Themepark

Rant: The Kindle, Part 2, Wet matches

Charles — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:38:56 GMT

Yes, the industrial design is strange. But that is actually the smallest part of the business play. What Amazon is really betting on is the revenue model of the content. This attempts to piggyback on the Ipod model, but with some deeply flawed differences.

The Ipod built a community through it’s sensitivity to the excesses of peer to peer copyright abuse. Itunes software allows you to both buy music from the music industry and rip your own off your existing cd’s. Unlike any media before it, the user does not need to replace their media. In the context of the music industry in 2001 this was a move that recognized the effect of internet community values in an unprecedented way. We should note that Itunes store sales have been disappointing to Apple and crushing to the music industry, so this is hardly a perfect solution. However, it has created a robust model for Ipod sales and won the acceptance of most users. This is a significant achievement in the face of free competition.

And it creates enough funding to improve the software and refine the business model, so it is self funding to Apple while it supports the now stratospheric [over 110 million] sales of the hardware. Fanatical open source cultists gripe that that it is a closed system, but the Ipod also supports playing non-proprietary mp3 music as well as Apple’s sonically advanced ACC format. The 12 to 26 year olds driving the bulk of these sales could care less what a bunch of wizened old geeks have to say.

The Kindle sets it’s standard by the existing competition - the Sony E-reader. The E-reader charges $14.99 for a book while the same text is $9.99 from Amazon. This seems like an obvious idea, except that nobody bought E-readers so the comparison is an academic business case. The E-reader also supports uploads, so you can go here [insert manybooks link] and get a fairly extensive selection for free.

Amazon requires that you purchase almost every piece of content that you put on it, or pay a ten cent tax every time you email something to it, which must happen through Amazon for word, rtf or excel documents you might want to read. The most egregious omission is the lack of ability to view a pdf. I suspect either an inability to negotiate a royalty deal with Adobe or too many books exist in pdf form already, thus eating into their proprietary scheme. The latter seems more likely than the former, but whatever, this is goofy.

What Amazon fails to recognize is the shift in values on the internet. Right or wrong, people assume that the content is free, and savvy content sellers have found ways to mix free with cheap to play to those expectations. Calibrating their business model to an irrelevant standard is unlikely to be successful.

A couple of notes...
Extensive comparison of Ipod managers. Most people see the Ipod & Itunes as a proprietary platform combination, but it can be seen as a hard drive with nice controls as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers

Here is a great discussion of NBC’s issues with Itunes
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/29/nbc-exec-slams-itunes-revenues-business-model/

Rant: The Kindle: Lacking spark

Charles — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:15:03 GMT

Some smart guy shows up at the office where I was working last week with one of these things. Now this is primarily a product design shop so these guys talking about a Kindle is a bit like artists talk about public sculpture. Not a very giving crowd, but precise.

We won’t dwell on the odd form of the thing, which tends to induce a slight list to one side. For some unknown reason the body is a wedge, as if referring to the emphasis of a spine. But not a spine of a book, as these lead to parallel surfaces. More like a coil binder that all the pages fell out of. The reference has left the building.

What is especially strange about the Kindle are the controls. The page turning buttons are tall vertical tabs that dominate both sides, which demand you use both hands. But you cannot pick it up without unintentionally turning a page. To quote Phillipe Stark from a video taken at a recent conference “Immediately when you take it [he picks it up with his left hand and grips it] and you push the button here. Oh shit! I do that [unintentionally turning the page, he passes it to his right hand] and you make the same mistake on the right.”

Here is the clip & it is pretty scathing: gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/12/14/video-philippe-starc.html

The product designers looked at the keyboard and remarked “Well, it must be intentional” Inferring that there is no way it could have been a casting error. So is it meant for thumb operation or ten finger typing? It has a full qwerty keyboard, but it radiuses away from your thumbs like a typesetter who got sleepy. This is novel in a way that even Beatrice Ward would have mercilessly derided - perhaps as “stunt industrial design”.

The conflicts are with the controls and the shape. It assumes that you are holding it, but has no resting place for your thumbs, save for the stunt keyboard. Except that to reach the keys, you would have to have hands the size of Andre the Giant. So you set it down on a table, lean to the right, and type with both hands on what is now the stupidest keyboard in the world.

The problem is the same as a Peter Opsvik’s 1979 Balans kneeling chair. It would be a great idea if we only sat one way. But we are actually very dynamic when we sit and the Balans chair forces you into single position. Opsvik was quick to recognize these issues & by the late eighties had designed chairs that incorporated more sitting positions than anything else on the market [Oposit Balans]. This gives me hope.

The Kindle’s controls, in fact, are not even as good as Opsvik’s initial effort which, however flawed, became iconic. Supporting one mode of use well would be an improvement. The Kindle infers modes of use of which few are possible & none comfortable.

As Phillipe Stark & one of the product designers pointed out, you want to touch the screen to turn the page. The fundamental problem stems from the limitations of the e-screen. The matte surface and high resolution comes at the price of touch. Unfortunately, in the world of early adopters, the bar jumped up to the height of an Ipod last year. Physical controls are now archaic, especially on a device that shouldn’t have them in the first place. The final impulse is to quietly set it down or put it safely in a drawer.

Use Cases, Scenarios & User Stories: Decoding the differences. Part 1

Charles — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:22:00 GMT

User Experience Designers [UxD], Business Analysts [B/A] and Agile developers to often find themselves misunderstanding each other while talking about very similar ideas. These forms of recording baseline user needs have much in common so we will take a stab at sorting them out. This will be necessarily concise as a full study of these issues could fill multiple thesis books. You would be very bored.

Use cases
Use cases gained popularity as a development tool through the Rational Rose project at the corporation of the same name, led by James Rumbaugh, Grady Booch & Ivar Jacobson. Each brought their own methodology to the corporation and then attempted to reconcile them into the so-called Unified Method in 1996/97. The semantic aspect of the notation Unified Modeling Language [UML] are Use Cases, a precise description of a single user action.

In the classic Cox/Aurum/Jeffery words which are cited so often as dominate definition: “A use case is a specific way of using a system using some part of functionality.” This is a bit cold as a description and it exposes some of the issues with writing them; well formed use cases need to be just specific enough; too detailed and you end with an ocean of them, too general and the developers don’t know what to build. The reality is that the generalizations allow the developers to synthesize a contextually appropriate solution.

Alistair Cockburn has a very usable explication of how to write a use case here. But these are the main parts and any User Experience Designer will see many linguistic overlaps with our notion of a scenario - they are named as a sub component of his template. Perhaps the best comment he makes is to construct it in several passes, which invites the Agile notion of iteration:

Description

Use Case: Number and verb phrase

Goal in Context: Short paragraph

Scope: & Level: Which part of which system are we working with?

Primary Actor: This would be primary persona in UxD

Priority:

Frequency:

Trigger:

Narrative

Main Success Scenario - Sunny Day Path

Context

Extensions

Goals

Performance Target:
Business Goal
System Goal

Error paths

Due date

There are definite pros & cons to using Use Cases. Personally I find them a very powerful starting point for describing a project if they are written as concisely as possible. Why? Because the primary flaw of Use Cases is one that you discover. They tend to multiply in complexity and create a maintenance nightmare. Which is precisely the Agile XP argument against them. And why Rational Rose uses a database to flag the effects of changing any case.

Looking at the description above, most I/A’s can do a taskflow in about 15 minutes. A taskflow which respects the other contexts in the application or website, reduces the number of steps and elegantly synthesizes actions in ways that create cumulative knowledge may take a bit longer.

This leads us to the primary UxD tool for planning actions, a scenario. If Use Cases are specific to an action, Scenarios are cognizant of the big picture.

Scenarios
Scenarios have multiple roots and the collision of histories can lead to confusion. They have origins in narrative literature and the human tendency to remember things through using stories. They have been used by market strategists as proxy ethnographic mnemonics. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is written as a scenario of the future, a not unknown storytelling device - Jules Verne comes to mind. Alan Cooper Thomas Erickson & John Carroll, among others have popularized their use in software design in conjunction with personas and this is how we will consider them.

In this light they are broader than Use Cases, and the focus is on the users actions & goals rather than the system or business goals. Typically UxD will only consider the user goals & leave the system functions to a B/A.

Scenarios are aligned with the primary or secondary personas & act as walkthroughs to uncover the requirements of any given set of tasks. One of the advantages of this tool is that it is general in use, allowing the designer to nudge it into a complex context. The rough boundaries also facilitate synthesis through iteration by not eliminating the discover of solutions. These are not trivial advantages.

Here is a typical if clearly fictional one:
1] Stephanie arrives at a west end station at about 8:20, parks in the smallest snowbank & walks through 3 inches of fresh powder to get to the door. Once inside the station, she turns up the heat & pulls out her laptop.
2] She fires up the Zippidy Connecto software and opens the group for the station she will be working on. She then opens the repository pane. Using standard windows navigational metaphors, she locates the current corporate template for the new relay.
3] She drags the template from the repository directly into her workspace. She is prompted to enter device specific information.
4] Stephanie selects the new device , shift clicks the Nimbus 3000 & clicks the data line connection. The two devices are connected.
5] The points that get passed to the Nimbus 3000 are all standard and set in the corporate IED template. She is done with the relay.
6] Stephanie saves the revised configuration and the configuration parameters have now been added to the Nimbus 3000 client in her station diagram. At this point she’s smiling as to how easy this was. She cleans the snow off of her car and heads back to the office.

From the basic story arc we extrapolate system functionality, rather than trying to determine a list of features based on the teams comfort level & kludging in contextual alignment. The focus is on aligning the experience with the task, which is obviously a user centric method.

In Part 2 we will look at User stories & see if we can find the similarities & differences between these three methodological baselines.

Wanted: Catalogs Dead or Alive

Charles — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:23:32 GMT

I have had a few interesting conversations with people over that last few months, and some interesting ideas happened because of them. Just thought I would share them because I would love to see them happen and am not in a spot where they apply right now. I will relate another one next week.

I was talking to a major Chicago retailer north of here on February 6 who has a truly elegant catalog site. A site which holds down about a fifth of their business. Which adds up to a couple of ducats. Assets are largely assembled in other departments, so the team is miniscule that produces this site. It is a very sophisticated site, most of the functionality of Targets’ very savvy site, but significantly better typography and use of space.

And that is great, it is a fine example of it’s kind, but the whole thing is basically pre-millennial. Lands End did this in 1997, minus a history of things browsed. So pretty in a cold dead way.

So I said what if... What if you could get people involved with the site? What if they could contribute to it in some way that would build a small bit of brand commitment? They don’t work for you; it has to be just above trivial to leave some record of your presence. If you ask them to write an operetta to your product you will get little response.

But this is a product based play. The artifacts are objects and this makes things much easier. What if users of the site and buyers of their products could upload pictures with a short caption of the objects in their homes. It is personal, it invests them, it shows individuality. Nuff said.

Selling with community feedback: baby carriers, Harley-Davidson & web 2.0

Charles — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:59:47 GMT

I heard an interesting story today that illustrates how some companies are failing to understand building community around their brand. This story was about Ergo baby carriers, but the business principles are just as applicable to companies like Harley-Davidson.

The Ergo baby carrier is an evolution of a Baby Bjorn in that it transfers the weight of the baby to your hips from your shoulders, a difference that everyone feels after about a half hour. Now this is not really a new concept, people have been carrying babies around in various slings pieces of cloth and homemade gizmos for, well, a few thousand years at least. Maybe more. The Ergo is pretty well made with clasps in the right places. Clasps that are cheap imitations of your standard Fastex models - certainly of better quality than the even cheaper rip-offs that Maclaren uses on their strollers.

The price point is pretty good, the aesthetics are not seductive. But the idea is right, and the carrier passes the vacuuming-with-baby challenge. Not a trivial hurdle.

However they are a bit challenged in the Brand management department. One of their retailers, Laura Hamilton of The Portable Baby in San Jose, found the aesthetics lacking and started hand dying them to her own colors. This is not so different from a Harley devotee repainting the gas tank. Admittedly probably a milder form of the obsession, but clearly related.

Ms. Hamilton is very savvy: she has a commerce enabled website and a blog which she uses to connect with her customers. Ergo saw that she was offering these modified carriers and immediately threatened a lawsuit and demanded the return of all their product. To a small retailer the threat of a lawsuit is not a minor matter. Profits from these kinds of businesses tend to be pretty modest. But the real issue is the ripple this kind of response has on the brand.

To return to the Harley analogy: people customize Harleys’ because they believe in the product. This is an act of commitment, money & time. Nobody would bother if they didn’t think it was worth it. And while it is a statement that the product may not be perfect, manufacturers’ need to recognize that consumers look to novelty for identification.
And these days we publicize the results if a company shuts that down. Ms Hamilton has the freedom of speech and a platform to launch a critique, which she has done effectively. The effect on the Ergo brand is both bad and out of their control. What could they have done to prevent this?

_ Step one would be to listen to their customers. If people are customizing it, then they should meet that need or celebrate the ingenuity of their retailers.

_ Step two is to realize that the commercial landscape is now a three way street. The company, the customer and an active public forum are all shareholders in whatever enterprise you have on offer. The heavy-handed tactics of legal bullying tend to backfire in this landscape.

Harley recognizes these realities and has incorporated them into their model. It hasn’t always been comfortable with it, but in doing so they have built a brand that has a kind of loyalty that other companies can only dream of. Ergo would do well to grab a page out of their book.

Yahoo! Fire Sale

Charles — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:34:21 GMT

The inimitable Khoi Vinh * just wrote a blog talking about Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo! A few days later, Microsoft has been rebuffed and Rupert Murdoch’s News corp. is being courted. Either way, it means that things are not going as planned down at the plant. Khoi suggests that Design [the D is always capitalized for people like us] could not help Yahoo!. That is not quite right.

It misses the history of the Yahoo! vs. Google wars. When Yahoo started, and established it’s brand, it was a long scroll of hyperlinks that was one of the first up-to-date directories on the internet. At the time - say 1997 - there were few enough sites that the mental model worked at least part of the time, but the great tsunami of sites soon overwhelmed this taxonomy. It quickly became useless as a tool, creating the association that Yahoo! was a stupidly long page of unsorted stuff. Sure, there was a search box all the time, but that was not your first impression when you went there. Search boxes are small, and lists are long. People get stuck on those visual scale things.

Google’s approach was a slap in the face to the whole notion of browsing as a starting point. Their minimalism forces you to create your own taxonomy through your search terms. It is a librarian’s version of Do It Yourself; refreshing after the face-packing psuedo portals of Yahoo! and Excite [remember them?].

After Google had established themselves as the great cleanser of Search, Yahoo! started hiring designers and some very good ones too. A bunch of friends of mine found shelter there during the bust. And in the margins of the company some spectacular work was done that benefits the internet design community still. But nobody beyond the hard core geeks knew it because they never effectively restated their brand.

Yahoo!’s advertising has always been misaligned with the utility of the tool, never exposing how they redefined themselves but always hammering on the same visual & auditory tropes that were irrelevant to their business. They mistook habit for talking about what they were doing. [dot cahlmmmmm!]

Thus we have Khoi’s perception that Design does not help. Not conclusive by any means. Design without brand strategy beyond your insider tribe does not help, that we can make a case for. That this reinforces our essential nature as creatures of habit should be noted. Yahoo could not have missed the rise of Google, but failed to understand why it was happening until it was too late.

Rant: Ikea‘s near miss

Charles — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:34:06 GMT

I was surprised to see Ikea’s most recent site, and not in a good way. Except for the first page, the top half of each index page is a huge movie - which is why it takes so long to load - that tries to cross-sell me. All Marketers seek this holy grail, and the result, should you wait for it, is a clickable image which suggests interaction. The problem is that someone just could not resist putting a billboard along the journey, and it all takes too long to load. This is a great idea on someone’s desktop that gets killed in the real world - it could all work well if it loaded in a third the time.

So the designers however have decided to flash a message at me before allowing the interaction. Perhaps this is some theme that informed the selection of objects for the photograph. Great, but unfortunately I don’t care. If the photo is good, it will describe the idea. If not, no text will cure it. I would guess that most users perceive it as a big ad and click away quickly; before they realize that the surface becomes a clickable portal to more information. Because of this lack of judgement on Ikea’s part, they damage their brand.

Let’s assume a typical scenario. A customer appears looking for the cheapest Billy bookshelf which will hold the books they still keep in boxes from the last time they moved [just a completely random hypothesis].

The brand building approach is to allow the user to find things on the site while offering related options in one area and even very lateral things in another. As well, these sites tend to contain extraordinary numbers of goods so some evidence as to what you looked at recently would be handy. And even better if it you could choose to expand it.

The less appealing approach is to stand in your users way like a barker in a hot dog suit. I have seen more annoying transpositions from other media - most notably when print magazines kludge together a page turning metaphor to shovel the magazine online. The issue is the lack of understanding as to why the user came there.

What motivates the impulse to force these messages down your throat? Certainly any Marketing Exec is going to look at their page views versus buys and want a higher response. The gap between lookers & buyers is vast on the internet, but people viewing this from the POV of a spreadsheet rarely realize the complexity of the psychology involved. Moving someone who is dreaming of stuff they could buy to buying takes either a delicate push or an extremely compelling offer. Both strategies have utility in different contexts. But they share the reality of user impatience. We just don’t want to wait. When I see a progress bar, the words that appear in my head are “Skip Intro”.

As a brand do you want to help your customers or get in their way? People having positive feelings about your Brand is like catching lightning in a bottle; there are many factors that contribute to it and if only a couple are off you can wreck the feeling. In a ‘delicate push’ context, standing in my way waving a flag may not help, or worse, may help your numbers temporarily while eroding brand confidence.

A better idea would be to invite your users to participate in your experience, which allowing them to choose does on the most elementary level. There is an emerging group of tools to do this in a much more sophisticated way; finding the right juncture between risk exposure, interaction & the amount of investment from the user is the challenging balance.
Not to get too geeky, but the best part of the site is actually the HTML & Javascript coding which are beautifully commented and well structured. It is unfortunate that the visible site does not show the same forethought and consideration.

Community rules rule communities: Part 3

Charles — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:11:02 GMT

Who ya gonna call?

On exclusive community sites, like the Well and Facebook, the community polices itself. With AOL chatrooms, Friendster & MySpace, you need a visible police force. As well, the consequences of bad behavior have different ramifications according to the level of investment in the community. A recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article tells the story a young teen in Missouri who committed suicide, apparently because of falling into a false romance set by the Mother of another girl in the neighborhood. Yet more proof that Junior High is stranger than fiction. While I hope this is an extreme case, it shows the emotional dependence that these sites can engender.

But is there any way that the site could have monitored or prevented this without alienating the users it sought to attract? The jury is still out on this, and is currently waffling about going in. The states attorney in St. Louis refused to prosecute citing lack of evidence but Los Angeles County prosecutor is now rumored to be looking into the case. The appalling reality is the lack of repercussions to these kinds of harassment.

One of many issues here is that different mindsets are drawn to each community. In my experience teaching at art schools, the bad kids are stars on MySpace and the somewhat cleaner young adults post to Facebook. However, the basic motivations of communicating with their friends, establishing some cultural reference points in their profiles and making smarmy comments are always durable pleasures. In the case mentioned above the peer pressure to be seen in the community was a strong motivation, fairly obvious in a thirteen year old but obviously suspect in the Mother.

Can’t Buy an Avatar

So different users desire different things, even different identities from communities and we see evidence of this in the professional communities like LinkedIn and Arrows & Boxes. These communities have expectations of accountability far beyond the social networking sites. LinkedIn is a series of social yardsticks in a very concise form. Professional discourse sites, like Boxes & Arrows, are platforms to express ideas to the community and gain discourse & reputation points in return. Both of these rest on named participation.

Facebook establishes you in a community, but allows a great deal of construction in terms of history, alliances, interactive mechanisms and image selection to create a very personal view within those boundaries. MySpace allows & almost provokes the invention of identity; all you need is some kind of name and email address & a birth date of your own invention. A good tattoo goes much further than a list of likes or pet peeves. It allows, in a way similar to Ebay, people to capitalize on their idiosyncrasies.

MySpace tends to capture people with stronger musical interests because of the ability to embed music in your page; to the point where it has become a crucial viral marketing medium for bands & the tattered remains of the music industry. In contrast, Boxes & Arrows is not known for it’s playful qualities though many of members may have tattoos.

In sum, humans have an uncanny ability to create and desire complexity. Therefore the best rulesets are the most concise. These rules & the effects they will have must be carefully thought through & tested before launching the community; any revisions to the original rulesets will feel like censorship, which damages the impulse to cluster.

On an emotional level, the users are motivated by either collaboration, self promotion or rebellion, which is why attempts to commodify these activities usually fail. Sensitivity to the community is paramount here. They only become viral & successful if their designers recognize that they will be out of control in the specifics, but contained in the general shape by the initial rules. All of these sites attempt to invest you in growing your participation; in order for this growth to be manageable, the premises of behavior need to be straightforward.

Addenda:
While this was intended to be a two part piece it quickly grew to three and the issues raised will be revised & revisited for some time to come. There are only partial solutions to social sites and many people are working very hard to figure out another move in this game. We will talk about those as they appear.

Rant: Apple’s New Laptop

Charles — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:08:35 GMT

Was it Wallis Simpson who said you can never be too rich or too thin? Being neither, I have no idea what the attraction could be.

Yet the revelation expressed in breathless hype and Huck Finn razzle dazzle by Steve Jobs last week at Macworld left me underwhelmed. Perhaps my expectations were led astray by the uncommon common sense of the Iphone. It was as if Apple said: what don’t you like about cellphones? Then made a list and solved for elegance.

The new laptop is a bit thinner at the front. This ain’t the future. I want the bubble car, thanks! The whole clamshell notebook is functional, but nothing new. How about a flexible screen and keyboard that roll out of a cpu container? Or unfold like a paper hat? Or roll up into a tube?

Let’s think out of the box here. You spill your coffee on any laptop in the world and it’s gone; sealed against moisture would be handy. And the whole mouse and click thing was a great idea when Doug Englebart figured it out in 1967, but it is time for gestural computing with a little more spatial specificity than in Minority Report. How about a tabloid sized touch screen with a keyboard that I can make appear with a double tap?

Well maybe next year. Although it would take Apple to successfully bring it to market, I am not holding my breath for Acer or Dell on that one.

Community rules rule communities: Part 2

Charles — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:16:27 GMT

Scrapbooking with feedback or the crochet of trivia?

Over the last 5 years we have seen the emergence of a new generation of community sites, the more formalized social networking site. The key structure that sets the tone of these sites are the short list of rules and premises that define entry and continued participation. Let’s compare some of the more notorious social networking sites and see how they approach it, and how that affects the tone, growth & kinds of participation.

In Friendster and MySpace, you can surf as many pages as you like. Leaving a message, chatting or looking at photos or videos requires a log in. Logging in requires registration. This means creating an account and stating your age without any meaningful verification, which is then secured by an email loop to the gmail account you created moments before... A very simple system, and one that has become a baseline for most social sites despite the obvious flaws. As a construction activity, it is the descendent of making your own web page on the internet, but with a simple Content Management System to make it easy and closed group browsing and searching.

Contained Loops

Facebook initially distinguished itself by allowing only people with .edu email addresses and limiting surfers ability to see participants details by school and region. This tiny change in the ruleset is fundamental to the kind of community that Facebook has created. Making access exclusive to students, it establishes a baseline credibility that leverages the brand loyalty mythologies constructed by the academic system. For instance, which school you attend usually creates a class structure and forms cliques of exclusion.

The general benefit is a level of comfort that is not felt on other sites, a dramatic difference from MySpace & Friendster.
This has a profound effect on how these sites grow. There are initial cultural triggers, but real growth appears when groups begin to cluster. If three of your friends have joined the site, then probably you and your other friends will join the same site. IM services work the same way.

The success of clustering is linked to how the sites are administered. Facebook devised an exclusionary context because of lessons it learned from Friendsters collapse. As with all online communities from AOL on, miscreants troll for innocence on the internet & these sites facilitate pedophiles. How the sites react to these behaviors and the threat of these behaviors sets a tone in the community.

Friendster became known for overreacting to this threat and damaged the impulse to join a cluster. The primary demographic for these sites are teens & young adults who are not fond of authority. In fact they are typically online to try and escape it, so Freindster seemed at worst a bully at best a pill.

MySpace capitalized on the disaffection with more robust servers and much less control. You could personalize your space more, add illegal music files and write pretty much anything you wanted. While there were still levels of access controlled by a log-in, the feeling that a participant could vandalize their own page through various hacks was a powerful loyalty builder. But both strategies leave questions unanswered and MySpace is currently being taken to court by both victims and alleged pedophiles.

Max Widget Toss

Charles — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:09:39 GMT

I had the luck to attend the Adobe Max conference this year. They started these after I left Adobe and are now a quintessential example of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle; the world is taken to be that which Adobe creates and no other. Or that which recently absorbed Macromedians seem to have very quickly carved out inside Adobe.

The mornings were dominated by main stage presentations where Kevin Lynch introduces a spokesperson or two for each highlighted product. The one that I want to talk about in particular was presented by Scott Fegatte and Ben Forta as an example of the magic of ColdFusion. The conceit of this task was that Lynch challenged them to do something “radical” for the United Way website in a week. This is undoubtedly a laudable cause, but what they did was a classic example of widget tossing that can be experienced here.

The original survey was a 4 page long scroll which lacked clear definition between what was required and what was not. These are obviously boring and this one lacked any indication of commitment, a crucial inducement to getting me to fill one of these out. Just how many questions are there? Given that they are numbered this shouldn’t be too tough to figure out. Whoa, pushing the envelope of logical thinking here. Call me a philosopher.

An Accordion Too Far

The redesign was hardly a cure however. The widget tossed was the newly popular accordion. This divided the content into two parts; perhaps the intended benefit was to make it seem shorter? However, it is now locked inside a fixed window which ends below the fold, so you have to scroll to see it, then scroll inside the window to access the questions.

Additionally, we were told during the presentation that the accordion folds delineate the required and optional groups of questions, but there is no indication made on the actual form as to which is which! Or if anything or everything is required.

This makes the distinction feel capricious. In fact that these are even accordions is not especially clear. Without any cues how to manipulate them they become a control accessible only by people who already know how to use them - the common term is geeks.

While I am sure that ColdFusion has come a long way since we all use to make fun of it in the Nineties, this was a very unfortunate example of how to use it. But a perfect example of grabbing some widget with flashy interactivity and not really thinking if it is going to help the user. [Am I sounding like Jacob Nielsen on a Flash rant here? So be it.] Designing a durable solution means looking critically at the problem and finding a specific answer. I don’t mind if it is clever, great, but the priority is that it improve rather than annoy.

Requirements Visualization 1

Charles — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:48:49 GMT

As I have undertaken increasingly complex projects, I have developed some responses to the problem of huge requirements documents.

The problem is that on a large project, a network of interdependent decisions is constructed, then shoehorned into an essentially linear document. While this functions as a form to analyze these problems, it's very [linear] nature makes it... well, boring! Even developers and designers are human!

They put it on my desk and the earth moved.

The functional result is that it ends up as a doorstop somewhere in the office, or finds a quiet angle of repose propping up a lamp and no one ever reads it. These books typically represent months of work by large, passionate teams and great expenditures. Not an ideal outcome.

What can prevent this? With all our focus on personas, and the scenarios we construct to walk them through, it is easy to forget that the person who received 150 pages of your careful work is basically just going to look at the pictures.

Take a moment and review that the order of the parts feels obvious. No one except the people who proof it for typos are going to read it in a linear way - most people will open it and refer to a couple of pages. That means that you have to show where ideas came from, how they connect and who they are important to all on the same page. This ends up being a lot of text, so there must be a clear page level hierarchy.

Make sure that the document structure is clear and accessible. This means a contents page with content areas providing immediately understandable names.

Even though it may seem unnecessary to you, having spent the last 4 months on it, a general overview that orients a first time reader is appreciated. This sets them up for the detailed decisions that follow. Starting someone in the middle of these processes, as I too often see, tends to make people glaze over and just make it up as they go.

Also, keep to the point in the main document and bury extraneous detail in appendices. This keeps the main series of ideas clear, without doing that brick-to-forehead thing so many technical writers have such a talent for.

Your mindset delivering the document is not how it will be read

It is good to remember that people do not always have the luxury of working on a project in a continuous manner. Imagine this all too common scenario: you start a project, then market conditions or some set of variables change and you are redirected to other tasks. The first task did not go away, nor did the strategic benefit that the company intended to reap by funding it in the first place. Months later you return to the first task having forgotten the details in a blur of other work. Concise, well-organized documentation will be worth time & money.

Visualization is usually roughly equivalent to comprehension. I find that annotated pictures are far more specific & engaging than trying to describe things that can be easily shown.

These visualizations do not need to be elaborate. Humans are experts at understanding abstracted representations - look at the drawing language of cartoons. The messages are clear, despite the fact that Mickey has only three fingers or Charlie Brown has a single squiggle that stands for hair.

In sum, showing what you intend is powerful, yet doesn't need to be elaborate in production. Time is easily wasted creating elaborate documentation that is too soon out of date; minimal documentation should be your goal.

The TED talks

Charles — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:42:32 GMT

Every once and a while you stumble across a resource that is truly amazing, and this is one of those. I was wandering around in the education area of the Itunes store and found this.

Every year in Monterey an invite only conference is held - TED, short for Television Entertainment Design, founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in 1984. I almost rode Russell Browns coattails into this conference when I was working for Adobe, but haven’t gotten anywhere near it since. Someday.

Let’s face it, most of the conferences I have been to [IIT’s Design Strategy conference largely excepted] have been mainly pretty lame occasionally rising up to very weird [adobe max]. Ted has created a powerful myth because it is not.

This conference has always been a cool & pricey ride since I first heard rumors about it in LA; now it is more of both, though the model seems to have be rapidly evolving under Chris Andersen’s new management. For a mere 6k, and an invite, you can walk among them.

On the other hand, you can download the video talks for free. Bonus, no speaker gets to talk for more than a half hour. Even ex presidents. Be brief or just piss off. Hey, good advice for people who write requirements too.

Lest I make more wild assertions without any evidence, check it out:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=160892972
[if this link works, it will open in Itunes, if not search for TED in the Itunes store]

You should subscribe, these are worth the drive space, except for the Rives stuff. You know it’s going to be bad when middle-aged white guys dressed in chinos start to rap. Don’t try to sing any Muddy Waters songs either, while I’m giving out free advice.

In particular, I have to recommend a few starters:
Sir Ken Robinson [2006]
Any parent or anyone concerned with development creativity and cognition should watch this riveting talk. Multiple times.
Al Gore [2006]
The importance of the topic aside, he is really funny. Like stand-up funny.
David Deutsch [2005]
The famous physicist explain why Stephen Hawkings is full of bollocks. Who knew.
Malcom Gladwell [2004]
I always thought he was a bit flash, but this is a very compelling talk about the blindness of market research. This changed my mind about him, now I read his books.
Pilobus [2005]
If you wondered why Pilobus was on the Academy Awards, it’s because they played here in 2005.

And kudos to BMW for sponsoring it, shows more than a bit of class. There must be designers in that thing somewhere.

About Themepark, 1

Charles — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:51:31 GMT

This is iteration 0.5 or maybe a bit less. After trying out 3 other ways of doing this I currently working with GoDaddy’s homecooked blogcasting service. There are worse but this is far from satisfactory. Soopah clunky, like bad javascript. The problem with most of these CMS constructions is that they are trying to save me from bad browsers and choose to give me limited control. Nope, I want it all, and interactivity, too, thanks. Wordpress is next, but there are bigger fish to fry right now with the html on my website. Born of a different aesthetic and needs to change asap.

Anyways, bear with me, both are going to evolve, but I wanted to get started on the writing.

Community rules rule communities: Part 1, histories

Charles — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:53:51 GMT

Click to Send
Online communities are amazing things, full of surprises. One of those surprises is how few successful ones there are. The first few were very exclusive clubs, initially of academics [darpanet] and geeks [compuserve] then expanding to a group of intellectuals who formed the Well. These groups, their ethics, their standards of conduct, their foibles grand and petty formed the expectation set by which communities and significant behaviors on the net are still defined.

Participants were named, flamewars typically moderated but rarely exiled, there was a sense that, as Nicholas Negroponte said “information wanted to be free” and the current wikipedia is one of the best examples of this atmosphere of altruistic democracy. Most of the participants were scientists who believed in the primary importance of the progress of scientific knowledge above and beyond the artifice of nation states. Those wacky pre-millenials.

Almost Real-time
However, communities were also being invented by commercial groups, and the most notable one of these was AOL. A couple of tiny differences had dramatic consequences on the tone, conduct & consequence of conversing online. One was the timescale. Instead of a threaded list, which is a non real time, stop and start interaction, it deployed live chat on a large scale. Or nearly live chat, as I recall there were lengthy pauses between interactions. But the expectation had been shifted, which changed the tone of the writing.

With a thread, a participant may feel some urgency but still has a few moments, hours or days, depending on the tone of the list, to compose their thoughts. That means the likelihood of complete sentences and structured ideas is considerably higher. With a chat room, the timescale is more like IM; you try to get a response back before a new comment appears. In fact with a chat room and multiple participants, participants are often trying to fit a response into the thread before the conversation moves on and a hilarious [you thought at the time anyways] comeback is lost in the scroll.

I have to admit that I always found the AOL chat room atmosphere to be pretty vacant, where probably intelligent humans where reduced to rapid fire monosyllables to stay in the conversation. Often conversations read like games of hopscotch, with threads being commented on one or two posts after the initial question.

Waiting for Anon
The other important shift was the option of anonymity that AOL encouraged. Of course, the user had signed into their account so it was a fairly thin ruse, but you were anonymous as far as the immediate community was concerned. This allowed users to participate without immediate consequence, a very different kind of interaction than a named environment. And popular too; the concept kept AOL afloat for many years, and the popularity was largely a surprise to them. I personally found it as boring as watching paint dry, but clearly many people found it intriguing.
In part 2 of this blog we will look at specific rules sets.

Brainstorming DIY Poster set free upon the innocents

Charles — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:37:17 GMT

hmmm. Maybe the tone of that title is a bit off? Anyways, I have been leading brainstorms for over a decade and a few years back started to formalize my notes on this process. The students in my Design Theory class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were fundamental as critics & user testers of the most recent versions, as well as colleagues at the various firms where I have worked. They have my gratitude.

The poster is concise. Too many rules get in the way of this kind of thinking so the basic staging, storming & distillation activities are the focus. A brief PS on roadblocks is the only qualifier.

The method is as flexible as they come. In class I have assigned essentially random problems & students have created solutions where none existed before. In about an hour. With professionals in a project setting the results tend to be more focused & very powerful, leaping over logjams in a single session.

Somehow, unlike the Golden Compass movie, it has evaded sanction by the church. Get it now while you still can.
I hope you find it useful.

User Testing: Shadow Casting Real Use

Charles — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:38:46 GMT

User Testing is always good. It always yields some worthwhile and occasionally unexpected results. After the egos involved recover, they realize it is always better & cheaper to know sooner.

But User Testing is not perfect. There are different potential flaws in different contexts, but let’s take testing an existing web application as an example, as this is very common in a discovery process.

Testing an existing site is like watching life in a rear view mirror. It’s a reflection of a snippet of experience; a kind of shadow casting of real use.

Often, people evaluate what they have access to and make determinations on the basis of what they can see. This can be a very limited view of reality, and tends to reinforce that which has already been invented; to paraphrase a tautology: That which is good exists, that which exists may or may not be good.

So it has to be taken with a grain of salt. There are famous business cases of researching an existing context and making regrettable decisions. The research that Ford did as to whether or not they should have a drivers side rear door on the Windstar strongly indicated that consumers did not care.

Dodge ignored similar research and added one, exercising common sense and taking the market from Ford. What is the lesson? Once consumers saw it, and used it, they realized that it was a valuable addition. Another chapter was added to Ford's seemingly endless downward trajectory.

To suggest that the fault is the user testing is not quite the whole story. The user testing counted what was known to be countable; what it cannot do is invent, or count what it cannot quantify. That is the design and ideation part of the process, much more messy & out of control than testing should be.

However, a mix of interviews, done by objective mediators, can reveal trends that designers & developers may not have considered or may have de-emphasized in their process.

The Iphone, this year's conference plan B

Charles — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:40:17 GMT

Years ago I would go to conferences and people would hold up their Palm and lecture us on why it worked, the economy of means, the elegance. Time passed and the same people - usually people who had not actually participated in the design process of the particular device - would hold up an Ipod and preach the wonders of the clickwheel and how it had revolutionized design on the order of bread slicers or fishnet hose.

That they usually missed the point was irrelevant. The value of the Palm was that it was much smaller than a Newton, and much faster because Palm asked people what they actually used. And both the Palm & the Ipod had coherent software interfaces that easily synced the stuff on your desktop machine. That the Ipod made having many gigabytes of purloined music sort of marginally legitimate was not trivial, either.

So I wanted to get in on the ground floor of helping Apple hype the Ipod phone, because I am predicting that this will save me a significant amount in conference fees over the next two years.

And it is not like I am above the seductive power of pop culture here. I too was reading the real time blogs from Macworld while Steve Jobs was unveiling it. Oh yeah, it is cool, and half of the people on my block have one.

But what it makes such a big splash is a study in contrasts, and how the competition failed to develop and market something that people can feel affection for. Much less use easily. Or perhaps they are related.

The current crop of cellphones are junk. There are so many difficult to use features that the cellphone manufacturers market a special line of simple phones for the very young, very old or especially annoyed. These phones have larger buttons and very few features. The emphasis is on talking to people, unusual for a phone I guess.

And the phone companies are completely oblivious to this resistance. Because of the way that cell phones are sold, really as a token of the extortionist contract with the service provider, there is a critical gap that occurs between manufacturer & user. The design of the phones is passed on as a feature list and separated from everything else in the users existence or context. An elaborate & extensively discussed system to create a broken wheel.

The worst thing about the current phones - and don’t get me wrong, Razors look cool and have great ads - is that if you lose it your numbers and all of the phone specific programming is gone. Unless you have a Trio or a Blackberry, you are just out of luck. But even Trio’s and Blackberries don’t have a good mp3/mp4 implementation. Much less the overwhelming cultural currency [read: cool] of the Ipod.

The Ipod advantage in both cases is it’s connection to the desktop.

For phone numbers, it leverages a much more powerful interface; your desktop through any Vcard compliant program. So you have all of your email addresses on the phone; and backed up. Think weeks of texting saved. Imagine what you will do with that time.

In terms of features, the new phone is configurable. Which means, to a luddite like me, that you can turn most of them off. Thankyouverymuch!

Some criticize the implementation of OSX on a phone. They feel that it is a heavyweight solution to the problem. But in fact it is a very demanding problem that is already spawning imitators as quickly as ipod cases. I am certainly willing to sacrifice a few songs for a usable interface! Features you can easily discover how to use are worth quite a bit more to me than ones that mystify & annoy me.

But the advantage to Apple is that it capitalizes on three years of software development of their OSX desktop widgets. And all of the development that has gone into the Ipod, Itunes content providers & the basic UI.

Not having to carry around my Ipod and my phone is probably the least of the advantages. Waiting until all the early adopters buy it and the price falls will be the hard part. But there is always the satisfaction of being patient enough to see what they add in generation 2; Apple has always been the most sublime tease of iterative marketing.

Comparing Notes

Charles — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:41:31 GMT

We had a meeting a few days ago with a rep at one of our clients. Unlike the series of Senior Managers we had been talking to, this client was a trainer for the product we are doing some substantial revisions on - and we learned more about it’s capabilities and the histories of use in 20 minutes from him than we could have in months of studying the app. The actual users are always preferable, but with this client this was as near as we could get.

So what do you do with that information once you have it? What is the best way to cut that iceberg of information into usable pieces ? And iceberg is the right term, because most of it is still hidden.

We decided to separate & each write our own version of the truth. Then to reconvene and compare/contrast/collect the ideas we heard while brainstorming more. This way we each define our individual perceptions, without the dynamics of personality minimizing contributions. We have tried this numerous times & found it highly effective for maximizing creative ideation.

And it is worth noting that information gathering at this phase is anything but linear. There are snippets of narrative, hard parameters that must be recognized, ideas that immediately strike you as being part of a larger solution.

Capturing these, sorting them and keeping them available to the team is an ongoing challenge to which there are both simple & complex solutions. These can range from the utility of having a well designed directory with ongoing and meta class folders to wiki solutions that enable sophisticated search.

The expedient group tool is Basecamp by 37 signals. While the solution is determined by utility, cost & scale, the clarity of the taxonomy is extremely important to an effective deployment. Remember that your audience is busy & not inclined to use the documentation unless they absolutely have to - it is a good idea to make it crystal clear.

UXD - User Experience Design: What is UxD?

Charles — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:44:14 GMT

Recently I was asked to summarize UxD in a single powerpoint slide. There are any number of zen and/or cynical responses to this question that we can just ignore. Anyways, I wrote something, designed two slides because I could not shoehorn it into one, various documents were thrown into the air, then we were all consumed by other work as the train moved on.

Now I am rethinking it. UxD is a fairly complex set of activities to describe, and there is no shortage of areas claimed by related disciplines. All of them are occurring in an area of rapid market development that happens to be highly valued by the societies we are in. Which is a recipe to attract passionate debate driven by financial rewards.

So is there a good way to describe it, or state it's value to a potential client in a single powerpoint slide? Assuming that no fly-ins, starbursts or windowshade rolls may be used in place of meaning, we will start with those old standbys - words:
________________________________________

Concise version:
User Experience Designers create structures for understanding and manipulating information, designing consistent contexts which encourage cumulative learning. In doing so they raise the bar from "being able to do something" to "being able to do something easily".

Their solutions go beyond code to model the most efficient and pleasing conceptual space that can be created within the constraints of time, budget & resources.
________________________________________

Verbose version: So here is the slide, and the notes for the slide follow.

User Experience Designers are typically employed on applications or sites with large amounts of features, complexity or information.

They create structures for understanding and manipulating information or parameters, designing consistent contexts which encourage cumulative learning.

They raise the bar from "being able to do something" to "being able to do something easily". As a starting point they conduct research to find:
_Who are the users?
_What are their goals?
_In what context will they use the product?

Then they use any modeling technique available to propose solutions that go beyond code to model the most most efficient and pleasing conceptual space that can be created within the constraints of time, budget & resources.
________________________________________

Just the beginning of a discussion. These are concentrated in application work, either in or out of a browser, and our communications tend to be directed toward fairly tech savvy folks. Interested in your comments.

Charles