Week two of the Knight Mozilla News Lab featured lectures from Jesse James Garret, John Resig and Christian Heilmann.
@jeresig’s and @jjg’s lectures were especially interesting as they focused on what qualities make projects and products accessible to users. This is something that Aza Raskin has also contended with in his blogs regarding his new project Massive Health.
How can we incentivize, encourage or alter user behavior through application design?
There are a range of possible ways that users can use a particular application. One of the great parts of creating and on the flip side, hacking, is watching users figure out fun unintended uses for a piece of technology. That’s one of the cores of innovation. But there is a tension between providing tools that are powerful multi-function, and providing tools that users can actually understand.
The way that @jjg put this is that a lump of clay provides a much wider range of possibilities and creative choices, but creating with it requires some skill and perhaps training, while products like legos constrain the creative space but provide users an obvious place to start, and a coherent means to explore the creative space. Likewise, successful software provides users with an appropriate framework for exploring the conceptual space.
There are interesting subspaces within this domain. It is not always the case that when users have a range of behaviors available to them, they will choose beneficial or cooperative behaviors. Comment trolls are a perfect example of this. This is crucial for developers to consider, because any application where users have a range of opportunities to interact with others is a potential hole for bad behavior.
And the history of communication on the internet is basically a story of taking unrestricted messaging (email or AIM or ICQ) and adding constraints which hinder bad behavior without interfering with the majority of intended use. Spam filters, moderation systems, and facebook style walled gardens were all built with this in mind. None of these technologies have fundamentally changed the use of the systems they build upon. All of these technologies are systems designed to discourage behavior.
At the opposite end of the spectrum a variety of systems have sprung up to encourage a variety of behaviors from users. Whether they’re companies that pay for crowdsourced work, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, or Serv.io, or game companies like Zynga who’ve harnessed social pressure on facebook to drive user adoption of their games.
The world of journalism has explored this space some. Broadly speaking there’s been two efforts, gamification of the news, and crowdsourcing data challenges. the Guardian’s MP Expense app is one particularly interesting example of the latter. Unfortunately, the majority of the journalism related crowdsourcing apps don’t provide any reward or connection w/ the process of news production, or news consumption.
What I would like to see (and what i hope to address in one of my future projects) are better ways to provide leadership and encourage participation to users in the news making process.
