Photo Mobiles

Here in the UK, we are currently being bombarded with ads from mobile phone players like T-Mobile (in its distinctive pink livery - not a Germanic colour in my book) to pick up on 2.5G/3G picture messaging services.

Most of the ads are trying to get people into "mob" activities - suncream fights, pillow fights, frisbee throwing etc. All well and good, but not really a world changing benefit.

Anyway, reading through the venerable Big Issue recently, I came across a small clipping explaining that Junior Doctors in Wales have been using photo mobiles to take pictures of X-Rays and forward them to consultants for assistance in diagnosis. It strikes me that this is a great use of the service - it could be extended maybe to teh general public with a 999-PHOTO number where, say, if you were at the scene of a traffic accident you could post a message to this service and receive a text of instructions from a trained medical professional while the emergency services beetled over to you ("Don't take off the motorcyclist's helmet, check his/her airways are clear...")

So, I reckon a big push for the medical services industry could be on its way.

Trust/Reputation in Search

I've been wondering whether reputation can be conveyed in any other way in search algorithms than Google's PageLink algorithm (which seems to me to be a measure of popularity - albeit in a network sense - rather than of reputation). I was reading an article in the ASIST Journal called "When Documents Deceive" by Clifford A. Lynch on the bus home, and came across the phrase:

"The question of formalizing and recording expectations...[of] trust in behavior [is] very poorly explored. There are a number of avanues: certification or rating services that might be consulted, or webs of individuals vouching for behaviour of others"

I'd been pondering whether it might be possible (particularly in an intranet) to modify a search engine so that when a user rates a page, he or she can also see in his/her search results how people like him/herself have rated the pages and/or how people he or she trusts rated the pages. This might seem a bit daft, but I was wondering whether, a bit like FOAF, a search engine could have a "who do you trust?" section, where you log-in, and then identify other people on a database whose opinion you trust. Search results might gain extra weighting within the overall results based on their "reputation" rating 9where the results would be specific to your trust network). I suppose the problem is placing the burden on users of registering and keeping their "trust networks" up to date, and the fact that it would become a very large database, but that detail could be ironed out by brains greater than my own.

Bah! Humbug

A section of the company intranet needed some serious IA attention. Because,perhaps more than any other section of the intranet, it focuses on end user needs and tasks, I ran a 20-person card-sort to get some idea of end-user ideas on groupings and labelling of these groups. Got some useful results, turned them into a decent wireframe with our CMS, then my boss presented the results to the "section" working group.

The working group said they didn't care for a lot of the user-focused stuff and wanted to stick to a fairly "departmental" viewpoint. Although I accepted this with gritted teeth, it was still fine as we had manged to make some significant progress on the section structure. So I re-worked the wireframe (not a small job) and we re-presented the findings for the working group's approval.

Lo and behold, some of them said - "I thought the purpose of this exercise was to focus on tasks and users". This from the every people who had rejected the initial user- and task-focused structure. Sometimes I despair! Send me valium.

Blog geography

via Tom at the OTHERmedia's blog, I've posted this blog to Blizg - it shows the closest blogs to mine geographically (that have been entered on Blizg) and the closest to mine topically (by analysing meta tags). Check out my listings: very nice.

Baby Perl

Because I haven't done any programming to speak of since I was nine or ten, and dabbling with BASIC on a BBC B Micro, I've decided to start to learn Perl. I've got my SAMS book and a couple of O'Reilly guides, and am ready to go.

Hierarchical labels

There have been a lot of postings on SIGIA with regard to Jakob Nielsen's kind of bland article on information foraging recently - but the article itself did send me off in search of some information retrieval articles. One I found called "Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval" by Kevin Larson and Mary Czerwinski at Microsoft research had some interesting conclusions (and I'll be honest, I was naughty, and skim-read the body, jumping to the conclusions). The conclusions are great because they suggest that if you ensure that the "information scent" (to use the in "meme" du jour) at each classification level is strong - i.e. label things clearly such that they give you a clear idea of what they are, and what else you'll find if you follow the link; and aim for a middle-path between a broad and shallow in terms of your site structure.

Not rocket science, but it's nice to have a justification for what seems like good practice.

The Web for the blind

I read a posting on Accessify about the RNIB supporting individuals in the UK in accessibilty cases. It looks as though we are moving toward a situation, as in the States, where W3C-type guidelines might have a basis in law. It's worth keeping an eye out on this one

UPDATE

Check out this interview with Julie Howell of the RNIB on Made for All.

Making "stuff" useful

Postings on Peter Merholz’ blog and Idblog that I’ve commented on have sparked off a train of thought in my head: the art of making stuff useful (as semantically neutral a statement as I can make it).

I’ve been pondering this for a bit: my thoughts are partially related to Lou Rosenfeld’s attempt at an all-encompassing image of how different fields relate to one another (I'll link to this when I can remember where on his site it is), but much more to my own position where I do a bit of Information Architecture and design, a bit of editorial work, some graphic design, some usability (and very amateur psychology and ethnography) along with business strategy etc.

Sometimes it’s difficult to relate each discipline to the other, but I feel that the common denominator is “usefulness”. I’m not trying to set this out as a new discipline, more as a connector, a way of thinking about the other things. It might seem like a reduction ad absurdum (and maybe it is – commonality is often reductive as menu items often show), but I like to think of it as a mantra in the back of my head: is this useful to the end-user, is it useful to the business, is it useful full stop (what’s the use of it?)?

Richard Buchanan kind of hit a similar note in his essay “Good Design in the Digital Age” in the book Used – Browser 3.0: The Internet Design Project when he stated:

”Qualities of usefulness, usability and desirability play a central role in good design for websites and all digital products. But there is one final step to turn them into useful tools of product development: discovering the proper balance of all three qualities for a particular product and the people who use the product.”

I’d extend this beyond “three qualities” and user/product demands, but it’s essentially my point. I could extend the analogy further, as I was considering an essay-length posting, but brevity is king, so I’ll stop here.

Reputation and Trust (an update)

While reading an O'Reilly piece on captology, I came across a URL that I'd completely forgotten about, and meant to mention in an earlier piece on online trust and reputations: the Stanford Web Credibility Research pages. Anyway, it's very interesting reading - even if you have read it before. I suppose this is a bit of a "note to self"

Annual Report - hooray

I was co-opted into the company's annual reporting this year owing to my editorial experience - I suppose it's nice to do some print work for a change. I've just got advance copies of the report in, and I'm really chuffed with the results given that I was responsible for design and production (as well as a whole heap of proofing). I've really enjoyed working with the design agency and printers that I selected for us to work with, so want to say thanks to them also. They are:

Emperor Design

Pillans & Waddies

All I can say is it's clean, austere and feels...well, a bit Swiss. Just what I was after.

Seek and ye shall find...

Just read Tim Bray on searching, where he says only Librarians use advanced search, and that most users want one "natural language" search box. This is all very well, but it doesn't always mean that users will get the results they want - the thing about searching (and finding) is that your results are only as good (or precise) as the question you ask. For most of us, vaguely defined queries get satisfactory results (or at least "satisficing" results) - if we follow information foraging theories this is because the value/effort pay-off is enough.

Anyway, I dream about our intranet search engine working - we can't enhance it with a thesaurus or fuzzy matching or best bets or anything else, because it rarely works. My colleague, Rik, is dreaming of getting "googled". At the moment, I think we are "googlied".

Books...

I've finished Krug's Don't Make Me Think and Garrett's The Elements of User Experience and still have the other two to finish. The best thing about each book is not that either teaches you anything completely new, but more that they help you to clarify the knowledge that you already have from an information architecture and guerilla usability perspective.

Personally, I've found the fact that both books sent me back to basics of more value than anything new I could have learned. Common sense is often (but not absolutely always) such a valuable commodity

Purists and realists

I have recently been accused of taking a purist approach to problems - which I suppose is a fair enough criticism - as opposed to taking business and political realities into full account.

My point is that I try to act as Devil's advocate: someone will always remind me of the fact that I might not be proposing a "real" solution, taking a purist standpoint forces people to give me some useful feedback which I can then use to modify my point of view and my proposed solution. Is this an obtuse way of working?

Testing images support

Does this work? Just seeing if I can call on photos from my free webspace for future reference. Hopefully, it should display a photo of me

One for the L-I-S educated

Reading the latest issue of The New Scientist, I noticed a short story about a new hotel in the U.S. This hotel has 10 floors for each of the main Dewey Decimal classifications, and the rooms are themed around sub-classifications according to the floor. Is this Information Architecture?

Weblogs: dynamics and value

UPDATE - 17 June 2003

Just a link to an ur-document on the issue of blog popularity: Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.

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I've been reading in and around some postings by Tom Coates on Plasticbag, related how thematic weblog discussions develop, and how the theme (or "meme" as everyone appears to be using Dawkin's phrase nowadays) is transmitted across the complex network of inter-relations in the blog. Coates was commenting on the original piece Dynamics of a Blogosphere story, where it appeared that four types of posting occurred - opinion, vote, reaction and summation - at different times in the blog discourse - and highlighting the differences between blog stories and bulletin boards (among other things). Ross Mayfield had also picked up on this line, along with several others, but it sparked a few thoughts in my head about the value of a weblog discussion.

The value of the discussion as a whole strikes me as being formed of the two obvious strands - qualitative and quantitative. A highly linked discussion will have a high qualitative value owing to Reed's Law (that in a many-to-many community, where n is the number of nodes/groups in the network, the network's value is 2ⁿ). Likewise, links - whether inline, in blogrolls, or as trackbacks, can be seen as a commodity exchange - the greater the number of links into a blog posting, the greater its inherent "value" (in a quasi-financial sense) - as evidenced in the wider web by Google's linking algorithm and Amazon's book ratings system.

As always, however, quantity is not the only rule of thumb. The judgement of the quality of a particular posting will be made by each visitor him- or herself based on a number of tacit understandings: is this information of interest to me? have I come across this author before? what do I know of the author's experience or personality? what is his/her position in my particular "social network"? how well written/formatted is his/her copy? So trust and reputation evidently also have a sizable role to play in in a particular posting's valuation.

When postings are linked to one another, and commented upon, the valuation of a thematic discussion, as opposed to a single posting also comes into play. According to power laws, it is likely that 80% of interesting comments and postings are likely to be posted by 20% of authors (and that 80% of traffic and linking will also be to 20% of postings). As the discussion grows, the amount of "noise" in the discussion is likely to increase - and the emergent value of the the sum of the postings (i.e. a single thematic discussion) might out-weigh the value of a single contributor's viewpoint (which may be overlooked as it occurs on the fringe's of the discussion regardless of its validity). The question arises that the volume of "feedback" might make it difficult for a new reader to read the entirety of the discussion.

I don't really think, however that "reading the whole discussion" is where the value of blogging resides necessarily (unlike Wikis or bulletin boards, for instance). Blogs offer a number of points of access into a discussion, and the threads sometimes follow a linear course, but more often than not spread off in a number of directions. Blogging's value appears to lie in this multi-valency. A blog posting itself - as a singularity - is a monologue. The moment that someone posts a comment to the blog, it becomes a more-or-less linear dialogue. The moment that someone writes a new posting either based on the original blog, or linking to it, the discussion becomes two dialogues. These dialogies can split up and re-join at any number of points along the way, but seem to tend towards expansion rather than restriction, until the thread peters out.

I'll try and put some flesh on the bones of these ideas at some point, as its rather late in the evening and I haven't finished work yet.

Trust Networks continued...

Rather than edit the previous blog, here's some further trust -related information as promised.

a few months ago, at an intranet benchmarking forum meeting, I heard a lecture by Adam Joinson of the Open University on Psychology and the Internet - I've got a Powerpoint of his lecture - if anyone wants it, just send me an email. Much of what he had to say about how we are more trusting on the internet is borne out through the example of my friend Jamie, who appears to be very successful in online flirting! I'd also point to the sample chapters of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey and Meg Hourihan which point out how a personality can be "constructed" online.

The oxytocin issue is discussed in To Trust is human in the 10 May 2003 edition of the New Scientist. Oxytocin is a lactation-related hormone, which I always remember being told is very important in mother-baby bonding. It looks like it might also have a role to play in other human bonding/trust relationships. The New Scientist archive is open to subscribers.

Trust networks

Aaargh - stupid me. I'd just written a lengthyish posting on trust (oxytocin, wikis, Open University lecturers, online flirting and business) when blogspot refused to post it! Oh well, I'll try and recover my thoughts and re-post it later on along with a few useful URLs.

UPDATE

• Trust Networks piece from Ross Mayfield's blog


• Criteria for evaluation of Internet Information Resources


• Paul English's Trust Model


• Peter Morville's piece Trust by Design

I'll add more resources later - probably not until Friday

Books, lovely books

Through work, I've just received Rosenfeld and Morville's 2nd version of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Bob Boiko's Content Management Bible, Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience. I've read parts of all of them before, and enjoyed the first version of IA 4 WWW, although found it very much an introduction for beginners rather than for the more experienced Information Architect. I've started reading Elements of User Experience on the bus in and from work, and like the expanded explanation of Jesse's famous diagram (later expanded upon by George Olsen). I like to think I'll use a few paragraphs of it to communicate some core user-focused/user experience ideas to others, as they are nice and succinct. The opening, mind you, does rip off Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things.

Banging head against a brick wall

I feel sometimes like I am banging my head against a brick wall. Our intranet menu plays host very frequently to the "I'm more powerful than you" playground contest. Pressure is put on the intranet team to add new top-level items to the menu based upon a department's "importance". Those putting the pressure upon the team are impervious to any clear explanations of user-focus or findability - our job - and generally try to assume an "I don't care what you say, I'm more important than you" attitude.

We have tried a number of ways to improve this situation: concerted communications efforts and - a measure which has been partially successful - user-focused card sorting exercises, which do deliver some form of "scientific proof" to those higher up the ladder that no-one thinks departmentally (apart from them!). Does anyone else have any experience of this specific problem, and have any useful suggestions for resolving it?

Contact me if you have any suggestions