As we come up with new tools, design (see Don Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things“) tells us to build upon learned behaviors, or affordances. Don Norman uses the term to refer to the “perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support and, therefore, affords sitting…/… Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into.”

In a way Google’s and Apple’s success is due to their adaptation of natural affordances to new uses. They did not invent those affordances, they “merely” did a very good marketing and engineering job. Now a “white box” affords search and a”touch weel” affords folder navigation.

As we develop more and more mobile phone applications with an internet access, what would be the best affordances ? I am not talking about complex “mind amplification” applications, but just simple applications like city guides for example. How should such applications be designed ? for instant use in mobility (“now we’re all together, where shall we eat ?”) or planning (“I want to book a restaurant with a terrasse for Sunday brunch”) ? Should we go for search or folder navigation affordances ? Or is there another, more adapted one based on visual interfaces like tagclouds, geographical maps, network maps, …, or interactive interfaces like multi-touch, point/click, buttons, etc… ?

Let’s have a look and test 2 iPhone city guides, applications that offer restaurants listings and recommandations. The first one is Michelin’s recent iPhone app (disclaimer : I was offered to test it by Michelin, which is good since it is quite expensive), and the second one is TellMeWhere (or Dismoiou in French). But first let’s have a look at their “desktop web” welcome page :

The comparison is not fully adequate since Michelin doesn’t really have an online version (it is available only as books) and this one is the promotional website for the 100th edition, but it shows clearly that TellMeWhere has done the choice of the list, whereas Michelin couldn’t decide and offered both the search box and the map. A quick A/B test would have let them know which one was the most appropriate and therefore improve the bounce rate.

The test becomes more interesting for the mobile applications. This what the welcome pages (after the splash screen) look like :

Both by default used the localization feature of the iPhone and displayed a list of restaurants in the immediate vicinity, but as TellMeWhere went for the map, Michelin stayed with the list … One of the reasons being probably that having less restaurants listed (since it is their own selection), they did not want to go for a map where for a given scale only a limited choice would be available. But this probably for other reasons as well since maps are almost not used in the application. But before we get to that, let’s have a look at the “alternative” welcome page :

 TellMeWhere offers to turn off the localization, and to choose betwen a list and a map interface. Michelin offers different choices : a list of restaurants in the vicinity, or near a given address (most probably trying to leverage their ViaMichelin maps and routes user base and application, or – a third option – the list of recent restaurants consulted.

So now, what do the item (restaurant) page look like ?

Here again the editorial choices are clear : while TellMeWhere puts the social recommandation forward directly on the page, and chose a colourful design (including a picture that can be added by the users themselves from the web or via the iPhone camera), Michelin stayed loyal to the design of the book version, enhancing its elite position, but – revolution !! – allowing for recommandations from users !!! We’re impatient to know more about how many people actually do it, but we’ve seen from other ‘elite’ brands (such as newspaper LeMonde) that such openings are really powerful attractors if they can manage it. A little adition that we’ve noted on he Michelin application (but that also exist on the TellMeWhere one, although not as intuitive and extended), is the possibility to contact / locate and know more (via its website) about the restaurant.

In conclusion I would say that both apps are nicely designed, but that the challenges are different :

• for Michelin to master the art of community management whithout endangering its brand equity
• for TellMeWhere to reach a critical mass of users and improve/extend its applicatio’s functionnalities (they’ve implemented a “feedback” module for co-design on the web, using Feedback2.0 platform, a French alternative of GetSatisfaction)

And that from a design and usability perspective, we still need some hard data to know which affordance is the best Being a “map” man, I know some do not like using them …but that’s another story

Crisis : we hear and read about it everyday … but it is hard not to get lost, not to lose track of events or context or historical background, and hard to understand as events unfold the links between them, the play of multiple actors’ interests, and untimately, hard to anticipate, plan for personal or business needs. This is expecially true as the news we get are … well news only ! Bits and pieces of a puzzle we get at some point of our day, sometime without the time to reflect and integrate these.

I have blogged before about 4 aspects of the modern media system (speed, image, multiplicity and “thunderingness” as French politician Michel Rocard put them) and how visualization could provide that added value to provide context, particularly difficult on TV. It was followed by a discussion with him via email and a presentation I made for my students on story telling and visualization. A growing part of the population got accustomed to managing multiple information feeds at the same time, which reflect in specific layout designs for TV news (see here) or enterprise dashboards (see Stephen Few’s very good book on the latter : “Information Dashboard Design“).

 So I turned to economics and information visualization leading press outlets (Financial Times, New York Times, The Economist, French magazines Le Point, L’Expansion, …), TV news services, blogs and document sharing sites (Slideshare, Vimeo,  …) to collect a few of the most self-explanatory examples I could find. I have organized them in different categories :

• History : trends and cycles

• Stock Markets  :  graphical analysis and company valorization

• Politics : public plans and social issues

But first, let’s start with an explanatory video (via Coolinfographics) :

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

It remembers me (in a nicer way of course) of one presentation (subprime primer) I got via email some months ago, to explain what sub-primes, CDO, CDS etc… mean, with simple sketches / a cartoon of a banker talking to another banker and devising the sub-prime scheme. In such cases email attachments are still the best way to circulate documents

Today I will publish the first part :

History :

Business cycles are commonly known since their creation in the XIXth century (notably by French statistician Clement Juglar, but also Kondratief, Kitchin, etc…). Periods of growth and decline follow each other, and looking at it from different “zoom” levels allow for a better understanding of the context.

In the case of the current crisis, several sets of data are to be looked at, whether they represent cause or effect I will not get into the debate, I have just chosen them because they are self-explanatory and in a way they enhance the dramatic aspects of the current situation. If I have not chosen less dramatic charts, it is because I wanted to make a point (like I did with “An Inconvenient Truth”) : the editorial decision to pick one or another, to zoom on a detail, change the scale, etc… plays a key role in conveying a certain message for certain benefits.

We see that trees (here housing prices), can climb to the sky

That a very clever ;-( financial innovation (sub-prime lending in CDO) definitely had a big success

And that it happened in a liberal context of massive national debt growth, all that money coming from foreign investors.

That somehow the link between those CDS/CDOs and the “real” market got lost in mad speculation, a loop feeding on itself

So the real ratio of debt to GDP was somehow worse …

And it was clear who was getting the larger share …

A process called “financialization” everybody thought was the sign of developped countries like us ;-(

Thank you very much Marshall for starting this conversation about RSS and information overload. This is a perfect example of why I love blogs

I have been through all comments and would like to offer a quick synthesis of the key ones I have picked up before suggesting anything

As Rick first put it, of course we are not talking about RSS adoption per se, but rather tools / solutions that make use of it as readers inside companies : portals / dashboards / or so-called RSS readers, as web or desktop clients.

As Eric puts it, this adoption poses a challenge : incorporating in a new tool or in an existing one (eg MS Outlook or Mac OS X Mail), especially when individual users are mostly prohibited from doing so (Nigel)

Then Brad was the first to talk about ‘information overload’, which is – along with the proper UI for each need category and personalization / filtering potential of XML – the key challenge here.

There is of course the cost issue (Jon) that will probably decrease (Oliver) and recent / future developments (Brad Feld) of those RSS readers.

I see RSS (I believe you’ve already seen Common Craft’s video RSS in plain English) as one of the cornerstones of “enterprise social software” (see the business cases offered by Christoph and his “Social Stack” – one of a few interesting ones I’ve seen with Miguel Membrado’s – or Michael’s), enabling improved management of information and therefore reduce the overload, but not replacing email (which will remain more like the fax : an ubiquitous, reliable way of communication).

In addition to what Thomas said (including the security or internal vs external issue), or Bjorn’s comment I believe some of the key differentiators between all those communication means are =

1) timing, in a continuum from asynchronous to synchronous (it reminds me the funny Twitter curve). The global trend is more and more communication canals adding up as business accelerates. Research on those emerging behaviors will tell us more about which one to use for what info,

2) personalization (recommendation, filtering, …), AideRSS and the PostRank algorithm beeing a nice attempt for better RSS management that needs to be expanded / opened to suit more diverse needs that only popularity. I believe social filtering is another avenue that needs to be explored, as it mimicks our usage : the good old url sent to me via email – in a push mode (or the for: feature of Delicious), but also in a pull mode (the ‘follow’ on Twitter). A data driven solution, it is enabled by permanent tracking of web actions and interoperability between services.

3) and interface, as I believe visualization is a key element of the solution, current ui having shown their limits. See my blog post http://www.uswim.net/2007/08/21/traceability-and-visualization-collective-social-solutions-to-the-information-volume-increase/ and Moritz Stephaner’s thesis Visual Tools for the Socio-Semantic web.

Note : a few of the tools mentioned in the comments that serve as solutions / substitutes / or parts of the solution for information syndication / filtering (in addition to the 3 objects of this post) are :
iGoogle, MyYahoo, Netvibes, Google Reader, SharpReader, Feedghost, RSSpopper, Bloglines, Confluence, PostRank / AideRSS, Yahoo! Pipes, Yammer, Lotus Connections, MS Sharepoint, and I will add Tarpipe.

Note 2 : Some of the interesting outgoing links from RWW’s blog post :

G. Oliver Young (Forrester) : http://blog.strategicheading.com/2008/12/17/2008-web-20-prediction-recap-pt-3-rss-demand-will-grow-substantially/

Brad Feld (investor at NewsGator) : http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/01/enterprise-rss-at-newsgator-is-alive-and-well.html

Samuel Driessen  : http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2008/12/missing-security-features-in-enterprise.html

Lee Bryant : http://www.headshift.com/blog/2007/10/social-tools-for-internal-comm.php and one of his business case at Allen and Overy

Scott Nielsen (Attensa) : http://www.attensa.com/blogs/attensa/2008/06/enterprise_20_mashup_business.php

A resource place for RSS in enterprises : http://enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com/

James Dellow : http://chieftech.blogspot.com/2008/12/where-next-for-enterprise-rss-in-2009.html

• The first one is the calligram (already covered by Claude Aschenbrenner of SerialMapper, Peter Gabor of Design et Typo, or this very nice blog dedicated to it : Calligram Designers). Popularized by Dada artists in the beginning of the XXth century, it is an example of an old usage that has been developped thanks to new technologies (here photo-composition for printing). See more on this page from the University of Chicago Library. The most famous examples are from French surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

• The second one is the graphical version of “exquisite corpse” (“cadavre exquis”), another usage popularized by Surrealist artists like Andre Breton and Jacques Prevert. See as an example this drawing from the current virtual exposition on Prevert:

• Another popular visual mind game is the doodle (“griffonnage” or “crayonnage” in French), that designer Dennis Hwang made a key part of the Google brand. During the last seminar I attended there were a good 5 doodlers in the room (at least that left their doodles behind them …). Not to be mixed up with the very useful meeting sscheduling tool, it is a key part of school age : who hasn’t doodled on his books or notebooks ? Many still do as an adult, during conferences, phone calls, etc… Some psychologists and cogniticians have dwelved on why we doodle, and what it tells about someone’s profile or state of mind (the “alphabet” of doodles.

• Maybe the last game I found is rebus, a visual word puzzle. Like most games, often played in childhood, it enabled me to work with pictures, so that’s the technique I used for my map (see below). I later discovered that rebus generator http://www.rebus-o-matic.com/, but because mine is a mix of French and English … and I had specific images in my mind, I wouldn’t have used it anyway.

For the first time that I see a nice (from a graphical point of point) Google Map mashup : well done !!

Talent and career management experts have long tried to catalog skills and capabilities, using taxonomies, or more recently folksonomies (see my previous blog post). For an easier presentation of those, many visualization techniques have been used, from interactive and multiple dimension maps, to more simple infographics based on common metaphors.

I just discovered Deloitte’s latest paper on talent management in an ad in the HBR, of which I have extracted (fair use I assume) the key visual below, using the popular “periodic table” visualization metaphor :

While I hope this will help HR professionals and employees to visualize what is requested from them (like a “cheat sheet”), I can only hope this is only the first of many more visuals to come. The other ones I can think of are :

• Orientation : provide a map of the routes for career development, each road bearing the signs of the training needed and the achievements requested to move sideways (one function, one business unit or one country to another), or up (increased responsabilities, position or salary). One of the best example I have seen so far is the classical map from the French ONISEP (organization for the orientation of students), as you can find examples below. Other techniques could be using mind maps or radial maps,

• Update and interactivity : for the data to remain consistent over time (such cataloging requires excessive amount of resources to “audit” the workforce that can only be done once every few years), and to be truly useful to others than HR professionnals in charge of career management and training planning (for example to search a person with specific skills and experience for a task, or to share best practices), a company should add another layer using folksonomies, and a visualization / navigation interface (see my previous post)

The first one I used was comics : “l’Histoire de France en Bandes Dessinées”. It was recently republished by Larousse and Le Monde newspaper. My history teacher would give us black and white prints / copies, that we had to colorize (I was 10) : it sure helped me to remember a lot Later I got more involved with comics and moved to historical series like “Alix“, then “Les 7 Vies de l’Epervier“, and more recently Marjane Satrapi for Persepolis and her own vision of the Iranian revolution.

The second tool I discovered / used was timelines, visual representations of historical chronologies. A French editor (Maurice Griffe) is specialized in these, and you can find them (often in a foldable format) at every historical landmark’s souvenir shop, or a selection here.

There’s even a wiki version for easy editing of timelines called … EasyTimeline

Then of course there are the historical atlas. The best known to French students if the Historical Atlas from Georges Duby, but a field that lends itself especially well to that sort of visualization is geostrategy, as for example Yves Lacoste’s Geopolitical Atlas. There’s also an Atlas collection by Les Editions Autrement looks at many major historical landmark through the Atlas / mapping eye.

The number of books that relied heavily on infographics seems to have picked up lately, with editorial success such as XXI, a quarterly magazine approach brought to the book sector, or separate initiatives in a more “encyclopedian” way, such as “Comprendre l’actualité par l’image” (by well known French infography agency Idé), or l’Encyclopédie Visuelle VU by Gallimard, also editing the beautiful travel guides “Encyclopédie du Voyageur“, similar to the Eyewitness travel guides sold in English speaking countries.

And I recently watched a video made by a local TV channel for Paris 2nd arrondissement (QNTv), that presented the history of the Jean Sans Peur Tower. Nice infographic job, that follows the narrator’s speech in sync to explain how Jean Sans Peur is related to other key historical figures. Imagine you could get such videos for major monuments accessible on your mobile phone or on a wireless video player that would be rented for a Paris city tour : wouldn’t that be great ?

L’histoire de la tour Jean sans Peur
envoyé par QNTV

Comics, time lines, atlas, infographics encyclopedia, infographics videos : many ways knowledge can by designed to facilitate understanding and transfer.

But why are they used ? what do they mean ? Logos, labels, seals, symbols, … what is the difference ? As a marketer and a visual thinker it has long been a subject I wanted to cover, but found difficult to wrap around in a blog post.

Let’s start with the definitions :

• seal : it is a complex word, having multiple meanings, both as a noun (to describe the animal, the object or the symbol) and as a verb (to describe the action of closing or signing)

• logo : short for logotype, visual symbol. “A logo (Greek = logotypos) is a graphical element, (ideogram, symbol, emblem, icon, sign) that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand” (Wikipedia).

• label : the result of a labelization process, with an identification / differenciation objective, it is often mistaken as a logo, as the label of a product often consist only of a logo, the easiest way to identify a brand. “A word or phrase used with a dictionary definition to provide additional information” (Merriam Webster). “The general function of labels are widely known and recognized as a method of distinction that helps people recognize one product from another” (Wikipedia).

• symbol : another complex word. From Greek symbolon, literally, token of identity verified by comparing its other half. It has different meanings, among which “an arbitrary or conventional sign used in writing or printing relating to a particular field to represent operations, quantities, elements, relations, or qualities” (Merriam Webster). Or, according to Wikipedia : “Symbols are objects, pictures, or other concrete representations of ideas, concepts, or other abstractions. In digital communications, a symbol is the smallest unit of data transmitted at one time.”

Because this is a visual design blog, below is a visual version of the definitions, using Visual Thesaurus :

Seals have been used for centuries, allowing the authentification of documents and coins, bearing the signature (coat of arms, head profile or another symbol). They were created for the purpose of information and goods exchange, often within the frontiers of a territory (the seal bearing the mark of its emperor, king or lord), or its influence area. They were marked on wax or using ink on paper / parchemin, often using a steel stamp or a signet ring.

Labels : in order to assert the quality of products in a mass-market environment, certification authorities have been created. Based on references (origin of ingredients, production process, …), and following a labelization / certification process, they authorize producers to display the logo of the label on their products. Producers typically pay for this label, that can be taken away should an audit prove they do not respect the guidelines.

The process to manage a label involves 4 different entities : the person requesting it, the referential base, the authority granting it, and the person controling its application. See the diagram below from Arnaud Belleil (Cecurity.com / AFCDP), shown during a Social Media Club session.

The common value of all those visual tools (labels, seals and logos) is to “encapsulate” trust in an authority to which one could resort to in order to get satisfaction, should anything go wrong.

Some common visual features can be found in seals and label’s logos :

• the round shape : from the stamp

• the “v” sign : to indicate validation / authorization

• tagline : like old “mottos”

• relief : a remnant from embossing, it is still used as it makes fakes more difficult

   

But what about pictures, pictures of you taken by others (and not “Photoshopped” of course), or pictures you’ve taken, and which end up online ? How far would you go in exposing yourself, voluntarily or even “unvolontarily” (if someone took a picture of you doing something that society usually condemns, by habit, morale, if not legally) ?

Sociogeek was developped to try and understand the behaviors of Internet users in the social media / web2.0 era. This study uses a game-like online survey (in French, using the new and powerful Flash CMS from SpinMedias) to help you and the researchers understand how you act. The results will be shared publicly. This research is a joint program by :

• faberNovel (my company), continuing the work we’ve done in our research on Facebook, Social Network Best Practices, and Open Source and Free Software business models,

• the socio dept of Orange Labs (Dominique Cardon, Christophe Aguiton, …), see Dominique’s recent research on social network users typologies

• and the FING (Fondation Internet Nouvelle Generation, especially the Active Identies group : Charles Nepote, …)

Here are the results of my test :

What about you ?