Spirited Thought

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

People are sensitive about technology they bond with and the iPhone is a recent example. Infoesthetics picked up Edward Tufte’s comments and critique of the iPhone and the reaction of Christopher Fahey, the information architecture practice lead at Behavior. You need not imagine the cat hiss of the commentary that follows either blog post, a quick glance reveals the emotional charge often experienced when pointing at people wearing t-shirts that read, “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Tufte drops some gems at the end of his video commentary:

To clarify add detail.

Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information they are failures of design.

If the information is in chaos don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Something he credits the iPhone for doing while critiquing that some applications leave the user in what I think of as a Jelly Bean Land. Things look great, smooth, glossy and colorful, just like the high polish of Jelly Bellys. In a wonderful call back to the ways of academics, Tufte pulls together some readily available visuals to illustrate his point – quite likely the work of his protégés. Messin’ with the iPhone is dangerous and exactly why someone needs to do it.

The two examples are the market view and the weather application. In short, each could offer higher data density, leveraging the characteristics of the high-res screen of the device, consistently reinforcing the uniqueness of the iPhone, not just relying on the improved touch screen, which will eventually be everywhere. However, people like Jelly Bellys and that is a tough argument. Many people like high fat, high-cholesterol, high sugar foods, but then are upset at their obese kids. Just because we like it, or that no one is complaining, is not a valid argument that it is right. In fact, there are plenty that agree, Tufte’s points are worthy, but his visuals leave too much and too little to the imagination.

His stock example is illustrated with a printed page (possible a portion of a printed page). The point is, see how much information could be displayed? Visually, it was awful. Everyone reveres the point, his text on sparklines and data density is biblical.

Lesson 1: When messin’ with the iPhone, offer visuals that are as esthetically pleasing as the ones in which you refer. It reduces the need to overcome the dissonance.

Tufte’s weather example actually draws upon lesson 1 (good job to whomever mocked up the improved weather experience). While not perfect, it demonstrates the added data density while maintaining some of the luscious visuals of the original weather experience. He adds a high-resolution weather animation below. It is a bit too large and reminds the viewer of low-def TV signals on a high-def, high-res TV. Conceptually fine, dangerously too real and hence offensive to those understanding it less as a direction and more as the solution.

Lesson 2: When messin’ with the iPhone, stay consistent in your accordance or violation with lesson 1. Again, it reduces the dissonance that the viewer has in understanding the presentation – consistency is highly explanatory.

Humans are fascinating creatures forming meaningful relationships with inanimate objects, often the ones that are soon perceived to be extensions of the self. Apple’s contribution to society is some of the best experience and industrial design ever, exactly what they are selling. Technically, it is all the same and yet they invest where people’s hearts are. A deeper reflection on Buddism and materialism reveals that there is no requirement to shed physically all material objects, but it is your ability to enjoy and simultaneously be indifferent of an object’s presence. Our appreciation for our present situation and detachment from it being so very necessary leaves a healthy mental balance. Many people will be buried with iPhones, but none of them will need them.

Riding the subway home from Manhattan, I was thinking about visual images that might suggest “clean.” In my mind’s eye, the work of Masahiro Mori came to view - I have a collection of his porcelain mugs. Mori is a great industrial designer, known for his beautiful modern work. The image below offers you access to selected images from my makeshift kitchen studio.

Adobe Lightroom was one of my last purchases in support of my relationship with photography. It has literally transformed how I approach managing my photos. While it is not a replacement for Photoshop, it is its best compliment.

Last week I hopped over to B&H after work and picked up a GretagMacbeth, now xrite, i1Display2 monitor calibrator. I have been on the fence about color calibration – especially since to do it right requires a substantial investment. Monitor calibration is a first step to a commitment to color. If you have never experienced the difference of a color calibrated display you will be in for a treat. Once you are calibrated, you might think that the only pleasure you get is when you recalibrate, but as you work with images, you constantly remember that the color you see is consistent with what the color data in your files and that is amazingly satisfying.

Just after you calibrate you are sure to open up a recent photograph that you spent time adjusting – setting the white balance, highlight recovery and color – and you notice that what you have is markedly different than you remember. I was not disappointed by what I found, the shadows revealed richer transitions from light to dark and variations of color that were there but unseen. While I am not unhappy with the photo, it is different from my original intention, which is exactly why calibration is important. If you spend any time investing in the post processing of your photographs, then display calibration is the minimal investment required to avoid wasting your energy in getting things just right. Unfortunately, only color corrected systems get to see what I see, but that is okay because what you cannot see is your unknown problem. Web browsers are in general color limited, but when I make a print it will be closer to what I know to be true.

Back in May, Adam Greenfield contributed a great article for Adobe’s Design Center Think Tank space called On the ground running: Lessons from experience design. He begins with an insightful – on hindsight obvious – observation that the distinctions between products and services is blurring. Adam introduces the roll of experience design as the agent helping blur these lines, highlighting three examples of XD gone awry: Nike+, Acela and Puma’s Trainaway. He ends with a resonating statement about conversations and not control, suggesting that while very often, tight experience design requires a greater level of control, but opening solutions up to user modification, the ultimate in end-user collaborative design.

While Adam’s examples illustrate his points well, there is another side of the conversation worth consideration. Obviously the three examples all result in some level of failure, which might lead to the conclusion that each was not worth doing. The thing about failure is that if the vision is grand enough, any action toward achieving that goal sets the stage for tomorrow’s experience. Nike+ (the iPod nano, Nike bio telemetric transponder shoes and the online data visualization) might not have been the hit people were hoping for – I actually did not know they lacked popularity – but the offering shows that someone over at Nike is thinking about how we reinvent the running shoe, a completely commoditized product with endless air pockets, gels and spring. Even if it fails, then notion that your shoes might have some electronics in them has come to pass in popular culture. It is no longer limited to the shock activated flashing LED. A recent post by Jonah Lehrer jokes about your iPod being made of biological flesh and yet continues on reviewing some research where scientists have shown circuits can be constructed out of biological material. It is all fantasy until someone tries to commercialize it and then the world gets to add it, flop or not, into the accepted realm of possibilities. This approach is probably not the best way to run a business, but its wonderful at winning the hearts and minds of people.

One of the areas Adam shines focus is the challenge in trying to control the end-to-end solution to deliver great experience design with a quote from Nokia’s Chris Heathcote. It might be the case that designing for one person is not practical; however, I also think we tend to try to make a single solution apply to too many. Narrowing the target audience may limit overall breadth of success, but it ensures at least one population is thrilled. For those early-adopters, runners and techi types, the Nike+ might have been a great geeky trip. Is this not just the long tail of XD?

Seth Godin posted on his obsession with improving alarm clocks, ending with the fact that products could be better if we tried to make them better. If the distinctions between products and services are blurring – a very sophisticated undertaking – then maybe the reason some have failed in the past has less to do with experience design and more to do with people agreeing its worth trying to make things better. As Adam explored, it only takes failure in any one of many things to challenge the overall experience.

Chris Chase, a neuropsychology professor back in college, enjoyed introducing concepts with the notion that humans are more alike than they are different. It is a useful foundation for deciding what is important to study, fundamentals that apply to everyone or the anomalies, certainly not unimportant, just narrow. And yet, humans are fascinated with differences and in particular our faces and our bodies.

Slavko Milekic, the chair of my undergraduate thesis on child friendly interfaces, evolved the face flipbook into kid-friendly touch-screen interfaces. Earlier on, in a self-study project I implemented the more traditional version of a face flipbook, allowing someone to switch parts of faces but in a more literal representation to the kid books I grew up with.

Reminder: There are too many examples of literal expression in virtual spaces that fail. It amazes me that we tend to not take on the larger challenges of inventing something new instead of replicating what we know.

Slavko introduced gesture and touch based interactions to the traditional computing environment enabling object switching, size shape and position. Certainly one of his successful creations was that of assembly of faces out of a variety of common objects like vegetables. Even at a young age, even when working with vegetables - something often seen as a challenge for children - we are fascinated with the construction of human form.

Move to the more taboo example of human nudity in art or even pornography. There are books dedicated to human genitals – again, the differences. Even when considering the world of fantasy and identity, nudity and pornography depict other people doing things that you yourself could do, by yourself, with others you know and increasingly others you do not know. So why that fascination, if not for the differences. What is it like to see an attractive someone with a certain set of features? It is all about the distinguishing marks, regardless of it being labeled art or smut.

My recent move back to New York City, more specifically Brooklyn, reminded me of the diversity I missed. A great Walt Whitman quote on a Barnes & Noble ad in my subway car read,

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

That must be what outgoing is, talking to the diversity around you instead of just observing. But, in fact, almost no one speaks to strangers – we even teach our children not to. However, everyone has the pleasure of enjoying diversity visually at fire hose volume in New York City and for me on my morning commute on the F train.

Professor Chase is still right, we are more alike than we are different and while we are consumed by those curious differences, I posit that our fascination exists because our distinguishing marks appear on a relatively common canvas.

Mark Detweiler from SAP has an exciting article – Managing UCD within Agile Projects – in the May / June issue of interactions. Last year I used SCRUM to manage a small development team on a high-profile project and one of the lessons we learned was that agile development does not work well with disciplines that are not also agile. The development is managed and completed in a series of sprints (we worked three, 30 day sprints) and the application was twitching before any formal UCD work had completed. This challenge applies to more than just User Centered Design (UCD); accelerating development is only so valuable. Detweiler’s UCD centric view offers a series of tips on making a better go at it, but the truth is this problem needs a more radical conception.

Detweiler offers three iterative UCD phases, Understanding Users, Defining Interaction and Designing the user interface. One observation is that UCD teams need to focus their energy on work that influences the current development sprint. Every profession has more they want to do. Delivering it apart form the product development positions their brilliance it to be ignored.

Understanding users is important, but it is not going to hold up development, so what is the minimal amount of work that needs to occur in order to have the development team be more considerate of the user context. Since we are iterating, maybe each sprint has a refinement of the user definition. One thing for sure, the developers will create a user persona if one is not provided.

Defining user interaction has to happen in a more collaborative manner with the development team. It is often just as easy to code the application, as it is to write the use case documentation. This does not mean use cases are a waste of time, but we need to ask what about the document is going to influence development. The time may be better spent with the UCD professional in the initial task breakdown meetings to help define interactions in detail. Having access to a UCD professional as the development occurs helps accelerate decision-making, but the goal is not to have the solution be perfect – it is to have a thoughtful solution, where lessons learned inform the next sprint’s interaction design. The UCD professional needs to own their role representing their stakeholders, but not constantly checking in to see if they are meeting expectations – there is simply no time for checking in and reporting back at every turn.

Designing the user interface as part of an agile development project is difficult. Short of starting this work prior to development, we need to find the opportunity in having the user interface be quick and dirty. An existing design system can address the developer’s need to assemble the application without having to worry about the overall application style. Assuming that a custom user interface is required, the designers need to be in the boat of iterative design. Save the Mona Lisa for a few iterations from now. If you want to influence this sprint’s user interface, worry less about the pixels and more about the styles. Design elements that telegraph where the design will be going. Development is iterative – it is assumed things will change so influence at each point, but save the masterful work for a time when it is not needed yesterday. Great work often takes time; why pretend it can be done in less?

All of this feels a little sloppy and this is why I think what we need is to revisit UCD and maybe the larger thought of user experience and how it is most affective in an agile development environment. This issue is exacerbated in innovation teams where often prototypes catch like wildfire and suddenly a solution with little to no formal UCD thought is at Version 1.0, causing pause to the value and role of UCD. We need to do more than apply more resource or slow down development to accommodate external dependencies. We need to do more than just the same thing in a slightly modified way. To be successful, we need to reinvent UCD or stop being agile.

Josef Albers’ book, The Interaction of Color, was my first real look at color. Ever since I have been eyeing original silk-screens and playing with color. In a first exploration, I dusted off my Macromedia Director hat and threw together a simple visualization to explore color blending, mottling and motion.

The algorithm is pretty simple: given the surrounding boxes, average their colors to determine the current box’s color. On a 10 x 10 matrix, I introduce two pebbles to drop in the pond, one is under the user’s control and the other is related, moving opposite to first and controlled by the computer. Each square has determined a random color and clicking on a given box will reassign it another color. The order in which you calculate the average impacts the visualization – consider that each square is an object, completely self-sufficient. To provide a little more interest, I have forced the rendering to occur around the vertical mid-point.

Clicking on the image will launch the Shockwave version.

Anyone living a Web 2.0 lifestyle – using applications like Flickr or Technorati – is sure to have seen a tag cloud. Typically tag clouds depict the frequency a tag has been used within a system. The larger the word, the more times that tag has been used. The idea is that tag clouds are a good indicator of community behavior, which is very misleading.

Tag clouds do provide a navigation interface which requires almost zero learning. Relative size seems like a universal concept for importance. Clicking on a tag usually shows a collection of items tagged with that word. The cloud is often contextual to a given page so digging into a collection is as simple as clicking tags in the cloud.

Tag clouds as we know them are actually not very useful. They are, in fact, a tease – so easy to use and communicating just enough to be interesting. The problem is that just because a tag is used in high frequency is not an indicator for what a community finds interesting. It is literally a display of how often a tag is used within a given context. In many cases the word flower is distinguished from flowers, even though they are obviously very similar in spelling and meaning.

A friend and colleague pointed me to a blog posting discussing how clusters were introduced to Flickr – groupings of related tags without the use of a high-level label or facet. If clustering can be done well, it offers a more interesting possibility for tag clouds. Instead of simply reflecting the use of a given tag, tag clouds could display the activity for a given cluster. It might very well be that the community is interested in food, but more people are using the tags “family”, “friends”, and “porn” so, as a user, you would never know. The use of clusters is an opportunity to reveal the higher level topics a community is actively working with. Flickr has chosen not to label their clusters. You can actually explore Tags / clusters / clusters. However, all you are really doing is browsing clusters of tagged images that are also tagged clusters. A less confusing example is exploring Tags / summer / clusters which limits the clustering to all images tagged with summer, which can be seen as a facet – a folk-facet. Certainly the URL convention makes it feel like a facet, but, is it really?

[digression starts]

Taxonomists seem to be fascinated with the emergence of folksonomies, but are quick to remind you that they are very different things. So, a facet that is applied by a user is different that one used by someone versed in the science of classification. Again, at first glance, Flickr appears to be automatically identifying facets, but is really just generating clusters from leftover tags. For example, look for clusters on Bergdorf Goodman and you get items tagged nyc, newyorkcity, newyork, etc. A typical faceted browse might show a breakdown within that category of clothing lines (i.e. mens, womens, childrens etc). Instead you are left with the breakdown of whatever the collection has been tagged. So, while it is possible to select a tag that might be a facet, for Flickr, it is not a facet, it is a tag. However, I would maintain that a user could intend to apply a facet through tagging, but the usefulness of that tag as a facet is lost because the system itself is unaware of the higher level categorization. Additionally, it would require that the tags, if clustered browsing was going to return a faceted collection would need to be limited to those expected from a faceted collection. (i.e. In the case of Bergdorf, mens, womens or childrens) Otherwise, the faceted browsing would be a mess, worse than not having the ability at all, because there would be no science to the tagging.

Taxonomies and formal faceted browsing are different activities from tagging and need separate user experiences. In that last example, it is clear that a user could intend a tag to have a higher level grouping property, but unless the system understands this then it is in fact, just a tag. If categorization was important in Flickr, I would expect a different interface from tagging to facilitate the classification.

I often ask what the difference is between content that is tagged or categorized “dog”. If I were surfing facets I might have different breeds under “dog” and maybe items tagged “dog” without a breed. If I were surfing tags, I would expect all dogs and if interested in a breed, I would enter it as a tag. Combine the two and I might browse a collection by facet, “dog” and then filter by tag, “flatfaced.” Is this any different than compound tagging, where one tag is ANDed to another tag? (i.e. dog AND flatfaced) Is the difference limited to the intention of the user who assigned “dog” as a facet and not as a tag? What happens when a user applies the same word to both the category and tag? Are they plugged into formal classification enough to distinguish the differences in meaning? Should they be? Should they care?

[digression ends]

Someone needs to birth version 2.0 of the tag cloud where the visualization is driven by the clustering of tags and not just the use frequency of a tag. Maybe someone has. I can even imagine layering user activity of browsing tagged items on top of the activity of users tagging. A fabulous side project!

A few weekends ago I made a stop off to a Wild Oats Market down the road to explore their options for tea. If I remember right, it was a particularly stressful time at work and tea always seems more soothing than another cup of joe.

On a high shelf, a satin silver tin box caught my attention amongst all the organic colored tea boxes promising added clarity, reduced headaches, cures for the sick and peace of mind. It was a tea box from Ineeka (which means little earth). I am a fan for package design and the box was nice to hold – it had weight and it opens slowly because of the extra think lid. The front label was simple, reading Green Osmanthus Ingenuity. It promised whole leaf tea in a pre-measured BrewTache, something that seemed innovative – the picture alluded to how their system worked a winged tea bag that does away with all the traditional tea steeping fuss. Opening the tin, smelling the subtle aroma and removing a silken bag communicates that you are in for an exceptional experience. You carefully tear off the top of the bag revealing the loose tea leaves. A gentle pull on either side of the bag offers two little wings that hug the sides of your chosen mug steeping the leaf blend in water. The color after three minutes was a wonderfully spring green and the first sip was gentle and honey toned. Cleanup is simple and controlled with a lift up and soft squeeze the left over water is removed from the bag and discarded. The experience is so nice that when it ends you wishing it was just a Tetley tea bag – cheap and wasteful – so brewing another could go unconscious.