Category: interaction design

The Page and the Item: The Dynamics of Context and Collection

Published October 28, 2009 by cgerrish

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In thinking about building things on the web, I stopped to consider the raw materials from which we build. HTML markup retrieved from a web server and rendered by a browser, that’s where it all started. But even at that early moment, there was the implied structure of the document. The markup that existed was there to render visible the form of the academic paper. Headings, paragraphs, quotations, tabular data display– these are the formal elements of the document.

And very early on, the metaphor of the page gained purchase. We nodded our heads and spoke of the ‘web page.’ The static web page and the static book page have similar kinds of boundaries. The web page could theoretically be infinitely long, but the usability experts indicated that users didn’t scroll much beyond the length of a book’s page. And just like that, an infinity was tamed. The edge of the world was discovered.

As the content on a web page became dynamic, infinity migrated to the combinations and permutations a database could produce. As long as the data continued to grow and change, the items presented in a particular page could be of an infinite variety. The boundaries to the north, south, east and west remained consistent with the book’s page, but the objects emerging from the depths of the backend could be practically without end.

The document and the page have been structurally ingrained into the architecture of content management systems such that the smallest building block becomes a page linked to a hierarchical document tree. The elements that can be placed into a page are those for which the system has templates. And while most systems allow the manual writing and insertion of raw HTML, it’s a practice that is discouraged because it ruins the uniformity of the CMS’s output. The content management system is an industrial machine for creating hierarchically organized sets of pages.

The other major organizational structure on the web is time-sequenced content. To some extent, news media takes this approach to organization, new material is published each day to replace the material from the previous day. What’s lacking in the model is the continuity of sequence. Yesterday’s news is fish wrap, rather than the next step in a sequence. Blog posts and Tweets (micromessages) have the form of a sequenced set of texts by an author or group of authors. In this sense they are more like the output of a columnist or the writer of serial fiction. Blog posts can also be assigned categories and tags so that they can be sequenced across other conceptual frames. Tweets don’t have the extra infrastructure to house categories and tags, so the practice of adding a hashtag has been bolted on. More elegant solutions like the original track feature have failed to resurface.

Rather than referring to time-sequenced pages, here we more commonly talk about items in a feed. We’re interested in the source of the feed in order to gauge its authority, along with it’s velocity and trajectory. And unlike a hierarchical organization of pages, the items in a time-sequenced feed need have no semantic relationship to each other. The items are such that they can be organized in an arbitrary large variety of collections either within a particular feed or among a diverse set of feeds.

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The page and the item converge at the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Because of our page-centric view of the web, here we’d like to say this is the point where the item becomes a page. And yet, the web becomes much more interesting if we resist this temptation. The item has no native context, the page wants to own its context. The item allows the user to create a collection, a playlist, a feed that suits her own needs, wants and desires. The page needs to reinforce the hierarchy of which it is a part. The key to the dynamic context of the item is that it both has a URL and can contain a URL, and it doesn’t have a single right context.

Information architecture has largely concerned itself with pages and hierarchies, and the economics of the web have centered around the page-view model. As the item begins to emerge as a basic building block, it will be very interesting to see what kind of economics and architectural patterns arise. The containers, the playlists, where we assemble items will command an interesting new role in the assignment of context. And in this landscape, the item and the context are always already social, two-way and dynamic.

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Real-Time Collaboration, Serious Play and the Enterprise

Published October 26, 2009 by cgerrish

With the advent of Windows 7 and the upgrades to the MS Office franchise, the talk is that there’ll be a big round of corporate upgrades. Many corporations are still running Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6.x and Office 2003 (or lower). Vista didn’t tempt them, but the good press for Windows 7 is supposed to do the trick. After all, they have to upgrade at some point, right?

If corporate America takes the plunge, one has to wonder if this will be the last upgrade cycle of this kind. The distribution and installation of software on to desktop and laptop computers is a messy business. Businesses require a very compelling reason to upgrade given the current model.

Google has put forward the model of the browser as operating system by working backwards from the Chrome browser to the Chrome OS. The integration of the Office Suite into the hardware starts in the cloud and moves to the local machine. When Microsoft tried a similar move in the other direction, the government stepped in.

Both Google and Microsoft have developed cloud-based Office Suite offerings moving from opposite directions. Looking down the road a bit, we can see that the next upgrade cycle will be “software + services” for Microsoft, and “services + software” for Google. The obvious motivation will be cloud-based software’s cost savings over the current model of distribution, installation, compatibility, upgrade and service of software installed on a local system. The sheer cost and pain of a firm-wide software upgrade is so frightening that most corporations defer it as long as possible. It’s entirely possible that some firms will skip the last installation and jump directly to the cloud.

Collaboration within the enterprise takes place via email, attached documents and shared network drives. The productivity software footprint defines the boundaries of the modes of collaboration. The big real-time innovation was the introduction of mobile push email via the Blackberry. This innovation reduced latency in the work process by detaching email from the desktop and allowing it to accompany a person wherever she might go. The introduction of Sharepoint and network-stored group editable documents is slowly seeping into the work process. But most corporate workers don’t know how to collaborate outside of the existing models of Microsoft’s Office products. Generally, this just an acceleration of the switch from production of hard copies to soft copies (typewriters to word processors). When confronted with Sharepoint, they view it as a new front-end to shared network drives, a different kind of filing cabinet.

Meanwhile in the so-called consumer space, Facebook, Twitter and a host of real-time social media services have radically reduced the latency of group communication and collaboration. In addition to text– photos, audio and video have begun to play an important role in this collaboration stream. For the most part the corporate computing environment has been left behind. This is due to two factors, the desire to maintain a certain kind of command and control of information construction and distribution within the walls of the corporation; and the desire of IT departments to avoid risk by maintaining a legacy architecture. The real-time productivity of the Blackberry has been working its way down from the top of organizations; but the tool set remains the word processor, powerpoint and excel. The only accelerant in the mix is faster mobile email of soft copies of documents.

Ray Ozzie discusses the “3 screens and a cloud” model as the pattern for the development of human-computer interactions across both the consumer and enterprise computing spaces. The missing element from this model is the input device, screens are no longer simply an interface for reading. Bits are moving in both directions, and email is being de-centered as the primary message carrier.

As we look at innovations like Yammer and Google Wave, the question becomes how will the corporate worker learn how to collaborate in real time? Accelerating network-stored documents and their transmittal via email moves the current model to near maximum efficiency. Further productivity gains will need to expand and change the model. Generally these kinds of innovations enter through the back door, or through a skunk works project, within small autonomous teams. But at some point, the bottom up innovation needs top down acceptance and support.

Luke Hohman of Enthiosys works with the concept of serious games in the management and development of software products. The collaboration processes he describes in his presentation to BayCHI may be the foundation for real-time collaboration throughout the enterprise.

Luke Hohmann on Serious Games: Luke Hohmann of Enthiosys on Serious Games

The lessons that we can take from Twitter and Facebook are that the leap to real-time collaboration is not one that requires a 4-year college degree and specialized training. It’s not an elite mode of interaction that needs to work its way down from the executive leadership team. It’s an increasingly ordinary mode of interaction that simply needs to be unleashed within the enterprise. But for that to happen, the enterprise will need to learn how to incorporate self-organizing activity. (Oh, and let employees use the video camera and microphone built in to their hardware) This will be a difficult move because the very foundation of the corporation itself is the creation and optimization of managed hierarchical organizational structures. It’s only when the activity of serious play can be reconciled with return on investment that the enterprise will come to terms with real-time collaboration.

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Ornamentation: The Beauty of Search

Published September 27, 2009 by cgerrish

It began with a discussion of ornamentation. As we look around us, the ornament seems to be disappearing. The things we use have been stripped of ornamentation in favor of pure functionality. Form, we are taught, must follow function. Decoration is an unnecessary expense, as it adds nothing to the function of a manufactured thing. Ornament has lost the battle of Return on Investment.

It wasn’t always so, there was a distinct turn. Alain De Botton, in his book “The Architecture of Happiness” explores the moment when engineering and aesthetics collided.

“The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.

A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominanace in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution.”

These engineers were building the factories, bridges and railways that would provide the infrastructure for the industrial age. Style simply wasn’t a consideration.

“The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott.

The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.”

In 1923, Le Corbusier penned a book called ‘Toward a New Architecture‘ which outlined the principles of this new approach to the design of buildings. Again, from De Botton’s book:

For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture — meaning, architecture movtivated by the quest for efficiency — was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

And with that prelude, we arrive at the web search engine and the use and meaning of ornament. There’s an interesting experiment currently being conducted called Blind Search. The creators of this test wonder what happens to a user’s perception of search results when all branding is removed. Google initially established itself by producing noticeably better search results. Now, established as a verb meaning “to search,” does Google still provide results that are visibly superior? The results indicate that Google still leads, but not by as much as you’d think: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. And putting the Google brand on any search results increases satisfaction.

In looking at the design of the Google user interface, we see the influence of Le Corbusier. The typographic logo is the only design on the page, and occasionally it is playfully re-imagined to commemorate notable events. Here, form follows function.

In his book, De Botton tries to articulate how we find beauty— the mechanics of what attracts us:

“We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally are deficient. We respect style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.”

While we may perceive the Network as vast, complex and opaque— with its simplicity Google’s design provides us with the antidote. Now look at this image of Microsoft’s Bing home page:

Bing’s user interface is decorated with a background image that gives a sense of what it does. I’m fairly certain that the image has no effect on the quality of the search results. Bing is attempting to provide a usage model for the consumption of faceted search results. Queries return both potential facets along with the traditional list of links. Bing is designed with both facets and links in mind, while Google appends facets to the bottom of the link list.

As the facets and links that search engines return become more and more indistinguishable, what is the difference that will make a difference? One could assume that there will always be an engineering innovation right around the corner that will make a significant and visible difference. We like to believe that progress is always linear.

Corporate brand clearly makes a difference, users like a brand name search product. Microsoft’s brand has been held in the background and a new brand has been established. Images have also been used to distinguish Bing. Ornamentation has been exiled for so long, it’s hard to understand how to even value it.

Let’s return again to Alain De Botton:

The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worth wile — which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of the good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forthrightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.

Le Corbusier’s aesthetic demanded design be “ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal.” He had a hatred of any kind of decoration. Google’s engineering aesthetic is a terminal design. Any competitor employing a purely functional design will unintentionally be referencing Google. There’s no way to get radically simpler than Google, and therefore no way to create enough space to allow for differentiation. The only alternative is to move back into ornament, into the decorative, into beauty.

While we may think of computerized search of the internet as a purely functional affair of ONEs and ZEROs, the simple lists of links are being pulled into organic forms by their facets. Human forms of life are surfacing in and through our search queries. Search results will begin to bloom into something that looks much more like a natural form than points and lines in a frictionless space. This moment may mark another turning point…

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The (TV) Guide is Broken: And Now Everything is TV

Published September 13, 2009 by cgerrish

There’s an old joke that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. But more and more, it seems like everything is happening at once.

Where television channels used to offer one program at a time, one after the other, laid out along a time line, now there are an infinite number of channels. To the extent that programming is recorded, or recorded live for broadcast, it can be tuned in on demand. Programs don’t need to unravel at a particular time on a schedule anymore. We’ve entered the era of random access; everyone can be watching different shows on the same channel— because it’s the watching that is the channel, not the broadcasting.

Live broadcasts used to be so labor and infrastructure intensive that it wasn’t possible to go live with more than one signal. Many broadcasters now emit multiple signals—different mixes and playlists of programming.

Assume for a moment that broadcast video/audio will move entirely to the internet—the new Network. How will you know what’s on? When everything that exists is on at the same time—how do you choose? This problem is similar to deciding which book to check out from a public library. The selection set you walk into the library with doesn’t include every book on the shelves.

I hate cable television listings because they present everything equally in a grid. And, of course, this is Comcast’s product—I understand that TiVo is much better. The schedule of programs knows nothing about me, therefore it presents everything in the equivalent of a comma separated value file with sub-primitive tools to work with the data. Everyone gets the same bad listing of a 1000 streams. There’s a sense in which this is the same problem users have with RSS readers and Twitter streams. Rolling cable television listings look disturbingly like an RSS or Twitter stream. They’re a linear representation of simultaneous data.

The suggested solution isn’t really a solution. It’s simply the acceptance that you’ll miss things that would be valuable for you to see. It’s noted that since you can’t completely consume a multivalent, multi-threaded real-time stream, instead you must simply jump in from time to time. When you jump out, you miss what you miss— and that’s okay. As with phone calls, if it’s important, they’ll call back.

With so much programming simultaneously available, its value is significantly reduced. Experiencing something and not experiencing it have a roughly equivalent value. This corresponds to the idea: The more information, the less significant information is. The less information, the more significant it is. Philip Roth put it this way: in Eastern Europe (before the fall of the wall) nothing is permitted but everything matters; with us, everything is permitted but nothing matters.

More and more we live in simultaneous time with links that provide us with random access to an almost infinite number of connections. The index was the first tool that was attempted, but the map could not keep up with the rapid growth of the territory. The search engine using a citation algorithm was the next tool. This would be a welcome method to discover when a program was on, when a program with an actor was on, when a program by a writer was on. More complex queries would enable more advanced discovery.

Why did the girl throw the clock out the window? To see time fly.

But as we live in simultaneous time so do the things that we experience. As McLuhan noted, everything has become television, streams of text, video and audio sensory data. We aren’t matching the grid of our daily schedule to a grid of programming. The grid is an artifact of linear time. The selection set in simultaneous time doesn’t contain everything, it emerges from a swarming micro-community in real time. The infinite universe is bounded by the social graph, but it expands into infinity through six degrees of separation.

The new guide leverages the swarm, the social graph, the real time network and track. So, what’s on?

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