kip/bot/blog

I recently downloaded a bunch of digital books highlighted by Peter Meyers at OReilly Radar. Meyers is a terrific thinker about digital books, going deep on usability, design, how text should be created for ebooks, and what the medium can do to enhance reading experiences.

In his “10 Innovative Digital Books” to check, he included two Bibles. Interactive, dynamic, well-annotated Bibles are of interest to the spiritual-but-not-religious side of me and to my designer side. Few texts could benefit and be enriched by interactive technology and web connections as the Bible. There are so many versions of the Bible, translation topics and controversies, archaic words that need to be understood to engage the text more fully, concordances, cross-references and allusions (or contradictions, if you’re coming from that angle) that interactive can facilitate. While I’m still bummed at how hard it is to find NRSV translations (the ones that left-liberal types like me go for), there are some interesting ones out there (which is a different post).

This post was just to highlight a great screen shot that caught me early this morning while I was reading Gary Shteyngart’s Russian Debutante’s Handbook. One of the most interesting possibilities of a digital iPad Bible is a reading plan. There are many different versions of daily scripture – to work through the New Testament or the Pentateuch or to follow themes and ideas. There are also plans to help you read the entire Bible across the course of a year. I signed up to do the last (not really, I don’t have time, much as I’d like to). This was what came up while reading about Volodya’s first encounter with Rybakov:

via ReadWriteWeb

A video mocking up a solution to the annoying string of notifications that iPhones force you to click through (and ultimately ignore cuz you’re moving so fast to get to the task at hand). A little slow/long, but some interesting things in this:

iOS notifications concept from Andreas on Vimeo.

David Simon was guest celebrity for the “Not my job” portion of the 16-April-2011 “Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!” Peter Sagall asked why he provides so little explanation of new terms or highlighting of subtle plot twists, and there was a great exchange that hits some nice notes about simplicity, simplicticism, complexity and richness (around 18:00):

Peter Sagall: “One of the things about the Wire … is that you don’t do a lot to help your audience understand what’s going on. I remember when I first started watching The Wire the plot was complicated, there was language that I didn’t understand. I mean, is that intentional, are you like ‘you just got to pick it up?’”

David Simon: “For me, this is going to sound haughty and I don’t mean it to, to me when everything is explained when everything is right there on the surface, I find myself leaning back and becoming disinterested. And I think it’s much more interesting to tell a story when you have people leaning towards the television screen trying to think about it.”

Simplicity isn’t engaging, complexity is. Complication sucks, so does being simplistic.

Note: The app’s designer, coder, all-around maker, responded in his blog. Some additional comments, responses to this post, in a later post.

I just downloaded the Pennant iPad app. While connected to the internet, this app lets you look at every play of every game of professional baseball going back to 1951. It’s gotten glowing reviews from Wired and other places with praise for its “rich interface” and all the fun they bring to stats. I was stoked to buy it — I like reading about baseball more than watching it, I loves me my data, and I was genuinely happy with the Jazz app, which has a similar visual language and navigation tropes.

Sadly, Pennant is just prettied up data, prettied up so much that it underperforms the highly evolved system of box scores and the recent and insufficiently explored sparklines of Edward Tufte. It’s also loaded with some bad usability posing as visualization.

The first problem comes with the app designers’ attachment to cover flow. I’ve never been a big fan of cover flow, finding it imprecise for task completion, and way too low in information density for exploration of anything larger than 20 items. In Pennant, it’s a real waste of space and a strange distortion of a timeline.

The colors are meaningless and confusing, the covers themselves add nothing to the exploration (might be nice to have the jerseys to differentiate between the different iterations of the Giants, or some basic information about team founding, league, or notable players — anything beyond text to justify a visual treatment). Worse, they don’t even show enough items, requiring extra work to get around. While I dislike it, at least the iTunes version previews information and provides more:

The cover flow fixation obscures the drill-downs in the experience as well. This is a screenshot of the 1981 Pirates season:

The real information is the line across the bottom of the screen, but the cover, which simply confirms the user’s choice and serves as an over-sized title, dominates. The line across the bottom of the screen is also problematic — the individual data points are hard to pinpoint, as an adult fingertip can actually touch three at a time and the finger obscures your sight line. (It’s also a repetition of the cover flow above, but with the added, and admittedly useful though inefficiently executed, depiction of the average.)

This disregard for information and usefulness is pretty much the problem with the whole app. At a brisker pace, some screenshots and critiques:

Maps are possibly the most abused data visualization techniques out there. To make room for the map, you have to shrink the actual data (team names) to pin points. And for what? Spatial relationships? For this particular data set, maps actually create confusion – if you don’t remember that a team moved, or simply want to find the team name in that cluster of points in the northeast, or you don’t really consider the renaming of the Angels as different teams in the same way you think of the Brooklyn Dodger and LA Dodgers as being different.

This is the one that most people praise. It sure looks nifty, and you need code to draw it and do the transition, but why a circle? Usually the stats are listed in proximity and tell a quick story, and are clumped in ways that tell interesting stories. Here, all you have are wedges next to each other, forcing you to spatially assess the relative stats. Worse, they’ve got cumulative stats (number of walks, hits, runs) intermixed with percentage stats (OBP and AVG). Worse than useless, this actually reduces the clarity and usefulness of the data. (The pitching one is a drag too. A standard measure is strike out to walk ratios and you don’t even have the numbers and the shapes that might make for comparison are on opposite sides of the wheel.)

The most difficult thing about the screen is that, at its core, it’s a pie graph. There is a set of wedges indicating some proportional relationship with the other items, further implying that how far out it radiates is an extra dimension. None of these implied relationships, basic knowledge for an adult reader, is delivered on, thus frustrating user expectations.

Quick hit here: the win loss line on the bottom is hard to access (see adult finger stuff above) and the representation makes the Loss look like half of a Win, not the opposite. Compare to a Tuftean style presentation:

Here, the color pops for winning and losing streaks, and you get a sense of home and away performance. And, oh yeah, you have summary data at the end of the line.

I have no idea what they were thinking with this one. And, yes, you can move the bubbles around – and get absolutely nothing out of it.

The most annoying of all. This is the meat of the experience, the play-by-play, the true fan’s recreation of the great moments in baseball. Why a circle? Is there something full-circle about the game? What happens to the already maddening smallness of the lines when you go into extra innings? The metaphor dominates at the expense of the information and the narrative.

It gets weirder when you set it to play:

The weirdness comes in a couple places. First, all of the lines from the earlier screen are made the same length when it turns into a wheel. All you have now is the number of at bats and a preview that the last out is happening. The second is that, by ticking off the plays individually, you actually lose the narrative that would come with the list. In this case, Gary Carter tripled, but there’s no context – how many men on base, how many outs, what’s the score, how long has the pitcher been in? These are the moments that make individual plays dramatic. But, by putting the display at the service of the interface metaphor, the events are reported with no context and no outcome (which a list of plays would have allowed the user to put together, and which newspaper scorecards fill in).
Enough of the hating. A quick note about how good infographics are pleasing to the eye, engage you in conversation and add to the story the data tells.

Tufte shows cleaner, higher-resolution versions in his book, but I chose the larger, jaggier one to highlight the point. This graphic shows the pattern of a teams season, it visualizes, surges and slumps, shows tight races, conveys the hopelessness of being a fan for some teams and it has data.

Pennant is mostly chartjunk. Sad, but maybe there will be other efforts, as the data isn’t exclusive.

I’m late to the Zappos party. But my aversion, borderline phobia, of shopping in brick and mortar stores (especially for clothes) pushed me there — and now I’m seeing how they infuse a service-y charm to everything they do. I got these two emails in the space of 24 hours:

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.

In general, I think most game players don’t follow stories closely, but there are some for whom the game story is their main dose of fiction:

/via Getner

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?