Little LegendsWhat's on for Kids around the UK

[The previous post is here]

What we have at the moment is a finished draft. It’s finished, because we’ve developed everything we initially set out to develop. But it’s still a draft. We’ll be watching how people use the site and listening carefully to any feedback and feature requests. What we’re hoping is that, through chatting with them – however remotely – other parents and people with kids will help us co-design the next version. And the next.

What I thought might be worthwhile, though, is to give a brief, high-level overview of what we’ve tried to achieve with Little Legends. I also want to give credit to various of the giants whose work has helped us get this far.

So to recap, we were faced with three problems:

1. How could we make places easier to find?
2. How could we make things in general “less techie”?
3. How could we make contributing to the site less daunting?

And every solution had, as far as we were concerned, to put all that community richness which I mentioned in the last post, first.

Making places easier to find

I feel a little silly for not having thought of this earlier, but there’s an age-old technology for this – maps

The problem then was how best to integrate it with the sort of free-form community conversations we were (and are) hoping to encourage.

So enter the first giant. A big one really – Google. Their maps make it reasonable straightforward for us to show places people have entered. You can search by a postcode and we can then show you what we have near there. Below is a screenshot of a search on “SW18″ – I’ll come on to what the markers mean later.

(It’s worth noting that one big problem has been legality. Here in the UK, the Royal Mail holds the copyright for the data that translates postcodes to mappable longitudes and latitudes. As a result, unless you pay a fairly steep fee for access to that data, you can’t map it. Special thanks go to Barry Hunter and his nearby.org.uk. While we can’t map the exact positions of the places, using his service we can show you the places accurate to about 500m. It’s not perfect, but it does give you a pretty good sense of what’s in the area)

Anyway, given the map and the data, what’s then needed is a way of structuring what people are saying, and doing in it in as unobtrusive a way as possible. And the second giant showed us a way of doing this.

OpenGuides are wikis, city guides written by everyone. They’re combination of place details and personal opinion, much like we’re trying to be. Our first effort at structuring our data has followed their lead – we’ve divided the objective details of a place (address, website address etc) from the notes people might want to add (e.g. “good pushchair access”, or “minimal parking”).

Everything’s still editable by everyone, but that little bit of structure allows us to do more with the maps. A second bit of structure was adding some basic – very basic – categories. Below is the legend that accompanies the maps. Rather than worry too much about lots of hierarchical categories, we’ve put up some top level categories. Further classification is supported by tags, but more on that later.

Making the site less “techie”

Many people just switch off when they hear words like blog or wiki. And fair enough really. So while I was pushing for the sort of open, community-based architecture that meant parents and people with kids could actually be in control of what places they thought should be on the site, I thought there had be to an option for those who weren’t quite so technically interested.

And then I realised that’s totally the wrong way round. Rather than it being a site for techies with options for others, we should aim to make Little Legends a site for everyone, with options for techies. Vicky and others pointed out that pretty much everyone who went online was used to comments and ratings, so we implemented
those as the basic package, so to speak.

I also realised that, while we wanted the site to be useful (and so used), and while we were hoping for some sort of community effect, we actually didn’t want Little Legends to be something that people spent hours on. Far preferable would be to have it as an extra bit of glue, helping people in Vicky’s situation actually get out of the house. (One day perhaps, everyone’ll be able to update from their mobiles, but that’s me future-gazing.)

Making the site less daunting

Wikis start off as blank pages, and that’s kind of daunting. As a friend Natalie said, she started off all enthusiastically writing up one place, felt pleased to see it go up live on the site, and then stopped. The prospect of adding everywhere in her area overshadowed the prospect of adding a quick comment.

Hopefully, the basic package of comments and ratings will now help keep some of that enthusiasm bubbling away. There is a bigger issue, though, and that’s altruism. I tend, possibly naively, to think that if people had no constraints and no threats they would get all Spike Lee and “do the right thing”. In practice, life is full of constraints, and sometimes threats. Hey ho. So how to make it worth people’s while? How do we spark some enthusiasm?

I don’t know, is the short, honest answer. But Tom Coates et al came up with something that seems like a pretty good start.

“We believe that for a piece of Social Software to be useful:

• Every individual should derive value from their contributions
• Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
• The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals”

Of course, we’ve kept the more altruistic wiki options there – you can still edit and add to our directory of places in whatver way you want. But we’ve also focused more on those three “rules”.

1) Providing Individual Value

The obvious way to get parents and people with kids to derive individual value is to allow them to store places they like in ways that make sense to them. So for example, if you’re moving house, and trying to find out which schools are near you, you might want to keep a record of all the schools you find on the site.

What we’ve done draws on yet another giant’s work, Joshua Schacter, the guy behind del.icio.us. That site, if you haven’t heard of it, allows you to bookmark anything you see and “tag” it with words of your choice. So in the schools example you might have one bookmark tagged “school W1 all_girls” and one tagged “school W2 mixed good_grades”. You can also add little notes to help jog your memory, like “seems to be highly recommended”.

If you’ve used any sites like del.icious or Flickr, you’ll be familiar with how powerful this tagging can be. It allows you to go back to your bookmarks and immediately filter them based on a tag. So if you made the decision to try for a single-sex school for your daughter, you could immediately filter on “all_girls”.

We’ve implemented some similar features, and are thinking about ideas like, say, using these as a basis for printing out quick lists of places for babysitters. Anyway, do have a play.

And we also tried to ensure there’s some individual value for the places people are recommending. If you’re a local toyshop, say, you can add your place and edit the notes. It’s essentially a very quick way of a) getting a little website and b) seeing what people are saying about you.

2) Providing Value to Peers

Step 2 was to make sure we used any individual contributions to help others using the site. This is (and always will be) an ongoing process, but as a first off we’ve made people’s bookmarks public. (Again, these are not really new ideas)

This allows for several things: we can show the tags people have used when bookmarking next to the place entry, which gives a fairly good snapshot of what the communtiy thinks of a place.

It also means people can find other people with similar interests, by seeing who else has bookmarked the same thing as them. Very much like Amazon’s “Customers who bought this also bought …” feature.

And it means the places themselves get a rough idea of what people are looking for when they find them.

All of which, we hope, provides value to peers.

3) Exposing that all back

Lastly, we needed a way to expose all that (imagined ) activity back to the individuals using the site.

One common way is to use a tag cloud. The jury is still out, in my view, as to how useful clouds are, but they do provide a quick snapshot of what everyone on the site is finding important.

More practical, I think, was to put the aggregate ratings and comments next to the maps. This gives people some idea of what people think of a place and how much interest it’s garnering.

And again, we can expose that back, along with some more statistical information about how many people are hitting various pages to people running the various places mothers, fathers and people who have kids to look after are talking about.

The last bit involved in making the site less daunting is really about making it easier to use. We’ve tried hard to keep the interface simple and intuitive, but any recommendations as to how we can improve it are very welcome. As I’ve said, this is a continual process of co-design for us. If you can’t use the site, then it’s no good us shrugging and saying “seems easy enough to us”. If you can’t use the site, then we need to make it better for you. So do let us know.

Thank you to the giants

So that’s it really. Personally, I think we’ve come quite a long way, and have a much better site. We may not yet “see far”, but we see much further thanks to the work and ideas of the people mentioned above.

Vicky’s written about some of the problems she faced as a mother of young children, and I thought I’d explain some of the thinking behind why we’ve designed Little Legends they way we have.

The main aim is to make good places for kids easier to find. Broadly speaking, there were two possible approaches to this. The first is to make a big online directory, where everything is neatly categorised – a little like a Michelin food guide, but for places for parents rather than for restaurants. And there are a number of sites out there that try to do just that.

This approach had a number of difficulties for us.

1. It meant we’d have to find and review everything ourselves (which is time consuming and costly).
2. Much more importantly, I felt that although we might have a more organised directory, it wouldn’t be as rich. For example, what about the places that only locals knew about? What about other parents’ views on the places? This “top-down” approach tends to miss out all those community aspects, and can suffer as a result.

The second approach is to try to design for this richness from the outset. A great example of this approach working is Wikipedia. For those unfamiliar with the site, Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Rather than source experts for each entry, as an Encyclopedia Britannica might, Wikipedia is built in such a way that anyone can edit or add anything that interests them. There are articles on everything from Mother Nature to the heavy metal umlaut, often in some depth. The results are astonishing – or at least, they continually astonish me. I’ve just had a check, and there are now 1,316,185 articles. Nor is it quantity alone – last December, the American magazine Nature ran some tests and:

“the exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.”

Getting even close to Britannica is pretty darn good. Tapping into this bottom-up approach, and the richness that a community could offer seemed the way forward.

So we set up a wiki, called it Mothershare, and set about creating an “encyclopedia” of sorts for parents. We had enough hits to make us feel that we had piqued people’s interest, but it didn’t really take off.

Among the various bits of feedback we recieved, positive and negative, various pointers stood out:

• it was “a good thing” that it was parent to parent
• it was too daunting a task to add pages from scratch
• it was too “techie” – and people panicked about ruining the site (bless’em!)
• and (crucially) while some of the stuff up there was useful, there was still no easy-as-pie way of find out what was near you.
• Mothershare as a name was too exclusive – what about other people with kids to lookafter, like Dads, babysitters or grandparents?

At which point (this was October 2005), it was back to the drawing board. We found a different name – Little Legends. And we had a think … how could we make the site less “altruistic”? How could we make places easier to find? In short, how could we make the site more useful to parents?

Well, as one Isaac Newton once said, he saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants. We found some giants, and tried to climb up to at least their toecaps.