Spirited Thought

Clippinger turns to Robin Dunbar and colleagues to show that there is a correlation of neocortex development (thinking and problem solving) and membership size in social groups.

…the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens can in large measure be attributed to its ability to manage complex social relationships.

Page 57 from A Crowd of One

Clippinger pulls a great passage from Dunbar that describes the notion that what challenges an individual animal is tracking the societal groups in which it partakes. Dunbar then offers another view that maybe it is not the quantity, but the quality of the relationships. The following page explores the famous statistic that people successfully organize informally at groups of 150-200.

This book continues to have botox on the brain moments with the occasional brilliant series of pages. It is as if Clippinger started with a fantastic 80-page paper that inflated to fill a book. Regardless, the gems make you want to commit concept to memory.

One behavior that continues is the incessant friending activity on social sites, regardless of the site’s purpose. Sites even suggest other people you might know and connect. As interconnections grow, the network inherently diminishes in quality. The notion of identifying a connection with another person, community or organization is a simple enough activity. Maybe adding the need to classify those connections beyond a binary state was an inhibitor to adoption. Was this something FaceBook noticed, or was it simply that the creators never had higher intentions?

Moving beyond high-level classification, the next useful articulation is quality – how connected are we? There is plenty of work and math that can analyze these issues, however it all presumes having access to the data. Moreover, are my behaviors in online social spaces reflective of connected I am to my network? The data analysis is inherently reliant on the accuracy and relevance of the data. Might I love someone dearly that I hardly interact with online? Again, this level of analysis introduces yet another step to organizing our view of the societal graph and might be prohibitive to adoption.

On a related but separate note, some interesting user experience work is being done in the MIT Media Lab around visualizing and managing the adhoc face-to-face social network. Check out the project called Snap N’ Share by Nadav Aharony, Andrew Lippman and David Reed.

This brings us back to the point that humans are able to execute each of these tasks – identification, classification and qualification – without trouble. Short of disease, it is safe to assume that forgotten people accurately reflects their status on our societal radar. The hope of the articulated social graph being leveraged by technology is that maybe we will finally see what we are missing.

What is beautiful about the notion that humans have been so successful because of our ability to manage relationships is that it is startlingly not about being an individual. At an individual level, it is the quality of the relationships we create, but it is the group that benefits. What would we even do with an optimized view of society and is that discussion really absent from society?

The success of social spaces rests in their ability to create and support meaningful relationships. The proliferation of week ties in the social graph is noise in what could be a high fidelity signal. In the end, meaning is embodied in the people and the technology is just an enabler. What might these spaces be like if the only goal was to support meaningful connections?

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.

FaceBook presents interesting fodder around a variety of topics including personal privacy, affiliation and community building. In some cases, those topics create interesting tension with each other. For example, in creating your profile you might add all of your intimate details (i.e. phone numbers, aliases, photographs). You then may join any variety of networks or groups where traditionally you managed your profile in how you socially engaged them. For example, in a work affiliated environment you might disclose something different from a support group or political action network. Furthermore, you might have tended to keep those affiliations to yourself. That photograph of your wild college experience probably is not something you were looking to share with your employer or your priest. Now, there are levels of access controls on elements of your profile, but participating means letting it all (most of it) hang out. To get the benefits you need to surrender your guard and jump in the ball pit.

Once you are invested in the space, your contacts begin interacting with you. Writing on your wall (e.g. like leaving a note on your door), sending hugs and looking to see how compatible you are with them by asking you to take a taste test. All fine and good if you understand what you are doing, where the data are being stored and how they are going to be used. With the constant creation of new FaceBook applications – components enable additional functionality – users are encouraged to add them to their profile. To receive a hug, you need to add an application like SuperPoke, which comes with both the terms and conditions of Facebook and the application developers. While FaceBook spells out their privacy policy and the limitation of personal information sharing (e.g. applications wont get your email address), what is considered personal is constantly evolving, as are terms and conditions. The invitation to join in the fun no longer shows up as an email, but as a hug that requires joining a network in the network to receive it or share it. Therein hides a bit of genius!

Instead of leading the interaction with signing up, enable participation to lead to the sign-up. This is powerful for three reasons:

• First, interactions initiated from people we know, we trust, at least to some extent.
• Second, the interaction is often context rich (e.g. I thought of you when I came across this book.) hiding the sub-context (e.g. signing up) in a genuine message and implicit endorsement.
• Third, joining in enables action and reciprocation, something people tend to do if only in polite acknowledgment.

Tie the goals of a primary task to the motivations of a secondary task, engaging the collective in what is of self-interest, while satisfying the true activity.

Twitter is a centerpiece to techi-discussions where everyone shakes in amazement that such a simple application could become so integral to people’s lives. It is the simplicity, content and medium that supports such phenomenal adoption. More specifically, the interfaces to Twitter are minimal – website, email, feeds, Twitter Tools (extensions to Twitter) and most importantly text messaging. The website supports initial account creation, management, historical archive and message broadcasting, but in truth, like every other website would require a user to show up to participate and benefit. Extending their interface to email offers the few people who have a computer but no mobile phone a way to engage, but it is the text messaging that lets Twitter reach down and touch you in your pocket. There is too much information and yet participating in Twitter only increases it. So, why are we experiencing such compulsion?

Twitter has been described as micro-blogging and it is not a terrible coin. Twitters are character limited training people to marshal life updates into pithy messages. If one made a valuation of a blog post that journals a person’s day-to-day activity, the value in any given twitter is at most proportionally as small. However, considered in the context of the same person’s daily twitters and an individual’s understanding is enhanced. Consider one person’s twitters in their twitter-network cocktail and the twitter-log takes on additional meaning, meaning only understood by the receiver. Throw into the mental mix that one person does not necessarily need to know another in order to follow them – supporting fantastical senses of potentially very distant individuals.

Blog-trolling a last weekend I remember running across Matt Hatem’s reflection on the social sixth sense. He actually ends up meeting a friend that he might not have otherwise through Twitter. Interestingly, Matt’s very real social connection enhances his relationship with Twitter. Regularly, Twitter is a simple way to keep up with his network virtually. He is left to construct what one buddy is up to based on what he knows of them and what the message said. In his example, though, Matt bridged the relationship into the real world, which is far richer and now forever part of how Matt understands Twitter – it connects him with people he knows – virtually and in the flesh.

Matt also points off to Clive Thompson’s Wired article How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense. Clive offers similar anecdotal support that small messages understood cumulatively have meaning, meaning that changes what we understand about the people we know. The fact that these messages show up on a mobile phone – a intimate device – offers urgency of interruption and often a visually simple rolling log of what is what in the network. The mobile phone has become an ambient device that creates more socially aware people, in some cases, actually getting them away from tiny keyboards and meeting up close enough to touch.

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.

Yesterday morning while catching up on some email a Photojojo email from July 20 featured The Simpsonizer. My results were pretty good. Interestingly enough, I find this two dimensional avatar more accessible than my Second Life me, Vienna Lamourfou. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the couple of times venturing as Vienna I ended up immobilized in a teleport.

Given a set of Simpsonized friends, could our FaceBook, Twitter and IM chats have a little more character? What kind of cartoon might that be like? How about our interactions taking the form of a printed comic? How might it change our experiences and memories of what we are doing in virtual spaces?

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.

One of the areas I focus on in my job is the social behaviors we enable and then capture in digital spaces, such as tagging, rating, commenting, sharing (email) etc. I am particularly interested when I see how other companies leverage similar capabilities in their products.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom offers hierarchical classification (might have been in their Album product, I don’t remember), wherein the keyword Animals might contain Dog and Cat. Tagging an image with Dog or Cat implicitly adds Animals. However, if I had another keyword Family and add Dog as a child tag, Lightroom essentially sees two Dog tags and will only see the implicit tags if specified explicitly. If all I type in is Dog, it picks Dog > Animals and I do not benefit from the Dog > Family relationship.

From an end user point of view, this is when a flat list of tags is often more powerful, there are no semantics between tags upon entry, users just type away. This brings me to one of the elements I am curious about, the post processing of tags to understand their semantic relationships so that Dog can be both a part of Family and Animals without the user worrying about declaring either. The notion of implicit tagging is interesting, but it is not implicit if a user needs to take an additional action to experience the benefit.

Thoughtful software engineers and architects struggle between two extremes: traditional software development (i.e. often well documented, planned and executed) and agile development (i.e. often sprint driven, iteration focused). Each offers characteristics that drive the decision to select one approach over the other, however we all fail to communicate what we will not be getting because of our reasoning.

Booch has written about accidental architecture where the end product is a result of decisions that make the solution what it is, not what we might have intended it to be or how we would do it if we began again. This is a plague of almost any developer or architect. Given constraints, we create software and solutions and the result may or may not be viable shortly after delivery. Initial constraints may not be real (e.g., performance is more important than end-to-end user experience), and they are surly to change over time (e.g., mobile devices are irrelevant).

A recent article from UXMatters.com explores how UCD and agile might work better together. Clearly, if a small group of developers are to deliver working code in four weeks time, user centered design – all of user experience – will need to be working overtime prior to the start of development. This is counter to the idea that agile development iterates to deliver better software sooner. Waiting to deliver initial prototypes is similar to having a much larger process governing the flow of end-to-end solution development, do not look now, we are back at traditional software development. Cecil makes a point that it is possible to work better, albeit challenging – it takes a better collaboration between UX and development. I believe this is possible, but it actually takes the right attitude to make it work.

These general challenges have me wondering, “What is it that we are trying to achieve with more nimble methods of development?” One reason is that we want to get a preview of the possibilities without actually committing to a long drawn out process. This is critical in an innovation lab where no one is sure if the current prototype is the next big thing or just a nice experiment. Here in rubs the pain of innovation – “When will it be complete now that it is twitching?” The developers are often pleased at this point, bragging all the excitement that can be delivered from a 30 or 60 day development effort and yet the fun has just begun. They embark on the accidental architecture and the tough collaboration of creating a delightful end-to-end user experience under the pressure of delivering final software in another 30 days, after all it is an innovation team and the whole point is to be fast, right?

Everyone is always attempting to create software the right way the first time and that is where expectations are horribly wrong. We make decisions that trade one characteristic for another (e.g. great end-to-end experience for quicker initial deliver) but forget to revisit that executing the solution correctly, in a world-class manner, requires a moment of thoughtfulness to ensure the end solution, without course correction, will actually deliver value to users and the business. “Iterate often” is a good motto. It keeps everyone focused on delivering incrementally with less overall investment. Great user experience naturally causes rework in an iterative environment. The two processes do not align easily and it takes real work to produce stellar experiences. Patience among an entire team, to do the right thing distinguishes good from great. A place to start is remembering why we approached our work the way we have, to communicate it and ensure that it fits with changes in the environment (e.g. shifts in strategy, management or schedule). All too often, the delivery of an exciting technology drives the desire to deliver more maturity, faster and better without the thought that maybe regrouping actually delivers a bit slower, but with greater impact and longevity.

For my birthday, I received a new book that I had been eyeing, Happiness by Richard Layard. I am about a quarter through it and while I am not so hip to his writing style, I am enchanted by the information presented. You see, Layard is actually an economist that worked with a variety of others – psychologists, philosophers, sociologists etc. Just as you get through the initial premise you begin to think, “yeah, but how about this other aspect, you cannot discount that?!” and then he answers you before the chapter is over. You feel smart until you realize that Layard has done his home work and you, well I, get giddy being the student.

On the way into New York City, on an early train, I started scribbling some thoughts on the back of an old business card. They apply to more than just happiness and obviously resonate with my current outlook.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This came out of a section where Layard presents how over time people have become wealthier while happiness has stayed constant. He presents a series of examples where people show that wealth relative to others is more important than absolute increase in wealth – it is all about where people perceive they are in relation to others. Given the opportunity to have more relative to others, people elect that over an increase in wealth and no upward mobility.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This seems to be all that matters and all that is important in so many circumstances – politics, relationships and commercials to name a few. Everything is impression management and very often, the altruistic among us (that includes me) feel like there should be some kernel of purity worth worshiping beyond the manufactured experience. Relating this to the field of user experience design, all that matters is what users think.

What people experience is not our reality it is theirs. We do not get to decide, which really refocuses the importance of other related elements. Very often technology gets a lot of focus when, for the most part, a user rarely interacts with it – even more so when on the web. What server, middleware or backend is employed, the user has no idea or cares. As technologists, we use technology as a way of expressing ourselves, but fail when all we see is a technical problem. In the end, all that matters is what people think, in which case, as technologists we need to be far more sensitive to how we create delightful experiences. Extend that to any relationship.

Every day, we have the opportunity to create life-long memories, even more so if we pay attention to how people experience us. Who doesn’t want to be that impactful?