created 2004-03-31 15:42:49

(Up to: Proles And Technology Functionally Focused Interfaces Interfaces Conversation Is AFlow Interface Trends )

While I welcome progressive thinking on how to make our lives easier when it comes to swapping messages, it amazes me that there are still hugely obvious mistakes being made when it comes to user interfaces.

David Brake points out BulB, a new way of visualising bulletin/forum board activity. Here's the original paper.

The paper's worth a look, but the premise is that information about topics, posts and authors are represented by flower-like diagrams, with the stalk length indicating the age of the topic, and a choice of decorations indicating the number and frequency of posts, as well as who/how "dominant" post authors are.

The problem, IMHO, is that in an effort to produce an aesthetically-pleasing overall view of a board as a whole, many more-important facets of what people want to do are missed out. Furthermore, it seems to me that trying to encourage a community (whatever that may mean) by pushing visual representations as a "bolt-on" is ultimately doomed.

Purpose

First of all, there is the question of what BulB is trying to do. As the paper states...

"A sense of community is normally associated with close interaction and shared co-presence, whereas the typical contact between user and website is on the whole a solitary experiencewith limited visual clues indicating the presence of other participants and their activity. The work outlined in this paper is aimed at promoting and facilitating member communication within bulletin boards, whereby a feeling of co-presence akin to 'face-to-face' interaction is engendered."

So the purpose here is to encourage communities by providing users with an overview of forum activity. This strikes me to have the following drawbacks:

1. The overview is more of a "stats" approach, but isn't intended to deliver any kind of "relevance". This is ok if a forum is centred around a particular area in the first place, perhaps, but many forums provide threads for different uses and purposes, and a user will be interested in some more than others. Naturally, this interest will differ according to the user, which an overview does not cater for.
2. A complete overview is only useful to those that are not familiar with the forum in any way. Anyone else will already know the history of the forum, or as much as need be, and so as the user stays on the site, the information presented in the overview becomes less and less relevant.
3. While the overview is most useful to newcomers, only a small number of threads will be particuarly relevant to that user - e.g. "Start here", or "Welcome", etc. By sorting by activity, an overview assumes that a new user will be willing to join any thread at first. This goes against any social network behaviour, on the whole, moreso in real life, where people will seek out "newbie-friendly" places initially, then explore more "specific" locations later.

Interface vs Design

There seem to be several quite-fundamental design flaws that exist in the BulB interface. At first glance, at least the following are present:

1. The use of colours to represent users does not scale, and certainly isn't informed by accessibility guidelines. If only a handful of users are present in the visualisation, then obviously the maximum difference can exist between the colours used (orange and blue, for instance). But as more users must be represented, so the difference between colours gets blurred.
2. . ...

continuing...

Concluding Thoughts

As the paper claims, "there are many examples of communities offering these [communicative] facilities with little or no participation from users". This is rather vague, as there are plenty of sites offering plenty of chance for users to say something, but that also have a much larger issue of attracting users in the first place. In my experience, the activity of a communication system depends on many more factors than simply the interface, for instance...

• The purpose of the site
• The type of users being attracted
• The content being generated by the system, by other users

A visual overview of site activity, and user activity, may offer just that - an overview, but does relatively little, in comparison to other factors such as those above, to actually encourage an active community. I agree that there can be factors related to how forum information is presented to a user, and that there are methods to assist a user find their way around (sortable threads, "Date of last message" info, "Number of posts" info, and "Hot topic" icons have all found popularity for instance), but these are generally overshadowed by more fundamental movements.