UX Social is Olga Howard’s new initiative to investigate connections between user experience design and public policy. Recently Olga has been interviewing information architects about their views about IA in the public sector. She interviewed quite a few of us at last month’s IA Summit in sunny Miami.

Her interview with me is now posted for your enjoyment. While I’ve done no real professional work in the public sector (unless you count the Smithsonian), I did have some ideas, namely: The government is something we interact with inwardly and outwardly. We expect to receive some kinds of information from the government (I discuss New York’s awesome 311 service) and we we give other kinds of information to the government (such as census data).

On a personal note, listening to myself speak — much less viewing my own smirking face — isn’t always easy for me to bear. My “ums-per-minute” drops significantly after the first few minutes, thankfully. I hope you enjoy it!

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I’ve always loved Flickr, but I’ve never had the time to really use it as diligently as many of my friends apparently do. The Flickr Uploadr software always seemed a little wonky to me, and I didn’t savor the idea of sorting my photos locally in folders or in iPhoto and then having to repeat the process when uploading to Flickr. So my Flickr use was at best sporadic.

Recently I started using FlickrExport for iPhoto, and after only ten minutes with the trial version I was compelled to fork out the £12 (about $900 USD) for the registered version. FlickrExport simply adds a little panel in iPhoto permitting you to transfer your carefully-organized photos from iPhoto directly into Flickr. When you give your photos names or descriptions, the metadata is copied to both locations. Brilliant.

It’s amazing how a simple bit of software makes such a huge difference in my use of the Flickr service. This is a great example of the great stuff that can emerge from the ecosystem of symbiotic third party software. I really do anticipate keeping my Flickr account far more up-to-date and active than I ever have in the past, simply because now I can add my photos to Flickr immediately after adding them to iPhoto and without having to launch a separate program.

As usual, I am askrom. So go ahead, check out the pictures!

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Facebook is allowing users to subscribe to view periodic updates of various redesigned site elements that are under development.

I was interviewed last week for an article on BusinessWeek.com, Facebook’s New Facelift. If you didn’t already know, Facebook is in the final stages of a redesign process. BW asked a few designers for their views. I had a few thoughts:

First, Facebook has been sharing and previewing their new designs to the public, which sounds like good cluetrain-thinking, treating their product as part of a conversation with their users. Interestingly, the dialogue has been primarily with their development community, not with their entire user base. It makes sense to involve developers — when the site relaunches, developers will need their apps to work with the new functionality.

Opening the redesign process to the general public, on the other hand, would have opened the floodgates to lots of very specific design input that they might not want to have to deal with. I know very well the kind of angry emails dedicated users and fans send after a major redesign — when Behavior redesigned The Onion, for example, the immediate email and message board response was vicious and almost entirely negative — but we were warned in advance by The Onion’s team that even the littlest changes to their site inevitably generate thousands of angry emails from trolls users. In the BusinessWeek article, I refer to this reaction as “cantankerous”. I’m surprised I used that word, but it is a great term to describe how a great many people respond to changes in design.

Second, I was struck by how much Facebook’s redesign is almost exclusively focused on the site’s fundamental information architecture.

The site’s new information architecture will enable end users to play with their own page’s information architecture, allowing them to change the tabs that appear at the top of their profiles (using a little plus sign to add new tabs of their choosing).

The redesign will make no changes to Facebook’s core branding and visual vocabulary, nor will it give any new special visual design tools to end users. Compare this to MySpace’s long-standing strategy of allowing users to customize their page’s visual elements — colors, fonts, etc.

This struck me as an interesting development: Normal everyday people are becoming information architects, and companies like Facebook are giving them the tools to play with the navigations and structures of their own data. Pretty cool.

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I am currently training for my first triathlon, the New York Triathlon on July 20.

(Holy crap, that’s only 9 weeks away!)

Anyway, last weekend I competed in the Prospect Park Mother’s Day Duathlon right here in Brooklyn. This was my second duathlon (I ran my first one last August), and this time I did a lot better: I came in 23rd out of over 120 competitors. I came in 6th place in my 24-39 age group, too. If you’re my parents or if you are thinking about racing against me someday, you can see the complete results here.

A photographer, Len Lopate, was on site taking pictures during the race (the top pic is his). Check out his site to see his other shots, including me at the start and on the bike.

Most happily (and most surprisingly) at the end of the race I discovered that the race organizers had free WiFi set up around the finish area, and as people finished the race the staff was updating their web site with the results in real time. Those of us with web-enabled devices were able to check our own times and everyone else’s as we waited for the rest of the athletes to finish the race. Pretty cool.

I’m pretty nervous about July’s triathlon, but these duathlons have helped me a lot. They help me actually get some idea about what switching from biking to running in rapid succession really feels like, and in a competitive environment, too. I’ve been able to meet other multisport athletes, too, although it would be more accurate to say I got a chance to scope them out but not really meet them. I still feel like an outsider in a fairly exclusive club.

Other lessons learned:

• Transitions: I need to figure out how to get my bike gear on more quickly. I could have come in the top 20 if I hadn’t been so leisurely about my first transition.
• Nutrition: The duathlon is probably half as long as the triathlon in sheer time, which means I need twice as much stored up energy. I’m going to need to pay closer attention to my diet on race day. I began to feel a little weak towards the end of the race, but moments after finishing I was shocked to find myself getting dizzy and then vomiting in the bushes. Must remember to avoid acidy fruit drinks for breakfast!
• Pacing: I’m going to have to figure out my final pace. I intended to take the bike part pretty easy, but I think I pushed myself pretty hard in the end and lost some energy for the final run.

I’m not sure if I will have a chance to compete again between now and July 20 — maybe I can find a 10k to join or something — but I really enjoy this and look forward to more.

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Two months ago, I tweeted the following cry for help:

Over the last several months I have made some tough choices about what to devote my time to. And “blogging”, unfortunately, didn’t make the cut.

In short, I have been extremely busy doing things other than blogging. In the next week or two I will try to write a few more detailed update posts about my recent shenanigans, just to get it all on the record. But for now, here’s a rundown of some of the things that have been keeping me away from graphpaper.com:

• I’ve been intensely working on some big time client projects at Behavior. We’ve launched a few major awesome web sites.
• I presented a workshop at the IA Summit in Miami, and had a technology misadventure.
• I went to SXSW, but thankfully I wasn’t a speaker this year.
• I attended and made a short presentation about iPhone design at an iPhone BarCamp, and showed off some iPhone design experiments I’ve been working on.
• I’ve been serving on the advisory board for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo NYC.
• I did a couple of interesting magazine interviews.
• My triathlon training has gotten more intense. I raced in a duathlon and placed 23rd out of 120+ competitors.
• I had some great times with friends and family. Seriously, this was the best part of getting off the blogging wagon.

And here are a few things coming up in my future:

• I’ll be a presenter at An Event Apart Boston in June.
• I’m taking a personal vacation in LA right after AEA.
• I’m competing in the NY Triathlon in July.
• I’m preparing to start teaching again in a new MFA program in interaction design.

Finally, a word on the weather.

It’s well known that everyone (at least those of us who live in climates with seasons that change) undergoes a certain degree of seasonal affective disorder, where the dark cold months of winter dampen our mood and our energy and where the sun and warmth of spring and summer lift them up again. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly susceptible to this phenomenon, but this year I learned that I am, and profoundly so.

Which is to say that now that spring is here I feel great and have a new sense of purpose, optimism, and ambition for the months ahead.

I am back!

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My wife is tinydiva. She is a musician. Her band is called Masolit. They are awesome. Seriously. And you should see them play their world debut performance live this Saturday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Timing:
Saturday, March 22, 2008
7:00 pm: The Creationists
8:00 pm: Masolit

Location:
MTAA
60 North 6th Street, 2nd floor
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC
(L train to Bedford Avenue, 3 Blocks west on North 6th, just shy of Kent St.)

Visit the Masolit web site or myspace page to get a taste of the rocking that will ensue this Saturday night.

This FREE performance is part of the Over the Opening series of art events sponsored by the artists known as MTAA.

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I am in Austin Texas at my fourth SXSW. I’m here until Tuesday. So far the weather is nice and the people are as great as ever. Please keep an eye out for me and say hi. Here’s a picture of me to help you distinguish me from all the other skinny white guys with glasses.

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter (I’m askrom) to keep tabs on how many mojitos I am drinking. But if you’re a new follower, please don’t judge my SXSW tweets as representative of my usual tweeting style. :-)

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Fish Magic, 1925, Paul Klee

It is said that a fish, even a really smart one, cannot really grasp the meaning of the concept “wet” because it is the only condition they know. There is no “dry” to compare it to.

Humans, too, have a tendency to imagine that the way things are today is the way they’ve always been, or the way things will be from now on. It’s hard to imagine that perhaps we are merely living in a transitional period where our worldview is under a temporary spell, soon to revert to the way things have always been.

It has been observed, for example, that representational art — paintings and sculptures intended to mirror what we see with our eyes — has, for most of human history, been the exception not the rule. Optical representationalism has only been the dominant art form for a few centuries, and only in a few limited places: in Greece and Rome in ancient times, and more recently in Europe from about 1500 to 1900. Outside of those periods and places, most of our art has been highly-stylized or completely abstract, from cave paintings to hieroglyphics, from Islamic mosaics to Kandinsky’s paintings.

Viewing modern abstract art as a kind of degeneration from representational art, as many still do, presumes that representation is somehow the “normal” way of doing things. But history shows that this is simply not true. Representational art was and still is a kind of fashion or style, a way of thinking about artmaking that utterly infatuated mankind for a long while, but which eventually receded into the general pool of possible artistic expressions.

The 20th Century Fishbowl

Looking back on the 20th century and the new forms of media and culture that it produced, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: Many of the fascinating social and cultural changes transforming the media right now, in the early years of the 21st century, are little more than reversions back to the ways things used to be before the 20th century. When we talk about “revolutions” in technology and media and how they impact our culture, we should remember that a revolution is a 360-degree trajectory, bringing you back where you started.

The 1900’s saw the emergence of a dozen new forms of media and communication, from mass-market publishing to television to online social networks. Each new media’s birth was followed by decades of adaptation to that media, both social (how new media changes our day to day lives) and economic (how these media have been “monetized”). And as each media reaches maturity and settles down, it’s surprising how many of the social and economic changes turned out to be less earth-shaking than we may have thought. In many cases, we’ve come full circle.

Adopt, then Adapt

The 20th century was a period of continuous infatuation with new technologies, particularly in the media, that felt so powerful that we sometimes thought that these technologies were fundamentally transforming, or even doing irreparable damage to, our culture and our world.

And the evidence for the latter is certainly compelling: Families don’t talk at dinner tables anymore, and instead gather around the TV to watch hours of game shows. We spend hours each day driving in cars by ourselves, polluting the atmosphere. Kids glued to mobile phones in schoolrooms. Reality TV. Internet porn. Britney Spears. Have technology and media really made our lives better?

I actually think we’re not doing so bad. Many of the 20th century’s most infamous technology-enabled cultural degradations may, in fact, merely be temporary effects which inevitably trend back to “normalcy”. In the early 20th century, for example, we invented the automobile and drove around with reckless abandon. But then, after countless accidents and horrific smog, we eventually licensed drivers and regulated the vehicles and roadways. Still later, we crashed our cars reading SMS messages on the freeway, but then we made driving while text messaging illegal. We adopted, then adapted. I hate to characterize this in dialectic terms, but much of it has a distinctive thesis/antithesis/sythesis feel to it.

Some examples of 20th-century phenomena whose transformation has, I think, been exaggerated:

• Reading: Much has been said about how “nobody reads anymore”. Steve Jobs recetnly scoffed at the Amazon Kindle, saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”. Despite the numbers, which I don’t doubt, I’ve always been suspicious of the claim that we are less literate than we’ve been historically or than we should be. How much people were reading, say, in 1500 or 500 BC. Or even in 1850 or 1900, before mass-market paperback books and magazines were invented. Ursula LeGuin wrote a fantastic deconstruction of this accusation in February’s Harpers magazine, in a piece called “Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” (print only –come on, Harpers!). Her gist is that most people never really read all that much anyway, and in that light people are actually reading quite a bit right now. I’ll also add that the supposed high-point of human literacy, which I gather to be the late 1800s and early 1900s, was also the point at which new information technologies exploded on the scene: telephone, phonograph, radio. If people are reading less but they are instead learning things via the spoken word in an electronic media, is that so bad? Were the books and periodicals of the fin-de-siecle any better than the electronic forms that replaced them?
• News: People complain about the increasing partisanship and corporate-bias of the news media. Most of us take for granted the idea that a news organization must be “impartial” or non-partisan. But when was this idea born? I’m not a news historian, but I’d guess that this emerged sometime around the middle of the 20th Century, in particular with the large American corporate news organizations who wanted to avoid favoritism and partisanship in order to maintain a consistent flow of advertising dollars. Before that, however, newspapers were completely dominated either by overt political interests or by their governments. Outside of the USA, too, this is still largely the case. But with the recent emergence in the US of deeply partisan mainstream news media (e.g., Fox news) and the global phenomenon of blogging and citizen/advocacy journalism, we are perhaps witnessing not the emergence of something new or unique, but rather the end of a strange and rather short (50 years?) period in the history of news and information.
• Music: I wrote about this in my last post, which is what inspired this one. Music was once something you could only enjoy as a live experience, in the presence of performing musicians. The 20th century brought us recorded music, which could be bought and sold. This gave everyone the idea that music itself could be bought and sold. With the emergence of digital file sharing, this model is being broken down again, leaving us in a place very similar to where we started, with music being un-ownable, but the experience of music enjoyment being entirely sellable.
• Food: Okay, this isn’t media, but it is definitely technology: From the 1920’s to the 1990’s, the American diet was infatuated with technologically-processed food. Michael Pollen calls this “nutritionism”, a dietary theory that values the chemical composition of food products over the integral food-ness of them, where a loaf of white bread with all the nutrients bleached out of it and then re-introduced through chemical “enrichment” is somehow better than eating a loaf of whole grain bread. The same adopt-then-adapt pattern is here: Humans become so enamored with food technologies — canning, preservatives, refrigeration, and nutritionism — that our diet turns away, for the first time in a million years, from real food. After a few generations of this, and witnessing the resulting horrific health effects, we eventually began to turn away from these foods. Supermarkets now have enormous fresh fruit and vegetable sections in them, incuding organic foods. But when I was a kid in the 1970’s, a trip to the supermarket was like going to a bomb shelter — canned, processed, and frozen foods were pretty much all you could get, because that’s what people wanted. The more the food was abstracted from nature into powders, spreads, flakes, and puffs, the more people desired it — because they perceived it as futuristic, healthy, and convenient. Once we started to realize that the old ways actually had value, when the novelty of snow-white bread and powdered milk wore off, we began to ask for regular food again.

Once I started seeing things this way, I’ve noticed the pattern everywhere: A 20th-century phenomenon is presumed to be eternal, and then its decline is lamented as if it were the end of civilization itself. I learned that nobody plays bridge anymore — but I learned, also, that contract bridge wasn’t even invented in 1925, and had a run of massive popularity for only a few decades before falling into decline by the late 1960s.

Same as it Ever Was?

My whole idea here is admittedly an optimistic argument (and a slightly conservative one, I confess) in which humanity learns valuable lessons by looking toward our past, and where the most troubling social and cultural trends of the 20th century turn out to be merely side-effects of our slow adaptation to rapidly-emerging technologies.

But the opposite is certainly possible: Humanity could continue trending towards technology-enabled illiteracy, junk food-induced decrepitude, social isolation, and retarded media completely controlled by corporate conglomerates. We could quite easily end up with Idiocracy. I could be completely wrong.

Yes, changes occur. Humanity’s greatest social and technological inventions — the wheel, writing, democracy and human rights, the printing press and the Internet — surely have fundamentally transformed the human experience. Some have even speculated that these technologies have brought about physiological changes to our brains, enabling us to use our minds in ways that our ancient ancestors simply could not (see Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). This may be true (I am skeptical), but I think in the case of most of the 20th century’s most interesting transformations, despite the constant seemingly earth-shattering changes, we are what we are and we will tend to adapt the technology to us, not the other way around.

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Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations.

Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst possible way to employ user personas in a design process is for the designers themselves to have no role in the creation of the persona documents themselves.

Or to put it another way: It sucks when the creator of the research artifacts is not also the designer of the product. If personas are created by a specialized “research team” and then handed off to a specialized “design team”, that design team doesn’t actually experience the substantive benefits good personas can provide.

This is true because, in my view, the primary benefit from creating personas is bestowed upon those who actually make the artifacts, via the thinking, collaboration, and conversations that occur during their creation. The best insights emerge during the investigations and discussions about the data.

Typically we think of a research-based design process being boiled down to a simple equation: “research + design”. I think this model is too simplistic. To me, there are three steps, not two, in any good research-driven design process. Between researching users and designing a product there is an additional critical step, something we all do but don’t recognize as a distinct stage in the design process: research interpretation.

The creation of compelling and useful research artifacts, whether personas or modemaps, mood boards or mental models, is a process of interpreting plain data into meaningful structures and systems that are sensible and useful to designers. It is a synthetic and analytic process at the same time. It’s a creative process. It is a design process.

The Second Step

Let’s look at these three components or stages in a research-driven design process, in particular the second step:

1. Gather research data
2. Interpret the research
3. Produce the design

Ideally all three steps would be conducted by the same team, with the same individuals doing the data collection, documentation, and design work. This is easy when the whole team is made up of skilled designers with good research skills.

But on some projects good user research doesn’t yet exist. Someone will need to conduct surveys, observe users, run tests and analysis, interview domain specialists, and do all kinds of of direct, primary research.

Meanwhile on other projects the research may already exist, in great quality and quantity. The only real research necessary is for the design team to ingest these pre-existing reports and data into their design process.

In either case, however, the second step needs to be taken. Somebody needs to transform the data into something that lays the groundwork for the design.

Getting Creative with Research isn’t a Bad Thing

For example, when we create personas we make editorial decisions about how many different types of users we will define. We may choose to represent several types of users in our group of personas. As an example, let’s say for a news web site we define the following four primary personas based on how dedicated they are to visiting the web site:

• The Temporary Visitor
• The Occasional Repeat Visitor
• The New Subscriber
• The Long-Term Subscriber

Does this breakdown of users not immediately suggest a navigation scheme or a UI design model? Doesn’t it seem likely that all four of these user types will want their needs addressed in some explicit way on the web site, something that manifests itself in a big way in the final design?

But what if we chose to define them this way instead, focusing on their content desires rather than on their devotion to the site?:

• The Sports Fan
• The Political Junkie
• The Concerned Parent
• The Well-Rounded Person

Would this alternate way of thinking of users and of interpreting the data not have a fundamentally different effect on the subsequent UX design process? Wouldn’t the resulting designs be different from the design that came from the first set of personas? The data behind these personas may be the same, but the effect of the interpretation of that data on the rest of the design process may be profound.

There are many other ways, of course, to structure a set of research-informed user personas from the same underlying data. My contention is that this process of transforming data is right on the edge, and maybe over it, of being a design process. Sometimes a dataset may reveal clear design solutions (if 30% of your users speak only Spanish, you may want a link to en español somewhere pretty obvious), but more often than not these kinds of structures are far from obvious in the data. Usually it demands creativity and abductive thinking.

Todd Zaki Warfel likes the phrase “Data Driven Design“. I prefer Data Inspired Design. Data-driven implies that the best design solutions are inferred from or deduced from the data, like Michaelangelo removing David from a block of marble. I don’t think design happens that way, even when data is deeply integrated in the design process. In my mind, the data exists to inspire the designers to new ideas, to point them generally in the right direction towards a solution. Not to provide the solution outright.

This is where interpretation comes in. Interpretation and inspiration. This is the magical part of great design, the part where being a good researcher isn’t enough and where being a good designer isn’t enough. It’s where the designer understands research, and where the researcher understands design.

To be a good designer or a good design researcher, you must master the second step of interpretation.

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