Good Profiles Gone Bad
Online profiles suck. Sure, filling them out is a tedious chore, and often an impediment to the actual task you're trying to pursue, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the structure and functionality of them suck.
Over the course of my career, I've implemented roughly a bizillion of them - all sorts, all shapes, all styles. But there's one thing they have all had in common: they've been designed by the wrong people. The average online form is the byproduct of a business process, and normally attributable to the whims and aspirations of marketers, sales people, business owners, or at best, knowledge workers and information architects. Many of these people show great intelligence and insight in marrying business or functional requirements to the overall design of the form, to be sure - what's lacking is insight into the requirements of the users themselves.
Your name is a great example. If you've always had the same name, and always will, most online profiles work out just fine. But what if your culture encourages periodic changes in name to mark significant milestones in your life? Spiritual, ethnic, and marital transitions often provoke a change in name, yet online profiles rarely offer any way to effectively manage this transition. The best you can reasonably hope for is that your name is editable, but I've yet to see an online profile, even in our exploding world of web-2.0-social-networking-bliss-hotness, that allows you to indicate time as a property of your name. A million people searching in vain for a maiden name that can only be expressed as if it were a middle name - the horror.
Same basic rant applies to gender definitions and our transgender friends. You can be a boy, or a girl, but not a boy who was a girl, or a girl who was a boy. And don't even get me started about hermaphrodites.
Here's another rage worthy dilemma - how often is your login name and email address the same thing. If we lived in a world where email addresses were some abstract identifier that was merely a portal into the rich tapestry of your electronic communication then things would be pretty sweet. But in a world where people get hired, fired, sell off domains, and neglect to log into webmail during that 2 month camping trip on the shores of Lake Kariba, folks, you're screwed.
My point in all this? The wrong people are designing these forms. Where are the genealogists, biographers, psychologists, social scientists, and librarians whose insights and fields of expertise could be so valuable in determining the structure and function our users need to manage their expressed identities? If I ever see one, I'll be sure to let you know.
Over the course of my career, I've implemented roughly a bizillion of them - all sorts, all shapes, all styles. But there's one thing they have all had in common: they've been designed by the wrong people. The average online form is the byproduct of a business process, and normally attributable to the whims and aspirations of marketers, sales people, business owners, or at best, knowledge workers and information architects. Many of these people show great intelligence and insight in marrying business or functional requirements to the overall design of the form, to be sure - what's lacking is insight into the requirements of the users themselves.
Your name is a great example. If you've always had the same name, and always will, most online profiles work out just fine. But what if your culture encourages periodic changes in name to mark significant milestones in your life? Spiritual, ethnic, and marital transitions often provoke a change in name, yet online profiles rarely offer any way to effectively manage this transition. The best you can reasonably hope for is that your name is editable, but I've yet to see an online profile, even in our exploding world of web-2.0-social-networking-bliss-hotness, that allows you to indicate time as a property of your name. A million people searching in vain for a maiden name that can only be expressed as if it were a middle name - the horror.
Same basic rant applies to gender definitions and our transgender friends. You can be a boy, or a girl, but not a boy who was a girl, or a girl who was a boy. And don't even get me started about hermaphrodites.
Here's another rage worthy dilemma - how often is your login name and email address the same thing. If we lived in a world where email addresses were some abstract identifier that was merely a portal into the rich tapestry of your electronic communication then things would be pretty sweet. But in a world where people get hired, fired, sell off domains, and neglect to log into webmail during that 2 month camping trip on the shores of Lake Kariba, folks, you're screwed.
My point in all this? The wrong people are designing these forms. Where are the genealogists, biographers, psychologists, social scientists, and librarians whose insights and fields of expertise could be so valuable in determining the structure and function our users need to manage their expressed identities? If I ever see one, I'll be sure to let you know.
posted by jrb at 22:41
2 Comments:
I think you are right on - profiles on the computer should be more human oriented and less database oriented.
Are you just ranting, or are you the kind of person that can actually review and make suggestions?
I've recently updated the registration and profile management part of our application (www.othersonline.com) and tried to address the 'screen name' .vs. 'display name' issue, but had not thought of the others situations you mentioned.
Having lent considerable thought to this issue, and being deeply immersed in the world of genealogy, I would hazard to say I'd able to render some insight. Ask away, or you can grab my email address from my Blogger profile at: http://www.blogger.com/profile/2716887
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