Corvus Consulting

If email were an animal it would have to be a shark: it’s been around almost forever in internet time, its basic design all but unchanged by time and circumstance. Email’s success is impressive: it’s an almost universally understood concept; it was the nascent internet’s first killer app; it’s an underpinning of identity in (some) new and legacy web applications.

Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.

Read more »

In June I began working with DreamBank, a Yaletown based startup with a unique idea for reducing waste in gifting by using the social web. By posting a dream, members describe something they truly want as a gift, usually for an upcoming event like a birthday or wedding. Bringing friends and family to the dream, the dreamer can collect contributions towards the goal, foregoing the ‘buy something and hope they like it’ route. It also saves a shopping trip or 10 for those who make their contribution through the DreamBank.

That’s what I’d tell you in the elevator. Others have already blogged about DreamBank and painted a more detailed picture (youtube), and the website itself is generously self-explanatory.

DreamBank’s social model places a high value on being inspired by each other, with lots of opportunities to come across and keep in touch with the aspirations of other dreamers. I’ve been pitching in through product management role, and in early July we went from internal alpha to a well-received beta.

What stands out the most about DreamBank for me is the straightforward focus on creating beneficial outcomes on both small and larger scales. It happens at the personal level by reducing waste and guesswork in gift-giving while making it more collaborative. Across its community and beyond, DreamBank truly embraces a win-win-win business model; for each contribution towards a dreamer’s gift, members benefit by getting a bit closer, DreamBank benefits by sustaining and growing with transaction surcharges, and a charitable organization chosen by the dreamer receives a contribution from each dream.

The balance of positive benefits is more than a stated goal; it’s built into the core of what DreamBank does. As such. it really works to realize the promises of making a better world through the web. It’s one thing to bring people together and hope they do something good when they meet, but it’s something different, and I think more promising, to build that intention into everything you do. With that, I think DreamBank can go far.

But for now it’s the hard work of beta, the excitement of seeing early members explore and try out the service, and being able to work with the DreamBank team. As a bonus, I’m glad to be working again with Darren and Julie of Capulet Communications. It’s been great having them back in the Vancouver area, and to put our heads together on an innovative and interesting product.

The second of two posts on Twitter, where I’ll share how we’re using Twitter to enhance communication with the Ma.gnolia member community.

In the last post’s apologia petite (pardon my faux French) for substantial meaning in Twitter posts, I held that despite being tiny, Twitter posts can carry very significant meaning when read in the context of an established social relationship. That notion immediately suggests that micro-blogging is best done between friends and family who know each other well. It turns out though, that this isn’t strictly the case.

At Ma.gnolia, we’ve put Twitter to good use as a means of keeping in touch and staying relevant to a core group of our membership. Not all our members are using Twitter, obviously, but those who use Ma.gnolia every day are heavy web users, and as such are much more likely to be able to tame and enjoy Twitter with ease. So our expectation is not to reach all our members with Twitter, but just those who are very regularly connected.

It’s worth telling how we got started. During a big upgrade in January, we spent a couple of days getting the kinks worked out, but some of those kinks blocked access to the site from time to time. Since our blog and wiki are integrated pieces of Ma.gnolia, we couldn’t use those channels to keep members informed. And it’s not like we could send out a newsletter for each change, primarily because these momentary changes in status didn’t affect everyone and people would start to wonder if we’d lost it.

So we started using Twitter, making posts whenever there was a change worth reporting. We updated our standard error pages to point people to Twitter as a source of status updates. That got us through the rough parts, but it was a suggestion from factoryjoe that took us to making status updates a daily thing, and to maybe even throw in a cool link of the day.

All in 140 characters?

Messages for the Medium

Twitter demands that you be concise, a brown belt in précis. It also demands that you be somewhat innovative with your words, not just to get in under the character limit but also to keep your communication interesting. Seeing ‘Status OK’ almost every day would be informative, but it gets old quickly. We try to mix it up by finding new phrases to say that all is well, and when it’s not well we have the fun of fitting an artful description into a tight space.

Adding the cool link of the day is the other part of our Status OK posts. We have two advantages here. The first is that Ma.gnolia produces a short link to each bookmark we save. The second is that Twitter takes that short link and makes it even shorter, getting us in under the limit almost every time. Moreover, we make a point of thanking the person who saved the bookmark.

Today’s post was a good example.

Ma.gnolia thinks that spring has sprung, and it feels great. Live large with today’s link http://ma.gnolia.com/zalayo (Thanks fabioassis)

And 3 characters to spare! Rock on. The feedback on how we’re using Twitter has been good and folks say they like a cool link of the day. Hunting a new link down each day is a great exercise for me because it’s one more chance to explore the community and see what people are up to, but with specific purpose – I need a cool link and I need it now! It makes me enjoy the fruits or our own work even more.

Of Course We’re Friends!

Almost as soon as we got the word out that Twitter would be a status update channel for us, people started to add us as friends. Though we hadn’t seen other companies using Twitter do the same, we almost immediately started to reciprocate. We made a point of doing so as soon as we saw the notification that someone had added us, as quickness is in line with the Twitter experience and it shows people that we’re here and engaged, and that they matter to us outside Ma.gnolia as well. Our approach produced an unexpected benefit in that Twitter is a two-way channel, and before long members began posting publicly and directly to us about service interruptions or other issues that needed attention. Without barely trying, we had opened up a lightweight support channel with a super-low barrier to use.

I’ll admit that it’s flattering to watch the numbers of friends grow, but for me that’s the lesser part of the fun. The real thing is in the posts that people share with us, and how it allows us to understand where they’re coming from.

Unexpected Benefits

I’ve already mentioned that Twitter opened up an unexpected way for members to let us know when the service needed some kind of attention.

A greater, though less tangible benefit, came in the insight into what our members are up to. Scrolling through the posts of our friends gives us a Gestalt of what they deal with, what excites and frustrates and amuses, what little successes and failures they face. In short, it enriches how we see our members and understand them as people. No specific features have changed or been planned in response to what we see. Instead, the payoff is that we can think and talk about our members in a more informed way.

What started as a need for a way to keep members posted through a rough update has turned into a vital extension of how we communicate with our members, and how they can talk back to us. All in 140 characters per post. Not too shabby.

This post is the first of two about Twitter and its potential to be an effective and meaningful way of communicating. Today I’ll share some thoughts on objections to the micro-blogging groove, and try to show how Twitter does achieve meaningful communication because of, and not in spite of its format. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how Ma.gnolia is using Twitter to help us keep in touch with our members.

Pretty much anyone who has heard of Twitter has an opinion about it. Not just the casual, evaluative kind where we give a thumbs up/down or numeric rating, but a serious consideration of whether it’s somehow bad for us. The arguments go along one or both of these lines:

Objection 1. Twitter is noisy, and as such adds a high frequency interruption channel to our environment. With so many interruptions, getting focussed and into a productive state becomes more and more elusive, and we end up with something like late-onset ADD. Perfect instance: Kathy Sierra’s pondering if Twitter is the end of attention.

To hear that Twitter is noisy makes me point to the name and raise an eyebrow. It feels like it’s supposed to be a little noisy, and while that can be part of the fun it also has to be managed. Outpacing email and instant messaging, the phone, children, pets and the person who sits next to you, Twitter can be a serious interruption engine. And like all those other interruptions, learning to keep them from running and ruining you is part of working and playing in the Internet.

Objection 2. Twitter is a river of banal narcissism, in that answering the question that drives Twitter, “What are you doing right now?” produces only familiar, ordinary moments. Waiting for the bus. Eating a sandwich. Is your sandwich that important that the world must know? With 140 characters, what can you possibly say of substance? Perfect instance: Nick Carr calls out Twitterers as a navel-gazing chattering class.

Context is Key

The answer, I think, is quite a lot, and it’s not so much about what gets sent out as it is how it is read. Twitter posts (I really can’t call them ‘tweets’, not yet), aren’t consumed like most regular blog posts and web pages, because we usually read those items in the context of a search for information or in a passive, news-reading mode. Twitter is just sort of happening, and as such most Twitter posts can seem pretty trivial when read without some kind of context.

Since Twitter streams grow and intersect by adding ‘friends’, the most natural context is a personal relationship with an individual or group. Common, but important relationships, like friend to friend, organization members, teammates, and so on. In the context of these relationships, the conversation is already flowing in some way or another, opening up shared values, vocabularies and timelines as informers of each Twitter post.

To demonstrate, let’s make a fictional Twitterer. We’ll call him Adam and say he’s in university. When Adam posts to Twitter:

“Talking to Amanda on the phone”

We can imagine that being read in a few different ways:

Adam’s lab partner: Who’s Amanda?

Adam’s best friend: Awesome! He finally got the nerve to call her up!

Adam’s ex-girlfriend: Her?? I can’t believe it. He’s still rebounding.

Adam’s rugby coach: Whatever

Amanda: doesn’t use Twitter, which is probably a good thing at this point

How Adam’s post is read is determined largely by the relationship he has with the readers. There’s a neat trend in that scenario, where the more involved the shared context, the deeper the understanding, and the stronger the resonance. Indeed, Adam has moved the shared timeline between himself, his ex, and his best friend in under 140 characgters. As a relationship builds, Twitter posts can say more with the same number of characters, and I think that’s how Twitter posts can communicate very well with few words. This isn’t to say they always do.

Same Time, Different Space

Dropping into a bunch of Twitter posts might leave you feeling a bit lost if you don’t have any reason to be looking at them. Something has to tie you to the person making the post for the resonance to happen. The campus gossip scenario shows this in theory, but please try with me this comparison of experiences:

First, check out the public timeline from Twitter. You get the idea right away, but it’s just kind of there.

Next try this view, and let it play for a half-minute or so.

Bada-boom! Context! Every post gets a place on the world map, and you’re seeing it barely a moment after it was sent. With our understanding, or lack of, about places in the world we can establish a context for the person behind the post, and a powerful one at that. What does it do to know that someone who just posted “getting ready to go to the market” lives in Baghdad or in Paris? The difference in locality from our own or from what we are familiar with becomes a binding element in reading a given post and knowing where it comes from.

Place raises notions of environment, culture, language, stereotypes and more, and as such adds richness to each Twitter post. By also answering ‘where are you from’, Twittervision adds something engaging and human to what is otherwise can feel like a bulletin board on Red Bull. Twittervision adds the context of geography, an alternate to the context of interpersonal relationship.

Though overlapping Twitter streams with different types of contextual information are novel and interesting, the context of relationship seems to be the one in which Twitter works best. Returning to the scenario with Adam, we can see that the value starts to go down with the degree of interpersonal involvement. That would seem to relegate the best uses of Twitter to existing friends and family circles, but in fact, with the right circumstances and the right approach, Twitter can be a great tool for strengthening ties in communities that gather online around services or initiatives.

Next Time, on TwitterTalk

In the next post, I’ll show how we’re doing that at Ma.gnolia, and talk about some of the unexpected benefits of doing so.

Who doesn’t remember The Blair Witch Project? Though remarkably un-scary, I was mesmerized by the characters’ experience of being lost. In recent years, Blair Witch airs every Halloween, and re-watching it reminds me of a lesson learned in crafting information architectures and software designs.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, a great deal of camera time is spent following the characters as they trudge through the woods, becoming increasingly unhinged as they are unable to find a way out. As they slowly realize that they are hopelessly going in circles, they employ the usual rules of wayfinding in the woods: check the map, stick to the river, mark where you’ve been. But it’s to no avail, for these are enchanted woods and the Blair Witch is messing with them.

The characters are badly lost, going in circles despite following the rules for getting un-lost. They check and re-check reference points, they reiterate the rules, but they remain lost and things quickly turn to blame and recrimination. It ain’t pretty.

And that feeling of going in circles is one I’ve come to recognize in the IA and product design process. It happens in even the most agile and creative teams, and the trick is to recognize when it does and to accept that for all your team’s brilliance, you’ve fallen into GroupThink.

GroupThink happens when a team has lost the ability to incorporate new information into a design approach, and can happen for any number of reasons. It’s the kind of thing you can’t see until it’s already happening, and the realization is usually folllowed with a sense of lost time and wasted effort. If only I had seen this was happening sooner, you might think. You’re on the right track; early detection is key, and that’s where the Blair Witch Test comes in.

The Blair Witch Test

Step 1: Trust your gut. If you have a slight feeling that your team is treading over the same territory, stop and pay attention to that feeling.

Step 2: Check the internal signs. Have you started skipping steps in the process? Have you started giving stronger voice to how you personally want to work? Is your team constantly referring back to source documents but not coming up with something new?

Step 3: Do you suspect one or more of your teammates are letting you down? Maybe they are. But if you’re feeling this over one issue, you’re likely wrong. The fact that it’s getting personal is a sign that something needs to change, and fast. As in today.

OK, We’re Lost in GroupThink – What Next?

The fatal mistake of the confused and scared Blair Wtich victims is that they rely completely on internal reference points – things that are within the woods. Setting thematic magic aside, had they been able to find something external to the woods to fix their position they might have broken out and escaped the woods.

The same thing happens in GroupThink – if you’re lost on cracking a problem, it’s time to stop going in circles and bring in your customers. There are all knids of ways to do this, from surveys to user interface testing to simply getting on the phone with some trusted voices and asking what they think. As an information architect or product designer, you already have the skills and tools you need to do this; you just might not be used to doing it at this stage of the process.

Your customers can’t solve your design challenges for you. What they can do is to put you back in touch with their real-world needs and aspirations. They can give you examples and scenarios and passing comments that become the reference points your project needs to break out of GroupThink and to find that sweet spot where you know you’re on the right track.

Like the Blair Witch, GroupThink never reveals itself directly in the form of a bug or a missing piece of data. It must be sensed, sussed out and acted on, or it will consume your project. Do you have a way to bring customers into your process at unexpected points? If not, you’re missing an important project tool, one that can be as important as a compass in unfamiliar territory.

Language changes with the times, so when we stop to listen to the words being used we get some insight into the intentions and dreams of the day. When we see patterns of use, we get a deeper sense of underlying values and how people are thinking. Take the way people talk about the web, and how it’s changed from Web 1.0 to 2.0.

In a recklessly informal and undocumented manner, I’ve been listening to the words that people emphasize when they talk about what’s important in Web 2.0, and it’s definintely different from the first time around (not that these things have real, discernable boundaries until we name them).

Hot Words in Web 1.0

Page Views

Eyeballs

Content

Push vs. Pull

Links

Hot Words in Web 2.0

Social

Interactive/AJAXy

Community

User generated

Sharing

Open

Now, this is a very selective and small sample, and it’s meant to demonstrate rather than prove a trend I’ve noticed in conversations and writing about what’s happening online. I see two significant differences between these sets of words. The first is more emphasis on human activities and experience (and more touchy-feely, to be fair); the second is that adjectives rather than nouns.

This second change is pretty interesting because it suggests more than just a new set of buzzwords in play. Instead, it suggests that we don’t talk as much about the technology being cool as what we do with it being cool.

Consider the leap being made here. In Web 1.0 we were impressed by streaming media, online translation services and shopping carts. It was a feeling of techno gee-whiz. It was fun, for sure. But now, services like MoveOn and Upcoming are moving people from online shared interest to physical world shared space. Flickr and LiveJournal let people express their personalities through words and images. This is a lot differeent from being able to catch CBC Radio online or to watch a news clip.

Try it yourself. When you hear a conversation going on about the web, what are the words that you hear the most? Are people talking about the nuts and bolts, or are they paying more attention to what they can build? Listen to them. They’re telling you what’s important.

I was writing an email to schedule a meeting this weekend when I had a revelation. Yes, a revelation, one that I’d like to share.

First, some background: people who know me will agree that I’ve got a real penchant for effective meetings. I like my meetings guided by agenda, focussed on outputs and outcomes, civil and with a definite end point.*

That dedication can turn me into a bit of a whip when it comes to starting on time, as the urgency helps teams build a culture that values the time spent in meetings and makes the most of it. Usually this approach is just fine, but sometimes starting a meeting on time is not an act of will as much as it is an allowance of probability.

That last part was the revelation. On small, agile teams, starting a meeting on time isn’t always possible or even desirable, as the team members wear several hats. Operations is one of those hats, and it’s all too common for small emergencies to take precendence and to derail that precious starting time. After being thrown off schedule, everything can fall apart and the next thing you know your meeting is taking place another day, with a loss of momentum.

So how do you schedule start times for agile teams? You don’t try to force it, that’s for sure. Instead, go with the reality you’re working in. I asked the team to expect a meeting of an hour or so in the early afternoon, and that we’d aim to begin between 1:00 and 1:30. Just before 1:00, I use instant messaging to feel out where the team is at in their day. Based on that we nail down a solid start time when everyone can set aside their work and focus on the meeting.

The result is that I’m not asking people to decide between two imperatives, and instead line them up in their proper order on the fly. As an aside, this is an example of where instant messaging can be a hugely productive tool on a team, better than email, the phone, and any project management tool.

This might seem obvious, but on small multitasking teams, coordinating to meet at specific times can be a challenge. The lesson here is that relaxing time to timeframe is a more humane and realistic way to organize people around the daily hurly burly of having development and operations in the same set of hands.

*For what I consider the gospel of running a good meeting, check out How to Make Meetings Work by Michael Doyle and David Strauss. Read this book on Tuesday and on Wednesday you can have a dramatically improved meeting experience. If it doesn’t work for you, I’ll personally buy your copy of the book for ten bucks.