Global neighbours

I live in Denmark and work in Sweden. As with all countries that are close neighbours (and share a fairly turbulent past) there are some funny differences and attitudes towards each other. If you've watched the original series of The Bridge (Broen) you'll know what I mean. The interactions between the Danish and Swedish cop are beautifully observed, full of cultural nuance. However I think it's a little skewed towards the Danes.

Below are my favourite 'indicators' that for me somehow reveal the way they think and feel towards each other:

 

Danish

 

"Roligt" - quiet or calm

"Frokost" - lunch

On Swedes. "friend or foe, you'll never know"

Breakfast beer

Swedish

 

"Roligt" - fun

"Frokost" - tetanus shot, but "frukost" is breakfast

On Danes. "If you do business with a Dane, count your fingers"

Systembolaget - all real booze can only be bought in the state liquor store (limited locations and opening hours)

Google translate fail

More perfection from Google translate - they seem to have based Swedish to English translation on a 1970's English comic: "Manninglish"

  "The company started active operations in December 2007 to mount her"

 

 "The company started active operations in December 2007 to mount her"

The end is nigh - Yahoo and Flickr

We all knew that Yahoo would be the kiss of death for Flickr. When they first took over it was the horror of moving from 'oldschool' flickr account to Yahoo account with all it's log on horrors, invasive signup and clunkiness. But the years went by and Flickr was still Flickr. Many people like me upgraded to Pro accounts and threw our images up into the cloud, where we were content to share them and manage them. Always secretly hoping someone would discover our 'brilliance'. 

When the new kids appeared it was Facebook that drove the social image, the 'friends at play' and the holiday pics. No one sent out Flickr invites for holiday pics anymore, they were on Facebook - "why would I need to invite someone? " Of course a few of us resisted the assimilation (and still do) . But then Instagram got it's hooks into me and that was that. It became my social image space, where I was happy to have strangers see my images and even comment on them. I knew the rules, it wasn't my intimate moments it was snaps and fun images and it was with me all the time on a near immediately gratification loop. Flickr became the place where 'real' pictures went, or where I stubbornly adhered to ideas I'd started on there through sets and groups. The thing is, it's the social bit, the fun frivolousness, and above all instantness of Instagram that keeps you engaged. Flickr felt like the boring friend you'd known since childhood and had taken a very different path in life. You still feel obliged to spend time with them but it always feels like a chore - especially when you could be having fun with your new friends. 

Yahoo obviously saw this (after all their numbers must have been plummeting) and decided to act - FULL REDESIGN. Predictable response, and not always the right one. Especially as it meant they needed to pull a fast one on all the Flickr Pro members to get the new model in place. This left the community feeling a little sour.

So it's been a few months since the redesign, I've abandoned the Pro account and essentially have abandoned the account in general. Last weekend I uploaded a bunch of images but it was the first time in months. Is this a result of the design change or is it simply that they are too late and stuck in an outdated model?

It seemed such a good approach:

  • Make it all about the images (and video)
  • give people tonnes of space
  • Focus on the people and activity
  • Make it all HTML 5 and look like a modern site

Good try but not enough. From a design point of view the images never seem to be at a useful size for the device I'm viewing on and the video experience just isn't as good as elsewhere. The 'activity' stuff is just too late, sorry the other players do it better. The modern site, yes looks clean but the navigation is horrible, full of dead ends, traps and remnants from the old site. It just doesn't do it for me. 

So as Yahoo struggles to reinvent itself and it's services, are we seeing a strategic play to appeal to an aging web population? After all, the new brand and a logotype looks surprisingly like a masthead from an early 80's crossword magazine. Maybe they want to be the boring old friend/relative that you feel obliged to spend time with? You never know as these services get ever more ubiquitous and experiential they could add their own scent - perhaps it will be cat pee.

 

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Ethnography and big data

Neat article on the positioning of Big Data and Ethnography over at Ethnography Matters (Big Data needs Thick Data).

"Thick Data: ethnographic approaches that uncover the meaning behind Big Data visualization and analysis."
I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially in my world where I advocate design and ethnographic research methods to help with the creation of data analysis products. As a 'user experience' person I know the value of deeply understanding the people who use or could use a product. Ethnographic research brings so much colour and context to the user and helps elicit real empathy for those people - you simply can't draw that out of cold metrics and statistics.

The author talks about how big companies:

"... need Thick Data because it gives something that Big Data explicitly does not—inspiration. The act of collecting and analyzing stories produces insights."
For me this is a very interesting point. In the data viz world we talk about the power of storytelling all the time. It has become a much hyped phrase which spans many approaches from the bad old days of 'reports' to powerpoints and infographics and even live data exploration with 'on the fly insight'. Storytelling is fundamental to ethnography it's at the very core of the discipline. I think the interesting thing here is how the two areas can blend together, insights and data 'facts' supported by real world observations, stories and above all humanity. This combination can create truly compelling arguments where the individual is used to express the humanity of the group (the aggregation, the data point). It gives us characters to connect with and relate to, it's very hard to get that with a number alone. Of course this can slip into journalistic and media tendencies where the 'data' can be polluted and the insight skewed by the emotional engagement of the viewer, especially when the story is crafted by a 'savvy operator', but so too can the data. I hope that with the development of the right framework and research approaches there should be a way to tie the two spaces together. A way that leverages the credibility of the scientific aspects and maintains our connection with the human. This combination of human feelings with the data can help people grasp the meaning and potential impact of their decisions. The great work in data storytelling by Hans Rosling and data visualisation in general by Edward Tufte is helping these areas come together. The raw measurement alone (no matter how statistically significant) isn't enough, even the beautifully crafted visualisation doesn't do the trick. It's the story about what this means, what possibilities this opens up and what impact it has that makes the real difference and has the real power.

It's good to see the debate begin to moved on from the early polarizing arguments where quantitative approaches crashed into  qualitative. Where sample size was the only debate. The idea of combining the deep and human nature of ethnography with Big Data and essentially behavioural economics opens up some amazing opportunities for products and their design. It's a great time to be designing for people.

 

Source: http://ethnographymatters.net/2013/05/13/big-data-needs-thick-data/