Adaptive Path Blog

The New York Times on Experience Design Usability:

Sometimes there is a huge disconnect between the people who make a product and the people who use it. The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion. Software designers may not anticipate user behavior that can unintentionally destroy an entire database. Manufacturers can make equipment that inadvertently increases the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries.

Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology.

This isn’t an article from 1997. It’s from July 8, 2007. Another groaner from the article, which I am hoping is just a typo:

Harvinder Singh, president of Bestica, which is based in San Antonio, says that there is a shortage of people to fill usability jobs.

“We’re working with companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and having a lot of trouble finding user-experienced people,” he said.

Sigh. Has the design profession really made such little progress?

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Brandon tells this story:

“When Domino’s Pizza did research to find out why customers ordered pizza, they expected to find data points like ‘to spend more time with my family’ or ‘convenience.’ Instead they found ‘because I’m hungry.’ “

Sometimes you just want a slice of pizza.

The other night, NPR had a piece on the iPhone, features and simplicity. The jist? People think music players, fancy touchscreens, and syncable address books on phones are cool and all but wouldn’t it be nice if, when you need to call someone, no matter where you are, you just can?

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This morning, Yahoo!’s homepage featured a story on the most hated Internet words. It got me thinking about the terms that we hear abused all the time. “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet. Any additions to the short list?

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Even while my 21-year-old brother was stationed in Italy with the US Air Force, he could always make me laugh, whether via AIM, Xanga or MySpace. For the past two years, the online Zach is the Zach I’ve gotten to know best, as I’ve been accompanied by ShadowsandDust7’s presence in my buddy list and followed stories of his adventures snowboarding, rock climbing and hiking in the Italian Alps on his blogs.

Thus, when I received the awful news a month ago that my brother had died in a hiking accident, one of the first places that I turned to was his MySpace. His last login was 4/20/2007 — and that salient date-stamp will always remain the same. When I opened his site in a state of initial denial (”Zach can’t be gone — he just left a comment yesterday!”), I found that dozens of friends had already left messages, not about Zach but TO him:

“Zach dude, we missed you today man. I had a sweet assist to Ruben. I was really looking forward to seeing you up in California in a couple of months. I guess i’ll have to delay seeing you for a little longer.”

As grief and the celebration of Zach’s life unfolded and as friends continued to “keep in touch” with Zach via MySpace and the memorial blog we set up, I encountered facets of social media that I’d never thought much about before:

MySpace was how many of Zach’s long-distance friends knew him best while he was in Italy, and online, it’s almost as if nothing had happened: His page looks the same as ever. Though Zach is physically gone, his MySpace presence feels alive. And so people go there to “be with” Zach. Instead of talking to a tombstone in the land of the dead, it’s like you’re chatting with a friend amidst a community of the living.

A person’s physical mark can erode or change relatively quickly. But according to recently-announced policies, “MySpace won’t delete a profile for inactivity, and it also won’t let anyone else control a deceased member’s profile” [1] and Facebook “will put the page in a memorialized state indefinitely” [2] when notified of a person’s death (unless a family member requests that the profile be removed). Zach’s bedroom may not always be his room, but his online spaces will endure.

As people are becoming increasingly aware of the role that online communities play in the grieving process (NY Times: Rituals of Grief Go Online), which has been most recently brought to light by Virginia Tech (USA Today: Slain Students’ Pages to Stay On Facebook) and Iraq (AP: Fallen Soldiers’ MySpace Profiles Live On), it makes me wonder how this role will continue to evolve.

Will we see the emergence of more explicit policies regarding members who die? (I had a hard time finding any policies — including for email addresses — about what happens when the user dies.) Is there a place for online “cemeteries” — sites to help friends and family, perhaps far in the future, easily find and revisit their loved one’s online presence (MyDeathSpace seems like a slightly morbid attempt to create such a thing)? How enduring will online memorials prove to be in the long run? (After all, the web is only in its twenties.)

For now, in these first weeks after Zach’s death, it’s been comforting to still “have Zach around.” Instead of an awkward new ritual of leaving flowers at his graveside, I can leave messages for him the way I always have. There will always be things that only Zach would understand, and it’s nice to know that there’s still a place I can share them.

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I attended O’Reilly’s RailsConf last week in Portland Oregon. What a difference a year makes. There were 550 attendees at last year’s sold out conference. This year’s conference, moved to a larger venue, also sold out early with a final head count of 1600 participants. It’s a testament to the continued growth of Rails as a platform and makes it clear that Rails isn’t going to disappear. Now that at week has slipped by, looking back at the conference I’m left with several distinct thoughts.

I presented a session on Design for Developers that was standing room only, clearly indicating a trend that I’ve been pointing to for the last couple of years. Rails, other similar frameworks, Ajax and the increasing adoption of Agile inspired development practices have pushed developers to work more and more closely with designers. With Rails in particular, developers often find themselves challenged directly with design questions. This has left a real thirst in the developer community in general and the Rails community in particular for guidance and information around issues of design. There’s a real opportunity for practitioners on both sides of the developer/designer divide to help each other work more effectively and share information.

Judging by the keynotes, there seemed to be a lot of concern about whether Rails is ready for the Enterprise or not. This echoed conversations at last years RubyConf as well. Maybe I’m not reading the right blogs but curiously, this question doesn’t seem to take up as much space in the general community dialog. I don’t know if it’s even the right question. An impromptu, raised hands survey during one of the keynotes revealed approximately a third of the attendees came from a Java background. As Java developers in enterprise become increasingly interested in and enamored by Rails, it will leak into the enterprise environment whether management wants it there or not. Initially small projects will get done in Rails where there is a management blind eye. With a foothold established, it will be easier to employ Rails as an approach to larger and larger projects. JRuby and the associated ability to deploy rails apps to existing Java application servers is only going to exacerbate this trend .

And finally…Twitter Twitter Twitter. It’s clear that Twitter is going to be the poster child of Rails scaling issues both good and bad. Scaling has always been a perceived achilles heel for Rails applications and Twitter’s tremendous growth has resulted in some visible hiccups. Progress has been clear though and it’s likely that were will be solutions for most of the Rails specific performance issues in the near future.

All in all, it was a great conference and a pleasure to participate. I can’t wait until next year’s.

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I realized something recently, spurred by a mailing list discussion of David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, which is about how the digitization of information is breaking down our old orders.

Here’s a paraphrase of what I wrote to the mailing list (edited so you don’t need the context):

We have to recognize that the practice of experience design is miscellaneous.

Unfortunately, standard thought around design work is rooted in a typical, and, I would argue, retrograde, notion of what a practice and/or discipline is. Most organizations are stuck in classic mid-19th to 20th century thinking, borne of a manufacturing economy, where optimization arose when people were as interchangeable as the parts of the machines they built.

21st century work is going to have to be much more synthetic, mixed-up, and uncertain, largely because of the forces that Weinberger points to in his book.

I think it’s a key reason why experience designers have had such a hard time defining their work. It escapes definition.

And you know what, that’s a good sign.

As Bruce Sterling said on his blog (in response to an conversation I had with (gasp!) GK VanPatter): “this is the enterprise of the future: if you can explain what you are doing with any conventional terminology, you’ve already been outsourced to India.”

(I find this also follows on Todd’s earlier post on job titles.)

(Oh, and Andrew Hinton’s talk at the IA Summit, which, happily, he’ll be sharing [in some form] at our UX Week in August.)

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Carson Systems was kind enough to invite me to speak at their Future of Web Design conference in London last week. I took the opportunity to do some thinking about what trends I think are starting to emerge, and what role experience designers (and UCD principles) will play in what’s about to happen.

During my work on Plazes, what I realized was that a lot of new products out there are finding it necessary to change directions from the goals they had at launch. These are teams like Riya (now Like) and Topix, who are eschewing traditional iterative development in favor of extreme redefinition of their offering and its value to the audience.

The audience for FOWD was very diverse, but the presentation that emerged from my thoughts on product redefinition wound up being pretty warmly received. I framed my thoughts with some parallels to evolutionary biology, and tried to give some helpful tactics for how experience designers might go about preparing their team and their product for the “punctuation” that redefinition can cause.

You can download the slides from the talk, “User-Centered Design Principles for Evolving Products” here. Huge thanks to the Carson folks for the opportunity and the hospitality, and thanks to everyone in the audience for the kind reception.

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In his post yesterday, my colleague Dan pointed out some of Twitter’s flaws, including the potential of twitters to verge on banality, as well as cause attenuation conflicts. While I’ve been a fan of the service since launch, I’m not blind to those flaws. More than anything, I’m excited to see the evolution of the product — I’m waiting for all of these little bits of ambient data that Twitter shoots back and forth to resolve into something more meaningful.

Increasing the contextual value of Twitter messages should happen without impacting my normal use of Twitter; any changes should ideally dissolve into current behavior. I’ve been saying for a while that presence and status go together like chocolate and peanut butter — they combine to define part of your online identity. So why not simplify matters and get the systems I use to communicate them to work together?

I was thinking about this during SXSW, when I experimented with sending SMS to both Twitter and Plazes at the same time. I knew that if I sent “at casino el camino” to both systems, I could simultaneously let my friends know my status and log my location for my presence history on Plazes. Even better, the friends that I have on Plazes could query “Casino El Camino?” to Plazes SMS to see who else was there (without having to spam everyone on Twitter).

What I’d like to see is Twitter integrate some of how Plazes parses SMS, since it is already using a structured grammar to get valuable bits of context from the messages I send it. In full disclosure, defining the Plazes SMS user experience is the first portion of the work I’ve done with Plazes to launch. The team and I worked hard to make it both easy to use and extensible — it employs a grammar of “at”, “in” and “on” phrases to allow natural expressions of location. I believe that an integration effort between the two products would allow the Plazes’ parsing mechanism to listen in on my twitters, so that when I send “having a martini at Pony Bar” to Twitter, it could be parsed to pull out the location data. Even better, it could do so without requiring any change in how I normally write.

Of course, not every message would include an “at,” in” or “on” but the ones that did might contain a place that Plazes knows about, that it could log to its system and associate with my account. And there’s the value add for this integration — my normal behavior of broadcasting status now generates a presence stream that can be archived, queried, and used to help me coordinate my activities and interactions with my friends. For those who don’t want the service, simple options for turning location-parsing on or off should be implemented. To encourage people to use both services (and bring their communities closer together), I’d love to see both Twitter and Plazes adopt OpenID for sign in.

As we move away from overly-centralized collaboration and coordination tools, I’m encouraged to see lightweight platforms like Twitter and Plazes emerge and become popular. I believe the two provide naturally complimentary offerings, and any form of cooperation between them could benefit a whole host of users.

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It’s that time of year when Adaptive Path wades through stacks of design school students’ resumes, looking for summer interns and potential hires. As I was doing this, a trend that that I had suspected became clear to me: quite a few design schools no longer teach design. Instead, they teach “design thinking” and expect that that will be enough.

Frankly, it isn’t.

I was taught that design has three components: thinking, making, and doing. (Doing is the synthesis, presentation, and evaluation of a design; the bridge between thinking and making.) If all design schools are teaching is the thinking, well, they are missing the other two thirds of the equation. They have abandoned craft for craze. Thinking without the making and doing is almost useless in the job market, unless you want to work at Accenture or some other big consulting firm. It probably won’t help you get a job as a designer in a studio environment. You’d be better off getting a degree in Humanities; at least you would be well-rounded.

D schools are doing a serious disservice to their students by only teaching them “design thinking” when a class in typography or mechanics or drawing might not only give them a valuable skill, but also teach them thinking and making and doing — all at the same time. For design to be truly useful as a profession and as a discipline, designers can’t just use “design thinking” to come up with strategies and concepts. Dare I suggest that those are much easier than building a product? Some notes on a whiteboard and a pretty concept movie or storyboard pales in comparison to the messy world of prototyping, development, and manufacturing. It’s harder to execute an idea than to have one, genius being 99% perspiration and all.

What gets lost without the making is the detail work that makes us designers in the first place, the small parts where we earn our paychecks. Details are also where we earn the respect of the developers, businesspeople, and manufacturers who make what we prototype real(er). Details often get overlooked in just “thinking” projects, as do constraints. Constraints are somehow less solid in the world of thought than they are in the world of making.

What we’re going to end up with is a generation of “innovators” who are MBAs in MFAs’ clothing, who can neither create or run businesses like entrepreneurs can, nor design products and services like designers can. It’s the worst of both worlds. What we as employers are searching for are people who can do as well as think. This isn’t to say that we’re looking for glossy stylists either: we want designers who create thoughtful, meaningful designs: designs that pay attention to details, and have emotion and craft in them, as well as reason and cleverness. The world desperately needs those designers. Start making them again.

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Adaptive Path works with a variety of media clients. So this interesting list caught my interest…it’s the Magazine Publishers of America consolidated list of digital initiatives.

Culled from news items and press releases, the list works in interesting ways:

• Want to see what initiatives a magazine or media group is investing in? Start at the top.
• Want to see what initiatives are (or should be) live and how they turned out? Start at the bottom.

If you work in interactive media, this is a list to keep an eye on.

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