Building Social / Collaboration Platforms

I started my trek designing, developing, and managing social / collaboration platforms in 1996. Over those years I've been part of a lot of different projects, development of platforms, long term and short term strategy and planning with vendors in the space, and in recent years back helping design, and product management (from an advisory role and mentoring). I have also been framing product needs and flows for new systems (either plugging into existing social platforms for new major releases, adding these capabilities into existing platforms with distinctly different focus to augment them where other existing services can't fit, and / or building platforms from scratch). I have also been continuing to advising organizations by helping them understand their needs better and problem sets they are trying to resolve before they get into the selection process, so to best fit product to their actual needs.

The focus of this piece is for organizations looking at social and / or collaboration platforms or services for internal and / or external uses. This is to help provide some understanding when considering a build versus buy consideration, but also some background on platform and services design and development

Lessons Learned

The lessons learned aren't new lessons learned for me, but I'm finding they are still relevant and haven't shifted all that much in the last 7 to 10 years.

Build vs. Buy

The build versus buy question is oddly still asked. I had figured about 15 years ago that by 2010 organizations would mostly just consider buying a service or platform to use. Many organizations still are considering building, as social and collaboration seems easy. But,nearly always you want to buy a service or platform rather than building.

Why? Time. This is comparison is for getting things up and running and working smoothly at a somewhat foundational level.

On average, after going through needs assessment and right fitting a purchase decision a service or platform can be up and running optimally in around 9 months, with the usual range being 6 to 18 months. That is getting the service running, getting test groups in the service, optimizing and iterating the service, modifying the design and UI to meet needs, building taxonomies that work, getting onboarding created and honed, work through some lasting workflows based on needs, and getting community managers comfortable working with the service and patterns honed for the cultures they are working with. Most services and platforms can be up running and functional in 48 hours for very basic functions, usable in 2 weeks, working through initial groups and integrations in 3 to 6 months, and iterations and scale often span the 3 months to 18 month difference.

If you are building your own it is 2 years to 3 years on average to get something up and running and working smoothly. This 2 to 3 years is the comparison to the 9 month mark. Many well funded product development attempts are getting to feature parity with something they could buy in that 2 to 3 year span.

Why Build?

There a few reasons to go down the longer and more painful build path: 1) There isn't a product that remotely covers the complexities you are experiencing and have documented in your needs assessment (more than likely a good chunk of what you need to build can be bought); 2) The identity model and adaptive needs aren't supported by existing offerings (this is one of common reasons as identity models with adaptive use on most platforms are limited - most often limited on the free or bundled services - and in many platforms rather stiff and restrictive); 3) You are building or integrating a large collection of services that don't interconnect well and collaboration, social interactions, communication in and around them is essential; 4) The social components are internal to another platform you own and have built end-to-end. There are a few other edge cases to build rather than buy, but these four are the most common of the rare cases where buidling makes sense.

If building what is needed? The most important things needed is teams who have done this before a few times (yes not a team as this isn't a light effort). Building social platforms is hard and complex, it isn't adding commenting to content on an existing site, nor building a simple messaging system, but dealing with adaptive systems that will need to embrace and support many cultures and sub-cultures that intersect with their different mental models. See the roles needed in Team Roles Needed for Social Software Projects. If you have those covered, particularly the social sciences, and with people with serious depth on these, not just watched TED Talks, nor read light blog posts, nor the TLDR versions, but actually had years doing this on top of serious depth of understanding, then you may be ready.

How Can This Still Be So Lengthy?

Social software is hard and complex, which is the simple answer. There is a lot to build and account for. I've watched and worked with teams who have built a few platforms for social and collaboration in the past and sold them off. They have started anew and getting to a good platform with basic feature parity with some new functionality to move things forward it has been 2 years at a minimum.

In the past couple of years there have been quite a few new services surfacing that have design and development teams with nearly all members having 5 to 10 years of prior experience building and managing social platforms and in 6 to 9 months they have something decent, yet still a clumsy beta. The product isn't open to everybody. It normally goes through heavy iterations and most of them shut everything off for a few months for rebuilds and reopen beta again. A decently good and useable service and platform often hits that mark at the 2 year point, if not farther out.

Another reason it takes time is the adapting to changes and norms of use. Most organizations are looking at systems that will be relatively easy to understand for their employees and or customers so they spend minimal amount of time training and onboarding. The interaction patterns that are common and norms are rather fluid and shift a little or a lot every 9 months to 18 months or so. Patterns that were fine at the product development start, may have changed quite a bit in a year.

Social Interaction Design / User Experience is Complex

A few years back I framed out 20 social roles for different interaction model roles people fall into in social platforms / services. When I started talking about it vendors responded that they were lucky if they had two: User and Admin. In the past 6 years things have changed a little for vendors as they are trying to embrace more social roles. But, for community managers they are commonly working with 6 to 12 different roles and or personas, which has vendors working with a broad set of personas, sometimes beyond 15 (the social role is just one element of a persona and it is common in reality to have people with 4 or 6 different social roles they embrace across a few groups in a community or network.

Having those designing and developing a platform working from this understandings helps smooth some of the complexity. But, having solid familiarity with this diversity has become essential if building a service or platform that is expected to work broadly, which is what social platforms do.

The Wrap

Hopefully this helps a tiny bit when thinking through "should I build or buy" or "why is my social product development taking so long" questions.

Design Fiction Futures for NYC Libraries

I have long been a fan of design fiction to frame what the deployment of a design idea looks like after it has been created and is in use. I have used this quite a few times in my own work over the years. But, seeing great examples of design fiction in public isn’t a common occurrence. The great folks at Near Future Laboratory do great design fiction work – it is well worth picking up their “All-In-One Design Fiction Combo Pack” if you haven’t yet.

Librarians at large

Fantastic Example for NYC Branch Libraries

This week Union released When A Branch Becomes The Root: A proposal by UNION that imagines the future of NYC’s branch libraries.. This is not only a great example of design fiction, but a great rework and imagining explained as happened of how to reshape and design not only the physical New York City branch libraries properties, but how to expand how they function as a service for people in the city. The brand / identity design becomes as much of an important part of the work as it helps not only help the library stand out, but helps bring the library and information out of the libraries and into people lived.

There is so much that is really good in this proposal and how it is executed that it will likely be an open tab for a while in my browser or in near reach saved out.

Shift Happened - Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined

What are Small Apps Loosely Joined?

There has been a large shift in how many people work today and part of that is in the tools that they use to get work done. This shift in work patterns mirrors the shift that many had in their personal lives around social interactions and productivity.

Late one night many years ago (long before the iPhone), a group of us were talking about web and mobile and opportunities to work in a variety of similar tools that were all interconnected. The mash-up culture was a year or two behind us with Paul Radamacher’s first map mashup HousingMaps and the salient understanding that surfaced from that was the ability to have different interfaces for different needs and uses that could work as a workflow, or even similar interfaces for different personal needs of the users. We talked about Twitter and its heavy reliance on third-party developers to build web and mobile apps and services on top of its services and the Twitter API (the application programming interface, which is a standard data and interaction layer that sits behind the scenes bring data back and forth between the service). This approach allowed anybody to build an interface for seeing and interacting with Twitter or create an interface that provided greater ease of use for tasks. With tongue in-cheek (paraphrasing David Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”), I said this model was small apps loosely joined.

What joined these apps together was a common data layer that fits a standard data model (or, as is common in APIs, a data model that self describes). The Twitter model allowed people to interact with the service through a mobile app with full functionality of the Twitter site, or to see many different Twitter lists in something like TweetDeck, or monitor and respond through different accounts in something like HootSuite, while tracking follows and drops in other monitoring services.

This same idea is more prevalent now across our mobile devices and the apps and services that they connect to and use. Not only are today’s mobile apps and services interacting with the APIs on the internet, but they are working with standard file formats on the backend and apps that meet the needs of users’ context and workflows. Some of the common app and service types that people have been shifting to the small apps loosely joined model are: Calendar, email, photos, text / documents, and to do lists / reminders (a closer look at these follows).

Who is Doing This?

The small apps loosely joined concept is nothing new in the technical geek and productivity nerd community (as part of both tribes, i use the words geek and nerd lovingly), as well as for early adopters. These uses and patterns with small apps loosely joined started surfacing around ten years on the web and mobile devices, all interconnected to the internet.

We understand innovation and broad adoption can take quite some time, roughly 10 years for innovations and new ideas to take hold broadly. We are about 10 years into this way of working and interacting with information and applications, so it was not exactly a surprise to hear research (done in-house to better understand the mobile market) that 60 to 70 percent of military members and their families surveyed use more than one app for a task types. They used calendars, email, and weather as examples. I checked with others who do surveys of employees inside organizations if they were looking at the question and found that they were. Their responses were also in the 60 to 70 percent range for calendar, to do, and text apps on mobile devices.

So, while this small app loosely joined focus and obsession within technology and productivity communities has been more than a decade old, it is something that is now rather mainstream. Over the last five years or so, when I am traveling or in a dank gym for club basketball, I often ask people next to me what apps and services they like the most on the mobile devices that is in their hand. Their answers often surface apps related to tasks and workflows for a data type (calendar, document, etc.) and the person would qualify how and in which circumstances they use it. Quite often, the app did one or two things really well that others didn’t cover or did not do well in their perspective.

Why are People doing this?

There are a lot of reasons why people started embracing small apps loosely joined. The primary driver has been mobility and looking for small mobile or tablet apps that do a specific, needed task. Mobile and tablet uses often have quite different contexts for use, including a mix of creation and consumption, but the affordances and agency in these apps is a driver too. Having applications work across platforms is helpful, but it is more essential to have open file formats and standards that work with apps that can pick up the file and provide use on another device with the constraints and augmented capability mobile and tablets provide.

There are additional relevant benefits of the file formats and standards working across devices. The ability to easily share files with others with whom you are working or communicating is a great benefit, as the platform doesn’t matter, just the ability to grab an app (often inexpensive and sometimes free) to read and modify the file is key. Being able to easily share files leads to always having needed files accessible, as they can be kept of an internet directory (the kids, okay grown-ups, call this cloud storage).

The last benefit that is driving people to the world of small apps loosely joined is the value of non-proprietary files, which isn’t as hippy and give-it-to-the-man as it sounds–it’s really about ensuring that the files will work on any device with an application that handles that type of object. Having to keep two or three versions of the same software around so one can work across file differences, or open files in a different version of the software so it can be saved down into an older version, is silliness we can leave in the inefficient old days. Many of the file structures that are based on around text, including calendars, can be opened in any text application and read and edited there.

Where are People Doing This?

Most people (particularly outside the geeks) started down this path when smartphones and the modern class of tablets entered their lives. They looked for ways to replicate how they worked on laptops and desktops, but often the same apps weren’t there and they had to improvise. Word of mouth also spread ideas and options for getting things done. But, often people go exploring small, focused apps that are inexpensive or free to see what they do. The small targeted apps, often in the “does one thing well” class of app or small app that is does a few things simply and easily, have filled made it easy to try quite a few different apps to find something that works. People often find a few apps that fit into a workflow that targets a few small tasks to get things done while standing in line, stuck in traffic, or sitting at your desk waiting for one’s computer to finish updating and reboot.

As a result, often people find that this small focused app model helps them do the things they need to do, and it can be more efficient than digging around large cumbersome software. Often this can be more efficient as the person is not digging around large cumbersome software. Once this becomes a habit or a way of working on mobile, the expectation is that it should also work on the desktop / laptop as well. People look for similar apps and services that fit their more efficient workflows that started on their “devices that are too small and limited to do any real work on” and want that same type of focussed application where they “do their real work”.

This change is also being driven by more than just shifts in devices–people are trying apps and services in their personal life to help manage their schedules or work simultaneously with club or event organizers crafting an email or newsletter. Our personal lives used to trail our work lives as far as technology and services
augmenting what we do, but now what we’re doing in our personal lives has greatly surpassed the capabilities of many of our work offerings.

The Types of Apps that Often Fit the Bill

The starting place for many people who try a variety of apps on their mobile and tablet devices are weather, text, and calendar. We don’t modify weather apps as they are mostly just a display of provided content, but there are much variety among the offerings, such as <give a good, standard example> and DarkSky, which offers micro-location weather with how many minutes until precipitation starts or stops.

Text apps

Text apps is where many start seeing the concept and value of small apps loosely joined. People want something more than just simple notes application to jot ideas and sync them to other devices. They want to be able to read and do a little editing of text that they or others started writing on their “work” devices, all while standing in line or during other available moments that permeate our day. Soon this “little bit of editing” seems like it isn’t all that bad to do and they start picking up things they started writing elsewhere and knock out more on their mobile device or tablet. Or, they have an idea when they are not near their “work” device and start jotting a few notes in a text app, and soon it has turned into a couple or few paragraphs. The accessibility and convenience of these capabilities has switched on a lightbulb. Talking and comparing notes with friends and colleagues, they find there are apps that are not just simple text, but can add annotations for structure (headers and outlines), hooks for style (bold and italics), and more. This often leads to learning that some apps have more robust writing tools (dictionary, thesaurus, writing analytics, etc.). Those who write with a workflow of first getting ideas out of their head and then working with them to hone them are often most prone to the small apps loosely joined way of doing things. But, others also like the ease of just getting words and ideas out in one app, then editing elsewhere by just opening another app and grabbing the same text file from a cloud sync service or sharing between apps directly. These text apps, particularly when those that are markdown friendly, can take that initial text and turn it into a styled PDF, a Word doc, HTML to post, RTF (rich text format), or more.

Calendar apps

Calendars are another gateway drug, er application type, that leads to embracing the small apps loosely joined way of doing things. The calendar files are a set file type that is easy to move from app to app (except when working across platforms that have proprietary hooks that break compatibility). Smartphones and tables all come with calendar apps, but they rarely fit the full range of needs. Some people want a calendar to have a certain look or layout format that helps them see and evaluate their day, and there is an abundance of options on all platforms for visual display. But, the real gems are the small apps that shine with certain tasks like Fantastical does on Apple products with its natural language parsing that turns spoken words into an almost always bang-on calendar entry.

Other calendar apps start adding other intelligence and agency (applications doing things on our behalf to ease our work). Donna (rest her digital soul) was a favorite of mine for evaluating time between events and different modes of transport and calculating time to leave based on weather and traffic conditions (and if you were really stuck in a jam, it offered to help you get Uber). Donna was a gem for the space between meetings, but was an incredible help with coordinating kid pick-up and leave times related to their various events. Other apps that are helpful agents are Tempo (it came out of the same SRI lab as Siri), which is one of the fullest featured and most helpful calendar apps around. Tempo monitors your mail not only for events, but pulls the relevant emails, documents, location and contact information, and relevant transportation needs into one simple calendar entry–and all you had to do was place it on your calendar or say yes to an event invite. Tempo offers the ability to send an “I’m running late” notification to those with whom you are meeting, as well as the expected arrival time.

One the the interesting things about calendars in the small apps loosely joined set is that most of these class of apps do something else–they augment and clean-up the calendar entry. Say I open Tempo and it doesn’t recognize the location that is in the calendar entry - say it only has Ray’s Pizza in NYC (oh, you too have gone down this crazy path of meeting somebody at Ray’s Pizza in NYC only to later realize (not soon enough) that there are more than one and nearly a billion permutations of Ray’s, Ray’s Original, Original Ray’s, etc.)… so Tempo offers suggestions to sort out the exact location and then enters the address in the calendar file’s location field. Bingo! We have clarity, but not only does your calendar have clarity within Tempo, but in all other calendar apps that read that event file. Not only does Tempo do this, but other apps may also do this. We learn quickly the apps that don’t play well with others and hoard the clean up information (Mynd app has done this in the past, but it seems to be more friendly after its last update). Additionally, some apps give you the option as to which mapping and directions app you would like the calendar to open when you are actually on your way.

Email apps

One of the things that mobile and tablets reinforce is how painful email is in our lives (on both the work and personal sides). Being able to live in email and work with it easily in some managed way from a mobile device or tablet is critical. The small apps loosely joined concept really takes hold with email for many people. Some tools work as easy, light triage, such as Mailbox, to quickly filter through your email based on importance and time-relative needs. Also, some tools that manage attachments in email (or, more appropriately, files that would have been attachments, such as Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), which stores files and documents for your email to link to securely. The only requirement for most of the email apps is the email account must run on IMAP, which is pretty much the norm these days.

Photo apps

The quality of photos has improved drastically on many mobile devices and even tablets. This along with the adage, “the best camera is the one you have with you” (and most people always have their phone with them), has led to the reality that a lot of photos get taken on mobile devices and tablets. The photos are a common file type and there is an abundance of apps that can take a photo and modify it to improve its quality, add filters to change the look, add text, or turn into something that looks a lot like a watercolor painting. The photos can also be scanned and OCRed, as well as uploaded as a document and later searchable (as many do in Evernote.

Standards and Access

The key to many of the apps loosely joined use types mentioned (and the many not covered here) is that the files passed among apps follow a set or ad hoc standard. Text files that use Markdown (or Multi-Markdown that extends the capabilities to add footnote, tables, and more) are all human readable, but also any text app can read them and edit them. The file sizes are small, which is incredibly important for mobile devices and tablets in limited mobile bandwidth locations (be that Manhattan at 5:15 on any weekday or the outer suburbs of Accra).

Access to the files is the other important characteristic of small apps loosely joined. Working between apps may not require internet access, but working between devices that are not in bluetooth range, or sharing files to collaborate requires data access (most often through the internet). Small file size, which those of us working with mobile a long time know is still an essential for actually getting things done reliably.

Common Use Traits

These apps have a core set of functionality that stem from the capabilities of:

• Viewing
• Creating
• Honing
• Agency
• Features / functionality augmentation

Viewing is a common characteristic of all the apps, but the ability to create is where the real difference in these apps start to have real value for people using these apps and working in a small apps loosely joined workflow. The small apps can also provide the ability to hone what has been done in another app or on another device. This honing may be editing or adding data or an element to improve use. Agents that look out for us and do work we would be having to do is quite helpful, particularly when they are getting to the near bulletproof reliability some are approaching these days. The features and functionality augmentation in apps really helps when working with light apps that are focused and easy to use. Adding grammar checks and tools that can improve our work or creations, much like we would at a laptop or desktop, have shifted many people to this small apps loosely joined life.

App Traits

There are a few core traits in these apps. First off, as mentioned, they work on open document types that are are commonly used as actual or de facto standards.

Another trait is the apps are light (a few features and functionality sets), focus on simplicity, and are easy to use. Mobile devices do not have the screen space for complicated or complex interfaces, and, in reality, given where and how these devices are used, the user’s full attention is not on the app or device. Good mobile and tablet designers and developers understand this limitation very well and understand just how far they can push the limited human constraints that come into play when interacting with the apps.

The last related trait is that the apps are focused. When listening to how people use and interact with their devices and apps, it is interesting how they understand and parse functionality that fits their needs across apps. With calendaring, some people love Fanstastical’s UI for display of the day’s and upcoming events, while other people love how easy it is to input information and create events from a chunk of copied, typed, or spoken text (and getting it right). It was interesting talking with other Donna calendar app users as many of us would open Donna to get just travel-related information and / or honing the address, then close it and open another calendar app for its different functionality. The apps do a few certain things really well and those that live in the small apps loosely joined workflow are quite fine with that.

Wrap-up

The small apps loosely joined workflow and expectation has moved from mobile devices to the laptop / desktop world. The small apps that were just on mobile devices are showing up on the more fully powered devices. The output created from these apps have supporting services on the web that can augment this practice much further. Many who work in small apps loosely joined have learned to like the focused task and mindfulness of that targeted approach–they get things done far more efficiently and are more productive more of the time, and, as a result, they can often get more uninterrupted time to focus on living life beyond devices and apps. The goal going in was just to get things done on the device I have with me, but it is not a bad benefit for those whom value it.

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Shift Happened Series

• Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools
• Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined
  
• Part 3: Capturing Decisions in Social
• Part 4: The One Social Way (Or not) to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise

Donna, Designed for Use, Closes

The impending closing of Donna has bumped a couple of thoughts to blog to the front of the queue.

First off, Donna is an iOS calendaring app that focusses on one’s agenda for that day and upcoming days with a targetted focus on the transportation timing and how that impacts your day. If your life has children that need transporting between activities or work that is out and about bouncing to meetings or work sites Donna is utterly indespensable. Donna puts a focus on the getting between places, so calculates the travel time to let you know when you really should leave, as it monitors traffic and weather conditions. The app offers four different modes of transportation and the related times for those: Driving, public transit, biking, and walking.

One of the best parts of Donna, which many other applications also do, is it reads your native calendar on iOS and augments it. It isn’t a separate calendar to lose things in if you forget. Content you may modify to help plan in Donna, like search to find the exact location for a meeting, is added to the calendar object and can be used in other calendar apps. I will focus a bit more on this in the following section on “Small Apps Loosely Joined”.

Not only will Donna give you a warning when it is approching time to leave, but it can send those you are meeting with notification that you are on your way and / or you are running late. Donna also monitors the weather and can advise on transportation changes should you be walking or biking. One other really helpful element is having the option to use Uber, if you are in a city that has it (Donna knows) and the event is that day (this was incredibly helpful this week).

One of the wonderful things is the evening of the day prior Donna provides a notification of how many meetings you have the next day, but if you don’t have any in your calendar(s) it tells you to enjoy your day, which is a wonderful little touch.

Designing for Use

The thing that stands out with Donna is not just its really good interaction design and really well designed information structures for easy to scan appointments, but it is designed to solve a pain point. Most specifically it is designed for use. The design is focussed on solving a problem and to be an easy to use solution for that problem, which is: I have meetings and activities in my day that take me out and around and sorting out the timing so I can optimize my day for my interests (get more time by driving, more health and environmentally focusse using bike or walking, etc.). Letting others knwo when you are late or on your way is really helpful and directly tied to the mobility of getting to meetings and activities. Having an app that pulls all the needed information around that task set is fantastic.

Donna isn’t designed to be a full replacement for a calendar, but is there to augment it and the use needs around the activities of getting between places.

Donna also understands what is needed as well as not needed. Allowing for modifying settings for alerts and notifications is really helpful. Understanding when alarms are not going to be helpful, understanding helpful user preferences when you are running late (auto send notes, how far ahead, or not to send at all automatically). Donna was built with the idea of a really helpful human assistant who looks after your schedule and is a step ahead of you. This framing of use and a helpful model really shines through in the app.

Small Apps Loosely Joined

Donna and many other calendar apps that are on mobile devices are not aimed at fully augmenting your native calendar service, but to integrate and augment that service. The model that is increasingly familiar is along the idea of small apps loosely joined model. This model puts a focus on using standard data structures, common object types, and a central app or service as a hub to provide a foundation for other apps and services to use the core object and augment it, often with data that fits the model type, and exends use.

With Donna the object is a standard calendar entry that has day, time, timezone, location, who are meeting with, notes, etc. But, the app can improve the data in the object, such as location. But, most of the apps not only improve the information within itself, but improve the core data so all other apps that use that object as well. The apps are often offering agency to do a task, or set of tasks, around the object. Donna puts the use focus on the use needs for getting there and communicating with others around that activity.

With calendaring, many using Mac or iOS opt for Fantastical to imput new calendar items as its native language parsing into a calendar data structure is incredibly good. Some people really like the interface from Fantastical and use it to view their day and upcoming events. There are an incredible amount of viewing your calendar / schedule options out there. Another smart agent for the calendar is Tempo app, which works to aggregate everything around a calendar item and pull it into easy reach (very much in the Come to Me Web model). Tempo pulls all the contact information for all participants in a meeting, all related email, all related files, weather, etc. all within easy reach as part of its view of the calendar entry. Tempo is as indespensable as Donna is for me personally (and I heavily rely on Fantastical for easy input, on my mobile I talk the calendar entry info into Fantastical and let it do its thing).

Who is Living the Small Apps Loosely Joined Life?

So who is working this way? Not so surprisingly, if one has been paying attention to how people actually are using devices and services, the user survey’s the past year or so have been asking about using more than one app for task types (calendaring, notes, reminders, text, etc.) and finding that 60% to upper 70% of those surveyed are using multiple apps for task types. Those surveyed have often been well outside of the geek and nerd camps that have worked this way for years, but regular folks who are not deeply adept technically. The focus on apps that do a task or set of tasks insanely well and easily trump a large app that does many things somewhat well. That one size fits all and category winner thinking has been dead for quite a while and is far from helpful model for thinking about much of anything.

The last few years, either in conferasions or listening to them, with people talking about their apps and how they do things on the devices (often mobile and tablet) it is increasingly common to hear, “I use a few apps to do…” what follows is calendaring, text documents, notes, mapping, driving directions, reminders, etc. and two or more apps stated and the specific tasks and user flow they have for each app. These were often non-geeks, but having surveys targeted at mainstream users and their habits and use patterns really brought home how mainstream this actually is.

Good Bye Donna

As Harry McCracken pointed out in Yahoo to Donna Users: We’re Dispensing With Your Indispensable App Donna has become indispensable for me. The great folks at Incredible Labs (that includes bud Kevin Cheng) did a fantastic job with Donna. Keeping Donna going was likely going to be a struggle as the computing to suss out location and needs as well as the and licensing the transportation times they used was not going to live a long time as an ongoing free app. The competition with other apps starting to incorporate similar time for transit models (yet clearly not designed from a perspective of use, but as a feature to add) likely was going to make things tougher as well as Apple adding transporation times and notifications based on that in Mac’s Mavericks version (adding it to desktop OS and not the mobile OS really was an odd move that is very un-Apple as it was not designed from a use in mind perspective).

It has been a while that I have been worried about the long run for Donna. A chat with Kevin about running a start-up in this space somewhat gave legs to that concern. Many start-ups have an exit in mind from the start and with any luck and perseverence it is a positive exit (not just shutting it and going bankrupt). I am really happy for Kevin and the other Incredible Labs folks as they got a positive exit for them and I wish them well at Yahoo (for all that are making that transition). Incredible proved they could nail a service that is designed for use, which leads to it becoming a really valueable part of people’s lives. Thank your for bringing us Donna as an agent to greatly improve our lives.

Responsive Design is Part of the Question not the Answer

Today’s New York Times redesign has lit up Twitter and other services with many saying “… but, it isn’t responsive”. I quickly recalibrated who knows mobile design / development and who is still learning. Responsive design has become the mantra the zombies repeat for mobile. Responsive is one of the five options for mobile and most often the end product doesn’t end up with responsive as the best answer, it is the intermediary stage answer if needed.

I am going to start with looking at understanding mobile and the user, then look at how we got to responvie design, then look at the New York Times (which, I think is the most important piece of this whole piece).

Understanding Mobile and the User

The history of mobile and designing and developing for it goes back far beyond the iPhone and Android. It predates the years of smart phones that came before this current iteration, and gets it starts about the Post-WAP age (it actually starts with WAP, but it was so bloody limited and poor most skipped it). Early mobile started with the PALM generation of devices and building web pages that worked on the go (often through AvantGo or similar) or network connected apps. The design and thinking process, as far as which to use route to go started with understanding a few things (I framed these in 2003 in presentations, workshops, and client work as Model of Attraction Receptors, which I realized never blogged so can’t point to it but will have that shortly as an active link): The user and their use (the intellectual, perceptual, and physical receptors) and the whole of the device system (mechanical receptor).

The user’s basic need is they want the content or tool/service capability on their mobile device. Since the early 2000s more than 60 percent of us in the, often referred to as, first world have had these devices on us to use content we find out where we need it (in the world) either in a Come to Me Web manner, or finding and creating the information out in the world. (For many today the laptop / desktop is now their secondary device not their primary).

The essentials for the user are have the information or service in the mobile device and work. The “working” is where the thinking comes in for options as the question of network connectivity, volume and velocity of change of the content or service changes, how often with the user interact and how long, and is this the primary service or is a just to get one through until they get to their desktop (and are you really really sure about this last one). These are the rudimentary questions to understand some of the use to start making the decisions about options. The largest issue in the set of questions relates to the reality about the network and capabilities of the device as both capabilities are assumed better than reality. Networks are far more limited that assumed and devices on the whole are not as robust nor consistent as hinted at.

The mobile user is most often looking for something that is quick, easy to load, and really easy to use.

The options we have before us on mobile are: Native app, web app, web app wrapped in native app, mobile site (often using media query), and responsive.

The questions and thinking needed to work though which option fits the need best are quite a few and usually best worked through by people who have designed and built through all of the options, and (most importantly as always) been responsible and had to fix the end results. These people questioning not only working with those wanting mobile site or service, but also the users. The decision trees and understanding which route to go can be learned, but takes a workshop of a day or two not a blog post.

How Did We Get to Responsive?

So, with these five options how is it responsive got to the front of the line, even when you walk through all the questions and would rarely end up with responsive as a viable answer?

The simple answer is content management systems suck. In 2009 / 2010 many organizations realized they were late to the game and their site use had relatively high mobile use and their users were complaining about how poor the site was on mobile. (This actually hit much earlier and work on solutions has been long brewing going back to early 2000s as to how to resolve this.) Mobile finally had tipped into the territory of something organizations needed to deal with.

In 2010 Ethan Marcotte shared his Responsive Web Design as a way forward to get mobile web up and running, somewhat as a hack to CMS that couldn’t support other options. Ethan is also one of the many who with Jeremy Keith and others of us from the (now shuttered) Web Standards Project (WaSP) focussed on web design from a progressive enhancement model. Responsive design is intended to be a progressive enhancement approach, it is one of a few “mobile first” design approaches.

A large chunk of Responsive design as it is today isn’t practiced from a progressive enhancement approach and there is a ton of bloat up front, which is very counter to mobile needs. Responsive design filled a gap and serious need. As Ethan points out Responsive is one approach and other business cases will lead to other solutions.

Responsive Design for Content Management Systems that Suck

Part of the need and fit for Responsive web design is due to content management systems that suck. Why do they suck? There are many, but with mobile in particular there are two issues: 1) Content is not stored in a manner that is far enough separated from the presentation of it; 2) The CMS adds incredible cruft into the page that there is page bloat.

User Centered Design and Responsive Design

As Ethan points out in his Responsive Web Design article:

That’s not to say there isn’t a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices; for example, if the user goals for your mobile site are more limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach.

The business case should follow the user needs. In the last few years if you spend a lot of time watching how people use their mobile and tablets (how we use them our selves isn’t that helpful other than as a base to watch the insane variety of different use patterns others have and the interaction models other’s use when they are out or even in meetings - something I started doing in the 90s when I got a Palm Pilot as I watched others to see what I was missing, which was an extension to always watching others interact with the world around them to learn for myself (moving a lot as a kid provides this potential)). How people use mobile and tablet has expanded greatly in the past four to five years. The expectations (often users are completely unaware of their expectations as it becomes as natural as breathing for many) for each device and the actual use vary quite a bit. This expansive shift makes honing in to device classes needed.

The last year or so I have been hearing many doing mobile and tablet design for years have been moving away from broad (one-site for all and Responsive) offerings with Responsive to targeted offerings for mobile, tablet, and desktop and using hints of responsive within those classes of offering. The user research finds the needs are different enough across the classes that full Responsive became unwieldy very quickly.

Users Live Across the Patforms

One of the realities of use is it is very common for multi-modal use of sites (mobile, tablet, and desktop) and the need for content to be there. One of the very important user context to always consider is spacial memory. People remember where on a page they saw something. This is really important for news sites as people will see the an article that doesn’t have much interest, but later in the day they find themselves needing that article and often their memory of where it was on a page (Business page on far right column, etc.) is how they know to get to the article (one of the reasons news publications for year have offered a “print view” of their offerings). With most Responsive design this ability to switch between these presentation modes is not there.

I have heard users and content owners talk about this problem for a few years, but it was a train from NY to DC where I saw the deep frustration this causes. A gentleman in front of me was working and had started out in Boston and needed to link to an article he saw on the Boston Globe site that he was reading on his laptop in the morning in Boston. He tried finding the article on his mobile device, which triggered anger as there wasn’t a way to get to the full front page on the Globe’s responsive site, he needed to fire up his laptop. The whole train car started helping him, mostly saying go to the “M dot” (m.bostonglobe.com) site and find the link to the full desktop version. The inability to get to the full site stumped the train (they were mostly New Yorker’s who read papers with mobile version and desktop versions, like the New York Times). Soon the whole car was angry.

The ability to jump to a full desktop site in Responsive is technically really easy, but it is an interaction and design messy festival with state and user desire and intent, which is far cleaner to deal with when there are distinct mobile and desktop versions, as a minimum. This issue is also how many started moving beyond Responsive as they saw their user needs move well beyond was was going to be straight forward with Responsive.

Never has a customer said they want Responsive, they want mobile and/or tablet usable formats that meet their needs. Responsive has been a design middle step to get to providing mobile options relatively quickly, but over time (often not much time) that moves beyond what makes sense. The need to design for user needs goes back to the old mobile foundation of thinking first about all the actual user needs and all the options properly.

The New York Times and Mobile

This started with the New York Times and its redesign. The New York Times has long had a mobile version of their site that is mobile specific. They have a CMS that makes it relatively straight forward to work their content not only into mobile site, but many other options. The New York Times has continually had some great folks who think across platforms that users are using and designing for needs there. The New York Times also has long running experiments that try many different things, like their Skipper Interface.

I bring up the Times not only because of how users actual use what they offer. I know a few Times digital folks and know many who have been part of the digital Times team of the years and even lead it.

The New York Times rough usage patterns for mobile split to roughly even thirds across mobile web (their mobile.nytimes.com) site, their mobile native apps, and full desktop use of the site on mobile devices. Another interesting piece is people bounce from one mode of reading and interacting to another (so read mobile web and shift to desktop or to mobile app) during their session (tracked with user login I assume). [These are from conversations with some current “not on the record” mentions and others at conferences who worked in that group have talked about roughly current use metrics third hand. I had them only roughly confirmed with a “that sounds about right”, but haven’t followed up with going through the New York Times press office to get official quotes.)

What is really interesting is there is no one dominant pattern for mobile users of the New York Times (this also applies to many other services who actually do user pattern research). Not only is there no dominant pattern, but users bounce between the different offerings. I have many times heard readers of the Times telling other readers they will find an article they are looking for in one interface but prefer to read it in another. Different interfaces of the different offerings resonate with people differently (the truth in “there is no one way proves true yet again”) and user patterns for discovery and use/consumption vary too.

Where Does This Leave Us?

One thing that has long been true is the New York Times understands mobile (has the data to influence design - not sure that is how it is used, so just guessing) really well. Also proving many who think they do shouting “Responsive” likely have a long way to go get to that understanding.

We are left, just like we were in the early 2000s, needing to understand mobile broadly and deeply as well as understanding how people actually are using mobile. We need to understand how to work through the questions needed to get to the needed solution for mobile and mobile use (as well as tablets, which need slightly different focus). When you walk through the questions and do the research likely Responsive is not the solution that best fits. It still could be a decent option as an in between step, but the essential first step is to learn the options and how to think through them.

Resonance in Sound and Design

Resonance:

• The quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating: the resonance of his voice.

• The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions: the concepts lose their emotional resonance.

Listening to the lovely and haunting Dead Already from the American Beauty soundtrack by Thomas Newman in high quality recording (lossless) and a compressed version (at 256 kbps) the beauty that is lost is in the resonance of the marimba / vibraphone and other instruments that make up the core of the musical experience. The this isn’t the white space between characters in print, but a grey space. It is beyond what is struck and to place a note in time and space, but what resonates out beyond that initial placement or use.

The last few years I have been reripping much of my musical collection as my main headphones improved, which are my main listening experience. The sound and experience is drastically different and exposes the gaps and the details that are missing in other listening environments. This combined with listening to music that is well produced and exposes and lets the musicianship and craft shine.

Resonance in Design

Thinking of resonance from an interaction design view is quite enlightening. The work of creation of usable interactions is good, but it is the first strike and it is not just white space that follows, but resonance of striking that interaction. This struck me a few years back when the iPhone came out (or one of its subsequent iterations) when I realized my Nokia E61i was faster at rendering pages and actions than iPhone, but what the iPhone did really well was manage and design the resonance after the person using the service clicked something. After striking for an action Nokia left white space and a void, but Apple crafted the grey space of resonance. Nokia would surface the result much more quickly, but with Apple that lag in the delay was not as perceivable unless you were watching the clock. Apple filled the empty space with fade-out, fade-in, activity notifications (windmill bars), which display for just a small amount of time usually. Much like the resonance of a marimba the sound and resonance can not last forever, nor very long, but it is enough to evoke beauty through filling the void.

The one or three second lag between clicking to trigger an action was painfully noticeable on a Nokia, but rather imperceivable on Apple devices. A longer delay is perceivable and painful no matter the interface and relies on engineering to resolve those issues. But, it is that resonance and understanding the design and crafting of it is what can separate a good experience from one that is more rough for the people who desire to use it and could find it of value in their life.