In other words, we change technology by creating it, and then it changes us as we use it. And we both change in response to each other. Many times when we talk about technology we talk only as creators…should we create it…should it have been created? But by the time we have created technology it’s too late to ask that question…it’s already changed us in some way. We can’t go back, at least not this generation. Maybe the next generation will forget.

The gun-rights activists like to assume the first frame…that we are sovereign over the technology we create and it doesn’t change us. Guns don’t kill humans, humans kill humans. On CNN the other day was a photo of a protester holding up a sign: “if guns kill humans, do pencils write books?”.

But thoughtful people know it’s not that simple. Technology isn’t neutral…the mere presence of it changes our behavior. I’ve read about a study in which the mere presence of a gun in the room (a randomly placed gun…nobody mentions it during the study) made people uneasy and tense. The people in the study thought they were there for something else…but of course everyone notices the gun and it has a direct affect on their behavior. They act more hostile, more angry. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. When you have a gun everything looks like a target.

Of course, if guns didn’t kill people our army wouldn’t need them to kill people.

Ahh!!!…there’s the key. Guns make it easier to kill people…they enable a behavior, and by enabling the behavior, by making it easier to do, it is done more often. And as guns get easier to use and more deadly, they make it even easier. This is the grey area…the area that people who see the world in black and white can’t see…

Anyway, this piece wasn’t supposed to be about guns. It was supposed to be about technology. Lately I’ve been using several tools that enable me to perform actions easier, and as those actions become easier it changes the way I work. So while they don’t do anything new, per se, the fact that they make an activity so easy and fast changes the way I do the activity. I think this is a sign of me co-evolving with the technology I use.

Here are a few:

• Wordpress when I installed Wordpress many years ago the ease of publishing allowed me to publish more. Tumblr is another recent tool that makes it even easier to post.
• Skitch Skitch is a screen-capture program that makes it incredibly easy to grab screenshots, annotate them, and throw them up on the web. Because it allows uploading in one-click, I’m now using my Flickr account to store screen grabs that I think are interesting.
• LaterLoop I’ve just begun using LaterLoop, but it’s a great way to save things you want to read later…to “loop back on”. This happens to me a lot, when I have 80 tabs open and simply want to remember them, but don’t necessarily want to bookmark them permanently (although it does that too)
• Time Machine Time Machine is the backup program in Apple’s latest OS Leopard. It makes backups super easy to do, which results in the happy outcome that you backup more often. The addition of a wireless base station (which I don’t have) will make this even easier.

It’s interesting to note that these technologies are late-comers by a long-shot. Many, many solutions had already existed in the marketplace supporting the exact same activities for a long time before they showed up. But this software is designed so smoothly that it actually pushes the state-of-the-art forward…changing the way we do those activities.

That seems to me to be the hallmark of good design…when the person and the technology co-evolve…changing each other as time goes on.

Here’s a 2003 email from Bill Gates in which he vents his frustration with the Windows interface…in quite excruciating detail.

Epic Bill Gates email rant

Throughout the email Gates continually voices his frustration in trying to perform what he thinks should be straightforward tasks.

My favorite bit:

“This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.”

Lesson: No matter how expert you are…you still appreciate clear instructions. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, likes feeling they have no clue.

6) So let’s say I’m building a site with social networking features. How do I figure out which reputation pattern to use?

My advice would be: start small. Definitely think of which one or maybe two patterns to employ. Consider the spirit and intent of the community that you’re trying to build. What exactly do you hope people will do there? Write reviews? Post videos? Form connections with each other? Consider all of these things, and others, and then try to place your intended community somewhere along that Competitive Spectrum.

And be honest with yourself! I’d posit that the vast majority of consumer-focused social sites are somewhere at or below the ‘Cordial’ level. If you still insist on placing a ‘Top Hunks’ leaderboard on your dating site after all of that? Well… that’s fine, but at least now you’ve made that decision consciously and clearly. (It’s probably still the wrong decision, but…) And, not to re-plug my earlier talk, but more guidance is given there as well on this very question of ‘which pattern?’

7) What is the biggest mistake that designers make when implementing reputation patterns?

I’d say 2 related things: one is employing those more empirical patterns— Points, and Levels, ranked and tracked on Leaderboards— in situations where they’re not appropriate. I feel like I’m belaboring the point, but… if your community values fun, and easy-going interactions with each other and helpfulness? Then don’t destroy that fantastic dynamic by comparing members, one to another. Don’t elevate certain members’ status at the expense of everyone else in the community—’cause resentment, factions and gaming are soon to follow.

And related to this is the mistake of rewarding the wrong types of behavior. Specifically, there’s a tendency to want to reward activity (how many times have I contributed, or how frequently) instead of the quality of those contributions. (Do people like this video? Have they watched it? Responded? Linked to it, or embedded it on their blog? Voted for it, or assigned a rating?) Of course, both are important: you want people who are actively engaged and prolific contributors: but you want those contributions to be quality ones: thoughtfully prepared, formatted along community norms, and above all useful or interesting to the community.

A relevant, and recent, example I could cite is Plurk. Now, I absolutely don’t mean to hate on Plurk. It looks like a fine product (it’s kind of a Twitter-like microblogging platform.) But they’re tracking and displaying some very “official-looking” Karma metrics, and even feature a Leaderboard of Interesting Plurkers. My response to this is two-fold: first is… “why”? What community goals does it further? My guess would be that it’s a desire to promote active, high-use Plurkers to the community, that others might find them and opt to follow them as well.

But the prominent Karma score, and a surface appraisal of how it’s generated, might lead one to believe that Plurk is a competition. And, specifically, a competition won by the amount of stuff you do! (Number of Plurks, number of friends, etc.) Most people can see how badly this could end: if someone really wants to make it onto that leaderboard? They’ll probably try mass-friending and spam-blasts first. (Even if Plurk’s system is smart enough to counter this, the overall effect is still negative.) There is a nod to quality—’Quality Plurking’, however that’s defined—but the emphasis appears to be on Activity. And I’d posit that a karma system for an app like this is somewhat extraneous. It kinda smacks of “wouldn’t it be cool if we…”

I also feel compelled to point out that the particular label they use—’Interesting’—is a loaded one: while very complimentary to those who receive it, it’s can also feel derogatory to those who’re left out. There’s a reason why Flickr has only ever applied the descriptor of interestingness to photos, and not the people that take them—and that reason is that the community folks over there have a wonderful awareness of community spirit, and are sensitive to the effects that labels can have.

8) What is the best example that you know of of a site that implements reputation patterns?

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but a site that I’ve praised in the past is Yelp. They’re a review site and they feature a nice variety of reputation indicators. What I like about Yelp is that they seem to have payed close attention to their community, and what motivates people to write reviews, and their reputation system leverages that nicely. It doesn’t work against it.

A really simple example: some of our own research, at Yahoo, indicates that one reason some people may write reviews is just this desire to ‘fill a void’ or provide a review for a product or venue that has none. (I’ve wondered if this isn’t somehow psychologically related to those guys that like to type ‘first!’ into comment fields.) Now of course this isn’t the only thing that motivates someone to write reviews, but it can be a small motivator for some folks.

Yelp must be aware of this tendency, cause they give users a small boon for being the first person to contribute a review for a business. The first review for any establishment will display a ‘first to review’ badge for ever-after. So it’s not a huge thing. They don’t place a lot of importance on it, but there it is: a small and very natural show of appreciation for those users that like to help get the conversation started.

And Yelp does this in a dozen other ways as well. They have specific reputation types that reward funny Yelpers, or helpful ones. They have a special designation (the Yelp Elite — you’ve written about them before, in fact.) So Yelp encourages a wide range of expression from their review-writers: basically, you can be any kind of ‘Yelper’ you want to be, and—as long as the community finds value in your contributions—Yelp has a way of rewarding you. (And Yelp doesn’t ‘rank’ users against each other, or display a leaderboard anywhere on the site.)

And, of course, I’ve already mentioned XBox Live. I think they do a fantastic job. I believe that they employ just about every pattern from the set that we’ve published, and probably a couple others besides. And all for great effect, for a very specific purpose. BUT… they’re a fairly competitive context, so I think they get a lot of leeway to do things that a lot of social community sites should probably not be doing.

9) What is Yahoo’s strategy in getting these out to the community? Are you simply being altruistic? Wouldn’t these help your competitors?

There are a couple of dimensions to my answer here. First, I’d say that the Pattern Library, in general (which has been open since February of 2006, btw) is a good fit for Yahoo!s stated goals of openness and transparency.

Secondly, there’s nothing especially proprietary about the information or opinions embedded in the patterns. Christian, who I’ve mentioned, actually vets all of our public patterns with our Legal team, so if there actually were some sooper-sekrit game-changing reputation business logic in there…? Well, that probably wouldn’t make it outside the firewall.

But, also, these patterns are in large part drawn from examples and experiences of competitors, as well as products that we’ve shipped at Yahoo! So in a way, it’s not so much ‘getting them out’ to the community as giving them back to the community. There is some work involved in these patterns (compiling, researching, refining and writing them out) but the benefits for us are innumerable: the ability to positively influence the community, be seen as thought-leaders in social software. Heck, just taking part in a smarter dialog about the place of reputation systems… it’s all good.

Thanks for the interview, Bryce!

Resources:

• Yahoo’s Social Design Patterns for Reputation
• Bryce’s Designing your Reputation System slide deck
• Bryce’s personal blog

That’s why I’m really excited about the recent release of Yahoo’s social design patterns for reputation systems. The following graphic from the pattern library illustrates what Yahoo calls the “competitive spectrum”, which is a way to classify the activity on your site and helps you to choose which reputation pattern might work best for your community.

My first introduction to the patterns happened by accident. I needed a room for this year’s IASummit and I twittered about not having one. I received a tweet back from Bryce Glass, whom I knew of but didn’t know personally. He was gracious enough to let me share a room with him and over the couple of days I was there Bryce told me about some of the fascinating work he’s doing with Yahoo’s various properties.

Bryce Glass is an interaction designer at Yahoo! He currently works in the user experience group supporting the recently-announced Yahoo! Open Strategy. But in the past year, Bryce was the user experience lead for a Reputation Platform that powers the rep systems for many of Yahoo!s properties. In that time, he had opportunity to work with several different community-oriented sites on Yahoo! on improving their reputation systems, increasing user engagement and generally creating friendlier, more-active communities.

In the talk he gave at the summit, Designing your reputation system, Bryce outlined a framework for designing reputation systems that is probably the best starting point for figuring out how to build your own. In the following interview, he starts from ground zero and explains what reputation is, what a design pattern is, and how to start applying them to your own work.

1) So, Bryce, what is your definition of reputation?

I generally use a fairly coarse-grained definition of ‘reputation’ when discussing these patterns or other work we’ve done with reputation at Yahoo! By my simple definition: one’s reputation in a community is both a history of one’s past actions within that community, and a value judgment about the worth of those actions.

Who makes that value judgment? Ideally, the community itself. So contributions that the community values are good, and those it finds objectionable (or simply has no interest in) are bad. And you, as the author or originator of that content, can be judged according to these same values. Quite simply: contribute to the community and—if the community likes it—your reputation rises.

Obviously, it’s a little more nuanced than that, but…

2) So what is a reputation design pattern?

This family of patterns are a small subset of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, which has been out ‘in the wild’ for a couple of years now. I’d suspect that many of your readers are at least passingly familiar with that effort (and, if not, my fellow Yahoo Christian Crumlish has a good video update up on our Developer Network.)

These patterns are notable, however, in that they’re the first social design patterns that we’ve included. I know that this is a direction that Christian wants to take the library in, so expect to see more and more of these in coming months. (Identity representation, participation, more reputation, etc.) But… going back to your question… this family of reputation patterns can be thought of a couple of different ways.

First, and foremost, it’s just an attempt to catalog and describe a number of common ways to represent some one’s status within a community. They are patterns that recur across websites, games or other interactive communities and we’ve made some attempt to be as complete as possible in this release. (Tho, for the sake of finally shipping the patterns, we did omit several—I’m hoping to sneak those out over the next several months.) For the designer of a community, these patterns might he helpful in just identifying and naming a reputation feature which they’ve been considering. And providing some very lightweight guidance on where and when to employ the pattern. So you could almost think of these patterns as a ‘Chinese menu’ of options for showing some one’s reputation on your site.

But this was a concern to us as well: through working with Yahoo! property-owners internally (the folks who make decisions about things like our Finance site, or Yahoo! Local, Maps, Answers, etc.) we understand that sometimes a long list of options is actually less helpful than no guidance at all. So we pushed hard to include at least one meta-pattern, The Competitive Spectrum, that attempts to provide guidance about which of the other patterns to employ. It attempts to provide a selection rationale.

In truth, there’s so much more guidance we could have included (the Spectrum is but one of 15 questions that I covered in a presentation on reputation systems earlier this year at the IA Summit.) But this one central question is an important one for anyone attempting to influence the community spirit of any ‘place’ they’re building online: what type of community will this be? A friendly place, where people cooperate? Or a competitive, cut-throat one with winners and losers?

3) Although reputation is sometimes bestowed on an individual by a community, what steps can an individual take to improve their reputation?

Tho’ it may sound… un-profound (is that a word?)… my advice here is simple. To improve your reputation in a community, become valuable to that community! There are a number of simpler ways to state this as well: Don’t be a jerk! Play nice with others! Do unto others as you’d have done unto you. It was all good advice when our mothers gave it to us in our youth, and is still good now.

But it gets tricky. I’d mentioned how reputation is very contextual. So you have to keep in mind the relative values of that specific community. Maybe your idea of ‘being a jerk’ is, in fact, not at all in agreement with the majority opinion of the community. Some communities on the web are built on ‘jerks’ and they’re fine with that reputation. Perhaps they value being a funny jerk, and you just don’t want to be boring in that community.

So I would say… hang out in a community before you start participating and try to learn its values. Then become an active participant, and try to figure out a way to become a valued participant. And, you know what? If it ends up that the communities values simply don’t agree with yours, then maybe that’s a sign you should find a community to frequent that’s better aligned to your values.

4) What are the biggest hurdles in designing for reputation?

I think it’s probably the number and variety of unintended consequences that little design decisions can have further down the line. I’m fond of the article—so I cite it a lot—but Ben Brown, who founded the dating site Consumating, has a great blog-post about the ‘ill-fated points system’ that they used for that site, and the variety of… um… less-than-ideal behaviors that those incentives gave rise to. Early on, Slashdot struggled with many of these same issues, and they’ve re-jiggered their comment karma system several times through the years.

A lot of these learnings are, in some small way, encoded into these patterns that we’ve released, as well as research that we’ve done at Yahoo!, and products that we’ve released, tweaked, tinkered and learned from.

A big hurdle—and if you can solve this, you’re halfway there to having a well-designed and effective reputation system—is appropriately marrying the incentives that you offer your users to the appropriate set of goals that you have for your community. You want to be sure that you’re rewarding folks for behaving like good citizens, and not just rewarding them for no good reason. (Or for vague and misguided reasons like “to keep them engaged” or “so we can have a leaderboard.”)

5) What is the biggest misconception?

My own belief is that community designers today are a little too enamored of the “allure” of these types of systems. They are, indeed, quite powerful patterns. Microsoft, for instance—I think it’s fair to say that they’ve been quite pleasantly surprised with the success of their XBox Live Achievements program: it’s a huge revenue driver (gamers will actually buy or rent games they have little or no interest in strictly to unlock that game’s achievements!) and a fan-pleaser (witness the dozens of community sites dedicated to tips and tricks about unlocking achievements.)

BUT… and this is a big ‘but’… XBox Live is a very specific context. I would place (parts of) that service to the extreme far-end of the Competitive Spectrum. And it should be pointed out that not everyone who plays on XBox Live universally buys into this ‘competitive’ mindset. (Read the comments here for a nice overview of contra-Achievement viewpoints.)

So, it’s a powerful feature and a real showcase example for the pattern that we’ve labeled Collectible Achievements but you should really think twice before employing it on your own community site. Ask yourself: will it inculcate a certain competitive mindset in the community? Do I want that? Who will be motivated by collecting achievements? Will they be too motivated, and act out in anti-social ways to get them? Who will be turned off by them, and leave the community? Am I okay with that?

So a big misconception, currently, I think is “we should be doing this.” We should have an explicit reputation system, with badges, points, voting, thumbing up and down. All the bells and whistles. I hope that sites will soon start to employ a more measured, more intelligent approach to designing these systems.

Read Part II of this interview: Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass (Part II)

A new article on Boxes and Arrows, On A Scale of 1 to 5 is a nice introduction to the topic and a good read for folks building reputation systems. The authors provide 5 design takeaways:

1. List the behaviors you want to encourage and those that you want to discourage
2. Be transparent
3. Keep your reputation system flexible
4. Avoid negative reputations
5. Reflect reality

The authors also provide a helpful framework to keep in mind while designing, paying close attention to three questions:

1. Who is doing the rating?
2. What, exactly, is being rated?
3. If people are being rated, what behaviors are we trying to encourage or discourage?

One thing that my research has shown is that people often make up their mind about the trustworthiness of others based on how they write…they get a sense about who to trust from the prose that people use…even if it’s merely a product review. While a Netflix-style “people like me” feature can be valuable…they aren’t trusted outright…and it doesn’t replace what people will glean from their own inspection of the actions of others.

One thing I didn’t like about the article was how they explained reputation systems as helping people manage risk. While this is fine for economics class…this is an incredibly distancing term for design. When I’m shopping on Amazon I’m not managing risk…I’m trying to decide! I’m making a decision, and I’m uncertain about what to do. Using the term “Risk management” confers zero empathy…but when we design to help others make important decisions in their life we’re much more empathic…well I’m quibbling. That small quibble aside…it’s a good article.

I also like how the authors pay homage to the heavyweights in this arena. While reputation and rating systems have been around for many years, Amazon and eBay are only recently getting the credit they deserve. These are massive, scalable, and generally effective designs that have pushed the entire state of web design forward. While we can look at these two sites and recognize what’s happening, we inevitably take for granted the tens of thousands of hours of research and design that led to them. They are the canaries in the coal mine of reputation system design.

Yesterday I presented a short, introductory talk called “7 Core Principles of Social Design” at the Voices that Matter Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. One of the principles I talked about was “reciprocity”, and how reciprocity is at the core of a lot of social interaction online, especially things like customer reviews and recommendations. When people read customers reviews from other people, they feel like returning the favor and write reviews of their own.

I pointed out that Amazon.com has had reviews for years, and only recently have their competitors added them. For example, Best Buy only added them within the last year, and Circuit City not too long before that.

I suggested that the reason for the failure to add reviews was not a technical one. These sites certainly had the technological know-how to add reviews to their sites if they chose to. They’re doing much more complicated backend processing in other parts of their site: customer reviews would have been relatively easy to add.

I proposed that the real reason they didn’t add reviews was fear. They feared that allowing the public to criticize products on their site would have several negative effects, including:

• Decreased Sales: people would buy less product because they would avoid products with negative reviews
• Angry Manufacturers: manufacturers of goods whose products got negative reviews would begin to be upset if their sales went down, souring the relationship

I received a question from someone in the advertising industry who claimed to be skeptical of reviews…that in his mind he thought that people would go out of their way to write negative reviews but not positive ones. In other words, a site would get a disproportional amount of negative reviews, even if the general sentiment for the product was positive. This, of course, would lead to decreased sales. This is a typical example of the fear that I was talking about. It’s easy to imagine the damage done by people who write negative reviews. As someone else in the audience mentioned, they were afraid that if someone went to a site and saw a negative review first then they would leave and be lost forever.

But here are a few points to keep in mind.

1. Most of the time, negative reviews are genuine. Many products are bad. If someone truly has a negative experience with a product, they will write a review not just to get it off their chest, but because they actually want to help others avoid the same fate as they had. Most people write negative reviews to be helpful.
2. Negative reviews are an opportunity. If you treat negative reviews as input into your design process, then you can actually use them as research to improve your offering. This is a tough pill to swallow, however, as it’s not easy to admit shortcomings.
3. People seek out negative reviews. As someone in the audience mentioned, they almost always zero-in on the negative reviews. Why? Because they’re already interested in the product, they know the positive aspects of it. What they’re looking for are the negative aspects, that crucial information that the manufacturer or the site will never tell you. People know that products are never as good as they’re advertised to be, and seek out the balancing information so they can make a smart decision.
4. People write positive reviews to balance out the negative ones. This is often overlooked when people think about reviews, they imagine that negative reviews simply beget more negative reviews. But if a product has a bad rating and people have had an opposite experience with the product, they’ll be more likely to write a review to balance out the message. People vote for the underdog, and generally want others to know the truth.
5. People buy more of positively reviewed products While negative reviews might lead to decreased sales, positive reviews lead to increased sales. Therefore, better products are vetted more quickly and get sold more, while poorer products get vetted more quickly and sold less. This is actually what everyone in the chain should want…

In addition, there are several designers can do to make reviews more valuable.

• Good sites average reviews and show distribution. This dampens the ability for any single review to unfairly upset the pot. If people can clearly see that there are both positive and negative reviews for a product, they’ll be more likely to investigate and see why people are having such different experiences
• Let people rate the reviews. On Amazon you can rate the review, which helps to moderate rants and overly-biased negative reviews. This allows the site to display the reviews in helpfulness-order, which means that people see the most helpful (positive or negative) reviews first. This also helps to remove the worry that a single unfair review will upset the pot.

In addition to these points, a huge factor is in convincing management that reviews are good for the long-term health of your site or product. They’re the ones who have to deal with any negative effects, so they’re the most cautious about implementing reviews.

Here are two arguments for using product reviews, tailored to the situation:

For product managers (who make the product being reviewed): Negative reviews exist whether or not they’re published. By stopping them from being published, you’re not stopping negative sentiment, you’re just slowing down the spread of it. But in the long term, ignoring that negative sentiment will kill you just as thoroughly as if it were fast-acting. Why not embrace the speed of feedback to improve your offering?

For retailer managers (who distribute products): Negative reviews are in incredibly helpful resource for shoppers. They appreciate knowing ahead of time what problems exist with the product. Yes, they might not buy because of a negative review, but if you have an alternative positively-reviewed product they’re much more likely to buy that. In this way customer reviews are a valuable resource for your customers…they’ll appreciate that you’re helping them make a tough decision, and end up happier customers as a result.

In general, people are coming to expect customer reviews as part of the shopping process. If you don’t have them, then they’ll go to Amazon or somewhere else to find them. In chapter 1 of my book Designing for the Social Web, I include a quote that sums this up nicely.

When I asked a shopper why they went to Amazon and scrolled immediately to the customer reviews, bypassing a tremendous amount of product information from the manufacturer, they replied:

“I already know what it’s going to say, it’s going to say how great their product is. Why would I need to read that? If I want to know the truth, I have to read what other people like me thought about it.”

There is a moment in every blogger’s life when they realize that yes, other people are going to read what they have to say. Perhaps they assume this from the start, perhaps they develop it the first time they have a wave of traffic come to their site. I can’t tell you how many bloggers have told me “Well, I suppose I have to keep writing my blog now that people have come”, almost as if they weren’t going to continue writing it otherwise. I touched on this some while back in my piece Nine Lessons for Would-Be Bloggers.

But I hadn’t heard that idea articulated clearly until I read this post over at Brian Christiansen’s blog about social interaction in learning environments (I used to work with Brian at UIE)

Brian quotes a paper by John Seely Brown containing the following story from a college professor who explains what happened when he required his students to post their work publicly.

“Because my goal as a teacher is to bring my students into full legitimate participation in the community of instructional technologists as quickly as possible, all student writing was done on public blogs. The writing students did in the first few weeks was interesting but average. In the fourth week, however, I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another’s writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other’s writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community’s discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.”

So the shift to public display, a shift to expected social interaction, changed the way the students learned and the effort they put into their education. If that’s not an incentive to experiment with and use social software I don’t know what is. Social software isn’t just a new way to work, it changes the effort we put into that work. Now there is a sound byte for social media consultants.

The original article (pdf) by John Seely Brown is here: Minds on Fire. It’s a good read on what Seely Brown calls “Learning 2.0″.

What is Learning 2.0? It’s the shift from a Cartesian view of learning where knowledge is treated as something to be transferred to students (that students merely have to learn some set of knowledge) and instead based on a social view of learning where meaning is socially constructed. Says Brown:

“The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”

This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).

Smashing Magazine is holding a books giveaway that includes the following titles:

• Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke
• Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
• Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter (me)
• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
• The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun
• Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by James Kalbach
• Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski
• The JavaScript Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks by Cameron Adams

They are giving away a copy of each book. To win the book, you simply write a comment along with the book number you’re interested in. The comment need only be present…you don’t have to write anything of substance or wit.

Good luck with the contest!

Last year, dConstruct sold out in 6 hours!

Several reasons why I’m excited:

• The topic is social. For Bokardoans, you’ll know that this is right up my alley. An entire event focused on social design. Woohoo!
• Awesome lineup. This is the lineup I would want to see at a conference, so I’m very humbled to be a part of it. It includes Daniel Burka, whom I spoke with on a panel at SXSW this year as well as the folks from Satisfaction and Dopplr, two social sites that really push the social design envelope. There’s Aleks Krotoski talking about gaming, as well as Jeremy Keith, Tantek, and Steven Johnson being their usual brilliant selves.
• I haven’t been to England before: This will be my first trip. I’m going to stay a few days and see some sites…so if you have any great recommendations about things I must do or see, please leave a comment!
• I’m a huge fan of the folks at Clearleft. I even cut my web design teeth on Richard Rutter’s classic site Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi back in the 1990s. Does anybody remember Jalfrezi? I’ve also followed Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith for many years, so being invited to speak at their event is an amazing honor.

As for what I’m doing: I’ll be giving a short talk in the conference proper about leveraging cognitive bias in social design. I’m really excited about this topic…as it really brings home some clear reasons why some interface elements work and some don’t.

I’m also going to be giving a full-day workshop on September 4th. The workshop (I’m still polishing the description) will cover a lot of what’s in my book Designing for the Social Web, but I’ll also be doing exercises that involve everyone deeply in the discussion/design. Warning: if you attend the workshop, you will have to draw an interface.

And, as I mentioned, last year d.Construct sold out in 6 hours. So get your tickets early. Registration begins June 24.

Take the example of Facebook’s recently redesigned Profile pages. Huge news both for the users of the site as well as the developers Facebook is trying to court. The design decisions made in and around the profile are paramount to the future of Facebook, who is trying to find a solid revenue model while at the same time trying not to drive people away with fake recommendations and too much noise in their news feed.

This isn’t just news for geeks, either. They’re writing about it at the New York Times. The L.A. Times. A software upgrade is now news? Absolutely.

Take the wrangling around social networking data portability, with Google and MySpace and Facebook and others trying to provide the system by which we share our social information. The futures of these companies is tied to the design decisions they’re making.

Take the contrast between Microsoft’s new Vista operating system and Apple’s OS X. 5 years since MS upgrades their OS and they actually deliver one that people like less than the older one. Talk about a design failure.

Take the monumental leap forward for mobile phones that is the iPhone touch screen. A single, well-designed product completely rewires the global mobile phone market in a matter of months.

All of these things are huge news, and all of them are design-related.

It wasn’t so long ago that design wasn’t news. It was something that “creatives” with black-rimmed glasses did.

Now design is the big differentiator. Executives talk about innovation, synergy, value….whatever. The buzzwords don’t matter.

Welcome, Design, to the conversation.

But I’m pretty sure that social design, at least one way of thinking about it, is something relatively new (as in, the last decade or so). To try and illustrate this, it helps to look at how we’ve evolved so far on the web…I think we’ve seen an evolution in three broad steps:

Social design is the design of these social interactions (red bendy arrow on the bottom). It’s enabling people to talk to each other and thereby improving their experience. They may be commenting, recommending, friending, or some other social activity. In short, social web applications enable conversation between people who use a web service, not just between people and the web app itself. For years web sites would simply save your preferences and transactions, and as a user it didn’t matter if anybody else used the web site or not (think banking applications). It was a personal tool, for personal use, much like desktop software. Going from personal use to broader social interaction is the crucial distinction.

The genesis of web-based social applications were the bulletin board systems of the Internet, which pre-dated the web and were around since the 70s. These BBSs, as they were called, declined rapidly with the surge of the Internet in the late 1990s.

However, while bulletin boards were the precursor, they were not people-centric. They were instead topic-centric, meaning that discussions revolved around topic threads. What made some of the early social web applications different (PlanetAll, Friendster) is that they focused on the person as the primary pivot (see Finding the Primary Pivot), meaning that you model relationships between people (friend them). This was another huge step in social web application design.

Blogging, which started in earnest around 2000, was also a big push forward for the idea that getting people talking to each other maight actually be a valuable endeavor. Amazon and eBay were the pioneers here, as they laid social elements on top of business transactions to make those transactions more valuable.

Additionally, much of the current evolution of social software is in improving the communication between people who provide a service and people who use a service. This is what I think is meant by “social media marketing”. This is somewhat of the fourth wave…when social applications not only improve the conversations between people using the site, but between people who provide the site and those who use it. (Tearing down the firewall isn’t easy) While email has done much of the heavy lifting here for many years, the mere act of putting these conversations public changes further interaction around them, while scaring the wits out of executives who worry that negative conversation will bring down their empire. (What they don’t count on are the fans they have who defend them)

So while all of this stuff is constantly evolving, and the word “social” is bandied about in countless ways, social design is relatively concrete: it’s designing software that support social interaction.

If you’re considering diving into it yourself, here are some reviews from folks who have already read it.

My first Amazon review!:

“First, this is not a programming book- there are no lines of code. Instead, this is about the design of social websites. It is very well written, with many illustrations and examples, in a style which makes it both easy to read and useful as a reference. It’s clear that the author put a lot of time into this- probably because he’s read countless books himself lacking in these areas. You can probably find books with more information on each topic he discusses but I have never seen one that pulls the information together so completely and coherently. For this alone, he deserves high marks.”

David Mantripp says:

“Designing for the social web is a great little book, and deserves to become a classic.”

Mike at Web Worker Daily writes:

“The book overall is a good mix of theory and practical advice. The author doesn’t hesitate to bring in things like Milgram’s experiments on authority or Axelrod’s work on cooperation when they inform his subject - but he’s not mired in theory. You’ll find plenty of concrete tips (many of which may be obvious after you’ve seen them) on subjects as diverse as removing friction from your sign-up process to where to place the most important content on your site.

If you’re serious about building interactive sites, this book should definitely go on your shelf. I wish the designers of some of the sites that I struggle with had read it.”

Justin Thorp says:

“Some of the highlights so far have been things like the intro to the rise of the social web, AOF (Activities, Objects, and Features) method, how to build authentic conversations with your users, and how to communicate the actual benefit of your service in a way that will get your users coming back over and over again.

Buy This book. You’ll love it.”

(Note that some of these links points to a larger review, and I’ve just grabbed the juiciest bit here)

I’ve also had quite a few mentions on Twitter, which is an awesome way to get quick feedback and know what’s going on. Many are “I’m reading the book” type posts (I’m leaving those out), so no feedback as they’re still in the process of reading. If you have feedback, please send it my way (or post it).

Here are the folks who have read the book and are commenting on it on Twitter.

Chrissie Brodigan (@chrissieb) tweets:

“loved it myself - feels like the “Don’t Make Me Think” of the social web world - I expect it will become a classic.”

Chris Palle (@chrispalle) tweets:

“It has that simply said approach, @bokardo is hitting a readability/brevity sweet-spot.”

Amie Gillingham (@gillie) tweets:

“Josh, I think the new book is excellent. You gave our team a ton to think about. Kudos!”

And this one wins for inventive use of language:

Nick Bouton (@nickb) tweets:

“fwiw, the last 30 minutes reading your book have already given me two massive brainwaves for Protagonize. thanks for this!”

So, if brainwaves are what you’re after, give Designing for the Social Web a try.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Could we recast this into “the great enemy of clear interfaces is insincerity”?

In other words, does the sincerity of the copywriter/designer shine through? I think it might.

A second trick restaurants use is to create a line out the door so that people think there is strong demand. This is also often artificial, making us think that many people are waiting to get in. Sometimes they merely create lines by not letting people sit down, making an excuse that the empty seats are “reserved”. Other times they simply don’t let people in. This is often practiced by nightclubs, who rely even more on mystique and exclusivity than restaurants do.

These techniques leverage powerful social behavior. When people are searching for a place to eat, they rely on the behavior of others to help them make their decision. They seek out signs of life…signs that other people are present and already doing something. If they are doing it, it must be worth it, we think. Given the choice between something that nobody has chosen to do and something that many people are doing, it is human nature to gravitate to what others are doing.

On the web, signs of life are extremely important, for several reasons.

• Too much choice
  One reason is the sheer amount of choice we face. As the web continues its torrid growth, we simply have too many web sites to sort through, too many places to buy products from, too many software providers to pick from.
• Black box of use
  Another reason signs of life are important is that web applications are like black boxes. Many applications, like Google Docs, for example, require a login to use. Because of this we simply can’t see what others are doing with the software. We can’t see if they’re using it well or not using it at all.

When sites leverage signs of life well, it provides welcome direction for folks trying to make a decision. A great example of signs of life is the Freshbooks home page, which contains an interface element called “Some of our happy users…”.

The happy users element does many things well. Most importantly, it is authentic. You immediately get the sense that these are real people who actually do like the product. The pictures are decent, but not airbrushed or overly produced. The quotes sound like real people, not infomercial-like. Subtle touches like using people from all over the world and including team size add to the sense that these people are just like you: the intended audience.

In addition to these testimonials, there are many other ways to leverage signs of life. I describe several more in Designing for the Social Web. But though leveraging signs of life in your design is powerful, it must be authentic. You can’t use stock photography and made-up quotes and expect people to react positively to them…people can smell fake a mile away.

While the Freshbooks people aren’t actually standing in line outside the door of a restaurant, they might as well be. They’re having the same effect: showing others there are people here using this software…acting as signs of life on what could otherwise be a desolate home page.

The other day I wrote about the idea that people go through a progression as they use your software, what I call the Usage Lifecycle. I described how Tripit.com was doing a good job at getting people over the hurdle of Sign-up with several really nice features on their site.

Here’s an example of a design team doing a good job of getting over a different hurdle, the hurdle of Return Visits.

Half.com founder Josh Kopelman wrote a great post on what he calls lifecycle messaging. He wonders why this technique isn’t used more:

“I’m surprised how little pro-active messaging/communication most Internet companies do. And if they do send me an email, it tends to be a generic weekly promotional email that they send to all users. One thing that I learned at half.com is the importance of lifecycle messaging — in which you deliver different messages to different users based on where they are in their lifecycle.”

Josh gives several examples of how they used lifecycle messaging at half.com. They paid very close attention to new users, in particular, sending them emails at very specific times in order to keep their attention and time their next action. They found out that two weeks is very important in the lifecycle of book readers:

“The average fiction book is read within two weeks of purchase. So if you purchased a John Grisham book for $8.75 on Half.com, chances are that you will finish it within 14 days. We decided to implement an auto-email that was sent 17 days after purchase that said “Want your $8.75 back, click here to list your Grisham book for sale”. We found that the open (and conversion) rate of that email was amazing — and it greatly added to our ability to “turn” the same book multiple times.”

This is fascinating in its simplicity. Once you know the day that someone receives a book, you know a lot more about them…they’ll probably read that book within two weeks and will be ready to get rid of it after that. And it doesn’t have to be email-based, either. It could be something embedded right into the dashboard of users that changes based on some metric, say how many times the person has logged in.

As some readers pointed out, the usage lifecycle isn’t a novel idea. Some industries have been using lifecycle messaging for a long time. Take, for example, this insightful post by Andrew Chen (both Josh and Andrew are excellent bloggers), who writes about how the casino industry in particular is fond of the lifestyle framework.

Why, then, are web applications so far behind? I think it may have to do with how we’ve approached web apps. For a long time we treated web applications as products, akin to physical products that are produced and used. We also treated them as publications in a way. But web apps are more like services delivered over time, or perhaps more descriptively tools that talk back.

So the overall value of the usage lifecycle is to really dig into the steps it takes for someone to become a passionate user of your software. The crazy thing is that you probably already have the information you need, but just aren’t surfacing it in your interface design. The important thing to remember is that people don’t become passionate overnight or without cause.

And, for the folks who asked why I organized my book around the usage lifecycle? Well, that’s easy. I tried to identify the problems that designers and developers were having over and over and write a book to help address them. The problems I kept seeing became the hurdles in the usage lifecycle: Gaining Awareness, Getting people to Sign-up, Coaxing Return Visits, and Eliciting Emotional Attachment. I’ll be writing more and more about these things over the coming weeks.

Now that I’ve fleshed out the usage lifecycle and lived with the idea for a year and I’m starting to get feedback from folks reading the book, I’m confident that these are indeed core challenges that many folks are dealing with. They aren’t easy, but they’re not black magic either. We simply need a framework that puts them in perspective. That’s what I’ve tried to do with the usage lifecycle.