Valueless Design

Valueless Design

In a fascinating piece on the amazing growth of the photo-sharing site Fotolog, Jason Kottke clearly articulates a growing problem in design:

“Fotolog…relative to Flickr…has
changed little in the past couple of years. Fotolog has groups and
message boards, but they’re not done as well as Flickr’s
and there’s no tags, no APIs, no JavaScript widgets, no
“embed this photo on your blog/MySpace”, and no helpful
Ajax design elements, all supposedly required elements for a successful
site in the Web 2.0 era. Even now, Fotolog’s feature set and
design remains planted firmly in Web 1.0 territory.”

How do sites with sub-optimal visual design and technology grow so big and become so successful? How are MySpace, Fotolog, and Craigslist
so popular in an age that values stunning visual design and amazing
technology above all else? Conversely, how is it that Flickr, full of
beauty and Ajax, is being overtaken by a site as boring as Fotolog?

Aye, there’s the rub…a rub that defines the current state of web design.

First off, a little throat-clearing. We’re dealing with Alexa stats
here, so there are no guarantees that anything is accurate. Just
because Alexa shows that Fotolog gets more traffic than Flickr
doesn’t mean that it is…it’s kind of like listening
to a reporter who usually covers political news tell us what’s
going on in Silicon Valley. Suspect, to say the least. But for the sake
of argument let’s assume that the trend is right, and that
Fotolog is overtaking Flickr in terms of traffic.

Page views and Ajax…a match made in Hell

Well, one reason why Fotolog might appear so successful is the very
technology that Jason mentions: Ajax. Page views are a metric that
Alexa uses in its traffic calculation. But when you switch to an Ajax
interface, your page views plummet. For example, when people want to
add a tag, change a headline, or edit a photo set on Flickr very few
page views occur. You’re simply interacting with a single screen
that doesn’t refresh, but sends and receives requests in the
background. This undoubtedly has a huge effect on the page views on
Flickr.

Fotolog, on the other hand, gets a page view anytime a person wants
to change anything. Therefore, less efficient bandwidth consumption and
server usage actually gets Fotolog much higher traffic
numbers…which is pretty damn ironic.

What’s more ironic is that this is an increasing problem on
huge advertising sites and few people want to talk about it.
What’s at stake? Billions of dollars that are wrapped up in
page-view models where money changes hands depending on what
“traffic” a site receives. And for years that traffic
depends on page requests to a server, which of course happens even when
people are doing simple things like changing a photos headline. So
while companies realize that using an Ajax interface, when done well,
can literally save millions in bandwidth costs and actually provide a
faster, easier-to-use interface, they also realize that their
advertisers only know one metric: the page view.

I’ve talked to some folks at Yahoo
about this, and they say that their discussions on this topic get
pretty tense. This is a huge problem for them because so much of their
revenue is advertising based but they know that the future of interface
design is elegant Ajax. This problem has been known for some time, but we’re still at the start of the huge effort in migrating away from the page view as a valuable metric for anything.

Technology doesn’t a great value make

Jason makes a strong case that technology is over-valued. I think he’s exactly right when he says:

“Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the
silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog,
MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build
compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on
so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t
think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

This is the exact problem I’ve been talking about lately: in
some cases visual design and/or technology are trumped by other aspects
of design.

In my Social Design talk,
which I most recently gave at the Web App Summit, I ask this question:
What are the most successful web sites in the world? The answers are
the ones you would expect: Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, Craigslist,
Amazon, eBay.

But then I ask the question slightly differently: What are the most well-designed
web sites in the world? Outside of a minimalist Google, there is no
overlap for most folks. None of the others on the list are
“well-designed” in their minds…they’re simply
successful, poorly-designed sites. They attribute the success of these
sites to other factors: being first in the market, having economies of
scale, etc.

From a visual design standpoint they might be right: these sites
aren’t going to win any visual design contests. But the value of
these sites goes so far beyond the visual that to judge them by the way
they look is to completely miss the boat. In our testing at UIE,
for example, we’ve never had anyone refuse to shop at Amazon
because it doesn’t look great…in fact people are most
passionate about Amazon because of the value they get from
reviews…and the rest of the socially-focused features there.
People love Amazon, and it has nothing to do with its visual design!

And people are passionate about the other very successful sites,
too. To Jason’s point, the major value of all of the successful
sites doesn’t rest on what specific technology they use or
whether they have tagging. Instead, the major value rests on social
aspects of the design…take away the interaction of the
communities on these sites and there is very little value left in them.
Take away the reviews from Amazon and you’ll hear a great big
sucking sound of folks rushing out to buy their wares on some other
site…

Similarly to Amazon, Fotolog relies heavily on social interaction,
in their case sharing photos with friends. This is the primary value of
the site, not how they do it from a technological standpoint.

The usual red herring: judging a book by its cover

Ignoring visuals and technology (at least temporarily) is a big
change for many designers and technologists. Why? Because technology
and visuals often get the credit when things go well, but aren’t
really talked about when things go contrary to our assumptions.
That’s exactly Jason’s point: why is it that Fotolog uses
inferior technology and visual design and still succeeds?

I think the answer is that the differentiator on the Web right now
isn’t great visual design or technology, although those help out
tremendously (don’t get me wrong!). An analogy might be in order
here because so many people think I’m trying to denigrate visual
design…I’m not! Here’s an analogy:

Every time George Bush makes his State of the Union Address he
speaks very clearly, his words are well-chosen and his speechwriters
are obviously top-of-the-class. They communicate very well, and for the
most part every single person who listens or watches the address knows
exactly what George Bush is trying to say. Speechwriters learning the
craft would do well to emulate the skill and technique of Bush’s
speechwriters. Even so, the address is a bunch of statements that most
people disagree with: most people want the U.S. out of Iraq and observe
that the efforts there have largely been a failure. But the State of
the Union Address itself is well-executed: it’s clear
communication…Bush is just sending the wrong message.

This is the same with visual design: you can execute beautifully but
if the message you’re sending isn’t the one the audience
wants to hear then the overall design will be a failure. I believe this
is what Jason is talking about with his repeated references to
“Web 2.0″. He doesn’t see the value in the majority
of so-called Web 2.0 services…they might look great and have
interesting technology but if they don’t actually improve our
lives…then what good are they?

Visual design is about communicating a message well…getting
the point across. The problem comes when the message being communicated
isn’t the right one…and that’s exactly what
we’re seeing so much of…so many sites have great visual
design and great technology but just aren’t sending a valuable
message…

Where are all these sites? They’re everywhere: they’re the ones you’re NOT using.

There are two primary aspects of design: communicating the right
message. Why is this two aspects? Because one aspect is communicating a
message well and the other is making sure it is the right message in
the first place. Perhaps this second part is what is called design strategy these days. I don’t know, but I know that one needs the other in each and every design project.

Preventing valueless design

We need a new way of thinking to prevent valueless design.
Valueless design is like a George Bush speech: well-executed but wrong.
While it may be communicating beautifully on one level, the impact on
society may be minimal or, even worse, negative. We need design that
provides real value to humans.

The new model as I call it is social design: a focus on the
social lives of users, the context of how people live, and the
connections they have with their family, friends, and loved ones.
It’s about the daily activities that people care about, that make
their lives richer, more fulfilling, and that have very little to do
with how a piece of software looks or works behind the scenes.

But that’s just how I see it. I’m sure that other ways to get people in the right design mindset. I believe the best designers not only execute technically well, but have the mindset to discover
the right design. They’re open to new ideas, passionate about
what they do, and focused on the lives of their users in order to
prevent sending the wrong message.

Alan Moore

Research by Cap
Gemini Ernst and Young in October 2003 found that 17% of car
buyers were influenced by TV ads, whilst 71% were influenced by word
of mouth. And a Nokia Monitor research project in 2004 found that 49%
of mobile buyers were influenced by word of mouth, whilst crucially
the decision-making has reduced from 6 weeks to 6 days.

And as Tomi Ahonen
likes to say,
“In a connected world sharing information is
power.”

The increasing penetration of the internet,
coupled with increasingly cheap bandwidth, has become our means to
search for more credible, more authorative sources of information.

Consumers have learnt to be more discerning and lest trusting. We
actively seek sources of information we trust. That’s why, 27%
of Americans now read blogs and 77% of Americans seek their primary
news today online.

The aggregated result, a growing disconnect
between the way consumers want to be communicated to and the way
organisations communicate with them.

This is further supported by numerous reports and surveys
(Yankelovich, Chartered
Institute of Marketing, Deutsche
Bank). Glen Urban,
Professor at the Sloan School of
Management, MIT said,

“Evidence is building that the paradigm of
marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the
last 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies
that are essential in a time of information empowerment.”

The internet in many ways is not so much a technology as
social phenomenon.

For example, the rise of community rating sites such as Epinions,
where you can get marks out of ten from well-being medicines to the
latest movies, or the creation of ‘folksonomies’
such as flickr.com., with its social
tags system, or travelpost.com,
a community site for those travelling the world, with, as the site
says, “174,238+ unbiased hotel reviews, travel journals, photos and
itineraries.” For unbiased read; co-created, unfiltered, authentic,
more credible.

And like World
of Warcraft, or Desert
Combat (Massive
Multiplayer Online Role Player Games), all these sites have
connectivity of one-to-one and many-to-many. They are constantly
updated or modified with new content, have built an interested and
passionate community and are also successful commercial models.

The social phenomenon of the internet goes further, for example it
extends into blogging, that last year toppled leading media icons
like CBS anchorman Dan
Rather or Jason
Eason, Chief News Director of CNN, who was forced to resign over
remarks he had made at Davos by
Rony Abovitz,
a blogger and that nearly brought the bicycle lock manufacturer
Kryptonite to its knees.

Blogging showcases how enlightened companies have embraced the
social phenomenon of the Internet.

Bob
Lutz Vice Chairman at GM blogs on the GM
Fast Lane Blog, Jonathan
Schwartz COO of Sun Microsystems and himself a blogger, believes
that the 1000 bloggers at Sun have done more for his company than a
billion ad campaign ever could.

Jamie
Oliver’s School Dinners, is a more homegrown example, of one
man’s passionate belief that we should stop feeding our kids junk
food in schools, which translated into the social phenomenon of a
community of interest forming around an issue that cared passionately
about what we feed our kids in school. Jamie’s
School Dinners motivated people to respond in a number of ways;
230,000 signatures delivered in a petition to 10
Downing Street and the creation of worldwide online forums, via
Jamie’s blogsite and an
ongoing debate globally about what we feed our kids.

In the corporate world the Boeing
Design Team with 120,000 members is another example of how a
corporation has harnessed the collective intellect of many people who
are seriously interested in aircraft and aviation. These people are
spread across the globe and are constantly in touch with Boeing
sharing and discussing information about the future development of
Boeing aircrafts. The maxim that “nobody is as clever as
everybody,” is never truer than here.

Habbo Hotel is
the preferred virtual playground for teenagers from Finland to UK to
Japan, spending on average 40 minutes per session at this internet
based gaming world, where payments are made by mobile phone. Over the
past two years in the UK alone Habbo Hotel has acquired over a
million gamers.

And we see it in mobile phone based smart
mobs, which brought down the government of Joseph
Estrada of the Philippines in a peaceful
mass demonstration of literally over a million participants in a
smart mob.

Adriana
Cronin-Lukas co-founder of the Big
Blog Company says that the Internet is not a channel, it is
what’s causing the other channels to leak and bleed ‘content’.
This will become more profound as the internet increasingly converges
with the mobile device. It is a valuable insight.

For companies the threat is this:
The
internet combined with broadband essentially changes everything.
It changes the way customers can access information and changes the
way they use it. It changes the way business can communicate with
their customers and it also changes how a business might go to
market. It changes the linking between channels, that link
businesses, customers, suppliers and employees. It offers opportunity
and it offers your once helpless competitors the chance to radically
rethink their business strategies and attack vital parts of your
business model.

Professor
Anthony Hopwood of the Said
Business School in Oxford believes that there has been a
fundamental structural change in the way we consume information and
content. This is supported by Merrill
Brown, author of a Carnegie
Corporation of New York report on media consumption.

On the news media Merrill says, “The future course of
news is being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer
wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in
traditional ways.“

Rupert
Murdoch speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in
April 2005 reinforced the point,

“What is happening right before us is,
in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing
news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their
up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like
figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the
religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news
presented as gospel.“

Murdoch states that where four out of every five Americans in 1964
read a paper every day, today, only half do. For younger readers the
figures are even worse.

So what happened to 18-24 year
olds usage of traditional media like TV and newspapers? The
answer is they are early adopters of new media. New media includes:

• the internet

• picture phones

• instant messaging

• blogging

• cell phones

• MP3 players

• satellite radio

• text messaging

• TiVo/Replay

• broadband TV and web radio.

But its not only the news industry that is feeling the
pre-tremors of the volcanic eruption that technology is about to
unleash, as Lord
Currie described it in a Royal Television Society Fleming
Memorial Lecture in 2004. He believes that over the next 10 years
audiences will move away from the linear, scheduled world where
relatively limited number of distributors who push their content at
the viewer…. “we will instead enter a world where content is
increasingly delivered through internet-protocol-based networks that
are non-linear, on-demand and entirely self-scheduled. In that world,
the viewer – not the broadcaster – will decide what is consumed
and how.”

BT’s announcement in July 2005 that it is to launch
an IPTV
channel in conjunction with Microsoft demonstrates exactly what
Lord Currie means as technology goes up though the gears.

IPTV aggregates and amplifies this fundamental change in how we,
collect, edit and consume information or content and share it with
our friends.

Howard Rheinegold author
of the book Smart
Mobs believes that the mobile phone amplifies peoples talents for
co-operation.

The internet amplifies human interaction.

That is why MTV have recently launched 2 broadband channels whilst
AOL has created a partnered multimedia production company that will
accelerate its live entertainment events online, as well as for TV,
cell phones and other media platforms.

The internet + broadband has put the “me” into media, and Jeff
Jarvis at Buzzmachine
describes traditional mass media channels as cold media, whereas,
community sites like wikipedia, blogs, commercial online enterprises
like ebay, Amazon etc., are what he describes are hot media.

Vital, emergent, with two way flows of communication, the
connection of many-to-many – social media.

To put this in
context, last July’s tragic bombings in London demonstrated how far
we have come in how we collect, share, create, and disseminate
information. Newsweek (July 9,2005) describes the most dramatic
example of this,

“The biggest story on Thursday was Wikipedia,
the online encyclopedia that Internet users around the world freely
add to and edit. Yesterday’s
entry on the London bombings was amended, edited and updated by
hundreds of readers no fewer than 2,800 times throughout the day.

The
entry has photographs, detailed timelines, contact numbers, a
complete translated statement by the jihadist group claiming
responsibility for the attacks and links to other Wikipedia entries.“

The first video pictures broadcast from CNN came from a citizen
journalist, as did many images broadcast by the BBC.

The BBC is no slouch these days has understood the implications
for its organization. And has for example taken a “pioneering
new approach to public access rights in digital age.” For
example The
Creative Archive Project. The project will allow British
residents to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk
for non-commercial use, keep them on their PCs, manipulate and share
them, thereby making the BBC archives more accessible to licence-fee
payers. In the next, pilot phase of the project the Creative
Archive will make 100 hours of BBC content available.

To
see how connected communities are generating a paradigm shift in how
businesses can connect and co-create value with their audiences, we
look to Korea and the online newspaper, OhMyNews.
OhMyNews is the third largest newspaper in Korea, but the important
part is that it has 26,000 citizen reporters that contribute to the
newspaper. Get your story published and you receive $20 USD and your
name in print.

Founder and Editor Oh
Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine “With
OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where
people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream,
conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a
reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for
themselves.”

The Guardian
(who has its own blog) has described it as the world’s most
domestically powerful news site and, a South Korean diplomat was
quoted as saying that no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

Ebay,
Yahoo
Social Search, SMS
messaging and Skype in
telecoms, music file sharing, Wikipedia and OhMyNews all show how
enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows can transform
business models. Companies need to understand that today value lies
with the consumer not the other way round.

And Simon London writing for the Financial Times
Monday 27th June 2005, said,

“In business as in art, we live in a postmodern
era. Old certainties are being demolished and relationships
redefined. Everything you thought about business has been upended.
The relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The
old notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded
passé by management theorists.”

In
its cover story entitled the Power of Us, of June 20, Business Week
said that community power is the biggest change to business companies
have faced since the Industrial Age. In context, that means bigger
than the telephone, TV, credit cards, the PC and the internet. The
Economist, in its cover story Crowned at Last, on April 2 2005 ,
said, “Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary
implications of newly empowered consumers. Only those firms ready and
able to serve these new customers will survive.”

Peer-to-peer communication is the life force of
communities – the rapid emergence and convergence of the
mobile phone and the internet means that we suddenly have access to
our peers, our friends, our colleagues and family members. And like
search that is changing peoples habits and attitudes. We are getting
used to living in a connected age where we naturally draw on our
participation in various networks for assistance information and
support.

The problem for businesses and marketers is that traditional
marketing has become in the eyes of everyday people, adversarial.

Customers have changed and adapted to this new
always on, always connected, media fragmented world, they seek value
by searching, they are not waiting for you to interrupt them with
unwanted messaging, they look to their peers for voices of authority.

They are in effect doing it for themselves.

Shoshana Zuboff, in her book “The
support economy” Penguin 2002, said,
“In today’s
market, supporting end consumers is not an occasional event, but a
necessary condition of being in business.”

Some companies are responding to consumer power by pushing harder
down more channels using traditional marketing methods.

But you can no longer take one way broadcast or a monopoly
approach into a consumer empowered world. Because the internet and
increasingly the mobile phone has fundamentally changed this.

Photo
credit: Aleksandar
Bracinac

The harsh reality for all businesses today is
that they need to change they way they think about marketing and
marketing communication strategies.

And the notion of mass media is fast becoming an oxymoron.

The current language and behaviour of our post-modern culture is
one of:

• Flexibility

• Fluidity

• Portability

• Permeability

• Transparency

• Interactivity

• Immediacy

• Peer-to-peer networks and flows of
  communication between them.

So what are the implications for companies as a
consequence of these developments?

Companies need to ask:

• Are our products
  and services the very best they can be?

• How can we support
  our 21st Century consumers in a real and credible way?

• Can we facilitate
  positive co-creation?

• Does our current
  operational structure allow us to support this?

• Are we engaging
  our audience or are we overly transmitting to them?

• Can we deliver a
  genuine valuable experience across multiple platforms?

• Do we have the metrics
  to support such initiatives?

• How can we align
  everything we do to deliver enhanced customer advocacy?

• Can we become a
  dynamic engaging brand that is true to ourselves and true to our
  customers?

• Can we continue to accept mediocrity?

Jeff Jarvis
writing on his blog
Buzzmachine, posted in late 2005 “ Who
owns the wisdom of the crowd?” in which he said,

“…there’s one more fundamental notion that
informs this new society, a notion that big companies and
institutions invariably forget because they were built in the old
order.

This is no longer a centralized world, a world
controlled by those institutions.

This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by
us.

And if you try to take control away from us, you will
lose.

It used to be that you could take control away from
us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can
always go somewhere else for content or information or service.

There’s always another news story, always another
email service, always another search engine.

Thus my first law, once again: Give us
control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.”

All marketing interaction should deliver an experience
that actively and positively links customers, media and
brand in relevant and meaningful ways. Brand experience replaces
broadcasting in its broadest sense.

Successful brands today are:

• Life Enabling

• Life Simplifying

• Navigational.

Set those as your guiding principles.

And finally a word from Glen
L. Urban who writes:
“As customer power grows,
innovative companies are moving beyond traditional push marketing and
customer relationship management to become full proponents of the
customer agenda.“
(source: Glen L. Urban.
The
Emerging Era of Customer Advocacy. 2004)

Amen to that.

About the author:
Alan
Moore is the CEO of SMLXL
a next-generation creative marketing company, focused on enabling
businesses and brands to engage with their audiences and succeed in
the 21st Century.