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I'm a developer at Yahoo's Brickhouse, and have been designing better ways to browse live internet video broadcasts. Currently the best way to find interesting live content is to flip through channels and sites one-by-one, I'm convinced there must be a better way.

One of the approaches I've been working on involves storing periodic snapshots of all the indexed streams. I've been using these snapshots in different interfaces to explore the current and past broadcasts visually, as well as to illustrate search results. Taking image and metadata snapshots at approximately five minute intervals of all the broadcasters on Yahoo! Live, I've accumulated close to a million snapshots.

As a small fun side project, I've used a portion of the collected snapshots and some of the simpler metadata to put together two simple visualizations of the activity on Yahoo! Live. The first visualization is in the form of a grid of broadcasters which shows all the simultaneous broadcasters at once:

Grid

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The first thing that struck me on watching the grid visualization was the transitions people go through as they host their broadcasts. Some people change clothes, quite a few fall asleep, and plenty more start to get visibly tired. Looking at the grid as a whole, I also see some interesting trends. Night and day are pretty clear from both the number of broadcasters and the lack of natural light late at night. As an extension to being able to see the collective night and day I am guessing that most of the broadcasters are in similar timezones. I've also noticed that most of the broadcasters on the grid look like they are under 30, and are broadcasting from a private place.

The second visualization is a chart displaying broadcasters by the time they've been broadcasting versus the number of viewers they have:

Chart

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The most popular broadcasters float to the top of the chart, while those with very few stay near the bottom and get lost in the crowd. As the most viewed streams tend to have exponentially more viewers than the average stream fitting all of them on the screen at once required a logarithmic vertical scale. This difference in viewers might correspond to the distinction between a broadcast environment, and a chat room environment. The broadcast environment would have one primary broadcaster who is the primary focus of viewer attention and interaction. A chat room environment would have a small number of user all interacting with each other.

It's interesting to see the trends that become apparent when visualizing the broadcasters viewership over time. While observing the top broadcasts in this view, I noticed two. The first is that viewership for popular broadcasts tends to rise very quickly at the beginning of the broadcast, and then stabilizes within a limited range. The second was that most of the top broadcasters tended to be female, which is an interesting contrast to regular television.

So how did I achieve these visualizations? The snapshot collector uses Yahoo live's API to discover broadcasters and then instantiates a browser for each broadcaster to grab a shot. When it grabs the shot, it also collects some simple metadata, and stores it in an SQL database. This metadata along with the snapshot is pulled out by the visualization code, which was created using ruby-processing, an API to the Processing framework for visual programming in Ruby. Eventually, given some time I would like to clean up the visual design and also experimenting with auxiliary information displays, such as trace lines on the paths of the chart to visually show more history information.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Developer evangelist Christian Heilmann was captured in Paris late last year, humoring a post-prandial crowd of European web developers and sharing the wisdom of web standards, as well as a humorous bit on how (and when) to make the international sign for "bullsh*t." He also discusses the benefits of web standards and the value of taking the long view, for increasing the resilience, flexibility, and maintainability of web projects.

You can watch the video, thanks to the generous permission of the Paris Web 2007 conference organizers.

Or take a quick trip through Chris's presentation, thanks to SlideShare.net:

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Popularity: 29% [?]

It's April, and Ben Davis, an Ohio State University junior, is freaking out that he has yet to find an internship for the coming summer. His parents are on his case, his best friend has already lined up a sweet internship at an investment firm ( and lets everyone know about it, repeatedly), and his friend's dad cannot get him a job. As he sifts through job listing websites all night, his housemates drink and play Madden 07 non-stop.

Sarah Wong, with two internships in the bag and about to graduate USC, really wants to work in New York. It's her dream. She is a journalism major, has great grades, and prides herself on her ability to network. She doesn't know anyone in New York though, and is actually kind of nervous about her prospects. She is hitting up everyone she can.

This is not the story of the frat boy slacker meets the motivated A-Type and they magically end up together. Ben and Sarah are both fake. Phony. Imaginary. But you know a Ben, don't you? How about a Sarah? My guess is we all knew someone like this when we were in school. If you are current student, they are in your class right now. Maybe you are or were one of them. Ben and Sarah are "personas," archetypal users with real human attributes, based on many research sessions we conducted with college students.

We also gathered a ton of research accessible to us here at Yahoo! and I even crashed a "How to get a Job and Network" seminar for Cal students. Yep, I am not above it but I did skip the free pizza. Note to the guy at Cal who fell asleep during that seminar: Thanks man, you made my day and helped inspire "Ben." All of these insights drove the development of Yahoo! Kickstart.

I work in the Advanced Products group. My official title is senior interaction designer. I think of myself more as an overall product designer using goal-directed methods. We start with some general themes to give us direction, but that's really it. We get as guerilla as we can. We talk to A LOT of people. Even people outside the Valley, if you can imagine that. We comb the vast halls of Yahoo! for research studies performed by other groups with big budgets. We look at technology trends, problems people are having, and interesting areas to explore. We formulate the best ideas into product pitches that go before a board of really smart people.

Y! Kickstart was one of the ideas that got the green light. Our idea addressed a valid set of problems in an interesting area: students and recent grads needing to extend their weak-tie networks to get jobs, interacting with working professionals who love where they went to school and want to help. My presentation focusing on Ben and Sarah was an integral part of our pitch.

But I've heard some people say, "this is Yahoo's answer to missing out on the Facebook deal" or "Why would I use this when I have LinkedIn." But looking at the problem we are trying to solve, these services are not necessarily gettin' it done. At least not yet.

I am not going to lie, I have love for Facebook and LinkedIn -- they serve me well. But this is not about *me*, and maybe it is not about you either. It is about Ben and Sarah and the countless number like them. And new Bens and Sarahs who come of age every year. We've read articles about students doing the junior year Facebook cleanup, freaking out that a potential employer may see their beer bong exploits. We asked college students about LinkedIn, only to get a resounding " huh?". We asked about "social network fatigue." Let me put it this way, the first time a current college student says "dude, I am not signing up because I have social network fatigue," I will either let them slap me in the face or I will buy them a beer. (Actually, I'll just buy them a beer because I know most are poor and do not have a job.)

With a total of 4 months to go from design to coding to launch, we are really proud of our preview release. By targeting the problems we heard again and again, we were able to focus on core features with minimal distraction. We brought in college kids several times during the development of Kickstart (including early stage wire-framing) and shifted the product direction where appropriate. Since launch, we've received lots of great feedback. Some of it doesn't make sense for the product, much of it does. There are many features to add, to fix, to dream up, and we are listening to everyone. Open up another browser tab and check it out between pokes, that's what Ben and Sarah are doing.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Yahoo! was represented at the DUX conference this year by three presenters. Principal designer Samantha Tripodi gave a talk about her work on Yahoo! Teachers titled "Yahoo! Teacher Camp – Creating Tools by and for Teachers.” (I wish they had this when I was in school.) David Ayman Shamma talked about Zync , a plugin for synchronous video sharing and conversing over rich media developed at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. And Joy Mountford spoke about the “The Future of Ambient User Interfaces," and the work we do on the Design Innovation Team. There seemed to be particular interest around two recent projects.

The first was a new visualization of Yahoo! Search data I developed -- Query Bursts across the globe. Thanks to help from Jasmine Novak at Yahoo! Research we are able to visualize queries that have a “bursting behavior,” or rapid fluctuation. In this way you can see how current events impact web search and create spikes or "bursts" around the world. A couple examples are online at our site, including the “Miss Teen USA” geography video and “Hurricane Felix” queries and bursts from earlier this year.

Second was the BookScape project developed by my coworker and friend Michael Chang. BooksScape is a responsive zoomable interface to image data from thousands of books in the Open Library project, from the Internet Archive:

Also, Yahoo!'s own Joseph O'Sullivan helped to orchestrate the conference and did a great job! Thanks Joe.

Popularity: 5% [?]

This year's Designing User Experience Conference (DUX) clearly demonstrated for me the fluid and complex state of interactive design. The DUX presenters came from a range of disciplines, with diverse and eclectic backgrounds in the arts and sciences. After taking in many views of the role of design in creating user experiences, I left the conference with a heightened awareness of the changing landscape that visual and interaction designers are now adapting to.

Many designers feel their influence has been marginalized by technology innovation. Developers, product managers, and business leaders control the big decisions. Often, usability takes a backseat to feature requests, and design is a superficial layer that gets slapped on top of a product or service which offers something newer, faster, or more competitive. The speakers and attendees at DUX seemed hyper-aware of this situation. They discussed the value of recombining and rethinking top-down and bottom-up approaches to decision-making and project management. By the end of the conference, I was more convinced than ever that designers should know how to code (or at least be well-informed algorithm authors).

Having attended past conferences related to HCI, data-vis(ualization), and graphic design, it was refreshing to hear DUX presenters tackle high-level questions about their roles and their process -- as members of a larger work environment or organization. I'm confronted with many of these same questions at Yahoo!, where I design stuff directly with Processing, an open source programming language and environment for developing images, animation, and interactions. I'm often asked: When is it useful to prototype? How does one evaluate success in interaction design? Where does design stop and development begin?

These are great questions. I still believe that many of these issues would be resolved if designers took more ownership over code and all the design value it contains. At DUX, people confronted real challenges to the role of designers, even the definition of design today. And there were many opportunities for learning.

B.J. Fogg on keeping it simple

B.J. Fogg gave a particularly broad and all-encompassing talk on “simplicity” (I would be more inclined to call it “economies of comfort”). His talk was delivered as a prerecorded movie (vlog style), a format I've begun to appreciate as an articulate and guided method of presentation. He focused on the mindset that a designer tries to create for users.

Fundamentally, Fogg argued that users have limited resources (time, money, physical work, brain power, social deviance, and routine) and that their perceptions of investment vs. return are what ultimately should guide experience design. As abstract and elementary as this sounds, every experience designer out there would benefit by consciously evaluating their own work in light of investment vs. return.

Mindset matters

My favorite example of a designer appealing to the mindset and experience of the user is Wake n' Bacon (by Matty Sallin, Daniel Bartolini, Hsiao-huh Hsu). What better experience could one hope for than waking to the smell of fresh bacon every morning?

Popularity: 5% [?]