the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I was reading and had an idea about user entered tags, and other user-derived metadata. I am referring to data such as "users who viewed this object also looked at these objects" or "users who purchased this also purchased that" sort of information. Or "user X says this list of items go together". It is another way to tagging, I supposed, figuring out what items are related by passive means (at least with the first two examples.) Basically just poking around in your database for interesting correlations. Amazon.com is obviously the leader in this space. I can imagine a system that can take advantage of freeform text tags, and user-derived metadata would be very powerful. The focus would be on intelligent analysis of the data. Or maybe not. Perhaps just making the data available is enough to inpsire creative use of it.

Alan Cooper recalls a conversation with Keith Pleas where Alan asked about making software more human. Keith replied

Would a computer say you have "about $500" in your checking account?

If you look at MS Outlook you can see where imprecision can actually enhance understanding. When you sort your emails it sorts them by date as Today, Yesterday, Last Week. Some weblog software will state the post time as "3 hours ago" or "5 minutes ago" instead of the exact timestamp. Of course timestamps are meaningless in a global environment with time zones anyway. 3 hours ago is more informative. Of course, a human brain can gague relative time measurements like that easily. I am not sure I want my bank to be imprecise about my balance, but the basic idea of using human language is a good one.

Revisiting Alan Cooper and "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", Cooper says that design iterations are quick and easy because they are on paper, and that programmer interations are slow and difficult because they require code. I am not sure this is entirely true. Using dynamic languages, and web application toolkits and other rapid development techniques, and agile processes, a code iteration can be quick and reasonably painless.

I think the basic ideas behind interaction design are very important, and the balance between code and design is very important. The speed of code and design in dependent on the team doing the coding, the team doing the design, the communication between them, and the specific project they are doing. Factor in the actual customer, and you can see how the rules might need to be bent and adjusted.

Basically it all comes down to paying attention to what going on around you, and being aware of the needs of the customer, design team, development team, and the constraints they are all working under. Awareness and communication are the keys.

I am reading Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" and it tries to build a business case for interaction design. Interaction Design seems to be deciding how the program will behave, and actually what it will do. Too often this is really not decided except during programming. Some people think it is realted to user stories and other techniques used in various agile programming methods. I agree, but Alan Cooper himself does not.

One bit that is short and really is important is

Will the user understand it? Can we present this information in a way that makes sense? Is the sequence of instructions appropriate for what the user wants? What information does the user need most?

These questions are incredibly important and too often the are not considered fully before deciding what software to build. Cooper says all interaction design and all decisions must be made before one line of code is written. I think the interaction design ideas can be applied to shorter iterations and smaller pieces of software, but prioritization and deciding what is most important is even more critical in that case.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it -- Alan Kay

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!"
— Alan Kay in 1971,
inventor of Smalltalk which was the inspiration and technical basis for the MacIntosh and subsequent windowing based systems (NextStep, Microsoft Windows 3.1/95/98/NT, X-Windows, Motif, etc...).

I love finding connections and patterns. Some people believe human brains are built to notice patterns and connections. That seems likely to me. Jeff Hawkin's On Intelligence is a good explanation of a theory of how it works inside your brain.

This week I noticed a blog entry about John Beck's interview on IT Conversations about his book Got Game, and how kids brought up playing video games are changing the workplace. Listening to the interview, I found some great ideas that are related to learning, games, and how brains are wired. Beck says that neural pathways are formed most readily before the age of 14 or so. He mentions the common idea that it is easier to learn a language while you are a kid, and he says it is because the pathways are forming and the language helps form those pathways. He goes on to say that once you pass a certain age, it is impossible, (or possibly just very difficult?) to learn a language without relating it to another language.

If you read Hawkins' you can see how this works in his model of the brain. Hawkins says there is a hierarchy of levels within the brain that match patterns at different levels of detail and connect, of course, to each other in exciting ways (read the book.) One important point is that patterns can be delegated from higher levels to lower levels in the hierarchy once they are well established.

It seems to be that the language learning example is a perfect one to show how this works. So using Hawkins' model of brain function, in an older person learning a new language the patter has to go all the way up the hierarchy and then be related to the native word before the listener can understand it. In someone who can think in the foreign language, the connection happens at a lower level in the hierarchy connecting the foreign word with the abstract concept at the lowest level of the idea.

The next idea from the interview that connected in my brain was about team building. Beck described how kids sometimes play a video game as a team, handing off the game controller to the kid who is better at the current type of challange in the game. THe interviewer said "they are good managers." Beck says that is correct. He goes on to explain that good managers will act like a "strategey guide" giving help and guidance, but allowing the team members to do what they do best and even make mistakes as they learn while they work. This is quite related to the effective teams post I made earlier where the leader sets a goal, and then gets out of the way.