New Amazon Features: Translating the Bookstore Experience On-line

Amazon is offering new Text Stats on "Readability" and "Complexity", and a Concordance feature, both part of their comprehensive effort to translate the physical book[store] experience into the online medium. The new features build on existing capabilities such as Look Inside, Wishlists, Recommendations, Editorial and Customer Reviews, Citations, and Better Together to create a comprehensive book buying experience. In the same way that bookstores include kiosks to allow customers access metadata and other information on the books for sale in the immediate environment, Amazon is offering on-line capabilities that simulate many of the activities of book buyers in a bookstore, such as checking the table of contents and indexes, flipping through a book to read passages, or look at select pages.

The new features appear on product pages for books, as well as other kinds of works. [Try this intro to FRBR for a look at the conceptual hierarchy differentiating works from items, and it's implications for common user tasks like finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items.]

Text Stats may be experimental, but it's hard to feel comfortable with their definition of complexity, which is: "A word is considered "complex" if it has three or more syllables." To point out the obvious, English includes plenty of simple three syllable words - like "banana" - and some very complex one syllable words - "time" "thought" and "self" for example.

The Text Stats on Readability seem a bit better thought through. That's natural, given their grounding in research done outside Amazon's walls. But with clear evidence that US education standards vary considerably across states and even individual districts, and also evidence that those standards change over time, I have to question the value of Readability stats long term. I suppose that isn't point...

The Concordance feature is easier to appreciate; perhaps it doesn't attempt to interperet or provide meaning. It simply presents the raw statistical data on word frequencies, and allows you to do the interpretation. Amazon links each word in the concordance to a search results page listing the individual occurances of the word in the text, which is useful, and then further links the individual occruance listings to the location within the text.

With this strong and growing mix of features, Amazon both translates the bookstore experience on-line, and also augments that experience with capabilities available only in an information environment. The question is whether Amazon will continue to expand the capabilities it offers for book buying under the basic mental model of "being in a bookstore", or if a new direction is ahead?

Here's a screenshot of the Text Stats for DJ Spooky's Rhythm Science.

Text Stats:

Here's a screen shot of the Concordance feature.

Concordance:

local tags: amazon, books, frbr, mental_models, ux

Mental Models and the Semantics of Disaster

A few months ago, I put up a posting on Mental Models Lotus Notes, and Resililence. It focused on my chronic inability to learn how not to send email with Lous Notes. I posted about Notes, but what led me to explore resilience in the context of mental models was the surprising lack of acknowledgement of the scale of hurricane Katrina I came across at the time. For example, the day the levees failed, the front page of the New York Times digital edition carried a gigantic headline saying 'Levees Fail! New Orleans floods!'. And yet no one in the office at the time even mentioned what happened.

My conclusion was that people were simply unable to accept the idea that a major metropolitan area in the U.S. could possibly be the setting for such a tragedy, and so they refused to absorb it - because it didn't fit in with their mental models for how the world works. Today, I came across a Resilience Science posting titled New Orleans and Disaster Sociology that supports this line of thinking, while it discusses some of the interesting ways that semantics and mental models come into play in relation to disasters.

Quoting extensively from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Disaster Sociologists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hurricanes, but Will Policy Makers Listen? the posting calls out how narrow slices of media coverage driven by blurred semantic and contextual understandings, inaccurately frame social responses to disaster situations in terms of group panic and the implied breakdown of order and society.

"The false idea of postdisaster panic grows partly from simple semantic confusion, said Michael K. Lindell, a psychologist who directs the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University at College Station. 'A reporter will stick a microphone in someone's face and ask, 'Well, what did you do when the explosion went off?' And the person will answer, 'I panicked.' And then they'll proceed to describe a very logical, rational action in which they protected themselves and looked out for people around them. What they mean by 'panic' is just 'I got very frightened.' But when you say 'I panicked,' it reinforces this idea that there's a thin veneer of civilization, which vanishes after a disaster, and that you need outside authorities and the military to restore order. But really, people usually do very well for themselves, thank you.'

Mental models come into play when the article goes on to talk about the ways that the emergency management agencies are organized and structured, and how they approach and understand situations by default. With the new Homeland Security paradigm, all incidents require command and control approaches that assume a dedicated and intelligent enemy - obviously not the way to manage a hurricane response.

"Mr. Lindell, of Texas A&M, agreed, saying he feared that policy makers in Washington had taken the wrong lessons from Katrina. The employees of the Department of Homeland Security, he said, 'are mostly drawn from the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and from police departments. They're firmly committed to a command-and-control model.' (Just a few days ago, President Bush may have pushed the process one step further: He suggested that the Department of Defense take control of relief efforts after major natural disasters.)

"The habits of mind cultivated by military and law-enforcement personnel have their virtues, Mr. Lindell said, but they don't always fit disaster situations. 'They come from organizations where they're dealing with an intelligent adversary. So they want to keep information secret; 'it's only shared on a need-to-know basis. But emergency managers and medical personnel want information shared as widely as possible because they have to rely on persuasion to get people to cooperate. The problem with putting FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security is that it's like an organ transplant. What we've seen over the past four years is basically organ rejection.'

If I read this correctly, misaligned organizational cultures lie at the bottom of the whole problem. I'm still curious about the connections between an organization's culture, and the mental models that individuals use. Can a group have a collective mental model?

Accoridng to Collective Mental State and Individual Agency: Qualitative Factors in Social Science Explanation it's possible, and in fact the whole idea of this collective mental state is a black hole as far as qualitative social research and understanding are concerned.

local tags: culture, hierarchy, katrina, media, mental_models, organizations, resilience, semantics, social_systems

Mental Models: Additional Reading

Some additional reading on mental models, courtesy of the Interaction Design Encyclopedia.

local tags: mental_models, modeling

Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes

Several very unpleasant experiences I've had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.

The IAWiki defines a mental model as, "a mental model is how the user thinks the product works." This is a simplified definition, but it's adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse's thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users' Models of Computer Systems.

In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages - at least not as I experience it.

Here's what happens my mental model and my reality don't match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox - the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly - (I'm using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I'm unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it's frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
   
2. I realize I need to respond to an email


3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages


4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese


5. I attempt to send this email


6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like "We're really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can't send out any messages using your email client."


7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)


8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not


9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient


10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.


11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can't send a message. I'm no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren't enough to change my model of how Notes works.

Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, "Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance." From an ecological perspective, resilience "is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system." The psychological view emphasizes "the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe."

Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since - in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself - seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.

Notice that I'm using a work-around - switching to Gmail - to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, "The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation." This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.

I also noticed that I'm relying on a series of assumptions - email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages - that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it's easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I'll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.

Here's a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?


2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?


3. What's the threshold of recovery for a mental model?


4. Put another way, what's required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I'm comfortable saying it's a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.

Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems


2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system


3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models


4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it's safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.

Time to close this post before it gets too long.

Further reading:

Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.

Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance

Garry Peterson's blog Resilience Science

local tags: lotusnotes, mental_models, resilience, social_systems, ux

Concept Maps: Training Children to Build Ontologies?

Concept maps popped onto the radar last week when an article in Wired highlighted a concept mapping tool called Cmap. Cmap is one of a variety of concept mapping tools that's in use in schools and other educational settings to teach children to model the structure and relationships connecting - well - concepts.

The root idea of using concept mapping in educational settings is to move away from static models of knowledge, and toward dynamic models of relationships between concepts that allow new kinds of reasoning, understanding, and knowledge. That sounds a lot like the purpose of OWL.

It might be a stretch to say that by advocating concept maps, schools are in fact training kids to create ontologies as a basic learning and teaching method, and a vehicle for communicating complex ideas - but it's a very interesting stretch all the same. As Information Architects, we're familiar with the ways that structured visualizations of interconnected things - pages, topics, functions, etc. - communicate complex notions quickly and more effectively than words. But most of the rest of the world doesn't think and communicate this way - or at least isn't consciously aware that it does.

It seems reasonable that kids who learn to think in terms of concept maps from an early age might start using them to directly communicate their understandings of all kinds of things throughout life. It might be a great way to communicate the complex thoughts and ideas at play when answering a simple question like "What do you think about the war in Iraq?"

Author Nancy Kress explores this excact idea in the science fiction novel 'Beggars In Spain', calling the constructions "thought strings". In Kress' book, thought strings are the preferred method of communcation for extremely intelligent genetically engineered children, who have in effect moved to realms of cognitive complexity that exceed the structural capacity of ordinary languages. As Kress describes them, the density and multidimensional nature of thought strings makes it much easier to share nuanced understandings of extremely complex domains, ideas, and situations in a compact way.

I've only read the first novel in the trilogy, so I can't speak to how Kress develops the idea of thought strings, but there's a clear connection between the construct she defines and the concept map as laid out by Novak, who says, "it is best to construct concept maps with reference to some particular question we seek to answer or some situation or event that we are trying to understand".

Excerpts from the Wired article:

"Concept maps can be used to assess student knowledge, encourage thinking and problem solving instead of rote learning, organize information for writing projects and help teachers write new curricula. "

"We need to move education from a memorizing system and repetitive system to a dynamic system," said Gaspar Tarte, who is spearheading education reform in Panama as the country's secretary of governmental innovation."

"We would like to use tools and a methodology that helps children construct knowledge," Tarte said. "Concept maps was the best tool that we found."

local tags: concept_maps, education, modeling, ontology, science_fiction, semantics, semanticweb, thought_strings, tools

mSpace Online Demo

There's an mSpace demo online.

local tags: modeling, mspace, ontology, semanticweb, tools

Two Surveys of Ontology / Taxonomy / Thesaurus Editors

While researching and evaluating user interfaces and management tools for semantic structures - ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, etc - I've come across or been directed to two good surveys of tools.

The first, courtesy of HP Labs and the SIMILE project is Review of existing tools for working with schemas, metadata, and thesauri. Thanks to Will Evans for pointing this out.

The second is a comprehensive review of nearly 100 ontology editors, or applications offering ontology editing capabilities, put together by Michael Denny at XML.com. You can read the full article Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools, or go directly to the Summary Table of Survey Results.

The original date for this is 2002 - it was updated July of 2004.

local tags: metadata, ontology, semanticweb, simile, taxonomy, tools