Category Archives: Online Trends

Why Can’t I Argue with Google (or Malcolm Gladwell)?

First published February 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week I was in San Francisco for Big Think’s Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box. I took copious notes but there was one comment in particular I found intriguing. Luc Barthelet, from Wolfram|Alpha said that the company’s goal is not just to provide an answer, but show the route taken to arrive at the answer. Then we’re free to question the validity of the answer. “I want to argue with a search engine. I want to be able to challenge its logic.”

This was the first time I had ever heard this, but it immediately struck a chord. Why can’t we argue with Google? Why do we just accept its answers? How do we know they’re right? Of course, Google doesn’t really create an answer, it connect us with answers. But more and more, Google is disintermediating the source of the answer. For many searches, we never go beyond the search results page. We accept the answer as presented by Google, without ever questioning the rationale behind the answer.

Why is arguing important? What could we gain from arguing with Google? Let me give you one example of why it’s good to argue.

There is no problem…

The Summit featured recorded video clips from famed pundits, including Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell told us that the purpose of the Summit — to ponder how we might reinvent search — was misguided. “Can we build a better Google or Bing? Yeah, sure we can. But it solves a problem that’s not really a problem.” In Gladwell’s view, we already have access to all the information we need.

I diasagree vehemently with Gladwell. This same logic could be applied to any avenue of human endeavor and would stop all progress and innovation in its tracks. Could a horse and covered wagon transport us across the country? Yeah, sure it could. But I’d rather take a plane, thank you. And someday I hope there’s an even faster way. Gladwell’s off-the-cuff comment shocked the audience. How could he provide an answer so obviously lacking in informed context? The structure of his argument had holes so big we could have poked the Golden Gate Bridge through them.

Say What, Malcolm?

If Gladwell believes that a valid answer to every question is Wikipedia, perhaps his argument holds water. But he is ignoring the fundamental precepts of information foraging and retrieval. We need to surface the best information by taking the shortest possible path to it. Everyone who knows anything about search agrees with that, and we also agree that we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot.

But going beyond this, there’s the broader question: Is the current use case of search the one we need going forward? Right now, search is about the retrieval of relevant information. Let’s leave aside the question about whether it’s successful at doing that. But is simple retrieval of information (often false information) enough anymore? As Esther Dyson pointed out, perhaps “search” isn’t even the verb we should be using now. Is “solving” or “fulfilling” a better description of what we need? Dyson remarked, “We use the Ito connect to and affect the world around us.” And if that’s the use case, search falls far short of our expectations.

But I couldn’t argue with Gladwell, because he wasn’t in the room and I couldn’t uncover the rationale behind his pithy answer. He was a bit like Google; he dropped his wisdom from on high and was gone.

The Importance of Arguing

We argue because it knocks down intellectual straw men. It allows us to test and prod the logic that lies behind opinions. It challenges beliefs, which tend to keep us barricaded from the rest of world. If those beliefs are deeply held, they may be difficult (or impossible) to dislodge, but if they’re never questioned, minds will never change — and we’ll all barrel down those pre-laid tracks to a much too predictable future.

I agree with Barthelet. We should be able to argue with online information. We should be able to see the path taken to answers. We should be able to challenge sources. It’s more appropriate in some instances than others, and it’s an option we may not take advantage of very often, but it should be open to us.

Google’s Mission and the Economic Colonization of the Web

First published January 27, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron Goldman and I agree — it’s time for Google to rethink its mission statement. But we disagree on the reason. Goldman thinks it’s time “to call a spade a spade” and for Google to come clean on their intention to grab as many ad dollars as possible. From this perspective, the change in the mission statement is really just to better align it with Google’s business.

I think “organizing the world’s information” needs to be changed for a different reason. I think there are inherent limitations in it that may seriously impact Google’s revenue stream in the future.

A Quick Update

But first, some background. Eric Schmidt has moved into that corporate limbo called “executive chairman”-ship. I don’t really know what an executive chairman does. I asked Google and it’s also pretty fuzzy on the concept. According to Schmidt, it’s to focus on external partnerships and to “advise” Larry and Sergey. To me, it sounds like a long and polite good-bye. Whatever we know about the shift, I guarantee there’s more to the story.

Also, Google rocked expectations on Q4 earnings, so all appears to be rosy in Google-world. But quarterly earnings calls are a notoriously poor indicator of the strategic health of an organization. They reflect the success of strategic decisions made a year or two ago and the ability of the organization to execute against them. They tell you nothing about the strategy today, or how the company may do in the future. Which brings us back to the mission statement.

Missionary Work

Organizing the world’s information sounds like a lofty goal, and it is. It was entirely appropriate given the “wild-west” nature of the Web when Google first appeared in 1997. But on the Web, information equals data, and data comes in two forms: structured and unstructured. Google’s mission was defined at a time when almost everything online was unstructured. It was a mess. It needed to be organized. And Google’s revenue model sprung from its ability to match consumer intent with all this unstructured content. It was a broad-based attempt to tame the Web, and it was tremendously successful.

But the success came with limitations. If you’re going to try to organize unstructured information, you have to rely on some method to interpret the meaning of the information. You need some framework to organize information into. Google, like every other engine, relied on language as a measure of relevance — specifically matching content to a query made up of keywords. But language is notoriously difficult for machines to get right, because it’s ambiguous. Consider that words like “set,” “cut” and “break” can be defined in close to 100 different ways. Google’s struggle for the past decade and a half has been dealing with the difficulties of organizing unstructured data.

Another challenge is trying to deal with all unstructured data in the same interface. Google has tried to meet the challenge by incorporating more and more content categories into the main results page. There are currently more than a dozen categories you could conduct your search in. The elegance of the one-size-fits-all engine is rapidly becoming clunky and awkward.

The Colonization of the Web

Over the same time that Google has been pursuing its mission, the Web has become economically colonized. Where there’s an opportunity to make a buck, there is motivation to move data into a more structured format. Pockets of economically viable data have become increasing structured in the past 10 years, including all travel categories, books, movies, music and many commonly purchased products. Increasingly, we’re going to see this colonization, which will organize information in a way that Google could never do “on-the-fly.” And as this data becomes more structured, it allows for a different interaction with it. Data becomes more functional and more useful. It moves from conducting a search to using an application. Think of the difference between trying to plan a trip using nothing but Google — and planning the same trip using Kayak. That’s the difference between dealing with unstructured and structured data.

This colonization will hit Google where it hurts most — the highest volume, most commercially relevant searches. At this point, Google still acts as a navigational path to these structured destinations, but this is a transitional band-aid at best. The Web is growing up and it’s being tamed in bits and pieces; not by Google’s algorithmic wizardry but by commercial opportunities.

Google is right to focus on the possibilities of mobile. More and more of our online activity will happen there. But mobile is not a new frontier, it’s simply a new view into the same landscape. It will leverage the same colonies of structured data. In fact, the mobile use-case is perfectly suited to dealing with structured data. It will accelerate the colonization.

Google’s concept of “organizing” falls short of our end goal, which is using information to do things with. If I were Google, I’d be doing some wordsmithing using words like “useful” and “functional.”

The World Out of Context

First published January 20, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Did you see Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes? No? Neither did I. Neither did about 98% of the population of North America, according to the ratings numbers. Yet I would bet in the past week that we all knew about it, and we all talked about it. But we’re basing our judgments, opinions and conversations on something we’ve, at best, read online, heard about through the network (virtual or otherwise) or seen on YouTube. We’re experiencing the simultaneous pleasure and pain of Ricky’s Golden Globe Roast through hearsay and sound bites.

This isn’t an isolated incident. More and more, our view of the world comes after the fact, often filtered through fragments found somewhere online. Most of our experience of the world is out of its original context. This phenomenon isn’t new. Gossip is as old as language. We all love to talk about what’s happened. But the prevalence of digital footprints throws a new spin on this inherently human tendency. The impact of that spin, I’m afraid, is still to be determined.

The World as I Remember It

Memories are funny things. We like to think of them as snapshots of the past, accurately recording where we’ve been. The truth is, memories aren’t all that reliable. We tend to remember high points and low points, removing much of the distracting noise in the middle that makes up the stuff of our everyday lives. It’s like a Reader’s Digest condensed version of our past, except we tend to rewrite the actual content to match our view of the world. And once we rewrite our memories to match our beliefs, we believe them to be true (see Danny Kahneman’s TED talk on remembered happiness). It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that helps maintain the consistency of our worldview, but it’s a far stretch from what actually happened. Even more disturbing, if you’re a fan of the truth, is that we can’t seem to resist tweaking the story to make it more interesting. We love to build memes that take on a life of their own, spreading virally across the social landscape.

I always maintain that technology doesn’t change behaviors; it allows behaviors to change. Technology can’t force us down a road we don’t want to go. This drive to tweak little tidbits of the past is something baked into the human psyche. But the vast tableau we now have available to share it on is something quite new. “Going viral” now raises gossip to a whole new level.  Just ask a dorky little kid that goes by BeenerKeeKee 19952 online. His strangely compelling lip syncs to popular songs have turned him into an instant celebrity. His cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” has garnered close to 30 million views on YouTube, closing in on the popularity of the original video. He’s become so popular that 50 Cent popped into his bedroom to do a cameo recently.  But we know nothing of the kid behind the webcam. We don’t know the context of his life. We don’t know if he is bullied at school, has a life outside his bedroom or is good at baseball. All we know is what we can see in three minutes and 48 seconds.

Fool’s Gold

One recent example of this problem of context is Ted Williams, the homeless man with the golden voice who was plucked from the streets of Columbus, Ohio and placed on a world stage. The world judged the situation based on a 1 minute and 14 second Youtube clip. We saw what appeared to be injustice, and rushed to right the wrong. Job offers poured in. Williams became a celebrity. But it all happened without the context of the 53 years of an undeniably checkered past that preceded the fateful video clip. As it is turning out, as we gain the context, the real story is not nearly as simple or straightforward as we would like. Williams is already in rehab.

Acting on hearsay and secondhand information is nothing new. But as our communication abilities and our ability to archive history continue to expand, we get further and further from the true context of things. With the advent of online, word of mouth flows farther, faster and is more compelling than ever. More and more, we will act on little bits of information that are far removed from their true origins. We will pass judgment without the benefit of context. This will create more instant celebrities, basking in their 15 minutes of fame. And it will also create more viral sensations with self-destructive tendencies. There’s one thing about context – it may not lead to the instant gratification we crave, but it does tend to keep the egg off of one’s face.

High Risk & High Reward: Fully Engaged Buying

First published January 13, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I talked about High Risk/Low Reward purchases and said that when you’re in this quadrant, your “buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards.” True, but at least there is some consistency in the behaviors: risk trumps all.

When you’re navigating through a High Risk/High Reward purchase, you can be forgiven for appearing schizophrenic in your decision-making process. We swing back and forth from logic to what can only be described as love, with the volatility of a pendulum. If ever we were fully engaged in a buying process, this is the time. It’s all hands on deck for this purchase.

High Risk/High Reward purchases include new homes, vehicles, expensive toys and extravagant vacations. We spend a lot — but we also expect a lot. Game theorists and economists use a term called expected utility to describe our envisioned probable outcome from a decision.  It’s a pretty colorless term, and in theoretical terms, the lack of color in the label reflects the lack of emotion in the decision. Here, we weigh risk against logical outcomes — for example, the expected payoff from a wager.

Expected utility plays a major role in high reward purchases, but here, utility is dramatically colored with emotion. A car is not just about solving your transportation challenges (the expected utility). It’s about mid-life crises, keeping ahead of your brother-in-law, and the image of airing out your thinning hair on a cruise down the California coast. This, in many cases, is high-octane fantasizing, and there’s little logic to it.

Anywhere you find emotional rewards, you’ll find brands. And in these types of purchases of manufactured goods, you’ll inevitably find a brand turf war. Our complex relationships with the brands that define us are born in high-emotional-reward purchase scenarios. And in these types of purchases, the increased role of risk creates a delicious ambiguity in our rationalization of brand love.  We buy brands because of an emotional connection that comes straight from our limbic core (really, in this world of “pretty good” products, there is little to differentiate one brand from another), but our thinking brain kicks into overdrive to explain the logic behind our choice. We can’t seem to grasp the reality that logic had little to do with it.

These highly engaged purchases leave a vast and deep online footprint. We spend hours online, theoretically researching a purchase, but in many cases, we’re pre-rewarding ourselves through envisioning the acquisition of the reward. We use vehicle configurators and agonize over option packages and interior color schemes. We do endless virtual walk-throughs of homes. And we plan our dream vacation in minute detail, balancing recommendations from TripAdvisor and other sites against the limits of our budget and itinerary. Fantasizing begins online, and we have to allow for this in our marketing strategy.

When your product falls into this category, you want to support the fantasy as much as possible, utilizing digital media that encourages an emotional connection. Video and interactivity are a key part of the mix. We reach out on social media sites not just to manage risk by getting the opinions of others, but also to live vicariously through capturing the experiences of those who have bought before us.

As one would imagine, giving the depth and complexity of this online engagement, the search paths taken are equally convoluted. Search will be used repeatedly through the purchase process and for differing intents. There is no “one size fits all” approach here. In these purchase scenarios, a deep qualitative understanding of prospect behaviors will separate the great marketers from the herd.

High Risk & Low Reward: Buying with the Brakes On

First published January 6, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

After a brief detour last week (thanks for the many heartfelt messages for my Uncle Jim) I want to return to my exploration of the role of risk and reward in our online consumer behaviors.  We looked at the low risk/low reward and low risk/high reward quadrants. Today, we’ll continue by exploring the High Risk/Low Reward quadrant.

As a brief recap, our brains tend to apply brakes or step on the gas when steering through a buying decision based on the degree of risk and the promise of reward inherent in the decision. This dictates the nature of the consumer journey we take – both in terms of paths chosen and duration. I’ve talked before about the concept of bounded rationality, or the threshold of logical consideration we give to any decision. As behavioral economists have found, in almost every human decision, ration is modified by gut instinct. We call this “satisficing.” The only question, it seems, is the balance between the two. Risk and reward are hugely influential in determining our “satisficing” threshold for any purchase decision.

High Risk/Low Reward

In the last column, I described Low Risk/High Reward indulgences as “all gas and little brake.” The chocolate bar temptingly placed at the grocery store checkout aisle is just one example. High Risk/Low Reward purchases live at the opposite end of buyer behavior spectrum. Here your buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards. Consider this the consumer equivalent of teaching your teenager to drive.

In our personal lives, it includes such joyless purchases as insurance (all kinds, and the higher the premiums, the greater the perceived risk), financial planning, big-ticket home maintenance (not fun stuff like renovations, but replacing a roof, fixing a sagging foundation or getting a new furnace), car repairs and professional services such as lawyers or accountants.

Ironically, each of these types of purchases is usually triggered by either legislation  (car insurance), a non-negotiable need (a leaking roof) or the greater perceived risk of doing nothing (not having a lawyer in a divorce). If there wasn’t some impending reason to buy, we never would. There are no positive emotions at play here, only negative ones.

There is another type of purchase that falls into this quadrant that impacts many of our clients – bigger ticket B2B purchases. Indeed, I wrote an entire book on the subject : “The BuyerSphere Project.”

The lack of positive reward means our consumer research is all aimed at one thing and one thing only: the elimination of risk. In this scenario, risk has several dimensions: price, reliability and, because many of these purchases are predicated on avoiding future risk, balancing current risk against future risk. There is another aspect of risk, which is not commonly identified in these types of purchases: the risk of change. Often, big-ticket purchases require you to make changes in your routine, which involves change management.

When we look at what online behaviors might be for a High Risk/Low Reward purchase, we see risk mitigation as the key factor. Sites that allow buyers to compare several alternatives tend to be very popular, especially if they offer some type of rating. Online aggregators and directories tend to thrive in this quadrant, as they focus on quantifying pricing-based risk.

Because there is little or no emotional reward in these purchases, there is little in the way of positive emotional engagement.  As somebody once told me, nobody ever threw a party to buy car insurance.  Social media engagement is restricted to verifying you don’t get burned in the purchase. Rich-media demonstrations will be passed over in favor of quick comparison charts. And if you are engaging the senses, you’ll be capitalizing on fear of risk rather than a promise of reward.

Next week, we’ll make our way to the last quadrant of the matrix: High Risk/High Reward.

Google’s Recent Changes: Here There Be Monsters

First published November 11, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Something’s brewing in Mountain View. Google’s geared up the SAR (Screwing Around Rate) of its results page to unprecedented levels. We have Google Instant, Place Search and Google Previews all rolling out in the last few months. And from around the blogosphere, there’s rumors of testing that allows users to show 11 sponsored ads on top and also the telling switch of the label “Sponsored Links” to simply “Ads.” So what do Google strategists have up their sleeves?

The recent changes at Google prompted me to dig out a research paper we wrote a few years ago called “Search Engine Results: 2010.” In it, I interviewed Marissa Mayer along with a dream team of search pundits and usability experts. A lot of what we’re seeing today was hinted at in those interviews.

For example, Mayer said: “If you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through — to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format. When you started seeing some diagrams, some video, some news, some charts, you might actually have a page that looks and feels more like an interactive encyclopedia.”

Michael Ferguson, who was the UX lead at Ask, which had just rolled out Ask 3D (which, in hindsight, was well ahead of its time), went further: “There might be a time you might see people advertising and providing content not just on web pages and blogs etc. but with short discrete self-contained video answers and audio answers that come up either as sponsored or relevant content. So you might have a breaking down of search marketing that takes some of the things that have been learned like optimization and designing good text ads and seeing how that would work when you’re delivering an audio 20 second pitch or delivering an audio content that drives traffic to your site.”

There’s a delicate balance that must be respected when you’re combining the presentation of advertising and the way we search for information. As the results themselves become increasing rich and interactive, advertisers won’t be very happy if the ads start to lag behind in terms of visual prominence. Mayer touched on this: “As you know, my theory is always that the ad should match the search results. So if you have text results, you have text ads, and if you have image results, you have image ads. So as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page. That said, trust is a fundamental premise of search. Search is a learning activity.”

It’s this trust that makes the presentation of advertising a precarious proposition on the search results page. We’re not there to find ads, we’re there to find relevant information. If ads are highly relevant, we’re receptive. If they’re not, we’ll skip over them. We accept ads not as ads, but as potential paths to relevant information.

This is an important distinction. If ads start to look too much like ads we start to skip over them. And that decision is made in milliseconds, before the relevance of the information that lies on the other side of the ad is even considered.

This phenomenon is called banner blindness. Jakob Nielsen explains: “If they put up display ads, then they will start training people to exhibit more banner blindness, which will also cause them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well. The problem of course is they are inherently a more two dimensional media form, and video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional – graphic, and the third dimension is time, so they become more difficult to process in this linear type of scanned document ‘down the page’ type of pattern.”

I believe that Google is now responding to the multi-screen search challenge. Search on a desktop needs to be different than search on a mobile device or on a tablet. Mayer’s “encyclopedia” format makes sense here. But experimentation and the resulting change come at the potential price of alienating users.

Why have ads been the least changed part of the search page? It’s certainly not because advertisers have been demanding that they remain as boring lines of text. It’s because Google, along with Bing and Yahoo, are acutely aware of how important that trust is. The nature of our engagement with ads on a search page is far less straightforward than you might think. There’s a lot of subtle psychology at play here.  In the words of Hector Barbossa, “You’re off the edge of the map now mate, and here there be monsters!”

Google Defines “You” on the Fly

First published November 4, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Google’s ramping up of local results last week made me realize something: our Web presence is rapidly being taken out of our immediate control. Case in point, the Place Page.

Beyond the Walled Garden…

For over a year now, I’ve been pushing a mind shift to our clients, asking them to stop thinking of their online presence in terms of a “website” and more in terms of a portfolio of digital assets; some under their control and others either completely or partially out of their control. For every entity that lives online, there is a ripple effect. At the core is our website. Spreading out, usually with lessening degrees of control, are the “rings” of our presence: portal sites and extranets, mobile apps, information or products on channel partner sites, online ads, videos, interactions in the social space, comments, reviews, references and third-party apps that may access either our data or pieces of our functional infrastructure. The sum of all this is our online presence. As such, it is incumbent on us to be aware of what that looks like, and how visitors might interact with it.

The challenge is daunting for any company that has been online for a while. Even as an individual, according to Google I “live” online and in over 10,000 separate locations. And that’s just what can be easily identified in Google’s index. I suspect the number is even higher. Today’s column will have its own ripple effect, adding to the collective total of what is “Gord Hotchkiss.” My company’s online presence is the sum of over 25,000 individual parts.

Bringing the Web to Your Neighborhood

Now, consider a tiny two- or three-person company in some small town somewhere in America. The odds are pretty good that they may not even have a website, or if they do, it may not have made much of an impact on the vast ecosystem of the Web. At least, that’s been true up to now. But Google’s Place Pages provides a prescient view of how our Web presence might be defined.

Place Pages aggregates at least some of the various pieces of a local business’ online presence. The interesting part is that these Place Pages exist even if there’s little or no input from the business owners themselves. It’s an online presence defined by an algorithm — or rather, multiple algorithms. It’s a small digital snapshot of “you” as defined by Google. Google decides which parts of “you” it exposes.

Place Pages are important in Google’s local search strategies because they solve a problem that restricted the growth of the hyper-local online market. People will only search if there’s something there to find. Google had to create a scalable on-ramp model to give local businesses an online presence. The company did it by leveraging its strength: finding and organizing information. In this case, the presence is created from the information that defines the business on the Web. It’s carrying a search results page one click further, making it specific to one company and structuring the data in a more cohesive way.

“You” on the Fly

This is interesting and important on two different levels. It shows that an online presence can be created through algorithmic aggregation alone, even in the absence of an official website. It shows how extensive our identities are online. Like it or not, we leave footprints on the digital landscape, and no one is in a better position than Google to gather those together to create online destinations on the fly. If this is true for the tiny Mom and Pop shop in Cannon Ball, N.D., it’s even truer for bigger, more established entities, whether they be organizations or individuals. Will our online selves be increasing defined by Google, with or without our input?

The other thing to ponder is that this is scalable and driven by technology. Google has an open door to aggregate and present different types of information, specific to the type of company it is. I suspect a lot of what you see in the current Place Pages is simply a placeholder for new things to come.

The creation of Web destinations on the fly is quite probably a game-changer for Google.  It’s a natural extension of the company’s mission, organizing the world’s information. It provides a new outlet for something that Google has been doing for well over a decade now: gathering together the ripples that define us online.

Ode to an iPad

First published October 21, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I really had no idea how much I’d love my iPad. I have to say that it’s now my preferred connection to the online world. Somehow, whether by design or coincidence, Apple has tapped into something primal and intuitive in myself. Judging from other iPad owners I’ve talked to, I suspect I’m not alone. There is a magical thing happening between me and this sleek little device. And whatever it is, it’s important, even prescient. This, I suspect, is our future sitting in our laps.

What’s the Big Deal?

I’ve spent a good part of my life pondering various technology interfaces. Based on this, I really didn’t think the iPad was that big a deal. The reason I got one was because I needed an ebook reader and I felt that the iPad offered me more functionality than a Kindle. But other than the inevitable coolness (or, at least, perceived coolness) that comes with any Apple device, I didn’t see what all the buzz was about. After all, it was just a big iPhone… without the phone. I still had to deal with an all-too-touchy digital keyboard and a rather anemic processor.

But then I got my hands on one. And something rather strange happened. I suspect that Apple may have found the perfect form factor. When you combine the larger screen with multitouch technology, it completely changes how I interacted with my device. It wasn’t something I could have predicted. But everything I did on the iPad just seemed more natural, more enjoyable, more — dare I say it — sensual. This was one sexy little piece of technology.

Love of the Limbic Kind

What happened? There is no new technology here. We’re even using an obsolete OS, for heaven’s sake. There may be no rational reasoning — but I’ll tell you, my irrational mind has fallen in love. Then again, perhaps it has nothing to do with ration. Maybe Apple is just making interactions with technology more primitive, in a good way.

Keyboards are stupid in pretty much every way imaginable. I’ve dedicated several hours of my life to understanding the QWERTY layout so I’m a reasonably proficient touch typist, but the layout still makes no sense — and yes, I’m aware of the history of it vs. the Dvorak keyboard.. The mouse was a step in the right direction, but there was still some rewiring of our brains required to understand that the cursor was really our proxy for our hand movements.  I find track pads a rather poor compromise.

But, to be able to grab something right in front of our eyes and manipulate it, ah — that is touching something hardwired deep in our limbic brain.  To flick, to stroke, to pinch — that is what it means to be human. Up ’til now, our user experiences have had to be jammed in the arbitrary constraints of outdated and illogical interfaces. But the iPad, perhaps more than any other device before it, is letting us be human again. And the experience is intoxicating.

The Human Part of HCI

I felt something of the same rush when I first picked up the iPhone, but the extra real estate of the iPad delivers a compounding effect on the level of the user experience. Perhaps you think I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but I suspect that the very humanness of the iPad’s interface could be a game-changer. I’m not the first to say so. This was much of the buzz I discounted when the iPad first came out. But now I’ve had the chance to see what might be behind the game-changing aspects of this device. And ironically, it’s nothing to do with new technology. In fact, it’s wrapping existing technology in a package that nailed the “human” part of the human-computer-interaction equation.

The question that comes to mind is, how might this change the nature of our online experiences? If our entire online history has been built on the paradigm of a keyboard/mouse/monitor interaction, how might that change with a multitouch, interactive screen? And that’s not even including geographically savvy devices, cameras or voice commands. That’s a substantially different paradigm, which will inevitably lead to a substantially different experience. Imagine, interacting with a virtual world where you can picture your surroundings, know where you are, touch the things you’re interacting with and express your intent verbally.  Finally, technology will start to catch up with what it means to be a human.

The Jill Hotchkiss Inflection Point

First published July 29, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Technology has reached a critical point in the adoption curve. My wife, who is imminently practical and intolerant of anything that smacks of gadgetry, is becoming intrigued by my iPhone. I can’t overstate the importance of this in terms of watershed moments. Steve Jobs, if you can get my wife to buy into your vision, you have crossed the chasm.

There’s something important to note here in attitudes towards technology that we digerati, gathered together on the leading edge of the bell curve, often forget. Technology only becomes important to most people when it lets them do something they care about. For my wife, my gleeful demonstrations of the wonder that is Shazam gained nothing but a prolonged rolling of the eyes. Twitter clients and Facebook apps? Puh-leeze! Redlaser elicited a brief spark of interest, but this quickly passed when she saw the steps she had to take to do any virtual shopping. Even the wonders of the cosmos, conveniently mapped by pUniverse, did not pass the Jill acid test. As long as my app inventory didn’t improve her life in any appreciable way, she remained resolutely unimpressed.

But lately, there have been cracks in the wall of technology defense she has carefully constructed since marrying me. A nifty little app called Mousewait was the first chink. Knowing the wait times in the ride lines on a recent trip to Disneyland was something she cared about. Suddenly, she was asking me to take out the iPhone and check to see how many minutes we’d have to wait at Splash Mountain. Yelp helped us find a reasonable family restaurant in San Diego. And Taxi Magic allowed us to quickly hail a cab in San Francisco.

But the moment I knew the defenses were ready to crumble was when she recently turned to me and said: “So, you can do all that stuff on an iPhone? What other things can you do?”

Aahhh… the door was open, but only a crack. If I’ve learned one thing in 21 years of marriage, I’ve learned to tread slowly when these opportunities present themselves. I had to carefully craft my response. Too much enthusiasm shown at this point could be fatal…

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“On the iPhone… what could you do with it?”

“What could I do with it, or what could you do with it?

“Me… let’s say.”

And here we come to the crux of the matter. I’m extremely tolerant of technology. I’ll struggle my way through an interface and put up with crappy design simply so I can emerge victorious on the top of the early adopter heap, holding my iPhone proudly aloft. At the first inkling of frustration, my wife will turf the thing into the nearest trashcan. If you functionality is what you’re looking for, app designers have to provide the shortest possible path from A to B.

If you really want to scale the opportunity that lies at the Jill Hotchkiss inflection point, what you have to do is start providing seamless functionality for app to app. The new iPhone OS is edging down this path by supporting multitasking, but there is still a long way to go before you’ll make my wife truly happy. And that, believe me, is a goal worthy of pursuit.

White Salmon and Black Swans

First published July 22, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The conversation started innocently enough. We were entertaining out-of-town guests at a winery and restaurant overlooking Lake Okanagan. And, as often happens when people visit B.C., they ordered salmon.

“You know, I heard that not all salmon are pink. There are actually white salmon.”

“Really, I’ve never heard of that.”

“Well, let’s see if there really are white salmon.”

So, we turned to the arbitrator of all such things: Google. If it can be found on the Web, apparently it exists. Which is an interesting behavior in itself, and a point I’ll come back to in a minute. But first, let’s talk about why the existence of white salmon is important.

A Fish by any Other Color

A white salmon is important because it’s a black swan. Or, rather, it’s a Black Swan. The capitalization is critical, because it’s not the animal I’m referring to, but the phenomenon identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name.

For all of human history, until the 17th century, it was commonly accepted that all swans were white. But in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered a black swan in western Australia. Why is that important? Well, for the vast majority of us, it’s not. But what if, for some reason, our world revolves around swans? What if our ability to earn a living depends on the predictably of a swan’s natural coloring? Then suddenly, it becomes vitally important.

Black Swans — and white salmon, for that matter — are outliers. And outliers are important because they cause us to change our view of the world. The normal, regular and expected allow our lives to run down predictable paths. As long as this continues, nothing changes. But the unpredicted, the unknown outlier, is an undeniable occurrence that forces us to reframe our view of things and take a new path. It was a Black Swan that changed the world.

According to Taleb, Black Swans have to have three things: they have to lie outside the realm of regular expectations, they have to carry extreme impact, and, when we discover them, they force us to alter our view of things to explain their existence. We have to change our view of the world to accommodate them. Taleb asserts that all of human history has taken a path that pivots on the discovery of Black Swans.

Discovering Black Swans

Now, back to our dinner conversation. Black Swans only become important when they were discovered. The vastness of the physical world meant that it took us a long time to find that first black swan.

But the world today is significantly different than it was in 1697. Today, Black Swans pop up all the time on YouTube or in a blog post. Every single day, somebody somewhere is googling a Black Swan. And, when they find them, Black Swans go viral because the unexpected is naturally fascinating to us. We can’t help but talk about it, and today, when we do, chances are it’s through a digital channel.

The more the world becomes digitally connected and synchronized, the faster word spreads about Black Swans. And when word spreads, we are forced once again to change our view of the world. This means that the pace of change in human history, catalyzed by Black Swan discoveries, is picking up speed. Today, you can’t step outside your door without tripping over a Black Swan.

The discovery of a Black Swan sets in motion a recurring chain of events. First, we have to acknowledge its existence. Let’s call this the Black Swan Googling stage. Then, we have to talk about it. This would be the Black Swan Twitter stage. Then, we have to rationalize its existence, creating an explanation for it — the Black Swan Wikipedia stage. Then, it becomes an accepted part of our new worldview, the new normal. What used to take centuries to filter through the civilized world now happens in the matter of days, or, at the most, weeks.

After all, when I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white salmon. Today, my world has changed forever.