Gifts of Attention and Twitter: Why Follow?

The "attention economy" has been talked about for years, maybe since the 1970s. Kevin Kelly has had interesting things to say about it in New Rules for the New Economy, which is available here, and in his article Better Than Free on Edge.org.

Gift economy is an older idea. Wikipedia has a good description: "simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community".

Twitter seems like a pure expression of these two ideas in combination. Using twitter you tend to develop a desire for more followers, and there's a bit of a social norm to thank followers. I say a "bit of a social norm" because not everybody does this. I don't, although I'm starting to wonder if I'm being rude. This isn't immediate, at least not in everybody's case. My starting attitude about Twitter included "why would I want lots of followers I don't know?" and "why would I want to follow lots of people if I don't know them?"

I used to be pretty picky about who I followed. I wanted to follow (more or less in order) people I knew personally, people whose work I knew in some way, and people doing work somehow related to what I do, or what I'm particularly interested in. I would check out someone's tweets and website first, then decide whether to follow them.

This changed pretty quickly; it was a combination of things. My attitude about what Twitter was for changed -- or more precisely, my sense that Twitter had to be for something in particular faded. My sense of determinism about people's activities faded too. Determinism in the sense that "John did an interesting thing in the past, so he will do an interesting thing in the future" -- and even more, "John hasn't done anything I think was interesting, so I don't think he's going to."

We all tend to have this sense of determinism about people, I think. It has to do with your own attention, which is a relatively limited thing. But in Twitter, it's different; you can make your attention go further, in a sense, by spreading it over many, many people you follow. Thinking about attention in a traditional "this is a resource" way suggests that this is a straightforward problem of division: you have X attention and you divide it among Y people (or Y tweets, I suppose). However, in the same sense that folk wisdom suggests things like love, trust, and the like actually increase when they're "used" more, I think Twitter is an attention multiplier.

Giving away your attention by following lots of people somehow multiplies the attention you have to give. And oddly enough, it actually feels satisfying; you have the sense that it's a gift. Chalk up another truth to folk wisdom; giving a gift feels at least as good as receiving one.

Update 4/13/09
Talked myself into it; now I do thank everybody who follows me.

Surfing the Delta Wave

As somebody said, one of the biggest effects of mobile phones is that people do less planning ahead -- rather than "let's meet at 7:30 on the south side of Union Square near the bench", it's "I'll call you after I'm done and we'll figure something out."

That's a change in social interaction. It's vast, ubiquitous, and subtle. You probably do it yourself, and I'll bet you never really noticed the change. It just happened.

That's one of the things that makes mobile UX design work fun; you're working on things that really change the world. At the same time, you're part of the change, too. Surfing the delta wave is a job requirement.


I think it might have been Clay Shirky, but I wasn't able to find the original.

What usability testing doesn't tell you

Most people in UX have a pretty good grasp on what usability testing can tell us. But it's important to maintain an equally good grasp on what it can't tell us.

Let's say you have an idea for a new mobile application that lets you work with email in some new way, and you're thinking about how users might organize their email. Maybe you arrive at two options: organizing by sorting, and organizing by applying tags. You're not sure which to implement as the primary approach, so you do some usability testing.

The problem is that even if you're able to mock up a test application that presents your tagging idea, any population you find with email experience will almost certainly already have experience with using sorting to organize email. At the very least, the email systems they've used have employed sorting as the primary organizational method.

Now, I don't know (or at the moment, particularly care) whether sorting or tagging works better for organizing emails. The point is that the two things represent different underlying concepts of "how to organize". Usability testing is not good at testing underlying concepts. Established concepts are familiar, and although a new concept may have great advantages, it's often hard to understand them right away, particularly in the very abbreviated time usually alloted to a participant in a usability test. So the established concept is very likely to appear more usable in the test.

Usability testing doesn't inevitably reinforce the status quo, but it's something to watch out for.

When finished isn't done

The product of some processes of creation can be called "finished". A book, a painting, an automobile, for example, generally at some point reach the stage where they're done. The book goes to press, the painting goes to the gallery, the automobile goes to the dealer. There are many kinds of designs for a piece of software, from data to architecture to user interface, and most of them can be aimed at this kind of result. The specification is finished, and ready to be handed over to the developers, who implement it.

I think we should rethink this. Software developed in an agile approach is not really done as much as done for now. You reach a point at which you step back and take a look, or do some testing, or get some more experience with the product, and then you jump right back in and iterate it again. I think this works better for design too. It's the way design really works, but the corporate superstructure suppresses that in the interest of schedules, deadlines, time to market, promotions, testing plans, and the like.

The truth is that later iterations of the same design will almost always be better because there are things you just can't think of in the first iteration -- or even the first few iterations -- because you need the previous ideas in order to derive the later ones. Any piece of software or hardware product that's gone through a few generations of versioning is a good example of this. The new iPod shuffle takes all the controls off the player itself and locates them on the headphone wires. This was just as technically possible in the first iPod shuffle as it is today. Why didn't they do it? I think it's because it just wasn't possible to think of it before having experience with previous iPod shuffles.

Iteration is pretty central to design, and a pretty natural way for designers to think and work. It's really corporate processes we need to fight. A big ally is Agile; it produces results in software development and it seems to be leading to more iterative thinking at the corporate level. Designers should pay attention, and get on board.

Objectivity, Beauty, and Interface

Part One: The Question and its Importance to Designers

Computer-Human interface design is a functional art; you use and experience an interface in addition to perceiving it. Moreover, you use an interface for a purpose, which is another way of saying it's a kind of tool. It is also, of course, a functional art, and involves the elements of taste, sentiment, and aesthetics any art involves.

The functional aspect of interface design can (arguably) be usefully quantified. The designer might establish as a goal "the smallest number of discrete physical actions by the user to accomplish any goal within the scope of the system". Thus your design is successful when there are no more discrete actions to design away. More to the point for most interface designs today, a software design would be successful when it requires the fewest number of mouse clicks. There are certainly other functional goals a designer might use, and for the purposes of this discussion any will do; the only important thing is that a functional goal in this sense can be quantified, whether it involves a quantity of mouse clicks, a span of time, the total distance traversed by a mouse pointer, or what-have-you.

In mathematics, science, and computer programming, and sometimes in interface design, an approach to a problem that comes close to a quantifiable limit is often described in aesthetic terms as "elegant" or even "beautiful". For example, if your theorem, experiment, code, or design involves the fewest possible terms, the simplest possible explanation, the most compact code, or the lowest number of actions, there's something pleasing about it, at least to other practitioners.

The "artful" aspect of interface design is less easily quantified. The designer's goal might be simply "beauty", or might involve the pleasure that users of the interface will experience. This is based more in a sensory response to a stimulus, which here is the interface -- most especially the sensory aspects of it. Today the sensory aspects of an interface are most commonly visual, sometimes auditory, and only occasionally involve other senses.

The question I'm slowly approaching here has to do with the objectivity of the different aspects of interface design. Something you can count is clearly objective; it doesn't matter what you think about a number; its value remains constant. The aesthetics of an interface, though, is a kind of beauty. Everyone is familiar with the truism "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but it's not entirely clear that this is both a truism and true.

Whether the beauty of an interface can be objectively, universally beautiful is significant for designers, particularly designers whose work is (or might be) distributed worldwide. Establishing design goals that match the needs or wants of a specific group of users may not be easy, but at least represents a problem with a known scope. If the beauty of interface design is objective and knowable, then the scope of a design problem becomes much greater while remaining possible. It would be, for example, possible to create an interface design that is beautiful no matter who the users might be. Alternatively, if the beauty of interface design is inherently subjective, then the designer can set aside such a universal goal and establish a multiplicity of goals: beauty for each definable group of users.

Jitterbug

The Jitterbug phone (and plan) is designed for and marketed to older consumers. Their website says:

Jitterbug may not play games, go online or give you the weather, but it's the perfect phone for those who don't want all those confusing extra features.

I think the idea of confusing extra features is a real key. Most tech companies (including cellphone manufacturers) just do not understand that simplicity itself can be a major feature. Apple, of course, tries to include the features but make them easier to use. But even easier is not including the features at all.

How to Design a Toolbox

Apple released the iPhone Software Developer Kit (SDK) today, or some of it at least. I'm no coder, but I downloaded the free version anyway just to see it. They're using a lot of the existing MacOS X tools (XCode and the like), and I'm told they're good. The interesting thing to me is that the SDK is supported by both traditional documentation and video presentations. I watched the first, in which John Geleynse introduces the tools.

I don't know a lot of demographics about the market for the SDK, but I do know quite a few people with the right skills. The video presentation approach seems pretty well targeted. Good design in a pretty broad sense, finding the kinds of things they think will reach their audience.