The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.)

When you talk about “watching a video,” you’re probably talking about a combination of one video stream, one audio stream, and possibly some subtitles or captions. But you probably don’t have two different files; you just have “the video.” Maybe it’s an AVI file, or an MP4 file. These are just container formats, like a ZIP file that contains multiple kinds of files within it. The container format defines how to store the video and audio streams in a single file (and subtitles too, if any).

When you “watch a video,” your video player is doing several things at once:

1. Interpreting the container format to find out which video and audio tracks are available, and how they are stored within the file so that it can find the data it needs to decode next
2. Decoding the video stream and displaying a series of images on the screen
3. Decoding the audio stream and sending the sound to your speakers
4. Possibly decoding the subtitle stream as well, and showing and hiding phrases at the appropriate times while playing the video

A video codec is an algorithm by which a video stream is encoded, i.e. it specifies how to do #2 above. Your video player decodes the video stream according to the video codec, then displays a series of images, or “frames,” on the screen. Most modern video codecs use all sorts of tricks to minimize the amount of information required to display one frame after the next. For example, instead of storing each individual frame (like a screenshot), they will only store the differences between frames. Most videos don’t actually change all that much from one frame to the next, so this allows for high compression rates, which results in smaller file sizes. (There are many, many other complicated tricks too, which I’ll dive into in a future article.)

There are lossy and lossless video codecs; today’s article will only deal with lossy codecs. A lossy video codec means that information is being irretrievably lost during encoding. Like copying an audio cassette tape, you’re losing information about the source video, and degrading the quality, every time you encode. Instead of the “hiss” of an audio cassette, a re-re-re-encoded video may look blocky, especially during scenes with a lot of motion. (Actually, this can happen even if you encode straight from the original source, if you choose a poor video codec or pass it the wrong set of parameters.) On the bright side, lossy video codecs can offer amazing compression rates, and many offer ways to “cheat” and smooth over that blockiness during playback, to make the loss less noticeable to the human eye.

There are tons of video codecs. Today I’ll discuss five modern lossy video codecs: MPEG-4 ASP, H.264, VC-1, Theora, and Dirac.

MPEG-4 ASP

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile.” MPEG-4 ASP was developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2001. You may have heard of DivX, Xvid, or 3ivx; these are all competing implementations of the MPEG-4 ASP standard. Xvid is open source; DivX and 3ivx are closed source. The company behind DivX has had some mainstream success in branding “DivX” as synonymous with “MPEG-4 ASP.” For example, this “DivX-certified” DVD player can actually play most MPEG-4 ASP videos in an AVI container, even if they were created with a competing encoder. (To confuse things even further, the company behind DivX has now created their own container format.)

MPEG-4 ASP is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. MPEG-4 ASP video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including AVI, MP4, and MKV.

H.264

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 part 10,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 AVC,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding.” H.264 was also developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2003. It aims to provide a single codec for low-bandwidth, low-CPU devices (cell phones); high-bandwidth, high-CPU devices (modern desktop computers); and everything in between. To accomplish this, the H.264 standard is split into “profiles,” which each define a set of optional features that trade complexity for file size. Higher profiles use more optional features, offer better visual quality at smaller file sizes, take longer to encode, and require more CPU power to decode in real-time.

To give you a rough idea of the range of profiles, Apple’s iPhone supports Baseline profile, the AppleTV set-top box supports Baseline and Main profiles, and Adobe Flash on a desktop PC supports Baseline, Main, and High profiles. YouTube (owned by Google, my employer) now uses H.264 to encode high-definition videos, playable through Adobe Flash; YouTube also provides H.264-encoded video to mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Also, H.264 is one of the video codecs mandated by the Blu-Ray specification; Blu-Ray discs that use it generally use the High profile.

Most non-PC devices that play H.264 video (including iPhones and standalone Blu-Ray players) actually do the decoding on a dedicated chip, since their main CPUs are nowhere near powerful enough to decode the video in real-time. Recent high-end desktop graphics cards also support decoding H.264 in hardware. There are a number of competing H.264 encoders, including the open source x264 library. The H.264 standard is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. H.264 video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including MP4 (used primarily by Apple’s iTunes Store) and MKV (used primarily by video pirates).

VC-1

VC-1 evolved from Microsoft’s WMV9 codec and was standardized in 2006. It is primarily used and promoted by Microsoft for high-definition video, although, like H.264, it has a range of profiles to trade complexity for file size. Also like H.264, it is mandated by the Blu-Ray specification, and all Blu-Ray players are required to be able to decode it. The VC-1 codec is patent-encumbered, with licensing brokered through the MPEG LA group.

Wikipedia has a brief technical comparison of VC-1 and H.264; Microsoft has their own comparison; Multimedia.cx has a pretty Venn diagram outlining the similarities and differences. Multimedia.cx also discusses the technical features of VC-1. I also found this history of VC-1 and H.264 to be interesting (as well as this rebuttal).

VC-1 is designed to be container-independent, although it is most often embedded in an ASF container. An open source decoder for VC-1 video was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, and the resulting code was added to the multi-faceted ffmpeg library.

Theora

Theora evolved from the VP3 codec and has subsequently been developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. Theora is a royalty-free codec and is not encumbered by any known patents other than the original VP3 patents, which have been irrevocably licensed royalty-free. Although the standard has been “frozen” since 2004, the Theora project (which includes an open source reference encoder and decoder) only hit 1.0 in November 2008.

Theora video can be embedded in any container format, although it is most often seen in an Ogg container. All major Linux distributions support Theora out-of-the-box, and Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will include native support for Theora video in an Ogg container. And by “native”, I mean “available on all platforms without platform-specific plugins.” You can also play Theora video on Windows or on Mac OS X after installing Xiph.org’s open source decoder software.

The reference encoder included in Theora 1.0 is widely criticized for being slow and poor quality, but Theora 1.1 will include a new encoder that takes better advantage of Theora’s features, while staying backward-compatible with current decoders. (Info: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, source code.)

Dirac

Dirac was developed by the BBC to provide a royalty-free alternative to H.264 and VC-1 that the BBC could use to stream high-definition television content in Great Britain. Like H.264, Dirac aims to provide a single codec for the full spectrum of very low- and very high-bandwidth streaming. Dirac is not encumbered by any known patents, and there are two open source implementations, dirac-research (the BBC’s reference implementation) and Schroedinger (optimized for speed).

The Dirac standard was only finalized in 2008, so there is very little mainstream use yet, although the BBC did use it internally during the 2008 Olympics. Dirac-encoded video tracks can be embedded in several popular container formats, including MP4, Ogg, MKV, and AVI. VLC 0.9.2 (released in September 2008) can play Dirac-encoded video within an Ogg or MP4 container.

And on and on…
Of course, this is only scratching the surface of all the available video codecs. Video encoding goes way back, but my focus in this series is on the present and near-future, not the past. If you like, you can read about MPEG-2 (used in DVDs), MPEG-1 (used in Video CDs), older versions of Microsoft’s WMV family, Sorenson, Indeo, and Cinepak.

The decision to utilise a sub-domain, sub-directory or even a microsite is simply an architectural decision, but one that is often compounded with a marketing decision. In general, sub-directories are used to describe what individual pages are about while sub-domains and microsites are used to describe what an entire site is about.

When to use sub-directories

• Sub-directories are useful for organising content into meaningful groupings with descriptive URLs. If you have a meaningful taxonomy, then sub-directories are a good way to make your URLs more search friendly.
• For relatively small websites, i.e. not the BBCs and CNNs of this world, keeping your content in one place will help your website build trust and authority. The more trust and authority a website is able to garner with the search engines, the easier it becomes to rank new and related content.
• For the less technically savvy, sub-directories are easier to manage than sub-domains since they are generally created as part of the website’s page hierarchy. Furthermore, many CMSs don’t support the ability to publish across different domains out-of-the-box.
• Google Webmasters tools allow you to set basic geo-location preferences to sub-directories. The idea is to create new pseudo-website listings that also include sub-directories. For example, the www.domain.com listing could have www.domain.com/uk for the UK, www.domain.com/es for Spain and so on for each geographic location.

When to use sub-domains

• Sub-domains are useful for organising content that is otherwise unrelated. Take Google for example, they have a news product at news.google.com, a maps product at maps.google.com and a email product at mail.google.com. Since they are fundamentally different from each other and Google’s main search product, they aren’t held under the same domain.
• Sub-domains allow you to target regional markets more effectively. Sub domains are easier to market to specific geographical regions. For instance you can assign an IP address to a sub-domain and set a geographical preference in Google’s Webmaster tools for each sub-domain (sub-directories can have their geo-preference set but can’t be assigned an IP in another country, which might also be a signal of geo-location). For example, the www.domain.com listing could have uk.domain.com for the UK, es.domain.com for Spain and so on for each geographic location.
• If you already have a well established domain and want to expand out into other areas not completely related to your main website’s activities then a sub-domain may well be a good option. At the same time, people associate the sub-domain with your main domain’s brand, which means it can be easy to build up momentum on a vertical related to your main site. This is what the web giants Google and Yahoo, Sky and the BBC do successfully, but smaller websites can do the same. You often see this when the third-party functionality is “plugged into” an existing site, such as a payment gateway, events and job boards.

When to use microsites

Like sub-domains, microsites have an important position in the overall debate.

• If you have a new product or service that you potentially want to sell off or brand completely differently from your main business offering, a microsite makes a lot of sense. Microsites are really just a stripped down website, but as the product or service develops, so will the website and associated brand and it will take on trust and authority of its own.
• Microsites offer the ability to completely separate your main brand from the new product, service or promotion. This is useful if you’re pushing a content piece that has little to no association with your site and you don’t want the potential branding confusion or commercial association to hinder link and user growth.
• Microsites can be powerful if you have an exact match domain name for a particular keyword you’re targeting. Google’s preference for and ranking exact-match domains is a very powerful tool to use for SEO.

But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed‘s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

But is it right for an all-boys choir and orchaestra to be performing Carmina Burana?

Why the hesitance you may ask. Well read on…

The BBCs h2g2 has a great write up on Carmina Burana, which begins:

It is not often that the little old ladies of the choral society scream since Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me!, or when they are in a more cheerful mood, My virginity makes me frisky, my simplicity holds me back. Oh, Oh, Oh, I am completely coming to life. All this while the men strain their dinner jackets singing a bawdy drinking song. However, this is Carmina Burana, one of the most popular works for choir and orchestra of the 20th Century.

But Carmina Burana is not all dramatic chanting – there is plenty of lyrical and gentle playing and singing, merry dances and of course the aforementioned drink and sex. The work lasts about an hour in performance and requires baritone, tenor and soprano solo singers as well as a boys’ chorus, an adult chorus and a massive orchestra.

UK residents will be familiar with the opening and closing music of Carmina Burana. The ‘O Fortuna’ chorus with its dramatic chanting against orchestral backing was used for many years in television advertising for a well-known brand of aftershave lotion (Old Spice). And, since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, there is more than a hint of the same chorus in the sound track of the film The Fellowship of the Ring, particularly to accompany the Black Riders.

You can read more about Carmina Burana on the BBC website.

About h2g2

h2g2 is an unconventional guide to life, the universe and everything, an encyclopaedic project where entries are written by people from all over the world. h2g2 was launched in April 1999, and the BBC took over the running of the site in February 2001 as part of our drive to develop new and innovative online services.

The Guide is written by visitors to the website and already it has thousands of entries on all sorts of subjects. The result is a living, breathing guide that’s constantly being updated and revised, driven forward by the very people who use it.

So what is the big deal? The Adobe marketing team state that:

The Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

What AIR applications should you check out?

What is intriguing is that all the tools I have chosen are generally useful tools for the developer or designer, with the exception of twhirl, which is a social-interaction tool. I’m looking forward to when other, less developer-centric tools become freely available. AgileAgenda has taken the lead with this respect, albeit not freely available, as has eBay desktop, but I would like to see examples from the BBC in the form of a desktop BBC iPlayer or maybe a Flickr image browser, del.icio.us bookmark reader, RSS aggregator and a Picnik image editor.

Analytics Reporting Suite

The Analytics Reporting Suite, by Nicolas Lierman, brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all the features of Analytics.

For website owners this is a must-have application. Like the twhirl AIR application below, it is a fantastic example of what can be achieved with Flex and AIR. Measuring visitor trends and traffic are essential tasks to managing and improving a websites performance. The Analytics Reporting Suite allows you to configure multiple Google’s Analytics accounts and access the web-based suite’s plethora of features via a desktop application. The application displays integrated graphs and animations via a tabbed interface, which allows you switch between a number of reports. These reports can then be saved as a PDF, Excel or XMLdocument, or printed.

You can download and install the application from the About Nico website.

twhirl twitter Client

twhirl, by Marco Kaiser, is probably the most popular desktop client for the twitter micro-blogging service. Most of the features available on the twitter website are accessible through twhirl, plus, a lot of usability enhancements have been added to make it easier to manage multiple accounts. This is great for those who want to separate business and personal accounts they may have.

The twhirl application is a great example of how AIR can bring web applications to the desktop; it can dock to the system tray, display message alerts and you can configure the applications opacity when not focused (great if you like Mac and Vista-styled themes). The application allows you to search twitter users, view their timelines, add friends, view followers, delete tweets and much much more. Twhirl automatically fetches your friends’ status updates, direct messages and replies, whilst also colour coding different types of messages and alerting you to messages both audibly and visually.

The twhirl application is skinnable and comes with several built in skins with which you can customise the application. All-in-all twhirl is not only one of the best twitter clients, but AIR applications.

You can download and install the application from the twhirl website.

Kuler Desktop

Adobe kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe Creative Suite software. Built using Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about colour: colour for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing. Kuler is clearly targeted at the designer, but anyone interested in colour will benefit from its use.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe Labs website.

WebKut

WebKut is a web screenshot tool that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you with 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection. This little application proves particularly handy for those presentations or projects that need great visuals from the web.

You can download and install the application from the WebKut website.

RichFLV

RichFLV, by Benjamin Dobler, lets you edit FLV files. The key features include reading FLV metadata, read and edit cuepoints, cut FLV files, convert the sound from an FLV to MP3 format, convert an FLV to an SWF … and much more.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe AIR Marketplace website.

SearchCoders Dashboard

This Flex-based chat widget is designed with programmers in mind. The code input feature allows developers to chat about code without disrupting the conversation.

You can download and install the application from the SearchCoders website.

Pownce

Much like twhirl in look, feel and ease-of-use, but with a slant towards productivity rather than micro-blogging, Pownce is a way to keep in touch and share things with your friends or colleagues. You can send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients. This is a great collaboration tool and was one of the first services to really embrace AIR as an application architecture, which could realise their service as a desktop client. Everything that is available via the Pownce website is also available via the client application, except and possibly importantly, the ability for the user to amend their account settings and add friends to your network; this still has to be done via the website.

For a small annual amount, Pownce offers a paid-for service which will eliminate adverts from your profile and allow you to send huge file sizes (100MB) and customise the theme of your Pownce.

Pownce also offers Drupal integration and a mobile application, which works with the iPhone, BlackBerries and many more ‘internet-ready’ mobile devices.

You can download and install the application from the Pownce website.

Richard Titus, the Acting Head of User Experience at the BBC was a key driver of the project.

From a conceptual point of view, the widgetisation adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking.

Titus identifies the key features of the new homepage as being:

• Simple, clean and beautiful, the final design, … visually striking yet unpretentious.
• Personalization: you can choose the content that interests you by adding and removing the content boxes via the “Customise Your Homepage” tab.
• Localization: Users can now set their own location, enabling them to access local sites, weather, news, radio and TV schedules without the hassle often associated with user journeys to local content.
• Simplicity: the customization is intuitive and includes an interactive demo and tips to guide users through the process. It is also unobtrusive if the user has no desire to customize their page their experience won’t be compromised.
• Search: The site is much easier to read and scan at a glance. At the top of the page there’s a search function (now reduced from two search boxes to one), and at the bottom a full directory of all BBC sites and a link to the A-Z, allowing users to quickly find what they’re looking for.
• Nostalgia: the new homepage also manages to incorporate eccentricity alongside innovation.

Aesthetically bold and bright.

Aesthetically, the new homepage looks nice. It’s big, bold and bright – a far cry from the old days when BBC sites had text almost too small to read and a fixed-width design optimised for tiny monitors. But at the same time it appears far too clunky! I’d prefer something that would look a little more elegant and understated. Something that doesn’t appeal to The Facebook Generation, who are less likely to read the BBC pages at lunchtime, than update their Facebook, Bebo or Twitter profile during that ‘valuable’ hour. This begs the question, does the BBC know who their core audience is?

Confusing interactions.

The homepage makes great use of AJAX, but at the same time, there are a number of confusing interactions going on. For instance, the ‘Edit’ button next to each area of customisable content seems like the wrong label text. I’m not editing the news, the weather or blogs – I’m selecting which news categories I want to see, where I am and which blogs I want to read. These types of button ought to be contextual rather than generic. Edit is simply too vague.

Also, what’s the idea behind those plus and minus buttons for news? Strange idea. Add or remove articles from the displayed list? Why would you want to remove them from view sequentially? If the idea was to allow the user to asynchronously update a short list of available headlines, then why not move back/forwards in blocks of five? Plus and minus are often used as metaphors for creation/deletion in software, so the usage doesn’t seem right.

Personalisation vs Simplicity … an uneasy relationship

The ability to personalise a website is, in general, a good thing. Google has done it with their iGoogle, Yahoo! with My Yahoo and Microsoft with Windows Live. But I think the balance here is gone too far towards design and borrowing from succesful Web 2.0 sites. The BBC website has always been an impressive destination for (relatively) impartial news and current affairs throughout the world, not a Web Portal. Or is this the point? Does the BBC want to become a destination for all your information needs and compete with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo?

The BBC should consider that 14-25 year old users, what I term The Facebook Generation, will require far greater scope for adding their individuality than is currently available. The social networking generation are page-savvy. They want control of their interface to information, their screen is their window on the world and I don’t think that you have gone far enough in divesting control of the display of that information to the user.

But for those who aren’t part of The Facebook Generation, the people who care about getting to the content fast and with little fuss, is the ability to personalise the homepage worthwhile or even simple? I’m not so sure.

Who needs a clock?

Finally, the clock and date. What an important waste of webpage ‘real estate’, even though in the BBC‘s case I understand it was a throwback to the old clock that preceded individual TV programmes. If you’ve got a modern computer capable of displaying the clock with the Flash plugin, then you’ll almost certainly have the date and time visible to you anyway. It’s needlessly superfluous on a website.

Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge

Desire lines are those well-worn ribbons of dirt that you see cutting across a patch of grass, field or park, often with nearby pavements, particularly those that offer a less direct route, ignored. In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as trampled down paths in the snow. These paths are never perfectly straight but instead, they meander like a river this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn’t uniform or linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward. Desire Lines show that it is human to choose, but it is also human to choose what other people have chosen before. Be it for establishing a pattern, be it for convenience, or be it for not reinventing the wheel. In this way the Desire Lines become well-trodden and pseudo-permanent routes to a particular destination.

Desire Lines are the ultimate unbiased expression of natural human purpose

The term ‘Desire Lines’ originates from the field of urban planning in the early 20th Century.

An optimal way to design pathways in accordance to natural behaviour is not to design them at all

Extending the concept to websites

Broadening the concept of Desire Lines, it is also possible to see other impressions of human desire in websites, many of which can provide a commercial advantage to the particular website in question.

The web phenomenon is simply another way people find entertainment, communicate and interact. Whether the purpose of using the web is for enjoyment or employment, Desire Lines are are a such perfect expression of natural human intention that they become the utlimate design pattern for building successful and intuitive websites. It is easy to envisage users like an army of ants moving in single file towards their goal, not following set paths, but bypassing the planned route directly towards the news article, the video, indeed any product being offered by the website concerned.

Instead of websites providing classic access points via menus and taxonomies, they can employ different access points based upon user preferences and previous browsing history. This is heavily dependent upon capturing user’s details via a cookie or a login system, like at Amazon, but the benefits to the user can be far more rewarding.

So who is doing this?

Understanding the demographics of your users and your site usage is key to Desire Lines. The BBC website is a great example whereby search statics are monitored frequently. They adapt their web user interface and site structure based upon what people are typing into their search box thus making it easier for subsequent users to view the more relevant or interesting stories of the day.

Amazon makes Desire Lines more explicit and beneficial to their users through Listmania, recommendations, Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought, What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?, Better Together, Recently Viewed Items, Wish Lists etc. In essence, Amazon does not provide a single standard way of finding an item, but relates each item together through a myriad of historic information from its user community. The user therefore has the option to search for an item, use the catagories, or click on links and begin their own desired user journey, which can be uniquely distinct from other users journeys or a mirror of those journeys.

Current TV takes the concept even further by showing content that is purely based upon what users want, or what they term as viewer-created content. Current slice the schedule into short segments into “pods” — each just a few minutes long. These pods profile interesting people on the rise, intelligence on trends as they spring up around us, and international news from new perspectives. Anyone who wants to contribute can upload a video. Then, everyone in the Current online community helps decide what should be on TV. You can join in at either stage — watch & vote or make video.

Limitations to Desire Lines

A key limitation, or possibly a challenge, to the successful adoption of Desire Lines concerns advertising revenues. For a user it is beneficial to be able to reached the desired destination as quickly and efficiently as possible, but for a website’s advertising revenue it certainly is not. To be simplistic and possibly cynical, many sites don’t want users to have an overly efficient experience as this limits page views and page impressions. The challenge, therefore, is to retain users on the website and provide them more relevant information and targeted advertising.

There are also implications on what is considered more relevant and what is not. The BBC to some extent decides based upon user searches, but this serves also to hide potentially captivating an important stories. One user’s preference isn’t necessarily the next’s, therefore creating an information bias. This may be even more problematic with our over-reliance on Google for finding information. The Google algorithms essentially decide what we find even though we are told that the sites listed are based upon relevance and popularity.

Finally, you can’t pave every desire line. To do so would end in a playing field not covered in lush green grass with a few tracks intersecting the green, but a concrete mess.