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Gmail and the Desirability of Scarcity

internet, society & sociology

June 28, 2004, 12:23 PM

I haven't made a big deal out of it, but I've had a Gmail account since around the time Google publicly announced the service (thanks to Kevin). It's a great little webapp, perhaps the best email client I've ever used, but that's not the point of this post.

Since April, Google has given current users of the service the ability to invite a limited number (2 or 3) of their friends into the fold. This has had the effect of introducing an artificial scarcity of Gmail accounts. I'm guessing that it's also had the effect of making them much more desirable than they otherwise would have been.

When Kevin first sent me the invite, my first thought was "ho hum, another webmail service". But then I got curious, largely because I felt rather privileged. I was cool enough to know Kevin and get early access to this new service. So I signed up, and wound up moving all my email to a webmail client (something I'd never expected I'd do).

Granted, Gmail's superior design and storage capacity were critical factors in this decision. Had Gmail failed to differentiate itself from its competition, I would have taken a look but turned away and gone back to Entourage. But the invite system was enough to convince me to take that first look. Often the weakness of good human-centered design is that it isn't always apparent at first glance, so people may never buy the product even if it would turn out to benefit them greatly. The invite served to make that jump, at least for me.

And it seemed to work for other people as well. During the first round of invites Gmail accounts were going for upwards of $50 on Ebay (now that they're much less scarce, their price has dropped dramatically, of course). The website Gmail Swap was created for people looking to trade things in exchange for Gmail accounts.

I don't know whether this was intentional on Google's part; there are certainly other reasons they might have done it. After all, handing out limited invites makes it easier to control how quickly the application scales so that Google's server admins don't get deluged with an unexpectedly high numbers of new users. But the marketing angle is more interesting; one wonders whether it would apply to other products. Perhaps this is a form of computer-based social networking that 1) doesn't rely on colored bubbles and lines and 2) is actually practically useful.

While we're on the subject, it has been brought to my attention that Google is branching out in new directions. Their next project involves producing a tangy, cheese-based cracker spread. When released, it'll be called "G-Whiz".

Ok, that was bad.

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On Being a User Researcher

society & sociology, usability

May 21, 2004, 07:18 PM

I've been thinking recently about user research (by which I mean formative research techniques that attempt to understand how potential users live their lives, what problems they have, what their goals are, etc.) and what it takes to be a good user researcher.

There are many skills that a person who hopes to do user research must acquire. For instance, a good user researcher must learn how to put interviewees at ease while still maintaining sufficient objectivity by avoiding misleading questions, etc. A good user researcher must be able to moderate a focus group by keeping it on topic without stifling discussion, avoiding group-think, and ensuring everyone's opinions get heard. A good user researcher needs to be a good listener. He must keep good notes. He must keep his biases out of the results. And so on.

But there is one quality that I believe all user researchers need to have to be effective, and it's never taught nor even mentioned in any training programs I know of. A good user researcher has to like people.

And I mean he has to like people, all people, not just his friends, peers, and colleagues. He has to be intrinsically interested in who they are, what work they do, how they feel about life, what they want to achieve, and so on. Even though user research is generally conducted to inform product design or marketing, in order to do his job well, a good user researcher must possess an interest in learning about people that transcends these goals. Gaining a deep understanding of how others live their lives must be an end in and of itself.

This is different from the goals of a psychologist or social scientist. Scientists who study humans hope to obtain generalizable knowledge about how humans behave. They uncover facts about human behavior; often these are abstract and somewhat removed in their statistical generality from the real thoughts and feelings of individuals. User researchers, on the other hand, do not uncover generalizable facts; instead they hunt for an understanding of the qualia, the what it's like to be a member of their target population. Though useful in and of themselves, psychology and social science aren't user research professions, nor can they be expected to adequately train user researchers.

I rather suspect that a mature field of user research would more closely resemble journalism than psychology. A good journalist goes out into the world and hunts for stories that will be interesting to their intended audience. A user researcher's audience is the design team. Their job is to uncover stories about their users that would be interesting to the designers while also accurately portraying the people they are designing for. To do this well requires many skills, but foremost among them is an intrinsic interest in and love for people that few other professions in this world truly call for.

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Some Simple Rules of Argumentation

society & sociology, writing & communication

March 26, 2004, 12:04 PM

These rules of argumentation (found via Mark) are golden. They're based on the core observation that you will never change anyone's mind in a single argument, so it's a waste of your time to engage in protracted debates. The post is a little long, so I'll summarize.

When you find yourself in an argument, follow this procedure:

1. State your case as clearly, rationally, and convincingly as you can. Never re-state it; this only hurts your argument and wastes everyone's time.
2. Clarify any misunderstandings since people may disagree with your case simply because they mistook some of your points. Don't get trapped in endless clarifications, however; there's a point where the required understanding is simply based on a "you had to be there" experience and you can clarify forever and never get anywhere.
3. Walk away. For a short argument, this is easy to do without conceding defeat. Keep arguments short.

I also love the suggestion that "the ideal attitude to project during any argument is one of calm disinterest". You can't lose if you don't care about the outcome (or at least appear not to).

Those of us with better things to do can never hope to win long arguments with those who seem to have infinite time on their hands. These rules can help save time, if nothing else.

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IBM's Social Computing

information, society & sociology

February 29, 2004, 11:26 AM

Wendy Kellog from the IBM T.J. Watson research center, gave a talk at the HCII seminar series last Wednesday on research directions in social computing. It was one of those "look at all the cool stuff we did" talks, but there were some fairly interesting ideas underlying the mishmash of technologies.

IBM research have moved from developing funky visualizations of social phenomenon to emphasizing technologies that universally represent users in the computing environment. They call them "people proxies", but they are essentially a form of digital identity. For instance, one of these technologies, Grapevine, was an intelligent electronic business card that allows recipients to contact you via multiple mediums (phone, email, IM, etc.) without disclosing your actual phone number, email address, etc. Another, Rendezvous, aimed to make conference calling more transparent by making it easier to bring in more people without hassling with special phone numbers and the like. IBM are also interested in personal middleware, the idea that individuals should be able to create and manage personal web services which rove inter- and intranets to locate information and perform other tasks for them, and that these services (dare I say "agents"?) should be sharable (although the really hard question, how everyday users are supposed to create these services, was completely skirted by Wendy). The theory behind all these approaches is that the vast majority of a company's information assets exists in employees' heads, whereas only 4% exists in enterprise database systems. So currently, 80% of a company's IT budget is spent managing that 4%. These technologies aim to facilitate sharing the remaining information.

I ran into my friend Cristen Torrey in the hall last Friday and we had a short discussion about the talk. She was concerned about privacy issues, which always rear their heads when the subject of consolidated online identities comes up. IBM assumes that making certain information transparent will improve productivity and enhance communication, but it could also increase the power of those on top of the management (or government) chain, encourage micromanagement, strip us of the right to choose what details of our lives are public and which are not, as well as a host of other unintended consequences. Where are the guarantees that we will have control over our digital selves? Where are the researchers that are bringing these issues to the table? I have yet to see them.

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Ratings and Online Forum Design

design, internet, society & sociology

January 25, 2004, 01:54 PM

Many large online forums such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin support collaborative filtering mechanisms for user-supplied content. The general purpose of these mechanisms is to help make the content people do want to read visible and to hide the content people don't want to read. In both communities mentioned above and many others besides, this takes the form of "moderation", where some users are given the authority to judge whether content supplied by other users is "good". As an aside, Paul Resnick, my former CSCW professor, has a CHI paper coming out on the topic of Slashdot moderation.

Moderation is a feature that tries to deal with many problems at once. The "quality" of a comment or story is subjective and may be based on many factors, and one person's notion of quality may or may not impact another's desire to read the content. Some of these factors may include:

• Spam is generally frowned upon by everyone, and easily identified by everyone. The filtering system need only mark content as "spam or not spam".
• Trolling is harder to detect, and feelings on it are a little more mixed. One person's troll is another person's devil's advocate. Also many people accused of trolling are simply espousing an unpopular opinion, which many forums may wish to actively encourage. So the solution here is less clear; there may need to be more consensus about a comment or story before it gets marked as a troll. And even then the appropriate solution may not be to filter out the content, but merely to mark it as a troll as a warning to other users.
• Information accuracy is theoretically objective but in practice is hard to determine. Truthfulness may be better determined through comments presenting supporting or contradicting evidence than moderation.
• Information interest and relevance may be supported well by moderation, depending on the diversity of the community and how specialized its interests are. A diverse community may have many conflicting opinions among its readership as to what is interesting and relevant, whereas a more specialized community may enjoy more consensus. Community designers need to take into account the type of community they are designing for when judging how (or whether) to address this issue.
• Unpopular opinions can be squelched through collaborative filtering, and again community designers must consider the type of community they wish to create and whether their design goals include encouraging or discouraging heated debate.

The point of all this is not to (necessarily) recommend a more complex moderation system (moderation systems are probably overly complex as it is) but rather to suggest that filtering community content is a complex issue that needs more thought put into it to come up with an appropriate yet simple solution.

The major difficulty with designing collaborative filtering systems is that you must keep the needs of two very different types of users in mind: the reader and the filterer (and possibly the poster of the filtered content as well). The reader wants to see the most interesting content without having to wade through a bunch of crap, but the filterer needs the proper incentives to contribute to the filtering system, and often there is little or no direct benefit to him. How much you can demand from your filterers depends on the type of community; it's worth remembering that the majority of users are social loafers and free riders in any online community (although these terms seem overly harshly judgmental in this context). Its for this reason that I'm always suspicious of collaborative filtering as a panacea; many designers are excited by its potential but, I believe, often ignore the subtle complexities of the design problems it introduces.

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A Usable Open Source Software Community

design, society & sociology, software development, usability

December 18, 2003, 10:42 PM

I've written a lot before on the subject of bringing usability to open source software. I've been silent on the topic recently, but not idle; I've been working diligently all semester long with my friend Dana Gelman for our CSCW course on a project to design an open source community that has the tools, techniques, and participants to develop products that can effectively target end-users.

Our core recommendation is that existing open source communities that develop applications targeting end-users (for our purposes, "end-users" will be shorthand for "users that are not like the developers") should invite usability professionals and interaction designers to participate in the development efforts. This is harder than it sounds, however, since existing, developer-centric communities will have to change the way they work to make room for these new people with new skills. To begin to paint a picture of what this new, integrated community might look like, we have developed eight specific recommendations for any OSS community that targets end-users.

1. Involve usables in the core development team. Our literature search has shown that most OSS projects have a small team of one or more developers that do the bulk of the work. On large projects, this team is responsible for decisions relating to the high-level architecture and organization of the code. We propose bringing interface designers into this team to take responsibility for the user experience, including defining and maintaining the core metaphors, ensuring interface consistency, and other high-level duties. These participants will also need to interact closely with the core developers to determine implementation tradeoffs, which is why they're part of the same core team.
2. Incorporate personas. I've already argued extensively for this recommendation, so I won't say much more of it here, except to note that to be effective, the personas must be used and valued (in particular, they should be frequently referenced by name) in design conversations throughout the community.
3. Build small, heterogeneous teams of developers and usability people. Small teams are more productive, and can focus on the details of an interface design with a minimum of overhead.
4. Modify the joiner script to require newcomers to justify design decisions with the personas. Open source communities have an implicit cultural barrier to entry called the "joiner script" that sets a standard that new members must live up to in order to become contributors to the project (think of it as a very long interview process). We recommend not admitting contributors (both developers and usability people) who are unwilling to justify design changes and feature requests in terms of the personas' needs.
5. Use synchronous communication (chat) for design meetings. Synchronous communication is more efficient at building shared understanding, which is essential for making effective design decisions.
6. Transmit design decisions back to the public list. The previous recommendation introduces a problem, however. People who are outside the immediate circle of the design team (contributors working on other parts of the project, contributor hopefuls, users, etc) also need to be kept in the loop about the design decisions that are made and the rational for them. For this reason, someone needs to be willing to summarize the synchronous design conversation and post it to the asynchronous communication medium in use by the project (e.g., a mailing list or discussion board) so these other followers can get access to it.
7. Provide a shared visual information space. We recommend using a shared, visual information space (like a shared whiteboard application) in parallel with synchronous chat for design meetings. Design is a very visual process, so having the easily accessible graphical space to work on rather than trying to describe all interface changes linguistically is necessary.
8. Modify bug tracking tools to better support collecting usability issues. Bug tracking tools are often used to record change requests as well as bugs in open source projects. On large projects, however, we found that they often break down as large numbers of UI problems pile in and contributors must spend time sorting through them. We propose developing more efficient bug tracking tools that are capable of handling UI issues as well as code bugs. We have not yet defined the form such a system must take, since this is really another semester project in and of itself.

Dana and I have put together a final report that contains more comprehensive descriptions and extensive arguments for these changes, ties our assertions back to the literature, and describes an experiment we are proposing to test one aspect of our solution (how personas change the design conversation in an integrated open source and usability community). I haven't made this paper publicly available (yet) since we're hoping to publish portions of it at CHI or CSCW and I don't want to run afoul of prior publication rules. But if you're really interested, drop me an email and I might send you a copy.

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On Ideas and a Community of Ideas

design, society & sociology

December 16, 2003, 10:49 AM

I've been busy with the end of the semester recently, which is why I haven't been posting much. This, of course, means I've generated a huge backlog of things to say. Now that classes are behind me, I'm going to try to get some of them out in the open, so if the next few days seem rather verbosely scattered, that's why.

Let's start relatively concrete. I was talking to Matt a few days back about ideas and the ways we come up with them, and the relative value of coming up with ideas versus putting in the time and energy to actually execute them. We agreed that most of the real work and the real value is in the execution of ideas; if one person comes up with an idea but another puts in the required work to see it brought to fruition, then the second person is the one with the stronger claim (a fact that is recognized by copyright law). But ideas are funny things; sometimes good ones will hit you out of the blue with amazing ease, but frequently if you try to sit down and deliberately come up with one it won't be there when you need it. Ideation is easy to do but really hard to focus and control, and a good idea that comes at the wrong time or in the wrong place is next to useless.

My theory on coming up with ideas is that getting the right idea is a matter of having the right kind of brain with the right kind of information in it, which enables you to make the appropriate neural connection to get the idea you want (I further believe that ideas don't come out of nowhere; they are composite thoughts that arise from mushing together apparently disconnected facts, values, and beliefs). The long and the short of this is that having the "right" idea is a matter of having the right person with the right knowledge at the right time.

We designers can up our chances of being that person through extensive domain research and brainstorming techniques, but we cannot ever step into another person's head, and sometimes that's what's needed to get at the right idea. But if we can't do it, who can?

The user community, of course. But often user ideas are never heard by designers, since there are no effective feedback channels from the end-users to those who develop their products. What we need is a forum for collecting such ideas and encouraging the best ones to rise to the surface. For this purpose, I propose an online community built to leverage this broad swath of brains who could possibly make these connections.

There are many barriers, however. How would the community designer encourage contribution of ideas? And once users are contributing, how would the community evaluate the ideas to know which are suitable for recommendation to the designers (who should, of course, exercise their own judgment in deciding how and whether to apply them)? It seems a fertile ground for exploration. The only community I know of that's attempted it was the Dilbert Lazy Inventor site (which is off the web now I think), and that struck me as more of a toy than a serious site.

Although I haven't emphasized it before, this idea strikes me as very much in line with my thoughts on increasing end-user participation in open source software development. It's nice to find those rare occasions when all your interests converge.

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Augmented Reality Graffiti

design, society & sociology

December 03, 2003, 11:23 AM

Cary sent me a link to a website complaining about the iPod's allegedly short-lived battery life. Here's to hoping my iPod holds out longer; no matter how great the design is, I can't afford to buy a 300$ music player every year and a half.

The section of the video where the creator is spraypainting the apple advertisements with the message "iPod's Unreplaceable Battery Lasts Only 18 Months" got me thinking about technological measures for adding greater public deliberation to advertising, specifically using augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality is an interface genre that involves creating technology that can recognize something about the state of the world and then overlay some additional information on top of the user's experience of the world. For example, a (conceptually) simple example would be a pair of glasses with a small embedded camera that can recognize the faces of people you're talking to, look them up in a database, then display their full names underneath their face (or so it appears; the glasses would project the name directly into your eyes), which would greatly help out those of us who are bad at remembering names of people we don't know very well.

Now take this thought, and imagine a system where viewers of an advertisement could append commentary about the product or the company to the physical poster, television spot, or whatever that would then be available to all other viewers of the advertisement as a sort of "virtual graffiti". This gives us the benefits of the website author's approach to commentary without actually being illegal or even ethically questionable (although it also might lack the thrill of committing minor civil disobedience).

This approach is already taken by some websites, which have the advantage of not needing augmented reality since they exist in an entirely virtual space. Kuro5hin, for example, allows users to append comments to the text advertisements on the site to foster discussion about the product or service or company being advertised (although the advertiser has the ability to disable this feature). One problem with such systems which hasn't really been solved even in virtual spaces is how to empower readers to filter through a potentially large volume or comments, many of them useless, and how to get an at-a-glance "big picture" of all this commentary. In other systems, the problem may be encouraging contribution, since people may be less willing to take the time to contribute their recommendations or complaints if their feelings aren't strong or their readership is small.

I also confess to having no clear idea how far off in the future such an augmented reality system is. We had an interesting talk at the SSS on augmented reality given by a couple of guys from the ETC who were investigating the possibilities for AR in games. But I did get the impression that most of the technology was pretty nascent. Still, now is a great time for designers to start investigating the potential interactions afforded by AR so we'll be ready for it when it comes.

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Why Trusting Pretty Web Sites Is Rational

internet, society & sociology

November 01, 2003, 10:41 PM

Paul gave a lecture in CSCW yesterday on the topic of economic analyses of reputation systems. One of the points he discussed relates to an earlier post of mine on how people judge the trustworthiness of web sites. The upshot of that post was that the quality of the site that was most relevant to its perceived trustworthiness was how pretty it looks, that this is bad, and people are dumb (implied).

Turns out that conclusion is wrong. Paul presented an economic analysis that explains why a rational, self-interested actor should choose to pay attention to things like the visual appearance of a site. The argument goes like this:

1. Imagine a marketplace which, like most marketplaces, has some number of high-trustworthy sellers and some number of low-trustworthy sellers. Imagine you are a buyer. You have to decide who you are going to buy from, but you don't know, a priori, which sellers are which.
2. Consider the position of the sellers. Both types of sellers have some interest in sending signals to buyers that they are a professional, trustworthy organization that deserves your business. These signals may include trust-focused advertising campaigns and/or spiffing up their website design.
3. The high-trustworthy sellers know that any money they invest in sending these signals will attract customers who will be satisfied with their transaction and will continue to be customers of the business. Thus, they invest a good deal of money into making their website attractive.
4. The low-trustworthy sellers know that money they invest will only have a limited return, since they can't scam you forever (eventually you'll find out that they are violating your trust) and then they will lose your business. So they will not invest as much money in making their website spiffy, since the rate of return for them is lower than it is for the high-trustworthy sellers, and thus the market is against them.
5. So as a buyer, you have reason to believe that a site with a spiffy visual design is trustworthy, since high-trustworthy organizations have a greater interest in spending their money on such pursuits. Therefore, it is perfectly rational to associate an attractive visual design with trustworthiness (even though it is hardly a strict guarantee).

Of course, as several people pointed out in class, this "ideal" model doesn't hold true in all markets. For instance, this model assumes that it's easy for a buyer to end a relationship with a seller as soon as he realizes the seller is untrustworthy. But this isn't always the case; for instance, in apartment rental markets, buyers must generally sign year-long leases that commit them to staying with the same landlord even if the landlord reneges on his responsibilities. And even after that year is up, the expenses of moving may keep many tenants in situations they otherwise wouldn't accept had they known before they moved in. So, like any general economic analysis, you have to think about which conditions it will hold under and which conditions it will not.

Still, it's an interesting counterpoint to my more cynical earlier comments.

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Online Community Currency Analysis

internet, society & sociology

October 29, 2003, 09:42 AM

The ever-insightful localroger has an article on K5 analyzing comment moderation system currencies (like Slashdot's Karma and K5's Mojo) and providing some design recommendations for improving these virtual economies.

Although I'm filing this under Meta it is not a specific suggestion for immediate changes to Scoop. Rather, it is a set of ideas I've been mulling over based on what e-community engines like Scoop, Slashcode, and various web BBS packages are all trying to become, and how the next generation might do it even more effectively.

Whether you call it Mojo, Karma, "Standing," or something else, all content rating feedback systems have some sort of currency. While there are many different ways of acquiring and spending such capital, nobody seems to have implemented an economy varied enough to be robust. And this is the key to building a system which can be stable in the long term.

Some of Roger's ideas seem good and others need work, but he's on the right track. We should be doing more of these comparative analyses and reasoning about the effects of community features on the social structures they're supposed to be supporting.

Analyzing Roger's ideas using the social science design principles we're developing in CSCW is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Paul's Online Social Science Weblog

internet, people, society & sociology

October 23, 2003, 07:56 AM

So it turns out one of my professors for CSCW, Paul Resnick, has a weblog (on livejournal, no less). Doesn't look like he updates it very often, but when he does he posts some nice, lengthy reflections on his experiences with online communities research. His most recent entries chronicle his experiences at the Online Communities Summit, which looks like it was a fun event. Might be worth checking out; he's in my Newsable sources list!

In his last post, Paul learned about Technorati and complained that he didn't have too many incoming links. Consider this my contribution to the cause. :)

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Mark's Bread and Online Identity

funny, internet, society & sociology

October 20, 2003, 10:39 PM

Mark Pilgrim is having problems baking bread:

I have been coping with my new bread machine for several months now, with distinctly mixed results. The first loaf came out great, an outcome which I attribute entirely to beginner's luck. The second loaf failed spectacularly, by which I mean that it failed to mix, bake, or rise, three steps which are generally considered crucial to successful breadmaking.

At this point I decided to quietly stop blogging about it, in an attempt to project, as they say in The Matrix, a somewhat fantasized mental projection of my digital self. Online, I am a god who commands the respect and adoration of thousands. Offline, I am a moron who can't bake bread in a bread machine. This blogging thing, it has legs, but not for the reasons you've been told about.

Mark's a funny guy. His quip also brings up some interesting issues with online identity, specifically the identity of webloggers. It's quite true that the persona a weblogger projects online can be quite different from his "real life" persona. To an extent, you get to pick who you want to be on this Internet of ours.

Sometimes I wonder what sort of person those who read this weblog but don't know me in real life imagine me to be. It all smells vaguely of postmodernism. My friend Katie, a sociologist, argues that