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 2007-02-10

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