About.

Chris Tompkins is a consultant and former journalist.  You can reach him by twitter or by email.


Planting design, for growth

I’m going to put my foot down and say that the simplest blog is best, but I’d like to explain a little about creating a simple blog, a simple communications platform, and a simple way to share ideas. And a caveat.

Growing life, not Astroturf

First of all, communication is not easy. Launching a blog is easy, and easier with each successive platform launched today, but communication is not easy. While weaving well-written posts under a personal brand, keeping in mind search-ability, mobile compatibility and platform scalability, all while pursuing ‘good looks’, many well-intentioned products get lost in a convoluted design. Widgets and ‘interactive elements’ are sprinkled across a page, doing little but filling space.

When a producer wants to begin work on a new product, they often have a long list of features that are designed to solve for each one of these problems. However, a producer (and a developer) can fall into the trap of creating a new feature for every perceived problem. This presents its own, larger problem. Even if each feature is well-designed, well-executed and simple, en masse features begin to overwhelm the product purpose. Tweet trackers, featured articles, comment promotion, media management – by the time it is completed, it has already collapsed under its own scale. That’s not yet mentioning the manpower needed to go into properly curating or creating new content for each of the features intended to engage the audience.

The result is a planned community lined with astroturf in the midst of the desert.

Simple seeds

The simplest form of web communication is text. It’s not always the best, though it’s often the fastest, and it is most definitely the simplest. Pictures are nice – they can be fast, but they are certainly not simple to produce. Videos are difficult, expensive, slow, and have a low potential for viewership – on occasion, they can be great. Mostly videos are not simple – they are cumbersome. Other interactive elements I will address later. For some products, like SaaS, obviously interaction is the core of the product. This presents a different model I will address in several dedicated posts.

So text is the best place to start, the best chance to grow. It solves a great deal of problems with one, very malleable feature: readability.

Growing and eventually pruning

If you happen to plant seed in good earth, water it with plenty of text, maybe fertilize it with some social promotion, and give it time, you can – just maybe – see something grow. What it grows into is very much a matter of what you plant, and to a lesser extent a matter of how you prune it.

Wild-lands (4chan)
Seed planted in very fertile earth, 4chan is a simple forum that is allowed to grow nearly unregulated. As with any wild-land, it poses very real dangers. It is messy and overgrown in almost every sense of the word. The ecosystem flourishes from seed blown in from all corners of the earth. It is free and adventurous. You will encounter new ideas in wild-lands that you may never see in any other part of your life. They are not always bad.

Unkempt meadows (Digg)
Again the product of fertile earth, unkempt meadows are mostly free ecosystems with some natural limitations imposed on the inhabitants. Digg allows users to self-regulate through a karma system, which generally puts everyone on an even level – much like a meadow. Seed is blown in, but also carried in by the native wildlife. When healthy, seed becomes self-propagating. However, while this ecosystem is prone to creating beauty on occasion, its limitations do not sprout dramatic growth and, much like meadows, its content is predictable. Sudden changes to the ecosystem (redesigns) are akin to wildfires and can suddenly destroy them.

Farmland (Nytimes.com)
This is healthy earth that has been tilled and planted to produce a predictable crop. Farmland exists so both the producer and the audience know exactly what to expect and how to interact with the content. The New York Times produces predictable, commodity-like growth, which is consumed regularly by a constant set of readers. Seed is provided by professionals.

Perfectly mowed lawns [or golf courses] (McKinsey Quarterly)
Highly controlled, authorized and sometimes premium, these ecosystems produce content for a very specialized user. Comments are regulated and approved, sometimes even edited by administrators who watch carefully to control the appearance of the land. Only what is planned will grow. 

Astroturf (Branded blogs)
This is ultra-controlled, purpose-built, fake life that is created to appear as an ecosystem. In reality it consists of fake, plastic, plant-like images that have been layered on top of any surface. Brands use these to create the appearance of a community for marketing purposes. There is no seed. Often more fertile unkempt meadows or even farmland exist around the brand as well, simply outside of the control of the parent company.

Much like a real ecosystem, a product can go through stages resembling any one of these. Farmland can decay into wild-land once it is no longer cultivated by farmers, and unkempt meadows can be tilled and turned into farmland when a producer believes they are ready.

Starting out: grow what you know

Find good earth (subject matter) in areas you know well, plant seed, and vigilantly watch over its growth. Prune as you see fit or as the ecosystem deems appropriate.

Here’s where I’ll share my caveat: this simple metaphor does not apply forever and can be ultimately constricting. For the rest of this blog, I will try to adapt simple, natural solutions to complex software design problems – the systems we work with have grown to such a size that this is not always an option. The designs, workflows and executions are by nature complex, and to reduce them would cripple their functionality. That being said, when problems arise in these complex systems, a strategy in its most reduced form often repairs the most, with the least amount of damage.