designcult

Tired of mediated online commerce?

A few weeks ago, I posted on Facebook that I was "tiring of mediated online commerce." It was a bit of a flip comment, probably in response to seeing too many headlines about the Groupon IPO, Google Deals, Facebook Deals, etc. I wasn't entirely sure what I meant, so I had to go back and think about why I responded that way.

INtrospection time! I think serious introspection (deeper than "I like X but not Y") has become an underused tool for designers & researchers. Yes, we are not always representative of other users -- but who is? We are all unique snowflakes! But I know myself really well. And I can ask myself no end of nosy questions without being too intrusive. So, with the obvious & tedious caveat that I may not be representative of other unique snowflakes out of the way, I can forge on.

First point: I can't be too tired of mediated online commerce, because I buy stuff online, all of which is mediated in some way or other, and often I enjoy it. Accentuate the positive: what online purchases have I made recently that have made me really happy? Turns out there's a bunch.

Kickstarter. But wait, you say--kickstarter isn't e-commerce! Well, it isn't. It's a way of funding projects you believe in. And yet ... I've given money to a bunch of projects. In one case, Syzygryd, I was just helping a bunch of awesome people put together a crazy interactive sound-fire-light-sculpture thing, but I did get a bunch of stickers & a tag. Which I treasure! And in another case my wife beta-tested a custom dress service. Beta-testing was the main point. But in the end we paid money for a nice dress! So in at least some cases, Kickstarter feels like commerce, if of a very particular kind. It is mediated (they handle the money & facilitate communication between funders & the project), but what it feels like is a direct connection between you and a project you believe in. Plus sometimes you get stuff. I love funding Kickstarter projects, and usually feel a great deal of attachment to the ongoing project long after the initial project has finished.

Bandcamp. Definitely commerce. You pays your money, you gets some music. But the experience is pretty similar to Kickstarter -- it fosters a very close connection between fan and musician. Often musicians offer different levels of purchase for an album -- a cheap download, a CD with packaging for a little more, a deluxe set with a bunch of schwag for even more. Bandcamp also encourages musicians to sell in a "name your price" style -- set a minimum price but allow fans to pay more if they like. Which they often do -- I usually put in at least a few bucks extra, sometimes more.

Another thing Bandcamp and Kickstarter have in common is fee transparency. It's very easy for a buyer to figure out what the seller is being charged. If part of your goal is to support an artist or project, not just get a good deal, it's helpful to know they aren't getting ripped off.

AirBnB. Mediated commerce! Really, it feels like the early days of eBay, when buying stuff from a stranger was new & exciting. Maybe a little risky. In this case you're renting someone's room or house -- they could be anybody! So making a personal connection with them (as well as looking at reviews & etc.) is a big deal. And, in my case, you find you start reacting to the people you're thinking of renting from as well as the space. Which is that personal connection thing again.

Individual storefronts. I like paying with PayPal for individual merchant storefrontswhen I can so as to avoid creating new accounts or entering credit card numbers. One of my favorites is Betabrand -- they have site with a lot of personality. And they make great pants. I've been pretty obsessive about unsubscribing from commercial emails lately, but these guys I make an exception for. I'm excited to get an email about new pants. Interestingly, they're the only case I can think of where display advertising played a psoitive role in a buying decision--I'm not sure I ever clicked on one, but their Facebook ads did keep them in my mind when I decided to go shopping for pants.

A few more:

• Buying things on eBay old style: vintage auctions! Here I don't form a personal connection with the maker, but I might form one with the seller. And after all these years it's still nice to open up a hand-addressed package from a faraway place to find an old Traveller module from 1982.
• Square. Not online, in person! But really, they're so dang slick they make getting a receipt fun. And the card case app is intended to make a closer connection with regular in-person haunts.

These are the online (ish) commercial transactions that have made me happy over the last few months. The merchants I've done business with these ways are also some of the few for which I haven't unsubscribed from all emails. (Although in some cases I have unsubbed from the mediating services email -- e.g. Airbnb's.) What do they have in common?

With the exception of some merchants who use Square, they are not regular, day-to-day necessities. These are fun purchases. Not necessarily luxuries (those vintage auctions are cheap if you stay cool), but definitely fun stuff. But I do feel happier about them than, say, buying a few MP3 albums on Amazon.

Why? What do all these transactions have in common?

• They all represent a real connection with an individual or small company. Whatever services are mediating the transaction, they're not interfering with that connection.
• More specifically, my communications are with the individual / project / company, rather than any mediating service. (This is fuzzy, as some services do a bit of "I am sending you an email on behalf of X". It really comes down to feel.
• I feel like money is going to the individual or small company I have connected with. I don't feel like I'm getting a deal at their expense 9this is where fee transparency is helpful).
• In many cases I feel like I have a stake in the success of the individual / project / company beyond the specific transaction. Even if I never make another purchase, I might want to keep up with what's going on. I'd feel bad if the company went down or the project was a failure. I'm invested in their success!
• Individuality. All mediating services place some limits on a merchant's ability to have a unique experience, but these all do so in fairly limited ways. The more restrictive services (Airbnb, eBay) still let some personality through. PayPal and Square only really limit the payment experience, which is not where most merchants want to show their character anyway. Bandcamp in particular lets musicians customize their pages very heavily, and in fact is happy to have their brand fade into the background and make it entirely about the musician / fan connection.

So, after all that introspection, I guess what I really meant was: 

I'm not at all tired of mediated online commerce that helps me make personal connections with vendors, that allows the personality of individual vendors to come through, that allows me to support vendors in monetary and non-monetary ways,  that allows me to communicate directly with vendors, and that helps give me a personal stake in the vendor's success.

Bits and pieces from Reality is Broken

Another book finished: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. I've seen Jane speak at SXSW -- she's phenomenal. The core ideas are not new to me (because I've seen her speak), but she fleshes them out in more detail & adds some nuance and research. Which is nice, and increasingly rare for a Current Thinky Book -- I'm getting frustrated by books that don't have anything more to say than what the author's 20 minute TED talk said.

Anyway, these are the bits that caught my eye. More definitional & pragmatic, so more from the front of the book--the back of the book is more the world-changing ARG stuff, which is fine but not what I'm looking for right now.

First, an examination of two related concepts: hard fun and fun failure. (Funnily enough a Berenstein Bears book I was reading with my daughter also covered hard fun.)

Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress (a combination of the Greek eu, for "well-being," and stress.) From a physiological and neurological standpoint, eustress is virtually identical to negative stress: we produce adrenaline, our reward circuitry is activated, and blood flow increases to the attention control centers of the brain.  (p 32)

But without positive failure feedback, this belief is easily undermined. If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency—and optimism goes down the drain. As technology journalist Clive Thompson reminds us, “It’s only fun to fail if the game is fair—and you had every chance of success.”

That’s why Nicole Lazzaro spends so much time consulting with game developers about how, exactly, to design failure sequences that are spectacular and engaging. The trick is simple, but the effect is powerful: you have to show players their own power in the game world, and if possible elicit a smile or a laugh. As long as our failure is interesting, we will keep trying—and remain hopeful that we will succeed eventually. (p. 67)

Next, some detail around Your MP's Expenses, a crowdsourced investigation by the Guardian after the UK expenses scandal (you may remember the floating duck island incident):

The game interface made it easy to take action and see your impact right away. When you examined a document, you had a panel of bright, shiny buttons to press depending on what you’d found. First, you’d decide what kind of document you were looking at: a claim form, proof (a receipt, invoice, or purchase order), a blank page, or “something we haven’t thought of.” Then you’d determine the level of interest of the document: “Interesting,” “Not interesting,” or “Investigate this! I want to know more.” When you’d made your selection, the button lit up, giving you a satisfying feeling of productivity, even if all you’d found was a blank page that wasn’t very interesting. And there was always a real hope of success: the promise of finding the next “duck pond” to keep you working quickly through the flow of documents.

A real-time activity feed showed the names of players logged in recently and the actions they’d taken in the game. This feed made the site feel social. Even though you were not directly interacting with other players, you were copresent with them on the site and sharing the same experience. There was also a series of top contributor lists, for the previous forty-eight hours as well as for all time, to motivate both short-term and long-term participation. And to celebrate successful participation, as well as sheer volume of participation, there was also a “best individual discoveries” page that identified key findings from individual players. Some of these discoveries were over-the-top luxuries offensive to one’s sense of propriety: a £240 giraffe print or a £225 fountain pen, for example. Others were mathematical errors or inconsistencies suggesting individuals were reimbursed more than they were owed. As one player noted, “Bad math on page 29 of an invoice from MP Denis MacShane, who claimed £1,730 worth of reimbursement, when the sum of those items listed was only £1,480.”

But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. (p. 222-223)

What I like about that is how easily you can imagine applying some of these things to non-investigative crowd-sourcing situations.

Also on crowdsourcing, a warning against building in compensation schemes:

The logic behind these practices is that if people are willing to contribute for free, they'll be even happier to contribute when they're compensated. But compensating people for their contributions is not a good way to increase global participation bandwidth, for two key reasons.

First, as numerous scientific studies have shown, compensation typically decreases motivation to engage in activities we would otherwise freely enjoy. If we are paid to do something we would otherwise have done out of interest--such as reading, drawing, participating in a survey, or solving puzzles--we are less likely to do so in the future without getting paid. Compensation increases participation only among groups who would never engage otherwise--and as soon as you stop paying them, they stop participating.

Second, there are natural limits on the monetary resources we can provide in a community of participants. Any given project will have only so much financial capital to give away; even a successful business will eventually hit an upper limit of what it can afford to pay for contributions. Scarce rewards like money and prizes artificially limit the amount of participation a network can inspire and support. (p. 242-3)

Finally, an explicit crowd-sourcing=MMORPG analogy with Wikipedia:

Second, Wikipedia has good game mechanics. Player action has a direct and clear result: edits appear instantly on the site, giving users a powerful sense of control over the environment. This instant impact creates optimism and a strong sense of self-efficacy. It features unlimited work opportunities, of escalating difficulty. As the Wikipedians describe it, "Players can take on quests (WikiProjects, efforts to organize many articles into a single larger article), fight boss-level battles (featured articles that are held to higher standards than ordinary articles), and enter battle arenas (interventions against article vandalism)." It also has a personal feedback system that helps Wikipedians feel like they are improving and making personal progress as they contribute. "Players can accumulate experience points (edit count), allowing them to advance to higher levels (lists of Wikipedians by number of edits)." (p. 230 -1)

Bits and pieces from Empire of Liberty

I just finished Charles S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. It's an awesome book, and since I don't think any American history from this period stuck in my head from school more than "blah blah XYZ affair blah blah Hamilton Burr duel blah War of 1812" I really needed to read it.

Three unrelated quotes struck me enough to preserve. The first is Madison's description of Jefferson, which I think could apply to half the genius geeks I know. (Or me, excepting the genius part.)

Madison knew his friend and knew that Jefferson's fanciful and exaggerated opinions were usually offset by his own very practical and cautious behavior. As Madison later remarked, Jefferson had a habit like "others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment." Indeed, it was often the difference between Jefferson's impulsive opinions and his calculated behavior that led many critics to charge him with hypocrisy and inconsistency. (p. 150)

Expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment. Awesome. I love that.

The next bit starts by relating the fad of calling things "mammoth" and ties it in to a subject that will be slightly familiar to West Wing fans, the Big Block of Cheese. (I say slightly familiar because this story relates to the Jefferson cheese, and the West Wing episode to the follow-up Andrew Jackson cheese.)

The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Wilson Peale's exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of a mastadon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth inhis celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized scientific exhumation in American history. Peale's discovery electrified the country and put the word "mammoth" on everybody's lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of "mammoth bread." In Washington a "mammoth eater" ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes.  And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a "mammoth cheese," six foot in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds. The cheese was produced from the milk of nine hundred cows at a single milking, with no Federalist cows being allowed to participate. The president welcomed this gift from the heart of Federalism as "an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution" (p. 393)

I do not know how the cows were checked for Federalism. Perhaps their stalls were checked for copies of the New York Post. (Did you know the New York Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton?)

I can also recommend A Big Cheese for the White House: The True Tale of a Tremendous Cheddar to folks with kids who'd like to learn more about this important cheese incident in our nation's history. It's a great book with awesome illustrations, and totally answers any practical questions you might have re: how you make a cheese that size and transport it.

Finally, a bit that tells us American politicians weren't always enemies of science:

When am American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying the United States did not make war on science. (p. 544)

Slides for Pig-faced Orcs: Can designers learn anything from old-school roleplaying games?

Someday I'm going to learn to write short titles.

This talk was ridiculously fun to put together, and even more fun to present. I was surprised (and pleased) to have a chance to play some D&D (4th edition Red Box intro rules) the night before—a perfect warmup.

Many thanks to the fine organizers and attendees of the 2011 IA Summit. It was lovely.

Thinking back over the talk, I think I followed my own advice inadvertantly. Give them something to manipulate—I handed out 20-sided dice to everyone who showed up. Leave gaps & messiness—I didn't have a software example for the last point. The audience supplied great ones, so that worked perfectly.

So, here are the orcs.

Pig-faced Orcs: What designers can learn from old-school role-playing games

View more presentations from James Reffell

Event: Pig-Faced Orcs at IA Summit 2011

I'll be giving my newest talk, Pig-faced Orcs: Design lessons from old-school role-playing games at the 2011 IA Summit in Denver Colorado, on Sunday, April 3rd.

You know you want be at a 8:30 AM session to talk about Dungeons & Dragons!

Here's the spiel:

Pig-Faced Orcs: Design Lessons from Old-School Role-playing Games

Can designers learn anything from old-school role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller? Sure!

Designers of all kinds are getting comfortable applying principles of game design to non-game applications. Many of those principles date back to the early days of role-playing games, from Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's first edition of D&D in 1974 to less well-known games like Runequest and Traveller. Game designers have been revisiting these early works and extracting wisdom from them, and I'd like to bring some of those lessons to the user experience community.

In this deliciously nerdy talk, I'll present user-experience lessons from old-school gaming, including the role of showmanship in constructing an experience, how imperfections and missing pieces can increase engagement, and the difference between sandbox and railroad designs.

I'll be handing out free 20-sided dice to all attendees.

Addendum: Yep, that's a real character sheet from when I was about 13. That campaign didn't have any thieves, but it did have "merchants" ...

Slides posted for Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices

I've posted slides (and notes) from the talk "Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices" I gave at SXSW Interactive 2011. I think it went well—I definitely had fun giving it.

(I'll try to never give a talk with a title that long and awkward again. I get tired just typing it out.)

Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices

View more presentations from James Reffell

Update on 3/22: Audio for the talk is also available.

Event: SXSW Interactive 2011

On March 14th, 2011 I'll be speaking at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. My talk is called OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices, but could probably also have been called "What To Do Now That Login Got All Weird."

Here's what I'm going to talk about:

Authentication on the web wasn't simple even when it was mostly usernames and passwords. Now, with 3rd-party authentication services like OAuth, OpenID, and Facebook Connect, creating good user experiences has gotten a little weirder and a little harder. I'll give some examples, and present a pragmatic approach to designing identity and authentication on the web.

Doesn't that sound awesome? If that's not enough, I have a really entertaining digression about the history of "log in". History is cool.

If you're going to SXSWi, please come!

"Don't blame me! I voted for blood."

Bruce Sterling just posted this transcript of a talk he gave in 2009. I read in on my phone on the BART this afternoon, cackling to myself like a crazy person. There's a lot of good in here, but this bit:

Why are Gen-X goths? Why are they goths rather than hippies, beatniks? Why do they like to dress up like dead people? That’s their temperament.

When you’re a young goth, you dress up like a dead person because that’s something grownups do. Dying.

But if you’re an adult Gen-Xer and you’re dressed up as a goth, it’s like “Don’t blame me — because I’m already dead! I’m not morally responsible, I’m not a political actor, it’s not my fault, look, I’m a vampire. Don’t blame me! I voted for blood.” Or, whatever. It’s gothic.

Ow. That hits home. Followed by:

Okay, I want to offer you a general principle here. For a Gothic generation like yours, this is going to be painful for you. I mean, really a cognitive upset.

“Stop acting dead.”

Now, you think that acting dead is a virtue. Because you’ve been trained to behave as is if you were dead for a long time, and it actually appeals to your temperament as a generation. It’s your default position.

But you have to stop it. Because Hair shirt Green, which is most of the things that you had on your action list there, Hairshirt Green just changes the polarity of the twentieth century.

It’s just the opposite of consumer culture. It’s like Satanism for a consumer culture. And all Satanists are actually Christians. It’s not really a different way to live. And it’s not something that’s going to fulfil you.

Now, how do you know if you’re acting dead? Well, there’s a test for this. It’s the Great-Grandfather Principle.

You’re saying: I’m going to do something morally worthwhile that’ll make me feel proud of myself. But does your dead great-grandfather do a better job of it than you?

For instance, saving water. Okay, water is indestructible, first of all. You cannot possible damage water unless you turn it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then it just spontaneously recombines.

But you’re trying to save water, because you’re told to save water. All right, your dead great-grandfather is saving more water than you. You cannot possibly save any more water than a dead guy. He’s greener than you in that regard.

Saving electrical power. Okay, you should be using less power, power’s bad, you need a lower footprint. Okay, your grandfather is not using any electrical power.

He’s much greener than you, you cannot compete with that. If you move into a smaller apartment, your grandfather is in a very, very small apartment. It’s underground, there’s no lighting, there’s no heating, he doesn’t have any broadband.

Recycling, okay, recycling is useful in some ways. Your grandfather is literally being recycled. You can’t actually out-recycle your dead grandfather.

And furthermore, in a pretty short amount of time compared to the length of the problems you’re tackling, you’re going to be dead, like your grandfather.

You’ll be saving everything at that point. You might be alive 70, 80, 90 years. You’re going to be dead for hundreds of millions of years. Billions of years of saving water, billions of years of having a light carbon footprint. It was carbon sequestration. You’re full of carbon, they buried you.

So you need to do things that you can do while alive. Do things you can do while alive. If your grandfather’s doing a better job at it, you can put that aside for later, when you’re dead, like him.

I'm so happy that I'm going to see him speak at SXSW this year -- the last time I went was one of the few years he didn't speak, and that seriously bummed me out.

 

Thief, thief, thief! Baggins!

I'm slowly reading "The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion" by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It's a dense exegesis of LOTR and clearly for pretty obsessive Tolkien fans only.

It's a lot of fun, though. My favorite so far is finding out that baggins is, among other things, English country speak for afternoon tea.There's also layers of bag related language play: Bag-end is Anglicized cul-de-sac (which is in turn faux French), Baggins vs. Sackville Baggins, etc.

I like dense naming. See also Warren Ellis's explanation of how he names characters, in part:

For instance: I’m working on something right now where I think I’ve nailed the character name finally. Birch. Birch = wood = connotes a degree of strength and basic groundedness. But also birching = flagellation. Also, “John Birch Society,” skeevy and untrustworthy. And it’s a hard, sharp word. There’s a lot about the character that unpacks out of the name.

I'm working with some folks on a product name right now. It's hard. And I think the good ones have dense (and sometimes non-obvious) layers of meaning, just like in fiction.

Some pretty random thoughts about Internet stuff

These are unorganized thoughts that are bouncing through my head right now.

• Facebook and Twitter could become less ephemeral. I first said should not could, but there's a trade-off there. The reason for becoming less ephemeral is to allow users to collect and re-assess their fleeting thoughts and links and conversations for later consideration. The reason not to, of course, is that sometimes you don't want that.
• On balance, though, I'd rather have it than not. After all, I'm pretty sure that (in some abstracted sense at least), it's being done about my data for other reasons. Why don't I get to play?
• I'm hearing more about Livejournal from outside the circle of people-who-have-been-using-it-all-along. I doubt it is going to have a renaissance in a business or growth sense, it's more that folks are figuring out some of what was right about  it all along. I tend to think about this in terms of UI details (like putting the "who this post will be exposed to" option very clearly under every post) that emphasize its flexibility on the public / friends / private axes. This person seems to think somehting similar. But it's not just about that axis, there's also something about navigating the line between intimacy (Facebook, at it's best) and publicity (regular blogs).
• I'm pretty sure that last is at least one reason why Tumblr is taking off as it is. It has really nailed the feeling of connecting intimate communities while also constantly running into new things.
• I wish it had a "friends-only" post feature, though. That's Livejournal talking again.
• On a third axis (personal control), I was and am pretty skeptical of the chances of Diaspora's success. But this post on why gender is a text field on Diaspora is one of the finest things I've seen in a long time and pleases me muchly.