A bucketing visionary of old. Credit: Percolate Galactic.

What is Bucket Studio?

Welcome to where a long run of independent client work in content, product and experience has taken me in 2017.

Friends, colleagues + those maybe soon to become such—I wanted to jot down some opening thoughts to unpack the move I’m making this year to evolve my work practice through this new initiative I call Bucket.

Thanks to all who’ve expressed enthusiasm or guided me — through their conversation, expertise or client partnership — to this fun and exciting spot.

In buckets, we build. My working thesis is simple. Better buckets create better personalized products and experiences.

Where am I?

You’ve found Bucket Studio, the services side of Bucket. Occasionally I’ll post here, though mostly I expect that to be excerpts from the newsletter or about Bucket’s eventual service offering.

What’s Bucket?

Bucket is an initiative to provide products, tools, perspective and community on the unfolding drive, alive in many organizations today, toward personalization. (Take a look at what’s intended for the wider Bucket effort.)

Who are you?

Probably the best place to get a précis on me. Or the LinkedIn bio.

What’s with the “bucket” metaphor overkill?

Bucketing is slang for the basic business of classification in information sciences: organizing stuff. To every item, a home or “bucket.” More on that below.

Still here?

Great. Here’s a brief explainer on what I’m up to.

Or here’s the unabridged YouTube clip, below.

So I had this epiphany while traveling for a client. Beachside in sunny Santa Monica, yet I’m nerding out in a hotel room.

Say more. What’s the thesis here?

This effort takes as its central premise 3 observations, in a pattern that appears to be increasingly commonplace today:

1. Bucketing is an apt descriptor for this singlemost essential labor (by machines and humans alike) to make personalization, or recommender systems, or our early-AI landscape, satisfy its users: information must be organized in effective, efficient and inventive ways.
2. Where these experiences suffer or don’t make the grade—I’ll comfortably plead as both gleeful digital product Darwinist and “guy with the hammer” here—I see a rote or flimsy version of this upstream classification work. In better buckets, better bots — but maybe that’s not readily clear to all of us just yet. You’ve already heard a variation on this claim before, even if we don’t have consensus in naming information design as the specific culprit: today’s novelty bot, so it goes, is only a taste of the more savvy, capable, knowledgable conversational interfaces to come. (Hint: Machine learning is not a silver bullet in 2017.) To use another generalization, recommenders need to create value, or be retired. Still, the stakes for product folks are incredibly high and rising, as such dynamic or tailored experiences become more mainstream, feature-level expectations: we bolt them on and implement without an afterthought. I’ve seen this too many times. Yet they are as core to our experiences as the content they handle.
3. Why should personalized products suffer this way? Right now it can seem like many of us are just getting our bearings in what makes a personalized UX work well. I think the real inhibition is something darker and more human. It takes uncommon powers of analysis and product leadership to wrestle with user experience debt. Too often (in my experience), it won’t even be noticed, let alone acknowledged and identified as such. Attentive design and information sciences professionals have a clear role in winning the day here. And yet, to their detriment (sweeping generalization ahead), product teams are operating at increasing disciplinary distances from the lessons of information architecture. As such, an opportunity is at hand.

This newsletter is the best way to keep tabs on the progress of this effort.

So what?

In other words, bucketing is prosaic work, but also a prerequisite to effectively designing information spaces, and fitting the data, to enable sophisticated products, features and experiences.

Over my career I’ve come to believe better bucketing is the only way we’ll effectively confront the big domain issues out there today, like effective content discovery in the face of information overload and content oversupply. As such, Bucket is an exciting step forward to a career spent consulting in the business of content.

More, please.

If you’re still curious about Bucket, the facets of this effort, its origin and rationale, or why I’m so stuck on the role of recommenders and personalization in the future of content, I share a detailed video backgrounder on the main site.

If you’ve read this far, chances are you oughta be a part of this thing.

If there isn’t a community of practice here, there should be. I’m looking forward to sharing much more down the road—but I’m awfully keen to hear from you, too.

A huge part of what’s fresh and exciting about this effort is the number of smart folks who’ve inspired me in recent years. Soon enough you’ll be hearing from some of those voices, too, so consider sticking around.

Stay connected.

Do keep in touch is via the newsletter, Bucket List.

Thanks for giving me a few minutes of your day. I quite hope to hear from you and return the favor sometime soon!