Fresh

After an inspiring trip to Austin for SXSW, I’m finally getting a chance to look back at all of the notes and ideas from throughout the week. One of the standout panels for me, was the talk entitled “Design for the Wisdom of Crowds”. The speaker, Derek Powazek began his talk by referencing several social experiments such as the one conducted by Francis Galton, in which a crowd was asked to guess the weight of the cow. Everyone guessed wrong, but the average of the guesses was very close. Similar results were found when applying this to a change jar. So the question he poses is: How can we, as the creators of the web, allow for this wisdom to take place in our communities online? In his panel he discussed some simple ways to think about tweaking interfaces to facilitate better user experiences online.

Some basic rules for making this happen.

1. Diversity - Organize a group of diverse individuals with a wide range of opinions

2. Independence – Encourage the group to contribute for their own selfish reasons

3. Decentralization - There’s nobody in charge

4. Aggregation - Tallying the results and doing something with it

Powazek emphasizes using small, simple tasks to encourage the best results. Communities often fail when they ask for too much information up front, with no frame of reference. An example of this would be the dreaded blank text field. We need to give the user some context in which to give feedback and understand why they are participating. For example, the Threadless submittion page does a great job of spelling out the reasons to interact with their site: “Submit an idea for a chance of fame and $25,000.”

Also, it’s important to make sure there actually is a quantifiable result or answer. Leaving things too open-ended will lack direction and make it hard to aggregate the results. Ranking, scoring, voting, and leader boards are all ways to present this information but Powazek warns not to make it too much of a game as people will always find ways to beat the system. This is referred to as “The Heisenberg Problem”

I found it interesting how this played out in the sites we use most frequently. For instance, nobody created links so that Google could have a great search engine. This was done through selfish reasons, without Google in mind (at least it used to be). Also, when you tag photos on Flickr, you do it for your own reasons, but tagging also creates value for Flickr and its user experience.

Another interesting point was that the most popular thing is not always the best thing. Amazon doesn’t always rank the most popular reviews first; sometimes they will present popular positive and negative reviews side by side next to a product.

On Powazek’s own site Kvetch.com, a site that allows people to submit complaints, he experimented with subtle design tweaks to see if they affected the results. When he used a dark background, users submitted angry complaints, and when he used a lighter background users were more light-hearted and funny. In a similar exercise red and blue were tested against one another and it was shown that generally red creates a fear response and detailed orientated state, while blue pushes creativity. Once again, design matters.

What’s really interesting about these ideas is how they reflect back to the real world. In a recent art exhibition put on by the Brooklyn Museum, 400 photos were submitted and the community was asked to rate themsleves as an art snob, then how they felt about the photos. The photos were then sized by number of votes in the physical gallery.

User interface design frequently utilizes visual metaphors from the physical world to give meaning to experiences online, and I think Powazek made some really compelling points regarding how to best use social metaphors to guide an interaction that feels both authentic and gratifying for the end user. I’m most excited to see in the coming years, what shift occurs in our in our physical culture as a result of the conventions that are happening on the web.