Sure, the internet has sped up communications, which changes the rate at which banking business is done. But it doesn’t change the way banks borrow, loan, and invest money. So here are some crazy ideas we came up with about how banks could take advantage of the affordances of the internet to change the way they do business.

• Local micro-lending: find someone in your neighborhood/city who needs a small loan, or find someone to lend you money. This wouldn’t need to be significantly different from the old model of small business loans (on the lending side) and CDs (on the investment side). Let’s say you have $5000, and you want to invest it at a 4% interest rate — but you want to give it to some deserving entrepreneur in your local economy. So you go to your bank web site, look up people in your city who need a loan, and give it to them. The bank loans your money to the entrepreneur at 5% and handles all the loan servicing from there. You get a 4% return on your investment, and the bank scrapes a little off the top, plus any late fees if the entrepreneur misses a payment. The internet would be an ideal platform to support this kind of peer-to-peer communication. Borrowers could even work to achieve an Ebay-style star rating based on how reliably they pay off their loans.
• Crowdsource investing: put money in a savings account and let your bank know where you want them to invest that money. Banks could be reaping massive amounts of market research from their own customers if they would just use the technology available to listen to them. Customers could tell banks which industries, types of companies, and causes they’d prefer them to invest in. Banks wouldn’t have to actually agree to follow their customers’ advice, but they’d glean valuable information on what their customers care about.
• Locavore banking: bank local. Just as with the local food movement, where consumers are becoming hyper-aware of where their food comes from, customers are beginning to care where in the world their money comes from and goes. This is why credit unions have been doing so well in the past few years. And, now that the nation’s large banks are falling hard, small, nimble, conservative credit unions will look like far safer options. Well, what if the big banks started using the internet to keep customers’ money local? With social networking tools, banks could enable customers to locate and collaborate with like-minded investors, creating local ad hoc investment groups that could buy/sell stock in local companies, local real estate, local municipal bonds, and so on.
• Netflix-style ATM: the snail-mail cash machine. Why waste gas driving to the nearest bank branch to pick up cash? Just go to your bank’s web site and order up a regular disbursement of cash. Paying for a stamp is cheaper than the $2-$4 fee you’d get from the ATM at the convenience store. If you’re on a $40/week lunch budget, you could get your bank to mail you $40 every week. Banks could disguise the envelopes in a multitude of ways to foil mail thieves — as junk mail or as a letter from your fictional great-aunt Mildred.

Anyone care to out-crazy me? What could banks be doing to change the way they interact with customers? And would any of those changes prevent the kind of mess we’re in now?

Nature + Agriculture = Permaculture

Natural ecosystems evolved over hundreds of millennia, developing sustainable, complex webs of relationships over millions of generations. Humans gathered or hunted whatever edible organisms they could find from this emergent food web. However, supply was limited and unpredictable, which is why humans invented agriculture. Our ancestors replaced forests with fields, which were planted with carefully-selected species that provided the tastiest or most nourishing byproducts. Over time, these species were bred to maximize yield and reduce maintenance costs. Unfortunately, this led to a destruction of natural habitat and mass extinction of plants and animals that did not conform to the human ideal. Farms became brittle monocultures of one or two crops, denuding the land of nutrients.

There is a better way: permaculture. Permaculture is a human-cultivated, sustainable ecosystem that produces food by mimicking the balance and interactions between plants and animals found in nature. It basically involves planting a forest filled with a wide variety of native edible and beneficial species that enrich the soil and provide each other with nutrients, protection from parasites and disease. A permaculture plantation can yield food for humans and animals while surviving indefinitely — without the addition of artificial fertilizers, irrigation, or pesticides.

Permaculture for social media

What if we structured social media like a permaculture — capable of yielding revenue for a business while supporting a vibrant, self-organized, self-sustaining community indefinitely? What would that online community look like? How would we go about designing and structuring that permaculture for production AND longevity?

Here’s my unscientific and mostly untested back-of-the-paper-napkin wild-ass guess for an approach to applying permaculture practices to social media.

Step 1: Analyze the site

View your social media site as a plot of land. Each plot of land is different, with a unique mix of soils, wildlife, topography, microclimate, precipitation, sun profile, and people who live on or near that plot. The same principles apply to web sites. Each has a different organizational structure, political hierarchy, business model, content domain, audience, competitive landscape, and so on. In order to design a permaculture for your site and choose the appropriate elements for it, you must consider all of these factors.

1. Business model: Begin by reviewing how resources — money, usually — flow into the business and, as a result, the web site. What are all the sources of funding, staff, political will, and so on?
2. Content domain: What is your organization’s specific industry, subject matter expertise, or genre?
3. Audience: Who do you serve? Who do you sell to? Where do you sell? From what cultural point of reference do you speak from?
4. Competition: Who serves/sells to the same audience as you? Who offers the same product or expertise? Who has the same business model?
5. Seasonal factors: How does the environment for your organization change over time? Based on historical records, what periodic fluctuations can you expect on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis?

Step 2: Design the value web

Let’s return to the analogy of the natural ecosystem. In every self-sustaining community of organisms, there is a constant cycle of give and take. Predators eat prey while becoming prey themselves to some other predator. Each organism eats something and is eaten by something. Every organism’s byproducts becomes food, catalyst, insulation, structure, protection, or poison for another organism. The complex network of dependencies that emerges from an ecosystem is called a food web.

On a full-circle farm, the food web is simplified to be more manageable by humans. The sun feeds the grass which feed the sheep whose manure fertilizes the grass and attracts flies which lay eggs which hatch into maggots which are eaten by chickens whose manure fertilizes the grass and enriches the compost which nourishes the corn which is fed to pigs… and so on. In a permaculture, the food web is more complex. Fungi on the roots of a legume will enrich the soil with nitrogen, supporting nitrogen-hungry onions whose flowers produce an aroma that draws harmful insects away from the fruit tree whose fallen leaves prevent water from evaporating and block weed seeds from germinating… and so on.

In a social media system, the people and business entities that make up the network of dependencies don’t eat each other. Instead, they form a living food web where the unit of exchange is value, forming a value web.

In order to create highly targeted, self-sustainable, vibrant social system that also makes money, we must identify how each actor in the system gains value from and gives value back to the system. Consider how users, the content they contribute, and the affordances provided by the system act to create a living, vibrant community. For each user, determine their needs, what they produce, and how what they produce meets the needs of other types of users.

For each product offering, feature, function, target user type, or content type, answer:

• Who will find value in it?
• Who will use the output of it? For what purpose?
• What information goes into it? Where does that information come from?
• What part of it can be used directly? (e.g., revenue generation, brand awareness, data mining)
• What useful byproducts does it produce? (e.g., metadata, customer demographics, behavioral data)
• What waste products does it produce? (e.g., irrelevant content artifacts)
• What does it compete with?
• What is its lifecycle? How does it change over time?
• What is its life expectancy? How often does it need to be “re-planted”?

In gardening, a common practice is companion planting, where the gardener places two or three plants that have some sort of simple dependency relationship near each other. Over time, the output of each plant will nourish its companion.

Companion planting can be applied to social media as well. For example, a Twitter-style micro-blogging feed from a product design team could be used to seed topics for a Digg-style feature-voting discussion board about the product. Votes and comments harvested from the discussion group could then be used to provide feedback to the product design team. By designing multiple clusters of such value loops and then linking them together, a nascent value web could be created.

However, it’s not enough to just create a network of dependencies. The value web must be flexible enough to survive, even if one element of that web is removed. Each organism has multiple sources of nourishment and produces multiple byproducts for multiple organisms. Additionally, each organism has individual variations, even amongst members of its species. This is what makes natural ecosystems robust enough to survive — and even thrive on — storms, disease, or seasonal fires.

In the business world, this strategy is called diversification. However, this usually means diversifying investments in multiple markets and multiple products. What needs to be added to this strategy is an understanding of the different kinds of value your customers gain from your business. Consider the value a customer gets from not just the product, but also from friends and family, other customers, society (in the form of social cachet from using your product), their own sense of accomplishment, your customer service, bonuses and rewards, and so on. If there are enough different types of value from a diverse enough set of sources, you could replace one of those vlaue components without causing a collapse of the value web.

Step 3: Fill in the niches

In nature, certain roles must be filled and in balance for a permaculture to form and thrive. Might we construct a social permaculture online by identifying and designing for analogous user roles to those in nature? (Or am I taking the analogy too far?)

Step 4: Control Weeds

Some of the niches above will be filled naturally by “weedy” users. Weeds are essentially ANY plant growing in the wrong place. It could even be a very valuable plant, such as a saffron crocus or rare orchid. If it occurs in an improper context, it’s a weed. In a permaculture, weeds are naturally suppressed by having an abundance of the right kind of plant. If a community is filled with active moderators who diligently cull and suppress the irrelevant and harmful content, there will be little need for the business owner to actively weed.

Many social media sites simply start with an empty lot, letting their “plot of land” become overgrown with weedy users and their by-products — irrelevant content, off-topic flame wars, link farms, spam, and so on. Sometimes, by selective weeding and cultivation, these chaotic systems can be coaxed to some semblance of community. But it is very difficult, once a permaculture of weeds is established, to steer that community toward relevancy.

It’s far better to plan the social media permaculture and seed it with the right content and encourage the right users to participate. Identify and constrain the system to the audience you want to reach. Provide them with the right mix of functionality and interactions to encourage conversations and connections. Slowly add new elements until you get the right balance.

Step 5: Harvest, prune, and tend

The idea behind permaculture is to create a self-sustaining system that also produces food. In social media, you want to encourage community AND accomplish some business objective. How do you know the establishment of the community is helping you reach your goals? How do you know it’s making money? How do you know what’s working and what’s not? The answer: measurement.

Farming requires fastidious bookkeeping. What did I plant where? How did that plant react to the addition of the other plant? How did the late onset of summer affect yield? How does compost made of kitchen scraps and lawn clippings perform year-over-year compared to compost made with chicken manure? What’s the optimum distance between fruit trees so enough light reaches the understory to encourage the growth of fruiting shrubs?

The same goes for social media. Analytics must be collected throughout the lifetime of the site to understand the effect of seemingly minute changes to elements of the online community. You won’t be able to predict with 100% accuracy how your permaculture will develop over time. As a result, you’ll need to swap out underperforming technologies, keep an eye on content rot, prune back overgrown categories, re-target audiences, tune your messaging.

For the permaculture gardener, many of these optimization decisions require trial and error over decades. For a web site or online service, new features, designs, and content can be trialed and refined over a few weeks. Here are some of the most promising methods:

• Rapid, iterative testing & evaluation: prototype designs are tested with actual users, revised in real time or within a matter of days, and re-tested and revised repeatedly. This results in a relatively well-optimized pre-launch design.
• Beta launch: this is the pilot test. Users are more forgiving when informed that the site or service may not be stable. They are also more likely to return to see if improvements have been made since their last visit. Just don’t leave it in beta forever.
• Multivariate testing: in-flight testing of minor changes, run on a random selection of a small percentage of visitors.

The user experience of a permaculture

You may well wonder whether a permaculture feels any better to a user than a simple, straightforward, single-product site or service. I’m going to cop out and say, “it depends”. Any web site or product, no matter how complex, can be made to feel simple, given enough latitude in the design. Sure, a natural ecosystem would just look and feel like an overgrown jungle. But a truly useful, sustainable, and profitable permaculture by definition must have simple and aesthetically-pleasing pathways, fully-accessible harvest patches, and an easily-maintained structure. Likewise, a sustainable social media system must look and feel simple, approachable, and accessible, even though it may be supported by an extremely complex set of business rules and technologies.

1. 1. Invest in research for cheaper, more efficient, mass-producible solar energy technologies, paired with seed funding for companies to bring those technologies to market.
2. 2. Create an X-Prize for the design of a cheap, efficient, mass-produced electric motor that can replace the gasoline engine of an existing popular stock car (e.g., Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, etc.) and can hook directly into its drivetrain with little/no loss of performance. Part of the prize would be an immediate contract for mass production with a major automaker.
3. 3. Start a free community-based farmer re-education program to teach current industrial-scale single-crop farmers how to re-tool their farm operations for large-scale permaculture and polyculture using viable heirloom seeds.
4. 4. Split everything left over between scientific research and K-18+ education.

We tried to apply user-centered design principles to our conference planning process — hopefully, that message comes through in the article.

I was struck by how similar - and educational - the garden design process is to the user experience design process. While reading these books, I’d often just substitute “garden” and “landscape” with “web site”, transforming the text into a comprehensive guide to creating sustainable and useful information systems.

The garden design process all starts with the vision and goals. Our goals for our garden include:

• low-maintenance structure
• self-sustaining, bootstrapping, balanced micro-ecosystem
• layout optimized for access & use (socializing, entertaining, harvesting)
• long-term, sustainable source of food

After that comes a site assessment that analyzes the specific space and context from many different perspectives: climate, microclimate, seasonal factors, flow, access, use, aesthetics, materials, soil, organisms, etc. A design can’t simply be copied from one site to another - the topology, wind, water, sunlight, and so on are extremely site and context-specific. For each perspective, the designer maps out the healthy and high-yield areas, the sick and risky areas, confounding factors, and so on. An overlay of all of these perspectives simultaneously shows which areas will support which types of features and which areas will need to be built up or re-designed.

From there, the designer brainstorms different approaches, blocking out on a conceptual bubble diagram how the new design will address the factors identified in the site assessment while still fitting within the vision. They then choose from a pattern library of well-tested, sustainable feature configurations, using some features to protect and support, while using others to add aesthetic and nutritional value. Again, not every pattern will work for every site. The designer must intelligently select the right pattern for the constraints and factors inherent to the context for which they’re designing.

The design is iteratively refined, considering all of the perspectives from the site assessment, until enough details have been resolved to begin selecting and placing individual plants. At the same time, the site can be prepped for installing the new design. As the new components are inserted into the landscape, the designer must consider how these will change over time. An edible forest garden must be able to sustainably evolve over decades, so the designer needs to take into account short-term factors as well as the long-term plan for their design.

Once the design is reasonably certain, implementation can begin. However, it doesn’t end when the last plant is placed or the last paving stone is installed. The design must be refined and the site tended over the months and years. Iteration and optimization are key to the long-term success of any design.

There are so many complex and competing factors to consider in a garden. As with a social networking web site, the community can’t really be controlled directly. The garden designer must attract beneficial organisms with certain layouts, features, and plants, while considering how the requirements and products of one organism might affect other organisms. If the structure is well-designed and plants well-selected, different organisms will nourish, protect, and police each other.

Sounds a lot like the user-centered design process, right? Well, it’s no mystery. Landscape architecture and garden design have histories that extend to the beginning of human civilization. There is deep wisdom to be gained from examining the process of creating and cultivating of healthy, sustainable forest gardens.

In web sites, the pathways in, out, and through the site determine how people use, gain value from, and give value to the site and the other people linked to it. The site will constantly evolve, powered by a constant influx and outflow of information, money, time, and so on. Like a yard gone to seed and overgrown with weeds, an unattended, poorly designed web site will stagnate and collect spammers and trolls. The web site designer must consider how to attract the right audiences, provide them with value, allow them to be productive, and make use of the products of their input to further improve the structure and value of the site.

I’ve posted a blog entry about the Blended Agenda Matrix and its history to the ZAAZ Blog.

Yesterday, it struck me that the users I design user interfaces for might just be those same people. This led me to realize that we in the user-centered design industry often tend to idealize our users, creating soft-focus glamorized personas that portray them as honest, hard-working, likeable people. I wonder, though… do we do the world a disservice by glossing over their flaws?

What would happen if we tried to understand our users as real human beings, warts and all? How would our design process change for people who are dishonest, lazy, disagreeable, and - heaven forbid - evil?

As user-centered professionals, it’s our job to promote and defend the needs of all users, right?

No, not really. It’s our job to design experiences that simultaneously accomplish the goals of our employer or client while meeting users’ needs as best we can. All user needs we meet must be within the subset that are correlated - directly or indirectly - with the business’ or organization’s needs.

In social networking sites and multiplayer online games, it becomes more crucial to understand the personality flaws of users. Every online community suffers from trolls and griefers who intentionally abuse other users and poison social systems with offending or annoying content or actions. They do this to gain attention, feel a sense of empowerment, get revenge on another user, or just entertain themselves. However, even “normal” users will game social systems to maximize their virtual wealth, improve their peer rating, gain attention, feel a sense of empowerment, etc. The design of any good online community will have checks and balances to prevent users from exploiting the system or abusing each other.

So what does this mean for the user-centered designer? I think it means that maybe we should drink our persona kool-aid with a grain of salt. Just as pharmacists include a list of side effects and contraindications for every drug they recommend, perhaps we should be detailing the weaknesses, negative traits, and potential errant behaviors of our personas. Or maybe we should create anti-personas for the trolls, griefers, or any other user we’d like to actively discourage.

What would follow from this would be designs that proactively inhibit or balance out negative behaviors. We would specify who we are designing against in addition to who we are designing for, thereby improving the focus on our true target audiences. We’d discover which audiences are supporting the bottom line of our clients. We’d create online communities that are self-regulating. Or maybe we’d just understand who our users really are: imperfect human beings with foibles and vices. Just like you and me.

What I found is that, contrary to the paper-thin plots in movies, strategic planning does not happen in a subterranean room filled with maps of the world and scale models of ships. It doesn’t happen in the mind of a genius admiral at the helm of a battleship. More likely, strategy happens in a well-facilitated brainstorming session after everyone in the room has gathered and examined as much information as possible. Strategy is what you get after thorough research and analysis and testing and refinement. A strategic plan is a blueprint for achieving a set of goals.

Sounds similar to the user-centered design process, right? I have a sneaking suspicion that we are on the verge of a shift in the IA/UX discipline toward the strategic planning end of the customer engagement.

We cannot simply focus on drawing well-structured diagrams, creating fancy deliverables, and conducting well-designed user studies. These are the tools of our craft, but they are merely tactics for communicating, visualizing, and extracting the information needed to make strategic decisions. When our clients and business decision makers can follow the thread of user objectives and high-level business goals down to the smallest detail of a wireframe, we will have done our job as strategists.

As a result of this insight, I’ve been trying to intentionally throw in mindful imperfection in everything I do. When cooking, I avoid using measuring spoons. When creating artwork, I sketch as many ideas as possible on scrap bits of paper. When writing, I often type in stream-of-consciousness just to get my ideas out. At work, I start everything on paper, whiteboards, and unsorted lists.

I start from this raw material of apparent chaos and gradually make sense of it all. I combine and iterate and remix and refine. I adjust as I go, let the patterns emerge, allow the ingredients speak for themselves, trusting my instincts. When it’s done, the product is often surprisingly good — far better than I could have achieved through planning and fretting.

In Japanese artwork, this principle is called wabi sabi — nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. It’s responsible for some of the most beautiful and poetic (perfect?) works of art in the world.

It’s difficult to see how this principle may be applied in the user experience architecture process. I am constantly faced with a project schedule or budget that is too tight to do anything perfectly. I must choose between two awful approaches — do we cut scope and deliver a half-implemented design? Do we scale back user research and requirements gathering to leave more time for design iterations? Or do we invest on understanding the problem in depth while using up all our budget for creating a solution to that problem?

What to do?

I don’t think there’s a simple answer to this problem, even though it’s one we consultants encounter on a daily basis. But here’s what I’ve learned: if all options are equally flawed, go with the one that has the least damaging long-term, ongoing impacts. Choose the approach that will set a precedent for future work. Create a path that defines your role, sets boundaries, and sets you up for ongoing success.

To do this, step back for a moment and consider your priorities and your overall strategy. For a consultant, the highest priority is to set up an interaction that strengthens the client’s trust. A client-consultant relationship based on mutual respect and trust is an extremely powerful and profitable strategy over time. Consider what will gain the client’s trust more: timely execution of short-term objectives or deep-thinking strategic analysis. If your client just wants to know that you are responsible and dependable, go with the former. If your client values your judgment and intelligence, go with the latter.

Whatever you do, don’t just sit there and refine your plan or deliverable over and over. Missing a deadline will jeopardize the clients’ trust in you far more than delivering something less than perfect. If you present them with a product that is imperfect, be honest about your reservations and suggest your recommended alternative approaches. Your honesty and openness will cultivate more trust than the most perfect process or deliverable in the world.