2 posts tagged “interaction design”
There are a lot of factors which go in to making a successful social Web application. Keeping spammers at bay, ensuring a snappy response time for users, slaying the Fail Whale and so on.
However, one feature to a site that must exist as you become successful is the ability to make your large site feel small again.
What's your problem?
As a member of Yelp since 2005, I've seen first-hand the turnover of active membership - viewed here as people who participate on message boards, create and comment on events and consistently engage in communication features - as a site grows. I look at the active users on Yelp now as the 3rd generation. The first 2 broke off the site and some of them founded their own little communities, essentially retaining the culture they had developed for themselves on the site.
In each generational shift, you saw the same thing. As those outside of their culture joined the site, there is an initial snarkiness amongst the majority actives. Essentially, they are telling the noobs they better get in line with their culture, or they're going to give them a hard time at every turn. Eventually, enough noobs overwhelm the current size of the generation and the generation feels disenfranchised. They reminisce about how cool the Web site "used to be, before all these new people joined."
This concept will likely seem obvious to most people. In high school, sophomores think freshman are out of touch. The Baby Boomers think the X Generation has bad taste. Punk feels betrayed by post-punk, as seen the documentary Kill Your Idols.
My friend Chris and I were chatting the other night and he brought up something he had read in The Tipping Point, a book I've owned for 2 years but have read to actually read. He told me about The Rule of 150, which is the idea that at most 150 people can work together in harmony and be productive. While the book highlighted this in a professional, co-worker scenario, it's applicable to the online world as well. If I had to make an estimated guess at how large the active community was on Yelp, it was probably quite near 150 each time there was a fracture.
What's the solution?
How you make a site feel small again is naturally unique to each one. Flickr has Groups, for instance. The fundamental fact is you need the ability for your users to organize themselves. It's not enough to simply create your own organization and expect users to slot themselves into your structure. Because unless you have your finger on the pulse of each grouping you've created, you'll never know when or how to fracture them. Leverage the feelings of your users and give them the tools to self-organize.
Lastly, you shouldn't half-ass the tools for organizing. It's easy enough to create something you call "groups" that users create and join. However, if there's very little to do beyond join the group and state that you're a part of it, you've failed in your design. Each group needs to feel like they have all of the features of your site, but limited to a self-organized subset of members. Stop defection - go small once you've gone big.
posted by Ryan Gillespie
Client-side image resizing
52 Clix expects to have 2 types of users: photo casualists (this is not a word) and photo enthusiasts. We love both groups and so we want to cater to both. This blog post discusses meeting the needs of the casualists (still not a word), who we expect to have little interest in resizing and touching up their photos before submitting to a Clixie. The casualist wants to drag the 8 megabyte+ image right from their memory card to our Web site.
52 Clix doesn't have nearly the bandwith or storage capacity as the big guys (jealous glare at Flickr) nor the money to afford such luxories (jealous glare at Warren Buffett), so in the interest of cost-savings, and to some degree the user experience, we implement client-side image processing via Thin File's Java applet Thin Image Upload. We hope bypassing high-res JPEG file uploads is one of those un-noticed, but appreciated features.
For the most part, Thin Image Upload works like a champ. Users can drag the image onto the target region in the applet or browse their hard drive via Java's horrendously ugly file browsing UI. The applet resizes the image on the user's machine and pushes it to your server. Not bad.
Where things start to fall apart for Thin Image Upload is in its resizing algorithm. You can specify a JPEG compression, like any graphics library; however, the sharpening is a bit overzealous, something akin to Photoshop's "Nearest Neighbor." We're talking Playstation 1 jaggies, folks. The ill-effects are worst in images that feature fine lines, such as bridge cables or your uncle's spiffy pin striped zoot suit. To be fair, Thin File is likely just using the built-in Java graphics algorithm.
But this post isn't about the product as much as it is about answering the question, "how do we satisfy our users' expectations with a known constraint?" With the pin striped zoot suit craze in full-effect, we can't ignore the problem. The solution we've come up with is a mixed bag of image resampling. We allow Thin File to handle the first resizing pass, which is an image dimension somewhat bigger than our final. We still save on bandwith and meet the user expectation of a fast site. Once the image has been transferred though, it's time for the GD library in PHP to take over and make the image a bit prettier. The GD library's resizing algorithm is similar to Photoshop's default "Bicubic," resulting in a smoother-looking image. Interestingly, because the first pass is so sharp, by applying the final, smoother resizing on it results in a nice level of sharpness. When shrinking an image you often want to increase the sharpness anyway to push out some of the details lost. Serendipity, baby! Does Vitale own a copyright on that phrase? We hope not.
There are some small tradeoffs with this approach. First, we're pushing more bits upstream across the Intertubes, from an average of 70k before to about 370k now. On 56k modems, that's about 70 seconds. Not optimal, but reasonable. Second, PHP is now being tasked to do some additional work. That said, the improvement in photo quality far outweighs those negligible negatives. View the difference in the image comparison below - click to see the orginal image before Vox blog resized it.
So what about our enthusiasts? You know, the people who agonize over the levels in their photo and a 2.1 versus 2.2 radius sharpening. For those folks, they simply upload their photos at the exact size we use on the site and so long as the resulting file is under 70k, no automated process will touch it. The enthusiast gets exacting precision and the casualist gets ease of use. Everyone wins. Well, we'll see who wins... check out this week's competitions.
User Upload Validation Woes
Thin File's ThinImage wasn't without some pains. It was incorrectly assumed that a call to the session from the PHP scripting language would get us our validated user's credentials. Not so. The Java running on the page is its own instance - essentially an unvalidated user. We're not sure how other Thin File clients get around this security exposure and the Thin File site, nor support, has any documentation on suggestions to prevent anyone from uploading through the applet.
We resorted to a time-limited token hand-off between the page and the applet. A flat file outside of our document root is written with a long, random file name. It contains the user's validation credentials. This file name is passed to the applet, whereby validation is confirmed and the upload is permitted. The token flat file is then destroyed.
This approach works and isn't any less secure than session hijacking. The downside is that user's now have an artificial time constraint on their upload. This becomes a problem only when a user hits the applet upload page, leaves his or her computer for 10 minutes and then returns to upload their photo. Thinking about this problem out loud makes us think a meta refresh tag of 10 minutes that bumps the user to their last visited page would be a good solution. See that? You just read how a feature is born!
Alternative image uploaders
SWFUpload
Pros:
* File size limit
* Multiple file uploading
* File queuing with start & stop upload buttons
* File type(s) limit, including filtering on file browsing
* Familiar, native OS file browsing dialog window
* Beautiful, XHTML-compliant degradation (if that sort of thing turns you on)
* Faster than Java applets
* Free
Cons: (all of these are Flash limitations)
* No client-side resizing
* No client-side manipulation (e.g. rotation)
* Authentication is a little kludgy (Flash cookie bug)
Aurigma
Pros:
* Many client-side manipulations (resize, rotate, watermarking and more)
* Displays preview image on file browsing
* File size limit
* File type(s) limit, including filtering on file browsing
* Multiple file uploading
* Multi-language support
* ZIP compression
* Folder uploading
* Upload resuming
* Nerdy features (load balancing and file pairing stuff)
Cons:
* Most expensive
* Slowest to load
* Ugly, clunky UI (we don't care what their Web site says)
* Facebook uses it (we kid, we kid)
