Here are some of the things we’ve paid attention to this week:

Jeff Veen reminds us that users aren’t stupid but efficient, and that the sometimes odd usage patterns we (people who live and work for the web) see in our websites and applications are easily explained by that simple fact. This is something I’ve insisted through my work in the past, and will continue to insist on.

Users aren’t stupid, they’re efficient. They’re spending the least amount of effort (i.e. intelligence) as they possible can on each step of the goal they’re trying to achieve. If you make them spend more, they’ll go somewhere else — it’s like intellectual bargain shopping.

The Flickr “Everyday Information Architecture” group pool, that reminds us that not always Information Architecture is conscious. We do it every day of our lives, even if we don’t consider ourselves Information Architects. And that thought alone is beautiful.

Joshua Prince-Ramus’s presentation at TED (downloadable at TED Talks) is extremely inspiring in the sense that it shows how architects need to shift their thinking patterns to build something truly useful to a global audience. Watch it, trace the parallels between architecture and IT, and go from there.

Christine Perfetti has a good post about building successful user experience teams. This advice isn’t only for UX professionals, so you may want to have a look if you run an organization that either incorporates or is thinking of working with a user experience team.

Myspace is a hit, and there’s no doubt about it - regardless of how you or I feel about it. This week, the social network swept the Yahoo! portal from the top of US website visits and keeps proving how powerful the connection between youth, music and online journals really is.

One of the consequences of this success though, is the feeling that now that one (or two - think Facebook) social network is doing well, the world needs a slew of others like it - and honestly, it doesn’t. If you’re really going to build a social network, if you really want to try and enter that space, if you can’t stand the idea of not doing it, don’t just “try to be like Myspace” - at least aim higher.

The value of Quality and Quantity

Myspace is what I like to call a catch-all social network - a network whose audience is comprised of people of any age or social status. In comparison, Facebook caters to a totally different kind of people - college students. Now, what do you think is more valuable: a million people aged 14 to 18, or a million people in colleges and universities? If you didn’t say the latter, think again.

I think future social networks are either going to be completely generic - mutating into new worlds (like music, photography, politics, etc) as its audience shifts -, or completely domain-centric (like Flickr is for photos). It makes more sense from a social perspective and much more sense from an economic perspective - because advertisers pay more for a targeted audience.

All this to convey the idea that if you’re really set to build social software, you should cater to either a specific kind of people, or to a specific kind of social object (something that binds people together - again, like the photos on Flickr).

Do you still want to do it?

If you still want to do it, go ahead. Apparently there’s always room for YASN (Yet Another Social Network - you read it here first, folks), at least for a little while until the hype goes away. Seriously, though, we’re getting a tremendous amount of proposals to build social networks but have yet to see someone actually being passionate about it. And without passion, it’ll be just another myspace copy, and that we really don’t need.

Related Link: myspace funny comments by funny4myspace

Here are some of the things we’ve paid attention to this week:

If you haven’t seen Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at TED about creativity in education, you should. This is probably the most inspiring thing I’ve seen and heard in a very long time - and it got me thinking about applying for being present at TED 2008 (well, considering TED 2007 has sold out already). Seriously, go watch the video.

Donna Maurer has an eye-opening post on “Things you should know before working with me“. Hear, hear - couldn’t have said it better myself.

Dan Saffer, senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path has a book coming out in the beginning of August called “Designing for Interaction“. Pay attention to this one if you work in the field. And speaking of Adaptive Path, their User Experience Week is going to be in Washington from the 14th to the 17th August, and I sure as hell wish I could be there.

User Experience Design (the blog) has a great post about Day in the Life scenarios with a series of interview questions to ask in evaluating use of an application - this is something we’ll be doing for the products we’re about to launch (particularly GoPlan).

Digg is notoriously a success-case of Web 2.0 - or if you are tired of buzzwords, of user-published and reviewed content. Its traffic growth rate is tremendous and it shows the power of viral marketing and participatory communities in the success of a company. However, despite the obvious successes, there’s a lot to be said about the quality of Digg’s content recently.

Questionable quality or a different audience?

A site running off of a community (like Digg is) is only as valuable as the average of its users’ contributions. Also, digg’s audience has shifted from a community of early adopters and people passionate about web development and social networks, to a much bigger and younger audience, unhappy about the existing news portals and websites. This change had a huge impact on the topics Digg covers. (more…)