It’s All About The Audience

Mark Cuban sees no-model and a bleak future for video on the web, but I’m inclined to agree with one commenter at least.

Call it old media, or old software, but one thing is clear — neither seems to really know who the hell their audience / customers are. You see this reflected back in passive ads that fail to engage (why pay attention if what I’m watching has no relevance to me) and unsightly, uncompelling software that’s difficult to use.

It’s no longer possible to assume a broad and captive audience, but that’s a good thing if you’re a content creator, advertiser or software developer that has a deep understanding of who your audience is and where they’re at.

To pull a Clay Shirky, the real problem is that the distribution of video is no longer monetizable. Control of delivery guaranteed “final cut” over content creation and total leverage over monetization. Since relatively little could be known about the viewing audience (who was watching and their level of interest) only mass market content was financed and marketed to consumers and advertisers. This is any easy system to administer for distributors and advertisers, but is extremely inefficient.

Other factors also have contributed to the old model’s decline. Television replaced radio as the only game in town for a largely rural / suburban population, but has since been challenged by the increasing number of entertainment options available to a highly mobile and increasingly urbanized population. Combine these factors with the rise of social computing and interactive media and you have a lethal cocktail.

As with most things, I see a lesson in software development here. Old software assumes a broad, apathetic, if not quite passive, audience and tries to lock them into a one-size fits all model. Old software doesn’t really understand its audience, so it tries draw an audience by offering a smorgasbord of diluted features. Old software won’t be effective in making an emotional connection with its audience (beyond anger) and isn’t relevant enough to withstand cost or vertical pressure.

…at least that’s the way I see it. :-)

Iteration Is Not Inherently Good

What happens when you lower transaction costs to the point that making “interface” changes becomes an unremarkable effort? You get more change and less discipline. In some cases the results are positive and in others, not so much as Danah Boyd points out.

In the software industry we often pride ourselves on iteration and view the ability to quickly change an interface as inherently good. It’s nice to be reminded of the costs of “improvement”.

User Interface + User Experience = Brand

The realization that targeted branding is actually very close to user interface design was hammered home as I read through an old Danah Boyd post.

Danah Boyd on personalization within the context of tailored branding:

Bret Victor on context-sensitive information graphics:

One of the reasons Flash has been so important to the brand conscious on the web, is because its ability to present emotional, powerful branded aesthetics combined with rich contextualization. What Danah and Bret do extremely well is explain why this is important. Going forward I’d argue that most software–desktop, web, RIA, or otherwise–will be judged by the market on its ability to deliver the two pillars of rich experience:

• personalization
• contextualization

Annotated Screenshots + Hyperlink = A Cerebral Lifestream

I surf the web, my feed reader, twitter and a lot of the other information sources. Often I find I want to use a highlighter or otherwise annotate my reading material just as I would of done back in college (mabye a little less liberally with the highlighting). Jing is great for this and I’m a huge fan of it’s tag template mechanism which allows me to create embed / image tag templates that get returned when I press the link button.

Here’s what gets returned to me by Jing after clicking the “embed / tag” button:

However, what I really want most of the time is an image (img) tag wrapped by an anchor (a) tag. The anchor tag contains the link to the article where the screenshot was taken:

I call this technique disclosure to context (maybe “establishing shot” is more apt–spit it out if you have something better). Annotated screenshots and screencasts are brilliant at providing micro-context (hey, this over here is what I find interesting), but fall flat when providing macro-context (where the hell did this come from and why can’t I see). If you put them together however, you have the ability to “stream” what you find salient within its broader context – a more cerebral form of lifestreaming. There’s all kinds of contexts where this can be used…maybe I’ve stumbled on a new microblogging format (jingstream, screenstream, dstream – desktop stream, vstream – virtual stream).

I’d love to know if anyone knows of a microformat which does this for items that don’t have a web URI (this is my image and this is the application, or context, it came from). Also any pearls on embedding this type of information within the binary file itself with XMP, or otherwise, gets you a beer or my undying gratitude the next time I run into you. ;-)

Transparency Extended: Flickr Stream UI Screenshots

It’s amazing how much the world of software development is changing. What was once a clandestine affair now extends to early public alphas / betas. For those not quite so inclusive, a Flickr stream of UI screenshots lets the masses get involved.

Why screenshots of the UI? Like it or not, everyone considers themselves a UI expert. An application or website UI is likely to draw a considerable amount of feedback (or ire — anyone remember the great Adobe icon debacle of ’06). In the case of the “icon debacle” by releasing previews early Adobe was able to free the actual product release window from considerable negative noise by showing the icons early and engaging in a dialog with the protestors. Adobe didn’t change the icons, but it gave consumers a chance to digest the change and develop an alternative set of icons that could be used if you were a hater.

A stream of ui screenshots seems like a trick every product marketer / PM should have in their bag. What I’d really like to see is a stream that went from start to finish. It would be great to see the complete evolution of ideas from the initial designer comps to the final build. On release day throw together a time lapse video and you’ve got ready made marketing Kool-Aid that illustrates the hard work and refinement that went into the release.

For the record, I liked the CS 3 icons then and still like ‘em now. ;-P