Posts Tagged: User Experience

Business / Design / Technology — No Comments
19
May 11

Treading water in the shallow end of social

It has been a few years since I was actively thinking about social software and the distance likely adds validity to some more recent observations. One of the simplest ways to integrate end-user facing technology is to aggregate information. The rise of the portal for good or bad encourages this concept of adding tiles on a grid enabling you to overwhelm yourself with information – intelligently or not. Visual aggregation as a method of integration is really an unacceptable place for social software to plateau. The most successful experiences create a context for multiple streams to come together. However, more could be done to integrate complimenting information and capability so that a new expression is created instead of a schizophrenic newspaper no one really wants to read or interact with.

Consider what you have seen in the social software landscape and ask yourself why the actor is almost always the sense maker. Why is it that there is an explosion of great social islands but a pathetic showing on how to leverage that information to create richer, contextual spaces? Most of the time solution designers attempt to create context employing a nicely designed banner and carefully selected color pallet. Unfortunately, the skin is only but a small element of context and while I believe that people are ultimately required to appreciate the meaning of a given confluence, we could do a better job surfacing interesting information and enabling interaction. One of the fatal flaws with traditional portals is the visual and physical boundary of information. There was a time when products enabled connecting one portlet to another, but failed to resolve that portlets do not inherently know how to collaborate with each other, a design activity outside of the technology. Unfortunately, some of our best examples of dynamic experience modification are also some of the most annoying commercial applications. You have to love the real-time markup of content where hovering over a word opens a thought bubble and video obscuring the content. Given a strong page framework and similar techniques integration could be this fluid and easily less irritating – a very simple example, abused, justly hated and hopefully soon to be abandoned.

Opportunities to do more have been around for years, and yet it feels as if the social technology landscape has just stalled. The best work is not even web bound, but device focused now. There is so much to do; I would think it would inspire people to push a little harder to realize the next revolution of user experience instead of hanging out in the kiddy pool all day.

Business / Technology — No Comments
10
Nov 08

Prototyping can lead to remarkable outcomes

Prototyping is something software builders leave to user experience professionals and that is completely insane. Prototyping should inhabit everyone’s being. It is an opportunity at any step of any process or creation. There are too many first drafts called final drafts, especially in software.

Regardless of your software development methodology, agile or waterfall, there is always a notation that says, “Take time to prototype.” Practitioners speed by this phase as if it were distracting from the final form. Project leaders receive pressures to deliver more, in less time and at or under budget. Where in that formula is prototyping placed at the top?

Some companies handle this by creating smaller development teams, housed in research and development or branded agile extensions of the larger delivery organization. This is where people think the prototypes come from. Does location, context or reporting structure have any bearing on how real software is?

pro⋅to⋅type [proh-tuh-tahyp]
noun, verb -typed, -typ⋅ing. –noun

  1. the original or model on which something is based or formed.
  2. someone or something that serves to illustrate the typical qualities of a class; model; exemplar: She is the prototype of a student activist.

1595–1605; < NL prōtotypon < Gk prōtótypon, n. use of neut. of prōtótypos original.

When I joined a skunk works team at IBM directly from college, everyone said they created prototypes. These prototypes were designed and delivered to scale to the entire enterprise. People called them prototypes to set expectations and help the traditional brass understand why a one-year project might be delivered in three months. Rarely was there anything approximating a prototype – well maybe the very first version.

There have been notable individuals that would have the courage to rewrite what they had coded to achieve greater aesthetic or optimal execution. It is a humbling, empowering and inspiring experience to throw out your current work in attempt to write it again better than before. This is the closest I have seen to developers creating prototypes and this is a rare occasion because we so easily rationalize how there is so little time, so little money and so much more to do.

First drafts make lame software, hence we iterate in hopes to accelerate the separation of curds and whey. In the end, this is not prototyping. Prototypes offer the opportunity to understand what is uniquely delivered by the solution, what is important to end-users and how the way the solution is built helps or hurts those two points. This is why the process often ends up being a user experience deliverable. The challenge and thus opportunity, is that maybe what is deemed important is unfounded. Maybe the feedback users provide is based on a poor articulation or misguided offering.

Prototyping in software development educates the architects, the developers and, in turn, the user experience professionals. By building relatively low investment prototypes through rapid development tooling, the notion of throwing the resulting build away seems palatable. It offers the opportunity to learn without entering the software delivery cycle – skipping the prototype is the quickest way not to have freedom to try things. Once there is focus on solution delivery, everyone creates a context that prevents the exploration of what is right. Everyone is left to struggle with making what gets delivers as good as it can be, given the circumstances.

This is all likely generalizable to many professions. Creative types work through revisions as part of their craft. Prototypes educate you, your team and others to the importance of the end direction. It forces everyone to approach the real work with purpose and limits the exposure to making poor decisions under pressure or pretense. Spending the time up front pays everyone back during and after delivery and yet it is not prioritized as such. Instead, we hope that professionals executing a good enough approach will deliver something remarkable.

Culture / Relationships / Technology — No Comments
5
Apr 08

Getting the brain to swell

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.People I may know

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.

MIT Snap N' Share Screen shot

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?

Design / Relationships / Technology — 1 Comment
10
Feb 08

Messin’ with the iPhone

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.

Relationships — No Comments
6
Oct 07

Invitation is in the action

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.

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