Assignment 8: Become part of the online workforce

For our Entrepreneurial Design course we are all tasked with spending some time on one of a variety of sites: TaskRabbit, GigWalk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and 99designs, among others. I’ve always been curious about Mechanical Turk after reading about it a while back, so thought I’d give it a try to learn more.

Signing up to Mechanical Turk is fairly straight forward, especially if you’re already logged in to Amazon. They basically ask you to confirm your address and for your social security number. This has been a problem for a few of my international classmates, but lucky for me, I’ve got an SSN. Once thats in, the Amazon Payments system sends you a confirmation email. 

Once logged in you are presented with over 150,000 ‘HITs’, which I believe stands for Human Intelligence Tasks. These appear to range from checking spelling, taking surveys, and translating sections of text. Most of the tasks pay less than $0.10, which seems pretty low for a piece of a human’s time - even if it is simple work. After surfing around for something that might be fun and/or pay at least $0.25, I decided I’d just go with some basic tasks.

First I did a spell/search for Buzz.com. This task consisted of copy + pasting a search term and location into a search engine and seeing if anything came up. I had to confirm that the term was valid for the location and spelled correctly. It was both of those things, and if my entry is ‘approved’, I’ll have earned a whopping $0.02. Following this task I did 2 HITs where I copied information off of scanned business cards and cut out the logo. I had to sign an NDA and will receive $0.05 for each approved HIT.

Following these tasks, I went in search for something a little more interesting and landed on a 50min survey. The survey was done by a social studies department at Harvard. First it had me read a relatively bizarre story about a hamster in Syria, then asked me to judge a characters in a variety of small stories on a scale of ‘forbidden’ to ‘permissible’. They included somewhat disturbing things like this: “Sally is working on a chairlift at a ski lodge. She knows the chairlift isn’t safe for children, but lets a child ride anyway. The child falls 100ft to her death. Sally’s decision to let the child on the chairlift was…..”. Needless to say, my faith in humanity is somewhat diminished, but I’ll receive $1.00 for my efforts.

Overall, I feel that my hour as part of Amazon’s ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ team was educational. I won’t be spending much more time on the worker side, but it’s good to have an understanding of the process and workflow. An interesting next step would be to post a question or task and see what comes back.

‘Exploiting Users’

The other day in studio I overheard a conversation about the exploitation of users time. The context was that there’s only so much of it business can ‘mine’, so at some point we’ll run out of time to get our products in front of people. I found that throughout this conversation the way the terms ‘exploitation’ and ‘users’ were brought together really rubbed me up the wrong way.

As interaction designers, we spend our time trying to craft something worthy of engaging someone’s attention. On the surface, this may sound similar to exploiting someone’s time, but carries a completely different mindset for both a project and it’s audience. Brad Burnham of USV, who spoke with our Entrepreneurial Design class a couple of weeks back, captures the idea well in how he speaks about old and new media. While old media’s audience is viewed as either customers or crooks, new media’s audience become ‘co-creators’ and a vital part of a product or service. 

This distinction is really important to me, and the language we use everyday to discuss our work inevitably frames the way we perceive it. I think Don Norman says it well,

Words matter. Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them “subjects.” We depersonalize the people we study by calling them “users.” Both terms are derogatory. They take us away from our primary mission: to help people. Power to the people, I say, to repurpose an old phrase. People. Human Beings. That’s what our discipline is really about.
Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users

I want to live and work in a world where we are actively engaged with our audience, not taking advantage of them. Seeing the people I design for as rich and complex yields many more exciting opportunities than reducing them to a set of eyeballs with a credit card. Norman’s use of the word ‘people’ may be a little to general, but surely we can come up with something with more dimension than ‘user’.

Getting organized for semester 2

Jan 9th brought about the beginning of our second semester. As I slowly started getting my brain back in to work mode, I realized that I had some serious tidying to do. My inbox was overflowing both in Gmail and Evernote, my Twitter was all over the place (who am I following…why?), Tumblr rather forgotten about, then there was all of the articles and the other online reading to catch up on. The ‘read later’ situation then spurred the following questions: How do I store things to read later? Where do I store things I found really interesting? How do I keep from missing even more stuff as I’m catching up on the old?

These are questions many of us face as we are all inundated with new information competing for our attention nearly all of the time. Being a master’s student at SVA’s Interaction Design program, I’ve got more coming at me than I have ever experienced before. It’s exciting and inspiring, but can be overwhelming at times.

Gmail
To start, I decided to tackle my gmail inbox. I’ve found that if I can keep it down to 1 page of messages, my brain feels much lighter. I’ve noticed this is a given for a few of my peers, but its relatively new for me. In November 2010, I read David Allen’s productivity book GTD and decided that the clutter in my life needed to go. This meant archiving everything in my inbox and starting from scratch. In theory, I will one day perform a sort of triage on the backlog…but probably not. This method, combined with my mother’s sage advice “If in doubt, chuck it out”, got me back down to a single page. 

Evernote
With that out of the way, I needed to rescue Evernote. I took to Evernote to store my school notes, hoping that it could become my repository for everything. I started with a version of Jeff Kirvin’s GTD + Evernote approach, which is based on having the least number of notebooks + tags as possible. This appealed to me as my Delicious account currently sits around 800 tags, and the only way I currently navigate through it is by estimating the date I bookmarked something. This is not ideal.

First semester the minimal strategy worked fairly well - I had 3 notebooks, Inbox, School, and Reference, and a series of tags, primarily for classes (eg. c_cybernetics). I found pretty quickly that I wasn’t using context tags, as my context is binary at the moment; I’m either doing school work, or not doing school work. However, 3 notebooks was a little restrictive, and I often ended up with an overflowing inbox.

For the second semester, I’ve added a few more notebooks to make things a more flexible. My list now looks like this:

!_Inbox 
Everything goes here first, I’ve started emailing links/tweets/things to read later directly to Evernote.

!Current
Anything I’m working on presently or just need to have around for quick reference.

!Read
Things to read later. I’ve set this as an ‘Offline’ notebook, so I can catch up on reading while I’m on the train.

!School 
Everything school related for this semester goes here, tagged with the corresponding class.

!Watch
Videos to watch later, I’ve found this is handy when you’re jaded from too much reading. Thanks @tomharman for this tip.

Reference
Everything else goes in here. I have a few tags for quick searching, such as lists (eg. l_restaurants, l_cheeses), but mostly I’ll pop a few key phrases into the beginning of the note and follow Jeff’s advice - just use Evernote’s search function.

1 week into my new system, and its working pretty well. I’ve only got a minimal number of things in both my !_Inbox and !Current notebooks, which helps me keep focused on tasks at hand.

Reader
One of my new years resolutions is to get more organized with my internet reading. I’ll be honest and say that everything I’ve managed to catch over the last little while has either come from a quick twitter scan or from the something I’ve received from my classmates. Occasionally I’ll have time for surfing around, but not often enough. I want to be more aware of what’s going on in all of the domains I’m interested in, but not spend a lot of time doing so. 

To start, I went to @tonyhschu for some advice. He showed me his neatly organized Google Reader, and let me know its ok to have thousands of unread posts. In the past, I have tried to get RSS readers going, but end up with something that is rarely accessed and looks similar to my Delicious account. Back at my desk, I followed his lead and pulled together a handful of sites for a handful of topics. These are organized into tidy folders with titles like: SVA, Design, Eye Candy, Interaction, Entrepreneurship, and Code. 

After working through Google Reader and Flipboard, I’ve landed on Feedly for my reading needs. Google Reader doesn’t have a summary mode, and while Flipboard is great for social networks, navigating between reader folders in Flipboard is a little cumbersome.

Feedly syncs with Google Reader and displays your posts in a clean style similar to Flipboard. Where it varies from Flipboard is by having a left side navigation menu that allows you to quickly flick between folders. They have an iPad and iPhone application, as well as a web interface. So far, I really enjoy it. It lets me see posts at a glance, including images, so I can quickly scan through sections of my reader. To save interesting posts, I email them to Evernote for filing, or links to Delicious for safe keeping.

For Later
Still on the agenda are my messy twitter + tumblr feeds. The content I have streaming through both of those is a combination of day to day observations from friends and big ideas from interesting strangers. These come together and dilute each other, so learning how to better manage these is high on the to do list. If you have any tips, please send them my way!