2009
March Sliders
The Flickr photo sharing service has always been a love/hate relationship for me. Ever since it's inception, the relative slickness of its flash interface with the open standards to allow some images to be used by other services made it the leader in the space. Even though many others have tried, and Yahoo even bought the thing, it has kept it's place as the place to store and share photos. Perhaps because of the creeping up of Facebook, their interfaces have languished for many years. The organization tool I found impossible to use, the slideshows were clumsy, and the site difficult to navigate and use. I even bought a 3rd party upload tool to publish my photos from Iphoto, since the built in version was just too much trouble. Well, I wanted to show my appreciation for the new slideshow tool, finally, exactly what you would expect from a slideshow - and no extra clicks, no fuss, just a beatutiful experience. Lets hope it extends to the other services that they can simplify and bring more value to the service. Since I have all my photos backed up there, I wouldn't mind it being more of a front-end after all!
January Convergance avoidance
If you read back in this blog you can see I have more than a few thoughts about TV and HTDV in particular. I can say with some assurance in around 2000 when the first HTDV's were readily available that I predicted this would be just the perfect delivery device for the web. Why? Well, the increased resolution of the TV's made it possible to display text in a readable way.
Fast forward years later and my prediction never came remotely true (well, I could say the post 9/11 ticker tape was in a sense text on tv) but no set-top boxes (webTV flopped), or other 'real' web experiences got near the device, they were always watered-down for the remote control, or used browsers that were customized for 480x320. Fast forward to 2006-now, and the web has become television, so it even gets more confusing. I suppose my major misconception was that people tend not to like to read on devices with even a hint of fuzziness. Even computer reading should not be counted on, and printing of online resources is still preferred by those, especially those who really care to understand the text.
So it's exciting to see real web techonology actually make another stab at TV's - certainly I am a big fan of watching www.hulu.com through the PS3 onto the flatscreen, but it is a bit cumbersome, and somewhat geeky. The new TV's seem to be trying to integrate a neat old technology -the widget, and lets see if we can finally get our 'interactive' TV that has been promised all these years. I'm sure advertisers cannot wait to have you 'click' on their commercial. See Read-write web's analysis for more good screenshots.
January Taxonomy or popularity?
IA (Information architecture) is about selling ideas effectively, designing with accuracy, and working with complex interactivity to guide different types of customers through website experiences. The more your client knows about IA's processes and deliverables, the likelier the project is to succeed.
As an IA I tend to think of sites as a collection of data. Some of that data may be text, pictures, or sound, movies, but most of the 'meat' consists of Headers, sections and clickable elements. In many ways it was the clickable elements that created the joy of using the web. It was an action that had an implicit reaction, clicking this will refine my choice to something related. By continuous clicking I should satisfy my goals and create something within each click. OF course, this implies a structure that goes from general to specific so that no matter how the person selects items, they create more granular views of information until the goal was reached. This is the classic hierarcical information problem, how to generalize, how to organize all the information.
This problem was tackled first by Dewey in the 1800's with the decimal system that took all of knowledge and put it into 10 categories -
- 000 – Computer science, information, and general works
- 100 – Philosophy and psychology
- 200 – Religion
- 300 – Social sciences
- 400 – Languages
- 500 – Science and Mathematics
- 600 – Technology and applied science
- 700 – Arts and recreation
- 800 – Literature
- 900 – History and geography and biography
These could be further divided into categories -100 of those with 1000's of further divisions each. It has been improved over the years, but it's goal was simplicity and ease of use, and that is still it's main selling point. The library of congress has a more complex scheme, but both are in the position to take new works and assign them into categories. For the browser, it means that a bookcase in the library can contain a serendipitous mix of books that may seem related or not, and occasionally bizarre juxtapositions. Any major organization scheme that's simple enough tends to fall into this category of being 'good enough' - and it certainly helps if topics fall within reasonably known categories, such as 'auto repair'. Conversely, this scheme puts all of literature (for example) in one bucket, and within that area only genre can help a potential reader. Fiction is organized by author, so things that are difficult to categorize are harder to find. I personally would put works like "A secret history" as a Thriller, but instead it is filed under "Tartt" which leaves some other method to find things in this scheme, such as reviews.
Another powerful categorization is reviewing (plug- see my best of year records at: www.unbelievablesounds.com), the book-of-the-month club, or other recommendation schemes, such as digg. This method of categorization relies more on buzz, word of mouth or churn, and suits itself somewhat perfectly to computing systems that can plow thorough mounds of tiny data much easier than they could sort a book into a category for a specific idea.
The challenge from the IA perspective is which is right for the purpose, or both? I lean somewhat to the popularity or churning model, which while it does not categorize the offerings into neat chunks, it may push forward a popular story or item which 'gives you the idea' of the value of the site or company to you. I offer this as a subject I'm thinking about much in the new year, and hope to come to a more distinct conclusion on which model will bear more fruit.