20 User Experience Books You Should Own

UX By Design has a list of 20 UX books they feel every designer should own. See their post 20 User Experience Books You Should Own.

Designing Web Navigation is #4 on the list. I’m not sure if this is a ranked list or not, but it’s still nice to appear towards the top. AndI’m in good company–places 1-3 rightfully go to:

1. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, by Peter Merholz
2. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, by Dan Brown
3. Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs (Interactive Technologies), by Hugh Beyer

Auftritt im Fools Garden – Sa. 2.5.

Hallo an alle, die in Hamburg sind.

Meine Band–Helmut and the Lampshades–wird morgen am Samstag den 2.5. mit unserem neuen Programm im Fools Garden auftreten.

-> Spoken-Word: Jazz-Arrangements zu den Erzählungen, so wie Songs von Neil Young und eigene Stücke.

Mehr Details auf unserer Website: http://lampshadejazz.wordpress.com/

3D Tag Clouds

The 3D tag cloud isn’t new, but I came across one in real life on a Sydney tours site. WordPress has been offering a 3D tag cloud for a while now, developed by Roy Tanck.

I’m not a huge fan of tag clouds as a navigation mechanism in general. They’ll probably prove to be a fad and will date the current generation of web sites. Sure, tag cloud provide a certain zeitgeist-effect and give a quick overivew. But as a navigation mechanism, tag clouds are pretty lousy.

The 3D tag cloud was fun to play with, but I don’t think it will revolutionize tag navigation in any way.

IA Summit Program

The IA Summit 2009 program looks to be stellar once again:

I’m particularly excited about the keynote speaker: Michael Wesch–a real live anthropologist and forerunner in the field of digital ethnography. In my talk on ethnography at the Euro IA conference in Amsterdam, I made the point that IAs need to be doing more ethnography. I wonder if he’ll make a similar point.

In this light, the “Evolve or Die” panel looks interesting to me too. So does “Strategies for Enabling UX to Play a More Strategic Role.” I can’t decide which presentation to go to for most of the other time slots–typical for the IA Summit.

Unfortunately, I have to miss Jesse James Garrett’s closing keynote speech. Arrgh. That may change, but I don’t think so.

Be there or be square.

Carousel Navigation (was rotating navigation)

I previously blogged on what I was calling rotating navigation–for lack of a better term. Mia Nothrop, from Razorfish, thankfully corrected me on the label. It’s widely referred to as a carousel or carousel navigation. See the Yahoo design pattern on carousel navigation.

Thanks, Mia.

Information Search Experience Revisted

The name of this blog–Experiencing Information–was inspired by two people.

• First, Andrew Dillon is quoted as saying “data is stored, information is experienced.” He’s done a lot of work on the concept of information shape and document genre to show that how we encounter and interact with information is an important part of understanding information.
• Second, the work of Professor Carol Kuhlthau has influenced my thinking on information seeking. In particular, she included emotions in her information seeking model. Actually, considering actions, thoughts, and emotions simultaneously–which Kuhlthau does–is a key part of my definition of “user experience” in general.

In 2004 I gave a presentation at the IA Summit in Austin, TX entitled Information Search Experience: Emotions in Information Seeking (ISX). This basically took the work of Kuhlthau and others and put forth a framework for a diagnostic tool that could be used in conceiving of information systems. A significant part of this model is that it takes user emotions into account. Parts of this framework have also appeared in other places, namely in an article in interactions and in my book.

Recently, Kuhlthau and company re-examined her framework for the Information Search Process (ISP) model. See “The ‘information search process’ revisited: is the model still useful?“. Not surprisingly, the authors (including Kuhlthau) find the ISP model to still be valid, even across different information seeking contexts:

The information search process model describes feelings, thoughts and actions in an information seeking task with a discreet beginning and end, where considerable construction of knowledge takes place. The description of the stages of affective, cognitive and physical experience of users continued to be found in this study. This indicates that the model continues to be a useful theoretical and explanatory framework for user studies in librarianship and information science.

In addition, the model continues to be instructive when designing user centred information services and systems. Its consecutive stages can form the basis for timed interventions in order to support users throughout the progress of a project. This research indicates that a crucial stage for interventions is the exploratory middle part where the formulation of focus is developed.

It’s this last part that has always interested me and that stands at the heart of my ISX model. But rather than necessarily taking Kuhlthau’s ISP stages as is, I suggest that you first need to uncover the seeking stages your particular user group actually goes through. This can be inspired from the ISP, but may have important variations. And of course the inclusion of actions, thoughts, and feelings in my ISX is directly inspired from Kuhlthau.

Not too long ago, I had the privilege of working with the good folks at the University College of London Interaction Centre (UCLIC). At the time, Stephann Makri was finishing up his doctoral work, and he visited LexisNexis to get feedback and valid a tool for designing information systems for legal researchers. See his forthcoming JASIST article on the method.

Stephann doesn’t include feelings in his tool, and it’s really more based on Ellis’ behavioral model of information seeking. But at a high level there are similarities between his approach, my ISX, and Kuhlthau’s ISP, I think. Basically, in conceiving of information systems, it’s helpful to understand the phases people go through in a systematic way. Then, you need to ensure that you match the features, functionality, and design of the system to support the user’s actions, though process, and feelings.

Sounds simple and obvious (which is good), but I’m not convinced project teams do this, and they certainly don’t do it explicitely. The tools (either mine or Stephann’s) provide important insight, I believe. But we’ve not used Stephann’s tool at LexisNexis, and I’ve never had success bringing the ISX model to a broader project team. (I’ve really only used it for myself.) So maybe as diagnostic tools the models are limited in their impact in practical settings.

Still, I think there is potential for theory to inform practice in this area. Maybe I need to revisit my ISX and formalize it (and package it) better.

Separate Tags with Commas

Tagging, in general, leverages natural language. You tag as you would normally speak or use language in every-day life. And that’s a strength of tagging–one that makes it popular and scalable and usable and all that good stuff.

Why, then, don’t all tagging system use comma-separated tagging input mechanisms? There is nothing natural about these tags–either in entering them or using them:

• socialnetworking (del.icio.us)
• to-read (del.icio.us)
• notionalbookfestival (flickr)
• newyorkcity (flickr)

Note that I’m complaining that there is no preferred term for these concepts, rather that the form that the systems require people enter tags in have caused people to find workarounds. Namely, entering compound tags (i.e., tags with 2 or more terms) isn’t how people naturally type. That you get multiple forms of tags for “New York City” is fine with me–a Good Thing even. But where there is a workaround, there is surely a fault in the system or workflow.

Consider this: “york” consistently appears in flickr’s top tags tag cloud. Really? Are so many people traveling to the lovely city of York in the UK and posting photos to flickr? Well, no. People are going to New York City and tagging their photos in a way that they would normally type: new <space> york <space> city, instead of the system-required newyorkcity or new_york_city or new-york-city. Here’s any example of a user doing that on flickr.

So, combined with the photos from the city of York that are tagged as such, “york” as a tag on flickr gets boosted up to a top tag.

WordPress does it right: you can simply type like you would an email or blogpost or whatever, using commas to separate compound tags.

itsamysterytomewhywetoleratesuchnon-user-friendly_systemsforenteringtags_whenasimplesolutionis-certainly-just-around-the-corner

Entering tags should always be comma-separated. Punkt.

Veranstaltung in Hamburg, 2009

Aufgrund der positiven Resonanz und zahlreicher Nachfragen veranstaltet NetFlow zwei Workshops mit mir auch in 2009. Die Workshops werden auf Deutsch gehalten.

• 26. Januar 09 – Workshop I: “Prinzipien der Informationsarchitektur“
• 27. Januar 09 – Workshop II: “Elemente des Navigationsdesigns“

Siehe auch den Flyer (PDF 64KB).

Die Teilnehmer Anzahl ist begrenzt. Du kannst dich online anmelden.

Open Shevles Classification

This isn’t exactly new, but I wanted to post on it anyway. Library Thing is trying to get an open-source-like project for classification for to replace Dewey going. It’s called the Open Shelves Classification.

Back in my library days, I might have joined in–but not now. There is a forum for the project on Library Thing, as well as a wiki.

While Ifind the initiative interesting and with some potential, I wonder how they’ll ever arrive at top-level categories or even facts. Good luck to them.

Syntopicon

My previous post pointed to activities at Google for automatically extracting quotes from books and linking them together. In his talk in this project, Google research Bill Schilit mentioned the Great Books of the Western World project and the Syntopicon. I had not heard of this, but it’s quite intriguing.

In a nutshell, Mortimer Adler, an American philosopher, and Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, headed up a project in the earlier 50s to index ideas across key books in the western canon. This index of 102 core ideas across 431 works is called the Syntopicon, or collection of topics, which spans 2 volumes. Here are the ideas that were indexed:

Volume I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love

Volume II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World

It apparently took a massive team to read all the works, extract the ideas, and index them. And it cost a few million dollars. Apart from being completely impractical, there are obvious problems with the approach as well: a limited set of books, small scope of coverage (lots of philosophy), and bias from the people doing the indexing.

So, they are not my “great” books and not (necessarily) my key ideas. I didn’t see anything about music in the above list, for instance. And there’s a lot of overlap (where do Religion and Theology start and end?). Still, there are some interesting universal qualities to their collection of terms.

When you consider efforts like this–which started nearly 60 years ago–or things like the Science Citation Index from Eugene Garfield or the work of Paul Otlet, we see that a lot of the core ideas behind the new innovations in the digital era have predecessors in the offline world. I wonder what else we think we’re “inventing” anew that has already been thought of.

Quotation Mining at Google

Folks at the IAI mailing list pointed to an interesting talk by Bill Schilit of Google Research called “Navigating the network of knowledge: Mining quotations from massive-scale digital libraries of books.” Check out the video. Or, see a couple of the papers published on this topic from Bill’s publication page.

Overall, they are mining the millions of scanned books in Google Books for quotations, or popularly cited passages. There’s a lot of complexity to their approach, but basically there are two key points:

• First, they let authors decide which passages from other sources are quote-worthy. So if a passage in one source is quoted by a hundred other works, that passage probably contains an important or interesting idea.
• Second, by looking at the context before and after a quoted passage in the citing sources, they can extract labels for that quote. In other words, they also let the authors citing another source use their own terms to describe the quote.

The result for you and me is twofold:

• First, when looking at a book on Google Books, you can see and navigate passages in that book that have been quoted elsewhere. This serves as a quasi summary of the book in some ways, as Bill points out in his talk.
• Second, you can then navigate to the other sources that reference a particular quote in a book you’re looking at. You might know this as backward chaining or reverse citation, which isn’t a new concept.

So, it’s all quite in line with Google’s approach to search in general: harness the wisdom of crowds to create meaningful links based on frequency or popularity.

Sure, there is a lot of heavy computing going on here with tons of complex algorithms. But Google is once again parasitizing human judgement. That is, their algorithms (for Google Search, Google News, or Google Books quotations) don’t determine what’s important directly and mechanically; rather, they look to see what others have already determined to be important and they aggregate that into relevant linking. I don’t mean to minimize their innovations and hard effort by point that out, but do keep in mind that there is still human judgement at the heart of equation: it’s not all technology. Actually, it’s this human element in the Google equation that makes their approach to search so usefull and so successful, I believe.

Book Review: Subject To Change

Subject To Change, by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens (Adaptive Paths), O’Reilly, 2008

 

In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger formulated their 95 theses into what became the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was then published as a book in 2000. This pointed to new world marketplace, where markets are seen as conversations. To sum up this paradigm shift in the authors’ own words:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

Perhaps we’ve already seen this shift starting to take place. Old-economy models of management and customer relationships have been replaced by fast-moving, transparent ways of doing business. The authors of Subject To Change recognize this change as well:

“We’re sitting at the crux of a fundamental shift in the ways in which businesses engage with their customers. There are many reasons for this shift—globalization, containerization, digitization—and these emerging forces are causing consternation for businesses that don’t quite know how to react. The old tools at their disposal, such as efficiency, optimization, just-in-time manufacturing, blitz marketing, and outsourcing no longer provide the gains or competitive advantages they once did.” (p. 3).

Subject To Change guides us through this new environment from a user experience perspective, making a compelling overall case for experience design. And it does so with a sense of urgency: experience design and experience strategy aren’t things you should slowly start getting into. They are crucial to your business. You need to fundamentally transform your relationship with your customers and how you create products. Now.

A key message in Subject To Change is that “the experience is the product,” which is also the title of Chapter 1. Technology and richer feature sets alone are no longer sufficient to stay ahead in a competitive marketplace. Instead, you must create meaningful, engaging experiences to bring value to your business. And ultimately, from a user’s standpoint, there is no difference between the product and the experience.

An experience strategy, the topic of Chapter 2, is a critical step towards good experience design. The authors show that differentiation is of primary importance here, directly recalling Michael Porter’s perspective on strategy outlined in his landmark article “What Is Strategy” (HBR, 1996). A strategy based on parity is destined to fail. Instead, the goal is to find where you are different from competitors and highlight that value proposition in everything you do, including in the product design. Design and strategy, then, are not mutually exclusive; in fact, you could say that the former is the embodiment of the latter. Great product experiences demand a solid experience strategy.

What’s more, having an experience strategy is critical for dealing with change and uncertainty. Your product design may fail here and there, or you may have to change it often, but if the strategy is well-defined the user experience will still be consistent. Having a clearly articulated and explicit strategy, then, is central to being able to react and accommodate change:

“You have to recognize that a system will degrade, and make it such that such entropy doesn’t shatter the entire experience. The true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when thing start going wrong.” (p. 99).

Unfortunately, many organizations overlook the value of a creating a clear vision of the intended user experience. The authors point out:

“All too often, product teams have no central vision to work toward. At best, there is a list of requirements to meet; more typically, they simply have a set of features to develop. Designing and developing to requirement and feature list leads to unsatisfactory experiences, because those lists aren’t oriented to the perspective of the user. As they make decisions along the way, teams’ concerns for features, data, and technology trumps [sic] serving the customer. This is in large part because they have requirement and feature lists in front of them, but nothing to represent the user’s ultimate experience.” (p. 26)

One tactic to clarify a product vision is through prototypes. Vision prototypes make a common experience goal tangible and visible to others on the development team. What’s more, this type of exploration is important for the general design process. The overall take-away: make the vision of the user’s experience explicit early on.

But where does experience vision come from? In part, it comes from empathy for users. Building empathy for users, the authors advise us, is the first step on your way to transformative experience design—preceding and directly informing the experience strategy.

Traditional marketing techniques, however, don’t create empathy. People are not the gregarious consumers marketing data often portraits them as:

“To cultivate empathy for customers and users, it’s vital that an organization have a realistic view of those people’s lives. We must understand people as they are rather than as market segments or demographics.” (p. 43)

Even some traditional user-centered research methods don’t necessarily build empathy. Many approaches view people as rational actors or goal-driven buyers. Though methods like GOMS have a place in user research programs, they often miss the bigger picture. Alternatively, the authors advocate seeing “user experience” as a holistic phenomenon, taking emotions, culture, and context into account. In other words, don’t oversimplify the user’s experience, and instead embrace its complexity and vagueness.

Luckily, there are methods and approaches for capturing a holistic view of users. These often contrast traditional marketing techniques. Ethnography, for one, currently leads the pack of such holistic techniques and is on the lips of many experience designers these days. It’s curious, however, that although very effective, ethnography is still not widespread. A recent study on methods clearly demonstrates this: of the 20 methods compared, ethnography emerged as the most effective for creativity and innovation, but was one of the least commonly used techniques. (See “Ideation for product innovation: What are the best methods?” by Robert Cooper and Scott Edgett).

A central point in gaining empathy is that user research must go far beyond just listening to what people say. Looking at verbatim customer comments from questionnaires, for instance, can be flawed and skewed. It assumes that users are capable of expressing the real issues they are having in words, and that you—the reader of their comments—can draw the right conclusions from those comments.

But even if users could formulate their issues clearly and you could interpret them accurately, they won’t tell you want to do or how to design a product. They can’t. People don’t know more than what they’ve already experienced when it comes to product design, and they won’t be able to see beyond what they know. As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Or, consider the now-famous collaborative filtering navigation mechanism for book recommendations on Amazon.com. Maryam Mohit, responsible for the online customer experience at Amazon, explains in an interview that the idea for that feature was inspired by users, but didn’t come directly from their comments:

“It’s a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the “similarities” feature – the one that says “people who bought this also bought that.” In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they’d say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That’s an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.”

To be able to design for an innovative experience on the user’s behalf, you first have to build empathy. To do so, go beyond just listening to customers, and observe what they do as well.

The authors Subject To Change therefore urge businesses to make user research a core competency. This doesn’t mean throwing a few extra dollars at consultants to perform a few more usability tests each year. Instead, everyone in the organization must have an implicit empathy for the users of your products and services. First-hand contact with users helps greatly.

All of these recommendations in Subject To Change are not just idealistic talk without regard of project constraints. Thankfully, the authors have a very realistic perspective on product development. They recognize that having a primary focus on the user experience doesn’t mean you should ignore technology or business constraints. Of course these things matter, and they are huge challenges to solve in their own right. But the approach advocated in Subject To Change suggests that the user experience must be the centripetal force pushing downward on traditional technology- and feature-centered perspectives of product developement, rather than having those aspects act as a centrifugal force outward on the user experience.

Tim O’Reilly makes a similar observation in his blog posting “Designing from the Outside In.” He writes:

“Isn’t it curious how many of the applications and ideas getting the most buzz right now are coming from fertile collaborations between designers and developers? In addition to basecamp, there’s Flickr, conceived by designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. And who put their finger on AJAX, the meme of the moment, but web design firm Adaptive Path. Are designers the new heroes of the computer industry?”

O’Reily also quotes from Christopher Alexander’s landmark book A Pattern Language, which is about user-centered patterns of building architecture. Alexander writes:

“To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. Then connect the goals to one another to form the paths.”

This suggests that to create the optimal footpaths in a public space, it’s best to first put in the lawn and see where people walk. Then lay down the pavement to accommodate their natural walking patterns.

However, designing from “outside in” is often opposed to the organization and culture of many companies. Recognizing this, the authors of Subject To Change devote considerable space to discussions on how companies are organized and how organizational structures affect experience design. They point out that aligning an entire organization towards experience design represents a fundamentally different approach to how the company is run. Despite these challenges, the recommendation is to also make Design (with a capital D) a core competency—along with user research.

”Most companies are absolutely capable of creating the necessary processes. It’s just that this capability has languished because design activities have been discouraged in standard business practice. The ability to design and create new experiences is diffused and scattered throughout every technical and creative discipline. In addition, it’s typically relegated to lowest levels of an organization, given the least thought and analysis, and, not surprisingly, products results that are well beneath its potential.” (p. 111).

Bill Buxton, a notable author and speaker on human-computer interaction, corroborates this notion in an article “Innovation vs. Invention,” taking a perhaps more hard-core position. He writes:

“Is design leadership an executive level position? Do you have a Chief Design Officer reporting to the president? My view is that if you do not, you are not serious about design or innovation. Furthermore, you are telegraphing this fact to all of your employees, along with a clear message that they need not be either. As a result, you might as well fire all of your creative people, since you are setting them up to fail anyhow.”

It seems that good experience design—and innovation for that matter—must come from the top down within an organization, as well as from the bottom up. With out broad, high-level support for transformative design, good product experience won’t happen.

Why should businesses care? Well, the benefits of experience design to businesses are many. Chief among these is customer loyalty. The authors describe in some length what they call The Long “Wow!,” or a continued series of offerings that “wow” users. This means reaching beyond typcial measurements of customer satisfaction or creating things like loyalty programs. Instead, look deep into the lives of your users for opportunities to amaze and delight them through design. Make experience design a strategic advantage for your organization to bring value to your business. Win over your customers’ hearts.

On a more tactical level, the authors also propose agile developments methods as an important way to deal with fast changing projects. But it’s not just the process or steps that formal agile methods offer which are important. For sure, agile methods aren’t really structured to accommodate user experience design: they tend to focus on implementation. Still, there are aspects of agile methods than experience design can directly benefit from. You should therefore focus on the agile ideals: iterative design, open communication, and experimentation are all critical in melding agile development and experience design.

 

Overall, three themes emerge as the key elements in experience design throughout the book: strategy, empathy for users, and organizational transformation. This mirrors the main points made in Jared Spool’s recent keynote speech at the 2008 IA Summit in Miami entitled “Journey to the Center of Design.” His company, User Interface Engineering (UIE), investigated what development teams that create great experiences do differently than those that don’t. Their evidence shows three distinguishing elements: vision, feedback, and culture. In other words, teams that consistently create great user experiences have a clear vision of the final experience, they have proper channels of input from users that build empathy, and they have a company culture that truly supports Design. Teams that are not so successful lack these traits.

 

Subject To Change repeats many common themes found in the user-centered design literature from the last three or so decades. User research? Of course. Task analysis? Yes. Personas? Also good. But this book goes beyond the tenants of user-centered design to present a framework for understanding experience design. Start with a vision of the experience, gain empathy for users, and work in a culture that supports creativity and innovation. And above all, let your paths naturally adapt as needed.

The real value of this book is that present a case for experience design that makes good business sense. In fact, Subject To Change shows why experience design is critical for businesses in today’s market. The user-centered design community has come up short on this point: for all of user-centered dogma and research studies out there, we’ve failed to tell businesses how to get value from their products or to tell engineers how to build products. As a result, Subject To Change is not just for designers and should appeal to managers and developers alike.

Subject To Change paints a broad picture of user experience, but it also goes beyond that. It’s really about how to enable an organization to engage in Design Thinking, which isn’t only for designers. To effectively and consistently innovate and create compelling user experiences, everyone in an organization needs to be involved in Design in different ways. So, at its core, this is also a book about innovation and the mindset needed to create a culture of innovation.

This is a slim volume with eight short chapters over about 170 pages of text. The writing is compact and clear. And there is no mincing of words. Some may actually find it too emphatic at times, with very direct imperatives. But given today’s heavy engineering-oriented or feature-oriented product development approaches, such a tone is needed.

Subject To Change is a much-needed wake-up call for businesses looking to stay competitive in the 21^st century. This is an excellent, well-written book packed with great advice from veterans in the field. It’s highly recommended and essential for anyone currently trying to innovate products and services in just about any field.

 

Quotes from the book:

“The key to succeeding in the contemporary marketplace is to fundamentally change your relationship with customers. Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you’ll find a whole new world of opportunities to meeting their needs and desires.” (p. 3)

“We live in an increasingly uncertain world, where the tools that served us well for so long no longer do. Technology isn’t sufficient; we can’t simply add features to attract an audience. There is no more efficiency to squeeze out of our operations, nor defects to remove from our products.” (p. 14)

“The experience is the product.” (p. 14)

“Strategies of parity are low value and short-lived. Strategies of delivering new offerings for novelty’s sake won’t survive much further than the infomercial. These approaches center on features and technologies rather than focusing on the one thing that really matters—the experience. But even though experience matters to everyone, we almost always lose sight of it in product development.” (p. 25)

“If earlier reductionist models offered ways of avoiding or reducing the complexity in people’s lives, these new approaches are our attempts to acknowledge and embrace that complexity. By doing so, we are able to understand people more honestly and completely. We gain the potential for greater insights because we see and account for things left out of the old models. We build empathy that gives us the ability to provide a truly great product or service experience. This greater understanding also allows organizations to handle uncertainty and reduce risk.” (p. 58)

“Stop Designing ‘Products’” (title of Chapter 5, p. 79)

“So there you have it: the secret sauce is to focus on experiences by delving into the complexities of people’s lives, and then to create elegant systems to support them.” (p. 105)

“Anything elevated to level of an organizational competency has to align with both the organization’s strategy and its system for doing business. Without this business perspective, design fails. Strategy, systems, and design are all innately about tradeoffs.” (p. 116)

“Design can and will fail when it’s practiced outside the context of systems and strategy. […] When applied well, strategy provide useful boundaries to the design activity.[…] Sam Lucente, head of design at HP, has also shared his take on the effectiveness of such constraints: ‘For the longest time, ideation was about throwing out as many ideas as you can. We’ve realized pretty quickly it’s really not about a bunch of ideas; it’s about really good strategy, alignment with business, diagnostics, and deep customer understanding. And when you’re ready to talk about ideas, bringing people to the table who are informed is what it’s all about’.” (p. 118-119)

“As markets, people’s lives, and the world are becoming more complex, many of the old, easy answers to business problems are insufficient. Developing creative, agile, and experience-focused approaches will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.” (p. 176)

Exploratory Search

Mark Nolan has a nice article in the April/May 2008 issue of the ASIST Bulletin called “Exploring Exploratory Search.”

Citing an article by Gary Marchionini (“Exploratory search: From finding to understanding.), Mark points to three larger classes of behavior: Lookup, Learn, Investigate. Each has subclasses of behavior. These behaviors, however, aren’t linear. Makes sense: we can bounce back and forth between them when searching information.

This recalls Allan Foster’s nonlinear model of information seeking he proposed in 2004 in an ASIST article. “The behavioral patterns are analogous to an artist’s palette, in which activities remain available throughout the course of information-seeking,” says Foster. He identified three large phases as well, which he calls Opening, Orientation, and Consolidation. Not quite the same, but similar.

Mr Nolan gives the Investigate mode of searching the most attention in his article–and rightfully so. It’s the hardest to understand and to design for. How can people find things they don’t know they need? How can a search system support unknown information needs?

Of course, Donna Mauer describes this mode of searching “don’t know what you need to know” in her Boxes and Arrows article “Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them.”

The article ends with some high-level areas to consider in supporting exploratory search. I must admit I was hoping for more than a focus on improved search retrieval systems and better content. What about text analytics and automatic extraction techniques? What about semantic analysis of tagging and the like? Seems we’re still thinking in terms of an active information seeking model for the user when maybe passive models may be more fruitful in exploring information. In other words, people shouldn’t have to find information; the information should find the right people.

Google Graphs and Visualizations

In case you haven’t seen it yet, you can add graphs to your Google Docs spreadsheets. Particularly cool is the Gapminder motion graph. I couldn’t get the attributes on the right of the graph to show up from my spreadsheet, but it’s still cool.

Managed Q Search

Just came across Managed Q, a search application the inventors describe as “dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query.”

The entity extraction around person, place, and thing seems fairly good. But I’m particularly interested in how you interact with the entities. Just by rolling over any one of them, you can see the precise locations in the found documents where that term appears. Niffty.

Of course, to do this they also only show images of the pages found. That’s right–no text list. Even the paging navigation show thumbnails of the next or previous pages. There are a few interaction problems here and there, but overall it’s quite an interesting experience. I like the thumbnail browse view–it’s helpful for somes types of queries and information seeking.