Let them meme cake: Conspicuous connection in the social network.

June 16, 2011

I’ll be honest. I’m only writing this post because I thought of the title. Now I have to write the content. I know I’m not the only person who does that.

Having said that, the title was borne of an observation that we’re moving/have moved into a new phase of conspicuousness, driven by the desire to belong. This time it’s a curious elitism defined by your connection mass in the social network, but conspicuousness draws on a strange lineage from a mythical Marie Antoinette to many on the net via as much as I can get and mourning those I’ve never met.

Conspicuous consumption

As a device to delineate a social class, as with the conspicuous consumption of the cake-eating French aristocracy, its intention is clear: to define yourself irrespective of others. While not so much about cake, there were clear, if unwritten, rules about the externalisation of wealth and power to demonstrate your status. This was mostly manifest in the construction of elaborate and ornate dwellings and the furnishing of one’s self with much dandyness. However, it also demanded that you were a magnanimously social creature – the burden of lavish party-throwing and fatuous, fabulous benevolence was great – but all these attributes identified you as belonging to that noble, narrow aristoclass, unattainable through mere social climbing and fiercely protected by the bourgeois with their own laws on how to use the dressing-up box.

Conversely, through the industrial revolution of the late 19th century, when the term was first used, and the post-war era of the 1950s, particularly in America, conspicuousness was all about perception of social power and ascending the social strata. Conspicuous consumption here was more about demonstrating accumulation of wealth as a means to describe your social standing, in the process, creating its own social class – the nouveau riche. In contrast to an aristocratic, 6-fingered, birth or marriage right, this was an attainable variation of social climbing, and conspicuousness was part of its tactical implementation. While often attributed to the already wealthy as some kind of vulgar, modern rendition of cake-baiting, it probably more accurately describes the actions of those who can ill-afford the conspicuous investment, but still have that desire to be seen to belong to the class that can.

Conspicuous compassion

In the tail-end of the 20th century, a more emotive form of conspicuousness began to surface, that seemed to suggest a different kind of need: to define yourself to be just like others. Conspicuous compassion was posited by Patrick West, for Civitas, as a kind selfish, ostentatious recreational grief, which was triggered in individuals who had somehow lost their way due to the diminishing social influence of the church. It is suggested that this ‘mourning sickness’ pervades our modern society, because we have need a to show how much we care, without actually wanting to waste our Sunday mornings at church when there’s a sale on at Next. Think flowers on royal hearses and ten-minute silences.

Conspicuous compassion, as described by West, is a mawkish ‘me too’, whereby the collective forms in an extravagant display of ‘grief-lite’. Strangers coalescing to cry over strangers. Make of that what you will, but how they come together is what makes his opinion interesting. It’s the idea that the conspicuousness of the individuals’ emotional response is the qualification for belonging to a particular social group that says ‘I care’.

Conspicuous connection

In contrast, conspicuous connection in the social network says ‘I care’ in a very different way. It satisfies a quite different need: to define yourself to be more popular than others. Conspicuous connection doesn’t necessarily speak of influence, which is a quite different metoogorithm , but it definitely speaks of volume. It says ‘I care that you ‘like’ me’, and it is an evolved ranking system that simultaneously holds no value and means everything.

You could argue, in hindsight, that the volume-driven connection model that was first massively popularised by MySpace was a kind of post-modern ironic, generation Y in-joke, as the friend numbers passed from ridiculous to sublime and back again. There was no real connection in MySpace. I was more like stumbling into the biggest teenage house party in the world. There wasn’t really any social collateral in the numbers, it was just a bit of a laugh. Friends were added, rather than tactically coveted.

As Facebook really told hold, rubbing MySpace’s face in the corporate sand and as Twitter appeared as the curious IM/blog hybrid it was ok to admit to, then conversion tactics really emerged. Driven by the inflation and recommendation model of the herd and the revenue from ads for baldness remedies and weight loss (is that just me?), marketing strategies developed to maximise, monetise and commoditise the network. One of the primary strategies was volume. And that is why conspicuous connection is so prevalent.

Conspicuous connection is the manifestation of the desire to be seen to be a social prime mover. Influence is hard to measure. Numbers describe a kind of brute-force reach. Consequently, the larger the numbers, in theory, the further the reach. Which is why elementary volume tactics, developed by gurus, used by the rest of us, account for a sizeable proportion of content itself. Following, liking and connecting, is what creates your social mass. In some cases, the mass is so large it creates its own social gravity, sucking in the rest of us. It’s this planetary tipping point that completely alters perception of influence, and so the very act of asking other to get you there is now an acceptable strategy.

It just doesn’t appeal to me. But then, you’re probably not reading this.

listening post: everything everything – come alive diana

Writing to be read: A workshop on being a better writer

June 9, 2011

Martin Belam and Cennydd Bowles have written popular and successful books, articles and blogs on user experience. On Tuesday evening, I attended a writing workshop, where they shared tips, tricks and best practise for ‘better writing’.

I write too much. When I write about an event, I fill the page with clever, but meaningless sentences. Seeing the details of the workshop, I thought it would be a great way to learn from others and share opinions on what makes a better writer. It ended up being all that and more. It was an insight into methods and practices that Martin and Cennydd use in their own writing, highlighting that personal approaches to writing differ, but common creative techniques and some rigorous editing can nearly always improve output.

First off, Martin shared some of the tactical armoury he has developed through his own writing. He focused on tips and tricks for writing to be read and was able to provide some excellent examples of the dramatic impact simple devices can have. Some of his advice was common sense, while some was quite crafty. Some was plainly evil, but, nonetheless, common practice, when writing with particular targets in mind.

Cennydd, on the other hand, wanted to help us understand that after writing, the real work starts. Editing your content is just as important as writing it. Through a series of classic examples and anecdotes from his own experience, he gave practical advice on analysing and improving your own writing, through careful, considered editing. In common with Martin, Cennydd also was keen to make the most important point of all: if you can’t speel, please don’t write, especially if your grammar do suck.

It was thoroughly enjoyable evening, with practical, actionable advice. Clearly, there is no one ‘right way’ to become a better writer, but if you can learn from others’ experiences, you can, at least, take steps in a better direction.

[This post is an edit of the previous post ‘This title is clever but pointless and inefficient’. It is an attempt to put some of the learning from the writing workshop into practice and so it’s not a great post, more of an exercise. If you prefer one or the other, leave a comment. You might not like either of them, which is more likely]

listening post: the soft moon – circles

This title is clever but pointless and inefficient

June 7, 2011

This is the post I would normally write about being at an event in the city with a collection of like-minded individuals who were compelled to attend to on the promise of solace at their smiting of writing with encouraging words from the scribers of note that can say what they wrote with articulate summary, a sprinkling of chummery and, not least some encouragement, wrapped up in wit, delivered in earnest, with meaning, to whit, I give you a paragraph to be used as example, to print and to squint at in lieu of a sample of how you could simply just dribble away like a gibbering goon for the rest of the day.

Except, I now know better.

This evening I attended a workshop run by Martin Belam and Cennydd Bowles, which, ostensibly, was about being a better writer. That sounds like a rather lofty and grandiose concept, but, you know, I like those. Realistically, the workshop was more about personal approaches to writing, learned writing skills, need-to-know and evil-to-use devices for being read, and a heavy dose of editing. Oh, and spelling. And grammar. Which, I plainly flout irreverently and irreconcilably and even irresponsibly. In fact, there were so many golden nuggets of ‘better writing’ advice that I didn’t even have time to flippantly flap about it on the twitter.

Not really knowing what to expect from the evening, I did approach it with an open mind, and an open bottle of Corona. I was hoping that I might get some opinions other than my own on what might constitute good writing and take those opinions away to inform my future output. I did get that, but I also got a rather delightful insight into the methods and practices of two writers that I rather admire. If were to make some dubious football analogy at this point, which I am going to, I’d suggest that Martin’s approach was that of a wily, crafty, tactical midfield genius, who has a great eye for an opportunity, knows all the tricks and can pick out the killer pass most of the time. He’s always the first man to be picked, notwithstanding his occasional tendency to argue the toss with the gaffer over formations. On the other hand, Cennydd would be more of a silky, clinical, methodical kind of player. While apparently effortless in his command of the ball and organising the team (for he does wear the armband), he will be the one on the training ground under the floodlights at 2a.m., repeatedly kicking a ball at a wall until he can predictably hit the same brick every time.

All of which is just a way to say that when describing how to be a better writer, you necessarily end up describing what you’ve done to try and be a better writer yourself, and this will be different depending on who you are. Martin and Cennydd described quite different experiences and approaches, but they shared a common aim. Clearly, there is no right way to become a better writer, there are many right ways. However, what this evening demonstrated is that if you want to focus on a few of the many, some of those right ways are more righterer than others.

Tomorrow, as an exercise, I shall mostly editing the life out of this post before publishing it again. It will be like harvesting antimatter with a sock.

listening post: the fall – how I wrote elastic man

overloading my function

June 2, 2011

since waking up in a real job where I do proper work and stuff, I’ve been spending less and less time expounding on such hot topics as situational awareness or pressing buttons in a manic fit and when I have managed to construct a few over-long run-on sentences, I’ve mostly been doing it for my current employer who has kindly let me do so in between the other bits of time when I’m actually doing the work. which is to say, I’ve not been writing here for a while. which is fine, because I’ve been busy, and I’ve been expressing my ideas and thoughts somewhere else.

now I’ve settled into some kind of cadence with regard to writing, and since the blog I write for my employer is a shared blog, and there’s any number of brilliant minds there who can contribute, I’m currently compiling drafts of thoughts of ideas that will never get published unless I funnel them into an appropriate bucket, which is where this am is, right here. so that what I shall be doing.

listening post: the longcut – transition

Expose yourself – design workshops in the real world

April 8, 2011

When I uploaded my slides from the recent IA Summit in Denver to slideshare, I had particular problems with uploading the speaker notes, which, still now, are not available. I’m a great believer in using simple slides as a visual enhancement to a spoken narrative, and so when those slides are posted on their own, there can be some strange interpretations.

In particular, I have one slide in that presentation which simply says ‘Expose Yourself’. On its own, it could be read as something of a mid-life crisis admission in a magistrates court, but in my defence (pun intended), it’s actually part of a series of slides that try to explain the benefits of opening the black box of design, to encourage collaboration with clients and stakeholders to maximise brain power and increase efficiency.

I recently worked on a project that had a quite specific definition of the design deliverables that were likely to be required, before we’d even understood the problems and thought about solutions. This sounds bad, but really, it isn’t. When we’re defining a statement of work that clients can agree to and sign off, especially for newer clients, we’re not yet in the position to sell them a period of time that’s largely undefined, that we’ll somehow magically fill with analysis and design. Pragmatically, we have to describe something tangible for delivery, based on our previous experience of similar projects, that is meaningful and understandable. Critically though, that ‘tangible something’ has scale – and that is where it gets interesting.

On the project in question, the design deliverable was pretty well-specified from the outset. But following the results of focus groups, it was clear that we needed to spend some serious thinking time trying to understand what the deliverable really needed to be – which was potentially quite different from what we’d anticipated. The scale of our ‘tangible something’ was measured in days, and in order to set our new course, we had to agree on the best use of those days. In this case, we proposed that to understand that, we should get all the project stakeholders to bring their thoughts and ideas to the table and that we spend a day working together on defining our goals and objectives and thinking about how that looks when we talk about structures, clusters, boxes and arrows. Yes. A design workshop.

Design workshops can be super-effective for clarifying objectives, surfacing ideas, analysing research outcomes, using up flip charts and making swift progress through design challenges. But they are not for everyone. They’re not for all clients. They’re especially not for all designers. While more than one head is almost always better than just one head to solve a problem, there can be a reluctance on the part of professional problem-solvers to allow others to collaborate with them on that most cerebral of tasks. That’s why I say you have to expose yourself. Let clients, stakeholders and anybody else who might have an opinion be part of your process and maximise the benefit of all those brains being in the room. When you’re steering a new course for your project ship, it should be all hands on deck. If you want to hit new project targets, you should have all your brain-wood behind one arrow. If you want to continue with ridiculous project metaphors, you should all, well, actually, forget that one. The point is, design workshops really work, and if you’re not doing them, especially when you need to corral project stakeholders and think about design direction, then I really think you’re missing a trick. In this case, the workshop enabled us to clearly define the design requirements, scope out the next phase of work and turned on at least a hundred lightbulbs over people’s heads. In the end, just talking through design propositions in the workshop radically altered the client’s expectations for how their business could position themselves in the marketplace. We’re going to do another one soon, where I’ll expose myself some more, but better to be outed in the conference room of collaboration than stuck on my own in the black box of design.

Lean UX: The UX you wish you were doing

March 2, 2011

Jeff Gothelf, Director of UX at TheLadders.com, has a great proposition for what he is calling ‘Lean UX’, which reminds us what’s great about user experience design and how, potentially, we’ve over-specified it.

His central proposition is that it’s about time we got back to looking at experiences, rather than deliverables. Deliverables help us build commodities and describe solutions and actually, they can be pretty handy to work backwards from when we’re selling into a client.

The trouble is, deliverables can also define our outcomes and we often simply work towards those outcomes, filling in the boxes as we go. I can do that. I can do that on my own, in a dark room. And then I can ask users whether it’s any good. But really, we’re missing the experience design opportunity – to get those users at the heart of the design process.

All Jeff is really advocating is that we stop for a moment and remember what user experience design is about – solving problems. You don’t solve a problem by simply picking the right deliverable. You solve a problem by understanding the problem, engaging with the user and having a conversation.

Jeff’s method includes quick conceptualisation, early collaboration and a distinctly unselfish approach to design success, but what keeps it simple is that he doesn’t focus on artefacts, documents, or whether you want it in Visio or Axure. Because that’s not the point. It’s about:

Control: giving it up isn’t giving it away, you’re still the ‘keeper of the vision’
Momentum: keeping everyone engaged and motivated
Quality: not compromising on finding the solution
Feasibility: keeping an eye on implementation (but not the documentation!)
Filling the blanks: the more you talk, the more you see

To quote one of the quotes he quoted, “Speed first. Aesthetics second” – Jason Fried of 37signals.com.

I’m paraphrasing here, so to get the full story, check out Jeff’s presentation.
Lean UX: Getting out of the deliverables business

View more presentations from Jeff Gothelf

If you want to hear him talk about Lean UX in person, he’s at a number of speaking events this year, including the IA Summit in Denver, but I should probably mention that there’s also a scintillating discussion of the value of thought in experience design happening at exactly the same time, so if his session is full, perhaps you could consider that one instead.

Building theme-based information architectures

January 31, 2011

There is often a temptation to dive into information architecture design based solely on acquired knowledge and a well-articulated business objective. It’s quite possible to produce meaningful taxonomies and content structures in this way, especially for discrete, closely scoped projects. However, some of the most effective structures evolve when iterative analysis of research findings and discussion outputs start to surface emerging themes.

I recently worked on the development of a new sales and investments channel for one of our financial services clients. A sales and investments channel in of itself is not a particularly unusual proposition and there is a depth of experience within the team that might predict some of the outcomes. We might even consider sketching out the concepts in our heads just to start the conversation, since the business objective is reasonably clear. In doing that, we might even get it done quicker than anybody planned, or budgeted for. I might even get home in time for tea.

How we really maximise the potential of the design phase is if we take the insights from a well-executed discovery phase, invest meaningful time to digest and analyse the messages we’re getting from customers, and we start to build up a picture of an ideal customer journey. I’m not talking here about spending a day in a dark room with a stationary cupboard’s worth of post-it notes and walking away with a full site map. All we should really be aiming for at the end of an initial design session is identifying those emerging themes and understanding how accurately they reflect the voice of the customer. Themes are really just a logical clustering of questions, statements and pain-points related to a customer’s interaction. Since they’re deliberately vague at the early stages of design, they’re not distinct categorisations with well specified hard attributes, but more of an expression of the customer needs and desires. If that doesn’t sound pompous enough, I’d also suggest that they often describe the soft attributes of the customer’s emotional engagement with the site, for example, ‘I’m worried about the future’, or ‘I need help on this’. Identifying these themes early provides a clear customer-centric reference when iterating into task-based journeys and navigation models.

Themes are also a great way to solicit empathetic feedback. It’s more meaningful to describe a potential customer journey to a client, for example, if they can clearly empathise with the customer. Using needs-based descriptions with more open language, through themes, it can be much easier to evaluate a customer journey than by simply referencing a label on a navigation entry point. Consider the difference between ‘Protecting my future’ as a theme and ‘Savings’ as a label. While one might not map directly to the other, there is still a much clearer expression of the customer need through a theme-based approach, which sets the context for discussion and iteration.

There are number of approaches to how we take discovery outputs and begin to build out information architectures that place the customer at the heart of the discussion. Using a theme-based approach is one of those that I rather like and it has proved successful in articulating the voice of the customer, particularly when talking with clients. While this has been a brief outline of the approach and some of the benefits, feel free to contact us to find out more.

inheritance in user experience design

August 2, 2010

by which, I mean, inheriting someone else’s user experience design, or proposal, or thesis, or presentation, or, even, 5 year plan. there is nothing quite so painful but satisfying as developing your user experience methodology and describing, in the most insightful of prose, the application of the process unto the design challenge that is the growth target that begets the business that spawns the project that produces the artefact that describes the outcome that provides the design solution. from whence that design solution was so eloquently detailed is the brainism that you channelled and distilled and expertly crafted into methods and practices and timelines and checkpoints that spake of some experience alchemy magick’d up from your mind cauldron.

in other words, its nice to define a process that supports a practice that enables you to deliver against your goals and make the online world that little bit better each time. actually, that last bit might be a rather grandiose and pompous blart, but without there being kind of user experience light at the end of the funnel towards which we steer the online improvement charabanc, why would we bother?

therefore, having just said whatever I just said there, it’s a significantly greater challenge to mind-mangle a process design when it actually begins as someone else’s. I’m currently co-working on a proposal for developing an experience design practice that helps enable a business transition. except that proposal is someone else’s and I’m collaborating on the further development and enhancement to get it to where it ends up on a projector in a boardroom and people start raising their eyebrows and checking their iphones for status updates from farmville, but its a good challenge. its also a challenge that’s likely to make the outcome more successful. in this case, the two heads are much better than the one head. the one head being mine.

listening post: orbital – the box (part 2)

just try everything

July 15, 2010

there is an option during an interaction with a particular screen, page, interface, device, port, socket, panel, window etc., that can be so effective that its a wonder we don’t do it from the outset and avoid all that well-thought-out user experience nonsense. its the option I most often select when I’m beginning to feel the vein on my forehead and there’s small beads of ‘stay calm’ sweat forming on my temples. more often than not, its when I’m trying to find the enhancements panel in window media player, or wondering why on earth something that used to be quite so simple in windows XP needs to be quite so appallingly difficult in vista, but quite often, its at the point when I have piece of hardware A that need to somehow interface with hardware B in order to successfully deliver experience C.

its normally at that point I just try everything. this is actually more successful with hardware issues since notwithstanding the screwdriver/electrical outlet scenario, most should-be-compatible-somehow hardware interfaces allow you do mash them together in any number of ways before doing it the right way. things don’t really get broken much and there’s not very often a knock-on effect to other resources. consider my vein-throbber today. I was only trying to wire in my previously perfectly serviceable 5:1 speaker system into the back of my new desktop system – both dell. of course, since the last computer, they’ve changed the sound card interface and so it all looks a bit different, although its all a bit the same, its just that the 6 jacks plugs and 1 I/O cable for the front left, front right, rear left, rear right, center, subwoofer (I have to say them all out loud like that because the old soundcard configuration utility spoke them out like that like some teutonic sat-nav for audio hardware) now don’t have the same number of sockets and boards and interfaces and things like that to plug into. but they have some of them. needless to say, crawling around the back of a PC with a torch when you’re supposed to be analysing financial consultancy data outputs doesn’t really have a long attention span, so the temples are glistening pretty quickly. I tried a few insertions and extracted myself from under the desk, hitting my head in the process, to see what was coming out, but it was variously a fuzzed warbled cross-phased back-to-front tinny bass calamity of an Aimee Mann track. 3 or 4 swaps and re-insertions and head bangs and torch positionings later, there really wasn’t any progress, and the markings on the interface panel that were supposed to somehow help me out were just making it worse, since they just appeared to be crop circles to me. its at that point I decided it was probably worth the risk to my 800 quid desktop if I just tried everything and anything and just wrapped this sorry exercise up.

needless to say, as soon as I just randomly flapped about with whatever cables and plugs I had in my white-knuckled fist at the time and crammed them into the nearest probable orifice, then hey presto, goodbye caroline. I should have just done that in the first place and saved myself the bother. which is what I subsequently did with windows media player. so craftily obfuscated are the enhancements that rather than navigate a series of contextual menus or follow a meaningfully and meticulously signposted user journey to the graphic equaliser of beelzebub, I just randomly clicked all the buttons on my mouse at stupid speed across all the panels in the media player container. and it worked. I saw a fleeting reference to a fly-out menu that said ‘enhancements…’ and followed that menu thing all the way to frequency nirvana.

so now I’ve got my sound balanced exactly how I want it, and my speakers are working just fine thank you. once I’ve rebuilt the music library I deleted in the process, it’ll be great.

listening post: nothing – I deleted it all

even more gainful

July 6, 2010

since I last extoled the virtues of an employer, I’ve mercilessly cast them aside in favour of an even more virtuous employer. that’s not to say the last one wasn’t virtuous, for it was, and I liked it, but my new and current employer held all the cards in terms of my experience, development, and personal circumstances. if I were to have written myself a perfect job description (which I often did) while I was on the 6:10 train to user experience land (London) every day (which I was), it would have looked something like this:

user experience consultant
10 years+ experience
permanent
salary like what I had before
involved in strategy for growth
oh, and in Norwich.

that was, effectively, the holy grail of job descriptions for me. so, it was with some surprise that I was contacted by Michael at localrecruiteragency to let me know that there was a role available that was indeed exactly that job description and was I interested. needless to say, I asked where their hands were so I could bite them off immediately. once we started talking, it was obvious (to me) that this is where I should be, and thankfully, they thought I may be worth a punt, so here I am. which is nice.

listening post: the soft boys – queen of eyes

Things what I writ