Adaptive Path Blog

When the NBA introduced a new synthetic ball from Spalding for the 2006 season, it would appear it failed to ask one very important question: did any of the league’s players actually like it?

Two months into the season, the NY Times reports that complaints and injuries relating to the ball have reached a tipping point. Spalding and the NBA’s failure to do any upfront testing of the product design has left commissioner David Stern with some egg on his face, and the Players’ Union still isn’t backing down from their grievance with the new ball. Apparently, the new synthetic surface, designed to increase players’ grip and control, has a tendency to lacerate fingers and handle inconsistently.

One N.B.A. assistant coach, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to comment, tore a ligament in a finger when, in retrieving a ball that had bounced onto the sideline, his finger stuck at an odd angle on the surface of the ball.

The real shame? All of this could have been sorted out before the season; Spalding admits that the only current players who actually used the ball prior to its introduction were last year’s All-Stars. With the ball being sent back to Spalding for further analysis, and the return of the original leather ball being considered, all of this looks like a costly and embarrassing episode for both the NBA and Spalding. Other companies seeking to introduce new products should look at their design process and ask if they’re doing enough to avoid an unforced error like this.

Talking to actual users of a product isn’t a luxury, it’s a business necessity. Jerry Stackhouse noted that changes to the game are inevitable and players will adapt as necessary, but “when it comes to the actual game itself and when it comes to in between the lines, we should definitely have some input.” That’s it precisely. Designing for use requires you to talk to users - the design of the product can only benefit.

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This weekend’s New York Times Magazine features an excellent and lengthy piece on the intelligence community’s efforts to update its analysis capabilities by leveraging blogs, wikis and the like. The author, Clive Thompson, has previously written on Google’s dealings with China.

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I recently let my membership to the ACM run out. This marks the end of a 10-year relationship that has been on the rocks for at least the past 5. I gave up on the CHI conference about 4 years ago and was mostly holding on for Interactions, the journal from SigCHI. But it has been a very long time since I was excited or eager for a new issue. Sure, Don Norman or Aaron Marcus usually have something interesting to say and everybody loves Ok/Cancel. But two short columns and a comic are not enough to carry a journal. The content has been getting less and less relevant to the ideas and problems of HCI practitioners, at least for me and folks I know.

Take the most recent issue for an example: Weights and Measures: Quantifying Usability. Does “usability” as it is commonly practiced really need to become more quantitative? Is anyone picking up a copy of Interactions, “the premier publication in HCI,” to learn basic statistics or hear yet another person attempt to answer the “how many participants is enough?” question. (The answer as always is “it depends.”) I don’t want to deride any of the authors in this issue. They are all clearly knowledgeable and do a good job of covering their subjects. But why were they brought together in the first place? Why was this topic chosen over more challenging or timely topics like qualitative research, embracing social science, or service design? Who is this publication written for?

Human-computer interaction as a field has expanded enormously in the last 2 decades and especially in the last 5-7 years. The core of the discipline has moved outside of computer science to include designers, social scientists, and others. Yet this publication still seems to be written primarily by and for computer scientists. Unlike many HCI practitioners and researchers these days, I actually have a computer science degree but that training has become less and less relevant as I’ve had to engage more and more of the human side of HCI. I have grown and changed a lot over the last 10 years and it seems that the ACM and I have grown apart. I’ve tried to make it work but a guy can only hold on for so long. Breaking up is hard to do but, baby, it’s not me, it’s you.

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…I said at the Shift conference.

Photo by Euan

Download the slides (1.2 MB PDF)

Read Luke W’s write up.

Read Ivo Gomes’ write up of Day 1 (in Portuguese).

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I’m certain that Gap’s new advertising featuring Audrey Hepburn will play extremely well with Gap’s elderly, homosexual male customer base. Except of course when the music switches to AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” which is clearly targeted to Gap’s other big audience: middle-aged, heavy-metal fans who still occasionally like to “rock out, man.”

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Doug Engelbart is a visionary genius. Let’s just get that out of the way. In the 1960s, the guy invented the mouse, hypertext, and parts of what we now know of as the GUI. He was way ahead of his time…until time caught up and surpassed some of his original visions, one of which has now been resurrected: the hyperscope.

Hyperscope is basically a type of document browser. (Longer explanation in an article on Read/Write Web.) Hyperscope, like a lot of Engelbart projects, was focused on an amazing future: imagine linking documents! Jumping to specific paragraphs!

The problem is that Hyperscope is for a world that doesn’t need it any more. Had it been widely available in, say, 1982, perhaps we’d all be using it right now. But I don’t think so. The learning curve (it’s “expert-oriented”) is too high and its features have been distributed elsewhere, to the web and other software.

While it’s great to draw inspiration and ideas from the past, recreating the past in the hope that it becomes the future seems like a futile idea. Does anyone really want to return to a command-line interface to manipulate documents? It’s designing for a past that never happened, one where we all became computer scientists and enjoyed manipulating documents via arcane commands.

Design solutions like Hyperscope only work if they fit their time and place. Recreating the idea as conceived decades ago would be like making a really cool VCR right now–it’s great that you can do it, but don’t expect many people to use it. The solution doesn’t fit the time period it’s in. Which, given that it’s Engelbart, is ironic. It’s the same problem he’s always had, except in reverse. He’s usually out there in front of us all, not 25 years behind.

A better, more productive, use of time would have been to say, what inspiration can still be gained from Engelbart’s ideas? There’s still a lot to be gleaned from his 1962 (!) paper Augmenting Human Intellect. How might some of his thoughts on collaborative intelligence be implemented in our world now, in 2006, within the technology we have now? That’s the question waiting to be solved.

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The Firefox browser (for Mac) has been messing with my (and I assume other users’ as well) muscle memory lately. The first version of Firefox 2 Beta (2.0B1) made a small but disruptive change from the earlier version of Firefox: the close button on the browsing tabs was moved from the right side to the left side of the tab. This undid all the training about tabs that the previous year of the browser had taught me. Which would have been fine had the shift been more natural or made clsoing the tabs easier or some other gain. But it didn’t, and, even though over the last few weeks I’d sort of gotten used to it, now in the new beta (2.0B2), the tab close button is back again on the right. Argh.

Complicating this, the drop-down changer on the search box (to switch between Google/Yahoo/Technorati/etc) didn’t move this time — it’s still on the left. Huh?

Cooper’s Rule applies here: if it doesn’t provide a noticeably-better change, don’t change it from what’s expected. Keep the close buttons (and the search changer) on the right.

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Not to pick on my people, but Germans can be a little process-oriented from time to time. This comes from Kettner, a supplier of hunting equipment:

“Dear Kettner Customer,

We are restructuring our logistics operations so that we may serve you even more quickly in the future. As a result of this thorough process, this page is under construction.”

I can appreciate Kettner wanting to supply my (non-existent) hunting needs with greater speed. Their corporate motto is “Competence in hunting.” Sadly, they don’t seem to be too competent with the customer experience.

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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.

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“Even though the bag will not inflate, oxygen will be flowing to the mask.”

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