Gadget Ads

Google is launching Gadget Ads, rich, interactive advertising in Google’s “gadget” widget format which can run anywhere on the Google ad network. The main difference, apart from the flexibility of the rich media environment, is that these ads can be added by users to other sites or to iGoogle pages allowing a viral dimension to advertising for the first time. Interesting move. Jeff Jarvis thinks this will put Google in competition with the publishers it has always claimed to have a symbiotic relationship with.

Technorati Tags: ,

Designing for the Web of Data

Tom Coates is designing for a web of data. He works for Brickhouse, a Yahoo! experimental unit. He explores the challenges of helping users navigate paths through the web of data, which he defines as data connected through APIs. The human facing web and the data behind the scenes are getting closer and closer together, he says.
Websites are now only part of your product – Twitter is available on various platforms and 90% of all activities is through its APIs. The product is everywhere the network goes.

Therefore it is important to design for recombination. It should “play well with others”. Why? Because it will drive people to your service, people will pay for them, to put yourself in the middle of an ecosystem and because you can become better for less work. In short it’s the network effect.

He talks about Fireeagle (a code name). It’s a service about location – it allows people to capture their location and share with their friends and with software. They have an API which will allow other software to use the information to provide local information and services.

Owing or maintaining a data source is a really good source of competitive advantage – more so that building services, he argues. The important thing is that you need metadata – any kind of metadata. He thinks you can’t have too much.

He is a second speaker to urge the use of visual hierarchies to reflect importance.

Soundbite: “Twitter is a way of accessing error messages on the web – it’s more than that: it’s a way of accessing error messages on IM.”

Technorati Tags:

The Experience Stack

Matt Webb is on stage to talk about adaptive design. His talk is arranged in alphabetical order. “I wrote down all the things I’m interested in and coerced them into alphabetical order.”

By the time he gets to “P” he says this: products should be:

  • shelf demonstrable
  • explainable in a sentence
  • for an audience
  • identifiable
  • measureable
  • predictable (because they have an ethos)

Web services should be the same way, he argues.

Recommendations: the website history of the button.

Technorati Tags:

Building communities

George Oates and Denise Wilton on stage talking about community. George, principal designer of Flickr, discussed the origins of the site which started out life as an application with network interaction. It migrated to the web to take account of asynchonous requirements of the user base, but she says they are thinking of adding back the messaging functionality in the future. It was a game-based environment (with about 10,000 players) which sounds remarkably like the way that Facebook is developing. It migrated to photosharing when the company began to run out of money.

Denis talks about b3ta: “we started with what is now called viral content, but what was then called fucking around”. We did things to the site to make sure people understand what we are about.

How does Flickr do this? The staff would watch what was going on the site and help out if they could see someone was struggling. The staff would add these as friends so that at least they knew someone. We always tried to make it obvious that there were humans here – down to labelling the buttons. Flickr has 10 million users and there are over one billion pictures on the site. Keeping the human face on the site is more and more difficult as the site gets bigger. Flickr users act as hosts.

Denise says people underestimate the hard work involved in building the community and making it develop in the way it was intended. “My biggest contribution was sitting day after day writing posts and steering people in the right direction.” The way that you present the site – visual design and writing – very much dictates it’s direction.

George: When a community really takes off there are users who take on the same language of the site and help to guide and police it.

George: “We have a long history of zero user testing”. Now Flickr uses the blog and forum topics to open up discussion about the new features. The feedback is very strong.

Denise: What do you do if people rebel?

George: We persevere. We try hard not to release shit code.

Denise: You have to remember that there are people on the community which spend more time on it than you. You are not the boss, you are the guardian.

Geoge: You move from host to steward. When things go wrong it is really important to apologise for that.

What is the difference between on- and offline communites? asks Denise. Less and less as Flickr gets bigger, says George, though the main thing is speed.

Denise cautions against responding to flaming in the same tone as the users do. “Walk away from the computer and calm down.”

Flickr is about to launch a geographical based version of “interestingness”.

George wraps up: keep taking photos.

Technorati Tags:

Good vs Great Design

Cameron Moll, interaction design manager of the LDS Church in Utah, is on stage. He is talking about Good vs Great Design. He recommends the book How Designers Think. He argues that user productivity should trump machine productivity. It’s quicker to boil water for one minute and 11 seconds than one minute and 10 seconds – because it’s quicker to push the “1” button three times. He argues strongly that sites should emphasise what’s important by bringing out the most important functions rather than having everything with the same emphasis.
His presentation is on his website.

Technorati Tags: