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Posted by richz at 11:46 AM

Innovation’s Collateral Damage

Innovation kills. When we talk about innovation (and a lot of people are talking about it these days) we mainly focus on what it creates. When something new and innovative is embraced, new behaviors and patterns replace old ones. Often, we lose something when the old ways of doing things go away.

Let’s take an example: the digital camera. The idea of taking film to your local pharmacy and waiting a few days for photos to develop seems silly today. On your typical $100 camera (or phone for that matter), you can take hundreds of photos and enjoy them instantly. In minutes, people around the world can enjoy them as well. Many smartphone apps bake in Twitter, Facebook or Flickr integration.

We undoubtedly gained some amazing new capabilities which lead to new possibilities, but we also lost some things:

• The moment. Rather than being somewhere and enjoying an experience, we feel compelled to stop experiencing that moment to document it. We’re so motivated to share beyond the current company, we forget the moment itself as we momentarily depart. When others witness this, it’s disorienting. It’s as if you momentarily disappeared and returned soon after.
• The need for judgment. A $15 smart card can hold hundreds, possibly even thousands of photos. There is no need to weigh and consider whether that next photo is worth taking. We just snap away. The real work comes later as we glare at photos that all look alike. All that abundance steers us to lazily snap away without much care or concern. Scarcity motivates and sometimes inspires. 
• Anticipation. At the tail end of my teenage years, it was still necessary to go develop film. It usually took 2-3 days until the 24-hour development shops kicked in. By wedging some time between the experience itself and getting the pictures, the photos became so much more satisfying. It was a new moment to enjoy and talk around. Today, we’ll take a photo, pause real life, stare at that LCD and edit on the spot, then move on. There is no distance. It’s a gimmicky pausing of the live experience.
• Exclusivity. Growing up, my aunt amassed a bigger collection of photos of my own family than we ever had. She loved sharing them with us but warned us never to take any for ourselves. They were hers. She cherished the time we’d spend sifting through them together and she didn’t want to lose that. Today, we share with everybody everywhere. Nobody is special enough to afford exclusivity. Everyone is special, which means no one is special. By “publishing” we forego the intimacy that can come from sharing something with someone else.

This all may sound a bit quaint and nostalgic. It isn’t meant to be. I’m a designer and technologist myself. I love the possibilities of technology. Still, I think we will seek out what we lose in other ways. We still want to look forward to things. We still want to make others feel special when we share something with them. Hopefully, we’ll continue to think about the human context as we innovate, and be wary of what’s lost as much as what’s gained.

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Posted by richz at 11:20 AM

Readability Updated: Hyperlinks Be Gone! (If You LIke)

What I love about working at Arc90 is that, rather than just putting in my .02 on some heated debate on design and technology, we actually get to ship stuff to state our case. Shipping is the strongest statement you can make.

Nick Carr recently wrote an interesting post entitled Experiments in Delinkification. The premise was simple: the lure of hyperlinks are a distraction from the reading experience. A heated (and I mean heated) debate ensued and many others chimed in.

Well, we decided to do something about it. Today, we’re releasing an update to Readability that adds the option to turn all hyperlinks in long-form text into a set of footnotes. You can learn all about this update by visiting the Arc90 blog.

This clever little update would not have been possible had Tim Meaney not clamored for it and had Chris Dary and Dan Lacy not built it. We hope you find it useful.

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Posted by richz at 6:51 PM

The iPad & The Side Streets

Anyone that follows this blog knows that I'm an unrelenting advocate of building great user experiences. Whether on the Web, mobile or desktop software, great user experiences enlighten, flatter and elevate users.

As technology continues to accelerate forward, it's become even more critical to mask away the complexities of how things work and to just make them work. Period. Thanks to the likes of Apple, user experience isn't "something we should think about" anymore. It's a key differentiator. A better-designed anything will win.

A hallmark of strong experience design is to take things away. To only reveal – almost magically – what the user really needs at a given point in time. Taking this to its end, an odd sort of irony emerges. To build a great experience, you in fact take control of things. The net result is less freedom, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. While it's ok to interact sometimes, a great experience feels a bit like you're on a sort of pre-scripted ride. You almost feel like you're gliding along.

Now let's really take this to its end. What is the greatest user experience possible? How does it feel to be shrunken down to 1/100th your size and dropped into a world built by the greatest designers around? What if the experience appealed to not only our intuition but our aesthetic sensibilities? What if it seemed to present a world that magically seemed one step ahead of us? What would that world look like?

Well, it would probably look something like this: 

 

 

The above is the town (or fictional town) featured in The Truman Show, Peter Weir's beautifully realized world where Truman (Jim Carrey) is thrown in from birth into the ultimate reality show where everything is perfectly constructed (or "designed" if you will) for Truman. The film documents Truman's struggle with this perfectly situated place where nothing out of the ordinary happens. Throughout the film, Truman can't bear all this sterile perfection around him. He longs for more. He finds himself suffocating underneath all that pristine predictability and longs to escape into anywhere else.

See here's the thing: human beings have a problem with perfection. We all think we want it. We sort of strive for it. But when we get it, we sort of die a little. We stop moving. We grow restless. We get depressed. We tried this already. It's called the 1950's. The outcome of our weak little attempt at a Utopian vision was…well…the 1960's. We ran towards chaos and mayhem and drugs and rock & roll and creativity and disorder.

The Human Web

Humanity began casting its reflection about twenty years ago and it is the World Wide Web. It's messy, beautiful, disgusting, inspiring, offensive and glorious all at once. It was conceived without limitation or boundary and the whole of the world poured itself into it. There's a lot of crap on the Web, but from that mayhem incredible things have emerged. Amazing voices, images, tools, applications. Twitter. Facebook. Basecamp. Google! Google rose out of that swamp.

Apple's Evil Ways (Or Not)

I'm not going to sit here and deride Apple for offering us a .5 inch thick version of suburbia. Apple is a commercial entity that realizes that the Web is a big, bad, confusing and sometimes dangerous place. A place littered with filth and scams and all sorts of mayhem. To the detractors that bitch that the iPad is "closed," all I'd say is: "I hear you. Don't buy one. Go build your Ubuntu box or whatever else you want to toy around with."

The iPad is a beautiful, inviting piece of engineering. To use Apple's words, it's "intimate" and "magical." It's…I dunno…comforting in a twisted sort of way. Seeing Steve Jobs settle into a lounge chair and cradle it sent signals of casual submission. This thing is about passive consumption, not exploration.

Side Streets

Growing up in New York, I was always dumbfounded at the big Red Lobster and Olive Garden in Times Square. I would ask myself: why would you travel to the greatest restaurant city on earth and go back to Red Lobster? Eventually, I came to understand that most people aren't explorers. Most people just want what's familiar.

But thank God for the explorers. The amazing achievements we have in technology today – including Apple's – are built atop the discoveries that arose out of those swirls of chaos. The iPad isn't for the explorers. It's for everyone else. Thankfully, there are many places to go to scratch that itch. You can take a cab downtown away from Times Square and find yourself at a dive that serves the best Indian food in town. Thankfully, the more adventurous among us have options.

What is a bit disheartening is that Apple is evolving into more of a leaf of the ecosystem rather than a node. It represents this pinnacle in design and engineering but is laser-focused on it's own sustenance and growth. Google, for all its faults, buys into the ecosystem and feeds back to it. Apple doesn't. Again, this isn't meant as a judgment towards Apple. As a commercial entity, they can do whatever the hell they please. They're filling a very real need out there. They built a beautiful and relatively safe place for people to go.

We should all take Apple's lead in caring about and building great experiences for users. Apple is not evil. They build great experiences. They built a beautiful place for people to go. What the world needs isn't less Apple but more Apples. More enriching experiences. More options. More beautiful places to go. The Web is capable of anything…including hosting beautiful places to go. Apple isn't scary. Having only one Apple is scary.

The iPad will undoubtedly be a world class product. Nobody doubts that. Still, after a few hours of a pristinely designed experience, we'll hit that Web browser. Thank God for the side streets leading out of Times Square. Because in the end, we will venture out. We always do.

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Posted by richz at 3:55 PM

The Essential First Step To Blowing Minds

"Less is more."

It's a powerful phrase. It's one of those rare quotes that itself is illustrative of what it's trying to say. If we decompress it, we're really saying something like "If you show less, then each thing you show carries more weight."

Taking the thought a bit further, I'd assert that less isn't only more, "less" is often essential to success. Conversely, "more" often leads to failure. When we release a product, we often want to talk about its power and versatility. Truth is, nobody else wants to hear about that. They want to know – in as simple a manner as possible – why something should matter to them.

A few days ago, Bonnier's Mag+ design concept video was making the rounds. If you haven't seen it yet, here it is:

It's a beautifully produced concept of how a magazine of the future could take shape. What intrigued me isn't what it does. We're fairly close, technically, to pulling off what Bonnier is envisioning. I was more interested in what it didn't propose to do. It isn't:

• A Netbook tablet
• A portable computer
• A Google OS
• A Wifi/3G/Wimax/4G/whatever-enabled device

It's not any of those things. It's purpose is singular and simple to digest: it's a modern form of the magazine. It embodies the casual experience around interacting with a magazine and nothing more.

Many would suggest that this needs to be a browser that can do anything that a Web browser of today could do, but that would actually harm the narrative around the product. Yes, it's a narrow in scope, but that's the power of it.

Rewind back ten years. There were phones out there that were handling email. Some had slide-out keyboards. The Palm Treo was taking hold. If I had proposed to you that I had an idea for a small phone that would effectively become synonymous with portable email, you would've laughed me out of the room. The Blackberry didn't do more than other phones at the time. Instead, it became synonymous with a single basic task: interacting with email on your phone.

Rewind back again. What if I had an idea for a portable device that focused on one single task: recording video. Again, you would've trampled on the idea. "Just about every digital camera lets you record video. Hell, many phones have video!" Again, it would've been tough to stomach the idea of a device that does just one thing. Yet both the Blackberry and Flip Video stories are important lessons.

They teach us not only that less is more, but also that more is an impediment to adoption. People don't want to figure out what to do with your product. They want you to draw a straight line between your product and a simple, digestible purpose. The more "powerful, flexible and versatile" your product is, the more alien it's going to appear to the great majority of people that may take a glance at it.

Ultimately, it's about the "Sentence Test." If you can't convey what your product does in a simple, single sentence, then you've already cast off a huge swath of your potential audience. There's one other wrinkle to this. Lean on what people know and build on that. Everyone knows about the "magazine experience." The Bonnier video resonates because we can make that leap from "today" to their vision of the future.

You may think you have something so mind-blowing that nobody's going to understand it. Their lies the wrinkle. To blow minds, you first have to get inside of them. And to get inside, less isn't only more, it's essential.

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Posted by richz at 4:18 PM

The Rise & Fall of The Nintendo Wii

At Arc90, one of our meeting rooms is proudly called the Wii Room. It’s an informal meeting space with a whiteboard, projector and…a Nintendo Wii. When we first got the Wii a couple of years ago, it was a universal hit at Arc90. The bowling and golf games in the Wii sports package were just plain fun.

Fast forward about six months from the time we got the Wii and it’s a completely different story. It was hardly being used. Fast forward two years to today and I can confidently share that it probably hasn’t been turned on in over a year.

And this isn’t only about the cumulative short attention span at Arc90. A handful of friends have told me that they hardly ever play their Wii’s anymore. The narrative is fairly similar across the board: “we bought it, played bowling and stuff like crazy and then we just sort of…stopped.”

Beyond my circle of acquaintances, Nintendo is reporting that sales of the Wii are slowing considerably. They cite a few different reasons, but it’s all a fairly strange turn for a product that I and many others were gushing over as a great example of innovative, forward-thinking design. We lauded the approachability of such a simple and intuitive platform. It attracted such an incredibly broad audience beyond the hardcore gamers. From the elderly in retirement homes to little kids barely past first grade, everyone loved their Wii’s (at least for a while).

So what happened?

Before trying to figure out what happened, it’s worth mentioning that the Wii is still, by just about any measure, a resounding success. With less impressive, but more innovative hardware, Nintendo rose from the ashes to become a major player yet again in the console market.

That said, it could be argued that one of Nintendo’s brilliant strokes: to appeal to a much broader, less technically savvy market, actually ended up putting an expiration date on the appeal of the Wii. By winning over the unwashed masses and not just the “gamer” demographic, the Wii’s appeal declined almost as quickly as it rose. In other words, the Wii became a fad.

Merriam Webster defines a fad as “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal.” (emphasis added). Oddly for the Wii, one of the reasons it became a fad are the very reasons it was so wildly successful in the first place. It was easy to pick up and play. The initial batch of games lacked any perceivable depth or complexity and it was just plain fun to wave around a controller. It was a novel experience that nearly everyone could relate to.

As the next round of game releases started to hit the Wii, that same audience had no interest in them. The novelty of waving around a controller wore off and newer titles that were more complex or required more of an up-front time investment weren’t appealing to the population that had found the Wii so compelling in the first place.

And what of the hardcore gamers? They never bothered to come over to the Wii in the first place. It was the gift you bought grandma. You still needed your Xbox 360 to play Grand Theft Auto.

One of the design lessons that can be learned from the Wii’s story to date is to think long and hard about how we can create things that are both welcoming and captivating but also have an eye towards longevity. It’s one thing to initially capture someone’s interest. It’s a whole other matter to have a longstanding, evolving relationship with its user.

In all fairness, the Wii did about as much as it could to succeed with the demographic it won over. While my grandma may love bowling and think it’s an absolute blast, she will never, I repeat never go to Gamestop and pick up a few new Wii games. In fact, she doesn’t even know that games are on DVD’s in the first place. She just turns it on and bowls. That may well be the crux of the issue. The Wii made such a powerful first impression that it narrowly defined itself. It became novelty, no different than the Rubik’s Cube or Beanie Babies.

So be warned product designers, be novel, but be careful. People love to stereotype, and once they do, it’s pretty hard to break out of it.

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Posted by richz at 10:51 AM

The Web And Rewarding Expertise

On the Web, you (“you” being a designer or developer) can pretty much do whatever you like. Got a hankering to reinvent how a personal profile or company presence is going to look on the Web? Go nuts. Nobody’s going to stop you. Every URL is a blank canvas. There’s infinite freedom.

But alas, there are patterns out there. Here are some familiar and fairly common user experiences:

• You visit a restaurant Website. Some lounge music kicks in while a Flash movie loads in that pans across a dimly lit interior. You fish around for some links and find the menu. In a bizarre marriage of technologies that we’ve grown to accept, the menu gets handed to you in PDF format.
• A friend points you to a band that is supposedly worth checking out. You type the band name into Google and the Myspace link is predictably within the first three results. You click on it and rummage through somewhere between 400 and 1,000 pixels of garbage to get to that familiar Myspace audio player.
• You visit Facebook and glance down your social stream of activity.
• You visit Twitter and glance at all the chatter coming from the people you follow.
• You click through a Youtube link and end up on Youtube and just watch stuff.
• Your run-of-the-mill corporate site navigation (sing it with me): Home – Products – Services – About Us – Contact Us (with some variation).
• The familiar information flow of any Wikipedia page.

Even though the Web is generally an ungodly mess, we find ourselves – as users – seeking out patterns around how certain information is displayed. In fact, while we all can appreciate some creativity and out-of-the-proverbial-box thinking, we really, really appreciate consistency. As users, we love it when templates are used on the Web. Despite how shitty restaurant sites are (and yes, they’re all shitty), we’ve hard-wired how they work and grown to understand their common characteristics, warts and all.

One of the reasons Arc90’s Readability resonated with so many people is that it empowered users of the Web to impose consistency around nearly any article-based content on the Web. It’s helpful that the tool removed a lot of clutter, but it’s #1 feature, in my opinion, is the application of a consistent representation of content.

It may come across as a bit of depraved soul-sucking to suggest that we all start to appreciate the common patterns on the Web rather than try to be unique or original. This isn’t about the shiny top-coating of the Web. It’s about the skeletal pieces that make up how things are structured. You can design a car a million different ways, but stick to what people know: steering wheel, pedals and stick shift.

Put differently, your users are building an expertise – an expertise on how to get around on the Web - that you should lean on and respect. The trick is to bring your own character, style and inviting elements of surprise while still relying upon and rewarding that expertise.

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Posted by richz at 11:09 AM

Why Do We Love Rounded Corners? The Answer!

Nearly four years ago, I asked the question, and attempted to answer: “Why do we love rounded corners?” Back then it hit quite a nerve, leading to an enlightening (and entertaining!) comment thread. But alas, I’m not sure we ever really arrived at the answer…until now.

Konigi recently posted an entry entitled Realizations of Rounded Rectangles, where he points to a bit of Mac history (folklore?) on UI&us. It’s an interesting tale of how Steve Jobs demanded roundedness in everything on the interface. Still, the most illuminating thought comes from Professor Jürg Nänni, a scholar on visual cognition:

A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our “fovea-eye” is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.”

Professor Nänni is saying that rounded rectangles are literally easier on the eye. Put another way, compared to square-edged rectangles, rounded rectangles are more computationally efficient for the human brain. To me, this is a revelation. An idea that at the very least demands more investigation.

Looking back, the original rationale I threw out wasn’t too far off. It’s a fascinating puzzle and speaks to the intersection between visual aesthetics and interaction design.

I’m sure this isn’t the end of the debate. Nevertheless…progress!

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Posted by richz at 10:13 AM

An Argument For Building Attractive Things

Here’s a rule of thumb that applied to both people and design experiences:

The more attractive something (or someone) is, the more we’re willing to tolerate its flaws.

When something is beautiful, we’ll work with it just a bit more, despite its inadequacies. We do this because we want to be associated with beautiful things. We want to build relationships with beautiful things (same for beautiful people). We want to evangelize them. We want to become a part of them.

When one becomes obsessed with a beautiful object, it isn’t because we want that object to come into our own personal world. It’s in fact the reverse. We want to enter its world. Of course, that thing that we found to be so beautiful at first glance may actually have some awful flaws. Really expensive yet excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes come to mind. We want it to work out so badly.

Here is my theory in a beautifully elegant visual form (also known as “data visualization.”):

So what’s the moral of this blog post? When you’re building stuff, make it usable but also make it attractive. I mean, we should all be aiming for both, but not everything can be Brad Pitt.

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Posted by richz at 11:38 AM

Praying To The Wrong God

Let’s go back to the year 2000 for a few minutes.

The music industry is in turmoil due to an amalgamation of factors:

• The Internet has arrived. Distribution of just about anything that can exist in digital form will change forever. Your big box retailer of compact discs instantly looks like a relic.
• People have found ways to compress audio into a manageable size without sacrificing very much in audio quality. Not only has the distribution piping been laid down, but the packages are light and easy to transport.
• Napster and its brethren come into existence. Decentralized peer-to-peer farmer’s markets crop up everywhere, compounding the nightmare for the music industry.

The music industry does what any industry would do when their precious commodity – in this case music – is suddenly as available as paper towels at your local YMCA restroom. It’s a scary place to find yourself. The natural reaction is to wrap your arms around that content and hold on for dear life. After all, it is your bread and butter.

As a result, the music industry lights a ring of fire around its content and fires on sight at anyone that tries to steal it. All of their energy and focus is spent to somehow contain the damage and retaining the perceived value of their content.

Because content is where all the value lies right? Wrong.

Throughout this siege, another player showed up that virtually hijacked the entire industry based on one very basic tenet: build a best-of-breed experience around these newly found conveniences. Apple doesn’t come from a content-worshipping culture. They build and sell hardware and software. They understood that if they built a great experience around the content, they would win.

And win they did. Who would’ve guessed that a closed ecosystem that spans hardware and software that charges money would beat out tools that let you get at the content for free. While the content owners were fretting about their content, they failed to realize what really mattered in the eyes of their customers: new conveniences, stylish easy-to-use products and reasonable pricing.

It wasn’t about getting stuff for free. The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free. The mistake the content owners made was that they believed their content had value in a vacuum. It doesn’t. Content is part of the experience.

The funny thing is we’re seeing this play out all over again, and it looks like it’s headed towards the same ending. Newspapers, magazine publishers and book publishers are the new music industry; worrying and fretting and battling to protect their content. Meanwhile, Amazon is investing in building a great user experience for people that like to read. The perusal, purchasing and reading of content is what they’re focusing on. Since they don’t have any content to worship (like Apple) they’re just thinking about delivering a great experience. Attract the masses, gain mindshare and then go back to the content owners with a platform.

I suppose it only makes sense that such innovations continue to come from somewhere else. It’s hard to let go of how you value your stuff. Some content creators are trying. The New York Times recently came out with a refresh of their New York Times Reader. It’s an elegant, clean way to read the New York Times content. It’s a better user experience. Still, it’s only the New York Times content. Imagine EMI records coming out with their own flavor of iTunes. Makes sense from a business perspective, nonsensical from a user perspective.

Content owners need to come to a few realizations:

• Nobody cares about carrying over the physical constraints of content into the digital realm. In fact, it’s a nuisance. They want granular control and they want to pick and choose their stuff.
• Consumers are willing to pay for a great user experience and if it’s an incredible user experience, will pay a premium (see Apple).
• Your content is transient (to varying degrees, depending on the content). It may spike in value then dissipate quickly or it may last a few months.

iTunes, Hulu and recently the Kindle (to a smaller extent..so far) are winning these markets by building a new way to interact with and experience content. They all come from cultures where they understand that the meaning of “content ownership” is changing and that people will still spend money if it’s wrapped in a great experience.

When we released Readability a few months ago, the response was astounding. This seemingly innocuous little tool that cleans up Web pages to make it easier for you to read clearly hit a nerve. People hated the reading experience on the Web. They love the content and want the content, but they despise the experience around it. This pain is less about needing a reading device and more about an utterly lousy experience on the Web. Would people pay for that experience? Is there a way to handle advertising in a less obnoxious (read: more effective) way? I think so. The history of technology is littered with good intentions, false starts and great successes that take those false starts and simply wrap them in good design.

Content owners are praying to the wrong God. In this new world, their content is valuable only in the right contextual experiences. While they worship, someone else will build that experience and invite them to sit at the table later.

And reluctantly, they will come. They always do.

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Posted by richz at 11:14 AM

4 Things Designers & Marketers Can Learn From the Slap Chop Website (Yes, The Slap Chop Website)

We’ve all had restless late nights where we can’t sleep only to be greeted with the Slap Chop guy Vince. He’s chopping food and rambling on with unbridled enthusiasm. Yes he’s a little ridiculous and pretty cheesy. And yes, he’s been remixed. Hey, mock all you want. The original TV ad has been viewed nearly 400,000 times on Youtube. The remix has been viewed nearly two million times! How many times have your videos been viewed?

But this post isn’t about corny TV ads and remixes. It’s about shameless selling and what we – as designers and marketers – can learn from the Web version of all this slap-chopping madness: www.slapchop.com.

The more refined among us love to speak about how we “shape user experiences” and how we can more effectively market and message the masses. With the rise of new media, an elitism has been cultivated where we’re always looking forward for more innovative ways to market and connect with potential customers.

Guess what kids, Slap Chop is an example of what works for a massive demographic. If I sit my mom in front of the Slap Chop website, she’s gonna get it. She knows what it’s about and there is zero confusion about how to buy the damn thing.

So what can we learn from Slap Chop on the Web?

1. No play button. As soon as you hit the site, Vince starts yapping away and the TV ad starts playing. Yes it’s a little obnoxious and a bit rude, but it works. Somebody actually chose to visit the site, start selling. Youtube changed videos on the Web by auto-playing.

2. Big Obnoxious Text. The goal of Slap Chop on the Web is to get you to buy the product. Period. This is an impulse purchase. The Web is driven by impulses. You’ve got a few seconds and a sliver of attention bandwidth to work with. Punch the visitor in the mouth as soon as they get there. Forget paragraphs of explanatory text and detailed lists of features. Go big right out of the gate.

   

3. Control the Narrative. When anyone lands on a Web page, they immediately begin digesting the information before them. Designers have a couple of choices to make. If we think: “This is a magazine ad!'’ we spend a lot of time organizing and structuring the information. If we think: “This is a TV ad!” well then it’s less about guiding the eye and structuring content. It’s about throwing content at the user. In the first 20 seconds of visiting the site, a handful of pitches fly by. Text is moving around and bouncing. Images are dropping in and sliding out. It’s a pretty annoying for me personally, but incredibly effective at taking hold of the storyline. It reminds me of the rat maze Ikea puts you on. You’re more or less forced to walk the path.
4. Order Now. And I Mean Now! The Slap Chop site is a single purpose site. The whole sell and the purchase process happens right on that front page. You pretty much can’t escape the plea to “ORDER NOW” and clicking on it just takes you to an anchor at the bottom of the page with the actual order form. No other pages. No shopping carts. The pitch and the purchase process is all right here.

So there you have it, design and marketing tips from Vince. Yes, salespeople are slimy. Yes, the sales experience can be creepy. But there is something to be said for a clear, targeted direct message. When I was drawing up the landing page for TBUZZ, our latest from Arc90, I wanted to capture that simplicity and bigness. If only I’d had Vince to help me pitch it.

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Posted by richz at 11:37 AM

Flying Garbage

Let’s make a case for good ol’ paper for a second. I don’t think anyone would dare throw garbage at you to make a point while you were reading a newspaper. Well, the Web I suppose is a different story.

If you visit the NY Times today, there’s a good chance you’ll see…umm…garbage fly across your screen. Here’s a snap:

Desperate times I suppose.

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Posted by richz at 8:36 AM

“I Wanted To Make Posters”

Jacek Utko talks about how he infused art design into the newspapers he worked on and saw both critical acclaim and a marked increase in circulation. In essence, he elevated the newspaper from a generic source of news to an overall experience that marries content and design. It’s an inspiring six minutes:

I’m not sure if this translates into “design will save the newspapers” but Jacek is on the right track: he’s blowing out the definition of “newspaper” as we understand it today. He’s bringing something else to the table. It’s no longer only about “well, the news isn’t timely anymore because I have the Internet.” It isn’t only about content anymore in Jacek’s world.

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Posted by richz at 9:14 AM

The Human Quality Of The Analog

Here’s a wonderful quote from John Kolko of Frog Design. John is sharing thoughts about the transition from old, traditional media to the highly specialized digital world of today:

Our memories are crafted by experiences, and the richest experiences I recall have a multisensory and substantially real – physical – foundation. Until the niche style bloggers can find a way to offer this resonate physical quality, I can’t see it offering the same richness of the old media. Even in a customized, personalized, and direct way, digital news reporting still lacks the human quality of the analog.

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Posted by richz at 3:15 PM

Bias Is Your Friend

A week ago, I said this about the NY Times article skimmer:

Put simply, it’s better than the NY Times front page.

Since then, I made a commitment to replace the NY Times front page with the article skimmer. All that noise would obviously be trumped by this wonderfully elegant and ad-free view. Right?

Wrong.

I’m going back to the NY Times front page. I really hate being wrong, but I think it’s worth exploring why, as a designer, I thought this was better, but as a user, it really wasn’t. I think there are two reasons why I’m going back (maybe more, but I can only think of two):

1. The overall structure, however noisy and chaotic, of the existing NY Times front page is forever burned in my mind. This is a painful reality: I’ve gotten comfortable and familiar with something that is less than ideal. For all its faults, I’ve learned my way around the NY Times front page. So designers be wary, the less-than-ideal becomes the ideal for an existing user base over time.
2. In the NY Times Article Skimmer, all articles are created equal. You’d think applying a democratic use of grids would help matters. It didn’t for me. I value relative weight as I skim over the front page. When I view the regular NY Times page, I allow myself to get pulled in a few directions depending how the editors or layout people decided to take me. Features, big stories, editorials – they each have a different footprint which actually seems to make life easier.

So there you have it. I was wrong. Completely wrong…at least in my case. I think an over-arching lesson learned here: take off your design lab coat and be a user for a while. It’s not easy to do sometimes, but it goes a long way.

The kneejerk reaction with design is to apply objectively agreed-upon practices devoid of bias. This view is too narrow and probably a bit dangerous. The on-the-ground sentiment and understanding of how things work within the user community says a whole lot. Bias is your friend.

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Posted by richz at 8:43 AM

NY Times Article Skimmer : Better Than The Real Thing

Man if there ever were an argument for “less is more” the NY Times Article Skimmer is a score for “less”:

Put simply, it’s better than the NY Times front page because:

• It loads really fast.
• It compartmentalizes information so I don’t see the 560 links and blurbs all at once, and of course…
• It has no ads.

The last point is obviously a sore spot for newspapers online these days. Most are really struggling to figure out how to stay viable as the world goes electronic. I think this prototype is a lesson learned: keep things neat and orderly and don’t turn your web presence into the Magical Mystery Tour.

If that commitment is made, I think newspapers will be pleasantly surprised. In my opinion, people would pay for this peace and quiet. Also, if you tastefully dropped an ad (one single ad instead of eleven plus Google Adwords) few people would mind.

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Posted by richz at 9:40 AM

Put A Little Goo In That Interface!

Fellow ARc90’er Avi and I were chatting up the goodness of physics-based puzzle games like the excellent World of Goo and Crayon Physics and it got me thinking: what’s so universally appealing about these types of games?

I think the answer lies in how these games reinforce our hard-wired logic about the physical world. From our earliest days on this earth, we start to sort out how objects in the real world interact. Some pretty basic ground rules are laid down and reinforced throughout our lives. Things like gravity and the various laws of our physical world are completely hard-wired into our minds. If you actually draw out these laws into their basic scientific formulas, its relatively complex stuff. But in our brains from a very early age, it’s all second nature.

Physics-based games and interfaces play a sort of trick on us. For fleeting moments, even though we’re interacting with pixels on a screen, all those familiar rules are validated. This is why they feel so inspiring when we first experience them. They illicit that “whoah!” after seeing a good magic trick.

As we design interfaces, don’t discount the power of simulating the real world – even in the most subtle ways. Even something as simple as a sliding accordion box feels better than just popping up and hiding information indiscriminately. Just ask Nintendo (with the Wii) and Apple (in just about all their interfaces – iPhone, Coverflow, etc.).

So the next time you’re designing that all-too-boring invoicing application interface, think about putting a nice helping of the real world in it. It’ll make the experience just a little more fun.

[While poking around for links to this article, I stumbled on a nice list of physics-based games. Have at it!]

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Posted by richz at 8:55 AM

Offline Prototyping Awesomeness With The Web Stencil Kit

Prediction for 2009: paper’s making a comeback. I’m talking about things like writing, taking notes and keeping a sweet-as-hell looking Moleskine under your arm as you strut to your next meeting.

Want proof? Take a look at this UI prototyping stencil whipped up by the Design Commission:

They’re not available just yet but they promise to have them up for sale in January. I want one.

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Posted by richz at 10:41 AM

The Television-ization Of Newspapers On The Web

So I’m gong through my usual routine, sipping my coffee and visiting the usual handful of news sites. Eventually, I land at the NY Times and I’m confronted with this:

It’s not your reliable Times home page with some ads, it’s your reliable Times homepage infested and overwhelmed with an advertisement. The ad not only completely dominates the above-the-fold experience (and my “fold” is generous here, 682 pixels high) but it’s moving around, people are talking (thankfully with the sound turned off) and the whole thing just overwhelms the newspaper reading experience.

Now, it’s worth noting that the New York Times is fully aware of this and provides a Minimize Ads control near the top of the page (you can actually see it in the snapshot, it’s the little gray box). It’s thoughtful of them to provide this. I’ve actually written about this “Off Switch” before. But here’s the thing: you don’t actually see that button the first time you’re greeted with that monster ad. Only if you refresh or revisit do you see it.

Anyway, the goal of this post is not to beat up on the NY Times advertising policies. The NY Times, in my opinion, is the best (if not one of the best) news destinations on the Web. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I still perceive nytimes.com as a digital representation of the paper newspaper. In the paper version, we would never see this kind of compromise for advertising on the front page. If you gray out the actual non-content on the above the fold, we’re left with this:

As you can see, a good 70% of the real estate is useless. This isn’t a newspaper anymore. It’s television. Ultimately, this is about controlling the experience. Television and radio, with it’s doling out of valued content over time, can place advertising along the experience timeline. To get to the stuff we want, we pretty much wait. Print publications are different in that I can jump to and go to anything I want. If I’m interested in the Science section, I’ll just “fast-forward” right to it. My options are far less linear and my ability to jump is unencumbered.

Content delivery and advertising on the Web is sort of it’s own animal. It borrows conventions from both TV and radio and print. I guess it feels wrong to me because, in my mind, you’re not supposed to move sections and words around on me when I’m reading. The physical placement of these information “objects” has become familiar to me. I’ve grown to know the lay of the land. When you move them around, I’m left annoyed and slightly cheated.

I can fully appreciate the Times’ motivation to sell ads. The newspapers are going through a lot of turmoil right now as they transition. My hope is that we’ll find a balance and that newspapers and magazines on the Web will hold strong on the things that compromise the reading experience and more importantly, their identity as news sources for reading news. I don’t want the NY TImes to turn into the NY Times Web Channel.

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Posted by richz at 11:15 AM

One Big Ball Of Experience

A few months ago, I put up a post about how software delivery is materially changing. In that post, I talked about how software delivery would transition from CD’s and DVD’s to over-the-wire instant software. It’s a worthwhile transition. Eliminating prerequisites to getting software up and running is a great thing.

Just ask Youtube. Youtube exploded precisely because we didn’t have to get the knife and scissors out to pry away that annoying, thick plastic casing to get at the product. Realplayer had a stubborn plastic wrapping around it. Youtube didn’t. Rewind ten years ago and stroll into Real Network’s offices and explain to them that their product was just fine but that their “packaging” would one day do them in and they would’ve laughed you out of the building. Installation downloads. Plugins. Configuration settings. It’s all a big honkin’ waste of time. The URL box killed Realplayer. Hell, even Amazon, the ultimate purveyor of actual physical stuff, is waking up to the uselessness of over-packaging in today’s world.

The un-packaging experience (or in software circles, what is commonly referred to as “download and installation”) is part of the entire experience around a piece of software. In fact, it’s a pretty important part of the relationship: it’s the introduction. The iPhone application and song acquisition experience is arguably one of the main reasons why the iPhone is so wildly popular and successful. The whole process flows beautifully. You don’t need to get the knife and scissors out.

A few weeks ago, I ran across an article or post that explained that MLB At Bat, the popular $4.99 iPhone application that gives you up-to-the-minute scores and video highlights would…*gasp*…expire. For a moment, I was offended and felt a bit duped. I paid my $4.99 and I assumed I’d purchased the damn thing. I owned it. I owned it in the traditional, free-market capitalist sense of the word. I give you $5, you give me a jar of pickles. The pickles are now mine.

Not so. Major League Baseball is going to require everyone to buy At Bat every year. It turns out I didn’t own a damn thing. In fact, I leased it…or subscribed to it. After getting over my initial grievance about the whole thing, I realized a few things. First, $4.99 a year is not even worth debating for an application of this quality. $4.99 gets you a large coffee at Starbucks. Second, all software is headed in this direction. It’s going the way of cable television or cell phones. We’re going to pay to use, not to own.

Today, the burden on software publishers is to sell you software that you will then own. A few years will go by and you’re asked again to “upgrade.” You can choose not to and just keep using whatever you’ve got. The burden is on software publishers to pile on features and updates compelling enough to make us want to pay the upgrade cost. If our copies of Photoshop CS3 stopped working tomorrow because it had “expired” you’d witness some sort of revolt of graphic designers, but that’s exactly where we’re headed.

This shift will bring a renewed emphasis on the software experience itself. The marketing of software; the barrier-to-entry to use; the virtual out-of-the-box experience along with the actual use of the product is all blending together into one continuous interaction. As we ready our idea management product, Kindling for general release, we’re realizing that the entire thing: from marketing pages, to the sign-up process to the actual application itself is really one cohesive experience.

So take heed product managers and designers, the shrink-wrapped box is gone. The barriers are gone. Hell, the actual shelf space is gone. Marketing is no longer over there and your product is over here. It’s all one big ball of experience. Make it as simple and memorable as you possibly can.

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Posted by richz at 10:38 AM

Strolling Around Amazon’s Window Shop

We’ve all been put in that awkward spot. We’re perusing the racks at some trendy clothing shop and we catch a glimpse out of the corner of our eye. He’s coming this way. We don’t need help, but here he comes:

“Can I help you with something?”

We roll our eyes (mentally at least).

“No thanks. I’m good. Just looking around.”

Shopping is recreational for many. It’s less about walking into Best Buy with printouts of exact model numbers targeting something specific and more about just killing some time rummaging through stuff. We may buy something, but there’s a good chance we won’t.

The online shopping experience is far different. Many of us do surf around and stroll through the virtual aisles, but it’s a very different hunt-and-peck sort of experience. The key difference with the online “no-thanks-I’m-just-looking” experience is that it transcends physical space or location. In a click, we can hop thousands of geographic miles. One minute we’re checking out a New York City boutique, the next we’re on the fringes of bizarre Japanese merchandising. It’s a manic, unpredictable experience.

The question for online retailers obviously leads to: “How do I keep that potential customer inside my ‘store’?” It’s a tough thing, and nobody’s really been able to nail it. Amazon has done an amazing job of building community and personalization around the shopping experience and it’s paid off so far. Now, they’re trying to bring the fiddling-around-the-shop experience to the Web with the Amazon Window Shop.  Here’s a snapshot of it:

It’s a fun, virtual reality-style experience. They’ve kept it to music, games, books and movies/DVD’s (which makes sense). You don’t search for anything. You simply flip through the latest products. It’s a nice experience (for an even more impressive 3D-ish browsing experience, check out Cooliris) but I’m not sure this is going to connect for people for one key reason: there’s no search.

This may well be a first iteration and search may be upcoming, but the online shopping experience is all about search. As we rip through site after site we search…constantly. It’s become the way we pivot from place to place, honing in on what we’re after (or what we think we’re after). If we go astray, we reset our bearings by…searching yet again. In the world of online retail, perusal equals search. It’s how we stroll around. The problem with an experience like Window Shop is that it recreates the limitations around the physical world; a limitation that we were glad to obliterate and transcend on the Web. The visual experience is great, but it can’t be confined. It needs to go everywhere to be compelling.

As the economy turns for the worse, I think people are going to be doing a lot more perusing and a lot less buying. Experiences like Window Shop have a compelling halo effect for Amazon even if it doesn’t directly lead to purchases. Let’s face it. Amazon, at the very least, wants you at the mall. Even if you’re only gonna hang out at the food court.

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Posted by richz at 11:22 AM

Bansky On Advertising

Via PicoCool:

 

Ouch. Hey, we gotta make a living somehow. Heh.

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Posted by richz at 4:14 PM

The Design Grand Slam

For years, I refused to purchase an iPod for a certain someone in my life (hint: she gave birth to me). I tried your $29.99 deals you find on sites like Computer Geeks. I tried one of the older generation iRiver players. In essence, anything but an iPod. Of course, she eventually went out and bought one on her own.

The other devices all worked well and good (for the most part). But the thing that really bugged me was that my mom called every one of them "iPods." I found it slightly annoying and amusing all at once. I wrote it off as part of the first-generation immigrant experience. My family came to the United States in 1975.

My family comes from a (third) world where brand names of innovations became the generic words that represented those products. For example, growing up I remember "corn flakes" being synonymous with breakfast cereal. "Frigidaire" is a refrigerator. "Kleenex" is the word for facial tissue. And the list goes on.

While companies invest to build and differentiate their brands in modernized societies, barraging you with logos, slogans, colors and typography, their impact on less industrialized cultures is far more drastic. This happens a few reasons:

• Mass marketing hasn't really taken hold in certain societies. So when someone kicks off a brand campaign, it's not a stick of dynamite, it's an atomic bomb.
• The product or service never existed before. If the first refrigerator in your village has a big metallic "FRIGIDAIRE" plastered across it, and this thing keeps your food cold, then a refrigerator is a frigidaire (lower-case 'f').
• A product or service is so obviously useful and aesthetically appealing that people embrace it, brand and all. To do this, such a product must transcend cultural boundaries and connect in a very basic way with people.  People have to get excited about it. If they don't have it, they have to want it. They have to identify with it.

Fast forward to yesterday evening. I'm walking to pick up my car from the lot here in New York City, and I'm greeted with this:

So much for stereotyping my mom as a naive Third World immigrant.

If read literally, that sign still holds the parking lot responsible for my lost Archos 605 or Creative Zen player. Of course, by "iPod's" (note the attention to the lower-case "i" and upper-case "P") they mean any digital media player.

If you reread that third bullet above, you begin to appreciate how powerful design can be. People speak of better ROI, competitive advantage and improved brand perception, but the design equivalent of a grand slam is far more profound. If something immediately evinces its utility and appeal and provides satisfaction and pleasure to those that come upon it, it will be rewarded with it's own classification and place in our lexicon. Over time, it embeds itself in our culture and collective identity.

If there were ever an argument about the merits of design, this would be the trump card. When a grand slam is hit in marketing, it makes noise, creates buzz and eventually fizzles out. But when it happens in design, it transcends the commercial sphere and becomes part of life. Your competitors? They get reduced to oddities and anomalies. So the next time you're pitching that "design phase" that everyone rolls their eyes at, talk about the grand slam.

Now if you'll excuse me, a box of corn flakes (lower-case 'c', lower-case 'f') awaits...

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Posted by richz at 2:32 PM

What Software And Hardware Designers Can Learn From Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon

Ok, I know my titles have gotten a bit ridiculous of late (and sometimes ridiculously long) but bear with me here...

On a long flight over the Atlantic, I cued up Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. For the uninitiated among us, Dark Side is one of the great classic rock albums of all time. It's also one of the most famous concept albums ever created. A concept album is (and this is my anecdotal definition) an album where an overarching theme, and on occasion sounds, melodies and patterns, weave their way through the entire record. The notion of a "set of songs" gives way to an overall experience.

What's amazing about Dark Side is that it attempted to represent something bigger than your typical album. If you stop and think about the notion of a single "song," you'll quickly realize that it's a product of capitalism. Songs used to be sold as singles for a lot less than entire album. They also fit tidily within a radio station's play list. As a result, artists were asked to, and eventually became accustomed to, churning out 3-5 minute songs for mass consumption.

Dark Side flies in the face of such conventions. Yes, there are "tracks" that are each individually titled, but anyone that's listened to it will tell you they're relatively useless. The tracks bleed into one another seamlessly without interruptions of silence. In addition, some tracks are less than two minutes long while others exceed seven minutes.

In essence, Pink Floyd created a singular, cohesive, seamless experience. They were aware of the artificial delineations that exist around popular music, and simply set them aside. Instead, they created a work that represents an uncompromised expression.

As we think about engineering and more importantly designing software or hardware, we can't help but be aware of and heed the risks and challenges of technology constraints. When we design, we can't help but compromise because certain realities exist. But if you really want to build something great that represents singular, cohesive, seamless experience, we must check ourselves and challenge convention.

You could boil down the above ramble into a single example: you can't see the screws on an iPod. The hard realities that the engineers had to contend with in designing it are hidden away. The more we, as designers, are able to  create the illusion of overcoming or better yet defying constraints, the more impressive and often-times magical our product will seem. And "seem" is good enough. For your users, it is reality.

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Posted by richz at 9:56 AM

I Have Seen The Future And It Is PicLens

For the uninitiated, PicLens is a full screen visual browser of photos and videos. It's available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. It is a very fast, very slick, frankly awesome way to view visual assets on your computer. I'm not one to play fan boy of any technology, but Piclens is just too good. Here's their promo video:

The progress loading of Google Image search results is really something. PicLens works with Flickr, Youtube and other photo and video sites. The beta (found here) lets you browse and view news, sports and photo assets. It's a great way to glance at news stories.

There's been a bit of buzz lately around "visual browsing." Apple has made coverflow a major part of Leopard's Finder and companies like Searchme are betting their future on "visual searching." I don't think visual searching or browsing works for all types of assets, but for pics and videos, it really is great...and nothing does it better than PicLens.

Now if we can just convince the PicLens guys to add RSS feeds...

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Posted by richz at 9:24 AM

Needs, Wants And The Great Wall Of Human Fickleness

User-centered design is arguably the single most influential framework by which interfaces are created today. The core of UCD is to meet the needs and wants of end users of a system. Few would doubt that UCD is a good thing. Machines that pass off the illusion of patience and sympathy and a prescient anticipation of what we want to do next is in fact, a very good thing.

When we decide to introduce new product, it's a very tricky proposition because we're effectively trying to bring something new and most likely frivolous into a user's world. This is distinct from a project whereby a team has been hired to meet needs or wants that a user community is conscious of and seeks help on. One of the most formidable and often-neglected obstacles towards successful product adoption is the lack of appreciation for how high and thick that user's wall really is.

When assessing the viability of your new product, it's important to weigh the core reasons and motivators of why people would consider and potentially use your product.

A new product aimed at a broad audience must peg these "wants and needs" with little validation. In this post, I'm going to humbly attempt to categorize the types of needs that may motivate a user to try a new product.

Basic (Primal) Needs

This is the easiest to peg and thus requires the least design work because the needs are so obvious and strong. If I created a complex and painfully confusing sign-up process that led to a $100 check being mailed to you no strings attached, people would tolerate it and go to great lengths to trudge through that process.

If we're providing a service that meets a basic and obvious need or desire, then we can worry less about the user experience. Pornography is another good example of this category (though I'm not going to spilt hairs here between needs and wants).

Organizational Or Financial Pressure

Here, the motivation to use your product materializes from the top on down. If you're able to sell an enterprise CRM application to a CIO or IT manager, their population will have to use it. It's part of their jobs. They may get trained on it and they may have their gripes about it, but there's an implicit understanding that you need to work with this tool to get your job done.

While you should still care about the user experience because bad buzz can still catch up with you, the value proposition is different here. It's more about return-on-investment and "number of transactions per hour" that a decision-maker is going to weigh. In this case, the "needs and wants" are more organizational than individual.

Social Connection

This category is a close relative of the Basic Needs category above. We love to be connected to, talking to, sharing pictures with, befriending (quote-unquote) other human beings. We are social animals and any tool that highlights and enhances our social connections is appealing to us.

If my good friend from high school is on a particular social network, I may well sign up to whatever service to connect with her. Myspace and Facebook are the most obvious examples of products that feed off this need.

Utility Applications

This is the toughest category to define because it's so broad. The products in this category rarely serve their own end but rather help us meet a multitude of needs. Word processing, email and web searching all fall into this category. They lie somewhere in the middle of the assembly line that leads to our goals.

Be very wary of introducing products into this category because utility applications are used heavily and constantly. As a result, the patterns and habits run very deep for many users. People get good at bad habits. When you're thinking through your product's value proposition and if it falls into this category, be sure to apply a heavy tax.

"It's Just So Darn Perty"

There are other, less critical factors that may drive one's needs. A product may be emotionally or aesthetically appealing. For example, Apple's hardware is intuitive and speaks to our desire to be associated with physically attractive objects.

What Is Your User Plan?

You'll often hear that a good business plan clearly states the problem or "pain" that its addressing. After all, without defining that need or want, why bother executing on a product? This is all well and good for business plans and overarching strategies, but it's critical to carry through that analysis down to the humans that need to interact with your product. What is the source of their existing pain? How will your product help? Which category of need are you going after and are you ready to disrupt their current way of doing things, however flawed it may be. It's great to have a business plan, but what's your user plan?

If people are going to touch your product, then be wary of their fickleness, tolerance and sensibilities. They may not seem like much, but when they work in concert against you, they are nearly insurmountable.

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Posted by richz at 5:56 PM

The Antidote To Big, Obnoxious Web Ads : The Off Switch

Recently, I've noticed that the front page of the New York Times on the web had given way to a more, how should I put it, Times Square sort of feel:

 

This is an above-the-fold snapshot. As you can see, the ad is grabbing nearly 40% of the available real estate.

The New York Times web presence is, in my opinion, one of the best-designed news sites on the Web...and then these obnoxious ads get slapped across the whole thing. It's a challenge for ad-driven sites like the New York Times. You want to present information in a useful, readable and constructive way, but you also need to pay the bills. When American Express or Apple comes knocking, you don't want to shoo them away. So what to do?

Well, why not let the reader decide? Near the top-right corner is a click that actually hides the ad:

It's an interesting tactic and one I'd never seen before. I wonder if their advertising clients are OK with this or if maybe they paid a little bit less for this functionality to appear. It seems to be universal.

A content-driven destination as successful as nytimes.com will inevitably have to draw a line somewhere because too much advertising undoubtedly detracts from the perceived value, reputation and prestige of a publication. Everyone has visited sites that splatter ads all over, under and in-between their content. They make you feel icky about being there. It's a difficult tension between good design and good revenue opportunities. The New York Times has done a great job so far. The Minimize Ads button further highlights that tension.

Thankfully, the Web in general has gotten better. I still remember the days when balloons or dolphins would come flying across an article I'm reading. It's pretty awful. Thankfully, the market seems to correct itself. Publishers have a better appreciation of finding that balance today. The New York Times is going one step further by empowering the visitor with the ability to put ads away.

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Posted by richz at 8:37 AM

Journalism, Information Design & The Ability To Mold The Minds Of The Masses Like Big, Heaping Lumps Of Clay

Take a look at this chart from Time's March 31, 2008 issue:

You'll often hear about the importance of journalistic integrity and the importance of objectivity and impartiality when reporting news. The above chart may well convey nothing that can be construed as inaccurate or skewed. Words are words. But alas, the art of marketing, however slyly introduced, is clearly at play.

Some observations:

• The questions are posed such that McCain answers in the negative. They could have easily been rephrased such that the reverse is shown. In the final question, McCain responds with "Maybe" (and yes, to a reader, it is McCain "responding"). "Maybe" can be perceived any number of ways: shady, indecisive, secretive or simply lacking clarity. 
• This one's a kicker: in response to the Hedge Funds row, all three candidates are assigned "No's." I'll admit I didn't even notice this until the third or fourth time I glanced at the chart. The visual power of the right-hand column colored in red overwhelms the actual content.
• The No's and Maybe are colored in red while Hillary's and Obama's responses are in a gray-blue. So what do colors mean? Read means: no, stop, angry, hot-tempered, emotional, simmering. Blue means: calm, soothing, stability, wisdom, trust, confidence. Red is hell. Blue is heaven. (There are numerous articles out there on colors and emotions.)

I'm not going to go so far as to say that there is a sinister plot brewing at Time magazine. But the above illustrates just how powerful even the most subtle tweaks on how information is presented can affect not only how we digest information but how we perceive it and digest it. Such tactics are well known and used extensively in marketing and campaign circles, which is OK, because to most the caveat is already in place. "It's just marketing." The above reminds of those in-between advertising links that look like articles when they're really just more ads masked as such. Except with the above, it isn't. It's just Time magazine reporting.

Note: this post isn't meant to convey a preference or bias towards a particular presidential candidate. It's merely put forward to illustrate how information design can be used to shape perceptions.

(I found the above on Last Psychiatrist. He gives his own thoughts on the above as well).

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Posted by richz at 9:39 AM

Searchme : Cover Flow Meets Search (Yay?)

The folks at Searchme were kind enough to send me a beta invite into their visual search tool. Searchme presents search results in a cover flow style interface. After playing around with it a bit, I sent them a note:

I'm honestly dumbfounded with this. Beyond the "oh neat" initial impression - how is this useful? The cover flow style of perusing assets makes sense for large, easily-recognizable assets. For search results, I just don't see how it makes sense.

I'll admit that my impression is colored by the major backing that Searchme is enjoying - which I assume comes part-and-parcel with validation from some smart people. If a couple of guys had done this with Flash, I would have a very different impression. But I'm guessing that Searchme is a venture that seeks to become a full-fledged business. If Searchme does take off, it'll be an important lesson for me to learn about how an application penetrates a market and ulitmately succeeds. Because right now, I just don't see.

Soon after, Searchme responded back. Here's the entire response verbatim:

Hi Rich:

You certainly are entitled to your opinion.  We have heard it before and we think  that for some people, looking at text just makes more sense.  You are one of those people, for sure!

But there are people out there for whom a visual representation is preferable. They want to recognize a page by it’s look (oh, its a wikipedia page, etc.) not it’s title.  Information wise, pictures are much richer than text, and we have heard hundreds of users who tell us that the like the alternative of looking and choosing pictures over words.

The wonderful thing about this world is that everyone is different and we embrace that, so please go ahead and post your view, you are entitled and encouraged to do so - thank you for telling us first.  We really appreciate your integrity.

Best,

Searchme Team

A day later, I got another response, I'm guessing from a different group or person within Searchme:

Hi, Rich-

We show pictures of web pages to help searchers “look before they leap.” with a traditional text-only list view, searchers fall into a rhythm of “click, back… click, back…”, as they review search results. this takes time. Enabling users to quickly see pictures of the pages in the results helps them in two ways. First, they can quickly scan the pictures and identify features like images, headlines, and brands that catch their interest. no more “click, back… click, back.” you know it when you see it. Second, searchers can also visually ~reject~ pages, pages that don’t look useful or relevant. A visual image provides users with additional data than can be useful in evaluating both individual search results, and also a set of search results.

Also, helping people narrow their search by category, as kara mentioned in the article, is another way to make results more aligned with the intent of the user. If we can disambiguate a query and capture user intent, we can serve pages only about the category that they want to see. and, just as importantly, we can omit the pages they don’t want to see.

Thanks so much for the feedback. We'll make sure to pass it on to the appropriate people. We're working really hard to make Searchme fun and easy to use. Stay tuned for some cool new features, and don't forget to tell your friends to sign up for a beta invitation!

Thanks for trying out Searchme!

The Searchme Team

I've played with Searchme for about fifteen minutes so far. You could easily argue that I haven't given it a chance. Still, I'm failing to see how illegible snapshots of web pages will prove to be superior to seeing a snippet of text just below a search result. Cover flow works well if you're sifting through images (Piclens does an incredible job of displaying image search results).

As for Apple's implementation of it in iTunes, it makes sense there because you're leveraging an association that a user has already created between an album and its visual "icon." Perusing search results is another matter altogether. To quickly weigh the value of a result, you need to know a little more about it and the great majority of destinations on the Web convey themselves through textual content.

In the end, it's about how it feels in a real-world scenario. I hit Google probably 30-50 times a day. I'm going to try to block out some time and use it instead of Google and report back. My guess is I'll grow annoyed within the first few searches and abandon it. But who knows. Check back soon!

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Posted by richz at 9:03 AM

Microsoft-Centered Design

And you wonder why Microsoft gets on people's nerves...

So I'm perusing the various blog posts that have streamed out of the MIX 08 conference and some interesting talks are available online. So I head on over to the MIX 08 site to view some sessions and I run into this:

Yep, I need to download Real Player, I mean Silverlight to watch these videos. Silverlight, for the less enlightened, is Microsoft's foray into streaming video, rich media and rich apps on the Web (aka Microsoft's Flash).

Putting aside general observations about industry trends and such, the move is just downright selfish. Here's why: Flash video works well and Flash is installed. I can respect Microsoft's desire to compete, but don't do it at the expense of end users. Silverlight is bringing nothing new to the table here except distraction, disruption and what amounts to a dead end on a web page.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, I'd offer this to the Silverlight team: sit in a room with a whiteboard and think up some actual things that will compel users to install Silverlight with a fevered passion. In other words: invent something we don't already have. We all know what user-centered design is all about. This is Microsoft-centered design. The users? They're taken by the ear and forced to follow along. We're force-fed Microsoft's strategy.

I for one, am convinced that if Microsoft re-channeled their energy to delivering new and creative inventions that we don't already have, we'd be pleasantly surprised.

This post shouldn't be read as a wholesale condemnation of Microsoft. Microsoft's sphere of influence is vast, and many good things have come from them. Office 2007/2008 is a beautifully designed experience in my opinion, and the features in the new Internet Explorer 8 show some out-of-the-box thinking. Such examples further emphasize my point.

C'mon Redmond, you can do better than this.

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Posted by richz at 2:08 PM

A Lesson From Apple : How To Make Your Users Fall In Love With You

As part of the iPhone SDK, Apple included a gem for anyone interested in creating effective user experiences: The iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for Web Applications is a nicely-written set of guidelines to help developers build usable, intuitive applications for the iPhone. Looking past the iPhone however, you'll find great advice that applies generally.

A couple of things struck me about the document. First, it's incredibly well-written. It seems to intentionally avoid tech-speak or unnecessary jargon. It's written in an almost dumbed-down, non-technical manner.

The other theme that permeates the entire paper is the enormous care and concern for users. The document can be read as a series of warnings to developers and designers. It constantly reminds the reader to "pay attention to" and "be mindful of" how user's think, work and interact. It's a glimpse into Apple's design-dominated culture.

People wonder why people love their Macs and iPods. It's because Apple is thoughtful and sympathetic. Unlike most other technology company cultures, technology takes a back seat.

Below are some choice snippets that I found especially useful:

1. [U]nderstanding your users, is a cornerstone of user experience and user interface design, whether you are designing a webpage, an iPhone application, or a computer application.
2. [Y]ou must be prepared for the probability that users will not be giving their undivided attention to your content, at least not for long.
3. [O]ne of the ways to achieve simplicity is to avoid the clutter of too many visual elements that compete for the user’s attention. In a webpage, you might do this by reducing the number of ads, images, and links.
4. Avoid clutter, unused blank space, and busy backgrounds.
5. Express essential information succinctly.
6. Avoid unnecessary interactivity.
7. You can’t assume that users have the time (or can spare the attention) to figure out how your content works. Therefore, you should strive to make your web content instantly understandable to users.
8. A webpage that is cluttered with many different sizes and styles of elements, different sizes and colors of text, and gratuitous images presents an unpleasant user experience.
9. Avoid technical jargon in the user interface. Use what you know about your users to determine whether the words and phrases you plan to use are appropriate.
10. Consistency across user interfaces allows users to apply knowledge they’ve gained from other webpages and applications to new content.

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Posted by richz at 11:43 AM

Seven Things I've Learned About Improving Design By Paying Close Attention To My Technically Incompetent But Wonderful Mother

I've written in the past about my mom's oddball computer and Internet habits. My mom is far from tech savvy. English isn't even her first language and she's only been using the personal computer for five years or so. Most importantly, my mom started using a computer in her early 50's. She is far from the technically-inclined Internet/Email/Chat/Facebook/Myspace generation of today.

But don't let her lack of competence fool you. There's gold in them there hills. Here are some of my mom's odd habits and some possible lesson's learned:

1. My mom likes spam. Well, let's just say she loves seeing a large number of new items in her Inbox. I knew something's up when she'd tell me she urgently has to check her email. Then I thought to myself: "who the hell is emailing my mother?" It turns she just likes getting email. Also, all those annoying newsletters from Overstock, Sears or Banana Republic? She likes them.
   Lesson Learned: People enjoy the feeling of being involved and connected to others - even if it isn't what we'd view as "legitimate" activity.
2. She doesn't know the difference between a search box and a URL box. This one blew me away. I was walking her through some task on the phone and I asked her to put a particular URL into her browser. She kept trying to no avail. It turned out she was putting the URL into the Google search box. She makes no distinction between interface controls in applications and inside of web sites.
   Lesson Learned: Never assume that a typical user knows of or cares about the technical delineations that we're so conscious of. Yes, an HTML form tag is a world away from the controls within the chrome of a browser application, but many people don't know or care about that distinction. When designing, try to consciously break down the technical walls we respect so much.
3. My mom has one login...for everything. I've set up most of the user accounts for my mom: desktop, email, Yahoo, Facebook and we've made it a point to use the same login everywhere. As a result, mom has no notion of her user accounts being stored in various places. She's actually living the unified authentication dream we're all seeking.
   Lesson Learned: Innovations in technology aren't just about new processor chips and brilliant code libraries. They're as much about creating illusions of seamlessness, elegance and downright smarts. Very often that's as much about trickery as it is about actual technical innovation.
4. My mom likes malware. Months ago, my mom called me laughing hysterically: "You have to come see this! Every time I play a song Scooby Doo comes out and and dances on my desktop!" As soon as I heard this, I knew that some insidious malware had made it onto my mom's PC. As Scoopy danced, Lord knows what that software was doing underneath. Still, it was a pleasant surprise that made my mom really happy, even for a brief period of time.
   Lesson Learned: While a user's experience shouldn't be jarring or unpredictable, people may enjoy something unexpected if done well. I remember really loving the Easter eggs and hidden tricks in games. Another example is Google's ever-changing logo on it's main search page. It's a subtle twist, but people enjoy it.
5. She keeps every one of her contacts as a "task" on her Yahoo account. This one is bizarre. My Yahoo has a nice, full-featured personal contacts application built into it. My mom doesn't have a single contact stored properly in Yahoo. Instead she keeps all her contacts in the Note field in the Tasks portion of Yahoo Calendar. Each contact is a "task" stored haphazardly without any sort of useful sorting or filtering. I asked my mom why she put them there instead of in Contacts. She was annoyed by the question but then explained that she tried this and it worked the first time. So she kept doing it.
   Lesson Learned: There a few lessons here. (1) Don't assume people know what "Contacts" or "Tasks" or "Todos" means. Large swaths of computer users don't have a clue. (2) You can win a user over with immediate feedback of some sort of success, however small. My mom immediately saw that tasks worked and so she kept using it. (3) Don't intimidate users. The "New Task" dialog is far less complex than the "New Contact" dialog. "Less" means less pain for novices.
6. She has never used Google. My mom is locked into the Yahoo ecosystem. Email. Messenger. She views search as search and hasn't fallen into a particular brand loyalty. When her searches fail, she just keeps trying in the same search box. She's not an exploratory user. Instead, she finds her groove somewhere and sticks to it. When she does lock in, she makes a big assumption: "now I have to use it right otherwise anything that may go wrong is my fault."
   Lesson Learned: When things go wrong, many users assume that they've done something wrong - not the tool they're using. If "errors" occur, be wary of who you correct, and speak constructively.
7. She inadvertantly invites me to join crappy services all the time. Rarely does a week go by without my mom inviting me into social networking sites that I would otherwise never bother with (e.g. Hi5). When I bring up these invitations, she doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about, throws up her arms and declares "I have no idea what I'm doing!"
   Lesson Learned: Don't deceive, trick or somehow coax users into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do. Don't make users regret ever leaving that checkbox checked on that signup form. It doesn't engender good things, only mistrust.

Of course, moms teach all sorts of valuable life lessons, but in their blissful ignorance of technology, they (and anyone else that isn't skilled with computers) can inadvertently teach us a whole lot more.

So if you're looking to improve your product experience or want to reach a broader, less savvy audience, what are you waiting for. Call your mother!

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Posted by richz at 10:27 AM

When The Awesome Converges With The Everyday

This past weekend, I caught a documentary called Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo (it's airing on PBS currently). It's about the the relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright and his friend and client Darwin Martin. It chronicles Wright's struggles and eventual ascent as a prominent architect.

As Wright's design sensibility matures, a tension is revealed. Wright viewed his work as art. Every excruciating detail was accounted for. It was a clear vision that could not be compromised in Wright's eyes. The budget for the Martin House spiraled out of control as Wright replaced his client's requests with his own grand vision. Practicality gave way to an ambition to attain something uniquely austere. Darwin Martin's wife, who was nearly blind, complained over its impracticality, most notably the lack of sunlight allowed into the home.

Most creative art, whether paintings, theater or music,is created for passive observation. We, the intended audience of art, rarely interact with the creative work. We listen to music; watch a movie; observe a painting; etc. Architecture, on the other hand, is highly interactive. We often live within, and live with the creative work.

In many ways, architecture is the precursor to interaction design. It's one of the few early art forms that contends with that tension of creative expressiveness and basic practicality. Wright had a personal vision that blew away conventions of the day. His work was derided as impractical and heralded as groundbreaking all at once. What fueled Wright's tangent away from conventional design was not just a simple desire to be different. He sought to create a memorable work that evoked emotion. He wanted its inhabitants and the occasional visitor to feel something about the place. Utility took a backseat.

We can learn a lot about respecting this tension as designers - and feeding both ends of it. It isn't easy to create something both beautiful, emotionally-evoking and at the same time useful, intuitive and practical.

During the program, one of the commentators summed up this tension perfectly (I'm paraphrasing):

What Wright sought was to somehow reach a place where the awesome converges with the everyday.

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Posted by richz at 2:04 PM

The Enterprise Software Hostage Crisis

Khoi Vinh has a thoughtful post on why enterprise software seems so far removed from anything that has to do with good interaction design. At Signal vs. Noise, Jason Fried adds that the buyers aren't the users and as such the users are left with these bloated monstrosities that may get MIS guys all giggly but bring nothing but pain to the actual user base.

To take the conversation further, I'd add that this apparent disconnect hinges on the distinction of what drives software. In the product-for-the-masses scenario, companies like 37 Signals think long and hard about what the masses are going to value. They must apply an enormous amount of scrutiny and re-factoring to deliver something that resonates with potential customers. What's critical in this scenario is that 37 Signals is in the driver seat. They've taken it upon themselves to learn and understand a potential market and deliver something of value to that market. In some instances, they may even introduce innovation - i.e. things the market failed to articulate as a real need but embrace after the fact.

This is hardly so with enterprise software. The product maker-to-market dynamic isn't at play. Instead, you have a three-way dynamic between enterprise software makers, their customers - the MIS decision-makers, and finally the "customers" within the enterprise whom the MIS guys answer to. In this scenario, the enterprise software maker is singularly focused with making sure a critical goal is met: that the MIS guy has complete flexibility to meet just about any need, however ridiculous, that comes along.

If anyone has glanced at a gap analysis matrix that often precedes a big purchase of enterprise software, they'll know exactly what I'm alluding to. In the enterprise world, all users are not created equal. If an investment bank's managing director that is responsible for billions on revenue wants a feature, he's going to get it. And so, the drivers in the enterprise software world, ironically, are the users. The MIS guys? They're just hostages who's sole purpose is to make sure they meet the needs of their own "customer base." IBM and SAP know this all too well. So they deliver them what they need: a do-it-yourself Frankenstein kit.

Jason mentions that "[t]he people who buy our products are the people who use our products." He's right, but he's still selling 37 Signals short. The value they bring to the table isn't just delivering software, it's distilling needs to down to something constrained and cohesive. There is no gap analysis. No custom bolt-on that has to be maintained. 37 Signals, not its users, is in the driver seat. Of course, this leaves 37 Signals with the significant task of figuring out where to take their software next to keep their current customer base happy and gain new customers.

So don't blame the poor schleps who have to buy, customize, deploy and maintain enterprise software. They're merely trying to keep the masses in check and relatively happy. They do that by being everything to everyone...and nothing special to anyone.

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Posted by richz at 11:52 AM

Design Dictatorships

Speaking of design dictatorships, Gerd Hildebrand, chief designer of the Mini, on the new Mini Clubman:

"It was design by dictatorship," clarified the somewhat autocratic Mini chief designer, Gerd Hildebrand. "All else, this marketing, these focus groups, what have you, is bullshit."

Heh, ya gotta love it. (via Metacool).

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Posted by richz at 2:17 PM

Apple Knows Best

Since the iPhone's release, hackers have been pecking away to try to unlock the power of Apple's little portable computer. iPhones could be fake activated (so you can use the Wifi capabilities and iPod features), homebrew and custom applications can be installed, and your iPhone can be "unlocked" to allow it to work with other SIM cards.

By now, everyone is aware of Apple's latest iPhone firmware update and what it does to hacked or unlocked iPhones. If your iPhone is hacked and you throw down update 1.1.1, your hacks and installed applications will no longer work. If your phone is unlocked and using another carrier, it apparently wreaks havoc.

The motivation for targeting unlocked iPhones is pretty straightforward: Apple shares service revenue with AT&T and is contractually obligated to keep other carriers off the iPhone.

The motivation behind breaking the hacking/custom apps on the iPhone is not so clear. Also, it's pissed a lot of people off. Gizmodo is not recommending that people purchase the iPhone. So the question begs to be asked: why would Apple break applications that make the iPhone more valuable to its customers?

I see two possible answers to the above question:

1. Apple didn't intentionally try to break anything. I don't know a lot about the software cycle process for portable devices, but I'm guessing its not a cakewalk. Unlike computers, the tolerance level for a phone crashing or not functioning properly is extremely low. Apple has enough to worry about in dealing with software updates. They simply can't commit resources to make certain the iPhone will continue to support a constantly changing software ecosystem that is outside of their control.
2. Apple seeks to maintain total control of the iPhone experience. The iPhone is an inspiring piece of technology. It's powerful, intuitive and is the product of enormous control exerted over the software and hardware design process. You can't create an experience that good without exerting that kind of control. If Apple chose to, even passively, allow the homebrew community to flourish, the result would be less control in Apple's hands.

Reason 2 is intriguing to me. In many ways, it highlights a rarely cited reality in design: most people aren't good at it. The iPhone is not the product of a democratic process. It's the outcome of the labors of a team of extremely talented designers, architects and developers.

If you stop and look at Apple's development and design guidelines for OSX, the need for control is there as well. Just about every OSX application shares a common aesthetic and flow. Apple aggressively enforces and recommends design "guidelines."

So stated in a less than friendly manner: Apple doesn't want other people mucking up their stuff. "Thanks, but no thanks" is the message. Taken to its end, this is about their lack of faith in democracy. Apple believes Apple knows best...and in many ways, they do.

This highlights another seemingly obvious-yet-not-so-obvious trait of Apple: they care about their customers more than they care about developers. I'm guessing the great majority of people (95%? - I'd be interested if there are statistics out there) don't know about nor have even heard of the iPhone hacking scene. They've got their iPhone and iTunes and that's it.

Reasons 1 and 2 above speak to Apple's true loyalty. While there are a lot of great applications written for the iPhone, nobody knows (or much cares about) SSH or IRC. Nor they want anything to do with "Jailbreaking" their iPhone. They just want it to work as advertised.

As designers, we all know about the dreaded "design by committee." Design's inherent subjectivity can quickly turn a tightly-focused effort into an ugly free-for-all. The reality is tough and somewhat unfriendly: it's hard to democratize a vision. While we want to invite all sorts of stakeholders to the party, the outcome is rarely good and oftentimes bad.

This leads back to the title of this blog entry: does Apple know best? Based on their track record, they probably do. People love their products because they design great products. They don't ask for feedback. They don't have betas. They don't do the focus group thing (at least that I know of).

It's a design dictatorship. Their products just show up, all polished and ready for sale. Version 1.0 and ready for consumption. And the customers, not the developers, vote on their success. And as long as Apple keeps succeeding, they'll hold onto that power.

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Posted by richz at 10:15 AM

The "Almost Web" Web

With the release of the iPhone and now the iPod Touch, its clear we're headed on a slightly divergent path when it comes to Web standards and mobile devices:

• Mobile devices are getting more powerful from a raw CPU-horsepower perspective. They can do more.
• Displays in general are getting bigger and resolutions are improving.
• Ajax and Javascript (albeit slightly watered-down) are running on the latest portable devices. The Archos 605 (a product that is available today) runs Opera 8 with Javascript & Flash in all its glory. Apple's products are running (more or less) a full-blown version of Safari.

It's also clear that the capabilities of these devices will only get better. While it's niche today, it'll be the norm tomorrow to have a near-desktop browsing experience in the palm of your hand. This raises two questions for me:

1. Are we (the web designers and developers of the world) wasting our time targeting woefully watered-down versions of our platforms for your typical cell phone?
2. Should we stop thinking about "versions" of the same content (a "mobile version" and a "full web version") and instead start thinking about how to make one version gracefully degrade to the limitations of a mobile device?

As for question 1, I think the answer is "yes." As much as we tried to make it happen for years, nobody is shopping on Amazon or searching through eBay on the typical flip mobile phone. It's too painful and frankly, it just plain sucks. So why design for it? As for WAP: it's a technology that has two things going against it: (1) Nobody asked for it and (2) it sucks.

Question 2 is far more interesting. Even with the iPhone, a device that comes with a fully capable browser, developers felt compelled to come out with iPhone versions of their apps. Why? Maybe there's too much stuff going in our web destinations anyway. Been to Espn.com lately or any of the Major League Baseball franchise sites? They are the web design equivalent of Times Square. Even well regarded sites like New York Times & CNN pummel you with information.

Let's face it, when you first saw that Apple ad where the user navigates around NY Times and zooms into a column, you couldn't help but raise your eyebrows. It looked damn cool. Coolness and usefulness, unfortunately, don't always jive. That's why the good folks at Blue Flavor put out - you guessed it - an iPhone version of the NY Times (along with all kinds of neat iPhone ports called Leaflets). Truth is, it wasn't very usable.

As designers, we need to design towards what appears to be a new goal that is materializing: The Almost Web. It's not completely dumbed-down, but its also not a drop-all-the-content-at-once free-for-all. Grab the bottom-right corner of your browser and see how your design reacts as you take it to 400 pixels wide. Increase and decrease the size of fonts and see how your containers behave. It's a new challenge: can we produce one version of our content that gracefully fills and morphs to accommodate the various clients we're going to be using?

So c'mon kids, start thinking about this new waypoint we're inevitably heading towards. It ain't your mama's mobile web and it ain't that fancy 1920x1200 screen you're staring at either either. It's somewhere in between. It's a healthy reset.

Until then, I'll keep navigating to the place that most closely mimics how the Almost Web should feel: printer-friendly pages. One of my favorite hacks is to tag printer-friendly pages on del.icio.us and then retrieve them on my PSP or Treo. It's a shortcut out of Times Square.

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Posted by richz at 10:36 AM

Flash Bumptop

Anyone remember that slick interface prototype Bumptop? It was this groovy interface where artifacts behaved like physical objects. You could stack them, fan them out. Really cool concept stuff.

Well Doug McCune, Flash/Flex developer, is in the midst of actually implementing it in Flex. It's part Papervision. Part Actionscript Physics Engine. Very frickin' cool. Here's a video of what he's got working so far:

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Posted by richz at 10:31 AM

Design Leads The Way

It is a sexy little thing. The iPhone that is. It's finally out after arguably the greatest viral marketing blitz in the history of everything. Apple seems to understand human nature - a key ingredient that preceded the Web and blogging. I'm convinced there's a part of P.T. Barnum in Steve Jobs. They understand suspense, drama and some really basic things about what triggers the inner child in us.

But this post isn't about the marketing of the iPhone. It's about the iPhone being the single most drastic example of infusing design into the development of a product.

I've often yammered on about how great design can really make the difference for your product; how marking off some time for some good, solid design sessions can really elevate your product beyond the ordinary. A really successful design can almost feel like something completely new if done right.

If we roughly break it down, there are three ways to fold design into your product development process:

1. Build the thing first, then design around it. This is bad. Really bad. The development group has gone ahead and picked off the key "function points" around some business requirements list. Here, design is an afterthought. Warning signs are phrases like "it's nearly done, now let's give it to the design team to make it look nicer." Design is an afterthought.
2. Have some brainstorming design sessions. This approach isn't half bad. You'll often see a "representative" from development sitting in on these sessions. Here, design is sort of mushed into the development process. "Negotiations" often take place with the development team pointing out impossibilities or near impossibilities ("there's no way that's making into this timeframe."). This approach is fairly common nowadays. The value of design has finally gained some headway so you'll often have your CIO (or some equivalent) saying "hmm, we should probably have an interface designer in the mix."
3. Design leads the way. This is rare. Really rare. Here, development - the construction company - doesn't make a single move until the design is created, tested, validated, and ideally, refined again. Only once presented to the development group can they give their assessment. You know you're in a design-driven shop when development is on its heels, excited to figure out the puzzles that will make this design come alive. The power dynamic is shifted compared to #2 above. The designers and product managers will make the hard call of what can or can't make it in.

Apple is in a very rare place today. They are very large, very powerful (in terms of purchasing power) company that happens to adhere to #3. Not only are they entirely design-driven, but the design will not only influence the development team down the hall, but the hardware manufacturer across the globe and one of the largest mobile phone carriers in the world. Apple believes in design as the lever, and they've now reached that place where that lever can affect a lot. The result is the iPhone, the outcome of a massive alignment of hardware, software and design. That's why it looks like an impossible device by today's standards.

The thing that other companies have struggled with in trying to catch up to Apple is their inability to dismantle the engineering-driven mindset within their organizations. Microsoft and Dell have felt the pain of somehow always feeling a step behind. Nokia and LG are now about to.

So it's yet another lesson learned from Apple. If you head a product group, put a few hours aside and take your design team out to lunch. If you're really interested in making an impact, give them the reigns and do what you can to get everyone else out of their way. The less encumbered they are, the better your product will be.

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Posted by richz at 10:59 AM

Thomas Edison's Startup

For the unitiiated, Marc Andreessen (the co-founder of Netsape) started blogging a few weeks ago. Marc is on a serious role so far, providing all sorts of gems about the in's and out's of a starting a technology venture and hiring the right teams. If you aren't tracking it and this stuff interests you, don't miss it.

In Marc's most recent post, he expounds upon the only thing that matters when thinking about a startup. In sum, the only thing that matters according to Marc is the market. You may have a great team and a stellar product, but if the market isn't there you'll most likely fail, according to Marc.

With all due respect to Mr. Andreessen, I think his conclusions are not only wrong, but sadly discouraging. Innovation, invention, those great out-of-left-field ideas that someone is tenacious enough to bring to product and introduce them in a clear way. The ideas that not only fufill a need, but create wants. The ideas that, in effect, create markets.

On every corner and side street in New York City, there is either a street coffee vendor or a deli or coffee shop ready and willing to sell you coffee for $.50. Could anyone have foreseen the "market" for Starbucks to wedge its way into practically every 100 meters in New York City and sell their coffee for three to four times as much? Where did that market come from?

The portable music player market existed for years before the iPod came along. The market was effectively demarcated by the early players like Diamond (which eventually became Rio). And then, the iPod came along and absolutely obliterated the boundaries of what everyone presumed the portable music market to be.

Marc sort of addresses those rare market-creating products that come along every so often, but he frames it in a "product/market fit" argument. The failing there is that he's writing off the market as some fixed, pre-defined entity. The task of the startup is to somehow make your product fit within it.

I'd much prefer to view the dance between product and market as something far more fluid and highly reciprocal. A product can expand, and in rare cases, create a market. A market can inevitably drive the strategic direction of a product. Factors like ease-of-use, elegant design, and aesthetics that can evoke emotions and loyalty, and others can help shape wants that we never would have conceived of prior.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this blog, this is again about honing in a real need (or want) and attacking it with good design. Good design broadens your potential market and can create loyalty that is nearly impossible to attain otherwise.

But even if we forget design for a second, what of the market for phonographs? Or moving pictures? Or a toaster? How would Thomas Edison react to Marc's argument? Wait...how would Marc circa 1993 react to Marc's argument today?

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Posted by richz at 10:32 PM

10 Things We Can Learn From Apple

There's no need to restate the high reverence (or pangs of envy, depending on where your loyalty lies) of Apple. They have innovated, floundered, and in recent years, risen from the ashes to make one hell of a run in computing and electronics devices. Love them or hate them, you can't deny that they are adored by their fans. Their brand has reached that highly sought-after place in the world of marketing: they can do no wrong.

So how did they get there? Is it dumb luck? Or are they just much smarter than the rest of us? The most common reason given is Apple's rabid devotion to design. That is, without a doubt, a key component of Apple's success. But I think there's more to it than that. Here are ten reasons why I think Apple is so successful today, and what we can learn from them:

1. Understand The Total Experience. Apple is not a software company. It's also not a hardware company. It's an experience company. Software and hardware just play a part in the broader experience. Imagine your iPod without iTunes. Hardware and software are industry demarcations that the masses could care less about. By ignoring that separation and focusing on solving real problems in a cohesive way, they obliterated the portable music market.
2. Less Is More. You see it in all of Apple's interfaces. That "clean" look. Sure, the power is there, but wherever possible it's hidden away. As for controls, there's hardly a single button on an iPod. Hell, there isn't even a power switch. It seems counter-intuitive to the engineering mind. Less features and less controls appeal to people more. But it makes sense. With less, there's less room for error. Less to digest. Less to learn. In other words, a shorter path to enjoyment.
3. "He's Got His Father's Eyes." Take a look at an iPod. Then take a look at the Apple remote. Load up iTunes. Then visit apple.com. Nearly all of Apple's products share common genetic characteristics. One of the most striking examples is a previous version of the iMac that actually looks like an iPod. Why is this important? Two reasons. First, by reinforcing common conventions, the learning curve is flattened. Second, these familiar profiles reinforce Apple's signature. You could probably pick an Apple product out of a line-up that you've never seen before.
4. "I'd Like To Introduce You To Some...Thing." How many other companies do you know of that introduce a product line personally? Rather than a press release. Or a meme that starts out among a collection of bloggers. Or some sort of email list. Apple personally introduces their products to their loyal fans. Often times, it seems like magically, their web presence is simultaneously updated - sometimes allowing for purchase of just-introduced products.
5. Control The Hardware. This isn't even a secret. Steve Jobs said it bluntly at the iPhone introduction: if you want to build great software, you have to control the hardware. This is precisely why the iPhone feels four or five generations ahead of any portable device available today. Phone carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile fish around looking for sexy, powerful hardware from electronics manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola. Microsoft will go to bed with just about anybody to promote their software platform. Apple knows better. To create truly compelling experiences, you need to have a hand in all the pieces of the puzzle. The iPhone is a great example of that synergy.
6. Hide The Screws. This is a classic Apple move. Mimic real world artifacts and make things feel less like technology devices and more like something you'd find in the real world. Pick up your iPod. It has no visible screws. It isn't even clear how the device comes together. Hiding the ugliness of technology makes these toys more endearing. Features like coverflow and the upcoming time machine further this notion of pulling design inspiration from the real world.
7. "Go Ahead. Touch It." People are scratching their heads wondering why the Apple retail stores are so successful. Gateway tried it years ago and their stores are all gone now. Dell is trying to sell through retail as well...through Walmart. Somehow, I don't think finding Dell laptops across the aisle from 60 lb. bags of fertilizer will amount to the same shopping experience. Above all else, Apple stores are designed to allow you to touch, play with and interact with every one of their products. You're implicitly invited to approach an iPod or Macbook and just play with it. This evinces a confidence in the ease of use of their products, and more importantly, a confidence in you.
8. Feeling & Thinking. Good functional design and thoughtful product management is a struggle to appeal to and connect with others at a cognitive level. While that's important, Apple understands there's more to it than that. Their products have a welcoming, anthropomorphic quality about them. They lack the rigid right angles and black tones that dominate so many computer devices. They appeal to our emotions as well as our intellect.
9. Great Design = New Invention. The MP3 player was around for years before the iPod hit the scene. While others were vying to somehow coax consumers towards this new way of carrying and listening to music, the iPod reset everything. It was, for the great majority of people, the real invention of the portable music player. Apple understands that great design (not just good design) can have such a staggering impact that it can introduce a product to the uninitiated masses. Another example is Spaces, one of the new features on their upcoming operating system. Virtual desktops have been around for years, but one look at Spaces and it feels brand new.
10. It's About People. The one over-arching theme that seems to penetrate everything Apple does is their basic understanding that every single thing they sell will be touched by a person. They don't build API's. They aren't integrating with back-end systems. They aren't making sure machines talk to machines. They're creating things that people are going to touch and, at the risk of sounding hokey, have relationships with. Every bit of their philosophy - from how a box is opened to how a clickwheel feels - reinforces this unavoidable fact.

Ultimately, the points listed above are really lessons about design. If we think through what makes a great design, it's something that someone else connects with - whether emotionally or intellectually or both. When they connect, it's a great feeling of achievement and connection with the creator. Never mind the features and wiring and CPU's underneath. They're all a means to that single, common end. Apple understands this better than any other company in the world. And we can all learn a lot from them.

This post was also published on the Arc90 blog.

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Posted by richz at 9:43 AM

Can I Greasemonkey My Life?

In yesterday's post, I pointed to a collection of photos of urban settings without the logos. I found them to be wonderfully soothing. In response, Rachel Murray pointed out the art of Matt Siber. His work is pretty interesting as well (and also kinda soothing). He manipulates photos so that logos float in space. It creates a pretty bizarre effect.

So this got me thinking about...Greasemonkey. What's Greasemonkey? It's the venerable Firefox add-on that lets you load in all sorts of user-created scripts that end up manipulating/mangling/scraping clean web pages after they've landed in your browser. Greasemonkey is used for all sorts of things, but one of its most popular uses is to remove ads and banners from web pages. There are ad remover scripts for just about every popular site.

There's value in getting rid of stuff. As the bombardment on our poor little senses continues to get louder, I'd pay good money to shut things off. Really. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to filter out ads from radio programs? Or shut off the news tickers on the cable news channels? Or turn off the ads behind home plate (also known as the Homeplate Rational)?

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Greasemonkey only works on web pages. We need a Greasemonkey for television, radio and billboard ads. Of course, this is a pipe dream. WIth Google's success around contextual ads, we're headed in the other direction. Backlash anyone?

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Posted by richz at 10:34 AM

Our World...Without The Clutter

I'm a big honkin' believer in clean design. The more we clutter our world, the more painful it is for us to take in. Yeh, Times Square is kind of cool...for about five minutes. Someone was kind enough to painstakingly remove the logos, branding and nonsense from everyday urban photos. Without all that noise, the images are actually...beautiful?

Clean design isn't only appealing in furniture and fashion. It's appealing when applied just about anywhere. Think about the next time you design anything really...a web site, a logo, a business card. Don't underestimate the power of nothingness.

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Posted by richz at 8:58 AM

Give Google Reader A Facelift

This is pretty darn slick. Jon Hicks has whipped together a modern Mac-like theme for Google Reader. For Firefox, it requires Stylish, an extension that allows for custom CSS styles for sites.

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm really tired of Google's dumbed-down, preschool look & feel that dominates most of their applications (Gmail, Reader, etc.).

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Posted by richz at 1:13 PM

Arc90 Lab Flex Component : Shufflestack!

Arc90's very own Andy "Stacks" Lewisohn, Actionscript and Flex stud, has generously added a new tool to the beloved Arc90 Lab. It's a new container style called Shufflestack (you'll have to ask Andy why it's one word). It's an alternative approach to accordions and tabs that we've found works nicely in certain interfaces. You can check out the example and source code as well.

We hope to put out more Flex-related tools on the lab. We've got other things cooking that will hopefully come out of the kitchen soon. It's great to see a mix of Javascript, RSS and now Flex/Actionscript action on the Arc90 Lab.

Who knows what the kids at Arc90 will cook up next...

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Posted by richz at 8:47 AM

And Now For My Next Trick...

Dan Saffer of Adapative Path has an interesting write-up where he questions the need for user research in interaction design. Researching your users is pretty widely considered to be key ingredient to designing an effective user interface.

From the article:

Most experienced designers have enough expertise to get many products 80% designed without ever doing research, and sometimes that 80% is all that’s needed. Research can be a useful tool, but it can also be an ineffective waste of time. Good designers make good designs, not research. Even with good research, you can follow users (and time and money) down some serious rabbit holes, never to return.

If we step back and look at the predominant thinking around interaction design, user-centered design clearly dominates. And that's a good thing. For data gathering, it's good practice to research user profiles and needs, or at the very least, go through an inside-the-mind-of-the-user exercise to really get a good understanding of their goals.

While this is all well and good in terms of gatherng evidence, I think the breakdown occurs when it's time to go and build. That user data does not transfer over into a clear building strategy. That "magic" (and Dan himself calls it magic) happens in the designers mind. The role of user-centered design gives way at this point. It's already done its job: established the backdrop for the real building that's about to occur.

At the building phase, there's a lot less known or agreed upon about how good design comes to be. It just sort of...happens. All that research and thinking and debating boils down to a few gut moves by a designer. We take the puzzles in front of a us and assemble the solution. As Dan quotes Michael Bierut: Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic.

I'm curious to hear if anyone actually has a methodology (even a rough one) that they use to attack a design effort. Or do they just stroll around the ol' neighborhood waiting for the proverbial light bulb to go off.

In any case, I'm ok with this characterization. Heck, we're not just designers. We're magicians!

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Posted by richz at 9:09 AM

Total Recall

Did you ever stumble on a song that you haven't heard in 10 or 15 years? A weird, reflective grin creeps into your face. Within seconds, you're singing along (maybe just in your head, but still...). Not only are you singing along, but somehow your brain reconnects all the pieces instantly and you recall the entire song nearly perfectly. Right down to the subtle note hits and vocal intonations.

Throughout our lives, we are in a perpetual state of taking in and filing away information. It's a near constant flow. As we age, the "storage area" where all this stuff is kept gets more and more cluttered. Eventually, we start reaching a point where pulling any one bit of information becomes tricky. Stuff gets buried here or there and unless some event forces us to recall it, we may never contemplate it again. Someone's name from years ago. Old phone numbers. Lessons learned in 4th or 5th grade. It's all there. It's just buried.

But when some event does occur that triggers a recall, it's amazing how thoroughly we appreciate the details of the recalled data. Music in particular seems to be a special case. The unique characteristics of music seems to lead to more reliable storage. But generally speaking, we once we call the information up, it's pretty thoroughly accessible.

As we design interfaces around information and controls, we should appreciate the difference between our mediocre ability to recall, and our impressive ability to have all the data at hand once we do recall. I use 37 Signals' Backpack pretty extensively. All day long I jot down reminders of things to do later, tomorrow, or next Monday. Lately, I've reduced my reminder text to one or two words. That's all I need to "trigger" all the information behind them. "Call Debbie" translates into all kinds of details almost instantly.

So as you think about your information designs, ask yourself how much information the user really needs to get going. After all, the less clutter the more impressive and digestible an interface becomes. Note that this has one key requirement: the user had to have had a hand in creating that data in the first place. That creation process "saves" the data into the person's brain and all that's often needed is a reference.

As a side note, I'd argue that people get a certain pleasure out of flexing those recall abilities. It feels really good to quickly piece together information you thought you'd forgetten way back when.

As designers, we should keep an eye out for opportunities to leverage this shared unique ability. With apologies to the Tuftes of the world, sometimes we don't need all that data at hand. We just need the spark.

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Posted by richz at 1:39 PM

Cool Distorted World Maps

Here are some cool world maps that have been distorted by superimposing certain statistics to inflate and deflate nations. It's a great example of how much we can communicate very rapidly by displaying data in visually understandable ways.

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Posted by richz at 10:15 AM

Browsegoods.com

Browsegoods.com is an interesting approach to browsing for products on an ecommerce site. It applies a Google Maps-style interface where you see a bird's-eye view of the high level categories and as you zoom in, you see subcategories until you eventually see products.

I can't help but sigh when I see stuff like this. After about 90 seconds of "oh cool" you start to wonder about the usefulness of this sort of interface. If we step back a second and agree to overly generalize, you've got two types of shopping users: the "seeker' that is looking for an exact product and the "browser" that is looking for something in a general category ("I really need a winter coat...").

Through either user's eyes, this interface is annoying and potentially obtrusive. If the seeker wants a specific model of something, they're gonna drop it in the search box. Just make the search smart enough to get him there. If the browsing user wants a winter coat, make it ridiculously easy to jump to that category - whether through a nice laundry list of categories or just by typing "winter coats" in the search box. Neither user really wants to have a simulated flight over a landscape of shoes.

I think this further highlights the raw power of the humble search box. If that search box is smart, it'll outdo any whiz-bang interface. Just ask Google.

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Posted by richz at 2:31 PM

Poetry And Powerpoint

Mashups are all the rage these days. But let's face it, if you've seen one Google Maps mashup, you've seen'em all. The concept of mashups is cool. It's just that we need to mashup a more diverse set of things.

How about...poetry and information visualization? :

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Posted by richz at 10:13 AM

Flash Is Goin' All Shiny 3D

Way back when Flash 8 got released, I was really impressed with all the new graphical effects and enhancements built into it. Since then though, we haven't seen a lot of activity come from the community (at least that I'm aware of) along these lines.

Well it looks like things are starting to heat up a bit. Here are a few nice examples. You can find many more at Flashscene.org.

You have to wonder if we're going to start to see the shine of Vista or the slick tweening of OSX on the Flash platform. Better yet, I wonder if the the Flex crew are thinking about taking a r/evolutionary step forward in terms of the standard GUI components that make up Flex - sort of the way Microsoft bumped it up from Windows XP to Vista. The capabilities - like transparency, alpha effects and such - are obviously there and client CPU power continues to get better and cheaper.

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Posted by richz at 10:08 AM

Framing Software

Software is frighteningly powerful today. With all that power comes the ability to really hand over all sorts of knobs and switches to users. Hey we built it, we may as well give the end users all that power right?

Wrong.

I use 37 Signals' great little Backpack tool for to-do list reminders that I get via SMS and email. It's a great tool and actually not overly complicated. Yet still, end users are still required to do some work to make it useful for themselves. In fact, the final step is a tricky one: formulating a useful usage pattern for yourself as a user. Remember, most end-users aren't tech savvy or even care to be creative with how to "hack" software tool for their own purposes. People want a problem-solver out of the box.

Imagine, takemymedicine.com, built atop the Backpack engine that serves a single, very narrow, but very common purpose: it lets you know when it's time to take your medicine. You can achieve this capability on Backpack with almost zero additional effort. In fact, to achieve this goal, some functionality gets shut off (e.g. the need to specify an exact date for a reminder). This is a good thing.

By framing the software to fit a real problem, you lift the burden of completing the puzzle for users. By applying constraints to what the software can do and by clearly conveying why the software exists in the first place, the purpose and goal become clearer. A less cluttered experience and a clearer purpose lead to a broader audience. My 50 year old aunt wouldn't know what to do with Backpack. She may know what to do with takemymedicine.com. Less is more.

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Posted by richz at 6:07 PM

Working Some New Muscles

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

- Winston Churchill

Ever work out at the gym and do something a bit different than you're accustomed to? Let's say you usually run the treadmill but decide to go ahead and do something completely different. The workout goes fine but then the next day you wake up and you are in serious pain (despite how good a shape you're in).

Since picking up the Macbook Pro, I'm feeling that same kind of pain. As I "override" my Windows habits and usage patterns I've gathered over the years, I'm really feeling that pain. Key combinations. Standard window icons and their representations. Certain applications that have evolved from useful to absolutely necessary. All taken away from me with this switch. And yet, with this newfound "trainee" status comes an opportunity to get better.

Putting aside whether the Mac world is better or worse than Windows, one thing is definite: they're different. Macs and OSX are not what I'm accustomed to. And I have to say, while the pain is rough these days (I'm still badly crossing up in a few places and I still cringe because I just can't find a C: drive) I can really tell that all this change is...healthy. Challenging the patterns we become experts in is a great means of building new strengths - and dimensions to our thinking - that we all can use every so often.

When we get good at something, we love doing it over and over. There's an innate satisfaction with doing things well. The actions take on the characteristics of feeling intuitive and second nature. So when we're challenged with something foreign; something we're not experts in, we'll often recoil and avoid it. That's a bad move.

While it's great to build those mental muscles to prime form, there are many others that are being neglected. There are few things that are presented to us in our everyday experiences that require us to really consciously think. Everything around us is streamlined. We don't remember phone numbers any more because our mobile phones do that for us. We don't bother counting change because charge cards and credit cards do all the math. It takes three clicks to buy something on Amazon - without a single keystroke. We all fall into these routines that make us feel accomplished and comfortable.

Changing computer operating systems is by no means a valiant endeavor. It's just a computer. But I happen to spend hours a day making a living on it. So to replace the primary tool in my workday with something markedly different - the experience is undoubtedly new and a bit jarring to me. It doesn't feel good to be a novice, but the payoff in the long term is worthwhile. One thing I'm realizing is that I'm not replacing my Windows knowledge. I'm just adding to it.

So at the next chance you get to change something you're comfortable with: do it. It's a bit scary at first, and you won't feel good about yourself at first, but over time your entire brain will be better toned...and not just one portion of it.

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Posted by richz at 1:32 PM

Digg Gets Refreshed

The formidable Digg has been updated with some nice interface tweaks among a slew of other features (mmm...liquid display). The official blog has the details.

It's good to see design enhancements getting proper billing as these popular sites evolve. There really aren't many new features this time around. The last major Digg upgrade introduced new categories and such. Nevertheless, it's these often times subtle interface tweaks that really help elevate a site and broaden its audience. It also shows that Digg is paying attention to feedback - not just feature requests, but how to make the whole experience easier to use. Good stuff.

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Posted by richz at 10:43 AM

Nick Bradbury & Simplicity

Nick Bradbury is the man. He's the man behind Homesite, Topstyle and now FeedDemon. What's amazing about Nick is his knowledge of building software (he's a one man machine) and his appreciation of good usability and design. He's written an excellent series of articles called Simplicity Ain't So Simple. Don't miss them:

• Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part I: Decide What to Hide
  
• Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part II: Stop Showing Off
• Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part III: Don't Add Features You Can't Support
• Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part IV: The Blessed Curse of Power Users


• Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part V: Combine Features


• Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part VI: Simple = Secure

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Posted by richz at 11:07 AM

WPF/E & Flash - Playing Nice

Ok, this is freaking me out. Who says Flash & WPF/E can't play nice? "I'll meet you at Javascript junction." I'm fully convinced that the man behind the WPF Blog is the only guy on earth who can do this at this point in time.

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Youki

Want another example of why Ajax doesn't creatively scale? Check out Youki. It's a service that allows you to display your galleries of photos in a booklet-style interface. It's Flash-based and it's pretty darn awesome.

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Posted by richz at 1:58 PM

Technical Ignorance Is Bliss

Years ago - when I owned a 486 (or something similar) my mom woke me up at 7am in a panic. "Rich, the computer is flashing something! It says 'your text is here!' Have you been waiting for your text to arrive?"

My mom had mistook the infamous Windows "Marquee" screensaver for an announcement from some nebulous service that my text had finally arrived.

Recently, I set my mom up with a Yahoo account for email and calendaring and such. All was well until she called me and with a frustrated tone. She couldn't understand why she couldn't log into her Windows desktop. She assumed that her new Yahoo user name and password applied to everything. Her Windows desktop. Her Amazon account. Everything.

A reporter recently wondered why the most searched term on Google was "Yahoo." What exactly is the difference between a URL bar and Google's search bar? Yeh yeh, Google is a web site (sort of) and it's search bar is just HTML that posts to their servers.

The lesson learned here? Do not underestimate the value of the non-technical user who is absolutely clueless as to how things work. Unified authentication between your desktop and web apps is a complicated thing. It also happens to be the right thing. This sort of feedback not only sheds light on how people use systems (i.e. usability data) but also, and almost by accident, illuminates possibilities that we as technologists simply write off because of assumed limitations.

Why do I have to manage twelve different passwords? Why is it so hard to find my pictures from last weekend's trip? I wish my calendar would SMS me with reminders?

So at your next family get-together, sit your uncle or grandma down at the PC and watch closely. Watch how they fumble around. Just as important - listen closely. Listen to the "why" questions that arise out of their blissful ignorance. You'll often find gold in them thar hills.

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Posted by richz at 2:06 PM

Cool ≠ Useful

Ars Technica is reporting that a recent Nielsen survey reveals that only 2.2 percent of video iPod usage is video (yes that's a decimal between the 2's). Consider how loudly Apple and other device makers trumpet video playback capability - that's a pretty sobering statistic.

So what's going on here? We've had digital audio for years. Technology has finally made it feasible to affordably watch videos on a portable device. First audio, now video. Makes sense, no?

No.

Who said users want to watch videos on a 2 inch screen? You can do a lot of other things while listening to audio. Run. Read. Work out. Do your work. Study. Audio even has the ability to enhance such experiences. I can't imagine running without music. Add video to the mix, and suddenly your options narrow - a lot. Demanding the undivided attention of your eyes requires commitment and concentration.

There's one other problem: it's still hard to deal with video. Pop a CD in your computer, and it shows up in iTunes. The story isn't the same when it comes to DVD's for the casual user. Nor is it really any easier to deal with TV. Regardless, I don't think the need is really there.

Cool technology isn't always useful or sought-after technology. It isn't a far leap to see that people don't have a lot of hours in the day to fully commit to video on a small screen. Audio is great because we can "share" our other experiences with audio.

It's disheartening for technologists to face the hard reality of what the real world wants. Great design ingratiates itself into people's lives without demanding too much. We first have to make sure people want it in the first place.

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Posted by richz at 9:55 AM

Yahoo Maps Released From Beta

Yahoo Maps - built on the Flash (and some Flex?) platform - has been released from beta. Congratulations to Yahoo and Adobe. This is compelling validation for using the Flash platform as a way to deliver richer experiences. I'm not sure if there's a more accessible, mainstream application out there on Flash.

Google Maps is still winning the battle in terms of mash-ups, and if I'm not mistaken, Mapquest (yes Mapquest) is still the most popular. Old habits die hard I guess.

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Posted by richz at 2:11 PM

Jquery - Beautiful And Smart

At Arc90, we're always looking to build our dynamic web skills and Lord knows there are all sorts of spiffy frameworks out there - Prototype, Dojo come to mind. Then there's Jquery a really lean little framework that does all sorts of cool things. It's a got a nice plugin architecture so people can easily build capabilities on top of the framework. It's also really skinny (compressed to 12k).

Here's a nice example of how to light up something with Jquery. A simple nested list can turn into a nice collapsible menu system with Jquery and eight (yes eight) lines of code. Here's a nice little video to show it all happens. Pretty damn slick.

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Posted by richz at 5:07 PM

Design Is...

I just finished reading John Maeda's The Laws Of Simplicity, a short, thoughtful book about simplicity and design. While it's goal is ambitious and I don't wholly agree with all its tenets, the book left me feeling good about design. John's positive energy really comes across and it had me thinking about what good design is really all about.

Design is that weird craft that is partly utilitarian and partly an expression of the creator. But beneath all that, what is design? Everyone is a designer in a sense. But what separates good design from bad design? You can create a wildly expressive, captivating product that leaves one who interacts with it fuming with frustration. What's missing there?

What's missing is empathy. Good design is about taking the time and energy to see through another's eyes and create something that sympathizes with how they think. At the risk of sounding hokey: Good design is thoughtful and compassionate. The beneficiary of a good design experiences something very unique. A good interaction experience creates an emotional bond and loyalty to the creation that is really, if you stop and think about, a bond with it's creator. "Someone took the time to think about what I need and worry about how I think."

Design in its broadest sense is forethought. Good interaction design is forethought and consideration about what others are going to experience before they do so. Everyone's seen that scene in countless movies where a character comes home and finds a candlelit dinner all beautifully prepared. Good design is anticipation.

Defining bad design also helps highlight what good design is. Bad design is selfish, unsympathetic and self-centered. Bad design makes end users feel abandoned, left alone to wade through the maze before them with no help in sight. It sometimes even leaves them insulted, embarrassed and often frustrated. In this case, the end user met the creator and he found him to be rude and patronizing.

Product managers and marketers often wonder why products with more features and better performance fail behind others. They put the latest hardware and software in and wrap it in the fanciest packaging. Giving customers more stuff is only half the picture. What they really want is your forethought and patience in learning how they think and delivering things that are in tune with that. If you do that, you can give them less and still win them over.

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Posted by richz at 11:15 AM

Adobe's Headquarters Is One Big Frickin' Puzzle

This is bizarre and kind of cool. Adobe's HQ in California has some sort of semaphore puzzle. It's a set of flathead screw-like symbols that rotate periodically. It was designed by Ben Rubin. I like it. It's intriguing, dynamic and nicely offsets that lifeless feeling we often associate with "corporate headquarters." I also like the notion of this physical entity communicating with its surrounding world. In a strange way, it's kind of endearing.

Then again, it just may be because I really enjoy Adobe's products. Either way, check it out. And if you can decipher the code, you get a prize (or something).

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Posted by richz at 9:20 AM

Search Results, Tag Clouds & Motives

Joel Nagy, architect here at Arc90, throws out an interesting approach on how to convey more effective information around individual search results. It's an idea over at the lab, and it raises a subtle, but important issue with search results today: how do I know the context of a particular result?

Joel here is focusing on the choice the user makes after search results return. In a tougher search, the user is forced to probe and skim through the blurb that often comes right after the search result title. It's usually a snippet from the actual page, and it's often not very helpful. Joel suggests "term clouds." From his lab entry:

A great way to present this sort of weighted information is in a cloud (as in tag clouds). A cloud of terms would show the frequency of related words on each page. With terms clouds, a searcher can peruse the hits on her query and quickly weed out the pages that emphasize topics she is not interested in, or hone in on ones that do.

It's an interesting approach, and one that could actually elevate search clouds from Web 2.0 gimmick that no one really uses in any sort of functional way to that of real utility.

Providing users with better context of search results is a very tricky thing. There are websites out there that "cluster" results (Clusty comes to mind). Yahoo has an interesting approach with Yahoo Mindset. With Mindset, users are given a slider where they can emphasize "shopping" or "research" as their motive.

And that's really what this is all about: it's not about giving users context around search results. It's ultimately about giving search engines context of the user's motives. Had Google known what Joel was looking for, it wouldn't have to bother with search clouds and such at all. Why do you think Google would like nothing more than watch every move you're making 24 hours a day? It wants your motivation...

...but that's for another blog entry. For now, let's see if we can convince Joel to whip together a script/experiment that actually creates these clouds. ;)

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Posted by richz at 9:13 AM

I Really Like The New York Times Reader (Really)

Being in NY and all and liking good journalism and all I really enjoy reading the NY Times. For the past week or so, I've been trying out the New York Times Reader. It's an application that runs on Windows XP that displays Times content in a readable, newspaper style right on your desktop. You click on a link and it takes you to a particular article.

You're probably asking now - why the hell would I need that? It sounds like a web browser. Well, it pretty much is a web browser. But goshdarnit, there's something about it. It's a very enjoyable way to read the news. I think the Reader has a few things going for it:

• The text and fonts have been carefully selected for readability. It's not straining at all to read. It's still not as good as paper, but a step up from what we're used to in my opinion.
• It's a single-purpose applicaiton. It's not a browser with web pages. It's built from the ground up for reading newspaper articles and that makes for a different experience. The way articles are laid out and connected helps simulate the "flipping through the paper" feel we enjoy today with offline content.
• I'm an avid user of RSS. FeedDemon is constantly running on my desktop. But I'll be damned, there is something about a unique layout that RSS readers deprive us of. Our brains don't only take in the words, but the structure, organization and aesthetic surroundings of content - and feed readers deprive us of that.

Overall, it's pretty cool. The only annoying aspect of the whole thing was having to install the .Net runtime - a bloated bolt-on to Windows XP - to get this thing running. Other than that, it's good stuff.

Long live paper.

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Posted by richz at 1:16 PM

Developing Stories, Breaking News And The Abuse Of Design

Blame it on Fox News. Since their rise a few years ago, they have handily beaten CNN & MSNBC in ratings. There are a few reasons for this but I'd like to focus on the one that deals with the display and presentation of information on these news channels.

Fox News knew full well that news, above all else, had to compete with and captivate viewers to compete. Is there enough news to show 24 hours a day? Probably. Is it all exciting and entertaining? Probably not. Issues like the political wranglings in some far off nation or global warming don't exactly make for captivating entertainment and Fox knew it.

They also knew their audience very well. They knew that in this age of the Internet, and bite-sized pieces of information, our threshold for attention has gone way down. As we flip through the 300 channels cable offers us, you've got about a fifth of a second to stop us in our tracks.

And so, the perpetual state "Breaking News" was born. Everything is either a "Developing Story" or "Breaking News" or "This Just In..." Stop reading this blog right now and flip to either MSNBC, Fox News or CNN. There's a very high probability that something is "breaking" right before your eyes.

Now of course, CNN & MSNBC had no choice but to join the party. Fox was eating them for lunch with this slimey little tactic. And so they soon adopted the practice. Today, we're not really sure where or when real breaking news happens. These stations have cried wolf too many times already. It's not clear what's important or what really matters at any given moment.

Without getting into the moral or ethical aspects of this, as an information designer I can't help but think that this is an abuse of design. Good information design both conveys information and provides good context for what we're taking in. What's more important than what? How does this bit of information relate to all the other bits?

Fox, CNN & NBC have replaced this goal with another: grab the viewers attention, however way you can, and try to keep them around as long as possible. It's like walking down the path of a carnival as the various booths try to entice you with prizes, bright colors and a deceptively easy game to play. The major news networks have resorted to billboard advertising tactics to get their ratings.

This all of course raises larger issues of ethics in journalism. Good design - and Fox has proven that this in fact is good, effective design - is a means to an end. The end here, disappointingly, is ratings. The motive isn't a more "usable" design. It's just marketing and advertising tactics applied to news. Unfortunately, news isn't often good. In fact, news is often bad, and sometimes scary. I'm not sure if enough is given towards how delivering information in this manner not only affects what people know but how they feel. In a post 9/11 world, how information is conveyed can shape sentiment as much as the content of the information.

Which raises a question I was pretty sure I would never ask of information designers: do we have a responsibility to not only present the right information but to also present it in an un-biased manner? I suppose it would depend on the business context. If you're designing an ad, then bias is welcome and obvious. But if you're presenting what is supposedly news information, how far should we go to captivate viewers or readers?

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Posted by richz at 1:17 PM

Miniature Earth

Miniature Earth is a website that displays a simple 3-4 minute Flash movie that envisions the world if only 100 people lived on it. The movie outlines a handful of statistics against world's 100 inhabitants - e.g. there would be only 8 North Americans.

The site uses these "miniature" statistics to shed light on the global poverty problem. What struck was how compelling these numbers appeared. I've read numerous articles on poverty in the past and I often glaze over the statistics that throw percentages, "millions" and "billions" at me. They're harder to conceptualize quickly as I'm reading - and thus their impact is dulled.

By working against a number like 100, the site is able to better convey the gravity of these statistics. Or in other words, it takes my brain less work to fully appreciate what's being said.

Which leads to a good self-auditing mechanism for information designers: what are you doing to your data representations to make it easier for your audience to digest and appreciate?

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Posted by richz at 9:11 AM

Yes, Apple Copies Microsoft

With the debut of iTunes 7, Scoble asks if Apple copied Microsoft. The interface enhancements, most notably views of album cover art and more space (mmm...space) takes a page right out of Microsoft's Windows Media Player 11. Hell, it was just last month that highlighted this exact deficiency in iTunes 6.

It's good to see Microsoft's work copied by Apple. Above all else, it shows that Microsoft is really starting to care about the end-user experience. Media Player 11 is a seriously impressive piece of software. As the saying goes, "imitation is the best form of flattery" (or something). Their upcoming Office 2007 product is all about a completely new interface - and it's also very impressive.

Is Microsoft a good design company? Weird.

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Posted by richz at 9:59 AM

Windows Live Search Goes...Live.

Microsoft has released their flagship search engine to the world. It's an important step for a company that has committed a lot if its energy to get into the ring with Google.

Will Microsoft's search be good? Probably. As good as Google's? Probably, eventually. Will users really stop using Google and start using Live Search? That's the tough one. We can make a strong argument that the game is already over. That Google, left unchecked for nearly 5 years, has sunk its hooks real deep into our lives.

The inertia of deeply engrained habits is an extremely dififcult thing to undo. Just good enough is not good enough to do it. While people gawked over Google Maps, they still use Mapquest. I've played around with the various services they've put out. Without a doubt, their image search knocks the socks off of Google's. Yet I still find myself consistently going back to Google's image search.

Google has reached the Holy Grail of adoption. When a product fades into the background of your daily life because its so pervasive, the party is essentially over for the competition.

How can Microsoft unseat Google? I'm not really sure they can. It's a big market and they're probably going to be perfectly happy with a nice chunk of it. They do own the desktop (which Google is trying to redefine) and they will no doubt tightly tie their services directly to the desktop - bypassing the browser altogether. By dispersing the services away from the browser, Microsoft pulls Google into its battlefield. A battlefield that has seen other casualties.

Google Desktop is a pre-emptive strike against that battle in my opinion. It's an early entry that has a two year head start on Vista. And I have to confess, it's very good. Their search has been a huge time saver for me (especially with Outlook email).

It's fun to watch all this go down. Google ain't no Netscape. That's for certain. They've got money and brains to give Microsoft a good battle here. In the end, we'll all hopefully reap the rewards with better products and services.

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Posted by richz at 12:18 PM

Dots, Lines & Good Design

Way back when, I was reading about the process a well-known game designer (I believe it was Peter Molyneux) goes through to designing a good game.

What intrigued me was how he described his "protoype" phase. In essence, he and his team would map out the constraints, rules and characteristics of the game and then create a very crude implementation of the game with practically no graphics. The various elements would be represented with very basic shapes and objects like lines, dots and boxes.

The rationale behind such an approach is that the game should be engaging and fun without all the bells and whistles. Sure, there is a visceral satisfaction that comes with great graphics and sound. For example, realistic graphics and sound coupled with simulated physics can make for a very satisfying feeling when launching a shoulder-mounted rocket. But that satisfaction is short lived. The real enduring enjoyment that can come from a good game is derived from its most basic elements that make it fun. And as the theory goes, those elements have little do with great graphics and sound.

Nintendo's upcoming Wii game console is a practical counter-argument to the super-charged game consoles that flaunt powerful hardware to deliver a good gaming experience. Nintendo is betting on good game design to trump sheer horsepower - and they're probably going to win.

There's a great lesson to learn here. In an era, As we design applications, their truly long-lasting value will be derived from their...well...value. Their value stripped from the skin and whiz-bang effects (*cough* gratuitous Ajax *cough*).

Think ebay. Think Craig's List. In an era of Web 2.0 aesthetics, prove out your value before you apply those seals and shiny buttons and fade and slide effects. First make sure that there's more to your product than good looks.

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Posted by richz at 9:58 AM

The Grossly Under-Rated Power Of Thumbnails & Icons

Delicious just did a design refresh of their home page and it's now got some really delicious (heh) thumbnails. The world seems to have gone thumbnail crazy. Arc90's link thumbnails tool is by far the most popular on Arc90's lab.

I'm a big believer in icons, thumbnails and any other sort of bite-size visual cues to help people digest information. The biggest digestion challenges come when the information comes at you in big, sweeping globs. It's hard to know what the hell is going on. As a result, we're forced to make that strange squinty-face and read stuff. Reading takes time and some focus. You can't step back from that glob and start to get a sense of what's going. With simple visual cues like icons, colors, bolding and such, we put the user's brain on a faster track.

Here's a simple example of using thumbnails for lighter information digestion. Below is a screenshot of iTunes, focused on my collection of Radiohead albums:

Here's the same view on Microsoft's new Windows Media Player 11:

Now I know that this distinction isn't groundbreaking, but let's keep the user's goal in mind. It is without a doubt easier to scan through my seven or so Radiohead albums in Windows Media Player because a well-recognized grouping - by albums - has been visually reinforced, not only by spacing out the various albums but by providing me with a familiar visual cue for each album: the album cover. In iTunes, I have to read. And reading takes more work.

So get out there and start thumbnail-izing and icon-izing. It's a powerful way to provide your users with cognitive shortcut to digesting your information.

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Posted by richz at 10:48 AM

The Little Design Tweak That Changes Everything

As we labor over how a product is designed, we'll often get mired in the larger pieces. Move this element here. Reorganize those elements there. Designers make wholesale changes hoping to create an intuitive user experience.

Very often, after that design's been set out into the wild, we're quickly humbled. Feature set X, which took months to develop, is almost never used. What's most frustrating is that failure of adoption has little to do with how good or valuable that feature may be. People simply aren't using it because of poor or confusing design.

Virtual desktop software has been around for years. It essentially expands your desktop space beyond your display size to allow for more workspace. It is by no means a new invention. Yet to this day, virtual desktops are still relegated to the realm of the tech savvy. One reason for its niche status is that many people simply don't need multiple desktops. However, if you've ever played with these tools, you quickly realize they're a bit, well, hokey.

And then along comes Apple to reinvent what's already been invented. Spaces is a new virtual desktop feature that is to be bundled with their Leopard operating system update. If you spend a couple of minutes watching the movie, you'll quickly realize how much more accessible Spaces feels than your typical virtual desktop.

What struck me was not now much better Spaces was in terms of features, but actually how feature poor it is. It's simply four tiled desktops with simple navigation. No Advanced Options. No configurations. It's a slight update to the existing concept, yet it may well be just enough to introduce it to a much broader audience. Good design can do that. The features may well not be needed, but the right design gives your products a chance.

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Posted by richz at 9:33 AM

Uncivilized Design

Kathy Sierra recently declared: we can't leave innovation up to our users. Amen. A while back, I asked if innovative design can come from users.

Interaction design is dominated by the user today. And rightly so in some ways. It's far easier to leverage some knowledge or conventions they already know. For example, everyone knows what tabs are for. If the user approaches an interface for hte first time and sees tabs, they'll know exactly what to do. Easy win.

For me the really exciting stuff doesn't happen when we take agreed-upon conventions off the shelf and implement them. Customs and conventions are borne out of seeds of innovation that originated somewhere. As Kathy astutely points out, "the world never needed GUI's."

User-centered design is implicity conservative. It seeks to leverage the already understood cultures and norms. Most designers work within design civilizaiton. Where norms and customs and implicit social contracts pervade. Civilization is necessary because it allows us to thrive and function, but it is inherently predictable. Creativity exists, but it exists within civilization.

For me, the real excitement and satisfaction around design comes from introducing something that is outside the customs and norms and seeing it embraced. Something plucked from less-ventured territory. We'll typically see resistence to this approach. But if and when something unique is embraced, it's incredibly gratifying. It's magnified by the knowledge that you, as a designer, were somehow able to bypass common customs and conventional thinking and appeal to something very basic and fundamental to how people think and feel. There are few things more difficult to attain, and more gratifying than that achievement.

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Posted by richz at 10:54 AM

Five Things I Don't Like About the iPod's Design

About a month ago, I finally took the plunge and bought a 5th generation iPod (60gb). I've never owned an iPod before. I've owned many non-Apple mp3 players and have had mixed results. Now that I've finally taken the plunge, I'm pretty happy I did. You don't need me to tell you that the iPod is a well-designed, sleek little portable music player. The world has already placed their vote.

With all that said, I'd like to throw on some protective gear and highlight what I think are some incredibly nagging and downright lousy aspects to the iPod's user interface. Yes. That's right. I'm going to criticize the iPod's highly-regarded user interface. Say a little prayer for Rich...

• I Really Need To Play Next. The iPod just asks to be touched. Even if I'm just listening to music, I like to peruse my collection. Albums. Genres. Artists. As so often happens, I'm ready to play the next track - after the one I'm listening to ends. Yeh, I can stop the current song, but I'd like to queue songs without interrupting the current song. This is especially useful for parties or in a car where you want to queue stuff on the fly.
• Why Is Shuffle So Far Away? If I've queued up a playlist or an artist's entire catalogue, I'll often want to go into shuffle mode. To do that today, I have to navigate back out to the Main Menu to hit shuffle. Why can't I just toggle? Maybe hold down one of the buttons to turn shuffle on or off?
• A Recently Played Mess. Maybe I'm an edge case, but this one absolutely kills me. I'm an album-centric user. I think in albums, not a la carte songs. Very often, I want to get to my new albums. So I navigate the Recently Played playlist and click into...a rolling list of songs. My four albums are now one big playlist. Very painful. I'm left sifting through the album or artist name to find my new albums. There are many ways to fix this. It could be a simple setting on the device or a flag on the playist itself in iTunes.
• The Alphabet Is WIldly Overrated I cannot put into words how sick I am of seeing the same eight artists show up first when I navigate to the artists listing on my iPod. So often, I'm thinking more about browsing than finding. Why can't I resort by genre? Or recently added?
• Show Me More As I Navigate. I have a fairly large music collection. I can't always connect the album name with the artist - at least not immediately. As I highlight albums, show me a little more about it. A nice little thumbnail and the artist name would be fine. In many places, the iPod does a poor job of providing context to the user. It's a navigate-through-pages type of experience, which has its shortfalls.

Now, I know that I'm a power user compared to the typical iPod user. Apple's designers aren't stupid. While the iPod's interface may seem a bit over-simplified and the amount of interface controls are quite minimal, its paid off for them. These design constraints actually broadened Apple's potential audience. That said, I don't think that's a good enough reason to not provide some of the additional power I'm seeking. A Play Next feature is pretty self-explanatory, for example. Also, many of these capabilities can be added but effectively hidden away from the more novice users.

With all my gripes, it's hard to argue that there is a portable music player that is better than the iPod. I've messed with devices from Creative, iRiver and others and they all fall short...until now. My brother recently picked up a Toshiba Gigabeat S and I have to say...the interface of that device is outstanding. It's incredibly intuitive and addresses many of the gripes I've outlined above. I'm going to keep my iPod because it's good enough for me and I already invested in some accessories. But I encourage anyone looking to buy a high capacity portable media player to take a look at the Gigabeat. It is very sweet. CNet recently did a head-to-head roundup between the Gigabeat and the iPod and the Gigabeat was selected as the superior device.

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Posted by richz at 9:17 AM

The Elements of Design

Boxes & Arrows Christina Wodtke provides a thoughtful article on applying good elements of writing to design. A fresh perspective on design.

I would chime in with one semi-counterpoint. Unlike prose, which delivers a strictly linear experience for the reader/user, web applications are interactive and thus non-linear. The user's actions (or interactions) mold the experience over time. We "navigate" through an application. This is where I think things diverge.

Great interactive experience marry the two worlds: the draw and appeal of good writing coupled with the satisfying and gratifying feeling of using a well-designed tool. It is part creative work, part utilitarian invention. This is partly why I find interaction design so challenging and rewarding.

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Posted by richz at 8:23 AM

IE7 To Be Installed Via Auto Update

Hey if you've got the weapon, why not use it? Rather than sprinkling "Get Internet Explorer" buttons all over the Web, Microsoft is taking the shortcut right to the desktop. IE7 will install via automatic update.

Does anyone know if Firefox will jump from 1.5 to 2.0 via automatic update?

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Posted by richz at 1:17 PM

Battling User Inertia

Everybody loves Google Maps. It's just...cool. The way you can drag and zoom and see satellite imagery and such. Yahoo! Maps Beta also kicks ass, with its overlays of all sorts of mapping data (restaurants, theaters, events, traffic).

But guess what the most popular mapping application is? Good Ol' Mapquest. Mapquest is nowhere near as impressive as Yahoo's or Google's offerings. So why is it still #1?

A recent BusinessWeek article explored why Google is having such a hard time getting any of their other initiatives to gain real traction. Google FInance, with its nifty Flash integration, is a wickedly impressive application. So how does it fare against the other finance portals? It's 40th. 40th.

What is Google doing wrong? Or better yet, is Google doing anything wrong? I think there are few lessons here not only for Google but for all these Web 2.0 startups that are trying to make headway:

• Users get good at something and stick to it. It may not be the best way to do something, but users that invest the time (mainly because there were no other options at the time) optimize their brains around these tasks. The result? They work faster at a less efficient application. Even though a newcomer may have more features and be easier to use, it's not enough. With their existing apps or tools, they know where everything is. They know what all the buttons and levers do. They are experts.


• New features aren't enough. This is a tough pill to swallow. The technical wizardry that went into Google Maps is impressive by any measure. But the hard reality is this: Mapquest does the job just fine. Directions. Finding a location. Maybe make some printouts. 99% of the typical use cases for mapping are covered.


• The rest of the world could care less about technology. As technologists, its so easy to confuse great technology with a great product. A truly great product in fact hides the technical gymnastics and unveils itself as a simple yet beguilingly powerful experience. Amidst all the Web 2.0 buzz, we often lose sight of how little the rest of the world cares about our own little acronyms and buzzwords.

When it's all said and done, I think you can overcome all that and get there one of two ways, or ideally, some combination of the two:

Invention. True invention captivates the masses so much so that "wants" become "needs." The Netscape browser. The Google search engine. These are true inventions because they delivered experiences that were so compelling and unique that they overwhelmed people. People were willing to take the plunge and commit to these products. The interface didn't have to be seamless and easy because the value returned is so strong.

Simplicity. This one is much harder to pull off. Even if you make your offering much easier to use, there's an excellent chance that the existing offerings have already gathered mindshare and recruited "experts." Nevertheless, it does happen. The iPod was not an invention, but it simplified and hid away the nuts and bolts of portable music. Thus opening it up to the masses. Others had previously delivered more technically impressive products, but when iPod came along - it was all over.

You can build good product but when you release it into the wild, it is going to be subjected to the elements. The "elements" aren't only comprised of the typical challenges of a business climate. They also include the raw inertia of existing habits and routines. Overcoming that inertia in both product definition and interaction design will always be a challenging.

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Posted by richz at 9:28 AM

New Study : Complex Products Are "Broken"

So Mr. Businessman, are you still trying to figure out if it's worth spending the money on some good interaction design? Arc90's Chris LoSacco rambled off a list of reasons why it's worthwhile a week ago. Now here's some hard evidence: a new study reports that half of all returned electronic items function perfectly well, people just don't know how to use them. If I'm not mistaken, when you go back to the store with a product and return it, you're refunded your money.

People spend millions of dollars for a measly 30 seconds of air time on the Superbowl. Why? Because it's known to reach a vastly larger audience than your typical TV programming. It's a wonder that many businesses fail to connect a poorly designed interface with a narrower customer base. You want the kids. You want the grandmas. You want the person who can't even speak English. It's simple math: make it easier to use, and your potential customer base grows larger.

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Posted by richz at 3:12 PM

An Alternative Desktop : BumpTop Prototype

Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan of the University of Toronto have put a really interesting alternative approach to a virtual desktop. The BumpTop is a desktop where the information assets take on real-world characteristics. Users can pile, scrunch, fold and organize items just as they do physical objects on their desktop. Quicktime and Windows Media movie demos of the prototype are available. There's also a PDF white paper on the rationale behind the BumpTop prototype.

I think Anand and Ravin are onto something here. It is far easier to leverage our knowledge of the physical world and all it's characteristic when creating interfaces. While icons and actions like drag-and-drop surely help, the metaphor often breaks down. With this prototype, they're taking the metaphor to a new, far more realistic level.

Over a year ago, I gave a talk at the IA Summit around an alternative methodology for interface and information design called Information Objects. The driver behind that approach is similar to the rationale behind a prototype like BumpTop. In short, we are experts at manipulating the objects in the physical world. Why not leverage that expertise when creating interfaces? A PDF on Information Objects is available for download here.

It's also worth noting that, for a long time, there was a technology barrier to these types of interfaces that we're just now overcoming. Cheaper, more powerful processing power is now available to handle the graphics and physics demands of such interfaces.

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Posted by richz at 10:19 AM

The ROI of Interaction Design

Arc90's Chris LoSacco discusses on the real, tangible returns of investing in interface design. Few things frustrate me more than key decision-makers not getting the value of good, thoughtful interface design. The post highlights some excellent points on the often-overlooked value of interaction design.

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Posted by richz at 5:10 PM

Introducing : Unobtrusive Sidenotes

Ever have something to say in a post, and then decide that you'd like to tell a little side story in your blog? There reallly isn't an easy way to do that unless we take the time to reformat and tweak HTML to include these brief asides to the primary theme of our post.

You can use footnotes, but footnotes aren't very cool. They're at the bottom of your post - taking your reader away from the flow of your narrative. Besides, you'd still have to mark up your entry in some specialized way to denote the text as footnote text. There had to be a better way to simulate the elegance of web linking with static text.

The first offering from the arc90 lab is Unobtrusive Sidenotes. It's a dead simple way to include nicely highlighted sidenotes that live alongside your primary text. They're color-coded via CSS and require almost no technical know-how to implement. They're freely available under Creative Commons. You can see them in action here.

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Posted by richz at 9:46 AM

Yahoo!'s Home Page Is Born Again

Yahoo! unveiled its new homepage today. The Yahoo! UI and Search blogs have more on it (Read/Write also has a nice analysis).

Overall, I like it a lot. It "feels" right and nicely delivers a pretty wide range of information without completely overloading the user. I think Yahoo! did a great job. Two observations:

The end of the categorized listings is testament to the power of good findability. Traversing a directory of categories has given way to simply typing what you want and getting there. The Yahoo! Directory, the hallmark of Yahoo!'s early years, has been relegated to a tab option above the search box. Credit to Google for raising the bar and making information that much easier (and quicker) to get to. Machines truly got smarter. We do a lot less work these days to get to what we want.

On a second and somewhat related point, the directory listings of Yahoo!'s past also represented a highly subjective static view of the world. They didn't change much...until humans got involved. Today's homepage is driven by highly dynamic information that is in constant flux. Trends, news and personalization have replaced the directory listing.

The three themes I take away from Yahoo!'s new page are immediacy, findability and personalization. I think these themes are a reflection of broader trends that are happening on the Web today. Rigid structure has finally given way. Congrats to Yahoo! Advocating change can be a really difficult and exhausting endeavor. It takes guts to make these kinds of moves. I think they've made the right ones here.

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Posted by richz at 4:57 PM

Why Don't Elevators Listen?

We've all done it. You walk into an elevator at the ground floor. You press 5. You wait a couple of seconds. Someone else walks in. They press 7. You quickly glance at one another. You press 5 again. A few seconds go by. You check your watch and with a sigh, you press 5 a couple more times. After a brief pause, the elevator finally complies. The doors close.

When you press an elevator button, the elevator talks back — sometimes. The button lights up. The elevator says “Ok. I’ll stop at 5 for you.” But the dialog ends there. Other people will get on and they can say their piece as well. But that’s it.

We talk to machines all the time. And they are getting more and more sophisticated in terms of the tasks they’re capable of completing. But where machines still fall short is in the breadth of dialogue they’re willing to embark upon with us. Better yet, why can’t machines pay more attention in general?

Consider the following questions:

• Why can’t the elevator realize that after a minute or so of me pressing the same floor and nobody else coming on and pressing any other floors that it’s time to go?
• Why can’t the button illuminate a bit brighter each time I press it, thus signaling to me that it is listening?
• Why can’t the elevator keep track of the patterns of the typical work day (the same way trains and buses do with schedules)? “Rush hour” happens in the morning and late afternoon so it should behave differently at those times. At 3AM, it should immediately respond to a single request.

The technology to do all this is not only there but pretty bare-bones. This logic can all sit on a single chip. The hurdles are clearly not technical but rather conceptual. Thinking about machines as beings that pay attention isn’t typically baked into your typical elevator business requirements. The weight of the payload. The time of the day. The days of the week (weekends vs. weekdays). The patterns of use. And of course, the odd patterns and habits of passengers as they click away at those buttons. 5. Door Close. 5. 5. Door Close.

As people on the other end of this dialogue, we can’t help but feel like we are talking to this machine – and that it’s listening. What we should do, as technologists and product designers, is aid these machines with the ability to listen, pay attention and let people know that they are paying attention.

Ever walk into a shop and buy some gum or soda and the shopkeeper doesn’t even acknowledge you or make eye contact? Instead of handing you the change, he tosses it on the counter and says nothing. Now you may not be trying to make friends, but it’s not a very good feeling. We love to be acknowledged and recognized. The more interactive machines are, the more of an affinity and loyalty we’re willing to build towards them. Is there a business case for smarter elevators? Possibly. But there’s a value to all this that is beyond efficiency and algorithms.

Ultimately, interaction design is about people. Today, people’s lives are filled with stress and anxiety. In our work lives, we’re often subjected to these impersonal routines that can eat away at us. This isn’t about improving the IQ of elevators. There are plenty of really smart people with high IQ’s that are really rude.

This is about making elevators a little smarter…and a little more thoughtful.

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Posted by richz at 9:45 AM

Creating Power Users

Ask any interaction designer or information architect about the importance of simplicity and their eyes will light up. Anyone who designs front-ends knows full well that its success is measured by how effectively an application’s functionality is communicated. The more complex the system, the greater the challenge to somehow mask that complexity and deliver a usable, simple interface. Applications only feel powerful when we’re able to achieve that marriage: deliver compelling capabilities in as simple a way as possible.

Thankfully, simplicity is well engrained in today’s Web 2.0 mindset. You’ll often stumble on applications with very simple forms, more dynamic experiences and highly focused functionality. Often accented with big fonts and friendly, primary colors, Web 2.0 is in many ways a statement against cluttered design. A minimalist sensibility pervades Web 2.0 – and that’s a good thing.

As Web 2.0 continues to expand and as needs grow, the goal of driving towards simplicity is going to be challenged. A heavyweight CRM tool can only be dumbed down so much, for example. So the challenges to deliver better experiences is going to really be tested as we’re confronted with more complex, involved software.

Beyond the challenges ahead, there seems to be a casualty of all this simplicity: the power user. Yes, power users are a niche population, but they are invaluable to the maturation and evolution of products. They’re a critical feedback loop. They’re also great advocates. Very often, they’ll take the time (often excitedly) to pitch, convince and even train others on a system they’re loyal to.

By putting the user at the center of the design universe, we inadvertantly fall into a sort of trap. Eventually, we want our users to graduate, but so long as we try to please them and, dare I say, “baby” them, the tougher it’s going to be to take them to the next level of proficiency, skill and ideally, expertise.

Google is a great example of this. They’ve done a fantastic job of delivering enormous power through a deceptively simple experience: the non-descript search box. Inadvertantly, they’ve created a loyal user base that is, in effect, spoiled. As Google tries to introduce more services and content, they’re forced to continue to meet that standard. It won’t be easy.

Can we design systems that are both simple (thus not alienating casual users) and yet somehow establish a breeding ground that can create new power users? Better yet, can we entice casual users so much so that they want to invest the time and effort to dig for more levers and switches? Or even better yet, can we slyly introduce more complex capabilities into the “simple” experience such that we’re breeding power users without them even knowing it? Can we train up users through the experience itself?

The moral of the story for me as an experience designer is to somehow bake learning and expertise-building into the experience. Rather than just have a new button show up one day that leads to a whole other cluster of functionality sitting elsewhere, we should try to blend these additional capabilities into the way they currently think about and do things. It isn’t easy, but the result is a more seasoned, empowered user that finds it worthwhile to keep learning and growing their knowledge of a product. I believe that can happen without creating a cluttered, unfocused experience. As designers, we just have to shoot for it.

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Posted by richz at 8:13 AM

Feedback Loop 2.0

You have got to love the twisted little feedback loop that is the Web these days. Last week, I whined like a child that Netvibes' front-end was a bit too cramped. Yesterday, I posted about a neat little tool called Stylish that allowed you to hack at any sites CSS with Firefox.

This morning, I open up Firefox to find that the Netvibes team actually made the changes. It's an oh-so-subtle change, but man it makes a difference. Very cool.

Imagine watching a TV show and phoning into the network and telling them they need to shift their camera angles; or emailing your favorite magazine to tell them that their article layout in their print edition needs to change. Only on the web.

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Posted by richz at 8:59 AM

Stylin' Up Firefox

In response to the Netvibes CSS tweak I posted a few days ago, Jon from Wow Factor kindly pointed me to a Firefox extension called Stylish. Simply put Stylish is "to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript. Stylish allows you to easily manage user styles for the application UI, all websites, or only certain websites."

Now until those freaks at Netvibes sober up and tweak their design proper, you can go ahead and drop the CSS changes I suggested a few days ago into Stylish and you're all set. Pretty neat.

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Posted by richz at 9:27 AM

Spacing Out Netvibes

I'm a big fan of Netvibes. It's a highly dynamic portal with all kinds of neat widgets. It's my home page these days. One gripe I have with it though is the way headlines are cramped together. It's hard to distinguish each headline, especially if the words wrap around:

Notice how the headlines look like one big paragraph even though they're actually discrete bits of information. So I decided to whip out the beloved Firefox Web Developer Extension and mess with the CSS. After some digging around, I ended up with this:

All it took was the following bit of CSS tweaking:

.rssItemList li{
margin-bottom: 4px;
/* height: 14px;
overflow: hidden;*/
line-height: 1em;
padding: 1px 0 6px 12px;
border-bottom: 1px dotted #ccc;
}

I've rambled on in the past about the importance of space in laying out information. When you clump stuff together, the information sticks together, and our poor little brains are left with the task of pulling it apart again to make sense of it.

Long live CSS.

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Posted by richz at 9:06 AM

NY Times Redesigns

The NY Times online has redesigned and it looks pretty spiffy. The Editor in Chief blogs...I mean talks about the changes. It's pretty clear that major media is done with resolutions smaller than 1024x768. CNN.com redesigned a couple of weeks ago and now the NY Times. Generally speaking, it's clearly a nod to better semantic based markup and CSS. It's also a clear acknowledgement of the power of blogs as a force. The site is sprinked with blog-ish characteristics (Anil Dash has more on that).

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Posted by richz at 10:52 AM

Creating Passionate Designs

If you look up the word objective in a thesaurus, you end up with synonyms like: cold, cool, detached, disinterested, dispassionate. These are hardly adjectives we’d use in thinking about creating intuitive, compelling interfaces for users. With that said, I’ve been harboring an obsession for a couple of years that there exist certain aspects in design that are universally right.

Making such a suggestion runs counter to the dominant mindset in usability and experience design: learn and understand your users and cater to their needs. The user is the center of the universe. As he should be. What we design and build, after all, is for the user to touch and use. What I’m suggesting here is that while yes, we want users to be happy, the path to that happiness isn’t achieved solely by listening to them and discovering what makes them happy.

One of the most popular design blogs out there is Kathy Sierra’s and company’s excellent Creating Passionate Users. It’s theme is simple: what can we as designers to do to get users excited about the things we design and build? How do we create that passion and loyalty that few products enjoy? Listening to and talking to users is part of it. But I think there’s something else going on.

If a product flatters a user, they get excited about it. It’s complimentary. It makes them feel smart. Beyond the flattery, the user feels an almost visceral connection with how a product works. “It knew what I was thinking.” When that is achieved, loyalty and passion will follow.

From my experience, a compelling design almost invariably taps into something far more instinctive than what a user explicitly desires. Our shared psychology did not pop into existence but is rather a product of millions of years of refinement and evolution. I’ve suggested in the past that we’re attracted to certain objective characteristics in design (rounded corners and open space) and I think there’s a lot more out there that good designers unconsciously leverage.

One of the things I think we seem to forget, as designers, is that we are of the same cognitive lineage – no different than the users we cater to. As a designer, I often find myself shutting out all that user data out as I stare at a blank page. In a sense, I become the user. I then embark on an effort to design something that simply feels right to me. In other words, I try to tap into these basic, common patterns that we all share.

We can suggest with some confidence certain conventions that are fairly universally agreed upon. Certain geometric shapes. Like a square or perfect circle. The notion of symmetry and balance in design is also worth noting. The way colors interact in a design (i.e. color schemes) also comes to mind. Then you’ve got other conventions who’s only evidence of objective appeal lies in their popularity. Rounded corners is an obvious example. The Golden Ratio, Section or Mean is another interesting convention that’s used in art, architecture and many other places. The Golden Ratio is interesting because there’s anecdotal evidence of its existence in nature (e.g. in the symmetry of the human face and body and plant life).

While these conventions are all around us, it’s very difficult to prove that they are inherently good for design. As designers and artists, we seem to subconsiously dip into them. A colleague once told me that you know you’ve got a good design when you just stop. You reach a sort of Zen place where any more touching feels more like tainting. An odd balance is struck.

I’m all for creating passionate users. There are few things more gratifying for a designer than hearing someone not only talk about your work but talk about it with excitement and emotion. I’m convinced that a key way to do that is by creating designs that emulate our shared, basic understanding of how we perceive, process and communicate with the world around us.

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Posted by richz at 2:07 PM

Microsoft Live Search And The End of Paging

Last week, Microsoft debuted a major update to their Live family of web-based products. A major part of that release was a revamped search engine. I was toying around with it today and one thing sort of jumped out at me: there are no pages to the search results.

Instead, you're left to either click on an up-down nav control on the right or use your mousewheel. This applies to their images and news searches as well. It's an interesting approach and I'm not really sure of the gains of going to the trouble of implementing search this way. As you scroll, live.com dynamically loads the next set of results (just enough for your current browser window size).

After playing with it for a bit, I think it makes sense. The image search feels a lot more elegant and seamless than Google's or Yahoo's. Unfortunately, I can't you a link example because all this dynamic-ness comes at a price: you can't pass along a query to someone else...sometimes.

Overall, I like it. It feels a lot less like a web destination and more like something I'd like to see in widget form on my desktop. I don't do many exploratory searches. 90% of my searching is because I'm going after something within the first 10 results. As to the quality of results. I don't think I can speak to that just yet. After some cursory use, Google's results still look superior. The home run for me is good search results on my desktop without going to a browser each time. This looks like a step in that direction.

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Posted by richz at 3:19 PM

The Origami's Last Hurdle

The web is abuzz today with news of Microsoft's new ultraportable PC, code-named "Origami." Jupiter Research has a decent write-up. There’s a lot of chatter going about what the thing really is (and is for). Is it a portable device? Is it for GPS & Multimedia? Is it a new kind of notebook? The questions are justified.

The Origami is really just a scaled-down PC with a touch screen that runs Windows XP. This leaves us with a very wide range of possibilities in terms of what it can do. Yet, amidst all this marketing hype, Microsoft has failed to really deliver any sort of real story. Yes, there exists a chasm between the notebook market and PDA’s. Filling that gap is a business goal – a business goal hardly grounded in solving any real problems for people. Microsoft needs to take a page from Apple and narrowly define the capabilities of Origami. How is this going to make the average person’s life more pleasurable or less painful?

Of course, there are all sorts of possibilities. Reading articles, blogs and syndicated content. Watching and listening to multimedia. Sending and receiving emails. These are all problems that lack a killer device that nails them head on (Apple took care of the portable music market). So while I’m sure many technical hurdles had to be overcome to make this thing a reality, there’s still a lot more to do.

The remainder of that work lies in software, or more specifically, the design of software. Nobody out there makes the distinction between the software on their iPods, the hardware on their iPods, and iTunes. It’s a single cohesive experience that masks all the technical interplay and simply solves a problem. I look at the icons and menus on this thing and I just cringe. The message most people will get is : Who needs a PC with a tiny screen and no keyboard or mouse?

Microsoft needs to take Apple’s lead and solve a real problem; deliver a message around that solution (not the hardware that helped solve it); and follow it with a simple story that gets delivered through a simple interface. No icons. No start menu. Keep it simple and succinct. As a designer, I get excited about the possibilities of such a device, but not in the context of a Windows XP application. I think the narrowed mode of control (touch screen and some thumb controls) is actually a blessing – allowing for a highly focused experience.

Your early adopters and tech heads will enjoy this. But the real frontier is the average Jack and Jill who would see this and within 10 seconds say “Ah!” And only good experience design can achieve that. Only after that last hurdle can innovation become mainstream.

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Posted by richz at 10:17 AM

The Perils of Design Conventions

So I'm clicking away...Channel Up, Channel Up, Channel Up. Cycling through the channels on my digital cable box. 701. 702. 703. 704. While doing this, it dawned on my that this little interaction - skating up and down across a sequential list of channels - is awful.

Digital cable boxes have some amazing capabilities built into them. On-demand ordering. In-line TV guide. Information about programs. Yet we still have channel up and down. Now should flipping through channels go away? Of course not. But there is no doubt there are better ways to easily navigate around the 200 or so channels on a typical cable box.

Why not provide a grid-like listing, nicely categorized, that I can pull up at any time. Why not show me my most frequently visited channels in the same type of listing? In the example below, I don't have to stick to one serial path to get to my channels. For example, from Fox Sports, I can navigate up and down to other channels and jump left and right to Fox News and Cinemax and navigate from there.

The above isn't meant as a specific suggestion to redefine how we navigate TV channels. It's really meant to highlight a danger that designers often overlook when leveraging older design conventions. The original old TV sets had a technical limitation that required you to "flip" through a set of stations by turning a knob. Each snap of the channel knob locked you into another frequency. It was an analog way of tuning to different stations.

The remnants of that interaction still exists today despite the leaps and bounds that technology has afforded. Digital TV is readily capable of doing just about anything, but designers are still locked into the way things used to work. The result is a sort of damaged peripheral vision that hinders us from conceiving of designs that are potentially innovative. It's difficult to wipe the slate clean.

There is, of course, an advantage to leveraging how things used to work even when introducing newer technologies. Your users are already "experts" in channel surfing a sequential number and it's wise to leverage that expertise. The holy grail lies in how we're able to introduce innovative methods of interaction without breaking the already-learned concepts. Agreed-upon conventions are good...and bad.

Some other examples of interaction design conventions that may be an artifact of a previous time:

• The Blue Web Page Hyperlink. This thing has served us well, but we're sort of stuck here. What can we build upon here to accomodate different types of capabilities that have since become popular. Open in a new window? Open in a tab? Open a different media type?
• The Cassette Player Interface Previous song. Rewind. Play/Pause. Fast-Forward. Next Song. Music media formats and CD's can do a lot more than these controls allow. Queuing the next stong is still cumbersome. Organizing playlists is still cumbersome. Rewinding and fast-forwarding is also a remnant of older technologies. It's how you got to the next song. What use cases drive fast-forwarding through a song today?
• The Page-Flipping Paradigm. We're about done with paper yet we still flip through pages to get to more stuff. Financial Reports. Articles. Etc. We've seen glimpses of ways to navigate large information landscapes (Apple's Exposé comes to mind).

As designers, we work hard to make things easy for people. A great way to do that is to leverage what they already know. What we have to be careful with is to not get locked in to current conventions such that we discourage the idea of introducing something new - and potentially groundbreaking. Technology moves fast. We should reset our design thinking every so often and revisit the technologies available and what we can do with them. Invention lies dormant within. We just have to go get it.

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Posted by richz at 9:02 AM

Thinking = Good. Overthinking = Bad.

There's been some sporadic press of late about how the U.S. Snowboarding Team listened to their iPod's while competing at this year's Winter Olympics. One of hte athletes summed it up best: "You're not over-thinking, and that's the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers."

Ever watch one of those surgery documentaries? Notice how the surgeon is casually rambling on while he's toying around with someone's heart? How can they be so casual? Shouldn't he be...concentrating?

There are some widely accepted theories within the realm of cognitive psychology that say "no, he in fact shouldn't be." Once we learn stuff and become "experts" we store that knowledge away in long-term memory. Unlike our immediate consciousness, which finds us fumbling around and "thinking too much," long-term memory is highly efficient. Our actions flow out of that knowledge in an almost rhythmic pace, unencumbered by the unnecessary ramblings of our immediate awareness.

As designers, it's worthwhile to think about how we can present information and controls that quickly stick to long-term memory. The more "work" someone has to do to learn something, the longer they're going to fester in the noisy world of short-term thinking. There are a lot of variables at play. The intelligence of the user. The pre-requisite "expertise" a user possesses. But the one thing we can control is the interface itself, and it's our job to do what we can to reduce cognitive load.

So don't blame those hotshot snowboarders. They're just trying to bypass the clutter and tap into a rhythmic flow. They're trying to think less. Any time a design can do that, it's a home run.

[A nice summary article on cognitive load theory is available here.]

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Posted by richz at 9:16 AM

Interaction Design Conventions As Band-Aids

Digital Web magazine has a new article up on the Usability of Rich Internet Applications. It's a good article that brings up some salient points. Section 3 of the article touches on a subject that always left me a bit curious. Designers of AJAX applications have spoken at great length about clearly showing users that something's changed on the page. You'll often see this in the often-used yellow fade convention. The idea behind it is this: something's happened and we need to give a user a better indication that something's happened; that their action actually had consequences - significant consequences. Typically, it's denoting a write-back (or "saving") to the server. Luke Wroblewski eloquently stated the technique as "communicating change."

Stepping back, I can't help but feel that the last ten or so years of web application building established such a low expectation of interactivity that we need to re-teach users that "hey, this is actually doing more stuff than your typical web app." I'm guessing that, over time, as AJAX and Flash apps become more mainstream, such conventions will no longer be very distinguishing. It will simply become accepted that applications work this way. When they don't, we'll think they're broken.

Until then, what I think we have to be careful with is establishing conventions like yellow fade not because they are justified on their own merits but because they are needed to help overcome a previous shortcoming in technology (in this case, the static, page-based nature of web applications of old). The Netvibes web portal is a highly-interactive AJAX-driven app that has very little yellow fade and frankly, I don't think it needs it. The novelty of saving asynchronously to a web server is wearing off. Move on.

More broadly, I think it's important to move on because I think giving the existing boundaries and limitations too much credence can stifle more creative, innovative thinking.

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Posted by richz at 8:42 AM

Yahoo! Spreads The UI Lovin'

Yahoo!, in its unending desire to "shake things up a bit," has released their design patterns and front-end UI libraries to the masses. It's essentially a collection of interface design best practices and related front-end code that people can adopt and play with. Pretty cool.

So why would Yahoo! release these tools? The optimist in me says that Yahoo! simply wants to share and help others create better end-user experiences with their tools. My more pragmatic side thinks otherwise. Yahoo! is battling the Google juggernaut. What better way to fight the larger enemy than by handing over some of your practices to the community? Commoditize the interface. Focus on content. Arm the masses and let's see what happens.

On another note, the only thing that worries me about UI design patterns is that they can breed a lack of creativity or out-of-the-box thinking. There are 10-15 common "controls" that make up just about all application user interfaces today. That's both good and bad. It's good because establishing common conventions flattens the learning curve for new products. It's bad because shrink-wrapping interface solutions can discourage innovative thinking and problem-solving.

That's enough from Cynical Rich. Kudos to Yahoo! for forwarding a philosophy and handing over some of their best assets without fear. Implicit in their openness regarding things like API's, RSS and now user interfaces is the belief that they will continue to innovate. Good stuff.

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Posted by richz at 8:39 AM

AJAX Is Just a Saw

We had a marketing firm approach us yesterday telling us that all their clients (they do all sorts of digital branding) are asking for AJAX. I laughed – on the inside. 

Customers asking for AJAX is like a prospective homeowner walking over to the contractors hired to do the building and handing them a saw. “I’d really like it if you used this particular saw to build my home.”

AJAX is just a tool. It’s tempting for firms to take on new business based on a technology trend that more and more people are starting hear about - and ask for. It’s also tempting for developers to do stuff that interests and excites them. AJAX is a weapon. Like all weapons, it should be used with forethought and good judgment. The ultimate driver should be the net result on the end-user’s experience.

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Posted by richz at 1:47 PM

Nice Collection of Illustrator Tutorials

I've been trying to find time to dig into Adobe Illustrator lately. I've become a big fan of vector-based art. Here's a nice collection of Illustrator tutorials. There are some real gems here.

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Posted by richz at 3:13 PM

Interaction Design & "Chunking"

The last couple of articles I posted on interaction design (Rounded Corners & Open Space) talk about two techniques of clustering information so that users can digest them. Both techniques (and numerous others) are used, whether consciously or not, by designers.

The rationale behind such mechanisms is based upon the notion of "chunking." Chunking is not a formal term and definitions vary, but this one works:

Chunking, or recoding, is grouping separate bits of information into meaningful units (chunks) that are easier to digest and remember.

The idea of chunking was articulated in a landmark article by the pyschologist George A. Miller entitled The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. In the article, Miller argues that our working memory (i.e. our immediate sensory intake) can't handle much more than six or seven discrete bits of information. Beyond that, it's just a big blog. Here's a simple exercise that illustrates the concept.

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Posted by richz at 9:00 PM

LukeW: Blog Interface Design 2.0

One of my favorite sites on interaction design is LukeW, always smart and insightful. Here's a recent article on the interface design of blogs and blogging interfaces.

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Posted by richz at 7:52 AM

Give'em Room Folks : The Importance of Open Space In Design

In a previous article on basement.org, I asked why we love rounded corners. I argued that the appeal of rounded corners went beyond the purely aesthetic and into the realm of "intuitive" for us. In this entry, I'd like to talk about another seemingly simple design mechanism that does more than just make interfaces look good: the use of open, empty space.

"Dirty" Interfaces

This is a snapshot of a typical "newspaper" destination on the web. It's the home page for The Economic Times. Notice how the content of the page is crammed together. There is very little "open area." I'm sure the designers were given a mandate to display links to all sorts of resources. Nonetheless, the viewer is left to wade through a lot of visual data to make sense of what's going on.

When we land on a page like this, we're not really "reading" just yet. All these snippets of text and links are really a collection of options presented to a user. They can make any number of choices here. Before a user can start making such a decision, he has to first break up all of that data into digestible pieces. Studies have shown that we don't scan such pages in any predictable way. Instead, we sort of zig-zag around. We delineate this blob of information into chunks that we can take in, think about and ultimately act upon. It's sort of like noise-reduction for information. We first reduce the noise and then we listen.

As information and interaction designers, we are armed with a toolset that can help users understand the information before them. The more complex the set of information, the more work we have to do. Without much thinking, designers provide visual cues of what is related to what by a process I like to call delineation. We box things. We color things. We title things. Through delineation, we can deliver information with less noise.

One of the most powerful means of delineation is the use of open, empty space. By pushing less semantically-relevant information away we reduce the potential for cognitive load that can arise when less relevant information is placed too close together. In other words, we're handing the user a greater level of context to work within.

The blogging explosion and the advent of CSS brought with it a new design aesthetic that introduced an emphasis on the use of open space. One of my favorite sites is We Break Stuff, not only for its content but its visual appeal. Kubrick, the now nearly infamous default template for the Wordpress blogging platform, makes excellent use of space to convey a simple elegance. While the Economic Times barrages your field of vision with all sorts of "information pollution" We Break Stuff is a breath of fresh air. One of the most gratifying comments I can receive from a user is how "clean" an interface is. For me, a user is telling me that they didn't have to deal with a lot of clutter to understand it. They didn't have to work as hard.

Less Is Not Only More, Its Actually Better

A few months ago, I was at a Sigur Ros concert here in New York City. During one of their songs, the music just stopped and there was nothing but dead silence for at least 30 seconds. The crowd was perfectly silent during this pause. And then, finally, the music started up again (Kottke was actually at the same show and blogged about it). At first, it felt a bit self-absorbed and trite, but when the music returned, it had a new emphasis. It stood out.

Beyond reducing cognitive overhead, open space can convey a captivating, often times dramatic message. A bit of information, often times a title or brand name, that is placed in a drastically open space calls upon viewers to stop and pay attention. Used well, it can exude confidence and an understated power. One of my old law school professors often lectured us about speaking as slowly as possible. "When you hold onto your words, people wait for them." The Economic Times is the visual equivalent of a rambling, anxious speaker. Sites like We Break Stuff and the recently redesigned A List Apart for example, convey an unassuming confidence. You can find many examples of simple, powerful designs on site galleries like Webcreme and CSS Beauty.

Any designer would appreciate the ability to deliver a simple design while simultaneously delivering an emotionally powerful message. Open, empty space is one of those rare tools in a designer's arsenal that can do both.

This article and the previous article on rounded corners are based upon a design methodology called Information Objects. A white paper explaining Information Objects is available in PDF format.

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Posted by richz at 3:22 PM

Weird, Naked White Collar Guys

One of the things I'm all about these days, as an interaction designer, is simplicity. I think a lot of what is driving all the excitement is grounded in the notion that if you work at masking the complexity behind things - whether through a simple API or through a simple user interface - you will win.

A few months ago, I stumbled on this process diagram for a financial company. Now, I'm all about communicating through thoughtfully created artifacts that communicate. This diagram, however, does not do that (click on it to view it in all it's glory):

This is an actual representation of...some sort of process. It amazes how much our brains get in the way of our brains when we're trying to convey something to others. This diagram not only solves nothing, but actually creates more problems on top. Though I have to admit, I love the weird, naked white collar guys toiling away at their workstations.

So let's leave information design up to the experts folks. We, the information architects of the world, possess the requisite empathy and forethought to create simple, intuitive artifacts. We would never be caught dead putting out noisy, cluttered diagrams like the above. Or would we?

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Posted by richz at 10:07 AM

Google Video Updated

Google Video has gotten some tweaks of late. The home page now has a simple, two-tabbed interface (Popular & Random). You can also now play search results back to back in a single film (rather than clicking on each one).

In related news, any Family Guy fan knows it's all about those little flashback moments of idiocy that make it funny. Well, it turns out Google Video is a great way to catch them.

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Posted by richz at 12:33 PM

Why Do We Love Rounded Corners?

As interface and graphic designers, we border on obsessed with rounded corners. Web developers have gone to great lengths, through the creative use of CSS (and sometimes Javascript) to make the creation of rounded corners as painless as possible. The proposed CSS3 specification even includes properties for rounded corners (Firefox already supports it).

So why is there such a fascination with rounded corners? I would venture that our attraction to rounded corners goes beyond the aesthetic and speaks to something more.

On one level, I think we're attracted to things that appear to be organic in nature. Take the iPod for instance. While the industrial design of similar products clearly hints towards how the device came to be, Apple put a lot of effort into creating a device that feels more like it grew on a tree than assembled in a factory. They went to great pains to conceal the machine-like characteristics that would typically hold a device together (screws, etc.). The result is a smoother feel with very few edges or hard angles to be found. This "smoothness" not only speaks to usability but also fosters an emotional connection with the device. Some of our earliest memories are tied to objects and things that are far less than perfect and rife with right angles. Corners say "go away." At the risk of sounding hoaky: smoother, rounder surfaces say "hold me."

Beyond physical objects, there is also appeal to presenting information and the controls around information in a more organic context than just boxes and right angles. When we're introduced with a complex set of information, especially a set that is unfamiliar to us, one of the first things we do is survey the information and apply context wherever we can. "This bundle of information is associated with that title. This group of buttons over there is clearly associated with that piece of information." Etc.

As information architects and interaction designers, much of our work involves helping users make sense of the information and controls in front of them. In other words, we provide them with visual hints that guide them along the process of applying context to the interface in front of them. Rounded corners are a great way to do just that. Unlike plain old boxes with right angles, rounded corners clearly hint to what is inside ofand part of this cluster of information and what isn't. When designers use solid colors it adds another level of reinforcement of context: the illusion of weight and volume.

Both explanations I've laid out above have one common denominator: they appear to leverage our own, very basic understanding of how we interact with and use objects in the physical world. The world is comprised of discrete objects that have their own integrity and are clearly separate from everything else (a beach ball, for example, is clearly its own thing not tied to anything else). Some objects even have controls on them that allow you to manipulate them. The knobs on your toaster, by virtue of being attached to your toaster, clearly control the toaster and not your refrigerator.

Rounded corners speak to and leverage this basic "expertise" we all possess and use to interact with the world around us. I'm pretty convinced that the appeal is beyond aesthetic. When used judiciously, we can create more intuitve experiences through such devices.

This article is based partly on a paper I wrote called Information Objects. For anyone who's interested, It's availabe in PDF format for download.

Update: A related article has recently been posted that explores the use of open space in visual design.

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Posted by richz at 10:22 AM

The Usability of API's

As experience designers, we constantly tout the virtues of paying attention to users and creating thoughtfully designed interfaces. This philosophy not only applies to laymen end-users but for the development world as well. With Google Base, Google establishes RSS as the preferred delivery mechanism to getting your content en masse into Google Base.

Bill Burnham sums it up well:

At its highest level, Google's adoption of RSS represents a further triumph of REST-based SOA architectures over the traditional RPC architecture being advanced by many software vendors. Once again, short and simple wins over long and complex.

Simplicity - whether applied to the development community or the general user community - is a virtue.

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Posted by richz at 6:26 AM

Yahoo! Maps Beta Debuts - In Flash

This is probably the best validation of Flash as a serious alternative to AJAX to date. Yahoo! Maps Beta has debuted and it is in Flash. There is also an AJAX version for the .0001% of people who don’t have Flash installed.

But wait, it gets even better. If you’re a Flex freak (and we know you’re out there), there’s an API just for you. Very, very cool. Across the board, Yahoo! went ballistic, delivering five API’s in total. Three Flash variations, the old simple API and AJAX. You can mix it up any way you like. A lot of people already have.

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Posted by richz at 12:11 PM

Del.icio.us Delivers A Seamless Listening Experience - With Flash

Del.icio.us brings an end to the silliness of playing linked/streamed MP3’s on the web by including an ultra-slick “play” icon to MP3 audio links. Very, very cool. To this day I couldn’t tell you why Quicktime hijacks MP3 links on the web and plays them on that dumb white screen in my browser (and don’t even try to undo it, it requires a Ph.D.).

And how are they pulling off this magic? You guessed it: Flash. It isn’t immediately obvious, but they’re using Javascript to construct the Flash calls. Very cool. As illustrated in the use of Flash for video (on Google Video and other sites), Flash is a great way to seamlessly deliver rich media into a user’s experience. There is simply no need for all sorts of stuff to launch on your desktop just to hear some music or see some video. Good stuff.

Posted by richz at 1:34 PM

Can Design & Innovation Come From Users?

About a year ago, I was involved in a pretty exhaustive contextual design effort for a client. For the uninitiated, contextual design is similar to user-centered design in that it focuses on the users of a given product and breaks down and studies how they work. Habits, patterns, work environments are all carefully tracked and digested so that we can gather information to help us make informed decisions about their needs, their goals and the things they contend with on a typical work day.

Any interaction designer would agree that this information is invaluable. It reveals insights into some of the most subtle and nuanced aspects of users' experiences and provides a great foundation for designer better products.

Most frame user-centered design as a comprehensive methodology that takes you from discovering the users and their goals to synthesizing that knowledge into an effective response: a new design. I don't think it does this at all.

Users are critical sources of data for the environments, habits, tasks and motions they go through. A lot can be learned from them. But ask a user how to solve a hairy interaction problem, and they'll often deliver a pretty convoluted response. This is understandable. People become very good at bad habits and their opinions on what they need will be colored by their own patterns. In other words, they're top-heavy. They optimize their thinking to do what they need to do with the tools at hand. Ask them to "invent" a way to do things better, and you won't get very much.

There comes a point in the design process where we actually have to design. I think user-centered design drops you off at the bus stop once you reach that point. Good designers take this background and sit down and design, often using their own intuition and experience to architect information and interaction. Good designers have good intuition. Great designers have great intuition. And so it goes.

Beyond just responding with a better design, I got to thinking: where does innovation come out of any of this, if at all? For example, in the project described above, a major part of the application was email alerts. Creating, managing, getting email alerts was critical for many users. Today, RSS is a technology that challenges email as a superior way to send alerts to people. No user (except for the extreme technophile) would've suggested RSS as a solution, or even wished they'd had it. Instead, they'll ask you to rejig the pieces they already know of, and not much else.

I guess what I'm trying to get across here is that user-centered design eventually breaks down and stops becoming valuable when we're staring at that whiteboard or Illustrator canvas and trying to formulate a solution. More importantly, I think it has boxed us in as interface designers such that we almost fear bringing something radical, but potentially groundbreaking, to the mix.

In short, it's a reactive mindset that does a great job of calibrating us to absorb and digest user-centric data, but isn't much help when the time comes to synthesize that data into something tangible. The problem is that there is nothing to synthesize that data with. There is no widely-adopted concrete approach to building interfaces today. Instead, we mostly feel our way around until it "feels" right.

In a future post, I'll talk about an attempt to codify into a methodology some of the patterns that interaction designers do instinctively. Stay tuned!

Posted by richz at 11:20 AM

A Lesson To Learn From Apple

Apple recently unveiled their new line of iPods and this time around, they've included video in the mix - sort of. It isn't really the official video iPod. It's an evolutionary step of sorts. You can't rewind or fast forward. It isn't a "PVP" (Personal Video Player). It's just an iPod that happens to play video.

They also unveiled a beautifully simple Apple remote control that can be used to control other Apple products - like iPods that happen to play video and Mac Mini's.

After thinking about these announcements a bit, you'd wonder why Apple would make such a half-hearted attempt at video and release, of all things, a remote control. Is Apple slipping? If not, then what are they up to?

Well, I think one of the lessons designers can learn from Apple - whether we're talking about interaction design or product design - is that products don't mean a hell of a lot to people when thought about in isolation. The press tends to focus on products A, B & C that Apple releases, but Apple doesn't seem to think that way.

Instead, they are more interested in augmenting and enhancing broader user experiences. Their products are part of larger holistic picture. iPod conquered portable music because Apple didn't think about the hardware alone but rather the entire experience: search for music, gather music, organize music, listen to music (on your iPod or your computer). Sure, iTunes and iPod are the pieces of the puzzle, but the real value Apple delivered was the end-to-end experience.

This week, Apple began to unveil the pieces that will eventually fall into place for managing, mobilizing and enjoying video - anywhere. Dock your video-capable iPod. Flip on your monitor. Sit back on the couch with your iPod remote and enjoy. Want to finish watching something at your friends? Just unplug and go. Your content goes with you - whether for mobile use or viewing elsewhere.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about how the adoption of RSS was lagging because the initial step, subscribing to a feed, is broken. If we think about RSS in the context of the entire experience: finding channels, subscribing to them easily, getting content wherever we are, there's a lot of work to do.

So let's all learn a bit from Apple: the technology pieces don't mean a hell of a lot on their own. We've got all sorts of neat technology in our hands these days. All we need to do now is design worthwhile experiences and think about how to leverage them.

Posted by richz at 9:29 AM

Long Overdue CSS Linkage

I haven’t shown CSS any love in a very long time. Sitepoint’s Trenton Moss lays out his top ten CSS tricks. WG has a nice post on Maintainable CSS.

Posted by richz at 10:44 AM

The Importance of Metaphors

It’s really exciting to watch some of the trends that are materializing on the Web. Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are popularizing tagging and collaborative categorization (also known as folksonomies). RSS is starting to really take hold as well. It’s popularity continues to grow and is now attracting venture money to help bring it to businesses and to the masses.

With all that said, I think these technologies, while compelling, have a ways to go before they graduate to the levels of email and chatting. For these trends to break out of the domain of the technically curious and savvy and into the rest of the world, the experiences around these technologies need to feel right and natural.

I was chatting with a friend yesterday. He was telling me about his dad jumping onto Gmail, Google’s popular email service. From the looks of things, his dad is your typical computer user in his 50’s or 60’s. He was explaining how he took the time to label all his messages under categories that made sense to him. Once he was done, was dumbfounded to find out that all his messages were still in his Inbox. “If I did all this work to move them, why are they still there? And now why are they in two places?”

I think there’s a critical lesson to be learned here. One of the ways interaction designers are able to introduce complex or abstract concepts to less technically savvy users is through the use of metaphors. Metaphors allow designers to leverage an assumed prerequisite understanding of how things in the real world work: Folders. Trash cans. Envelopes Pieces of paper.

Today, we go to great lengths to lean on what people already understand about the real world. We all know full well that email systems don’t actually have inboxes and outboxes. Yet we introducing them to users by correlating them with their real world siblings. The result is less “figuring out” on the user’s part. You move a document from Folder A to Folder B. Simple enough.

The challenge for interaction designers is to think creatively about (a) what can we leverage from the real world that will make these new technologies easier to digest and understand and (b) how to apply these metaphors effectively.

RSS is an amazing new technology that most people simply don’t bother with. The RSS experience today is so badly disjointed and confusing that it’s nowhere near capable of breaching the “AOL” type of experience that so many are accustomed to. Orange icons that lead to gibberish in your browser; confusion over what we should call RSS; the requirement to go download a client before you can even leverage it. This is all assuming that people want to even embark on this joy ride.

One of the biggest challenges for RSS is even explaining what it is. Look at the BBC’s attempt at explaining RSS. Bless their hearts, they’re really going the extra mile here. Now put yourself into the curious, yet ignorant user’s head. You figure “Ok, let me see what this is about…” You end up on an essay about the virtues and inner-workings of RSS. The most likely outcome: you’ll do a quick scan and move on without reading.

What needs to happen here is, rather than sitting the user down and educating them (i.e. asking the user to come to the technology), we must think creatively about how we can cheat the user into adopting it. How can we camouflage a powerful technology like RSS such that users will correlate to some other understanding and just say “Oh, cool. That makes sense. I’ll try it out.”

The same goes for tagging. Folders are an incredibly powerful, effective metaphor of a very basic real world concept: things can contain other things. Tagging, which is no doubt powerful and has advantages over folders, is quite a bit different. To understand tagging, we have to effectively “unlearn” the well-engrained metaphor of “folders.” My friend’s dad, in his own head, perceived the actual moving of physical papers (emails) to physical folders (the labels). The fact that they remained in his Inbox confounded him.

It’s interesting to hear all the debate going on in reaction to Microsoft calling RSS feeds “Web Feeds” in their upcoming Internet Explorer 7. Dave Winer (the creator of RSS) railed into them pretty hard about it. Microsoft responded to his criticisms and defended their decision to name RSS feeds “Web Feeds.” The debate was over what would confuse users. RSS. XML. Feeds. Web Feeds. I’ve got news for everyone, we’ve got much bigger fish to fry than what we name this stuff.

The real challenge for RSS and other up and coming technologies is how to best package it such that it doesn’t feel like a new technology at all. Instead, it should feel and work like something familiar. The more familiar it feels, the less cognitive friction the user is exposed to. Metaphors are an essential weapon in creating that familiarity.

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Posted by richz at 11:06 AM

Authentic Boredom: Mobile Web Design

Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom has just kicked off a four-part series on mobile web design.

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Posted by richz at 11:08 AM

Flickr & Stealing Metadata

Flickr just announced some really interesting new features that gleans photos for what they call “interestingness.” In short, it essentially studies newly uploaded photos and determines which ones are somewhat…interesting.

Of course, the big question is: how can software determine what is “interesting”? We can of course ask people what is interesting with features like voting and the like, but that’s disruptive. What the boys and girls at Flickr have done is effectively watch how people use their services, and thoughtfully determine what is interesting based on the actions and behaviors of their users.

A while back, I posted an entry entitled Stealing Metadata. The idea behind that article is that, while tagging and the like are great for gathering metadata, from the perspective of a user’s experience, it is disruptive. What we can do, alternatively, is carefully watch what users do, crunch that information and draw some educated conclusions. Their actions and decisions often provide insight into their motivations. Flickr seems to have done exactly that.

As an experience designer, I think this is the far superior approach to gathering important metadata. Rather than asking users to stop, “check in” with some information, and then continue, the flow of their experience is not disrupted.

On the flip side, this presents new and interesting challenges to the world of data warehousing and usage monitoring. To attain this kind of information, systems will need to do more than just log information. I think the technical capabilities are clearly there. The task at hand is on the design side: what are we interested in? what actions hint towards a certain conclusion? how much weight do we give certain actions? This is a higher level of sophistication than the typical logging capabilities that we’re accustomed to today.

In the end, the payoff is huge. To the casual user, Flickr and other services that provide this kind of information take on an illusion of intelligence and awareness that is truly captivating. Come to think of it, most great technologies are shaped this way: a simple, intuitive solution that hides away the complex work behind it. “Show me some interesting photos.” Perfectly simple.

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Posted by richz at 7:20 PM

What the Frick is a "Tag"?

Recently, I made the argument to a client that, while tags are great for flexible organization and folksnomies, the typical user simply wouldn’t get it. I argued that folders – a clear and well-established metaphor for organizing information assets – was a far simpler concept for typical users to grasp.

Just recently, the My Jeeves team was faced with a similar dilemma: how do you get users going on tagging without running into a sharp learning curve. Their solution came down to labelling – they toyed around with “topics,” but that didn’t fly and eventually settled on “Virtual Folders.” Though after playing with their interface, it looks more like a mixture of folders and tags (in my opinion, just as confusing).

This issue raises some important questions and should serve as a lesson to product managers and designers: don’t lose sight of the prerequisite knowledge of the typical user. There are few things that have a more immediate negative impact on a user’s first experience than a concept or a feature that they don’t get quickly. It’s our job to try to step inside their skin and take a good, educated guess of what they already understand and how we can leverage that.

Sites like Yahoo’s Web 2.0 and My Jeeves have the biggest challenge because their audience base is so wide and varied. For most of us, if we look carefully enough, we can often draw a fairly decent picture of the typical user’s mindset and work from there.

In my opinion, while there are some great experiments happening on the Internet – RSS, tagging, etc. – none have been nailed down such that the rest of the world can take them and run. This is not a technology challenge, it’s an experience design challenge.

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Posted by richz at 3:37 PM

Learning To Ignore Google Adwords

I visit a lot of sites on any given day. My feedreader is tracking over 200 and I may click on 40–50 per day. One of the habits I’ve acquired is the ability to subconsciously block out those annoying blocks of ad links.

Of course, I sort of see them. Sort of. They have that predictable pattern to them and are often relegated to boxes. I don’t really need to read them to know that they’re useless to me. In a split second, they’re relegated to peripheral vision and never dealt with again.

I would categorize myself a savvy web user. I think (and I fear) that over time, others will also become immune to these ads such that the search engines will feel compelled to start to, how shall I say, mix it up a bit: Images. Varied layouts. Etc. I think the goal today is to make money on advertising without reverting back to the time of balloons flying across a web page via Flash.

Despite my ability to mentally block them out, as a designer, I must say that I hate them. They really destroy any sense of cohesiveness or consistency of a page’s design (if a page was designed with some thought to begin with). I understand they’re not mandatory by any means, but ads like this (unlike the occasional usefulness of ads alongside search results) are just plain annoying.

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Posted by richz at 12:54 AM

Dynamic Ajax Tables

The tasty Ajax stuff just keeps on comin’. Here’s a nice implementation of editable table cells via Ajax.

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Posted by richz at 10:13 AM

Backbase Community Edition Available

With all the Ajax hubub swirling around these days, someone was bound to package it up into product. A European software company, Backbase, has put out a platform (so to speak) that ties together a set of server-side tags (.Net or J2EE) that wrap up rich client functionality. They've apparently hidden away the all the ugly details of Ajax and turned it all into a set of tags.

There are a slew of demos on their website. It's pretty interesting stuff. I think they're going to find a niche here because it would simply be too costly and talent is too hard to find to build this sort of stuff from scratch yourself. Not everyone has the cash or appeal of Google.

There's a Community Edition available sans the server side stuff. It's free to download and play with. Smart move there as well. I'd love to see Macromedia make Flex more freely available to the community.

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Posted by richz at 2:04 PM

Start.com - Microsoft's Own Little Garage Shop

Something interesting is going on at Microsoft. Or at least in their start.com group.

For the unfamiliar, start.com appears to be Microsoft’s quiet foray into the world of web-based RSS portals. What’s interesting about it is it seems to be the product of a more off-the-cuff style of building software. There’s no beta, no promised release dates. It’s just a few people screwing around with stuff and making some cool toys.

Of course, this is all theory, but take a look at the site. If you go to www.start.com you get a “page not found” error. But if you go to www.start.com/1 or www.start.com/2 you get a couple of variants of a web aggregator. www.start.com/3 is their latest stab at it (you have to do this lame little quiz before you gain access).

I’ve gotta say, with version 3, they’re coming close to something really nice. It still has some issues, but I like their approach: hack away and throw some stuff out there. Nothing they have makes me want to uninstall FeedDemon, but they can get there. I think the most interesting thing here is how Microsoft appears to be trying to counteract the Big Company sluggishness with some slick, nimble little efforts. If they can infuse that into their culture, they will put some hurt on all the little guys.

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Posted by richz at 9:42 AM

Newsgator Buys FeedDemon

Newsgator has acquired FeedDemon (along with Nick Bradbury and TopStyle). This is pretty big news in the world of RSS. FeedDemon is about as good as they come. Newsgator is best known for its Outlook-integrated feed aggregator (though they have other products).

So what’s the big deal here? The marriage of a rich windows application and the convenience of syncing the state of your feeds (read/unread/etc.) over the Web. Powerful stuff.

Anyone want to guess when Microsoft buys Newsgator? I’d say…within 12 months.

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Posted by richz at 3:49 PM

Ajax Overdose

The Ajax phenomena continues to grow within the web development community. People are really starting to use Ajax to do some pretty interesting things.

Kottke.org, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, recently introduced an Ajax-driven menu control to help navigate users around the various corners of the site.

It's an interesting application of Ajax that I would argue is somewhat heavy-handed. From an interaction design perspective, Ajax really shines when the action about to be triggered by the user is, in fact, less significant in terms of the resulting impact on the user interface. The more drastic the consequence of a click (or a drag, or a select), the less valuable Ajax becomes.

In Kottke's case, each menu selection is practically a page refresh. The only part of the interface that stays intact is the right-hand portion. True, it's a slightly less jarring experience than refreshing the entire page, but the need is less compelling here.

Contrast that with, for example, the use of Ajax to add a comment to a blog posting for example. The interaction involved there is far more discrete. It makes good sense to keep the user grounded in this case.

Viewed from an interface design perspective, Ajax is simply another tool in the arsenal. In the end, we want users to feel grounded as they interact with applications. The web is notorious for leaving users disoriented after a full-page refresh. Ajax can help remedy that, so long as it is used judiciously.

Finally, it's worth noting a nasty drawback to Ajax - the Back and Forward buttons on the browser are effectively useless (Kottke actually mentions this). Like it or not, users will continue to use them.

In the end, Ajax should be viewed as a specialized weapon for certain interactions. It is little more than a means to an end.

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Posted by richz at 4:45 PM

RSS Traffic Information

Anytime you need information that’s constantly changing (or even information that rarely changes), RSS is worth thinking about.

Up-to-the-minute traffic information via RSS makes good sense. Those sly bastards at Yahoo! deliver a real-time traffic data via RSS. It goes down like this:

http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.rss?csz=11209

Just replace the csz value with your zip code and you’ll get traffic info for your area.

Yahoo isn’t the only one doing this. Traffic.com delivers feeds by major cities. 

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Posted by richz at 9:46 AM

Yahoo! Shopping RSS

Yahoo! has wired up its shopping.yahoo service to RSS. Good stuff.

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Posted by richz at 6:48 PM

Making Signal Out Of Noise

As RSS’ popularity continues to accelerate, it’s becoming more and more difficult to neatly weed out the entries we want to focus on from the flood of information that is being collected.

Part of the problem is aggregators themselves. They’re looking more and more like email clients these days. Channel Groups. Channels. Read & Unread Entries. Etc. It’s starting to feel like we’re back to Square One as far as the productivity leap goes.

Another part of the problem are the feeds themselves. They’re effectively just one-dimensional lists today. The only real unit of grouping is the feed itself. A blog that nicely separates its entries into neat categories on its website typically delivers the feed in one big blob of information. The feed reader can’t do a thing with it - except list out the entries. Again, back to Square One.

Let’s take a look at an example of how the feed is a clear step back from a visit to the same site on the Web. Fark.com is a very popular news/humor site. If you visit the actual site, you’ll notice that they’ve got each of the entries neatly tagged with visual labels representing the categories they fall under. They even stick to a consistent use of color-coding categories to further assist the user’s task of digesting all that information.

Now take a look at the feed supplied by Fark.com. Look careful at the titles of each entry. Notice that the first word of the title is the category the entry falls under. As a result, you get titles that look like this:

Unlikely Two originals of “dogs playing poker” paintings sell for over half a million dollars. Auctioneer attributes it to the growing popularity of poker

The word “unlikely” above is not part of the title. It’s simply the category it falls under. The decision to just drop the category right into the title borders on ridiculous. Nevertheless, it’s more than most sites do.

A few months ago, I drafted up an RSS 2.0 module called RSS Traits. Traits is designed to provide a simple way to enrich RSS entries with just about any kind of metadata. Beyond just providing a mechanism for slapping on metadata, the spec also allows for some simple methods for helping aggregators “draw” that information so it becomes easier to understand. The module, along with examples, can be found here.

I think Traits makes sense. Adoption is a whole other matter.  I had a brief back-and-forth with Nick Bradbury (creator of FeedDemon – in my opinion, the best client feed reader for Windows) and he raised a good point in regards to adoption. Something like Traits requires the adoption of both sides of the participants in RSS – the channel providers and the software developers that make the clients. The result? A “You go first. No, you go first…” type of stalemate.

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Posted by richz at 8:20 AM

Start.com - Microsoft's Web-Based Feed Reader

Microsoft has released Start.com, a web-based feed reader. In short: it sucks. It’s practically feature-less (except for the ability to, um, read feeds). It also doesn’t work with Firefox.

Is it me, or is anyone else getting the sense that Microsoft is just half-heartedly throwing its hat into the whole feed syndication thing with this?

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Posted by richz at 9:24 AM

IA Summit '05

I returned yesterday from the charming (and cold) city of Montreal. This year's IA Summit was hosted there. There were a lot of interesting presentations and many interesting people attending.

I'd never gone before and I have to say it was informative and enjoyable. There were probably around 400 people at the conference.

I presented on Saturday. The topic was applying Cognitive Load Theory and object oriented concepts to interface design. It was probably one of the most poorly named and marketed presentations at the conference (it was called...Information Objects). Nevertheless, a nice-sized crowd showed up.

I'll be talking more about the topic here. Within the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting links to a PDF and the Flash presentation.

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Posted by richz at 5:22 PM

Speaking At IA Summit '05

I will be speaking at one of the sessions at this year's Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, Canada.

The presentation is called Information Objects and you can learn a bit about the subject matter here. In a nutshell, it's an attempt to introduce an alternative methodology for creating useful and effective user interfaces. It applies object-oriented thinking and some concepts grounded in cognitive psychology to deliver a supplementary approach to user-centered design.

The presentation is on Saturday, March 5 at 5:00PM. If you're attending the conference, feel free to join us. I promise an interesing and life-altering experience (ok maybe not life-altering, but pretty damn close).

If you're attending and can't make that particular presentation for whatever reason, shoot me an email anyway and let's try to meet up.

Posted by richz at 2:25 PM

The Art of Icon Design

I'm a big fan of using icons as an effective visual mechanism for interface design.

I just stumbled on this excellent (and relatively old) article on the art of icon design. Good stuff.

While we're at it, I should pass along a plug for Boxes & Arrows, a solid resource for information architecture articles.

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Posted by richz at 11:36 PM

Big Showdown: CSS vs. XSL

Xml.com pits the two big guns of presentation languages, XSL & CSS, against one another. A good read (if you're into that sort of thing).

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Posted by richz at 1:14 PM

Microsoft Makes Avalon Available

Those of you that regularly follow this blog know that every so often I get absolutely giddy when talking about RIA (Rich Internet Applications). I think (and hope) that it's the wavy the world is headed on the web.

Microsoft today announced that they're releasing Avalon, their Longhorn graphical user interface layer, as an installable module for existing operating systems. Avalon handles the rendering of XAML markup.

This may be partly a response to Macromedia's Flex presentation server. Flex renders MXML (Macromedia's own XML GUI language) into Flash applications that are sent over the Internet. Flex is actually starting to show some traction (at least according to the blokes at Macromedia).

You have to wonder how Microsoft can compete with Flash as an application delivery platform. Say what you will about Flash, it is ridiculously thin and truly adheres to the zero-install promise of RIA's.

Any way you flip it, competition in this space is only going to heat up. A good thing for everyone.

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Posted by richz at 10:11 PM

Hot Web Design Trends for 2005 (Maybe)

eMediaWire has an article up about the web design trends to look forward to in 2005. Some outfit in Phoenix called Forty Media came up with them. I'm not sure how they became the authority on design trends, but nevertheless, some interesting things to look out for.

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Posted by richz at 12:14 PM

Sitepoint:: Color For Coders Article

Neat little article that dips into the lovely little world of color theory for the less-than crative.

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Posted by richz at 10:31 AM

Photo Inspiration

As part of my generally rabid addiction to web feeds and blogs, I've stumbled on an entire underwold of photography blog sites. There is some really great talent out there. Some strut their stuff on an almost daily basis. Here are some of my favorites:

• pixel@day
• 28MM
• Adam Polselli
• Chromasia
• Shutter Release

There are tons of others out there. Photoblogs.org is an excellent resource that makes it easy to list/find all sorts of photography blogs out there.

Remember, great photographs are not just for inspiration. They're also a great way to extract color schemes.

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Posted by richz at 3:31 PM

Firefox Web Developer Extension

If there's anything that can get a web developer excited, its the Firefox Web Developer Extension. It has a laundry list of very cool features that would anyone working in the web practically giddy (ok, maybe not giddy).

Give it a look. Very handy.

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Posted by richz at 9:30 AM

Adobe Studio

A pretty neat resource for designers is hosted by the Big Mama of graphics software - Adobe. The Adobe Studio has free tutorials, downloads (symbols, brushes and the like) and other goodies for designers.

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Posted by richz at 1:39 PM

To Hell With Web Applications

I've got an article I'm going to be posting in the next few weeks that touches on how the web is an abysmally poor platform for applications.

A few months back, there was some buzz in the community that web applications were now really starting to kick in and that better, richer experiences were to be had on the web. There's also been a decent amount of writing about the usability of web pages, home pages, and the like. Others critique the usability of sites like Amazon and Ebay.

I don't think such exercises are necessarily bad. Analysis is a good thing. However, I think the design community has really lowered the bar by simply accepting the web browser as an adequate means of application delivery without really scrutinizing its glaring flaws.

Now mind you, this doesn't necessarily apply to content-heavy sites like news magazines or blogs. These are less applications and more publications. I'm really talking about the more involved applications that are pumped through the web - like financial apps and the like.

I think the most fundamental flaw in web applications is subjecting users to the web page paradigm. If a user interacts with a web app in any sort of way, the entire application effectively goes white and the application is effectively “redrawn.” The user is then burdened with the task of surveying this new page and understanding the implications of what he or she just did. In other words, they lose context. This is not a good thing.

Yes, certain conventions have come into place that people have grown accustomed to (e.g. "Add to Cart"). But as soon you start to introduce more involved controls, the page paradigm starts to get in the way. People are constantly re-establishing context when using a web application. This is a big reason why the browser Back button is so heavily relied upon. Users don't feel like they're manipulating persistent objects (a timesheet, a project, etc.) but rather are traversing a series of snapshots in time. This effectively increases the overall cognitive load of the web application.

Various tricks have come about to overcome this. Page element loading without refreshing the entire page (through technologies like XMLHTTP) helps alleviate things, as do pop-up windows that intimate some semblance of modality, but these are just hacks.

As interaction designers, we shouldn't just accede these shortcomings and assume we have to work within them. Yes, the web browser is ubiquitous and we will inevitably have to work within its confines, but all the while, we should continue to press technology to take us beyond this platform.

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Posted by richz at 10:41 AM

Neat Little Aqua Effect Tutorial

Veerle's Blog has posted a nice little tutorial on how to achieve that delicious, candy-like aqua effect. Let the aqua effect overkill begin.

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Posted by richz at 12:19 PM

Job Title: Information Architecture

One of the biggest problems I've experienced with getting the word out about good information and interaction design is explaining to people what I do. Even in casual situations, usually the third or fourth question from people you've just met involves what you do for a living.

And so I respond with "I'm an information architect."

The head usually tilts sideways. People are usually intrigued. "Hmm. He's a different kind of architect?" So the typical followup question (if there's a semblance of interest): "What's that?"

Admittedly, I rarely know how to answer. I fear being labelled a "designer who makes web pages" because I know there is far more to it than that. I equally fear being viewed as someone who's "in technolgoy." Both are obviously incomplete, yet its always an uphill battle to not only explain what I do, but to explain that what I do is somehow valuable. If you're trying to convince a potential client, this is not a good posture to be in.

And so, I pull out the analogies and the examples. "At that point in the engagement, I come in and do my thing..." It's often exhausting to go about this. In my opinion, if Information Architecture the profession were a company, its PR campaign should be deemed a failure. I confess, I don't have a degree in IA (does anyone?) and I latched onto the title because I was part business analyst, part product designer and part interface designer. And so, I labelled myself "Information Architect" because it seemed vague enough to cover a few different areas.

After some time now, I'm less comfortable with the title. I don't think it adequately captures what I do. Yes, I architect informaiton in that I try to organize and present information in logical, easy-to-digest patterns. But most of my work involves the layout of controls that allow users to interact with and manipulate information as well. Even more importantly, I often find myself sitting in on and actually defining what the product is before a single screen is drawn. I'm not sure if the breadth of my responsibilities is unique (I doubt it is) but "information architect" falls short regardless.

These days, I've settled on "Interaction Designer." I don't think that's a home run either, but it'll have to do for now. Time to print up some new business cards.

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Posted by richz at 9:40 AM

Create Groovy Looking Icons

Sitepoint has a tutorial up that shows how to create Windows XP-style icons with Illustrator or Freehand. Pretty useful. The WinXP style is a bit too toy-ish looking for my taste, but the techniques are salient nonetheless.

If you're a fan of the Mac OS X's aqua styles, here's a brief article on recreating that look.

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Posted by richz at 10:31 AM

"The Same Six Templates"

After toiling away at over ten different themes and styles for this site and finally settling on a design, I run into this painful posting on the sameness of designs (via Kottke). The poster (Heather Champ) is "so very tired of seeing the same six templates."

Garrett at YourTotalSite makes some good points in speaking to this issue, and really nails it in the first paragraph:

I am so absolutely sick of hearing, "It's nice, but it still looks like a blog." I can understand everybody's desire to see the limits pushed, but let's be logical about this. Have you ever said, "I love all these new books being published, but they all look like books." Or maybe, "That's a beautiful car, but why does it have 4 round wheels?" How about, "It's so boring to always have the door knob on the outside edge of the door about waist high."

He's hitting on a critical point here: blogs serve a certain purpose, and to make them useful, key features are becoming conventions. Conventions allow others to get proficient and good at using these things we interact with. And so, because we are concerned about ease of use, we self-impose some boundaries to work within. That's the interaction designer in us. Once the boundaries are set, the creative designer is left to roam around.

Of course, we could choose to be bold and try something radically different and ignore boundaries altogether. It's really any designer's prerogative to do so. The Holy Grail, in my opinion, is striking that balance - presenting an intuitive interface that leverages common conventions while introducing designs that are compelling and attractive.

In fact, I would argue that a good, familiar organization of information and controls lends itself to the overall aesthetic appeal of a design. I've run into numerous sites where the design is beautiful, bold and provocative, but the interface is downright awful. The ultimate feeling I walk away with is "that didn't feel good." Conversely, you can have a well thought out interface that is visually unappealing (Jakob Nielsen's Useit comes to mind).

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