Adaptive Path Blog

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the ways that web products’ interface / interaction  evidence the business strategy and approach. While wafting in metaphorville, this one emerged: you can look at web products like you do gemstones. To take it further, which bling is your bling?

the diamond: transformation
Distill the business (and the interactions) down to something totally clear, where each facet creates more luster and sparkle, where it’s harder than steel and incredibly valuable. Start with a bunch of coal, and apply pressure intensely until it’s completely different, where it’s not coal any longer…it’s been transformed into something brand new.

Coal comes from situations that erode good user-centered design: too many moving parts, complex data structures, lots of business rules or expectations, too many options, unclear filters, results, form-fields, whatever. Pressure comes from intense competition, need for organizational change, markets that are poised to combine or consolidate, and other internal / external factors.

What Google did for search is a visible diamond. Search was a major (and growing) market with too many options, lots of complexity, lots of market pressure, lots of stuff out there. Google collapsed it all down to one entry field and a whole lotta under-the-covers algorithmic smartness. Now that’s sparkly.

the pearl: evolution
Pearls start with a grain of sand. In real life, the oyster is really just trying to find a way to survive with a stupid piece of sand in its body; but in business life, the sand can be seen as a problem or an opportunity that rallies a team to make something else. Whether it’s an opportunity (here’s a nugget of an idea that could be BIG) or a business snafu (we get 8,000 complaints about this a year) the goal is to apply strategy and design to change the grain of sand into a positive thing.

Pearls are great when the strategy needs to evolve over a measured period of time. The good part is that the bigger they get, the more valuable they are. The more oysters you got working to make the pearl, the more you win.

Wikipedia is a pearl: start with something small (an empty page, a one-sentence entry, an erroneous claim) and let the community nacreate it over time into something that iterates and evolves into something unique and valuable. Tah-dah, pearls of wisdom.

the crystal: organic growth
It grows organically, wildly, sporadically and spontaneously. But through it all, it keeps a crazy kind of symmetry and holism, since the prongs extending in all spatial directions are built from the same pattern as the core. Crystals are great for unknown challenges, communities that give their members more than lip-service power, and cultures that promote organic, opportunistic change. Crystals are products that start small and grow exponentially and unexpectedly.

Flickr is a great crystal. The stuff that makes it all up is pretty much the same: it’s a bunch of photos. But the crazy fractal-like outgrowths jut out in all directions, are constantly in development and build organically on the whole. And baked into the entire approach is the concept of giving power to the users so that the community itself takes charge of creating new spurs and directions. The strategy is crystal clear.

These are just three examples in the jewel box of the web. So now when I think about cornerstones of design, I’m going to consider gemstones, too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 10:28 am and is filed under Interface Design, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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