Waiting at a bus stop is your weakest, smallest, most ignorant (in the technical sense, not a personal stupidity sense) moments in your day.  You cede all sorts of control and information that you could use to understand the context of your wait to a process that is subjected to a variety of forces hellbent of ruining it.  Traffic, weird passengers, sick drivers, bad weather, rogue North Carolina farmers – all of them are out there ready to make you wait even longer.  The only thing you can do is stand there and hope the bus will make it.  It always does but the relief you feel when you can grab a seat on your bus is not appreciation for an efficient public transportation infrastructure; it is Stockholm Syndrome.

When you wait at a bus stop, you are waiting passively.  All of the variables in the interaction – the bus stop, the bus route, the bus number, the schedule (ha!), and finally you – are relics of an age where information required organization to be recovered.  Encyclopedias broke subjects to their elements so that an alphabet would lead you to some data.  A city would determine the most valuable routes to serve a population of commuters.  Everybody understands why these systems were originally designed and we have learned to live with the consequences.  Buses are always late; they are always clustered when they arrive; and you can’t change that.

When Slate.com asked readers to propose updates to public transportation, I proposed a solution that would change the way users wait for buses.  This realignment would revolutionize the way people relate to their public transportation.  Rather than considering buses as road-trains (fixed to a track-like bus route and schedule [ha!]), people will think of buses like livery cabs.  This is a valuable shift and one that would increase reliance on the bus system and improve mobility in a city.  My solution was called Smart Buses.

Smart Buses inverts the call/stop button on a bus.  In the old system, a rider waits at a bus stop for a specific bus to arrive.  The rider then pulls a rope to tell the bus to stop at another bus stop to depart.  In a Smart Bus system, the rider calls a bus at the initial bus stop and is picked up by a bus waiting for the call.  The Smart Bus then drops the rider off at a pre-determined destination (that was indicated at the initial call).

In this new system, the wait at a bus stop is active.  You are not waiting for a random process to notice you – you are calling for attention.  It is a shift in power and a streamlining of information.  The variables are simplified and the incentive to riding the bus is greatly improved.  Riders stuck across town can find their way to jobs anywhere in the system without depending on a limited set of bus routes.

More on this to come. (ha!)

Everybody shut up for a second: The internet is being used to solve the world’s problems.  Let’s zoom in on that ridiculous statement to Slate.com, which recently asked its readers to propose inventive solutions to the world’s public transportation woes.  Notice that this question, which I have paraphrased and then re-phrased not as a question but as an invitation, does not target a specific public transportation mode, city, geography, state, nation, or planet.  Each of these specifications come with their own unique set of woes that a community of readers might solve with collective wit, imagination and inspiration.  My problems as a subway rider on the Boston T might differ from the complaints made by a Metro rider in DC, which would alter dramatically from the issues raised by an Earth-ferrying intra-orbital zeppelin passenger, etc.  There is a reason Slate.com generalized this topic – Slate.com lives in the cloud and clouds can’t be fenced or they won’t be fenced, or they are never fenced no matter if you try to fence them or not.  They float here and there in an ethereal fog that sharpens colors and outlines temporarily before fading away.  Slate.com is not a community.  It does not represent a locality.  It represents ideas that are written by people with editors on topics that shift like the cloud, with the cloud and in the cloud itself.  This cloud can’t be chained to a location – it can’t be tied with any specificity because it will rust or whither or it will die or you will stop going to it because your visits give it power and when it stops moving, you stop caring.  Anyway – I’m over-writing.

Slate.com can’t ask you about the T or the Metro because it doesn’t know who you are.  And if it knew who you are, then it would know where you are.  That knowledge is the thing that makes a cloud-based publication a community.  That knowledge is the thing that can be harnessed to solicit information of value from a community that is not interested solely in prize money but rather in the value that is collected by the community itself.  Because the community shares a problem that needs to be solved.

So Slate.com which may or may not succeed in solving the world’s transportation woes made me realize recently the difference between an online publication with user-accounts and comments sections and blogs and the same thing that is also an online community.  I posted a solution to transportation woes and if you were to be so kind, I ask you to please vote in favor of my smart buses solution.

Zack Hiwiller wrote a fantastic piece at Kotaku about over-designing digital experiences, video games in particular.  Zack re-imagined the original Super Mario Brothers as if it were a website launched today.  In his mockup, the user’s hand is held firmly and safely in place as every mystery, question, and point of the experience is mapped out in clear, bullet-pointed text.  The first scene, where a first-time user is dropped into the world and left on his own is met with the following welcome:

Mario!  Welcome to Nintendo Presents Super Mario Brothers!  Press Right or Left to Walk!

The original Mario Brothers was intuitive and that made it so interesting (I knew I loved it when I first got it).  The point of a game is not always to solve it – the point of the game is to play the game and the point of playing is to not have a point.  The concept of making the web simpler has invaded a space that was doing just fine, thank you.  The web should be confusing in some circumstances.  Let’s not breed a generation of web users that depend on instructions, please.  We can overdesign every experience into a useless gesture – like telling two chess players what moves to make.  Eventually, they stop playing the game and start moving the pieces.

I know why we’re doing this.  I’m guilty of it myself.  There is a glut of step-by-step instructions living online.  They’re ugly.  They’re confusing.  They’re everywhere.

New sites are streamlining these lists with friendlier presentations.  Foursquare is the latest hottest newest coolest thing.  They don’t even have landing pages on their site!  I went there to grab their how-to list and found a video instead:

What am I getting at here?  I don’t know, man.  This whole thing is just an exercise for me to just write anyway…  Foursquare has to be defined – it takes a long video to do it and the answer I get to this question: what is foursquare?  Is: a thing that makes you happy.  Which is probably a good answer, because, when I ask myself as if I wasn’t answering this question: what is Super Mario Brothers?  I say: it’s a game, shut up; just keep moving to the right and you’ll save the princess (and isn’t the dungeon music awesome?).  But SMB didn’t require a 2 minute video to define the product.  Not because anyone knew what the thing was – but because nobody needed to be told about it.

Why didn’t they need to be told about it?  Because they were too busy playing it to ask.

♣ Post Script ♣

Check out this interview with Shigero Miyamoto & Satoru Iwata – the top dogs at Nintendo, Miyamoto being the originator of SMB – about their work and how they “trained” users to know the difference between a turtle, bad, and a mushroom, good, without telling the user.

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/nsmb/vol1_page4.jsp

Earlier I argued that the everyday applications that we consider to be the online world are too easy to use.  It was a complicated argument that was lacking for examples as well as a clearer explanation.  The bottom line is that the concepts of interaction are so commonplace they’ve become banal and invisible.  Until they are updated, the interactive breakthroughs that make the web so exciting will live on the cutting room floor of the next failed start-up.  What is a commonplace web-interaction that is ignored and boring and useless?

Comments.

It is hard to imagine this in 2010, but comments are a very strange phenomenon.  What is a comment section doing in an article?  What is the purpose of it?  An article is the broadcast of a thesis – in most cases it has been considered and marinated with time and editing and rewriting.  A comment is a statement made in the moment.  Until the online world made it ubiquitous, the phrase comment had verbal/audio connotations.  In other words, one made comments only in conversations.  Conversations are instantaneous and spontaneous exchanges – quite the opposite of articles.  Currently, a word about comments is considered more textual.  To put it all together: the fact that an article and a web-based comment are both text-based, is the only commonality.  They are different beasts all together.  An article is a donkey – it works and is productive and it can reproduce.  A comment is a mule – it works as well, but it cannot reproduce.

Currently the relationship between articles and comments is taken for granted.  They are almost always included on a blog or article, an in almost always the same way.  An article is broadcast into the universe and the readership takes in the thesis.  Then slowly over time, the readership responds with comments – they can be thoughtful, challenging, spam, confrontational, tangential, long and short.  Either way, they are posted in chronological order at the bottom of the page in a way that de-emphasizes their content (opposite of the article).  Some commenters respond to other comments, rather than the article itself.  Rather than broadcasting the fruits of that tangent, the content is buried deep at the bottom of the page relevant only to those willing to dig for it.

How to make comments more relevant

Make them harder to post.  Hire a well-paid moderator to sift through incoming comments and select only those that contribute to the thesis in a pre-determined way.  Hide all comments to readers – only making them available to those who have posted acceptable comments.  After a time, broadcast all accepted comments in a way that organizes the content.

This proposal for a comment meritocracy requires something that is considered counter-productive in the speed-first internet.  The articles that use this strategy need time to marinate with readers.  They need time for things to happen behind-the-scenes.  Andrew Sullivan uses comments in such a way on his blog.  Rather than open all comments to users, he accepts user emails and filters through all the noise that accrues, publishing only those user-comments that contribute (positively or negatively) to the conversation.  His conversations take on their own life on this publication, giving the readership time to ingest the points he is making, and contribute thoughts of their own.  What transpires is a truly interactive experience where the ideas are emphasized by turning down the noise volume of the comments.

More on this soon…

You are learning Spanish and you want to use the web to teach you.  The New York Times broke it down for you on January 27, 2010.  The Web Way to Learn a Language by Eric Taub tells you there are free and expensive options.  There are social networks and black-box software available.  Do you want to hear paid actors speak textbook Spanish or do you want to interact with fellow students stutter in their strained accents.  It’s all there.

Actually not all of it is there.  Something is missing from the article.  And it’s important.

You want to learn Spanish.  How do you do it?  It’s a very easy series of difficult steps.

1. Fill your empty brain with Spanish vocabulary.

2. Speak Spanish badly.

3. Repeat #2 every day in every way for as long as it takes until you are watching Predator re-runs on Telemundo on a Wednesday night while every other idiot is tolerating CSI Miami.

Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha exist to complete step #1.  Your brain is empty and they know how to fill it with Spanish.  They offer variations of the same theme: turn a Flash application into an interactive vocabulary quiz.  The dings and buzzers tell you when you’re right and wrong.  The progress bar tells you how far you’ve come.  Eventually, your line will tell you and everyone else that you know how to ask for the bathroom in Barcelona.

The web is bigger than #1.  Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha are small enough to handle that because that’s the easy part.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s try to make #3 meaningful and engaging and interactive.  The web is waiting for an application that makes that possible.  This is what needs to happen.

There is a feeling every new language student shares.  Every student is overcome with this feeling the moment they are about to speak Spanish to a stranger.  It is a mixture of dread and shame and embarassment and frustration.  Overcoming this fear is essential to making #3 happen.  Recreating this feeling in a language website is possible and absolutley essential to building a truly innovative interactive experience.  The fear will not be overcome unless it is confronted.

A meaningful online lnaguage tool would make this promise to users: this will make you talk and it will force you to listen.  And you will most likely feel really uncomfortable while you’re doing it.  This is not the online language tool version eating your Spanish vegetables.  This is the online language tool version of your first Spanish date.  A horrible experience that left you with a lifetime worth of lessons.

All of the language websites profiled on the NYT article were fine in their own way.  They should be used along with library books, classrooms, and private tutors to support all the students in the middle of the #1 phase of their lessons.  This new tool described here would compliment any and all lesson plans with engaging practice tools.  In other words: the world wide web needs a language lab.