Waterfire Photos

On Saturday, I visited Providence's town-wide art installation, Waterfire. Picture a huge number of bonfires in the middle of the river and a large crowd of fire watchers, some lucky gondola riders with glasses of wine in hand, fire volunteers in black boats with logs, and eerie music. Very pagan. You can smell the smoke and wood from the river banks.

Asshole-Driven Development on Berkun

Time for my weekly post on assholes in corporations, I guess; this is a few weeks behind, but I needed to space out the AH stuff, and I was busy.

Berkun posted an idle conversation starter on what he called "asshole-driven development" and the responses brought down his server. Then Lost Cog did some content analysis of the styles of development described by the comment thread. It seems to be going on and on. Some of the original categories identified:

• Asshole Driven development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development.
• Cognitive Dissonance development (CDD) - In any organization where there are two or more divergent beliefs on how software should be made.
• Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) - The driving force behind most individual efforts is to make sure than when the shit hits the fan, they are not to blame.
• Development By Denial (DBD) - Everybody pretends there is a method for what’s being done, and that things are going ok, when in reality, things are a mess and the process is on the floor.
• Get Me Promoted Methodology (GMPM) - People write code and design things to increase their visibility, satisfy their boss’s whims, and accelerate their path to a raise or the corner office no matter how far outside of stated goals their efforts go.

As some posters and Scott noted, bad development management may be subtypes of general Management Antipatterns, like "Death by Planning."

And I'd note that these techniques aren't limited to management of technical problems, but also exist in any other project context, in slightly different forms.

Zen Error Dialog and Flash Victim

I especially like the title bar on this guy: And a friend sent a link to a great animation of a flash victim getting destroyed by the app. Lots of in-jokes for designers who use Flash, and hilarious anyway. You definitely want sound on for it.

User Experience 2007 Survey Report

The Usability and User Experience Report 2007 from e-consultancy costs money, but the sample data are interesting enough to post about. There were 756 respondents to the survey that fed this report. (Hopefully it represents more than just the UK, where the consultancy that did the survey is based.)

Some highlights:

• On average, organisations are investing 11.5% of their overall website design and build budgets in usability, and 13.2% of their design budgets. [If you're spending none, or you don't even know what you're spending, this may be an Issue for you.]
• A quarter of agency / consultancy correspondents say their clients are typically indifferent whereas only 9% say their clients are extremely committed. [I admit I find this surprising -- if you've been hired as a consultant, doesn't that suggest they care? Or is the evaluation of caring based on more complex factors, such as "are you listening to my advice," "is there anyone else in your organization advocating for this," "is it likely anything will change after I leave."]
• Top benefits/ROI for commitment to user experience and usability included as number one and two, improved perception of brand, and increased conversion rates. [Since brand is now being defined as what a customer thinks of you and what and how you do it, rather than your logo and graphic design [see, e.g., the Brand Gap], this makes a lot of sense to see here.]
• Two thirds of the respondents say their agencies plan to increase their spending on usability in the next year.
• The activities that are being "done" in organizations are, in order of frequency, user testing, expert evaluation, information architecture; and lagging behind, "full user-centered design" [a rigorous process that incorporates testing and design during the definition and development cycle].
• The largest barriers are time pressure to get things done and lack of resources. [We still have a ways to go to educate businesses about the risk factors in not being more rigorous about the processes for good design up front, it seems.]
• Project management is either not done, or being done "ad hoc." [Coincidentally, I've just written an article for interactions, a professional journal for designers, on the ways in which designers get lured away from doing design and into project management, in order to be sure that things get done. Timely!]

The full report costs $179.

Sutton's Weird Ideas

I've been reading Robert Sutton's Weird Ideas That Work, which is Yet Another Book on Innovation. I like his Assholes bookand Evidence-Based Management, and this one is entertaining and provoking too. Here is the summary of the weird ideas, which he counts as 11.5, but this is hard to do automatically in html so for me it's 12:

1. Hire "Slow Learners" (of the Organizational Code)
2. Hire People Who Make You Uncomfortable, Even Those You Dislike
3. Hire People You (Probably) Don't Need
4. Use Job Interviews to Get Ideas, Not to Screen Candidates
5. Encourage People to Ignore and Defy Superiors and Peers
6. Find Some Happy People and Get Them to Fight
7. Reward Success and Failure, Punish Inaction
8. Decide to Do Something That Will Probably Fail, Then Convince Yourself and Everyone Else That Success Is Certain
9. Think of Some Ridiculous or Impractical Things to Do, Then Plan to Do Them
10. Avoid, Distract, and Ignore Customers, Critics, and Anyone Who Just Wants to Talk about Money
11. Don't Try to Learn Anything from People Who Seem to Have Solved the Problems You Face
12. Forget the Past, Especially Your Company's Successes

He says executive audiences responded to him with an "all very amusing, Bob, but we need to get things done here." I admit I'm a little bit with them on this -- it's great for consultants to come in and be creative at you, but end of the day, most of us need to ship code/product, which means teamwork of some variety, goals and means mapped out, achievable successes. But an innovation factory is a different thing, perhaps.

This said, I have seen the teamwork and normative workplace culture taken to extremes of unhealthiness, usually to the detriment of new hires with different ideas from other places. It's possible to be both infused with creative new ideas that threaten your status quo AND ship products, in my opinion. It's a challenge for mature management! To test your own culture: Check carefully how many managers, especially senior ones, were promoted from within versus hired externally. Then look at how experienced the people being hired are (sometimes, very). It might tell you something interesting about status quo thinking versus desire for fresh input.

Another test of your culture: In interviews, does the corporate "fit" come across as paramount, or the resume and evidence of work product elsewhere? I once watched a very senior statistician get turned down in favor of a more junior candidate who was just like everyone else in her skillset. I didn't fight hard enough myself on that one, I was part of the problem.

Defying authority certainly doesn't go over well in most corporate cultures I've worked in. Hierarchy is very much part of the American firm (Larry Prusack pointed this out recently at a great Boston CHI talk)-- the larger and more established the company, the more ingrained it is. I think there's a function related to size, corporate age, hierarchical position, and a person's tenure at a company that will predict how resistant she/he is to new ideas about doing things differently. Because large, successful companies are most reluctant to change what they do now (which is making money), for some sensible reasons: shareholders, golden handcuffs, employees to retain and feed, etc.

For designers, this often cashes out in how much change to an old shipping product you can make... a lesson it took me many jobs to really understand. (Note to designers hunting for jobs: Don't believe them when they say you're going to redesign it, especially if it's selling! The inertia will be strong and may become an actual undertow.) Historical success limits how much change you can make to processes that produced a selling product, even if they were flawed or painful in various ways for the people who worked on it. People are always more comfortable the way things are, regardless of what could be better.

Edited to add: It's a cultural failure mode to assume that everything is great or okay as is, but it's another one to fail to critically understand your successes, too. You can do root cause analysis for the good things too, and it might even teach you more than the failures do. If you aren't good at understanding success, you can't duplicate it, and you might make the critical morale error of celebrating the wrong factors.

Of all the weird ideas, the sensible-sounding "punish inaction" is particularly hard to see really happening in most offices. Few people are ever fired for not rocking the boat. People who aren't often noticed usually have a job for life, as long as their company keeps doing the same old expected thing.

Travel Need: Can someone help?

I'm a frustrated impulse traveler. It takes way too long to search through even existing ajax-rich travel websites for deals that meet my criteria. I'm on travel deal mailing lists (BookingBuddy, for one) but haven't found what I need. I know it's possible today, and it's a business that might already exist:

I want a search agent that's heavily customizable to send me updates when certain things happen. What I specifically want is the ability to watch for fares of certain types to specific places FROM MY LOCAL AIRPORTS, or fares for vacation deals, again, FROM MY LOCAL AIRPORTS.

Sample criteria I want to have an agent look for:

• Boston to Greece, unusually low, no more than 1 stopover (and it can't be a 12 hour stopover)
• Long weekend vacation packages to certain Caribbean islands, from Boston, flights no longer than 4 hours (including any stopovers). Under a certain price threshold.
• Extraordinary low prices on fares to certain continents, again from Boston or local airports here.
• Alerts for fares from Boston to key cities I care about (e.g., Paris, London, Cleveland, San Jose).
• Unusual travel packages like volunteer work, adventure (er, not athletic, but cultural), educational. I get to rate these as they come in and get more like them or less like them, till it learns what I like.
• A home page where I can tune and browse, and easily set up new email alerts; something like Amazon's Recommendations system. I want it to know me and learn about me.

Again, all this is possible. Am I missing someone's service somewhere? The cheap travel browsing sites are all very similar, too much work, and too manual for me.

PS. If someone wants to start this business, I'd be very motivated to help design it and to collect more requirements. Drop me a note.

Declassified Defense Research and Archaeological Mysteries

Wired online has had a couple recent pieces on defense research on ESP, paranormal, remote viewing, homing pigeons, etc. -- there are a bunch of abstracts now visible in the Scientific and Technical Information Network (a .mil site). Note: It is, in fact, extremely hard to use. Good luck.

I get challenged occasionally as to why a seemingly well-educated, presumably rational person would be interested in the paranormal. I'm always a little surprised by this question: Why not? Do we know everything? Isn't it rational and intelligent to assume we don't yet? Remember, a UFO is just unidentified, it's not necessarily from another planet. It's interesting to me that there are so many worth talking about, and the stories people tell about them are interesting in themselves. I'm certainly open to believing in many things, while being a strong skeptic about what counts as good data and strong argument.

Another really entertaining collection, equally amateur web-design but much easier to use: The Photo Galleries of Mystery from the MMMGroup. Truly, if you like archaeological mysteries, this is the place to browse. Make sure you hit page two, too. It might make you wonder about time travel... The phenomenon of OOPARTS, or Out of Place Artifacts, is a strong feature of the pictures of rock carvings (people with lightbulbs, space suits...) and fossilized items. Here's a blog post about this type of find with particular reference to a find in 19th century Massachusetts, a metal fossil apparently blasted out of solid rock.

On the other hand, sometimes these things are explicit funny fakes; here's a guy who briefly got away with rock art depicting a caveman pushing a shopping cart in a British Museum Exhibit (2005).

Banksy also hung a sign saying the cave art showed "early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds". It read: "This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era. The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him. Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls."

CEOs Who Work Too Much

A great article in the Huffington Post on CEOs who neglect their families but get written up in Fortune for it. Low-income fathers who work too much get critizied, but Fortune blithely praises it in executives. Towards the end there's a nice bit on the long hours phenomenon more generally:

Fortunately, respect for this sort of parenting outside the board room is dwindling as baby boomers disappear from the parenting picture and Gen-Xers take their place. Sylvia Hewlett presents research to show that while baby boomers are willing to work extreme hours, younger people scoff at the idea of doing that for more than a year. And recent polls (via Hole in the Fence) show that men are sick of the long hours and want more time with their kids: Almost 40 percent of working dads would take a pay cut to spend more time with their kids. It'll be a great day when CEOs are dismissed for neglecting their kids. Meanwhile, employees, beware: CEOs like Stringer and Immelt have a negative effect on your own ability to keep your personal life intact, because work-life policy starts at the top and trickles down.

Amen. Some ways to figure out what the real corporate values around work-life balance are: Do people regularly have email exchanges on weekends or at strange hours of the night? (When you start a contract, do the execs welcome you via email sent on the weekend? :-) Who's still working at 7pm in the office?

Another point I'd add: How effective are they if they have that much to do, even at the office where they spend all their time? Executives at one of my past companies-- who praised it as an "aggressive" company with no ability to promise new hires good work-life balance and reasonable hours during their growth plans-- were themselves too busy to pay attention to many of the critical management issues that cross their desks! They're way past the tipping point on being good parents at the office, or good peers-- blowing off visiting VPs, even-- never mind what their wife and kids think of them for neglecting them! (This is, of course, my own opinion on them as seen from the middle management trenches, and may not be their own or their peers' opinions.)

Dutch Near Death Experiences

A fascinating Lancet article (pdf) on a study of NDEs (near death experiences):

• No relationship to any pre-existing medical conditions found, although young people may be more likely to experience them
• Corroborated evidence of out-of-body experiences, despite flat EEG and coma states which should indicate impossibility of observation or recall during "death"
• Long-term excellent recall, from interviews at 2 year and 8 year periods, of the phenomena experienced
• Life-changing effects, even for non-religios etc. who experience them

Angry Bluebird, Happy Bunny

Both of these fellows were seen at Drumlin Farm, an Audubon site in Lincoln, MA.

UX Boston -- I'm Speaking June 26

The newly created UX Boston group is having their first meeting. I've been asked to give my talk on designing online community; I'll be updating it with a few more concrete examples of interaction design for community and sample metrics.

WHAT?

UX Boston Kick-Off Meeting AND presentation: "Design for Online Communities: Past the Hype!" by Lynn Cherny, PH.D. (User Experience Consultant & Author)

WHEN? 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 26th

• 7 p.m. 7:45: Conversation, networking, refreshments.
• 7:45 to 9:00 p.m.: Presentation and discussion.

RVSP by Friday, June 22nd required: please send an e-mail to: [redacted due to spam] with your name and your company information.

WHERE?
One to One Interactive
Schraft Center | Suite 209 (2nd Floor)
529 Main Street
Charlestown, MA 02129
There is a free public parking lot at the Schraft Center.
DIRECTIONS

MORE ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Successful online community creation requires an understanding of both social and technical design challenges, as well as skills you may not realize you need in your organization. Face-to-face study of community predates the Internet by at least two centuries, and has been done within sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. I will review some academic background on what makes a "community," whether online or offline, and then show how these notions apply online in the form of useful design principles. I'll wrap up with some metrics for evaluation based on your choice of definitions, taking you beyond simple page views and number of members.

Bio: Lynn Cherny's books Conversation and Community (1999) and Wired_Women (1996) were classic web 1.0 studies of online community that were used in many graduate classes. Since her research days, she has been a designer and manager at Excite.com, TiVo, Adobe, Mathworks, and Autodesk.

ABOUT UX BOSTON:

UX Boston is a new local branch of the User Experience Network, (Uxnet.org.) Our goal is to foster cross- disciplinary conversations and create connections across UX-related disciplines in the Boston area, including design, information architecture, usability, and technology development. We also serve as a bridge between other local and national UX-related groups. Membership is free and open to Boston-area UX professionals. For more information, and to help influence our meeting content, please visit: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/uxboston/

Stephen King on Writing -- And Design

I like this no-nonsense essay by Stephen King, Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes. I think it applies to doing good design as well.

Here's my remapping to design:

• "Be talented" should go without saying. Design is an art, too, even if it's data-driven. There is still creativity involved in knowing how to ask the right questions and take insight from the data.
• "Be neat" may be my own weakest point -- I'm a sketchy ideas person, and struggle for the pixel perfect after the big insights. But I keep trying and see it as a self-improvement challenge.
• "Be self-critical." If you haven't thrown away a bunch of ideas, and can't show that you have, you're probably not talented. The same goes for photography or any other art that takes practice to do well. Idea generation is easy, choosing the right ones for the right reasons is the skill part.
• "Remove every extraneous feaure." That's my redoing of King's "extraneous word." It's about clean design -- it's harder to get to the core than it is to throw in everything you thought of. It's also braver, faced with the "featuritis-sells" mentality that even some (most?) customers have in saturated markets.
• "Never look at a reference while doing the first design." Hmmm... In the spirit of letting creativity run free, I like this. But I need to think some more about its applicability here.
• "Know the market." Know the users, know the competition, know the business. Don't work in a creative, monk-like vacuum. Your work won't be very smart and your clients/company will stare at you funny when you present it.
• "Design to improve someone's life." King had "write to entertain," and I lean towards keeping it at the same sentiment even for a professional product -- but instead I think this is about more, like elegance, and beauty, and that "wow" moment that people get from using something that works well and does exactly what they didn't know they wanted it to do!
• "Don't design if you've stopped having fun." If you've turned into one of those hurt, tired people who feels like no one gets it and you're wasted there, you can't be Jonathan Ive at Apple. (I don't know if he's tired, but he did stick it out and it eventually paid off.)
• "Take usability input and use the design or start fresh." King's point is about how to weigh feedback: if you hear different things from everyone, you can probably ignore it safely; otherwise, take it seriously even if you don't like it.
• "If it's bad, kill it." Too few companies can do this; designers themselves need to be able to do it with authority to their own ideas. You're a hack if you don't know how to filter your own ideas. Remember, ideas are cheap! You are paid to be creative, right?

Successful people are generally also practical, and King really brought that home to me. In fewer words than I would have done, to be sure! His introduction story makes a few other good points: Even people who are talented need critique and input from more experienced people to get better at what they do. They need to be receptive to that. And not everything they design will be for a domain they know something about. It's part of the talent of a good designer to get into the heads of potential users, to do the research to understand them as input to the design process.

Berkun on Innovation Myths

Another book recommendation: Scott Berkun's new Myths of Innovation. I'm a big fan of Scott's earlier book, Art of Project Management, and his new one does not disappoint. I think it stands apart from other books by consultants and design agencies on building innovative organizations. (They're now a dime a dozen.) It's short but still condenses a huge amount of material from both business lit and historical research in a way that even someone who once wrote a dissertation can be amazed at. (Note: I was not as successful as Scott was at this trick.)

One of my favorite parts is on the myth that "good ideas are hard to find." Why, no, they're not, but execution is hard. Which segues nicely to his other book; in my experience, a lot of organizations have grand product plans and grand business goals, but execute very, very poorly. The customer only ever sees a fraction of it, and often the worst fraction.

Some of the sentiments that kill good ideas before they even get to fail by execution include: "We don't have time," "That never works," "We don't do that here," "We tried that already," "That won't make enough money." A longer list lives here on Scott's Blog. I'd add the question: "Who are you, again?" Or the related, "You're here to listen, not talk" (which I've actually heard).

The issue of time is the biggie, from what I've seen in my past few companies. The execs may be reading books about innovation (for whatever reason), but at the operational level, everyone is signed up for way too much work. They can't succeed at what they've agreed to do, but they're trying anyway. Why would anyone want to sign up for more, regardless of how cool the idea is?

I have the same feeling about brainstorming; as a concept it's all warm fuzzies, considered obviously valuable, although it's often poorly or incorrectly executed (as Scott points out). In practice, though, not everyone's ideas ARE considered equivalent, precisely because of this economy of time available to the participants; given a small, finite amount of time to think and make decisions, why pay attention to the crazy sounding new kid's idea, instead of the seasoned manager who deserves to get his say because he's proved himself, right? In a more applied, problem-solution context, the more seasoned people are assumed to "know the code" or "know the users" better and therefore their opinions are worth more. It's been said out loud. It's basic human sense, right? And the less time people have, the less they're willing to extend themselves to be open.

Successful innovation might require fewer over-ambitious projects, acceptable risk and play (meaning: someone isn't working on your critical shipping "normal" work and that's okay, and not overtime work for them), plus a commitment to try to listen to all voices differently, no matter what the problem is: new product, new feature, or old ordinary problem you have to solve on an ordinary project. I'll come down strongly in favor of that last -- I think innovation can happen on "old" projects, too, and it should, to keep them viable and interesting to developers and customers.

But good project management is always needed to help you actually plan and then ship something! It's still innovation once it's in the development phase, even if it feels like just "work" then. The team needs to be supported, rather than having their work taken for granted as "a done deal" while managers go off looking for the next big idea.

I can't find it now, but one of my favorite lines from Myths of Innovation goes something like, "Successful ideas, like happy pets, are shared among many people who care about them deeply." Pet them, sometimes.

Hiring the Smart and Effective: Joel

Joel Spolsky has just published a short, concise book on his hiring principles, summarized by the excellent "Hire Smart People Who Get Things Done." His book is Smart and Gets Things Done. I've blogged about his hiring guidelines and other interviewing issues: My 20 Observations on Coporate Design touches on this, as does the post about "Joel on Interviewing, Me on Performance" and the one about "Past and Current Employees and Your Reputation."

As a consultant now, and a survivor of (too) many companies, I do and have done a lot of interviewing. As a manager, I interviewed a lot of people while hiring (especially at TiVo and Autodesk). Joel is a good guy to follow on this subject, and I find his points can be extended to interviewing for designers and good employees in general. Failure to hire well (or take the right job!) is sometimes your fault!

Some things to consider when interviewing people to hire or interviewing for a possible job yourself:

1. A bad interview usually means "you don't want them and they don't want you." It's okay if it's not a mutual fit. Use that time wisely on both sides.
2. Some reasons for bad interviews (that suggest bad jobs in the background): They have junior people doing the interview, because they don't take it seriously; they have unqualified people doing the interview, who don't know what's good or bad; they have the wrong expectations, because they've never hired for this type of position before or are confused about the market and the job.
3. If you're the interviewer, and you do a bad job, that person is now possibly pissed off; freaked out; depressed; going to tell other people about your and your company. Mostly about your company because they may not distinguish between you and the company since they probably don't know you personally and you act as a representative of the company when you bring in a candidate. They may want to tell their friends, who are possible great fits, or tell their friends' friends, that you are a scary place to interview. This can do you damage and make it hard to get good candidates, needless to say (right?). I've heard more frank stories from former "rejected" candidates of the places I've worked since I left them than you can imagine. Bad word-of-mouth is not something you need in a competitive climate.
4. Sometimes you hire badly not because the person is bad, but because your job description or belief about what's needed are inaccurate. I've also heard plenty of stories along the lines of "this is not what I thought I was hired to do." (See post on "Invisible Work," for some examples.)
5. Someone who does a really superficial interview for a high-level position is a warning sign: either they hire other people badly so your peers will be poor colleagues, they have had a really hard time retaining and are desperate, or... something worse. Be wary of people who don't do a rigorous interview. I had a great one recently, or mostly great: the hiring manager walked me through scenarios, questions about the resume (detailed), adjectives people would use to describe me (I tried for positive and negative), past performance review feedback, etc. Her one failure was that she didn't ask why and what I was looking for up front, and in truth, I wasn't really looking! I was hoping for an informational discussion, as a consultant, first! But at worst, this wasted some of our time, and I ended up thinking she was a good manager and a possible contact for future work.

Ways you can avoid bad interviewing, as an interviewer, apart from having design/code tests and the other things Joel talks about:

• Treat each candidate very seriously -- it requires energy, but don't convey disinterest. Intuit once sent me home with a design test, rather than doing their usual and more effective whiteboard version, which pissed me off on several fronts; and I would not interview again with them despite them having many large product groups that need good designers, and see, I'm now blogging about this; see points 1 and 3 above.
• Get back to them in a reasonable amount of time with frank but polite response -- yes you're busy, indecisive, disorganized and unable to get everyone's input or reach a decision as a committee, but still. This is important. They're forming conclusions about you too.
• Don't assume you're their only job option and they're not being picky and making a decision too -- you're not in as much control as you think you are here.
• Don't let disorganized, rude, or confused HR people get involved and ruin the mood for them.
• Have senior people involved, to show you care, and to help make the right call outside of the comfort zone of junior folks on the interview schedule. Sometimes a hire can be strategic as well as tactical.
• Hire for potential and growth, not because of someone's current age (yes, it has happened), what they look like (yes, again), because you had budget to spend (someone still has to manage them), or because of domain knowledge that they will lose in a year off that former job. Yes, it's harder to evaluate this, but if you can't do it, maybe you're not the right person to hire or manage them?

Followup on Assholes at Work

Following up on my previous post on this... On Sutton's blog, he has a No Asshole Rule Roundup of comments he's gotten. One is quite well-taken: the subtle asshole is just as bad or worse than the flamingly obvious asshole, in their effect on morale. Sutton agrees: "Indeed, these more subtle assholes actually can often get away with doing more damage than their more 'over the top' and less politically skilled counterparts."

While googling around, I ran into this well-observed book review: Disorganized, Incompetent and Dangerous: Workers Dislike Manager Incompetence Even More Than Abuse, Study Suggests. The review is for a book I have since ordered but not yet read, Dignity at Work, by Randy Hodson. Some points from the article about it:

He found that abuse by managers was significantly connected to negative employee actions such as absenteeism and withholding effort on the job. However, the research found an even greater connection between mismanagement and these same negative employee actions.

"Nobody likes abuse, but employees can find ways to work around abusive managers. But employees don't want to be involved with chaotic, mismanaged workplaces where nothing gets done well and people feel like they can't be effective," said Randy Hodson, professor of sociology at Ohio State.

"The thing that undermines dignity more than anything is incompetence and mismanagement."

I spoke with someone recently who told me how much he'd learned from someone competent who had managed with a big stick approach, arguably an asshole by Sutton's criteria. But he had respected the guy anyway. It seemed to me in listening that he had tolerated it while he was learning, and then moved on to a more humane work environment. You decide the moral, if there is one.

LiveJournal in the Blogosphere

Work by Matthew Hurst on mapping the blogosphere has been blogged around recently, particularly because of his cool hyperbolic graphs of the huge data set of linkages, one shown above. I post here because I've got friends reading on LiveJournal -- I know LJ folks occasionally wonder why the press about social networking sites rarely mentions LJ, favoring MySpace and others. One reason may be that LiveJournal is a fairly close-knit and separate community site, with a lot of internal links via friends lists, and not a lot of other blogging post cross-over or linkage in. (I don't know how he handled syndication on LJ friends lists, if at all.)

LiveJournal's small network cluster is shown in the image as cluster #3. The others are (1) DailyKOS, (2) BoingBoing, (4) other political bloggers, (5) porn, and (6) sports fans. LiveJournal is further out than the porn fans, but bigger! Smaller than sports fans, though.

Goat Mockery

From a nice day at Drumlin Farm, in Lincoln, MA:

Design for Online Community: Past the Hype

I've posted my slides (PDF) from a recent "mini" Usability Professionals Conference talk about online community design. The talk was well-attended! Thank you if you came.

If you didn't, the gist is this:

• In Web. 1.0 we talked about community off the web as well as on it, in IRC, USENET, MUDS, BBSes, etc. (My dissertation and books are from that era.)
• There are a lot of sociology, anthropology, and linguistic studies of "community" that predate the internet. What can we learn from their definitions?
• Designing community requires special skills and ongoing commitment to the group.
• Good definitions help you understand "when you got it." This can influence your metrics.

Virtually every slide here could be a separate full talk, especially the metrics part. Let me know if you want any more references or help on the subject. This is my first in-depth look at this topic since 15 years ago, and like then, there was a lot to digest!

Funny Networks

I really appreciate a sense of humor in a network diagram. Here are two unusual ones found on visualcomplexity's feed, introduced with such sober and boring description that I was saddened for the VC readers who are probably missing the fun here.

The Story Map is a social network diagram of a wedding party, with the arcs annotated by relationship facts that link the nodes. It's beautiful and inspirational. Why are social network pics not funnier in general; relationships are, right? (Well, some. I guess professional ones aren't very. At least the publishable diagram versions.)

Next is a bigger investment, but worth it if you love detail (of the really obsessive type). An art project by Media A of massive size (10 meters), it's a representation of a fictitious designer's life spanning a century into the future. The Networked Designer's Critical Path is a PDF (3 MB) that takes time to download, but I guarantee it's very amusing and science fictional. Here's an excerpt (English in light gray):

Notice the chronic over-networking issue in the center there. Heh. My printer dialog says it would be 171 pages if I tiled to print this sucker at 100%. I'm tempted anyway.

Digg Labs Infovis

I've been enjoying the latest infovis apps from Digg Labs, co-created by Stamen Design (I want to be them when I grow up) and funded by Intel.

These cool applications let you watch digg news stories being posted and re-dugg in real-time. They're all good at different things, and compelling for different reasons.

My favorite in terms of "hypnotic to watch" is the swarm. It's eye-candy for the ADD set.

It does have some issues as a tool, however -- if I were them, I'd have prioritized the display of the text identifying the article over the other graphics, rather than letting it mix in with the background (see above). Also, I don't entirely understand the beautiful mysterious arcs that sometimes appear, but I'm not sure I care, either.

While watching a bunch of these, the role of time gets problematic for me. I'd like to be able to replay, or step backwards (like if I missed a cool event in the swarm). And watching the big arc display for "newly submitted" in the category of science is really boring, or was on Saturday night. (See if you can even figure out how to do that that!) Finally, I would far rather go right to the article itself than click through the digg page first. That's a minor quibble, though.

There's a definite long-tail problem on digg, isn't there -- lots of the same stuff gets dugg, and it's hard to find high-quality new stuff that matches your interests.