Recently in Teamwork, Process, and Collaboration Category

In anticipation of the Pattern Library workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, Will Evans interviewed us for Boxes & Arrows, the premiere user experience magazine online.

Will asked great questions and I think he brought out some interesting discussion among us all. Here’s a taste:

Question: I have heard it argued that use of design patterns and pattern libraries removes creativity and innovation from the solution-finding process? Do these criticisms have merit?

xian: I don’t really think that argument holds water. I do understand the concern, and it’s totally possible to apply patterns mindlessly or to force their use inappropriately, but, to my mind, patterns focus innovation and creativity on the leading edge of the problem: the unsolved part.

Read the whole thing over at B&A!

I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of social web design patterns).

If you’re interested in joining this conversation, let me know and I’ll invite you when the list is set up.

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.

I wish I could have been at the recent Chicago IxDA Pattern Library conversation, a participatory discussion about using pattern libraries in practice.

I appreciate the shout-out for the open Yahoo! pattern library and I welcome the questions about how our non-public-facing library actually works. In fact, I am currently putting together a brown bag talk I’ll be giving in Sunnyvale tomorrow to catch up and fill in our own user experience designers on what’s new in the pattern library, what have we changed, what have we learned, what’s been working, what hasn’t been working, and how they can contribute and get the most out of it.

While this is an internal-facing talk, I believe the camera guys from the Yahoo! Developer Network will be filming it so as long as I don’t slip and give away our secret plan to equip everyone on the planet with a jetpack (oops!) there might be an opportunity for the interested general public to see the talk.

In Chicago, it sounds like they raised all the right sorts of questions:

Are we confusing pattern with component, pattern library with style guides?

Is a lightbox a pattern or a solution, or is that one and the same?

How do we have a group of people come to a consensus on what should constitute a pattern?

How do we justify the time spent in creating the resource?

Does this need to be tied back to code to be efficient?

How do we institutionalize its use? Here you create this thing… does it die the minute you look the other way?

Should an agency have one? How would that work across clients? Could it be high-level enough to be useful?

I think the answers to many of these questions are situational. There’s an interesting tension between pattern-language purity and practical usefulness. In my experience a working pattern library has to straddle that line between enshrining time-worn principles and providing handy reusable components.

I think a pattern library can be considered a sort of style guide, although the discipline of expressing patterns as solutions to problems in context takes it away from the more changeable, spec-oriented, visual-centric style guides most of us are familiar with.

The granularity question (lightbox? slider? carousel? etc.) needs to be answered in context. I’d say whatever works for the people who have to actually use the library is what you should do. Don’t get too hung up on semantics and purity.

Building consensus is probably the most interesting challenge, although of course it depends on the size and structure of the organization in question. This is something I plan to address at several conferences over the next year (organizers willing).

Justifying the time spent on the resource has to be based on time saved and efficiencies realized in the future. If you can’t get that “return on investment” it’s frankly not worthwhile to put together such a resource. However, do carefully look at what time and efforts are being wasted if a large team keeps designing the same interactions over and over.

Wherever possible, I think patterns should be tied back to code. I don’t consider the code samples to be part of the pattern language proper, but I think the best patterns are augmented by many visual examples (including animations), interaction and visual specs, code samples, reference implementations, prototypes, and templates and stencils for rapid reuse. You won’t always have all these elements available but the more the better.

I’ll leave the agency question for the community to discuss. I suspect it would have to be fairly high level to work at all. But then again what agency doesn’t reuse some tried-and-true wireframes or other conceptual documents and diagrams?

Janna Hicks DeVylder wrote on the ixda list, “It’s clear that people are interested in this, but it feels like we want to see its utility proven out past just the creation of the library. I would love to hear about the successes and challenges Yahoo has faced with their non-public facing library. Sounds like a great conference topic to me!”

I agree! I have a panel on this topic (Pattern Libraries: The Devil’s In the Details) under consideration for South by Southwest. The panelists include Austin Govella and Jenifer Tidwell. I’m also about to propose a slightly different talk with Austin for the IA Summit, this one focused a bit more on the information architecture and social organization of pattern libraries (for effective use). In both cases I will be drawing on the lessons we’ve learned at Yahoo: what’s worked and what hasn’t and how we’ve changed course and refined our ideas to continue building consensus around a core library.

I’ve also got a lightning-session proposal submitted for Interaction08 where I will talk about a new wave of social media patterns (and toolkits - a concept I’d love to explain further) we’re currently incubating in our internal-facing library.

I blogged just recently here on the “bastardization” as Janna put it, of the pattern term. I understand why it’s happening (and in general I am more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist when it comes to language use), but I will probably continue to speak up for the idea that to be called a design pattern something must at the very least be described in terms of context, problem, and solution.

Lastly, I want to note that I think the consensus from Chicago is dead-on when addressing the role of patterns in innovation. Patterns are inherently not about innovation. They are about tried-and-true dependable solutions. What they do is free the designer up to create and innovate on the leading edge of the design problem, without having to dedicate as much energy to “reinventing the wheel.” Inevitably, we will all end up retracing each other’s steps frequently as we learn to design, but whenever we can learn from the successes of the past, I think it behooves us to do so.

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.

Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.)

Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li and her collaborator are using a full suite of “living web” tools to write their book, Groundswell (why does that name sound familiar?): Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): 7 ways the Web makes writing a book better & faster:

1. Collaboration with a wiki. Charlene and I have put as much as we can into a SocialText wiki. It’s contains research interviews, title ideas, the latest table of contents, the elements of the proposal that got us here, everything. I just added a page which tracks all the chapters as they move through various writing, editing, and review stages. We don’t generally use the Wiki to write the chapters — the drafts still move back and forth by email, partly since SocialText can’t quite handle all the formatting flexibility that MS Word can — but copies of the chapters do live there. A bicoastal collaboration needs a wiki. We also share it with other interested parties including my boss, Charlene’s boss, and our editor at HBS Press.

2. This blog for testing ideas. I can’t count the ways that a blog helps. When we think we have a good idea, it goes up here. For example, the five goals of a company for social computing, which became the core of the book. We put our outline up here for your review. That post became extremely useful, because I reference it in every email I send to people I’m trying to influence or interview. People doing interesting things contact us because of the blog. And I’m not even getting to the uses of the blog for promotion, which will start after the book is written, but well before it’s published.

3. Del.icio.us for gathering research documents. Every story, vendor, YouTube video, and anything else on the Web gets tossed into the del.icio.us bucket. I rarely used to bookmark things — now I bookmark everything. These sites are even classified with our own proprietary set of tags that indicate what chapter they relate to. (We’ll share this when the book is closer to done — right now it’s proprietary.) I don’t believe we could have written this book without del.icio.us.

4. Email for everything — but highly personalized. Every single contact in this book — and there will be hundreds and hundreds — will have been made by email. I’m sure you’re not surprised that I email Charlene 10 times a day and do a few IM conversations, but I’m talking about making introductions by email. If I need to introduce myself to somebody, I send a personalized email describing the book in one sentence, linking to the blog post about the book, and telling them what I want and making it clear I have researched them and know what they are about — and I frequently get a response the same day. This email might take 15 minutes to write, but it’s worth it — it’s the opposite of mass emailings, highly personal and personalized. (I recently invited a CEO to speak at our Forum in October and got an affirmative response within two hours — astounding our events team.) Where do I get the email addresses? Forrester has a database that may or may not help. Easier is finding the PR email address on a company’s site. Often somebody I know, knows it. Sometimes I use Zoominfo’s PowerSearch. And sometimes, if I know the email address of somebody else at the company, I guess based on that format. That actually works — recently got the CEO of an Italian company to get back to me that way.
   
   At first I had big spreadsheets full of contacts I was pursuing on Google docs but I’ve found a better way. I just flag all incoming and outcoming mail that relates to contacts. The yellow flag means I’ve pinged somebody and need them to get back to me. Then I just check all those flags when I’m in followup mode. It’s not ACT, but it works for me!

5. A big monitor in a quiet office. When I am ensconced in my home office with my high-speed Internet, VOIP phone line, home network, and big flat monitor, I am highly productive. The big monitor has made a big difference — I no longer feel cramped and squeezed by my laptop screen, and I frequently have one thing up on the laptop (like a Web site, or edits I need to address, or an interview) while I write on the big monitor. When I’m not at home, my productivity goes down. My home office, while it’s in the basement, also has a window out onto my lawn, a fireplace, a hardwood floor, big whiteboards filled with the stuff I’m working on and my kids’ artwork, and quick access to the kitchen and my family when I need to decompress. Makes all the hours possible.

6. A phone line that follows me anywhere. Forrester has an Avaya phone system with a cool little feature — an Internet app I can run on my laptop that turns any phone into my office phone. At my home office, I can call Japan using Forrester’s phone system, conference people together, transfer them to other Forrester extensions — everything I can do at my desk. And if I go anywhere else, I can do this with any phone line — my mobile, Forrester’s Foster City office, or my parents’ house. People see my caller ID as if I were calling from Forrester, and my voicemail is one click away. I find this far better than giving everyone my mobile phone number.

7. Firefox and Netvibes. I use Firefox for everything possible, because the tabbed browsing and the bookmarklets make it very efficient for me. I cannot survive without tabbed browsing since I am typically browsing 4 or 8 things at once to build a chapter. (I know IE has tabbed browsing now but it’s too late, I’m happy with Firefox.) I use Netvibes to track a surprisingly small number of blogs including Micropersuasion, The Church Of The Customer, The Long Tail, Blog Maverick, and Seth Godin. I also have up TechCrunch, GigaOm, TechMeme, and TechDirt, but they post so frequently that I don’t read them unless something catches my eye.

(via allaboutgeorge)

I am curating a series of articles at the venerable information architecture (and user experience) web magazine Boxes and Arrows, based on the panel I moderated on the same topic at this year’s IA Summit.

The first article in the series is Joe Lamantia’s It Seemed Like the Thing to Do at the Time: The Power of State Mind. Joe looks at the big picture, literally, comparing business failure ot catastrophic societal failure, using the Easter Island culture as a case study (as well as his own experience with a startup).

I’m really glad to see this article published because we had limited time on the panel and I wanted to hear more of Joe’s thoughts about these scenarios.

Fascinating stuff and more to come.

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:

Todd Warfel shared an interesting deliverable, The Task Analysis Grid, a sort of visual substitute for a requirements document, saying

Personally, I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, we use something different - a task analysis grid….

Each column starts out with a scenario, describes a task and is followed by all the sub-tasks necessary to complete the task. The sub tasks are colour-coded and prioritized from 1 (must haves) to 4 (some day in the future).

This is one of our most successful artifacts during the design process (next to personas and wireframes). A client once said that this artifact “takes our 60 page requirements document and distills it down to one page.”

[E]ssentially, this single document allows anyone looking at it to see the entire scope of a project, figure out what’s in this release (1) as well as what we’re planning for future releases (2, 3, and 4). It’s an extremely effective artifact for getting everyone on the same page.

I wrote a little blurb for the IAI Newsletter this month introducing the information architecture deliverables we’re using to guide the relaunch of the Institute website:

WEBSITE REDESIGN We’ve all heard the cop out about the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes. Most of us have probably made that excuse about our own neglected personal websites as we spend all our time working for clients or doing paying work. But everyone agrees that the website for the IA Institute needs to be exemplary. It should exhibit solid IA fundamentals, a great user experience, and seamless usability. We all know that the current site falls short of these targets in several respects. There has been a site redesign project underway as long as I’ve been a member of the Institute. When I joined the board of directors this fall I expressed some interest in the progress of the website relaunch and was rewarded with the role of IT/Web director. I began reviewing the documents associated with the redesign project and was impressed by the depth and thoroughness of the process and deliverables. I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me, given the core capabilities of so many of our members. (The site relaunch, just like the original site, relies entirely on the volunteer efforts of our members.) So, in the interests of transparency and as a way of sharing with our stakeholders some insight into the redesign process, we’re including a link to our IA concept documents for the site redesign in this newsletter (and we plan to continue posting our documentation as the project continues to give our membership some visibility into the progress we’re making.) View the concept map on the IAI website. Note that these are final deliverables and we are not circulating them to seek amendments or suggestions. The project is well on its way based on these IA documents. We are close to selecting a final design approach and volunteers are busily implementing some of the new technical features and grooming the old site content. In fact, we are seeking a volunteer to help review and revise the content in the Education section of the site, so if you are interested, please contact Melissa Weaver at volunteer AT iainstitute DOT org to volunteer. Christian Crumlish, IAI Board of Directors Information Technology/Web

The deliverable includes some conceptual maps, some use cases, a navigation map and a set of wireframes. Hat’s off to Wolf Noeding, who created the documents based on research, surveys, and input from the members and board of the Institute.

On the IA Institute mailing list Patrick Walsh recently asked, “Is Stakeholder Analysis/Mapping a commonly used tool by IAs? It helps to identify all relevant stakeholders at the start of a project and can help ensure that they do not get overlooked.” He also pointed to a 2004 article in Boxes and Arrows by Jonathan Boutelle called Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success.

As long as I’ve been doing IA and related work I’ve understood stakeholder interviews, at the very least, to be a cornerstone of the discovery process. I had just assumed this was par for the course. Isn’t this how everyone does it?

Often the challenge is getting beyond the obvious stakeholders and getting access to the external stakeholders. There are a number of techniques for doing this, some qualitative (surveys, focus groups, interviews) and some quantitative (traffic analysis), but often I find that we need to rely on internal people, such as customer-support representatives, as proxies for external stakeholders because they at least have direct contact with them and are aware of some of their most pressing concerns.

Joshua Porter wrote a terrific article about Netflix and their Fast Iteration process. Since UIE is more of a design and user experience shop, the article focuses primarily on creative designers, but I think that the concepts apply equally to developers. At Extractable, we are always trying to move away from a classic waterfall process and towards a more agile/iterative process with each new project.

So how often does Netflix update its site? Every 2 weeks.

Every 2 weeks they make significant changes. They understand that some of the changes will work, but most won’t.

At first, this sounds like a frustrating design constraint. In talking with the team, we realized that it doesn’t frustrate them at all. Instead, it frees them up to be flexible and adaptive, so they can react effectively to customer needs. As a result, they don’t deal with the many “when we redesign” issues that so many of us deal with in the design world. They’re building for the present — all the time.

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”).

Dan sent me this link to an article on project management at the Ektron website. I especially like the idea of a project blog (or project log, as I prefer to think of it), since to me it seems like the natural way to post updates and circulate information - infinitely preferable to an endless stack of email messages.

I did like Lost in Translation, but I agree with I think about six of the Eight Things IÕm Supposed to Love But DonÕt from The Bivings Report (especially the bit about preferring Ze Frank’s The Show to Rocketboom).

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan for Peachpit/New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.

I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as and she’s known as . A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan È interview with christian crumlish.

In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, and the long tail. Hope you enjoy it (in lieu of Friday UX blogging, which I’m too lazy busy to do today.