I was listening to a few podcasts on TWiT where Paul T. and Jason C. were talking on various points of usability. The big ideas that stuck with me were 1) Paul stated that Microsoft had underestimated the ability of end-users to learn a new interface (speaking on Windows Mobile), and 2) Jason was debating on why so many websites and portals looked so much alike (speaking on the likenesses between AOL and Yahoo!).

I had simply filed those in the back of my filing cabinet to chew on, and then Dan posted an article over at BizTechTalk speaking on the interface and “findability”.

This really got me thinking again.

You see, I have really adopted the notion that a major metric of project management is end-user adoption. Overall, I can do everything right and if the culture or customer doesn’t adopt it - it’s a flop!

However, does this mean we can just throw up what the crowd wants regardless of quality? If the mob likes the product it’s a success?

The answer of course is, “No.” However, it is easy to become so focused on either form or function that we begin to sacrifice the overall vision of what it is we are trying to accomplish.

Jason, during the podcast, mentioned that many websites are now using the L.S.N. format for their portals, indicating a Logo, Search, News layout (from top to bottom respectively). He further goes on to state that it takes time and energy to retrain our minds to think a different way. In other words, we have grown accustomed to a sandwich being 2 pieces of bread, meat, lettuce, tomato, and some mayo or mustard.

What if I don’t like my sandwich this way? Well, that’s what’s being served, so eat it anyway?

In my humble opinion, the beauty of technology is it is so malleable. That is, it can be shaped, and re-shaped, to fit the situation. Is there now a huge trend in media consumption to provide a plethora of channels of choice for consumers to feast upon?

On the other hand, if I can’t “find” what I need, or something is not where I expect it to be, statistics show a large majority of consumers will move on in search of what they want, impatient and disatisfied.

Hmmm… is form or function the more important choice?

Google is a great example of function. I think all would agree the interface is spartan, but do you generally find what you need quickly? In other words, Google understands its mission is to provide a clear egress to another source; in other words, don’t get in the way of what I am looking for - enable me!

Most endpoints will be a little more rich in form. However, beauty for its own sake is a cardinal sin - at least in UI development.

For instance, YouTube’s homepage, I would argue, is on the edge of being too busy. However, it has some similar features a consumer might be used to such as a few navigation links at the top right, some tabs, and some general content. I would venture a guess, most people don’t make it past the top 1/3 of the page before they move on to another page. If that is the case, YouTube has indeed done their job on layout.

In summary, form and function play a vital role in “findability”. It is not sufficient to dismiss one or the other in a majority of situations. This being said, the creator must understand the goal of the content and design according to need of the customer rather than his or her own perceptions.

Do you find yourself wondering if you have too many sites to go to in order to keep up with what’s going on? RSS readers, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, FaceBook, and the list goes on and on (and on)…

As a continuation of yesterday’s post Are we too connected to social media? I asked some fairly open ended questions. This all started when I read a post over at Dan’s blog (BizTechTalk) regarding meta-meta-aggregators. For those of you just tuning in, that’s a tool that crawls all of your social media sites and pulls them back together in a single portal or allows you to atleast create vectors of usable information rather than trying to sift through the static of the Internet.

As fate would have it, Scoble strikes again… and talks on FriendFeed.com. As it turns out, someone already had this bright idea (and they evidently use to work at Google - why am I not surprised?).

I have subscribed to FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/changeforge), and I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes. With all of these social media channels in this land grab for subscribers there has to be some players in the space to help orchestrate the static. Let’s see if FriendFeed can do it.

Do you ever feel like you are too wired in? Do you find yourself using a password manager to keep up with your passwords to your other password managers? Dan Keldsen just posted a very interesting piece that really got me thinking on linking all of these various social media types together to form multi-dimensional and very personal POP’s (point-of-presences) for every individual.

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the “2.0 age” rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

Though Dan’s article is referring specifically to a product called SalesView by InsideView, I can’t help but notice we are drowning in a sea of social media outlets. For instance, Twitter is interesting, and a social medium to which many people subscribe. It begs a question though, in the context of its underlying purpose,

What is the end-game for this type of social experiment?

[Dan contends] social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your “friends” (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

Bluntly put, information about people abounds through many different channels, all of which were never before captured outside of family photo albums or epitaphs. Now that all of this information exists in a connected world, it is becoming a very relevant question to ask,

What can be done with all of this information about you? Is your information usable in its new formats?

All of this latent “social information” is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one [corporation], even deeper … than “normal” electronic information is.

InsideView has a few ideas, according to Dan, albeit a bit Minority Report-ish. However, let’s assume we all have the best intentions of using this information to the benefit of mankind; it makes me wonder whether this medium will connect us in ways never before dreamed or allow us to conduct plastic surgery at-will to our public persona? And just who decides someone, or some organization, should be granted access to a given network of POP’s?

For now, everyone is having fun, and rightly so. By all accounts, this is a golden age of connectedness not seen in centuries past. Even as we marvel at our own magnificence, I can’t help but step back, take a breath and ask if we are all too connected?