I briefly attended a user-centered design seminar thingy yesterday, and one of the things that came up was the increasing acceptance of the importance of ethnography in design research. More and more companies are “getting” that they’ve got to observe people and better understand what they do, how they behave, etc.

As a UCD nerd, I think this is great. But listening to this discussion, I wondered if we’re going far enough.

As someone who got a B.A. in anthropology, and who lives with an archaeologist, I fear we’re giving ethnography short shrift. We’re cherry-picking a few methods, applying them in a rapid fashion, and patting ourselves on the back for “understanding people.”

Our research tends to be so problem-focused, and so user-oriented, that we lose sight of the situated-ness of our designs. Not just situated in a context (whether it’s domestic or commercial) or within a group, but within a larger, more complex, social fabric.

I think it’s a shame that we study users for 2-3 weeks, get all pleased with ourselves, and move on. We ought to be cultivating relationships with our subjects, and engaging with them for weeks, months, even years. (Sadly, such opportunities aren’t really in the consultant’s purview — here’s to hoping organizations recognize and address this need.)

I was thinking about this because at this design event, some of the participants were commenting on what, for them, was a new idea — that users make products meaningful for themselves. This was in relationship to obviously-tailorable products like del.icio.us or upcoming.org. But it was disappointing that these folks didn’t recognize that “users” having been adopting and adapting products forever, and they’ve definitely been circumventing designers’ intent since the beginning of mass production.

The class I took last semester on Information and Society had some wonderful readings on a subject called the Social Construction of Technology, which is an approach for understanding how the meaning and use of designed objects shift and evolve over time for quite a while before they become established. We also read some work on “configuring the user,” the follies of which danah addressed a while back.

I think as more and more tools get more and more explicitly social, we’re going to have to reach beyond snapshot ethnography in order to truly understand use, meaning, and value, and that designers who pay attention to this ought to be able to have longer-term successes… ones that might require more investment, but ones that could truly pay off.

For what it’s worth:

Yesterday morning I had a work-related breakfast meeting, and wanted to do so in downtown San Francisco. Torrefazione was suggested, but I opted for Starbucks — because of the wi-fi. And then I bought a coffee and scone there. I’m surprised we’re not seeing more collaboration between Starbucks and Kinko’s — that office away from the office thing is a very powerful draw for Laptop Nomads.

And in the end, I hardly used the wi-fi. It was more the having access to it.

From the press section of BestCellars.com, comes a story from Wine News about BestCellars’ innovative approach to selling wine. It includes this question-and-answer:

So how did this whole thing come about?

Most wine stores tend to be organized by grape type, or country of origin. But neither of those organizational directions allow for a consumer who knows nothing about wine to be comfortable. They both presume a certain knowledge and awareness on the part of the consumer, and when you put the onus of knowing what a cabernet or merlot is on the customer, you immediately narrow your customer base. We wanted to democratize the process. We really set about making it as simple as possible.

You’ve got eight categories set up. In red wine, for example, there are “juicy,” “smooth,” “big,” each modified by several adjectives. Why those adjectives? Why those categories for that matter?

First we started looking at all the adjectives commonly used for wine. We blocked out maybe two hundred and fifty of them on cards, and then aligned the cards in broad sweeps based on attributes we thought would tie to different colors of wine. Then we started to turn over cards that needed a glossary for the average person to comprehend, the words that were understandable only by someone with a substantial knowledge of wine. Then if they were so broad that they were essentially meaningless we got rid of them. In the end we had about thirty words that seemed to work.

I love that a business model is predicated on a way of classification.

Apologies for having so little to offer. Work has become a little… nutty (in a good way!), and I haven’t had time to think and write.

In lieu, some pointers to stuff we got going on at Adaptive Path.

Redesigning Blogger, a one-day workshop where Doug Bowman and Jeff Veen step you through how they redesigned Blogger to better explain the message, encourage registration, and do so while looking good.

Additionally, 37Signals is offering their workshop, Building of Basecamp, an in-depth look at the development of their leading-edge project management tool.

Use the discount code APDC to receive 10% off either or both days.

In other news, Scott got “Web Design: ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet” published on CIO.com. It’s very similar to what he wrote for the Adaptive Path site, though with some smart introductory text for a UX-unaware audience. Most cool is that we’re getting the value of user experience word out to the more business and tech press.

As I have increased the frequency of my handwashing (best way to prevent colds!), one thing I noticed is that there is an astonishing variety of mechanisms for dispensing paper towels. You’d think it’s a pretty, well, solved problem. You’d think that, by now, the optimal solution would have been hit upon, and just used.

But no. So, I’ve gone into bathrooms and photographed some of the variety I’ve seen…

There’s everything from the spring-loaded…

…to the pull-and-tear…

…to the one that got me started, the wave-your-hand…

…and much more.

As a design-minded person, I find all these different approaches to the same problem fascinating, because they each betray different concerns. I would think that, for the user, the most optimal is the upside-down-kleenex box — easy dispening, and no need to touch anything.

But for the provider of the paper towels, they probably like the big rolls, because I’m guessing they’re cheaper than the sheets, and last longer before refilling.

I don’t know why bathrooms still have dispensers that require manipulation — touching them defeats the hygienic purpose.

And do we really need motion sensors in them? (And I find that those motion sensors tend to work poorly).

Anyway, I’d love to start a collective album of paper towel dispensers over on Flickr. I’ve developed a tag, papertoweldispenser, that can serve this singular purpose. People of earth: go into your public bathrooms, photograph your dispensers, upload them to Flickr, and tag them so they appear here! Let’s see just how many varieties there are.

My essay, “Organization in the Way: How decentralization hobbles the user experience” has just been posted to the Adaptive Path site. Readers of peterme will recognize its genesis a few posts back. I was able to evolve the piece so that it spoke to a broader concern in design and user experience. I also wrote this passage, of which I’m most proud:

Ideally, these measures would balance to create a superior product. Realistically, all of those disparate objectives often conflict, leading to one of three results: 1) “design by committee,” where, in an effort to achieve consensus, innovative impulses are dampened, 2) “design by accretion,” where products are cobbled together in a serial fashion, each department contributing without regard to what the other groups are doing, or 3) “design by gauntlet,” where projects are subject to so many approval processes that they can be stalled at any point along the way.

It sounds like I would do well to read The Mythical Man-Month as it touches on some of the same problems with projects.

The latest meme to catch fire in the IA community deals with the folk classification tools found on systems like del.icio.us and Flickr. Users are able to freely tag content with whatever metadata comes to mind.

Headshift provides a good overview of the issues at hand, and Alex does his thing when making sure we appreciate the good and the bad of such approaches.

I just IMed with Victor about this for a while, and thought I’d chime in with my perspective.

I touched on this topic almost three years ago in a post titled “Vernacular Thesauri,” based on a talk I saw at the 2001 ASIS Annual. Go read it. It’s about porn.

Okay, you back?

First off, I think we should drop the term “folksonomy.” No offense to Thomas — it’s a catchy term, which, I guess, is why it has caught on. It’s also inaccurate. What bugs me most is the use of the word “taxonomy.” Taxonomies tend toward hierarchy, and they tend to be imposed. Tagging does not a taxonomy make.

What we’re talking about here is “classification.” In rooting around, trying to find some prior research on this topic, I plugged “folk classification” into Google, it turns out that anthropologists have done some thinking around this, particularly with respect to ethnobiology, or how the folk approach biology, and ethnoscience.

This lead me to think that the appropriate term would be “ethnoclassification”, and when I plugged that into Google, I found “Slouching Toward Infrastructure”, a page for a 1996 Digital Libraries Workshop lead by Susan Leigh Star.

The practice of tagging on del.icio.us works because, at its heart, it’s meant for the use of the individual doing the tagging. The fact that it contributes to the group is a happy by-product… But as a tool for group tagging, it’s woefully insufficient. Del.icio.us has a very low findability quotient. It’s great for serendipity and browsing, and an utter disaster for anything targeted.

This is where Alex’s quest for a middle ground resonates with me. Being as wedded to the practical as I am, I wonder how we could put such ethnoclassifications to work in useful contexts. I’m thinking maybe an intranet, where people are free to tag documents as they see fit, but there is some librarian/IA role that attempts to provide some degree of robustness to such a scattered classification. If nothing else, this approach would be a boon to developing thesauri, particularly variant terms.

Chatting with some friends who have been going to Burning Man for years, we marveled at how, even with it’s astonishing growth, the event has been able to retain it’s essence year after year. It’s remarkable that, while the experience necessarily changed (25,000 people is just too different from 250), the spirit, and what draws people to it, has stuck around. Yes a few jaded folks dismiss the more recent instantiations, but that’s little more than old-timers pining for long-lost glory days.

Anyway, in our discussions, it became clear that, among the things it has done very right, Burning Man has a small set of core principles that are easy to communicate:

– No spectators
– No commerce
– Leave no trace
(there are probably others, these are what sprung to mind).

Such simple and clear memes are easy to spread, and won’t mutate. Additionally, they’re pithy, unambiguous, and directive. They thus support dissemination to a wide audience, and can effectively prepare first-timers for what is expected of them. Any growing organization can learn from this example.

I’ve just completed the first section of Lawrence Weschler’s delightful collection of essays, Vermeer in Bosnia. One essay, “Aristotle in Belgrade”, follows protests in the face of rigged elections. He describes the Serbian political mindset as being able to support seeming opposites — “they could simultaneously feel that their neighbors were affording them no threat and exult at a visiting demagogue’s promise that he wasn’t going to let those neighbors ‘beat you anymore,'”” — and of not being cognizant of consequences — “They saw no problem in roundly despising a leader and simultaneously planning to vote for him.”

Weschler explains the origin of such puzzling thought as “state propoganda, [which] had blithely spewed forth all manner of contradictory positions simultaneously.” His tone, however, is a bit condescending — as if it’s a Serbian problem that he just cannot understand.

I read that passage the day I read Louis Menand’s piece in the latest New Yorker, “The Unpolitical Animal.” It’s a roundly depressing piece, filled with evidence that people make political decisions without the slightest concern for ideology, issues, and consequence. I’ll quote the passage that connected me to Weschler’s work:

Repeal [of the estate tax, which effects the wealthiest two percent of the populations] is supported by sixty-six per cent of people who believe that the income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has increased in recent decades, and that this is a bad thing. And it’s supported by sixty-eight per cent of people who say that the rich pay too little in taxes. Most Americans simply do not make a connection between tax policy and the over-all economic condition of the country.

Americans are, clearly, just as contradictory as Weschler’s Serbs. I suspect Weschler’s condescension toward the Serbian mindset has likely lifted, given an editorial he penned for the LA Times, “He’s The Picture of Racial Compassion,” about how President Bush employs photos of himself with black people in an attempt to demonstrate his “compassion” toward them, though his policies have only served to hurt them.

Weschler is the head of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, though it’s not clear that the institute actually does anything.

He’s also trying to get a magazine titled Omnivore off the ground.

And the Globe and Mail has a decent interview with Weschler.

A while back I posted about how product designs are getting too difficult, and how the greater the number of steps it takes for someone to set up a product, or to use a service, the less successful they will be. In it, I mentioned the Six Sigma concept of Rolled Throughput Yield: “the probability of being able to pass a unit of product or service through the entire process defect-free.”

Let’s say you have a website, and a registration process that takes four steps. Each step is pretty well-designed– 90% of users are able to complete each step. However, only 65% of people will actually make it through, because you’re losing people every step of the way (.9 x 4 = .65). The shows that often the best way to address the problem is not to improve the individual elements, but to remove elements altogether.

More recently, I wrote about how hard it is for organizations to produce well-designed products, because in order for a good design get out in the world, it has to run jump through a set of departmental hoops — be approved by the business owners, marketers, designers, engineers, manufacturers, etc. etc. At each step, the project can be stalled. Or so many people have to be pleased, products are “designed by committee” – not a recipe for innovation.

This struck me as a kind of organizational variant to Rolled Throughput Yield. Particularly because we’ve seen that the organizations that do support innovative design have smaller, multi-disciplinary teams, not departmental stovepipes. It also struck me that these are two sides of the same coin. The complexity of product from the first example is often a result of the complexity of organizations in the second — design by committee, or some form of serial design process, leads to products with too many discrete parts and interfaces, which are essentially invitations for something to go wrong.

Separately, on a bit of a Googlewander, I came across David Woods, who, among other things, has written about “human error.”In reading some papers he wrote on the topic, I came across this diagram:

Taken from here (PDF), which is meant to be read in conjunction with this (PDF).

(I’ve been meaning to read more of David’s stuff for a while. I think the study of “human error” can be an insightful perspective for user-centered design.)

The challenge, of course, seems to be to manage complexity. Complexity seems to be a given. Is it? Is increasing complexity inevitable? Occasionally products emerge that massively reduce complexity (at least, complexity of use), and are popular — the original Palm (compared to earlier pen-based computing) and Google come to mind. Maybe the iPod (I don’t know how it stacks up to other music players from a complexity standpoint).