Janice Fraser’s keynote at User Experience Week 2005 here in DC triggered many good ideas. I imagine that this entire week will be good inspiration. Watch this space as the ideas fall out of my brain.

One thing that occurred to me this morning during Janice’s talk. She said that Web 2.0 is not just a change in technology, it’s a change in attitude. Government work has demonstrated to me that attitude changes are no doubt the most difficult obstacles to overcome in implementing new technologies. One culture change is the notion of relinquishing control. For designers, it’s relinquishing control of the interface, and for contributors, it’s relinquishing control over content. For government workers, though, that’s all they have. People who work in the government are frequently defined by what they control. Orchestrating this level of culture change is hard enough just to get people to contribute content, much less allow others to remix it.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point has always served as a model for me on culture change — taking advantage of the natural behaviors of people. Gladwell identifies three different kinds of people who are instrumental for engineering social change, and the Web 2.0 model can adapt and make use of these roles:

• Mavens = Contributors: Mavens are the people in Gladwell’s model who know everything about a topic. In the Tipping Point, these people are willing to share because, perhaps, they have something to gain by doing so.
• Connectors = Remixers: There are people in organizations who know other people who have mutual interest in each other’s content. These are the remixers of Web2.0, the guys who take Google Maps and mix it with Craigslist or the Chicago crime reports.
• Salespeople = Culture Changers: So, where do Gladwell’s salespeople fit in? I think this is where the rubber meets the road. It’s one thing to create cool stuff, but it’s quite another to help other people understand how it’s relevant to them. Culture change depends on the people who can tell me why it’s important to me.

Web2.0 projects, according to Adaptive Path, are smaller, lightweight, and feature stingy (a phrase I love), but they’re big enough changes to require these players to make them work.

This is a brain-dump on three genre-related ideas:

Genre theory and humane interfaces

Activity theory would interpret Raskin’s theory of interfaces at the microscopic level, that gesture and locus of attention are concepts to describe operations — as opposed to activities or tasks. Difficulties with interface elements lead to breakdowns in the interface, and yet are symptomatic of destabilizations at other levels in the activity system. Although I don’t think Raskin’s ideas would expand genre theory at all — since they deal so specifically with the operational level — it would be interesting to explore breakdowns using Raskin’s vocabulary.

Genres and video games

Although “video game” is considered a genre, there are elements within games that are themselves genres — “culturally and historically grounded ways of ’seeting and conceptualizing reality’” (Spinuzzi 41). My first read of that was outside the context of a game, but now thinking about it in terms of games makes it seem even more meaningful.

The particular example I was thinking of was the Inventory from adventure games. As you take your character on an adventure, you pick stuff up. This stuff is stored in the Inventory. In pen-and-paper games you would record your inventory as a written list, but as games migrated to the computer, we needed to invent other genres to accommodate the list. In text adventure games, type inventory and the machine would simply list the items you were carrying — very similar to the pen-and-paper games. As games evolve (1) graphical interfaces and (2) more complex storylines the inventory genre evolves. Still a list of items, no doubt, but with much richer display and interactions.

The inventory is a crucial genre for adventure games because it mediates between task and objective in the game. When people employ an instrument to mediate between their behaviors and their objectives, “they begin to think and act differently,” going through a “psychological transformation.” Such a transformation is “physically” manifested in the game because by using an object from the inventory, the inventory itself is transformed. By accomplishing minor objectives in the game, we go through a psychological transformation in that we have a further understanding of the story as we help it to unravel.

Spinuzzi frames genres as biological entities, suggesting that there are genetic relationships between them as they become consolidated or expanded. Inventories in modern computer adventure games have clearly evolved beyond their pen-and-paper ancestors, but the phenotype is still evident.

I suppose this occurred to me for the simple reason that if an information architect is ever to become a game desiger, he or she would need something to think about.

Access to genres

Is access to the genre part of the genre itself? That is, the gestures we use to bring a genre into focus (see above) may or may not be inherent to the genre itself. For example, a dialog box is a genre in computer interfaces that can be evoked in many different ways. In some scenarios the user actively seeks the dialog box — to format text in a word processor, for example — and in others the user is confronted with a dialog box unexpectedly — when the user saves a document for the first time and must supply a save location and filename.

Although a genre is defined mostly by the way it mediates between a person’s behaviors and their goals, I need to bring the instrument into focus somehow, whether it be retrieving a form from a file cabinet or clicking a button on-screen. This behavior — this gesture? — is crucial to using the instrument and yet may not be inherent to the genre. Does the work change when I print a form out instead of get a copy from my manager?

I suppose the real question is whether there are certain behaviors that fall outside any given system because they are more logistical — not operational. At the same time, it seems to be important to know how to get a relevant instrument, and that access is one of those operational things that can lead to a breakdown if I don’t know where to find a particular form or dialog box. The point, I guess, is that finding an instrument in order to use it is as important as the form of the instrument itself.

If I’m using genre tracing to diagnose information design problems, what technique am I using to identify findability problems?

In my spare time, I occasionally help my wife out with her work, which is at once very similar and very different from the work I do. She consults with developing countries to identify strategies for improving the viability of their private sectors. Like most jobs that sound sexy, at the end of the day this one involves lots of report writing.

My wife and her colleagues lament that no one ever reads the 100+ page reports they put together. I find this stunning. My reports are usually about usability tests and the like: not life-and-death stuff. Sarah’s work, on the other hand, impacts the economy of an entire nation, and the clients (who actually live in the country in question) can’t bring themselves to read the report?

So, her firm enlisted my services to create simple visual displays of important concepts and conclusions. One piece summarized an entire report on one page consisting of three sections: symptoms, causes, and cures. More recently they asked me to help explain secured transactions, which is simply a loan guaranteed by collateral. Developed countries, especially America, take this notion for granted. If you own something substantial (like a house or car) you can use that to give the lender some security that you’ll pay back the loan because:

1. If you default, they can replace the value of the loan with the collateral.
2. You probably don’t want to lose your house or your car, so you’ll do your best to pay back the loan.

Because loans are secured in developed countries, the lenders can use lower interest rates, extend the terms of the loan, and increase the size of the loan. These transactions are, however, quite complex and require a substantive legal framework in place to ensure success.

You’ve probably stopped reading by now. Secured transactions are boring. Sarah’s firm needed a way to explain them quickly without losing their clients’ interest. So I created a one page comic strip that explains everything I just wrote about in a visual format. There’s nothing more compelling than stick figures trading money bags.

Dan Pink mentioned me on his blog today! (Sorry, no permalinks.) The accompanying photo of the labyrinth at Johns Hopkins Bayview* was inspired after I read his book A Whole New Mind, which suggests visiting labyrinths to get in touch with our spiritual sides. I also took some pictures at another labyrinth closer to home.

Turns out, however, that it’s hard to get in touch with one’s spiritual side in 90+ degree heat. Note to self, wait until autumn to visit a labyrinth.

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\* If you need a good otolaryngologist, I highly recommend Dr Matthew Kashima.

Like Thomas did last week, and James will do next week, I gave a presentation at Vera Rhoads’ User Interaction with Information Systems class, a the University of Maryland. Vera suggested I talk about “a day in the life” which was great because I like thinking about how the environment shapes the work, and vice versa. Since I’ve had the opportunity work in many different corporate cultures, I’ve seen how the setting reacts with the work. So I used the three main activities that make up my day — gathering, brainstorming, documenting — to structure the presentation. We talked about the challenges in doing each of these things and the role clients and stakeholders play in each of these areas. The main point of my talk was that 50% of user experience work is client management — just like 50% of any service profession is collaboration with the recipient of those services.

Admittedly, I got a little grumpy when the questions turned to, “tell us about Dan.” It turns out I don’t like talking about myself as much as my ego would want me to. One reason is that my experience breaking into this business I don’t think has any bearing on someone trying to break into this business today. In the mid-90s I was fortunate enough to jump into a profession where there was very little action. The landscape looks quite different today.

So, hopefully I didn’t leave a bad taste in their mouths. The discussion was otherwise really interesting, and the class had many difficult questions. We talked about how to evaluate the usability of a web site… I mean information system without the benefit of true usability testing. We also talked about different kinds of situations where agendas clash: I want to do user research and you don’t want to spend the money — that sort of thing. Ultimately, the answer is the same in every situation: identify the pain point and show how your work helps alleviate the pain. One person brought up a different scenario, where you put a lot of work into a document only to have no one read it, so what makes a deliverable meaningful. Often we have contractual obligations to compose large documents — and it can be fairly satisfying to put them together — but our clients are not contractually obligated to read them. The document must be summarized in a way that grabs them. I intend on posting an example shortly.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I’ve posted both the outline of my presentation and the text from my hand-out, entitled Dan Brown’s Ten Consulting Tips.

In any given activity, there is a set of genres employed by people to facilitate it. The genres may serve different purposes in facilitating the activity, but ultimately they all play some role in it. Spinuzzi calls this “mediating.” To make a phone call, for example, I use a phone directory to help me find the correct phone number. In this case, the directory is a genre that mediates the task. Making a call might be part of the larger activity of user research, mediated by many genres, of which the phone directory is only one. Spinuzzi calls this group of genres clustered around an activity a genre ecology. This metaphor is appropriate because:

1. changing one member of the group will have an effect on all the other members of the group
2. the group is in a constant state of change
3. the relationships between the genres is arbitrary, and directly related to the activity (any other grouping metaphor, like family or library, would be inappropriate as these metaphors evoke different kinds of relationships between the members)

Spinuzzi illustrates a genre ecology on page 121 of Tracing Genres Through Organizations. To an information architect (and Tufte fan) the visualization is disappointing, showing only two dimensions of data: the genres and whether they are connected or not. Spinuzzi discusses several important aspects of genres but does not include them in his ecology picture.

One dimension not shown that could be is the nature of the relationship between genres. One type of official genre, for example, is the dialog box — a means for capturing information to be integrated into a report genre. Users may copy data from one source (another genre) to a notepad (genre) to then type it into the dialog box. (This is very similar to the example Spinuzzi uses from the Iowa traffic accident tracking system.) The notepad is therefore an informal genre that mediates between two official genres. At the same time, some workers may not rely on the intermediate genre to get from one to the other: they may simply type it straight from the data source. The problem is that Spinuzzi’s representation does not accurately portray these subtle relationships:

Each genre is also measured by its degree of “officialness,” whether it is sanctioned by the organization or not. This dimension is also not represented in Spinuzzi’s genre ecology diagram, but the distinction is more subtle. At any given moment, each genre in an ecology is subject to two forces (to varying degress), which Spinuzzi dubs centripetal and centrifugal. Centripetal forces move genre toward “officialization,” the formalization and sanctioning of a genre as it is incorporated into an official process. (The parallels to graded categories are intriguing, but I’m going to leave them alone for now.) A genre may also be subject to centrifugal forces, which carry a somewhat different implication. In this case, the genre does not mediate the activity well and so demands local innovations — workers developing informal genres for additional support.

Here is my representation of a genre ecology, where the circles represent genres. Their proximity to the center and to grid intersections shows the degree of formality and officialness — those genres that line up with the grid are more official. The green arrow shows centripetal forces and the orange arrow shows centrifugal forces.

Notice how the green circle sits smack on an intersection while the orange circle is floating nowhere in particular. Although this illustration clusters official genres at the center of the grid, this is not necessary since “officialness” is represented by proximity to an intersection (*any* intersection). What would be nice is to cluster genres around different information systems that play host to those genres. For example, the Web publishing activities in an organization may make use of a content management system and workflow management system. There is a vast ecology of genres associated with Web publishing, and some of those cluster around these two systems, to varying degrees of formality. Ultimately, the most formal genres are inside the systems themselves.

To illustrate these forces:

To make a call in the “old days” I would need to consult a printed phone directory. Depending on the size of the organization, this directory was either a single sheet of paper tacked to my wall or a printed book I kept on my desk. Sometimes I would create my own phone lists of numbers I used frequently. Other times, my group would distribute “internal” phone lists. Occasionally, I would put very important phone numbers on a sticky and post that in a prominent place. The formal, official phone directory — subjected to centripetal forces — led to informal, unofficial genres for mediating the activity of calling someone else.

These days, my desk has one of those shiny Cisco IP Phones, and demonstrates how phone directories have been subjected to centrifugal forces as well. These phones have a directory built in, which allows me to search for a person by name, and then dial the phone number once I’ve located the contact. In this case, systematizing the phone directory meant making it easy for people to dial the phone number once they had found it in the directory, replacing one official solution with another to help address the shortcomings of the older one.

I’m a little confused about the “centri-” forces because while one represents the transformation and incorporation of an existing genre (centripetal), the other represents the formation of a new genre to support the existing one (centrifugal). I guess I’m not confused so much as concerned that these forces seem to be asymmetrical — and what else would bother an information architect more than imbalance? At the same time, it makes a lot of sense. Official solutions can not be *replaced* by unofficial solutions. The point of an official solution is, as Spinuzzi puts it, “meant to weather change” (118). The only thing we can do at the “local” level is devise genres that allow me to improve upon the offical genre, or bypass it.

As I mentioned in my last post on Tracing Genres, author Clay Spinuzzi levels two critiques at the user-centered design community:

1. Designers, in their efforts to incorporate users into the design process, end up treating users like victims, oppressed by technology.
2. Typical design processes diagnose and analyze organizations from one perspective, offering solutions at only that perspective.

As Livia pointed out, the timing of my post coincided with a recent article published by UX luminary Donald Norman on his site jnd.org. Peter Merholz and Andrew Otwell responded on their respective blogs. Both come-backs, if I may paraphrase, draw back the curtain to reveal very little behind Norman’s approach. Merholz indicates that Activity-Centered Design is nothing new, and points to Spinuzzi’s Tracing Genres itself as an example of activity theory applied to design. Activity theory, says Merholz, “has emerged as perhaps the second most important theoretical platform in human-computer interaction research, after cognitive psychology.” And though he doesn’t like the approach, he does like Norman’s escalation of questioning UCD “dogma.”

Otwell takes this a step further, saying that ANY dogma (whether user-centered or activity-centered) harms design and that both UCD and ACD are dated approaches — arriving at requirements through deliberate and measured analysis. Otwell instead praises 37signals’ “get real” method, a down-and-dirty approach that leverages the speed of technology change to allow rapid iteration of products which exist in a state of constant improvement.

In light of Spinuzzi’s work, however, I would offer a different interpretation of Norman’s essay. On the one hand, Norman’s tone and conclusions imply he still considers users to be victims and that designers are there to functionally empower (to use Spinuzzi’s words) them. Rather than being lost in a sea of “system-centered” products — as most UCD literature would have us believe — customers and audiences are treading water in a sea of over-analyzed user-centered products, according to Norman. At the same time, he sings the praises of evolved products — those that over the course of time have improved their design by virtue of ongoing tweaks. In these cases, the design team — whether formalized or not — as internalized the needs of users and how they use the product.

I’m not sure if Norman is saying that evolved products are results of activity-centered design, or the informal design processes that led to these products are related to activity-centered design. Either way, his notion of ACD will fail in the same way that UCD fails, according to Spinuzzi, in that Norman-branded ACD focuses on one level of the organization — the activity level. Therefore, Spinuzzi’s second criticism still holds true. It doesn’t matter which level of the organization we focus on, it still skews our understanding of the organization and the solutions. By contrast, Spinuzzi says that the only worthwhile analysis is one that accounts for every level of the organization: from activity on down to individual gestures.

By limiting his analysis, Norman draws some incorrect and dangerous conclusions about design. In Norman’s “new” design method, he says that users must adapt to the tools. Creating a tool around an activity may force users to change their behaviors to adapt to the tools. “Learn the tools,” says Norman, “and the activity is understood.”

This, too, is a limited view of how things actually work. Spinuzzi’s focus on genre better explains the interaction between people and artifacts. It accounts for the use of informal tools — like Post-It notes attached to manuals — and the combination of artifacts to create new ones that are still recognizable — like the translation of a paper-based report to an on-screen report. Informal artifacts and evolved artifacts are not humans adapting to tools. Instead, there’s a dialectic arrangement between people and their activities, reflected in their tools.

Different tools have different half-lifes. They evolve at different rates, and have different expected lifespans. A cup needs to last forever. A hammer until we have some other way to fasten wood together. A Web traffic report will live until such things are meaningless. The printed television grid, which evolved over time to pace our cultural involvement with television programming, is nearing the end of its useful life, as suggested by the transformation of TV Guide — fewer and smaller grids and greater emphasis on Hollywood gossip. This is not a tool that humans adapted to: it’s adapting to our changing behavior and identity.

There’s not one single right way to design a web site (or any product, but I’ll stick to what I know). Every site is a different genre that’s used in a different and unique way. This isn’t to say there aren’t lessons to be learned by working on different sites, but every project is going to require a unique approach depending on stakeholders, team members, and resources. Most of all the current state of the relationship between user and artifact should define the best approach to improve upon (or supplement or complement or replace, or whatever) that artifact.