Design for online collaboration

I just got back from IDEO social software and strategy specialist Gentry Underwood’s (if I’m ever reincarnated, I totally call dibs on that name) spiel at the Rotman School. He was talking about IDEO’s experience with creating interactive knowledge sharing systems and the 5 principles they’d extracted from the process. The first lesson? Technology is only the beginning.

Gentry Underwood presents at Rotman

According to Underwood, IDEO ran into an increasingly typical scenario — a growing company, globally distributed offices and hierarchical structures (however minimal) were causing key information and practices to get trapped in unconnected parts on their organization.

What they found as they began to research and implement online social software solutions was that companies who focused primarily on technology fixes to knowledge sharing challenges failed and that understanding the technology in the context of organizational culture and processes was key.

When they finally implemented their own system,  IDEO found that within 6 month almost 97% of their staff were participating in online collaborative technologies, which is just completely remarkable. From that success they distilled 5 key principles to drive success at online collaboration:

• Build pointers to people. Big central databases don’t work; create a context for people to find each other (e.g facebook)
• Reward individual participation. There has to be some personal payback for the time spent feeding collaborative systems (e.g. delicious.com).
• Design intuitive interfaces. If the systems require a lot of training and setup, they’ll probably fail
• Take the road more traveled. Emulate successful models and don’t create systems that depend on people making radical behavioral changes.
• Iterate early and often. Learn fast from mistakes and move on.

Underwood’s presentation resonated on many levels with many of our design and process assumptions here at Fruition.

First, design for intuitive ease of use. Duh. I mean, that’s what we do.

Second, a rapid iterative approach — where we’ll start with basics and layer on features and changes on a bi-weekly schedule in response to our clients’ learning — is the absolute linchpin of our technology development and design practices.

Third, although Underwood didn’t talk about it in exactly these terms, IDEO’s approach relies heavily on a design pattern that we call “information radiators” — visible, ubiquitous sources of information that people can absorb without having to seek them out. Underwood talks about tactics like always-on video conferencing, email-pushed blog feeds and big, public visualizations of information from IDEO’s knowledge sharing system as being key. We’ve been big believers in that pattern for a while.

But I think the main resonance was really sub-textual and philosophical. I think, embedded in Underwood’s approach, is this idea that I’ve had for a while that knowledge isn’t something that exists or can exist outside of the person who has knowledge. Knowledge isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective.

And so the whole notion of “knowledge management” that underlies so many digital media projects is kind of bullshit.

You can manage the artifacts of people’s knowledge — documents, pictures, whatever; and document management is fine as a small tactical piece of sharing knowledge  — but that’s usually going to fail at the bigger task. Effective online experiences are ultimately about creating appropriate contexts for people to interact.