This book isn’t very good, right? Even distribution of ratings from one to five stars:

Except no, the two one-star reviews are both protest rankings because of the Kindle price:

Publishers might see bad ratings for their books and change the ebook prices. So Amazon does have an incentive to leave those ratings up and include them in its overall averages.

But the ratings now aren’t very helpful to consumers. If you’re buying the hardback, your questions are about the book’s content (and maybe format), not about the pricing of the ebook edition. Unlike seeing comments on the hardback when buying the paperback, the only purpose of the Kindle-specific protest reviews is to skew the star rating downward. I’ve seen a few reviews in the past complaining about the speed of third-party sellers’ shipping, which also cause ratings problems, but nothing as pervasive as the Kindle pricing issue.

So what could Amazon do?

• Only allow people to review a book if they purchased it from Amazon, instead of allowing them to “review” a book they refused to purchase because of price: probably a bad idea, since many helpful reviews presumably are written by people who bought at bookstores, etc.
• Try to filter reviews based on review content, and don’t count protest reviews in star ratings: too hard an artificial intelligence problem.
• Filter based on “helpful”/”unhelpful” votes, and only count reviews with a certain proportion of “helpful” votes (plus new reviews that don’t have many votes yet): would be fairly easy to set up and to justify to users, though it would require some kind of explanation by the star summary.
• Segregate Kindle reviews from paper reviews: it would be a bad idea to make them completely separate, since Kindle edition reviewers also comment on content, but probably a good idea to give separate ratings summaries. This would allow someone to say “great content, but the formatting is awful” and have their downgraded star rating only affect the Kindle summary.
• Other options?

As Kindle and other ebook sales grow, consumers are still going to look for reviews. It’s time Amazon figured out how to keep them reliable.

Liz Danzico’s post about her presentation

Definitely the most controversial presentation.

abriefmessage.com - with Khoi Vinh
edits many people but project with Adobe was first time she'd
	been edited in a while
Adobe's design center editor redlined a sentence that ended with
	a preposition
rules are easy, guidelines are hard
lists with numbers are commandments, people writing them
	are experts, etc.
Joe and Josephine, first personas in industrial design -
	Henry Dreyfuss, The Measure of Man
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
many many others.
Chris Messina, flickr Patterns
Yahoo! Pattern Library
Navigation must always be consistent.
	you can recognize a Chinese menu from a small window
	UT Austin, The Shape of Information, presented by Victor
		Lombardi at IA Summit
	can recognize Amazon left nav from color, content, space,
		leading, etc.
	Rapunyi Hills in Tokyo is beautiful
	very few street names in Japan, so they use landmarks, and those
		are on the Google map
	don't need Google searchbox of homepage on the Google Maps page
	need -> interpret -> navigate -> react, with interpret being the
		important step
	new Apple nav "inconsistent at every single page, which is awesome"
	So: Navigation must always be predictable and familiar.
There is a magic number seven (plus or minus two).
	individuals can only keep about seven items in short-term memory
	but broad and shallow navigation structures are easier to navigate
		than deep ones
	So: There is a magic number but it always just "depends".
Users must get to all parts of the site all the time.
	when you're dealing with a closed system, then provide navigation
		to all parts
	John Gruber of Daring Fireball talked at the AIGA/Apple speaker series
	asked audience who knew about the event from whom, and pretty
		much everyone knew from DF
	it's OK to get to an AIGA event without being notified by AIGA
	think about interconnectedness of web
	So: Users must get to everywhere from everywhere - but that
		includes external everywheres.
Users must know where they are at all times.
	when wayfinding breaks down, people take matters into their
		own hands
	daylife's purpose is for you to get lost on the site
	YouTube doesn't have sense of place or structure, just jump around
	Barnes & Noble gains a significant part of its revenue from "people
		who bought this also buy"
	So: Users must know what's next, where can I go from here.
The user experience must be seamless.
	Apple's Human Interface Guidelines has a very complete style guide
		- windows named "untitled"
	WordPress has its Codex to codify its interface
	original twitter sketch (my.stat.us) is about what you're doing
	"What are you doing?" and character limit are only constant
		across applications
	So: The designer must design beautiful seams.
Shorter is better.
	how often do people make a mistake with Amazon One-Click?
	longer is often better:
		No one belongs here more than you, by Miranda July
	So: Short is better, and long is sometimes better too.
Information architects do information architecture.
	cloaked society, secret handshake discipline
	good reason for explicit person to be responsible for deliverables
	we talk about moving between phases, really jarring words
	used to work at Razorfish when trying to figure out what IA was
	GM said "from now on, each one of you is your own project
		manager," and they were shocked
	instead of saying "we need to hire an IA", we should all figure out
		how to do IA
	So: Information architects do information architecture, and so
		should developers, designers, writers, clients, and users.
this is scary, because pointing at research can stop an unwise client
	in their tracks
you can point to research, but consider doing your own
you can also point to this talk :)
there's a chance Steve Krug is thinking about another book on
	usability testing on a shoestring
students often flounder without rules - how do you avoid reinventing
	the wheel?
Razorfish interviewing 8 people a day, hiring 3 people a week
how do you teach people your practices when you don't know what
	they are yourself?
created a project called Shallow Dive Project - like Dateline Deep Dive
three days to solve a design problem using the resources in the company
just gave them a brief, then after three days present to the entire company
they found their own rules
make research available to students, but present problems where they
	can experience the rules
then let them decide which "rules" are actually useful
how do you teach clients to catagorize content for a new CMS installation?
subjective process, have to work through it together
a favorite lie is "users will not scroll horizontally"
relativist bent of this talk - learning rules to know when to break them
there's value to learning rules, but people should be encouraged to
	decide when to follow them
users may not need to know where they are, but do they need to be
	able to get back?
studied news: the more tools people had to use the internet, the more
	excited and proud they were
combination of bookmarks, RSS readers, friends, del.icio.us
watch what they're doing - use of del.icio.us and bookmarks suggests
	need save feature
what happens to accessibility when you're breaking the rules?
what you do depends on audience

internal search logs are a missing tool
Jakob Nielson says 50% of users are search-dominated
Zipf curve - long tail distribution - for search results
in this case, try to optimize the short head
look for seasonal patterns
cluster types of queries to look for patterns
how to capture search queries: search logs, local database, commercial
	search solution
most frequent unique queries? do they retrieve quality results? which
	retrieve zero results?
click-through rates per frequent query? most frequently clicked result?
what are the referrer pages for frequent queries?
which queries retrieve popular documents?
then you generate specific questions
i.e. Netflix which most searched and clicked titles are least frequently
	added to the queue?
analytics won't tell you the answer to a problem, but they'll tell you
	the problem is there.
User Research
	type SKUs into catalog site that they looked up in the printed catalog
	BBC has reports for "people who searched on X also searched on..."
		using session data
	segment needs by security clearance, IP address, job function,
		account information
	or extrapolate segments directly from the data
	associate real queries with a persona - now you really know what
		they care about
Content Development
	start from failed queries - does content exist?
	are there titling, wording, metadata, or indexing problems
	"best bets" results defined manually
	identify points with no or way too many results where you could
		add help
	query syntax helps select search features to expose
	if people are using queries with boolean operators, make them
		more visible
	if get zero results, could show options to broaden search
	if get too many (200 or whatever), could show options to narrow
Interface Design:  search entry interface, search results
	consider what elements to include in search results - i.e. author
		name for books
	get more clickthroughs on result 10 than 6-9 on a page with
		10 results
	Financial Times saw people entering dates; so let them sort
		results by date
Retrieval Algorithm Modification
	Deloitte, Barnes & Noble, Vanguard show basic improvements
		(i.e. best bets) aren't enough
	needed to go into more complicated and expensive customizations
	add spell checking
	weight company names in metadata highly
Navigation Design
	if created "best bets" to show at top of query results, can also
		use to generate index
	Michigan State University builds A-Z index automatically based
		on frequent queries
	cuts across organizational sils
	from what pages are searches initiated? those pages are failing
		and people are stuck.
	what are the queries from those points?
Metadata Development
	classify queries as types of metadata, then mark documents with
		that information
	Netflix had movies, people, and genres
	get possible values for those categories - natural language, jargon,
		localization (lorry)
	most common queries are known-item - there's one correct answer
	long tail is often research queries, more open-ended
	do some sampling in long tail to check if it's very different from
		short head
organizational impact
	bad search results demonstrate what happens when content
		authors don't follow guidelines
	look at common queries and make sure good documents aren't
		falling in results
	Google Analytics and others make it easy to email reports - viral
		spread of information
	Financial Times looks for spikes in queries to find breaking stories
complements qualitative methods that can tell you *why* people do
	something
need better tools for parsing logs, generating reports - thinks will get
	good this year
Hitwise and Comscore can help you benchmark against other sites,
	but are expensive
Google Trends may also be helpful
having a hard time writing book because can't get data from people
middle area of the tail may have fast-rising or slowly falling items
has free template for analyzing queries

Jeffrey Zeldman’s event wrapup, with various links

Links to individual posts:
“Secrets of the CSS Jedi” by Eric Meyer
“Writing the User Interface” by Jeffrey Zeldman
“Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag” by Jason Santa Maria
“Search Analytics For Fun and Profit” by Lou Rosenfeld
“The Seven Lies of Information Architecture” by Liz Danzico
“Interface Design Juggling” by Dan Cederholm
“Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave.” by Jeremy Keith
“Best Practices For Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski
“Accessibility: Lost In Translation” by Derek Featherstone
“The State of CSS In an IE7 World” by Eric Meyer
“Selling Design” by Jeffrey Zeldman
“Dealing With the Both of You” by Jim Coudal

The site is a place to catalog personal book collections, and they’re also working with libraries and booksellers to share their useful information. Because the community is interested in books and in libraries and in classification, some of the thread comments are fascinating. Some are from laypeople, others from librarians, archivists, etc.

“I like fun tags that are so personal or unique that nobody else uses them. A friend of mine, for example, has tags like “Detectives with gimmicks”, “Elaborate crimes”, “Witty people being clever”, and my favorite “Fangirlin’”. I myself want to use a tag for “Farm boys with magical destinies” but it’s apparently too long.” – saturnine13

“Conversely, the most intriguing tags (autistic-like character, Kleenex, the end of Pottermania) are almost inevitably used by only a single member.” – SilentInAWay

This reminds me of Elizabeth Bear’s LiveJournal tags, such as a policeman’s work is never done, all three sides of the story, and ask a stupid question.

“First, tags really only seem to work for organizing stuff you have some sort of conceptual “ownership” of – things that in some way you have an incentive to keep order within. People don’t seem to want to tag in enough quantity / detail to be useful when they don’t have a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess.” – cubeshelves

I wonder how this relates to people’s del.icio.us collections getting out of control? Perhaps that mostly happens when they’re saving “interesting links” rather than “links related to this interest or project”. In the former case, it’s not at all clear what tags will be useful over time (level of detail, omitting broader categories, forgetting what’s been used before, etc.). In the latter case, the focus of a particular area lends itself both to continuity in tags and to having “a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess” – or a stake in not letting it become a mess.

“In a small community, though, tags are very interesting. Not only do they provide the advantages mentioned above, but they also allow the community to negotiate meaning and context — the types of tags that are used, and the content of those tags says something about what is meaningful to a community.” – Placebogirl

But getting critical mass of tags in a small community is hard. One of the great things about Flickr, for instance, is that there are enough people tagging enough photos that I can easily find a Creative Commons licensed photo of just about anything to put into a presentation. Maybe this is just an instance of many intersecting small communities in one place, so that the wider world gets the advantage of each of those smaller groups’ tagging efforts.

“Something I’ve found frustrating about the tags I find on books here is _sometimes_ nearly all the tags are personal. If I am looking for sci fi recommendations about Intergalactic Travel, well, very few people use that tag. In fact, a fair number of the sci fi books will tell me the main character, series, where people have stored it, etc. without telling me what its world-view/situation is (such as psi, alien encounters, culture clashes, intergalactic civilization, parallel worlds, etc.) Those were things I was hoping to learn from other people’s tags, and, at the moment, can’t always figure out.” – EowynA

When cataloging physical books, the first instinct seems to be to tag with physical locations (coffee table), ownership (mine vs my boyfriend’s), personal state (unread), etc. Books’ contents come after personal reactions.

“Is there a genre that has a low/no rate of tagging? Why would that be? How would one find it if it isn’t tagged? ” – hexmap

A symbol for zero was invented much later than those for positive numbers. Stumbling on Happiness talks about people ignoring the intervening time when thinking about how they’ll feel in the future. Clearing your mind while meditating is difficult. Absence of information questions are a lot harder than presence of information questions.

“I have to admit, I never got really excited about tagging until we could search multiple tags. That ability has made me rethink how I tag things. ” Katissima

Tagmashes are fascinating. I’m looking forward to playing with them.

He mentions simplicity (in header and structural elements) and consistency (in element and whitespace dimensions) as keys to making your content stand out from its presentation and having it be easy to actually read – creating the right kind of affordances for large quantities of content meant to be read rather than just skimmed. I read a lot online – here’s hoping more news (and blog, for that matter) sites will listen to Rutledge.

And I just finished reading the section in “Everything is Miscellaneous” where David Weinberger discusses how much better Amazon’s system of multiple classifications is than Staples’s physical store requirement of a single place per item. In fact, if I go to realtor.com and say I’d like to find a house using advanced search, I’m presented with a form that lets me choose one or multiple criteria. The actual system is more like Amazon’s (well, in having multiple options at least), in spite of the ad’s suggestion that Staples is the right model.

So why does the Realtors’ ad promote the wrong model of their website? Possibilities:
1. They’re counting on their audience to know it’s a metaphor and take away only the friendly, helpful, organized attitude of the ad.
2. The ad’s audience might not be particularly comfortable with the web, so the Realtors think relating the site to something the audience is familiar with might help them.
3. The experience of the site does look like the warehouse – after you enter the information you want, you get neat classified shelves of colonial style houses if that’s what you asked for – but the warehouse can be differently organized for everyone.
4. The ad agency simply didn’t understand this was the wrong model.

My guess would be some combination of 2 and 4, with 3 hopefully becoming more clear to a site visitor after they’ve clicked around for a while. 3 is the promise of Weinberger’s book (I hit the point on my evening commute today where repetition of his core idea began annoying me – 175 pages to go!).

But there’s an additional problem with the ad. Where’s the helpful salesperson? In “Don’t Make Me Think”, Steve Krug talks about making each choice obvious. If I’m lost in Staples and want to know where the three-ring binders are, I ask a salesperson – and in the Realtors’ ad, someone does ask for directions. If I’m lost on realtor.com and want to know where the mortgage lenders are, there’s actually no Help section. I’d better know they’re in Home Finance – or be lucky enough that clicking randomly gets me to the right place. That’s a failure of content and navigation, and could destroy the ad’s good impression.