Dearly eParted

We were out for a lunchtime walk when my friend Rob Brueckner asked "Can we change the subject?" as I had been talking about a book I was reading at the time called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." The book takes a gentle literary exploration of death around the world; looking at rituals and customs of several different cultures as well as some new methods for handling human remains.

In western society we quickly get itchy around the topic of death. I believe this is in large part owed to the value we put on life. I won't speculate about how the subject is dealt with in other cultures and refuse to be bated into arguments about whether or not we put a high value on all life, but it's safe to say that our own personal life is typically quite precious to us. I don't mean to belittle other cultures--I simply don't know them well enough to speak on their behalf. The ancient warriors of Sparta, Kamikaze pilots in World War II, and today's suicide bombers in the Middle East all share a sense of nobility in death that is alien to most of the folks I know.

Here in the "modern, western world" we are starting to develop lives that extend into the virtual world. Beyond online shopping carts, bank transactions, correspondence, and job hunting, we have prolific online social lives. I befriended a baker in Melbourne, Australia as we played Monopoly on Pogo the other night. Not that long ago as I prepped for a job interview, I bought my PlayStation Home avatar a suit, tie, and shiny shoes (total cost $1.96 US dollars). The game Second Life takes its name from the notion that we are beginning to lead online lives in step with our corporal lives. When I go into a bank for just about anything these days, the tellers explain to me that I can do just about everything (except deposit rolls of coins) without the aid of a teller these days. Most of my interactions with my banks, my retirement accounts, the unemployment office, and all my friends have become online activities.

So what happens to our online lives when we die? In most cases, they die with us. When my friend Ed Rojek passed away I sent a final email to his old email account for personal closure. I knew no one would read it but I felt such a loss. He had been taken away so young; I needed to send one last message.

There have been several news stories about families trying to get passwords to their departed loved one's email accounts and being refused. I used to be very staunch in my thinking on this topic. Of course they were refused! Email accounts are like diaries...filled with the minutia of our personal lives. Inboxes become our virtual desktops full of receipts from online purchases, usernames, passwords, membership agreements, travel confirmations, letters from significant others--often VERY personal correspondence.

I recall how after an argument, a woman I had a legal agreement with (I feel identifying her more directly would be slanderous) chose to break into my Yahoo! mail. It wasn't hard for her to accomplish--I had set the security question to be "What is Mason's (my younger son's) middle name?" --information she was well aware of. At the time, I had no reason to believe she would attempt anything so malicious as this invasion of privacy. She deleted a lot of sentimentally valuable email as well as wrote and called several old friends. The good news is that most of them called me to laugh about the trash talking she did, and the better news is that I now write cryptic security questions with twisted answers. I myself often have a hard time getting back into an account if I am challenged for this information.

My point is that my basis for thinking about online property was forged in the heart of a serious violation of my privacy. My personal inboxes are currently a mess with very little organization and tons of spam. I don't know why my children would ever want to wade through all that crap, but with some years since suffering an online attack I have healed and find my mind in a more peaceful place. How better to come to a deep understanding of who I am? Gigabytes of people laughing with me about the good and bad times we have shared. Trials, tribulations, tawdry attachments. My boys don't know half of my friends very well...if at all! They have very little idea of how I participated in focus groups, user groups, charity events and even joined a couple of professional guilds. I don't know that they would want to go through that stuff, but I plan to welcome them in.

CNN ran an article the other day about a site designed to tackle this issue. This is an interesting approach. At first, I found the article discouraging, as it had the picture you see at the top of the blog post. I thought the aticle was merely about online venues to pay final respects where everyone can see your thoughtfulness. Where there is one such site, there will be many. The thought of cheapening final words to a friend by equating them to an online birthday card seemed as cold as Phil Collins faxing his wife divorce papers. This just seemed like another way to milk the grieving for more cash.

The good news was the article was in fact about something a little less shallow. It talks about the website Legacy Locker, which offers a means by which users can bequeath access to their accounts to those they leave behind. This informs loved ones which accounts the departed wanted them to access and it takes the fuss out of getting usernames and passwords.

I am personally exploring the site. If for no other reason, I think my kids would get a kick out of some of my passwords. I believe this is a very useful service. Although it's not popular to think about death in this culture, it is an inevitability that is best met well-prepared.

Semantic taxonomy, part 2

Last month on 28 April, I wrote an entry about semantic taxomony. In my post I referenced two abstracts I found on the web via Google searches: both academic exercises on the topic of semantic taxonomies as they relate to personalized web searching.

The first abstract was authored by disciples of business and computer science. This paper proposed that users should anticipate their search needs and preferences and "teach" the system what kind of results they want. While I have always been a proponent of search preferences and offering options to the user for searching, including selections that can be stored for later use, I do not advocate making the user guess what kind of results they think they want and forcing them to teach the search engine to find them. This might work for a small population of search experts who comprehend the inner workings of the engine's algorithm(s) but for the vast majority of users, it would be a befuddling experience.

The second abstract was authored by adherents of linguistics and computer science. This study championed an intelligent system that observes the user's searching and based on compiled empirical data, the engine builds a profile and anticipates the user's preferences. It refers to the data in this profile as "meta-knowledge." I am a big fan of this approach. I believe it serves the majority of individuals with search needs much better than laborious form-driven exercises that may or may not aid in finding anything and have ephemeral relevance.

CNN recently published an article on a new spate of search engines (naming Twine, Hakia, SearchMe, Kosmix, Cuil, Duck Duck Go, Scoopler, and Wolfram Alpha) that have built this kind of meta-knowledge into their engines' algorithms and are aggregating them againt results from sites such as Twitter. These new engines start where Google currently ends, observing the user's behavior and providing better and better results over time.

I imagine once one or two of these engines breaks ahead of the pack, they will be absorbed into the Google omniplex. This will be a welcome addition to the Google toolset -- right now Google seems to only use our histories to show us tailored advertising. Though I prefer an ad that offers something I might want over one simply based on keyword matching against my search query I would really enjoy this sort of intuiting within the results themselves.

Non-sequitur: a fish

I awoke today from a crystalline dream about a fish I had as a child.

It seems as though to achieve official blogdom, a blog must have the occasional random entry. This entry will serve that purpose. While this blog is an attempt at chronicling my professional meditations on UI/UX I do state that it also observes my pursuit of life and liberty.

Since I was laid off almost two months ago (where has the time gone?) my sleep pattern has changed radically. Mostly by that I mean I now sleep occasionally--almost regularly. In fact last night I overslept. Around the time the alarm went off I was in the spell of a most compelling dream. I turned off the alarm in a state of semiconsciousness and managed not to fall out of the dream.

The dream was about a goldfish from many years ago. Somehow I had discovered it still alive while going through some odds and ends that I still have at my mother's house. It was clearly ecstatic to see me and when I put my hand in the pristine water of the fish bowl it pressed against my hand affectionately like a loyal dog. I felt that the water needed to be changed and as I followed my old water changing methods the goldfish kept trying to escape. I managed to keep it in the bowl but as I set it down to resume cleaning this very persistent fish started climbing over the edge of the bowl in a most unfishlike manner.

I lowered the water level and set the bowl on a towel as it had gotten wet on the outside. After doing so I again turned to resume cleaning duties. With this the fish started jumping out of the water like a dolphin at an aquarium. Flipping in the air...attempting to keep my attention.

I brought the fishbowl downstairs to show to my mother and brother for whom the fish continued to perform its antics. They were spellbound by its very athletic prowess. My fish was most definitely a special fish.

When I finally woke hours later the dream was still fresh in my mind's eye. My love for the fish was strong and I was struck with how much I missed it. I remembered vividly understanding that the fish wanted me to dip my hand in the water--it wanted to snuggle against me. I had a connection with it such that I knew that behind my back it was trying to get out of the bowl to follow me. I intuited that it wanted me to be impressed with the tricks it had learned. And the whole time, I was in awe because this fish was decades old and had managed to find sustenance and keep its own bowl clean in my absence.

I don't know what the dream means, but I woke up happy and refreshed from what was an amazing dream and a very restful night of sleep. What an amazing dream!

P.S. Happy Birthday, Dad!! 68, woo!

Facebook Fan Pages (Groups)

I decided I needed to be more comprehensive about my fandom on Facebook. I had randomly become the fan of several topics my friends had become fans of but this left topical gaps among my Facebook pages. I had no idea what I was getting into! I don't know why I thought the task would be quick, I guess it had something to do with the small number of groups I was in up until this evening. For those that don't know about Facebook pages (groups), on every Facebook user's profile there is a tab marked "Info." At the bottom of the Info tab is a list of "Pages" (groups) that the user joined by supporting their causes or becoming a fan of their topics. Politicians get support for instance, rock bands get fans.

The impetus for feeling my Facebook pages needed attention was the fact that I appeared to be supporting Barack Obama twice. Because of limited real estate on the Info tab this meant that some other topic was falling onto a second page. I thought I could get all these objects of my admiration onto one page. Silly me! This became pulling the proverbial thread from a sweater and unraveling it entirely.

I could probably have compiled a satisfying list of pages by "depth charge" searching. By this I mean look at a few pages of topics and via inspiration (one television program begets another, etc.) I could round out a pretty good collection. If I like Star Trek (I do!) then I would search on analogous topics such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and Galaxy Quest. Instead of doing it this way, the Harris in me came out and I decided to tackle this the slow and methodical way...I would browse through all of Facebook's group pages and find all the things I am a fan of in this fashion. What a dreadful mistake!

It would appear that Facebook fan pages are sorted primarily by popularity. I say "it would appear" because with each page turn, at the top of the page there is a topic that has more fans than the last topic on the previous page.

Many have observed before me that Facebook's pagination provides no hint as to how long the queue is. I decided I would find out the hard way. When I started, the pagination read "1 2 3 4 5 Next." For those curious, if you are on page one and you click Next, it takes you to page two, not the next set of pages--there is no easy way to advance to page 100 on Facebook.

At the top of page one was Barack Obama with over six million supporters (I am one) followed by Vin Diesel with over three million fans (I am not one). By page fifteen I was on topics just above and below the half million fan mark. For those interested, Mariah Carey has 500,496 fans on Facebook. Just behind her, at 499,691 fans, is "Naked Cuddles In Bed." Although I am a fan of naked cuddles in bed, I choose only to share that with you my loyal blog reader, making this fact a blog post exclusive. My Facebook friends will be so jealous!

Atop page 100 we find "Mini Eggs Cadbury" (not a fan). The mini eggs have 97,186 fans tonight.

While I browse I begin to wish there was more governance over these pages. Not just for parentally challenging topics but also because of the amount of redundancy. As far as getting parental I'll go straight to the crux of the problem as I see it. I believe that Facebook was started by and for college students and I applaud both the ingenuity and the end result. The number of fan groups around specific brands, of alcoholic beverages for instance, becomes saddening to me. I hypothesize the majority of fans of Marlboro Light cigarettes and Smirnoff vodka are people not legally old enough to purchase or consume them. A search on the topic "wasted" yields a few fan groups for a band (or bands) called "Wasted" but it also shows a group of 106,133 fans of "Getting Wasted" and another focused on "Getting Wasted After Exams" --an "Event Planning Group" with a fan base of 31,974. Among Facebook fan pages that's not a particularly high number but it's greater than the number of males in Framingham, MA (the largest town in the USA) according to the 2,000 US Census. Similar searches on "partying," "drinking," and the like yield depressing results.

With regard to redundancy it seems as though if I was the owner of the Boston Red Sox I wouldn't mind if a Facebook moderator combined the three fan groups I have seen so far into one category--permitting the world to see the true number of Sox fans on Facebook in one group. There are three pages of search results full of Nutella fan groups. Dr. House and Chuck Norris each have several groups, instead of the single, centralized page they each deserve.

I also observe that lingual barriers seem to create redundancy. There are several groups around each of the following topics: sleeping, napping, siestas, hating waking up on Mondays, hating waking up for school, hating waking up for work, and hating waking up for exams, but each one is labeled in a unique language, some of which I am only guessing as to the topics by their "avatar." Here is one entitled "La grasse mat' avec son (sa) chéri(e)." Babelfish translates that from the French to mean "Fatty the mat' with its (its) cherished (E)." This illustrates why I find the language barrier a little offputting.

I click further on and a disheartening revelation dawns on me: as the pages advance and the popularity goes down the difference between each topic's number of fans is also going down. This means that while on page 120, I am probably not even half way through the results. When I started, I was determined to go through all the pages. At this point, a few hours in, I have decided to cap my hunt at four digits (9,999): the first group with under 10,000 fans will end my hunt for topics this evening (and perhaps for good). I realize as I write this I may need to rethink even that goal.

Another effect of doing this for so long is I start to lose my judgment. Early on I would go past several sequential pages without joining any fan groups, but I just caught myself asking over and over again "Am I a fan of 'Axe Body Spray?'" (the answer is NO!). While Facebook has categorized each of the groups, even when I delve into a category (Celebrities / Public Figures) I am still presented with the same pagination issue.

[ long break ]

Good morning! I had to go to sleep at the bottom of page 150; the group was Tie-dye shirts with 52,415 fans (now including me). My hunt goes on.

I decided my new goal was to get to a topic under 50,000 fans. This project was not intended to take days; I don't frankly have days to devote to it. At 49,625 fans, the group "Brothers and Sisters" is about an eighth of the way down page 159. From here I will depth charge the rest of my fan groups and I will conduct that activity after I post this blog entry.

This blog entry was being concluded with dismay when I discovered I could cheat to get to the last page of results. All I had to do was spoof the browser's query string. Duh! So using this new method to circumvent Facebook's limited pagination I discovered that they capped pagination at 1,000 pages. Go figure...I am glad I gave up on page 159! The group that currently holds the dubious distinction of being the last topic before going into the too-unpopular-to-appear-in-the-pagination void is Hobart (a "Religious Center") with 3,466 fans. I feel good knowing now that it was best that I gave up browsing one page at a time; and I was able to get around the confounding pagination--GO ME!

It has been an interesting study--let me review what I have learned.

1. Facebook's pagination is due for a rehaul. There are so many good models for good UI/UX it is unclear why they don't provide better control. Throughout the Facebook experience, there are so many instances of brilliant DHTML pop-ins and on-demand control; why not provide something like that for getting to a high-numbered page?
   
   
2. Non-English speaking people like to sleep and cuddle naked a lot. OK, who am I kidding? Most people like to sleep and cuddle naked but the vast majority of the groups around these topics have titles in languages other than English. A friend of mine confessed that she set her primary language on Facebook to French and this has done wonders for dusting off her knowledge of that language. Shouldn't these titles be in the language I declare and get translated based on my preferences?
   
   
3. Facebook groups desperately need librarianship. I was asked "why?" this morning by a friend with a post-baccalaureate degree in library sciences. If for no other reason I might have found Brothers and Sisters on page 80 instead of 159. Further if I were to have kept paging forward to groups with really small memberships, I would see increasing redundancy and that's where I believe the groups suffer most. Ultimately a librarian's pruning and grafting is needed because for so many topics such as fanaticism for "snoring whilst sleeping during an exam" parsing through all these groups becomes exceptionally painstaking.
   
   There are way too many groups for any individual to actually parse through and become a fan of even a small fraction of the things they like. I wanted to find peanut butter on the list (I finished a jar while doing this study). I will have to go depth charge for that. Now that I am done clicking through 159 pages of groups I have an unwieldy list on my Info tab that I have to consolidate--who among my friends wants to wade through 293 topics across thirty pages of my predilections? Also, having now cheated Facebook's pagination algorithm, I wonder if I really only have thirty pages or if this is another imposed cap. Ultimately this falls under the category of poor UI/UX.
   
   My suggestion for this is two-fold:
   
   
   • Combine redundant groups. It is OK for there to be differentiation between "Star Trek" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" but there don't need to be ten groups called "Star Trek" spread across six pages of results when I query against that search term. I want one definitive group!
     
     
   • The other way to reduce the number of groups is to set a firm policy for group creation and police for inappropriate topics (getting wasted after exams) or antitopics (I Hate Boston Red Sox). Fanaticism is about things we like, not things we like to hate. Hate groups beget hate groups, adding to the confusion.

Facebook is a positive, family-friendly environment. Without effort, it will fall into the pig sty that MySpace fell into. I can't visit MySpace with children present for fear of some form of profanity or nudity; it's safe to say I don't particularly like to visit it alone. I enjoy sharing the lives of my friends and classmates with my kids. I would hate to lose that on Facebook. Information is entropic by nature. With entropy comes chaos and amid that chaos users will post inappropriate content into the mix. It is a slippery slope, one particularly hard to scrabble back up after you've gone any measure of distance down.

To conclude, I enjoy and applaud Facebook's groups functionality but I feel it needs TLC.

That's my two bits, what do you think?

Brian Harris: on assignment

At many of the jobs I have worked, I've been asked to write product documentation. "Explain it as you would to your mother..." they say. But what do you do when your mom is really sophisticated?

My mom is visiting for Mother's Day weekend and while here I am going over some of the basics of Social Media. I figured I would take notes about what I say and then post my explanation in next week's Tuesday blog post.

If there is anything you would like me to cover, leave a comment with your topic and I'll see if I can't work it in. In the meantime, why not visit a random link (courtesy of Yahoo!).

Designing for iPhone

I had a wonderful dinner with a friend and colleague, Scott Sutcliffe. Scott is an all-around engineer, comfortable with both mechanical and software engineering. I apologize if this sounds like mechanical/software are either the entire range of engineering or the limits of his expertise, but those are the two areas he and I most often find at the core of our conversations.

Scott was the engineer who oversaw the development of a lot of the back-office b-to-b tools I designed for the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers. He was the coding genius behind the prototype for a color thesaurus, a screen shot of which can be seen in my portfolio. I also designed a logo for him and put some CSS together for his website.

At dinner, Scott showed me his latest endeavor, an iPhone app called Tippety Split. He constructed the tool as a practical exercise to better understand the iPhone SDK. The application is very simple in its sophistication: Scott managed to pack a lot of clever functionality into what seems like very simple UI. Then, like he was reading my mind, he asked if I would be willing to play around with the UI!

How could I turn down such an opportunity. I won't go into all of the stuff I did to the UI (that would be giving away confidential secrets!) but we came up with some very cool concepts. In order to conceptualize them, I had to overcome some of my web design bias. For instance, the application is essentially an interactive form. On the web, with basic HTML and JavaScript, a product designer would be able to infer from that their design needed to accommodate a small series of fairly well known event states: onFocus, onBlur, onClick, onMouseOver, etc..

These states are all gone or different on the iPhone. There is no happy little pointy cursor, there is in fact no single point of focus. One of the features that makes this UI so slick is the fact that a user can create multiple points of focus, and depending on whether those points move closer together or apart, a control will behave differently. An example of this is when looking at a photo, a user can touch two points on the image and push them apart; the effect of this will be to zoom in on the picture. If the two points converge, the photo zooms out.

Another iPhone behavior that I wanted to capitalize on is the focal deceleration that makes the UI so realistic. When looking at a list of phone numbers, a user can put their finger on a number and nudge it up or down. The list scrolls in that direction, decelerating as it goes, then stopping. I won't give the particulars of how I took advantage of this (hint: it doesn't have anything to do with lists) but suffice it to say that we've come up with some very clever UI constructs. I fully acknowledge that acceleration and deceleration are easy to accomplish in JavaScript in a web browser, but the point is that there are common conventions built into the iPhone GUI that users have come to expect. A once relatively stable and small lexicon of mouse events are replaced by a significantly more elegant vocabulary of interactions: nudging, brushing, pinching, pushing, pulling, flipping, etc.

I understand that the iPhone as a device and it's interface as a GUI have practical limitations and a finite shelf life, but jumping into this venue and playing with these new conventions was like being a kid in the proverbial candy store. What a delightful experience this is!

WWW: 16 years in the public domain today

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was at my friend Brad McLean's house in East Syracuse, NY and he had this new program running. He called it "Mosaic" and the logo caught my eye because it animated as he "downloaded" content off what he was calling the "web."

Each page he loaded was not coming off his local computer, but off a "web server." This server wasn't even one of the other computers in his house; it wasn't even in New York State! It was delivering "HTML pages" that "referenced" images and could display them "inline." Sure today this all sounds commonplace but back then he might as well have been speaking Greek and telling me ancient Aztec secrets. What is this thing? Who can put pages up? EVERYONE can put pages up???

I worked at a State University and had been using Gopher for a while by that time but this was radical--it was graphical...each page could have its own design. To the fault of most of the developers putting pages up back then (myself included) each page *DID* have its own unique design. Consistency from page to page was a sign of laziness and we had so many ideas to try out. I will even confess to having used the "BLINK" tag in a few applications, and I won't even try to tell you it was tasteful. We all have our crosses to carry.

In March of 2009, the WWW turned 20 years old. On April 30, 1993 CERN put the web in the public domain. Any form of publicly available interconnected content prior to that was proprietary. You might find Apple or Microsoft for instance, utilizing the network for their own systems, but beyond that, there was no centralized connection for virtually everything. Today, with the exception of content we intentionally hide offline or behind firewalls, virtually any piece of content can link to any other piece of content. Now this seems as normal as microwaving a cup of tea, but back then this was seriously radical thinking. The naysayers were adamant that this was exposing vital content to hackers. Using the Internet as a primary means of acquiring data was dismissed by skeptics as a fad (why bother with slow downloads when you can get data off a diskette instantly?). I have since had many jobs developing web content and applications for this venue, and as far as I can tell it's here to stay.

Those of us surfing the web today, reading this blog for instance, may find browsers unrecognizable in ten years. I made my first VRML page back in 1997. It was my dream office, with a spiral staircase up to a loft for reading and drawing, and it had a T-Rex skull (that skull took A LOT of work) mounted on a plaque over my "hand-carved" oak desk. Under the desk's surface, I had an "escape" button which I hooked up to a random link generator that Yahoo provided. Anyone who knows me well knows that button under my desk was a jolly, candy-like button. As mentioned in previous posts, I have watched a semi-literate six year old flying through operating systems. I myself have wandered around in the PlayStation Home virtual world; this required no technical savvy whatsoever. I even purchased shiny shoes and a business suit for my virtual avatar in preparation for a job interview that I conducted IRL. While no one knew I had purchased the suit, somehow seeing my avatar standing there, all dudded up gave me confidence--we looked good!

I can only guess that the browser of the future will be as revolutionary an advent as Mosaic was over Gopher. People will have to be networked constantly. In the book Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson refers to such folks as "Gargoyles" --although his vision of a Gargoyle was weighted down with a lot of heavy gear. I imagine not too far into the future we will find today's cell phones as cumbersome as we today find "the brick" (the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X). We won't "connect" anymore--if anything we'll have to work to DISconnect. The ideas of synchronous and asynchronous communication will blur. The boundaries between public information and personal knowledge and our access to both will become indistinguishable and instantaneous.

All that said, I still remember with great fondness the first browser I ever saw and how blown away I was by the idea of it. World Wide Web, I embrace you! CERN, thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting it in the public domain 16 years ago. What will you do next?