But this post isn’t about tabloid hysteria – that’s just to be expected. Instead, think about the dormouse bridges for what they are: infrastructure for wildlife.

This notion sent me off on a Googling spree. Here’s what I found:

A dormouse bridge

A fish ladder by the John Day Dam in Washington

Badger tunnel in the Netherlands

A bat 'bridge' in Cornwall

I’m sure there are plenty more examples.

Aside from being interesting design challenges, and a good example of humans trying to be vaguely responsible about our time on the Earth, when I see specialised infrastructure an obvious thought pops into my head: there should be a map of this stuff.

After all, if there’s CycleStreets mapping all the esoteric cycling infrastructure stuff (bike lanes, repair shops, parking spots, etc), then perhaps there’s room for an AnimalMaps? As well as all the man-made stuff, it could show you where the natural habitats for different animals are. So if you wanted to see a Red Squirrel (which I definitely do – never seen one in my life so far), then you’d know where to look. Obviously, zoos would be big hotspots… For migratory species, you’d have to have some sort of time slider (which would default to today). There could also be a longer-term year-slider, which you could roll back to see how rapidly habitats have shrunk over the decades. For some species (such as those featured in Last Chance To See), that’d be pretty dramatic.

Does anything like this exist? And if not, who would build it?

The genesis of Interesting is a little hard to track down online. It was started by Russell Davies in 2007, and there’s a website for the first event (with some video), but for info on the 2008, 2009 and 2010 events, you just have to follow the relevant posts on Russell’s blog or @interesting on Twitter. They were all in London though, and so this year Tim Duckett has picked up the baton, and is running Interesting North as a northern outpost. It’s going to be ace.

See you there?

I was about to weigh in with some of my thoughts on the subject as a comment on Martin’s blog, but decided to post it here instead.

I like the idea of doing what’s “least surprising”. It’s interesting if you compare this on news websites to Wikipedia though. On Wikipedia, there’s a general expectation (I think), that all links lead to internal pages – even if they’re a company name like “Microsoft”. This is probably down to it being an encyclopaedia, which is necessarily “meta” – it’s almost like an alternative web, where instead of linking to the thing, you link to a page about the thing.

Interestingly, Wikipedia uses a fairly decent mini icon which is used inline after links to denote external links. I’m not sure how intuitive this is to a first-time reader (though it has to be more obvious than using colours), but once you’ve understood it, it seems to work without being intrusive into the reading experience.

There’s an interesting factor that humans make when deciding where to add links, which I wonder whether your auto-linking tool takes into account. That is, humans are unlikely to link well understood terms, like “Microsoft”, “David Cameron” or “France”, as there’s not much value to be gained from those, as most readers are going to already know who and what they are. Linking has a much greater value when the subjects are things that some portion of the audience are unlikely to have heard of (if it’s likely that no-one’s heard of the subject, then you’d hope that it’d be explained in the text itself).

This idea sounded like it could be graphed. So here’s a very crude diagram by way of an attempt at illustration:

What do you think?

A few people in the museum-web community have taken umbrage at this conclusion (including the usually-genial Claire Ross, who wrote a bit of a rant), but I read the article as more of a conversation-opener, and it got me thinking about what the ‘trifecta’ might look like.

A quick disclaimer: I haven’t even attempted to review every, or even many, existing art museum websites, and so some of these ideas might have already been implemented, or have been proven to not work. They’re also a bit off-the-cuff, and aren’t fully thought out. But I thought I’d share them as another conversation-opener.

My first thought about art museums is that they’re very different from other museums (like history or science ones), in that they’re far more about a collection of potentially stand-alone artworks, rather than a narrative experience illustrated by historical objects. (There’s more to both sorts than that, but I’m talking broad characterisations here).

When I visit an art museum, my primary experience is of wandering. I never know that much the art works, or what to expect, so I rarely have a specific destination in mind – merely just a desire to see some interesting/provoking stuff.

I think it’s this experience which is so hard to replicate online. We’re good at building web experiences which are optimised at getting users to the thing they’re after (usually information) as quickly as possible, via carefully considered navigation and relevance-optimised search. What we’re less good at is building web experiences where the user sits back and is simply entertained/amazed/enthralled by things they wouldn’t have otherwise come across.

This isn’t a problem that’s exclusive to art museums. I think news has it too, for instance. Which is why Phil Gyford’s Today’s Paper project is so significant (read his explanation) – it manages to bring the ease and effortlessness of newspaper-reading together with the benefits of the web.

Reading is different to viewing though, and the visual arts need a different experience.

One thing the Read Write Web article rightly highlights is the need for digital copies of artworks to be available in high resolution. There are some reasons why this hasn’t always been available (legal reasons, and copyright fears), but with computer resolutions getting bigger and bigger (both in terms of actual screen size and pixels density), even 800 pixel-wide images are starting to look like thumbnails. Many art museum websites already realise this, and let you zoom in to get more details, but a true full-screen experience is hard to come by (partly for technical reasons, I suspect, although these are now solvable). On top of image resolution, it’s important that the photos download fast, and are pre-cached where possible. Nothing kills an experience more than having to wait more than a couple of seconds for blank or fuzzy images to fill in.

The best image-viewing experience I’ve had recently is the Guardian’s Eyewitness app on the iPad (sadly not my own, I borrowed someone else’s). It combines absolutely stunning photography (the photos are the ones that the Guardian uses as it’s centre-page spread every day), with just enough interpretation and an almost invisible user interface. The photos load full-screen, and a simple swipe instantly loads the next photo. There’s no navigation other than forwards or backwards (the photos are arrange in chronological order, I think, although this doesn’t really mean much). You can either simply view the photos and interpret them for yourself, or with a single tap you can bring up a small caption overlay which explains the who/what/where/when/why of the photo. A second option lets you read a short technical interpretation of why the photograph works in terms of composition, aperture and so on. It’s a wonderful experience, could probably be replicated on the web almost as easily as within the app, and could be a good model for art museums.

(Incidentally, I haven’t had the chance to experience the Art Authority app, which Read Write Web has also reviewed, but that looks pretty good too).

So, how might I build upon these things if I wanted to create a better art museum online experience? I have a few ideas. For brevity’s sake, I’ll outline them in a list format:

1. Slower zoom. Common javascript libraries and the iPhone/iPad multi-touch interface all put the user in ultimate control of the zoom level. You double click, pinch, scroll or drag and the image instantly zooms in as far as you want to go. For things like maps, this is probably appropriate. For art images, perhaps this is too fast? I wonder whether it’d feel more relaxed, and more contemplative, if the zoom behaved more like the Ken Burns effect on a rostrum camera. Perhaps you could tap/click on an area that interested you, and then the picture would slowly zoom in (with ‘easing’) on that area. Or tap/click a number of different areas, and the image would zoom in slowly to the first one, and then pan to the second, and so on, before zooming back out.
2. Audio commentaries. Audio is a great companion to visual images, as you can experience both at once without any conflict (unlike text). But I wouldn’t want the audio commentary to be like the ones you get on those rentable audio tour handsets – those often feel too long, and impersonal. I’d want it to feel more like a tour guide standing in front of the painting telling you what they love about it.
3. ‘Completable’ collections. If you go to an art museum, you can ‘do’ a room (or a floor, or even the whole building), where ‘doing’ means seeing everything there is to see, and spending as much time looking at each thing as you want to. Once it’s ‘done’, then you can almost unconsciously check it off in your mind (until the room is re-arranged, or a new exhibition arrives). Online, this is often impossible, and the choice and scale can be overwhelming (a feeling exacerbated when the museum proudly advertises how many thousands of images they have online). To make the images more completable (and sharable), they should be curated into meaningful collections. Ideally, these would be less random than simply “pre-Raphaelite masterpieces”, and would actually be comprehensive collections alongs the lines of “every Warhol celebrity pop-art portrait” (this would be something only the web could provide) or “every art work from the original Sensation exhibition”. ‘Completing’ the collection would mean seeing them all, and you’d be able to keep track of “viewed” collections.
4. Time-lapse video/slideshow of the artwork being created. This might be a bit of a gimmick, but it’d be a fun one. What if, as well as seeing the finished artwork, you could scrub-back in time to see how it was painted (or otherwise made). Think Rolf Harris, but in reverse (and then forwards again).
5. Pictures of the ‘subject’.  This wouldn’t always apply, but if an artwork has a specific subject, or inspiration, be that a ‘sitter’, a landscape view, or a object/thing, it’d be nice to see a photo of that. Would this detract from the artwork? Maybe. It’d be an interesting option to have though.

Do you agree? Or have any other ideas? Let me know.

Update: Mike Ellis has also written a blog post in response to the Read Write Web article, titled Quantity or Quality?

This is an idea I’ve had in my head for a while – I remember initiating a discussion on it at the Bettr unconference last year.

One of the key ‘problems’, to which I don’t have a ready answer, is how accreditation for online self-learning (or group-learning) would work. The closest I’ve come to is wondering whether you could have open exams, where anyone could take them, regardless of whether or not they’ve been doing a formal course. But what do exams really measure?

I’m not sure Bill Gates had the answer either, but here’s what he was reported to have said (via TechCrunch):

[Bill Gates] believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.

He also outlined a problem with text books (again via TechCrunch):

One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is text books. Even in grade schools, they can be 300 pages for a book about math. “They’re giant, intimidating books,” he said. “I look at them and think: what on Earth is in there?“

According to Gates, our text books are three times longer than the equivalents in Asia. And yet they’re beating us in many ways with education. The problem is that these things are built by committee, and more things are simply added on top of what’s already in there.

WikiBooks is perhaps one attempt at improving this situation, but I’m not sure they’re really there yet…

Techonomy have said that they’ll be putting video and other documentation of the conference online in the coming weeks, so I look forward to seeing those. In the meantime, there’s a short video from the Q&A session.

I think this is an area that more and more people will become interested in – there’s a huge potential waiting to be unleashed.

(Image: TechCrunch)

Here’s the video:

And here’s the box cover for the model:

The UK retail price is reported to be £204.99, and it should be available from October. I’d better start saving up then…

More at BrickJournal (yes, there’s a magazine all about Lego) and at Brothers Brick.

The basic principle of this pattern is to notify the user of something that needs their attention through the metric of a number which quantifies how many ‘things’ there are that need to be dealt with. The most common example is an e-mail inbox, where the number of ‘unread’ e-mails has always been displayed fairly prominently within the application. The ‘notification number’ moves this magic number up a level though, by displaying it next to the actual app icon on your dashboard/desktop view.

The iPhone was the first example of this pattern that I experienced. Here’s a quick view showing the applications on my phone which have notification numbers at the time of writing:

There are plenty of other examples of sites and services using this pattern. Here’s the WordPress admin interface showing numbers of unmoderated comments, and available upgrades in the left hand nav:

Facebook does the same, although it’s a little more subtle (for the time being). There’s even some talk of the feature making its way to web browsers themselves (as browsers start to support ‘app tabs’).

I’m in two minds about this design pattern. On the one hand, it feels like a useful way to see at a glance the things that there are to ‘do’. On the other hand though, this can start to feel like a real burden – the numbers are really there to nag you, and you can end up with a cacophony of apps all demanding your attention.

The problem is that there are some things which really do require or merit attention (and sometimes a response), but plenty of other things that don’t. More thought needs to go into which apps should be allowed to urgently request your attention, and how often.

E-mail inboxes are one of the worst culprits. As you can see from my iPhone screenshot, I currently have 162 unread e-mails. It’s actually far more than that though, as the iPhone only syncs e-mail from the last month. I’ve actually got 18056 unread e-mails. There’s plenty of reasons for this. Some of them are from mailing lists that I don’t bother to read any more. Many are marketing e-mails that I ignore. And plenty more are e-mails notifying me of messages on other services (like Twitter or Facebook), which I often don’t open because I’ve already read them on those other platforms. So the ‘unread e-mails’ count for me is both inaccurate and utterly useless. It’s for this reason that, in Gmail, I’ve actually enabled the ‘Labs’ feature which removes the number from the interface.

For e-mail inboxes, I think there’s a simple fix to make the notification number useful again. Instead of showing the number of ‘unread’ mail, show the number of ‘new’ mails received since you last opened your inbox. That way, you can simply open the inbox view, scan the e-mail subject lines/snippets, either opening or ignoring them, and then close the app to reset the number to zero.

Other apps should simply consider whether they need to surface notifications at all. Asynchronous multiplayer games (like Words With Friends and Carcassonne) reminding me of how many moves I have to play is actually pretty useful. The App Store and WordPress constantly urging me to upgrade apps and plugins soon gets annoying – upgrading is not an urgent task, it’s something that can be done silently in the background, and then completed when the computer senses that you’ve got a spare moment.

A problem you may have spotted though is that this all requires application developers and designers to think more carefully about when to use notification numbers – and in the attention economy, it’s tempting to issue as many notifications as possible in an attempt to drive people back to your app.

Facebook already try to manage this with the following policy:

… you must use the counter only to inform users about legitimate actions that they should take within your application, and must not use the counter for promotional or marketing purposes. You should increment the counter only once for each item or action about which you need to notify a user.

There’s still quite a lot of wriggle room in that for app developers to notify users about every conceivable thing that users might wish to ‘action’.

So I think ultimately that managing this attention spam is going to require a combination of preaching best practice to designers and developers, and putting more control over notification numbers into the hands of users.

When I was mucking around with designing Wordr (yes, I know, it needs some love and attention), the key verb I picked for the service was ‘say’ – as this felt like the best term to describe the very immediate way in which words are uttered.

Facebook has used ‘share’ as the verb for posting content to the site for a while now – this covers everything from text updates to uploading photos, or posting links. However, the recent trend on the site has been towards an even more lightweight form of interaction – the ‘like’ button.

‘Liking’ must be the most anodyne sentiment you can possibly express. It’s precisely because of this that it works for Facebook – users only have to feel the most slight of connections towards a brand or a bit of content in order to feel able to press the button.

Greg Povey did a presentation on ‘Enthusiasm’ the other night in which he complained that “The “Like” button is changing our responses to a binary yes/no or up/down”, and I can’t help but sharing in his discomfort with the increasing ubiquity of the button (which must be now be on millions of pages thanks to Facebook’s easy-to-embed scripts).

I’ve just discovered that Facebook does offer one alternative: ‘recommend’. You can use this verb instead of ‘like’ when configuring their embeddable button. It seems to be targetted at news organisations, in order to alleviate the uncomfortable juxtaposition of having the ‘like’ button on grim murder stories (as illustrated by Martin Belam).

‘Recommend’ is perhaps a little better than ‘like’ (it at least implies more of a social motivation), but it’s not hugely different. What could other alternatives be?

There’s a reasonably popular application on Facebook (over 2,000 monthly users) which adds a ‘dislike’ button to various status updates. It doesn’t seem to work that well though, and I’m not sure that ‘dislike’ is the answer (though it’s at least a bit more provocative).

It could be interesting to create a service where ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ were the main verbs though. This might encourage people to post opinions, rather than just factual statements of intent. Plus it’d be pretty difficult to press ‘disagree’ without explaining why you’re disagreeing, which then prompts a healthy debate.

Another option is to let users pick their own verb. This is something that Get Satisfaction does really well. Whenever I’m submitting a bug report or a feature request using the service, filling in the ‘how does this make you feel’ box always makes me stop and think for a few seconds. In some ways, it’s the hardest bit of the form to fill in. But I think that’s positive. As James Boardwell has articulated, introducing a bit of friction can be a good thing.

You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t. You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t.

If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll have flicked a switched, cap deploy‘d, or flipped your closed sign to open, and just waited – holding your breath for whatever happens next.

Tom makes the obvious but highly pertinent point that actually shipping something (the term ‘shipping’ is an Americanism, I think, but I can’t think of a good alternative) is a hugely important milestone. Without that step, what you’ve produced is just vapourware. Just an idea. Just something in perpetual development that nags away at you.

I’m guilty of having started tons of things that never actually got shipped. Sometimes the idea never left paper. Or my head. Many times things get started but never finished.

I’ve also had a bit experience of shipping things which have failed to have much of an impact on anybody at all. Either through lack of awareness, or because the thing wasn’t that great in the first place (or was only interesting to me and no-one else). I won’t list these things in order to save myself some embarrassment (I’m not even sure whether half of them still exist or not. I daren’t check).

Actually shipping stuff is a great feeling though.

We (Rattle) hope to be shipping one thing on Monday. It’s only a small thing. A really small thing. But it was originally my idea (though we worked on it as a team), so I feel some ownership of it. And if no-one else gets it, then it’s probably my fault. That doesn’t matter too much though, it was a fun project to work on, and hasn’t taken too much time.

We’re also putting a price on the thing we’re shipping. Not really because we hope to make tons of money from it. But because pricing something gives it some value, and makes it mean a lot more when people are willing to pay for it. The idea of actually selling something feels good (even if it’s only for nominal cost).

One dilemma we’ve faced a bit though, is picking the point at which to say “okay, that’s good enough to ship”.

There’s a mantra in software development of “release early, release often”. It’s a good argument, and feels like a truism. But it always seems to apply more strongly to stuff that’s already shipped, than stuff that hasn’t yet shipped. The initial release still feels like a bit milestone – something to be considered carefully.

Partly, I think this comes from the observation that so many things get a huge amount of initial ‘buzz’ when they first launch. And then this drops off a cliff after a few days, and often never gets discussed again. Social media makes this initial spike even more dramatic. You can see this happen with big projects like Google Buzz and Google Wave, both of which launched in a wave of publicity, and then nosedived and became pretty obscure. I’ve also informally heard from friends that this pattern has been repeated for some of their projects.

The question is, then, given the initial peak of interest might be all you ever get, how long should you wait and how much perfection should you put into your products before shipping?

Here’s a quick list of the patterns I remember:

• Alliteration (matching initial sounds)
• Tricolon (think I learnt this as ‘triplets’) – amazing how powerful this is.
• Repetition (“Education, Education, Education”)
• Opposition (“They say X, we say Y”)
• False dichotomy (“If you want then do X, but if you want then do Y”)
• Swearing (for a really good analysis on why this is effective, see the chapter in Stephen Pinker’s book The Stuff Of Thought)
• Humour (this is the one that’s hardest to get right)

These devices are all widely used by politicians and campaigners – and the surprising thing is how effective they are. Some might say that it’s a symptom of the ‘Soundbyte Culture” (this phrase has amusingly become a soundbyte in its own right) generated by rolling tv news. But I think it probably goes back further than that, and has more to do with the requirements of combative speech than of TV.

If you watch someone give a genuinely persuasive speech – the sort that you might see at TED, or in the early days of Barack Obama’s campaigning – then it’s far more about storytelling and narrative than simple linguistic tricks.