Wexploration

Quick note

Jane Mejdahl — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:44:42 +0000

These days I’m doing a usability test on wemind.dk. What I find most interesting so far is that the participants seem to regard design mistakes as “intended messages: http://www.wemind.dk/om-wemind/profiler. It’s easy to see the mistake here (two of the profile pictures are out of line). The participants in the test sees that as if those two pictures are supposed to tell us that Anne and Hans Henrik hold a different position than the rest of the people depicted. Interesting because it points to a high degree of trust users have in products’ perfection. What happens to a user’s perception if that trust is broken?

It’s almost a trend

Jane Mejdahl — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:48:19 +0000

The dispute lives on.

in the last 30 years, there has not been one website or other digital innovation that can point back to UCD as the defining factor for its success.

How ever as Jakob Buur noticed at a recent presentation on design anthropology; not listening to, involving or understanding the user has never proved to be the single point of success either.

via

Excoticism and the development world

Jane Mejdahl — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:00:26 +0000

It’s a good thing that design research and the technology business in general are directing attention to the development world or emergent markets (btw a noun that may express why attention is being paid to the seond and third world at this point in history). I’m glad because the digital divide between western and non-western countries seems to decrease. It’s not only a positive thing (in most cases) for the actual countries and cultures in question, but it’s also a good thing for the world of tech. People now gain the possibility of not exaggerating too much when easily including the whole world in technological progress…

May I just humbly suggest that you don’t exotizise the unfamiliar to the extend expressed in this otherwise brilliant interview: .

Today we face the mass extinction of plant and animal species. But we also face the mass extinction of languages and modes of thought and perception. Just as disappearing plant species may hold the keys to preventing or curing physical diseases, the modes of being and thinking of so-called primitive peoples may hold crucial keys to solving some of humanities recurrent problems such as prejudice and warfare and emergent ones such as global pollution.

I really believe that instead of gaining new insights you may risk repeating the failures of the development business, if you don’t try to understand the actual life worlds and premises of the people you study preferably to going along with what you think people are like.

The user is king - the user is not king

Jane Mejdahl — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:01:10 +0000

Lately I’ve been following the user vs expert-discussion prompted this time by an article in Wired Magazine featuring the guys from 37signals. It’s an old discussion, but as users get more and more involved on different levels of design processes the question of who you are designing for pops up more frequently. Hence the Norman vs 37signals-dispute isn’t the only thing out there touching upon the subject. Here too user involvement is questioned.

To me the discussion is exciting, but disturbing too. I must admit that initially I felt that my area of expertise was under heavy attack. But then again I guess that the etnographic method and it’s user/human focus has been under attack for more than hundred years now, so just because the world of tech has discovered the user fairly recently, and might abandon listening to them already doesn’t mean that I’m becoming obsolete. Still the dicussion is disturbing though.

As I strove my way through the first sixtysomething comments on 37signals’ answer to Norman I wondered why everybody assumed that one side of the table was wrong and the other right. I saw nobody questioning the premises of the whole disucssion. Why ask if the user is right, and on the other side why ask if the expert is? Who is right should nok count for anything in development!

Why?

1) The user: It’s not about the user being right or wrong nor is designing for the user about succumbing to the user’s needs and wishes. It’s all about the user EXPERIENCE and how that experience is interpreted and analyzed. From my point of view you’re doing a pretty bad user experience job if you act as nothing else than a spokes person for the user’s needs.

2) The expert: “Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. ‘I’m not designing software for other people, ‘Hansson says. ‘I’m designing it for me.’ ” (quote from above mentioned article). To that I have to ask: which designer live on a far away deserted planet, isolated from other people or in a vacuum without the possibility of interaction, conversations with, and inspiration from fellow human beings? No products arise in a vacuum. We are all engaged in and influenced by our surroudings including other people, let’s call them users, and products are a result of that. In addition, the designer may be an expert, but she’s most likely a user too…

Thus the discussion is in vain from my point of view. It’s not about who is right or wrong, but all about experience.

As dinner approaches dessert

Jane Mejdahl — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:53:43 +0000

I work with him. We do our job, and I go home at 5 o’clock. I don’t have to like him!

A few weeks ago I was at a birthday party and I tried to explain to my dinner partner what it is that I do for a living. I told her that I do mini inquiries into social capital in organizations. I interview and observe people, try to determine the state of their relationships, stress problematic areas of communication, and then make recommendations to our software designer. Then we work together to figure out good solutions, and thereby implementing the findings of the inquiries in the design of the software. Or at least that has been the desired process so far, I told her.

The word social capital seemed to stir something in her though. She suddenly looked almost upset and when I finished my rant she asked me “all that talk about relations - do we have to like each other at work in order to be productive, effective, innovative?”. I couldn’t quite figure out what made her upset, but the question I think was meant rhetorically (hence the quote of the beginning of this post). I seriously did not know what to answer her.

Later on I figured maybe her reaction was due to the lack of consistency and content when we talk about relations. We talk a lot about the social web, and how it creates relations, and how those relations create value (although ‘value’ is a very disputed word), but who talks of the nature of relations? Of what they consists of? And what they have to consist of in order to create value?

All stirred up and nowhere to go

Jane Mejdahl — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:27:20 +0000

My colleague Thomas provided me with a brilliant link to a piece discussing the measurement of social capital. At first I was a bit skeptic because the author - who are the authors by the way? Who are behind gnudung.com? - keeps stressing the search for hard data to measure in the growing body of social capital theory. I was thinking to myself that maybe you’re asking the wrong questions if you persist on looking for hard data to answer your questions. Maybe you shouldn’t look for the amount of social capital, maybe you ought to look at the meaning of social capital…the meaning of trust, the meaning of reciprocity - what does those factors mean for a social network for instance over time? Later on I started to get down right disillusioned as the piece kept going on about quantitative methods and the hardship of measuring social capital quantitatively.

Well I know it’s all a matter of your perspective on scientific method, and my initial skepticism when reading the piece quickly vanished as I was once again soothed and reminded that Ideally, measures of social capital should be thouroughly based on, and tied to, the conceptual framework for the specific study. Basicly that means that the questions you ask has to guide your choice of method. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks, Thomas for the reference.

In search of literature and tools

Jane Mejdahl — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:30:43 +0000

When searching for literature on tools and methods for measuring social capital I found a useful article called Measurement of Social Capital(a cup cake to the one who guesses my search words). In part 2 of the article a whole list of specific tools for gathering data about networks. And in part 3 quantitative and qualitative methods are discussed. As I’m trying to make a list of tools (and ressources eventually) on the rather dusty wiki and at the same time writing a working paper on the measurement of social capital, I would very much like to hear if anybody knows of any good overview articles on methods and tools regarding social capital?

UX for social software

Jane Mejdahl — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:22:05 +0000

…was the main topic of last week’s first meeting in the Danish UX-network. I hoped that we would have discussed which UX-methods to apply to social software, because as I see it (from my limited experience though) UX and social software has different implications than if you’re doing more traditional stuff. I truly believe that when doing user research you have to focus more broadly on culture, communication, networks, relations, social capital in other words, because the technology has to be designed with relations in mind instead of “just” people or features for that matter.

However we ended up discussing the phenomena of web2.0 more than UX and web2.0- I’m to blame, I know - and it turned out interesting anyway. At least I’m glad that we (Wemind) was invited by 1508 to join in, and I look forward to contributing to the goals of the network: To share knowledge and make professional standards for UX in Denmark.

New study on social capital

Jane Mejdahl — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:29:59 +0000

I don’t know much about the study itself, but it sure looks interesting. A group of researchers at the University of Nevada are doing a survey investigating blogs’ effect on trust and social interactions. How ever it would be even more interesting if they provided a bit of information about context etc. But do go and check it out!

Furthermore you can get af copy of a report on a previous study of social capital by emailing reza.vaezi@yahoo.com

Whitepaper on social capital

Jane Mejdahl — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:53:57 +0000

Social Capital in Business - Why exchanging (immaterial) gifts will enhance productivity, innovation, and loyalty in organizations is a new white paper written by my colleague Thomas Møldrup and I. What is Social Capital? Who builds and maintain Social Capital - and how can Business profit from it? That is some of the questions raised in the paper.You can download it here - the paper is in english, but the downloadpage is still in danish. If you experience any problems, please contact me directly at jane at wemind dot dk and I help you through the process.