In a series of prior blog posts, I fleshed out three of the talks that were most relevant to my work at Instructables. There were many other good presentations that I saw and conversations that I had, but time is running out for me to post them. So, after the jump, you’ll find the remainder of my notes, unedited. These are all from Wednesday, April 18th. They may be useful to someone, at some point, so I post them here as an offering to the global indexing gods.

Highlights:

• Squid labs represent! Both Christy Canida (Instructables) and Colin Bulthaup (Potenco) were chosen to present five-minute talks at the Expo keynote. Christy did a great presentation about the “K’nex kids,” an emergent community on Instructables. Colin presented Potenco’s ideas on small-scale human power, the “wireless” power source that the developing world needs to match its wireless communications.
• Alex Chaffee and Leslie Chicoine had a great presentation about Agile software development, and how designers can be brought into the mix.
• Fred Von Lohmann surveyed the legal landscape around how Web 2.0 companies fit into the four traditional DMCA “Safe Harbors.” (And to mix the metaphors further, Fred preferred calling these sections of the DMCA “Islands” rather than “Safe Harbors.”)

The full set of (rough) notes, including notes for these and other talks, are after the jump.

Conference Keynote

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Title: Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is It Soup Yet?
Speakers: Ross Mayfield, Satish Dharmaraj, Dan Farber, Matthew Glotzbach

Format: The Moderator (Dan Farber) plays the skeptical CTO, while the three speakers try to convince him that it’s time to move away from Microsoft desktop solutions and into the cloud.

Interesting points:

• Users drive adoption. It happened with IM, now it’s happening with wikis and collaborative docs. Embrace it instead of fighting it, this time. The CIO’s role is shifting from command-and-control to enablement.
• Apps can be hosted inside the firewall for compliancy issues.
• The big switch can be done gradually, with certain groups moved online first. At the same time, your finance department will probably always need Excel.

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Five-Minute Preso: Happiness Hacking
Speaker: Jane McGonigal

Games can someday be a path to happiness. Focus on Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). Forecast for 2012-2017: Quality of life will be the primary metric for evaluating everyday technologies. Positive psych as an influence on design Tech companies should have a vision of a life worth living.

Check out her upcoming game, . SF Weekly also just did a story on her.

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Five-Minute Preso: The 4-hour Workweek
Speaker: Timothy Ferris

The key: Extreme selective ignorance in a world of infinite information. Tactics:

• Batching. For example, check email only twice a day. Set an autoresponder alerting people to your policy and giving them your voice connect. Focusing on the critical few instead of the trivial many.
• Trim your connections. He “fired” the 20% of low-value customers that were taking 80% of his time.
• Oursource! Virtual assistants. He’s outsourced even his online dating
• Schedule life. If you don’t, work will invade.

Tim’s book is Mastering the Low-Information Diet.

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Five-Minute Preso:
Speaker: Christy Canida

Christy prefaces the presentation with a note about the tragic Virginia Tech killings. That event occurred right before this presentation. Because the presentation was about the “K’nex Kids,” young Instructables users who get together to make toy guns out of K’nex, the event threatened to color the talk really negatively. Instead, the response of that community only underscored Christy’s point.

About Instructables: We’re about people and enabling technology. We’re a universal how-to platform. One of the most vibrant communities on the site was a geographically dispersed (UK, Toronto, Asia) group of teens who like to get together, building toy guys out of K’nex pieces.

An anchor point of the community is actually one of the kids, “killerk.” Though still kids, these anchor points take ownership over their emergent community, encouraging quality Instructables and mentoring newbies.

The kids love to one-up eachother. Christy flips through slides showing guns, crossbows, and mines of increasing complexity. The kids start using a hacked Lego CAD program to trade designs. The ultimate design is the Shifle, an incredibly complex chain guy drawing (and citing) parts of many other Instructables. It’s truly a collaborative and innovative environment.

With the VT killings, the community had an opportunity to discuss something more than making toy guns. The discussion about that tragedy has already begun, and these kids (some of whom might otherwise be isolated) have a place to share their thoughts and feelings.

While the content can seem offensive to us adults, here’s the take-home: These are the engineers you want to hire in the future!

Click here for the official blog post on the presentation.

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Five-Minute Preso:
Speaker: Colin Bulthaup

Human-generated power. Interim power for the 3 Billion non-grid-connected areas. We have wireless communication, we just need wireless power.

[I took terrible notes on this presentation, but it was really good. Check out the Potenco site for more information.]

Daytime Sessions

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Workshop: The Challenge of Agile Development: Avoiding Half-Baked Design
Speakers: Alex Chaffee and Leslie Chicoine

Coder and Designer, together at last.

XP and Agile Programmming, How Agile processes can be applied to design.

Web 2.0 is about playing faster. Design is a verb. The process, not the product. Coding is the same! Focus on the practice of coding or designing, not the spec.

“Design is finding the problem, not the solution.”

Extreme Programming XP is an agile process. The motto is: “Embrace change!” Other agile processes: Scrum, etc.

The values are feedback, communication, simplicity, and courage. These are not just buzzwords; they are first principles from which each XP practice can be derived. These include things like:

• Collective ownership
• Pairing
• “Asking the room”
• Design by discussion
• Stand-up meetings
• Sustainable Pace
• Regular retrospectives - Frequent (weekly) demos, frequent planning/design sessions.
• … and a dozen more

The most important XP practices that apply to design

• Continuous Improvement
• Iteration
• Bracketing

The pre-agile system was “waterfall design.” Waterfall design was a linear process, with an input and an intention to “hand off” the product. XP, instead, is based on continual cycles that nest. There are repeating processes at each level of operation.

The usual XP shop will have a handful of two-person pods within earshot/eyesight of one another. Practices:

• Weekly demos - Must be moderated so that discussion focuses on the present rather than the future. There is often some inefficiency in “tying off” functionality so that it can be demoed regularly, but this is far outweighed by the valuable insight that can be gained from using something that actually works.
• Daily standups - Gets people in the room at the same time, keeps meetings short.
• Pairing

Beware, though, the impulse to simply add these processes piecemeal to a traditional organizational structure. You have to understand and internalize the first principles, not just layer a few processes.

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensible” Dwight D. Eisenhower

Agile Design:

• Embracing Change
• Communal design ownership
• Evolving solutions

Take in ideas from any source. Ideas are a product of the team, not of the specialty of one person on the team. Good ideas will stand on their own.

Scales of Design

• Concept
• Business Goals
• User Tasks/Motivations
• Site flow/wayfinding
• Supporting Systems
• Navigation
• Widgets
• Global Styles
• Buttons
• Graphics
• Fonts, etc.

The large scale is tested on the small scale, as the small scale design reveals problems with the large scale.

On the coding side, this means “Get coding right away.” Or, said another way, “No big design up front.”

Review the design process for getSatisfaction.com. Design at multiple scales. For example, what to call the user page? “Profile”, “my profile”, “account”, etc.? When your arguments begin to loop, it often means that you need to step up a level of scale. In this case, they found that context was not so necessary (e.g. Flickr.) [Didn't understand the connection, here...]

Documents as a communication space. A document is a bookmark for a conversation. It’s a story, not a spec. Photo of their document board, stacked iterations of their wireframes:

• review iterations
• see the big picture
• go back and see why you made certain decisions, see how you solved a problem, before.

Open Design Agile demands open: it’s got to be flexible and extensible. This is something that coders are sometimes more familiar with than designers. But with the right process, design also becomes flexible and extensible.

Don’t fall in love with your code or your design. Refactor mercilessly, “murder your darlings.”

Expose to create depth. Interesting example: Japanese drawing, house, drawn isometric with roof removed.

Moo.com: the front page is full of user comments and flickr photo stream. Exposes the operation of the company (users’ production, users’ opinions) in real time.

Designers should:

• Design one week in advance of coding. No more or less.
• Mockups should not be pixel-perfect.
• Work literally side-by-side with coders when implementing mockups. Coders can give valuable insight when designing. They can add awareness of that depth that is difficult for a design to expose.
• Allow coders to participate in IA/UI design, especially once coding has actually started. They are the front line of design testing. They are the very first users to be trying out the features they build, after all.

Coders should:

• Ask designers about the mockups! Don’t work on assumptions. Coders should internalize the thinking behind the design. “Pictures are worth a thousand words, but those words aren’t necessarily true.”
• Coders should give frequent live demos. Designers need rapid feedback to know if their designs are working.

Q: What about remote offices? This is difficult in an agile process. Time and space barriers are imposed. Try to keep as frequent demoing and communcation as possible.

Q: What about documentation and QA? These are separate questions. Documentation is only needed if the business owner requests it. When it’s really needed, then do the documentation at that time. Documentation should not be done pre-emptively, as you never know who will really need it, what form it should take, or whether the functionality will change.

QA, on the other hand, is necessary. One tactic in an agile environment is to branch after each weekly demo. That way, QA can work with something stable on that time scale, at the very least.

Q: How is user testing implemented? Ideally, you user test as you code. Get it out there and have people bang on it as quickly as possible. Mid-week, you can also do developer testing to get quick-and-dirty feedback.

Links:

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Workshop: Licensing User-Generated Content
Speaker: Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney, Intellectual Property, EFF

My rough notes are below, but I found some good notes on this blog post.

The talk is split into two parts:

• Licensing Inputs, or “On the shoulders of (Angry?) Giants”
• Licesnsing Outputs, or “Resuse, Recycle, Remix”

The first title is a bit of a misnomer, however, as Fred is going to cover how the current legal landscape allows businesses to avoid licensing content.

Viacom vs. Google and the DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions

The basic copyright problem: You have an ocean of copyright uncertainty. The copyright risks are huge: Statutory damages ranging from $750-$150,000/work infringed and personal liability for officers, directors, and investors. In combination, these are company-ending risks. You can ask Napster about this.

The DMCA attempted to reduce this uncertainty with its “Safe Harbors,” limiting injunctions and eliminating monetary damages. Courts are thus limited to ordering a company to terminate users or take down content.

However, the “safe harbors” are more like islands where the tide lines change. The thing with harbor is that you know whether or not you’re in one. On an island, it’s more difficult to know if the tides (or a tsunami) will wash you out to sea. Here are the four DMCA safe “islands”:

• Conduits, Section 512(a): If you’re an ISP and all you do is provide the pipe, then you’re on this island. But you can’t keep, cache, or modify the packets.
• Caching, Section 512(b): This was designed for a caching within walled-in network, e.g. AOL circa 1997. However, it doesn’t work with modern forward-caching (Akamai). This is also known as “the island where nothing grows.”
• Search Engine, Section 512(c): Indexing and linking. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all live on this island.
• Hosting, Section 512(d): This is the most important island. The island was designed for the old web hosting businesses, but has grown.

It may be worth noting that you don’t have to be on an island to run a business, but few have made it “offshore.” Bittorrent (an enabling tech) is a good (if rare) example.

When we talk about sites with lots of user-generated content like Youtube (Google), we are referring to one of a whole host of sites that have founded their businesses on a combination of the “Search Engine” and “Hosting” islands. Content is hosted, and the service provides a way for users to find that content. Other companies of this sort are MySpace, Blogger, and even Ebay and Wikipedia. However, the Viacom suit exists because all of these companies sit near the waterline on these two islands; the law is not yet resolved on a few sticking points. This is what we’ll review, next.

Getting on the Hosting island:

• Registering a Copyright Agent: It’s an incredibly simple but necessary step and costs only $80 at the Copyright office.
• Notice and Takedown: The host must take down infringing content that a copyright holder brings to the host’s attention. The copyright holder must be specific about what content is infringing, and go through a few other formalities. Blanket notices are not valid.
• Infringer Termination Policy: The host should have some written policy that after 2 or more takedowns (the law doesn’t specify), an infringing user’s account will be terminated.

Staying on the Island (Disqualifiers to avoid):

• “Red Flag” Knowledge: If it’s obvious that you know that infringement is occurring, you may be off the island. This is a very fuzzy line. It’s unclear what kinds of activity will get a company in trouble. For example, having employees who review site contents frequently may indicate that you should know that your users are infringing.
• Direct Financial Benefit and Control: This is another fuzzy line. Is the mere fact that advertising exists on a site enough? This is what Viacom will be arguing, but it’s unclear that the courts will agree. It’s also unclear that Youtube has “control” over its users’ activity. “Control” may mean something more than simply being able to delete infringing content when it is found.

[The last third of the talk was devoted to how companies should enable Reuse. Most of this revolved around the use of Creative Commons licenses. My laptop ran out of juice during this talk, but you can see some notes at the aforementioned blog post.]

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Workshop: Designing for Web 2.0: The Visual Ecosystem
Speaker: Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer, Yahoo! Social Media

Visual Design is deeper than just pretty pictures.

Useful eyetracking images showing that people look feverishly for useful data; they seldom scan through a design in the way that our orderly, boxed-in designs would imply.

Three layers of visual design:

• Presentation
• Interaction
• Organization

You want visual Organization and Personality.

What are the shifts in the Web 2.0 world? Web 1.0:

• Locomotion => Services
  • Generally, how we interact: Locomotion, Conversation, Manipulation (Terry Winograd)
  • The progression: Locomotion (directories, portals, brochureware) to Digital manipulation of physical goods (e-commerce) to Digital Services (feeds, online applications, blogging, collaboration)
  • Packaging desingn for web applications:
    • Meaningful shouting: Differentiate, attract, and embody the brand
    • Back of pack
    • Unpackaging Experience: in the real world, a good example is the MacBook pro, packaging culinating in the laptop taking a picture of you to personalize it. Contrast with posting a video on Google, where the first step is obstructed by a long
      . Imagine if opening a Macbook Pro involved being smacked with
      ! A better experience is JumpCut, which only asks for this information once you have uploaded and finished playing with your movie.
• Pages => Rich interactions
  • No longer going page to page to page. Now, there’s a lot more in-page content updating (AJAX.)
  • Indicate state: Invitation, Transition, Feedback. This doesn’t have to be a spinner. Changes in color/shape/etc. can also do this.
• Sites => Content Experiences
  • User-generated content and metadata creates a distributed system. Design for clouds instead of semantic hierarchies. Don’t assume any entry point for the user into your site.
  • Primary focus should be on primary content. Related content and actions should be secondary. Visual interest captures attention, often inappropriately. Avoid clutter.
    • Example: National Cancer Institute (Peter Morville’s optimization for findability.) Instead of optimizing their content hierarchy, they analyzed search terms that people were using to get to the site, and designed specific content targeted for those searches.
    • Example: User comes to the Chicago Tribune searching for a specific story. 76% of the site is devoted to cruft! Ads, “related” content, etc. Compare with the New York times, which has a much, much cleaner design. Just a “Most Popular” sidebar.
  • Even when content is distributed or remixed, your personality and visual organization still matter.
    • Example: Life of a Flickr photo (map goes all over the place)
    • Example: Renkoo embedded interactivity in an email sent to a friend.
    • Example: Renkoo importing Yahoo! contacts using a Plaxo widget.
• Webmasters => Everyone
  • Visual design is no longer about making things pretty. Constraining the format of user-created content is a tricky balance. You have to support personal aesthetics.
  • However, you can go a really long way by creating good tools. “Most user-created content is crappy. As we create better tools, we’ll increase the value of the output of those tools.” - Will Wright. Optmize “display surfaces” to help people do good design.

[We need more specific design practices around this.]

Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability

Related Posts:

Post-Plugin Library missing

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