Adaptive Path Blog

An internal AP mailing list has been buzzing since Amanda Willoughby asked, “What are the top 10 books, papers, websites, or objects had the most influence on your work, inspired you, or made you a better person?” I knew that as soon as I answered, I’d end up kicking myself for forgetting to include someone or something that I’d be mortified not to have mentioned.

Wouldn’t you know, I forgot to list Jane McGonigal’s This Is Not A Game: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play, her seminal paper on the alternate reality game (or ARG) known as The Beast, it’s “players” and their methods of collaboration. It’s a delightful read, and it was at the front of my mind this weekend when I learned about something that can only be the emergence of another full-fledged ARG.

It seems that as both a political statement and a promotion for the upcoming Nine Inch Nails album “Year Zero”, Trent Reznor has orchestrated a full-fledged immersive game that spans from encoded messages on T-shirts to dozens of microsites to thumb drives with leaked tracks. It’s complex, potentially controversial and gaining a significant amount of press attention only two weeks after it first came to light.

I’ve already spent a couple hours perusing the 360+ pages of threaded posts on the message boards at Echoing the Sound, where (much like the original Cloudmakers group board) the game is being discussed and dissected as it unfolds. It’s all rather impressive, both in scope and in its message, which is strongly anti-establishment (these links come with a strong content warning: the game kicks off with audio from an alleged “sniper shooting”). As the Year Zero approaches its puzzles will be tackled, and I’m excited to see how this group of players works together to solve and experience the whole thing.

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As a fan of good information design, I’ve made a point lately of raving about Google Reader’s trends visualization. Despite my enthusiasm for visualizations of personal data from digital life, I admit to some serious data-envy for the exhaustive analog efforts of Nicholas Felton (of NYC design firm Megafone) and his Feltron Annual Report(s).

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the 2006 Feltron report since I first discovered last year’s, and I was not at all disappointed. From the total number of air miles traveled to a geographical listing of every restaurant eaten at in New York City in the past year, the Feltron reports stand as the most gorgeous representation of personal information I’ve ever seen. The extent to which Felton goes to record his own movements along various axes over such a long timeline is incredible, and the quality of execution — especially typographically — is close to perfect.

The quality of Felton’s work has gotten me thinking about improving personal data visualization in the tools we build.

When Adaptive Path founder (and current Googler) Jeff Veen posted recently about the work he and his team had done with Google Reader’s trends, he expressed excitement for “collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.” Specifically, he referenced an excellent post by Tom Coates, who elaborates on the value of personal data summaries:

… more specifically I don’t want to know this stuff, I want to be able to capture it invisibly so that it can be knitted together and sense made of it and data made discoverable and searchable at some point in the future, when the urge or need takes me.

For me, Tom’s sentiment (and Jeff’s enthusiasm) clarify something I’ve just started to really grapple with: As we create tools that have the ability to record the wakes of users moving through their digital lives, there is a corresponding obligation to create quality visualizations of that data.

Designers should seek to enable everyone to discover meaning in the patterns of the everyday. What is required is something as complete and concise as it is visually parsable — maybe even beautiful. As artifacts go, the Feltron reports are an exemplar that tools like Google Reader Trends should evolve towards, if not in form, than in spirit.

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Last summer, it was my pleasure to lead an Adaptive Path team that worked with Turner to flesh out their concept for an online video platform. The result of that collaboration launched today as Super Deluxe, Turner’s site for short-format comedy creators.

Everyone involved in the creation of Super Deluxe understood that success would mean crafting an experience that kept people entertained — while still catering to their needs to successfully navigate, discover and socialize. The result is probably the most visually experimental site I’ve ever gotten a chance to contribute to; a sense of wit and whimsy permeates the experience, inviting users in and encouraging exploration.

Look for more details on the creation of Super Deluxe soon, when I post my upcoming interview with some members of the team. In the meantime, go on over, have yourself a laugh.

[update: Comments for some reason defaulted to off - sorry, fixed now.]

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As has already been reported by a number of those who attended, Microsoft invited a group of fourteen “leaders in various aspects of the web community” to Redmond on Wednesday to discuss some of their ongoing projects, including preparations for next year’s Mix Conference. I’m pretty sure I got on that list thanks to Microsoft User Experience Evangelist David Shadle, whom I’ve enjoyed collaborating with over the past year. My invitation came courtesy of Beth Goza, who let us know that the final hour of the all day event would be devoted to a Q&A with Bill Gates.

There was a tremendous amount of material covered in the morning, and some free-wheeling conversation about conferences and outreach during the afternoon. Bill arrived right on time, and was ushered into the room with minimal fanfare. He took the empty seat at the conference table, which happened to be right next to me. After a short description of some of the work he’s involved with, both at Microsoft and with his Foundation, the question period began.

You should follow the links above to hear more about what others asked, but as for me, I asked Bill to what extent he saw experience design having an impact (if it had any) in his Foundation’s work to address issues in health care and education. It was obvious from his answer that he doesn’t think of his work in the terms that we, as practitioners, would - but everything he described involved redefining the way certain problems are viewed, to ensure that solutions benefit those who needed them most.

Bill described a small number of the efforts his Foundation is engaged in, but an example that stuck with me was their work to completely redefine how certain medications are made available to patients in poverty-stricken areas of the world. Multi-dosage treatments that require repeated return trips to see a doctor (e.g. tuberculosis) work just fine in the first world, but represent a tremendous failure where regular visits are difficult or downright dangerous. The Foundation has focused its efforts on distributing a single injection that releases necessary medication over time; in doing so, they’ve reinterpreted the problem to resolve the difficulties needy patients find in their current experience with the treatment.

People all over the world face difficulties imposed on them by tools and systems that were designed with no input from them. In that room with Bill Gates, I was aware that I represented a class of professionals who have devoted themselves to building humane systems and tools, in the hope of making improvements (big and small) in the lives of others. When Bill asked me if he’d answered my question, I realized that he had in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In his willingness to reconsider a problem like TB in a manner that addressed both the medication’s efficacy and how it fit into the the lives of patients, he’d demonstrated a commitment to the same principles we believe in as a community of user experience designers.

It was not in a way I would have expected, nor in the terms any of us would have used, but Bill Gates laid out a framework for providing solutions to the humanitarian crises of today that took a decidedly “recipient-centered” approach. Having been lucky enough to meet him, I believe he is in the business of reconsidering everything, and working for the benefit of everyone involved.

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When the NBA introduced a new synthetic ball from Spalding for the 2006 season, it would appear it failed to ask one very important question: did any of the league’s players actually like it?

Two months into the season, the NY Times reports that complaints and injuries relating to the ball have reached a tipping point. Spalding and the NBA’s failure to do any upfront testing of the product design has left commissioner David Stern with some egg on his face, and the Players’ Union still isn’t backing down from their grievance with the new ball. Apparently, the new synthetic surface, designed to increase players’ grip and control, has a tendency to lacerate fingers and handle inconsistently.

One N.B.A. assistant coach, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to comment, tore a ligament in a finger when, in retrieving a ball that had bounced onto the sideline, his finger stuck at an odd angle on the surface of the ball.

The real shame? All of this could have been sorted out before the season; Spalding admits that the only current players who actually used the ball prior to its introduction were last year’s All-Stars. With the ball being sent back to Spalding for further analysis, and the return of the original leather ball being considered, all of this looks like a costly and embarrassing episode for both the NBA and Spalding. Other companies seeking to introduce new products should look at their design process and ask if they’re doing enough to avoid an unforced error like this.

Talking to actual users of a product isn’t a luxury, it’s a business necessity. Jerry Stackhouse noted that changes to the game are inevitable and players will adapt as necessary, but “when it comes to the actual game itself and when it comes to in between the lines, we should definitely have some input.” That’s it precisely. Designing for use requires you to talk to users - the design of the product can only benefit.

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The good folks over at IT Conversations have posted my presentation from this August’s User Experience Week, “Facilitating Collaboration: Web Technologies that Work“. Here’s the relevant portion of the presentation’s abstract:

With an eye towards helping Interaction Designers and Managers choose their collaborative tools effectively, we’ll survey the landscape of what’s available and why it’s important. We’ll take a look at the factors that shape adoption, from uptake strategies to degrees of commonality and centralization. Finally, we’ll look at how some organizations are combating email overload by employing “governance architectures” to structure their use of these tools.

I had a great time giving this talk, and people seemed to really enjoy it. I did my best to keep the focus on what teams need to work together effectively, rather than just do a competitive analysis of the available tools. I’ll post the slides as soon as I can get Wordpress to stop throwing script errors during the upload. The deck is available for download from the IT Conversations page linked above. Listen, follow along, and enjoy.

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During my presentation at UX Week, I discussed the “visualization” category of web apps for collaboration. I quoted Jeff Veen’s comment that screen-sharing seems to be more useful then seeing one another when collaborating over distance. With that in mind, I talked about VNC and free web tools like Vyew.

If you could have both screen-sharing and see or hear one another, though, wouldn’t that be nice? Right before UX Week, it seems Apple announced some of what iChat will be capable of in OS X Leopard — and wow is it impressive.

Tom Coates drew my attention to these drool-worthy new features with a post on his blog: Screen-sharing and slideshows, complete with live audio or video commentary. And it’s all tightly integrated with the messaging client many of us use every day.

That coupling with the Mac OS will work both for and against these features’ uptake in internal and consultative environments. Seeing as how nearly all of my coworkers and an increasing number of my clients exclusively use Macs, I honestly couldn’t be happier. I’ll be able to give and get over-the-shoulder demos, dry-run presentations, and troubleshoot my system… all without sending another piece of email, or even leaving my desk.

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Thanks to the good folks at Socialtext, the attendees here at User Experience Week in D.C. have been able to contribute their session notes to a fantastic conference wiki. Two days in, and there’s some great notes from sessions with Steven Johnson, Michael Bierut, Shelley Evanson, Dan Brown and more. We’ve got two more days left, and now we’re rolling out the welcome mat for everyone!

If you couldn’t make it this year, the UX Week ‘06 Wiki is the place to check out what’s happened and the great conversations that are taking place — no account or password needed.

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A few days ago, Mike Madaio pointed out something the Adaptive Path team just brought up on our internal mailing list: the new Vehix.com television advertisement that actually has an actor saying the lines, “How do we improve the user experience?”

I saw this the other night and you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Not because it was odd to hear those words on national television, but because I could not for the life of me remember ever having heard “user experience” utilized as an explicit selling point in that medium. Leaving aside the overall veracity of the ad (is Vehix.com a superior experience to its competitors?), we are continuing to see variations on this kind of language (”easy to use” being the most common) creep into mainstream marketing of services, sites and products.

It’s nice to see that even traditional marketers have started to understand some of the value of user experience, for both ensuring customer satisfaction and as a differentiating from the competition.

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I’ve been quite happily subscribing to the New York Times’ Sunday edition for years—despite the hilariously weak journalism of some sections and the paper’s boneheaded refusal to include the Metro section in West Coast deliveries. That said, I note with amusement the schizophrenic coverage the online Grey Lady receives from bloggers. The paper’s site is either an absolute paragon by virtue of its design and reportage, or a bad web citizen due to foot-shooting “features” like the TimesSelect pay wall.

The TimesSelect debacle began over a year ago with the paper’s announcement that it would be charging explicitly for access to some of its most widely read, e-mailed and blogged editorial columns. In that year, the overall success of the experiment has been questioned, but it should be pointed out that none of the truly dire predictions made early on have come even close to bearing out. The Times is still a relevant, contributory source of well-reported hard news—the same core fluency that enabled it to spawn generation after generation of influential op-ed writers. Whether the influence of the current generation (or the ability to draw attention to the next) has been damaged by the pay wall is a question best left to Sunday morning talk show bookers.

Despite the ongoing annoyance of TimesSelect to many bloggers, the addition of “Most Emailed/Blogged/Searched” article promotion (among other changes) in the latest redesign of nytimes.com had largely put aside questions about whether the Paper of Record understood its place in the larger conversation going on around it. Or so I had thought, at least. This weekend, TechDirt pointed out a recent tiff between GM and the Times over a Tom Friedman op-ed (handily hidden behind the TimesSelect pay wall), and the paper’s attempt to over-edit the auto manufacturer’s letter to the editor defending itself from Friedman’s assertions.

GM’s response? They went ahead and posted not only the entire text of the letter the Times refused to print, but offered a compelling story of the paper’s seemingly arbitrary guidelines for responding to op-eds. Both of those are great fodder for blog coverage (I’m writing this, aren’t I?) and have probably drawn a lot more readers to the GM blog than would probably ever visit in a given week. The Times missed a golden opportunity to host and participate in a furtherance of conversation it had kicked off. Now, an op-ed that many readers didn’t even get to see is being savaged and fact-checked far away from the letter col of the Times, and the paper’s missteps have acted as a multiplier of not only the audience, but the negativity of the episode’s coverage.

So how to categorize this? Is it more backwards progress for a newspaper that wants to embrace blogs while acting like it expects exclusive control over conversations about its protected content? Or an unexpectedly savvy move on the part of GM? I’m leaning towards the latter, but the whole kerfluffle emphasizes a point we’ve been making repeatedly of late to organizations that have a healthy fear of blogs and conversations happening online: there is tremendous advantage in being aware of your place in the larger cosmology of the web. Avoiding accusations of being a “bad actor” online means knowing that communication is neither one way, nor about blindly capitalizing on the intellectual property you produce.

I’ve had to deal with some head-scratching the NY Times has caused me as it exhibits both awareness and ignorance of its role online—perhaps blog coverage of the Times is schizophrenic because the paper is just that. Thinking about it, though, there has been a larger lesson in all of this for me. I believe now that it’s possible to evaluate the maturity of an organization’s online strategy by the overall “awareness” its actions betray; a truly mature communications strategy conveys awareness that the greater value lies in contributing to, rather than attempting to own or manipulate the conversations it engenders.

By that rubric, the Times still has a ways to go.

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