Why building forms should be like shopping
Up until about 20 years ago when people wanted to get other people involved in doing something, they made posters. They took a few marker pens, maybe some letraset transfers, a polaroid photo or two, and by cutting, pasting and drawing created a poster which they then took to a printer or (whoa!) got photocopied.
They then went around sticking up posters wherever they thought people might be who would like to get involved in the thing they were doing. This was true for people in large corporate organisations as much as it was for local church volunteers. Of course, the bigger the organisation and the bigger the initiative, the bigger the budget and the more professionally produced the poster (or ‘
collateral‘) needed to be.
But people knew how to make posters. They had been making posters since they were at nursery.
Then in the late 80s companies thought they could get faster, more professional posters made by training their staff to do ‘desktop publishing‘. And all the people who had previously spent afternoons rubbing stray pritt stick off their fingers now had to get their heads around text area flows and .eps files.
And the posters were mostly rubbish, but at least they were still posters.
Then in the late 90s the Internet provided a much better way of reaching people than sticking posters up all over the place, so instead of (although very often as well as) desktop publishing, people who wanted to do stuff had to type it all into some kind of ‘Content Management System‘. They had to figure out where their poster should go, how to place the picture where they wanted it to go, how to get rid of all the weird rubbish that somehow crept in when they pasted text from Word. No where near as much fun as sticking letters on card, but things did gradually improve over the years and, let’s face it, people can get used to pretty much anything.
But they were still producing posters!
And posters are not enough. To actually engage people in a new initiative online they have to be able to interact. The poster needs to tell you to do something, to provide some information, join in with someone else who’s involved, show everyone what other people are doing, what they are talking about, where they are doing it, what the organisers are planning on doing next.
So the people who design and build the tools to enable people to do this make ever more complex design tools, form builders, RSS plugins, ways of managing databases of information. The design philosophy of even the best tool designers is: how can we make this creative process as simple and obvious as making a poster with marker pens and letraset? But the best of that work goes into large-scale public platforms like Google Sites, Netvibes or Squarespace and never finds its way into corporate content management systems.
And the people expected to use the tools their organisation has provided them are often still barely able to create a poster, let alone make it look good – and as for creating intuitive, joined-up interactions…no chance.
So, I’m starting to wonder: maybe the whole concept of ‘creating something’ is the wrong way of looking at the problem? Maybe flexible, generative tools to create pages and interactions is never going to work effectively, especially in situations where a large organisation can’t ensure all its staff are enthusiastic users of technology *and* talented community engagers.
Maybe if instead of trying to create something, they spent their time shopping for the elements they need. Maybe instead of one complicated tool that allows them to create any kind of form, they could evaluate and chose from hundreds of different kinds of form, all ‘vetted and stocked’ by people managing the system. And not just ‘forms’ but lots of different, specific interactions – twenty different ways of allowing someone to say “me too!”, 15 different kinds of social media feed. Each with just a few very simple configuration options and with its own presence in the administration instance for the site? And each created by other users of the system to enable interactions that are specific to the organisation and its communities.
What if their whole creation environment didn’t look like a design tool, but a shop? With all the conventions of an online shop, pictures, product descriptions, faceting, related items, customer service (!), etc.
Yes, I realise that there are plugin libraries that are sort of like shops, and widget libraries and portlet libraries, and app-stores etc. etc. And sure, I realise that it seems far cheaper and more efficient to create generative tools and put the power to use them in the hands of people creating the pages.
But:
- Plugin libraries are not *really* like shops, and even if they behave a bit like shops they certainly don’t appear like shops, are not called shops, don’t directly use conventions borrowed from ecommerce to give the user a “feeling of shopping”.
- Each plugin or widget is in itself too generative. What I’m talking about is very low level interactions that have a direct relationship to the things people want to do (so no “RSS feed widgets”, but a whole series of “What are people saying?” and “Show me a list” objects.) Generative tools might be efficient, but they are only *effective* if people know how to use them well, and people will only learn how to use them well if they are really ‘into it’ which is fairly rare – it’s absolutely no good having a form builder if no ever one uses it to do anything useful.
- Shops have owners – people who are responsible for the goods sold in the shop, who can be called upon to provide buying advice, to whom suggestions can be directed to stock items not currently available, and who are actively engaged in promoting items to customers, educating them and intently listening to what they need.
I suspect there isn’t an enterprise web platform or content management system out there that presents itself in this way (although I wish there was!), but with online shopping so well established as a paradigm in society, and shopping for *apps* now extending this paradigm to software for non-technical users, I can’t help but feel that this idea can help the industry progress towards a solution to the problem of enabling organisations to engage their communities without being critically impeded by over-complex technology and their staff’s ability to create things with it.
After all, we’re all familiar with the experience of *buying* something rubbish and it’s a world away from the feelings of frustration and inadequacy brought about by having struggled for days only to have *made* something rubbish…
