Corvus Consulting

I’m a lucky guy when it comes to getting advice on web community relations: I have friends with experience and insight that I trust, who are also patient with my questions about the right approach or even the right words to address an issue.

Just the same, it’s good to brush up on the basics every now and then, as the state of the art changes and new ideas or ways of thinking can stir up new thoughts in an otherwise old hat. This week, the Capulet Communications team of Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, two of those kinds of friends I was talking about, released an e-book that promises to do just that as part of my holiday reading list.

Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook will be a welcome read for both old and new-school marketers who’ve seen how even small missteps in communicating with web communities can turn into anger and heartache. Darren and Julie have helped many clients run successful and responsible social media campaigns, and have gathered the most valuable lessons from their work, and the work of others, together into a tidy volume of good advice.

As if good advice isn’t enough, I’m pleased to have a spot in the book about my own approach to making the most of negative comments found on a blog. It’s heartening to see these friends bringing their insight and experience to a wider audience, and to be make a small contribution to the book as well.

At $29, Getting to First Base is easily one of the best investments in learning to communicate better on the Internet, with its ever-changing and sometimes baffling ways. It’s also a good way to divert attention from holiday hurly-burly, without any extra calories or the carbon-footprint of treeware.

I spent a few days on the far-west coast of BC this week in a small town called Tofino. In the summer, Tofino’s population goes up to about 20,000, attracting surfers and nature lovers. In the winter, the population is about 1,500. As you can guess, in February, it’s a quiet place to be.

I didn’t check email, turn on my cellphone, or tell anyone the exact place I was staying. I turned off status reporting widgets and read minimal news. I didn’t listen to my iPod once (for real). Late in the week, a surprise snowfall cut off all communication for about a full day, removing land-line phones, television and Internet access for everyone there, like it or not. Local radio is the only kind of radio there, and they lost power as well. Now that’s quiet, and perfect for exploring the beaches, taking in views that defy description and getting lost in the oddities turned up by the tides.

I didn’t fall into some kind of Luddite bliss, but I did notice, by their absence, the demand for our attention that the mere availability of these channels creates. Silencing the flow of incoming information seems to be a staple of the modern vacation, but I think that speaks to a need not being met in our approach to information technologies, and not some inevitable consequence of connectivity. That is, we shouldn’t have to turn off communication channels as a defensive action.

There’s some blue-sky thinking about how the devices we use to access these channels could become aware of our states and bring information to us accordingly, but that’s a post-iPhone world and I’m interested in what we can do now.

When thinking about this I keep coming back to the idea of information richness. The conventional wisdom is that offering depth and interesting pivot points on the information an application delivers is a good thing in itself. We want information, give it to us, relentlessly so. That takes us back to the beaches of the Tofino area for a moment.

On my first morning out I kept coming across Sand Dollar shells. I wanted to collect a few whole ones for some friends back home, but because they are usually partly buried in sand, each one has to be checked to see if it’s whole or broken.

A Sand Dollar, maybe broken, maybe not.

Most are broken. Even after finding a few whole ones, I found that I had to resist an urge to check out each one I came across. It’s the beach-combing equivalent of leaving no stone unturned.

Leaving stones unturned is just something our brains don’t do well, for many good reasons. It’s not that info-richness is a bad thing in itself, either. It’s that it’s often offered without qualification, without meeting a true need other than that of data voyeurism. Always wanting to put lazy theory into a Quaker-like work mode, I’ve been putting together a sanity checklist that will keep the lessons of my week in Tofino in mind.

1. What is the one essential and concrete purpose that presenting a view of information serves? If the answer is highly subjective or vague, then it must connect directly with the core emotional experiences that the product is designed to create.

2. How deep does the view of information need to be to serve that purpose?

Applying these questions to previous projects, I see places where we came close to the sweet spot, and many other places where we really filled up at the Information Candy store. In About Face 2.0, a must-read book on interaction design, Alan Cooper identifies cardinal applications, or those that take up all of our attention for extended lengths of time. As the desktop computing experience dissolves into many and mobile devices, cardinality will be taking a back seat. Instead of designing for any one application, we’ll be designing more for an ecology of applications, each of them asking for some degree of attention from people. Being relevant rather than rich in the information that they provide will set applications apart more and more, I believe.

There are many rewarding and appropriate uses of rich information structures, and info-voyeurism certainly has its place. And, we all need to manage the channels that demand our attention, but not by dulling our natural curiosity and learning to ignore the scores of unturned stones presented on any given interface. Making information rich in relevance rather than data will be the key to making applications that fit well with our lives, rather than something we want to escape from every few months.

We hear that saying a lot, that less is more, but too often it comes across as just a saying, and as such is easily ignored. But now there’s a proof unfolding in the gaming market that will eventually become impossible to ignore or forget.

Just before Christmas, the stage was set for a battle royale between Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii. The PS3 seemed set to steal the show, with more of everything: more processing power, more graphics, more storage. It even plays high-def dvds. The Wii is, by contrast, a technical toaster, with simpler graphics, lower storage, fewer games and less storage.

So which console has captured the imagination and dollars of the gaming public? Against every geek’s instincts, and according to the Google News for today, it’s the Wii.

What gives? People don’t go out looking for the option that offers them less. The answer is not on any spec list.

The Wii broke many rules of game consoles, and not just the idea that more power = better games. Instead, they incorporated wireless, gesture-based controllers, and a very strong social component for people in your living room over top of those you play with online. Things that work well with, you know, humans.

If you contrast the early advertising for PS3 and Wii you can see they are worlds apart. In the PS3 commercial, the console sits in a white room and quietly oozes a sinister and transformative black goo over everything. For the Wii, friendly people come to your house and playfully say that ‘Wii would like to play’, stirring up a household batch of exhausting fun before driving off into the sunset. Even in the ads the PS3’s M-O is to dominate, smother, overcome. The Wii just wants to fit in and play along.

What to buy: the thing that leaks cool freaky tar, or the cheerful and energetic cuteness? Do you want power, or fun? What would you buy? An engineer’s shopping list, or an experience that makes games more physical, more social, and less about how realistic a polygon-based universe can look and sound?

Sony bent over backwards to bring a technically fantastic product to market. They’ve bet their reputation as a leading consumer electronics company on the PS3, but sadly, the pursuit of more crushes the PS3 under its own weight. The Wii isn’t magic. It has silicon and plastic guts, and not pixie dust inside.

But the Wii focusses on having a good time, and removes barriers of cost for the consumer and for the game developers. That second part cannot be over-stated. That’s why it’s bold. In fact, it’s been said that game developers are not keen to work on PS3 games, as the costs of producing creative content that can fill its amazing capacity will push games to about $100. Per title. Ouch.

The Wii team kept simple ideas in mind about what people get out of playing games, and made that happen with far less as an experience, rather than with a killer feature list. It’s never the specific technologies that make great products. Instead, it’s the careful selection and combination of those technologies into a coherent experience that wins people over.

Repetition is so very important to everything. I mean it! Everything!

It’s the belief in repeatability that drives our trust in science. It’s the process that makes our brains better at almost anything we can do. It’s the thing that turns the jagged jumble of a fractal shape into the structures of the natural world. Still not convinced? It’s the last step in Lather-Rinse-Repeat. Spooky, like the golden ratio.

In seriousness, repetition is one of the basic facts of life. It’s hard-wired into our most elementary thinking machinery and behaviour. One of the most important ways that we differ from traditional computers is that when we recognize repetition, we start to not notice it. Think about the last 5 times you brushed your teeth? Anything out of the ordinary? If not, then you likely don’t remember much about those individual experiences. If something strange did happen, like an important phone call or hearing some big news while you brushed away, the repetition is broken with uniqueness and you’ll likely remember it. Just ask any five people what they were doing when they heard about some huge event, and you’ll see this trick of the mind in action.

You may rightly question, what has this got to do with making software? Answer: abso-freaking-lutely everything.

Let’s start with a truism I learned from reading either Alan Cooper or Jeff Raskin’s writing: there’s no such thing as intuitive software. What can possible be intuitive about software? Nothing in the world works like it, so there’s nothing from which to draw natural inferences. Instead, we bootstrap the learning process with metaphors: layered objects, desktops, folders, rulers, envelopes, and so on.

It’s through the repeated use of these metaphors that software becomes familiar, and when we say intuitive we really do mean ‘familiar enough to drastically lower the learning curve.’ But ‘intuitive’ fits better on a brochure, so it’s the word we’re most familiar with. Funny how that turned out.

Se learn through repetition, and as we do we necessarily start to ignore the details of each repetition. This bit of knowledge is extraordinarily powerful for anyone designing a coherent set of software features. We can often rely on repetition to reinforce the pathways through information and actions that we create with software. We can also count on seeing it misunderstood and mis-used. Behold, one of the deadly sins of interface design: setting people up to fail by making critical, non-recoverable tasks repetitive.

An amazing example of how thousands of Windows Vista users will be screwed by bad use of repetition comes from an article on gaming technologies. While talking about the gauntlet of warnings that people to pass when introducing software on Vista, the author :

The principal user experience problem with LUA’s is that when a consumer wants to download and install a game demo off the Internet, they must first click past the IE warning dialogs, and then respond to the security elevation dialog Vista pops up requiring an admin account name and password to enable the software installation.
For boxed games, this may not be super intrusive because consumers purchase relatively few boxed titles annually, and have already paid for the game at the point that they experience the elevation dialog… The same will be true for core gamers surfing free downloadable demos. The frustration value of this experience is akin to what it would be like if you had to enter a username and password per song you wanted to try in Apple iTunes.

The intrusive dialogs are also oddly pointless, because Vista’s frequent warning dialogs do nothing to differentiate legitimate commercial software from known hazardous products, so consumers will still mistakenly install malware. Kids will either have to ask their parents to respond to elevation dialogs per download they want to try, or have their own elevation account and password and continue to download whatever they want.

It sounds pretty safe, if cumbersome, but it’s not even near safe. Using the same authentication interface makes granting permission easier. It also makes ignoring important details easier, while encouraging users to rely on muscle memory rather than think about what they’re doing. This is a problem in many interfaces, and not exclusive to Windows at all. But leave it to Windows to lower the bar to pain.

The Vista design ensures the absolute trivialization of the warning steps by increasing the number of instances, decreasing the importance of each instance, and making it an obstacle to immediate gratification. This is the perfect storm of disastrous repetition: Vista will train an army of unwitting users how to habitually pass an important, protective measure. Hackers will have it easy, with victims hurriedly and habitually granting malicious code the permission it needs to make trouble.

Fixing the scenario requires a rethinking of the administrative authentication interface. User names and passwords are a fact of life, and aren’t going anywhere. They shouldn’t be tossed out of the scenario, but instead reinforced with cues that interrupt the tendency to ignore details and rely on memorized action. Such cues could be floating placement of some interface elements, greater emphasis on details of the action being authorized, and possibly a challenge in the form of a choice or question about the context for the action (choosing a category for the software being installed, for example).

So say it three times with me: where you see repeating events in the software you’re creating, treat it with care. Dealing with repetition properly will make their lives truly easier; failing to address its dangers will lead to ‘what did I just do?’ moments that we all, regretfully, know too well.

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.

In the year 2000 I was not behind the wheel of a flying car, I didn’t talk to my mom by wristwatch video phone, and my life had not been made infinitely easier with the aid of a robot butler. Instead, I was riding my bike and using diesel-powered transit to get around and was working in a software development office as an analyst and spec writer. The future had arrived, but with less technological panache than my youth had led me to expect.

My world did change that year, though, when a coworker pointed me to an article he stumbled across called Why Great Technologies Don’t Make Great Designs. Products, Scott Berkun argues, are more than the technology inside them. Rather, it’s the value of the experience that the product delivers that gets us excited. This small idea changed my way of looking at product development by putting the experience first and the technology into its proper role as the thing that helps make experience happen.

I was reminded of that pivotal essay twice in the past week, once when reading responses to the preview of Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS, and again when talking with a friend about his past life working in server product development at Microsoft.

Time Machine vs. Shadow Volume Copy

First, about the reactions to Leopard, specifically Time Machine, one of the new features coming to Macs this spring. Time Machine remembers previous versions of any kind of file in your computer, and allows you to go back to that version at any time. So, if you deleted a file that you needed, or you had changed a file in a way that you wanted to go back to, you could.

Soon after the demonstrations ended, Windows enthusiasts, most notably Paul Thurrott, jumped up to proclaim that Windows Server had offered the same technology under the name of Shadow Volume Copy for at least a year, and attacked Apple for being smug about a technology they did not invent.

The critics miss the point by a light year. The innovation here is not automated data backup, which is really the technology we’re talking about here. The innovation is making that technology accessible to people who are not technically inclined. My mom (yes, it’s a mom-test) can understand Time Machine because it provides an experience that capitalizes on familiar metaphors for moving through time, namely backwards and forwards.

The interface bestows a science-fiction inspired feeling and in its simplicity changes disaster into simple remedy. The Volume Shadow Copy interface, or what I could find of it online, provides an intimidating and option-ridden mess that will only make sense to you if you have already used it. So when disaster strikes, you don’t get to act and save the day, you get to go to school:

The technology behind both products is almost the same, and is really quite interesting if you’re interested in that sort of thing. But the quality of experience is a world apart for the average, even the savy person at the keyboard.

Another Mac User Who Bashes Microsoft – Big Surprise

But I’m not done! The Volume Shadow Copy experience does appeal to some people, and according to my ex-Microsoft buddy, that appeal is the secret to why Microsoft maintains its hold on the business market and why Mac will never take it away.

The reason, he says, and I agree, is that Microsoft does deliver the kind of experience that its key customers need: system admins need to be needed. That is, the complexity and obscurity of Microsoft product design allows administrators to become valued repositories of arcane knowledge. They are wizards in their domains, and to put it bluntly, simplicity and reliability would diminish the need for their magic.

I won’t get into whether this is a good or bad way to do things, because that’s not the point I want to make. What I do want to stress is that the value of an experience is determined by how well you meet the emotional and practical needs of the people who use your product. Far from being incompetent, Microsoft has mastered the identification of the customer who matters most to their survival, and has dedicated itself to serving that customer with great success.

Both Apple and Microsoft, in these examples, bring real value to the people using their products because the value is measured not in technical coolness but in human terms. What is value to you is not to the next person, and as soon as we focus on the technology before the people using it, we cease to deliver real value.

Updated
Chris Howard reached a similar conclusion with a different approach in his wondering over whether Leopard will actually help Vista by making it look bad.

When future historians look back at the emergence of blogs, one conclusion they’re likely to draw is that we are one angry moment in time. Many a blog seems to exist purely for the purpose of ranting about this or that, and for personal blogs this is just fine; we all need space to blow off some steam, and a blog is one way to do that. But when it comes to a professional blog, there are few things that disappoint more, and in the world of professional consulting blogs it seems that this is all too common.

Crabby blog posts take otherwise smart, and probably friendly, people with good ideas and dress them up in anger just to make a point. I can’t imagine these people bringing their ideas to clients or potential clients with this kind of tone, but that’s what crabby blogging does. Moreover, slipping into the tone of the cranky blogger misses the chance to contribute something to the discussions that the web lets us have other than to say this bugs me.

Don’t get me wrong – sometimes you need to get a little piquant to make yourself heard and to scratch a personal itch. There is a line, though, between sharp critique and simple venting. John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog is a good example of the former, and it’s the kind of blog that makes me feel smarter and better informed after I’ve read it. Closer to home, Christine Rondeau of Blue Lime Media regularly shares her experience in correcting the ills of online marketing and web design by encouraging good practices.

Of course, there’s some irony in using my professional blog to complain about complaining on professional blogs. But if something bothers you, why not talk about how to make it better instead of trying to be your profession’s Andy Rooney? That’s my challenge to consultants who want to show some of the value they bring through their blog – to make the world a bit better, rather than to build ourselves up by tearing others down.