First and foremost – Happy 2010 everyone!
As you may have noticed, I’ve been a bit silent over the past 2 weeks. For that, I apologize. I was taking a well deserved holiday break from work and school to visit with my wife’s family in Athens, Greece.
Greece was uncommonly warm this winter (averaging 15-18 degrees Celsius) so it didn’t feel like Christmas from a weather perspective, but it sure was nice to be around so much family!
Anyway, I’ve since returned from my Greek holiday and am fully charged up for 2010. This quarter I’ll be focusing my school studies on Trends in Digital Media, and examing Social Production and Distribution of Digital Media – so count on the majority of my upcoming posts to be focused on these two topics!
Cheers!
David
Chelsey, Matt and I finalized our end of quarter project for our Theories and Practices of Interactivity class (COM 597) this evening. As you may recall from my previous post, we conducted a usability study of the OpenCongress.org website to determine if it’s layout and interactive features help citizens participate in the federal legistlative process.
You can find our final deliverables on our project blog, or read the final paper. OpenCongress Final Project Paper
(Just a note: the final paper doesn’t include any of the fun interactive stuff, so visit the site instead!)
It’s been a fun and exhausting quarter and I’m ready to take a well deserved two week break! Thanks for the great partnership Chelsey and Matt!
My first quarter in the MCDM program at the U.W. is drawing to a close, and I’ve been tasked with summarizing my learning in Theories and Practices of Interactive Design. This will be a difficult task as the quarter has been packed with information. In some cases I had some previous experience, either through work or my own reading with the material. But for the most part, much of the material was new for me.
I will begin with a brief discussion of design, and specifically interactive design. Bill Moggridge in Designing Interactions tells us that design, especially that related to IT should account for usability, usefulness, meaning or quality and sociability. Usability is about ensuring a product is easy to use; Usefulness is about ensuring that a product helps it’s user accomplish something; Meaning or Quality is about the implicit and explicit things that a well-designed product communicates to its owner and others – the obviousness of what the product does, but also the aesthetic qualities the product elicits; and lastly Sociability is about helping enrich the world in which we live and operate. Again, keep in mind the Moggridge is concerned with computer related design, so in addition to these qualities he thinks about products having clear mental models, providing the user with reassuring feedback, allowing for easy to understand navigability, consistency of operations, and minimizing the need for consciously thinking about operation via intuitive interaction.
Donald Norman in Emotional Design thinks of design more broadly than Moggridge. For Norman, design is also about usability (or lack thereof); aesthetics (or meaning and quality); and practicality (or usefulness). However, Norman believes that in order to understand what makes for good design we need to understand the emotional side of design. This means considering the visceral, behavioral and reflective aspects of design.
John Maeda, a designer, artist, scientist and instructor at the MIT Media Lab is all about simplification. Maeda believes that the best designed products are those that have been reduced down to the simplest form while still being useful, and without significant penalty of functionality. For Maeda, a big fan of the acronym, this can be accomplished through the application of the SHE approach. Shrink, Hide and Embody. Shrink down the object so that when it exceeds our expectations, it’s pleasing to us. Hide the complexity of a product. Make the use of the product simple or appear simple. Last, and perhaps most important to counterbalance shrinking and hiding is to embody the product with some quality that is desirable – whether it be through materials or some other messaging cues.
The common thread between these three authors with respect to design is that a well-designed product needs to create some connection with its owner while at the same time being easy to use and serving some purpose.
With this understanding of design in place, I’ll quickly recap my quarter in Theories and Practices of Interactive Design.
Our first class was focused on identifying examples of good and bad design in print. This was supported by a discussion of color, typography and layout to communicate meaning and create clarity. We next applied this thinking to web design by identifying a poorly designed website. I chose www.recordsbymail.com as my example. I have to say the recordsbymail really wasn’t that poorly designed, by I thought there was definite room for improvement. In order to address how we’d propose fixing our example sites, we learned about wireframes as a means for visualizing a webpage layout without introducing emotional elements. This is accomplished by suggesting layout via a series of boxes representing the various content containers in a page, without the use of color, text or imagery.
Our next lesson focused on use cases and task flow. Use case is about who is using a product and how they interact with that product. Task flow concerns the steps a user should take with a product to accomplish a specified task. This lesson was supported by reading Robert Hoekman’s, Designing the Obvious. We applied the task flow lesson later in the quarter to re-designing a poor task flow in the MCDM program’s collaborative workspace, Media Space.
There were a couple of opportunities to apply our learning to a design of our own making. First, we individually had to design an improved classroom layout. I chose to design a class in the round vs. students facing one direction, and an instructor staring back. Our second opportunity was to prototype an imaginary product that we designed to address some problem. Prototyping is a great method for designing a product and came out of lesson on the practices of the international design firm, IDEO.
One of our last assignments before starting on our final projects, was to recommend how design service envy into AT&T’s Developer website for its developer community. Service envy is about applying the principles of meaning and reflective emotions that Moggridge and Norman spoke of and applying it to a service vs. a product. How can we make people desire services more than product? A lot of creating service envy is thinking about the various engagement points with customers and creating a simple and useful experience. This requires a true understanding of who you are designing for, and how they would interact with the service.
Lastly, we applied all the quarter’s learning to our final projects. I’ve partnered with two of my classmates to evaluate the effectiveness of a website called OpenCongress. TomTullis and Bill Albert’s Measuring the User Experience has been instrumental in helping us evaluate the site’s effectiveness. You can read about my group’s proposal in my previous post, Usability Study – OpenCogress.Org.
In the end, I wish this had been a class I could’ve taken in a semester based system because I really enjoyed the content and wished we could have explored it in more depth. To supplement my learning, I plan to develop base level knowledge of Sociology and Psychology.
This is the class presentation that Chelsey Glasson, Matthew Franco and I gave as part of our final project for Theories and Practices of Interactive Design at the Univ. of Washington MCDM program.
The project is a usability study of OpenCongress.org, and is intended to determine if the layout and interactive features of OpenCongress.org help politically active and potentially politically active citizens participate in the federal legislative process by providing an opportunity for them to learn what a federal bill proposes, better understand the arguments surrounding that bill, and to take some form of action?
The presentation provides our initial usability test findings. Further testing will be conducted, with final recommendations and proposals.
View the presentation: OpenCongress Class Presentation
View the intro video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjNhtI7V25g
For those of you familiar with Twitter, you probably know what a hashtag is, and how it’s used. If not, a hashtag is a convention used to organize commentary around specific topics. The way it works it that a hashtag is created by adding the # sign in front of the specific topic (e.g. #swineflu). Then if you want to follow or comment on that topic, you simply include the hashtag as a part of your tweet.
Word cloud of Top 50 Tweet Trends
According to TweetStats, the hashtag for the presidential election in Iran between conservative hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi this past June (#iranelections) is one of the top 50 Tweet trends of all time (to date), ranking in the top 10 for a month. In fact, the hashtag is still being actively used today.
Why is this important? Because it’s one measure of the impact Twitter and social media in general is playing in the political landscape. During the Iranian election and in the days following, Twitter came to represent the voice dissenting Iranians, as well as the world’s means of following and commenting on the events surrounding the hotly contested election as they played out. In Ester Addley’s “Twitter: Iran’s voice of dissent,” she describes the role of Twitter as an enabler of citizen journalism when mainstream broadcasters were being expelled by the Iranian state, effectively offering a counter punch to the Iranian authority’s clamp down efforts. Combined with photos and videos captured by mobile phones and distributed to YouTube, blogs and news agencies, web users in Iran were able to offer “snatches of information in real time” and provide some level of transparency to an election in a country in which the theocratic republic works to restrict basic rights, including freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
However, this kind of reporting does come with an element of risk. Addley describes the technological fight back of the Iranian authorities as being spirited. Iranian censors quickly moved to block Internet services for servers from which Twitter was being accessed. This wasn’t entirely successful as alternate servers were being set up almost as fast, oftentimes outside of the country and the government’s reach. Yet, for many Iranians the interruption of services brought back memories of past practices by the government to censor and filter online activity to identify “internet-related crimes and offenses,” often resulting in the arrest and in some cases the death of lesser known bloggers or journalists whose sudden disappearance might not draw too much attention. (Rahimi & Gheytanchi) Many web users became nervous, fearing all the attention their pages were attracting and took steps themselves to disable their own pages and asking not to be referenced by their usernames.
The power these social media tools offer to influence the political landscape is great, as exemplified most recently in the U.S. Presidential election in which now President Obama successfully leveraged social media to find, connect to and mobilize his base to help win out over John McCain, who largely overlooked the importance of social media in his campaign until too late. Yet, social media’s power is still limited by the willingness of people to make use of its full potential, especially in countries whose governing bodies rule in part by fear or threat to its citizenry.
In “The politics of Facebook in Iran,” Rahimi and Gheytanchi provide a brief history of Iran’s efforts to “control” the Internet, and examine their unusual pattern of blocking and unblocking of Facebook while at the same time limiting access to other sites. For a detailed account, I encourage you to read the full article, but I will provide a brief overview as part of thoughts below.
As mentioned above, Iran has followed a practice of Internet censorship from the earliest days of access in the late ‘90s. Frequently sites that we deemed “immoral” or politically offensive were monitored, blocked, and the author often imprisoned, and occasionally executed. Rahimi and Gheytanchi point out that bloggers deemed famous as a result of a large following often were left un-harassed, perhaps for fear of the potential backlash by the populace. Yet despite these censorship practices, online usage has grown.
According to Elham Khatami’s article “Facebook brings big changes to Iran politics,” 35% of Iran’s 65 million people had access to the Internet, and there are nearly 700,000 blogs, of which between 70,000 – 200,000 are active. Of the 65 million people, 45 million are eligible to vote, half of which are under the age of 30. Rahimi points outs that many young Iranians started gravitating to the web, especially university students and journalists. They started using the Internet as a means to blog and express themselves, as well as to socialize online which then lead to dating – forbidden by Islam according to Khatami. In particular, many young Iranians were launching personal and collective discussion forums on Facebook, which eventually become the most famous social networking site in Iran. The site was blocked, but then in February, the site was inexplicably unblocked. It’s presumed that with elections upcoming, the incumbent government did not want to be seen as denying certain rights.
Given the need to reach young voters, and the popularity of Facebook among the youth, it’s no wonder that reformist candidates adopted Facebook as a key component of their campaign engines. Shortly after establishing a page on Facebook, Mousavi had more than 30,000 followers, despite a recent law that required presidential candidates to register any blogs or websites with the government, and would therefore have identified them as Mousavi followers. (Khatami)
As reformist candidates began to capitalize on the power of Facebook, and voices of dissent continued to grow in the various discussion forums, the government blocked access to Facebook in May. Three days later access was restored. Its speculated that the government was forced to unblock the site in light of the growing protests of the population, and the difficulty of taking away certain freedoms once experienced. Not long after, Mousavi’s Facebook page was blocked for two days. When confronted by Mousavi supporters, Ahmadinejad denied any knowledge of the cause, but not long after Mousavi’s page was unblocked. Going into the election, polls showed Mousavi leading in 10 major cities in Iran. However, as we now know, the official election results showed Ahmadinejad winning by 63% of the vote, despite claims that Mousavi had won 60% of the vote. (Khatami)
Closing Thoughts
So in the end, how much impact did social media have on the political landscape? Certainly it allowed for the world to “witness” citizen reported events on the ground, and certainly it provided a forum for Iranian’s to express their opposition, but did it help mobilize the youth vote in favor of a reformist candidate, or perhaps expose what may likely have been voter fraud?
A fellow student of mine, Roni Ayella voiced what I thought was an interesting opinion on the question. “Lots of folks want to believe tools like Twitter and Facebook can put power back in the hands of the people. The research on the Zapatistas movement notes “the internet played a crucial role as the catalyst to disseminate information about the indigenous struggle in Chiapas around the world and opened the space for the creation of networks of transnational support…” While it may be true that Twitter, Facebook and other outlets brought transnational attention to the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, actual support and action on the ground was absent… For information communication technology to put power back in the hands of people, action on the ground must be present. There is no magic wand or tool to counter corruption.”
As Roni states more eloquently than I, social media can definitely be a conduit for change, but only when accompanied by meaningful action by individuals as a follow through.
Works Cited
Addley, Esther. “Twitter: Iran’s voice of dissent -.” Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source. 20 June 2009. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-06-20-twitter-irans-voice-of-dissent>.
Khatami, Elham. “Facebook brings big changes to Iran politics.” Post-Gazette.com. 8 June 2009. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09159/975872-82.stm>.
Rahimi, Babak, and Elham Gheytanchi. “The politics of Facebook in Iran |.” OpenDemocracy. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-politics-of-facebook-in-iran>.
Successful products and brands generally bring to mind specific qualities. As an example: Mercedes connotes success, quality and luxury; BMW connotes high performance, superior design and advanced engineering. Often times, people who own these products are associated with these same qualities, or believe these qualities to be reflective of them. In an interview with Live/Work in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, the team at Live/Work tells us that one of the two basic needs a product serves is to confirm and communicate the owner’s set of values. When the product is highly desirable, other people experience product envy, and if we want people to desire services more than products, we have to create services that help people tell one another who they are through that service instead of through ownership of a thing. This is referred to as services envy.
In our Interactive Design class, we were asked to think about how we could create service envy for AT&T’s developer program site http://developer.att.com/developer .To answer this question, we also considered AT&T’s competitor sites and services: Apple Developer, Verizon Droid, Motodev and Intel.
Insights and Suggestions
Having attended the Game Developer’s Conference the year before last, I had an opportunity to sit and talk with several iPhone developers. Thinking back on these conversations, I realize now that Apple has successfully created service envy, as demonstrated by the great pride that these developers expressed at being associated with Apple iPhone applications. There were three common reasons expressed by the developers for why they like developing for the Apple platform: the positive associations of the brand and product, a well designed developer site, and Apple’s distribution channel and support.
Brand and Product
In the consumer space, Apple has done an amazing job of creating a brand and set of products that exudes “cool” for many. This cool factor includes both the iPhone and iPhone applications, so by extension being an iPhone app developer is seen as being cool, even by the casual user with no background in technology or development. So my first suggestion for AT&T would be to develop marketing campaigns that emphasize the “cool” factor of AT&T and it’s devices. Verizon and Google’s introduction of Android is a good example of this kind of effort.
A Well Designed Website
According to the developers, Apple’s developer website is very well designed. The site’s UI (User Interface) is clean and uncluttered, the navigation is simple and intuitive, the steps to engage are clearly laid out, and provides a wealth of easy to consume resources like “how to” videos. AT&T’s current site appears clean and uncluttered, however I suspect there may be too many navigation options initially. An alternative might be to limit the initial set of navigation options to those related to signing up, signing in, and learning about the developer program. Other information and resources can then be surfaced based upon filters. One thing to avoid is trying to bring too much of the cool factor into the website. Earlier, I mentioned that Verizon and Google of done a good job in creating buzz and creating that cool factor for Android, but then Verizon tried to recreate that on their developer site. What they’ve created instead is a site that is difficult to understand and navigate.
Ease of Distribution
The key appreciate factor for these developers however was how easy Apple made it for them to distribute and sell their applications through the App Store in iTunes. Most independent developers are just that, developers, and do not possess strong business and marketing expertise. Providing a channel through which their applications can be sold and is easy to plug into, creates enormous good will for Apple among its developer community. So, developers spend less time marketing and distributing their applications, and more time developing more applications. This is something that AT&T can try and replicate. One key to success is to make it easy to access, browse and purchase those applications through the device. One area where AT&T can improve on Apple’s AppStore is to create more transparency in the application approval process. The biggest complaint I heard from the developers at GDC was that once they submitted an application for approval to Apple, it was like it went into a “black hole.” They never knew the status of the review, or how long the process might take to complete. Additionally, some developers expressed frustration that the approval criteria weren’t fully documented or consistent. Some developers had applications rejected by Apple for certain features that were approved in other developer’s applications.
Following Apple’s successful approach would be my suggestion to the AT&T developer program to create service envy.
In 2007, I remember reading a book by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba called Citizen Marketers. McConnell and Huba were expressed the idea that Web 2.0 was changing the centers of gravity for content publishing and broadcasting from large corporations and organizations to individuals sitting in coffee shops, hotel rooms, airports etc armed only with a laptop, a cell phone and a message. As a marketer, it was critical we understood the social media wave and how it allows everyday citizens to influence culture and what people buy. Mobiles in Citizen Media, one of our articles for this week’s reading, takes that notion of everyday citizen publishers and how this is playing out in developing worlds through the mobile phone. Reading through the article, I began to realize how critical a role the mobile phone plays in this concept of citizen media. Certainly, the laptop is a powerful tool, but when you think of the capabilities enabled by the mobile phone its pretty amazing.
Anywhere/Anytime reporting
News, events, life happens everywhere in a split second, and often in places where we don’t have or can’t carry laptops. So the reporting that is captured and distributed via computer is generally after the fact reporting. The potential downside here is that details become forgotten, subjectivity can creep in, and follow on events have since occurred. Yet the exact opposite can almost be said of the mobile phone. We generally carry our phones with us wherever we go, so if we happen to witness something of interest, we can immediately record and distribute our thoughts through text, audio, and ever increasingly, video. Imagine if you will, following up to the moment eye witness reports and thoughts posted to Twitter by an Iranian student during this year’s face off between protesters and the state police during Iran’s state mandated annual celebration of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy. Perhaps this same student has captured video of the protest on his camera phone and uploaded the videos to YouTube. Live reporting is how this is referred to in the Citizen Media article.
Capturing the moment when it happens is just one part of the picture. Another great advantage to the mobile phone is that it is relatively easy for people to participate, and it can provide access in areas that other forms of media cannot. Because the phone is nearly ubiquitous now in most parts of the world, the barrier to entry is low. Anyone, anywhere with a mobile phone, or who knows someone with a mobile phone and understands how to send an SMS can become a citizen journalist if they choose. In the article, they give the example of The People’s 311, a citizen-created service in New York City that encourages everyday citizens to report on non-emergency situations that should come to the attention of the local city government offices. By the same token, anyone who can receive text messages or connect to the internet can stay informed. People can even choose to upload photos taken on their phone of public nuisances to a public Flickr account. By the same token, anyone who can receive text messages or connect to the internet can stay informed. A regional editor for Global Voices of Sub Saharan Africa, tells the story of his brother who teaches in a rural area of Tanzania. Everyday, his brother can access his blog through his phone’s web browser, download his latest blog and then read it at his leisure once its downloaded. This idea is further exemplified in the article, When Radio Meet Mobile in Pakistan.
In Pakistan, it is becoming popular for people to tune into the radio through their phone. The radio is means by which Pakistani’s can avoid dangerous areas and access news that may be considered illegal by the state to discuss thanks the creativity of radio journalists. If there is a topic that the state forbids the radio journalist to discuss, they simply invite guests to call in and discuss the topics. As a way to report on areas where conditions may be dangerous, radio journalists advise listeners to avoid areas under the guise of traffic reports. Traffic descriptions became code for urban warfare and violence. (Ramey) The article also describes how the Pakistani government is struggling between restricting news and allowing community radio stations to blossom as a means of counteracting the message of the Taliban through its many illegal radio stations.
Although not centered on citizen media, the concept of anywhere/anytime reporting through mobile is emerging in other areas, like global healthcare. In South Africa, Cell-Life, an NGO created a program called Aftercare to work in public health system to help ensure HIV/AIDs patients were staying current with their HIV treatments. Each Aftercare worker visits 15 to 20 patients in their home and use a mobile phone to capture treatment data. That data is immediately transferred via text to a centralized database. Once there, a care worker can use a web based system to determine if the patient has received timely treatments and text back any instructions to the Aftercare worker.
Challenges ahead
Despite all the positive progress mobile services has provided citizens of the developing world, there are still challenges ahead. In previous posts on my weekly readings, I’ve described several of the ways in which mobile phones and mobile services are being utilized to address some of the difficult challenges of the bottom billion: Global Health, Financial Services, Commerce and more. The ability to gather and disseminate news and information is equally as important. Yet many of these efforts have been the result of small scale efforts to prove out the various services. As public, no-profit and commercial organizations start to think beyond the pilot stage the reality of challenges settles in. Issues of budget, implementation difficulty and lack of shared practices must be addressed if the potential for mobile technologies to help improve life in the developing world is to be fulfilled.
For NGO’s and public sector organizations in particular, sustainability is huge problem. The costs of scaling and deploying technology solutions is often expensive and difficult. In our third reading, “Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use” (Kincade and Verclas) by NGO’s, its pointed out that often times these projects are heavily subsidized by direct donations from the mobile operators and technology companies. However, it’s unclear that this level of support would continue if a project were to be scaled out. Businesses have responsibilities to create return on investment for their shareholders, so without commercial incentives many of these projects may be at risk of remaining small pilot projects only. Another challenge is the silo’d nature of these organizations. A startling example was presented by Anthony Ofosu of Access to Health, Ghana when he described the problem of tracking patient health progress across the various health services organizations. Each organization required a unique identifier the patient, and did not trade information across services. So a doctor working in Malaria services had no idea if an expectant mother that came to visit him may have already received vaccination from a maternal care service. It’s actually not unlike our challenges here in U.S. Often times, clinics do not share patient records and its the patients who suffer from either too little or unnecessary care.
Certainly, access continues to be a challenge. Despite the amazing growth of mobile phone subscriptions in the developing world, dealing with the cost of access remains. However as more homegrown operators emerge, infrastructure expands and increased competition come into play this challenge will be overcome. Then the focus will be how quickly the technology divide can be bridged so that internet connectivity becomes as common place as SMS based service is today. Once the internet gap is sufficiently bridged, a host of new mobile solutions will emerge to drive further forward momentum for quality of life improvements for the bottom billion. The challenge will be if we can take the lessons being learned now and apply them in the future so that solutions are much more sustainable and less expensive and difficult to implement.
Use Case: Navigate to a friend’s blog page on Media Space.
Step 1. From Media Space home page, user clicks on Blogs link in top nav, which takes the user to a page showing a newsfeed of recent blog posts, and a Search by Author text entry field in the left hand navigation.
Step 2. User clicks into Search by Author text entry field and types name of friend. This takes the user to their friend’s blog page.
