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From Donald Norman’s new book, Living With Complexity, some lovely passages about how we crave richness and complexity, but in ways that are manageable, revisitable, rewarding, satisfying and fun. Fits nicely with a recent post about the difference between complexity and complication, simplicity and simplicticism:

It is no great trick to take a simple situation and devise a simple solution.  The real problem is that we truly need to have complexity in our lives.  We seek rich, satisfying live, and richness goes along with complexity.  Our favorite songs, stories, games, and books are rich, satisfying and complex. We need complexity even while we crave simplicity.

… Some complexity is desirable.  When things are too simple, they are also viewed as dull and uneventful.  Psychologists have demonstrated that people prefer a middle level of complexity:  too simple and we are bored, too complex and we are confused.  Moreover, the ideal of level of complexity is a moving target, because the more expert we become at any subject, the more complexity we prefer.

I find it wholly admirable, and completely fun, that Peter Merholz ( @peterme ) chose to be so defiantly douchey about how much he dislikes advertising and marketing and loathes what it’s doing to UX. As @armano points out, it’s a refreshing counterpoint, even antidote, to the high-fiving, back-slappy, we <3 ourselves mode that seems to surround the decreasingly useful links in my twitter stream.

On the other hand, it’s unfortunate that the over-done disdain for an entire industry, and the blanket moral judgment on its practitioners (this guilty soul included), gave everyone such an easy out. Alexander Herzen’s line that “one must open men’s eyes, not tear them out” is a good reminder that some statements can feel great to make and rally the existing troops, while completely failing to engage real conversation where it’s needed. I shared the link amongst my soul-less advertising colleagues, knowing the risk of associating myself with such a hater but hoping that the good points might get across, and the only responses were references to seeking help/medication and variations on “what’s with this guy?” More broadly, I even saw friends dismissing Adaptive Path out of hand.

All of this is unfortunate, cuz these are some very smart people, doing very smart work, saying very smart things, and, Adaptive Pathis one of the few places that has the guts and the luxury of doing design for the user, without all those pesky requirements around selling the damn stuff.

So, for my own sanity, a quick recap of the points Merholz makes that are well worth listening to:

Many advertising and marketing agencies are moving into user experience. This is because the work of these agencies is moving/drifting towards something close to product design, or, as I like to call it, product extension. (Peter, whom I don’t know personally but will call by his first name so as not to sound like I’m trying to take him down, refers to this dynamic as owning more “touchpoints”.) That alone should be a wake-up call to agencies that they should be thinking differently, but there are a lot of people who are still invoking the Bernbach/Ogilvy mode of communication and messaging as drivers to interactive design. I doubt there’s a single UX person who hasn’t struggled with this.

Because advertisers and marketing services people are focused on sales, there’s a tendency to put sales and marketer’s goals ahead of user experience thinking. On this point, I think he is spot on. Those of use who were designing for the web back in 2000 were quickly and punishingly taught that people don’t give a crap about funnels and they won’t be treated like so many cattle run through a chute. With TV and print, we rarely saw people’s reactions to the work, so we couldn’t tell if we were aggravating or entertaining them. With the web, you turn the site on, watch the abandonment rates and you had no outs — and no award could come fast enough to justify your work. We gravitated to the idea of “user-centered design” as a way of thinking about what people want and need rather than what we want them to do.

This wasn’t just out of respect for the user, it was also good business — if you insist on pushing people through your funnel, they’ll tell you and your brand to piss off and go somewhere else. The beauty, and challenge, of the web is that if you’re not doing what the user wants, there’s a good chance someone else out there is and it’s only a search or an ask-for-help tweet away, so you can cattle prod the people you want to engage or actually provide what they want. Reading classic and contemporary marketing textbooks, it would appear the field isn’t even aware of this choice.

Advertising tends to treat customers as sheep. This is another excellent point which I’ve spent a lot of time working through over the years. Ever since Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, I’ve been convinced (and tried to convince others) that people aren’t as stupid as we think, that we need more than the single reason to believe, the one truth, the single idea, the unique (one) proposition to engage people. Peter leads with the funny but alienating line about pushing crap down people’s gullets (and Orwell has a fun one about advertising being the rattling stick inside the swill bucket of capitalism), but the larger point that marketing has fallen behind the complexity and intelligence of today’s internet consumer is still worth listening to.
(If you’re enjoying my own douchey rants, click here for more on oversimplification, and here for more on people actually being people not segments, motivations, sheep, or cattle.)

@armano makes the point, in the funfunfun comments section, that @RGA made Nike+ (I made a lot of apps while I was there as well, and we were pretty user-centered, albeit in service of brands) and actually did a lot of good product design work — addressing a wide range of needs and creating a rich environment for humans to add even more value. So there are exceptions (which Peter would have done well to note). But for those of us in the business of designing and selling things, Peter reminds us of some important questions: are we treating customers like sheep? are we ‘driving them through the ecosystem’ and ‘pushing them through the funnel’? If so, do we really think they’re going to respond well to that? Would we respond to that? If what we do is “salesmanship in print”/TV/web, aren’t we being the worst, most obnoxious kind of salesmen?

I think Peter’s heart is in the right place, and the venom, oddly, came from that place: he’s tired of seeing UX talent burnt out. I think he’s also worried that the user-centered sensibilities of the discipline will get diluted . For that, much respect. I only wished he had joined Adbusters or the Ad Nauseum crew and dialed the anti-advertising back from 11 to 10 — and made it less personal to the people he is concerned about. Then, his valuable, dare I say thoughtful, points, would have come through. As it is now, only the statesmen ( like @armano ) or the douches (like @kipbot ) can try to make use of his points.

One of the most dangerous, and therefore regrettable, books floating around in the various design-related industries is John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity. The book is actually great, but in the category of “Learn it in 120 Pages” and “x Rules to Success” books, this is probably the one that creates the most dangerous reflexes. By fetishizing simplicity, we’ve turned it into a weasel word. The success of nearly everything can be attributed to simplicity. Anyone in a meeting can say “let’s make it more simple” and have it pass as useful, insightful, or designery. The trickiest reflex, though, is achieving simplicity by cutting — cutting words, cutting features, cutting links or buttons, and, eventually reducing the overall quality and enticement of the product or experience.

What’s interesting, though, is that Maeda actually tries to prevent this and other reflexes. In the book, Maeda offers a simplicity acronym: S/H/E standing for Shrink, Hide, and Embody. Three paths to simplicity, but only one of them actually suggests cutting. The others suggest design — balancing, trading off, managing form, function, levels of attention, lines of sight and cognition. They suggest it in a way that pulls you into interesting design ideas like paced layering, and which remind us that people use things more than once and that you win when the things actually get better over time (ie, discovering a new feature, finding your own shortcuts, optimizing and customizing, anticipating how it feels.)

In his TED talk, Maeda takes people in a direction that is much more productive. At 2:30 into the talk he points out that simplicity isn’t really what we crave and proves it nicely with pictures of a sunset. The simplest sunset is a 41% grey one:

It’s nice, but not that exciting, not what you want to sit on the deck and watch for an hour. Instead, this is what we love:

Nothing simple about that one but it’s what we <3. Why? Complex thing are interesting, they have crunch, they engage many parts of the brain emotionally and intellectually, they fascinate as they change over time even if they remain static, like a piece of recorded music. (This is familiar territory for fans of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You which has great demonstrations of how we have, over the years, come to demand more complex material and plotlines and characters in TV.)

So what are we getting at? Is there a way out of the pendulum swing of shrinking and adding and shrinking and adding?

One answer was inspired by a passage I read in Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand where he talk about the process of seeking “complexity out of chaos”. It’s a nice phrase in that it highlights differences between chaos, complication, complicatedness, and complexity. Complication is something no one would ever seek — in fact, it’s a much better word to contrast with simplicity. But saying people crave complexity is a little risky — complexity, as a word, doesn’t connote something virtuous. But richness does. People seek things that are rich — things that go somewhere, are worth revisiting (re-reading, re-listening, re-watching, re-thinking in your head, re-ferencing in conversation, making into a metaphor or analogy), things that yield nuance, depth, and new truths and emotions on longer, sustained watching — like a song that builds to a part you love, or the build-up to a great line in a movie.

So you could look at the goal like this:

People want the richness that comes from exploring complex things, but want to avoid complication. So it’s tempting to do this:

Make simplicity out of richness! But that takes design too far — simplifying richness puts a narrowing word too close to the expansive. I would argue that it’s better to think of simplicity as an interface to richness:

This puts you in a place of thinking about designer-y things like affordance, pace, multiple use, conceptual portability (if you’re writing), clear prose, rich metaphor in simple language, use of symbols.

Create richness out of complexity, provide simplicity as an interface to it. Don’t be simple.

Only possible down-side: reminds people that your emails are being parsed for all sorts of reasons. Still, saved me from having to do a “Doh! Here’s the attachment” note.

Just spent another weekend doing a Boulder Digital Works executive training session. Always great, always a treat learning from attendees and folks at CP+B, Mondo Robot, and Colle + Mcvoy. About four sessions ago, we started adding reading lists, resources, and tips to the end of each of our presentations. That’s always a fun exercise, seeing which things have had the most impact on your thinking over various stretches of time.

One of the underlying themes of the BDW workshops is around ‘getting digital’. It’s a tricky phrase, implying various unprovable states of binary and raising the question of whether digital is even a useful word (much better, to my mind, to use interactive to emphasize behaviors and relationships over technologies and channels). Anyway, below is my list of things for my planning presentation. Interestingly, I had no overlap with any of Edward Boches’s books on his BDW list.

Emergence, Steven Johnson
Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge (CD is key)
101 Things I learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick
Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson
Design of Business, Roger Martin
Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink

These books have a common theme: they’re meta and address how thinking has changed.

Emergence talks about learning to embrace complex and rich results that emerge from simple rule sets, a key piece of game design and IxD thinking.

Designing Interactions is so wide-ranging in its examples that we learn that there are no golden rules or silver bullets and that every problem must be solved (or conjured up before solving) on its own terms.

101 Things I learned from Architecture School introduces the loftiest and most pedestrian aspects of the craft emphasizing that you need them all to be great.

Where Good Ideas Come From highlights the importance of connectedness, constant curiosity, apophenia, and how a culture can kill or foster creativity.

Design of Business is hard-nosed and cognitively rich discussion of design thinking (as opposed to the whispy “we are all designers now” kind of crap that can be read in two hours.

Whole New Mind highlights not only that we have many modes with which to turn on our brains, but many modes with which to engage people around us (turns out there’s more than story! there’s metaphor, and symphony, and meaning, and…).

The second half of the slide — about things you can do to get more digital, got some raised eyebrows:

Get to level 20 in World of Warcraft (ferrealz) — experience the richness of an interactive world, see how great interactive experiences derive not from one big idea, but hundreds of little ones, see how much more goes on than sweat and twitch, watch the wild emergent creativity of other players (my favorites are still the same-sex marriage I stumbled into in Stormwind, and the dwarf who got undressed and told me jokes in return for a gold piece).

Do your info-graphics in Illustrator — overcome the tool tyranny of powerpoint, learn about bezier curves, care about pixels, get some cognitive empathy with visual designers, and do better work

Play with the “Game of Life” or Turtle Art — emergence, pure and simple. Gorgeous, intriguing things like gliders, spinners, shooters and sustainable systems come through.

I actually really think that non-digitals should do all three of these things. Immerse, always immerse!

A terrific article by Roger Martin, “Building Better Decision Makers: The 3D MBA”, crystallizes some of the challenges of advertising/marketing in the digital age. Martin argues that the business school’s original focus on decision-making (and expediency) has caused MBA-thinking to be shallow, narrow, and static. In particular, he highlights the over-dependence on models that MBAs have: people in business will focus on how to choose between models rather than coming up with new ones to meet new circumstances.

I was most intrigued by the graphic that he provided to illustrate the notion of 1D versus 3D MBAs. It’s a cube with three axes: static vs dynamic; shallow vs deep; narrow vs broad.

This applies really well to the advertising/:30 centricity of a lot of brand thinking. For decades, advertising, particularly the :30, has been our most powerful tool for communicating, defining, and shaping consumer perceptions of brand. Due to its very nature, however, this puts brand thinking in the static/narrow/shallow space. Think about it:

Narrow — because we’re buying customer’s attention, we can only pick one thing to talk about, the unique selling proposition, the single most important thing, the one human truth, the one insight. With only :30, we can’t talk about much, so we must be narrow in order to do do it well.

Shallow — again because of limited time, advertisers have to find the most efficient way to have an impact. :30 doesn’t allow you to make an argument, do a meaningful comparison, explain how great an offering you have. Instead, :30 forces you to quickly try and hit a memorable emotional note. A truncated version of the pre-TV “salesmanship in print” formulation, :30 thinking is closer to ringing Pavlov’s bell.

Static — this is partly the production nature of :30 and print, but it goes deeper. Not only are you unable to have a TV spot or advertisement dynamically adjust to a situation, but its focus on big ideas, stories, and belief in the power of repetition make :30s a relatively unchanging communication monolith. Pick your favorite spots and see how much variability you find — even the super-awesome Old Spice guy’s twitter responses came down to variations on a very funny, very entertaining, but very singular theme.

So, cribbing Martin’s visualization of the three dimensions of business problems to explore marketing, you have a brand space that is broad, deep, and dynamic, largely defined by :30 thinking which must be narrow, shallow, and static.

This is a rich vein Martin has identified. Digital technologies, communications, and interactivity make it possible for communications and activities to go as broad and deep as users want to go. If the content is provided by institutions, users will deepen and broaden it themselves. The web is inherently dynamic through hyperlinking but various technologies make these situations even more dynamic by inviting interaction, invoking personalization algorithms.

Brands are 3D. People live their lives in 3D. Advertisement is 1D. :30 thinking is 1D. When :30 thinking drives everything in the brand space, there’s a lot of lost potential.

I’m getting up to speed on the upcoming tech wave by reading the finally published “HTML5 Up and Running”, by Mark Pilgrim. That sentence just feels sad (though necessary), but the first chapter of the book is really, really interesting. In a section titled “A Long Digression into how Standards Are Made”, Pilgrim walks us through a three week email thread that covers the origin and (pretty much) final resolution of the IMG tag.

The thread begins on February 25, 1993, with Marc Andreesen writing:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

Required argument is SRC=”url”.

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:

<IMG SRC=”file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm“>

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that’s sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally. I’m certainly open to
suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don’t see an alternative than to just say “let the browser do what it can” and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Let me know what you think………

Cheers,
Marc

–
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu

For the next three weeks, a number of programmer types, including Tim Berners-Lee, discuss a whole range of ideas for how this much-needed tag should be developed. It’s worth a read or two, since it highlights several open source, design, and software dynamics. Even in the note above you see a bunch of things:

There is very little preciousness — about ideas, implementations, territory, intellectual/engineering integrity — to be found. I’ve worked with engineers, and written code myself, for almost a dozen years, and was surprised to the point of shocked to see how matter of fact, and yet rigorous, a group of programmers could be, especially on a medium (email) that was at the time new and where etiquette was still evolving.

The book is worth a read and this chapter is really illuminating.
You can view the Andreesen post and click through the thread here.

GS&P just put out a gorgeous and inviting teaser/trailer for the Adobe Museum of Digital Media. It’s a beautiful, well executed virtual museum. The creatives have done some interesting things around conceiving of a virtual building that could live in any real city (or virtual rendering of a real city), and how to move about and recreate the sense of sight lines and movement of a real place.

The whole exercise is a preview, so it’s hard to know what we’ll be seeing in August, but I tend to be pretty meh about virtual anything. It seems like an easy impulse that we’ve lived with for many years: put the word virtual in front of anything and you have a concept for digital, along with a baseline for solving most of your design problems.

I did a talk last weekend to museum and art publishers about where e-Readers and interactive reading were going. To prep for the talk, I grabbed a bunch of art books for the iPad. In general, the results were far from magical. The interactions were banal, click and play kind of stuff. But, one of the books that horrified me was “The Art Authority”:

Seeing this screen gave me flashbacks to early CD-ROM designs and BOB from Microsoft. Back then, we used metaphors and virtualizations because, I think, computers were new to people and we wanted them to feel comfortable and grounded. To do that, we tried to give them a sense of physicality.

There are all sorts of problems with physicality in designing interactive/digital/screen-based experiences: 1) you use a lot of real estate for the interface-metaphor and therefore less space for the content; 2) the interface-metaphor behaves in an insistent way, continually making itself the center of attention, rather than fading back into the role of facilitator/quiet mediator of content; 3) interface-matephors pull you into a level of specificity that can actually break rather than create an illusion of physicality. As a result, most of them are cheesy or childish.

To be clear, GS&P have gone farther and built something virtually that would be impossible in the real world. Already, we’re in the realm, then of speculative architecture rather than simple virtual thinking. And, as I mentioned above, the experience is beautiful and the space is interesting, so the speculative architecture aspect of the project is quite teh awesum.

But despite the coolness of the building, there’s still a need to justify the overhead of the interface-metaphor. In the physical world, you need a physical museum to show art. That physical world has requirements that make museums great architecture: the environment to protect the art, how crowds are managed, what the space for art encounters is like, what kind of art can be shown, what the building says about the art within, what an art viewing session is like, and what the building does for the viewer as a piece of art itself.

The internet is already a ‘place’ where art is displayed. So, what do we get out of putting a virtual building in between the internet and the art that would normally live there? And is it worth the costs of the overhead (especially if people are viewing it on an iPad or something smaller)?

The part that’s really interesting to me, is the way the video for the interviews was handled. There’s a satellite transmission aspect to the video, the purpose of which is unclear:

If I ventured to guess, I would say the idea was to stylistically degrade the reality of the real talking heads to dial up the reality of the virtual building. But that graininess goes away when the trailer shows team meetings, so I can’t be sure. Leaving aside the motivation, however, the degraded scan lines do highlight, even or create discomfort with the larger metaphor by once again calling attention to what’s being done rather than than the art that will, eventually, be displayed.

In a real museum (or I should say a Real Life Museum), the trailer would be about how the curators and the museums conceived of the show — how did we choose the themes and the art, what popular and academic understandings of the artists did we want to explore or explode, how did we arrive at the final works, what collaborations and personalities came to bear on the final product — not how the space was conceived.

Enough. Twitter version:

When we do virtual things, we need to ask, what’s the star of the show, what’s the point, is there balance, and are we serving the content?

For several years, Steven Johnson’s Emergence, E O Wilson’s Journey of the Ants, and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science have bounced around in my head, inextricably/apophenically connected to ideas of creativity, invention, and generative systems. Wolfram’s book, which I could follow through the first three pages of each chapter before the specific science and maths lost me, came and went – people were open to its revelations, found none, then, it seemed, he sank into crankdom. But, in his TED talk, he seems to be pulling it together – computation science (as opposed to computer science or computing) is a source of ideas, beauty, computing power. Best line:

in a sense we can use the computational universe as a way of getting mass customized creativity … to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly … and find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer or incremental evolutionary process could ever come up with.

Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers. With the exception of Interface Culture, I would gladly see every one of his books (Everything Bad is Good for You, EMERGENCE, Ghost Map, and even The Invention of Air) be made mandatory reading people in digital design, digital strategy, digital marketing. Johnson goes deep into cognitive patterns, longer arcs of human behaviors around entertainment, information-seeking, and learning and provides great frameworks for understanding the features and technologies that are usually the center of gravity in digital discussion.

His Time article on the iPad does a nice job of setting the right tone for discussion. Rather than being millenial (Apple fanboys) or crotchety (iPad haters), he grounds the conversation in the longer arc of how we’ve envisioned computing in the last ten or so years:

If you time-traveled back to 1995 and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools, the story went, and too little about the task. …

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.

I truly don’t know how I feel about this. It might be genius. Maybe most users are more confused by Finders and File Explorers than I’ve realized. But I can’t help thinking that if the iPad really wants to be a device that you might take on a business trip instead of the laptop, it’s going to need a little more document-centrism.

Couple things to love here:

- pointing out that there is a widget-centricity to the iPad. Hadn’t noticed it, but now that I think about it, it sounds like a bad way to make netbooks suck less.

- The comment that “most users . . . might be more confused than I realized”, highlights another weird dynamic in the discussion — just how bad do laptops and netbooks suck? Aren’t hundreds of millions of people living with these supposedly “fatally flawed” devices? A lot of the dialogue about the iPad as netbook talk about how unpleasant people find computing, but is the problem of OS stability and feature bloat so bad that we need a neutered appliance to replace it?

And what a great writer Steven Johnson is. I’ve been scribbling in my notebook, in evernote and two blog entries (this’n and this’n here) to get this idea across:

The iPhone revolutionized smartphones, but I think we all accept that smartphones were in our future. There is no equivalent consensus that tablets or couch computers or casual computers are inevitably on the road ahead. We don’t even agree on the aims here: Is the iPad replacing the laptop or supplementing it?

Anyway, a great article.