Social Proprioception
Speaking of monitoring what people are doing, there has been a lot of talk recently about micro-blogging, especially in the form of twitter. Essentially they are ways of people leaving traces of their lives online with little effort. There was an article in wired about a month ago talking about it and why they are useful:

“It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.”

It’s an interesting description of it, and justification for why twitter-related stuff might be around for a while. I’ve been trying out the different ways of doing it, and I don’t know if I’ve found something satisfying yet. I kind of stumbled into doing it on Facebook. I used to just send people links and videos through email or IM, but posting it on Facebook was a more passive way to share without bugging people. It was up to them to click on something if they were bored.

Too many accounts
By way of doing research for various projects I forced myself to sign up for things like Twitter, Jaiku, and Tumblr just to see what they were all about. Twitter is nice and simple, but won’t work on the phone I have free texting. Jaiku is great because you can import feeds from anywhere into your own feed. It tends to clog things up a bit, especially if you are bringing in Last.fm or a news site. It also limits what you can see in one post, so images and videos are just links, which is good in some respects. Unfortunately I forgot the password for the Jaiku account that had my phone linked to it, so I had to start a new account and my phone number is “in use by another account” that I can’t get into.

So that leaves me with tumblr. I like it because it’s a little more focused on showing the actual content. So when I post a photo or video it is shown. It’s essentially a lightweight blog that makes it easy to just throw your content into it and also allow for feeds to be imported. Because of this, it’s a little less focused on the “social” part of micro-blogging.

In the end, I really wonder what will become of these sites. The link to mobile is what I think will keep them afloat for a while. It was very liberating to be able to snap random pictures and have them sent directly to a new post (although using way too many button presses). I don’t know if the average person has a need to use them or if they just aren’t aware of them. Maybe the younger generations that will see the usefulness in the same way that they gobble up Facebook and MySpace features.

Infinite Loop
One last point, when I was signing up for these, the idea of being able to clog these micro-blogging sites with feeds from anywhere was kind of ridiculous to me, so I tried an experiment. Just like you might put one mirror in front of another, I fed a tumblr feed into jaiku and a jaiku feed into tumblr to see what would happen. At first, nothing, but when I pulled in a third feed (it was randomly Herbert’s flickr stream) it started echoing forever. It’s kind of a play on the idea of people updating these things constantly and automatically.

Now that I’ve been using this feed aggregator for a while, and I can see all my relevant feeds in one place in an organized categorized way, I’m starting to see some of its issues.

First, the main benefit has been for news sites. For general news, tech news, and mobile news I can just go to one page and scan it to get a sense of what is going on in the world. It works out great, since most of them have descriptive titles. It works with design-related sites to a certain extent, but it can still get overwhelming.

It doesn’t work with certain sites like boing boing or WMMNA because I might read a story posted because of interesting pictures or follow-ups from other people. It’s just a much more enjoyable experience to actually be at the site scrolling through things rather than always be in the same netvibes interface. There is a lot more stimulation and possible follow up links when you actually make it to the sites. Not to mention, a lot of cultural or design sites don’t have the most descriptive titles for posts.

So I guess what I’m realizing is that feeds are best used for monitoring sites that tell you “what is going on” whether with world news, business, politics, or the people you know rather than monitoring “what is being said/created” in the form content.

It’s one of the biggest interaction design related debates. Should we make sure something is measurably better than something else in terms of efficiency and ease of use or should it simply address people’s needs regardless of how? It crops up not only between design and HCI students but design professionals and usability specialists. It’s the whole useful, usable, and desirable deal that we learn about so often.

Jakob Nielson wrote a couple of weeks ago asking Should Designers and Developers Do Usability? I don’t want to be too judgmental about the guy, but this article makes me wonder if he is a little out of touch with things. Like many others (I’m looking at you Don), he wants to put people into neat boxes that do certain things. There’s this ridiculous view of designers as artsy touchy feely people that create things on a whim, and that considering usability, a very planned and logical practice, is of no interest to them.

“Design obviously appeals to people with a drive to put things together, whereas usability requires analytic thinking and conceptualization skills.”

His argument is that having specialized people, like himself, around is the best case scenario. Or you could sign up for the not-so-subtly-plugged 3-day $20,000 seminar. I agree with him to a certain point. Sure, you can’t have one person doing everything, but I think he’s stereotyping designers a bit here. There is plenty of analytical and conceptualization going on when designing.

Which is why I like the new title-grabbing article from Adaptive Path on Why usability is a path to failure. Not because he is bad-mouthing usability, but because he is saying that it’s not an end or “Usability is not a strategy for design success.” Which I agree with completely. I think the author goes a little too far though. There is some point in the process where it does become the focus. You have to set aside your thoughts and dig in. Like in his example, there is a point when developing that a photographer is spending their time getting their prints developed with the right exposure, cropping, etc… and making sure everything is clear when taking it through the chemical process.

So I guess I sit in the middle. Usability shouldn’t be the entire focus of a product, but there should be some time and energy dedicated to it at some point depending on the constraints. I think Jakob makes a good point in that the value of usability professionals is that they might have a lot of experience with user behaviors and might be able to correct some problems. But don’t we do that as well?