Category: Stuff that doesn’t fit

Stuff that doesn’t fit in any category, or leftover posts from the big category revolution of 2009.

Being Lifter 20: I'm the "Star" Networker! [en]

[fr] Après LIFT l'an dernier, un questionnaire a été soumis au participants dans le but de déterminer quel impact la conférence avait eu sur leur réseau. J'y ai répondu, avec 27 autres personnes (un assez petit échantillon, à mon avis). Il se trouve que je suis la "super-réseauteuse" de l'étude. Quelques remarques.

Eleven months ago, I participated and encouraged you to participate in a survey which aimed to map social networking between participants of the LIFT’07 conference. As I was browsing around after submitting my workshop proposal, I saw that the report based on that survey had been published. On the LIFT site, you can see screenshots of the graphs (yes, this is what I call a “social graph”!) before and after the conference.

Go and look.

LIFT'07 Network Mapping Report

Notice the node somewhat to the left, that seems to be connected to a whole bunch of people? Yeah, that’s me. I’m “lifter 20”. How do I know? Well, not hard to guess — I have a rather atypical profile compared to the other people who took the survey.

So, as the “star” networker in this story, I do have a few thoughts/comments on some of the conclusions drawn from the survey. Don’t get me wrong — I think it’s very interesting, and that we need this kind of research (and more of it!) but as Glenn says himself in the 1Mb PDF report, it’s important to bear in mind the limitations of this study. (All the quotes in this blog post are taken form the PDF, unless I say otherwise.)

The limitations of this study needs to be understood before considering the findings: This
study maps networks from the point of view of the 28 participants. Consequently, it is
only a partial map of the networks established at LIFT07.

In this study, I’m the “star” networker: the person with the most connections before and after the conference.

Before the conference, participant Lifter20 had the largest network (59 attendees)
which was increased by 25 attendees after the conference.

Bearing that in mind, I would personally have removed myself from the “average” calculations (I don’t think that was done), because I’m too a-typical compared to the other people in the survey. Typically, I would find it interesting to be given figures with extremes removed here:

There was a large range in the size of the individual networks before LIFT07 (from 0 to
59) and a smaller range in the number of people added to networks after the conference
(from 0 to 28). However, on average, participants had seven people in their network
before LIFT07 and added nine more people after the conference – leading to the
conclusion that people at least doubled their network by attending LIFT07.

As mentioned earlier, 28 people took the survey. I know I’m not the most networked person at LIFT. In my “network of red nodes” (people not in the survey) there are people like Robert Scoble, Stowe Boyd, or Laurent Haug — who clearly did not take the survey, or I wouldn’t be the “star networker” here. So, they are a little red node somewhere in the graph. Which makes me take the following remark with a big grain of salt:

Before the conference, several “red” attendees (i.e. those attendees nominated as
part of the network of the 28 participants) were significant relay nodes in the network
receiving considerable incoming links – notably the red node to the right of Lifter 12
and the red node to the left of Lifter 16. In both cases, the number of links to these
nodes increased after the conference.

What’s missing here is that these red nodes might very well be super networkers like Stowe or Robert. The fact they receive significant incoming links would then take a different meaning: only a very small part of their role in the global LIFT networking ecosystem is visible. (Yes, the study here only talks about a small part of this ecosystem, but it’s worth repeating.)

I think that most heavy networkers are not very likely to fill in such a survey. The more people you know, the more time it takes. I’m easily a bit obsessive, and I think this kind of study is really interesting, so I took the trouble to do it — but I’m sure many people with a smaller network than mine didn’t even consider doing it because it’s “too much work”. I suspect participation in such a survey is skewed towards people with smaller networks (“sure, I just know 5-10 people, I’ll quickly fill it in”).

Here’s a comment about the ratio of new contacts made during LIFT’07:

For example, the “star” networker, Lifter20 has a ratio of 1:0.4. In
other words, for every third person in her existing network, she met one new person.
Whereas, Lifter18 had the highest ratio of 1:7. In other words, for every person in her
existing network, she met seven new people.

I think it’s important to note that, as I said in my previous post about this experiment, knowing many people from the LIFT community beforehand, the increase in my network (proportionally) was bound to be less impressive, than, say, when I came to LIFT’06 two years ago (I basically knew 3 people before going: Anne Dominique, Laurent, Marc-Olivier — and maybe Roberto… and walked out with a ton of new people). I’m sure Dunbar’s number kicks in somewhere too, and I would expect that the more people you know initially, the lower your ratio of new contacts should be.

On page 8 of the survey there is a list of participants and the number of before/after contacts they entered in the survey. So, if you took the survey and have a rough idea of how many people you knew before LIFT, and how many you met there, you should be able to identify who you are.

This is interesting:

The “star” networker, Lifter 20 had seven links to other participants before LIFT07
which grew to ten after the conference, giving her the most central position in the
network of participants.

So, basically, 10 people I know took the survey — out of 28 total. I know I blogged about the survey and actively encouraged people in my network to take it. This would skew the sample, of course, making it closer to “my network at LIFT”. If we know each other and you took the survey, can you identify which number you are? it would be interesting to put faces on the numbers to interpret the data (for me, in any case, as I know the people). For example, if you’re a person I brought to LIFT, chances are your “new connections” will overlap mine quite a bit — more than if you came to LIFT independently.

A chapter of the report is devoted to the “star” networker (in other words, little me).

Interestingly, many of the
people that she connected to, both before and after LIFT07, were not part of the
networks of the other 27 participants of the study, indicating a certain isolation of parts of
her network.

[…]

Before the conference, a significant number of contacts (35) of Lifter20 had no
connections with any of the other 27 participants of the study.

After the conference, a number of contacts (14) made by Lifter20 had no connections
with any of the other 27 participants of the study.

The first remark be turned the other way: maybe all these “unconnected” people are actually quite connected within the “global LIFT network”, and it is the sample of 28 people who answered the survey which have isolated networks. Of course, isolation is a relative notion, but the way things are phrased here makes it look like I have an isolated network… which I don’t really believe to be the case — a great part of my network is actually very interconnected, only it doesn’t show in the graph because the people in question did not take the survey. Friend Wheel for Stephanie Booth - Facebook Friend Relationships My friend wheel (see screenshot) from Facebook gives a better impression of what it looks like. (No, no, I’m not taking this personally! I’m not.)

Lifter20 shares a number of contacts with one other participant (Lifter13 – the blue
node horizontally to the right in the “after” diagram).

Who is Lifter 13? (14 before, met 7 at LIFT’07) Somebody I knew before LIFT’07. I’m curious.

I’d also love to know who Lifter 18 (the “booster” networker) and Lifter 11 (the “clique” networker) were, though the graph indicates I know neither.

In conclusion, I’d say this is a really interesting study, but the anonymized data would gain to be interpreted in the light of who the actual people were and what their networks were like. I think it would allow to evaluate where this kind of analysis works well and works less well.

I think 28 people is a rather small sample for such a study — it’s a pity more people didn’t participate in the survey. How could we motivate people to participate? I think one of the issues, mainly, is that people don’t get anything directly out of participating. So… maybe some goodie incentive for doing it, next time? Also, I remember the interface was a bit raw. What I did is go through the participant list and type the names. It’s almost impossible to just think back at “so, who did I meet at LIFT this year?” — either you’re going to take a stack of business cards your brought home, or you’re going to go through a list and see what names ring a bell.

Maybe the survey organisation could take that into account. Provide participants in the survey with a (searchable, ajaxy) list of attendees with checkboxes. Then you could add smart stuff to help out like Dopplr’s “travellers you may know” (based on a “contacts of your contacts” algorithm).

Fresh Lime Soda Episodes 8 & 9 [en]

[fr] Deux épisodes de notre podcast Fresh Lime Soda que vous avez peut-être ratés.

Whoops. Unless you’re directly subscribed to Fresh Lime Soda, the podcast (audio, video, depending on the circumstances) I co-host with my friend Suw Charman, you have probably missed episode 9, FoWA and Lace, as well as episode 8, What on Earth is Mornington Crescent.

Yup, they’re not fresh from yesterday either. Busy schedules for both Suw and I, but keep your fingers crossed, we have a recording date for the next episode set mid-January.

If you haven’t clicked on the links above, let me bring you the podcasts to your doorstep. First, episode 8, which is audio:

  • video is easier and more entertaining
  • what the heck is this Mornington Crescent thing? (the game on Twitter, blogged by Suw and Lloyd)
  • delusions of privacy: private and public Twitter feeds; ORG-discuss mailing-list archives
  • permanence of digital media (teenagers, adults, and nekkid pics!)
  • “breaking down the walls between the silos of our lives”: Facebook as a business networking service?
  • social network fatigue and contact groups (note, though, this feature has been announced for Facebook) since we discussed this; we need Structured Portable Social Networks
  • centralizing e-mail in GMail and multiple inboxes (Suw might like Xobni)
  • the psychology of e-mail: subtle differences between “inbox” and “archive” (and a sprinkle of GTD — check Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk about e-mail)
  • what will I do tomorrow? Suw’s “campaign to get more done” and Steph’s nine to twelve
  • keeping track of time whilst watching Sky News and answering e-mails

You may download the MP3 of Fresh Lime Soda, Episode 8 or listen to it using the player below. (15Mb, 44min)

Second, episode 9 (video!):

Cory Doctorow: Europe's Copyright Wars – Do We Have to Repeat the American Mistake? (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin) [en]

My live notes of Cory’s talk. Might be a bit messy because I have trouble wrapping my head around some of these issues, and Cory does indeed talk rather fast. Plus, as you probably know by now, I’m in a frightening state of exhaustion.

Europe and America: harmonization escalation.

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It’s easy to laugh at US copyright policies from Europe.

Inducing infringing of media copyright: should be held liable. If your technology might be used to infringe copyright… arghl… you’ll be held liable.

So if you develop your technology with the idea of infringing copyright, you will be held liable (thought crime!) for any subsequent copyright infringement.

With this kind of stuff, the VCR would never have seen the light, because one of the main ideas behind it was “time-shifting” and “librarying” (watch something later, or collect your favorite shows). The court ruled that time-shifting was legal, but never ruled on librarying.

FCC.

Guy who gave a talk explaining how Adobe’s DRM was evil, arrested at the end of the talk by the FBI for talking about the wrong type of maths.

DMCA takedown notice. No need for proof. Routinely abused to silence critics, etc.

Viacom abuse, searching YouTube for keywords, thousands of DMCA takedown notices, for things as innocuous as people talking at a part who happened to have the names of their characters, etc.

Viacom says that by allowing private videos, Google and YouTube are inducing infringement.

Lawsuits against music fans in the USA. Suing fans does not convince them to go back to the record store! Hard to believe that the record companies’ best response to file-sharing is suing enough college students hoping the rest get the message.

Europe is by no means inculpable. DMCA started as a proposal shown to Al Gore who said it was bad, then presented to Europe where it got positive response and became the EUCD and back to the US as DMCA. steph-note: maybe the difference in perception, if the laws are similar, has to do with the suing culture?

IPRD 2 : probably the worst. Copyright infringement, historically, has to be dealt with in court. This criminalizes copyright infringement. And turns over dealing with it to the public police. steph-note: I’m afraid I don’t understand all this, a bit over my head.

e.g. Sweden, whole server farm taken down by the police (servers in police van), including legitimate sites of legitimate business, just disappeared into the van.

The sophisticated “cyber criminals”, this kind of thing doesn’t stop them. It just can be the end of it, however, for innocent people who aren’t very tech-savvy. Police cordoning off area for 6 months, 70% of businesses hosted there failed within those six months.

DVD CPCM: Europe-wide thing, all devices reading DVDs required to be compliant. CPCM can individually shut down certain classes of users, based on content producers’ decisions, even if you have the legal right e.g. to show something in school, you wouldn’t be allowed to break the CPCM.

Disturbing CPCM flags: DVD flagged so it can only be used by one household. (What is and what is not a household? huge problem. They have a very “conservative” concept of what a household is, which doesn’t include children and parents scattered through continents, old dads entering retiring homes, kids with divorced parents…)

Restricted playback systems. Goodbye interoperability. We didn’t need permission from Vauxhall to plug in your Nokia phone, or permission from Microsoft for Keynote to open ppts, or film company for playing their DVD on a Toshiba player…

All this is turning interoperability into a crime! You need keys to interoperate, and you’re not allowed to reverse-engineer keys.

steph-note: quite scary, all this.

Some of your sound systems won’t play certain types of audio, etc.

US smart enough to stay away from things like the Database Directive. In Europe, a collection of facts in a DB is protected for 50 years! Economist’s opinion on this: the DB directive is not good for Europe. They also asked the incumbents if the directive if it was good or bad, and of course they said yes. So the commission concluded: “opinions are divided! some people say it’s good, others say it’s bad! let’s leave things how they are!”

What can we do? Get involved in the EFF. steph-note: or ORG

Problem now: hearings for copyright stuff attract copyright holders, not technologists, geeks, economists.

Keith Richards isn’t going to go hungry if he doesn’t get another 40 years of copyright protection for his recordings.

First time in copyright history that the government turned its back on a proposal, and said “no, copyright extension is not a good thing”.

What Cory thinks the BBC should be doing. Streaming with DRM. Excuse: “we don’t have a choice, the right holders dictate the terms.” Why does a corporation funded by the public, for the public, come and tell the public that it has to adapt to the right holders demands, and not the opposite? Here, the BBC is not acting in public interest, but there is a history of the BBC doing so.

At one point, rights holders wanted use-by-use payment for the radio. e.g. each time the DJ want to play something, he has to call and ask permission. They turned that down. Found another solution, other music. Finally rights holders backed out and asked the radios to license their music (instead of the stupid conditions they were putting previously).

So Cory’s advice: look the rights holders in the eye, and go off to find other content, artists, etc which will agree to their terms, and give them a place they have been denied until now.

Problem: nobody is offering collective licensing schemes to the internet. Nobody is offering ISPs a blanket license for music or television shows.

It is not good for society that average people are criminalized for accessing culture.

The EFF is about copyright reform, not copyright abolitionism — not is Cory.

ThePirateBay weren’t abolitionists in Cory’s opinion, at the start.

Useful for copyright reformers that there are copyright abolitionists, because allows to say “if you don’t negotiate with us, you might end up having to deal with them”.

Ankur Shah & Gi Fernando: (Facebook API) Disrupting the Platform (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin) [en]

*Here are my notes of this session. Usual disclaimers apply.*

Harnessing social analytics and other musings on the Facebook API

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In the lights of OpenSocial, tough week to be talking about Facebook.

Ankur and Gi are going to talk about a variety of good things that they’ve done with the Facebook platform.

Understanding human relationships.

Facebook is a truly social platform, which allows to create truly social applications. Engage with your friends directly. Ability for a company to respond to the social content inside the platform.

Questions:

– where were they? (Facebook)
– where we are? (developers)
– what’s everyone doing?
– where’s it all going?

Geek + pizza = Facebook.

7000 applications. SuperWall, Slide, Top Friends, iLike, Flixter, Likeness — successful!

*steph-note: Ankur is speaking a little fast for me and I have a headache, so I’m not following this very well, sorry*

Applications kept in a controlled environment. The back-end to all those applications is the same.

Doesn’t depend where your engaging with your users as long as you are.

Standardised facebook functions => very compact code. Homogenous look (avoids the “MySpace effect”)

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 8

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Bob Dylan application.

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PHP. API easy to use. *steph-note: maybe I should build a Facebook app… not sure about what though!*

Standardised component set.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 20

Big question: does the platform really break? Facebook’s innovation is so quick that things break.

A short note on viral-ness. A phenomenon, from 50 friends to 50’000 users in a week. It can happen… but. The Dylan application allows you to share something with others. Individuals make applications spread more than other users.

Facebook allows users to spam their friends with applications.

My Questions: 450’000 daily active users.

Socialistics. Information about your friends.

*steph-note: ew, sorry, I’m passing out. Nothing to do with the content of this session, quite interesting.*

Little Facebook API vs. OpenSocial moment.

Jesse James Garrett: Delivering Rich Experiences (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin) [en]

Here are my notes of the end of Jesse James Garrett’s keynote. There might be bits and pieces missing and I may have misunderstood things. Thanks for bearing with me.

steph-note: missed the beginning, sorry.

MS Word Displaying All Toolbars!

Word Toolbars all turned on sends the following message:

“Word processing is complicated. In fact, it’s so complicated that we, the developers of this tool, haven’t figured it out. So, we’re outsourcing that job (figuring it out) to you, our users.”

Look at video cassette recorders. They’ve come a long way these last 30 years, lots of buttons but… nobody seems to be able to set the clock, still now.

Mentions something Steve Jobs said in 1984.

Beautiful, elegant solution that works.

The product has aesthetic appeal (beautiful), maximises simplicity (elegant), has to address a genuine need/desire (solution) — many startups out there fail because they don’t address a real need — and can be used by its users, not just by us, its creators (that works).

Even MS word has started to get this. They’ve moved beyond toolbars. More simplicity. Not there yet maybe, but real progress. The new interface is much cleaner and simpler.

Last generation of video cassette recorders. Now, we have TiVo. But TiVo was only made possible by really taking a step back. Look at TiVo users: passionate. Users develop an emotional attachment to products which deliver on those four points.

Research seems to show that there is something different happening in our brains when we interact with complex technological tools. steph-note: some variety of pets? Like our interactions with other people, same mechanisms in our brains. We respond to these products as if they were people. We imagine they have personalities, moods… 12-year-old girl who kissed her iPod goodnight before going to bed on the day she got it. Or adults whose iPod breaks, go out and buy a new one, but can’t open the box for two days, because it would mean they have to say good-bye to their old, broken, companion.

iPod case “iGuy”. TiVo logo that has arms and legs.

Products who know who they are, and reflect a consistency in their behaviour.

Experiment: have users try software and evaluate it. One group, user same computer for both tasks. Group 2, different computer. Group 1 were nicer with their feedback, almost as if they didn’t want to hurt the computer’s feelings.

Diamond Rio, first mp3 player commercially available. Looked like a transformative product, so much that the record industries went to court to have it banned in the US. But nobody remembers it! Everybody remembers the iPod as the first mp3 player. Met with a lot of skepticism. (ipod = “idiots price our devices”). Too expensive, not enough features. But actually, it’s a beautiful elegant solution that works.

Developing software applications: we talk about them as data, wrapped in logic, and a user interface. User interface = shell.

But in the minds of our users: there is the user interface, and magic inside.

When we make choices about our products based on things that our users cannot see, we’re going in the wrong direction.

But this is changing. The web (2.0) is leading the way. We make decisions about the user interface first, and allow those decisions to drive technological choices. “Designing from the outside in.” (O’Reilly)

Web 2.0 companies are not being driven by a business or technology strategy, but by an experience strategy.

The experience is the product.

Any technological choices that do not reinforce the experience that we want the users to have of the product are the wrong decision.

Kathy Sierra: Keynote (Web2.0Expo, Berlin) [en]

[fr] Mes notes de la keynote de Kathy Sierra.

Here are my notes of Kathy Sierra’s keynote, quite different from yesterday’s workshop, which I also blogged. My notes are probably incomplete in some spots and may contain mistakes.

Finding Web 2.0 Opportunities (Kathy Sierra)

1) reduce guilt and fear

most of the time, people feel like they suck, like it’s their fault. Sometimes, making the product easier is not always the answer. We need to reduce that kind of feeling/face. How about using facial recognition to see when users are pulling a face? Or even simpler, have a WTF?! button.

Help, FAQ and user manuals do not solve WTF faces. People writing help and FAQ think you’re happy to use the softwa
re and a bit intellectually curious about using the software. Not true! Assume that most of the time, our users feel in WTF mode. Even if your software is easy to use, it might be they’re pulling that face because of what they’re trying to do with your tool.

FAQ/Help aren’t wrong, they’re written for the wrong place of the curve.

Recognise that people are miserable, feel they suck at what they’re trying to learn. Let people off the hook for feeling bad that it’s their fault. Books teaching something shouldn’t make people think they’re stupid.

“Appartments for rent: dog required.” In the US, so hard to find a place to live when you have a dog.

“Please walk on the grass, hug the trees, smell the roses.”

“What kind of genius? young, early, or late bloomer (Doc Searls).”

A lot of 2.0 stuff (like Twitter) increases the guilt, because you have to keep up. steph-note: I realise I’ve been letting myself off the hook quite a lot regarding that.

Being an expert is generally just a matter of focus, not a matter of natural talent.

How to write a bestseller? Choose a title that lets people off the hook. “The perfect mess” or “Everything bad is good for you.”

2) Don’t “bait and switch” on the relationship

Don’t start out all nice and interested and seductive, and in the end push away. How do you treat your ongoing users vs. the users you want to capture? The difference between how sales reps treat customers or prospects is often huge and the wrong way around. Documentation quality.

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Take the marketing budget and throw it into user learning. It’s not always a problem to not have a marketing budget: teach your users to kick ass.

Every time you think of something that you might do for marketing, think about what would happen if you applied that to user learning. Huge example: camera brochures and material. Glossy brochures that are all about taking great photos — which is the reason people buy cameras! — and afterwards, manuals that teach me to be a tool expert, which is not what I want!

Serendipity Curve. Introduce randomness. Excessive customisation and tailoring strips out the delight of discovering something unusual and unexpected. Encourage people to make connections between your stuff and seemingly unrelated things.

Roger von Oech’s “Creative Whack Pack” (steph-note: looks really good!)

3) Make it real/Make it important

Why are we here? We still need physical presence despite all our technology. A huge part of our brain is devoted to our hands and mouth.

Smell is really important steph-note: shows cup of coffee on slide, it does something to our brain but not just smell. Skin was meant to be used.

A real present trumps a virtual gift (not that the latter isn’t meaningful!!) Think about how you can give something in the real world to your users, related to your product. In the US, the UPS guy is a hero. He’s a sex-symbol. Physically impossible to not smile when you see the Amazon box on your doorstep.

Philosophy of Electric Rain:

  • users should do something kick ass within 20 minutes
  • the process of buying, downloading and installing feel like you’re getting a special present. E.g. a real human answers the tech support. We don’t expect that!

Unboxing! “geek unpacking porn” Look at pictures of other people unpacking their new geek toy. steph-note: I almost did that with a Flickr photo of my new macbook and roomba.

People are actually coming up with ways to make those pictures more seductive. These things matter!!

Even if you’re working in bits, and all “virtual”, find something you can send to your users offline. People always care about the t-shirts.

T-shirt First Development. ThinkGeek. It’s not enough to send it to them, give them a way to show that they’re wearing the t-shirt.

Don’t make this mistake:

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There are women or smaller men in your audience. They won’t feel like they kick ass in an XXL t-shirt. Yes, even if it’s not cost-effective.

Remember we’re not ready to leave our bodies behind just yet. “Real” sex still trumps the “virtual” kind…

Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Users (Web2.0Expo, Berlin) [en]

[fr] Workshop de 3 heures animé par Kathy Sierra. Comment rendre ses utilisateurs passionnés.

Disclaimer: theses are just my live notes of Kathy Sierra‘s workshop. Though I try to be accurate, they may contain mistakes or be incomplete. Please don’t hesitate to link to other notes, reviews, or relevant material in the comments.

Not passion like being attached to your iPod, but more passion like how we invest energy into our hobbies.

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There are techniques we can use to achieve that…

Kathy is going to draw techniques from many domains, who all have a piece of the puzzle:

  • hollywood 🙂
  • cognitive science
  • neurobiology
  • psychology
  • learning theory
  • design
  • game design
  • advertising

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Passion: music, photography… that level of passion. Think of something that you have a passion for, or have had a passion for. Here’s how to tell if it was: you want to keep getting better, you want to learn more, practice more… that’s a real passion.

People with a passion:

  • show off
  • learn
  • continuously improve
  • spend time
  • …

Reverse-engineering passion. Look at common attributes of things people have a passion about (e.g. people want to keep learning and getting better). How can we drive passion rather than wait for it to happen?

Where there is passion… there is a user kicking ass. Nobody really get a passion about something they suck at. Challenge: what to do in the period where users still suck.

One of the reasons people pursue passions is that it gives them a higher resolution experience. You see things differently when you’re passionate. You see more details, things that others don’t notice.

The Kick Ass Curve:

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Between the first time and the suck threshold is the real challenge, because that’s where we’ll lose people. Strategies to keep pushing our users up that curve, and not just when they get past the point where they no longer suck. The faster you can get your users past the Suck Threshold, the more likely you are to have passionate users.

So, how fast can we do that, and how?

But… the problem is that people don’t want to be experts at a tool, but experts at what they can do with the tool. They use the tools to do something. That explains why documentation is all wrong, because it focuses on teaching the tool.

Good example: photography site which focuses on the results people want, the photos they want to be able to take, instead of on the camera.

Kathy, seeing slow-shutter speed photo of waterfall, understands why she needs to ditch her point-and-shoot, because she needs control on the shutter speed to be able to take those kind of pictures. And that’s what she wants to be able to do.

We don’t want to be tool experts.

Before our customers buy, we treat them well with glossy brochures, and as soon as they buy they get an unpalatable tech manual for their camera.

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What if your product isn’t something people can use to do really cool things? (Showing a picture of Coldplay.) If we look, we can see what people might be able to use it for that they’ll get excited about. So, Chris Martin of Coldplay is very interested in fair trade. He helps people get involved in the cause. (Oxfam.) A band can help people become passionate about their work, their music.

Another example: Red Bull. Kathy likes Red Bull, but she doesn’t want to become an expert at what’s in it! So Red Bull are helping people become passionate about other stuff, not the drink — music, for example.

Bottom line: whatever you have, whatever your business is, you can have passionate users. They don’t have to be passionate about your product.

Imagine Nikon sets up a really cool site to teach people about photography. Learning is a drug for the brain, so this feel-good feeling is going to be linked to Nikon, who is behind the site. Passion spills back to the tool/brand. (That was a bit of psychology…)

THE important question: what do (or can) you help your users kick ass at? (answers are not: the tool, the interface). The stuff your tool allows to do.

What if you make trash bags? Well, you can sponsor a festival, do something completely unrelated. But you could have little films with creative use of trash bags, and then you create tutorials to teach people to make kick-ass films with those trash bags. (steph-note: sounds way more lame when I write it than when Kathy says it.)

Big question: how do we actually make that happen?

It all starts in the user’s head, and the user’s brain is not our friend.

Our brain has a little logic, and lots of emotion. Our brain thinks we’re still cavemen. Our brain has a big crap filter, and not much gets through. Your brain cares about that which you feel. Chemistry! Mind has one agenda, but brain has another. Imagine, trying to learn from a dry textbook even though committed to studies and the test… but the brain isn’t into it. Any moment though, something could wake the brain up (smell of pizza, cute guy).

What does the brain care about?

  • things that are just a little weird, that are just out of expectations
  • scary things
  • sex
  • little young helpless innocent things (baby, puppy)
  • play, joy
  • humour (bunny suicides…)
  • faces
  • things that are not quite resolved, some mystery, want to know the rest of the story (hand hiding face)

To keep people reading, you need to make sure their brain stays awake.

The brain doesn’t care about

  • generic clichés (bride and groom kissing, no-no, whereas groom biting bride’s shoulder…)

Trick the brain!

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Conversational beats formal every time. It can be subtle!! steph-note: this what I try to explain to people about writing in “blog style”.

Leading theory about that: the brain can’t tell the difference between a real conversation and something written in conversational tone. “God, a conversation, I have to keep up my end, pay attention.”

Rule: talk to the brain, not to the mind.

To read: “A mind of its own” by Cordelia Fine (How your Brain Distorts and Decieves)

Prepare the brain so that when people see this they think “ew, bad”:

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Hey… all this was just about getting people’s attention! We still need to get past the Suck Threshold.

Where are my users on the suck / kick ass curve? If your tool is easy to learn, can they spend a lifetime getting better at what they do with it?

Who do snowboarders go back the second day? The first is so awful! Because there is this picture in their mind of what it’ll be like to kick ass at it. People persevere because they have an idea in their head of what it will be to be really good at it. Another reason is that they see a path, a series of steps to getting there.

People stick at something that’s stuff because there is:

  • compelling picture
  • clear path
  • easy first step

How easy depends on how much value they perceive they’ll get. Sometimes just giving an e-mail address is too big a step.

Who is describing this “compelling picture” for your users?

Why? Who cares? So what? If people are to learn something, they have to keep turning the pages of the book. We need to get past the brain’s crap filter when we’re explaining.

It’s an exercise:

  • My tool does X
  • So what?
  • Well, if you can do X, then it means you can do Y
  • And so what?
  • etc…

(when you feel like killing the other for being so thick, you’re getting close t the meaningful stuff: “you’ll never have sex again”, “you’ll lose your job”)

Keep asking why.

Now, we need to get users to learn.

Learning increases resolution.

“RTFM” expresses how we feel about our users. If you want them to RTFM, make a better FM!

All the money goes to enticing, sexy, motivating, advertising brochures. And after… when it’s time to learn, nothing left.

Learning Theory

Facts — information — understanding. Need more understanding. We tend to teach too many facts. steph-note: cutlery noise from outside coming in through open door is really annoying me

The more they understand, the less they need to memorize.

Because a choice is asked, our brain starts doing more processing.

Smackdown Model: throw two equally compelling, strong, arguments at somebody, and the brain is forced to start processing.

Words + pictures > words. Even drawing a picture on a napkin and taking a photograph of it.

Look for “oh crap!” and “oh cool” moments.

steph-note: tiring

“just in time” is more effective than “just in case” learning. But be careful, you don’t want to always prevent them from scraping their knees.

Who can help you help your users learn? Where are the resources? steph-note: other users! Kathy: “community” 😉

However, nothing of that matters unless you manage to keep your users engaged.

steph-note: break-time, good!

Should read the book “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience”.

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What is it like to be in the flow state? You don’t really notice that time is passing. If you have lost time, either you were abducted by aliens, or you were in the flow state. You just keep going. For people to be in the flow state, a very delicate balance needs to be achieved:

  • knowledge and skill
  • challenge

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What turns the brain on?

  • discovery
  • challenge
  • narrative
  • self-expression
  • social framework
  • cognitive arousal
  • thrill
  • sensation
  • triumph
  • accomplishment
  • fantasy
  • fun (?)

Fun does not have to mean funny.

What breaks flow state, state of enchantment? Think of the user as under a spell. Suddenly realising that they’re using this tool to achieve what they’re doing. (Oh, crap, where’s that button?)

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Don’t make me think about the wrong thing. Just make me think about the interesting stuff. Make it hard to do the wrong thing, and easy and natural to do the right thing.

Techniques to make the flow state happen and remain there. How do we keep them coming back?

Nobody does this better than game developers. Video games! Always trying to get to the next level.

User experience Spiral:

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Motivational milestones. Make sure the users know where they’re going.

Differences between girls and boys and video games:

  • boys: getting to the next level is the aim
  • girls: getting to the next level, but what for?

Are there any new superpowers that I’ll get at the next level? If done right, the payoff gets bigger for each level. Gives you a chance to paint the next compelling picture of what they’ll be able to do.

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Levels have to be small at the start.

What are levels for web development?
Online communities?
Flickr users?

What are your level superpowers?

Frequent rewards. Lots of small benefits. User as hero. Who/what is the helpful sidekick/mentor? How will the hero be changed?

The Tribe…

e.g. 37 signals: “getting real” — so people who are into 37 signals products identify with this “getting real” attitude. Mac: “think different”.

Music video, shot just in living-room and shows what all the money that could have gone into making it could be used for in the third world:

What part of your product is (or could be) part of a user’s identity? (meaning)

Site where people photograph their iPod in various settings. People holding one company’s book in various locations.

So, how can your users show that they belong to the tribe?

If you want them to talk… give them something to talk about. LOTR stuff in calendar OSX (steph-note: dig around that).

e.g. on cover of one of Kathy’s series books, same girl as on this site— lots of talk!

Figuring things out (insider info) is social currency (whuffie). Everyone loves to be the one to tell you about… X.

Find interesting stories. Give users treats. Things that they can talk about. Give them social currency that they can use elsewhere. Legends, stories, people. Where there is passion, there are people.

Once you get to a certain level, people start trying to figure out who will play you in the movies 😉

founder/creation stories, user-as-hero stories? You don’t want to make it about you… people are passionate about themselves. First thing to look at: testimonials. They should be about how great these users are as a result of using the products. People want to see themselves reflected in the testimonials.(Not about the product of the founders.) The more first person language in reviews (about a book, eg.), the better. What’s important is if something good happened to the user, not what they think about you.

Community

  • forums?
  • study groups?

at the least, a blog with comments…

Javaranch registration terms of service: “Be nice”. Users have to agree to that. If people aren’t nice, how do you get them to answer and ask questions? How quickly can you make it possible for people to ask and answer questions?

No dumb questions. Don’t allow people to say “that’s already been answered 50 times”. It’s OK to ask a question again. Never shun somebody for asking a question.

But the most important factor is actually no dumb answers. Try to get people to convert to answerers as fast as possible. Information on “how to answer questions”. When people answer a question, make sure they feel encouraged because they’ve done it.

Tutorials on how to make tutorials.

How to know you’ve got passionate users

When people stop criticising you, but criticise your users. A bit unsettling, but that means you have passionate users. “Cult?” “Sheep?”

Then, give your users some sort of defensive weapon.

If you try to satisfy everybody, you delight and inspire nobody.

Tips and trouble on the road to passionate users

Levelled products (iMovie is free, FinalCut isn’t — so you start with iMovie thinking you’ll never need more, and at some point you’ll outgrow it; problem though: big gap between the two from a usability point of view). Good strategy, however.

“Dignity is Deadly”

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Startup: individuals
Corporate: consensus

Apes become smarter as they work together. Humans become dumber as they work together. (“Wisdom of Crowds”)

We tend to think our ideas are amazing, but our users think they’re tolerable.

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Listening to users: what they say is not what they want.

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User priorities

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When you ask them to prioritize, and when you ask them to also explain, you get very different results.

The greatest cause of user pain:

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Making things better can in fact make them worse. If a simple thing is nice and flow-inducing… No need to improve it by adding tons of features.

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The Secret…

It doesn’t matter what they think about you… (It’s not about you, and it’s not about what you do). All that matters is how they feel about themselves as a result of their interaction with you, your product, your company… steph-note: thinking that Lush testimonials are spot-on, they really have passionate users and I’m one of them.

The user must have an “I rule!” experience.

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Remember: your users are real people.

Thank you, Kathy. It was great to have a chance to see you.

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Physical, Digital, Categories, Tags, Experts… [en]

[fr] Le numérique révolutionne la façon dont nous organisons l'information. "Une place pour chaque chose, et chaque chose à sa place" vaut pour les objects physiques. Cette excellente petite vidéo démontre ces changements. C'est en anglais, mais il n'y a rien à écouter (sauf de la musique) -- il suffit de lire.

If you’re still a bit in a fuzz about how exactly the internet is revolutionizing the way we store and retrieve information, this great little video should help. It’s pretty fast-paced (watch it twice if necessary) and the music is very nice.

Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing it out.

BarCamp Lausanne: Privacy (Julien Freudiger) [fr]

[en] Privacy... a tricky issue, as ever.

“Nothing to hide.” Est-ce que ça justifie de ne pas se préoccuper de privacy?

Julien fait une thèse sur le sujet. steph-note: j’espère qu’il ouvre un blog pour documenter sa recherche!

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Surveillance:

  • CCTV (on peut reconnaître quelqu’un à sa démarche => porter des schlaps) => et peu efficace côté incidence sur le crime
  • Wiretapping (CALEA) conversations téléphoniques + tous les ISP doivent laisser des portes ouvertes. Mais Skype, pas, car Skype est européen. Donc pour le moment, OK.
  • Banques (SWIFT): transactions internationales… les USA arrivent à contrôler les sommes d’argent transférées dans et hors des USA, alors que c’est interdit dans les autres pays.
  • Avions: doivent donner numéro de carte de crédit, peuvent fouiller nos affaires…

Ça semble un peu dramatique… ça fait beaucoup d’information! La NSA a un des systèmes informatiques les plus puissants au monde… caché quelque part.

=> Privacy Enhancing Technologies

  • Internet Anonymity: Tor
  • Data Confidentiality: PGP (bien, mais trop complexe)

steph-note: sympa, ce MacBook Pro sur lequel je tape… clavier très agréable… et pas si lourd!

Ces services fournissant l’anonymat sont aussi des sortes d’aimants attirant beaucoup de traffic “sale”, ou potentiellement illégaux. (e.g. gens qui utilisent Tor pour faire du P2P…)

Deux systèmes qui marchent bien mais que personne n’utilise.

Travail de doctorat de Julien: trouver des motivations économiques pour que les gens utilisent de tels services. Lack of concern. Lots of info on social networks. “Nothing to hide.”

Privacy vs. Security: si on renonce à notre privacy, on donne plus d’informations pour aider le gouvernement à nous garder en sécurity. Comme: la torture est interdite, mais si on demande aux gens s’ils tortureraient une personne pour en sauver 1000, bien sûr que oui.

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Terrorisme: aux USA, en fait, on “torture” des millions pour préserver quelques miliers. Les USA disent qu’ils ont gagné la guerre froide car ils avaient la liberté… Mais maintenant? le contraire…

Le fameux “nothing to hide” argument: steph-note: guilty. On perd la conscience d’être regardés/observés, sur Internet. La privacy n’est pas important que lorsqu’on a des secrets. C’est pas pour les secrets, ou les choses qu’on a à cacher. Ce n’est qu’un aspect de la privacy. “Web of things.”

Lorsqu’on perd des petites quantités de privacy, pour (on espère) gagner en security. Métaphone: Orwell; Kafka. Kafka a imaginé une société qui en sait plus sur nous que nous-même. Elle sait prévoir ce qu’on va faire — perte du sens de contrôle sur notre propre vie. Une petite série d’actes mineurs qui s’aditionnent. Sur internet, si on dit une chose une fois, c’est dit pour de bon. Très difficile de retirer de l’information.

La privacy c’est quelque chose de pluriel.

Data:

  • collection
  • processing
  • dissemination

Risque potentiel. Possibilité aussi que toutes ces données à notres sujet soient mal interprétées.

Valeur sociale de la privacy. Nécessaire à la construction de l’identité. Chacun a un espace de liberté dont la société bénéficie. Protéger la privacy = devoir social.

“Torturing Our Privacy”

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Où sont les abus?

WiFi: AP data sniffing. Pas très difficile de déterminer qui utilise un réseau (e.g. via l’accès à son serveur mail). Beaucoup de choses sont en clair. (Rajouter le s à http:// quand on est dans gmail…)
Social community phishing (“can I be your friend?”)
L’an dernier, il y a eu plus d’argent gagné par le cybercrime que le traffic de drogue.
Location tracking.

Compliqué: c’est utile pour moi comme utilisatrice, cette ouverture. Donc je n’ai pas envie d’y renoncer… mais quand même, comment protéger ma vie privée contre les abus, tout en l’ouvrant pour ma communauté.

Passer les captcha pour les spammeurs: ils les intègrent dans les sites pornos, donc les visiteurs les tapent pour voir l’image suivante, mais en fait sont en train de valider un spam quelque part.

ORG, EFF.

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BarCamp Lausanne: Facebook (Raphaël Briner) [fr]

70% des gens inscrits à BarCamp Lausanne sont sur Facebook. 30 contacts (médiane). Idée intéressante: donner à Facebook un fichier texte avec des noms, et en retirer une liste des relations etc. entre ces gens.

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Raphaël est sur Facebook depuis février 2007 (steph-note: je vous mets une saisie d’écran de son profil? 😉), n’a pas fait grand chose en deux mois. Juillet/août: lancement des applications Facebook => pénétration++.

Audience européenne a triplé en 2 mois. 42’000 en Suisse. Tilllate a des soucis à se faire. (Si ça continue, FB aura 200’000 utilisateurs en Suisse à Noël — autant que Tilllate.)

Design graphique old school en L. 5 tailles de typo, minimal. [analyse détaillée du design de Facebook.] Petits détails soignés, tout de même, malgré un design super classique.

Développé en PHP. Marche relativement bien.

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Objects à usage social principalement. Applications: plate-forme géniale pour ça.

Par rapport à MySpace, possibilité de se différencier: pas de MP3 illégaux, d’images dont les droits ne sont pas respectés, de vidéos piratées — ou uniquement via des applications tierces.

Intérêt de Facebook: pour l’individu, générer du “bruit” diffusé à un public restreint. Evite les problèmes de droit de distribution.

steph-note: intéressant comme présentation, bonne analyse du design (même si j’ai pas tout remis ici, ça me dépasse un peu j’avoue) — mais une analyse des enjeux sociaux est à mon avis à faire. Je me rends compte que j’ai des articles à écrire sur ce sujet en français.