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As a web designer and information architect it’s my job to make things simple. So simplicity, of course, is one of the attributes our firm strives for in all our work, as well. Our content specialists work on web copy to make it easier to read and understand. Our web marketing expertise focuses on boiling content down to its essence, for both its audience and for search engines. Our designers take complex technical product information such as flow charts and schematics and create visualizations and diagrams that tell a clear story. Or they create an icon or a logo that needs to communicate the most critical information about a product or brand in a half-inch square space.
Lately, for no reason I can tell, I’ve been seeing quotations about simplicity in books and on web sites. I continued browsing and searching to find a few more. I’m struck by the fact that the giant, iconic minds of art, science and philosophy all revere simplicity as a core principle. da Vinci, Thoreau, Einstein, and many others. So I thought I’d make a blog post out of them … they’re all very useful and all remarkably similar in their sentiment.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci
“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” - Henry David Thoreau
“Simplicity is the glory of expression” - Walt Whitman
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein
“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” - Albert Einstein
“A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life” — Winston Churchill
“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” - Fredric Chopin
Yesterday one of my Facebook friends posted a note that “Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission” and to copy the instructions to prevent this to everyone on your friends list. I followed the instructions myself, did a little research on Mashable and some of my Twitter feeds, and proceeded to let all my Facebook friends know how to protect themselves in their Privacy settings.
The whole scenario proceeded to become a bit confusing. We know that many Facebook users are seeing their own or their friends’ photos used in sidebar ads. Whether or not Facebook “has agreed” to allow this is a bit fuzzy. In their privacy settings for using your data in Facebook Ads, their copy reads as follows:
“Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules. You may opt out of appearing in your friends’ Facebook Ads below.” (Got that? Good. You are then given the option of allowing this data to appear in your friends’ ads, or ‘”no one.”)
“Relevant social actions.” Does that encompass “photos” and wall posts? We can conclude that these “actions” include profile “Info” such as your favorite movies and books, and your “Pages” that you are a “fan” of or Group pages that you’ve joined. It also obviously refers to the countless quizzes, top five lists and games on Facebook feed the hungry FB data mining machine. At my gut level, I feel like photos and wall posts should be off limits to marketers, but with that ambiguous privacy opt-out statement it seems like Facebook is being squeamish about it at best and secretive at worst. Having said that I can clearly recognize Facebook’s difficult balancing act: protecting as much of the privacy of their millions of users while providing services to their paying advertisers who want as much access to those millions as possible.
Before I go further I’ll provide some links to articles that look at this issue through slightly different lenses. I’m not sure they’ll help you resolve whether or not Facebook photo sharing is a legitimate concern or not, but they do fill in many more blanks than I do above. Check out DowloadSquad’s initial article that triggered this controversy; and their follow-up article to AllFacebook’s return fire. An updated Mashable article wraps up the tos and fros of the debate as well.
Decisions, decisions
So after reading and considering all this, where should the line be drawn? Because clearly, a definitive line has not been drawn yet. As social media continues to skyrocket to stratospheric heights of influence, conundrums like this one are nothing new (Google’s catches grief for similar Gmail data mining exploits) and will continue. After I posted those instructions to turn off Facebook’s ads-to-friends sharing, I got “thank you’s” from my brother and high school buddies and some “Bro! What are you doing??!?” responses from some of my web marketing industry colleagues. As in: “Why are you biting the hand that feeds you?” Hey, I tell my clients that Facebook is an excellent advertising tool because you can advertise on FB members’ pages who have indicated that they may be interested in your product, based on their interests, their “fanned” pages, and their groups. Facebook users are at some level aware of this business model. However, since Facebook’s policy is so fuzzy anyway I usually don’t go into the fact that “by the way, we can eavesdrop on their wall posts too, if you want to get really aggressive with this whole data mining thing.”
Your personal XML file
A few years ago, before Web 2.0 and Facebook and YouTube took hold, and Amazon and eBay were gaining full strength, there was a lot of talk in the industry about somehow, some way, getting every consumer to generate their own “personal XML file” — an über-demographic schema. You would populate this file with everything about you and your family that was relevant to future purchase decisions and perhaps include some social demographic data as well. You would agree to post this XML file would “somewhere” on the Web and based on its content, you would receive not only Internet ads but also TV ads and even out-of-home digital signage messages based on your personal metadata, your demographic DNA. The benefit to both consumers and advertisers would be more efficient communication of relevant information: The right content to the right person at the right time.
Well, fortunately this scenario didn’t play out as planned. This rather generic approach would have resulted in the commoditization of a lot of products and services and decreased the influence of good brands, not to mention a huge hurdle for small businesses. Instead, the concept of a personal digital fingerprint grew beyond this original blueprint to become Facebook and Google profiles. Especially in the case of Facebook, something interesting happened: consumers willingly and voluntarily WANTED their friends to know what cars, music, TV shows, fashions, vacation destinations, and coffee shops they were “fans” of. The Facebook info, profile, fan pages and groups are a user’s XML file, and advertisers use that data, and members aren’t all that concerned about the ads, and they follow the fan pages. Everyone is happy, brands thrive in a whole new frontier, and fascinating new opportunities surface for smaller brands farther out on “the long tail.”
In conclusion, I think you’ll see Facebook more clearly define “social actions.” What I’d like to see Facebook write into this definition is a better description of the vital user-consumer-marketer-advertiser ecosystem that these social actions (whichever they are) help nourish. An ecosystem where consumers help marketers and marketers help consumers to be in position to deliver or receive the right messages, learn about desired brands, find the best prices, explore relevant business or career opportunities.
Organic’s ThreeMinds blog posted some interesting links about lessons information architects can learn from regular architects (’regular’ for lack of a better terms … these folks are anything but regular). While this overall ideas is, of course, nothing new, these five lessons are all fresh takes with keen insights. Lesson #1, “start with the joints (points of stress)” definitely caught my attention. Sounds like this conference speaker they’ve met is writing a sequel to The Fountainheadache. These concepts are all focused on giving the client what they want while getting them excited about discovering what they also need.
In•for•ma•tion n. 1.) Knowledge obtained by research, observation, study or instruction in a form allowing for its recommunication to others enabling a state of knowing.
Ar•chi•tect n. 1.) An individual skilled in the art of building who creates the instruction for the construction of organized space. 2.) the thoughtful specifications and superintendence of the building of useful structures.
In•for•ma•tion Ar•chi•tect n. 1.) The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. 2.) A person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge. 3.) The emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.
From Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman. Lest we forget, as the Web 2.0 deluge pours on.
I use the Firefox browser and Internet Explorer 7 at a ratio of about 60% to 40% respectively. The plug-ins really make Firefox sing.
Here are the plug-ins I use:
Internet Explorer 7 has some nice plug-ins as well.
I am sure there are others worth noting. Feel free to pass them along in the comments.
As one who is very interested in usability and intuitive interfaces, I had to laugh at this list of top 10 usability bloopers in film compiled by Jakob Nielsen.
I think filmmakers avoid showing real email and other software applications to avoid product placement costs, but that certainly doesn’t account for the fact that there will always be one lead character that can walk up to any computer and instantly operate the interface, guess the password, find any document in seconds, and immediately send it to their mobile device. That’s how things work in real life, right? I have trouble finding documents on my own machine.
No matter how smart you are, some things just can’t be done without an esoteric knowledge of the system, so–for intimidated computer users everywhere–blame it on the computer not yourself.
There were years of anticipation around the latest release of Microsoft Windows such that the recent official release of Vista seemed a little anti-climatic. However, at least one launch party caught my eye. The photos from the Vista Ice House: Toronto launch party were fun to see. It reminded me of the mysterious Swedish ICEHOTEL which takes ice architecture to the extreme. I have always wondered about certain hygienic aspects of staying at an ice hotel, but I guess the details have been worked out, because now there is an Ice Hotel in Canada as well.
Merry day-after-Christmas everyone. Today my kids will enjoy their first full day with our new Nintendo Wii gaming system after cracking it open yesterday morning. What a revelation … and a revolution. On December 24 they sat cross-legged on their rear-ends with that deer-in-the-headlights gaze into the so-called action on their previous-generation GameCube. Today, they’re not only standing upright but also punching, swinging, throwing and bowling. On a chilly mid-winter night both boys come running upstairs with their shirts off because they actually broke a sweat from all the exercise. Merry Christmas, indeed.
For those of you who are not familiar with Nintendo’s latest gaming console and the paradigm-shifting user interface I’m referring to, check out http://us.wii.com. Not only can you take full-motion control of the action, but you can also custom-create an on-screen avatar of yourself (a “Mii” — what else?) that can appear in multiple games.
We’ve heard the PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360’s on-screen graphics are much better than the Wii, making the blood, guts, and mature content more realistic. Uh, no thanks. Instead, let’s congratulate Nintendo for focusing their product development on bona fide user experience innovation that makes the PLAY seem more realistic. Let’s hope the Wii continues to dominate market share and shift game-makers’ creativity back toward kids and families where it belongs.
One advantage of the web is the ability to control the content being viewed. This really comes into play when trying to compare products or services online. Being able to compare features effectively helps the customer make the right choice.
You have probably seen those web pages that include a huge list of features with check marks in the columns that represent products to be compared. Often a company will place its products next to competitor products and then stack the deck by inventing features it can claim that the competitors cannot–the advertising technique called differentiation.
A few sites allow you to filter a list of products by choosing particular attributes such as products within a particular price range, but most online efforts have not impressed me.
Well, I stumbled across a site called WikiMatrix, which helps users select wiki software. The comparative tools are fantastic. The features that mean the most to me are the fact that you can choose which products are compared and you can choose which features are compared. The later is key. The user determines which features are important and can limit the comparative list to just those features.
I think there is still more that could be done. One thing would be to let users define or apply their own features to products and then compare them. For instance, the user might add an endorsements attribute or certain personally-defined pros and cons.
Either way, there is a lot of potential here especially for complex products like insurance plans, cell phone plans, automobiles, and computers, etc. The web is the perfect medium to accomplish it.
Instant messaging (IM) is a useful tool for ad. hoc. real-time conversations with contacts. You can quickly ask a question, get answer and continue working. However, the problem with instant messaging is that all your contacts probably use different networks and each messaging client is a separate software installation.
There is a solution to this dilemma, which I thought most people already knew about. However, since I have met several people recently that did not know about Meebo, I thought I would post about it.
The website Meebo.com offers an incredibly slick IM client hosted in a web browser. It requires no installation and it works over port 80–the standard web port. I believe it uses only JavaScript to work its magic so you will want a modern browser like the latest versions of FireFox, Opera, or IE.
The good news is that it supports Yahoo, Google, MSN, and the AOL IM platforms. It does not even require an account to use, so you can just navigate to the site, login to any or all of the supported IM platforms and you are on your way.
To save preferences and customizations you can create a Meebo account. Nice!
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