interactive design 2 - med m/522 - summer 2006
Philip van Allen - v a n a l l e n @ a r t c e n t e r . e d u
room 227, wed 2:00pm-6:00pm
all materials on this web site © copyright 2005, Philip van Allen
 
week 01b - assignment, audience contribution/communities overview

audience contribution :

what does it mean for an interaction designer?

Interactive systems allow for the audience to participate with and contribute to the system being designed. How can the designer embrace users and their contributions to create a more compelling system? There are several means for doing this:

  • users become part of the content, e.g. online gaming
  • users add authored content, e.g. forum entries
  • user behavior is logged and aggregated for use by other users, e.g. Amazon's "Customers who bought this title also bought"
  • users' social behavior changes the system, e.g. people show each other how to best use a copier

Interactive Communities: One major area of audience contribution is interactive communities such as forums, Wikis, and blogs. A big reason for this is that standard, off-the-shelf systems have been developed that can be easily incorporated into websites.

Dynamic/database driven applications: Another technology component that enables audience contribution (interactive communities, dynamically updated site content, user customization, etc.) is the use of databases to store and retrive the content created by the user contributions. Interaction designers can use these databases to make dynamic and database driven applications that automatically change and evolve based on user contributions and interactions.

During the first part of this term, we'll be studying both of these approaches. The idea is not to make you an expert database designer or online community builder, but to make you familiar enough with ideas and applications to be able to design and deploy systems that incorporate them. Pretty much any project you may design can, and probably should have an audience component. For example:

  • Product: user forums where people can offer advice and help to each other
  • Advertising campaign: user contributed comments, videos for contests, viral marketing
  • Political communication: user contributions (real ones: money!), blogs, wikis to develop platform
  • Websites: any new website you design should consider having a database backend to make it dynamic
  • Self promotion: an interesting blog can be a great means of promoting the brand of you
  • Collaboration systems: Wikis in particular can be great ways for a group of people to develop new ideas

General topics to consider, and write about during this part of the term:

  • what are the benefits (and disadvantages) of interactive communities and databases?
  • how do these approaches change the project design?
  • what is the best way to design with these in mind?

 

interactive communities : 

The web started as a mostly one-way, static medium, despite what its primary inventor (Tim Berners-Lee) had in mind--a flexible read/write publishing medium. But in the last few years, web publishers have been discovering the benefits of dynamic content that comes from the audience. With the advent of a variety of content management tools, creating sites with these features has become easier and more prevalent.

We'll look at three major approaches to content management for interactive communities:

  • forums/bulletin boards
  • WIKIs
  • blogs

 

  
forums/bulletin boards : 

A discussion site is one where any member of a community can create and reply to discussion topics. Once a topic is established, other community members can respond and extend the discussion. Features of forum software include:

  • topics with most recent postings float to the top
  • older topics with no new postings are pruned off the forum
  • some bulletin boards show replys by indenting them when all postings are visible (see slashdot)
  • moderation can be enabled or not
  • users can select a variety of viewing modes
    • unread postings
    • recent postings (with a selected date range)
    • postings with a certain rating level or better (see slashdot)
  • some bulletin boards offer more levels of organization than others, enabling the administrator to create categories, and forums within those categories (see phpbb)
  • other bulletin boards show everything at the top (see phorum, used here)

Forum topics:

  • what do you think makes forums and the postings within them work, or not work?
  • who just reads (these are called "lurkers") and who posts?
  • how does the design of the forum influence the discussions?
  • what makes a forum successful? What is success?
  • what are forums good for, what are they bad for?
  • what do you think of moderation? Is it necessary?

Bulletin Board/Forum links:

 

  
WIKIs : 

Web sites that are modifiable by any member of the community. Unlike forums, WIKIs have pages devoted to topics rather than topic threads. Any member can add, change, or delete the contents of a page. In addition, any member can create new pages, simply by creating a new link. This may seem chaotic and anarchical, but it actually works. The philosophy is that the system is self regulating. If someone puts up dumb or bad content, someone else will remove it. If someone deletes good information, the information can be restored by going back to previous versions.

Some WIKI features:

  • the term comes from a Hawaiian word: WikiWiki - Fast, speedy; to hurry, hasten; quick, fast, swift
  • editing any page is accomplished by selecting the edit button on that page, and then changing the text in a web form
  • creating a new page happens automatically when a link is created. In traditional WIKIs, this is done be creating text with multiple capital letters. E.g. ThisIsAWikiLink. In the MediaWiki WIKI installed on the MDP server, put double brackets around any text to make it a link. E.g. [[This is a WIKI link]]. Either way, a blank page is created. Anyone can then go to the blank page and create the content.
  • many wikis provide back links that show which pages were used to link to the current page
  • if you don't believe a WIKI can work in a public setting, check out a collaborative encyclopedia here: www.wikipedia.org

WIKI paper topics:

  • what kinds of topics are best and worst for a WIKI?
  • what do you think of the WIKI concept? Before and after using it?
  • what are some possible uses of a WIKI?

WIKI links:

 

  

(we)blogs : 

Web pages with a series of postings listed most recent first, often but not always by one person. Sometimes these are like a diary, othertimes they are more like a diatribe. Blogs are not quite as collaborative as Forums and WIKIs, but they do seem to form communities. There is certainly something social about them--they have a kind of sit around the campfire and listen to my story feel. Blogs have a simple interface that enables the blogger to enter each new entry through a simple web form--the rest of the formatting is accomplished by the software.

Some Blog features:

  • each posting is time-stamped. This seems very important to the level of interest the blog generates
  • it's possible to go back and edit previous postings
  • it's possible to enter postings, but not publish them--like writing a letter, but sending it only after you've slept on it
  • some blog systems (like moveable type) allow comments for each posting, which pushes blogs more towards community
  • part of the blog culture seems to be linking to other "cool" blogs

Blog paper topics:

  • who is the audience for a blog?
  • what are the differences between a single-author blog and a multi-author blog?
  • why are blogs so seductive to read? or not?

Blog links

 

 

  

all materials on this web site © copyright 2005, Philip van Allen

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