He references the “broken windows” theory of urban crime prevention, which lines up very nicely with my belief that web design has a lot to learn from architecture and urban planning, in the way that we try to design tools and environments for interaction and communication.
One of the more interesting examples he brings up is a system he designed for Yahoo! Answers (I think). As I understand it, if a user “reports” a piece of content as being inappropriate, a comparison takes place between the “reputation” metric of the poster and that of the reporter. If there is a significant difference in favour of the person reporting the content, it is removed immediately (with the possibility of the initial poster to appeal, which goes through the company’s customer service department).
What I like about this is that it shows the way in which web designers potentially have a much wider array of tools at their disposal than architects or urban planners in the ways in which their designs can adapt to and shape behaviour. It’s hard to conceive of a way that a city could implement a “reputation” metric and use that to prioritize 911 calls, for example, but for online communities it’s a matter of a few lines of code.
I really feel like these design considerations are just beginning to be explored, and that given the extremely low cost of experimentation in this space we’re going to be seeing an even greater explosion in the variety of design of online communities.
SitePoint.com is giving away a free .pdf book, The Art and Science of CSS, for a limited 14 day period.
All you have to do is follow @sitepointdotcom on twitter and they’ll direct-message you a link.
And if you don’t use twitter, the usual SitePoint giveaway method works too, just go to http://twitaway.aws.sitepoint.com/, enter in your email, and they’ll send you a link.
It’s pretty standard fare, with chapters on styling headings (sIFR and image replacement), backgrounds, rounded corners, navigation, etc. The upshot is that the techniques presented are modern and up to date, and the results actually look pretty good (intermediate-advanced CSS books sometimes have a tendency to focus on the code, whereas this one clearly benefitted from some input from actual graphic designers.) If you feel like adding another book to your CSS collection, or you’re just getting started and don’t already have a shelf-full, well, this is an offer you can’t refuse.
I think the idea of jumping to the next or previous page when using the keyboard shortcuts to navigate past the “end” of the current page is a great one, but why not take it a step further and make a Google Reader-style “endless page” for the image browser, which would load in the next page of items at the end of the current one via AHAH (?) when you reach the bottom of the page? Ryan himself says it in the video: “pagination is annoying”. Yes, yes it is.
Great article from Khoi Vinh (creator, among other things, of NYTimes.com’s amazing grid layout design), about the similarities between video game design and web design (and design in general):
Michael Wesch, creator of the classic Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us video, gives a talk about the anthropology of YouTube at the Library of Congress. Well worth your time if you’re interested in the anthropological/sociological dimensions of the Web.
Seth Godin’s blog has an interesting little piece on the use of the word “architect” as a verb to mean “design with intent” (as opposed to “design to look pretty”), which is pretty much exactly my point. To wit:
Most broken websites aren’t broken because they violate common laws of good design. They’re broken because their architecture is all wrong. There’s no strategy in place.
In her review of Google’s Knol project (sort of like Wikipedia, except each article is written by a single person, ideally an authority on the topic), danah boyd dropped a one-liner that kind of set me off:
Y’see - a system that is driven by individualism quickly becomes a tool for self-promoters. (And men…)
I commented without thinking, blasting away at what I saw as “arbitrary sexism” from a blog that’s otherwise been pretty balanced. There have been a few replies to my initial comment that got me thinking about the issue in a bit more depth, so I wanted to go into that here.
First off, someone going by ‘b’ answered me with:
It isn’t sexism when its a legitimate problem. In 2006, nearly 80% of wikipedia authors were male. If you think that’s changed in 2 years, you might wanna rethink gender politics and who runs the web.
which is interesting, although I’m not sure I agree with it in whole. My problem with danah’s post wasn’t that I don’t think there are more men on Wikipedia (or wherever) than women, just that making a strong association of individualism (or whatever trait) with maleness and using that to decry certain modes of social software design seemed wrongheaded to me.
Then danah replied (very graciously I might add, since my initial comment, upon re-reading, was a little flamish), with:
[...] As b notes Wikipedia is heavily driven by male participation. The problem is that individualism and single authorship rewards tend to push towards even greater inequality in terms of gender and participation. This is a problem in publishing at large. Collaborative projects tends to attract more female participation than non-collaborative ones. High visibility projects tend to attract more male participation then low visibility ones. What Knol is doing is maximizing the things that traditionally generate more male participation. Thus, it’s not surprising that even on their showcase front page that is supposed to provide a representative sample of knols, the vast majority of knols are written by men. [...]
While this does serve to contextualize her initial remark (I don’t mind it so much if I can interpret it as a broad social criticism rather than an offhand diss), I’m still a little ambivalent. On the one hand, of course we want to encourage a more even gender balance online (for a bit of an explanation as to why, see my last comment on her post). But on the other hand it’s somewhat inevitable that certain online spaces will appeal more to men and others more to women (it would seem ludicrous to decry a video arcade as a fundamentally flawed public space simply because it appeals more to men than to women). Moreover, her criticism relies heavily on the strong association of individualism with males and collaboration with females, which is of course a very broad generalization. Given her field of research, I’m sure she’s seen a lot of statistics that tend to support that polarized view of gender (in her reply to my comment she linked to an old post of hers that breaks down blogs’ linking habits based on gender, it’s an interesting read, as is Joe Clark’s rebuttal), but I don’t think those kind of generalizations are necessarily very helpful for those building tools like Wikipedia or Knol.
The key here is her repeated use of “tends to”. These are trends. Let me put it this way: if you had statistics that showed that more women commented on blogs where the comment box was blue and more men commented on blogs where the comment box was grey, and you also knew that there was already a skew towards male participation, would it be your moral obligation to make the box on your blog blue to try to “even things out”? That’s a trivial example, because the color of the comment box has no other impact outside of simple aesthetics. Knol is something else entirely, because it’s trying a different mode of online authorship. What if it works well for certain topics? I generally trust information on Wikipedia, but maybe some people don’t, and it’s impossible to use for citations or research since the authorship is unknown. Knol tries to fix that issue by making the articles peer-reviewed and single-author. Of course it will never be as exhaustive or as intricate as Wikipedia, but maybe it will serve some purpose. If even one person finds useful information on Knol that helps them in some way, it seems completely wrongheaded to attack it because it’s designed in such a way that “tends to” attract more male writers than female.
But no matter what I think about her criticism of Knol, her replies to my comments have definitely got me thinking about the role of gender in social software deisgn, which is something I’d never really considered before. For that, and for her patience in replying exhaustively to a two-line flame, I’d like to thank her. Check out her blog at zephoria.org/thoughts.
So I’ve been incredibly frustrated trying to theme Drupal 5.x over the past few months. Now, I’ll admit that this was my own fault, but the problem I ran into isn’t very clearly documented anywhere, so I figured I’d post the explanation here so that anyone else Googling it might be assisted by my hard-won wisdom:
theme_node OVERRIDES node.tpl.php files
There. That’s it. I had created a theme_node implementation in my template.php file in order to customize the node display, and forgotten about it. Later on, when I tried to create node-nodetype.tpl.php files to customize the appearance of each type of node, nothing worked. I tried everything. I wound up just giving up. Until finally, today, I absolutely needed to change something in the HTML in order to add some Javascript functionality, so I dug in, and managed to find the solution in a description of the way PHPTemplate works here.
Nowhere in the theming docs on Drupal.org is this mentioned. It’s not mentioned in the API docs for the theme_node function either. So now you have it in writing.
What this means, in practical terms, is that you should NEVER write an implementation of theme_node. It’s less MVC than using a template file, it’s less flexible for displaying different node types differently, and it has the potential to trip you up down the line if you forget it’s there. Just use the template files. For sanity’s sake.
Sometimes web design doesn’t happen on the web: witness user lamedust’s video from instructables.com:
What does this have to do with web design, you ask? One of the things I want to communicate through this blog is my belief that web design, properly speaking, is the architecture of channels of communication. Designing for the web is creating environments in which people interact, no matter how simple or complex that interaction might be. Yes, they interact with the content, which is why web design is so often confused with graphic design. But they can also interact with the content creator, and with each other, and these modes of interaction are far more powerful and far-reaching.
One of the key discoveries that this view of web design has yielded in recent years is that if you lower the cost of interaction to zero, and get the job started, anyone with even a passing interest in what’s being done can hop in, do a tiny bit of work (fix a bug in Linux or Firefox, correct grammar or spelling in a Wikipedia entry, tag a photo on Flickr, etc.), and then go on their merry way.
These modes of interaction create impressive results that aren’t attributable to any specific person, or organization, they’re “crowdsourced”.
What lamedust has done is figure out one of the (theoretically infinite number of) ways in which this design vision can be applied to non-cyber-space (otherwise known as the real world). Start a project, make it ridiculously easy for people to help, and make it so that their efforts can be aggregated. Voilà! Free haircut.
Hi all. This blog will be a clearing-house for my ideas on web technology and design, mainly focused on the design of ’social software’, and the societal and political facets of said design and technologies. I also have a “microblog” on music at newsound.tumblr.com, where I’ll post songs, music videos, concert reviews, etc. The recent posts from that blog will show up in the far right-hand sidebar of this page, via the magic of RSS. You can find me a bunch of other places on the web, and I’ll try to maintain a list of those places here, to keep everything nice and tidy.