Blogging UX Week - Jeff Veen Keynote
This was an absolutely killer talk. I took 10 pages of notes, and I’m sure I could have filled up a bunch more if I could write faster. Jeff Veen is not only an Internet pioneer, but he’s still pushing along, and, most importantly, comes across as geniunely enjoying what he does; it was no surprise when he spoke of working at a job versus working in your vocation (he’s in the latter). To the notes on "Designing the Next Generation of Web Applications."
Jeff opening talking about having a job versus having a vocation: do you work because you have to, or because you love what you doing?
He moved on to a few questions we all hear about Web 2.0. Are you tired of the phrase? Is it a marketing ploy? "[It's] a way to raise venture capital without doing anything." He then went on to say, historically, this is "Boom 2.0": it’s the second time in the Internet’s short history that it has exploded with exponential growth (and hype).
Is this newsworthy revolution good or bad? "It makes me nervous when the things we do make the covers of business magazines" because those magazines exist only to promote fear. In reality, there’s nothing scary about this new boom: except the inevitable correction.
There have been plenty of boom and bust cycles thoughout world history. In the Netherlands in the 1700s innovation (in tulip horticulture) led to a rush of capital towards innovation (people sold everything for flower bulbs) which in turn caused the market to correct itself; the product was a lasting change. The invention of the steam engine followed a similar patter. "As technology has turned wealth into information, it’s gotten faster" Innovation always draws speculation; overspeculation always leads to a correction. Now, we work in terms of years instead of decades and change comes quickly.
Veen brought up real estate speculation in Tokyo as another example of "absurdity in the markets then change." "At some point, it’s going to correct."
Jeff showed the Web 2.0 Meme Map, and said that Web 2.0 is not about doing redesigns yearly, but gradually adapting our applications. The old cycle of build it, use it, blow it up for change’s sake, has been replaced by the idea that we can take a good application and slowly, over time, make it great: instead of disrupting the experience just for the sake of change, we now perfect the experience just for the sake of the user.
Jeff then related The Elements of Web 2.0 to Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience. Jeff broke down each of JJG’s elements, and noted how their used in - and ultimately shape - Web 2.0. The Elements of Web 2.0 are:
- Surface - How it looks (design).
- Skeleton - Interaction design. Expressing features and functions as ideas on the page.
- Structure - Information Architecture
- Scope - "What do we do on the web?"
- Strategy - "What does our company do?"
Surface - Everybody thinks thinks they know about visual design. It’s easy to comment on visual design (and just try to design anything for someone else if you don’t believe it). What makes a good design, or a design that does what it should? Such a design exposes metadata: it makes data more accessible. A good design turns data into information. It makes data "accessible, usable, and actionable" Good design turns data from numbers into concepts. Design can be dangerous, though: try too hard to explain what’s going on with your data, and you end up with something like the USA today Info Graphic: a pretty picture without any substance (see The Onion Infographc for a great spoof). Good design is about "letting go of design control. Designers are used to having control over their medium." Let users do what they want. "It’s about [users] controlling their own experience: Web 2.0 is bubbling that up. It’s about building trust very quickly on a website."
Jeff stated that you must build trust on the surface. Trust is the product of a site’s visual appeal, cognition and emotion, and ultimately, the Halo Effect (here Jeff cited the works of Gitte Lindgaard). Lindgaard’s research shows that you have under a second to win over your users: you must build trust in less than the blink of an eye. Jeff recommended Emotional Design by Don Norman and Persuasive Technology by BJ Fogg as two required reading for all those who wish to build that trust that is the key component of a winning design. Ultimately, designers must think of users as peers, with whom they are collaborating on websites: the site becomes "a converstaion" between the user and the designer; it becomes a living space that leaps off the page. Ultimately, the Web 2.0 surface is one on which users control their own data.
Skeleton - AJAX is an innovation of perception. It "allow[s] users to explore without the penalty of navigation": it promotes recoveribility. (As an aside, most people can’t figure out where they need to go on a site, no matter how well it’s designed. If clicking one obvious button can get the job done and save the user from having to complete a form, click through three pages, hit the back button a few times, and click yet again, let them click that button). AJAX has become "roller skates for the web": there’s no need to walk when you can glide along.
AJAX and Interaction Design combine in the skeleton to build the powerful, enabling principles of discoverability and recoverability.
Discoverability means finding stuff is easy: finding what you want is now "simple and obvious." The drag-and-drop shopping cart used on one example site is a negative example of discoverability: it’s "cool, but has no discoverability."
Recoverability is the idea that "actions should be without cost." Like the old iFilm login, sites should catch errors before they happen. iFilm had a great little interface that would report back your status (is that username you want taken? did your passwords really match?) without a submission to the server. But, one day, it disappeared. Why? The developer that wrote it left the company, and no one else could make it work. Web 2.0 isn’t just about user experience, but company competencies: it’s nice to dream big, but you still need the smarties that can make the dream come true.
Context - Web 2.0 builds context (and promotes context) by giving feedback. Take an AJAX-enabled file uploader for example: gone is the submit and wait experience; now you see how long things will take. Feedback removes the subtlety from subtle interactions: everyone’s seen the Yellow Fade Technique. Another popular feedback technology is something I personally implement all the time: graying out the entire screen with a message.
Structure - Experience as architecture. On a computer, the filing metaphor breaks down after you reach 1000s of documents. The search metaphor (type and there it is! instead of having to remember that precise path) works better. Architectures enable ad hoc conventions (how do you tag your images on Flickr? so people can find them easily). Take del.icio.us, where you tag for easy-to-remember searches.
Tagging really enforces the concept of experience as architecture: indeed, you’re creating a whole architecture for your life on the web based only on the ideas that the experience you had when visiting a site triggered in your head. "Tagging creates a trail behind us that becomes a trail I visit in the future."
None of the data in Flickr is provided by Flickr. None of the architecture is provided by Flickr. Everything is provided by the users through their experiences (and the ad hoc conventions that the community built for itself). Overall, the architecture of a site used to be hierarchical; now, it’s based on use patterns (everyone clicks a single tag, it gets bigger in size, more people click on it; Yahoo! built a link structure that promotes frequently clicked items to the top for easier clicking). Stepping back, instead of trying to control user experience, provide the containers for experience.
Scope The startup in 1996 versus the startup in 2006: in 1996 you had to have a big idea. In 2006, most server software is free. Servers are cheap. We no longer pay for impressions, we pay for clicks. "You can try out almost any idea for virtually no money." Old problems are solved by new platforms with an assumption of audience participation, in which the audience members control their own experience.
The old problem: CMS (a very complicated solution).
The new platform: customization to TypePad or free software. (The problem was access).
Participation: Aggregating feeds. Rich metadata.
Old problems: Map quest search engine.
New platform: Google maps (fluid).
Participation: API (mashups).
Old problems: Analytics - Enterprise-level software provides "everything but…"
New platform: Measure map - focusing scope on just bloggers
Participation: API
"Your site is just one piece [of the overall experience someone is going to have]. Play nice!"
Strategy - "The Web puts powerful tools in the hands of passionate amateurs." The travel industry has transformed to give people the power to do it themselves (the last time you flew, did you call a travel agent?). This lets to "amateurization." Take the George W. Bush flight status fiasco from CBS. One guy who wrote a typewriter blog figured out the famous Bush memo was faked. "If you can find the inefficiencies big companies have been capitalizing on, you can drop the bottom out of their market." Craiglist attacked the classified ad space, which the big newspapers relied on for a huge source of capital. Wikipedia killed the "one big company puts out a huge volume of books each year" domination of the knowledge publishing industry. Wikipedia is " changing the way we think about people’s knowledge." However, "don’t just put tools in people’s hands, show them how to be experts." Flyspy.com and Farecast don’t just let us pick a flight: they give us predictive modeling on when to book. We’re not just figuring out how to book or where to book, we become experts in booking: we now know when to book to get the cheapest ticket. TripHub gives us the power to be a tour guide. Blogger makes it effortless to update a website. Six Apart’s Vox gives inline tips in the experience. The successful Web 2.0 strategy? "Manage the risk in a way that will let [you] explore a very simple idea."
[Jeff’s slides are available at http://www.veen.com/nextgeneration.
