It was only a matter of time before designers would start misusing the tag cloud form factor to represent an information architecture. Two that come to mind as I write this are CollectiveX and Yahoo Tech.
There is an inherent problem in using tags (or tag clouds) to make up for your IA laziness. Tags were born from a need to add findability value, insight, and delight to the giant mountains of information that pile up in online communities - they are the Library Science antithesis of a Taxonomy. They are sloppy. They aren’t controlled. They aren’t top-down. They are generated by the people for other people to discover - or not. I hate to say the words, but they go hand in hand with User-Generated Content. They are the DNA of folksonomies.
When designers or companies come along, and take something that, for the past few years has been The User-Generated Lighthouse at the Point of Information Overload, and turn it into a cheap way to navigate a controlled corporate vocabulary, we have to question their intent, or perhaps their lack of intent.
I especially wonder about the decision to place a tag cloud form factor in web sites/apps where there is a huge amount of comingled editorial and user-generated content - for the purpose of navigation of the designer’s Information Architecture. Was it done for the sake of being Web2.0? Was it done because structured navigation has become passé? Was it simply done without an argument for why it should be there? In the case of Yahoo! Tech the purpose of the tag cloud changes depending on your context. On the home page it is top level categories. Inside a category it represents popular searches withtin that category. Eh?
I certainly believe that editorial content and authentic media can coexist in the same information space. In fact I would say that they are symbiotic in many ways - a system of checks and balances. But designers need to question harder their motives to use certain form factors in user interfaces. And in the case of tags, tag clouds, and tagging, keep your Information Architecture out of my tags.
In my design and thinking around online communities, I am constantly entrenched and talking to other designers about abuse risk and mitigation. Any product or service which presents opportunity for public reward also opens itself to a number of pitfalls, including gaming the system, abusing the system, abusing other people that use the system, and so on.
Some recent examples I can think of are:
The Flickr Flashr
A guy was going around Flickr introducing himself to women on Flickr, telling them how much he enjoyed their photos, and that they should also come check out his photos. When the unsuspecting women would arrive at his photostream, BLAMMO: they got flashed!
The Yahoo Answers gamer
I was talking to Randy Farmer about Yahoo Answers, and he mentioned something about a guy from Nova Scotia who, early on with Answers, gamed the system so that he would by far be the person with the highest score on the leader board. I believe he did something like write a little app that would troll questions, scrape them for keywords, conduct an internet search looking for said keywords, and provide answers that were maybe close enough to being right so that he would get even more points. I can’t remember the exact scenario, but it was something ridiculous like that. And what was his motivation? Nothing other than being acknowledged in a high-traffic public space on the web.
Anyway, the list goes on and on. The more involved I become with online communities, and more importantly designing online communities, the more I think about mitigating the risk of lowlifes abusing things. Which finally brings me around to the point of this post:
An Italian Interaction Designer has designed what she calls Electric Cinderella. As Gizmag points out:
The Electric Cinderella shoes idea began as part of Simona Brusa Pasque’s thesis at the Interaction Design Institute in 2002 and was inspired by a beautiful woman who Simona interviewed for her thesis who wanted to be able to “intimidate her intimidators.” She wanted to be empowered without losing her femininity, to have the freedom to be sexy without fear. The shoes certainly achieve that, offering 100,000 volts of high fashion stun gun power which can be activated by a control on the matching necklace.
Now maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this sound like a recipe for disaster? How does a designer 1) justify creating such a product beyond it being a joke and 2) mitigate the risk of someone abusing (or maybe killing) the recipient of the product’s intended use? Or are Italian men that aggressive?
I guess on the one hand designing that sort of product is much more exciting - especially the usability testing part of the process… On the other hand, I don’t believe I would want to put myself into a situation where the fruits of my labor could also land me in a courtroom, which, we all know is where everything that is any fun ends up these days. Oh, and be sure to check out the photos, which bare an uncanny resemblance to something from the Austin Powers series.
As Gizmodo puts it, a new form of cyber-begging for when you’re too lazy to work. A young and somewhat resourceful man puts up a site asking for help getting a G5. In return for replacing his older G4 Macintosh, he’ll blow it up.
Here’s (below) the first movie he probably made on his new G5.
Some most notable parts are:
Damien the displaced redneck from Wyoming.
There were also the following excellent features:
+ beer cans poked with a drinking hole
+ weiners
+ guns
+ explosives
+ dip
+ a hummer
+ folding lawn chairs
The conversation about what contributes to the success of online entities such as MySpace, del.icio.us, and YouTube, continues with Paul Boutin’s article ‘A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace’.
If its the only piece you read about this conversation, then I think it’s an appropriate argument - though I’m obviously trying to make this very post the only one worth looking at, if for nothing else, for it’s brevity.
Two key things to pull out is where in one place Boutin disagrees with the common opinion on the success factor of these sites, in that they have seen such success because of their “collaborative nature” and Boutin posits that it is because “They’re easy to use, and they don’t tell you what to do.”
The other is where Boutin suggests MySpace’s immense traffic numbers have something to do with its “puppylike accessibility”, and he agrees and quotes JJG (who wrote in BusinessWeek here) who said that the undesigned layout/format of the pages “sends a “we’re just like you” message to newcomers”. Boutin adds:
If tech builders want to hand the controls over to their users, shouldn’t they presume they haven’t thought of everything?
And he wraps up the article by giving us the secret to success:
The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way.
Now I’m inclined to agree with Boutin, where he pulls together two very good points about design: Make it as easy as possible to use: no friction between the user and product. And 2, make it extremely accessible: completely relevant and meaningful to the user.
But his rules are only applicable to a certain kind of online entity, and so far limited to ones that have no hint of a business model. Besides selling ad space. So while the success of these sites has an immense amount to do with these things Boutin explains - what is going to happen when the need to create a profitable and sustainable revenue stream is forced upon these organic and overnight successes?
Flickr may have peaked in it’s numbers/traffic for now, but it has the advantage of a revenue stream paid by subscriptions (as well as advertising) that will fund further feature and product development to encourage new waves of adoption. Sure it’s not bootleg TV or homemade videos - but it already has a paying subscriber base and as we have all seen (in 2000) switching on pay-for services to what was once free, dramatically reduces further adoption and can drive all traffic to the next free and maybe even not-so-easy-to-use online entity.
So I’d like to add, that MySpace and YouTube’s success in maturing as online entities, now relies in their deliberate yet extremely sensitive integration of monetizing their services if they want to last anywhere nearly as long as Flickr or even Slate has.
Jason Kottke weighed in also here.