Adaptive Path Blog

Jeff Veen has posted about the nifty race tracker that Adobe has developed for the Tour of California bicycle race. Its worth a look. Its also worth noting that Quokka Sports tried this kind of stuff back at the height of the boom, and failed spectacularly. We’ll see how it goes this time around.

My family is participating in the Guest at Your Table again this year. It’s a program that collects money for social justice causes. The cardboard box that you put money into sits on your dinner table, and on one side of the box is a panel about people not having access to clean drinking water. As I explained this to my six-year-old daughter, her response was, “Wow, we’re so lucky to have faucets!” For her, the whole system of reservoirs, pipes, plumbing, sewage treatment, etc. was completely summarized by the one visible part of the system: the faucets.

How often this is true, especially with digital products. What users physically experience represents the system to them, and how it works. The interface is the system. You can have the greatest interaction design or information architecture in the world, but wrapped in crappy industrial or visual design with poor affordances, the entire system is perceived to be bad.

If only this worked in reverse! How many nice-looking objects do you own that function terribly?

I had been waiting until I had a larger collection of images and movies, but since Core 77 outed it yesterday, no sense in waiting.

Inspired first by Bill DeRouchey’s History of the Button, then by Andy Clarke’s talk at Web Directions South, in which he implored designers to look to the real world for inspiration, I have a new side project: No Ideas But In Things.

NIBIT is a collection of buttons, dials, control panels, animations, latches, etc. that could be used as a source of inspiration for interaction and interface design. It’s not overly robust now, but hopefully soon it will be.

I attended the Future of Web Apps today, and among the speakers was Kevin Rose from Digg.com. Kevin said nothing particularly revelatory, but it was interesting to hear what he felt was important for Digg’s development.

It got me thinking about a key to Digg’s success — how the fundamental behavior on the site of “digging” a story, is done with a single click.

All you need to click is “digg it,” and your action has ramifications in the system. It’s as close to “frictionless” as a UI can be. Hot Or Not taught us this lesson a few years ago.

When you click the radio button next to a number, Hot or Not reloads the page with a new photo for you to rate. Every click thus gives us two results — a rating for what you just saw, and a new image to look at. It’s about as Pavlovian an experience as I can imagine. Users are like rats hitting the bar for more food.

Of course, Amazon famously figured this out…

“1-Click” is so powerful they patented it! And actually does a lot to encourage sales — with the click of your mouse, a book will be delivered to your home.

Reducing the user behavior to a single click is very powerful. It becomes an interesting exercise for any product designer — can I sum up what’s important in a single click of a button? George Eastman hit upon this over 100-years ago:

“You press the button, we do the rest.” And with that, consumer photography was born.

There’s a range of vocabulary that can be used to refer to user experience: ‘usability’, ‘interface’, ‘human centered design’, etc. What term we use seems to depend on what sells — within an organization, you use the terms that connect with the values and the understanding of the people you’re working with.

Adaptive Path recently conducted a survey of over 800 user experience professionals to create a base of quantitative insight into how organizations value and practice user experience. One of the simpler questions was, “If you use other terms [than 'user experience'] that are similar in meaning or intent, which terms do you use?” Here’s the terms we heard, ordered by the number of times mentioned:

93 Usability
63 Consumer experience
28 User centered design
21 Customer experience
20 User interface
14 Interaction design
13 Information architecture
11 Design
10 Brand experience
10 User interaction
8 Experience design
6 User satisfaction
5 Customer satisfaction
5 Ease of use
5 Experience
4 Customer journey
4 User interface design
3 Human factors
3 Interface design
3 Look and feel
3 User research
3 Visitor experience
2 Brand user experience
2 Client experience
2 Customer service
2 Experience strategy
2 Goal-directed design
2 Interface
2 Intuitiveness
2 Joy of use
2 Learner experience
2 Online experience
2 Product design
2 User advocate
2 User-friendliness
1 Aesthetic
1 Analytics
1 Audience experience
1 Audience-centred
1 Brand
1 Brand image
1 Brand value
1 Caller experience
1 Comprehension
1 Constituent experience
1 Consumer insights
1 Context
1 Customer centered design
1 Customer centered usability
1 Customer enjoyment
1 Customer focus
1 Customer-based product development
1 Defensive design
1 Delight
1 Donor experience
1 Ease-of-use leading to productivity
1 Educational experience
1 Emotional resonance
1 Emotional-centered design
1 Employee experience
1 End user
1 End-to-end experience
1 End-user centric
1 Enjoyment
1 Ethnographic study
1 Experience architecture
1 Experience planning
1 Experiential perspective
1 Field study
1 Flow
1 Form factor
1 Fun
1 Function
1 Functional design
1 Functionality
1 Good experience
1 Graphic design
1 Guest experience
1 Human centered design
1 Human computer interaction
1 Human experience
1 Human interface
1 Human systems integration
1 Human-machine interface
1 Humility
1 Information environment
1 Information Strategy
1 Interaction
1 Interaction model
1 Interactions
1 Journeys
1 Keeping them happy
1 Learning experience
1 Legibility
1 look-and-feel
1 Magic/Magical
1 Man machine interface
1 Marketing goals
1 Meaningful experiences
1 Member experience
1 Motivations
1 Multi-sensory experiences
1 On-brand
1 Overall customer satisfaction
1 Participant experience
1 Perception
1 Personalization
1 Product development
1 Product feature list
1 Product strategy
1 Product use
1 Programming experience
1 Rapid design
1 Readability
1 Reader
1 Research
1 Shopping experience
1 Site experience
1 Site optimization
1 Software design
1 Solution design
1 Stakeholder experience
1 Stakeholder value
1 Story
1 Total customer experience
1 Touchpoint
1 Usability evaluation
1 User
1 User adoption
1 User behavior
1 User centered
1 User centered design approach
1 User centred design
1 User design
1 User engagement
1 User environment
1 User experience
1 User experience design
1 User experience research
1 User flow
1 User friendly
1 User interaction design
1 User mental model
1 User needs
1 User perception
1 User study
1 User-based usability testing
1 User-focused design
1 User-friendly design
1 Value
1 Visitor
1 Visual experience
1 Visual interaction design
1 Visualization
1 Web experience design
1 Work practices
1 xDesign

Based on some interpretation, about 42% of these responses refer to the end person/human/being in the phrase. About 29% use the term experience, and a little more than 26% refer to the activity they perform (e.g., design, research, development).

Note that these were all “write-in” responses for alternative to ‘user experience’ used within organizations. When asked if respondents used the term ‘user experience’ within their organization, about 89% said yes. We’ll be sharing and reporting on more of the results as we study the data — there’s much more to come.

Dictionary.com’s recent redesign is a great example of how critical it is to consider the effect of advertising on your site’s overall experience. Their clean design and careful attention to information hierarchy is decimated by the slapped on advertisements. Of course you can pay to make the ads go away — or you can just ignore them.

And that’s what people do. Jared Spool, among others, has been talking and writing about the Death March for Advertising and how research shows that web site visitors quickly develop techniques to avoid looking at ads. It’s not enough to make online ads contextually relevant — Google has done a decent job with that and people have still learned to ignore them.

According to articles published by the Newspaper Association of America and Nielson Media Research, advertising dollars are moving from print to online at an increasing pace. The effect of this is raising the bar on the quality of the online ad experience — we all expect more. Adaptive Path advertises on The Deck, a network that targets design and creative professionals. The Deck serves ads only for products and services recommended by members in their network. This strategy effectively connects site visitors with businesses they are far more likely to find valuable.

Beyond improved contextual relevance and recommendations from trusted sources, the value of a site’s ad inventory can be increased by considering the role of advertising during the design process. Michael Beirut posted recently about Helmut Krone, “one of the greatest designers ever to live [and] an advertising art director” and noted the gap today between design and advertising. This gap is in fact a gigantic opportunity for companies willing to consider innovating with the role advertising plays in the overall experience of their site.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the ways that web products’ interface / interaction  evidence the business strategy and approach. While wafting in metaphorville, this one emerged: you can look at web products like you do gemstones. To take it further, which bling is your bling?

the diamond: transformation
Distill the business (and the interactions) down to something totally clear, where each facet creates more luster and sparkle, where it’s harder than steel and incredibly valuable. Start with a bunch of coal, and apply pressure intensely until it’s completely different, where it’s not coal any longer…it’s been transformed into something brand new.

Coal comes from situations that erode good user-centered design: too many moving parts, complex data structures, lots of business rules or expectations, too many options, unclear filters, results, form-fields, whatever. Pressure comes from intense competition, need for organizational change, markets that are poised to combine or consolidate, and other internal / external factors.

What Google did for search is a visible diamond. Search was a major (and growing) market with too many options, lots of complexity, lots of market pressure, lots of stuff out there. Google collapsed it all down to one entry field and a whole lotta under-the-covers algorithmic smartness. Now that’s sparkly.

the pearl: evolution
Pearls start with a grain of sand. In real life, the oyster is really just trying to find a way to survive with a stupid piece of sand in its body; but in business life, the sand can be seen as a problem or an opportunity that rallies a team to make something else. Whether it’s an opportunity (here’s a nugget of an idea that could be BIG) or a business snafu (we get 8,000 complaints about this a year) the goal is to apply strategy and design to change the grain of sand into a positive thing.

Pearls are great when the strategy needs to evolve over a measured period of time. The good part is that the bigger they get, the more valuable they are. The more oysters you got working to make the pearl, the more you win.

Wikipedia is a pearl: start with something small (an empty page, a one-sentence entry, an erroneous claim) and let the community nacreate it over time into something that iterates and evolves into something unique and valuable. Tah-dah, pearls of wisdom.

the crystal: organic growth
It grows organically, wildly, sporadically and spontaneously. But through it all, it keeps a crazy kind of symmetry and holism, since the prongs extending in all spatial directions are built from the same pattern as the core. Crystals are great for unknown challenges, communities that give their members more than lip-service power, and cultures that promote organic, opportunistic change. Crystals are products that start small and grow exponentially and unexpectedly.

Flickr is a great crystal. The stuff that makes it all up is pretty much the same: it’s a bunch of photos. But the crazy fractal-like outgrowths jut out in all directions, are constantly in development and build organically on the whole. And baked into the entire approach is the concept of giving power to the users so that the community itself takes charge of creating new spurs and directions. The strategy is crystal clear.

These are just three examples in the jewel box of the web. So now when I think about cornerstones of design, I’m going to consider gemstones, too.

A video making its way around the blogosphere is this demonstration of a new desktop interface paradigm, using a metaphor of piles. This is a subject of some interest here at Adaptive Path — Dan’s master’s thesis in interaction design was on a project called File Piles. (A classic text in the world of human-computer interaction is the 1992 essay “A ‘Pile’ Metaphor for supporting casual organization of information,” which, unfortunately, you must pay for to read [though I'm sure the authors won't see a penny of that!].)

After some discussion on an internal mailing list about the new demonstration video, I chimed in with my curmudgeonly two cents, offered here in somewhat edited form:

Watching that video was like watching a literature review of interface elements from the last 15 years.

Radial menus!

Pile metaphors!

Gestures and lassos and bears oh my!

While it’s pretty, and makes for good demo, it’s also distressingly *academic*, by which I mean, impractical and pretty much not at all useful. It assumes that we work in a world of a small enough number of digital documents to manage on a screen.

I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t.

The only new-fangled interface model I’ve seen in the last, I dunno, 5 years, that had any promise for the information blitzkrieg reality which we’re in is the Zooming User Interface

But, really, users do seem to satisfice with WIMP, and knocking it off its pedestal will prove remarkably difficult.

That last sentence of mine is based on having followed post-WIMP interfaces for 8 years, and seeing nothing emerge as a clear desirable alternative.