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Author: Shannon Bain, Principal Designer at XING AG, Hamburg, Germany

Source: Quora.com

Quora is still getting a lot of press, both positive and negative, much of it in the form of a debate about its value. Is Quora a good, valuable information service or is it simply a platform for SV self-aggrandizement? As far as I’m concerned, we’ll never get an answer to this question (mainly because it’s actually both). What we should be looking at instead is what the negative reactions tell us about the dangers of designing for social content creation on a platform that’s primarily positioned as a knowledge resource.

Quora is officially “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”. So it’s a Q&A platform, but a fundamentally social one. This puts Quora in a tricky position because there’s an underlying tension between the product’s official proposition and the activity it must “afford” through its design to be a successful social product.

Quora’s Q&A focus primes knowledge-sharing expectations in users. But a reality of social functionality design is that you must always “afford” user display: give users the domain-appropriate means to show-off, shine, look good, whatever. Display is a powerful and perfectly valid motivator of social activity, even if we like to pretend it’s not. In this case, it incentivizes good questions and smart answers. And since Quora is effectively a community talking to itself (it’s by us pros, for us pros), there’s no way to avoid display even if you (foolishly) wanted to.

So here’s the tension: when we’re primed with strong knowledge-sharing expectations, but are faced with brazen self-promotion instead, we get annoyed–– even when it results in good content and drives a lot of our own activity. The product’s official, expectation-priming proposition is so clearly about altruistic knowledge-sharing, we can’t help but feel weird about the selfish display activity necessarily afforded by the platform.

To understand why, we need to look at the product’s framing, the norms in play, and users’ perceived motivations. A product’s frame is the big interaction type that structures it, guides design and primes user expectations. For Quora, it’s a Question & Answer frame. One way frames work is by embedding norms, the informal rules and conventions coordinating and smoothing our daily activities and interactions. When you hear about a Q&A platform, it’s partially your grasp of the frame’s norms that give you that immediate, high-level understanding of what’s supposed to happen. There are at least two roles (Questioner and Answerer) whose interactions are temporally structured (Qs before As) and whose performances can be judged as appropriate or inappropriate (e.g. did the Answerer actually address the question).

It’s the last bit that’s interesting here. Norms can provide the means of evaluating performance appropriateness. But they often say more than just what behavior is appropriate or inappropriate. They can also say what motivations are appropriate and, more importantly in this case, inappropriate. They determine the frame’s legitimate behaviors and motivations. For us, the interesting Q&A performance norms are about knowledge sharing, and, specifically, the inappropriateness of knowledge flaunting.

But on a platform essentially dependent on user effort, display is a powerful incentive you can’t ignore. It’s also unavoidable in the product’s strategic “by us, for us” positioning. So, the product necessarily affords transgression of the official Q&A frame’s “no flaunting” norm.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that in addition to display there are two other big reasons people use social functionality: knowledge and connection. If you think of these as defining a space within which a piece of social functionality can be plotted according to how it mixes the elements, you can visually represent the mismatch between Quora’s “explicit” position and it’s “afforded” position.

Notice I’ve also included the “enforced” position. This represents the backlash apparently being enacted by some members against transgressions of the no-flaunting norm. My impression is that it’s even stricter and less display-lenient than the official position.

I can think of three approaches to mitigating the mismatch:

• Shift official positioning… bad idea.
• Monitor and enforce an officially “elevated” layer of user-admins. This is probably too Wikipedia-like and counter the communitarian, party-line rhetoric of SV and Quora.
• Structurally and functionally foster the definition and communication of member-negotiated, product-specific norms for appropriate display on Quora.

The last one gets my vote. Display is necessary for Quora to succeed and is going to happen no matter what. Indeed, as the backlash suggests, product-specific norms for legitimate display are already being negotiated. Why not improve the tools for negotiating, communicating, and enforcing legitimate means of display. For example, beyond the current sanctioning (voting) and elevation of “quality” performances, consider a menu of user-applied content tags – e.g. “flaunting”, “advertisement”, etc. Or socially reward users that review and rehabilitate tagged content, possibly even elevating them via a light status system. There are a lot of design possibilities in this direction. And though there’s a real potential for gamesmanship, it’s still  my favorite option. It’s not about iron hand enforcement of official rules. It’s about giving users the tools to define, enforce and communicate what they collectively decide are the normative bounds of performance on the platform.

We firmly believe that data visualisation has a wealth of exciting commercial applications, from communicating in new ways to developing new tools, apps and utilities for clients and consumers alike. So we’ve grown slightly frustrated by the rise of visualisations that are moderately pretty but add little in terms of real insight, utility or illumination.

We’re also, as we may have mentioned,  big fans of Manuel Lima here at Labs. So we were intrigued to see that he has authored an “Information Visualisation Manifesto”, a provocative (but characteristically generous and nuanced) take on the future of data visualisation which tackles head on the thorny questions at the heart of this ever-expanding field:

• Art versus Science
• Intrigue versus Immediacy
• Aesthetics versus apprehension.

 Manuel comes down firmly on the side of clarity of communication versus visualisation for visualisation’s sake, citing the discipline’s roots in the desire “to facilitate understanding and aid cognition” and a growing frustration with the “eye candy” approach to the craft. Many of his principles are rooted in this utilitarian approach, reading almost like a Bauhaus manifesto (and none the worse for that):

• Form follows Function
• Do not glorify Aesthetics
• Look for relevancy
• Aspire for Knowledge

It’s a bold, purist and punchy vision yet also acknowledges the power of narrative and the role of intrigue. Indeed the question of narrative seems to lie at the heart of this Manifesto; the need to pose a specific question of the data and to weave coherent themes and stories from it. These themes then drive the aesthetic approach. As Manuel puts it:

“Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualisation, Form follows Revelation”

This is perhaps the key distinction between Information Visualisation as defined here and what Manuel suggests we start thinking of as “Information Art”. Within this approach, artists will freely allow form to follow data, using the random-ness this creates to add texture and interest. Take, for example, Aaron Koblin’s desire to embrace the random-ness of a data set and indeed the richness and texture added to his famous Radiohead video by “interrupting the data”:

“I think it really gives character, because I think it’s really that kind of intricacy and detail that builds character and in a sense it’s the errors and flaws that make art”.

Incongruity making art: Aaron Koblin's "House of Cards" promo for Radiohead

As ever, then, we need to return to objectives, to ask what we are trying to achieve:

• Do we want to educate around an issue, making complex questions simple?
• To shift perceptions and provoke a response?
• To offer a fresh perspective on an infrastructure question for our clients?
• To offer our consumers better comprehension and control of their behaviours?  

Simply put, are we going to offer something that is either very, very useful or very, very beautiful? Either way, greater clarity of intent and greater discipline throughout the industry can only be an advantage in building credibility and engagement. Building that credibiltiy is vital if data viz is going to become not just an entertaining diversion but a vital tool for navigating a world generating more and richer data by the second.

If what we are building is neither very beautiful nor very useful, to Manuel’s final point “Avoid Gratuitous visualisations”: “Simply conveying data in a visual form, without shedding light on the portrayed subject, or even making it more complex, can only be considered a failure”. 

Or as William Morris put it: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”.

Traditional agencies are instinctively drawn to disruptive work-work that stops the consumer in their tracks and forces them to pay attention. Digital specialists on the other hand are focussed on a smooth and seamless user experience. Ideas that disrupt this experience risk increasing bounce rates from a site for designers working to the 10 second stay-or-go “rule” . This tension between disruption and usability is so profound it’s hardly surprising that we struggle to find a common understanding of what great looks like, much less deliver it.

Traditional agencies in the digital space (and indeed traditional digital agencies) are easily seduced by the power of Flash and the wonders of animation; we want attention and spectacle but what happens next? Why should the user stay, what are we asking them to do and where should they go next?  The campaign microsite is perhaps the prime expression of this tendency-as Iain Tate puts it, impressively punchily, in Campaign:

“No one cares about your bloody microsite. In 2009 the flashy high production value microsite is finally starting to feel irrelevant. Sites that seem to do everything, but deliver nothing.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, design in the digital space has become so seamless, effortless and professional that it’s arguably all getting a bit predictable. Usability was (quite rightly) the holy grail for many years, reaching its apotheosis in Jakob Nielsen’s controversial useit.com-the ultimate in functionality.  Now it seems though that perhaps every easy, effortless site is much like every other easy, effortless site.

Likewise, Nielsen’s partner Donald Norman’s seminal book on “Emotional Design” argues that attractive design makes consumers more likely to solve problems and find solutions, albeit not at the expense of core usability:

“Attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively. How does that makes something easier to use? Simple, by making it easier to find solutions to the problems they encounter”

One might argue the same of wit, entertainment and surprise-of sites that challenge the conventions of user interface and offer something fresh. Dontclick.it for example disrupts our expectations of user interface and forces us to interact with the site in a new and different way. It does challenge familiar behaviours but (I would argue) intrigue makes us stick with it rather than back away. Likewise, Orange’s “Never Ending” website no doubt breaks all kinds of rules but offers a marriage of idea and interface that opens up intriguing possibilities.

dontclick.it by the Institute for Interactive Research

So how can we best mash up these two apparently opposed agendas? How else can we marry idea and interface to deliver fresh, absorbing brand experiences and what might we learn about navigation and user experience in the process that might move us beyond clicks and pages?

Perhaps by starting with an open and humble mashing up of old and new world skills, as discussed at length in Mel’s excellent post on “Marketing Mashup” and by using that mash up to think in new ways and develop new outputs:

• Acknowledging how much we have to learn from each other’s instincts.
• Marrying the ability to make on-line experiences simple, useful and usable with the ability to shock, surprise and shake up perceptions.
• Bringing delight to simple experiences and usable interfaces to disruptive ideas.

Orange's Never Ending Website

"House of Cards" promo www.aaronkoblin.com

As you may just have heard (we’ve been a tad over-excited…) data visualisation maestro Aaron Koblin came into to talk to us yesterday.  He kicked off with a showcase of his work, from his exquisite grad school visualisations of flight paths (see post below) to his latest embryonic projects for Google labs. Along the way he showcased extraordinary visualisations of the ebb and flow of information in cities and around the globe, experiments in crowdsourced sound design and perhaps his most famous project, the Radiohead “House of Cards” promo.

Visualisation of SMS messages in Amsterdam www.aaronkoblin.com

In showcasing his extraordinary portfolio he touched on a number of powerful and provocative themes which we followed up on in our interview. Themes around the power of social context to make data compelling, the power of data visualisation to embrace the complexity of our lives today and the tension between the human and the machine present in crowd-sourcing engines.  He also shared his key learnings from life at the front line of data visualisation:  

Looking at everyday things in new ways completely changes your perspective: there is no ”mundane” data when you set it in context.

Use multiple visualisation techniques: there’s more than one way of seeing things  

Stay true to the data, not the “real world” : There is a random-ness to data-it will make patterns you never anticipated. Respect the random-ness.

You don’t have to use all the data : sometimes seeing patterns is about what you leave out

Set the data free: open-source and let other people play with your data

Following his talk, very graciously agreed to be interviewed by Labs about our (and your) burning questions around data visualisation.  It was a fascinating conversation for us and we hope for you. So over to Aaron….and many thanks to those who submitted questions for him. 

Why do you think the world has suddenly gone crazy for data visualisation? 18 months ago it was a struggle to get anyone interested in data and now it’s the new rock and roll…

I guess it’s really the times that we live in, now you have tools like Twitter and Facebook and things that are widely used not just by the nerds but by everybody. Popular culture has also just all of a sudden embraced the power of storytelling through data and the relevance of all the data to their lives. All kinds of things have happened that simply weren’t possible before – the author you look up to, the musician, etc. they’re sharing all kinds of things – you can be intimately living their lives along with them and you see all different types of applications.

Do you think it’s partly about the explosion in the amount of data currently available, the data trail we leave behind us now or the fact that companies have more data than they can process so they end up giving it away?

 I think ultimately the biggest change is that the data is now relevant to people’s lives. Before most of the data was about infrastructure at best and a lot of it was locked away or presented in aggregate form. When you’re presented with a huge lump sum number that has no context it’s just not interesting, but now when you get these granular stories, things that are saying at this specific point in time here’s the way that things changed, just by giving it that context and social relevance it becomes interesting. 

Perhaps the big difference between what you do and the bar chart or the single number that it really embraces complexity rather than trying to reduce everything-ur lives are complex and this gives you a deeper understanding of that, not simpler, but richer

 I think what’s really nice is when you can have that kind of simplicity but then allow for investigation.  Not necessarily forcing it into this sterile reality, but being able to present a story clearly and convincingly and simply but then allow for justification where you can say this is why, it’s fine to give a summary number but then be able to say this is why the number exists.

So do you think data visualisation should be about immediacy or intrigue? Should it be “I see that and I get it” or “I see that and I don’t get it so now I’m going to play with it”?

Definitely it boils down to your purpose. I think there certainly is a place for scientific visualisation. There still is a necessity for that type  of clarity and objectivity but there’s also a place for design and I would argue for art, that to be able to use data to tell stories and to tell the right types of story requires different kinds of techniques and different means. Often times I think the whole medium-is-the-message sense of actually using the system to think about the system can be valuable and fun and productive

What do you think is so fascinating about seeing one medium like music or dance portrayed through another?

I think that’s also something that’s really picking up because of digital culture. Now that everything has become digital it’s so easy to run it through a completely different process. You can make it,  just tweak the algorithm and sound becomes image and image becomes motion. It’s kind of a natural process, it makes a lot of sense, especially for people like myself who are visual thinkers and learners. I think translating a lot of these concepts and numbers and pure abstractions into something tangible, something to be seen and experienced and interacted with means the world, because for me it makes a completely different kind of sense. A lot of times that kind of experiment can reveal the underlying structure and point out the way that it makes sense.  

 You talked letting the data do the talking and really embracing the random-ness of the data; do you think that’s what makes data visualisation so compelling as art, because art is very seldom truly random?

I think it really gives character, because I think it’s really that kind of intricacy and detail that builds character and in a sense it’s the errors and flaws that make art. If you look at creative practice – like with the Sheep Market project for instance, if every person drew a perfect sheep they would all be the same and it would be a horrible project. It’s actually seeing the ways that people fail, the different intricacies and character that comes from the individual that adds a lot. You see that in all data visualisation, it’s the little variations that gives the character  and makes it interesting.

On the crowdsourcing sheep project, you talked about it potentially being a very fragmented and alienating experience  but you’ve drawn it into a coherent whole-there’s a certain ambivalence there 

I think it was the juxtaposition of those two qualities that makes it interesting for me. On the one hand you look at this huge grid that looks very much like a matrix of computer created content, but then juxtaposing it with each individual, looking down at the fine level you see there are actual little people in there. I’ve always been interested in microscopes, I bought a few microscopes and I have a family friend, Gary Greenberg, who makes these amazing oblique-lighting microscopes. Basically microscopes that produce images that are more like beautiful photographs than back-lit medical tools. He used to let me play with them and it was amazing fun. This notion that there’s a device that can completely transform the way you see something is really inspiring. You can look at the whole thing but you can also drill down and it’s a totally different world.

The Sheep Market www.aaronkoblin.com

The wisdom of the crowd versus crowd-sourcing is a fascinating topic. The wisdom of the crowd seems to kick in when the crowd doesn’t know it’s being watched, whereas with crowd sourcing it can sometimes just feel like mass-sourcing. Do you think the future of crowd-sourcing is genuinely collaborative, with the crowd consciously working together and making things better? 

I think you already see that happening with all the Wiki projects which are really inspiring. To some extent I think it’s because the motivation is different, it’s not really about money. Money really complicates things. With the sheep the people who I had paid two cents felt totally ripped off and were really mad at me but the people who knew what the project was were asking if they could give me free sheep! So they had a completely different perspective on the situation which was interesting to note. I think the weird thing about crowdsourcing is that to some extent it feels like the inevitable evolution of capitalism which is just something to think about.

Which is weird, because on the other hand you could argue it’s socialism in action….

Right, it’s both – it boils down largely to the approach of working with the crowd. There probably needs to be a better disambiguation for actions involving the masses. There’s wiki-style collaboration, the kind of thing you see with open source projects, people working together to make something massive. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the current incarnation of the Mechanical Turk, where you have individuals being harvested for isolated menial tasks, and somewhere more towards the middle you find things like CrowdSpring – more of a massive sifting of the crowds.

There are some themes which seems to recur in your work, such as the energy of cities or some themes about the flow of information. Is that about themes that interest you or is it about the data sets that are readily available?

 I wouldn’t yet say readily available, it’s still really tough to get at some of that data, but I think I am generally interested in all kinds of data that have anything to do with our lives and revealing the way that we live and build systems. So to me it’s something I’ve always been drawn to and part of it obviously is because I grew up in this computer and game culture and I’ve always been interested in algorithms and the way things work and the process behind things. There were a lot of films growing up about information and visualising information that inspired me a lot.

What tends to come first for you, the data set or the visualisation technique?

Based on the projects that I’ve done it’s usually either that I’m presented with an awesome dataset or it’s that there’s a data set I’d really like to create. I guess that’s answering it by saying both. So with the mechanical turk projects it was more about being interested in that tool and wanting to create data that would reflect the tool.

Does the software you use have a big impact on the way you work? You talked about the impact of the Processing tool?

I think it definitely has. The nice thing about Processing is that it’s an open source tool so it’s constantly being added to and growing and because it’s open source it makes it much easier not to be heavily influenced by it. I think because you can modify it to an extent that’s much more thorough than if you were using a closed source tool. In the sense that there’s all kind of things people have written that you can use but also in the sense that if something doesn’t work the way you want it to you can rip it apart and make it different and make it work the way you want.

We are living in a golden age of data availability right now. Does it bother you either that there is such a rich data trail available about our lives or that people may start withholding data on that basis?

I think that we will see people change, at least in terms of personal data, I think we’ll see people change their interest in sharing as much as they are. But I think that will probably come in the form of not necessarily less data acquisition just less public data sharing. I think what we’ll probably see is better disambiguation between aggregated public data and individual public data where I’ll be willing to opt in to something to share my information but not with my name on it and I think that that will end up being really valuable for all kinds of social studies and applications. But I think that will also potentially be less damaging to individuals as we see more of that. I feel bad for the younger generation that’s growing up right now.  A lot of the stories that they’re bonding to their existence, will leave trails that will last with them for the rest of their lives. Forgetting is a wonderful ability, and one that technology is not currently adapted to.

Yahoo! search burst globe, www.aaronkoblin.com

From the latter crowd I keep hearing this analogy that using Crowdspring is akin to outsourcing (complete with images of dank foreign sweatshops). If were going to trade in metaphors, I would counter by labeling this crowd protectionist. (Picture angry immigration opponents rallying to protect US jobs they probably don’t want in the first place.)

This isn’t outsourcing and this isn’t bootlegging. This is simply about an expanded marketplace. And as long as your product is best-in-market, you’ll always have best-in-market work at your door.

One last thing I need to note as some are accusing us of being exploitive and that bothers me greatly. (MORE BELOW)

For BBH Labs, this is definitely not about undercutting rates. The easier thing for us to do would have been to call on a number of established designers we’ve worked with or simply kept the project inhouse with our more than fantastic design team. But exploring new approaches is why we have “Lab” in our title.

Now, that said, one week into the process, I’m having one or two issues.

First, many of the designs being presented seem to be slapped together without much care or thought. As a client, it is taking considerable time to filter through, which adds a cost to the bottom line of my company. Our initial interest in Crowdspring is an attempt to find young talent, so I accept this process as more efficient than if we had to conduct portfolio reviews in the analog world.

The bigger issue I have is fair remuneration. The Crowdspring design process is fully transparent and this is great. When I comment on my likes and dislikes regarding a specific design, other designers take note and follow suit, sometimes, very literally, borrowing the basic typography of one designer and then building off it. Fantastic from the client’s perspective: I’m getting the best of the individual and the best of the crowd – all for one price! Now the problem is that I can only award one person the job and it isn’t fair for me to reward that person 100% for work that may have been built off another person’s work.

Hence my current conundrum halfway to deadline.

I realize Crowdspring is only eight months old and the online opensource community not much older. But when money is on the table, a winner-take-all approach doesn’t seem to hold true to the process.

Maybe this is a problem that Crowdspring with the help of the design community can come together to help solve?

The experiment continues. Have a great weekend.

We’re posting a brief on Crowdspring well aware of the heated discussions taking place within the design community regarding sites that promote spec work. Though the crowdsourcing business model is still clearly in its infancy, BBH Labs reasoning for giving Crowdspring a try, simply put, is because the model seems to be working (albeit, better for smaller companies).

We’ve heard the arguments against Crowdspring. We’ve heard it said that it lowers the standard of what is considered “good” design. But for the purposes of this conversation, isn’t a “good” design one that pleases the person paying for it? I think Marley and Me is a “bad” film. My niece disagrees. So be it.

Another argument is that the Crowdspring model is akin to outsourcing, putting professional design work in the hands of untrained amateurs, and in the process, driving down the price real designers are able to charge for their services. If you’re a great designer, these sites shouldn’t be a threat since aspiring designers willing to work on spec is nothing new. If you’re a mediocre designer on the other hand, then consider that new technologies will only continue to make you better: just as the mouse made you better and Adobe Illustrator made you better, competing on a larger playing field should also make you better (and add to your bottom line).

I don’t want to sound overly insensitive, but evolution isn’t always orderly: we are living in a transformational period and in order to not be put out to pasture prematurely, entire industries are having to retrain themselves and rethink how business is going to be conducted going forward. From young designers to established agency networks, change is coming.

I’ll stop rambling now and come back to why we like Crowdspring. We see these sites as giving much more than they take. By matchmaking small businesses that wouldn’t have been able to otherwise afford a custom logo with a pool of designers that wouldn’t have otherwise been able to offer their services, they are helping to grow an overall appreciation for design as well as build an entirely new market that didn’t previously exist.

Will Crowdspring deliver Labs a great logo that meets our demanding and sophisticated needs? Not sure, but we’re looking forward to fishing these new waters nonetheless.