David's critique
From CyberOne Wiki
David Levine
December 2007
A Review of www.ChangingDefaults.org
I reviewed Doug McMahon’s project on changing default behavior located at www.changingdefaults.org. Doug’s project attempts to address what he sees to be the status quo’s implicit assumption that default behaviors are persistent and unquestioned and that as a result many of these behaviors are in need of changing. His website proceeds from the assumptions that certain default behaviors should change and that it will be “communities who will change a default rather than lone voices.” As a result, his site attempts to foster a discussion around particular “defaults” that are in need of changing as the first step in a three step collaborative process that he envisions will ultimately change identified defaults. The website is seen as the locus of a broader discussion that Doug sees branching out through a Google Group and a Facebook Group dedicated to identifying and discussing default behaviors that are in need of changing and recommending replacement default behaviors.
The site itself is well designed and the project name and URL are both easy to remember and correspond well to the project. While perhaps seen as trivial, such factors are important in driving collaborative processes in an online environment, so people can easily pass information about the project along to one another via word-of-mouth as the discussion unfolds. In addition, Doug has developed an attractive logo which adds to the consistency and cleanliness of the user experience on his website. The same is true for the interface in the “survey” he has built into the site and the navigation throughout. Again, these cosmetic factors, while potentially unimportant in an “offline” discussion, become very important in an online or “cyber” conversation. Given the various issues and sites that compete for attention in an online environment and the resultant short attention span of online users, an online communications strategy must distinguish itself from the mass of competing data by making the user experience clean, easy and comfortable. Doug’s website effectively accomplishes these elements, potentially giving it a fighting chance to stand out among the competing voices out there in the Interweb.
The site is somewhat less successful in a related element – that of clarity. Given the aforementioned lack of attention span in online users, it is important that people are given the “punch line” within seconds of searching for it on a website. Doug does an excellent job of describing what he sees as a three-step process involved in “changing defaults” right on the front page. So a user who comes to the site understanding what the project is attempting to accomplish can see that Doug has a clear plan of attack in executing this strategy. However, the more challenging issue is communicating exactly what the goal of “changing defaults” is all about to a new user who first visits the website. While I had the benefit of a classroom discussion and verbal introduction to the project, and thus, I was able to glean the goal from the content of the site, someone who is less familiar with its goal may have less success. Because the project has such a large potential subject matter – default behaviors generally – it runs the risk of becoming overly vague and inclusive. In other words, it is difficult for someone first arriving at the site to know just what Doug means by “defaults that are in need of changing”.
Doug does an excellent job at defining “default behavior” clearly and concisely, starting with a dictionary definition and then giving examples of both a narrow (the default screen size in MS Word) and a broad (copyright law defaults to 70-year protection) interpretation of the definition. However, he stops here. In other words, it is unclear from the site alone whether Doug thinks that we should change the default copyright law, or MS Word layout, or something else entirely (e.g., should MS Word be the “default” medium of choice for essays like this, or maybe we should move with the times and start drafting essays in e-mail format?).
While in the classroom presentation and discussion of the topic, it was clear that Doug is clearly irked by what he sees as a passive acceptance of a sub-optimal status quo set of default behaviors, he does not articulate this frustration for visitors on his site. As a result, he risks losing people once they are drawn into the clean presentation and attractive design he has laid out. To address this issue, I would recommend that Doug introduce some suggested defaults that he thinks are particularly bothersome and in need of changing.
It is understandable, and perhaps intellectually more consistent, that Doug resists this temptation and instead starts by opening up the conversation for discussion. This is driven from his stated assumption that “it is communities who will change a default rather than lone voices” – even impassioned and motivated voices like Doug’s. However, there seems to be a difference between getting a conversation started with some basic guidance through suggested ideas and dominating the discussion and trying to accomplish change as a lone voice. I think Doug can continue to have the benefits that come from a community discussion (and gain the “buy in” necessary to move the needle on something like a default behavior), while addressing the ambiguity of such a large topic if he would simply list a few default behaviors that he thinks need to change. With this simple addition, the survey question that he asks (around how many “defaults” should be in the final goal for the project) would have more bite as users would have a better framework for envisioning what the project might entail as it moves forward. Without this guidance, it seems that some users might be lost given the immense scale that the concept of default behavior encompasses.
Another area that Doug might want to discuss, although less necessary to get the conversation started, is proposing some kind of methodology for choosing between default behaviors. In other words, why are some default behaviors bad and some behaviors desirable? In the classroom discussion of the topic and when he first mentioned that he was working on the project, Doug made it clear that some default behaviors are clearly inefficient or perhaps just annoying, and other default behaviors (like the use of the English language in classroom discussion) are clearly necessary and beneficial. It might be helpful to guide the discussion and provoke thought and conversation if Doug would offer his thoughts on this topic. This is related to the previous suggestion, but perhaps more “analytical” in that it is asking for a theoretical framework rather than examples. I think both are motivated by the same question: which default behaviors should we change and why?
As a whole, the project seems interesting and relevant, and importantly, it seems that Doug is passionate about the topic. It also seems like a topic that not only needs a “community” to execute it (because “default behaviors” are by definition behaviors of a community), but also one that should provoke interesting debate and collaboration as people consider the merits of current defaults and proposed solutions. By building on the attractive website, the effective logo, the clean and crisp user interface and the concise and clear language that Doug uses to communicate the concept of default behavior, he has the potential to be successful in building and guiding a community discussion of changing defaults. If he takes the advice suggested above, perhaps he can guide this discussion in a more clear direction and provide a needed introduction for those who have not had the benefit of meeting Doug face-to-face or hearing him talk about the topic. All in all, this is an excellent start to what seems like and interesting topic that has the potential for real change in the world if the community and discussion takes hold and is propagated through online communities and forums where collaboration and interaction have the power to transform ideas into reality.
