Self-centered Design

Well, the rumor mill certainly helped frame our expectations. But remember, Apple designers aren’t concerned with our expectations. They don’t do user testing. They don’t think about the faceless “us” when designing. They design for themselves, the only people whose opinions they can really know. Until we develop telepathy, this approach to design can be pretty powerful. And risky. So here we see the risk in self-centered innovation: you are not going to meet other people’s expectations, and likely not meet them in a big way.

But that’s not what makes Apple tic. I know that Apple is doing the right thing when people describe the experience of using their products not as “it does everything I want it to do”, but rather that when they pick it up and start using it–to do the stuff it was designed to do–”it just works”. If I pick up an iPad and I don’t have that experience, then I’ll call Apple out on that. But I don’t think this is the case from what I’ve seen so far.

The touch screen revolution crystallized this intuitive experience for me. The first time I got my fingers on an iPhone, I didn’t read user manuals, I didn’t watch video tutorials. I just started trying to make it do stuff. I downloaded enough apps from the app store to fill up my home screen. No one told me I could organize my apps on multiple screens. It just made sense for me to flick my fingers in a gesture that meant “slide this thing out of the way”, and I got to the thing underneath (a new, blank screen). Then, I wondered how I could move my apps around. When I pressed and held my finger on an app, it started dancing around, as if saying “Ok, I’m ready to be moved!” I knew exactly what to do next to get my apps onto their new screen. When that kind of symbiosis between user and interface happens–when I try something and it just works–it is so satisfying that I wonder why everyone doesn’t design stuff like this. I had no conscious expectation, it was all unconscious intuition.

I think we should judge the iPad not on our conscious expectations, but on whether or not it is a useful device with a great experience. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on the initial criticisms of this device.

No multi-tasking.

The mobile environment on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can only run one app at a time. On Mac OS X, I can leave many apps open and doing things in the background while I flick back and forth and complete other tasks while tasks that take a long time complete. But multi-tasking isn’t needed all the time. There are certain things that by their very nature are not useful when running in the background. Those are the tasks that these mobile devices designed by Apple are meant to target.

There’s no need to keep my email app running when I’m not using it. It isn’t going to do anything unless I’m actively interacting with it. The same goes for a web browser. Am I sad that the interwebs can’t be doing fun stuff in the background without me? Not really. Unless I am actively browsing web pages, there’s absolutely no reason to leave the browser running. If I’m watching a video, I certainly don’t want it to continue to run while I go check my email. I’d miss the video, so I always pause it. Yes, I could run it in a tiny window on my laptop to the right of my email window, and flick my eyes back and forth. But with screen sizes in the mobile/handheld market, that kind of experience would be disappointing.

On a regular computer, yes, it seems more efficient to leave all of your apps running so you don’t have to wait for them to start up each time you want to use them. But notice how the makers of these new smart/mobile devices have made each thing start up immediately without delay. They did that to remove the one reason why people leave tasks running that do not require multi-tasking.

If you examine the list of tasks that Apple targeted with the iPad, you’ll see that all of them fail to require a multi-tasking environment.

No Flash support

HTML5 native video support is going to make this moot for viewing videos on the web, and Flash graphical objects (e.g., games) are either A) used in places that they shouldn’t be (navigation), or B) not well-suited to a touch-based interface since they often rely on the mouse “hover” coordinates, which do not exist for a touch screen (it can only react if you have made contact with the screen). Give me the screen that I don’t have to touch to interact with, and we’ll talk.

No phone or camera

If I wanted a phone that big, I would have stuck with my mom’s bagphone. And there’s no way I’d be making all of my calls on speakerphone, or holding an iPad up to my ear. So the obvious choice is a Bluetooth headset and VoIP apps like Skype. However, if Apple’s relationship with AT&T prevents them from letting me use VoIP telephony on the iPad, I will be ticked off.

I’ll admit at first glance the lack of a camera is astounding. But not because I want to take pictures with something that big. I love the idea of me holding this thing in my hand and video conferencing with someone over the internet. However, its size and weight doesn’t seem like it would be a very steady video feed–what with my shaky hands–so perhaps I am not that surprised at the lack of a camera. But lo! the docking station turns this into a steady screen. The iPad seems like it could have been the coolest video conferencing appliance ever made. I mean, I’m sitting there looking at it, it’s looking at me. But I’m thinking Apple couldn’t hit their $499 target with a video camera, not with a first-gen product. I hope to see the addition of a video camera on the next version of the iPad.

Will I buy one?

I don’t know yet. I’m a pretty heavy computer user, so my “sweet spot” is likely going to remain in the laptop world. But the moment that Apple gives me a version of their MacBook where the screen rotates around and folds down backwards (with full touch-screen capability), you’d better believe I’d buy that tablet.

If I were a business person who traveled a lot, or someone who only used the internet for email and browsing, or a professional musician/photographer/videographer who wanted to review/organize their work on location, then I expect the iPad to be the absolute best product for me. Since I’m not one of those, I’m not going to be a first-in-line buyer for this. However, the moment I find myself with enough spare money to finally jump into the eBook community, I would definitely go for an iPad over a Kindle or nook because I feel like I’d be getting so much more than an eBook reader. It would be the best place to spend my dollars. And who knows what kind of new features and experiences app developers are going to discover in this new medium?

All that said, even I have to admit the latest Hitler reacts to…” video is pretty damn hilarious.

It’s time to retire the dogma of user-centered design. Instead, we should focus on informed design and build a reward system based on informed measurements: vision, feedback, and culture (three core UX attributes).

Presenter

Jared freakin’ Spool, UIE

Date

Sunday, March 15

Sites

UIE

brain sparks

putting a ring on it

37 signals v. Norman

Self-design: “We’re not designing for others. We’re designing for ourselves.” – 37 signals
“[37 signals] developers are completely arrogant and unsympathetic to the people who use their products.” – Don Norman

There is tension between user-centered design and self-design. So where did UCD come from? The IBM 360 was built by the engineers (“highly trained on the tool”) who also operated the IBM 360 (“focused on the tool not the data”). The IBM Displaywriter was built by engineers for office workers (“not skilled on the tool, focused on the data not the tool”).

UCD came about because tools designed only for engineers were tough for non-engineers to use. The promise: if users are at center of design, then acceptance will occur. Problem: no documentation that UCD actually improves results. Apple barely does usability testing, Microsoft does 15,000 tests a year. So there are great designs without UCD.

What do great teams do to create great designs?

UIE looked at successful design teams and unsuccessful teams and looked at key differences:

• Tricks – When the right technique is outside your skill level (or time limit or patience), you use tricks (improper techniques that get the job done) to get through the process.
• Techniques – Individual building blocks inside of a process. Can exist in multiple processes. You can improve your technique over time with practice.
• Process – Series of steps used to get things done. Process doesn’t have to be a repeatable thing.
• Methodology – Formalization of process to get repeatability.
• Dogma – Belief systems with an unquestioned faith independent of any supporting evidence.

UIE’s study found that the successful organizations didn’t use methodologies or dogmas very much. The teams that were struggling were attempting to use a methodology and failing. Failure resulted in increased methodology. The successful companies made sure everyone on the team had a full toolkit of tricks and techniques (it’s important to know how and when to do things right, and how to do them the wrong way–but still do them).

Ditch the UCD Dogma

It’s not about the particular dogma, it’s about what we do when we work as teams (“The Stone Soup”). If everyone works toward the same goal, you will succeed much better. At no time do you believe the dogma/methodology is the reason something is successful.

User research is about informing design. Every usability test ends the same: the developer says “OMG if we knew this two years ago, we would have designed it differently!” Every usability problem is rooted in someone not knowing something they needed to know during the design process.

What gets measured, gets done. What gets rewarded, gets done well.

Measuring Brand Engagement

Brand engagement has to do with how much people love your brand (Gallup CE11: Loyalty, Confidence, Integrity, Pride, and Passion).

So what happened when UIE did this with 11 electronics resellers? They looked at CE11 scores before shopping experience and after shopping experience. Out of all of them, only Wal-Mart got better after the shopping experience, even though they started extremely low in the beginning (low expectations). If you focus on improving the CE11 shift, and reward improvement, you will see improvement. Beware of the techniques you use to improve your brand engagement (e.g., eye trackers, analytics). What do the results of those techniques actually mean? That’s the important question. You can read this information in (too) many ways.

Core UX Attributes

Three things that make a difference:

• Vision – Can everyone on the team describe what the experience of using your design will be like five years from now (an experience vision)?
• Feedback loop – In the last six weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design?
• Great culture – In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure (accepting making mistakes means you honor learning from mistakes; if you are completely risk averse where everything has to be perfect, you put out drek)?

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.

Presenter

dan willis, sapient

@uxcranks

Date

Friday, March 13

Site

podcast

ux crank

the pdf

Books Mentioned

the experience economy. pine, gilmore.

• cross-discipline teams. exploit and protect the expertise.
• design for specific users and their specific needs.
• embrace your ignorance.
• the business model should begin and end with the user.
• it’s not meant to be easy, so fail quickly and learn.

Design solves problems. Design is what the product does. The visual design is just a means to an end. Just another dead tree: good web is not just print in disguise. “Take a print mag and just do the same thing but with video in it != good web.” Print assumes a linear order and relies on a headline format. taking a brochure and adding some web native tools is not really web design. We haven’t gone past print design; the web hasn’t become a medium in its own right and it should be. Headlines/stories are commodities. Good for the homepage (where there is a judgement of priority) but not great inside the site. once you have the content, chunk it and dice it into nuggets and use metadata to connect (visual thesarus) to other nuggets. In this way, the judgement is the user’s, not the editors. it’s alpha and omega.

1. first, technologists are doing the content.
2. then, slowly, artists get involved to use the technologist tools to build the content. next step.
3. then, even more slowly, you place the content in the hands of content experts/consumers. next step.

Web design needs a grammar. “the grammar of transcendent web design”

• random voyeurism. we like to watch other people at their most honest and raw. so any time content is being created and presented publicly, we don’t just interact with the content, we start to learn about the people who are uploading the content. (e.g., flickrvision)
• self-aware (but uncontrollable) content. data knows data about itself (metadata; xml is self-describing). and the meta data is often created by the reader/viewer/consumer, not the author. the power is shifting from the content creator to the content consumer (from authority to popularity). find content that can be used to support and prove your product from other sources/communities on the web that may not ever interact with your product (pillow research for the benjamen hotel).
• user-created context. online publishers try to control the context of content. you can’t online because each single user makes different choices and controls the context; and if they are forced, they tend to rebel. fighting the user for control will continue to fail. best step: assume you don’t have control of the data you are putting out there. how can you take advantage of that?
• ambient awareness. microblogging. small bits of data (140 characters or less) by themselves are usually useless; but collectively (e.g., body language cues, pointilism) we start learning a lot about what is going on.
• experiential content. something more than chunks of type is the content. the total experience is the content you are creating. start there. EXPERIENCE IS THE CONTENT. the designer shares space with the user because the user is also a designer since the user is the one having the experience.

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.