Toluu

Bokardo - Social Design by Joshua Porter

A Blog about Social Web Design

Why I like 37signals Design Decision PostsToday

I really like the design decisions blog posts at 37signals. A recent example: Design Decisions: Saying more in less space on the new Highrise site, in which a designer (in this case Jason) discusses how he made changes to a certain design. He shows the initial design, lays out the rationale for change, and then shows the changes. The structure of the post couldn’t be more simple.

But the reason why I like the posts isn’t because of the content (although it’s good). I really like the posts because they do it and nobody else does.

Now think about this. 37signals is a well-known company in web design circles and have a solid reputation as designers, and they’re releasing a beta design on their site, talking about its shortcomings on their blog. They’re designing in public. They have no need to do this. They’re risking their reputation here. Can you imagine if their design is less than perfect? Imagine what people will say? Holy cannoli…people might actually find something not-so-good about

Thoughts on the Friendfeed interfaceYesterday

Some modest suggestions for improving the Friendfeed interface

Friendfeed is getting a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about what they should do with their service. I’m sure I don’t know the bigger issues that Friendfeed are dealing with, but I do have some observations about the interface, which I’ve summarized below.

But first, a little rationale about how I got to these suggestions. We must start with the simple question: What is the core mechanic of Friendfeed? What is the one thing that Friendfeed does that makes it a valuable service? I would argue that it’s reading the feeds of friends in order to discover valuable content.

The first thing you’ll notice when you set up an account, however, is that Friendfeed is a fire-hose of content. Like other streams, it produces way too much content to keep track of comprehensively. To that end, one of Friendfeed’s primary goals has to be the efficient management of the fire-hose. The service can do this in two ways: by providing powerful search and filtering features to reduce/organize the content one sees or by making the interaction with each piece of content more efficient.

Friendfeed seems to have a good handle on the first way, providing powerful search features and filters in the form of lists, rooms, ways to hide content, etc. I’m sure there are other good ways to push forward h

What Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers can teach us about interface designJanuary 5

I recently finished Outliers: The Story of Success, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. More than any other writer, Gladwell can take any topic, even the most dry and boring, and turn it into compelling reading. Each time I receive a New Yorker magazine and see Gladwell’s byline inside, I immediately read whatever he wrote and end up enjoying it.

The entire Outliers book is good, but Chapter 7: The Ethnic History of Plane Crashes, is amazing. It’s worth the price of the book just to see how Gladwell stitches this chapter together. In it Gladwell tells the story of several plane crashes and uses the last radio co

Why the larger text?December 19 2008

Several folks have noticed I’m using a larger font size on bokardo now…here’s why.

In short, the text is easier to read now. Not just the body text, but the text in all columns. The inspiration for this change came from an image in the blog post relative readability by Wilson Miner, who explained his reasoning for larger text by holding up a page of 12pt text next to a screen with 16pt text, and they were the same size. That’s a great visual…nothing more need be said.

Upcoming Speaking EventsDecember 9 2008

Just a quick update on the various speaking events I’ve got coming up.

• UIE Virtual Seminar: Designing for Sign Up
  This thursday, December 9, I’ll be giving a UIE Virtual Seminar on Designing for Sign Up. This presentation is for folks struggling with getting people signed up for their product/service. I’ll go over some of the psychological reasons why sign up is so hard, while showing a boatload of examples of how designers have overcome those hurdles. Use the promotion code BOKARDO to get a discount: $99.00 for the seminar as well as lifetime archive to watch it again and again. (Or, perhaps closer to reality, to show to others who may want to see it)
• Webstock ‘09
  In February, I’ll be heading down to New Zealand for Webstock, the Woodstock for the Web Set. I’ll be giving a full-day workshop on social design as well as a short talk. I’m completely honored to be speaking alongside this cast of characters…a bunch of my web heroes. I’ve never been to New Zealand before, and I’m really excited to go, so please let me know what I *must do* while I’m there.
• SXSW Interactive
  In March I’ll be giving a talk