Surfaced here for a bit today, and for the foreseeable future I’m probably going to limit posts to ‘progress reports’ and calls-for-mental-participation around the project I’m working on.

The ethnography came back mid-Jan, and inspired the guys on the design team to come up with some new ideas which have suceeded to glue things together nicely. As well as the primary research, the analysis and synthesis the ethnographers did should stand us in good stead for a couple of release cycles yet. A good investment.

We’ve had a preliminary concept sign-off/review which went well. End of our concept stage is Monday. Lots of stuff to work out before then, as our product manager said, we’ve shone the torch around the room pretty well, but we need to striplight the place.

However, I’m at last comfortable that that we’ve got the “parti”: the driving, organising idea behind the thing.

Of course, this might all be proved to be complete rubbish once we put the paper-prototypes in front of people, but it’s great to have an idea that resonates with everyone on the team, that they ‘get’, and that they can generate their own stuff based upon.

I’m always happier on a project if we get to a good, grokkable parti, because even if it’s not the panacea you think it might be when you come up with it, then it will still drive the work along nicely, and lets you examine user research/testing critically, just as it should itself be revisited critically in the light of that feedback.

Other great thing about the work right now as a result of the research and the concept becoming more solid is the way in which it lets you view previous work in computer-mediated commmunication by academia or the commercial world with a more critical eye. Nico, our product manager brought our attention in the design team to “The Coordinator”, and its authors’ notions of ‘conversations for possibility’ and ‘conversations for action’.

Reading around and about this 15 year old design was revealing.

“In 1986, a six month study was done with Pacific Bell. The study was not successful – no one used the system.  Many subjects claimed that the system was fine, but that there was too much structure, and not enough flexibility.”
– Josh Introne, Brandeis University

Arrrgh! The Procrustean Bed of social software! I think the framework and models we’ve gotten too based on the ethnography balances flexiblity and ‘conversations for possibilty’, or maybe “spaces for half-formed thoughts” with the more teleological tools and processes.

The challenge of the project now is to marry this to a user-experience that lowers the barriers to participation sufficiently.

More soon

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Oh… and I’m sure I’m using the term wrongly but, anyway: zero bubble.