archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Some additional reading on mental models, courtesy of the Interaction Design Encyclopedia.

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From the “House Com­mit­tee on Demo­c­ra­tic Reform Fact Sheet: Esti­mated Tax Sav­ings of Bush Cab­i­net if the Repeal of the Estate Tax Is Made Per­ma­nent”:
The estate tax, the most pro­gres­sive Amer­i­can tax, is paid only by the very wealthy. The top 5% of tax­pay­ers pay almost 99% of estate taxes, and the top tenth of 1% of tax­pay­ers pay more than 33%.3 The vast major­ity of Amer­i­cans are already exempt from the estate tax. As a result, they will receive no ben­e­fit at all from mak­ing the repeal per­ma­nent.
Those with much to gain from the repeal include the Pres­i­dent and his Cab­i­net. Based on esti­mates of the net worth of Pres­i­dent Bush, Vice Pres­i­dent Cheney, and each of the Cab­i­net mem­bers, the Pres­i­dent, Vice Pres­i­dent, and the Cab­i­net are esti­mated to receive a total tax ben­e­fit of between $91 mil­lion and $344 mil­lion if the estate tax repeal is made per­ma­nent. The Pres­i­dent him­self is esti­mated to save between $787,000 and $6.2 mil­lion, while Vice Pres­i­dent Cheney is esti­mated to save between $12.6 mil­lion and $60.7 mil­lion.
The com­plete Fact­sheet is avail­able from Congress.

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Several very unpleasant experiences I’ve had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.
The IAWiki defines a mental model as, “a mental model is how the user thinks the product works.” This is a simplified definition, but it’s adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse’s thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users’ Models of Computer Systems.
In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages – at least not as I experience it.
Here’s what happens my mental model and my reality don’t match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox – the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly – (I’m using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I’m unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it’s frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
2. I realize I need to respond to an email
3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages
4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese
5. I attempt to send this email
6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like “We’re really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can’t send out any messages using your email client.”
7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)
8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not
9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient
10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.
11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can’t send a message. I’m no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren’t enough to change my model of how Notes works.
Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, “Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance.” From an ecological perspective, resilience “is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system.” The psychological view emphasizes “the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.”
Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since – in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself – seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.
Notice that I’m using a work-around – switching to Gmail – to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, “The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation.” This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.
I also noticed that I’m relying on a series of assumptions – email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages – that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it’s easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I’ll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.
Here’s a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?
2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?
3. What’s the threshold of recovery for a mental model?
4. Put another way, what’s required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I’m comfortable saying it’s a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.
Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems
2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system
3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models
4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it’s safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.
Time to close this post before it gets too long.
Further reading:
Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.
Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance
Garry Peterson’s blog Resilience Science

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After months with­out com­ments — thanks to all the dili­gent spam­mers out there for car­ry­ing out their cor­ro­sive activ­i­ties with such thor­ough­ness, I’m open­ing the site up to feed­back again.
Of course, for the time being, Mov­able­Type just does not feel like coop­er­at­ing when it comes to comments…

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I know that most enter­prise soft­ware pack­ages have shock­ingly, egre­giously bad user expe­ri­ences. One of the most tor­tu­ous aspects of the com­mon inex­cus­ably bad enter­prise soft­ware pack­age user expe­ri­ence is the stun­ningly use­less, hos­tile, and cryp­tic error mes­sages these mon­strosi­ties return when­ever users have the mis­for­tune to step out­side the bounds of their opaque, byzan­tine oper­at­ing logic.
Here’s a tasty exam­ple of the genre from an imple­men­ta­tion of Peo­ple­soft, that leaves me feel­ing like I’ve been barfed on by a machine.
Peo­ple­Soft Error:

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“An artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy” is how David C. Baker and Michael Janiszewski describe enterprise architects in their article 7 Essential Elements of EA.
The full quote is, “An enterprise architect requires a unique blend of skills. At various times he or she needs to employ the characteristics of an artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy.” Besides being pithy because it sounds like the intro to one of those ‘____ walk into a bar’ jokes, this rings true for enterprise information architects. However, humorousness aside, this isn’t terribly useful. And overall, the article is a fine breakdown of what’s required to put enterprise architecture into practice, but it only offers the pioneer’s perspective on where enterprise-level architects come from.
Their take, “Enterprise architects grow from within the technical architecture ranks, learning how to be artists, gurus, coaches, and spies as they work their way from being technical specialists, through application or infrastructure architects, eventually to enterprise architects.”
This is an honest if after-the-fact apprasial of a self-directed career growth trajectory that is no stranger to veteran IAs. It’s not adequate as a way to expand the understood scope of information architecture roles to address the enterprise perspective. I feel comfortable saying Information Architecture is accepted as relevant and useful in many areas of business activity, from user research and experience design to product development and strategy, after a few lean years following the dot com crash. But I’m not comfortable saying we have appropriate representation or even access to the enterprise level. It’s here that the business and information perspectives come together in an architectural sense, and also here where we should strive to make sure we’re valued and sought out.
We need to discover, create and define the paths that lead Information Architects to enterprise level positions.to action>
The alternative is being left behind.

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Looks like Dave Sifry at Technorati has drunk the Clay Shirky Koolaid on tagging and social bookmarking. Here’s something from Dave’s posting State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags, that shows he’s clearly joined the academy of received ideas.
“Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out…”

I’m disappointed to see this. The quality level of Shirky’s thinking and writing related to tagging is generally low; too often he’s so completely off the mark with much of what he’s said about tagging, social bookmarking, and categorization in general that his main contribution is in lending a certain amount of attention by virtue of name recognition to a subject that used to be arcane.

There’s little need to rehash the many, many individual weaknesses in Shirky’s writings, just one example of which is his establishment of a false dichotomy separating structured categorization systems and social tagging practices. Broadly, his approach and rhetoric show strong influence from anarchism, and utopian social theory.

From Shirky:
“There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else’s needs, interests, or requirements.”
Further, “…with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something “should” be tagged.”

Building back on the criticique of computerization, it’s clear that Shirky uses rhetorical strategies and positions from both technological utopianism and anti-utopianism.

Here’s Professor Rob Kling on technological utopianism:
“Utopian images are common in many books and articles about computerization in society written by technologists and journalists. I am particularly interested in what can be learned, and how we can be misled, by a particular brand of utopian thought — technological utopianism. This line of analysis places the use of some specific technology, such as computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies — like pocket computers which understand spoken language — as “utopian gadgets.”

Technological utopianism does not refer to these technologies with amazing capabilities. It refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti-utopianism examines how certain broad families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order.”

That Shirky would take speak from this standpoint is not a surprise; he’s identified as a “Decentralization Writer/Consultant” in the description of his session “Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata” at etech, and it’s clear that he’s both technologist and a journalist, as Kilng identifies.

Regardless of Shirky’s bias, there is a bigger picture worth examining. Tagging or social bookmarking is one potential way for the community of social metadata system users to confront problems of individual and group information overload, via a collective and nominally unhierarchical approach to the emergent problem of information management across common resources (URIs).

“On average, a new record is added to the WorldCat database every 10 seconds. Watch it happen live…” Watch WorldCat grow
According to the About page:
“WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.”
Here’s what went into the system while I was typing this entry out:
———————
The following record was added to WorldCat on 08/10/2005 9:08 PM
Total holdings in WorldCat: 999,502,692
OCLC Number: 61245112
Title: Theological and cultural studies in honor of Simon John De Vries /
Publisher: T. & T. Clark International,
Publication Date: c2004.
Language: English
Format: Book
Contributed by: SAINT PATRICK’S SEMINARY LIBR
———–
Some impressive WorldCat statistics from the OCLC site:
Between July 2004 and June 2005:

• WorldCat grew by 4.6 million records
• Libraries used WorldCat to catalog and set holdings for 51.9 million items and arrange 9.4 million interlibrary loans
• Library staff and users conducted 34.7 million searches of WorldCat via FirstSearch for research and reference, and to locate materials

Also:

• WorldCat has 57,968,788 unique bibliographic records
• 53,548 participating libraries worldwide use and contribute to WorldCat
• Every 10 seconds an OCLC member library adds a record to WorldCat
• Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat
• Every second a library user searches WorldCat using FirstSearch

For us information types, it beats the hell out of the old population clocks that the U.S. Census Bureau still runs for the US and the world.
BTW, for the curious, “According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 08/11/05 at 01:24 GMT (EST+5) is 296,854,475”

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I went to the 4th of July con­cert on the Esplanade this past Mon­day, for the first time in sev­eral years, expect­ing to show some inter­na­tional vis­i­tors gen­uine Boston Amer­i­cana. After all, 4th of July cel­e­bra­tions are sin­gu­larly Amer­i­can expe­ri­ences; part sum­mer sol­stice rite, part brash rev­o­lu­tion­ary ges­ture, part demon­stra­tion of mar­tial prowess, part razzle-dazzle spec­ta­cle as only Amer­i­cans put on.
I sup­pose a unique Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence is what we got: in return for our trou­ble, we felt like unpaid extras in a tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion recre­at­ing the hol­i­day cel­e­bra­tions for a remote view­ing audi­ence miles or years away. It was — de-centered — hol­low and inverted. It’s become a sim­u­lacrum, with a highly unnat­ural flow dri­ven by the cal­cu­lus of supra-local tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming goals. The cen­ter of grav­ity is now a national tele­vi­sion audi­ence sit­ting in liv­ing rooms every­where and nowhere else, and not the 500,000 peo­ple gath­ered around the Hatch Shell who cre­ate the cel­e­bra­tion and make it pos­si­ble by com­ing together every year.
Despite all the razzle-dazzle — and in true Amer­i­can fash­ion there was a lot, from fighter jets to fire­works, via brass bands, orches­tras, and pop stars along the way — the expe­ri­ence itself was deeply unsat­is­fy­ing, because it was obvi­ous from the begin­ning that the pro­duc­tion com­pany (B4) held the inter­ests of broad­cast­ers far more impor­tant than the peo­ple who come to the Esplanade.
There were reg­u­lar com­mer­cial breaks.
In a 4th of July con­cert.
For half a mil­lion peo­ple.
Com­mer­cial breaks which the orga­niz­ers — no doubt trapped between the Scylla of con­trac­tual oblig­a­tions and the Charyb­dis of shame at jilt­ing a half-million peo­ple out of a sum­mer hol­i­day to come to this show — filled with filler. While the com­mer­cials aired, and the audi­ence waited, the ‘pro­gram­mers’ plugged the holes in the con­cert sched­ule with an awk­ward mix of live songs last­ing less than three min­utes, pre-recorded music, and inane com­men­tary from local talk­ing heads. We felt like we were sit­ting *behind* a mon­i­tor at a tap­ing ses­sion for a 4th of July show, lis­ten­ing while other peo­ple watched the screen in front.
I bring this out because it offers good lessons for those who design or cre­ate expe­ri­ences, or depend upon the design or cre­ation of qual­ity expe­ri­ences.
Briefly, those lessons are:
1. If you have an estab­lished audi­ence, and you want or need to engage a new one, make sure you don’t leave your loyal cus­tomers behind by mak­ing it obvi­ous that they are less impor­tant to you than your new audi­ence.
2. If you’re enter­ing a new medium, and your expe­ri­ence will not trans­late directly to the new chan­nel (and which well-crafted expe­ri­ence does trans­late exactly?), make sure you don’t dam­age the expe­ri­ence of the orig­i­nal chan­nel while you’re trans­lat­ing to the new one.
3. When adding a new or addi­tional chan­nel for deliv­er­ing your expe­ri­ence, don’t trade qual­ity in the orig­i­nal chan­nel for capa­bil­ity in the new chan­nel. Many sep­a­rate fac­tors affect judg­ments of qual­ity. Capa­bil­ity in one chan­nel is not equiv­a­lent to qual­ity in another. Qual­ity is much harder to achieve.
4. Always pre­serve qual­ity, because con­sis­tent qual­ity wins loy­alty, which is worth much more in the long run. Con­sis­tent qual­ity dif­fer­en­ti­ates you, and encour­ages cus­tomers to rec­om­mend you to other peo­ple with con­fi­dence, and allows other to become your advo­cates, or even your part­ners. For advo­cates, think of all the peo­ple who clear obsta­cles for you with­out direct ben­e­fit, such as per­mit and license boards. For part­ners, think of all the peo­ple who’s busi­ness con­nect to or depend upon your expe­ri­ence in some way; the con­ces­sions ven­dors who pur­chase a vend­ing license to sell food and bev­er­ages every year are a good exam­ple of this.
For peo­ple plan­ning to attend next year’s 4th of July pro­duc­tion, I hope the expe­ri­ence you have in 2006 reflects some of these lessons. If not, then I can see the head­line already, in bold 42 point let­ter type, “Audi­ences nowhere com­mem­o­rate Inde­pen­dence Day again via tele­vi­sion! 500,000 bored extras make cel­e­bra­tion look real for remote view­ers!“
Since this is the sec­ond time I’ve had this expe­ri­ence, I’ve changed my judg­ment on the qual­ity of the pro­duc­tion, and I won’t be there: I attended in 2002, and had exactly the same experience.

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From someone else named Joe, a free service that generates sparklines:

http://bitworking.org/projects/sparklines/

Now I can plot the truly disatisfying long-term performance of my 401ks using a convenient networked infrastructure service…

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