Seeing this laid out again after the prototype gave me a completely new perspective on the user flow. Though people were using the site more or less exactly how I designed it, two things immediately stood out to me:

Assymmetry

Overall, it’s a pretty lopsided and, as a result, inefficient process. All the decision-making is accorded to the first user, while the second user can undo all those efforts with a single click. Ironically, I had designed it this way to make it more efficient… I had wanted to avoid a protracted discussion on ideal cooking times that leads nowhere, resulting in cooking that never happens. However in reality, people had this discussion anyway, outside of Hotpot’s purview. And forcing people to send all those ‘concrete’ invites resulted in a lot of wasted back-and-forths. Some even abandoned the process after a it resulted in a “maybe” the first time.

Alternative Channels of Communication

One new development was the blue circle: people needing to nudge each other into action because quite often the invitation email went ignored. I hadn’t quite expected that this would play such a big row, but in hindsight, the necessity for that nudge makes a lot of sense. We get so much email these days, it’s common practice to bypass an email from an unfamiliar service or website.

Looking at this, I realized now that I made the classic mistake of being an overzealous designer, trying to design everything. Instead of recognizing that Hotpot exists within a crowded network of services used by a single person daily, I had tried to make Hotpot take ownership of almost the entire communication process. Rather than allowing friends to communicate in whatever way was most natural and effective for them, I was asking them to use this specialized invitation which lacked the social capital to attract attention.

The “formal invitation” was one of my early darlings going all the way back to October. It was spurred on by a lot of positive feedback, supporting the idea that it helps make the cooking event feel even more special. Now I know this is not exactly true: an invitation email, no matter how well-designed, is not going to feel special in a crowded inbox.

Again, this is exactly why you make a live prototype.

So what would an improved process look like? Here’s one take:

In this version, I aimed for a few things:

• Earlier discovery for User 2: Earlier discovery means a longer time to get acquainted with Hotpot, rather than being taken by surprise with the invitation.
• Increased symmetry: Decision-making for the cooking event now happens together. This allows the 2nd user to become invested in the invitation process, rather being confronted with basically an ultimatum: “I already set the time and date, so take it or leave it.”  Friends that plan something together are more likely to actually do it together.
• Take advantage of existing channels: This version offloads the hard work of reaching consensus to whatever communication channels work best for the users. Doing so gives users more flexibility and control over that conversation, and allows them to take advantage of existing social capital to ensure  responsiveness. The downside is that Hotpot plays less of an intervening role, so this wouldn’t work between people who aren’t well-acquainted to begin with. If Hotpot evolves into a “meeting people” platform, the service will need to play a bigger mediating role. But for the purposes of getting a minimum unit of value working by the end of thesis time, I think it’s a good move.

Doing this was extremely useful in helping me to imagine the next steps. I admit to feeling rather lost and helpless last week, as I couldn’t quite figure out why people weren’t using this thing I worked so hard to make. Now, I have some concrete clues as to what to do in the remaining weeks.

I think that, rather than adding more features or imagining a fancy future for the product, I would rather make improvements to the existing prototype. My biggest hope is, by the time thesis is over, people will actually use this to cook with their friends. Rather than attempt to inspire and delight my thesis audience with visions of a beautiful imagined future, I want to inspire and delight with the actual experience of cooking with your friends. That alone, I think, will have enough beauty to fill an auditorium.

OpenTok Redux!

I had a realization: if I limit the # of participants in a cooking session to 2 in the prototype, then I can utilize OpenTok’s P2P technology, which means faster streaming and high quality. Would this be as good as Google+ or iChat? I put this to the test. The answer, for now, seems to be a tentative yes. The picture quality was good with a ~1 second delay, comparable to Google+ Hangouts. I also used Speedtest.net to note my connection speeds, and compared them to the other times I ran cooking prototypes with Google+ Hangouts— they were the same.

So… is it worth it to limit participants to two for the prototype? I decided, yes. In fact the experience seems to be way better when fewer people are in the cooking session. Even three feels a tad awkward because there is a slight feeling of “third-wheel-ness” and five borders on chaotic, though fun. Besides, all you need is two people to understand the point of what I’m trying to build.

This means, for the time being, I can consider OpenTok my video platform of choice for the prototype. Which means I don’t have to come up with some convoluted strategy for getting people to run both Hotpot and another video chat service at the same time. Hooray!

Diagrams!

Last week, I went to Staples with the intention of buying a $1 pack of notecards, and returned with $30 worth of Stickies. Oops.

What resulted was this:

User stories

And this:

user flow + wireframes = wireflows!

Having everything laid out on a wall was incredibly helpful in organizing my thoughts and making the task at hand seem finite. Of course, there were still millions of details to be worked out. But now things can at least proceed in an orderly fashion, one hopes.

Wireframes!

The next step was to turn the thumbnail Sticky note wireframes into higher-resolution digital wireframes. I downloaded Balsamiq Mockups, which is a tool that’s “so freaking good” (claims the site, accurately) for rapid-sketching wireframes on the computer. Its imprecise, hand-drawn lines resist efforts to obsess about things that don’t matter, like making everything line up perfectly.

I then mocked up each page, one at a time. Here are some wireframes for the “room” that people will cook together in:

Once I had all the pages in my userflow mocked up, I was ready to start coding again. This time, I admit, I felt less frantic and more sure of what I was doing as I sat down to the keyboard.

Advisor Meeting!

The thing that stood out to me from the meeting was David’s warning to not spend too much time working on the parts of the project that aren’t unique or innovative. For instance, coding a login/user registration system. So the challenge for me going forward is balancing my desire to learn how these things work (i.e. build them from scratch myself) and not letting that get in the way of thinking about more interesting, interaction design-y things. Something to keep in mind.

• Connections on the so-called social graph, as represented by a line with a label, are woefully inadequate for describing the nuance and complexity of real-life relationships. In fact, the harder we try to represent how we relate to one another using dots and lines, the more we end up with “a social version of the Uncanny Valley,” 
• Relationships require maintenance. Without it, they degrade over time. Social graphs do not reflect this—if you do not prune your friends list fastidiously, they will quickly grow inaccurate.
• Unfortunately, creators of social networks failed to understand that the act of pruning one’s account is a social act. “Unfriending” your ex is not really about you dispassionately updating your profile to reflect real-life changes. It sends a him message that you might be bitter, or hung up on him, or whatnot.
• Having all your social activities tracked and remembered is not just unnerving, it’s something that historically only sociopaths would do. There is something about social experiences that seems to require impermanence; otherwise they take on a sinister tone, as if there were some ulterior motive at play.

I’m going back to the start

All this got me thinking about what it means to be “social” nowadays. I’ve been describing my project as “social cooking” from the very beginning, but do I really know what that means? Lots of sites claim to facilitate such a thing, from GroupRecipes, a community recipe site, to RecipeRelay, a cooking blog. But am I doing the same thing as them, or something different? It’s time to find out.

To me, “social” can be boiled down (sorry, I couldn’t help it) to just an interaction between two or more people. However, not all interactions feel equally social. Handing my credit card to a cashier or a sales rep feels somehow “less” social than dinner with my friends on my birthday. Likewise, viewing a friend’s Facebook profile (without leaving any comments) feels less social than engaging in a heated discussion on an online forum. What separates these different forms of “socializing”?

It seems that there are at least 3 things:

1. receptiveness: both parties must be open to the fact that the other is trying to communicate something
2. acknowledgement: both parties must signal to the other that they are listening
3. meaningful content: the exchange must carry a payload of meaningful content. This is probably the most subjective point. What constitutes meaningfulness—is the cashier’s signal that I should sign a receipt not meaningful? Maybe not, compared to my best friend confiding in me.

If we go by these criteria, I can see why so many “social” interactions on the web these days leave us feeling empty. The ubiquitous “Like” button, for instance, often exists devoid of any sign of receptiveness or acknowledgement. (Is anyone listening at the other end? When they find out I Liked this, will they care? How will I know?) Furthermore, the meaning it conveys is indistinct at best, nonexistent at worst. (What does it mean to click the “Like” button? Does it mean it made me crack a smile for a split-second? Or that it profoundly changed my day?)

But one could argue, surely, that the only reason a “Like” button press feels un-received and unacknowledged is that there is a significant delay between the pressing of the button and the recipient of the “Like” checking their Facebook Notifications. So there’s definitely a fourth element at play here…

My working hypothesis: “social” appears to exist on a spectrum from “less social” to “more social,” and the controlling factor is time.

A scribbly little continuum diagram is born

To get my thoughts in order, I drew this (click to view large version):

Different forms of communication plotted along an axis. Not too sure about the labels at the ends right now, but also didn't want to spend 20 minutes in front a thesaurus to get this blog entry done with.

It seems that the more synchronous the interaction (the less of a time gap between responses), the more “social” it feels. This makes sense, because that kind of continuous, immediate feedback is what allows us to build up our relationships with others. Conversely, the gaps of silence in between responses can gradually degrade relationships over time.

True social experiences allow us to strengthen our relationships; superficially social ones merely keep our relationships from dissolving away completely.

In working on my thesis these past few weeks, I realized that the project is not really about changing the US food system anymore. That may be what I spent so many hours trying to say in my proposal, but that’s so far not factored hugely into my prototypes. Instead there is this new idea of creating a truly social, relationship-enforcing experience using cooking as the pretext and the Internet as the conduit. Maybe that’s where I’m headed?

If so, I think I am okay with it.

Some capital letters

Two nights ago, right when I was falling asleep thinking about thesis stuff, a very important thought occurred to me, but I didn’t write it down, and I couldn’t remember in the morning. Then I was folding laundry today, and it came back (can anyone explain how my brain works?). This time, I’m writing it down:

The Internet is a powerful platform, and in the past few years it has brought us a plethora of new tools for social engagement. These tools were all designed to enhance our natural faculties for developing relationships with one another—our mouths, eyes, faces, bodies, minds. With the Internet, we can now traverse time and space to interact with our friends! With Facebook, we can “remember” the contact info of hundreds of people! With Twitter, we can always “know” what our friends are up to at any given time!

But it also seems that lately, more and more of these tools are replacing the activities we’d normally engage in to keep in touch. A 1-sentence wall post replaces an hour-long phone call, a glance at someone’s profile replaces an email asking “What’s up? I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”

In taking advantage of the power of the Internet, I believe we should do our best to make tools that enhance our abilities to build strong and lasting relationships, instead of replacing them with a bevy of more superficial social interactions. Perhaps cooking online with your friends is just one of the ways we can do this. Either way, there is certainly a lot to be explored. And I’m excited to keep going, even if I’m not really going to save the world from factory farming. At least not this year.

In hindsight, I’m glad I’m doing this exercise now, rather than at the beginning. I think doing it earlier might have made me lose myself in the plethora of opportunities/problems to address. Doing it now lets me see the idea in context and brainstorm ways to make it fit in better with everything else. (I narrowly avoided using the word synergy just now. Whew, I’d better sit down and recover for a while.)

Your thesis is a consistent progression toward an idea. As it persists, it runs up against places, people, concepts that coexist alongside the work that is becoming your thesis. What is now possible because of these adjacencies? What is not? What does your thesis look like in the presence of this company? Create a visual representation of your thesis adjacencies. It can be physical or digital, tangible or conceptual, as long as it is clear.

I thought this would be a useful exercise to help me think beyond just the video chat layer. So I made a little diagram:

This diagram is by no means exhaustive, but I’ve put down what appears to be most germane, and it’s already a lot. If nothing else, doing this made me realize that there are so many more opportunities to “be deliberate” beyond just designing the cooking interface (which is really what I’ve been focusing on in the past weeks).

If I have extra time this week, I’ll do a few more exercises and post them here. (I’ve also decided that Omnigraffle on a huge monitor is vastly preferable to stickies on a wall.)

For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Paul Pangaro and Hugh Dubberly, this is basically a “stack” of simplified cybernetic diagrams. Each unit or layer shown is a “cybernetic system” – a feedback loop that has a stated goal, an actuator (that carries out an action to achieve that goal), a sensor (that measures the impact of that action), and a comparator (that compares the sensor’s input to the goal and determines what to do next). In my diagram, each layer can be considered a “sub-goal” of the one above it — it represents a set of requirements that must be achieved in order for the goal above it to be possible. These “sub-goals” are called methods in official Dubberly-Pangaro-speak: they describe how the goal above will be accomplished, e.g. the “method” via which it will be accomplished.

To read the diagram, start at the bottom and work your way up. Step 1 is where my thesis is situated: getting people to cook. This diagram then explains how this simple intervention could potentially lead to a positive change in the US food system…