Category: General

Information and participation replace standardization, power and anonymity of decisions to produce a precise fit between elements and function to meet need. The need for power and standardization to resolve design problems can be countered by substitution of careful observation, acquired knowledge and direct participation. Given adequate information we can achieve precise fits between system and function and make design more closely related to particular user needs. This information may be applied in initial shaping of the environment or during operation and use where feedback may be used.

For much of history design has been an intuitive part of culture. People understood their regions and communities and knew the design templates that would work. More recently, design professions have supplanted intuitive design processes.

Ok there are a couple of really important things being said here. The first quote, which may seem confusing, is really just saying design your environment to suit your taste and approach (but obviously still consider your neighboring sites as mentioned before). In other words, think local vs global. Or if you’ve read any books on designing online communities, most will tell you to build your community based upon the focus of the community itself. In other words, don’t use a cookie cutter approach. Just because another site is using a certain structure and design, it doesn’t mean that same design will work for your site and its community. Figure out your needs or focus and design your site based upon them.

The second thing said here in the next quote is something I’ve seen recently elsewhere actually. It is basically saying that the average person can understand design. However, I believe they often can’t because of the faster paced world we are living in. To understand design, all you need to do is to slow down and observe what is going on upon your site and those neighboring sites around you. Often times people don’t have the time to do this, thus they leave it up to the experts who do focus most of their time to observing and learning these things.

BTW I just remembered one more thing. This local vs global issue is one that I’ve been noticing quite a lot with regards to tagging or categorizing my content. Basically I found tagging my content, say using global Technorati tags, to be pretty much useless for me on a local level because the tag groupings become less useful to me the more I have of them. Instead I find that categorizing my content into meaningful topics works much better. That way each category tag is almost like a discussion thread that someone can follow like reading a story.

We want to design places where people feel comfortable and have free and open choices of activity and association. Therefore, attention to human needs and the ability of people to comprehend the world around them is important to design. Comprehension starts with considerations of scale and complexity of elements, technology and organizations. People relate comfortably to “human scale” items and organizations where they have a sense of understanding and can exert control over their lives and decisions. As size and complexity increase, people may become less able to comprehend their personal relationship to things and events.

Appropriate technology to meet needs may not necessarily be the most advanced. Some guidelines for selection of appropriate technology include:

• Use the best, lowest level, technology to meet the need. This will help avoid using technology for technology’s sake.
• Use technology that minimizes human energy expenditure while maximizing the creative and rewarding nature of personal work.
• Use technology that can be built and repaired locally.

Ok, when I read the above for the first time, I nearly fell over in my chair, especially with regards to the words “avoid using technology for technology’s sake”. As anyone who knows my web development history, I’ve been preaching those words for YEARS! Back in 1999, I saw the proliferation of Flash and didn’t like how people were using it. Often times people were just using it for the sake of using it. “Look I’ve got a Flash site!” But then when you look at the Flash site you realize that pretty much the entire site could have been done in HTML easier except for the ANNOYING repeating sound in the background and the ANIMATED flaming logo. Oh, sorry, not true. You could have made an animated GIF for the flaming logo. Don’t get me wrong, I have actually seen excellent uses of Flash. The only problem is that they were far and few between back then. Today, while there still are bad uses of it, there are actually a lot more good uses of it as well.

With regards to “maximizing the creative and rewarding nature of personal work”, this just means utilizing Web technologies that can actually empower you. Weblog software is a perfect example of this because it has allowed us to move past the point of hand coding our sites when what we really want to do is just put down our thoughts. It is like someone who wants to communicate a message but before they can do so they have to build a communication system from scratch first. It just impedes the user’s thoughts and prevents their creativity from just flowing.

Now another point that is mentioned is utilizing technology that can be easily “built” and “repaired” yourself. All that is really being said here is make sure you are using Web technology that you can understand and easily modify yourself. The less complex the technology, the easier it will be to use. What good is powerful technology, if the tradeoff is that it is too difficult to configure and use? Therefore, ensure you are using Web technology that gives you the power that you need but it is still easy to configure and modify yourself. And I actually believe this is very important because one of the important concepts of my “connected communities” approach is to ensure the use of easy and open technologies for creating this connection. If you are using proprietary technologies then often times you won’t be able to build and modify the system to your liking.

Energy flow on a site is enhanced by intercepting and recycling the flow across the site.

What I find quite funny is that I used the word “energy” a long time ago to describe what others call PageRank. David Weinberger said he didn’t like this word because it made the Web sound like an organism. Well no the Web isn’t an organism like ourselves but it definitely acts like one because its interactions upon it are by organisms, us.

This energy is basically the flow of the Web that goes through your site (i.e. people entering and people leaving). As we all know, if a site has a high PageRank and it points to something of interest on a smaller site, then obviously the PageRank for the site is going to go up because of the increased interest and traffic to it.

What I found quite interesting though is that the more “energy” a larger site gives to smaller sites, the more “energy” the larger site will attract to itself. In effect, by giving, you are making yourself stronger. Why? Because it is pointing at interesting things and in doing so, itself becomes more interesting. Why do you think Google is so popular? It is because of what it points to, not because sites point to it.

Therefore, if you notice a site that is bringing some traffic to you looks quite interesting to you, then by all means link to it. In doing so, not only will you be giving your “energy” to it but, in effect, you will be recycling that energy back to yourself as the other site gains more energy and redirects back at you.

Resource planning is one of the main tasks of design. Site elements and forces may be seen as problems or opportunities

Reuse of materials without need for major conversion takes advantage of expenditures and resource conversions that have already taken place and gives old products a new, useful life.

Hehe, every hear of recycling? Recycle and reuse your content often. Use it as much as you can and refer back to it as much as you can.

A multiplicity of pathways to accomplish a function or satisfy a need allows a flexible response to changing conditions. Multiple pathways are redundant systems that guard against overall system failure. Each important function in a design should be supported by several elements.

This should be pretty obvious to people on the Web. For the longest time people having been saying your home page is your most important page. Well sure it is IF people enter your site that way. What if they don’t though? What if they come in from another site or via a search engine to a specific page? What will they see? Click on a single one of your posts and what do you see? From that single page can you grasp what your website is about? Can you tell what type of discussions are going on upon it? Do you think that person will stay a while and visit or turn to leave immediately?

Relative location is related to the placement of areas of use and circulation on the site. Putting things in the right place is essential for making useful connections. A useful connection is one in which “the inputs needed by one element are supplied by other elements in the system; and the outputs needed by one element are used by other elements in the system.”

The effect of not paying attention to relative location is work, extra effort to meet needs not met within the system, and…outputs that are wasted in the system. To place elements in the right place we must know their potential connections.

Aggregating design elements will bring varied activities together to share space, reinforce each other and eliminate…trips from one area to another. We are always searching for connections between parts of systems and between seemingly disparate systems to establish appropriate relationships in our design.

The act of determining relative locations is, in fact, what we call design.

It is in the realm of the principle of relative location to be an aggregator.

If we viewed each element in a design, not as a discrete smooth-edged entity, but as having protrusions for connections of inputs and outflows, it might help us to better make usable relative location decisions.

That last quote, says it all. How are you making every single bit of information on your site connectable to something else upon it? Every post or thought that you put down should be connecting and linking to something else on the site. It is actually quite hilarious when you think about it. We often link to more information off of our site than the content upon it.

Actually this approach is similar to one of my own in that I always said I wanted each one of my posts to have an area near the bottom where it shows previous posts that relate to the topic I’m currently reading (i.e. if it talks about design, then it shows the last 5 posts about design near the bottom of the post).

Here’s another example. Say you have a movie section on your site where you review movies you’ve seen. Well, anytime you talk about movies in your post (even if only slightly) then you should be linking to those movie reviews (i.e. “And after the conference, we caught a movie with a few other people”).

Using natural forces rather than trying to overcome them is a sound design approach.

The Web has its own ebb and flow of its own. Instead of working against it, work with it.

Context in design means that we place our work within the framework of our surroundings, that we try to give it a distinction based upon the sense of place in which we are working.

Community definition is based on constructed and social elements. We want to understand the cultural setting into which we are moving and adding elements.

Finally, we are concerned with use of immediately adjacent sites. This is likely to have great impact on design decisions because activities on them influence our site and what we do affects them.

Our design needs to respond to functional requirements of our program, from the inside out so to speak, but it also has to respond to the larger setting, from the outside in.

These words are like a splash of water in my face, especially for someone who has built community sites in the past. What is being said here is that your site doesn’t exist in its own little space (i.e. my site, my world). Your site exists upon the Web and it therefore coexists with other sites around it. By around it, I referring to where most of your visitors may come from or go to. Those are your neighbors. You probably know them already because you probably visit them frequently yourself. Therefore, when designing your site, you not only need to think about your own local framework but of the framework of those around you as well. This is even more so true today with many blogs forming communities amongst themselves.

All people have an ethic by which they conduct themselves in their dealings with other people and their work. However, this ethic is frequently unstated and hidden away. It is a challenge to ask ourselves where we are coming from in making design decisions. What are the things we believe and how are they reflected in our lives and our decision making?

I’ve been calling this ethic, our culture. I’ve also been saying that a massive cultural paradigm shift is occurring right now. It isn’t making headline news but it is out there if you watch for it. Just look for people talking with words like “honest”, “truthful”, and “open”. If you don’t see those words, then just look for buzzwords that equate to them such as “transparency”. That’s just a fancy name for a company that is open, honest, and truthful. I encapsulated what I thought were these cultural values in my post entitled I Work For The Web.

Make links and connections.

Use local resources.

Increase ‘edge’.

Maximize diversity.

Relative location.

Build multiple backup and support systems.