kip/bot/blog

Just spent a very fun hour on BaseballBoss, a fantasy-like service that people have been predicting for years. It allows you to create teams, drawing on players from all eras of baseball. Here’s a sampling of potential team members, using the baseball card metaphor:

The explanation at the top is part of a nicely crafted guided tour — a good blend of sparse text, tight navigation, and what so far seems to be an experience crafted well enough to not require much explanation. When I got my first 40 cards, I was tickled to see old timer names like Cotton Minahan and Pug Bennett:

(I was also happy to think how happy Cotton would have been to pull down $1MM. Probably wouldn’t have been bitter that Batista was getting $5MM).

After setting up my team — The Vishniak Sting — my first challenge was with the 1906 White Sox. BaseballBoss calculates the results of every at bat (presumably pitches as well, but can’t tell yet) and gives you a very entertaining score card.

I was crushed to see the Sting get crushed - 6-0 - but check it out. Ed Walsh, a 1906 pitcher who still holds the record for the lowest career ERA (1.82), pitched the full 9.0 innings! It’s an honor to lose to an ironman like that.

You can also read a highlights play list:

What a dream come true for real baseball fans this must be. I managed to find (through Google Book Search) a Roger Angell passage I remembered about the beauty of the box score for true fans. Rather than text, I got a pic of the page:

I am oddly moved by this whole thing.

Crunchgear has some screenshots of a working version of Windows 7 — about three years out from its projected release date. Looks like they’re going with cover flow:

Though I’m totally digging the more robust system tray area. Nice idea to take advantage of better bigger monitors with some widget-y stuff.

There are also a bunch of screenshots with some wheel interfaces:

I don’t know exactly how it works, but I like the idea of a wheel that reflects resource usage and other statuses. Not sure I’m buying the search in middle bottom — there’s a lot of user inertia to reach up and to the right for a search box.

There’s also an intriguing, dense screenshot:

There were no higher res images available of this one, so I couldn’t get a closer look at what’s happening at the bottom . . . but it looked potentially cool. It’s always alarming to see the faux 3D wheels which obscure significant amounts of information (my main gripe with the cover flow mode: cool but thin on data), but I think I’ve seen these kind of pre-release experiments before and they get nixed before release.

TechCrunch, while writing about something else (Flowww, a visualized RSS feed algorithm), backs into a critique of the Apple cover flow mode:

The other issue I have is that, while the site is pretty, the Cover Flow metaphor just doesn’t work for me as a navigational tool. It is too slow and it forces you to look at the pre-selected sites in the order that the algorithm (or Zotter) picks them. If you want to read the middle story, you have to flip through all the previous ones to get to it. I’d rather pick my own stories from a list of headlines, thank you very much.

Over the last several years, I’ve seen many versions of this pop up in designs for client work.  I’ve never liked it — the rate of information transfer is slow, the visuals rarely sit together nicely or in a way that allows for easy scanning, there’s a lot of guess work in locating yourself somewhere along the spectrum (and maddening to re-find something after you’ve moved away from it).  I don’t like it, but I keep my mouth shut, usually.  After all, Apple does it, and they . . . well, Apple does it!

The techcrunch writer asks for thoughts and a conversation is starting.  It would be nice to have some data or real learning about this.

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel . . . pause for a minute to celebrate that fact (which I didn’t know until this morning) . . . pause for another moment to celebrate the fact that it is not historical fiction (as opposed to his last three) . . . too many ellipses …

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel, had a nifty blog entry today announcing that Stephenson would be doing an interview soon and that readers could submit questions in the comments section. Stephenson has done a lot of interesting publishing things. When he released Cryptonomicon, a novel in which the importance of cryptography and secrecy to WWII and business today was prominent, he offered readers a code to crack. For the release of Quicksilver, the first volume of his Baroque Cycle he started a wiki in which readers could document the characters, events, ideas, and books covered in what turned out be a massive historical cycle. The release of In the Beginning was the Command Line, a book about software design and the predominance of the GUI in it, as a free downloadable was one of the early instances of ‘free’ in publishing. He semi-famously told the NYT that he wrote Snow Crash because programming it as a multi-media thing turned out to be too hard. He also used to provide soundtracks to the writing of the novels as part of his acknowledgements.

So this is another of those interesting things that Stephenson is doing to publishing. The questions and comments are awesome:

Stephenson has a fervent following, which cares deeply about his work and the subject matter driving his work, so it’s not entirely safe to say that every author can or should do this. But there are two points worth noting. First, Stephenson writes dense fiction that entertains but which also goes somewhere. He can write hilarious, memorable scenes, but they almost always occur in a setting that has depths the novel doesn’t have time to explore. Even his pen-name-written Interface, one of his more straightforward narratives, gets into how the brain works, how much we can manipulate people’s tastes, and, oddly enough, turned me onto a now decade old love of Mahler (along with Kundera . . . I read Immortality a month before Interface. Second, he is all about the “More…” dynamic of the internet era. Knowing that there is a feedback loop where his intellectual passions feed his fiction which fuel his and his readers’ passions, he participates readily and effectively in creating and pointing to content that deepens the reading and appreciation of his work.

Meanwhile, I’m just psyched that he’s doing a novel about monks. I love that s@!$.

The Viking Penguin Bookclub has promise as an idea: a publisher curates its offerings, supports it with a blog, and allows users to do book club like activities around it. It starts out with a nice highlights/selections interaction:

(On a design note, I started out liking the entry note: tab key-accessible entry fields, with good coloring. But it kind of fell apart. For the second field, seen above, I forgot what field I was entering, and without a label, discovered that my fingers are used to entering passwords after the name, not email. I was also bummed when the tab-accessible state pull-down, didn’t support up and down arrows or first letter.) Starts out promising, highlighting three books that you wouldn’t find on the bestseller list and emerging authors.

But then, it got stupid:

This is an slightly shrunken image of a browsable bookshelf and, I fear, the future that I will be facing in Flash design meetings. These titles, with the exception of the (excellent translation of) Anna Karenina and (somewhat overrated) Collapse are unbrowsable. When you rollover the book cover, you still get precious little information:

I still can’t make out what the book is.

I can’t tell if the interface above is “pictures are always superior to text” or “recreational of physical reality always rocks users”, but I know that, as a CD/CD manager, I’ll have to suit up and deal with a lot of sad, silly, stupid, sucky interface ideas like this.

Link found via Konigi.

Zeus Jones has nice, but regrettably short, piece about storytelling in marketing and advertising. It’s built around a line from Lee Clowe at AAAAAAAAA:

The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter.

This reminds me a little of Spielberg’s line about a decade ago that video games would become an art form when one makes us cry: it’s a weird evaluation of one medium, through the value system of another one. In both cases, it’s a an older medium evaluating an emergent medium by its own standards. Z-J goes on to point out, rather crisply that, “There’s no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn’t really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it’s absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories.”
As advertisers and interactives race towards each others’ capabilities, storytelling is the word that many, most, nearly everybody uses to characterize that sacred center. Like concept, or big idea, storytelling is getting added on to the fundamental requirements of interactive experiences. For certain kinds of experiences, it seems like an unnatural bolting on. Is the logic that we should extend the formula of useful, usable, engaging to:

useful + usable + engaging + story == good experience?

Or are we saying that the way to be engaging should be through story?

In any case, it feels like storytelling is a heavy throw-weight word — strong on emotional attention-getting, light on impact — that we throw into the mix to let others know that we’re thinking of the next big thing.

Yesterday, David Weinberer twittered an increasingly common experience:

He saw something with a variety of features that looked familiar and seemed to string together intriguingly into something resembling value but, in the end, really couldn’t put his finger on it or endorse it.

When this tweet occurred, I was in the middle of trying to figure out what Skitch is, and whether it’s worth checking out.  This is something I seem to be doing more and more of recently.  Explaining the value of interactive experiences has always been a little tricky, even to professionals.  Some experiences involve behaviors which are foreign (sharing photos on the web).   Others hardly seem worth the effort (watching content through slingbox).
Now, there’s the problem of intricacy.  So much interactive design today is focused on one or both of two things:  subtle improvements to the individual steps in an experience; and/or the connective tissue between those steps.
I’m having that cognitive challenge with Skitch right now. Yesterday I witnessed some Twitter traffic in which people whom I respect were using and raving about Skitch. So I check out the site, watch the video, and try to decide if it’s worth trying. Its features look compelling:

1. screen capture
2. rudimentary image editing
3. easy connections to web services like flickr, .mac
4. less easy connections to blogs, and email clients
5. the ability to put your pictures on skitch.com
6. All wrapped in one experience, I think …

Features 1 - 3, I already have in place (and in abundance). Feature 4, the ability to connect to my personal email, blog etc., I have already done some work on getting sorted out (and do it every time I get a new machine). The value of feature 5 is unclear to me: if I can post to flickr, why am I putting it here? That said, a friend of mine, who is an active flickr user, is using skitch in his twitters . . . why is he bothering?

Feature 6 is potentially the one that moves me. A well constructed integration of previously dispersed functions is potentially serious value.

But see how hard it is to tell what we’re even looking at. Here’s how Skitch describes itself:

Skitch.com + Skitch = fast and fun image sharing. Skitch.com is a webservice that works hand in hand with our application Skitch to give you 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.

No differentiator from or value-add to flickr or other photo sharing services, no reference to the image editing interface that follows:

Then you have the additional text, which references two products, but still emphasizes sharing.  This time, instead of being fast and fun, it’s fun and useful:

So I tried the video and that left me confused also.  It was a combination demo, screenshot gallery, and user scenario.   Four different moments to get the idea across and I’m still confused.
Some of this isn’t a big deal, of course.  The product is in beta, so it’s messaging is likely to be as well.  They may be looking to simply be acquired, so it’s not clear who they’re really selling to.

That said, it’s interesting to note how intricate interactive experiences are and the new communication challenges they pose.  Flickr and the iPod were two late entrants to their respective fields.  The iPod had fewer features than other MP3 players, but was easier and more pleasurable to use (and had a better catalog).  Those are very difficult things to prove.  Flickr was supposed to be somehow more convenient and had the foreign, counterintuitive benefit, of being in the midst of a vast community.  Their value props were indistinguishable from their predecessors, and their differentiators were very subtle.  Since easy and fun are hard to reveal in text and words, and even screenshots, those stories need to be told in different ways — word of mouth, more complex visuals, motion graphics/videos.

Skitch is in a similar spot, and I’m experiencing it the same way I did the iPod and Flickr:  I’m watching it with the knowledge that I already have what it offers, wondering if it has something special, and waiting for critical mass of people telling me how great it is, or a negative critical mass of frustration with what I already have until I decide to spend time trying it.

We’re all about telling the stories these days, and I’m never quite sure I understand what that means.   For some emerging interactive experiences, however, it seems pretty clear that we have to start getting comfortable with intricate stories that result in fun, easy, and useful.

“Our guild just moved up to number 20 on our server.”

I’m riding the subway home with a friend, the guy who, among many other contributions to my life, got me hooked on World of Warcraft (WoW). I haven’t played in forever, but the night before I logged onto WoW specifically to talk to him. (We’re at a point where I log on to WoW and we schedule subway rides home to get caught up.)

We talk a little bit longer when I realized what he said. “Wait. How do you know your guild’s rank?” Well . . .

Turns out (how often do I use that phrase? this is the last time) that Aspir from the guild Ludicrous Speed has created a site that taps into the WoW Armory and, using an algorithm all his own, ranks guilds. He’s doing for World of Warcraft what Bill James and the SABERMetricians have done for baseball: created an objective data-driven way of understanding and evaluating a game while at the same time giving fanatics and geeks a whole new way to spend endless hours talking about something they love.
So let’s unpack the sentence for nonWoWers (and make sure I’m getting it right).

One of the best things about Wow is that, while you can in fact play solo, the most crazy over-the-top (or, as the kids say off the hook) fun to have is doing group activities. These include quests, which every player needs to do to efficiently advance and which requires working in concert with 3 - 5 other players. Then there are raids. Raids are special places in the WoW game which are restricted to players of certain levels, contain really nasty hard to beat bad guys, and yield nifty treasures. To beat the nasties, you usually need over a dozen people with the right mix of skills and who work well together. Players create guilds for a variety of reasons, but most guilds are heavily focused on raids.

I’ve only been on raids three or four times. They are time-consuming to actually do, since most raids are complex and require multiple tries. They even take time to coordinate. Raid parties are usually organized by the in-game chat system, then people have to fly to the location, often stopping at a bank to pick up supplies, or going to a store to buy “mats” (materials) so they can make potions, bandages or other items needed for the raid. That’s a prohibitive amount of time for me, but the few times I have done it, it’s been some of the funnest gaming I’ve ever done. For a better feel of a raid, check out youTube for videos that guilds publish of their raids. (There is a whole genre of videos celebrating raid completions or mocking the d-bags who get a little caught up in it. Some of them show quite elaborate planning processes, including spreadsheets, maps, Xes and Os that look like a football playbook.)

So, that’s a raid. The WoW Armory is an API where players can check out other players and guilds. Here’s my main character:

The character name is Vishniak (named after Floyd Wayne Vishniak, from Neal Stephenson’s Interface. most of my characters are named after Stephenson characters and it’s great fun to run into other Stephenson characters — could I be any dorkier? oh yes . . .). Vishniak belongs to the guild “Victory not Vengeance” (I didn’t come up with the name, but I am proud to have been a charter member). Most important, Vish owns the “Destroyer’s Mantle”. If you look at the description, you’ll see that it “Binds when picked up.” That means that once I pick up the object, I can’t give, sell, or trade it to another player. Certain objects which bind on pick up (”BOP”), can only be acquired after the successful completion of a raid. Put another way, I can only own certain objects if I was present at the killing of a particular bad guy.

So, we have a classic web2.0 thing here. An open API that exposes data, a small, fanatical audience with no small amount of technical chops, and a larger, less technical audience that is curious about the data and will engage spiritedly in detailed conversations.

When Bill James began crunching through baseball stats by hand, he said he wanted to find baseball ‘truth’. Aspir describes his beginnings in slightly less exalted, but equally geeky terms:

I’ve been working on this site in my off time for probably going on 2 months now. It started one evening after my guild, Ludicrous Speed from Bloodscalp, downed Gruul for the first time and the other officers and I began to wonder, “Where does this put us in guild rankings on our server?”.

Gruul is a baddie in a raid. Notice, that he says “for the first time” (this becomes significant in debates about his scoring system). What Aspir did to answer this question was create a formula that would measure the strength of a guild. The formula is based on the BOP items possessed by a guild’s members. If you look in Vishniak’s bag above, you can assume that I am carrying around my best gear and you can tell from the BOP items which raids I have participated in (I can only have a Gruul BOP item if I was there at the time he was dropped). You can ladder up from Vishniak to my guild and find the other BOP items owned by other guild members.

So you could create a formula that assigns points to a guild like so:

gather a list of the BOP items owned by individual players in a guild, distill that list (de-dupe) to a list of bad guys beaten, assign values to those bad guys, add up the points and that’s the score of the guild. Rinse, repeat, and rank as needed.

Number geeks, baseball fans, and AD&D players will immediately see the logic of the formula and quickly identify at least four areas for intense theological and dorkily fun debate: how do you assign point values to the raids? how do you handle guilds who have completed a raid several times? shouldn’t you divide the points by the number of members? aren’t there other things that we should factor into a guild’s strength like average level, complete sets of equipment? It’s like asking who is the better baseball player, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? There are so many factors, objective, subjective and somewhere in between, that the arguments can go on forever and be entertaining for almost that long. (The most recent definitive answer to that question can be found in Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s Babe Ruth, btw. Bonds ekes out wins on hitting and fielding, but Ruth’s pitching — which the guys at Baseball Prospectus convert into runs contributed, the only measure that counts — puts him over the top. That discussion is also a good overview of baseball statistics’ current state of evolved geekdom. The exercise of converting pitching — the quintessential run prevention activity — into runs contributed — the atomic unit of baseball stats is — nerdazzling.)

And these debates are already starting. The FAQ on the guild ranking site, called Wowjutsu, is a quick look at the major issues under discussion (the equivalent of on-base percentage explanations, at the beginning of a baseball stats book — it’s important, but there’s so much more). The issues that have bubbled up to the FAQ indicate a rich future for those so inclined: the scoring of multiple kills of a boss, how to handle guild alliances, dealing with guild defections. Dig into the notes and you’ll see updates about tweaks to the formulas.

This is yet another testament to how good a game WoW is. No matter how many hours you’ve played it, no matter how many times you’ve done every single thing there is to do in the game, there is a way to breathe new life into it. Over the last three years, I have grown bored of the game to the point where I have uninstalled it to reclaim disk space, only to hear about something that pulls me back in This time, for players, it’s the Bill Jamesian search for WoW truth.

A friend in Facebook has an album called “pick me ups”:

I wish this were bigger on Facebook, because it’s a great way to help clients and others understand the varied uses of photo-sharing and having personal information on the web. This is an album full of great pictures of friends in very happy states, nieces and nephews, a few outdoor shots. From the title, she’s put them there so that she can browse through her pictures for a little emotional lift.

I’m sure meta is the wrong word, but there’s something meta-seeming about the title itself. It’s originally for her own consumption, a way to have her favorite pictures readily available, but there’s a willingness to share. It might be even stronger, that there’s an indifference to an audience — I will build it and don’t care if anyone comes, cuz I built it for me. That might be the reason for lower-case in the title.

My flickr photostream is kind of a mess in that sense. I put up pictures I want people to see, I put up images that amuse me and which I hope will amuse others, sometimes I use it as a note-taking device (a handyman sign on a light pole where the little number strips at the bottom are all taken away). I post a lot of screengrabs and scans there, cuz I want them for future reference.

Among marketers, the emphasis on audience size is still the first filter for any understanding of an internet experience. There are still concerns about quality of the audience, but size is a gating factor.

This emphasis on size of audience misses the complex relationship internet users have with their “audiences”. We’re not necessarily seeking one. My friend’s album above is indifferent to the audience. “Come if you want, I don’t care. This gallery is for me, I expect some of my friends will like it, but that’s not the point. So much so, that there might even be pictures I’d rather some of my friends not see, but that’s OK, cuz I want my pick me ups right here.”
We probably all have contacts on Flickr where the pictures get a little too personal, the jokes are a little too in, or they’re just getting insider goofy with their friends and there’s no reason to share. The only reason they’re being shared is because it’s too much work to lock it down. My own photostream is amused by the possibility of/semi-hopeful for an audience. The pics are there for me so I can send links around and have them available, but if someone shares my sense of humor or interest in Rosicrucian symbols, cool. I’m doing this blog partially to help sort out all the stuff I’m reading (I’m in a very unfocused stage right now, hoping it’s an plateau or inflection point). I am risking an audience rather than seeking on so that I’m forced not to write anything too stupid, and put a little thought and care into the writing.
Even within my industry (internet marketing), it’s a struggle to get people to understand the normalness of flickr and other types of sharing. A colleague of mine returned from a vacation in South America several months ago.  Eager to see pictures, I suggested now would be a good time to get into the Flickr stream. “Why would I want to put my pictures out for everyone to see?” My reply was “Not everyone . . . me!”, at which point, an offer was made to bring the pictures in. Sigh.

When people ask me for interaction design (IxD) book recommendations (one of the few things I believe I do exceedingly well is recommend books), I always steer them towards Steven Johnson’s Emergence, away from Jakob Nielsen, and sometimes toward Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. I also show them a great photo/coffee table book about ants.

Yesterday, David Armano twittered a post of his from last year, where he described two architects creating a children’s playground. One architect has very firm ideas about the role of every element in the playground, and how it should function. The other designer is pretty open to creating an environment where things simply happen. (Amusing sidenote: the first is a man, the other a woman.) The first architect is bothered when kids use the playground their way rather than enjoying it in the way he had anticipated . . . Read the post, but the take-away is that designers shouldn’t necessarily be focused on control, and have clear outcomes in mind for the experience their designs create.

This calls to mind a classic story from Jane Jacobs about the fountain in Washington Square Park. City planners wanted the fountain to function as a fountain, with water jets, gently overflowing and tiered bowls, inward spraying outer rings — a lovely bit of the old world here in the Village. Before the fountain was operational, though, residents had turned it into a lunch spot, an additional set of benches, and even a performance space/amphitheater. When the water was turned on, residents had lost a gathering space and lobbied to have it turned off. City planners and parks people kept turning the fountain on, putting their sense of what the space should be used for over what had been working quite well for the residents. Eventually, people turned to sabotage to keep the water off, going so far as to put laundry detergent in the water system so that the fountain would bubble and foam rather than spray.

The residents won out, and the fountain has for years been dry. It is a place for skating, eating, stand-up comedy, the occasional performance troupe, some theater, and whatever other clever things people come up with for their reclaimed space.

That was an important design moment for me, and the book is an important design book for interactive designers. It highlighted to me a key principle: sometimes the best experiences are the ones where users can surprise you with what they add to it or do with it.

This isn’t terribly new today. There is a notion of emergent gameplay that has been around for years. Real-time strategy games like Age of Empires are loaded with emergent gameplay — even players doing the same matchup of civilizations on the same map over and over again try different styles and strategies and sometimes just do humorous stunts. In World of Warcraft, I have seen same sex weddings (Stormwind Cathedral), naked dancing guild meetings, impromptu fireworks shows (at the fountain in the Mage Quarter of Ironforge — Jacobs would have loved it!) and Intel sponsors screenshot contests.

When I was a game designer, I used to think of this as hard-coded experiences versus open ones. A hard-coded experience is a series of gates, funnels, obstacles: Pitfall Harry sidescrolling from point a to point b, solving all of the puzzles in Myst. Open games would include WoW, AoE, Sims, Electroplankton . . .

As we move from web sites to web services, this kind of emergent design thinking — the ability to create systems that users interact with in creative, dynamic, surprising, and useful or entertaining ways — is a new skill we have to come into.