To borg or not to borgIndividual vs Collective

Gavin BellFOWA, London 2008

hi

2

About user interfaceshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/loopzilla/193269925/!

about user interfaces and human interaction in small groups

Not about the borg3

http://www.scifidesktop.org.uk/gallery/displayimage.php?album=46&pos=5

Not really here to talk about Star Trek

Machine interfaces4

http://www.flickr.com/photos/awarnack/110797686/

We’ve been developing interfaces to computers for a long timeAnd have come a long way from machine level interactions on a bit panel

Man machine interfaces5

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theducks/2606817515/

We migrated to terminals and “man machine interfaces” which then gave way to

Human machine interfaces6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wordstar.gif

Human machine interfaces, now we are thinking about the person in front of the keyboard

rather than the internal processes of the machine

No longer just individuals7

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katiekrueger/2351656805/

We’ve ended up with powerful tools which help us to do amazing things from

Games to photoshop to presentations to desktop publishing and a myriad of other things

Now with the range of web and social web applications we are creating

I think we are moving beyond health care / word processing / spreadsheets

Beyond using computers as tools for an individual to do tasks for themselves

Nor audiences8

I don’t mean million plus audiences eitherThere is a lot of research into mass audiences in advertising or television

It is not that useful for software design,

If you cater to everyone you end up with every feature they wantA problem that Microsoft have in spades with Word or with WindowsEach feature has hundreds of people with vested interests in it staying

Audiences are also anonymous

About friends9

http://flickr.com/photos/serpell/15340621/

The social web is about people, relatively small groups of people,A few hundred for the most part

These are my friendsYou don’t know them, but that is ok, they are my friends

There are hundreds of web apps that understand I have social relationshipsShould the means of creating these apps be the same that create single user software like a word processor?

Beyond messaging10

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fadderuri/2715777726/

You might be thinking that email or im are quite social

but they are task focused tools around having a conversation

Quite goal orientated, they generally have a recognisable end point for each task

Tools11

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartku/2765190572/

What common tools do we use to figure out what the interface should be?

UCD12

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/2344473443/

User centred design is popular, well established

Effective13

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dav/141061092/

UCD draws heavily on task and goal directed thinking, focusing on the individualCognitive models from psychology where the foundation of the approach

Analyse the user, determine their needs, build a system which satisfies the needs / goals they haveUse personas to ensure designer bias is removed.There is good evidence to support this.

Well-defined14

http://www.flickr.com/photos/evanleavittphotography/1891136149/

Excellent for many problemsWell defined tools, good documentation and good case studies

But if done thoroughly it can be time consuming

Fits less well with an agile development style

Also very focused on the individual

Persona of Borg?15

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Image:LocutusOfBorg2367.jpg (fair use)

But when confronted with the vastness of the social web, I feel it gets out of its own depth

The pretext of individual goals and tasks runs out of steam,

On many sites there is a well defined goal, but on social sites it is less concreteFor example - dopplr, flickr and twitter are less goal driven.

I feel UCD has led us astray with its focus on personal activitiesWe focus on what the individual should be doing, what are their short term goals.

We can miss out on the social interactions, those things that happen between two people

We can also miss out on individual character too, if we treat the world as represented by 2/3 personas

Add as friend?16

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66854529@N00/493840637/

I’m going to look at one aspect of social networks

Do we really join social networks to make or add friends?Friend is an unhelpful term.I might care about your activity, but friend is not the right term.It leads to unhelpful distinctions between friend / family and contact

It is the activity we are interested in, not stating and restating personal relationship.I want to see your pictures

Collect them all?17

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakka/43293791/

It takes some people down very unhelpful paths

Anti patterns18

Evils like the anti pattern exist because of this perceived need for friending, which from the developer pov brings in more users.

This one comes around again and againLoopt, E, Spokeo, Plaxo

My name is E (above) took this a stage further and used the login details for twitter to post content on behalf of the person, without their knowledge. After a storm of protest they dropped the feature.

Oauth solves this technically, but we still have the restating of friendships

Privacy19

http://flickr.com/photos/sonicwalker/245770952/

Privacy is hard to do well, I regard it as an unsolved problem

One to one privacy is straight forward.Selective privacy is harderThe public group works for well for shared resources eg a Flickr groupPownce is a good example for more selective sharing

2nd wave HCI20

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorgeoux/633206226/

I’m not suggesting we throw out UCD entirely, just that we need tools which take social interaction into account

Human Computer Interaction is a broad discipline of which interaction design, information architecture and usability form part.In the mid 80s a new set of research methods came to the fore

Information architecture was extended by UCD over the last few years

ok21

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_d_miller/133786714/

UCD serves us well, But largely focused on the individual and personal goals.

cancel22

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_d_miller/133786397/

Time for something new?

Russian Revolution23

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32912172@N00/2763596701/http://www.flickr.com/photos/32912172@N00/2510789436/

1917, Russia is in revolution

Karl Marx24

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwiehle/2698954416/

Karl Marx’s economic theories are changing a country

Lev Vygotsky25

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/images/portrait.jpg

And Lev Vygotsky is throwing out the bourgeois psychology of Freud et al

Activity theory is the area he defined and a lot of childhood development ideas

he added socially meaningful activity to the models of consciousness current at the timeHe saw this kind of activity as the generator of consciousness.Stimulus response and psychoanalytic models were popular at the time

Essentially all human activity is social in nature and by engaging in this activity we are changed by itAn activity is composed of a subject, and an object, mediated by a tool, (counting, writing, signage)

Cognitive approaches focus on the person, Activity theory focuses on the activity

Aleksei Leontiev26

http://www.psy.msu.ru/science/conference/summer/leontiev_aa.jpg

His colleague Aleksei Leontiev extends his work ...

Adding in ideas around heirarchical nature of work (driving becomes automatic over time)Adding in a third level capturing motive.Activity --> motives | Action --> goal | Operation --> conditions

Separating individual actions from collective actions

The canonical example is the beater on a hunt,Individually they are hitting bushes, collectively they are taking part in a hunt.

Q which bit of flickr is individual and which collective

Activity theory27

ISBN - 0-262-11298-1

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11004

60 seconds on activity theoryDi" ers from activity centred design, not low level tasks

Theory drivenRespectful of contextExpects iterationPeople are social, Little we do is not social in natureconsciousness is defined by activityWe are changed by this activity

This is a complex theory, but I’m very excited by it and its potential for the social web

The book is recommended readingexcerpt available fromhttp://www.quasar.ualberta.ca/edpy597mappin/readings/m15_kaptelin.htm

Verbs28

http://www.flickr.com/photos/76301418@N00/109909940/

How might activity theory help

Makes you think about the high level tasks people are doing in the real world and their social consequences.

Dopplr - sharing tripsLast.fm - sharing listeningA lot of these work as they are passive activities

Verbs acting on objects, very rest like in nature

Hinternet29

http://www.flickr.com/photos/86939280@N00/1379123641/

Now that you are all reeling in the bolshevik nostalgia, lets look at another group worthy of our attention

The I don’t have broadband crowd, the hinternet, don’t worry there is a point to this diversion

Danny O’Brian’s phrase so I discovered.

Dialup30

http://www.flickr.com/photos/janandersen_dk/516266503/

25% of AOL revenue comes fromService charges in 2007/8People still on dialup!

People in developing world too

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They are the people who help make yahoo.com the number one page on the internet

They share email addresses, they are not avid users of the web

There are a lot of them

32http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/Outlook_Express_XP.png

They are hamstrung by operating systems and email programs

The idea of having multiple accounts on the same machine or even multiple accounts for their email is not in their world view

For them the machine has an email address, they don’t feel they have an identity on the web

Not geeks33

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vox/1694345464/

They are definitely not geeks, I’m not knocking these people at all

This is a strength for them, they care about the internet as a service.

It is like the phone network or TV, they care not how it works, just that it works.We do, but we pay 400 quid to come and listen to people like me.

We write code, plan applications, buy domain names

Reconcilable?34

http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrygrey/1202156133/

Are these two worlds reconcilable?The geeks and the rest of them

I think they need to be, that other group of people are parents, sons and friends, it is more than an age thing.

should they be shut out of our digital lives?

So what is going on here?35

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16693201@N00/417118496/

Design evolves, as shown earlierUCD can be very useful,

Activity Theory shows a di" erent approach, one more in tune with social interaction

We do have di" erent worlds to cater for, the ultra-connected geek and everyone else.Addressing this means rethinking how we make applications.

In fact it is a social story of technology adoption

RSS Adoption36

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Feed-icon.svg

RSS is a good example,

In !99 RSS was tech hot, but it took until 2006 to become “evenly distributed” and embedded

Why is this significant, RSS was the first major change to web browsing behaviour.

Technology adoption takes a long time.

There are many people even now who have no idea what RSS is, but they can understand a web feed in GReader, or

netvibes or a macosx widget. This is a good thing

See http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3 for detailed

research on web adoption and demographics.

Time37

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/60496147/

RSS has also given us a bad habit.We care about the most recent 15 items, something that happened last week is old newsWe even have an expression “internet time”

How can we gain value from the endless stream of dataWhat should an activity feed look like from six months agoI’d argue that it is not the same as the one for today.Reduce to the significant actions and interactions.

Take a long now perspective on data. What does a person look like aggregated over time.(read Stuart Brand’s Clock of the long now, if you haven’t yet)

Identifiers38

http://flickr.com/photos/phooky/93586893/

Identifiers for people - openidPlaces - geotagging and fire eagleIsbn, music tags all help in passively building a digital picture of the world

We routinely embed this kind of data in web pages, urls and feeds

However it works best as a passive process. I would not have actively told last.fm about the 10,000 tracks I’ve listened toContext is important, the verb, listen, in last.fm is implicitSimilarly for fire eagle

These identifiers turn the stu" in our lives into social objects.

Blurring39

http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/1629269/

What we are making and what the web is becoming is blurring

Desktop web applications can offer better perceived affordances than running a web app in the browser

Eg the unread mail count on MailPlane, the bouncing from Pyro etc

Ajax and AIR muddy the water, then add in widgets, embedded webkit or prism, fluid or weave and it isn"t clear what is being

made other than something that can render information from the internet on a screen

Marsedit and blogging apps - which bits are on the web

MacosX widgets - delivery status

Devices that measure power consumption and put it on the web

Initiaitives like Fluid show this desire for a clear and simple approach to making the web easier to use

It changes the experience to one of not using the “web”, I"m reading my email or reading campfire - the task changes and

focus returns

A version of Fluid holding basecamp has become essential for me.

What the web comprises is changing, we are moving back to the internet and the web as part of this.

Humans not servers40

http://www.flickr.com/photos/generated/99991779/

We are starting to build the world in terms of peopleRel=me microformats help

Moving from machines and rss to social objects and verb-based interactions

Social objects41

Some recent things and events in my life, we could have a conversation around each one of them

There was a goal in mind for each of these, but is there a goal in the ongoing social interaction?

The coincidentiality of these objects can be worth a lot, we need to think in terms of the social life of each object, prior and post action. There can also be multiple actions eg recommendation, purchase, listen, lend

Jyri Engeström - social objectsMatt Jones - coincidentialityDan Hill - social life of a broadcast

Design for the individual42

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2774208035/

Do support the individual, people need a useful service / activity to attract them to your product

43

Support the socialhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2831868995/

Think hard about the potential interactions around your social objects, what are the verbs that draw / bind people togetherActivity theory will help you survey this space

Scaffoldinghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/ldm/14296081/

Scaffolding is a useful psychological concept and the last one to leave you with, as a concept for the future.

It comes from developmental psychology and is the process we use to learn hard things.

Two apples and three apples makes how many apples.Remember that, well that is a scaffold, 2+3=I"ve just taken away the scaffold.

In terms of technology adoption we need to scaffold the rest of the non-geek population to get them into our world of social objects. Flickr guest pass is a good example of this.

Three suggestions45

Interactions between people

Look beyond UCD

People as composites

Look beyond designing for individuals

What are the motives for people using your site, what connects them to other people

Our profiles online are starting to connect together, there are many data points about someone who comes to you, Google Social API tells you a lot about someone.

Flickr credits46

flickr.com/photos/loopzilla/193269925/flickr.com/photos/awarnack/110797686/flickr.com/photos/theducks/2606817515/flickr.com/photos/katiekrueger/2351656805/flickr.com/photos/serpell/15340621/flickr.com/photos/fadderuri/2715777726/flickr.com/photos/bartku/2765190572/flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/2344473443/flickr.com/photos/dav/141061092/flickr.com/photos/evanleavittphotography/1891136149/flickr.com/photos/66854529@N00/493840637/flickr.com/photos/rakka/43293791/flickr.com/photos/sonicwalker/245770952/flickr.com/photos/gorgeoux/633206226/flickr.com/photos/andrew_d_miller/133786714/flickr.com/photos/andrew_d_miller/133786397/

flickr.com/photos/32912172@N00/2763596701/flickr.com/photos/32912172@N00/2510789436/flickr.com/photos/lwiehle/2698954416/flickr.com/photos/76301418@N00/109909940/flickr.com/photos/86939280@N00/1379123641/flickr.com/photos/janandersen_dk/516266503/flickr.com/photos/vox/1694345464/flickr.com/photos/henrygrey/1202156133/flickr.com/photos/16693201@N00/417118496/flickr.com/photos/lwr/60496147/flickr.com/photos/striatic/1629269/flickr.com/photos/phooky/93586893/flickr.com/photos/generated/99991779/flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2774208035/flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2831868995/flickr.com/photos/ldm/14296081/

Thanks

More? gavinbell.com

Questions?

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