Posts Tagged: hci

Noticed / Thoughts — 5 Comments
24
Nov 08

Serious Privacy Issues with Google SearchWiki

David Weinberger highlights a stunning oversight by Google’s SearchWiki team (bold mine):

[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up. So, now the whole world will see that “dweinberger” not only searched for “Angelina Jolie” but thumbs-upped the page of closeups of her tattoos? Guess who just changed his nickname to something less identifiable! This is a feature without value — the list of names isn’t clickable or complete or tell you how many people voted it up — unless you recognize someone’s nickname, in which case it has negative value.

In addition, Google has made a curious decision in requiring all SearchWiki “notes” to be public.  That is, if you want to take advantage of SearchWiki and leave yourself a note, all other SearchWiki members will be able to read it.  This is broken on many levels.  Obviously, there are privacy concerns – you may want to leave a note, but do you really want all other Google users to be able to read it?  And beyond privacy, what about utility.  Let’s say you want to leave yourself a note “To get to the policy page, click on About, and then Policies.”  Since you can only place that note publicly, it will quickly get lost in the sea of other Google users notes.

Considering Google’s zero-day rollout of SearchWiki into their main search property, the lack of HCI and Privacy consideration that went into the product is shocking.  There’s no opt-out.  All comments are forced public.  There’s no way to change your handle.  There’s no way to leave yourself a privacy-enhancing private note. Instead of rolling this feature out fully-baked (opt-in/out, with critical functionality), Google has rolled a half-baked product to all users and forced them through this curious funnel.

Last year Starbucks radically changed its business model by returning the company to its roots.  I don’t know how well that effort has worked, but I liked the concept.  Using the economic downturn as an excuse, perhaps its time for Google to do the same?

Noticed / Software / Thoughts — 3 Comments
3
Sep 08

Chrome’s reconfiguration of the web’s geography

I’ve really enjoyed Chris Messina’s two recent posts on Chrome.  His background (Mozilla, Flock) and experience thinking about next generation UI’s and UE’s is on fine display; I particularly enjoy his reconcpetualization of the browser and its experience.

Factory City: Google Chrome and the future of browsers

Factory City: Musings on Chrome, the rebirth of the location bar and privacy in the cloud

In the second, more recent post, Chris discusses the cognitive break inherent in Chrome’s vision of the web.  In removing the URL bar in favor of a single search interface, the web transforms from one spatially and locationally grounded (in URL’s, permalinks and bookmarks) to a fully-mediated, amorphous zone of information.  In this new web, there are no wrong answers or incorrect URL’s, because the algorithm always has information relevant to the intent of our information need.

As Messina notes, the tradeoff is such “that our fundamental notions and expectations of privacy on the web have to change or will be changed for us. Either we do without tools that augment our cognitive faculties or we embrace them, and in so doing, shim open a window on our behaviors and our habits so that computers, computing environments and web service agents can become more predictive and responsive to them, and in so doing, serve us better.”

That is, in embracing the mediated web, we trade (to some extent) our agency, any sense of privacy, and most importantly, our extant strategies of finding and reminding for new, less conceptually transparent ones.  To embrace the web in Chrome’s model, we must embrace the algorithm, and essentially invite it into our minds.  This new lens is all-or-nothing, and it casts away our strategies of past, those operationalized in pre-web design patterns.

On one hand, one might be able to argue that the web is so vast that inviting the algorithm home might make sense.  Perhaps it is better to browse with Google on your shoulder, assisting your navigation and selecting your best information choices.  Where I run into difficulty with this model is that Google is placed at a meta-layer above the web; it becomes the lens through which the web is experienced.  This model is troubling at many levels, but I particularly resent the idea the web should be mediated.  Slightly repurposing JPB’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Of course, this isn’t a question of morals; the web is a market, and there will always be a choice to opt-out or not participate in Google or anyone else’s schemes.  The gray area emerges when we consider Google’s place in the market, and the sheer power they exert in the configuration of consumer preferences.  Thinking as an educator – we lament the so-called death of the book.  In five years, will we lament the death of the URL, in an age in which all authority is conferred through the end-product of a citation-based algorithm?

All of this comes with a grain of salt.  Personally, I believe our current spatial metaphors of the web will exist for the imaginable future.  As revolutionary as these ideas seem, we change slowly, and the browsing and searching patterns of billions of web users are already well-established.  Further, this sort of change is essential – we’re constantly reconfiguring the web and our experience of the web – I just question how much we need to do that with Google looking over our shoulder.

Software / Thoughts — 2 Comments
10
May 07

Structural holes in del.icio.us, or, the value of editorship

Last year, Joshua Schachter raised some eyebrows when he announced that del.icio.us would be adding enhanced social features. This announcement generated some pushback, and I haven’t noticed much work towards integrating meaningful social tools in the meantime. Ultimately, this is dissapointing, because the integration of better social tools in delicious is a good idea, and without these tools, del.icio.us is comprimising its value significantly.

When we first started bookmarking links in del.icio.us, the notion of transportable, social, rss-able bookmarks was a great concept. It remains a great concept, and del.icio.us’ growth is evidence of the strategy’s value. Del.icio.us’ UI also appealed to many – it was fast, stripped down and eminently usable. Schachter had elected to design with an eye towards utility, not Web 2.0 fluff. This design reduced complexity and barriers to entry; combined with its core value, del.icio.us had all the right stuff to really take off.

And take off it did. The acquisition of del.icio.us by Yahoo (along with the acquisition of Flickr) proved to be one of the best marketing moves Yahoo has made in the past few years. In the wake of the acquisition, more people joined, the networks grew stronger, and the value of the bookmarks stored in del.icio.us grew exponentially.

Social bookmarking is a cool idea. If you follow del.icio.us/popular, you can see bookmarks that lots of people like. In doing so, you can spend lots of time reading top ten lists ad nauseam. This is the crowdsourcing model, the Digg model, whatever you want to call it. It flies in the face of editorship and control, and is one of the key concepts of Web 2.0. Unfortunately, del.icio.us has overinvested in the crowdsourcing concept. In fact, I’d argue that the key value of del.icio.us is editorship, a value that seems to fly in the face of Web 2.0.

What is del.icio.us other than an editorial tool? Each person that uses del.icio.us is slicing up the web it their own special way. And as millions of people have flocked to del.icio.us, its userbase has grown to include academics, experts, notables and laymen alike. And the slices of the web created by these people are all potentially valuable to someone else.

If you look at my network, you’ll see a list of people who I follow, as well as a list of people who follow me. I follow a small collection of friends, academics and industry experts. You’ll notice that I only follow about 15 people (on average) – the reason I do so is because that’s about all the people I can meaningfully follow in the current state of del.icio.us networks. In my opinion, there’s a lot of work del.icio.us could endeavor to make the editorial aspects of the service (the true long-tail value) more usable. Here’s a start:

  • Make people findable. Currently, del.icio.us offers you a single field that you can use to tell others who you are. You can basically offer a link to your blog or website, that’s it. This is terribly inefficient. Give people fields to describe their interests, occupation, areas of expertise. Make it searchable! If I want to find people who bookmark in the social networking field, let me search for people who describe themselves thusly. I’ll look over their bookmarks and decide if I want to follow them. Don’t make me use Google to find danah boyd’s bookmarks!
  • Enable people browsing. I want to know who is bookmarking or tagging stuff in a way similar to my own. If delicious would compute some rudimentary similarity metrics, I’d be able to find other people that share my interests. I want to know who these people are! I want to follow their bookmarks because doing so makes my life easier. Give me the tools so I can better find people who are like me, or who are popular for a certain topic area, or who are widely followed. People follow danah or Howard Rheingold or Fred Wilson for a reason – so make it easier for people to find these luminaries.
  • Improve the social UI. As I previously mentioned, I can only follow the bookmarks of around 15 people. Any more than that and I can’t keep track of what’s what. I wrote in to Yahoo some months back suggeesting that they set a cookie that would tell me what links are new when I refresh the network page – that’s a start. The social interface needs work – I should be able to follow groups of people, specific tags individuals use, and so on. The UI is a key limitation to the entire social strategy.

As it stands, the fact that del.icio.us overlooks the value of the individual is a key structural hole in the service. Del.icio.us is populated by many brilliant minds, but they are simply too hard to find! Its almost as if everyone on del.icio.us is blogging anonymously. It might have made sense a few years ago, but it doesn’t anymore. Del.icio.us can improve the social aspects of the service without becoming another social network; the idea that adding social to del.icio.us is somehow a negative is completely bunk. Social can be added well, and it will make del.icio.us even more popular. It’s time for del.icio.us to realize the value of editorship.

Research / Thoughts — No Comments
1
Apr 06

Faceted Search Interfaces

Facebook recently changed their search function from a faceted interface to more Google-like free text interface. After evaluating it, I have come to the conclusion it may fail to serve the Facebook user base. This has led me to ponder rightness-of-fit in search interfaces, primarily making me think about how important facets are in people-search.

First, what are facets? In the context of the Facebook, facets are the things about us. For example, if you’re single, a graduate student and studying anthropology, those are three facets of your identity. A faceted search interface lets you select from available facets, essentially creating a narrowed result set of the full corpus. The key in faceted search is the searcher has the ability to know all of the facets available for their search. Understanding the corpus empowers the searcher. The searcher has confidence that the result set is exhaustive, which is important in the context of identity search.

How people search for each other is not exhaustively documented. In a master’s thesis entitled A Framework for the Development of a Social Linking Theory, Tom Ciszek explores, but doesn’t address the particulars of identity search. I feel, however, that we can probably match up identity search pretty well to our existing understanding of information retrieval. In identity search, we are either finders or browsers. The finder is looking for an explicit good – a person they’ve met or wish to research. The browser, on the other hand, is looking to explore a subset of all people, whether that be singles looking for other singles, conservatives looking for other conservatives, and so forth.

The thing about facets is that when we search with them, we know we’re getting back all possible matches. In the context of people search, this is very important. In browsing, we’re willing to exhaustively examine a result set, which is traditionally associated with recall; in people search, however, we want precision in our result set so that we’re sure we’re not missing anyone. By taking the native faceted interface and replacing it with a google-like interface, I imagine that many people interested in the browsing side of people search will be frustrated. By empowering the user with simplicity, the elegant power and precision of faceted search are lost.

The problems are twofold. First, the taxonomy that the search keys on is no longer at the hands of the users. For example, searching for senior, a term traditionally identified with fourth-year undergraduates, returns only 149 results in the UNC Facebook. How can this be? Well, as it turns out, the Facebook only knows date information, so you actually need to search the year of graduation to find seniors. Not a big deal, right? Well, take that problem and magnify it over the hundreds of different facets we can have in the Facebook (there are 7 or 8 political affiliations, hundreds of majors and minors, etc), and you realize there’s no way a browser could ever recall the entire taxonomy. In making things simpler, they’ve actually become significantly more difficult. The second problem is that matches are now fuzzy, so even if you master the taxonomy, precision is a thing of the past. Searching for 2009 liberal returns a result set that matches 2009 and liberal anywhere in the profile, including students who are “very liberal” or who “hate liberal people”. The confidence that comes in being able to narrow down a result set by facet are lost.

I admit that how we search for each others is not a known entity. Its been a long while since I’ve logged on to a dating site, but search in those interfaces always key on facets (smoking/non-smoking, religion, education, etc). When we’re trying to find people, we want to be able to join, narrow and explore exhaustively. False positives are frustrating, and the notion that we might miss someone even more so. The Facebook is not ostensibly about dating, but a large part of the behavior of the students is discovery, a process not unlike the precurson to dating. As I’ve said before, as long as the Facebook gives students interesting, satisfying ways to discover each other, they are on the right track. By choosing simplicity over information needs, I can’t help but think this is a step in the wrong direction.