The EchoUser Experience

Measure me this

Over the past few years, the buzz on the street in the development space (read: international development), has been all about impact.  What is it? How does it affect our bottom line? Is it related to success - and if so, how? Who’s involved? How to improve it? But most importantly:

How to measure it…?

Quite a few people have been thinking about this for awhile now, and first among them is Sasha Dichter from Acumen Fund.  His thoughts on the matter merely reflect a broader movement within philanthropy that is focusing on what it means to create a sustainable development space that is responsive to changes on the ground.  Of course, before measurement comes definition, and what a bugbear that has proved to be!  Sara Olsen at the SVT Group has spent years trying to answer this question, and while she has been generally successful in some ways, it seems that a cookie cutter solution will be hard to come by.

Read more…

I stumbled across the work of Jonathan Jarvis (@JonathanJarvis) the other day, thanks to my housemate and colleague, @zaqintosh.  The idea of creating a “design language”, as Jarvis calls it, certainly isn’t new. Visualization geniuses like @Stamen (and here), Hans Rosling, Dan Roam and many others have long argued that a visual language is absolutely necessary when it comes to understanding complex information systems.  Even when I was at Origo, and we instituted a company-wide policy to take mind-map style notes and meeting sketches, a few of us took to creating our own “visual vocabularies” (as we called them) to help systematize our visual note taking, making them easily understood by anyone.

Goodbye chicken scratch, hello iconography and flow diagrams.

I think the most compelling piece of Jarvis’ story isn’t that we need to create a malleable visual taxonomy - systematizing is a natural step in any language, and visualization is no different.  No, the best part of his argument is that a new class of professionals, “New Mediators” as he calls them, will come to supplant - or blend - the previously separate roles of Journalist, Analyst and Designer.

I’m curious to see how this plays out - now I’m off to brush up on my After Effects skills, since it looks like I’ll be needing them.

(image courtesy of Jonathan Jarvis at www.newmediators.com)