February 4, 2010
January 26, 2010
Show me the money? Where did the stimulus go?
CNN has one of the best infographics I have seen on the stimulus package at http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/stimulus-tracker/index.html
Here is the second part that represents the “stealth stimulus”:
December 5, 2009
representing the current recession compared to history
from http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/
This is compelling, but I have a hard time keeping track of which year is what through the color scheme. I wish the years had been embedded into the curves on the chart…but it is still good to look at and think about.
November 15, 2009
Clay Shirky on classification, browsing, tagging, and search
My contrarian streak makes me not want to publicize well-exposed figures like Clay Shirky, but sometimes the content is too good to pass up. I have been delving into issues of knowledge representation and ontologies for my own dissertation research, and found this very thought-provoking essay on classification, browsing, tagging, and search:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
Of Cards and Catalogs #
The periodic table gets my vote for the best categorization scheme ever, but libraries have the best-known categorization schemes. The experience of the library catalog is probably what people know best as a high-order categorized view of the world, and those cataloging systems contain all kinds of odd mappings between the categories and the world they describe.
Here’s the first top-level category in the Soviet library system:
A: Marxism-Leninism A1: Classic works of Marxism-Leninism A3: Life and work of C.Marx, F.Engels, V.I.Lenin A5: Marxism-Leninism Philosophy A6: Marxist-Leninist Political Economics A7/8: Scientific Communism
Some of those categories are starting to look a little bit dated.
Or, my favorite — this is the Dewey Decimal System’s categorization for religions of the world, which is the 200 category.
Dewey, 200: Religion 210 Natural theology 220 Bible 230 Christian theology 240 Christian moral & devotional theology 250 Christian orders & local church 260 Christian social theology 270 Christian church history 280 Christian sects & denominations 290 Other religions
How much is this not the categorization you want in the 21st century?
This kind of bias is rife in categorization systems. Here’s the Library of Congress’ categorization of History. These are all the top-level categories — all of these things are presented as being co-equal.
D: History (general)
I’d like to call your attention to the ones in bold: The Balkan Peninsula. Asia. Africa.
And just, you know, to review the geography:
 [ Spot the difference? ] |
Yet, for all the oddity of placing the Balkan Peninsula and Asia in the same level, this is harder to laugh off than the Dewey example, because it’s so puzzling. The Library of Congress — no slouches in the thinking department, founded by Thomas Jefferson — has a staff of people who do nothing but think about categorization all day long. So what’s being optimized here? It’s not geography. It’s not population. It’s not regional GDP.
What’s being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That’s what the categorization scheme is categorizing. It’s tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing is an entirely different problem.
The musculature of the Library of Congress categorization scheme looks like it’s about concepts. It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels — any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories. But every now and again, the skeleton pokes through, and the skeleton, the supporting structure around which the system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves.
The essence of a book isn’t the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is “book.” Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage, and to people’s inability to keep the location of more than a few hundred things in their mind at once. Once you own more than a few hundred books, you have to organize them somehow. (My mother, who was a reference librarian, said she wanted to reshelve the entire University library by color, because students would come in and say “I’m looking for a sociology book. It’s green…”) But however you do it, the frailty of human memory and the physical fact of books make some sort of organizational scheme a requirement, and hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.
The “Balkans/Asia” kind of imbalance is simply a byproduct of physical constraints. It isn’t the ideas in a book that have to be in one place — a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it’s one place, it can’t also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the ‘be in one place’ requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents.
People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you’d think we’d have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that’s forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you’d think we’d have learned that lesson by now.
And yet.
The Parable of the Ontologist, or, “There Is No Shelf” #
A little over ten years ago, a couple of guys out of Stanford launched a service called Yahoo that offered a list of things available on the Web. It was the first really significant attempt to bring order to the Web. As the Web expanded, the Yahoo list grew into a hierarchy with categories. As the Web expanded more they realized that, to maintain the value in the directory, they were going to have to systematize, so they hired a professional ontologist, and they developed their now-familiar top-level categories, which go to subcategories, each subcategory contains links to still other subcategories, and so on. Now we have this ontologically managed list of what’s out there.
Here we are in one of Yahoo’s top-level categories, Entertainment.
 [ Yahoo's Entertainment Category ] |
You can see what the sub-categories of Entertainment are, whether or not there are new additions, and how many links roll up under those sub-categories. Except, in the case of Books and Literature, that sub-category doesn’t tell you how many links roll up under it. Books and Literature doesn’t end with a number of links, but with an “@” sign. That “@” sign is telling you that the category of Books and Literature isn’t ‘really’ in the category Entertainment. Yahoo is saying “We’ve put this link here for your convenience, but that’s only to take you to where Books and Literature ‘really’ are.” To which one can only respond — “What’s real?”
Yahoo is saying “We understand better than you how the world is organized, because we are trained professionals. So if you mistakenly think that Books and Literature are entertainment, we’ll put a little flag up so we can set you right, but to see those links, you have to ‘go’ to where they ‘are’.” (My fingers are going to fall off from all the air quotes.) When you go to Literature — which is part of Humanities, not Entertainment — you are told, similarly, that booksellers are not ‘really’ there. Because they are a commercial service, booksellers are ‘really’ in Business.
 [ 'Literature' on Yahoo ] |
Look what’s happened here. Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back. They couldn’t imagine organization without the constraints of the shelf, so they added it back. It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all. But Yahoo decided to privilege one way of organizing links over all others, because they wanted to make assertions about what is “real.”
The charitable explanation for this is that they thought of this kind of a priori organization as their job, and as something their users would value. The uncharitable explanation is that they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system. Both of those explanations may have been true at different times and in different measures, but the effect was to override the users’ sense of where things ought to be, and to insist on the Yahoo view instead.
File Systems and Hierarchy #
It’s easy to see how the Yahoo hierarchy maps to technological constraints as well as physical ones. The constraints in the Yahoo directory describes both a library categorization scheme and, obviously, a file system — the file system is both a powerful tool and a powerful metaphor, and we’re all so used to it, it seems natural.
 [ Hierarchy ] |
There’s a top level, and subdirectories roll up under that. Subdirectories contain files or further subdirectories and so on, all the way down. Both librarians and computer scientists hit the same next idea, which is “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to add a few secondary links in here” — symbolic links, aliases, shortcuts, whatever you want to call them.
 [ Plus Links ] |
The Library of Congress has something similar in its second-order categorization — “This book is mainly about the Balkans, but it’s also about art, or it’s mainly about art, but it’s also about the Balkans.” Most hierarchical attempts to subdivide the world use some system like this.
Then, in the early 90s, one of the things that Berners-Lee showed us is that you could have a lot of links. You don’t have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links.
 [ Plus Lots of Links ] |
This is where Yahoo got off the boat. They said, “Get out of here with that crazy talk. A URL can only appear in three places. That’s the Yahoo rule.” They did that in part because they didn’t want to get spammed, since they were doing a commercial directory, so they put an upper limit on the number of symbolic links that could go into their view of the world. They missed the end of this progression, which is that, if you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough.
 [ Just Links (There Is No Filesystem) ] |
One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know.
Let’s say I need every Web page with the word “obstreperous” and “Minnesota” in it. You can’t ask a cataloguer in advance to say “Well, that’s going to be a useful category, we should encode that in advance.” Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say is, “Obstreperous plus Minnesota! Forget it, we’re not going to optimize for one-offs like that.” Google, on the other hand, says, “Who cares? We’re not going to tell the user what to do, because the link structure is more complex than we can read, except in response to a user query.”
Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user’s needs and the user’s view of the world. If you want something that hasn’t been categorized in the way you think about it, you’re out of luck.
The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don’t need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.
A lot of the conversation that’s going on now about categorization starts at a second step — “Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should…” But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of not categorizing. Even Google adopted DMOZ, the open source version of the Yahoo directory, and later they downgraded its presence on the site, because almost no one was using it. When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
November 5, 2009
graphics representing the opaque notion of “cloud computing”
If I have not gone on the record one way or another to say I think the term “cloud computing” is a mistake for the computer industry, let me do so now. It suggests fuzziness, opacity, dreaminess, distance, and a nebulousness. I suppose we are stuck with it for now, though taking the long view suggests that not all metaphors survive: see information superhighway.
I found this definition on http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc3/051809-cloud-faq.html
What is cloud computing?
Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.” Beyond the Gartner definition, clouds are marked by self-service interfaces that let customers acquire resources at any time and get rid of them the instant they are no longer needed.
The cloud is not really a technology by itself. Rather, it is an approach to building IT services that harnesses the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers as well as virtualization technologies that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will”
I did find some graphics that attempt to explain cloud computing. Do they make it clear to you?
from http://www.bio-itworld.com/comment/2009/06/22/cloud-storage.html
from http://soacloudcomputing.blogspot.com/2008/10/cloud-computing.html
from http://www.schwimmerlegal.com/2008/08/
http://lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/what-cloud-computing-really-means022409/
from http://patricemckeown.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/cloud-computing.jpg
from http://electronsoup.net/?p=49
November 3, 2009
Windows 7: usability is critical to productivity
Having been a Vista user since July, I am very eager to upgrade. I like to be a contrarian, but in this case have to echo the conventional wisdom: Vista really is terrible. Of course my bad experience may be somewhat due to underlying issues with the chipset or other non-Microsoft system elements, but I am nonetheless convinced Vista will be remembered as a major error, despite what must have been considerable usability testing and design work.
I found an interesting article on Windows usability at http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220700407
“One of the goals of Microsoft Windows 7, now in general release, is to finally make the bad memories of Windows Vista go away. The operating system’s user interface is one place Microsoft paid particular attention to detail this time around.
The software giant had started down a path toward a simpler, more clutter-free user interface with Windows Vista, but critics and competitors found it lacking and took some jabs, as in Apple’s ad about Vista’s annoying security prompts.
With that, as well as reams of research, in mind, “experience” and attention to productivity took on a powerful role in the development of Windows 7.
“It was really about how we make the PC more productive, and get out of the way more so that people can spend less time interacting with the PC and more time doing the tasks they use the PC to do,” Julie Larson Green, VP of Windows experience for Microsoft, said in an interview.
That thinking is apparent in any number of design choices Microsoft made in Windows 7, including mouse gestures that automatically tile windows side by side, automatic driver installation and troubleshooting, the operating system’s ubiquitous search feature, and a new taskbar.
“The way we talked about Windows 7 from the earliest planning processes is that we wanted it to be simpler, and we wanted to put common and frequent things at users’ fingertips,” Sam Moreau, Microsoft’s director of user interface design and research, said in an interview.
That meant doing research — and lots of it — to see exactly what users were doing. To determine exactly how people use Windows and what improvements need to be made, Microsoft has long gathered telemetry from users who say they are willing to send information about their usage back to the company.
“We thought a lot about the costs of change for Windows 7, and we don’t believe in change for change’s sake,” Moreau said, pointing out that one of his friends goaded him for months with concern about the inevitability of more help desk calls after upgrading to Windows 7. That concern is one many IT managers have. “Change is bad unless it’s great, which means that it’s intuitive and useful, people can understand the value of the change and it solves a scenario they have in their everyday life.”
<snip>
Another buzz phrase for the Windows team during Windows 7 development was “quieting the system.” Vista, and XP before it, often interrupted the user with pop-up messages about security problems or available updates. Windows 7 is able to work in the background to take care of many of the problems that once required user intervention, such as driver installation. “The less I interrupt you, the more you’ll be able to get things done,” Moreau said. “Your scenario when you plug in a USB key is get a file, not to configure the USB key.”
Microsoft has been pushing software companies to take advantage of new taskbar capabilities like the use of so-called “jump lists” to open frequently accessed documents and “tab viewing” to see images of open windows when users scroll over taskbar icons. Microsoft went through a large number of prototype taskbars after research showed that users found the taskbar to be a “confusing experience” before it settled on the one in the final version of Windows 7.
Some companies, such as Mozilla, are beginning to jump on board with the new taskbar features — in Mozilla’s case, by showing images of open browser tabs — but it’s too early to tell how and whether others will do so.
Microsoft made a big fuss about widgets when it released Windows Vista, but few vendors really took advantage and built powerful widgets. “It’s very important we work early with that ecosystem early so that we they can take advantage of what we are doing with the operating system,” said Larson-Green.
Some developers are clearly taking interest in at least one of Microsoft’s user interface changes: touch. Hulu, Twitter, and others have built touch applications for HP’s TouchSmart computers, which don’t depend on Windows 7, but others will likely follow suit now that touch is an inherent feature of the operating system.
Touch is easily the most noticeable change in Windows 7, though at first, only a few PCs on the market will have touch capabilities. For Moreau, touch, like many of Microsoft’s other user experience changes, has been all about increasing productivity. He personally uses touch when he flies, the constrained space on airplanes makes touching the screen significantly easier and faster than trying to use a mouse or the trackpad, and he finds himself reaching up to the screen to touch buttons like send on e-mails “because my body just naturally figured out the easiest way to do common tasks.”
a representation of search engine optimization
I first became aware of the acronym SEO (which stands for search engine optimization) at a recent talk at the School of Information here in Austin. The computer science PhD student evidently wasn’t aware not everyone knows that acronym. Lately I have been surfing around SEO sites, and found an informative graphic:
I found a brief description of SEO here:
The term “search engine” is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.
Crawler-Based Search Engines
Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They “crawl” or “spider” the web, then people search through what they have found.
If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.
Human-Powered Directories
A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.
Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.
“Hybrid Search Engines” Or Mixed Results
In the web’s early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from LookSmart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.
he Parts Of A Crawler-Based Search Engine
Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being “spidered” or “crawled.” The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.
Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.
Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until it is indexed — added to the index — it is not available to those searching with the search engine.
Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. You can learn more about how search engine software ranks web pages on the aptly-named How Search Engines Rank Web Pages page.
October 12, 2009
Designing brand identity
This graphic in a book by Alina Wheeler packs a lot of punch:
Alina Wheeler's elements of branding
Hat tip: http://untcomdes.blogspot.com/2009/10/web-site-of-day-30.html
Peter Morville: representations of user experience
Marcellina Kampa* sent me a link to an interview with information-architect, user-experience advocate, and desiner Peter Morville. Among other goodies is his attempt to improve a traditional graphic to represent users:
Three circles of information architecture
with this:
He describes it this way:
Here’s how I explain each facet or quality of the user experience:
- Useful. As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.
- Usable. Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary but not sufficient.
- Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.
- Findable. We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need.
- Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10% of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.
- Credible. Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we’re beginning to understand the design elements that influence whether users trust and believe what we tell them.
- Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.
The honeycomb hits the sweet spot by serving several purposes at once. First, it’s a great tool for advancing the conversation beyond usability and for helping people understand the need to define priorities. Is it more important for your web site to be desirable or accessible? How about usable or credible? The truth is, it depends on your unique balance of context, content and users, and the required tradeoffs are better made explicitly than unconsciously.
Second, this model supports a modular approach to web design. Let’s say you want to improve your site but lack the budget, time, or stomach for a complete overhaul. Why not try a targeted redesign, perhaps starting with Stanford’s ten guidelines as a resource for evaluating and enhancing the credibility of your web site?
Third, each facet of the user experience honeycomb can serve as a singular looking glass, transforming how we see what we do, and enabling us to explore beyond conventional boundaries.”
* in the interests of full disclosure, the person mentioned is a family member
October 6, 2009
more great works of infographics
I can’t help but think aloud: is design that looks this good calling too much attention to itself?
Perhaps so. Yet it probably inspires more than a few of us to want to get in the game, no? Having spent years within the vital but less flashy worlds of usability and quality assurance testing, it is hard not to think of infographics as the where-it’s-at field of today. The quality here demands an audience. Kudos to these designers for representing knowledge and data with this level of clarity and style: http://www.visions.com.ua/70-prekrasnyx-primerov-infografiki/
