Perhaps, the real questions are: How many women are there in leadership positions. How many have a education in hard sciences , math, computer science and are working in engineering functions in high tech. Let me leave the first question for another time and address the second one alone.

When I came to the US almost two decades ago to start my graduate school work, I was truly horrified to learn that there were actually fewer girls interested in Engineering than there were in my school in India. I had naively assumed that in a more Western setting, women would be evenly distributed across disciplines. Today, as as parent of an almost middle schooler, I listen to the laments of mothers, who are starting to see their daughters turn away from math and science because it is seen by their peers as “difficult” and “not cool”.  Here now is something I can truly lament. Children, at the very moment that they should be introduced to the joys of a subject being turned off it for what seems like a ill informed fad. Let us design an environment where they can explore and learn to their hearts content, where they understand the inner beauty of some of these subjects – then choose to persue them if they so desire. This is vastly more important than insisiting that several of them appear at the far end of the funnel.

Any talk of women in tech must atleast be vaguely cognizant of the fact that if they are in tech , then there is someplace where thy are not. As my mind tries to find purchase on a local loss, I realize that she too was a woman in tech. A  rocket scientist no less. I remember her as someone who organized the school play last year and put in hours of work for three months – so that my son could be the loudest rooster to grace any stage in any universe (period).

So, then this: perhaps if they women are not in tech, they are somewhere else, where the need is greater, the good they do greater.

Trying to learn what is going on during an event by looking at the tweet tagged with the its name, feels a little like standing at a crowded intersection in a strange land, watching the locals stream by in every which direction. But if you pick one of them… yes that one with the easel and the paint smudge and follow him to a gallery or two, then walk into a cafe where he meets his friends, absorb the iffti and then amble along towards the river front. Now, suddenly, you know a little about this land.

When something trends, it is good to have someone to follow who is embedded in that issue that is trending. During the current crisis I just happen to be following someone who is in Japan, and who by his (very limited number of ) tweets is really able to convey what is going on there – both at the personal and community level.

I would be a better world citizen, I think, if for every important (and lets just say that what is important will trend) topic, I am able to find a person or two to follow.

It seems that this book seller is now in trouble. The descent of the ubiquitous bookseller is understood by most  by its juxtaposition against the ascent of the online retail experience and the raise in popularity of the e-book. Like many, I am thankful for the existence of on-line shopping. Unlike many, who lament the reduced reading experience, I actually like my kindle.  But still, I feel keenly the possible loss of the bookstore. I fear even more the possible loss of the personal library.

There is more to a book that the reading and understanding of it. There is more to a book store, or a library, or someones book shelf, than just the physical mechanism to hold many books. I wish I could make a list of all the things that would be amiss if actual book stores disappeared and only virtual stores remained in place. I find that I cannot. I can only tell you that my feet always take me to a bookstore. I never choose to wait for someone in a mall. It gives me joy to look at peoples book shelves. The serendipity of walking the aisles of a book store or library can never be replaced by a cover flow UI. The ubiquity of large, expansive stores filled with books, whispered to me something about the people that they served. If every book were to be digitized and given to me, and all book stores removed, I would be diminished.  Even when the information and the reading experience is well preserved, something is lost when we loose those physical entities.

I wish that every book store in trouble would be bought by Amazon and every record store by Apple. I do not mind consuming the content digitally. But I lament the loss of the storefronts and every thing else that this loss entails.

• We (UX bloggers)  probably don’t pay much attention to SEO
• We blog in generalities. We talk a lot more in our blogs about the meta aspects of our work and not the details of our work itself. We are for instance 82% more likely to talk about aspects of a well organized design review, than we are likely to say “I designed some navigation tabs today”. [OK, I made up the  82%, put it down to @lukew envy]
• Large swaths of work areas such as designing enterprise applications or even desktop applications go un represented
• When we do talk about some specific designs, we are talking about the “Topic of the Day” – a popular feature, a new application. We are adding to the Buzz.

In short, our blogs are not the sum total of our wisdom, they are more of a side outlet for our creativity and or steam. There are about 15 blogs that stand out as being exceptions because of the nature of their content. And they need to pay attention to Search Engine Optimization.

Netflix, Amazon, Pandora,  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – all have ways to recommend things to you. Pandora has a few interesting things working in its favor (in addition to the core of their recommendation engine).
It is interesting to look at how Twitter compares to Pandora along these axis.

The Recommendation  Moment and the Consumption Moment:
People will consume Pandora’s recommendations at the very moment they are made. Compare this to Netflix. Anyone who has returned a movie unwatched knows what I mean. It seems great when you put it on the queue. Later, not so much. So it sits there. And it is returned. Unlike this, with Pandora (and Netflix streaming) the instant of making the recommendation is the same as the instant of consuming the recommendation. On this dimension twitter represents something that you the user will be consuming for a long, long time after the instant of recommendation.

The Cost of Accepting
With Pandora or Netflix streaming, the cost of accepting a recommendation is rather low. You check it out, if you don’t like it, you stop and move on. The design of Pandora, it is all about reducing the cost of accepting a bad recommendation. With twitter, it may seem that the cost of accepting a recommendation is low – but in reality it is not. Un-follow is a heavy and emotionally expensive click.

Homogeneous or Distinct
I don’t know if it is conditioning by radio channels or if radio channels evolved this way due to the way we are designed to consume music: but typically when you are in the mood for a certain kind of music, you want more and more and more music of that same kind. This is less true of books or even movies. Infact right after watching an intense historical drama, I might be most suggestible to a situational comedy show. Now with twitter, my experience has become richer every-time I have found an entire new interest represented. For instance interaction designers, or snarky commentators on India, comfortable in Hinglish.  Once I found these groups, I could see who the people I found are following and add to people who represent this interest. Who to follow makes this part easier. However, it is the other thing – finding oasis of people who represent a different interest – that makes for a quantum leap in twitter-interestingess.

Length of Engagement:
For Pandora, the length of engagement with the recommendation is the average length of a song. For twitter, it is in some sense an infinitely long length of time.

Recommendation Basis: The basis for recommendations in Pandora is an analysis of the object itself. Contrast this with what Amazon does. Amazon looks to see purchase and browsing patterns, to approximate a recommendation ( they do not use a deep categorization of the books, for instance). (Netflix, ofcourse having run the million dollar contest, does a variety of things that are interesting). If we agree that twitter is ultimately trying to hook us up with more interesting tweets in our timeline, this current mechanism is more of a secondhand recommendation (like amazons) than Pandora’s.

In addition to those meta observations, here are some suggestions based on my personal experience so far:

Who-not-to-follow: Find out who I have explicitly un-followed. Do not ask me to follow them. Find out people that you have shown me that I have ignored, do not show me those people. If they have appeared 3 times on my sidebar and been ignored (less than 3 actually), that is an explicit (but no click) thumbs down.

The sounds of silence: If they have not said a word on twitter for three months, they should not be on the WTF list.

Recognize an Omission: For some people on twitter, who to follow could be showing a lot of names that they were choosing explicitly not to follow.  If 5 of the people I follow, also follow someone, that is actually a clear indicator that I choose not to follow that person.

Sometimes, Less is More: It is also possible that not all the people who are on twitter will really have a richer experience if they start following even more people. It really depends many things, including how many people they are already following. Users with a very active timeline may have a  higher resistance to adding more people. I, for instance, would prefer to get one recommendation every week or even every other week, rather than seeing something new every time I refresh the screen.

Tell me why: I want to know why you think this is a good person for me to follow. Tell me. Right up front. Right now all I have is the persons name. It works for the very famous (who turn out to be really ineffective tweeters at times, but that is another story) – but for everyone else – I want to know more. I want to know why you think this is a good fit. I want to know why they are on my wtf.

Show me the content: I want to see the tweets. That is what helps me make the decision. If you don’t show it to me, I have to click and look.There is a part of me that wants one or two “suggested” people to simply appear in my timeline with an explanatory hashtag? I can see that this suggestion is fraught with peril, but really, a name is nothing to me many times.

And in closing: People often comment that while Facebook is the place to connect to people you know, twitter is the place to connect to the people you -wish- you knew. So you want to recommend people for me to follow on twitter  – you have to figure out what I -wish- for. Tall order? Yes. But I am afraid, it is the feature I would request. I do not wish to be “Rolodex-complete” on twitter.  Make it an opt in feature if you need to, but be adventurous. Not a lot of people, just one or two a month. But recommendations that would make me smile, even if I decided not to act on them.

• Some people on my timeline voicing similar opinions: @psivadasan,  @daddy_san , @i_r_squared
• My stretch goal for this post: do not use “social graph” anywhere.
• Tangentially related reading: http://www.slate.com/id/2263462/pagenum/all/

These are five ideas, techniques from the workshop that I hope to apply right-away to work underway.

• As an exercise in exploring the solution or even problem space, take 3 hours of time to sketch out 45 – 60 ideas that the address the goal.
• When designing sites or apps, start with the tasks, workflows and storyboards. Let the navigation evolve from this.
• When soliciting feedback in group settings plan on specific questions for specific people. Possibly send these out to them ahead of time.
• When sketching use a secondary color – for title bars, drop shadows etc.
• When generating low-fi sketches use the fat sharpies. The fact that it is really hard to write or get into more detailed elements with these pens, forces you to stay at a higher level of abstraction.

In other re-realizations:

• Claritin is Good
• I really suck at role-playing exercises and need to let my partner(s) take the lead …

When I look at the Retweets by others tab in twitter, I realize that we, the users of twitter, do retweet a lot.

On the surface twitter supports both of these equally  - @ and RT are links next to each tweet. So why do we retweet? Why don’t we reply to people? Here are some possible reasons:

• “Its the wrong way to use twitter”. I remember when I joined twitter, I read a Dos and Dont’s page by someone that clearly told me that I should NOT use twitter as a public SMS. It seems like this rule does not apply any more (if ever it did) , but I still feel some residual guilt.
• What of the people who follow both people in the conversation and are forced to listen in? Sometimes listening to two people talking on twitter can feel like you are listening into a private conversation. Perhaps people avoid twitter-chats to spare the rest of their twitter family from having to listen in?
• What of my time-line: If I have one great nugget of wisdom and it is hidden under 400@ replies to people, wont the chance visitor to my twitter page miss it ?

Now, the idea that twitter should support threaded conversations usually fills me with dread. Everyone has had the experience where ones facebook status has become an unwitting podium. Twitter in its current form does not allow for this to happen. And this is a good, good thing. In addition, many a time I like the privacy afforded to me by the fact that twitter makes it harder for others to follow a conversation. This is also a good, good thing.

However, sometimes, there are some threads that I wish I could just wave a magic wand at and yell “cadmusify”. This tweet would then be shown in a cadmus like threaded format. It gives me , the tweeter control over which threads I make more easily accessible, it lets me keep my twitter home page clean, and by its very presence it tells me that its “ok” to chat with people  on twitter.

RELATED POSTS:

• This post made me realize that my observations may not be limited to my own timeline (Has twitter jumper the shark)
• Nobody has a million twitter followers – anil dash
• Making sense of Privacy and Publicity - danah boyd

Now the other thing that  I like about this site is its user interface. It is probably one of the best UIs I have come across in a long long time. Once you sign up, you get – a blank piece of paper. A bold open invitation to start doing exactly what you came here to do. As you type away, you realize that there might be more to this site than just one sheet of paper per day (and lets face it, that in of itself is a great UI). The brilliant thing here is that all of that is hidden away. The people who made the site really trusted you the user to discover all the other good stuff they have for you over time.

I am a delighted user. Thankyou folks at 750words.

Why do I Retweet?

Sometimes, I retweet  to bookmark things I like. Sometimes, I retweet to establish that I am interested in a topic. And sometimes, I retweet  to pass along something I find interesting to people who may not have seen the original tweet. But truth be told, RT is my way of connecting, not to the people who follow me, but to the people whom I follow. My RT says to them, “I like this, I agree with this and I think this is useful.”

Now, retweeting is not the only way I can express myself on twitter. I can favorite the tweet or @reply to the person writing the twitter. However, the best way to complement them, or to thank them seems to be to spread their notions along – as an RT.  I have wondered if we should have ways to say “I agree” , “I bookmark this”, “This is hilarious” etc., but I always come back to this: there is an elegance to having a single currency. A currency that is tied to the very essence of the medium. If I like the message, I help spread it.

Lets take a minute to look at the people who follow me. For the most part they fall into these groups:

• Real People at my work place (we use twitter as SMS / watering hole for design related topics)
• Real People who used to be co-workers (so nice to find them at the same watering hole again)
• Real people I know, who are not designers, but may be interested in design
• People/Firms/Magazines in design whom I do not know personally
• Marketeers who are following me because I once said the word possum (say)
• A ten headed demon (one is plenty)

The people I follow are design people, sources of humor, and a few news sources and news makers. Essentially, twitter is the place I come to read the news and the funny papers, and to hang out with my design-peeps. When I read something they say that I find neat, I high five them by RT ing what they said. Sure, it is likely that people who follow me may find these links interesting, but my main motivation seems to be directed towards the source of information. “Great”, I seem to want to tell them. “Nice Job”. RT.

Retweeting also apparently marks me as not being a leader. This recent finding underscores my intuitive notions about how a time line with many RTs may be perceived.  However, my attitude still remains:   - RT. FTW.

OK. Some other facts about my twitter audience:

• I have exactly one engineer following me.
• I have a few heavyweights – famous people, people who are my boss, other people who in my eyes are heavy weights
• there are some people who follow me, that I know really nothing about.

I wish twitter would give me a UI where it would map my private lists on to a theater seating plan. To help me remember who I am talking to. Now, notice how I tied back to the funny image at the top of the article? Bam!