Category Archives: Experience Models

Getting a Handle on Building Social Apps

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Building social apps can be a truly circular experience. Many of the traditional ways of thinking about products and features break down as social apps need to be organic and should adapt quickly as micro-behaviors change and new macro-outcomes emerge. As we develop Foodie.com at Glam, we continue to explore and experiment with different models to help define the right set of social features needed in an application.

One model that we have recently experimented combines elements of Agent-Behaviour with Structure-Behavior-Function models for complex systems. The Agent-Behavior framework is useful in highlighting the actors/agents – and the modes of interactions and behaviors amongst the agents. This framework can model how the overall outcomes change as the agents in the system interact over time. This model clarifies the agent behavior – and the potential outcomes – but it still abstract from a product definition perspective.

This is where the Structure-Behavior-Function model can be applied to align the social behaviors that emerged from the Agent-Behavior model. Essentially, Structure can be seen as the environment in which the agents will conduct their behaviors. And those behaviors will be enabled through Functions in the application.

Thus one can model social apps as a 2 step process – first build the agent-behavior model and then apply the learnings from that into a structure-function design process. This will help ensure that not only are the behaviors of the agents taken into account, but there will also be an understanding of the overall environment/structure in which the behaviors will take place. This gives flexibility in changing the Functions of the app as the agent behavior changes over time as the social graph morphs and matures.

Do sites like Pinterest and Tumblr hurt or help Facebook?

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Recently I’ve been playing along with Pinterest a bit. It’s a well-designed web application – both visually and functionally. At some level it takes long tail discovery, and makes the journey extremely visual, social, and in many ways fun. One thing that is interesting about Pinterest and other sites like Tumblr is that they rely on the Facebook social graph to build their “communities”. At one level it may seem that these sites are giving up on the hard work on building their own communities – and with the strength of Facebook that may itself be true. However I think that there might be something more subtle going on. Facebook initially build its strength on the nature of strong ties among people – friends, families, and colleagues sharing parts of their lives with each other through posts on the Wall, pictures etc. This does satisfy the core human social needs in identifying strongly with certain groups and individuals. However there is another very strong element of the human social need – which is the importance of weak ties among individuals and groups. Research has shown that weak ties are essential for novelty, and many times innovation and serendipity arrives through interactions with the weaker or more fringe ties of our social network. What is remarkable about some of the apps like Pinterest is that they make little attempt at building infrastructure for strong ties – they almost leave Facebook to handle that – but they focus their experience on helping people build large number of weak ties very quickly. I think this is a good symbiotic relationship for both Facebook and sites like Pinterest, and may suggest an interesting experience model for building new social apps – build applications that allow for quick weak ties networks to emerge on top of Facebook’s social graph. The importance is to stress on “weak” ties – so rather than using suggestions of “friends” etc., one should consider other icons of weak ties – like followers or other representations of light interest.

The Sonata Form & Product Experience

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In my continued exploration of metaphors that illuminate building great product experiences, the beautiful musical form of Sonata came forth while reading a book on Western Classical music. The Sonata form has been widely used since Baroque and Classical periods, and is usually the first movement in multi-movement pieces. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 “Pathetique” 1st Movement is a great example that you hear below.

In general, musical forms like Sonata imply a structure or framework within which the composer can bring to life a musical experience that is unique. The Sonata form especially caught my attention as a great framework to think about while building product experiences.

From music theory, the Sonata form has three required sections:

  1. Exposition: The exposition section using presents one or two themes that are then further developed in the next section
  2. Development: In the development section, the themes from the exposition are elaborated, contrasted, varied, and developed further. The listener still retains some of the ideas from the themes, but the composer takes the challenge of ‘playing’ with the theme that brings varying interest and character – yet grounding it somehow with the original ideas.
  3. Recapitulation: In the final required section, brings the Sonata to a closure by bringing back some of the ideas and themes from the exposition, but in a way that provides an element of closure and finality.

There is deep technical material within the Sonata form, but I wanted to stick with some of its structural form as it is a great metaphor for thinking about designing great experiences. Like music, product experiences can be a collection of discordant pieces that are more a cacophonic production rather than a polyphonic or homophonic production. The Sonata form gives another framework to think about how to develop an experience – beginning with clearly outlining one or more themes, developing those themes in unique ways, and then tying them together in a way that brings the full experience to a closure.

Making it Personal

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One of the aspects of great products is that they become an extension of you. In some sense a product that is designed for a vast audience is appropriated by you as you see it fit best in your world. A product goes from something you buy in a store to something that becomes an intimately personal object in your life. As I was reading, Samuel A. Papert’s, “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Power Ideas“, one of the frameworks presented by him in the context of “appropriating” mathematics in a way that a child can make it part of his life, could be explored for designing a ‘personal’ product. Papert mentions three principles that he thought were design criteria for making the subject “appropriable” by children. Building on his words in the book, here is one way to approach this:

  1. Continuity: The product must be continuous with well-established personal knowledge from which it can inherit a sense of warmth and value as well as “cognitive” competence.
  2. Empower: The product must empower the user to perform personally meaningful projects that could not be done without it.
  3. Cultural Resonance: The product must make sense in terms of a larger social context.

As a thought experiment it could be useful to see how some of the popular successes may have fit in this framework.

 

Continuity

Empower

Cultural Resonance

Facebook

The personal knowledge came from your close circle of friends. By definition, that is warm and valued. In essence, the core of the continuity principle for Facebook is the social graph.

Facebook inherently had features that empowered users to do meaningful things and keep in touch with their friends easily. By then opening up the social graph to applications, Facebook opened up the empowerment at a much wider scale.

Facebook chose metaphors and symbols that fit well within most people’s social context – facebooks, Wall, status, pokes, messages, “friending”, gifting etc. With an easy translation of some of these concepts in a person’s life, one can imagine how this can become an extension.

iPhone

Mobile phones by nature are personal. However Apple made it more personal by building on the personal knowledge of your body – specifically your fingers. Touch is an intimate act in most Western cultures, and by closely tying the screen and the input into one canvas, it provides a whole, continuous, personal experience.

iPhone went to an unprecedented level to add capabilities – accelerometers, GPS, camera – all aimed at making the mobile phone a very powerful tool in a person’s hand. Again like Facebook, they also opened up the ecosystem to developers so that more apps can be created to empower people to accomplish their projects using the phone.

iPhone’s resonance in the broader social context is largely built on Apple’s amazing ability to understand how products fit in a person’s life. iPhone’s (and Apple in general) approach to cultural resonance is somewhat more subtle and grounded in a deep understanding of how design metaphorically approaches our cultural values.

 

Few companies designing to make their products “personal” end up achieving depth in all three parts of the framework.

Tools Model – Part 2

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So how does the notion that the use of a tool is a mechanical operation help drive better products and innovation? Once the purpose is clearly identified, the tools operation is defined by interaction of a set of forces to achieve the goal. The set of operations or interactions to achieve the purpose is in some sense a function of technology that is available today or needs to be invented in order to execute the steps. For example, assume that two human beings are physically apart, but need to interact with each other. The mechanical operations available to them to close this physical gap have changed dramatically over the ages – legs (walking), horses, carriages, cars, post, phones, email and so forth. This in some sense is one fundamental basis of innovation – the purpose stays constant – however the mechanical operations needed to achieve that purpose are subject to technical changes and disruptions.

What exactly is ‘mechanical’? Based on Dr. Paul Carus, “The Philosophy of the Tool”,

“The mechanical is, as it were, mathematics in motion, and the mechanical in nature is the raison d’être of its own glorious order, its wonderful regularity and systematic constitution that allows us to trace its uniformities and to formulate them into natural laws.”

In essence thinking of the tool in terms of a set of mechanical operations helps put a strong analytical framework to characterize how the purpose is achieved. Since ‘mechanical’ implies both regular and systematic, it allows us to think about the discrete set of operations that the user needs to initiate. This analytical framework can be instrumental in designing a product.

In effect, here is a possible framework to model products on the basis of ‘tools’:

  1. Crisp understanding of the purpose of the user. The purpose is different than a need or a desire. The purpose is the articulation of a particular state of end results. For example, a user may ask for water. However the purpose (or the end result desired) could be that they would like to quench their thirst. There may be more than one way to achieve that purpose.
  2. A deep understanding of how the user achieves the purpose today. This involves analysis of the mechanical operations the user undertakes today to achieve the purpose. This analysis is important to know where the inefficiencies are, where the user’s frustrations are, where there is scope for disruptive changes, where differentiation can happen.
  3. Creative application of current technology or research into new technologies to provide a more efficient, easier, and more approachable construction of a new set of mechanical operations to achieve the same purpose.

This framework in some sense opens up the world to never ending innovation. People’s goals evolve very slowly over the millennium – however technology does change very rapidly – and that should have a huge impact on how people achieve their goals. This framework can allow for the rapid application of new technologies in creative ways to design innovative products.

“Tools” as a model for product design

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Jonathon Ive had an interesting comment in the December 2010 issue of Wallpaper.

“We make tools. Whether our tools enable communication or enable people to create something that didn’t exist yesterday – we still consider them to be tools.’ This view, he believes, ‘builds within us a deference at a very deep level towards their use and the people that are going to be using them, our customers.”

His use of the word “tools” caught my attention. Tools have been largely disparaged as a business model in the Valley – in favor of larger or cooler sounding constructs such as “platforms” or “applications” – yet, here is Jonathan Ive explicitly stating that Apple thinks of their products as “tools”.

Hmm…so perhaps rather than thinking of “tools” as a business model, it might be interesting to think of this as a “product design” model. To look into this further, I found this very interesting treatise on tools from 1893 – “The Philosophy of the Tool” by Dr. Paul Carus. According to him,

“A tool is any implement employed for rendering work effective. Work fills gaps between the needs of the worker and his purposes; it bridges the chasm between a desire and the thing or state of things desired; and a tool facilitates the performance of work, it helps us to execute the motions necessary for reaching the end in view.

Thus, tools exist only where there is a purpose, and the use of tools is always a mechanical operation.”

Two interesting ideas here – one the crisp separation of the purpose and the operation, and the notion that the use of the tool is a mechanical act. The first idea corresponds very well to the idea of “user stories” in agile development. Product definition, especially for consumer products, has always been a challenging exercise as many times the end state or goal that the user really wants to achieve gets mingled with the mechanics of achieving that goal. So thinking about the product as a “tool” at the minimum helps with the mental model of ensuring that the end purpose or the goals that the user is trying to achieve are explicitly clear. Apple’s products are known for their “essential” nature and their simplicity, and I think that the discipline of being true to user’s intended purpose – and designing the best product to achieve ONLY that purpose, greatly helps in bringing sharp focus to the products.

While Apple’s products are known for their ease of use and simplicity, they are also known for their remarkable innovation. Does thinking about products as tools help drive innovation? I believe so. I think the answer here lies in the second part of the definition of tools – which is the “mechanical operation” designed to achieve the user’s goal. More on that in the upcoming post.