David Emery Online

Ambient Information

27 February 2008

Over on the 37signals blog there’s an interesting article on a little feature they’ve added to their unified billing system (well, as interesting as something about a billing system can be). They’ve added a simple stats stream page that everyone at 37signals can access that gives them a simple, colour-coded look at what’s happening with their product sales, upgrades and account cancellations.

I think this is actually pretty important.

While a seemingly superfluous feature – if they wanted to they could find out this information by wading into the main interface of the software – because they don’t need to jump through hoops they actually will. Users are busy people, and – unless the data is critical to their day-to-day work – simply won’t bother checking this kind of information regularly enough to make it useful.

However, as soon as you make it easy to view you unlock all this information and make it useful, and quite often this information is really useful. Certainly, the idea of being able to at a glance view the current state of how your products are selling, and easily see trends (‘oh, lots of people are upgrading right now – I wonder why?’), is very compelling.

This kind of ‘ambient information’ flow could be applied to all sorts of systems. For example, being slightly stats obsessive I spend far too much time looking at the logs page for this blog, which in reality achieves a similar goal as the 37signals updates feed in that I can get insight into how often people are coming to the site, where they are coming from and what they’re reading. However, this could be easily improved by showing inline comments if people post them, and colour coding things like referrers, searches and the like.

I think the more easy access statistics you can put in front of people, the better. Most systems collect this data (or could, easily) but frequently present it in a way that’s just not going to get used. A query based interface (‘show me all the cancellations in the last 5 days’) is a must as a way of delving deeper into the information, but an ambient information stream is a far more effective way of turning that information into useful data.