Chris -

Great post (as always!). Made me think of two things:

1. The importance of metrics. Disney knows everything about their visitors because they’re a highly data-driven organization who measure every detail of your visit and feed it into an analysis machine that continuously improves the park experience. Gardening a community is the same: your garden is only as rich as your data. Go beyond the numbers built-into Wordpress (or your blogging platform of choice) and spend some time getting to know Google Analytics. I’d be curious, for example, to see if the low comment posts have a high enough time-on-page and low enough bounce rate to show that people are reading rather than leaving.
2. I’m commenting from my phone so can’t really look it up, but I’m reminded of a story Daniel Burka told during a presentation at mesh last year (slides from Iteration & You). I’m pretty it was about a new building at MIT, and specifically about the paths leading to it across the surrounding lawns. Rather than laying them out in arbitrary or aesthetic lines, they put down no paths and simply surrounded the building in grass. We’ve all encountered ad hoc paths: a deep, dirt groove through the greenery where the wisdom of crowds says it wants to walk. They waited for some time to pass and then used those ad-hoc paths as their guide for where to put the real ones. The first lesson here is simple: your community will find their own way through your site and will usually blaze the same trails over and over whether you want them to or not. Do you have grass in place to measure it? The second is equally simple but a little more bitter: students at MIT have to go into that building so their need overcomes the “path of most resistance” to create the “path of least resistance”. No one has to read your writing and so their determination to undertake grassroots trail blazing will be considerably reduced. That means you, as Community Gardner, have to step up your observation and measurement from passively watching grass get trampled to actively monitoring and responding.

I did a little more digging post-comment into the paths example and was reminded that they have a name by Daniel’s presentation: Desire Paths. What a poetic way to explain what people want! It was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his 1994 book The Poetics of Space:

A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the Human Computer Interaction field have borrowed from architecture (think of Pattern Languages, based on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language). You can apply this to your own site by observing people using it (do they go straight for the posts? Do they have to follow a torturous route to get to a list of your tags?), by reading their comments and reactions (look for things like “I wish there was a way to…” or “I love your blog but…” or even “It sucks that there’s…”), and by asking them directly. Finding patterns in your data is a bit of a black art, but think about ways to codify a desire path in the information you get back from Analytics or your blogging platform. Look particularly for the entrance and exit patterns from pages (do people leave the site entirely or do they go to a specific page?) as an indication of ‘virtual’ desire paths.

How about this site? Are there paths I’m not providing that would improve your experience? Let me know!

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Impressive piece of tech — made more impressive by this guest post on their blog by Brad Feld. For those not familiar with him, Brad (currently suffering a Denial of Service attack) is a very successful VC who has put a bunch of money into them after knowing one of the founders for years and seeing a demo. Also impressive that the same founder was a tech consultant on Minority Report (YouTube video of the user interface).

Of course, this wouldn’t be a blog post if I didn’t find something to complain about, right? Two things bug me about it:

The first is that there’s a lot of research going on right now into multi-touch gestural interfaces that involve direct manipulation of objects through gestural UIs, just without gloves. Some of the better known examples are the iPhone (obviously), the Microsoft Surface, and Jeff Han’s work at Perceptive Pixel (see his TED talk from two years ago). So I wouldn’t say that this is as ground breaking as they make it out to be. It looks like they’ve got some innovative work around linking the screens together and maybe in the spinnable ‘table’, but it’s hard to understand from the video what the real value of those features is.

Which brings me to my second point and one that’s shared with the videos of Jeff Han’s work: why do they always show abstract examples of zooming maps and flying characters? It’s impressive to look at but totally meaningless without context. Maybe this is the future of Human Computer Interaction, but if that’s the case it should have glaringly obvious applications in the real world and I can only believe that there demos would be more powerful if they took a task we all do every day and showed us how it would be so much better. I suspect, in the end, that these won’t turn out to make our every day tasks any easier and that they will prove hugely useful to a ’small’ subset of users rather than the mass, wide-scale change they predict. If you want to see something that has a much stronger possibility of having a significant impact on real computer use, check out my friend Anand’s company BumpTop, who are doing pretty amazing things right on your existing desktop.

What do you think? Will multi-touch, networked, interactive screens become the norm? How far out?

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