In his article One country two revolutions, Thomas Friedman describes two opposing revolutions that occur simultaneously. On the one hand, the social revolution that rattles Wall Street and as contrast the hyper connectedness revolution that is transforming Silicon Valley.

While at its face value it may seem that those two revolutions are contrasting in nature, in fact they are the two sides of the same coin – the user/citizen at the center. Connecting the dots leads to the common denominator –two expressions of the same phenomenon – the voice of individuals shaping society bottom up, in a collective collaborative way.  In both new social is the order of the day. Social activism, social media, grassroots actions and collaborative crowdsourcing are the means. Both are expressions of the traits that characterize user centricity and citizen centricity–a free spirit, independent state of mind and a natural sense of entitlement.

In one revolution, citizens faced with economic concerns, unrest and distrust of the system, react in a bottom up participatory wave of voices. They refuse to continue and passively accept old orders. In the Wall Street Riots the movers and shakers are no longer distinct mavericks, but a collective of citizens that has become a mover aspiring to shake the paradigm that brought them to the abyss.People who fear fragile economies, feel exploited, abused and betrayed want to bring back the human factor into the equation. They call for a more moral, value based and socially aware governance. These riots ignite a communal call for a civic ecology that that places its people at the center of the system.

The Silicon valley transformation works itself up through a ubiquitous open ended individual empowerment, a user centered paradigm, and a social collaborative grid of bottom-up shared conversations and collaborative efforts to work on the best solutions.

  Both are poking the box , replacing top down hierarchal dictation, both reflect a paradigm shift, a new state of mind.

This blog entry is about the death of standardized compliance.

We’ve gone a long way from mass marketing and categorization to the individualization and long tail choices as defining digital traits, where each one of us is a micro universe of one.  To the institutions we interact with – from commercial suppliers, through brands and government based services, we, users, are largely still links in chains of commercial, organizational and governmental goal achievements processes. The non uniformity of the people that comprise the client base, audience, market share… may already seem obvious , but it still not taken as an axiomatic key stand point .

Seth Godin’s new book We are all weird is a tale of individuality, of celebrating the uniqueness of each one in every food chain. Weird, as not standardized, talks to generalizing providers and institutions, and praises individuality as a stand point for interactions with people with a cynical reference to normality, as an outdated lens for definitions and processes.

Yes, the future belongs to individuals, to a mindset that replaces standardization with the humanification of interactions. Once the user is put at the center, not as a usability and marketing communication cliché’ of form, but as a fundamental matter, the real human value of user centricity and citizen centricity comes to life. To each of us our individually significant actions and choices are our own tales of individuality that strengthen our meaningful and valuable choices and interactions.

Icentricity is a philosophical identity definition that exceeds the individual yet gives a personal print and control on who, what, where, when and why.  Taking an independent yet very personal prism, enables a framework of the unique individual ecosystem of one that interacts with everybody else.

When each one of us has so many personal expressions across so many platforms, we need to take the individual fingerprint that on one hand sets us apart as individuals but on the other hands defines us and our say as parts of collectives in these frameworks.

The Icentered lens is an individual grasp for interactions, a prism that helps separate the wheat from the chaff in the overload of seemingly not connected interactions. It is a framework for a larger process that gives a context for the place of the individual in relations with providers, peers, friends, organizations….. Godin’s book is yet another call to start and exercise this distinct personal mark that sets me apart from everyone else and makes categorizing, segmenting, profiling me…. Impossible.

With the ubiquitous connectedness that enables us to be distributed across many platforms, across many contexts and interactions, Icentricity provides a looking glass that sometimes takes a step back to oversee and sometime to focus on how I am in a particular set of interactions – social, professional, or information based and how I relate to other people in social circles and in service providing systems.

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,  Google, cloud computing, mobile web.….. offer us an always on, accessible, knowledgeable social world, that keeps us connected physically and socially. This liquid web, as  Stowe Boyd calls it, is an immersive experience that makes us much more involved.

In the intersection between social graphs and interest graphs new relations between people and content are created.  He assumes that different consumer segments need different technological  support tools. In distinguishing between traditional, online and social consumers, users become stakeholders in the attention economy, as they draw their information not only from different content and social resources, but refine their relevant interactions through communication tools such as tweets, retweet, comments…    all create a very different user experience.

From an Icentered point of view, where I (the digital I of each user) strive for an adaptive web, tailored to personal choices and preferences – the human link of the single user still has a long way to go.

User centricity is about us, people. Yet it still takes a systemic view of the we interact with those tools and infrastructures, and how we become more immersed in this ubiquitous web.

Taking a different prism, an inside- out lens, the Icentered one, makes it more humanized. From that point of view It’s about us as people, not just users – centered or captive. To truly personify our web experiences, a deeper degree of individual personal signature should be called for.

Our personal data, real-time experience and interest based social graphs empower more humane social experiences, but the missing link is still personal context. Social humanification in smaller groups, such as the one offered by Flink12 that humanizes the social experience by creating social circles of no more than 12 people , is easier, because it reflects real life circles of interaction ad is initiated and moderated directly by users.

We need to control and manage more than just users’ privacy settings in various sites. We need to control in the same way Flink12 empowers us to connect at will people close to us around a specific subject, to connect our identity, data and sharing options from various sites around a topic that interests us in an inclusive holistic way that reflects us in our interactions around that topic.  This translates to contexting us, people, and not just a single thread of content. In such a Icentered reality, when I am in full possession of my personal information,  meshing all my interactions  around a specific topic within a specific interweb. Interwebs, as Venkatesh Rao explains,” is the perfect term for framing our experience of the Web today as an intricate mesh of play and storytelling that is enacted across many media and modes, an experience that is characterized primarily by its plurality A pattern of use with content, temporal and social dimensions, that evolves, lives for a while, and dies or morphs into something else.…”. For a short while, an individualized personalization hub is created. Since I own my representation, and am empowered to directly manage my privacy and trust regime, it completely sidesteps the exposure problem.

I, the individual user, am the glue that interconnects one inclusive context around many interwebs and allow an individual prismatic view of a thread/experience/ topic/action.

Once I, the individual user, create my personalized story, it is the context that makes it unique and  turns the overwhelming overpour of the liquid web into a humane selective experience .

Transparency empowers trust.

The internet is one of the most significant catalysts of transparency. Users own conversations, foster diversity, choices and openness.  The internet, information technologies, social media and users’ engagement have cultivated a culture of open sharing.  They keep providers, leaders, corporates and governments under a glass menagerie,  evangelize virtues and broadcast any misbehavior.

The internet allows visibility that we can’t control. Visibility on people, actions – from Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, articles, comments…. It makes us vulnerable, because we can’t control people’s reactions to what we do or say –voluntarily through the likes of  Facebook and up to bully disclosures of  Wikileaks – we are more exposed as people, employees, managers, officials, politicians…

This leads to greater personal accountability. Once we understand the inevitable power of the  exposure  of our actions, for better or worse, it leads to greater awareness to who we are, and accountability as to why we do what we do. The internet allows us to harness, share, cooperate, engage, become more sensitive to our surroundings – human, social, environmental.

Transparency becomes a key to authenticity.  In our personal life, transparency of social networks, a sharing state of mind and web culture support and empower our authenticity. It makes it natural for us to expect it from the brands, services and systems we interact with. We grow to demand the same accountability from our employers, providers, leaders.

Traditional conservativism cherishes playing one’s cards close to the chest, having full control and disclosing as little as possible, as a means of manipulating reality for corporate, sector, government and even personal interests.  Once organizations cannot control the ripple effects of their doings, gates, walls and a unilateral  top down control become a non applicable paradigm in an age of being under the constant microscope of user monitoring.

Embracing a state of mind of transparency spells a new paradigm – one that transcends regulations and is based on openness, disclosure, accountability, open systems as an organizational culture.  It requires relinquishing control in favor of direct connections, letting others decide. It’s a window to who corporates, institutions and individuals really are, what they stand for.

Therefore it becomes a cultural imperative for brands, corporates, organizations and governments.

Authenticity is a key to trust building.

The internet is more than just a global system of interconnected computer networks. It’s about us, people, and not just about technological platforms and apps, bits and bytes.  It is key in establishing transparency, authenticity and trust mechanisms and  plays a cultural and ethical role that transcends its material, practical and functional aspects.  Therefore the soft values that we users embrace as part of a web culture, will drive changes that will ensure a trustworthy, transparent, empathic way of life, that corporates and institutions will have to embrace to reach us.

Trust based relations are the new green – the key to a clean web ecology.  This fabric is what matters now – a new ecological culture of transparency, trust and engagement that individuals, corporates and institutions alike must embrace.

]]> http://www.icentered.com/trust-is-the-new-green/feed 0 http://www.icentered.com/user-centered-and-icentered-different-lenses-for-user-centricity http://www.icentered.com/user-centered-and-icentered-different-lenses-for-user-centricity#comments Sun, 20 Feb 2011 12:27:44 +0000 Ayala http://www.icentered.com/?p=616

User centricity is a universal approach that takes a holistic systemic view of  the place of the individual in it. As the web’s ubiquity becomes a given and an increasingly growing part of our interactions is web based, the issue of user centricity takes a more significant meaning. User centricity can no longer be seen as just a design principle, but the other way around, especially as user centricity and trust, an essential element in 21^st century web and business culture, go hand in hand.

User centered semantics comprise of multidisciplinary approaches – philosophical, social, economic principles and a fundamental set of values and concepts that assume:

• Open ended systems, interoperability protocols, design premises.
• User control over data, privacy, identity management…
• User controlled data portability
• Transparency
• Users own conversations, interactions, privacy and sharing
• Simple, intuitive usage design and inclusive user experiences for the weaker digital populations.

Once the user is truly at the center, user centricity requires balancing the interests of all parties involved, users, providers, institutions, architecture designers through a cooperative discourse that looks at all as equal partners and respects the rights and interests of all, through transparent mechanisms that enhance trust.

In web based systems, these values and premises can then be translated to define design principles of enabling and supporting technologies, platforms, architectures and business processes that empower user centered interoperability between users, providers, institutions, governance, communities and content creators.

User centricity in existing paradigms does not go hand in hand with top down siloed approaches that claim to be focused on the user, but confuse users with consumers from a corporate/institutional point of view. It is due to hegemony wars and business dominance of corporates and service providers, that do all they can to cultivate approaches that put constraints on customers’ disengagement, as they try to keep their customers captive for corporate profit building plans. It is in complete contradiction to the open, free and transparent spirit and culture of the web and of us, its users.

User centricity is not just about commercial offerings. It is about users’ control over their data, transparency mechanisms that are based on the principles of free choice, portability, simple and free disengagement…..

Whereas user centered takes a systemic view of user centered systems and scenarios, Icentered takes a prismatic view of the individual as the hard core nucleus of any user centered system. It represents the individual in the conceptualization of a user centered blueprint. How the world, interactions and relations should be seen through this lens, once the user is really at the center, with the reins of control in her hands.

The I in icentered focuses on the individuality of each user, as an Itom, the granular entity of the icentered world. An Itom is the smallest comprehensive unit that describes me, the individual user, as a whole, as a unique individual, through all my interactions, across all sites, platforms and media. Each and every one of us is an individual, unique, distinct, non divisible Itom.

Looking at the digital world through a prismatic view of each individual Itom , creates a new vantage point for web based relations. Once we look at it as a people’s web,  it’s an “I in the center” paradigm, where  each user becomes a distinct anchor,  an Itom. The systemic concepts and blueprints that will empower this vision of the web,  are at the heart of user centricity paradigms.

Why wasn’t I consulted?

   For Paul Ford it is the fundamental question of the web that distinguishes it from any other medium, since  the web is a customer service medium and people like to exercise their power and knowledge. WWIC (why wasn’t I consulted) translates to free web initiatives. Paul Ford scales the evolution of the expression by the level of interactivity and intuitive ease of expressiveness. Phase I – interactive, open to comments, talkbacks, phase 2 – Liked, shared, socially evaluated and appreciated, phase 3 – user initiative sites that let us, users, upload our content, fully debate our views- all that empowers full participation. As long as you consider service providing as a conversation, WWIC web empowers users to own the conversation.

Yet, this observation still stems from e a reactive frame.  It evaluates evolutionary boundaries of traditional paradigms, based on of top down defined relations, where corporates own the game but attentively empower customers’ conversations. More advanced ones still own the game but reframe the discourse and adopt a socially involved more humane corporate identity,  follow their customers and reach out to them in their social spheres, indeed a customer service medium.

To us this is our web, not a customer service medium.

 We invented the web to happen to ourselves, not to create content.  

As such, we should own the web, not just the conversation.

Each one of us is an individual with a defined mark . We’re Itoms in a people’s grid, what we want, how we handle it and what we control is defined individually. This cannot be endowed. It should be naturally ours.

The defining question of the web is who controls it. The answer to Who controls the web  requires a different mindset. A proactive mindset that puts the user at the center, with the wheel in her hands and full control over the relationship.

 For us, the web’s native users, the fundamental rule is to control it. For that end, new paradigms are required  An icentered state of mind spells user ownership and control over data, privacy, sharing, a new pact of relations, based on pull models,  freedom from captivity in siloed sites, from being manipulated as part of hegemony wars over web dominance.

Grandmas are the fastest growing sector on Facebook in 2010. Can you imagine Grandma liking your outfit from last nights’ party, commenting on your hairstyle or asking you who are you kissing with?

Once 74 and up are the fastest growing sector on Facebook, that’s a good reason to applaud Zuckerberg, named person of the year.   The humane value of such digital inclusion of elderly boomers exceeds by far the social attributes of belonging to a social network.

Age related digital divide is one of the things that make older people, and even late boomers, feel inadequate. What seems to many elementary, creates a paralyzing situation for elders at the most fundamental web based usage situations.  The joy of a grandmother that can press the Like button,  be updated on her grandchildren’s status through Facebook, find her way through Google, chat on Skype and send emails, is not to be taken for granted.

Elders are intimidated by technologies. Computers (other than basic functionalities) and the notions of the social web are very remote from their natural world. The digital inclusion of being able to manage on their own and communicate through Facebook and the connectivity it empowers them, mastering what to digital natives is intuitive, gives older people a sense of belonging and inclusion in the digital society and an ageless lifestyle.

We live in a society where from now on the number of elders will exceed the number of youngsters. Inclusion of past generations in spaces previously defined as youngsters’ spheres is indicative of the extent in which web fabric is being woven into our life. These Facebook penetration numbers manifest the mainstream place and the connectivity changing experience of Facebook.

Adapting experiences for people in their natural settings is a must if you want to reach masses through usability comfort and culture they feel comfortable with. Elders were associated with TV. Youngsters with computers.

Now that media borders are blurring and inclusion percentage in the digital society is on the rise – the next digital entertainment frontier is back to the TV screen. Or to be more exact – the IPTV experience.

TVs don’t have to become obsolete. 

Obsolete TV support group

Adaptations to IPTV can be older friendly and enhance digital inclusion.

Here again, youngsters are natural to surfing complex EPGs  or watching the shows of their choice on their computers. Elders, on the other hand, are still coach potatoes, used to passive remotes.

Translating the internet browsing experience through simplified interfaces and TV like navigation is another door, full of opportunities to devise new ways of inviting elders to join in. Kylo is a new web browser for TV that transfers the interactive experience to the TV screen itself, with a virtual on TV screen keyboard and a simplified TV oriented  browser. That and Google TV  will hopefully facilitate  inclusion of  millions of elders in a big-screen living-room web experience, and thus merge the comfort of their familiar coach based TV world with the interactive browsing of digital life.

A Wahington Post story  The Bloggess and the Christmas Gift Card Miracle of 2010 tells about  Jenny Lawson  who offered in her blog 30 Christmas gift cards for people in need who would tell her why it would make a difference in their lives. She never dreamed it would turn into a flood of people telling the hardships and circumstances of why they can’t buy their children a gift for Christmas and an overpour of people asking to give. From a small gesture she found herself sleepless over the whole weekend managing spreadsheets of candidates and donors,  resulting in hundreds of grateful families on both ends and committing to turning it into a tradition.

This is the humanizing web fabric of empowering a digital expression of  the human touch, that no computer, machine or sophisticated software will ever be able to provide. The power of the story lies in its smallness, simplicity and spontaneity. Through the heart, not through the brain. Not taking part in a large scale campaign for helping people to make their way out of poverty, not donating to organizations or participating in micro lending initiatives that give people tools to embetter their lives. Straight. Small. From one person to another.  A spontaneous, instant, bottom up market place that innocently sprung up to directly  connect those who reach out and those that want to hug. Remember the Free Hugs campaign that started from the need of one man for a hug, and turned into a world wide phenomenon? Just a hug!  

Once the web exceeds its functionality as a communication platform, information or commerce arenas and organically grows, bottom up, into personifying human reaching out – from one person to another, reading a story, being touched, because it immediately strikes a chord – be it personal childhood memories of being on the struggling end, gratefulness for being blessed and able to make others happy. This  spontaneous person to person reaching out  to make a difference, crowdsourcing to make someone happy with a small donation,  and vouching to do so again, is what truly makes the web our own.

The humanizing power of our web, one touching gesture instantly turns into a grassroots  endeavor that gets a life of its own as an organic Christmas hug is what makes the web a real web of life – for people, from people, by people – a grid of dots that spontaneously connect to make strong lines from heart to heart.

A bunch of guys at Google had a wonderful idea. Let’s create a series of videos that will help our parents to use the web. They  launched a site that empowers people to teach their grown up parents how to use the web. It is a great step in helping older people to overcome their technophobia.

Age related digital divide is one of the things that makes older people, and even late boomers, feel inadequate. What seems to many elementary, creates a paralyzing situation for elders at the most fundamental web based usage situations. Managing on their own, through a simplified adapted process of guidance that does not embarrass them in front of their children and grandchildren, not only answers their need to know, but provides a handle  to confront the issue on their own, at their pace, without being pressured by their slow and hesitant learning curve. Knowing that those guides are there, always at reach and they can revisit if they forget, makes seniors confident. Mastering things that to digital natives is intuitive, gives older people a sense of belonging and a feeling of being included in the digital society.

The joy of a grandmother that can press the Like button,  be updated on her grandchildren’s status through Facebook, find her way through Google, chat on Skype and send emails, is not to be taken for granted.

Giving these tools to teach the elderly is a great service to both children and parents.

On the functional level the videos, a spontaneous amateur production,  are not fully adapted to the needs and pace of the older population. The screenshots are blurred, not everybody has a Mac and the young presenters’ talk is not always coherent, yet –  it’s a grassroot initiative and an admirable one. Chapeau for their resourcefulness, awareness to the importance of enhancing the mature population to be more digitally savvy in an a simplistic and intuitive way and contribution to a softer digital based bonding between generations.

And on the same level, an equally admirable initiative at Google is a beautiful book that teaches young children about the internet – 20 things I learnt about browsers and the web. An elementary readers’ digest about the web, TCPIP, cookies, HTML, cloud computing….  I am sure much older children will be equally happy to learn about the what and why around the web and not just take its existence for granted.

These two initiatives, borne from an inclusive attitude,  connect the dots for digital immigrants and digital newbies.  This contribution to  facilitate, familiarize and bond  young and old to what is increasingly growing to become a natural part of our life fabric,  is another step in adapting our web to make it a real web of life.

Disclaimer: I am also a  partner at Senior-Touch, a company that focuses on bringing 3^rd age needs and usability into the process of developing products, services and bridging age related digital divide.

I don’t care whether the web is dead or the internet is alive – as long as I get from it what suits me best.

Chris Anderson claims, in a very controversial article, that  that The web is dead, long live the internet.

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web.

THE WEB IS NOTHING WITHOUT ITS USERS.

An  infrastructure,  an array of apps – once it is commoditized, it is hardly the issue anymore.

From a task oriented, information and communications points of view, the web is a utility, like an electricity grid. Supplied through solar energy or through other kinds of plant – important environmentally or economically – but its very existence taken for granted, and from here on the only issue for me, the user, is what do I use it for.

The  web’s ubiquity has become a given, the application economy is flourishing and now it’s getting closer to the users and their dominant place as the anchors of web based systems.

The mobile web brings the web closer to me, wherever I am. The social web harnessesmy social sphere for sharing,  building a trust base and leveraging marketing, communication, commerce and information seeking.

The next stage is concentrating not just on interaction between users as leverages on the web economy, but on the individual itself, as an Itom in a people’s grid. Putting the user at the center will empower a new dimension to the web.

From such a user centered point of view, the only real issue for me within the web’s amplitude of offerings, is personal relevance.

The web will evolve to truly serve people individually.

The semantic web will revolutionize use of browsers, applications and web based sociality to evolve around individuals’ contextified experiences, interests and activities. It will be about the attention economy – personal relevance to personal user, optimization of applicability to suit their dynamic interests, activities and automatically serve their fluctuating needs.

The missing link is contextification syatems that perceive the individual as a whole, contextifiy  her experience,and create an attention economy based on context as a measuring scale for services, transactions and degree of relevance.  

 The web is not dead – it is evolving towards its ultimate goal – a people’s web – a web that will eventually become  what is destined to be –  an Icentered  web of life, for each of us, individually – the web according to me.