Stone Age brains and the social web

I just listened to a brilliant "All In The Mind" podcast on "Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls" while jogging around Highgate Woods:

Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.

The podcast confirmed my thoughts on the importance of intimate social context in our lives—specifically, social intimacy appears to limit the extent to which the dynamics between manic/dominant and depressive/submissive personalities become excessively polarised within groups.

Such polarisation of social dynamics is an adaptive behaviour that is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain: assertion of leadership by the few within a small community allows the community to function without constant fighting. 

However, the exploded social contexts we live within in the modern world can distort assertion and submission into manic/psychotic and depressive behaviours respectively. Fascinatingly, we're told that all four of the major leaders in WWII (Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Tojo) had manic personality disorders of one kind or another.

Given all the above, how might we build social software that helps us rediscover intimacy of social context in an exploded society? Sounds like it's a fairly urgent mission.

LinkedIn's promise

Pretty much all my business friends are on LinkedIn. According to Read Write Web, LinkedIn has around 20 million members and around 6.6 million monthly active users. They are the clear global market leaders in the business networking space—Centre Networks report that Xing, their closest competitor, had 5 million members in January 2008.

So just what is it that LinkedIn is doing so right? And could it be doing that thing even better?

The LinkedIn promise

The heart of what makes a service or product successful is the power of the aspirations it evokes. Once we identify the core "promise" that the service holds out to us, we can then look at how effectively the its functionalities, workflows and UI amplify, filter and channel that promise into a rewarding and effective, tangible user experience (UX).

So what is LinkedIn's promise to its users?

First up, LinkedIn's self-avowed mission: "to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the relationships you already have". Hmm, not exactly snappy, eh? We're going to have to read between the lines and read the subtle cues here...

I would sum up my actual experience of using LinkedIn feels something more like this: "LinkedIn promises to bring my business card to life." LinkedIn seems to say to me: "we will extend your carefully-constructed business card and CV across your network for you, bringing you a wealth of serendipitous professional insights and opportunities."

So what, specifically, gives me this impression?

Visual branding—"corporate" and "creative" in counterpoint

LinkedIn's visual branding is deceptively subtle. At first glance, you might think it minimal and conservative. Lots of greyspace and whitespace around clean-edged boxes and tidy little icons; tightly controlled areas of colour.

But look more closely.

Within this conservative visual framework, there is actually a wealth of variety of gradient effects, block colour shades, corner shapes, button and border styles, list layouts. I can feel that the LinkedIn designers have had fun with this UI!

To illustrate my point, here's a collage of fragments from the LinkedIn UI. (See if you can find them on the site itself—a treasure hunt!):

But so what? What does the subtleties of graphic design have to do with LinkedIn's core UX?

Well, the "corporate yet fun" visual branding perfectly expresses the "double promise" of LinkedIn that I suggested above: that you can both keep firm control of how people perceive your identity while also benefiting in serendipitous and unexpected ways by expressing that identity. In my experience, those two attributes tap into fairly universal human needs, so it's no surprise that LinkedIn is so successful.

Genteel gameplay

If LinkedIn was a game, it would be one that you couldn't easily lose at.

As you build up the various aspects your profile, a little "profile completeness" status bar creeps up towards 100%. But there are no wrong moves or puzzling challenges in the profile building game—just the gentle incentive of that status bar and the hope that your contacts will view your professional identity in a better light and opportunities will flow.

By way of illustration, I found this image by blogger Stephanie Booth (though note also the somewhat disgruntled comment exchange under the original image!):



The status bar is classic LinkedIn. It says: "take your time, stay in control, just follow the instructions - but maybe, just maybe, this could lead on to unsuspected opportunities." That's a potent double promise.

Cherry picking the social web

It didn't escape observers' attention that the latest iteration of the LinkedIn site drew on key features of Facebook for inspiration - the Newsfeed on the Home page and the Questions and Answers features being two of the most conspicuous examples.

But even when cherry picking the "bleeding edge" of the social web, LinkedIn keeps its brand promise. The content of the Newsfeed is just interesting enough to attract a curious glance from time to time (e.g. "[Your contact's name] added [someone else] as a contact"), but never strays into embarassing or awkward territory.

I will never read a message like "[Your contact name] just got the sack and is now unemployed" on LinkedIn. Engaging and potentially useful to observers as that message would be, it would LinkedIn's implied promise to help you maintain a positive professional image.

LinkedIn sucks, but it shouldn't care

When I asked my social media maven friends to tell me how well LinkedIn worked for them, their reaction was mixed.

Here are a few of their twittered gripes:

"I find it takes too many clicks to see someone's connections. Also, interface isn't consistent." - Jof Arnold

"Always struck me as kind of thing that should be useful, but just not yet. Loathe to bail in case it's useful after I've gone." - Tim Duckett

"[J]ust an address-neutral repository of people I know, and an occasional source of annoying recruiters." - Alan Patrick

"LinkedIn would be cool if it had some decent apps..." - Steve Lawson

"It seems like it should be much more useful & effective than it is." - Pete Goold

So LinkedIn clearly isn't serving the early adopter crowd optimally, and I would imagine that must be impacting negatively on the amount of "buzz PR" they are getting on blogs, twitter, podcasts and so on.

But then again, why should LinkedIn care too much?

As I said at the beginning of this post, pretty much all my professional friends are on LinkedIn—despite their reservations about its utility. For early adopters, the bottom line is that LinkedIn works for them as a rolodex. And for those early adopters who aren't already maxed out with gainful employment, there is an additional hope (not necessarily expectation) that being on LinkedIn could generate new opportunities.

If LinkedIn jumped to the tune of every fleeting, outré social web trend in an effort to excite us early adopters, they would be breaking their brand promise of keeping the user in control of a dependable and familiar environment. They would risk alienating their mass market of late adopters.

And Reid Hoffman is far too clever to do that.

A message runs through it

If you've ever had the dubious privilege of eating a stick of Brighton Rock, you'll know that there's some message or other written pink or green into the white sugar, and that message goes through the length of the sweet.

Great brands are like that. Everything they do communicates their brand promise.

Of course, I could only touch on small areas and aspects of LinkedIn's web (and indeed mobile) presence in this post. But it seems to me that wherever I turn on LinkedIn, I encounter the same double promise of safety and opportunity.

It's a great lesson in business focus.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all my friends who helped me to clarify my thoughts on LinkedIn by sharing their own. While we're on the subject, why not check out their LinkedIn profiles, via my own (requires LinkedIn signin)? Maybe, just maybe, it could lead to professional opportunities for you...

[UPDATE: Special thanks to Chris Osborne for pointing out an error in my LinkedIn statistics references—now corrected]

User Experience made better

Does your company have a presence on the social web, but no User Experience (UX) specialist? If so, I can help you. Watch this two minute Blog Friends case study slideshow to see my UX work in action in a service that grew from zero to 27k users—including 13 of the world's Top 100 bloggers—in eight months.

What I offer

I can help you make your service's user-facing experience simpler, more powerful and more intuitive. I can take some or all of these steps with your company:

• Clarifying your User Experience (UX) question or challenge
• UX testing and evaluation*
• UI concept development or iteration
• UI design implementation
• Full or modular solution development (in partnership with web solutions agency Brain Bakery) 

*Optionally, I can engage my network of leading UK social media influencers for your UX testing, creating great PR opportunities and insights into that key demographic's needs for you.

Your ROI

On the hyper-competitive web, every useability barrier is a costly lost opportunity. I can help you to get to the heart of your usability issues quickly and efficiently, and then help you to solve them too.

• Clear objectives and engagement structure help you to project ROI
• Modular approach helps you tailor projects to your exact requirements
• Potential top-line benefits of even modest improvements in usability can be very significant

My track record

As CEO and UX/UI design lead for i-together Ltd., I am responsible for the Blog Friends and Buzzspotr user experiences.


Blog Friends was a social blog reading app on facebook that had 27k users, amongst them 13 of the Technorati 100.

• "My favourite Facebook app is Blog Friends... It's delightfully simple but packs in a lot of features."—Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk
• "I have been a big fan of the service since it launched, it has brought efficiency, variety and serendipity to my feedreading to the extent that I have pretty much stopped using any other reader."—Nic Brisbourne, DFJ Esprit
• "The most useful (eventually the only) Facebook App I used."—Alan Patrick, Broadsight
• And Robert Scoble, the world's leading technology blogger, put us in his Facebook Application Top 10.

Take a look at this two minute slideshow to find out just what it is about Blog Friends that people loved.


Buzzspotr is a social location-sharing service, currently in closed alpha. Buzzspotr makes it easy and fun to find friendly places and faces in the city.

• "Buzzspotr is reminiscent of Dodgeball (acquired by Google and mothballed) and Plazes, but, since it currently uses Twitter and Google maps, it is really a web app, not a mobile service or a PC download, which suggests it could scale faster."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch
• "A neat way to communicate with your network and see where people are gathering and who’s talking about what... a truly useful mobile app, one that I reckon has great potential."—Neville Hobson
• "The team that built both [Blog Friends and Buzzspotr] is widely known in London as being amongst the best in their field... Angel or seed-fund specialists would do well to get in touch."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch

Buzzspotr demonstrations can be arranged on request (we are in closed alpha at the moment).

Communication is key to success

Of course, I didn't make these great user experiences alone—I worked with both i-together's team of three and our community as a whole to learn about what was needed and wanted. Good communication has been key to our success. 

Similarly, I will work closely with you and your team, and also with your users and target users as appropriate, to ensure that every step we take together is along the path of your strategy to serve your users actual needs.

And the more you open your UX development process to your community and the world, the more effectively I can communicate the excitement of your project to my excellent personal network of influencial social media figures. If they take an interest in what you are doing, you may find you get the kind of authentic and compelling PR that money can't buy—for free!

Tech savvy

At the same time, working closely with i-together's development team, coupled with my prior study and consultancy in the digital identity space (see this blog's archives), enable me to root my UI work in a clear understanding of diverse technologies and their constraints, including:  database management, scalability factors, bandwidth and server performance issues, SEO best practices, HTML, Flash, CSS, JavaScript (and Facebook-specific versions of HTML and JavaScript), Facebook Platform, REST APIs, OpenID, Microformats and RSS. 

In short, my UX and UI work is rooted deeply in an awareness of both what is compellingly useful and what is technically possible—and the broad scope of technical challenge entailed by any given design decision. 

Interested? Let's talk

If you have a challenge or question you think I could help you to solve, please let me know and I will see what I can do. It's never too soon to make your users' experience better!

Email: luke@weaverluke.com
Twitter and Skype: weaverluke
Mobile: 07985 119095

Hacking the nature of existence

Nic Brisbourne concludes a thoughtful post "On widgets, social networks and the nature of existence": "[W]e find ourselves in a situation where internet companies might not even need their own website. A kind of virtual, virtual company if you will…."

I completely agree with Nic's sentiment at a high level. This concept of a virtualised service was what lead i-together to deploy Blog Friends within Facebook in the first place. However, the tactical view from within an early-stage startup like Blog Friends turns out to look subtly different than I expected. I left a comment on Nic's post:

Your "web brand virtualisation via open social nets" point is well taken. As you say, Blog Friends within Facebook is an example of this trend.

However, we are now building a central presence for Blog Friends beyond 3rd-party sites. To start with, we plan to deploy some key new Blog Friends features exclusively at i-together.com, over the next month or so, keeping the main feedreader service within Facebook. Then we intend to comprehensively re-architect Blog Friends around a set of APIs, which will make it relatively trivial to deploy (or for others to deploy) Blog Friends on diverse platforms and devices. (Incidentally, we didn't start off with an API-based approach back in June 2007 because we knew we had to get Blog Friends out as soon as possible to catch the Facebook adoption wave—a decision we still regard as correct.)

But why do we not feel that spreading across multiple social nets alone is an optimum strategy?

Two reasons: firstly, having our own "place" on the web gives us an air of solid independence; it safeguards us against the varying fortunes of any given 3rd-party platform (witness Facebook's fall from grace amongst the In Crowd of late). Secondly, it is *so* much quicker to implement and test features when e.g. FBML and FBJS are not involved, and those features can be a lot richer and run much faster. With our tiny development resources (three of us!), and with competition breathing down our neck, we can't afford to waste even an ounce of effort.

Presence distribution is immensely valuable as a strategy, but the current state of the web and the tech that powers it, along with startup resource limitations can necessitate some toughly pragmatic tactical choices.

The social web is not a machine—it is (evolving into) us

Chris Brogan wonders if the social web could be understood as a machine that we can learn to "program".

After adding a couple of rather emotive comments that didn't respond fairly to Chris's whole post (I've learned to open my mouth before thinking too much these days—I rarely regret it in the long run!), I managed to say what I really meant:

@Chris- My point (clumsily made, for which apologies) is that the programming metaphor only goes so far in encapsulating our activity on the social web, because we are (hopefully) not just using the social web as a “machine” to achieve a particular, pre-planned outcome that we desire (a blog in the Technorati Top 100, a new consultancy contract etc.), but rather are embedded in a complex and quite mysterious world of cybernetically-extended human relationship.

It’s only when we give up “knowing” where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn’t seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.

All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need “programming” skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.

Let’s just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )

Powerful metaphors need judicious useage.

My hairstylist is a Blog Friends user

Well, I must say I was pretty chuffed today when my Brazilian hairstylist, Pedro, told me that not only had he taken up my invitation to sign up for Blog Friends, but also that he really likes it and has found some great posts, including one that I had also read and that we both loved—Scoble's "What I've learned in 2007".

How cool is that? : )

Clearly, the days when all hairdressers were interested in was where you were going on your holidays are long gone. Seriously though, Pedro is one of the most thoughtful and interesting people I've met in a while, so the fact he enjoys Blog Friends makes me happy.

All of a Twitter

I'm really enjoying using Twitter wholeheartedly for the first time. It's a bit like tracking down an elusive party—a lot of my mates are hanging out there already. I'm also getting lots of inspiration for ideas for the integration of Blog Friends with Twitter (which is actually what prompted me to get Twittering). And you can now track my latest Tweets (should you really want to!) in the weaverluke sidebar.

But where's Twitter's business model? Fred Wilson, one of their investors, clearly feels that it would be a mistake to worry about that too soon, as it could distract them from growing their userbase as fast as possible. Nic Brisbourne agrees, but also points out that web entrepreneurs should at least have a "Plan A" for monetisation in their back pocket.

I suspect Jason Calacanis is right to point to mobile advertising as an attractive monetisation option for Twitter, but I'd go even further: maybe Twitter should get themselves acquired by a mobile telco who could pay for the SMS bills and integrate Tweets with mobile ads..?