Grant Cerny's Blogs

I've been thinking about how our online experience increasingly correlates to some dimensions of our human experience.

Semantic

The search engines, and predominantly Google, "organized the world's information" through smart robots that find and sort and rank content continuously and tirelessly, according to smart and ever-smarter algorithms. The world reorganized itself around search engines as the fastest and easiest method for finding relevant content.

Social

The searchers soon found that a supplemental index of relevance, the social graph, could be laid over this index of knowledge and, uniquely to every individual person, allow all to additionally consider whatever their friends considered relevant. With personal relationships as a keystone to the psychology of trust, the social graph became a new critical dimension to the relevance of available content.

Geospatial

In the years to come, algorithmic and social relevance of content will be supplemented by another human dimension: geography. Already we enjoy many geo-relevant applications (e.g. google maps), but in the future all content should be filterable with reference to a user's expressed location (I am here), a user's intention location (I will be or want to say that I am here), and the assigned or determined location value of a piece of content.

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Applications will be able to cross-reference algorithmic, social, and geospatial relevance. In fact they already can and do. But I suggest that in less than two years this will be ubiquitous. Our product designs and innovations should correspondingly begin embracing and bulilding upon this concept.

What other dimensions of relevance can we add to our searching and finding? How closely does this in fact map to the dimensions of human experience?

Meaning, People, World.... what else? Time, perhaps, could next be more comprehensively organized, as all of history becomes indexed...

At this week's "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in Washington D.C., attendees perched on ends of seats, focused on gleaning hints or tricks or otherwise silver bullets to turbo-boost their web properties' social syndication quota.

"Design for the Viewer," advised a panelist.

"Not just the user. Design for the Viewer."

Focusing on the "Viewer" rather than the user in this context means to "make your widget noticeable." Utilize your arsenal of brand and creative design to grab the user's attention, quickly. As Chris Anderson recently observed, in the "attention economy," a person's time actually is money and gaining even a split-second of it will commensurately enable monetization opportunity.

Make your placements visually vocal. Make them shout "This Thing is Grabbable!" or "This Thing Does Something With Facebook!" or "Like MySpace? You'll Like This Too, Then!" Images move faster to cognitive recognition and association. Images are sexy, free-tv-bundled FIOS where text is generic dial-up.

"Grabbability" - the ability to be taken and embedded elsewhere - was noted as a function without standard iconography and widely misunderstood or plain missed by the target audience. Separately, the Facebook logo (and by extension other logos with a brand afterimage) was cited as an element which "speaks to" Facebook users, and increases clickthrough by a multiple.

Text alone will not suffice to evoke the concept of intersite portability - at least not within the split-seconds available before whimsy or flashing hamsters distract. Often, site owners utilize text to describe a social app's value, and the text gets lost in a quick scan with other page text. To gain notice from attention-lacking social surfers, employ something visual, persistent, and relevant to the viewer's experiences or affiliations offsite.

The inference drawn is to design a system of visual prompts or cues (suggested to me earlier by John Kilpatrick) for what page elements refer to activities a Viewer may carry on to other favorite web destinations. And then, one will hope, back again.