Web Social Architecture

A New Blog on Accessibility from a Wisened Expert

Wendy Chisholm is an accessibility expert based in Seattle whom I've known for about a year. She co-edited the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, among other projects.

At long last, she's launched her blog, and I think it will be become a great resource for everyone interested in accessibility, human factors, web standards, and standards-based web services. And everyone who works in the interactive space should be interested in that stuff.

Here's a bit about Wendy's history prior to her work with the W3C:

[Wendy] got her start in accessibility during her undergraduate work in Computer Science and Psychology at Elmhurst College. As a statistics tutor for a student who was blind, she used a variety of media to create tactile teaching tools: legos, pins and paper, sand, and other materials. She also worked at an after school respite program for people with autism and coached them to 3 silver medals in their regional Special Olympics.

You can read her full bio on the W3C site.

Wendy is on a mission. Grab her RSS feed and pay attention. Not only is she a true expert in her area, but she's also a great writer. Enjoy:

http://wendychisholm.blogspot.com/

A New Twist on Social Media from Microsoft: Art of Office

UPDATE at bottom.

Yesterday's launch of Art of Office from Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (the group that creates software for Macs) was a great milestone for me. We started working on the project back in December of 2006, so naturally I've been chomping at the bit to see what happens when we launch.

The site attempts several very interesting things at once:

• It's meant to stretch the perception that Office is purely a productivity tool and extend users' sense of what can be done in Office beyond mundane "work" chores, a nice gesture toward the Office for Mac's creativity-inclined target audience and an interesting extension of Office's brand position.
• It creates a valuable resource for Office for Mac users: a document library they can pull from and use, remix, etc. (Everything's licensed for attributed reuse under a Creative Commons license.)
• It builds community around a shared value (creativity) while adding real, tangible, practical value (reusable documents).

We tested the early concepts for this site in the usability lab at ZAAZ, and we got some great initial reactions just to the home page. Lots of participants raised eyebrows in skepticism at the idea of "art" presented in connection with Microsoft Office. We worked hard to present some awesome work in a compelling framework, and ultimately found people very willing to suspend their initial disbelief. Check out the hot Flash work in the upper portion of the main landing pages.

Most people ended up feeling like the art / Office concept is pretty cool. And participants quickly realized they could contribute (we placed the proverbial BIG, YELLOW UPLOAD BUTTON right on the home page). What really excited test participants, though, was the realization that they could download and reuse the documents on the site. This is the real power of the site, the value offering Zeus Jones calls "marketing as a service."

Another piece of this that I think is interesting is that Art of Office enters the document-focused social space with something a little bit different than most of what exists already. For example, check out the following illustration from Rashmi Sinha, one of the minds behind the brilliant Slideshare:

What excites me here is that I think Art of Office introduces several new axes to this landscape: one is "content in document" to "document as content," another is "collaborative" to "single author," and yet another is "view documents" to "share documents." Art of Office manages to live in a number of different places along all these continuums--where individual participants can do the activity that suits them at different times.

Microsoft Watch had nice things to say. I'd love to hear what you think as well, and I can't wait to get a sense of the reaction that matters most--the reaction of participants.

UPDATE: Art of Office hit the front page of del.icio.us today, and is being noticed widely across the Web. And as I predicted earlier, the haters are out in force in comment threads. When the generalized anti-Microsoft fury subsides, what will happen?

The Elements of Social Architecture, Part One: Identity

This is Part One of a three-part series of posts, in which I'll try to capture some of the foundations of the work I do in social media.

There are lots of smart people in this space, and lots of names for Web disciplines closely related to web social architecture. Among my Seattle friends and colleagues, Lee Lefever describes his work as "social design," and Paul Ingram builds social applications under the creatively self-titled umbrella of "inventrepreneurialism." There are many others.

My goal is to put a little finer point on my own discipline than I have up to now. I work in between the nuts-and-bolts code of community platforms and the finished design, in the typical space of an information architect. But I find the traditional ways of talking about information architecture not quite directly applicable when describing what I do. Social web experiences, in my view, are structurally different from broadcast web experiences. So in this series of posts I'll start to list some of the elements of those structures.

I'm sure I'll overlook some, and I hope you'll remind me. And none of what follows supercedes, only complements, traditional IA practices.

Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville's famous Venn diagram has more or less defined the field of information architecture. There's a lot of debate about it, a lot of refinements done to it, and a lot of criticism of it: It's been the singular touchstone for the large conversation about "What is IA?" Here's a version of it:

 

I'd like to offer my own take on an emerging discipline, which I call web social architecture. I see it as a new subset of information architecture. You might say it's the practice of information architecture applied to participatory experiences. It exists both within and alongside traditional information architecture as it's been practiced on the web. Obviously, this topic is the focus of this blog, and everything on the blog really is about web social architecture as I practice it in my daily work. So here's a different view of the familiar IA diagram:

 

 

Within each of the three foundational elements, there are a number of areas of practice for Web social architecture. Following is a very rough  overview, and by no means an exhaustive inventory.

Identity

Identity: Attributes

I  posted a bit about this idea earlier in the context of personalization, where attributes attached to identity are matched or correlated to attributes attached to content. This approach, called behavioral targeting, is particularly apropos in dynamic web spaces like communities, and it's an important idea blogged about thoughtfully and thoroughly by Anil Batra.

In a nutshell, attributes are the things that are known about a person (as represented by an identity). Those kinds of attributes break down roughly into two groups: explicit attributes (the things I choose to tell you about myself) and implicit attributes (the things you know about me based on my behavior).

The combination of explicit and implicit attributes attached to identity form the basis for personalization and recommendations--but also relationships, groups, and so on.

Identity: Authentication

Authentication is important from a social architecture perspective because it's an important mechanism for establishing thresholds of entry and participation, establishing identity, and managing permissions. The social architect needs to design authentication requirements that provide easy enough access to encourage the required amount of activity while requiring enough commitment to ensure the site isn't flooded with low-quality content.  

Identity: Privileges

At its most basic, privileges (or permissions) means access. Authenticated users are able to access protected data. Users with higher-level privileges are able to perform additional actions, like add, edit, and delete.

In the context of web sociability, the idea of privilege takes on additional dimensions. In addition to privileges conferred by site owners, privileges can be conferred based on collective judgements, by levels of participation, and more.

Privileged community participants can become key communicators within the community, can assist with moderation, and can help broadcast the community's social contract.

Identity: Membership

Membership is, at a basic level, a persistent belonging. Individuals can belong to communities, to groups within communities, to structured events like live chats, and more. I say membership has a degree of persistence meaning the joining act ion creates a state of membership that affects the experience afterward, even temporarily.

Identity: Profile

There are two kinds of profile: public and private. The public profile is the view of a user that's visible to other users. The private profile typically enables a user to provide and edit information shared with the system but not visible to other users, like credit card details or configuration preferences.

There's a lot to say about the public profile. It's an important component of community experiences. Typically, all contributions a user makes provide a link to the public profile, enabling everyone to see who's talking.

The best public profiles include both static content (the things users say about themselves) and dynamic content (the reflection of users' activities in the community). Static content typically includes a bio, photo, and location. Dynamic content typically includes content uploaded, comments made, groups joined, and more.

Dynamic profiles can be a powerful tool to introduce accountability and broadcast reputation (more on reputation later). If the things you do and say stick to you and become, effectively, a part of who you are, you're a bit more likely to think hard about how you behave.

Identity: Favorites

Our favorites are the things we want to be able to re-find easily. There are two most-important mechanisms to enable re-finding: bookmarking and tagging,

Increasingly, favorites are being made public. Sean O'Driscoll wrote about a concept he calls tag drafting. The idea is basically that if you're interested in the same kind of stuff as another person, you can watch what they tag and get connected with their information landscape.

All kinds of favorites can be made publicly visible and aggregated, and the idea is broadly called social bookmarking or social tagging. Del.icio.us is built around this concept, and Microsoft's Tagspace is a powerful advancement. In another twist, Flickr adds favorites to publicly-viewable profiles as a mechanism for discovery and as a descriptor of identity--you can see the photos I like, and they tell you something about me. If you're looking at my profile because we have something in common or you like my photos, there's a decent chance you'll also like some of the photos I like.

Favorites really belong to all three of the social architecture domains, because favorites are typically media objects with which a person chooses to establish a persistent relationship, Media objects we collect become part of who we publicly are, just as the objects in our homes seen by guests shape their sense of us--in that sense favorites are attributes of identity.

Identity: My Content

My content is the stuff I create. In social media settings, my stuff might be my videos or photos, and they might be incorporated as part of my identity through a profile or, as on YouTube and Treemo, a "channel."

My content is also my blog posts, my comments on other people's blogs, my posts to discussions, the discussions I start, the archive of my instant messaging conversations, and so on.

Increasingly, we're seeing "my content" dynamically included in "my profile," and I think that's a great thing.

Identity: Reputation

Stowe Boyd gave a talk where he called reputation "collective intelligence applied to the individual." Not bad. Reputation is another huge topic, and my aim here is to be in overview mode, so I won't go too deep on this, But I will say reputation is especially important in informational contexts where the expertise of a content contributor is critical to understand, such as in a technical discussion or a question and answer forum. Reputation is the visible artifact of authority. It's credibility that can be measured.

 

Identity is one of the great frontiers of the online world, and there are lots of people out there who know more about it than I do. So, what dimensions have I overlooked?

 

See also:

The Elements of Social Architecture Part Two: Relationships (forthcoming)

The Elements of Social Architecture Part Three: Media (forthcoming)

UX Event Follow-Up

The talks last night were so much better than I'd expected. And I can say now, I expected them to be really good. Lots of great conversation afterward, too. I was really inspired by the quality of the people in the room.

I loved Lee's comments about the design of dance clubs with movable walls. Online communities need to scale similarly, to create an initial feeling of coziness so nobody has to be "the guy dancing all alone out in the middle of the floor," and eventually to scale up as the party gets bigger, without ever feeling either crowded or empty. Lots of ways to translate this concept into virtual space. And Lee scared the dickens out of at least one new community moderator with his stories of tp shortages and loose parrots.

Emma was the only one of the speakers I didn't know beforehand. She came very highly recommended by a respected colleague of mine, so I knew she'd be interesting--but I was delighted with the unique perspective she brought, having one foot in academia and the other in consulting. Challenged by a participant with a strong research background about the degree of representation in her sample, she responded with a great statement that the purpose of design ethnography is to produce insights that lead to design innovation, rather than to produce defensible, generalized conclusions about whole population segments. This is a great lesson for everyone involved in user research, and it's a great way of expressing the difference between user centered design research and market research (a question I have to field all the time, until now with less aplomb than Emma).

Jason Carmel shared a brilliant introduction to web site optimization, and contextualized it with UCD perfectly. And holy kittens, the guy is seriously hilarious. Hilarious, that is to say, while delivering serious information.

Paul Ingram's "Invetrepreneurship" talk challenged us to step up to the plate with our ideas. Paul is himself a human Swiss Army knife, and I think the real, implicit challenge in his approach is to blur the lines between disciplines, especially between design and development.

Some great conversation followed in the panel q & a. In particular folks wondered whether social networks would adapt over time as their constituents aged or whether age segments would migrate from one demographic-focused social network to another. Obviously, today's 80 year old is different from the 80 year old of 20 years from now--how will social networks evolve as today's heavy users age and new generations emerge?

We'll certainly be hosting additional events in the future--probably quarterly. If you're interested in presenting, send me your topoic ideas and we'll keep the ball rolling.

Thanks again to everyone who attended and participated, and thanks especially to our speakers.

Launching Your Online Community: How Not to Get Killed

It wasn't all that long ago when you could finish your 8-month web site redesign, throw the switch, raise a glass, and take a couple weeks off. You'd earned a break, and you could return home to address a queue of small bugs, changes, and additions without any great urgency.

Gone are those halcyon days! Gone, the feet on desks! Gone, the company-tab dinner-and-drinks bill! Gone, the laurels you could anticipate resting on! The real work is just getting started.

Whatever the challenges you face in the run-up to launch of a community site, you can anticipate a surge of activity immediately afterward, followed by an ongoing effort at moderation, engagement, and fine-tuning.

However strong your concept, your architecture, your design, and your implementation, human beings are going to show up. Inevitably, they will surprise you. They'll uncover issues the best iterative design process could never anticipate, they'll do and say things you don't expect, and in, hopefully, their enthusiasm, they'll break stuff.

 

Everything hinges on your ability to plan for ongoing work and set expectations with your stakeholders.

Plan ahead to engage the right resources to make updates to your site, especially in the first month after launch. Proactively prepare stakeholders for what's to come. Hang on to the slice of budget you need to keep the right people engaged ongoingly. If you fail to do this you will get killed.

 

When undesirable content starts showing up, respond, but don't overreact: Small corrections add up over long distances.

Inevitably, your community participants will behave in ways you don't expect. The content on your site will veer off-topic. Competitors' brands will show up prominently in conversations. People will post inappropriate, even objectionable content.

Don't panic. Don't redesign your site. Don't start moderating willy-nilly.

Instead, plan ahead to course-correct participant behavior. Build a phased approach, with increasing degrees of intervention and plenty of time between phases for the changes to take hold.

Start by identifying the issue. Analyze how it will impact your site objectives in the long run, and determine whether it's really an issue at all--sometimes the ways participants use your site will uncover for you new services you can offer--or even the real, hidden value of your community.

Before you do anything, understand why people are behaving the way they are. If you can't figure it out immediately, a survey is a great way to gather more information, and sometimes you can even ask participants directly. Start a thread in your forum asking what's going on and what people's perceptions are--you might accidentally solve the problem right then and there.

But it's common to need to influence the ways people participate. Influence behavior in ways that align with your site goals and participant needs, and everyone will appreciate it. Here's how:

Phase 1: Adjust Your Site Identity

Changing copy is one of the lowest-effort interventions you can do, and it's very effective. At slightly higher effort, you can support copy changes with visual cues, reinforcing the message you want to deliver. Wait a couple weeks and see what happens.

Phase 2: Adjust Your Algorithms

The most important influencer of participant behavior is the behavior of other participants. While you can't directly change the way people behave, you can change the degree to which different kinds of behavior are visible to other participants. While you can't control who shows up and participates, you can identify exemplary participants and showcase their contributions.

If the wrong content has too much visibility on your community site, identify the qualities you want to promote. Factor those qualities into your algorithms for surfacing content on the home page and important landing pages. Instead of showing the most recent content, show the content with the highest volume of recent contributions. Instead of showing the most viewed content, show the highest rated content. Instead of showing the highest rated content, show the content with the highest average time on page. Inhibit or promote content that uses certain words.

Keep your algorithms secret, so you can continue to tune them and so participants won't be tempted to game the system.

Wait a couple weeks, and see what happens.

Phase 3: Adjust Your Architecture

Changing what content shows up where, how the content is categorized and labeled, and which pieces of metadata appear with the content they describe can have a huge impact. Let's take those one at a time:

Change what shows up where. Problems with participant-contributed content tend not to be problems of organization, but rather problems of affordance. And organization can create affordance, most importantly on the home page. Think carefully about what stuff is visible on the home page. Make sure you include content that exemplifies the kind of contribution you want participants to make. Try the ten-second test: Show some people a printout of your home page, but only for ten seconds. Ask them to tell you everything they remember seeing, and then ask them to tell you what the site is all about.

Change how the content is categorized and labeled. One of the important functions of a navigation system is to describe the domains of the content included on the site. At a glance, site visitors can tell from your navigation what stuff is present on the site, and they can tell what kinds of things they might add. Is your navigation communicating the right affordance for your content? Try a simple test: Show some people a list of the navigation labels on your site and ask them to describe what's on the site. Then ask them to describe in one sentence what the site is about.

Finally, change which pieces of metadata appear with the content they describe. Site visitors will assume lists, for example, are ordered on the basis of whatever descriptors you display with list items, even when the descriptors would tend to suggest a different order. "Today's Best" can mean different things: Top rated, most viewed, most commented, editor's pick, etc--depending what information appears with the items on the list. If you want people to contribute content about dogs, display the breed of dog discussed in each content object next to the link to it.

Try tweaking these pieces. Then wait a couple weeks and see what happens.

Phase 4: Increase Your Editorial Presence

This is the nuclear option. But not all nukes are created the same. First and foremost, always enforce your community guidelines. Delete content that violates them, and leave in its place a reminder to others: "This post has been removed by the moderator for violation of the Community Guidelines." By the way, your community guidelines ARE visible on your site, right? If not, for starters, put them front and center everywhere participants can add content. Link to them when you moderate.

Don't overdo editorial presence. You want to create a sense of community, not a sense of editorial dictatorship--and community participants will be extremely sensitive to any kind of real or perceived manipulation of the community. If they feel manipulated they'll go away and never come back.

So be explicit about your editorializing. Create an editor's pick space that highlights the kind of content you want to encourage, and include highlights throughout the site, always with a label or icon that makes it clear what you're doing.

Use your editorial presence as an opportunity to humanize your brand. Show your editors' names and faces. Give community participants ways to interact with the editors.

 

Be polite to the flamers, haters, and grudge-holders--and leave space for the brand defenders.

When your community launches, it will attract people who have mean things to say to you. Initially, they'll come out in force. They've been waiting for this moment and they will not be denied.

Be polite to them. Be honest. Explain your policies. Apologize if you have something to apologize for--otherwise, don't. Walk the fine line between responding to your detractors and leaping to defend yourself against every criticism.

Remember that these people would be saying these things about you anyway. On your web site, they're likely to treat you a little more fairly, and you have a chance to respond to them publicly, in the full view of others who might otherwise be negatively influenced by them.

After a while, most of the intransigent haters will get bored and go away. Some might hang around, just to spice up your life a bit.

And then an interesting thing will happen. After all the shouting dies down, you'll start to notice level-headed community participants raising the dialog a bit, and perhaps even coming to your defense. You might even notice brand defenders emerging--loyal customers who value your offering and want a functional community to support it. That's when you'll know, without a doubt, things are working, and it's all going to be ok.

Measuring Community Success: Two Contrarian KPIs for Web 2.0

We've seen a shift recently in how some of the major players in Web measurement are evaluating success. Nielsen/Netratings switched from counting page views to counting time spent--to the derision of some in the analytics community.

Time spent has problems, it's true. But I haven't heard a lot of great suggestions about how you do measure success on participatory web sites, social media sites, or online communities. The truth is, the devil's in the details, there is no silver bullet, and most of all, it depends what you're trying to accomplish.

Yes, everything in web analysis should track back to your goals. Repeat that ten times.

Nonetheless, I will offer up a couple ideas about how measurement in online community is different than on brochure sites, and how standard measures, to the extent there are any, fall short in typical online communities.

My suggestion is basically that we need to think differently about success, and abandon some of the old-school, quantity-focused measures, like number of posts, number of comments, and number of registered users, for an approach that emphasizes quality. Here are two examples of what I mean:

 

Return Visitor Sign-In, Not New User Registrations

Sign-in is more important than return visit--it's even more important than registration. Participants in online communities typically register to access content they can't access otherwise, to take an action they can't take without registering, or to streamline a future process (e.g. saving credit card information).

So, participants typically register for the promise of a reward. Sign-in is different. When a registered user returns to the site and authenticates, you are a little closer to knowing you gave that person something valuable. In other words, when the cousins get up for more, you can be pretty sure they like your mashed potatoes. If you want to gauge the success of your meal, measure the number of second helpings, not the number of people at the table.

 

Qualified Content Consumption, Not Number of Posts

I've written in some detail about the value of so-called "passive" participation (I personally wouldn't call information-seeking online a "passive" activity). In short, content consumption tends to be greatly undervalued relative to content creation. While content creation introduces the potential for value, content consumption represents the realization of that value. Tracking content consumption, then, helps you learn not just how much stuff you have, but, more importantly, how good is your stuff.

Part of the problem with quantity measures in social media is that all content is not created equal. The best content, while it's created only once, creates value many times over, while the worst content can actually be detrimental to the participant experience. So the number of content objects on your site tells you much less than does the number of times those objects are consumed--in total, on average, and individually.

But how do you know content consumption when you see it? Content detail page views can be misleading, but I differ from those who'll tell you it's all about time on site in Web 2.0. Instead, count page views qualified by either a time-based or action-based threshold. 15 seconds on a detail page is a decent place to start, but it doesn't account for the effect of tabbed browsing, which can skew time-based measures upward.

Here are some examples of action-based measures for qualified content consumption:

• file downloads
• play embedded media
• copy embed code
• forward via email
• scroll to bottom of page
• print
• favorite

There are many more, and there's a lot more to say on this topic. Drop me a note in the comments with your thoughts, ideas, and questions.

Seattle User Experience Event: "Tinker, Tailor, Maker, Sailor: New Perspectives on UX and the Web"

 

We're hosting an event in a couple weeks bringing together some of Seattle's many interesting Web thinkers for a series of short talks followed by a panel discussion.

Lee Lefever of Commoncraft, the Troubadour of Web 2.0, will reprise his well-received Refresh Seattle talk, "Your Online Community Is a Party Waiting to Happen," in which all the ingredients, including some you might not have thought about, come together.

Paul Ingram of Ingramlabs, creator of To-Don't and other unannounced web applications (don't even ask, I'm under Friend-D-A), will hold forth on "Inventrepreneurship," his concept on how to make ideas real, and how to make real ideas into working businesses.

Emma Rose of the University of Washington will share some of her experience simultaneously researching two important Web frontiers--in-context use of mobile phones in developing countries--in "Design Ethnography: The Art of 'Deep Hanging Out'."

Finally, the Johnny Carson of web optimization--ZAAZ's own Jason Carmel, will explain the "Effective Use of Kittens: Site Optimization and User Experience." Jason's side project, Wish Radar, is a shining example of the usability benefits of ongoing site optimization.

The event is free and open to all UXer's, designers, user researchers, HCI geeks, usability fans, and cat-lovers. Dogmatists, prepare for an allergic reaction!

The vitals:

• August 14th, 5:30-8:30pm.
• ZAAZ Headquarters, 414 Olive Way, Seattle 98101, 5th Floor
• The event is free, but space is limited! Please RSVP to me, so we can get a sense of how many to expect and plan properly.

UX and User Research / Usability Job Openings at ZAAZ

I posted the job description for our User Experience Architect opening last month. We're still looking for the right person, and we now also have an opening for a junior person in that role.

Additionally, we're looking for a User Experience Researcher. Find out more, including how to apply, at zaaz.com.

 

User Experience Researcher

We are currently seeking a User Experience Researcher to uncover and communicate user interface issues and end-user preferences by applying a wide range of user-centered design methodologies. The ideal candidate will have previous consulting experience with a track record of delivering compelling research findings and recommendations on-time and on-budget.

Responsibilities

• Meet with clients and potential clients to propose usability studies, surveys, field research and other user research methods.
• Lead usability studies, including their design, planning execution.
• Analyze usability findings which include the creation of video highlights.
• Prepare and present usability reports to clients. Deliver findings that ensure the usability and effectiveness of interfaces for their intended users.
• Lead survey projects, including designing the appropriate survey, analyzing the results and presenting findings.
• Advocate for users while understanding the business goals of clients.
• Deliver research on time and within budget constraints.

Qualifications

• Formal education in usability engineering or equivalent hands-on experience to demonstrate an understanding of usability theory, methods, and practice.
• Several years of experience designing and conducting usability studies, preferably as a consultant.
• Several years experience designing surveys and analyzing results, with a solid understanding of statistical methods.
• Experience in user interface design for websites, software, and/or web-based applications.
• A strong business sense and the ability to work on multiple projects at one time.
• Proven ability to design and communicate potential solutions to user interface problems.
• Working knowledge of video editing techniques.
• Excellent presentation, oral communication, and writing skills.