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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 the Internet is essentially postmodernist. Now I'm wishing I'd asked her what she meant by that.

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Using Research to Guide Design

design, processes & methodologies, society & sociology

October 13, 2003, 11:15 AM

As I've mentioned before, I'm taking CSCW: Designing Online Communities this semester and one of the stated goals of the class is to figure out a way to translate the knowledge gleaned through social science experiments into a set of principles that can guide the design of online communities. The way we've been approaching this so far has been to distill out a set of stylized social science facts and then brainstorm features that would conform to these principles (generally by altering the design of an existing system, MovieLens).

My preliminary thought on this approach, however, is that this is the wrong way to go about applying social science to design. The problem is that brainstorming features from social science facts doesn't take account of the holistic nature of design; the principles are very specific and reductionist and thus the feature ideas you tend to get may violate some principles while supporting others, or just be bad ideas for other reasons. Some of the stylized facts are even contradictory, at least at this abstracted phase (e.g., disclosing personal details about yourself makes you like the people you disclose them too, but spending too much time with people you have an intense relationship with makes you like them less). They also might not fit into the conceptual structure of the design, or the culture of the particular community.

This is not to say that the whole idea is fundamentally flawed, just that I believe we should take a slightly different approach. Instead of using social science to guide design explicitly, we should use our stylized social science facts and distilled design principles as heuristics that can be applied in a post-design analytical usability evaluation, similar to Heuristic Evaluations. Although these principles may influence community designers, just as Nielsen's heuristics influence user interface designers, they are primarily intended as a checklist. Nobody comes up with interface designs merely by pondering Nielsen's heuristics, so we shouldn't expect that of community design either.

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Weblogs As Common Ground

internet, society & sociology

October 10, 2003, 07:41 PM

Last week, we had an SSS on weblogs. Unlike last year's hour-long talks, this one was more of a freewheeling discussion session. Neema provides a taste of commentary.

Chad made an interesting comment during the session. He remarked how being a weblogger had created a new kind of social relationship for him. Some of his friends and acquaintances he doesn't see very often, but he reads their weblog and he knows they read his. This creates a novel social dynamic when he does run into these people, since both he and his friend have certain knowledge in common from reading each other's weblogs that they can both refer back to and discuss.

Essentially, what Chad is referring to is a unique form of common ground that he and his weblog friends have established. Both parties in the conversation share a certain form of knowledge (the contents of the weblog posts they've both read) and thus can refer back to them without lengthy explanations of the concepts.

I ran into Chad at Entropy earlier that week, and experienced this phenomenon firsthand. I must say, it's neat to be actually experiencing these new social forms in the flesh!

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Friendster Trading Cards

internet, society & sociology

October 10, 2003, 05:53 PM

My friend Scott Davidoff and I were discussing Friendster this afternoon. Scott is not normally a big online communities fan, but he checked out Friendster since it relates to his CSCW project.

Now, one of the interesting (although not so surprising) phenomenons in Friendster is the "friend collector". Certain users of the system use Friendster as a kind of online popularity contest, where they invite just about anyone they know to be their friend just to rack up the number of pictures on their page. Scott and I have a mutual acquaintance (let's call her "Elise") who apparently engages in this practice. Although Scott barely knows her, Elise sent him a "let's be friends" invitation. Scott said, and I quote, "I felt like I'd just received an 'Elise' trading card!"

Turns out it's been called that before, but still, this has got to be the single best metaphor I've heard yet for Friendster. Perhaps they should capitalize on this concept and make a sort of mainstream "Magic: The Gathering"-style MMORPG with your friends (and friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends) as the game pieces.

If I wind up taking Game Design next semester, maybe I'll do it myself as one of my projects! ;)

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The Way We Really Speak

language, society & sociology

October 09, 2003, 11:06 PM

As part of our background research for CSCW, Dana and I are reading some social science articles on how people build common ground. "Common ground" is a term that refers to the customs, norms, and other background knowledge and experience that people in a group share that allows them to communicate efficiently (or communicate at all, for that matter). Common ground includes social norms as broad as "we will all speak English" to ones as narrow as "'that thing' refers to the sprocket wrench we were discussing earlier in our conversation". We feel that building common ground is an especially important area for us, since our particular problem, integrating usables into open-source software development, involves two groups that have a big problem with a lack of common ground.

Right now, I'm reading an article by Andrew Monk entitled "Common ground in electronically mediated communication: Clark's theory of language use". Monk's main point is that the ways we communicate with each other are much more socially-determined than you might think. To back up this claim, he describes Herbert Clark's theory of language use.

The classic model of human communication is very send/receive oriented. It goes something like this:

This model has been very useful, especially to communication engineers since it pretty much maps directly to the way two computers talk to one another. But the model breaks down when you examine how people really talk. The basic problem is that the model doesn't take into account the fact that the "code" people use to communicate isn't initially well-defined. With two computers communicating over a network, the protocols they use (such as TCP/IP, HTTP, etc) to exchange information have been precisely pre-defined by the programmers (or ginormous standards institutions). With humans, however, there are no such rigorously defined protocols. Sure, human languages are fairly well-defined, but the ways that people actually use these languages to communicate is not. The way people really speak is a process of negotating common ground. Monk gives an example in the paper:

Roger: Did you have oil in it

Al:    Yeah, I-I mean I changed the oil, put new oil filters, r- completely redid the

       oil system, had to put new gaskets on the oil pan to stop-stop the leak, and

       then I put -and then-

Roger: That was a gas leak

Al:    It was an oil leak buddy

Roger: Its a gas leak

Al:    It's an oil      leak!

Roger:                  on the number one jug

Al:    It's an oil leak!

Roger: Outta where, the pan?

Al:    Yeah

Roger: Oh you put a new gasket on it stopped leaking

Al:    Uh huh

If you read over that conversation snippet (which really occurred "in the wild") and reflect on it, you'll notice that much of the meaning is being negotated rather than transmitted. The nutshell version is that conversation is much more like ballroom dancing than it is like sending and receiving computer messages. It's a process of speaking, receiving and processing feedback, clarifying, receiving more feedback, etc. In some sense, it's an iterative design process with really tight feedback loops.

Here's a picture of our revised understanding of language:

Again, what's really happening here is a development and negotation of common ground for the conversation. Unlike with computers, with humans the "protocol" is developed on the fly.

Monk also notes three types of common ground developed in conversations:

1. Conversational conventions which are social norms that necessarily underlie all conversations (without them, we could not converse). E.g, "We will be as concise as possible" and "We will let the other person know when we don't understand something they said".
2. Communal common ground are norms that spring from the surrounding culture and environment, such as "We will both speak English". These conventions relate most directly to online communities.
3. Personal common ground is more specific to the particular conversation. These are norms developed between the two conversants previously or during the conversation, e.g. "We are going to lunch together tomorrow" or "The word 'Nish' refers to Newell-Simon Hall, the building on the southeast of campus with the green roof".

In essence, this theory is an interesting merge of classic cognitive, psycholinguistic approaches to understanding language and more sociological approaches, and appears to describe the ways we really use language much better than previous theories I'd learned while taking linguistics classes in undergrad.

More on common ground may be coming up soon (dunno if that's a teaser or a threat ;).

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The Ivory Blog Bubble

internet, society & sociology

October 06, 2003, 10:13 PM

Oliver Willis asks whether webloggers are taking themselves too seriously:

During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I'm not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I'm a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world - it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.

Again, it is quite similar to the web bubble. For a while when you were inside the industry (as I was) it would be easy to think: everybody is doing this. When the truth of the matter is that they weren't and they aren't. The vast majority of Americans are not online, and even those that are online only a small portion of them are reading blogs, and an even smaller amount are reading politically oriented blogs. That small percentage does tend to be quite influential (particularly if they're a part of the media) but it is our duty as bloggers to understand that we aren't exactly changing the world yet.

A too-true point, and one that I don't have much to add to (for once). Just a single thought: Whose world are we changing? We should think about these things, much more than we do. Before our time to think has passed us by.

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An Online Community for U&SA

internet, society & sociology, software development, usability

September 29, 2003, 09:02 PM

As many of you already know, I am currently employed here at Carnegie Mellon as a research assistant for the U&SA project. By day, I investigate the relationship between the usefulness, usability, and desirability of software systems (the human-centered view) and the architectural decisions that dominate the construction of these systems and ultimately determine what is easy to change and what is hard to change (the machine-centered view). Specifically, I work to improve our U&SA technique which involves general usability scenarios and considerations that impact software architecture design decisions and design recommendations for developing architectures that better implement these scenarios. (By night, I'm either an overworked graduate student or a hard-boozin' party animal, depending on the phase of the moon and the moods of my professors...)

When I leave here, one of the projects I hope to have time to start involves developing an online community for improving and refining the U&SA technique. Essentially, I believe we've got something good here but that it could benefit from more industry feedback and the infusion of best-practice wisdom. Hopefully CSCW will better prepare me for this task by the end of the semester, but in the meantime, here's a few thoughts on what such a community might look like:

• The scenarios could go in a wiki so that several people could propose and refine examples of architecturally-sensitive usability issues. This way, every time someone encountered an important usability concern that turned out to be difficult to add later and that wasn't covered by our material, they could add a scenario for it or modify an existing scenario to include it.
• Discussion boards on applying the scenarios to real-world projects and technologies. These boards may focus on discussing technology-specific patterns for the scenarios, such as implementing Cancel in a J2EE system, or on existing toolkit and framework support for the scenarios.
• Moderated essays on distilling out considerations and patterns from the scenarios and technology discussions. These essays would necessarily entail a lot of meta-analysis and require a higher degree of accuracy, so they should require more community consensus for publication. I'm thinking something like a Kuro5hin-style voting system for determining whether they're published or dumped.

So those are my initial, very rough ideas. If you're interested in helping me flesh them out some time, please do let me know.

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The Role Of the University in Higher Education

society & sociology, teaching & learning

September 19, 2003, 06:05 PM

After attending the whole IT in the research university event as well as reflecting on my experiences in classes here at CMU and my illustrious schoolmates' comments and complaints on their own experiences, I've got to thinking about what exactly the role of a research university should be in the broader educational system. Although I'm no expert in education, I have been a student for many years now and have some experience with teaching, so I feel I have some authority to pronounce on this subject.

Here's my thoughts on what kind of learning would be appropriate at the various stages of education and who should be responsible for meeting these expectations:

1. Undergraduate education should focus on giving students a broad base of knowledge to form the foundations of a productive intellectual life, as well as enough skills in a particular field to begin a career. Ideally students should all leave undergrad as T-shaped people. In my opinion, undergraduate degrees should not be conferred by research institutions; they should instead be granted by colleges that are specifically oriented towards teaching. Teaching well is a full-time job; you can't expect researchers to be able to just "fit it in" to their research schedules, especially when their incentive structure heavily favors deprioritizing it in favor of their research. These teaching colleges must also have the resources to offer courses tailored towards students with particular interests; it is not acceptable to expect a designer to learn everything they need to communicate with programmers by taking an introductory computer science course geared towards people who want to focus on programming, for instance.
2. Professional graduate education, such as the programs I and most of my friends are in here at CMU, can be taught by research institutions, but must not be seen as "more undergraduate work". If you want to learn a new skill, you need to go back to a teaching college. Professional graduate education, on the other hand, should mostly involve courses run in a seminar style that focus on collaboration between the professors and students (most of whom are returning to school after spending some time practicing their trade) to distill the abstract research done by academics into a form that can be used by the industry practitioners. Essentially, professional graduate education should be viewed more as a form of technology transfer (numerous studies have found that transferring people is much more effective than merely transferring technology) and less as a form of instruction.
3. Academic education, or PhD programs, should be run more or less as they are now. Essentially PhD programs are (or should be) a form of apprenticeship where the student learns by working with the master. Hopefully freeing researchers from some of their teaching burdens will give them more time to spend working with their PhD students, who are the type of people they are actually qualified to teach.

So that's my modest proposal.

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Social Loafing, Free Riding, and Online Communities

psychology, society & sociology

September 10, 2003, 11:25 PM

In CSCW / Designing Online Communities last week, we read, processed, and discussed a huge volume of empirical studies literature on the problem of free riding and social loafing. These two concepts describe the same basic phenomenon except that the first is an economics term and the second is a social science term. Some may quibble with details, but essentially both refer to the observation that people tend to contribute less to a common effort when they are in groups than they do to their individual efforts. The presence of others, it appears, causes contribution and productivity to drop. My earlier post about empirical research on free riding examined one of these studies, now I'm going to try to distill something out of all of them.

Examining this issue is important for online communities, since all of them are, to some degree or another, a common, public good. All require some sort of member participation to stay alive; email lists and discussion groups require people to provide new posts, weblogs require the author to add new entries and possibly readers to add comments or send feedback, online games require a number of people willing to play seriously and fair. And an issue that may touch the hearts of many community administrators is that of donations; the question of how to get your thousands of readers to donate those two cents or whatever it takes to keep your community/webcomic/magazine/etc. alive has free riding / social loafing written all over it.

And so we start by asking: when do people loaf / free ride, and when do they not?

Social Science

To examine the social science perspective on the problem, we read a "Karau & Williams", a formal meta-analysis of several empirical studies on social loafing. For the masochistic, the full reference is: Karau, S. & Williams, K. (1993) Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706. After slogging through the dry prose and statistics, I gleaned the following information from the article.

Social loafing is decreased by the following factors:

• Evaluation potential - if there is a chance that people will be evaluated on their individual contributions to the group, they are less likely to loaf.
• Task valence - if the task the participants are engaging in as a group is considered inherently interesting to them, they are less likely to loaf ("valence" is psychology lingo for an individual's feelings of attraction or aversion to a particular object or event).
• Group valence - if the participants feel a positive attraction or a sense of loyalty, commitment, or camaraderie towards the group, they are less likely to loaf.
• Opportunity for group evaluation - if the group's performance will be evaluated at a predetermined point, that group's participants are less likely to loaf.
• Individual is unique - if the individual feels they are the only one in the group that can provide a particular service or complete a particular task, then they are less likely to loaf.
• Female sex & Eastern culture - Easterners are less likely to loaf than westerners, and, for some reason, women are less likely to loaf than men.
• Task complexity - Participants are less likely to loaf if the task is quite complex than they are if the task is simple.

On the other side, social loafing is increased by the following factors:

• Greater number in group - the more people there are in a group, the more loafing will occur.
• Low expectations of coworkers - if participants thought their coworkers were incompetent, they were more likely to loaf. This contradicts the assumption that competent people will work harder to compensate for their less competent coworkers.
• Adult participants - for some reason, adults loaf more than children. Maybe loafing is a learned skill. Matt likes to talk about "skilled incompetence"; maybe this is related.

Economics

For the economic perspective, we read "Ledyard", which isn't a formal meta-analysis but is a smart guy who read a bunch of papers and tried to pull all the data together. Here's the reference: Ledyard, J. (1995). Public goods: A survey of experimental research. In J. H. Kagel & A. Roth (Eds.), The handbook of experimental economics (pp. 111-194.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. and here's the insights:

Free riding is decreased by the following factors:

• High marginal per-capita return (MPCR) - the MPCR is the amount of utility an individual expects to get back from contributing to a public good. Consider the game I discussed earlier; if the per-person return for investing in Group Exchange is 25 cents, people are less likely to contribute than if it is 75 cents.
• Common knowledge of who contributes - if everyone else can see how much you are contributing or withholding (and you can, in turn, see everyone else's contributions) everyone is more likely to contribute more to the public good.
• Everyone starts equal - if everyone starts out with an equal amount of money, people are less likely to free ride than they are if the initial distribution of funds is uneven.
• Donation threshold - if some form of threshold is in place (think of campaign contribution targets, for instance, or dollar-amount goals for cancer research fund-raisers) then this reduces free-riding. However, putting a threshold in place reduces the likelihood that the threshold will actually be reached. I don't entirely understand how this works.
• Friendship / group identification - Similar to the "group valence" finding in the social science article, if all the people in the group are friends or otherwise identify with the collective, then they are less likely to free ride.
• Communication allowed - if the members of the group are allowed to communicate with one another before playing the game, then they are less likely to free ride (even though theoretical economics like Prisoner's Dilemma strategies claim that communication is irrelevant).

Yep, you saw it coming. Free riding is increased by:

• Repeated games - if the game is played over and over again, people are more likely to free ride in later games than they are in earlier games.
• Economics training - people trained in economics are more likely to free ride than those who are not. Perhaps because they are familiar with the "optimal strategies" already.
• Experience playing the game - people who have participated in game theory economics experiments before are more likely to free ride than those who are not.
• Vote for contributions - this refers to an alteration in the game where, after the total amount is collected and the individual knows how much he stands to make or lose, everyone votes to determine if the contributions are applied to the public good or if the good is dissolved and the contributions are returned to their original owners. Although you'd think this would discourage free riding, apparently it only makes it worse.

Well, that was fun. Now the question becomes: How do we take all these facts and turn them into practical design recommendations for online community developers? Stay tuned, I hope...

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Operating System Learnability and the Digital Divide

society & sociology, usability

September 07, 2003, 04:23 PM

Dan has a post about how Macs aren't any more intuitive to use than PCs, at least in his opinion.

I'd have to say, after a year of using a Mac and several years of using PCs, that I can't see where all the hoopla over Mac OS being more usable than Windows came from. Both have their strengths and weaknesses (Mac OSs tends to be better at Just Working™, whereas Windows tends to be better at giving you meaningful feedback when it doesn't; Mac OS has slighly more sensible metaphors with its emphasis on drag-and-drop and files-as-objects, whereas Windows has many more features to help out expert performance), but overall, I'd agree with Dan's assessment that both OSes are probably still pretty tough for the novice user to grok. Unless someone can show me some hard data from summative learnability evaluations comparing equivalent tasks in both Operating Systems, I'm going to remain unconvinced.

Dan said something else interesting, though. I quote:

Yes, we are raising a group of hyperwired kids (my daughter can click and drag with a mouse to play games on the computer at age 2), but there's probably a huge underserved market out there who could use some sort of operating system that was powerful enough to run what they need and yet be hassle free: the elderly, the very young, the uneducated. These people, however, are also often poor. Which is probably why this hasn't happened yet.

I've been wondering, recently, if learnability will eventually become "obsolete". As Dan points out, the younger generations are becoming much more familiar with technology at a much earlier age. Does this mean that, in the future, systems won't have to be as learnable, since they can count on a user population that is generally computer-saavy? (Note that usability will still be important, since it is so much more than ease-of-use.) And what about the poor and uneducated? Will they just slip further behind as the rich are elevated to digerati and high-tech products become more complex and esoteric?

Things to think about.

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Empirical Research on the Reasons for Free Riding

society & sociology, systems

September 04, 2003, 08:51 PM

For CSCW this week, we had to read an empirical research article relating to free riding / social loafing and summarize it for the class. I chose an article that studied the reasons why people tend to free ride as a long-term trend in Prisoner's Dilemma-style situations, since I'm pretty interested in game theory economics (although not ordinarily so interested that I'm willing to slog through academic journal articles on the topic). I'm posting it here because I found the results interesting enough that I believe a higher-level summary of the experiment is worth disseminating. Just in case you're interested in the real thing, the reference for the article, in APA-style, is: Andreoni, J. (1988). Why free ride? Strategies and learning in public goods experiments. Journal of Public Economics 37: 291-304.

In "Why Free Ride? Strategies and Learning in Public Goods Experiments", James Andreoni is concerned with determining the cause of "free riding" in game economics experiments. Free riding is the term used to describe behavior where an individual acts in his own self-interest at the expense of the group because this will result in greater benefits to him, even though the optimal behavior is for all members of the group to act in the group's interest. For example, the classic experiment in free riding studies involves forming groups of five subjects and giving each member of the group 50 "tokens". Tokens can only be redeemed for cash by investing them in one of two funds: an "Individual Exchange" fund returns 1 cent to the investor and nothing to his group members, whereas a "Group Exchange" fund returns a half cent to the investor and everyone else in the group. Note that the game involves the same general situation as the Tragedy of the Commons; the rational individual will choose to invest in his Individual Exchange fund since that always returns 1 cent to him (and he'll also gain from any Group Exchange investments made by his teammates), but the best strategy for the group as a whole is for all members to invest all their money in the Group Exchange, since that returns 2.5 cents to each group member. It's also important to note that none of the participants are allowed to communicate about the game, so they cannot, for example, all agree to follow the optimal strategy.

Andreoni notes that all experiments of this type tend to result in a convergence on free riding behavior when the game is played repeatedly, whereas the behavior is evenly divided between free riding and public interest when the games are "one shot" deals. He describes two theories for why this occurs: the "learning hypothesis", which postulates that individuals don't initially understand the game, but, over time, they learn that free riding is the optimal strategy for their personal gain. The "strategies hypothesis" goes further and claims that some individuals learn the optimal strategy but seek to further maximize their games by occasionally contributing to the Group Exchange fund to prevent others from learning the game or realizing that they are playing rationally so that their groupmates will contribute more to the Group Exchange fund. However, at some point near the end they will "bail out" and stop contributing to the group fund, which explains the end-game free riding behavior.

To test these theories, Andreoni ran an experiment where a control group played the normal repeated game (he calls this group the "Partners"), whereas a variable group played a version of the game where the participants in each group were randomly shuffled at each iteration, so that effectively each player was just playing a series of "one shot" games (he calls this group the "Strangers"). This eliminated the effects of the strategies hypothesis (it makes no sense to try to "psych out" your groupmates if you are assigned new groupmates after each iteration) so that only learning could explain any observed behavior in the variable group. Moreover, both groups were subjected to an unexpected "restart" where the game continued for three additional rounds after they were told it would end. This was to isolate the learning hypothesis; if learning was primarily responsible neither group should be affected since both had already learned the game. If either group was affected, then something else had to be going on.

Andreoni summarizes his results as a series of six observations:

1. Investments in the Group Exchange was greater by the Strangers than the Partners in all rounds. This is evidence against the strategies hypothesis, which claims Partners would always be greater since all players invest more in Group Exchange when they are fooling or being fooled.
2. The percent of Partners who free ride is greater than Strangers in all the rounds, with the greatest difference in the last round. This is more evidence against the strategies hypothesis.
3. The Partners give the least in the last round, but most have still not reached the free riding equilibrium (the amount they would contribute as the number of rounds approaches infinity). Once again, more evidence against "strategies".
4. The Strangers give more than the Partners in the last round. If learning is all that's going on, then the Partners must be learning much faster than the Strangers, which is hard to accept. This suggests that learning is not solely responsible for the trend towards free riding.
5. The Strangers appeared to be only temporarily affected by the restart.
6. The Partners are affected, and return to high levels of investment in the Group Exchange in the restart. This appears to have a lasting effect. Remember that the learning hypothesis predicts that neither group will be affected if it is the sole cause of the free riding trend.

Andreoni summarizes by asserting that his experimental data contracts both the learning and the strategies hypotheses as accounting for the tendency towards free riding.

Finally, he concludes with a discussion on what theories and new experiments may account for free riding behavior. For example, he points out that it is possible that participants may have learned the optimal behavior for the "one shot" game, but don't yet understand the dynamics of the repeated game. This would help explain the fluctuations after the restart, since participants may not recognize that the continuation of the game should not affect their behavior. He also suggests the examination of theories that look at "non-standard behavior" that consider the reasons subjects make their decisions rather than just the characteristics of the equilibrium. For example, subjects may get non-monetary pleasures from cooperating. Or they may be enforcing social norms on cooperation by trying to punish those who don't contribute to the Group Exchange. Or participants who do worse than the expected may play more cautiously and not contribute as much to the Group Exchange. In conclusion, Andreoni calls for an empirical examination of a broader range of alternatives such as these.

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The Tragedy of the Commons

politics, society & sociology, systems

September 03, 2003, 12:38 PM

Last night, I read a paper for CSCW on "The Tragedy of the Commons", which I believe is the seminal paper that applied this concept to modern political science. If ever there was an argument that knocked down the "Invisible Hand will fix everything" theory of capitalism (still popular among some of the more overzealous libertarians), this is it.

The paper is very good and pretty readable, so I'd strongly suggest you read it. But since I know most of you won't, here's a summary of the argument, as applied to the problem of overpopulation:

1. As the number of people increases, the amount of available resources on this planet per capita will decrease.
2. Since population, unchecked, grows exponentially, we will soon reach a point where there is only enough resources per capita for bare subsistence, so no one will have sufficient resources to enjoy life (in reality I'd argue this is an unlikely scenario; it's much more likely that a minority will have sufficient resources and the majority will not have enough to survive, but the important point is that either scenario is bad news).
3. Therefore, overpopulation is a big problem.
4. However, from the perspective of the rational self-interested individual actor (whom the invisible hand is supposedly guiding), the cost of having another child is nearly entirely beneficial since the burden of overpopulation is distributed evenly to all humans and thus is negligable to him, whereas the cost of not having another child is entirely detrimental to him.
5. Therefore, the rational self-interested individual actor will conclude that he should always have another child.
6. And, of course, so will all the other rational, self-interested actors out there.
7. Therefore, the overpopulation problem will continue to get exponentially worse until the scenario described in (2) occurs.
8. Sucks to be us.

This is an insight that exposes a core problem confronted by modern economists and other social thinkers. It proves that a blind, simplistic trust in markets is misguided, and that the world is much more complicated than most laissez faire propoganda would have you believe.

This isn't to say that markets are bad, of course, just that they need to be fixed sometimes. The interesting debates are over how to do this; how to balance freedom with responsibility. But in order to engage in this debate, you first have to accept the reality that it must occur.

Hardin claims that attempts to convince people through education that they must voluntarily reject the course of action that benefits them the most for the sake of society at a whole are inherently flawed and unworkable. He argues:

If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? — not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: 1. (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; 2. (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."

Similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma, the system ensures that the people trapped in it cannot escape through cooperation unless they can be convinced to all trust one another, an unlikely scenario.

The only alternative, Hardin argues, is "Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon". Essentially this involves stamping out the commons and replacing it with systemic structures that either carve out portions and allocate them to individuals ("private property") or artifically make the costs of abusing the commons much higher than the benefits (fines, incarceration, etc). Essentially this entails giving up freedoms, but its a mutual sacrafice that humans agree to on their own volition. Of course, Hardin skirts the issue of what exactly those people who choose not to enter into the agreement are supposed to do... I don't like this conclusion, but so far I must say his argument is convincing.

The core idea, however, is that we as intelligent actors have to alter the system as a whole to work for our long-term best interests rather than against them. But this introduces problems of its own. Systems are complex, and it is hard to predict all the real effects changes will have. I've mentioned the "Law of Unintended Consequences" before. Hardin himself brings up the phrase "Quis custodies ipsos custodes?" or "Who shall watch the watchers themselves?". Whenever you introduce changes, there have to be mechanisms in place to enforce those changes. Usually this requires enforcers, who are human too and subject to the same rules as all the other humans in the system. You can't expect enforcers to be angels; they will look out for their own self-interest just the same as everyone else will.

Is it even possible to design perfect systems that can really address all these issues? Or is this just a cleverly disguised technical solution to a "no technical solutions problem", which Hardin deplores in the first few paragraphs? T.S. Eliot once said "It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one has to be good". Where, then, lies the hope for lasting betterment?

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Analyzing Communities

internet, society & sociology

September 01, 2003, 12:57 AM

The fall semester has begun here at CMU, and I'm taking a class in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) from Bob Kraut. This semester, the class is focusing on Designing Online Communities and Bob is co-teaching it with Paul Resnick, a recommender systems (think Amazon.com ratings) expert who is visiting from the University of Michigan.

In the first class, which was last Friday, we discussed several types of social structures that exist both in the real world and online:

• Groups are a small number of people who come together to accomplish well-defined goals and have a specific, agreed-upon purpose. Most of the teams you may have worked with for projects in a class or at a workplace fall into this category.
• Voluntary associations are generally larger collections of people who all share common goals or interests and have agreed to congregate around those interests. Unlike groups, the goals of a voluntary association may not be very well-defined. Voluntary associations tend to last longer than groups, however; many may even have indefinite lifespans. An example is your local chapter of the YMCA.
• Communities are like voluntary associations but might be more loosely organized. I don't believe we talked much about this category, so I don't recall a whole lot of distinguishing features. I'd imagine communities involve people coming together to socialize and share in each other's lives, and are potentially even longer-running than voluntary organizations (you may belong to some communities for your entire life).
• Third places are locations people go to socialize that are separate from the home and the workplace (which are the first and second places). Third places are characterized by people coming together to revel in the uniqueness of each others' personalities; the patrons of the third place go for each other and not as much because the place is enjoyable per se. An example would be a neighborhood bar. Cheers is kind of the prototypical third place.
• Social networks are collections of people who are associated with one another through social interactions such as friendships, working relationships, etc. Your social network defines who you talk to, who you can ask favors of, who you can get information out of, etc. Bob went into an interesting digression where he showed a drawing of a social network some sociologists had observed; he pointed out how the network formed certain "clusters" that were only connected to other clusters through a single link between one node in each. Bob remarked that the two people who formed that link were frequently (de facto) powerful individuals since they controlled the communication between those two social clusters. This is especially true if the groups must frequently exchange important information, since they get to play gatekeeper for that information.
• Social capital describes the sense of trustworthiness and shared identity that people feel towards one another. Your social capital is a measure of this sense that people experience towards you; if you have high social capital among a certain group of people they will tend to value what you say and listen to you; if you have a low social capital, they're more likely to ignore you. This is a different way of looking at social relationships than the more structural ones I mentioned before.

Bob also made an interesting point about how physical architectures (as in, the structures of buildings) define the environment in which a community operates and thus has a large influence on the community itself. The readings drew a metaphor between building architectures and city planning (the kinds of things Alexander discusses) that physical communities live in and the design of the software systems that virtual communities live in. The suggestion, of course, is that the software system design influences these virtual communities in a similar fashion. This was really interesting to me; I had originally thought of going to grad school to study online communities in general and specifically how the design of social software systems influenced the way their communities operated. I hope we'll talk more about this issue in later classes.

Neema is also in the class and has posted his thoughts on his weblog. Chad is taking the course as well; hopefully he'll put up a few reflections as the semester wears on. If you, dear reader, happen to be a member of the class and have a weblog of your own, please post it in a comment below or send me a trackback ping. I'd like to keep tabs on what other people think of the course.

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Social Networking Astronauts

society & sociology

August 23, 2003, 07:06 PM

Micah reminded me yesterday of an article written by the ever-insightful Joel Spolsky on "architecture astronauts", those great thinkers that have the unfortunate tendancy to get caught up in reaching for the highest pinnacles of elegant abstraction only to produce solutions that are completely incomprehensible to the rest of us. Essentially, the architecture astronaut's flights of intellectual fancy bring him out of touch with reality; the grand concepts he dreams up have little to do with the practical problems his real users face on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, Joel mentions Napster; he states: "Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like 'Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music' and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away."

That article was written over two years ago, so its example is a bit dated. I thought I'd take the opportunity to update it. Consider Friendster.

To many who are interested in social network analysis, Friendster is interesting because it is based on their paradigm. You join, you're hooked in with your immediate friends, and then you can explore the friends of friends of friends and so on who are in your network. And I must admit it is pretty neat; sometimes I'll find some person way out in my network is connected by two friends who I wouldn't have expected to be joined in that fashion. Its at least a neat curiosity and a possible conversation starter.

But let's stop kidding ourselves. Is Friendster really so popular because it's a real-world, practical social network analysis tool, or is it so popular because its a free online dating service? To the social networking intellectuals who are spilling so much digital ink over the site, the dating is almost incidental, but I'm not convinced. Judging from my experiences with how people actually behave on the site, I'd have to put in my vote for the latter.

My point, I suppose, is that astronauts exist in more fields than just architecture. We who dream of grand concepts in the clouds have a tendency to get excited over the wrong things, whether this is peer-to-peer architectures or social network theory; we easily lose touch with the real needs and desires of "ordinary" users, whether this is listening to music or finding a friday night date. Unfortunately, in our work we often start with these grand concepts; we hear about a neat idea, get excited, and then go try to find a problem to apply it to. How can we be more careful and ensure our energies are more focused on the real problems out there in the world?

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The Invisible Designer

design, society & sociology, usability

August 06, 2003, 08:24 PM

Since I first became interested in interface design, one of my favorite sayings has been "The most irritating thing about being an aspiring usability professional is that there is so much need for us out there in the world and so little demand!" Today I found out that Alan Cooper elaborated on this thought better than I have been:

Sometimes being an interaction designer can be so frustrating! If, as a designer, you do something really, fundamentally, blockbuster correct, everybody looks at it and says "Of course! What other way would there be?" This is true even if the client has been staring, empty-handed and idea-free, at the problem for months or even years without a clue about solving the problem. It's also true even if our solution generates millions of dollars for the company. Most really breakthrough conceptual advances are opaque in foresight and transparent in hindsight. It is incredibly hard to see breakthroughs in design. You can be trained and prepared, spend hours studying the problem, and still not see the answer. Then someone else comes along and points out a key insight, and the vision clicks into place with the natural obviousness of the wheel. If you shout the solution from the rooftops, others will say "Of course the wheel is round, what other shape could it possibly be?" This makes it frustratingly hard to show off good design work.

Cooper attributes the problem to this inherent property of design: the "right" design seems obvious once you've arrived at it, but boy is it hell to get there. And I think this is a large part of the problem. Our brains are funny things; neural impulse patterns have to click just right with other neural impulse patterns to produce those breakthrough design ideas, and sometimes it requires intense immersion in data or research, high-energy brainstorming sessions, mapping mental associations to physical objects using a process like affinity diagramming, or a host of other mental exercises to arrive at this "click". But once you have the idea and can describe it to others, they don't have to go through all this strenuous mental activity and thus have the "Duh; it took you that long to come up with this?!" reaction.

But I think this isn't the only barrier. Another big problem usability professionals seem to face is the "everyone's an expert" symptom when it comes to interface design, so it's hard for the designer to sell his skills when non-designers are convinced you don't need special skills to create great results. Interface design is one of those fields that is easy to do badly but hard to do well, and unlike programming, it isn't immediately obvious when a design is bad to those who designed it. This is especially if you don't run user tests, and since this problem crops up most in organizations that are fairly immature with respect to usability, this is likely the case.

But even if the organization is fairly mature, usability still often falls by the wayside because, as Cooper argues, its benefits are often invisible. A well-designed interface may not have immediate, measurable impacts on product sales, may not be demanded by clients (well, they may want the software to be "easy to use", but most don't understand what this entails), and thus may not hit the company in its pocket book. And even if it is impacting sales, this effect is likely to occur only after some delay, as users get frustrated with the product and switch to competitor's offerings. And as we know from systems thinking, we humans are bad at connecting effects to causes when there is a significant delay between them.

So, what's an enterprising young designer to do if he wants to help tackle this problem?

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Quality, Quantity, Progress, and Design in the World

aesthetics, design, society & sociology

July 29, 2003, 12:51 AM

Once again, CDF has reset itself and we've procured a new teacher. This week its Craig Vogel, an industrial design teacher with a penchant for waxing philosophic on the nature of design and its place in society.

Craig described the design problem as a process of understanding the existing world and then envisioning the world in a new, preferred state. Progress, then, is moving from the first to the second. I've described something similar in my definition of design. Yet people have different definitions of "preferred", as I hinted at in my earlier post. Some argue that modern society's concept of a preferred state of the world, and perhaps even its understanding of the existing state, is short-sighted, misled, or even downright inhumane. Craig mentioned an environmentalist architect (whose name escapes me) who felt this way. I thought of an old roommate back in college, Eric, who passionately believed that architecture and urban planning could be conducted in harmony with the environment, leading to a better world for all, except that society didn't value these things and thus they never entered into these visions for a preferred state of the world. Maybe he's right, maybe we need to develop such a vision. Alexander had lots of ideas along those lines back in the seventies, maybe its time for more people to listen to him.

Next, Craig discussed qualitative versus quantitative methods. He argued that qualitative methods have been deemphasized, when not actually reviled, in modern society. Our society values quantitative methods and skills such as mathematics and "hard" science. Our educational system emphasizes these skills and even defines intelligence (the primary educational value) in terms of these skills, while paying small heed to more qualitative skills like art and design.

So far so good. Personally, I'm very interested in merging quantitative data gathering with qualitative design and decision making, since I strongly believe both have great value for different purposes and both are essential for a healthy society. Along these lines, Craig discussed the cultural divide between engineering and design, which perked up my ears since I see my work on U&SA as one facet of bridging an instance of this divide. However, although Craig preached for bringing the two perspectives together on equal footing, the rest of his talk, I felt, had a definite "design has got it right; engineering is so materialistic!" slant to it. Over dinner, Matt remarked that it seems every area of study he encounters preaches interdisciplinary unity at first, then turns around and argues why their particular discipline is the best and should ultimately be in charge.

All too often, such discussions turn into power games. Perhaps its due to our tribal ancestries, but we humans always seem to want "our people" to be the dominant ones, whether our people are defined by nationality, race, gender, or discipline. Too few of us genuinely see ourselves as truly multidisciplinary, as having a foot firmly planted in two or more such cultures at once. Yet the disciplines must cooperate, and to do so they must see the other's point of view. Sometimes I'm amazed that anything ever gets done...

Craig also discussed the MAYA principle of design, which stands for "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable". A powerful concept, that speaks to the need for progress to proceed in digestable portions. Too many sweeping changes, and you've developed a product, interface, or system that is unusable, aesthetically displeasing, or otherwise rejected by the populace. Sometimes we refer to products and ideas of this ilk as "ahead of their time" (if they're lucky). Which is very visionary and avant-guard and all, but such ideas, almost by definition, never pan out, never make a significant difference. Keeping this principle in mind is especially important for us intuitives, who are always seeing the possibilities of the future and risk losing touch with the here-and-now reality our fellow humans live in. Perhaps here is where the quantitative methods come in.

Craig contrasted the design of two cars, one of which he held up as a better example of design. He mentioned that buyers know there is a problem with the second car but can't necessarily articulate what the problem is. They're likely to say "it just looks ugly" or something similar. This reminds me of the maxim of HCI that "the user is not always right". The designer's job is to define, articulate, and respond to the problems the users "know" are there but can't quite grasp, let alone offer solutions for.

As we talked more and more about these two designs, I couldn't help but feel how ironic it was that, after all that initial high-minded anti-modernity talk, we wound up discussing cars. If ever there was an example of a poor definition of progress, I'd argue its embodied in the automobile. They're dangerous, bad for the environment, expensive (on both the personal and societal level), and yet our society keeps demanding more of them, with more features and better designs. And thus our designers fight with our engineers over how to make the cars pretty and cheap at the same time rather than confronting the larger issues. Do we even need these things at all? Why is the only alternative an overpriced fancy scooter?

Unfortunately, all people, even designers, work within frameworks. Cars are so much a part of the framework of American society that people either take them for granted or dispair at ever improving on them. And no matter how convinced you are that you're discipline should rule the world, you still should recognize that its culture lives within a larger culture that dictates a surprising array of its values in deviously subtle ways.

I guess no one has all the answers, be they engineers, designers, or HCI people. But hey, if there weren't all these important unanswered questions out there, there'd be nothing for people like me to write about.

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Ayole's Water and Technology As a Catalyst for Change

charity, society & sociology, systems

July 11, 2003, 10:50 PM

First off, a quick apology for the recent slowdown in posting frequency. I've taken on way too many projects this summer and thus haven't had as much time to update this journal as I'd like.

Today I partially taught a lesson in the TCinC class I'm co-teaching with Matt. Matt has put together the lesson plans for most of the sessions we're redoing for Joe's class, and today he had us show a video to the students called The Water of Ayole.

The Water of Ayole is a video used by the Peace Corps to communicate the important concept that technology must be introduced into organizations along with the skills and systems necessary to maintain and develop that technology. The video itself is about a program to introduce water pumps into many third-world african villages. The basic problem this program is trying to solve is that many villages are reliant on water sources that are unsanitary, disease-ridden, far from the village (and thus take a lot of time and effort to collect), etc. This lack of potable water is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Africans every hour. To solve this problem, the program funded the construction of water pumps that are capable of drawing water from deep underground that is pure, potable, and close to the village (and thus much easier to gather).

Unfortunately, although the intentions of these programs are good, the execution was flawed. Here's what generally happened:

1. The government came in and funded the construction of the water pump. The villagers were overjoyed.
2. A couple of years pass. The pump breaks.
3. The villagers complain to the government, but the government doesn't have the money to maintain the pumps for free.
4. The villagers attempt to raise money to fix the pumps, but they are poorly organized. The money is never collected and used appropriately.
5. The women of the village go back to the time-consuming task of gathering the unsanitary water they drank before. Disease and death returns.

The exception to this rule is the village of Ayole. When the interventionists brought the pump to Ayole, they didn't simply build the pump and leave. Instead, they helped teach a mechanic who lived in the village how to repair the pump. The villagers themselves formed committees who were responsible for discovering problems with the pump and raising money for repairs. They even engaged in communal farming to help raise money for pump maintenance as a common good for the village.

Clearly, this video demonstrates the importance of organizational change when incorporating new technology. But I took another message away from it as well. I've always believed that true, lasting change can only occur if it happens in the hearts and minds of the people, and thus technology cannot, by itself, create change. However, technology can be a catalyst for change. The villagers in Ayole remarked that their community had grown stronger as a result of the pump, that the presence of the common good brought them together, even in ways that were not related to pump maintenance. They now took a greater interest in each others' affairs, and were more willing to help fellow villagers in need. Of course, this change did not come from the pump per se; it was the result of the organizational change that swept through the village as a response to the need to maintain the pump. But the pump undoubtedly spurred this change. Introducing a new technology can, when other conditions are right, tip the scales in favor of a new, better social order. And I think that's pretty exciting, especially for a budding technologist who hopes to do some good in this world.

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Designing Against Frivolity

design, society & sociology

June 17, 2003, 07:51 PM

I happened to hop over to Slashdot today and found a nice polemic over on the Guardian about how frivolous technologies are dominating the market nowdays. The article is full of derisive, quasi-luddite quotes, like The Innovations catalogue exists as proof that there are people with less perception than a wrapped loaf who are inventing things; and more, even dimmer, who are prepared to buy them and So the fatuous becomes the essential, and we become more decadent, more hungry for diversion and suckered into buying things that will improve our lives negligibly, if at all, but it raises what I think are some real issues. Most consumer technology nowadays are fairly frivolous, which isn't to say some people aren't working on important scientific and technological advances, it's just that the market is dominated by video phones and other gadgets that are cool for a little while, but ultimately serve no meaningful purpose. But the reason these things keep getting produced is people eat it up.

Personally, I avoid spending money on impulse purchases. I find gadgets like the ones on ThinkGeek as cool as the next nerd, but every time my Id screams "I've got to have this!!" my Superego replies "Yeah, for maybe five minutes. After the novelty of owning a portable lie detector wears off, it will just lie around your apartment and take up space". When I do purchase gadgets, it tends to be in response to some need I've been experiencing for awhile. I didn't purchase my current computer until it was clear my last one wasn't hacking it performance-wise (Netscape took around a minute and a half to get going). I've never owned a cell phone or a PDA even though they've been available for years, but for the past several months I've been having problems remembering meetings, birthdays, etc., and I've been in several situations where I needed to reach or be reached by someone while I was out and about. So I've finally been thinking of getting a phone/pda combo like the Sidekick.

Unfortunately, many people don't seem to be very good at assessing their real needs and distinguishing these from mere passing fancies. Thus, the market is bloated with products that seem glamorous but improve people's lives only marginally if at all. The solution, of course, is to help educate people in how to assess these needs and work to change society to favor long-term improvements in quality of life to short term instant gratification. This isn't to say I don't believe in the importance of designing pleasurable products, I do. But I think there's a difference between products that truly make your life more pleasurable to live and those that serve as temporary curiosities, then just get in the way.

Perhaps, in the short term, designers can help by working for those companies that are producing products that genuinely improve people's quality of life, such as the wind-up radio mentioned in the Guardian article, even if this means working for less pay. In my view, the pay cut would be worth it to know I'm really contributing to the betterment of humanity, and not just pumping out the next fad.

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Friendster and Digital Identity

internet, society & sociology

June 12, 2003, 06:41 PM

At Kenneth's urging, I joined Friendster today, mostly just to poke around. So far it seems like an interesting place that takes a new angle on the whole “meeting people” problem; it leverages social networking concepts to introduce people to one another (basically, “I know Bob who knows Joe who knows Jane who has interests in common with me, so maybe I can get Bob to get Joe to introduce me to Jane”). Micah pointed out that there isn’t any good way to visualize your social network right now using Friendster, which is a fair criticism, but it’s good to see that people are doing something useful with all this social software rhetoric.

Currently, however, Friendster has a problem with “fake users”, generally imitators of celebrities. Since anyone with an email address can create a Friendster identity, some people make up these fake identities as a joke, which several others add to their list of friends. The problem is this breaks the intent of the system, since this fools the system into linking you to several people who you actually have no social network connection with. (At least, no known connection with. Six degrees and all that notwithstanding.) It seems Friendster needs to implement an option for people who aren’t directly connected to one of these users to “bullshit” a friend-of-a-friend, thereby removing that connection from their own social network (although without disturbing the networks of everyone “upstream” of them).

However, this design idea is a point solution to a larger issue that affects not only Friendster but most any social software running on a network like the internet: there is currently no way to maintain a consistent digital identity online. This is essential for most social systems, since most such systems must have a way to link actions to individuals over time. We humans use identity for many, many things; I’m finding from my news reading inquiries that the author of a piece of commentary or analysis is one of the main considerations people use when determining whether or not to read that piece (people read articles by authors they have read and liked before). In the real world, we have people’s physical appearance, voice, etc. to define their identities. We will need something comparable in the virtual world to replicate this same sense of familiarity and trust, and prevent problems like the one facing Friendster. Until such a mechanism exists, social networking systems must blindly trust the population of the entire world, and there will always be someone who wants to screw around.

The problem, of course, is that privacy comes up whenever anyone mentions digital identity. People are skittish about entrusting their personal identities to the computer; most don’t understand it well enough and are scared off by stories of hackers and identity theft. They need to feel comfortable that they exert control over what information is provided to whom, that they can provide highly personal information when they wish and little to no information when they wish. Some of these issues were raised at the CHI privacy, security, and trust talks. Maybe I should go back and read some of the papers.

Not all of these fears are groundless. Aside from the numerous technical security hurdles, there is the problem that if you have a unique identifier associated with your online activities, anyone can associate any information they wish with this identifier. If this identifier is traceable to you, which it must be for it to fulfill its purpose, then this information will stick permanently, which opens up whole new possibilities for slander. The internet is a big place. Its hard to find where all the rumors lie.

Building unique digital identities online is simultaneously one of the most promising and most dangerous tasks we face in this new society we’re starting to form. I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.

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The Users We'll Never See

design, information, society & sociology, usability

June 03, 2003, 05:10 PM

About an hour ago, I felt a need to feed my Chipwich addiction, so I invited Kerry to go to Entropy with me. On the way back, she needed to stop by the Hub to get some registration and class scheduling issues worked out. Since I had nothing imminently pressing to do, I waited for her.

While sitting in the Hub waiting area, surrounded by brochures, magazines, important-looking forms, computers, and the various other trappings of a functioning administrative center, I started to reflect on how much information was out there in the world, and how much of it had to be dealt with. That's the thing about information; it always seems to need processing and organizing and analyzing and basically loads and loads of attention. Information can be rather childish in that sense.

I was reminded of Herb Simon's quote: "In the future, the scarce resource will be human attention". I reflected for a bit about how right he was.

But wait a minute, a little voice in my head remarked. Exactly how right was he? Sure the information-overload problem is a big deal for people at CMU, and probably is for information workers everywhere. But is everyone like us?

My father owns a house in rural West Virginia (Monroe County, for those of you familiar with the area). Life's quite different out there. People aren't so busy, for one thing; they don't appear to be so bothered by all this information. The information is there; there are construction projects and farm vehicles and weather patterns and plant DNA (scads of information lies in the DNA of even a simple organism) and who knows what else. But this information doesn't seem to be so concerned with getting your attention. It could care less about being processed.

My point is not that this "simple" life is ideal or perfect; it isn't. My point is not even that it's better; "better" is a matter of opinion and generally doesn't mean much in any absolute sense. Hell, I happen to like city life; I wouldn't move to the country if I was given a million bucks to do it. Rather, my point is that old Herb was not thinking about these people when he made up that quote. And how could he? He was here at CMU, where everyone is information-overloaded. Of course he saw the future in those terms; he was extrapolating from the present, just as any rational person would.

As human beings, our conceptions of the world and its problems are necessarily a product of where we are situated in society, both physically and status-wise, and who we choose to associate with. Dan Sieworek, Scott Hudson, and many other researchers here at CMU, are taking Herb's quote seriously with projects like Aura and Situationally-Appropriate Interaction to try to solve this information-attention problem of the future. But whose problem is this, really? It's their own problem, ultimately, and the problem of the people they associate with and the people who fund them.

As user-centered designers, we can only design based on our conceptions of the world. We can only perceive and design for the slice of reality we find ourselves in, and for most of us, this slice is quite limited.

Around this point, I was interrupted from my meditations by the secretaries loud discussion about whether picture files are supposed to end in ".jpg" or ".jpeg". They spent a good five minutes trying to figure out the correct answer (of course, both extensions will work fine for most modern programs). I smiled. File extensions are one of those known usability problems that no one can get seem to rid of. Usability advocates routinely complain about how design decisions such as this one are made by programmers who don't understand the mentality of the users they are designing for. But in the large scale, in the "redesign society" sense that researchers and the upper echelons of industry and government confront daily, does anyone really know who they are designing for? Does even the most skilled user-centered designer have any meaningful grasp on who the users are when the user base includes the population of entire countries (or the entire planet)? In this scenario, even we user-centered designers may be no better than the archetypal isolated programmer in a cubical we so frequently revile.

Sometimes I wonder if at least a subset of the designers of the world need to step out of their bounds sometimes. Some of us should go out into the world to observe the people whose lifestyles and values clash with the ones we are familiar with. Perhaps this would help us get a larger view of the world we are so eager to change, essential if we are to do more good than harm.

This idea has some background in design research; last semester we read a paper from DIS 2000 that advocated designing for "extreme characters" as an exercise to help break out of the mould of the existing interface design frameworks. But this is just a thought experiment; the extreme characters described in the paper are (by admission) caricatures of real people. A designer can't truly know what the elements of society outside his spheres of experience are like without seeing them for himself.

Now if we really were able to see the people of the world, the "end-users" of our world-changing visions, as who they are, and not just who we assume them to be, well, how mind-blowing would that be?

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Justifying My Existence, or Why I Have A Weblog

internet, personal, society & sociology, writing & communication

June 01, 2003, 01:57 AM

Back when I first set up this here weblog, Micah asked me what my reasons were for doing so. At the time, my answer was "I want to have a place to record my ideas" This was accurate if rather vague; I wasn't even sure then if I'd continue to maintain roBlog dot org or if I'd get bored after a couple weeks and take it down. Since then, I've obtained more experience with weblogs as a medium (I'm even planning to write my own news aggregator), and I think I've managed to refine that initial thought a bit.

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer did a report a few weeks back on weblogging. One of the people interviewed half-jokingly gave the reasons people blog (I still can't stand that word, but when in Rome...) as "narcissism, creativity, and a desire to connect with like-minded people". Not bad as one-sentence summaries go, but I think the reality is more complicated.

At Micah, Andy, and Don's CHI BOF on Weblogs, we talked some about the reasons people have weblogs. From that discussion and others, I've learned that there are myriad varieties of reasons why people choose to share their thoughts online. These range from:

• Emotional exhibitionism, or the thrill of sharing the intimate details of your personal life with (potentially) complete strangers. This works into the "narcissism" comment, and unfortunately is what some people tend to associate with weblogs.
• Communication with friends, which also involves sharing personal details, although possibly of a less sordid nature. Usually these types of weblogs are of little interest to those outside the author's immediate social circle.
• Sharing ideas with friends and strangers, so the author's thoughts can get wider circulation.
• Getting feedback on ideas from people with a different perspective, which may be the main reason the author wishes to share them.
• Recording thoughts and experiences for the purpose of having a "backup brain" that you can refer to later when your primary wetware has failed you.
• Improving writing skills, which was mentioned in the News Hour piece. Writing is a skill that requires frequent practice and good feedback to maintain and enhance.
• Reasoning through ill-formed ideas, since having to articulate an idea in written form is often a good way to identify where the idea is weak and needs further development, as well as identifying those ideas that sound good in your head but look pretty stupid when the (metaphorical) ink hits the paper.
• Connecting with others, since weblogs are a good way to express your interests directly without having to work them into a conversation. Others who are interested in similar things may find your weblog and get in touch with you about your common interests.
• Influencing others, since reading your thoughts may cause others to change theirs. You may express some insight they wouldn't have come to on their own, and thus start the spread of a meme. This is innately satisfying to many.
• And many others I've probably missed...

There are other dimensions of differences as well. Some authors tend to restrict their weblog posts pretty religiously to a single predefined topic, others write about whatever happens to be on their minds. Some authors post lots of personal details, others prefer to keep it dry and intellectual. I believe this variety is a tremendously good thing. Weblogs are a medium, they should be used for whatever people find them useful for.

I don't want to digress too far into ruminations on why other people use weblogs, however, since this post is supposed to be about my reasons for doing so. I set up roBlog dot org for several reasons. First off, as I said initially, I want to record my ideas, to have a "backup brain" where I can look back a couple of weeks, months, or years later and see what I was thinking about in June of 2003.

I also want to be able to see how my thinking has progressed over time, which gets to my second reason; I want to have a means of connecting ideas explicity, both my own and other people's, and if there's one thing the web is good at, it's connecting ideas. Within the context of roBlog, however, I'm hoping to develop a better way of accomplishing this.

I also hope to improve my writing skills and ability to articulate myself clearly, which helps me reason through my thoughts in ways that I couldn't if I just kept them in my head. On several occasions, I've written up a weblog post just to sit back and remark "Ya know what? I'm not so sure I'm entirely convinced of that anymore." I've rethought quite a few points as a result.

Finally, I hope to share my ideas with others, get interesting and helpful feedback, and hopefully influence others and help them think about things just a little bit differently. I've already received lots of interesting comments from my friends (often in person, but sometimes on roBlog itself), and I know my thinking has been stimulated by the thoughts of others I've encountered on their weblogs. To me, this is the most unique and exciting property of weblogs as a medium, this ability to spontaneously share ideas and form connections between them.

In closing, I'd like to present my current vision of the site. I think of roBlog as my open notebook on life, intended both for my future reference and as a window into my head for others, both strangers and friends. I see life as the ultimate research project that never ends, and I hope roBlog continues to reflect that. Stay tuned for as long as you'd like.

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On Cooperation and Understanding Others

society & sociology, systems

May 29, 2003, 03:50 PM

An important skill to cultivate if you wish, like me, to make a difference in the world is the ability to put yourself in the position of the people you must work with so that you can understand clearly what their motivations are, what external forces are influencing them, and why they act the way they do and make the choices they make. Here's why.

Psychologists have known for a long time that although we humans have a tendency to blame our own failures on external forces beyond our control ("I bit Bill's head off because I had to sit through rush hour traffic this morning, but I'm not an irritable person", "I did a bad job on the paper because I didn't get enough sleep last night, but I'm still an excellent researcher"), we have a tendency to blame other people's failures on their personal character ("Jack's a jerk; he yelled at me for a friendly joke!", "This is the third crappy paper Jill's put out; she's a lousy researcher!"). But this tendency blinds us to the fact that all people work within systems; they are all part of a larger whole that includes the other people they work with, the physical environments they live in, the technologies they use, etc. These systems define what these people must do (if they wish to maintain social and material standing), what they want to do (if they wish to improve their lot in the system), and what they cannot do (if they wish to avoid censure or some other punishment).

When someone opposes your goals you might be tempted to think that person is uncaring, or incompetent, or evil, when in reality they simply have external influences affecting them that you may be unable to see. More often that you might think, people with good intentions are hamstrung by systems that are not designed to support those intentions, or even designed to actively oppose them. It takes careful thought and empathy to fully understand such a situation; a surface analysis never turns up everything.

If you can't understand the larger systems that exist behind the people you encounter and how these systems are influencing them, you will be quick to demonize the people around you, to write them off as foolish because that's simpler that trying to understand the complex reality. But when you must work with these people, this only serves to foster a competitive environment where everyone is out for themselves. The only way around your coworkers is through them.

On the surface, this may seem faster. Surely fighting for what you know is right is faster than talking and compromising and working together (at least if you win). But the assumption here is that your ideas will work "out of the box", that the world would be a much better place if only everyone listened to you. This is patently false, no matter who you are. No one's ideas will work right off the bat because no one is in a position to see the whole world for what it is. There will always be complications, always a need to iterate and improve. Cooperation seems slower only because you are actually seeing these iterations in progress; you're constantly making small mistakes and small corrections as everyone checks and balances each other. But if you chose to compete, then each iteration requires a whole process of taking sides, building armies, fighting, killing (hopefully metaphorically), etc., just to have a bunch of new ideas put in place that frequently turn out to need just as much iterative improvement as the old ones did. If you think long term, if you keep your eyes focused on the ultimate goal, then antagonism is almost always an unnecessary distraction that gets in the way of real progress.

All this isn't to say that people's values are not important, but values alone don't tell the whole story. I can value intellectual openness, but if my bread and butter is coming from selling my work by the copy then I'm not going to embrace eliminating IP laws. I can value saving the environment, but if I feed my family with money I earn from a logging company, I'm not going to support stricter deforestation regulations unless you can convince me my needs will be taken care of. If you refuse to see the system people must work within, then you won't win them over to your side. You don't understand them. And no cooperation can occur without understanding.

In the end, all real progress occurs through cooperation. If you can't understand the needs of the "other side", then everyone's goals will suffer, regardless of the outcome.

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Whuffie and Rejection

psychology, society & sociology

May 24, 2003, 10:45 AM

A couple days back, Micah posted about whuffie, a "reputation currency" that appears to at least purport to be a metric for respect. This reminds me of a lecture I went to last fall given by the psychology department. The lecturer talked about the psychology of rejection. Among other things, he pointed out that to feel that someone has rejected you has nothing to do with how much they like you in some absolute sense. Rather, it depends on whether they like you in the way you want them to and to the degree you want them to. So if a girl I'm romantically interested in only considers me a very good friend, I'll feel rejected even though she likes me a lot in an absolute sense. And if a person I can't stand tells me he hates me, I don't feel rejected because I don't care if this person likes me at all.

So as we can see, the feelings of rejection are tied to how much you respect a person in the small and how much they respect you. The psychology lecturer, if I recall correctly, was trying to develop a scheme for measuring rejection which struck me as a particularly difficult thing to do. Likewise, I'm skeptical that this "whuffie" concept will be able to encompass enough of a complex emotion like respect to be useful. Some have complained that the Social Software people are reinventing intellectual wheels; they're recasting old ideas as new memes and confronting the problem of software in society without understanding the work of their predecessors. I'm not as vitriolic in my criticism, but I have started to get that feeling as well.

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Corporate Murder Revisited

politics, society & sociology

May 20, 2003, 09:11 PM

K5 has an article about how the UK has enacted a law on corporate killing. If a corporation is responsible for deaths in the UK, and the deaths can be shown to be the result of upper management failures, then members of upper management can be prosecuted as criminals and could face jail terms. This relates to my earlier post on how corporations are viewed as separate entities from the people who make them up and how this affects our language. It's especially interesting that this law is appearing in the UK, where the names of corporations are plural nouns. Not that I'm implying this is the primary reason they made the law, but I'm guessing both are at least partially originating from a different perception of what a corporation is.

If this law is given real teeth, I hope someone looks into the effects it has on corporate operations. We may need something like this here in the USA.

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Markets for Usability

society & sociology, usability

May 19, 2003, 10:06 PM

Since many of my friends here at CMU are nearing the end of their one-year program and are actively hunting for jobs, I've been thinking a lot recently about the market for usability in the software industry. Here's the basic problem I've been pondering: although there seems to be a great deal of need for usability professionals in the IT industry, there appears to be distressingly little demand for us.

My assumption that we are needed isn't just based on wishful thinking. Anecdotally, people complain all the time about how frustrating they find computers and technology in general; they can't program their VCR, figure out how to format tables in Microsoft Word, etc. It's a truism in the software field that 90% of the users only use 10% of any reasonably large application's functionality. Why? I believe it's because they don't even know the other 90% is there, or can't figure out how to work it if they do. Many companies that develop software spend way more on running their technical support centers than they do on writing the software itself. The list goes on.

And yet many talented usability professionals with a graduate degree from one of the top academic institutions in the world in the computing field are having serious problems finding a job. Why?

I believe the key problem is not that usability professionals don't provide significant value to their market, but that they don't provide value that can easily be assessed. Since their value is invisible to those making the hiring decisions, they aren't seen as necessary.

Here's my logic: for software developers, the value they provide is tangible. They write code that does stuff; they have a tangible output that could not be produced were it not for them. Companies need software developers if they want to develop custom IT systems or even if they want to integrate commercially purchased systems. I know this is true because I am a software developer and have lived it myself. Product designers (the people who make sure a company's products look nice and are desirable) also provide tangible value since their work translates directly into increased sales. A more desirable product will be purchased by more people, which brings more money to the company, which shows the managers bottom-line results for the hard work of the product designers.

But usability professionals aren't in either of these camps. They don't produce any direct work artifacts that are (a) essential to the company and (b) can't be produced without them like the software developers do. User interfaces are essential, but they can be produced without usability professionals, they just tend to be badly done. Yet unlike ugly or undesirable products, the unusable interface often doesn't directly impact the sales of the product. People frequently buy products with badly designed user interfaces only to realize their error later. And although this may give the product a bad reputation which impacts sales, its difficult to tie this back to raw dollar figures. So the usability professional doesn't have the direct impact on the bottom-line that the product designer enjoys.

The one market that seems to be an exception to this rule is the web design industry. Usability sells better to web design firms than just about anywhere else, I've found, and I think the reason is that unlike conventional products, a web site's marketability is badly damaged by poor user interface design. Users who can't figure out how to use a web site leave and don't come back, which directly impacts the bottom line of the company. Correspondingly, the professional usability scene has had an almost unhealthy fixation on web design for quite some time now.

If we want to make our skills as usability professionals marketable, I think there are a few changes that need to occur:

1. Usability professionals have to become better at showing bottom-line business value, and this means in terms of real dollars. There need to be techniques for getting at least a rough estimate of how much money producing a usable interface as opposed to an unusable one is saving the company. I know Deborah Mayhew has done some work on this.
2. Markets must change to favor usable products over unusable ones, perhaps by allowing users to try products out before committing their hard-earned dollars to them. This has become easy to accomplish on the web, and will hopefully become more prevalent if the industry moves more towards a software-as-a-service model where you rent your applications rather than buying them.

In the mean time, if anyone out there is pulling their hair out trying to design a usable interface, shoot an email my way. I know many amazingly talented people who would love to help you out (for the right price).

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Corporations are Plural Nouns

language, society & sociology

May 15, 2003, 11:30 PM

From reading K5, I've noticed an interesting difference between Standard American English (SAE) and Standard British English (SBE) that I believe runs deeper than a mere syntactic curiousity. It's this: in SAE, the names of corporations are considered singular nouns. In SBE, they are considered plural nouns. So whereas an American would say "Microsoft has come out with a new version of Office." a Brit would say "Microsoft have come out with a new version of Office." Upon reflection, I'm of the strong opinion that the Brits have this one right.

To Americans, a corporation is usually viewed as a singular entity with singular goals, desires, and motives. Moreover, it's frequently conceptualized as an entity "separate" from the people who make it up, even when it comes to unethical behavior. Here's a classic example: say I know that a car I own has bad brakes and is unsafe to drive. Yet I sell you this car anyway without telling you about the bad brakes. On the way home from your purchase you get into an accident as a result of brake failure and die. Due to my negligence, I can and should be held criminally accountable for your death, right? Yet in the 1970s this exact scenario played out with Ford Motor Company; due to a design flaw their initial Pinto line of cars were prone to burst into flames during an accident. A Center for Auto Safety article reports:

In 1977, Mark Dowie of Mother Jones Magazine, using documents in the Center files, published an article reporting the dangers of the fuel tank design, and cited internal Ford Motor Company documents that proved that Ford knew of the weakness in the fuel tank before the vehicle was placed on the market but that a cost/benefit study was done which suggested that it would be "cheaper" for Ford to pay liability for burn deaths and injuries rather than modify the fuel tank to prevent the fires in the first place. Dowie showed that Ford owned a patent on a better designed gas tank at that time, but that cost and styling considerations ruled out any changes in the gas tank design of the Pinto.

Ford was sued for millions and eventually issued a recall. But no legal action was brought against the executives who made the decision. "Ford the corporation" was the culprit, said society, not them.

This, of course, is a myth. Corporations don't really exist; they are just convenient abstractions for dealing with groups of people who come together for a common business purpose. Everyone knows this intellectually, but they talk, act, and reason as if the abstraction were a real entity, even in situations as dire as manslaughter due to gross negligence.

Although I'm not claiming that our use of corporation names as singular nouns is wholly responsible for this fallacy, I think it contributes. The way we talk and the way we think are inseparably intertwined, some have even gone so far as to suggest they are the same thing. Singular corporate names hide the fact that corporations are just a whole bunch of flawed human beings with conflicting goals and values; a fact that is important not to forget. So to help see the people behind the "corporation" abstraction, I'm making a conscious effort to incorporate plural corporate names into my common discourse, for I'm convinced America have the worse of the two conventions on this one.

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A Pattern for Distributed Work

patterns, society & sociology

May 12, 2003, 05:36 PM

Earlier I wrote a post on technology and life in the future and mentioned the Community of 7000 pattern from "A Pattern Language". Alexander mentions another pattern that fits even closer with the ideas I expressed in that post; in Scattered Work he describes the many downsides that the strict separation between work-life and home-life does to a society, and recommends organizing towns so that work and home life are intertwined by decentralizing workplaces so they can be moved closer to homes and modifying the daily schedule so that workers can easily move between their homes and workplaces, work from home, take half-days, etc. This was commonplace in traditional societies, and Alexander believes that it is a viable pattern in modern societies as well.

There were barriers to implementing this pattern when "A Pattern Language" was written (early 1970s) but I believe that the advent of distributed information technologies, coupled with improvements in personal transportation systems, will tear down many if not all of these. Read Alexander's pattern and my post and see if you don't agree.

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Visions of a Distributed Future

information, patterns, society & sociology

May 07, 2003, 07:00 PM

While walking home today I was thinking about the direction wireless and networking technologies are moving in and what impact this might have on society in the long term.

Since at least the beginning of the Industrial Age, we humans have lived a daily routine that looks something like the following:

1. Leave home in the morning and go to the workplace.
2. Do work at the workplace all day.
3. Leave the workplace in the early evening and go have fun, either by returning home or going to some other location like a bar, a restaurant, a club, etc.
4. Go home to relax and sleep.

This has been the structure of our daily life, dictated to us by the protestant work ethic which, according to Max Weber, has defined the spirit of the Industrial Age.

But the sands of time are flowing, and the world isn't what it was. Information technology has already enabled easy, global distribution of information and rapid, decentralized communication, and we are beginning to discover how to harness this power. Moreover, information/communication technology will soon become ubiquitous with the advent of universal wireless networking, wearable computing, and other mobile and embedded technologies.

So what does this mean for the structure of our lives? This ubiquity of communication is starting to make the concept of a "workplace" obsolete. Projects such as Aura, Civium, and many others like them are looking into ways of ensuring that your information is always with you, will always be there for you when you need it. So there is no need to go to the office to fetch the information you need. Moreover, wireless communication technologies, of which cell phones are only the beginning, make it easy to communicate with the people you work with, either completely virtually or as a quick means of setting up a real-world meeting. So your "workplace" could be anywhere; your project group could teleconference and agree to meet in a coffee shop or a park, then you could go back home to do the work you took on. We're already starting to see this happen technologically with the increasing sophistication of computer-supported cooperative work systems and socially with the popularity of telecommuting.

All this also means that the traditional structuring of the day into work, play, sleep may no longer be necessary in the future. We have the option of decentralizing, working when we want, coordinating our schedules only as necessary to get together with our colleagues. In fact, the entire concept of a "work time" could be discarded, and our jobs can be seamlessly interwoven with the rest of our lives. Work and play will coexist peacefully, and frequently become one.

In "The Hacker Ethic", Pekka Himanen discusses how this has already begun in certain cultures of information technologists, who interweave their work into their lives, their passions, and their dreams. These technologists ("hackers" in the original sense of the word) prefer this method of leading their lives to the "nine-to-five rat race / daily grind" option.

Many people fear the interweaving of work and play, of public and private life. They're afraid of getting "too connected"; they worry that if work can be done anywhere then they will never have time to do what they want. I believe this is an artifact of the protestant work ethic, which has always clearly separated "work" from "fun" and emphasized duty over pleasure. But that was a fact of life in the Industrial Age, and the Industrial Age is fading.

In "A Pattern Language", Christopher Alexander describes the "Community of 7000" pattern as a means of capping the size of towns and other communes to humane limits. Alexander is big on decentralization and distribution as means of building healthy societies. His patterns describe a society that meets these criteria; it lives at peace with nature and provides a humane environment for its inhabitants. What's interesting is how much easier it could be to facilitate many of the changes required by such a society were we to have a robust information infrastructure that gave us all "floating workplaces" so we were free to spend time in the places we want to and cultivate those places to become even more appealing to us and our peers. The chains that pull us all into overcrowded cities out of the sad necessity of centralization would disappear.

In our hierarchical world with global superpowers, multinational corporations, sprawling cities, an obscene rich/poor divide, and many millions of lives choked to death by inhumane conditions of every sort, it is difficult to imagine that a modern society could really work in the way he describes. But perhaps, just perhaps, distributed information technologies can be the catalyst that will bring this about. It is far from certain. No technology can change the world; people change the world, and if this vision is to become real we must make it happen. But I, for one, believe it will soon be in our reach.

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Ebay Cleared in Libel Case: Good News for Online Communities

internet, politics, society & sociology

May 06, 2003, 10:22 AM

There's an article posted to good old Slashdot about the dismissal of a libel case brought against Ebay. An auction winner posted several negative comments about a seller, the seller alleged the comments were libelious and demanded that Ebay remove them. When Ebay refused, he sued them for libel. The judge threw out the case, claiming that Ebay is not liable for users' comments under the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The seller plans to appeal.

This ruling is good news for online community sites, where potentially anyone in the world can post content to the site that could be considered libelious. If community sites can be held legally liable for this content, then its hard to imagine how they could continue to operate since most don't have the resources to check up on the facts behind every comment. This issue came up in my previous post about a recommender system for service providers; I'm glad it appears to be getting resolved in the right way.

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Online Publishing, from the Trenches

aesthetics, internet, society & sociology, writing & communication

April 28, 2003, 08:15 PM

There's an interesting article over on Kuro5hin about localroger's experience with publishing his book online and the success (or not) of the "tip jar" economic model for freely available online works.

For those of you who don't read K5, localroger (Roger Williams) is a member there who also happens to be an excellent amateur (in the not-getting-paid sense) writer. Awhile back, he posted a short science-fiction story called "Passages in the Void", which I've read and highly recommend. It went over so well that Rusty (K5 founder and proprietor) created a fiction section to house such content. Roger mentioned in the comments that he'd written a novel called "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" but was unable to get it published via conventional means, so several K5 users convinced him to publish it online and Rusty agreed to host it. I haven't read it yet (although I intend to). From people's comments I expect it will also be quite good, although apparently it contains some content that many may find disturbing (rape, violence, etc.).

Roger's analysis of his online publishing experience is thoughtful and objective, and his conclusions, although not unexpected, are worth pondering. Basically he found that he has attained a much wider distribution and rate of feedback through the web publishing medium than he ever would have through conventional publishing. From the tip jar he made around 760$, which, although not insignificant, is much less than a typical publishing advance and not something that he could quit his day job over. And he admits that his is really a best-case situation; he had the backing of Rusty and the benefit of two appearances on Slashdot, which is more than the average budding author is likely to get.

Roger's experience highlights the fairly obvious fact that many people still fail to admit: artists just can't make money by giving their work away and relying on audience generosity. On the other hand, Roger was approached by an agent who is now interested in publishing his work via conventional means. So we see a pattern which crops up frequently where the internet is a good way for budding content creators to get "known", but one that they quickly must switch out of and lock up their content into for-pay conventional schemes if they want to make a living. And maybe this is a fine role for the internet to play. However it doesn't take full advantage of the potential of the internet's highly efficient content distribution systems (which provided Roger with the wide distribution and quick feedback he discusses) and may not even be a viable option in a future where all content is digital and copying is quick and easy.

As a society, I think we're going to have to get over this "content on the 'net must be free" mentality. Someone's going to have to pay, one way or another, and that someone is going to be determining what the economic incentives for artists, writers, and other content producers are. Do we the people want to be determining those incentives, or are we willing to leave it to advertisers who are more interested in selling their products and services than in appreciating art and literature? To me the answer is clear. How about you?

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A Recommender System for End-Consumer Service Providers

information, internet, society & sociology

April 25, 2003, 08:46 PM

A sector of the economy that I've always experienced problems with, and I think many others have too, is the end-consumer service providers industry. This is just a fancy way of referring to auto mechanics, maid services, landlords, and anyone else who sells a service directly to individual private citizens (as opposed to other businesses or government organizations, which are a different story). Note that many companies that nominally produce goods may fall into this category as well since most provide some sort of service to support their products. For example, Compaq makes computers but also has a tech support line.

I don't mean to imply that its impossible to get excellent service from this sector; the problem I'm describing is that its hard to determine who will provide good service and who will not without a lot of trial and error. Part of the problem is that many of these services have slow cycles; unless I frequently experience car problems I won't need the services of a mechanic too often. Landlords generally sign leases for a minimum of one year. So you may have to go through several providers before you find one that's good. Meanwhile the not-so-good providers may stay in business through people who are uninformed or just don't want to have to take a chance with someone else. To compound the problem, if you're like me and you move fairly frequently then even if you do locate a good service provider, you'll have to start all over again when you reach your new home.

To help solve this problem, I propose a web site that allows consumers to rate service providers and discuss their service experiences. Kind of the same intent as Amazon.com's product rating system, except for service providers. This would allow consumers to mobilize and take crappy service providers to task, while promoting the businesses of honest, competent providers.

Aside from all the problems that normally confront recommender systems, one obstacle for this system might be slander and libel laws. Users of the system who are upset at a service provider may post comments to the site that aren't true, and of course it is impossible to check up on the facts for all comments. I'm no lawyer, but I have listened to lectures on business law and torts, and my understanding is that you can get sued for publishing libelious comments that another person made. I'm not sure if this applies differently to community web sites, but I imagine the proprietor of such a system might need to be prepared to defend himself in court.

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CHI Report, Recommender Systems

design, information, internet, society & sociology, usability

April 12, 2003, 04:40 PM

After lunch, I went with Mathilde to a short talk session on Recommender Systems. Three out of the four talks were interesting, so I considered it a pretty successful session.

The first talk was on how the ratings in systems like Amazon.com's customer-supplied product rating system can influence future customers ratings and lead to inaccurately high or low ratings for some products. The speaker studied a system called MovieLens, which looks similiar to an Amazon.com that only does theater movies. He found that around 8% of the time people would raise or lower their ratings based on the rating that was already present. Thus if users would rate a movie as 2 stars, but see a rating of 4 stars on MovieLens, they might adjust their rating, consciously or unconsciously, up to 3 stars. Though these individual effects may be slight, the inaccurracies may spread.

Another interesting finding he reported was that users could tell if a system had wildly inaccurate ratings, and that this would effect the users' opinions of the system. So if users found good movies rated low or bad movies rated high consistently, they reported a much lower opinion of the system as a whole. Unfortunately, he did only study a fairly extreme case of inaccuracy so it is difficult to say where the relevant threshhold value is.

The next speaker, David McDonald from the University of Washington School of Information, discussed a recommender system for group-ware tasks such as finding the relevant expert in a company who may be able to answer a given question. What made his talk particularly interesting was that he was using social networks to build such a system for a medical software company. Here are my main takeaway points:

• David built his social network through ethnographic observations. He discouraged the use of automated tools, such as tools that examine email sending patterns, since he felt these tools do not accurately approximate the real social network but instead are byproducts of the medium (a secretary may send lots of announcement emails to people she is not socially close to).
• He ran into a couple problems where one person was socially close to another even though few people knew it; they were buddies outside of work. Thus their connection didn't come out through his initial observations. Many users felt the tool should reflect their own personal social network rather than the socially perceived network of the entire workplace.
• Social networks are dynamic beasts, so the network had to adapt to changing social environments over time.
• The interface needed to provide a way to "escalate" the results, or expand and contract the number of recommended experts shown. Users reported that they often preferred many choices rather than a single choice, even if the single choice was in fact the best person to answer their question. They also wanted a good deal of control over the direction of the escalation.

The final interesting speaker was Thomas Erickson from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He discussed visualizations of social activity, such as those produced by the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab (which I applied to, by the way, and never heard back from...). He had a few interestiing things to say:

• There are two purposes of social visualizations: one is for an individual's information, the second is to portray the social state of a group back to the whole group. The two should not be confounded, and frequently shouldn't be combined in one interface.
• A completely accurate visualization of a social situation may be bad; many situations depend on face saving, "first impressions", etc. The little white lies that keep our social lives going...
• Ambiguity is often useful in these visualizations depending on the user's information needs. Large differences can be exaggerated, whereas runs of similar-looking data may be compressed. This is probably true of most visualizations

One side comment I thought of while watching these presentations: talks such as these are useful for making a few small, well-argued points that are interesting enough to encourage your audience to look into the area in more depth (or just take away your main points). The speakers who tried to go into great detail and make complicated arguments quickly lost the audience, whereas those who had simple points that powerfully portrayed their message were more effective. More on this when I get to Norman's closing plenary.

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CHI Report, Weblogs

internet, society & sociology

April 09, 2003, 06:50 PM

The final professional activity of the day was Micah, Andy, and Don's Informal SIG on Weblogs. It was a great experience; a lot of people came with widely varying backgrounds on weblogs, yet I felt that everyone took something important away from the session.

Lots of great ideas flew around. One woman was doing research on separating weblogs into genres; she mentioned they found that weblogs were much less anonymous, on average, than many other online mediums. I brought up a concern I've had for awhile that weblogs as a medium encourage the accidental sharing of personal details to people you may not ordinarily share them with. This is essentially a problem of visibility; unlike many other mediums, on the web you have very little sense of who your audience is and hence may be encouraged to share information with people that you might feel uneasy about if you were speaking face-to-face. Mathilde brought up the point that for many people (I'll call them "emotional exhibitionists" for lack of a better term) sharing personal information with strangers is part of the appeal. I agree (I've seen this with certain other webloggers I've known) but still feel that for most of these people, if they had the opportunity to stand in a room with all the people who would read their post online and shout out this same information, they might think twice before doing it.

We talked a lot about the benefit and disadvantage of having only a single "voice" or perspective in weblogs, as opposed to discussion boards that mix several points of view. One woman raised an issue I've also started to confront that there is no way to pull together ideas in a weblog; no way to find other posts that are "related" to this one or "part of the same thread". I can manually link posts together and I can categorize them, but this process is tedious and fixes the relations between posts statically. I'm not sure yet how best to solve this problem.

Finally, we talked about how there are few ways to locate weblogs by interest, search all weblogs on a given topic or written by a certain group of people, etc. There seems to be lots of potential for robust data mining in this area; weblogs have all the benefits and problems of any decentralized, grassroots method of organizing.

Micah, Andy, and Don put together a weblog where you can find more information on the session (of course :).

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