I’ve been out of circulation for the past few months, nose in a book…actually nose in many books, learning as much as I can about the field of Information Architecture and User Experience Design. No time left over to get out and have an adventure.
But now I have a new blog, loosely titled Phil Houtz Has a Sketch Book where I can talk about ontology and personas to my heart’s content without shifting the focus here. Drop by and say “hi” if you have the chance.
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Design Framework for a Single Tweet
If Twitter is part of your information ecology you are going to run smack into an interesting problem during the design phase – you have no control over the technology people use to access Twitter. Your users might come at you through a web app on the desktop or they might be using SMS on a cell phone. Or they could be seeing your tweets through a sidebar on topical blog somewhere. Yes you still need to design your Twitter profile page on the off chance someone will visit it (HOT TIP: use this Photoshop template) but the fact is that the only control you have over look, feel and function is your choice of avatar. OR IS IT?
The Tweet is the UI
It dawned on me this week that a single tweet is a user interface. Within 140 characters there are a surprising number of elements that you can control and some of them have profound design consequences. For instance, the choice of a URL shortener can have an impact on your analytics. TinyURL, one of the first URL shorteners, shortens links and provides users with a preview. Other shorteners like ow.ly, goo.gl and bit.ly also help you track click-throughs. And of course Twitter has its own automatic link shortener which doesn’t give you any analytics goodness but it does give your users some assurance against spammy links.
And that’s just one element of a tweet. For this reason it makes sense to me to put a single tweet through the design framework process, break it down to its basic elements and develop a list of “tweet best practices” to follow. This is for my personal online ecology redesign but I think it is even more important for businesses to consider.
It’s Best to Test
If Twitter is part of your business strategy then some user testing and design guidelines are crucial. What avatar best represents your brand as a personal entity (tip: it might not be your logo)? What gets the best response, @mentions, direct messages, hashtags? How does time of day impact your visibility in the tweet stream? What choice of photo/media sharing service provides the best value and viral functionality? What kind of conversational tone will you adopt and how much context will you provide in conversational tweets? Are you going to use location services or not?
That’s a lot of stuff to consider for a design element that is probably most often overlooked and almost certainly never considered in the design framework process. But think of it this way, a lot of the research that you do can be reused for other projects. And when you’re done with the design process for a single tweet you’ll be 140 characters closer to wrapping up your entire project.
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Tale à la Hoffmann by Paul Klee
I am putting together an online portfolio to showcase my abilities in research, structure and design. And of course you can’t think about a design portfolio without thinking about branding. And from branding it’s just a short walk to online presence. And now I’m thinking about my followers on Twitter – are they my users or am I using them?
What started out as noodling on the mechanics of tossing a few PDF files up on the web has become a massive project to redefine the architecture of an entire village. WordPress, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are very different but highly interwoven destinations on the Brand Me experience. But shouldn’t they at least be making an effort to work together toward a common goal?
The problem is, as anyone on Facebook knows, the online world is in a constant state of flux and upheaval. I just started to get the hang of Twitter and now I have to learn Google+? And what about Spotify, Quora or Diaspora? Shouldn’t I have an online presence on these sites too?
It’s overwhelming.
Howard Rheingold talks about “infotention” – the critical ability to be able to direct our attention to things that matter at the same time that we are being bombarded by a thousand streams of data. It’s absolutely essential for communicators to have a robust set of filters that allow them to capture high value information and ignore the rest.
But these filters need to work both ways. We need to be able to target, define, tag, highlight and otherwise focus the message that we have for the world.
It’s a two-way street. And that’s what makes Bonnie Nardi’s concept of information ecology so compelling – “We feel a sense of urgency about the need to take control of our information ecologies, to inject our own values and needs into them so that we are not overwhelmed.”
So, how would a person go about designing a personal information ecology? I’ve recently been re-reading Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities. Bacon believed that cities live or die on their ability to structure four dimensional movement systems. In other words, a successful city design will constantly reward the individual as she moves through its spaces.
Ever since the days when we navigated the network through Gopherspace, if not before, people have considered networked information in spatial and architectural terms. The amazing thing is that we continue to think in terms of spatial metaphors now that hyperlinking any sense of movement from one space to another. Rather than ambling down the Via del Corso toward the Piazza Venizia we simply “pop” to an entirely different location as if we were traveling by portkey.
Any movement system within an information space needs to be centered on relationships, then, and not on locations. That, I think, is the place to start looking when considering a design for an information ecology. How does content relate to modality and how does modality relate to social capital? Or to put it in American English, how does the conversation we are having on Twitter relate to my most recent blog post and how does that conversation relate to a prospective client’s storyline?
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It’s interesting how language shapes the way we think. For instance I’ve gone looking for jobs. Sometimes I’ve gone hunting for jobs. The result might be that I find a job opening and then get an interview.
It recently occurred to me that a career change might be more like a construction project. For instance you might have three kids but no spare bedroom. Myself, I’ve got a ton of skill and experience in my current position but not so much in career areas that interest me.
The problem isn’t really about hunting, seeking, finding. It’s about studying, designing, planning and finally executing.
A career change, by its nature, takes a person into unfamiliar territory. It means starting over at the beginning in some ways.
So I’m looking at this as a design problem. How can I build on the skills I have and minimize the amount of time and effort it takes to acquire new skills? The first step is to take inventory of my skills and interests and then to survey the job market and come up with types of jobs and requirements.
The place where all four sets intersect is the place to start building.
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I haven’t been blogging lately, not because I’ve been off section-hiking (I wish) but because I have been very actively rethinking my life and my career.
The only way I can describe my mental state right now is something like histolysis, as if my brain were being dissolved by digestive juices the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
I’m using the classic What Color Is Your Parachute? to help organize this process. What I like about this work is that it is essentially a strategic design process. Richard Bolles is really more of a designer and an architect than a counselor, at least in his process.
This means that my novel is on hold for the moment, and my Tinderbox blogging, and most of my adventures. But I’m very energized about what lies ahead.
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