Moving From Connections to Conversations to Collaboration

Social networks are a powerful medium to gather, rally and organize groups. We saw this clearly in Egypt just this past year. Social networks like Facebook help people get connected and begin communicating and organizing. They help organize conversations between friends and facilitate new connections between people with loose relational ties but possibly strong ties in a topic, belief or idea. It's strength lies in the fact that "friends" all share together in the same conversation. This is conversation model. Twitter takes this idea and adds a different dimension. It allows people to connect, regardless of ties and communicate and broadcast those topics, beliefs or ideas. It's strength lies in the fact that regardless of their being a conversation between them, they can still communicate, connect and organize but its more of a broadcast model.

Google+ seems to be trying to merge the two strengths. Giving you the ability to share in conversations within your own circle but still to allow those not a part of the conversation to listen in, connect and join in.

All three of these mediums can help people move from connections to conversations to collaboration. However, I'd argue that there is a limit to this collaboration. Social networks can help make new connections, that point cannot be refuted. They also do help start and sustain conversation both within a group/circle (depending on which platform you like). And I'd go as far as to say they all can, to varying extents, help people collaborate. And I believe collaboration is the next untapped area of the social network medium. So how do these three rate as collaboration environments? With Google+ it remains to be seen what features they being to release over the next year. With Facebook and Twitter I'd say there are limits. I think all three are good at are short-term, organized collaboration. As in Egypt, they surely helped the people organize and spurred the revolution. It helped them communicate and organize and collaborate on various things throughout the uprising. However, in the long term, it does not provide a sufficient medium to sustain a more complex level of collaboration. When it comes to the next steps of organizing the country and collaborating on a new government, that can only happen with face to face encounters and more complex systems of collaboration. And I'd go so far as to say that in most cases this would be true.

I'm not arguing that social networks do not strengthen weak ties. I do in fact believe that they can help strengthen ties between people and that weak ties can often evolve to strong ties. It is in fact the weak ties that help facilitate the sharing and disseminating of new ideas.  This has been argued and proven time and again in social science and in the real world through social networks.

Perhaps another way to look at this is to distinguish the different between conversation and organization.  Organization tends to start from the top down while conversation tends to starts from the bottom up.  Traditional information systems have been built with the approach from the top down, to help organizations organize.  Modern, web-based social systems have been built with the approach from the bottom up.  I'm not talking about the underlying information architecture and coding but rather the philosophy.  We need a new way of thinking that takes both of these and evolves it to a different level.  One where complex collaboration and management can take place.

Stigmergic Collaboration to Knowledge Management

Mark Elliott is in academia and he talks about stigmergic collaboration (it was his PhD dissertation). It's an interesting read. I haven't read it all in detail but you can at: http://stigmergiccollaboration.blogspot.com. He states:

"...mass collaboration (Wikipedia, open source software, Second Life etc) enables a shift from social to cultural negotiation, shattering the traditional glass ceiling of collaborative participation from approximately 25 members maximum, towards hundreds of thousands and beyond."

I'd like to see personal knowledge management systems be defined and built, then the mass collaboration of these systems "join" together to form a stigmergic knowledge management system. Its similar to the idea of a folksonomy working together with a taxonomy to improve overall metadata, tagging and ultimately usefulness of objects.

I don't scour the internet looking for organizations or software systems doing this but there is a possibility that some already do in some form.  Especially in a corporate setting, I think there is vast untapped potential of knowledge management and in essence, knowledge sharing.  In the current organization I work for there is a wealth of personal knowledge that is first unorganized and undocumented.  That's the starting point: to help individual users management this information and leverage it so that its easier for them to organize, find, recall and reuse.  The next step is to provide a way for them to be able to share this information (or the parts of which they want to share) with others.  This creates a synergy of information and can lead to stigmergic knowledge collaboration as Elliott discusses.

Usability of Mobile Devices

The advent of mobile devices with geolocation features, front facing cameras and multiple-touch screens raises some interesting usability questions and issues. The rise of mobile apps is undeniable, which makes me wonder the scope and breadth of usability done on these apps. My guess would be that it's low though probably (hopefully) growing. The low cost of entry probably dictates that. It's quite easy to release an app and have it beta-tested by users, a la Google, and quickly develop newer versions and get those out to users. Because of this ease of entry for a massive amount of developers and development, its likely that the market will determine usability and that's an interesting shift in paradigm.  And how much have websites been tested both for mobile devices distinctly like smartphones and tablets? Yes they are both mobile but they can be quite different in interface and experience. Obviously some sites have considered this and done something about while shamefully its obvious most haven't.

Likely, the devices themselves and the operating systems have been thoroughly tested for usability (some more than others).

The advent of these newer features in mobile devices could potentially present a new area of usability studies. Vendors can use these devices to test usability in new ways. Gathering the community to help design and test designs. It also allows for the vendors to collect interesting data and metrics. Where they are when they test, how long they play, record their voice and face while testing, and that data is easy to collect and feedback becomes integrated into the app.

I'm thinking that Neilsen/Norman have probably not only commented on this but have a document that you can purchase that gives you the step by step process to ensure proper mobile usability.

Websites with mobile versions can also present an interesting approach to usability. The limited real estate and multi-touch features add new dimensions to usability. In terms of human interaction with these types of devices, its only beginning. Of course, some standards will always remain but its a new genre and its interesting to see how it continues to develop.

The Future of Content: Creation, Access and Distribution

Apple has done it again. When I read the announcement by Apple yesterday I was blown away. This isn't just about being able to create interactive, dynamic content for the iPad, this is about creating a new category. iBooks Textbooks, iBooks Author and iTunes U integration. They already had the infrastructure with iTunes U but now they have created the tools, platform and delivery method to make this work. For years, people have wondered if books would ever be replaced in the classroom. This now finally makes that possible.

As long as their are content creators, this will likely succeed. If creators take advantage of the tools, the can leverage a vast and growing platform of iPads, iPhones and mobile devices in general (likely in the future) and the delivery method of iTunes U and the "store/app" model which more and more people have grown accustomed to.

The have done it again because they are creating a new way of thinking about content. A new way of creating, accessing and distributing knowledge. And its naive to think this is limited to primary/secondary schools, this can easily expand to universities and the corporate sector. Its not hard to see this spawning a whole new arena of training and learning methods at the enterprise level, thus increasing the need for more mobile platforms. Which increases the need for content. Its pure genius.

Its both intriguing and enticing and its about time. Can't wait to see how creators create and how this technology and new paradigm evolves and grows.

Communication Through the Social Network

I think there is a way to reduce the time we spend on email, whether that's reading or writing, by simply communicating more through the social network. Email is inherently siloed. Only those on the thread can send or receive an email. When we communicate via a social network, its out in the open, so we have to spend less time communicating specifically. We can leverage the power of open communication whether that's blogging, micro-blogging or posting.

This form of communication isn't for everyone but there is likely a place for it in every organization.

Imagine you receive a question from a colleague. Perhaps it's general enough that you can envision others asking the same thing, or perhaps that has already happened. How much more efficient if you move that communication to a social network so that others can see the conversation. It helps alleviate, if not eliminate the need to ask and thus the need to answer. I'd envision a system that merges the social network with a knowledge base and the ability to have content management integrated into the entire structure. Right now, I'd say any social network is limited to search, which would make this kind of communication awfully hard to scale once a persons social network becomes large and the number of postings grows.

Plain vanilla email is outdated. Sure, there are still uses and need for it for more private or siloed interactions but we need to move to more sophisticated ways of not only communicating but sharing information.

Android OS = Windows 3.x, 9x

I own a Samsun Galaxy S mobile phone with the Android OS. When I first got the phone it came with Android version 2.1. Out of the box I was excited and it ran great. I liked the features and installed apps (though hated all the locked in AT&T stuff). Of course one of the most important features of modern smartphones is that you can install more apps. Which I did aggressively. This began to change my user experience. The phone got slower, would freeze from time to time and generally ran with issues. This even began to impact the phone functionality; contacts would be unavailable, I wouldn't be able to make calls (because the phone was slow or frozen). Frustrated, I began to uninstall apps but this didn't seem to solve the problem. So I upgraded to Android 2.2. Again initially it ran well, but after installing apps, the same issues arose and in fact got even worse. Now I was taking the battery out about once a day and rebooting the device 2-3 times a day. I began to curse the day that I bought it. I tried to tell myself, its okay, I got the phone for free so I should be grateful. I was beyond frustration so I thought about rooting the phone but before that I thought I might be able to upgrade to Android 2.3, which I did. I have to say that Gingerbread is the best of the OSes thus far but some of the same problems still remain. Slow performance with more apps installed, general poor memory management and quirky errors and issues with the apps and the phone.

It finally dawned on me the other day that this whole process and evolution is very similar to that of the early days of Windows. My first job out of college I used Windows 3.1. That was a buggy, quirky, slow OS. It got better with Windows 95, 98, etc but it was a slow painful process. It reminded of the frustrations and annoyances I encountered when using Windows that I was reliving with Android.

It's evolving and obviously getting better because they are pouring resources into it and they are copying Apple's OS. It the same route that Microsoft took with Windows back in the day. They poured resources into it and copied the features of Mac OS. I believe that Android ICS is their Windows XP. Finally a platform that is more stable, has all the modern features and is catching up to Apple... so we think. ICS is new and its too soon to tell but the similarities were eerily similar.

The Tension Between User Experience and Content Management Systems

We often think of user experience from the perspective of what the end user sees. This is of course true. User design is the flip side of this from the designers perspective. And any good designer will design their site with the end users' experience in mind. Which is as it should be.
However, there is increasingly a more complex dynamic playing out somewhere in the middle. Designers design, users use but there is now the layer of the content creator which has been spawned by content management systems. It was an excellent idea whose time had come. To separate the functionality of the designer and content creator in large, enterprise-scale environments. But this layer is continuing to grow and move beyond the enterprise. As more and more content moves online and content management systems for the medium, small and tiny organizations become available, this layer of the content creator has grown and grown more complex. It is no longer just content that they create but they can in some cases make design choices (though minor and within the confines of of set parameters). These design choices can and do impact the user design and the user experience.

This is a delicate situation because as content creators, you want to have the freedom and ability to create content. And content itself grows more complex and dynamic beyond just text. As designers and administrators (and marketeers too), you want to set boundaries, have standards and maintain branding so that you can continue to deliver high quality and a good user experience but you don't want to alienate and stifle the content creators.

Then what's the solution? There are probably three main solutions with some shades of grey in between. The first is to lock down the CMS so that content creators are jus that and nothing more. The second is to have designers and content creators work closely so that everything is approved, a process is followed and everyone is on the same page. The third, and probably most likely and realistic solution is that content creators evolve. They are going to have to learn new skills, understand usability and user-centered design principles and become versed in what user experience is. What about the designers evolving? That too is a possibility, though less likely. In large organizations, it will probably be that content creators evolve and in smaller organizations, it will probably go both ways if the lines are already blurred.

So it involves the evolution of skill sets, defining process and policies related to governance, design, usability, and branding to name a few. The smaller the organization, obviously, the more fluid this would be and it would be more rigid as the organization grows. This tension is a tipping point of changes in the dynamics of web design, web content, content management and usability.