Recently in Design and usability Category

Well, I don't do Lowest Common Denominator Design.

Lowest Common Denominator Design is a sure road to dumbed-down, content-deprived, interfaces that feature themselves. LCDD is based, at its heart, on contempt for users and for content.

You tell em Ed ;-)

(www.edwardtufte.com/)

I recently had a QA on Linkedin with a guy who asked:

Community-based websites: the effectiveness of engagement and Interaction? There is still a real opportunity for them to be a leader using a community-based solution. How long will these community-based solutions continue to be effective?

Since about 2005 I've been getting a steadily increasing demand for sites that build, support or promote community. I was surprised by the above question as it was beginning to feel like pretty much every brand out their had gotten on the bus with varying degrees of commitment and success.

So I thought I'd drop my answer in hear for safekeeping:

If you rephrase your question slightly:

"What can my client do with interactive technologies to increase value co-creation and engagement?"

If the creation of social capital and the building of a value co-creation network become core business objectives then the worth of community-based efforts becomes self-evident.

A community can rally around an issue (changing legislation, agreeing safety standards for toys) or a task (designing the Lego Mindstorm, pushing GM towards sustainability) and collectively generate solutions. The alternative is a network of business development types driving around the country in cars. I gotta say, I like the website option better.

Please take note of Stephen's point about commitment. A thriving community does require investment in capital, in time, in risk management. Make sure you factor these issues into your planing.

> B to B is typically not a great area for community

I just wanted to add a comment about Tom's point above.

I have recently implemented "group pages" that allow insurance advisers to ask each other questions in a private, branded area. The service is hosted by the underwriting insurance company.

Here's what the value-map looks like:

1 - Each advisor builds her knowledge and feels more competent as a result of participating (similar to what we are doing here)

2 - The system reduces the number of calls to the underwriters which means they get more done in a day (their days become more valuable)

Created social capital:

The partner advisers deepen their engagement with the underwriting company. The experience of dealing with this company as opposed to one that doesn't provide this service is such that over time the business relationship is stronger (ie sales increase)

It's always worth trying to quantify this value when deciding what to build.

Experience value-mapping

I'm developing a methodology to map the co-creation of value by customers onto the traditional human-centred design assets we already use. I'm not sure where that's going to end up. Should I start another agency? (still a little sobered after the Pumpernickle experience) or do i just use this as a consultant, bringing the techniques to my day-to-day work?

In the meantime, feel free to ring me on 07515 661655 if you're a product owner and are trying to understand how value co-creation can impact your business requirement choices.

OK one last post before bed... I've just been reviewing the impact my mucking about with the templates has had on old URLs and came across the old splorp post with the "powered by Newton" gif.

I click on the link and ta-dah! the Splorp Newton server is still running, still reliably serving both static and dynamically generated pages - not sure why that makes me so happy but it does :-)

Well you can't, or at least I can't:-(

Instead, I have to tether my device to a master file system (my PowerBook) using a funny white stringy thing that need to keep in my bag (my usb cable).

Both my laptop and my phone are running FreeBSD, an advanced, Unix operating system the runs rsync (a native unix application all the more fabulous for its power and simplicity) out of the box. Both my laptop and my phone have advanced networking features with options to create or open sockets across a wide array of transports (IP over Firewire anybody?) so why doesn't this just work?

Rsync could run as a cron job and every 15 mins it would try and connect to a known host over the air (including connecting to the host via IP over the cloud, not just bluetooth or 802.11 lan) and voilà! A lovely synced up iPhone without the hassle.

I mean how hard could it be?

OK, I think O2 wins this donkey's current "Edge du Jour" tag.

Take a look at this wizard-style information display from the O2 self-care website. I landed here as I had just invested a chunk of my free time trying to review my invoice online having received my monthly your invoice is ready html email. Of course I failed, and I then failed to refresh my password, and sent a few paragraphs of vitriol to the support email only to be told that O2 can only be contacted using their customer contact wizard (perversly named "email us").

So before you even get started, what does this display suggest?

1. O2 only gives customer service to customers who know their details. This could be a problem for new customers who may not yet have received all the cryptic bits of misorganised pseudo-information that O2 sends out in a bid to help new customers settle in. This might also be a problem for existing customers who are on holiday or away from their base (imagine being in an internet café in Belize City trying to get help with your phone).
2. Assuming a customer has their details to hand, O2 will only engage in dialogue with users who can pass security. Now, this is a support email for crissake, what the hell kind of security do you mean? I just want to email you to complain or ask for help and you will only hear me out if I can give you secret password (which I've either forgotten or never had to begin with). This is just ridiculous
3. O2 will only listen to queries for internet users who get through steps one and two above

This is bad on a number of levels but the most obvious one is that the experience design takes no account of context-of-use.

If you are designing a support interface you can be pretty sure that most of the users who engage with it will have negative context-of-use issues. A big part of the interface's success will be taking into account why the user might feel upset or confused. Think of issues like:

• my phone is broken
• there's a problem with my bill
• I don't understand something and need help
• I'm in unfamiliar surroundings
• I don't have access to my own computer (with its cookies and bookmarks)

I think it's obvious from the entire interface that the O2 team took no account of these issues.

This is bad on further level. Dialog and transparency are now key elements of most sensible corporations' comms strategies. There is no point having your CSR team and your marketing folk writing about how open you are to dialog when your website clearly isn't.

Finally, the contact form has an input box which I think demonstrates the marketing team's deep understanding of the customer:

Now I'm pretty sure most iPhone customers can't tell the difference between an N95, an iPhone and a K800i. I know i certainly struggle with that one every day;-)

Disclamer: We've had a bit of an ongoing debate on this one with Anil fanning the flames as he tries to support the MT cause. I should disclose that I'm a member of the Six Apart Professional Network and also a 6A partner for the Paris office just so's you know...

While I'm a long-time Movable Type fan and user, I remember the first time time I installed Wordpress. What a treat, the thing was completely painless and took no time at all. I was way impressed and have been since. Added to functionality, the open-source community around Wordpress has spawned a huge templating and design resource with hundreds of very high-quality designs for the lay blogger to chose from. In fact, for many a year I considered switching to Wordpress and was only prevented by the thought of having to maintain security on a php installation and how I would handle any serious load should one of my client's projects really take off.

Now I've pretty much stopped worrying about this in much the same way as I've given up on the flash/no-flash, mac/pc, tomato/tomahhto arguments—they seem a bit pointless and on average both options/solutions have their merits.

I had an experience of doing some migration and configuring last night which brought to light some issues I hadn't yet come across in any Wordpress v. Movable Type discussions. I was trying to replicate behaviours from an MT installation into a series of WP ones and came across the following difficulties where Wordpress let me down:

• I couldn't perform a search and replace of strings across blogs and their pages, entries, comments and templates. To get the job done I had to edit template and entry data outside of the WP environment
• I couldn't use my global templates. I use these to configure global variables that several blogs can then share (in particular, I use primarily to manage root path across different systems and to avoid multiblog-calling-itself errors)
• I couldn't re-use my user configurations across blogs and if I wanted to set up an admin to cover more than one blog I couldn't re-gen their password
• Cutting and pasting, or generally moving data between templates across blogs was very unproductive (ended up jumping between Firefox tabs)
• There were two other things that got up my nose and I'll get them down here as soon as I remember them...

Before the WPfanboys jump on me, YES, I understand there are workarounds, upgrades, plugins and other fixes to the above and of course I'm going to struggle working in an environment that isn't my first choice. I simply wanted to list these experiences as I hadn't seen them outlined anywhere else.