Tools cover all aspects of media and technology that make new kinds of interactions possible. 

 

Craig Newmark (Newmark, 2009) has created one of the most successful online communities and he describes the type of technology needed to best serve others:

 

1.    people want to use

2.    people will use

3.    is simple

4.    involves honest dialogue

5.    changes in response to that dialog

 

According to Mr. Newmark, this describes the service principles for Craigslist. Items 1, 4 and 5 are discussed in the next section, but in the following section, I attempt to describe some of what it takes to achieve 2 and 3. 

 

User experience

If infrastructure can't be used, it may as well not exist. Hence the critical importance of user experience design. Following are heuristics, from some of the leading usability practitioners, namely 37Signals (37Signals, 2006) and Jakob Nielsen (useit.com). 37Signals does a wonderful job of describing how they think about user experience and their products showcase this thinking well. Jakob Nielsen is a prolific publisher covering everything from search to headline usability. Some of the key issues include:

 

Clarity and accessibility of critical tasks – the iPhone interface does an excellent job of showing only what is absolutely necessary in the context of what you are doing.

 

Responding to unusual situations – is often overlooked, but anticipating ways in which people and applications, can fail, is essential. Take a look at the way Google works with users to resolve spelling mistakes by making suggestions.

 

First time versus veteran user Experience – someone using something for the first time has different needs to veteran users. Game designers understand this very well, often introducing training levels to help new players become accustomed to their new surroundings and controls.

 

Copywriting – funny signage examples abound with language that is ambiguous, confusing or just inappropriate. Poor choice of language makes things less usable.

 

Search - From managing typos to determining appropriate relevance, making things findable, remains one of the most challenging aspects of design. 

 

As multivariate online testing often reveals, small changes in copy or layout can have a profound impact on how many people take actions. When the goal is to work with large numbers of people, often without pay, making actions easier, is an essential part of making the most people’s limited time and resources.

 

Media as scaffolding for communication

In many cases, such as games, it not useful to separate content from the experience, but for most media types, media is still treated separately from the broader experience. For example, video, images, blog posts, etc are all important tools to enable communication without requiring too much work from the community, like having to describe something, versus sharing a link to a video that explains the thing. This can be critical if your goal is to promote an idea.

 

Media is used a scaffolding for communication in much the same way as words stand in for concepts, so media plays an important role in giving people something to reference to express what they are trying to convey, without having to produce what they need to convey the message, communication is simplified.

 

During the Obama campaign, for example, the campaign manager, David Plouffe (Marketingprofs, 2009) noted that one of the things that surprised the campaign, was how often people would come to the campaign asking for help in addressing a particular campaign issue as they were talking with prospective voters about then candidate Obama’s merits. The campaign ultimately found that when it could craft video statements, it helped these people to communicate more effectively, not by telling them what to say, but by giving them something to use as scaffolding for communication.

 

Applications to automate or augment tasks

Applications are at the heart of enabling new capabilities. And this is likely where we will continue to see change. Blogs provide simple publishing tools as well as opportunities to interact via comments. It is not that HTML was not accessible before blogs, but blogging allowed non-technical people to focus on publishing without worrying about HTML or any other online publishing requirements. Then there are various message boards, bug-tracking and collaboration tools, all intended to facilitate collaboration.

 

However, while many tools enable relatively unstructured communication, Idea platforms such as Google Moderator (Google) or Salesforce Ideas (Salesforce) give more structure to the conversation. And then one can look to very task specific applications such as NikeID, Lego Factory or Dell Configurator (used to customize PC orders) that enable specialized types of interaction by enabling people to describe and design items in ways previously only available to expert manufacturers. Where a person might have worked through a process to arrive at a description of what people wanted, applications now enable people to describe what they want in a way that enables manufacturers to make exactly what these people asked for. 

Applications spread the benefits of automation and augmentation cheaply to a broader group who might not have been able to afford to develop the application for themselves – this is one of the core elements of information technology productivity.

 

Build on top of this

Toolkits are specialized applications for designers and developers to incorporate functionality into their own designs. In Von Hippel’s (Von Hippel, 2005) definition he is clear that end users should be able to use their own language to describe what they are trying to do, but we are including these alongside Application Programming Interfaces (API) like those used by a host of software of organizations such as Twitter, Google Maps, etc - a comprehensive and growing list of APIs is compiled by Programmable Web ( (Programmable Web)).

 

Going beyond APIs, services such as WordPress and software such as Mozilla enable participation at a variety of levels such as design templates to change the look and feel of the user experience or core code development that involves many operations that might seldom directly impact the end user. In the physical world, a platform might take the form of a new building structure where property developers can create their own units, finished as they desire. Or as car-lovers will attest, cars can be platforms as different components are adjusted and replaced to achieve better handling dynamics, fuel economy and speed Smart manufacturers are finding ways to simplify ways in which their products and services can be modified, as this becomes a new reason for people to choose their offering – the offer the opportunity for customization or modification and personalization.

 

In our interview in 2008, Roelof Botha (Youtube investor ultimately responsible for their sale to Google) explained how he learned much about an ecosystem where you can make it easier for users to act on your behalf – he and the Youtube founders were formerly at Paypal. Among other things Paypal constantly found approaches to make it easy for their users to use Paypal in different environments, such as eBay auction pages (that ultimately was a factor in eBay’s decision to purchase Paypal) without needing to be program. The end result – Youtube constantly found opportunities to make it easy for their audience to share and integrate their content wherever it might make sense with as little effort as possible.

 

In general though, both development platforms and certain types of applications enable a particular type of user or group to incorporate existing capabilities so that they can (sometimes literally) stand on the shoulders of those who came before. 

 

Data Shadows

Creating a hyperlink started out as a useful way to move between information on the web. People happily created content and linked to other content that was relevant to what they were doing. What Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized was that Google would be very different search engine because it found value in these links - they viewed these links as votes. It's not just voting, votes are weighted different based on a range of factors related to things that convey trust (such as how old your site domain is or how likely you are to accept “bribes” to link to others).

 

Google took an action that people were going to do anyway and turned it into the heart of one of the most successful organizations in history. Google uses clicks and sales data in a similar way to vote on the best ads. While some people might ask you what you thought about copywriting or creative, Google simply analyzes responses to creative by looking at clicks and sales.

Some more examples of organizations using data shadows:

 

Amazon Recommendations use browsing and purchase data to make better purchase recommendations. Amazon makes use of collaborative filtering to understand similarities between their shoppers and uses these similarities to identify suggested purchases that are likely to be of interested to their shoppers in much the same way as a friend who knows your tastes might suggest something.

 

Flickr Interestingness - finds interesting photos based on comments, views and interactions around photos posted to their site. They don’t ask people to tell them what is most interesting but look at how people behave, to uncover this.

 

Sense Networks - is harvesting location data as a vote for a variety of applications from restaurant recommendations to epidemic detection. They aren't asking people to actively report on whether they are sick or like a restaurant; they are inferring this based on their actions.