an impartial judge: data generated by users’ clicks. “We have this culture of data,” Bhat explains. “It is the biggest enforcer of honesty.” If sales wanted an ad smack dab in the front page’s prime real estate, the company would whip up a page to those specifications, serve it to actual users, and record their clicks. If traffic increased, great. If not, it was back to the drawing board. The refreshed home page went live in September. Now, with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to promote the redesign under way, the company is keen to see whether it has truly created a page based on what users like rather than what Yahoo wants. … Yahoo made a commitment to harnessing its trove of user clicks in 2004 when it acquired DMX Group, a data mining consultancy founded by former Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) researchers. Now called Strategic Data Solutions (SDS), the department has a daunting task: combing through the 10 terabytes of data that Yahoo users generate daily by clicking links (the equivalent of all the text in the Library of Congress), plucking out the relevant bits, compressing it, and storing it. So far, Yahoo has enough user data to fill more than 1,000 Libraries of Congress. Of course, all that information would be useless without a way to make sense of them. Before Yahoo bought DMX Group, a simple test of how users interact with a page required help from technologists and a month of preparation. Now nearly all employees have access to easy-to-use software tools that can run tests over a few hours or days. Along with providing the tools, the SDS department has worked to spread the gospel of data. “We say: Use data to make decisions. Don’t make decisions based on a fad or what your competitors are doing,’” says Bassel Ojjeh, vice-president for SDS.

To be clear, Yahoo! didn’t rely entirely on data alone to make all of their crucial design decisions:

What Yahoo learned often belied initial impressions. Throughout the redesign, the company used a blend of focus groups, one-on-one interviews, test pages, and data mining. “What people say they want isn’t always what they actually click on,” Bhat says. In focus groups, users consistently said they wanted serious world news. “I don’t want Britney Spears anywhere on my page,” Bhat recalls one user saying. “What if my boss came by and saw?” But when Bhat’s team studied users’ clicks, world news got little attention, while Britney Spears stories ranked among the most heavily trafficked. The mixed messages led to important insights. In the end, Yahoo kept world news prominent on the front page because users feel secure knowing that it’s easily accessible, even if they don’t often click it. Conspicuous placement also went to entertainment, which draws heavy traffic from people seeking a diversion at work. By contrast, seemingly work-related content such as finance gets ample use in the evening when people pay bills and manage personal portfolios. Another gem unearthed through data mining: Small changes can make a big difference. The redesign team was excited about a new feature called Personal Assistant, which lets users hover their pointers over icons to see preview boxes of content such as e-mail. “We knew this was going to be the wow’ element of the page,” Bhat says. But the data showed that users were less than wowed. Turns out the preview boxes opened too quickly, an unusual peeve in this caffeinated, wired world. So the team began fiddling with the speed at which the preview boxes appeared and introduced a slight delay. Bingo. Although Yahoo’s front-page redesign is finished, the testing is not. “There’s always some test running,” Bhat says. “It’s part of our DNA.” Now if only Yahoo could collect as much data about its advertisers’ spending habits.

Over at Juxtaprose (just added to our blogroll), Jay Fienberg recently wrote about the danger of making a fetish of any one particular tool in your toolkit:

But, no matter how magical a saw, it’s not so great for the people who need to drive nails. And, it’s not like hammers work and saws don’t - theyÕre just different tools that do different things. Working from the strategic, information architecture-informed approach, we aren’t tied to one information tool over another. We get to see firsthand (and, otherwise, we study secondhand) all kinds of different tools in different environments, used by different people for different tasks. And, we get to use this approach to find and design the right tools for specific people to get good information (where “good information” is, in itself, often something specific to those specific individuals).

On the IxDA list, LukeW asked which metrics or criteria can be used to judge “good” interaction design. Kim Goodwin wrote an excellent reply, saying “A few of us at Cooper were kicking this question around with Hugh Dubberly several years ago. We came up with 4 criteria we felt applied to all sorts of design, not just interaction.”

Here four criteria boil down to some excellent ideals to shoot for:

• Ethical: Do no harm
• Purposeful: Help users accomplish their goals
• Pragmatic: Meet constraints and accomplish business goals
• Elegant: A good design is the simplest complete solution

The first rang a bell with me. I’ve been telling clients for years that I like to follow a sort of Hippocratic oath with web strategy. First of all, do no harm. Do not take away features the customer likes because you have something “better” coming. To quote Dave Winer, “don’t break users.”

Kim Goodwin elaborates this way:

Ideally, a designer’s first rule is the same as a physician’s: do no harm. In the case of surgery tools, car dashboards, and airplane cockpits, this is obvious: don’t kill people. However, even business software can do harm by wasting a user’s time, leading to errors, contributing to repetitive stress injuries, or just making people feel dumb. Of course, there are likely a few situations where this principle is challenging, such as a missile guidance system - if you had to design something of that sort, the principle might have to be interpreted as “minimize harm by making darn sure you hit the intended target.”

I’ve often said that game interfaces tend to more forward-looking than those of productivity applications and that younger people are having their expectations set by the experiences they have playing games on their computers, on their TVs, on their playstations and mobile devices, and online in general.

Usually I haven’t pushed this idea too much further, though. How can we best capture these innovations coming from the game space and apply them to the nongaming part of the Web?

This blog post suggests a few ideas about what the online multiplayer fantasy game World of Warcraft can teach people developing “Web 2.0” sites. I’m not sure all of the suggestions are particularly compelling, but I fully agree with the last two:

• User Feedback: The WoW Community is both strong and vocal and its good to see when a lot of people agree on changes that should be made, many times Blizzard (the creators of the game) implement those changes in one of their weekly patches. Which brings us to…
• Frequent Updates: Updates don’t necessarily mean features, but even small tweaks allow your users to know that you still care about your site and are working on things. However, don’t tweak just because you want to look fresh, tweak for improvement.

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).

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?

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).