dsp· by gregor hochmuth

When Mental Models change, it hurts

In Designing on 17 August 2008 with 1 comment

Few things take more courage in design than to throw out time-tested and familiar solutions for the sake of progress and “something better”.

Last year, Microsoft’s Office group had such courage when it introduced the Ribbon in Office 2007, a radical shift compared to the decade of menu+toolbar-based design that had informed an entire generation of users.

Last week, the same group showed audacity again when Microsoft Office Labs announced pptPlex, an exciting innovation of the way in which PowerPoint presentations are prepared and presented.

With pptPlex, presentations are no longer a linear. All slides can now be placed on a single screen and presented in detail by zooming in. That makes the entire presentation visible in an overview at first; the presenter can then drill down and zoom out at any point and move in non-linear paths more intuitively. Not all presentations need this kind of format but it’s certainly useful for complex topics and presentations with multiple chapters/groupings of slides that are interdependent. I’ve embedded one of the demo videos below; more can be found on the project’s website.

So what?

I’ve seen a dozen projects that aimed to reinvent PowerPoint. I haven’t seen a zoom-based approach, but I’m sure it’s been done before. All of the alternatives I saw had one thing in common though: a different interface or some new and clever way of making the presentation (mindmaps, hyperlinks, 3D, …). The problem: in addition to learning a new tool, users had to wrap their head around a new model for constructing a presentation. (How do you think about a presentation that happens in 3 dimensions if all you need is a beginning, middle and end?)

That’s why there is a second, more subtle innovation in pptPlex’s approach:
Read more →

Yes, No, Maybe so: Designing for Fuzzy

In Designing on 16 August 2008

Human language is inherently ambiguous. Luckily in most cases, we manage to make sense of it because of context, cues and other signals. But since language is ambiguous, our interactions are too — just wait for your next invitation to “lunch next week.”

Computers on the other hand are not ambiguous, never. Instead, they’re painfully exact. When building software, it’s tempting to carry their low-order strictness all the way to the top-level design — databases and schemas make that especially easy (and often quite enjoyable for logic-loving engineers).

But what happens when people interact with each other using such software? Their intended ambiguity needs to go somewhere but finds no binary equivalent; as a result, it’s often cast in stodgy facts and statements that don’t quite fit. That’s analogous to an image compression — once you saved the photo of a flower with a low quality setting, other people can still recognize the flower but it will communicate fewer subtleties and your impressions won’t match.

How can interfaces do a better job of accepting and preserving ambiguity? Consider the following examples that were designed with this need for fuzziness in mind: Read more →

Introducing Community Analytics

In Community Management on 13 August 2008 with 1 comment

The industry of measuring how many visitors you have, what they click on and what turns them away is enormous these days. The reasons are financial and therefore quite obvious — especially when you’re talking about e-commerce sites and sites that depend on advertising.

But when you’re running a site that’s built around people and the content they bring to you, there is another set of questions that’s just as important: Is your community working? Are people nice to each other and respect your guidelines? How do you know?

Visitor counts, bounce rates and browser statistics won’t help you much here. A new kind of analytics, with new tools, measurements and methods, is needed — so let’s start talking about community analytics.

Read more →

The 3 Loops of Designing for Audience

In Audiences, Designing on 10 August 2008 with 18 comments

In the previous post Why Twitter hasn’t failed: The Power of Audience, I claim that Twitter has been so successful because it gives users a concrete model of who is listening to them — it gives them a sense of Audience.

Designing for this sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and sense of utility among users of a service.

Twitter is a prime example for this kind of attachment: it survives countless outages and a slew of alternatives that could all pull users away… but don’t.

So how do you design for Audience? Read more →

Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.

In Audiences on 10 August 2008 with 3 comments

Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Facebook is designed for person-to-person and group communication. But is it designed for Audience? Read more →

Why Twitter hasn’t failed: The Power of Audience

In Audiences, Designing on 10 August 2008 with 3 comments

Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around it.

No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.

Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.

What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?

The answer lies in understanding Audience. Read more →