"social network" was coined in the 1950s by John Barnes, a British anthropologist, inspired by the work of Elizabeth Bott and her kinship studies... These early social network researchers were primarily and fundamentally concerned with people and the social management of relationships and connections... these pioneers were not satisfied with the elegance of the model alone. They understood there was something to be said for looking at people as people, not simply as gates or nodes or conduits to other people.

they were interested in understanding people, and less invested in the belief they could engineer behavior

human beings take a while to develop social norms that enable and preserve their social connections; having a sudden disruption issued from afar and rippled through the system in a flash can be seriously damaging and can take time to repair.

it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

the way of thinking that lead to these errors, were ones that privileged simplified ideas and simplistic business imperatives over any concern for or understanding of human social engagement. 

a "social" steeped in a deeper understanding of what the technology is and how it fits into people's everyday lives... there needs to be a concomitant shift in the way in which design decisions are elaborated and business decisions are made.

Geeks, computer scientists, and mathematicians who love networks are not good people to assess your social-networking products.

Why? Because we operate simultaneously in user and evaluator mode. John Dewey, in his "Critique of Abstraction: The Intellectual Life as a Tool," makes the distinction between primary and secondary experience. Primary experience is a subjective relationship to external objects that are sensory—emotive, psychological, physical—but not reflected upon. They are experienced... Secondary experience is a rational process in every sense possible.

Social networking sites have focused on networks and individuals. When it comes to interacting and having relationships, people don't think in terms of the sum total of connections and inter-connections they have, they think of the individuals they know and the groups they belong to. People and groups are different from nodes and networks. 

in the rush to develop gestural (or "natural") interfaces, well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown.

But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best prectices, the more likely they are to fail.

Most progress is made through small and sustained incremental steps.

Discoverability: All operations can be dicovered by systematic exploration of menus.

Scalability: The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.

Recently. I’ve been reading through a lot of customer feedback for a project I’m working on. Naturally, not all of it is positive – which is actually helpful, because I can’t figure out how to improve the experience if I don’t know what’s wrong with it. But what I find interesting is that every now and then, I see a comment suggesting that Sears should fire their webmaster - implying a single person who is in complete control of the entire website - and hire a high school or college student to make a better site.

I have to say that at first blush, this idea seems ludicrous to me. I don’t think I could pick a single person who would actually qualify as our “webmaster”, considering how many people actually work on it. The website was built by over a hundred product managers, IAs, designers, coders, and engineers, and maintained by an army of taxonomists and merchants, not to mention the management to make sure the whole organization doesn’t just implode under its own weight. I don’t know any single person out there who is capable of handling all that! I also find it just as unrealistic, if not even more so, that a student could effectively create a site to handle all the complexities of e-commerce at such a large scale as Sears needs it. Most of my coworkers bring years of industry experience doing exactly that; many (myself included) also have a graduate education directly related to their job. I’ve known many incredibly bright students, and I also recognize that sometimes what you need is a perspective outside of the industry, but at the same time I know I’ve personally benefited enormously from having had the opportunity to practice my learnings both in higher education and in industry.

So how do I handle comments like these? It’d be easy to just write them off and say that these customers don’t know what they’re talking about if they think that our website could possibly be built by just one person. But I try to look past that. In fact, I think it actually helps me recognize who I’m designing for. I try to know as much as I can about the nitty-gritty details of what goes on to keep Sears.com up and running and keep customers happy, but most of our customers don’t. And you know what? They don’t have to, and they shouldn’t have to. So even if these comments don’t accurately represent the structure of our organization, they are still from real people with real, honest complaints about the experience we’ve delivered. Trying to brush their feedback off with a defense like “You don’t know anything about our business, we have so much going on that you couldn’t know about” is just an excuse that doesn’t help them. It’s our duty to address their feedback as best we can - even if they see us as just one superhuman!

Labels: customer feedback

Today AdAge published their top 30 list of Best places to Work in Marketing and Media in 2010. The list celebrates the 30 employers in the marketing, media and advertising industry that have created environments in which people love to work and contribute their best ideas.

These companies simultaneously nurture employees, clients and their communities with things like diversity programs, family-friendly benefits, education reimbursement and workspaces designed to stimulate creativity.

Unfortunately, we are not on the list, and none of the distinguished companies is even from Chicago. But with all the changes that are taking place within UX Sears I believe that we could have a shot for the next year. Just a few tweaks here and there, like the workspace design and implementation of the flexible working arrangements, and other improvements we can not only boost our results, revenue but also make the employees feel proud of the work they’re doing. We are really not that far off, and do offer all the things that employees value the most, we just need to take it to the next level.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Enter contest by: 10/5/10. To enter and for Official Rules, visit billionpoints.com. Official rules: http://bit.ly/bD5I3g

Labels: baby, billion points, contest, puppy, Sears

Today a couple of quotes and paraphrases from an article I read in August issue of Wired, titled “The Master Planner”, an interview with a really smart guy, University of North Carolina computer scientist, and author of a few books -the latest one “The Design of Design” - Fred Brooks. His insights are known as Brook’s law.

His first insight: “You can’t accelerate a nine-month pregnancy by hiring nine pregnant women for a month. Likewise, you can’t always speed up a [...] project by adding more (people); beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays.”

When Brooks was asked about design process, he stressed out that a great design comes from great designers, not necessarily from processes. He then continued by saying that a key component of the design process is for an organization (or designers) to identify the ‘scarcest resource’ and optimize for it. It doesn’t always mean that the scarcest resource is money. In Formula 1, for example (and this is not the example he used, but this one speaks to me better), the money is there but the scarcest resource is weight. The constructors must build the most aerodynamically efficient, technologically genius car, but they must build it as light as possible, and distribute that weight evenly across the car to ensure the right balance. The drivers even cannot wear a wrist watch on a race day, because that adds extra weight that will cost them fractions of a second (the difference that separates the fastest car and the following 10 drivers on the grid is usually less that a second per lap). It’s hard to think that way of an e-commerce site, at first, but it is a foundation for achieving great design.

Brooks also cites that a good method of design is to begin with a vision of what you want to accomplish and then proceed to one by one remove the obstacles that prevent you from achieving that vision. It is far more successful to start with a vision rather than a list of features (I think it’s how Jobs/Ives designed iPhone – slick and beautiful, while the other phone manufacturers were in a feature war with each other. I can see the feature war with the top e-commerce sites right now, including ours, but none of them is offering the customer the big vision that can grab their imagination (hearts, and wallets) and make them follow).

Brooks is also a big seeker of knowledgeable criticism – without implying that it is mandatory for people to always play it nice regardless of what their expertise and experience tells them is the right thing to do. In other words, we need to be open minded and welcome different points of view, even when sometimes they are in direct opposition to ours.