MikePadgett.com

I attended a seminar last night that represented the Belgian contribution to World Usability Day.

The conference was hosted by interactive agency Emakina and the theme set by the global organisers Usability Professionals Association was Transportation.

The agenda consisted of presentations on traffic congestion, user experience in online airline booking and social networking.

Usability and traffic congestion

The opening presentation from Joannes Vandermeulen, concerning how usability could contribute to the resolution of traffic congestion, was both curious and interesting.

Vandermeulen compared the current, systemic approach to traffic management with the possibilities of adapting Swarm theory, wondering aloud how direct communication between car drivers might resolve jam situations.

The online airline

So far, so good. Next we heard about an Emakina case study in which the latter had presented client Brussels Airlines with what it called a “user experience mission”.

The idea is to method act the process of booking and taking the flight, from website to take-off, so that the user experience can be considered not as an isolated online transaction but rather in the context of a larger process in which users engage with the brand. Hence the trip to Lisbon.

Of course I appreciate the sincerity of the thinking here, yet it does sound nevertheless like a marvellous jolly too - pity I’ve never had an airline industry client (though some orgs would be more preferable than others: could you imagine doing a user experience mission for SkyChefs?).

Feeling unsociable about the social web

After the break, there followed two presentations on the subject of social networking. Unlike Laurent Goffin, who was riffing enthusiastically about the “social web”, I’ve been unable to retain quite the same level of enthusiasm lately.

And here’s why. As far as social networking’s concerned, I’m right in the middle of yet another perennial cycle in which:

• I have embraced change;
• I have seen opportunities;
• I have accepted that it will have implications for my work;
• I have begun to implement it;

All good. But now, two or three years later, the cycle has predictably evolved:

• My clients have now heard a few acronyms and buzzwords;
• My clients can talk of nothing else;
• My clients call me in and tell me that I must embrace this new and exciting change, discover its opportunities, accept that it will have implications for my work and start to implement it;
• My clients insist on a [insert the social network du jour that's très à la mode] presence

Don’t misunderstand me, I love my clients: they do their thing, they pay my bills and they fill my day with endless amusement. But sometimes they behave like kids. This is the result of having baby boomers in senior management.

In a way, you could visualise this cycle in the same way as Joannes Vandermeulen described wave theory in traffic jams. Think of me as the blue car and it makes perfect sense.

Rant over, but what does social networking have to do with transportation?

And finally

There’s always a risk that this type of event, managed by a company, can end up being a glorified advertising campaign for the host. Whilst Emakina made reasonable efforts to avoid this situation, I did find myself wondering about what other contributors - myself included - might have offered, especially since we were told there had been numerous submissions.

Perhaps with a wider range of contributors there might have been more focus on the theme of transportation, in which I was particularly interested after the recent issue of UX. There might also have been some discussion of media other than the Internet.

Fundamentally, what’s most important is that this event - the Belgian edition of the global initiative - continues to grow. This year’s audience was quite impressive and very encouraging. If I’m around next year, the UPA’s designated theme matches my competences and I hear about it soon enough, then I’ll certainly consider making a submission!

Some things just wouldn’t work offline, would they?

Wikipedia would be no different to the Encyclopedia Britannica (actually without the key differentiator of connectivity, Wikipedia would have little going for it, if Britannica is to be believed).

Or why not imagine a Faceparty where you’re the only guest? MySpace where yours is the only profile, yours the only lonely mug pasted up, you the only one dressed in Sir Philip Green, gormless and doped on fast food.

If we didn’t have the Internet, we’d be stuck with television repeats of You’ve Been Framed or Tarrant on TV instead of glorious, cut-out-the-anchorman Google Video or YouTube (is that really Steve Ballmer?)

Should we breathe a sigh relief and admit that we can’t live without the Internet, just as we could never go back to a world without mobile phones, then? On the one hand, the Internet is more banal than telly, perfect for the 21st century attention span. On the other it still threatens, like a glimpse of sunshine in a dirty grey sky, to be a great leveller.

BP post Groom: never the same?

Talking of TV, people often laugh when I tell them I don’t own one. Once more for the kiddies, it’s because J and I really don’t need the advertising and we don’t do small talk at work. However, I must admit that I still have a fond recall for old shows and for the zenith of Internet-only ideas, this one’s a beauty: nichy, gauche but ultimately fascinating.

The gold medal goes to JumpTheShark.com, a repository of the moments when great TV shows started to go downhill. Everything from The A-Team (when the guys were no longer on the run) to Zorro (when they swapped the trusty black steed for a white one).

Absolutely riveting. For five minutes.

Seems like there’s a name for everything these days. The groove between the two branches of your moustache right under your nostrils is called a philtrum.

“Web 2.0″ is another of these odd descriptors, only unlike the groove between your moustache, it won’t stand up to thousands of years of evolution.

“Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” questions the small child sat on the lap of the rather severe looking gentleman father. The child asks this in big type, which means that the question is actually directed at us.

Men who originally saw this singular poster probably felt a somewhat confusing swelling of patriarchal and patriotic feelings. But with the benefit of hindsight, to me the gentleman father looks a bit disturbed, a bit haggard even, and in front of his kids he would have almost certainly yarned away the worst excesses of shelling and dead comrades like my relatives always have.

Before I get a bit too bogged down in lyrical prose on matters of the Home Front, because Roger Waters has long since cornered that particular market, let me try to conduct a forced march back to what I was originally on about.

Web 2.0 is one of those names that, as a web professional, fills me with uncommon dread. Such self-conscious hokum is the web designer’s equivalent of Mannerism: a group of irritating latecomers taking the hard won standards, the great concepts and the pioneering designs and using them as value adds on pointless start-ups in extremis ad nauseam. The results are the stuff of a hundred keynote speeches.

As we all know, start-ups are nothing new. But what grates a bit is the fact that we should have learned some lessons after the bubble burst on “Web 1.0″ and yet cash is once more forthcoming for crackpot schemes given a veneer of credibility by improved practices.

In this information era, things change oh so fast, and as Alvin Toffler once described at length, the capacity to deal with the pace of such ‘advances’ is simply not within the human grasp. Which may explain the sudden amnesia on the part of investors when it comes to the current slew of whatever-dot-coms. So pardon my cynicism, but some of these schemes look more vague and gauzy than their failed predecessors.

What’s also worrying is that the entirely modern propensity for labelling everything has come up with “2.0″ - an outright suggestion that, like new versions of software, these projects are somehow bigger and better. That’s a view clearly endorsed by such web big-hitters as Ask.com, Google and Yahoo.

If we assume that bigger hasn’t quite happened yet, let’s look at better:

BoingBoing.net, an eminently spellable dotcom, claims to be a “Directory
of Wonderful Things”. (you’ll see, by the way, a lot of these directories in the Web 2.0 Hall of Fame So Far). It seems to pick up on those oddities that keep you on Wikipedia much longer than you intended having looked up a definition of something as prosaic and overused as “AJAX”.

BoingBoing (or BB to those in the ultraknow) is maintained by a bunch of conscientious and probably talented authors who are propping up the site presumably until enough users will maintain it for them while they count the ad revenues (many Web 2.0 sites are, by the way, maintained by authors who may have been recruited from their snappy blogs that have been running ’since before the Internet’).

“The ‘mediocre’ argument really gets me going, though, because it’s anti-people”, says one BB user in response to an article about another article in Wired that the web was mediocre, “People are messy, illogical, and mediocre, and that’s beautiful. Damn beautiful.”.

By the sudden entry of the word ‘mediocrity’ into my discussion, I am reminded of the excellent series of little books by Gerritzen and Lovink in the beautifully blunt NL.Design style. But let’s continue…

Web 2.0 sites - how many will still be here next year?

A tongue-in-cheek look at Web 2.0 comes in the form of James Britt’s excellent Web 2.0 Validator. For those of you who wondered how the Blog that Nobody Reads fared, the result was 6 out of 43! Or why not try Andrew Wooldridge’s readymade off-the-shelf 2.0 startup generator Web Two Point Oh if you’re stuck for ideas on how to break into this emerging market?

Tim O’Reilly, who apparently coined the phrase, surely can’t keep down just a little self-satisfaction when he writes that since he blurted out the concept (or at least the phrase, anyway), Google offers up over 9 million results for “Web 2.0″.

“[C]ompanies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means”, complains Mr O’Reilly. When the phrase was coined, he was talking about positives and he’s right: there are some excellent, worthwhile projects out there. The Internet can indeed deliver worthwhile and often totally free applications and hubs of useful information that help people manage their interests, their work and their lives. People make discoveries with Wikipedia, express themselves through blogs and store their memories with Flickr. The organisations behind these projects create jobs and maintain livelihoods and eventually a bit of wealth might get shared around.

The key driver is that Web 2.0 is largely founded on the idea of community, a quasi-daft utopia that was appreciated and duly bungled by many Web 1.0 startups and company offerings.

It’s what happens to all this when the corporates wade in with their blank chequebooks that’s the underlying concern. When your dearly beloved community in your very own corner of the web gets bought by Yahoo! you get a shock. Your rose-tinted contact lenses drop out because you, quite legitimately, came to believe that no-one owned your community, your cache of photos and your blog. Unstintingly altrustic Oompa Loompas did bits of maintenance behind-the-scenes to make sure the grass still grew, but your picturesque landscape of web services was basically everyone’s and perhaps you didn’t mind dropping a few coins in the tin from time to time.

But the corporates want your data, your money and your Oompa Loompas. Or else they decide your ‘beta’ isn’t working and it gets dropped before ‘release’

[Distant echoes of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"]

Now the wording on this particular manifesto is slightly more sensible (i.e. commercial) this time around. Everyone in the web business will realise that, but I don’t think the Internet public does. Plus I cannot help but feel resentment towards those buffoons who market my hard work as a value add.

See also: Zeldman’s article at A List Apart.