Luis von Ahn presents the Duolingo project. Like Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood kids to paint his fence for him, Duolingo exchanges language lessons for help translating the web. Duolingo builds on predecessors like reCAPTCHA, which uses the free labor from proving you are human to translate old books, Duolingo addresses a massive task, breaks it down into small fragments, and aligns the task with a strong motivator. Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.
This design looks obvious in hindsight. I think it is harder than it looks.
Selecting the right problem from the universe of problems is hard. You need a problem that lets people feel good about participating, aligning with common values. You need a problem that is already understood by the public or that can be explained in a few words. Your problem should have measurable value in time saved or in money. And the problem should have a major component that can be solved by humans.
Breaking down knowledge work to 5 to 30 second snippets is a fairly new skill, although industrial engineers have designed simple repetitive snippets of work for factories for more than a century. Now we must learn to decompose to exploit what the human mind does well, leaving the rest to algorithms.
Motivation is the last leg of this triangle. We don’t have prior art or proven models to discover contexts that marry the human task to incentives. We have a few examples, like getting access to something valuable, learning a language, or running a cool screensaver. In each example the contributor benefits are immediate, in your face, and powerful enough for high completion rates.
The last project I saw that worked like this was 1-800-GOOG-411. GOOG411 was a directory assistance robot; you’d call for the phone number or directions of US businesses. It used caller voices and behavior to build a vast corpus of speech and search data. Google used the data to engineer its transcription service and to learn about mobile-local search. I loved it; it usually had better answers than expensive phone company operators.
CORRECTION: Skype for Windows 5.7 Beta includes a Push-To-Talk feature. “We have introduced a Push to Talk feature in Skype. Many people who are playing multiplayer games have requested this from us. With this feature you can set a hotkey which will toggle microphone muting on Skype call. You can set the Push to Talk up on the hotkey’s selection under Tools > Options > Advanced > Hotkeys.” — 27 November 2011.
Push-to-Talk is a style of voice call control reminiscent of the way you use a WW II era walkie talkie; on a common channel, the channel is silent unless a participant presses and holds down a button, turning on a microphone. Releasing the button turns off the mic. This is attractive when you have many people in a channel and want to avoid distracting background noise and extraneous chatter. Police radio and taxi dispatch are examples from the real world.
Technically, you might also think of push-to-talk as a call where mute is the default. Try this: start a Skype conference call then have everyone mute themselves. Want to speak? Unmute. Then, when you’re done, mute yourself again.
So why is that Skype operation not what realtime gamers need? Full Story »
Communication is well mapped and settled territory. So is telecommunication, video conferencing, and messaging. This means talk, in its many forms, is full of competitors that know how to string two digital tin cans together.
Collaboration is unmapped and unclaimed. People come together with common purpose, choose goals, and work towards those goals despite most systems, not because of them.
1994. The United States Department of Defense wanted to clean up sites where chemical weapon facilities had once operated. I was on Bechtel National’s bizdev team, helping construct our bid for the billion dollar job. The project manager brought in a facilitator to design workshops for a the managers and scientists who would lead the work. We were to uncover the risks and challenges inherent in the project, interpret what the contracting officer really wanted but hadn’t said. A complex, fuzzy problem with a hard deadline and big stakes. I saw strangers quickly become a team, focus on problems, feel safe enough to disagree and to think creatively. All in a few hours. This was my first experience with skilled facilitation.
I saw works similar to Gamestorming on Kaliya Hamlin’s bookshelf a few months ago. Decades of books and scrapbooks assembled by skilled small group facilitators. They approach team interaction like sports coaches, where the “other team” you’re playing against is the purpose for coming together. Different strategies for different opponents. Different techniques for different situations. A mix of roles that let the team go through what they must to reach their goals. Gamestorming’s playbook starts with a framework for group practices, a pattern pattern. The rest of the book catalogs 88 games, and many more can be found on the Gamestorming blog and wiki.
While Gamestorming was built for in-person collaboration, most of the games can be adapted for teams working remotely.
If only so we don’t have a billion crappy, time wasting, unproductive meetings over Skype.
Only one company comes close to offering a software product for this space. Dive into GroupSystem’s ThinkTank for a feature list. Requirements collection. Brainstorming. Sorting and clustering ideas. Voting. Prioritizing. Analyzing. Visualizing. It’s a rational, logical, reductionist approach to decision making and consensus building. It’s the right-brain counterpart to Gamestorming’s left-brain support for creativity, discovery, insight, for problems with fuzzy goals and high degrees of uncertainty.
Collaboration is where Skype and Microsoft can create enormous value for every user.
And Skype needs to do more than execute on a “Skype Everywhere” strategy. Skype can be knocked off, even with Microsoft’s support. Networks of people migrate all the time. We were using the acronym YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service) as far back as 2003. Skype isn’t safe.
Serving collaboration raises an effective barrier to entry. Helping groups of people be productive together, a tool for synergy, creates a value much harder to abandon than simple communication. In choosing between two communication channels, we choose the network that makes you and your social graph more effective, more productive.
A “Skype for Working Together” strategy is not obvious, easy or fast. I’d love to work on this, one of my “dream jobs.” Where do Skype-based collaborations break down now? Why? What can be done to prevent breakdowns? Can you identify and measure team formation, flow and accomplishment through Skype interactions? Where are people going to do all the things Skype won’t do before, during and after a call? Skype can raise a new barrier to entry through deep understanding of collaboration problems and the many better practices for getting things done together.
P.S. Collaboration is not just for the workplace. Collaboration is how we get things done together in the rest of our lives. It’s how we find work. Plan vacations. Troubleshoot a child’s problems. Organize a protest. Run for office. Restore a community. And work out why our last romance fell through.
P.P.S. Does Skype really want PowerPoint’s reputation as a powerful tool to create mind-numbing meetings?
P,P.P.S. Oh, and the book is an easy, fun, insightful read. Pick up a copy.
Mobile operator Three partnered with design studio B-Reel to bring the high-touch experience of in-store selling to the efficiency of centralized service. Three Sweden calls the service 3LiveShop, a blend of call center software, CRM, video calling, multitouch user interfaces, heads-up display, and in-store retail culture. It looks gorgeous.
Conversion rates in retail stores are very high, and are painfully lower in online stores. The Fireclick Index reports 74% of online shoppers abandon carts with products before checkout; only 2.3% of shoppers buy. This adds up when the lifetime value of a customer is high and switching costs are low.
Three things inspire me.
That a large phone company executive gave real budget to such a crazy idea and let it come to market. Was this a corporate culture hack or the product of a vibrant innovation system?
That the design process focused on both users: the sales rep and the customer. Too often design favors one or ignores the other.
That the results found human eye contact and rapport were as crucial to success as navigating all the information overload. Video is the real value add, building trust and keeping attention. Touch means operators can respond quickly, within the timeframe of a live conversation.
Here’s hoping a future phase gives some of the touch-screen magic to the customer, for some deep co-creation and collaboration. And that the Swedes get the go ahead to roll this out to the rest Three.
P.S. They built the user experiences in Adobe Flash. Why not Skype? Skype is already a partner with Three.
First, Skype requires each party to a call to use Skype-provided identities. That just doesn’t work for walk-in-off-the-street relationships. Selling starts off anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) for both the customer and sales assistant until you are ready to pay.
Second, today’s Skype doesn’t offer a way to build a video call into a browser-centered retail experience. Even if the developers chose to build the CRM station with SkypeKit, the customer would still have to download a full Skype client or a customized SkypeKit app. That’s serious friction, an unwanted step.
Third, early versions of SkypeKit’s private beta license requires you to share business secrets with Skype about your use of SkypeKit, and give Skype veto power over release of your “Plugged-into-Skype” product or service. That’s a lot of outside control to cede when you can easily, cheaply choose other tools.
Jason Asbahr is CEO of iOS game publisher Monstrous Company. Design defects in Skype’s persistent chat drove his whole firm to switch back from Skype for Mac 5 to the older 2.8. Still has love for Skype’s group video chat and hotspot payment services.
If Salesforce made a Skype for intranets, it would look like Chatter. We’ll talk more about it in the days to come but here are some of their television commercials which aired during halftime at Super Bowl 45. The style is fun and enthusiastic. And, like Skype, Salesforce loves the blue skies, clouds, and rounded sans serif typefaces visual identity.
The Interest Graph is Different than the Social Graph. The social graph is the people you know, existing relationships, usually based on prior experience. The interest graph are the people who share an interest with you, whether you know them or not.
The Interest Graph and Social Graph are good for different things. The social graph helps you cultivate your relationships. The interest graph helps you pursue your tastes, passions, and topics that matter to you.
The portion of both your Interest Graph and Social Graph that you care about is much smaller than the whole. Sorting out who matters to you in which context is not easy at scale.
The Interest Graph is going to reshape your Social Graph. People from your social and interest worlds cross over in both directions; some people live in both.
Talk with people in our networks can be a good thing in and of itself. It’s part of how we think aloud, but with others. It’s how we leave our mark, in a small way. It may be how we keep friends and belong and learn and make sense of our world.
Permit me to suggest a third graph: Purpose.
You’ve been on mailing lists with a lot of talk and no action. Friends who can’t muster up the focus to grab drinks. Work groups that never arrive at a decision. Fan clubs that talk about their hero but never got their web site up. We make fun of talk’s inconsequence, like in the beautiful My Favorite Tweets song.
And then… Sometimes talk leads to action. Volunteering. Giving money. Signing up for a project at work. Doing the laundry. Inviting that cute someone to dinner.
Purpose is the third dimension. Having someplace to go and the will to go there. Purpose, goals, common cause, intent, drive. Purpose is an human attribute or attitude that turns talk of shopping into buying, flirting to dating, griping to protesting. Purpose turns talk into results.
As you explore the future of work, look at your purpose graph as the people with whom you share a purpose. Some will be people who share your interests. Others you will know and trust. The folks in your purpose graph are the people with whom you can work to accomplish your goals. Collaboration starts with intent.
People who design tools for getting things done should be looking for the indicators that people want the same things and are prepared to do something to get them. The better you match people, the sooner you give them the tools to turn their drive into action, the more active you’ll see their purpose graph.
There’s more to it, of course. What’s the next step for you?
Posting and blogging and chatting and tweeting While both pretending we’re part of this meeting I friended you and then you followed me We began networking socially
Sharing and commenting, poking and liking Even while showering, even while hiking Having no message won’t stand in our way We tweet to say we have nothing to say
Facebook and Flickr and YouTube and Twitter Our productivity’s gone down the shitter FarmVille and Fish Life and Mafia Wars Now we’ve become social media whores!
Posting pictures… sending quizzes… Seems it never ends And when we both post fifty times every hour We really piss off our friends!
Most speculation about the future of work is straightforward linear projection; we all do it, it’s easy. The harder part, the thing I’m looking for, is insight into the ripple effects those changes will bring. New behavior patterns. Changed values and unmet needs. The conflicts sure to rise. The fragile points where disruption can change everything. Brittle assumptions. Some of the future will be exactly what we expect.
“Respondents needed an average of 4-3/4 hours per week to arrange nine meetings with seven parties involved. Almost a quarter of workers needed seven or more hours per week to coordinate their appointments. Before a single participant was sitting in a conference room, initiators had spent over half an hour arranging the meeting.” LMRMC report of a September survey of white collar workers in the US, Germany and France.
More than one in ten hours is spent scheduling.
1 in 4 workers spend about a whole day out of their week scheduling. 20% of the week!
Do you know anyone who is thrilled by juggling calendars? I don’t.
So what can Skype do before anyone even calls or chats?
Let’s imagine Skype offered a “Future Conversations” tab and a “+” button on that tab.
Skype Journal mockup of left tab in Skype for Windows 6.x with "Future" tab and "Conversation Requests" section.
You will have seven paths through the Add a Future Conversationwizard.
A simple event reminder. Skype would remind you, with all your open clients, of your next meeting. You might type this in or pick it from your Outlook, Exchange or web based calendar.
An invitation service. Think Evite. Invite people you know to a conversation at a time you specify. The folks need not be in your Skype contact list; perhaps you look them up in your Gmail or Facebook contacts. Send invitations, get RSVPs.
A scheduling service. It helps you negotiate the best times and places to talk. This might be through guided conversation (“I’m free Wednesday afternoon. How about you?”) or automation (“According to your calendars, the next three available times are…”).
An expectations setter. The host and attendees can type their meeting goals, agenda items, and deliverables in advance. One of those things that makes for better meetings.
A cross-poster. One event, shown everywhere I need it. Private calendaring software like Microsoft Outlook on the desktop or Microsoft Exchange on the intranet. Hosted calendars like Google Calendar and Yahoo! Calendar. Public listings like Plancast, Upcoming, Meetup and Facebook. Mobile calendars like those that come with RIM, iPhone and Android and many Symbian phones.
A parachute. Before the meeting, offer the attendees a chance to opt out and send their regrets. Better to have people who really need to be in a meeting than those who just lurk or waste time.
A hard start. A minute before the scheduled time, the Skype client of the call’s anchor automatically calls everyone so you start talking on time.
All of this is easy for engineers to build. Would people use it?
Can Skype switch people from their current scheduling tools (desktop calendars, email, phone, and online calendars) to a new one in the Skype client or on Skype.com?
Few people do their scheduling using online tools dedicated to the task.
Better scheduling cuts friction from collaboration. A Skype tool would have to be easier, more convenient and lead more naturally into appointments than existing alternatives.
Can Skype save millions of people a whole month of work every year by adding scheduling features?
I hope so.
Skype’s founding purpose is to help people talk. Getting them to talk at the same time is a great step.
Skype is used at work maybe 30% of the time. How are we spending those bazillions of hours in calls? I dare say a huuuge percentage are meetings. And meetings suck. They hurt. They waste our time and drive us crazy.
We need Skype to climb up from being just a communications medium and actually help us have meetings that work. That suck less. That don’t make us strangle ourselves with our headset cords.
Before your meeting, Meetzi helps attendees define goals, set agenda items, and invite people. During the meeting a timer announces the end of one agenda item and the start of the next, keeping meetings on schedule. During the meeting, you capture and assign action items. After, Meetzi emails meeting results to attendees.
These are basic things we all know improve meetings.
And we never do them.
Skype could put these Meetzi tools in our faces at exactly the moments when it will do the most good.
So we can actually have better meetings because we use Skype.
Gazillions of hours of better meetings.
Of meetings where we Get Things Done Together.
The collective productivity and happiness of Planet Earth would rise.
This is an obvious reason to choose Skype instead of phones or conferencing systems.
Think of Skype as a game. Skype’s gameplay and the game mechanics optimize for SkypeOut. Anything which doesn’t produce SkypeOut behavior, directly or nearly so, is hidden or removed. Skype to Skype calling is merely training for SkypeOut. Free Skype video calling is just bait to keep you playing until you’re ready to pay for a SkypeOut subscription (or a premium video subscription). The game’s navigation topology (topography), reward and punishment loops, models of character portrayal and self expression, social gestures, twitch-reflex conditioning, control surface design — all of it screams "move just one step closer to SkypeOut."
This is a limited and self-defeating game design strategy. Skype is the only game in this space right now. That will not last long. So let’s consider the basis of competition among games or gaming platforms that endure.
Some platforms follow the Hollywood portfolio model: produce a hundred games and a few will be blockbusters that pay for the whole business. Others emphasize different mental states like martial kata training that leads to victorious personal combat, or the diligence of farm cultivation, or solving mindbenders. Some software that promotes positive real world social behavior, like sharing restaurant reviews or updating map locations or endorsing events.
Most games, per Zynga, have a shelf life of weeks. So you can appreciate their portfolio model. How do you break from the flavor-of-the-month mold? What games spread? What games persist? What games evolve with mass culture, the aging of their users, advances in technology?
I’d look to World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs. Their game mechanics are tied to ongoing subscription revenue, like Skype. Yet their approach to game design is fundamentally different. Warcraft hits at multiple levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy like physical survival, security, prosperity, belonging, friendship, family, and esteem. Warcraft even provides a medium for expressing morality, pursuing curiosity, enjoying spontaneity, solving problems, stepping back for bigger pictures, and developing new talents and skills. People find meaning in their WoW experience. It changes how they work and live. It changes who they are.
Skype is shaping itself as little more than a utility, like a headset you put on to talk while you do something else. There is no higher purpose, no deeper fulfillment, no rewards beyond figuring out how to dial the phone.
As Skype stands, it cultivates the illusion that nothing is between you and the other people in a call. Skype staff want fidelity and a palpable sense of being there that dissolves the walls and windows and leaves you immersed in the conversation. This is hard. And admirable. But it is only hard the first time; once someone has shown the way, fidelity can be replicated. We saw that when rivals adopted the GIPS codecs Skype used. And fidelity is only admirable at first blush; high fidelity suffers from the tolerance we build to good things we take for granted.
So Skype needs more than fidelity. It needs more than being everywhere.
It needs a higher calling.
That higher calling will require rethinking Skype as a game.
Which higher calling? Let me suggest a few.
Immersion. Fidelity is just the first step into an immersive experience. Skype could fill The Augmented Reality Gap for conversation. Mobility lets us talk untethered. Augmenting conversation lets us use newly commercialized technologies to have better conversations wherever we are. Today we go to the Internet to talk. Tomorrow, Skype could bring your slice of the Internet to and into your conversations. Skype for Talk That’s Real.
Work. Help people work together, collaborate to perform knowledge work. This is a deep vein to mine and profitable. Focus on work cultures, work organization structures, on work planning, on the fight for resources. Unleash the world’s cognitive surplus. Skype for people who Get Things Done Together.
Learning. Students are taking control of their learning. Like the shift from linear cable channels to on demand video, education is moving from lockstep classrooms to just-in-time education, learning journeys, self-directed and learning in small teams. Conversation is fundamental to how kids and adults learn and remember. Knowledge flow, people sharing what they know, affects corporate values. Know more through Skype.
Play. Young men spend more hours playing video games than watching television. Or YouTube. Become the must-have tool for team talk, the height of realtime collaboration. Be the engine for talking during casual games, where checkers give you the excuse to just hang out. Be the back channel for amateur sports where fans share a game when they can’t share a room. Skype for Fun.
UPDATE: Tying this back to game design (or software design in general), Why shapes What shapes How. For example, a Skype for Getting Things Done Together might trade Skype’s instant messaging metaphor for a calendar/scheduling + status update metaphor. Instead of contacts+history you’d emphasize plans (for conversations) and actions. A calling beyond talk offers Skype a precious freedom to reimagine user experience.
Whatever your take, Skype needs more relevance than a can with string.
Bottom right: five bars (signal strength? call quality?).
Center bottom: Add People, Webcam (on/off), and Share (social objects like files, contacts).
Bottom left: elapsed time in call, microphone on/off, speaker on/off, and End Call button.
But what do we need in a Skype multiparty video service? How might we judge Skype MPV?
Before a call:
Option to minimize audio interruptions/distractions during a video conference.
Test your webcam (and how you look) before connecting
One-click launch to video from multiparty audio or chat conversations.
Add a voice caller to a video conference. Drag-and-drop, please. And support leaving a member of the call in audio-only mode.
Invitation and scheduling service. Two people are difficult to calendar; five can waste more time negotiating when to call than in the call itself. Partner with companies like Tungle and Evite.
Addressable chats so we can share a skype: link or a web http: permalink to bring people to a meeting and to its archive.
During a call:
Moderator power for one or more of the parties. Sometimes you help the quiet person to speak, a dominant personality to pause, or a rude person to leave.
Lurking mode: mute your outbound audio and “mute” your outgoing video while continuing to see/hear the meeting. Sometimes you just need to adjust your clothing or divide your attention.
Desktop screensharing, one of the great collaborative features of Skype video.
Easily switch video/audio sources without interrupting the meeting. I should be able to control my contribution to the call. So let me switch from the webcam that shows my face to the Ipevo close-up cam that shows the product defect we’re discussing to the product specifications Acrobat file.
Play a video file or stream from your PC or the web to everyone in your call. Video is a social object, triggering conversation.
Multitask. Sometimes we must be in more than one video conference at a time; sometimes meetings overlap.
Live streaming of meetings through services like Ustream.tv and Livestream. Skype could easily become the talking-heads network.
Let third-party software overlay captions, speaker names, illustrations and effects atop live video.
Picture-in-picture video for full-screen viewing.
Studio controls, to decide which participant has the focus
Interoperability with Cisco, ooVoo, Logitech, and other video calling and conferencing networks.
After the call:
Meeting video archive. Save meeting to YouTube (and other services) and to a blog.
One-click fallback to voice conference from multiparty video. Sometimes you just want to downshift.
Profile the chat. Let me add notes to describe what we did and what we promised, and share them.
Performance concerns:
Video quality. How many participants can be in High Quality (640×480@30fps) or High Definition (720p) at the same time?
Connectivity robustitude. Does Skype MPV perform well under adverse field conditions, with Wi-Fi and 3G/4G connectivity?
Scaling Up with Fixed Bandwidth. How does adding a third, fourth and fifth person affect bandwidth consumption?
Anchor requirements. Do video conferences have an anchor party or host, the way audio conferences do? If so, what cpu/bandwidth/memory is needed?
Audio quality problems and solutions become more difficult with multiple parties. How well does Skype address echo cancellation? Multipoint noise reduction? Sound leveling?
Proprietary or public audio and video codecs?
Backwards compatibility. Will people with older Skype clients be able to join a multiparty Skype video call?
Platform:
Software Developers Kit for the desktop client plug-in architecture. So independent software developers can build MPV applications for Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops.
SDK for SkypeKit developers. So Panasonic, LG, and Samsung can build MPV into their televisions. So others can build MPV into desk phones, video phones, and automobiles.
Hosted web-service SDK. Please! The better to build SkypeRoulette.
Feature-complete SDKs compared to the desktop UI.
Policy:
Is the architecture centralized or decentralized? Where is a call’s jurisdiction? Are PCs used by the parties to a call the only computers used to conduct the call?
Can MPV be turned off through the enterprise IT .msi controls?
Are multiparty video conversations encrypted end-to-end?
Do you need to be a party to a call or be monitoring the desktop of a party to that call to intercept the call?
Can others contribute Skype credits to share a call’s cost?
Is everyone charged, or just the host? How is the host determined?
Priced for wealthy-nation corporate use? Or for developing world personal use?
Can’t wait to get my hands on MPV and walk you through the details.
$10 a month gets you multiparty video conferencing, screen/application sharing, browser and phone access for your guests, and video broadcasting. Vivu‘s VuRoom for Skype plugs-in to your Windows and Mac Skype clients. VuRoom launches your session using the Skype client. Vivu notifies your invitees to your call through a Skype chat. They can launch into the room through their own copy of VuRoom or click on a link to the browser version. Your meeting uses Skype‘s encrypted, high quality audio channel. Here’s a flash demo, an offer for a 15 day trial account, and details on subscribing to VuRoom.
Vivu isn’t the first company to offer multiparty video for Skype, but their timing is excellent. Hundreds of millions of Skype users now appreciate video calling, paving the way in customer appreciation and behavior. This plug-in helps Vivu extend its market reach to Skype’s large user base and builds on the love and trust people have for the Skype brand.
Skype could easily target this market segment as it turns to business markets. Will Skype compete with partners like Vivu for customer attention, as they have with one-to-one video calling software partners and with desktop sharing software partners?
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