design it simple - sense

In his article about “The Wisdom of Community” Derek Powazek discusses many topics related to a very important concept of the web as of today. He covers simplicity, interface, aggregation, participation, just to name a few, and is definetly worth reading.

Especially this quote is interesting to me:

The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups—they’re not.

As he explains, WOC works best if the participation is very few and there is no discussion going on.

Conversational inputs are too complex for Wisdom of Crowds systems. Online discussion systems do not lead to wisdom on their own.

In other words, a crowd of widsoms doesn’t work. They don’t work because everyone part of the discussion is usually interessted in getting his own idea out, may not have complete knowledge of the problem, or it’s just hard to have a complete view of a discussion where opinions are often shared. Or, participants discuss opinions with each other and miss the importance to get back to the problem.

Instead of a crowd of wisdoms I’d prefer to have just a few experts that will understand my problem and provide me with a set of solutions and a recommendation. In addition I’d like to have someone to discuss with me and not with some other folks.

So, if you can’t use the wisdom of the crowds as descibed in Derek Powazeks article, better stick to experts instead of a crowd of wisdoms.

After a usability test of a product website I thought about why the test users didn’t understand the product as we did it. Sure, we know it better since we work with it already for 2 years. However, even technological educated users didn’t really understand it.

Some thoughts later - and bike rides, which I usually need to think about stuff - I remembered a book I read about 5 years ago: “Crossing the Chasm” from Geoffrey A. Moore

A short overview of “Crossing the Chasm”.
In this book Moore explains how high-tech companies can market new innovations to the mainstream market. This is important because the early market and the mainstream don’t share a lot when discontinuous innovations are to be sold. The important aspect is the adapted technology adoption life cycle and the chasm that lies between the early adopters and the early majority.

Crossing the chasm with scenarios and personas
The key to get into the mainstream market is to use a small segment and start with that and then use adjacent segments to sell more and more. In order to select a segment he suggests to create target customers and scenarios for these customers of how they will use the product within their segment.

We need something that feels a lot more like real people. However, since we do not have real live customers as yet, we are just going to have to make them up.

This might be familiar to anyone working in user experience design.

How does relate to personas in user interface design?
When UX designers create a website, product, or any other service they usually use personas to better understand the needs and be able to judge about different design options. The model now suggests that we have to use different personas in the technology life cycle since the 5 psychographic groups change over time. Each group needs a different set of product presentation and reasons to buy. The most important group is, however, the early majority since they need a whole product that can provide a complete user experience.

Today Jakob Nielsen posted an article about the first 2 words in a link on webpages. His researched showed that many people can guess the content of good links within 11 characters. While that doesn’t mean that we should now limit all links to that length, I think there is a good hint in the results. Make most of what is important understandable quickly.

From reading many articles about e-mail usability lately I think these results can also give good tipps for e-mail subject lines. If you want people to understand your e-mail in an overview list quickly, create subject lines that can communicate the meaning in a quick way. You can still add additional info in the subject line, but have the first words explain the important part.

Recently I have been invited to beta test ClickTale. Although I can’t tell much about the service itself yet there was one very interesting thing.

What is ClickTale
ClickTale is a website trackting tool that records the interaction of a user with the page, even mouse gestures. So it gives you the possibility to see how a user acts. You don’t know what he thinks since the mouse movement may not be the same as the eye movement. However, since many people move the cursor pretty soon to clickable areas (to not waste time) it still gives you a good impression. The visitors for the site are randomly selected to ensure that not just a special group (the early morning office surfers) are selected for all your available recordings.

Subscription models
As many other web services ClickTale has several subscription model to choose from. They allow for different amount of recordings per day. This is ok for sites where you want to test continuously, but this is not the usual case. For those who do tests every once in a while when a new feature is released ClickTale offers one-time boosts that give you a certain amount of recordings.

In my opinion this is a very reasonable choice to give the users what they need. I haven’t seen any other web service using this model. Sure, Backpack or Basecamp let you change your subscription each month, but this might not be the right thing sometimes. This is not to say that every service should have one-time boost but for this service this definitely makes sense.

Over the last months and even years I have registered with a lot of sites. Most of them I just try to check out because they are pretty new and are apps that seem to be worth using. However, I assume 90% of sites I register with I don’t use more than 2 - 3 times. Then I would really like to delete my account. Most of the time it’s hard to find how to delete your account, but sometimes it’s just impossible.

Today I wanted to delete my wordpress.com account. Why? I just don’t use it. I searched for a way and found a faq-page which told me something I just couldn’t understand.

Why would the software or database crash if an account is deleted? If you write your app code properly that won’t ever happen.

This question is a very important question, especially if someone thinks about OpenID. Can I unregister from a webpage. What happens to my data? Any suggestions?

Chicago based 37signals just launched Highrise, an online shared contact manager. It looks quite similar to their existing and successful applications, Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and completes the “suite” of easy to use personal and business web applications.

Unlike Google or many others, 37signals does not try to replace currently existing desktop applications, such as Word, with a web version (Word will be around for some more years, so competing against is really hard and maybe even sensless). Instead, they create products that solve problems better than many others by making it just simple, easy and a pleasure to use.

Since Highrise is out just a few hours ago, I won’t give any detailed review yet. However, one feature I already like. Adding categories to tasks:

This makes the task list a lot easier to view. Also, look at the grouping in GTD style.

Long awaited and now finally there it is - reboot 9.0. The last two events have been amazing, the city and especially the venue. Don’t wait too long to register.

What is reboot about? Reboot is an event where people from all over the world, but especially Europe, gather and share ideas, opinions and discussions about the web, the world and lots of other things.

This year’s theme is “human”.

A friend told me yesterday about a new blog tool on the web - SixAparts Vox.com. First I was not suprised, but after a while I was completely exited.

So what is different with vox.com. It has one feature I always missed and that was for many people a reason to not have a blog - privacy control. It lets you decide who can read your post. Whether it’s the whole world, your friends or your family. Now you can decide who can read your posts and view your photos.

Why is that so important? Many people use their weblogs to communicate with friends and so on. However, weblogs can be read by the whole world. This is not how it should be - only your friends should be able to read it. So, many people switched back to good old email and sent an email to all their friends. Sometimes with very long text and images. Now, you can manage to do that with a blog tool and still get the privacy you had with email.

Another aspect is, that a new way to communicate will emerge. Lets look at an email conversation with 4 people. You write the first one to 3 of your friends, and all 3 reply to your first one. So, how do you integrate their comments in your email to all 4 again. Actually you can’t do that very well and even more, if those 4 reply to all 4 participants, it doesn’t get better. I am sure you had that experience.

I already used Basecamp to communicate with more than one person in an email like way and it was a lot easier than with email. Everybody sees each others comment and will react on this comment. Also, you can view the conversation more easily.

Now with vox.com you can start conversations, not just blog posts, with others using your blog tool and don’t have to use email anymore. Sure, there are still uses for email but this opens up a whole new world.

One of the best books I read this year is free for everybody now. It’s 37signals “Getting Real”. After reading their weblog for more than 3 years now, using almost all of their products (except Ta-Da lists) I have become a big fan of theirs.

The insights and opinions in their book are amazing, groundbreaking and helpful. I have been struggling with same problems when programming and after using some of their techniques it makes a lot more fun.

But be aware, after reading this book you might get big problems with the old-habbit people that don’t want to change.

Matt from 37signals wrote today about his additional reminders he has set up in Backpack. Basically it’s the same note every week “There are things in life that you shouldn’t take for granted”. I was impressed. Yet again I have to admit. I know 37signals since I have been studying at CU Boulder in 2001. Since that time I’ve been a admirer of their work and closly watched their blog. At reboot 7 and 8 I also met David and Jason.

The main reason why I like those guys so much is because the do care not only about their visionary, great work, but also because they changed the way I think about being a part time developer and that there are some more things in life than just your work. That’s what makes them so exceptional and I am happy to have met them.

Matt says thank you on behalf of 37signals to all readers but I think everyone should say thank you for so many inspiring thoughts and for being the way they are. THANKS A LOT 37signals.