What is "Design Thinking"?

Design is a pursuit that requires you to be very methodical, logical and smart. You must be able to spot patterns that are not obvious, see things from many different perspectives and bring together seemingly disparate ideas. There is a need for great attention to detail as well as having the ability to abstract something down to its raw components, and being able to sense how it fits into a wider ecosystem.

That beautiful object, interface, gadget, or tool is highly practical as well. You enjoy touching it, you enjoy using it, you enjoy looking at it and having it in your life. It enhances your day, and makes you react emotionally. You love it. It solves a problem, and delights you at the same time. In fact, thinking about it now, it just seems like an obvious solution and you really can't imagine life without it. Someone however did have to sweat the details and work on many many prototypes before you even knew it existed. Why didn't you think of it?

This is where "Design Thinking" fits in. It is a method that allows you to deconstruct a problem, view it from all possible angles, and then craft a solution for it. It is a highly potent recipe for innovation, bringing together people from varied areas of expertise an intellectual and cultural persuasions, to solve a wicked hard problem together. Design Thinking can be applied to any sort of problem from running a hospital to evolving a product and anything beyond and in between. It applies the way that designers  think about problems to just about anything.

Design is not a beauty parlour. It is not where you go to pretty things up. It's where you go when you have problems to solve.

The backstory 

Design Thinking is a user-centered process for innovation based essentially around observation, collaboration between individuals from different disciplines and user group, rapid learning, focus on visualising ideas through prototypes, business analysis and strategy. When I mention "innovation" I don't mean having a lot of ideas, I mean actually making good ideas a reality. Innovation requires action or else they're just ideas. Design Thinking in my mind should be applied to all software development pursuits and can easily integrated with Agile and Lean methodologies. To some extent there's quite a bit of overlap. Using Design Thinking in your software teams will help you get the results you're looking for from a product perspective.

User-centered design is not design by committee

You must develop a deep understanding of your user-base. You must develop empathy for your users, and determine what the best way is to gain insights into unarticulated needs. You need to gain the experience, knowledge and ability to frame the real problem.

Many people mention Henry Ford who reportedly said that "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". There's no evidence that he actually said that, but it is clear that he believed it. Ford made the T-model in black only, and dominated the market for nearly 20 years. Ford's mistake was to stop innovating, and to refuse to understand what the market wanted. Harley Earl was GM motors head of Colour and Trim from 1927 to 1959. He not only introduced the idea of the clay prototype (still used to this day), but carried out user centered design by understanding what Americans wanted from their cars. This led to the strategy "A car for every purse and purpose". GM made 5 distinct brands from the Chevy to the Cadillac, and dominated the market. Ford was forced to shut down and re-tool his factories. (You can read more about Henry Ford and the "faster horse" thing on HBR)

This story is sadly still repeated in many industries and companies today, from Kodak to sony and beyond. If you fail to balance your portfolio, failure is a high likelihood.

Companies like Patagonia for example, have continuously innovated and listened to their customers to ensure they were responding to their needs and growing in the right direction as a company. Listening to users does not mean that you should act on every demand, but rather that you get good at sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making well balanced design, business and technical decisions. This is not easy to do, and there are a lot of great tools and techniques to help you get it right. This is the discipline of user-centered design, and it sits at the heart of Design Thinking. It overlaps a great deal with sociology and anthropology. We use ethnographic methods where we seek to understand people by observing, listening, discussing and through open-minded collaboration. If you think you already know what your end-user wants...you're starting to sound a lot like Henry Ford.

Take the time to do it properly and you will be leagues ahead of where you hoped you;d be. Do it wrong and it will cost you dearly as Target found out. They asked consumers in a survey whether they would prefer the aisles to be less cluttered. That was a 1.85 billion dollar mistake. Surveys have their place and this was not one of them. Asking leading questions will also never get you good results. User-centered design is a science, and if you want to do this yourself, then you need to learn how it's done. Learn from the mistakes of others first. Here's a quick overview on surveying to get you started.

The Method in a nutshell: Think - Make - Check

This very same cycle is being seen all over the "Lean" software methodology at the moment. It has been around for at least 50 years, and is finally being popularised and applied to all sorts of different industries by companies like IDEO, who drive large scale innovation in almost every industry that touches our lives.

Think:

During the "Think" stage you should be ideating, encouraging a lot of blue sky thinking, introducing yourself to the box so that you can think outside of it, and imagining all of the possibilities. It is a time to think big and broad. Invite specialists from different areas of expertise and give them a voice. Invite end-users to your workshops and brainstorms. Get all of the ideas on the table and then converge towards a few key directions that work from a business, design, and technical perspective for you and your market.

Tip: Include users by interviewing them, observing them using your current product or a competitor's product, visiting them in their environment.

Make:

It's time to think with your hands. Make some rapid prototypes of the directions that have emerged from your "Think" phase and try them on for size. A prototype can be anything from a role-play (like the Google checkout one for example), to sketches, 3D models made out of cardboard and tape or a user journey draw on post-it notes. Made sure that you only do enough to learn what you ned to. Once you have learned that, it's time to move along and throw this prototype away. You'll be iterating on it many times before you get to your end product. When I say this I don't mean that it is going to take a long time, I mean that in a week or even a day you can make many iterations on a single prototype. Don't get attached to anything, stay open-minded.

Tip: Include users by getting them to participate in collaborative design sessions. Invite them to show you what they are thinking by drawing, role-playing, acting out and modelling.

Check:

Check that your ideas so far are actually in line with what end-users need and want from your product. You can test with humans (anyone who is human) to test if basic interactions and flows are going to work. You should test with end-users and gradually more and more specific user groups, the more you have evolved your prototype. This is a time for stopping a direction dad in its tracks, adapting it to be something else more useful, or giving it the OK. Remember that you may still decide to not go ahead in future, so keep it as rough as you need,and don't waste time on cosmetics and documentation. The documentation is the learning. It is the prototype.

Tip: Include users by getting them to evaluate your prototype, but also by inviting them to tell you what they would change if they were in your shoes, and why.

Rinse and repeat:

You will go back through Think-Make-Check many more times, however many times you need to be comfortable with the result. The early Think-Make-Check cycles are gross and the later ones subtle. The key here is learn quickly whether an idea has legs and what is needed to make it a reality if it does. Learn by making it. Don't waste your time on long meetings where you endlessly discuss the same small details or where groups disagree and theorise over things. Put every to the test. Get people making rather than talking. Call out facts and assumptions. Check the assumptions. Make informed decisions.

A few tips to put it in place:

You don't need a lot of time or effort up-front to get Design Thinking working for you. You just need to do it.

• Start by getting the people you need together, being mindful to include people who view things from different perspectives
• Timeboxing all of your workshops together and keeping the focus and momentum rolling will help you greatly
• Make sure everyone is heard by using different facilitation techniques
• Don't shut down ideas,  build on them. Encourage groups to say "Yes, and..." rather than "No, but..."
• Don't allow any "Devils advocates" to exist in your groups, encourage people to speak for themselves. As Tom Kelley says "Devil's advocates can go to hell". It's too easy to shut ideas down and hide behind the devil.
• Having direct responsibility for your thoughts and ideas in a safe environment where failure is ok, will speed things up
• Prototype all the time. Every time we fail, we learn something important. When we make a paper prototype that fails, we didn't put a lot of time and money into making it, so we are less attached to it. If you have ever spent months working on something and polishing it only to find it isn't what users want anyway...you will know how painful and costly a lesson that is. You can learn those things in a matter of days at little cost. Focus on learning quickly through rapid prototyping
• Don't try to avoid the mess, the failure and the chaos that can sometimes ensue - keep moving towards a solution do not lose momentum. Those spaces of high emotion are where creativity lives.

Different environments will have their own challenges that you will need to deal with of course, and I am confident that it can be done. This is a really short intro to Design Thinking, I encourage you to delve deeper starting with the resources below and to experiment. If you are in a software environment you can work to iterations and soundly incorporate Design Thinking practices within the Agile or Lean framework you are using. More on that soon.

Some useful resources:

"Change by Design" - Tim Brown (book)

"Design Thinking" - Thomas Lockwood (book)

"The art of Innovation" - Tom Peters (book)

"The 10 faces of innovation" - Tom Kelley (book)

D-School Standford - Stanford school of design (website / course)

Tim Brown on Design Thinking - HBR (pdf)

Design Thinking - The movie

ROI of UX

photo credit: baldiri The scientist in me is always trying to measure everything, trying to find patterns and insights, trying to quantify and accurately qualify...It's no surprise that the ROI of UX is a topic that has been on my mind for some time now. Business people understand numbers and I learned that using them in ways they understood often won me time or budget or both. I'm working on various ways to measure the effect of the UX team in organisations, mainly because it would help us not only understand its value but also clearly see any bottlenecks. I would like to speed up the UX process, but in a way that greatly minimises risk. If you speed up a process, and decide to spend less time on certain things, there is always going to be a trade-off. I'd like to be able to accurately say by what percentage we traded-off, and what the effect of that was.

Agile and UX:

There is a lot of debate at the moment on how to integrate UX in an Agile development process. I think the key to that is live site/software metrics, remote user testing, and more metrics. I think that to include UX in the Agile process, you have to also favour working software over documentation, same as in any of the other disciplines in our teams, like QA or BA for example. This means pairing with a Dev and getting things done immediately for low risk features, is preferable to drawing up wireframes. It means sketching with a pen and paper, and updating those sketches during feature meetings, with other team members and stakeholders. Draw it and hold it up for everyone to see: "This is what we're talking about".

If you deploy features without doing live user tests, you can still check how well they're doing by analysing the analytics on the live site. This is why it's so important to have sophisticated analytics, beyond Google Analytics and other free solutions. Just so we're clear, I don't recommend doing this for innovative solutions, but rather for things that the team already has experience with (i.e. How many highly innovative contact forms have you designed in the last 10 years?).

There will be a trade-off, but if we accurately measure how effort, time, and so on are affected, we will have an idea of how well this method worked. If we have no idea of how productive the UX team is, or what the value of their time is, we are essentially working blind.

Measures:

Before you even begin thinking about design, I think that it makes sense to agree what the ROI is for different stakeholders. It can be different for different groups involved in the project, and you might not be able to please everyone every time. Keeping tabs on which way the balance is tipping is really important.

Hard measures might be:

- Conversion / Acquisition

- Lead generation

- Retention

- Traffic

- Viral referals

- Employee productivity

- Cost savings on Dev etc...

- Decreased time to market

Soft measures might be:

- Engagement

- Customer / User satisfaction

- Brand loyalty

- Product/service adoption

- Awareness

- Ethics

- Team morale

The value of UX:

For every $ invested in UX, there is a ROI of $2 - $100.

The UI accounts for:

- 47%-66% of the total project code

- 40% of the Dev effort

- 80% of unforeseen fixes required

An equation might go something like this:

Value = (Benefit - Cost ) / Cost

This can shed some light on what the ROI is, once the cost of the team has been taken into account.

In conclusion:

If we can measure the exact ROI of UX, we can demonstrate the value of the UX team, their work and also justify the need for research when it is necessary. Often the complaint around UX is speed. We can speed up the UX process by sketching, measuring features when they are live, and evolving our designs rather than working to create a final and highly polished version at launch. We can calculate the trade-off of using this faster deployment method rather than the more traditional process of doing lots of user testing up-front. There will be times where it isn't appropriate, and knowing the numbers allows us to justify this to the business. A caveat for the faster deployment method is that the UX team must be very senior and experienced.

I liked Dr. Susan Weinschenk's video about the ROI of UX, enjoy!

The business formerly known as Ad

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="...cross pollination is the key..."][/caption] photo credit: derekkeats

Unless you have been asleep underneath a comfy rock for the last few years (or in a totally different industry - both perfectly acceptable btw), you will know that the world of advertising is on the move.

"Going digital"

Adland used to be all about intellectual capital, idea creation and mostly revolved around print and TV. I can't tell you much more than that because I have only spent 14 months in Adland and can really only comment on the changes I've been observing. And they are big changes. The digital agencies have been gnawing at the big traditional ad agencies legs for a while now, taking away clients wanting to position themselves as web savvy brands. The Ad agencies decided to fight back and "go digital"...

...whatever the hell that meant! Many when asked will lump anything "below the line" as "digital". Below the what? That's what I thought too, so I found out what it all meant:

• Above the line (ATL): promotions are tailored for a mass audience
• Below the line (BTL): promotions are targeted at individuals according to their needs or preferences
• Through the line (TTL): advertising strategy involving both above and below the line

I think that "digital" can quite easily be ATL as much as BTL, as much as it can be TTL, no?! Actually this is all a bit antiquated. Any campaign should be aimed at the demographic the product or service is intended for. I would wager that 9 times out of 10 those people are online. If that is true, then practically all campaigns will be "digital" to some extent.

The thing that quite a few Ad agencies (and some digital agencies) didn't realise, was that they were becoming software houses, creative technology shops, computing companies...whatever you want to call it. Some will disagree with that statement, but making iPhone apps, Facebook apps, online games, and websites requires computational skills first and foremost. Being an "integrated agency" essentially means that you have figured out how to be a really creative, technologically astute and able shop. And that's hard, really hard. In my opinion, it's also where all the real magic happens.

Technology and creativity:

Google and Yahoo both have defined themselves as "Ad agencies" in the past. We'll likely all agree that they look a little different to what we formerly called an Ad agency. Their culture and philosophy is dramatically different. Traditional Ad agencies are mostly creatively led. In places like Google and Yahoo, the rockstars are the developers and the companies are technologically led. Technology shops are used to getting something out there fast, and then tinkering sometimes forever, until it fulfills all the needs and desires of the end user. On top of that, this way of working allows them to adapt to an ever changing space. This is an "Agile" way of working. Creative agencies are used to polishing something and launching it. They then chalk it up as "done" and move on to the next thing (like a TV ad for example). This sort of way of working (closer to waterfall), isn't adapted to a fast changing digital space. You can't launch an online campaign and then call it finished. In light of this, changes are afoot, and I am hearing more about Agile processes being implemented in traditional Ad agencies.

The new business of Ad:

The business of Ad (imho) should be more centered around service design, customer experience, redesigning business models, helping companies and brands speak but also listen to consumers effectively, rather than making great software. It's also about creating a little wonder and awe as well. There's nothing quite like a well adjusted business solution with social mechanics in tune with the consumer, that is also beautiful or fun or even both!

It's not about using the lastest technology for every client and every campaign, because doing that leads to gimmicky things that don't speak to people and aren't useful for the brand. Using augmented reality, for example, to show off the fact you can use the technology, is fine. If it isn't well adjusted to the campaign,however, it says exactly that to the end user ("The ad agency just wanted to show they can do this"). If you can make use of new technology in a way that isn't gimmicky, and really is useful to people, like the UPS augmented reality postage box by AKQA, then you are doing a good job. It's not about technology for technology's sake.

People

To achieve this level of brilliance, I think it's time for Ad agencies to hire from a range of disciplines, sometimes including and not restricted to:

• Computer science (UX, HCI, games design, graphics, data visualization and manipulation, physical computing...)
• Social sciences
• Psychology
• Creative arts
• Anthropology
• Business (MBA, economics...)
• Statistical sciences and maths (for serious analytics)
• Electronics and mechanics (to make prototypes and fuel imagination)

Hire experts, because they have greater potential to also be generalists. Good generalists are almost always experts at something, and they're really hard to find. To be a generalist, you have to be awesome at learning a lot about lots of things, quickly. Those skills come from practice and a sharp mind. Let's look at some definitions from WordNet:

- Expert: A person with extensive knowledge or ability in a given subject - Generalist: a modern scholar who is in a position to acquire more than superficial knowledge about many different interests (Renaissance man)

I often hear people confuse the term "Generalist" and apply it to mean something like "A person who has superficial knowledge about lots of things". That is incorrect.

The people in charge of your wonderful teams (management) should be chosen for the job because...they're really good with people first and foremost. They should be trained in performance optimisation (techniques to help teams be more innovative, creative...), counseling and other people focused skills. If you can create a sane, pleasurable and practical environment for these great minds, and you look after them really well, your business will boom, no doubt about it. And of course really smart people will be silly happy working for you.

A few last words to Adland residents:

Roles that will be in high demand in 5 years time don't even exist yet. Put yourself in good stead by hiring the best people from a range of disciplines. They will adapt to a changing technological ecosystem, and learn new things easily. The collaboration between different disciplines ("cross-pollination") will lead to fresh and unusual ideas emerging, award winning ideas, and more importantly, useful ideas.

I think that this cool little video explains it in a fun way:

TGIF - It is about living

Welcome to another edition of TGIF here on i-thought! Here's hoping you've all had a really cool week and that you're working on some fun projects too. I'm preparing to guest post in a few places in the coming months, so I'll keep up to date on that. For now, I'll get out of the way this post :) Without further ado...

Stuff I liked this week:

Samsung solar powered LCD TV - It looks pretty awesome

True Female Game Characters - The Escapist show us what it takes to create a good female gaming character

The Tire iron and the Tamale - Originally a Redit posting that made it to the NYT

Bamboo iPad cases - Grove strikes again and makes something useful and beautiful

Ideo Labs Bone Marrow Challenge - Brilliant project by Ideo labs on many many levels

Facts:

Jeff Bezos coined the term Amazon.com from the earlier name Cadabra.com

J.C.R. Licklider came up with the idea of the "Galactic Network" in the 1960's, which planted the seeds for the internet.

Leonard Kleinrock came up with the idea of "Packet switching" the basic form of Internet connections in the 1960's.

The "Ethernet" is a protocol for by many local networks, originally coined in Bob Metcalf's thesis on "packet networks"

Nam June Paik coined the phrase “information superhighway” in 1974.

Quotes:

Computing is not about computers any more.  It is about living.  ~Nicholas Negroponte

After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.  ~John Pierce

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.  ~Scott Adams

Don't explain computers to laymen.  Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.  ~Edsger W. Dijkstra

App of the week:

Alchemy - it's an app that you can find in the Google app store. I love the way it gets you to think creatively by letting you create new elements and mixing them with others. It's a lot of fun!

Video footage of the week:

Pretty clever...

What Google's into

photo credit: TenSafeFrogs

Google is a vast vast empire built on information retrieval at the base. They have become so huge that they span much more than just search. They produce interesting and ground-breaking research in just about every field that even slightly touches computing. Every year, all of the major (and minor) conferences are awash with papers from Googlers.

I wanted to draw attention to the papers that have come out recently (or that are about to), and that are not specifically about information retrieval. The reason for doing this is that I think that those working in marketing, advertising, TV & broadcasting, and the press, need to read them and need to keep a keen eye on developments. A lot of these papers are quite accessible, and they will prevent the reinvention of the wheel. Also they are really interesting and will help you think on a different level.

If you're new to research papers, I wrote a handy little guide explaining how to read them a while back. Scientific research papers tend to follow the Scientific method, so it helps to be familiar with that too.

Here is a selection of 10 papers that I recommend:

“Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access”, Yang Li, UIST'10: Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 2010, pp. 87-96. (PDF)

"In this paper, we present Gesture Search, a tool that allows a user to quickly access various data items on a mobile phone by drawing gestures on its touch screen".

“A Large-Scale Taxonomic Classification System for Web-based Videos”, Yang Song, Ming Zhao, Reto Strobl, John Zhang, Jay Yagnik,the 11th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2010).

"This demo presents a large-scale taxonomic classification system, with more than 1000 categories in the taxonomy. A user can select a video from YouTube.com, and the system returns one or more categories (from the taxonomy), which the video belongs to".

“Catching a Viral Video”, Tom Broxton,Yannet Interian,Jon Vaver, Mirjam Wattenhofer, 2010 (PDF)

"In this paper we seek to better understand viral videos on YouTube by analyzing sharing and its relationship to video popularity using 1.5 million YouTube videos. The socialness of a video is quantified by classifying the referrer sources for video views as social (e.g. an emailed link) or non-social (e.g. a link from related videos)".

“Media agenda setting and online search traffic: Influences of online and traditional media”,Laura Ann Granka (American Political Science Association, 2010) (PDF)

"This paper addresses the patterns of influence between the news media and the public, by specifically targeting breaking stories, or shocks, to a news system. Specifically, we assess media agenda setting and selective exposure by looking at the relative public attention spans to hard and soft news (as measured by query volume), in comparison with the volume of news coverage (in print, broadcast, and Web content) for these selected news events".

“How Surfers Watch: Measuring audience response to video advertising online”, Sundar Dorai-Raj, Dan Zigmond (2010) (PDF)

"For several years, Google has been analyzing television set-top box data to measure audience response to specific TV ads. This paper presents how similar techniques can be applied to online video advertising on YouTube. As more and more video programming is made available online, it will become increasingly important to understand how to engage with online viewers through video advertising. Furthermore, we find that viewing behavior is even more effected by specific video ad creatives online than it is on TV. This suggests that online viewing can become a valuable source data on viewer response to video ad creatives more generally".

“Evaluating TV Ad Campaigns Using Set-Top Box Data”, Sundar Dorai-Raj, Yannet Interian (Re:Think 2010) (PDF)

"Google has developed new metrics based on set-top box data for predicting the future audience retention of TV ads. This paper examines how to use these metrics to judge the effectiveness of TV ad campaigns. More specifically, we analyze how these metrics can inform future campaign targeting and placement goals".

"The Politics of Search: A Decade Retrospective.”, Laura Ann Granka, The Information Society Journal, vol. 26 (2010), pp. 364-374. (PDF)

"This article describes the thought behind search engine regulation, online diversity, and information bias, and it places these issues within the context of the technical and societal changes that have occurred in the online search industry".

“Suggesting Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph”, Maayan Roth, Assaf Ben-David, David Deutscher, Guy Flysher, Ilan Horn, Ari Leichtberg, Naty Leiser, Yossi Matias, Ron Merom, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2010. (PDF)

"In this paper, we describe the implicit social graph which is formed by users' interactions with contacts and groups of contacts, and which is distinct from explicit social graphs in which users explicitly add other individuals as their "friends". We introduce an interaction-based metric for estimating a user's affinity to his contacts and groups. We then describe a novel friend suggestion algorithm that uses a user's implicit social graph to generate a friend group, given a small seed set of contacts which the user has already labeled as friends".

“Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior”, Jiahui Liu, Elin Pedersen, Peter Dolan, 2010 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. (PDF)

"A key challenge of news service website is help users to find news articles that are interesting to read. In this paper, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system in Google News. The recommendation system builds profiles of user’s news interests based on user’s click behavior on the website".

"Children's Roles Using Keyword Search Interfaces in the Home”, Allison Druin, Elizabeth Foss, Hilary Hutchinson, Evan Golub, Leshell Hatley, Proceedings of CHI 2010. (PDF)

"Children want to find information about their world, but there are barriers to finding what they seek. Young people have varying abilities to formulate multi-step queries and comprehend search results. Challenges in understanding where to type, confusion about what tools are available, and frustration with how to parse the results page all have led to a lack of perceived search success for children 7-11 years old. In this paper, we describe seven search roles children display as information seekers using Internet keyword interfaces, based on a home study of 83 children ages 7, 9, and 11".

More papers?

You can read loads more papers, fear not! Head over to the Google repository. Of course Googlers are not the only ones to provide cool research papers. I'll cover the latest from Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft and more in coming weeks.

TGIF - the extent of one's ignorance

Before we get started, I'd like to take this opportunity to express how much the earthquake in Christchurch has left me feeling sad. I love Christchurch and really enjoyed visiting last year. The destruction that it has suffered is beyond comprehension. I can't imagine how residents must be feeling, especially those who have lost loved ones in the disaster. Google set up a crisis response page which has a lot of information and resources on it, as well as footage. It's a good place to find out more about what has happened and it's useful for those at the heart of the disaster.

This edition of TGIF is dedicated to all the Kiwi readers. I did contemplate not going ahead with it this week, but you might find a smile or some distraction so...

Without further ado...

Stuff I really liked this week:

Famous world ideologies as explained by references to cows - I haven't seen this for a long while, but it still makes me smile

Manon LeBlanc's WAT lamp - It is powered by water and really quite beautiful...actually all her work is beautiful

If Star Wars Was Real - Brilliant photos made to look like Star Wars characters really existed.

Robert Bradford's toy sculptures - They are sort of creepy but I love the detail and the idea

Analog Sundays - initiated by Antony Devers, this movement asks you to unplug on Sundays

Facts:

The phrase "surfing the Internet" was first popularized in print by Jean Armour Polly, a librarian, in an article called Surfing the INTERNET, published in the Wilson Library Bulletin in June, 1992.

The concept of stylesheets was already in place when the first browser was released.

Hypertext was an idea mentioned by Vanevar Bush in 1945. The term hypertext was actually coined by Ted Nelson.

The website of the world’s first web server is http://info.cern.ch/

Vint Cerf was the first to use the term "internaut" to refer to any technically capable professional internet user.

Quotes:

“Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.” – Nathan Myhrvold

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” – Confucius

“In a room full of top software designers, if two agree on the same thing, that’s a majority.” – Bill Curtis

“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage

“I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.” – Alan Perlis

App of the week:

Google Shopper takes the crown this week. This new Google offering is super smart and really useful, I think you'll like it. It recognises products by barcode, voice, text search and cover art. You can find information on millions of products such as online prices, reviews, videos, specs and more...

Video footage of the week:

This little video never fails to make me smile, I hope you enjoy it. Have a good weekend.

Tell Me More, not More of the Same!

It was about time we got round to a paper, so here is a nice little number from Northwestern University called "Tell Me More, not just “More of the Same”" by Fancisco Iacobelli, Larry Birnbaum, Kristian Hammond. I particularly likes this one because it addresses a problem that many people tend to consider as solved, but that actually really isn't. Online news...what could be simpler? Most of us use news readers so that we can file and filter our news, as it comes in fresh off the metaphorical press. We do this because there's so much of it, and personally, I feel that keeping on top of it could become a full time job. When something automated takes time and is hard work, it tells me that it's not functioning as well as it could. This paper addresses this very issue with a cool little system called TellMeMore. The Abstract "The Web makes it possible for news readers to learn more about virtually any story that interests them. Media outlets and search engines typically augment their information with links to similar stories. It is up to the user to determine what new information is added by them, if any. In this paper we present Tell Me More, a system that performs this task automatically: given a seed news story, it mines the web for similar stories reported by different sources and selects snippets of text from those stories which offer new information beyond the seed story. New content may be classified as supplying: additional quotes, additional actors, additional figures and additional information depending on the criteria used to select it. In this paper we describe how the system identifies new and informative content with respect to a news story. We also show that providing an explicit categorization of new information is more useful than a binary classification (new/not-new). Lastly, we show encouraging results from a preliminary evaluation of the system that validates our approach and encourages further study."

What is it all about? We are all familiar with the "related" stories option on almost every news site or blog on the web today. The authors explain that the problem with this "related news" is that if the stories are picked by humans, they are subjective, and that when they are automatically generated, the quality of the results is not so good:

"Yes, readers are presented with “related” information, but too often this information is just a rehash of the story they started with, and no guide is provided as to what they add to the main story, if anything."

Their system, TellMeMore, chooses stories that add to the current story, therefore not presenting users with "more of the same". The system selects and displays paragraphs from other news stories, that are different to the current story. It finds new quotes, figures, actors and creates a much richer information provision for the user.

The authors particularly place emphasis on the fact that labelling a story "New" or "Not New", is nopt efficient. TellMeMore instead finds the information within the story that is new, a much more granular approach.

The authors sum their system up nicely in their last sentence:

"Tell Me More aims to realize the promise of the Web by delivering a truly richer news-reading experience in a scalable and economical way."

How it works There are 5 core modules that have the job of extracting and presenting new information to the user. The initial document is used as the seed, and every other story is compared to it. The five modules are:

1 - Content gathering This module gets the seed document, and pulls out key features such as the title, keywords, named entitites and so on. It then queries Google or/and Yahoo news for more stories about the seed topic. Once the URLs have been found, a scraper gets the text, using the DOM tree of the web page. 2 - Content filtering This module picks up where module 1 left off, and filters the documents based on similarity using Latent Semantic Analysis. This extracts the semantic information from the words in the documents, based on contextual information. They don't want to return stories that are "more of the same" so only documnets that are different enough will go through to the next stage. 3 - Text analysis Named entities, quantifiers and additional quotes are considered important new information. A semantic representation of each paragraph is produced using LSA, giving each one a vector representation with 4 features (LSA representation of the graph, a list of entities, a list of quantifiers and a list of quotes) 4 - Difference metrics This module compares the vector for each paragraph to the vectors of all previously selected paragrpahs, and decides which ones have new information for the user. 5 - Presentation This module presents the results to the user, however the authors agree that everyone's perception of what is novel might not be the same. The system therefore recommends paragraphs and highlights what makes them different (using the 4 features we talked about in module 3). The paragraphs are all ranked according to the counts of new information detected by module 4, Difference metrics module.

What the users thought They carried out a human experiment with TellMeMore and found that people preferred getting information in snippets and that they trusted the stsyem (interestingly I found the exact same thing in my own research with dialogue systems). Users felt that the snippets contained relevant information, and most would use TellMeMore again.

What I thought It's not a revolutionary new concept, but it is very smart, and the proof is in the pudding. Users liked it and wanted more of it. I see a whole host of things that could be done in the online news area, and I'm looking forward to having a streamlined, easy to use and non-time-consuming way of consuming my news. I have tried a few different things, after noticing a few years ago that a lot of my news stories in my RSS feed reader were almost identical. I went through my reader and ditched a load of news sources. A method like TellMeMore actually would allow us to discover more interesting news and not focus on the source of that news so much. I also sort of like the fact that I don't even know what a lot of the websites I read regularly look like, because I only read the content in my reader. It feels like a deep resounding bell...things are changing.