My summary of Luke Wroblewski’s plenary today at VALA is now on this blog. I’ve done this because my wonderful fellow blogger, Michelle, wasn’t able to make that session.

Why is she wonderful ? Because she has summarised most of the sessions already on her blog, Connecting Librarian – and much more elegantly than I do.

See:

• ALA 2008 Conference – Day 3 – Stuart Weibel – Plenary
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 3 – Concurrent Session 14 – Social Networking
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 3 – Concurrent Session 13 – Virtual Reference
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 2 – Michael Geist – Plenary
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 2 – Concurrent Session 10 – Enabling Technologies
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 2 – Schubert Foo – Plenary
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 1 – Peter Lor Plenary
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 1 – Concurrent Session 4 – Engaging Communities
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 1 – Concurrent Session 1 – Library 2.0
• VALA 2008 Conference – Day 1 – Andy Powell Plenary

Luke Wroblewski who is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc.

UPDATE 10 Feb 2008: Slides from this talk are now up at Luke’s site.

My extremely rough notes from today’s session. Not very edited, but I told Michelle, who has so beautifully summarised the other sessions, that I’d put up this session she missed.

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First, showed eye tracking study on Squidoo. People scan all over the place, they are reading very little text.
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1. Design Considerations

1.1 Presentation: What is this thing, why do I care about it

1.2 Interaction How your application behaves in response to user actions

1.3 Organisation: The structure of your application

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1.1 Presentation

Web site should quickly communicate:

1. What is this – usefulness

2. How do I use it? Usability

3. Why should I care”? Desirability

Screenshot of Videoegg – “video sharing over easy”. Site is full of value propositions. Can easily see what it is and why I should use it.

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So What’s different about today’s web?

Once upon Webmasters created webpages that were assembled into sites.

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2. Recent shifts

2.1 Locomotion > Services

2.2 Pages > Rich interactions

2.3 Sites > Content experiences

2.4 Webmasters > Everyone

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2.1 Locomotion > Services

2.1 Ways we interact with the world

• Locomotion
• Conversation
• Manipulation

(Terry Winograd Stanford)

Yahoo Answers grew from 0 – 90 million in 18 months…

Yahoo answers allows you to have anything answered in 5 mins.

Conversation prominent online

Manipulating – mixing , re-adding, – showed Writely >> google docs

All three factors are now allowed.

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Web transitions

1. Locomotion to digital representations of physical entities. First websites included:

* Directories

* Brochures online

2. Next – Digital manipulations of physical goods

*E-commerce everywhere

*Amazon, ebay

3. Now becoming – Digital Services

*Enabling conversation

*Display surfaces

*Content creation

*Aggregation

* Entertainment

(spending time hanging out)

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Overhead to create a Digital Service is now very low:

Hosting = costs less than a cup of coffee per month

Free Open Source platforms

Development toolkits

Instant global audience – 1.2B people use the internet (Sept 2007)

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Know your core business

* Define yourself

* Focus on the core

* Build outward

What is the core of your business – work that out and then build outward and upward ….

Define core, then focus on itCore underpinning,

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Digg – know and define core

Voting, commenting, socially filtering the news

Every news article and can digg

Quote from Digg founder:

“When we made the move to the one-click Digg, activity went through the roof, it was just insane! Just the ease of the one-click and you’re done making the whole difference in the world”.

Flickr – core focus

Person takes picture > Greeeeat diagram of how flicker works

Core focus = person takes picture of a subject

How do you build outward from the core – grow outward, don’t just whack it on top of it.

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Packaging design for web applications

Meaningfully shouting

Being distinctive, yet appropriate for what your product does

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2. Back of Pack info(like what used to be on back of cereal box)

Support the story

Outline features and benefits

Eg. Zoho

Eg. Yahoo – Can click to get help – explaining in context

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3. Unpacking experience

Eg. Experience of getting new Apple laptop out of the box

Very personal and engaging to unpack

Jump cut (a site) – can start using immediately

Google videos – have to log in first before you do stuff

PBwiki as an example where it is not intuitive or easy to work out what to do.

Compare this to: Geni – add self, add parents …. are sent email every so often….

5 million profiles in 5 months

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2.2 Pages > Rich interactions

AJAX Interface design – allows you to just update/change a part of page without complete reload

Trad = User action > screen reload > data update

AJAX – User action > Data update (just small part of page updated)

eg. Digg, ratings on YouTube, To do lists.

Design Patterns

– Repeatable design solutions to common problems

– work “positively” for specific problems in specific contexts

– capture best practices

The following are sites to look up further, containing simple AJAX patterns to do useful things on websites:

“Yahoo Pattern Library”

“Designing Interfaces” – Jennifer Tidwell

“Web Design Patterns”

Here’s some solutions that may be useful:

Yahoo – when narrowing down search, if pause longer than set time x, then drop down menu appears with possible things you could be searching for.

Using rich interactions to make info retrieval more interesting

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2.3 Sites > Content experiences

Creating Navigating systems and site tree – traditionally

Usually – set up with hierarchies – closed, expensive, complex, accurate

Non-traditional – inter-relationships that are messy.

Accurate enough

Example of various manifestations of the same content throughout the web. His article Web Application Form Design is seen in Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, blogosphere etc…but always linking back to single same work. This little bit of content has an entire presence of its own.

When user gets to single work, then it better fulfil the promise offered by the manifestation. Showed newspaper site with low% of space occupied by the article and high % of space occupied by extra stuff – not good.

Content page should probably contain:

1. Content

2. Pointers to related Content

3. Little bit of context

When you make good on the promise of your content, then people are likely to continue and do the things you want on the site.
Content should dominate.
Also access points internally on site.

On most websites a few bits get all the attention and some get little attention (Long Tail ) Try to link items by relevance to pull clickthroughs from high use items to low use items in the Long Tail.
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Multiple contexts – things you can do for this

You can give code to manifest in differnt sites

Eg. widgets, search boxes, etc.

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Bring you CONTENT IN CONTEXT

Eg. typing blog post at Yahoo – showed page that recognises item in draft blog post, and retrieves info related to that item to the sidebar – ready to be dropped into blog post (suggest info related was rather commercial )

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Sites > Content experiences

* Design considerations

– primary focus on primary content

Need to fulfil promise

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2.4 Webmasters > Everyone

Everyone can create

Focus on creating community

1999 – add discussion boards

2008 – add blogs , trackbacks etc.

Always – creating community is a way to unite groups of ppl by sharing interests and goals

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Great products create community

Rare to organise around nothing

( ** twitter ??? ** )

Social behaviours

Sequences, rituals, groups

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Who’s in a community

Creators – 1% (core creators)

Synthesisers – 10% (do stuff with the thing that originated)

Consumers – 100% – all benefit

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Why enable community

When ppl interact with each other, valuable things come up.

Sharing options

(subscribe, save, share …)

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Community – positive implications

• Pool of people providing a filter
• Original content creation
• Increased Engagement
• Invested Customers
• Collaborative Innovation

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Community – negative implications

• Too much social = blur
• Too many social features can distract
• Quality – splogs
• Power laws – too many ppl in group have power
• Privacy and exposure

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BEST PRACTICES

Enable identity

1. Welcome

2. Allow personal branding

3. Re-entry points

4. ??

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Provide for Creators, Synthesisers and Consumers

Give them all and entry and action point.

CSC personality types do not easily migrate between groups

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CONTENT CREATION

– User empowerment, not user friendly

Value creation

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Will Wright:

” Most user created content is crappy. As we create better tools, we’ll increase the value of the output of these tools”.

Media Wiki – hard to create content …. ???

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Quality content is based on level of effort to put something in.

Bury submit button, fewer ppl will contribute but content will be better.

Barriers to entry – helps increase quality control

Eg. have to login

Yahoo Answers – first got points if you asked qn. Now costs 5 points to ask a qn, but get 2 pts if you get a best answer.

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luke@lukew.com

www.lukew.com/ff/

Experiential learning in action

1. When presenting slides that depend on lots of transitions on mouseclick, don’t place your body between the radio transmitter off stage and your mouse. Took me until slide 10 to work out the problem 🙂

2. If you are organising a conference, check the building for wireless blackspots, or arrange a temporary sponsered wireless hosting for delegates – that covers the entire building. Really not impressed that wireless at $20 for 8 hr doesn’t have coverage in the main theatre.

3. Some seats in auditoria have power outlets under them. If you ask the techie guys looking after the venue, they will point them out.

4. Whipping out a power board attracts a small crowd of bloggers.

All in all a good start to the conference. Really enjoying hanging out with people I see daily online, but haven’t met in person before … and catching up with interstate folk who I haven’t seen for ages.

Andy Powell‘s keynote this morning set a high standard of technical discussion that I read about at overseas events, but not often in Australia. Yes, we should be grappling in general library forums with FRBR (Functional requirements for Bibliographic Records ) and thinking about whether an institutional based repository model allows for a global community of scholars. We should be turning our focus from enabling storage in a repository to designing an architecture that maximises discoverability on the Web.

My presentation went OK. I was happy with it and people seem to like it.

More thoughts about the conference as they gel.

How can we create nimble libraries that keep up with our users’ demands – both known and anticipated – while also introducing services that will actually work, that can be maintained and will be the best use of our scarce resources ?

Is it our job to give our users what they say they want – or to provide the best way to connect them with information in a way that enriches them?

We should be playing with technology – but should we use our service points as our playground?

Will our users stay with us if we spend so much time evaluating new services that we don’t introduce them in time ?

At Beyond the Hype, many papers – mine included – had the rousing cry that we should be user focused and give the user what they want. It seems to me that many of us – me included – then pushed out our own biases, hiding behind this catchcry.

In the name of serving the user with nimble, relevant new services, we heard Christine MacKenzie who was implementing new services – like tags from Library Thing – at Yarra Plenty using Web 2.0. Kate Davis from Gold Coast Libraries told us how she is raising the profile of the Online Branch among users to provide resources using new avenues.

In the name of serving the users with accountable, evidence based services known to work, we heard from Kate Watson of University of Sunshine Coast who stated that they hadn’t implemented any Web 2.0 services because the users hadn’t asked for them. We heard from Andrew Spencer and Corrine Hughan from Macquarie University library who spent a ten thousand dollar grant traveling the country to find out about podcasting in academic libraries, and then concluded that they couldn’t find compelling evidence that podcasting was serving the user any better than existing services and that they would not be recommending a pilot project at their library.

In his paper Brad Jones argued, among many other interesting points, that the new social space being created by young folk online is just as radical and incomprehensible place as the space occupied by youth in the sixties. Now it is Virtual realities, blogs and wikis, file sharing and virtual sex. Then it was separate realities (drugs, counter culture), the alternative press, communal ownership and free love.

What is different now is the pace of change, and the rapid rise of alternatives to our services.

Libraries have been caught out by the pace of change in our users’ information demands. The contest between us and Google as a generalist reference source is over. Google won. Users took the shortest path to the information they wanted, accepting convenient, good-enough information instead of the harder to access, more authoritative sources we offer.

Our users didn’t come to us – once the only show in town for reference information – and tell us they were thinking of moving to Google instead, but before they moved they wanted to know what our counter offer was.

I think Lucia Ravi is right in her paper when she says that we have the tools to create bias free, information rich content that she refers to as knowledge gateways. If I understand her right, she is arguing that we can provide an alternative both to the over-mediated information in the mass-media and the under-mediated information of single word search on Google.

I missed the paper on evidence-based practice. I think we need an evidence based practice. I also think that we need new and nimble methods of evaluation. And a new model of peer reviewed publishing so that thorough and rigourous information isn’t totally outdated by the time it goes to press. And I think we need to be rigourous about evaluating our existing methods and services in light of changed circumstances.

I heard an argument in one session that face-to-face instruction was known to work, but I wondered to myself whether anyone has actually re-evaluated it now that we can be in more spaces in more ways over more time. A tentative question from the audience on the first day flagged the same issue – how do we provide “just in time” services to students who want in-depth instruction on how to research using our resources, without referring them to a complicated booking sheet and telling them they will need to come to a formal session that fits in with their childcare, work, study and social commitments -that probably has a swag of information irrelevant to their specific need.

I enjoyed Beyond the Hype, as it is obvious that people have moved away from the “what is it?” stage to the “what do we do with it?” stage. I can see an interesting time ahead as we grapple with how to do this.

Personally, Beyond the Hype has clarified the zone where I work. I want to be in a place where I’m saying “hey, look at this, here’s how it works, think you can use it??” I’m spending my time trying to keep up with new tools, tweaking and playing and fiddling with them, raving about them…. and then pushing them downstream to people who may or may not think there is any point to them. It’s really exciting to see librarians now understanding what these tools are and feeling their way to find best practice to implement them.

There were so many more ideas and interesting papers. If you were there, what else would you add about the symposium ? Did it raise different issues for you?

Information on the papers plus the authors’ slides will be up on the symposium site soon.

I’m enjoying the Beyond the Hype Symposium so far. Interesting ideas, interesting people and it is going beyond “Blogging 101”. If you’ve not checked out the conference web site, please do as it is a very creative and appropriate use of a do-it-yourself Ning social network.

More on the content tomorrow when I’ve had time to blog …but this was the day technology and I had a lovers’ spat. We are hardly speaking after my laptop bricked itself with an unsaved report on it and one thumb drive was dead when I tried to back up once my laptop was working again.

Not to mention missing all the three papers in the afternoon because I was installing software in the library lab (admittedly this was human disorganisation by whoever was meant to arrange this). Big, big thank you to QUT librarian Marvin who just happened to be passing on his day off and lent a thumb drive, his in-house knowledge of their IT department, and his expertise so the workshop could happen. Thanks also to Lisa the student helper who had to reload a web page on the PCs every 10 minutes or so to stop them automatically logging out, as they reimage on reboot and we would have lost the software we just installed.

During my Second Life workshop Linden labs joined the conspiracy and the map function didn’t work so I couldn’t TP to Murdoch Island, and one person had trouble making an avatar. It had begun to seen absurdly humourous by the time the video drivers on the PCs started dying at a rate of one per 15 minutes – “oh, your PC’s gone too …just move and look over your neighbour’s shoulder”. By the end of the session we had 10 people huddled around 3 PCs and I was improvising with a “any questions” session rather than people immersing themselves in the environment.

Off to Day Two …

Last upgrade, this blog stopped sending me emails whenever someone made a comment on a post or when there was spam needing moderation. I thought it would just go away next upgrade, and have been manually checking.

Actually, what had happened is that WordPress had begun sending these emails to wordpress@librariansmatter.com . I didn’t have this address set up on my email server – it didn’t exist – so emails were disappearing into the ether.

I created the email address at bluehost, have redirected it to my gmail account and now all that bacn is mine once more.

Clever Corey worked out this solution when we discovered that librariesinteract.info authors who used  “lost your password” were not getting any email notification sent back. Thanks Corey.