I'm Todd Sieling, and I've been designing information architecture, software experiences and product management for over twelve years. I help product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Learn how I help make better software experiencesNewly-launched Fflick taps into Twitter to get opinions on movies, most notably from your friends. It’s a neat idea and a good-looking build that advances the idea of Twitter as a platform. It also makes one big mistake by co-opting people’s identities and using them as shills to grow the perceived community size.
If you’ve been in software and website development long enough to see a few releases, this scenario is likely familiar:
It’s a few days from launch, or just around sign-off on a major design component. Someone on the project has an itch and reaches for external feedback, putting part or all of the design in front of new eyes. Then they ask, innocently enough, “What do you think of this?”
A few months doesn’t seem like very long to look for changes in the landscape of wireframing apps for the iPad. But this is the App Store where life moves fast. In the realm of apps for wireframing, those reviewed last time around have made steady progress while a snappy new player has entered the field to challenge their early dominance.
Some folks wanting to get the word out about what the privacy changes in Facebook mean have been using its API to show what people are posting. In doing so, they make the point that these people likely don’t realize that what they are posting is being shared beyond their friends.
Openbook, the latest to do so, falls into the same problem as pleaserobme.com, which collected tweets and status updates to indicate who was not at home, and personally identified those people and where they lived. Pleaserobme thankfully shut down the service having ‘made their point’.
It takes a certain measure of cruelty to exploit the people you’re trying to protect in order to make your point, much like a person who wants to show how dangerous handguns are starts to go around shooting at people. The right way to make a point like pleaserobme.com or Openbook is to pull the data but obscure the images and names. We don’t need individual identities to believe that the data is real nor to make the point, which is an important one.
And what we really don’t need is to have the damage that Facebook is inflicting on its members amplified by someone trying to make a point. Remember, it’s the people who don’t understand the technology who are getting hurt here, now by two parties instead of just one.
Even when they aren’t part of the deliverables, I write up personas to guide most of my interaction and experience design work. They keep me tuned into motivations and needs that aren’t strictly intuitive to me.
Personas are necessarily artificial; they present a single, fictionalized instance to stand for an entire audience of customers. Despite the assumptions that such abstractions come with, they earn their keep by reminding the development team what’s important to the people they’re building for.
Lately I’ve been wondering about the single-person focus typical to personas, and whether they need to be expanded to capture the real-world social existence of users even when the design doesn’t have socialization as a primary objective.
It’s good to see people talking about Facebook’s dissolution of the privacy walls its members were accustomed to. With any active discussion you get disagreement, but I wasn’t ready to see sentiments suggesting that people deserve embarrassing exposure because they made the mistake of trusting Facebook, or any web service for that matter.
Chris Pirillo, long standing web citizen, really surprised me with this tweet today:
People in the tech world are a-talking, and the words on their lips are straight from a hot headline: WHOA: Google Android Outsells Apple iPhone in US. Like a lot of people, my first thought was that this took a lot less time than I would have thought.
There’s no doubt that mobile is shaping up as a two-horse race between Android and iPhoneOS while RIM dithers in front of a mirror trying to figure out what it wants to be. But figuring out just where each horse is on the track requires a depth of reporting that the tech press isn’t inclined to provide. To help them out, here are a few simple questions about the Android vs. iPhone numbers:
August 30
Tuesday
August 31
Wednesday
September 1
Thursday
September 2
Friday
September 3