Experiencing Information

I started using Daylife just after it first launched. Since then I dropped if from my “Daily Stuff” tabs in FireFox that I usually open simulatenously when I go online. I liked a lot of things about the service, but it just wasn’t something that I needed at the time.
Just having revisited the site, I noticed some major changes to the user experience. The huge, page-filling image that previously occupied the start page has been removed in favor of more genre-conforming elements for online news sites. And for the most part, the site is far less image-rich than before. In areas like “Celebrity” this is unfortunate, but overall it’s probably a good move. With more focus on text and links, Daylife should be able to better expose and leverage their algorithms and entity extraction. And I like the basic information design on the site, so it works well.

A next step for them might be to expose more user-generated content and metadata. Comments, blogging, tagging, etc., would set it apart from other similar news services. (Now, there’s a good quesiton: how can tagging be leveraged on a current awareness service, where articles come on and go off the radar in a matter of days? With no time to incubate a collection of tags, what do you do there?). But their API is already a huge step in the Web 2.0 direction, so I’m going to knock them.

Anyway, I’m going to give it another shot and add it back to my daily tabs.

The smart folks over at SlideShare came up with a powerful new service for the site: SlideCast. Haven’t used it yet, but it looks to be fairly simple and a good idea overall.

Personally, I never considered PowerPoint to be evil. It’s just another tool the communicate. Sure, it can be used wrong, and it has it’s own style of communication, but any medium does. SlideCasting looks like it will make posted slide decks much more powerful.

If you have experience with SlideCasting, let me know what you think.

Information Architects, a design agency in Tokyo, created this Web Trend Map.

It’s not all that useful, but fun to look at. I have a large poster of the London tube on my office wall–as a sort of homage to early environmental information design.

The Web Trend Map is an interesting metaphor based on a subway map. They put some thought into the relationships between entities, even though it’s impossible to represent them on a 2-D map. It’s also interesting how they integrated weather symbols to show forecasts, something you don’t get (and don’t need) with subway map. It’s a mixed metaphor but works nonetheless.

Google launched an image view of Google News about a month ago. It’s an interesting alternative to text headlines of news stories. I quite like it. I also found myself gravitating towards different stories on the image view than on the normal Google News page, even though some of the images are the same.

The shape of information on the image view is different than on the standard view or text view. It breaks the offline newspaper genre more than online news in general. For one, the notion of priority is different. There is no real headline story, and it’s easier and quicker to dive into all of the articles.

That would make a good study: what is the perceived difference in daily events based on the different formats? I suspect with a typical news layout, the larger headlines in more prominent positions will correlate to people’s perception of what’s going on at that moment. On the image view, there may be other cues, and the top left photo may not have influence just because of its position.

Optimal Usability, a usability consulting company in New Zealand, has a beta version of their new card sort program called Optimal Sort.

On the surface of things it looks to be quite good. I only tried out the online demo so far–the participant’s view of a sorting exercise–and it was very smooth. It’s Flash based with drag-and-drop interaction. Easy to move items around and label boxes and stuff like that.

Once the screen started getting full, however, some of the categories were cut off towards the bottom (on my computer at 1024×768), and it became difficult to move items in and out of those boxes. Otherwise, it’s simple enough for any participant to get the hang of in a matter of seconds. Both open and closed sorts are possible.

In general, one of the advantages of card sort programs is that they can help with analysis. Yet, most of the programs available overcomplicate results with dendograms and clustering and not-so intuitive statistical formats. Though I didn’t see the results from Optimal Sort in the demo, it looks to be cleaner and more straight forward from the screenshots and descriptions.

I particularly liked this claim on their site: “use common sense and experience to spot patterns.” Imagine that: you have to use your intuition as a designer to interpret the results.

The process of administering tests seems to be easy as well. In a SurveyMonkey-like fashion, you can send a link out to participants, and they can then complete the sort on the web. Of course, this leaves out what I consider an important part of card sorts: talking to people about why they grouped things together and observing where they have difficulty grouping things. But the ease of getting people to take part and efficiency this tool offers makes it valuable.

Sam Ng from Optimal Usability tipped me off to this. Thanks, Sam.

They’re still offering free sign registration with the beta version until August. Check it out.

Todd Wilkens has an interesting post over at the Adaptive Path blog entitled Why usability is the path to failure. The ensuing discussion in the comments is just as good.

I must say that I agree with Todd’s take on usability. Sure, it’s important but it’s really a baseline for any functional design. Since everyone ultimately wants to be usable, there’s nothing usability people aren’t doing or saying that competitors aren’t either. It’s not a differentiator.
It kinda reminds me of Michael Porter’s take on corporate strategy. He essentially says that operational effeciency is important, but not strategic. It’s operational. It’s something everyone strives for, even your competitors. Can’t find the full text of Michael Porter’s “What is Strategy?” article free online, so here’s the summary and order form for the article on HBR.

“Michael Porter argues that operational effectiveness, although necessary to superior performance, is not sufficient, because its techniques are easy to imitate. In contrast, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match.”

Matt Hurst over at Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media points to this interactive map on the NY Times website to track political campaign funding. I guess I’m spoiled by the Trendalyzer mentioned in my previous post, but this level of interactivity is downright tame. It’s smooth and somewhat usable (although the banners and nav at the top of the screen cut of the date range controls so that I didn’t see them until I was done looking at it), but I craved for more interactivity and exposing relationships.

The thing I really wanted to somehow have the ability to overlay two or more candidates’ funding bubbles. Flicking between the two, Obama clearly gets more support from the Chicago area than Guiliani, for instance (which is no surprise). But what other interesting connections and relationships might also be revealed? How’s Barack stacking up to Rudy in NY? Or how about bubbles for Dems vs Reps? I don’t want to knock the NYT for doing this, but there just seems like so many other easy targets that could have made this so much better.

BTW, check out Matt’s blog for other neat things going on in the text mining and analytics realm.

Professor Hans Rosling gave this talk at TED in 2006 and this follow-up talk in 2007. It already made the blog rounds a while back, but I thought I’d post it anyway after re-watching. Incredible use of information visualization. It’s like, “understand the world in 20 minutes.” No wonder Google acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software.

Check out what you can do with some world data yourself.

This kind of visualization will start to become more widespread, I predict, particularly in niche markets. So it’s (once again) a timely acquisition by Google. The future will not about having information or even having access to information. It’ll be about how you make sense of it, and you have to be able to do it quickly. Trendalyzer is a big step in that direction with lots of potential.

There’s a interesting study in the February issue of JASIST about which elements are most important for determining credibility of news stories on automated news aggregator pages, like Google News. [1] Though the findings might be obvious (there’s nothing wrong with stating the obvious), the researchers point to three elements that are most important on such automatically created pages:

• The name of primary source from which the headline and lead were borrowed
• The time elapsed since the story broke
• The number of related articles written on the topic of the story

The researchers write: “…The findings from this study demonstrate that information scent is not simply restricted to the actual text of the news lead or headline in a news aggregating service. Automatically generated cues revealing the pedigree of the hyperlinked information carry their own information scent. Furthermore, these cues appear to be psychologically significant and therefore worthy of design attention. Systems that emphasize such cues in their interfaces are likely to aid information foraging, especially under situations where the user is unlikely to be highly task-motivated and therefore prone toward heuristically based judgments of information relevance. Navigational tools that highlight these cues are likely to be more effective in directing user traffic, as evidenced by early research on newspaper design (which highlighted the attention-getting potential of placement, layout, and color) and screen design (focusing primarily on typography and color…Finally, visualization efforts should focus on attracting user attention towards-and making explicit the value of-proximal cues instead of simply concentrating on visualizing the underlying information.”

This means to me that–even though the pages are automatically generated–there is still information architecture and information design that is critical to understanding and experience the information. Maybe machines won’t replace designers and there is a place for professions like IA in the future after all. Hmm…

[1] Sundar, S. Shyam, Silvia Knoblock-Westerwick, Matthias R. Hastall. News Cues: Information Scent and Cognitive Heuristics. JASIST 58(3): 366-378, 2007.

Here’s a really good video of Bill Buxton talking about sketching:
http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=323680309&channel=324389485.
It’s long–about 90 minutes. The contents correspond to his recent book, Sketching User Experiences, which I don’t have yet.

He covers a lot more great deal more than just actual sketching. The talk–and presumably the book–is ultimately about design, innovation, and the overall user’s experience. He also covers things like product development processes, touching on the notion of getting the right design versus getting the design right.

One thing that struck me was this quote:
“If you have the best designers in the world working for you and you don’t have an executive who is at the power of the CTO directly reporting to the president…who is called the Chief Design Officer, then you should fire all of your usability people and all of you industrial design people, because you are telegraphing to your entire organization that you don’t take this seriously, so why should they.”

Ouch.

But he’s right. At most companies, Design (with a capital D) is about getting the design right and not getting the right design. Also, Design isn’t integrated into all other parts of the business, and so has little chance of succeding. You need the C-level support. Punkt. Whether or not the Design Team should pack up and go home is questionable, though.

Buxton notes that sketching is different from prototyping. Sketches are disposable, unfinished, and ask questions. Prototypes answer questions and suggest a concrete design. And since ideas are a dime a dozen, you need at least 5 sketch alternatives to get the right design. This is what Design is all about. It’s not about the designer, but about exploration, throughing things out, and making mistakes.

In sketching information experiences, I’m wondering what the tools are. Wireframes, of course, are a staple of information architecture. But how do taxonomists and librarians sketch organization systems?

Sure, there are tools to help develop and manage abstract information structures, but is this really sketching? Is this really design? Maybe not. Maybe IA isn’t a design discipline. If alternatives aren’t explored, then it is not.

So what are the sketching tools for information experiences? Post-Its? Card Sorting? Sitemaps? Anything else?