2nd Version of New Look - & how do we get more feedback?

As described in my last post, we are working hard on the user interface.

There is a working version of where we have got to here, but we are now working towards a second version, which is not yet working, though you can see a mock-up here - simpler still, I think, and loses the 'floating' sidebar, which I think will be easier.

Of course designing an interface is a little like trying to mentalize another person - making sense of their actions (clicking that link there, rather than this one here - NOW WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?!) in terms of their intentional mental state at the time: their beliefs, their wishes, their worries - which collectively drive their actions. It is hard! As a user of the site, some of my intentional state in a particular moment is, of course, pre-conscious - not in my own awareness, let alone that of the guy struggling to predict how to make a website so self-evidently obvious as to make the 'interface' practically invisible to me... Interesting how it takes expertise (Jon Lister and Joshua Bradley, and our frineds at Osmosoft supplying this) and experience/feedback (me, and the others who I can squeeze feedback out of) to get this anything like 'right'...

Feedback is the gold-dust we require, and it is very hard to get others quite as fired up as those close to the project so as to increase our data from 'ordinary users... It takes a certain head of steam to go to the bother of letting a web-designer know what annoyed me about the website, where I got lost...

I guess what I am saying is that sometimes this whole tiddlymanuals project seems a very lonely task. People will look once, but if they don't like it they'll go away. However, what we are trying to do with the AMBIT intervention (for multi-problem, complex, and "hard to reach" young people) as a whole is what Weisz and Simpson-Gray (2008) describe as a "deployment-focussed" development of a new intervention, and I guess this is very similar to the methods of open source development on the web. I love the saying of open-source programmers "Release Early, and Release Often" - as this seems to capture something of the AMBIT developmental method, too - keep showing people your ideas, keep trying them out, keep tweaking, tinkering, improving, bit by bit. Build on what we know works for whom, and keep pruning out what doesn't work...

That pruning bit is the painful one - will we really manage to persuade enough teams to actually begin actively 'manualizing' their own practice in the kind of co-constructed wiki-manual that the TiddlySpace AMBIT manual promises? If we don't, then the basic premise of the Tiddlymanuals project is challenged, but it is hard for teams to do this before the technology easily and "invisibly" supports this. How long do we give it before we have to prune that idea?!

I take heart from parallels in neurodevelopment... neural development follows a line of early (pre-birth to young childhood) massive "efflorescence" of nerve connections, generating billions of synapses (links between branches of nerves). In mid-childhood, and accelerating in adolescence, this process then goes into reverse with what is called "synaptic pruning"... Structures, or more importantly functional pathways, that have adaptive value to the individual are preserved, and strengthened, whereas unused pathways (poor adaptive value) are gradually shed. BUT... certain areas of the brain - most notably, the highest executive bits such as the pre-frontal cortex (where mentalizing occurs) tend to lag behind in their development relative to more archaic structures that deal with, say, threat and attachment. This is not because the prefrontal cortex is less useful; on the contrary, it is just that it is doing such a compex job (working out why people are behaving the way they are on the basis of empathic and imaginative intuition of their intentional mental states) that it takes a while to come on-line... let's be hoping that tiddlymanuals are a bit like that, and not just another part of the massive pluripotentiality of the developing world of effective interventions that yet fails to show adaptive value. My hope is in the fact that it is the very qualities of flexibility and adaptability that tiddlymanuals are directed towards, my fear is that the technology will be too alien to facilitate easy adoption, or that teams struggling under the burden of surviving in the current harsh economic climate will baulk at "adding" the task of manualizing their practice (though I maintain that this can more or less be done in real time, or at least in "bite-sized chunks", so that the time burden should be minimal, and a reasonable investment.) We shall see.

New hosting site and new Theme for the AMBIT TiddlyManual

Some of the money from our Comic Relief grant is directed towards improving the user experience of the AMBIT manual.

We have moved it to TiddlySpace now (you can still access it and all tiddlymanuals through the central 'signposting site' www.tiddlymanuals.com). This makes it much easier for new adopters to set up their own space (wiki) at TiddlySpace and then to opt to "include" all the ambit.tiddlyspace within their own. When they add their material (local expertise, implementation protocols) this is saved in their space, but links directly to the Anna Freud Centre's curated content, so that from a user's point of view the whole wiki is seamless.

It also makes the major renovation of the theme easier to try out. You can see where we have got to here - as ever feedback is very welcome and there is a link to this in the manual.

The idea of the new theme, that is being developed by Jonathan Lister & Joshua Bradley at J&J, is to make the manual a much easier experience for the user. The original manual was very "busy" - far too many links, not enough of what I call "centripetal" force in the writing (that is, the intrinsic interst and relevance of what I am reading that holds my attention, as opposed to centrifugal forces that are sparked by relevant or interesting links.

Ideally a wiki has the perfect balance: allowing exploration in depth, that is nonetheless contextualised through links to relevant details that draw me on into material that is just 'meta' to what I originally came for.

By 'calming the typeface down' and setting links to new tiddlers (in tiddlywiki, 'tiddlers' are small chunks of content - not quite pages, more like hyper-linked and taggable notelets) to open down below, out of sight, this makes for a much more fluid reading experience. As a reader clicks and opens tiddlers, it is as though that reader is setting up their tailor-made 'chapter' up ahead of them. A menu ("you are currently reading") on the right lists all the tiddlers open at any one time, and you can flick back and forth between these, or close them from there. Best to try this out rather than have me attempt to explain it. It seems different but highly intuitive... Interested to get feedback though.