Digital Influence Mapping Project

Learning from Product Design

I have always been a fan of product design. While I have spent a lot of my professional career in design - graphic design, user experience design, televsion design - I have never worked in traditonal product design. I admire Ideo and have had a chance to work with them via my client Snap-on. I used to follow frog design back in the day. Now I am becoming a fan of Adaptive Path.

Subject to Change is the "Adaptive Path" book written by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Todd Wilkens. They cover a lot of their experiences and methods for product and service design. It's a good read. Part of the time I felt they were corroborating what I already believed. Part of the time they demonstrate a clear POV on develop products and services for clients that is insightful and fresh.

Social Media Engagement is like "Product" Design

One reason I focus on product design (I put "product" in quotes because it is the trade term but as you will see in my post, it is a misleading term) is that the discipline shares some best practices with what I do now with social media programs. There are three things in Subject to Change that stand out and are worth mentioning.

Empathy

The Adaptive Path guys (APgs) spend a lot of time talking about best ways - some new, some old - for understanding people. They stress the importance of empathy and they introduce research methods that can lead to spreading empathy for people (who use services and products) throughout the organization. One way they define empathy is "an understanding of a person or group's subjective experience by sharing that experience vicariously." While I know that the APgs are trying to be very professional - and I agree with them - I cannot help but want to shout - "It's not enough for companies to practice empathy; they should love their customers and want to know them personally." Anyhow, that's just the social media nut job in me. But the world would have a lot better products and services if companies made empathy a priority.

Behaviors, Motivations and Meanings

I am a  champion of usable design. Sounds terrible when I think about it. "Usable design" sounds like such a low bar. When I use it, I mean focusing on being of-use and offering a streamlined user experience. It implies focusing on tasks - what does the user want to accomplish. Just the term "user" says it all. APgs champion a new way which is not so new. It stresses understanding behaviors, motivations and meanings beyond simple tasks. They talk about people, not users. Their field research methods support this.  While APgs are suggesting this is an evolution for interactive and product designers, this is one area where I think the best brand marketers have a leg up. Our agency and many of our clients have long had ethnogarphers and held a deep value behind understanding behaviors. We long to understand the emotional drivers of our fellows by knowing what they do and where they find meaning.

Stop Designing "Products"

There is a huge interest amongst marketers to think about traditional products like services. In APgs case, they use examples like the iPod/ITunes service and the early Kodak film system (camera + development services). Any company ought to be looking at how to expand their view of their product to a potential service. That will be more difficult for simple consumer packaged goods (i.e. toilet paper). But with digital marketing and social media many, if not any, brands can think about being "of-service" in their marketing of their products. Listen to what your customers are saying and observe what they are doing. Find some way that you can enhance their lives that stems from the barnd. If you make Tupperware, help potluck supper enthusiasts. If you make computers for students offer people a companion program from Stephen Covey. If you offer a weight loss product, build your customers a way to track and reward their progress.And build a community of customers who add value to the overall customer experience. Spend more energy on that than on old-school advertising.   In short - design services not products; and market products likee services.

You should pick up Subject to Change. And you could do worse than to start thinking like a "product" designer.

Social Media Visualizations

I have become a quick fan of MITs Technology Review. Not sure why I am just paying attention now, but I picked it up a few months back in an airport and rediscovered a great pub (nicely designed to thanks to Art Director Lee Caulfield).

Erica Naone has a great article in the April edition about different schemes for social media visualizations. As a Creative Director, information design has been a long-time love. Now, with digital data, we are seeing interesting approaches to creating pictures of the abstract dynamic of social connectedness. Tools like Visible Technologies help us understand the network path of ideas across bloggers by showing graphics - bubbles, lines, connections.

New Visualizations
Two visual schemes that stand out to me include the work of Mathew Hurst at Microsoft's Live Labs ( I am a regular reader of his Datamining blog)  and the Comment Flow visualization from Dietmar Offenhuber and Judith Donath at MIT Media Labs. The Live Labs work demonstrates the clustering we all sense exists amongst blogs. The image below shows even more centralization than I would have guessed. Is it a 'blogosphere' or a 'blogoclump'?

Comment Flow displays that wonderful mosaic of pics and favicons connected in hubs of comments around core posts or conversations.

On the MIT site, Dietmar describes it as such:

"We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account."

They have a movie (64Mb) and an application file for download (26Mb) here - could be interesting.

It reminds me of the display of the Vizster project that Danah Boyd had a hand in.

   So where is all thi sgoing? These research-based and somewhat academic models must become the tools for us marketers tomorrow. If we want to track, demonstrate and prove the flow of WOM and the influence of person X over person Y in a particular conversation, having visual displays of the network and the spread of an idea will be very compelling.

As marketers, we live in a world of 'dashboards' that try to make complex data around campaign performance easy to get quickly and to provide meaning if not insight that can be acted upon. 

Can Crowdsourcing Lead to Commoditization?

In general, I am a big fan of crowdsourcing - asking a large group to come up with a solution to a problem. Some of the best examples tap into the collective intelligence to come up with new ideas that go beyond what a smaller, less culturally diverse group might do (i.e. in-house R&D).

But there is a difference in sourcing ideas and sourcing products. Here's an interesting example of crowdsourcing ideas:

CambrianHouse - people submit ideas for products, solutions and businesses and like Threadless, users can vote on them 1-5 and "I'd buy that". I just voted on Teun's idea which is really a simple one that I share which calls for something to integrate our various social network profiles. Others include creating a kid's shoe exchange (that is a no-brainer and possibly already exists at a local level like in our local thrift store - still a good idea). CambrianHouse has big ambitions. More than an idea exchange, you will also be able to source talent and funding. They even have an inspirational message platform:

"How would you unleash the ideas, talents, and entrepreneurial drive of 6 billion people? Bring them together under one roof."

The devil is in the details. The interface has a great design. It maintains overall simplicity while using some hand-made-looking fonts which humanizes the overall experience.

But can it lead to destructive commoditization?

Yes. I remember in the, gulp, eighties doing work for MTV. They would routinely run contests for independent animators to create broadcast graphics for on-air use. My company created motion graphics professionally. It was common knowledge that MTV not only did this based upon some of the best impulses of crowdsourcing but also to get animation at pennies of the cost. In that case, the winners who recieved a small cash prize had the glory of being on TV. And the creative was judged by MTV-level creative directors so it was generally interesting stuff (even if it did undermine my business).

Now, the design crowdsourcing phenomena comes to Web2.0.

SitePoint - an online crowdsourcing exchange. Designers around the globe can submit work to win a prize. The designer retains intellectual property rights unless they win in which case they transfer it over to the company seeking the design service. Can you feel the collective membership of the AIGA just groaning? (I was/am a member - need to re-activate my membership....).

What's the problem, you ask? Look at the prizes: $100 - $1000. For what? Nothing less than a full identity package, logo development, oh and throw in 2 Web pages with that. DESIGN SHOULD NOT BE COMMODITIZED! If ever there was a case of YGWYPF (You Get What You Pay For) this is it. This is nothing more than a commodity marketplace for outsourcing at the cheapest price. This will not spur innovation or even good design. It will spur the growth of Photoshop amateurs creating crap. The one thing I will give Sitepoint is their own caveat staqted pretty clearly:

"What is this service not so good for?
The Design Contests are not suitable for people who expect to walk away with the perfect design every time. Sure, you might get lucky, but often what happens is you come away with a good design that needs a few finishing touches.
Once you've picked the design you like best and awarded the prize money, you can either work with the winning designer to finish the design off to your total satisfaction, or take it to someone else to perfect."

Still their claim is that you can get design for hundreds of dollars versus thousands of dollars. That presumes you will get the same quality of thinking and execution. Not likely. It also implies that design is overpriced in the "general" market. If anything I believe it is underpriced due to the design community's constant struggle drawing the line between design and business ROI (Yes, there are many that do - Target, Dyson, W Hotels, etc...).

Hint: Just look at SitePoint's site design, especially compared to CambrianHouse. I have no squabbles with it's simplicity, but they clearly have no appreciation for any significant level of design beyond the most base level of function-driven design.

The problem lies in the 3 places:

• There is a big difference between idea crowdsourcing and service marketplace. Both are good and interesting. Service marketplaces will lead to commoditization unless there are allowances for quality providers to rise within the marketplace (i.e. like the ability to rate the quality of the eBay seller). Services that are idea-driven like design run the risk of being commoditized in an environment that pushes for the lowest cost.

• The definition of crowdsourcing favors the marketplace version. Look at Wikipedia/crowdsourcing:
  • "a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. The work is compensated with little or no pay in most cases. However, in a few examples the labor is well-compensated. In almost every case crowdsourcing relies on amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D.^[1]."

• We need more of a common understanding of what intellectual property is worth in a crowdsourcing scenario. If I submit ideas that are incorporated in a product, how should I be compensated? There are examples all over the map on this one. Dell's Ideastorm solicits a wide range of ideas which really represent the wishes of their customers or prospective customers. No one is compensated for their suggestions. Innocentive, on the other hand has bounties in the $10K - $1m range for science-based solutions.   

Questions: 

I realize I am covering a lot of ground here. From crowdsourcing ideas to service marketplaces to co-creation. As these great experiments get played out on the Internet, what are the lessons-learned about what works best? Is there one definition of crowdsourcing and if so, is it more like the one at the head of this post or more like Wikipedia's?

David Belman Wants Emotion

David Belman, one of the founders of Three Spot addressed the WWWW Art Director's Club conference and took us on a 10-year tour from 1997 -2007 of Web design.

And he's not happy about where we have ended up.

• Time spent online has dropped.
• The "character" of sites has flattened if not evaporated.
• We have given up on developing a branded user experience...

David is on to something. I just don't think that we have left the branded user experience completely behind. RGA was also at the podium later and shared their ubiquitous Nike work which is a best-practice branded user experience. There is a tremendous amount of sameness out there.

David ran Seth Godin's one second test: can we recognize brands in :01? It works when we look at an iPod but not so much when we look at Web sites. He cleverly compared NYTimes.com. the Washington Post.com and Miami Herald without their mastheads - hard to distinguish them apart.

David feels we have lost something in our discipline over the years - the impact and emotion. Navigation has become generic. Thousands of pages of content becomes an overwhelming vat of stuff.

43% of users start at the search field within a site. Is this a barometer of some type of failure in design?

Blogs miss out on creating a visual, emotional experience. His point is really about visual design but I think he's wrong. I would argue that the templatization of blogs is a small price to pay for the deomocratization of the publishing platform. And if David wants emotion, just read Birdie Jaworksi's post on her Star Trek convention with her son. I cried.

Still, David's recommendations are real and smart:

1. Make a promise and then keep it
2. Use what you've got (Use your brand equity like Tony the Tiger or VW cars)
3. Have a heart: Connect
4. User directed doesn't equal direction less: people wnat a narrative line
5. Delivering data doesn't equal delivering brand
6. Just because they did it, doesn't mean you should
7. Create an opportunity for users to have an emotional experience with someone they know

I am a big fan of Three Spot.

Curbly - DIY

Curbly.com is a bit of a community for DIYers. There are great discoveries and ideas from community members about furniture sources, make-it-cheap ideas, and more. In their words:

"Curbly is a Web community for people who love where they live. By connecting with others, sharing your experiences, participating in feel-good contests, and getting advice from experts, Curbly is the best community to help you feel good about your place."

Currently there seem to be 419 registered members. Certainly more readers on top of this. The service hasn't been around too long  - judging by when founders Ben and Bruno "joined" - I would say a month or so. I love the overall design and the openness of it. It's a great simple way to bring the young DIY crowd together.

The image above is a wall art recommendation that is actually pretty cool for the apartment set.

Cities Do Digital Well

For one reason or another, I have been focusing on different travel resources. No, not the big transaction services, rather the smaller, city-specific digital ideas that help me connect with relevant experiences in a particular city. I have shared about my appreciation for the consistent job VisitPA has done - I know, PA is a state.

Here are some other interesting ways to bring tourism and enthusiasm for cities to life:

Montreal - MadeinMTL

I have never been but now want to go. This site designed by BlueSponge and featured in this months CommArts is surprisingly deep. It is Flash intensive which actually annoys me but here the design is so intriguing and involving that I don't mind. The Explorer function allows you to search for resources and get a concurrent Yahoo Maps display. I searched for "rock music" the first listing was a climbing club followed by music venues - totally understandable. The "find similar" function has some abstract and not-so-believable choices like by Mood - Playful, Hungry or Laid Back. There's no real way to know how the machine interprets these.

There are films - only a half dozen so far - and I can't really judge them as they are in French. It is hard to beat the films at Turn Here.

Lastly, you can collect content as favorites for multiple visits. I love the visual design. They have gone too far relying on Flash. It's also impervious to social media. I can't tag it in del.ico.us. If anything, this is this sites fatal flaw. I want more crisp, fast function, less mood.

DC - Capitol of Punk

The other great example was sent to me by Alison a week or so ago. It was her vain attempt to convince me that DC wasn't an extremely conservative town. Stll it's a great example of a small, city enthusiast site. It's a micro-tour of DC Hardcore heritage. I love the video embedded in the main page - they interview guys from the Black Cat and other venues.

The site sets up ten texting tours of the hotspots in DC's punk history (don't forget Fugazi, Dave Grohl and Joan Jett did actually come from here). It is also too graphics heavy. I want those videos fast and clean. But I love the Google maps interface. And the texting tour thing is really ingenious and simple at the same time. The folks at Counts Media created this and specialize in mobile storytelling.

These special interest city-specific sites are really terrific. maybe this could become a template of sorts for more based upon different interests. If I were researching DC to travel to, this is the type of resource that I would want vs. the same-old same-old that crowd search results for various cities. 

Visual News

Remember Smart Money's Market Map? The visual display of stock information where blocks of color are sized and shaded to indicate performance is still around (although you only get it for free for 2 weeks).

A new visual display of Google News from NewsMap (thanks 37 Signals) builds on this idea and the Tagcloud concept of sizing type. Stories are sized based upon the number of related articles and then shaded by recency. It is an impressive display. But the aesthetics of knockout text and the incredibly small type limit this approach as any kind of substitute interface for headline browsing.

Visual Interfaces

Beyond the tools mentioned in the previous posts, there are other experiments going on out there in alternative ways to experience information. One great place that covers is Nooface.net which regularly reports on innovations. They are "In search of the POst-PC interface".

Thanks to them, I have downloaded Browster, a cool little utility that offers a visual preview of a page in search results.

Visual Search Maps

There are several tools out there that return search results in a visual way. For those of us who love infographics (e.g. Understanding USA or the Visual Thesaurus), these tools can come in very handy.

Kartoo.com displays a relational search in terms of a map. If I search for Ogilvy, I get a clickable result that looks like this:

The thumbnail to the left is of our homepage. as you select other domains within the map, the thumbnail swaps out. The keywords in the main display are very much like the visual thesaurus as they re-orient the display around that term.

If you search for something a bit more arcane like, say 'carbon sequestration' - something that involves storing carbon dioxide in ways where it cannot contribute to global warming (oops, climate change). You get a result that looks like this:

Mooter.com does something similar providing a more simplistic spider drawing that can be drilled down on to more traditional search results. You can also paw through different "clusters" which is probably the equivalent of moving across the relational key words in Kartoo. The second cluster on seraching Ogilvy looks like this:

You can click forward and back through the clusters. Selecting a link returns a search results page.

Another visual search display is Grokker.com. Once you insert a term, you can toggle between a list of results and a map. Considering that no one outdoes Google on lists, the map is the only reason to go here. Searching again on 'Ogilvy' gives us this result:

We quickly start to understand the digital real estate for both the golfer - Geoff - and our truly related companies.

The controls on the side are useful. You can limit your serach between Yahoo and Wikipedia, the two collections Grokker currently searches. The slider bar allows you to filter by recency.

I believe these displays are a step forward, a step towards "escaping Flatland" as Edward Tufte describes it. They display information in visual relation allowing for a quick take on things. I cannot evaluate their results or the collections they draw from. perhaps that's what is missing for them to be thoroughly transparent - a quick description (visual, perhaps) of how they work. That woudl go a long way to satisfying the skeptic in me. These tools have come a long way. What's next?

Digg vs. Netscape

While Valleywag (via Random Culture) reports on the next generation of Digg. Meanwhile, a beta of Netscape launched that is essentially...Digg. It's interesting to see this form of social media - users rating posts and driving their visibility literally up. 

Digg will have 25 new topic areas beyond the core tech category. There are 30 in the new new netscape. Everything from Art & Design to Women. Still, are these categories, many of them broad, newspaper-section-like categories narrow enough to grab th eattention of true enthusiasts (that's whose Diggs, er, Netscapes, I want to tap into)? I will track the Art & Design category for a while and see how it feels. The original tech strand in Digg is a no-brainer as there are plenty of broad tech enthusiasts.

These guys and others will go head to head. But Digg retains the semantic advantage - it can be used as a verb while Netscape is still trying to figure out what it can be used for.