Third Voice was a ’99 era company which made a tool that enabled users to add annotations to web pages, visible only to other Third Voice users. Realizing that this was fundamentally an online community tool, they had started to develop a system for more robust and general online forums, but had difficulty developing it because of conceptual flaws in the interface requirements they had written. They asked Cooper to do a just a few days' consulting on their interface design, to clarify and improve it.
The solution
Looking at their clumsy execution of a generic forum tool, I recommended that they play to their unique value: the relationship between the discussion forum and the existing pages on the web. I designed an application which tiled the screen between the browser and the Third Voice application, linking the discussion thread with the web page.
In the time since I first posted this portfolio, Google released — and then abandoned — their SideWiki mechanism, which has some similarities to this design.
What's coolEach discussion thread was associated with one or more web pages, and each web page was associated with one or more discussion threads. Participants could easily switch to a different page for the same thread or a different thread for the same page, creating a unique “two dimensional navigation” on top of the navigational elements of the web itself.
