Month: February 2007

Let’s see if we can post from IMified

So I’m giv­ing IMi­fied (www.imified.com) a spin and have just added the Word­Press ser­vice to see if it works. For those that haven’t heard about IMi­fied yet; it allows you to do a num­ber of things through instant mes­sag­ing (MSN, Google Talk, what­ev­er). For instance add stuff to your Back­pack account, or like I’m doing now, write a blog post. Let’s pub­lish this to see what hap­pens, hit­ting ‘return’…

Update: Looks like it’s work­ing! I had to man­u­al­ly insert the link to the web­site and also go into Word­Press to add some cat­e­gories, so it’s only real­ly use­ful when you want to fire off a quick note. As a bonus, here’s the Adi­um win­dow with a tran­script of the IMi­fied ses­sion.

links for 2007-02-17

Leapfroglog now with MonsterID

MonsterID for Kars Alfrink

Just a quick note to let my read­ers know the com­ments are now adorned with cute lit­tle Mon­sterIDs. I used this cool plug-in to gen­er­ate unique mon­ster pic­tures based on the email address a com­menter leaves behind. Curi­ous what yours looks like? Leave a com­ment and see. The image shown here is my mon­ster (based on kars at leapfrog dot nl).

I used to have gra­vatars, but they did­n’t work as well because hard­ly any com­menters actu­al­ly have a gra­vatar reg­is­tered. These Mon­sterIDs do the hard work for the user. I like hav­ing images in the com­ments to be able to quick­ly see who com­ment­ed and which com­ments are from the same user. It also helps tell apart peo­ple that leave behind the same name.

And, of course, these mon­sters look great!

links for 2007-02-16

Gift outcompetes exchange in design too

I just fin­ished Eric Steven Ray­mond’s Home­steading the Noos­phere. It’s a ter­rif­ic read for any­one look­ing for a thor­ough look at the inner work­ings of the open source soft­ware devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty. Like oth­ers, when­ev­er read­ing this kind of stuff soon­er or lat­er apophe­nia hits and I try to tie bits to my own dis­ci­pline, which isn’t pro­gram­ming but design.

In one of the last chap­ters of the essay (titled Gift Out­com­petes Exchange). Ray­mond offers some tan­ta­lis­ing insights into the rela­tion­ships between doing com­plex cre­ative work, moti­va­tion, and reward. While read­ing it I recog­nised a lot of ideas that I’ve long felt are impor­tant but could nev­er real­ly artic­u­late. Now I final­ly have some great quotes, and (over 10 year old) research to back it up!

Psy­chol­o­gist There­sa Ama­bile of Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty, cau­tious­ly sum­ma­riz­ing the results of a 1984 study of moti­va­tion and reward, observed “It may be that com­mis­sioned work will, in gen­er­al, be less cre­ative than work that is done out of pure inter­est.”. Ama­bile goes on to observe that “The more com­plex the activ­i­ty, the more it’s hurt by extrin­sic reward.” Inter­est­ing­ly, the stud­ies sug­gest that flat salaries don’t demo­ti­vate, but piece­work rates and bonus­es do.

Thus, it may be eco­nom­i­cal­ly smart to give per­for­mance bonus­es to peo­ple who flip burg­ers or dug ditch­es, but it’s prob­a­bly smarter to decou­ple salary from per­for­mance in a pro­gram­ming shop and let peo­ple choose their own projects (both trends that the open-source world takes to their log­i­cal con­clu­sions). Indeed, these results sug­gest that the only time it is a good idea to reward per­for­mance in pro­gram­ming is when the pro­gram­mer is so moti­vat­ed that he or she would have worked with­out the reward!

Oth­er researchers in the field are will­ing to point a fin­ger straight at the issues of auton­o­my and cre­ative con­trol that so pre­oc­cu­py hack­ers. “To the extent one’s expe­ri­ence of being self-deter­mined is lim­it­ed,” said Richard Ryan, asso­ciate psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester, “one’s cre­ativ­i­ty will be reduced as well.”

So a team of design­ers work­ing in the mode Ray­mond describes would choose their own projects and not be reward­ed for their per­for­mance on projects (which is usu­al­ly mea­sured in effi­cien­cy and client sat­is­fac­tion). In stead, to real­ly keep them moti­vat­ed, they’d be giv­en a large amount of auton­o­my (and would­n’t be instruct­ed on which prob­lems to solve and how to go about it). Of course, this only works with skilled work­ers, but I don’t think that’s the rea­son these philoso­phies haven’t been applied to design work on the scale they have been in pro­gram­ming. I think a lot of resis­tance for actu­al­ly allow­ing design­ers work like this in a com­mer­cial set­ting are relat­ed to a fear of giv­ing up con­trol. Lat­er on Ray­mond fin­ish­es the chap­ter with:

Indeed, it seems the pre­scrip­tion for high­est soft­ware pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is almost a Zen para­dox; if you want the most effi­cient pro­duc­tion, you must give up try­ing to make pro­gram­mers pro­duce. Han­dle their sub­sis­tence, give them their heads, and for­get about dead­lines. To a con­ven­tion­al man­ag­er this sounds crazi­ly indul­gent and doomed—but it is exact­ly the recipe with which the open-source cul­ture is now clob­ber­ing its competition.

When will the first exam­ples appear of design done in this way? When will the first projects pop up that out­com­pete the cathe­dral style designs process (or are they already among us)? Are there any design­ers out there actu­al­ly work­ing in this way? I’d love to hear from you.

Update: I changed the link to Flickr into one point­ing to a post by Tom Coates on how Flickr was built.

links for 2007-02-14

links for 2007-02-13

links for 2007-02-10

Using concept models to design for the web of data

Flickr concept model by mApplogic

I’m lucky enough to be doing some con­cept­ing and inter­ac­tion design work for a social web site. This pre­sent­ed me with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inte­grate some stuff I found while read­ing on social soft­ware, and the web as platform/network. Here’s how I’ve been inte­grat­ing some of it.

I was inspired by the con­cept mod­el of the Flickr ecosys­tem I saw in Luke Wrob­lewski’s pre­sen­ta­tion on social inter­ac­tion design (which was done by Bryce Glass) to try and cre­ate one myself. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly there’s a whole chap­ter in Dan Brown’s book (which Peter was smart enough to pur­chase and was lying around the office) on cre­at­ing con­cept models.

One of the things I want­ed to do is make the site play nice with the web of data. To that end, I decid­ed to apply Tom Coates’ 3 basic page types to the design of the site. So what I did was first cre­ate a con­cept mod­el (of course fol­low­ing some research of the site’s busi­ness and user goals) and then look at the nouns and verbs in the mod­el. For each noun I cre­at­ed a sin­gle object view page and a list view page. For each verb I cre­at­ed a manip­u­la­tion inter­face page. Of course, all list type pages would get RSS feeds in the even­tu­al site.

For instance if you have a mod­el that states ‘Review­er rates Book’ then you’d end up with a page for each review­er and book, a page to list review­ers, a page to list books and a manip­u­la­tion inter­face for rat­ing a book.

Doing this result­ed in a nice list of pages that I could then analyse for com­plete­ness and/or redun­dan­cy. Of course this only works if your con­cept mod­el accu­rate­ly reflects what the site should achieve. If your mod­el sucks, your list of pages will too.

Anoth­er caveat lies in the fact that a con­cept mod­el tends to be very effec­tive for map­ping the func­tion­al aspects of a site, but not very suit­able for cre­at­ing an overview of its con­tent (which is often more push ori­ent­ed). If the kind of site you’re cre­at­ing involves more infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture than inter­ac­tion design you might want to do some addi­tion­al con­tent inven­to­ry work and fold that into the page list.

One last chal­lenge would be orga­niz­ing these pages in a coher­ent whole (beyond cou­pling lists to sin­gle items to inter­faces). I can imag­ine I’d attempt some card sort­ing to achieve that.

Final­ly, for cre­at­ing the con­cept mod­el I used the spe­cial­ized (and free) tool Cmap­Tools which is pret­ty nice in that it goes beyond visu­al­ly mod­el­ling the con­cepts but actu­al­ly track­ing the state­ments you implic­it­ly make when link­ing con­cepts to each other.

Any­one else have expe­ri­ence with try­ing to inte­grate some of the stuff Coates was talk­ing about in their design of a site?

links for 2007-02-08