@rodbegbie‘s Circles

Many discussions have ensued about how people are organizing their Circles. Many have also praised Google’s elegant and unique implementation as a clear answer to Paul Adam’s research entitled “The Real Life Social Network“.

I’ve been thinking about grouping and organization of friends for a long time. As an information architect, it’s in my nature to want to organize and tag everyone I know. I even wrote a post in 2004 about the organization of my instant messaging list. In thinking about this for a little while, I’ve decided to try to document my thinking so far on Google Circles, as well as the larger context of digitally grouping people.

Why We Need Groups

I’ve noticed from reading a number of articles about Groups, Circles, Lists, etc. is the variety of use cases and needs. We see so many implementations because there are many needs. There are different use cases for publishers and consumers, public and private, symmetrical and asymmetrical. Before I talk about the challenges I think Google Circles, and any similar feature faces, let’s look at some problems grouping attempts to solve.

Privacy

One reason for needing groups is because you’re only comfortable with certain people seeing what you’re talking about. For example, you may only want to share baby photos with family. Flickr’s Friends and Family settings are very much targeted for this use case.

Interest Context

Subtly different from privacy, you feel only these people need to know about what you’re talking about. An example might be asking for advice on what tires to buy from your car enthusiast friends. You don’t necessarily care that it’s public, you just want to make sure the right people read it. Currently, communities around interests is largely solved by services such as Yahoo!, Facebook, and Google Groups.

Local Context

Posts that are specific to your location such as “what’s going on tonight?” or “Anyone have tickets to the concert tonight?” should be targeted to friends within that geographic area.

Event Context

Similar to local context, when you’re at an event (e.g., Coachella music festival), you may want to communicate and publish only to your friends who are also at the event. Group messaging tools such as GroupMe and Beluga—and now Google’s Huddle—attempt to solve for this use case. Not surprisingly, all of these solutions are mobile-centric.

Organizational Context

Your college friends don’t know your ex-coworkers don’t know your softball team. Maybe you want to share a link about your alma mater or one on how your former company just changed CEOs.

Not Spamming Everyone

A corollary to the contexts is that one may not only want to publish a post to a specific audience, but may also feel self-conscious about spamming others with what’s deemed irrelevant material.

Targeted Consumption: Reading From a Specific Group

For any of the contexts above, you may also want to consume based on a grouping. Perhaps you wish to view only messages from friends also at Coachella. Or you want to read the latest tech news from the technology journalists and authors you follow. Twitter Lists is an example of a way to address such a use case.

What Google Circles Does Right

Anything that’s created this much discussion and buzz is clearly doing something right. While I think there are some challenges for Circles, they’ve done many things that I think are positive, innovative, or at least interesting.

Visible

Unlike Twitter Lists or Facebook’s Friend Lists (did you know you could organize Facebook friends into lists?), everyone in Google+ has to be in a Circle. This is a bold move and puts organization as the focus of the entire product. While forcing grouping may seem like a higher barrier to entry, their interface makes it as easy as adding a friend on other sites.

The Circle Interface

Circles is a delightful experience. It makes you want to add people just for the fun of it. I do feel the drag n’ drop interface is one that’s more suited for touch interfaces and may be too much effort for large collections of people. However, adding people to circles through their Suggestions is a cinch. If you haven’t tried deleting a Circle yet, you should. Delightful.

The Sharing Interface

Although not unique, the sharing interface is simple. I can easily type in the Circles I want to share a post with and it’s clear from looking at any post which Circle I shared it with. One caveat is that the Extended Circles option is a pretty confusing one, even for those of us immersed in this world.

Auto-Suggest Circle Members

In one of the first Circles I created, after adding only three people, Google started suggesting others to add and every single suggestion was correct. This made creating that Circle much easier. Unfortunately, none of the other Circles I created had suggestions. I suspect they are generated from the Google Group the members are a part of.

One Way Circles

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure some people I think are my friends don’t think the same of me. Likewise, that guy who calls me his “buddy” doesn’t need to know that I put him in the “Acquaintance” Circle.

Why Grouping Sucks

When I first started using Google+, I had a sense of déjà vu as I categorized my friends. I’d done this before… on Flickr, on Facebook, on Twitter, on my instant messenger contact list, and in my address book. Shortly thereafter, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the effort to rigorously group everyone. Then I started thinking about whether it was ever worth the effort to do so. Because as much as one tries to emulate the real life social network and address Paul Adam’s research, there are some human subtleties we’re missing in the digital world.

The Soft Line

Have you ever had a Facebook or LinkedIn friend request where you weren’t sure whether to accept or not? There’s a soft line that separates a friend and an acquaintance.

It’s true that you can probably label everyone you met through an organization (school, work, etc.) but the boundaries quickly become blurred. Let’s say you met someone through your classmate but she’s not in your school. Does she belong in the school group? What about the person who sometimes hangs out with your group of friends? Or the guy you met dozens of times but only at parties?

We’re incredibly adept at knowing the right situations to include the right people. They’re not black or white rules and depend heavily on context: is it a party, who else is there, do they know any of the other people, have you talked recently, etc. Unfortunately, this skill and these implicit social rules we know are not easily translated.

Maintenance

I have a very close friend, Mike. We used to share an office together back in 2000. We talked about everything, went on trips, and hung out nearly daily. Today, I see him on average once every two months. We still share our thoughts and are there for each other for support, but life got in the way and our relationship is different now.

Sociologist Gerald Molenhorst has shown that we change half of our social network every seven years but there isn’t a Changing of the Guard ceremony here. It’s not entirely clear at what point Mike moved from one group to another.

Thus, maintaining digital groups has two problems. First, you don’t know when to move someone from one group to another because transitions happen gradually. Second, it’s simply a lot of effort to maintain. How often would you update the entire list? And if it’s not updated, how useful are the groupings, really?

Recall

I think I could run an open card sort for myself and probably come up with some good categorizations for my friends. However, once I’ve created these fancy Circles, will I actually remember who will see a given post? From my experience organizing my Facebook and address book, I’ve found that I don’t remember the complex taxonomies I dream up. In fact, I don’t know that I can list every person that’s in my “Family” group in Flickr even though it’s less than twenty.

When compounded with the high overhead of maintenance and likely outdated groups over time, it’s even less likely that I’ll know who I’m actually sharing a post with.

One use case where recall isn’t a concern is in consumption. If you’ve created a “Celebrities” group to read their content, it doesn’t matter if you don’t remember every individual in the group.

Can It Be Done?

The maintenance required for grouping our friends is too high and too vague. We simply don’t have the rules as clearly defined as programs require and even if we did, the parameters change. Your personal tastes change. The influential people change. Even your friends change. Keeping the groups accurate and remembering its members is a challenge.

The obvious question to ask is: what about automation? Google Buzz attempted to automatically determine social ties based on who you frequently emailed. That solution lead to disastrous results, linking a woman closely to her ex-husband.

However, Buzz’s nascent attempts and failures do not necessarily mean automation is untenable. If you’ve seen LinkedIn Labs’ InMaps, you’ll know that your network is simultaneously clustered and complex. You can almost make out the groupings but there are many nodes that overlap multiple categories or aren’t easily categorized at all.

A new app that launched last week, Katango, seems to be a technology demo of how we can use these clusters to auto-group your Facebook friends. I was impressed with how accurately they created logical groups that hadn’t occurred to me. Perhaps the smartest part of the app is that it then allows you to edit the group by removing people. This approach is smart because it’s easier to say, “this looks like my college drinking buddies… except that guy; he was only sort of with us” than it is to say, “this looks like my college drinking buddies… who’s missing?” Recognition over recall wins again.

Perhaps as we refine these patterns and technologies, we can start to not only recommend the grouping, but also recommend changes to the groups over time, thus lowering the maintenance cost. However, what I really wonder is whether we should be trying to mirror real life interactions at all. Instead of mapping, wouldn’t it be more interesting to change or create new behaviour?

Thanks to Dave Gray for his input and feedback on my draft (see his Google+ post on sharing) and to Coley Cheng for some masterful editing.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Brooklyn Beta, a new two-day intimate web conference put on by Cameron Koczon of Fictive Kin and Chris Shiflett of Analog. I had the honor of being invited to present on some of our thinking and process behind #NewTwitter, the redesign of twitter.com.

Smaller, Smarter, More Intimate

The conference had only 150 people but all the speakers and attendees were incredibly bright and talented, working on a lot of great projects. By comparison, Twitter seemed like a large company which is amusing as we’re a mere 300 people working on one of the largest services worldwide. I’ve never once felt like I worked in a large company while here and in talking to the others, I understood why. Much of our approach and practices are identical to three-person startups and agencies and, if anything, our execution time is at least as fast if not faster.

Though there wasn’t any explicit theme, the talks all centered around having passion in the work you do. Christ Shiflett even said the conference itself was crafted out of love and you could tell from each presentation how much love was put into each project.

The Talks

photo by Chris Casciano

Shelley Bernstein (@shell7) is the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum. She talked about all the ways they use social media to increase exposure and create a better experience. Her talk was a highlight for me and I hope she can come visit Twitter HQ sometime to share her experiences. Shelley talked about how they allow photography, and the Flickr photos gave more exposure to the museum but also gave them more understanding of how people interacted with the exhibits, even in negative ways. She emphasized how personal voices from the authors added much more backstory to exhibits and photographs. But to keep the voices and the attention on Brooklyn Museum, they use ConnectTweet to have multiple people contribute to one account.

Facebook and Twitter are tools they use to continue conversations so that external articles (such as negative articles from the New York Times) aren’t the last word on the museum. Using these channels has also meant a different definition of working hours, as you have to be on when your visitors are.

Her use of Foursquare was particularly creative. They created a landing page on Foursquare so staff can add tips of places to eat near the museum. They also have the rule:

“If you are staff you should not be mayor.”

When the mayor checks in, they meet the mayor and take pictures! And in order to reward other visitors, they also created a “BK Art Star” badge.

Shelley then shared a story of how HBO found a photo of one of their statues, not in the Brooklyn Museum but “somewhere online”. The statue was featured in the series True Blood and Shelley only found out through Twitter and Facebook when visitors mentioned it. The engaged museum audience then asked HBO about the statue, inspiring the writers of the show to connect with the museum. For the season finale, which featured the statue, HBO sent photo to the museum as a preview and encouraged them to share it.

Elliot Jay Stocks (@elliotjaystocks ) talked about his process and struggles with his solo creation, a print magazine called 8 Faces. Like the founders of the conference, he wanted to make a special thing that’s unlike a regular magazine. Some of the key lessons he learned included how many unseen things take a lot of time. Examples include: getting ad placements, chasing people for their advertisement assets, getting payments, and dealing with after-sales support. Although he’d completed his interviews in February in March, the magazine wasn’t printed until August because it was his own solo project that happened over evenings and weekends.

One aspect he discussed, which was echoed by both Cameron Moll and myself, was the concept of focusing on experience first. He called himself an “accidental businessman” because money wasn’t the focus but he still succeeded. He didn’t focus on marketing but wrote a few blog posts and tweeted about the project as he would any project he was working on. This was enough to garner sufficient attention and, though he didn’t do a press release, the magazine was featured in the Independent and, at its peak, was selling 2.94 copies a second.

Cameron Moll (@cameronmoll), founder of Authentic Jobs, talked in detail of how he took a side hobby and turned it into his full-time project. The job board first started with a few people trying to hire him for full-time positions. When he declined, they’d naturally ask if he knew anyone he could refer. Soon, he was posting these openings in a sidebar on his blog. This process quickly grew into a full job board, as it became clear that companies were willing to offer money for the quality of candidates he could refer.

Like Elliot, Cameron didn’t ask for money first and didn’t focus on money. Instead, he focused on creating something that could connect job posters to job seekers and even guaranteed money back to companies (very few want their money back because they care much more about getting a good candidate than being reimbursed). In its 5th year now, Cameron is expanding the job board and offered a lot of heartfelt advice on balancing such an endeavor with giving back, and giving time to family.

Marco Arment (@marcoarment) is the former CTO of Tumblr and the creator of the popular mobile/web application, Instapaper. Continuing on the theme, Marco shared how he started the project as something he was building for himself and did so on train rides during his commute. He was frank and honest about his initial attempts which, in his words, “sucked”. Continuing on, after his first attempt, he created the current version of Instapaper. His first revision of 2.0 was built in a single weeknight as a challenge to himself to see if he could. Although ugly and missing some basic “paperwork” functions, it served its purpose as a way to read links later.

As a project that was built while still at Tumblr, Marco had much advice to offer for those thinking of working on side projects. He suggested not hiding the project from your employer, getting approval, and also getting very explicit clarifications around ownership. While side projects are incredibly rewarding, he also emphasized that “day jobs are great and you get paid more than you think”. But his best piece of advice is applicable to any job:

“Spend time, don’t waste time.”

Closing out the day was Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) from Union Square Ventures (investor in both Tumblr and Twitter). His talk was concise and informative, detailing the 10 Golden Principles in successful web applications:

• Speed
• Instant Utility
• Software is Media
• Make it Personal (Voice)
• Less is More
• Make it Programmable (through APIs)
• RESTful (everything should have its own URL)
• Discoverability
• Clean
• Playful

He then spent some time in Q&A discussing the traits he looks for in entrepreneurs. Amongst them, he sought people who had tenacity, salesmanship, and a passion/fervor for their product. He finds that founders who are good product people with a team of an engineer and a frontend engineer and design hybrid make an incredible team, though the mix may vary. In keeping with the theme, he also mentioned that he tends to avoid founders who are “business people” or, more specifically, those who are chasing the money.

The Demos

photo by Chris Casciano

Interwoven between some of the talks were early stage demos from small groups and companies. The demos included Goodsie, a site that makes it easy to sell merchandise online. With it, you can create a store in five minutes. Where’s It Up? is an expansion of the initial idea of Down For Everyone Or Just Me, adding location granularity to the information. Moontoast is a “social commerce platform” that allows you to embed your store elsewhere, and consolidate various communities.

Svpply is a product that’s been in private beta for awhile and is like a delicious for products/shopping. Gimme Bar, a scrapbooking tool to easily collect media and content around the web, had many conference participants saying, “gimme my gimme bar!” and Mapalong offered a more personal, open and visual approach to annotating trips, events or even your life.

My Talk

As a major site redesign, the overwhelmingly positive reception of #NewTwitter far exceeded our expectations. This level of success requires a lot of vision, teamwork, talent, passion, and a fair bit of luck. My talk described the process we went through as well as some of the thinking that went behind our decisions. Rather than recap the entire presentation here, I’ll save that story for another time and place.

What Others Are Saying

Finally, some of the other speakers have also written great summaries or linked to their talks:

• Simon Collison: Brilliant Brooklyn Beta
• Fred Wilson: Brooklyn Beta
• David Kaneda: Sencha Touch Workshop

Congratulations once again to Cameron and Chris and other organizers on a great conference!

Update: The video for this talk is now online thanks to IxDA and I’ve included it here. If you’re in San Francisco, we’re also doing a redUX on March 6th, 2010 for free at Adaptive Path. There will be a number of local speakers that spoke at Interaction ’10.

It all started around July or August 2009 when I saw this video:

It was the first time I’d seen the iPhone 3GS’s new compass feature utilized in such a way. I immediately thought, “this would be great as a Ghostbusters-like game.” So my friend Arshad, Coley and I with some help from many of our friends and family, spent a little bit of our spare time over the next few months working on a basic concept which eventually became ARGH: Augmented Reality Ghost Hunter.

How many people have taken the Savannah ghost tours? A few of you? Well, in case you didn’t know, Savannah is known for being haunted. So let’s look for some ghosts.

[showing ARGH game and finding a ghost in the presentation room]

This game isn’t really all that complex. In fact, it’s just a small part of what we originally envisioned. But as we were building and designing this game, I learned a lot about augmented reality and it’s current shape. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Augmented Reality: Is It Real? Should We Care?

When I asked on Twitter what people at this conference wanted to learn from this talk, Dan Willis helpfully replied to me:

So, I decided to oblige and have renamed the talk OMGWTFAR?!1!: A Hefty Heap.

What is Augmented Reality?

Well, augmented reality is a term that was actually coined 18 years ago:

In 1992, Tom Caudell coined the term augmented reality when he was working at Boeing on a project to make it easier to assemble large bundles of electric wire for aircraft on the factory floor.

But what does it mean exactly? According to Wikipedia (with my own emphasis):

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.

The live and mixed reality parts are very significant because it means taking a photograph and processing it doesn’t count and it means virtual reality doesn’t count.

However, it doesn’t sound as fanciful as you might think. We’ve been seeing it in Hollywood for ages. Minority Report features scenes where Tom Cruise is greeted at stores with virtual, personalized ads overlaid on top of his reality.

And even earlier than that, in 1984, The Terminator was showing an augmented reality view in the eyes of the Terminator.

It’s not just science fiction. Your reality has already been augmented. This being Superbowl weekend, it’s appropriate to note that the first-down line we see in football games is overlaid on, or augmented, and not painted on. What, nobody told you?

Types of AR

There are different ways to create an augmented reality. What you ee with football games is one of them: show live video feeds and, while watching the feed, additional information is added. This experience is probably the most disconnected AR experience as you’re not actually interacting with the “reality”.

A very common type of AR you’ll see these days are the marker-based AR. The technology depends on the person holding up an easily recognizable and predefined marker to the camera. You can try it yourself with Boffswana’s Papervision prototype.

Another method, which is becoming increasingly popular, is location-based augmented reality. These systems depend on the knowledge of where you are, which direction you’re facing, and what the system already knows to be around your location. The most well known example of this is the Yelp Monocle which shows you restaurants and other businesses in a first-person view.

Another form of augmented reality is based on augmenting your world through audio instead. RjDj have created a suite of music apps which react to the environment and sounds around you as well as the speed you’re moving. Their latest collaboration with British pop singer Little Boots is probably their most polished demonstration of how delightful this experience can be:

Watching the people in the Little Boots video really serves to illustrate just how much of an experience AR can provide. While the term should and will remain the same now that it’s hit the mainstream, I do feel it’s more accurate to refer to it as an enhanced reality and adding information or interaction based on what is happening around you is in fact enhanced context and enhanced meaning which leads to enhanced experiences or even delightful experiences.

Why Now?

When you look at Google Trends for searches on the term augmented reality, you’ll find it’s skyrocketed in the last year. In particular, around halfway through the year, the term gained a lot more prominence.

This sudden increase came about because of a number of factors:

• Almost every phone now has a camera which means everyone is carrying a device which can capture what’s around them into a processor.
• Smartphones, which are also becoming increasingly common, now have reasonable internet connectivity to retrieve useful and contextual information (insert AT&T joke here).
• Phones are now equipped with GPS enabling phones to recognize where the user is.
• Most recently, and perhaps the tipping point, both Android phones and iPhones added digital compasses to their devices thus allowing software to detect not only where the user is but also which way they are facing.
• And finally, to a lesser extent, the accelerometers on these phones enable designs based on the user’s movement.

So What’s It For?

Augmented reality applications are being used in a lot of different ways. It’s used as art in installations like the N Building:

Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons.

But it’s also starting to see some practical uses. For example, instead of just finding out the price of a product, LEGO has a prototype where you can preview the actual product from different angles.

The majority of mobile AR applications we’re seeing right now relate to location-based searches or visualizations. Urbanspoon, Yelp, and Wikitude are all examples of this. Layar, one of the leaders in the augmented reality space, allows you to overlay different data sets such as Wikipedia entries or tweets in the area.

Unfortunately, there’s a glut of rather useless augmented reality gimmicks that offer little value. You’ve probably seen some of these like the Robert Downey Jr. Esquire magazine cover, the action figures from the movie Avatar, or the Topps baseball cards:

Much like the pitching “game” included, most AR games are little more than poorly implemented retro games which seem hi-tech because they’re overlaid on top of a camera. Again, there are exceptions and innovators. This demo from Georgia Tech and SCAD-Atlanta creates a narrative around the player (flying in a helicopter) but also adds an additional dimension that involves … Skittles!

It’s actually been quite surprising how fast this technology is being adopted or experimented with. The United States Postal Service isn’t exactly the place one would expect digital experiments to come from. However, they have one of the first useful demos of how AR might be useful. By printing their custom marker, you can see a translucent shipping box in front of  which you can then use to determine if the object you are shipping will fit.

Challenges

The future is so close we can virtually touch it but being as new as it is, developers and designers in this space have many challenges ahead. One clear problem—and opportunity—is the lack of any interaction design patterns emerging from common use cases such as AR browsers. The AR focused blog Augmented Planet has a nice summary of some of the ways applications are tackling one particular design problem but this overview also serves to point out just how disparate the interface currently is.

Augmented Planet also makes a case against AR which, among other points, expresses concern over privacy issues.

For example your mother comes over to your house and tweets about your priceless collection of Ming dynasty vases. Your home location is geotagged and out there for all to see along with details of your most valued possession. An enterprising thief using the latest version of BurglAR would be able to see high value items worth stealing in the local area.

As the mashup Please Rob Me demonstrates, these issues aren’t unique to AR but are certainly relevant.

When I first discuss AR with someone who hasn’t been paying attention to the space, their eyes often light up and their imagination starts to take off—much as mine did when I saw the Nearest Tube application. Often, ideas would revolve around turning a corner, or reacting to a step forwards or backwards.

Unfortunately, what we quickly found was that the accuracy of consumer-grade GPS is simply insufficient for many of these ideas. In particular, indoor GPS is even more inaccurate. Look at the disclaimer that Car Finder feels is necessary to show every time you launch the application:

If you were standing indoors, your compass may also be unreliable. On the iPhone, it asks that you wave the phone in a figure-8 fashion to get a better fix. I sometimes wonder if that motion cures hiccups as well …

Other technologies are also in their infancy. A lot of augmented reality’s promising comes in recognizing what your camera is pointed at but consumer engines are barely able to identify when something is a face, much less whose face it is. Much of the image recognition processing is also done after the fact rather than in real-time.

Even if the technology was there, the processing power for mobile devices would not be able to handle the requirements without burning a hole through your pocket.

It Can Be Useful

A lot of the products we see right now use augmented reality in a rather gimmicky fashion—adding little to the application’s utility. In most cases, the AR views are better served with maps or in the case of games, are little more than overlaying a mediocre game over a live video feed.

However, we’re starting to see some real uses both on the market and in prototype form. As technology catches up and the ubiquity of AR-capable devices increases, we should be seeing more and more applications like these.

One way to offer better AR experiences now is to do so with strategically placed kiosks. Instead of depending on mobile technology, kiosks can be customized to the environment. This Japanese company has a kiosk where you can try on different makeup in an augmented reality application. Once you’ve picked out some product you like, the kiosk then prints out an order form.

Some applications are particularly useful in mobile environments. Assuming sufficiently accurate GPS, the iPhone Car Finder application I mentioned earlier is a great use of augmented reality. You mark where you car is as you get out of the car and use that marker to find your car later. Such an app wouldn’t be useful to necessarily remember what street corner you parked in so much as what spot in a garage you might’ve parked in. The former is much better served with a marker on a map whilst the latter doesn’t have any map to mark!

In the near future, we may see even more utility from mobile applications. Nokia has announced that they are working on a mobile language translation application that utilizes Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We may be closer to a true Babel fish than we realize.

Once real-time image processing becomes more powerful, we can extend Nokia’s concept to recognizing faces and finding out more about people (or for starters, helping me remember names of people I’ve met).

And recognition can go beyond just faces. Recall that the term was coined at Boeing in reference to technology that might help people assemble aircrafts. BMW has the same idea and released a concept video of what an augmented reality training tool might be like. Hopefully, by the time you bring your 3-series in, the mechanic already knows what they’re doing.

Looking Ahead

Between the abundance of gimmicky AR “applications” out there and the technological hurdles we’ve yet to overcome, it may seem like it’s still too early to look at this form of interaction as something we should examine. But some companies, like Juniper Research, might claim otherwise:

The market for mobile augmented reality (AR) services is expected to reach $732 million by 2014.

The annual number of mobile downloads featuring augmented reality (AR) content is expected to rise from less than 1 million in 2009 to more than 400 million by 2014.

I’m dubious about those estimates, especially in relation to revenue. However, I do think AR may become an element of many applications in the near future. We will see many more applications that use AR as an alternate interface but hopefully, we will also see more applications that are specifically designed for AR’s strengths.

The rapid increase in smartphone market penetration will also mean a larger audience for AR applications. Based on this Changewave Research survey, we’re quickly headed towards technological ubiquity.

Smartphones may not even be the limiter when it comes to augmented reality. In addition to having location specific kiosks, we might be seeing some solutions that seem right out of science fiction. For example, instead of the awkward interface of holding up a phone in front of you, you could potentially be wearing augmented reality contact lenses.

I think the people behind Google Goggles hint at the future of augmented reality and they come the closest right now to making something that’s actual useful to the mainstream consumer. Watch their video and see what they have to say about their limitations, but also some truly interesting opportunities in the future.

Sadly, it seems like North America isn’t terribly interested in AR. Looking again at Google Trends and the searches for “augmented reality” in 2009, we don’t show anywhere in the top 10. Even English speakers as a whole are a distant third in AR interest.

Much of this might be attributed to the fact that mobile technology and adoption is much slower in the U.S. than in Asia but with iPhone and Android phones coming from right here in Silicon Valley, I would expect a much higher interest in the field than we’re seeing.

The following video shows some of our friends playing our ARGH iPhone game. Our game is simple and doesn’t even come close to the potential of what AR can offer in entertainment and utility but when you look at the expressions and engagement of the people that play the game, it’s clearly an immersive and delightful experience.

I think we may be missing an opportunity here to create incredibly interesting applications which actually take your existing environment and context into consideration. If design’s mantra is “it depends”, augmented reality offers a way to create interfaces that depend on what people are doing, looking at, and listening to.

Additional References

• Bruce Sterling “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry”
• O’Reilly: Augmented Reality in One Hour
• Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality
• Augmented Planet
• Games Alfresco
• iPhone AR Kit
• ARToolKit

This post is the third in my Project 52 series. Project 52 is group of people who have all signed up for the challenge of creating new content for their sites at least once a week. Read other articles in my P52 series.

So you’re thinking about being a designer? If I could tell you only *one thing* about going into the field, my advice would be ________.

I thought of a lot of different answers, many of them quite cynical. I imagine my time watching the industry’s discussions and throwing peanuts at it from OK/Cancel makes me think that way a lot. For example, I considered answering with, “don’t use convoluted phrases just to make yourself sound smarter.” In the end, I erred on the side of practicality:

The other answers have been collected on the School of Visual Arts blog.

It seems that Twinkle is taking advantage of their popularity in a completely irresponsible manner.

Before I go into details, let me quickly recap how Twitter’s conversations work. When you publicly reply to a person on Twitter, you type @USERNAME. So if my username was kevin, you’d type “@kevin that’s so true!”. Twitter and pretty much all Twitter applications support this syntax by providing a “replies” view which shows you every public Twitter that starts with @YOURUSERNAME. So you can see that it’s fairly important for these usernames to remain unique.

Enter Twinkle, who turn out to not just be a Twitter application, but a social network of their own. A person who uses Twinkle doesn’t have to be a Twitter user as well. They might just be Twinkle users, with Twinkle usernames. Thus, there are now two sets of namespaces with duplicate identities that might belong to two different people (a person named Peter on Twitter and a different person named Peter on Twinkle).

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. I have usernames all over the place. However, Twinkle decided that the way a Twinkle user should reply to other Twinkle users is also with the @ syntax and if the poster happens to use Twitter as well, that reply goes to Twitter.

What does this mean?

Let’s say there is a Twitter and Twinkle user and his username is Peter on both services. He has a friend who is on Twinkle only and her username is Jane. Suppose Jane says something witty on Twinkle and Peter decides to respond:

@jane LOL. That’s pretty brilliant, mate.

As a user of both services, his response goes out on both channels — Twitter and Twinkle.

At the same time, JaneB, a Twitter user who has never heard of Twinkle and  the owner of the Twitter username @jane, logs onto Twitter. She checks her replies tab and notices Peter’s message. Except she has no clue who Peter is, nor what he thinks that her last Twitter message about her aunt being ill is all that brilliant or funny.

Essentially, Twinkle’s poor product design, or if you give them less credit, their irresponsible product design, is hijacking Twitter usernames. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, either. Their Get Satisfaction page includes a number of threads like this:

The poster is right. It is completely unacceptable. In an environment where we’re trying to find solutions like OpenID to consolidate our identities, Twinkle has managed to find a way to create an application that now muddies the definition of who owns a username. The question is, what can really be done? My suggestion is that Twinkle doesn’t ever cross post responses to Twinkle users to Twitter as well.

But the real question is, what’s to stop anyone from coming onto Twitter and creating a similar kind of clusterf**k, polluting or spamming every @name there is?

Update: It looks like in addition to using the @ syntax, they also allow spaces and special characters (e.g., commas, dashes, etc.) as usernames. So now if your username is @kevin on Twitter, you may be getting responses in your replies tab for people who say “@kevin spacey” or “@kevin.cheng”. If you wish to voice a complaint to Twinkle and Tapulous, you may want to add your thoughts on this thread.

After two years of discussions with Lou Rosenfeld, I’ve finally signed with his publishing company, Rosenfeld Media, to write a book entitled See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas. For those that don’t know, Rosenfeld Media is like an O’Reilly for user experience books. They focus on compact, practical methods books for the practitioner. I will be joining such luminary authors as my friends and colleagues Indi Young and Luke Wroblewski.

As the title suggests, the book will be an extension of the workshop and presentations I’ve been presenting at various conferences. The subject matter has been expanded in scope but the gist remains the same: comics are an under utilized method for telling a story in a concise and accessible manner and See What I Mean will attempt to explain how to create comics for this purpose—without necessarily knowing how to draw.

I wrote about the full story of how the book came to be on the book blog.

It’s hard to describe the excitement and trepidation I feel. I’ve been writing pieces for OK/Cancel and to a lesser extent, here on this blog for many years but never a full length book. In addition, balancing the writing of this book with the responsibilities at Raptr will be challenging. Coley has been amazingly supportive about the whole endeavour and I’m sure hers and the support of my friends and family will carry me to the finish line this fall.

My goal is to complete this book and have it out by South by Southwest next year. I won’t be blogging much more about the book here as the book has its own place. If you’re interested in the development of the book, I hope you add your name to my book’s notification mailing list and contribute to the discussions there!

Improvisation: a creation spoken or written or composed extemporaneously (without prior preparation)

Last year, I started attending a weekly informal group of improv enthusiasts. We’d spend a few hours in a living room practicing various improv exercises. Occasionally, we’d bring in instructors to help us improve our craft and give us more specific pointers.

As unstructured as improv is by definition, there are a great deal of guidelines and rules that help improv artists. As I learned these rules, I began to think about how many of these would be useful to keep in mind when building and designing a product.

Yes, and …

One of the first “rules” of improv one learns is to always try to stay positive. They call this, “Yes, and” as opposed to, “No, but”. The idea is that it’s easy in an improv scene to take a negative slant to a story and find yourself quickly killing any momentum or flow that the story might have been able to develop. Turning that around is very difficult. Conversely, by staying positive and building up a story, one can introduce conflict and negative energy fairly easily when the time is right. For example, let’s say your improv partner is building up a scene:

Partner: “Would you like a glass of wine?”

You: “I don’t drink wine.”

Partner: “This is our finest from Napa Valley.”

You: “No, thanks.”

Partner: “Beer?”

You: “I’m not really thirsty.”

Partner: “…”

“Yes,” confirms another’s statement or at least confirms recognition of it. “And,” offers to build on top of another’s statements. “No,” not only blocks the progress of a discussion, it negates a statement.

It’s not a stretch to see how this applies to design brainstorms or when you are giving or receiving feedback on designs. I often forget this when it comes to design critiques and move too quickly to the “No but” instead of first recognizing the hard work involved, pointing out the positive aspects of a design and building on top of those aspects.

Lesson: Be positive. Build on top of others’ ideas instead of blocking them.

Relinquishing Control

Perhaps the most difficult thing to learn in improv is to allow yourself to lose control. Unless you are extremely talented and experienced, the best way to build a successful scene in improv is to not have anything specific in mind you want to get to. One improv site described everyone’s role well:

You are all supporting actors.

Companies often have a “vision” they want to get to. I’ve certainly been guilty of being so focused on reaching that vision that I lose opportunities to adapt and evolve a design. If you treat yourself as a supporting actor in a large ecosystem rather than the director or lead, you open up yourself to seeing changes and adapting to them. The same can be applied to products – the popular photo sharing site Flickr started as Game Neverending but evolved based on the market and usage.

Lesson: Be willing to throw away your own ideas and adapt to changes from the market, the users, the designers and the technical landscape.

Embracing Failure

In some improv games when you “lose” you’re required to lose in as dramatic a fashion as possible. The purpose of that exercise is to emphasize the importance of accepting and embracing failure. If you stay safe all the time and don’t step outside of your comfort zone, it will be unlikely that you’ll succeed at improv, nor are you guaranteed to be free of failure.

With improv, it seems that the more you are willing to step from your boundaries, the more chances you have of succeeding. The chances of failure also increase, but not by the same proportion. Most importantly, when you do fail, you embrace it and turn it around to work for you. By doing so, there is no such thing as failure in improv.

To continue to use Flickr as an example, when their site was unexpectedly down due to some storage issues, they made their downtime page a colouring contest which not only displayed their sense of humour but also reinforced their brand.

Lesson: Take risks in the product. Celebrate the failures and learn from them.

Trying Too Hard

The biggest rookie mistake in improv is to try to be funny or clever. Often, the most obvious statements or actions to you are viewed as strokes of genius by others. When you try to be funny or clever, that means you’re not being true to yourself and not doing what comes naturally to you.

While this might seem to contradict the previous point about stepping outside the comfort zone, it actually doesn’t. You can step outside your comfort zone and try different things (like going to improv classes) and still be true to yourself. Companies need to recognize this as well. In an article on Yves Béhar, designer of the Jawbone headset:

Executives often appear at Béhar’s door saying, “We want to be the Apple of our industry.” His response: “Do you have the guts?”

It’s ok for a company not to be an Apple and succeed on elements other than design. Companies that know who they are and what their strengths are fare the best over time.

Lesson: Remember who you and your company are and don’t try to be too clever.

Straight to the Point

Improv scenes are often quite short. Thus it’s important to get straight to the interesting parts of a story when building a scene. From Dan Goldstein’s “How to be a Better Improviser”:

Why have a scene that goes:

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jim. And what’s yours?”

“Mike. How are you?”

“I’ve got one month to live.”

When you can have a scene that goes:

“Jim, I’ve got one month to live.”

“Let me get you a drink.”

“No, my treat.”

In a presentation about Content Best Practices which I wrote about recently, Luke Wroblewski discussed how providing context was important to any given page because most traffic came from search engines, rather than internally from other pages on the site. To help users orient themselves, it’s important to quickly define “this is the site you’re on”, “here’s what you’re reading”, “here’s some related content.”

Lesson: Get to the point and cut the crap. Why is your user here?

Listen

In order to build on top of what others say or do, you have to pay attention. Say your line then shut up and listen—that’s a basic principle of improv. It’s not just about listening though; it’s about observing. What is the person’s body language? What is their intonation? How are they responding? What offers are they giving to advance the scene? Are they saying key words that you can use to build on the story?

The parallel here is simple and well-documented: listen to your peers, your stakeholders and your users. “Yeah, yeah, solicit user feedback, and watch the metrics,” you might say. But are you truly listening? Are you truly paying attention when a person is responding to your product idea? Often, I find myself assuming I know what an audience is going to say before they even say it and later discover that there were subtle yet important distinctions that I completely missed.

This concept applies even at a basic social level. Oftentimes, I’m told that I seem to remember names quite well. Though I still fail to remember many names, I do find that I’ve become much better at it. I attribute this to a conscious effort I made a few years ago to really listen when a person introduces themselves. I think to myself, “Jim. This person’s name is Jim.” The process is silent and takes a few seconds but that few seconds is the difference between paying attention and having it in one ear and out the other.

Lesson: Pay attention. Really, really pay attention. Shut up. Listen. Observe.

… And Scene

Many of these points given are in the “duh” category. However, they’re also in the category of, “easier said than done.” What surprises me is how so many aspects of building a successful product or company are expressed in the art of improv. For this reason, I truly believe that trying out improv on a regular basis and actively thinking about how these skills apply to your role can help you act on these principles. Here’s a few resources I’ve found regarding improv:

• Impro, a book by Keith Johnstone as much about teaching as it is about improv
• Improv Encyclopedia has glossary, exercises and resources
• How to be a Better Improviser by Dan Goldstein
• Learnimprov.com has warm ups, exercises and more
• Improve Training Can Improve Your Trial Skills
• Oprah has the rules of improv explained to her
• Pan Theater’s Rules of Improv Part One and Two

Stephen Anderson clearly has similar philosophies and this year at the IA Summit, he discusses some of the inspiration he’s gathered from games, cars, consoles, phones and more.

Continuing the Inspiration

Before I go into the notes I took, I’d first like to mention that the first think I thought when Stephen was presenting was, “he has the same hobby as I do.” I knew that we needed to share links with each other but even better would be for us to share links with everyone. So I created a Twitter account called Inspiring, where Stephen, Coley, Patrick Haney (who runs a web inspiration Flickr set) and I will post inspiring, innovative or beautiful artifacts. Do subscribe and check it out.

The Presentation

Stephen begins by discussing some of the objects he’s tried to convince his family he needs: the iPhone, the Nintendo Wii and the Toyota Prius. He’s succeeded in getting the iPhone thus far but he’s hoping his rationale of needing these items for research and inspiration will eventually fly (I also employ similar tactics when discussing World of Warcraft, but I actually do believe it’s one of the most immersive experiences today and as such, deserves to be studied – or so I shall claim).

Taking the iPhone as an example, Stephen asks how the iPhone has impacted web design. This question is interesting because the iPhone is undeniably innovative for mobile phone interfaces, but has it inspired changes in other medium? As it so happens, the iPhone has inspired such changes as the on/off controls in jQuery’s checkbox as well as interfaces such as Muxtape or Grooveshark which have iPhone-like interfaces for non-iPhone usage.

Stop Default Thinking

In an example which hit quite close to home, he asked where people would get inspiration from for redesigning an airline site. As one who has been involved with both British Airways and Cathay Pacific, I was feeling rather sheepish when I recognized that I fell into the trap of only looking at competitor sites for ideas and reference. As a contrast to the ubiquitous interfaces that adorn all the travel sites, he showed Wundrbar, a natural language flight search engine.

To further prove his point, he quoted a Forrester Research paper:

… look beyond immediate industry rivals for innovative design ideas. Why? Frankly, your competitors may be getting it wrong. But, more importantly, your customers visit Web sites outside of your industry, which their raises expectations about the types of experiences the Web can provide, expectations that remain intact when they come to your site.

With that, Stephen demands that we should all stop “default thinking” in a number of ways. First, to stop looking only within our industry or even medium and second, to think beyond what we traditionally think is our toolbox of drop downs, radio buttons, etc.

Anything is Possible

Just to get things straightened out, Stephen discusses how there are a great deal of hardware and software changes that have made many exciting things possible. Technologies such as touch screens, gesture interfaces, lightweight desktop applications, etc. are enabling much more. Further, Stephen claims that natural behaviours are better than learned behaviours, unless the learned behaviour greatly increases satisfaction or performance (e.g., QuickSilver).

He uses a Willy Wonka quote to illustrate the ultimate point, but I’ll paraphrase with a quote from Jonathan Trevor, the engineer behind the Pipes editor, when we were working on the project:

It isn’t, “can it be done?”. Anything is possible. It’s a question of, “how hard is it?”

Hiding Data Until It’s Needed

Although the examples provided by Stephen are set in the context of his projects, I’ll simply detail some of the sources he provide as inspiration and how they might be applied. These examples discuss how one can rein in a large amount of data and navigation to a manageable interface.

The XO Laptop utilizes the Sugar Interface which contains a frame with contextual actions. This frame, however, does not appear until the cursor is close to the edge of the screen and thus, stays nicely hidden until needed. Stephen applies this to the web by hiding information until needed.

The Wii, Club Penguin, iPhone and Quicksilver all employ what is called a “Hub & Spoke” model of navigation. Rather than illustrating the entire navigation, or going with traditional primary/secondary navigation, these interfaces have a hub which you return to before navigating to another top level action (e.g., the home buttons on the Wii and iPhone). This model can be easily applied to websites in a similar fashion to reduce clutter.

Games and advanced desktop tool such as Adobe products have often used panes and customizable interfaces to deal with a range of user ability. This level of customization and the breaking apart of panes through lightweight desktop clients or layers on top of a page can achieve similar effects.

Other interfaces discussed with regards to hiding data include Songza, which uses a radial menu, Picnik, which hides its navigation when in the context of a tool and the iPhone’s Mobile Safari tab structure which doesn’t display the tabs at al times and sacrifices clicks for screen real estate.

Communicating Content and Context

To illustrate some examples of visual interfaces that convey content and context in a clear and concise manner, Stephen showed Aaron Jasinski’s portfolio, Disco.app’s simplistic CD burning tool, Get Satisfaction’s clear indicators of mood through smileys, and Microsoft Popfly’s phyiscal representation of data objects as boxes.

Finally, Stephen wrapped up with a number of very visually powerful interfaces including Piclens (which I recommend and use), Jing, Schematic’s portfolio and the tag cloud from CookThink.

He begins with a discussion on how we currently optimize for sites – by studying their hierarchy and how pages relate to each other within the site. However, the site does not live on its own but rather as a node within an unstructured web. For most sites, the majority of their traffic is generated from external sources, not from within its hierarchy. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to spend much more time and effort optimizing designs for those who visit from outside.

In a site hierarchy, there is a home, a page may have parents, laterals and children. In contrast, web ecosystems have components to them roughly broken down as communication, display surfaces, content creators, content aggregators, and search (the categories are credited to Tom Chi, my colleague on OK/Cancel).

Communication refers to medium such as instant messaging or email. Links and recommendations which come from personal sources fall under this category. The quality of these links are generally very high and people are likely to click on them as they are received directly from a trusted source.

Display surfaces are places where one may show their support of a website or product. Common examples include MySpace sidebars, or the recent Yahoo! Mash. Facebook’s modules on a user’s profile page can also represent a display surface.

Content creators are where people are producing content which generally act as recommendations or information for their readers and subscribers. The most prevalent example of content creators are bloggers.

Content aggregators represent the places where content creator feeds are collected for quick browsing, accessing and updating. My Yahoo!, iGoogle, Netvibes and feed readers are all examples of these.

The important thing to note, of course, is that all of these lead to the same place – i.e., your content. In order to design with these entry points in mind, we need to design to inform Context, illustrate Related material and of course, get the readers to the Content they were attempting to access

Content

Although seemingly obvious, it’s surprising how few of us follow the core advice Luke gives: make the content your focus.

He illustrates with an example from an old design of the Chicago Tribune, where an article on the Olympics occupied 24% of the screen real estate, leaving 76% to overhead such as navigation, advertising, etc. Other examples he gave included Yahoo! Answers, which had their content occupying 5% of screen real estate prior to their redesign and Buyit.com which has horrendous visual hierarchy.

Users have an expectation when they access the page, based on where they arrived from. Thus, making sure they can see the relevant content as easily as possible is important. They have certain expectations which must be met through easily scannable content – beginning with keeping the title tag of the site the same as the link and the title on the page.

He uses CNN/entertainment as an example of great hierarchy and how they also use bullet summaries to increase reader comprehension and deliver on promises quickly.

Related

Luke then shares the less is more philosophy and reminds us that we don’t have to show everything. “Spare us your site map,” he says as he shows a site that has their entire site as a side navigation.

There are, however, often related pieces of content that tie in with the content being viewed and these should be revealed and embedded in a clearly visible fashion

The ever popular BBC.com is used as an example. On just about any given story, they right side features very relevant categories and content. Further, for some stories, the left navigation changes. Rather than showing all of BBC’s categories, for example, a story on European Football shows European Football news and teams as the core navigation on the left.

He then references the ever popular and relevant book, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Shwartz, reminding us that fewer choices tend to lead to more likelihood of action than more. Specifically, people who had 6 choices were more likely to act whilst those who had 10 tended to not choose at all. Of course, I couldn’t help but recall our own references to choice overload.

In terms of placement of related information, he recommends the left navigation side as the right tends to be viewed as advertisements. As one might suspect, readers do not click on links they don’t see so visibility is important.

Of course, all of this is irrelevant if your content wasn’t relevant in the first place. But if you make good on your content, then related calls to action are welcome.

Context

When the reader accesses a site through external means, they lack any sort of context. It’s important to indicate to readers:

• Who’s site is this?
• What’s going on?
• Is this a site I can trust?

Ensure that this information is evident and the design of the page looks professional or appropriate for your purposes in order to build trust. Luke mentions the Stanford Web Credibility research which indicated more professionally designed sites were viewed as more trustworthy.

Finally, Luke mentions how on his own site, if a reader arrived through searching for a certain term, he uses that term to provide additional context. For example, he will pull up other related articles on his site based on the search term. He will also highlight the words which match the search term. Similarly, Luke illustrates how Yahoo! Answers bolds the search terms used.

Luke’s slides are available as a 4MB PDF and he has his own summary as well as links to other writeups of his presentation on is blog.