Bunny Blog

Rick’s post about the cancellation of Online Nation got me thinking.

From my days as a web designer/developer, I have a fantastic book called The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garnett, which is a big-picture look at the process of developing web sites that work the way the user expects them to.

The web is no longer my primary source of income, nor what I spend most of my time working on, but I still like to re-read this book every few years, because the principles within are intelligent, effective, and apply to all sorts of projects.  In my most recent reading, I was struck by a few observations.

In discussing the way in which software has traditionally been developed, and how that is changing, Garnett says this:

… programmers could go ahead and build the system in the way that was most technically efficient without regard for what worked best for users… The approach that works best for the computer is almost never the approach that works best for the person who has to use it.  Thus, computer software acquired the reputation that has haunted it for much of its existence: Software is complicated, confusing, and hard to use.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this already, but just for fun, here’s a snippet from the following paragraph.

It took a long time, but as computers became more powerful and we learned more about how people used them, eventually we started catching on to the idea that, instead of designing software to work in the fashion that works best for the machine, we could design software to work in the fasion that works best for the people who use it.

With a very minimal amount of rewriting, you have an entire analogy for the current Media 2.0 revelation.  At the beginning, mass media (movies, news, and later television) were incredibly restrictive in terms of what was out there.  There was very little choice.  But the spectacle of the thing sustained it as a profitable model – the reason why Gone With The Wind is still the greatest theatrical film event in history.

As viewers got more savvy and more particular, the industry expanded.  Independent film evolved.  Cable television evolved.  Media was still being pushed at us, supported by more and more sophisticated marketing campaigns, but there was choice.  This choice led to whole new micro-industries of criticism that told people what they needed to see, and what was a waste of their time.

Now, though, we have such a development of pure computational and communication power that media need no longer be pushed at all!  There is such an overwhelming variety of entertainment, news, and critique available that users understand and expect to pull it themselves, to their own individual tastes, on their own individual timetables.  As Radiohead has just shown us, they can even begin to expect to do it on their own completely individual budget!  The user is in control, and doing what works best for them, rather then shoehorning themselves into a monolithic model that doesn’t even know they exist.

I’m not saying the system we have now is perfect; far from it.  I, for one, have a great appreciation for cinematic standards of beauty and refinement that you simply don’t see across the YouTubes of the world.  It turned out that arbitrating that mess wasn’t the right business for Online Nation.  The next step, however, will be in figuring out a vigorous, friendly, fair method for filtering through the onslaught of blogs and texts and photos and videos and really watching the cream rise to the top.  From YouTube to Digg to Last.fm, a lot of people have hit on different methods for doing this.  I personally think these are all freshman efforts, and not there yet.  But once we get there, we’ll finally have a system that works best for the people who have to use it: us.

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