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Category Archives: UX

Virtual shrug: Adobe’s upcoming ‘museum’

Posted on June 25, 2010 by kipbot
No Comments

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”:

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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.

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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:

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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?

Categories: craft, creativity, culture, design, UX

The IxD Problem: I can write TV, cuz I watch it

Posted on June 23, 2010 by kipbot
3 Comments

One of the toughest problems IxD people face is the ease with which people can consider themselves quite good, competent, or correct at it. It’s nearly impossible to fake a knowledge of programming when someone is actually looking at code or an architecture diagram. It’s almost as hard to fake being a visual designer (even if the person knows Photoshop, they’re still likely to clunk something up and be found out as a fake). But with IxD, everyone can credibly say they, personally, found something confusing or that they, personally, would like to see something done this way or that. The reasoning is simple: “I’m a user, so I can speak about user experience issues.” It’s a bit like saying “I can write TV, cuz I watch a lot of it.”

I might try this out at a meeting. Should make me a lot of friends.

Categories: UX

Interactive as Olympics or Chess? Advice for Traditional Agencies and other n00bs

Posted on March 4, 2010 by kipbot
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I have a weird memory from a surfer movie. I can’t remember the title, and having never watched surfer movies aside from stopping briefly on the remote in between stops, I have no context for it. (Major exception to the previous sentences: Point Break, which, of course, transcends and resists genre classification.) So here’s the memory:

Some girl, wearing an old-fashioned, square cut bikini is talking to an older guy about her boyfriend-the-hero-of-this-movie’s chances at winning a surfing contest. The boyfriend is, of course, the underdog. He has been screwed by his wealthier, more practiced, less scrupulous, and prettier but less attractive opponents. The boyfriend is behind and his success depends on the next run. The girlfriend wonders what’s needed to pull off this surfing and life miracle.

The older guy is big, barrel-chested, chomping a cigar, wearing a tank top and hat and holding his binoculars. He looks pensive and says something like “well, he may have the skill, and he may catch a good wave, but he needs more than that . . . he needs a great, big chest full of character.” (Not sure how to spell chest full — chestful seems like treasure chest. Chest full feels too biological and ribcage focused.)

This kind of thinking is common to people and companies new to interactive work. There’s a belief that spirit and energy and character can overcome all obstacles, even the laws of physics or ignorance (or a bad wave). In the movies, we see repeatedly how someone can overcome absurd adversity with a pep talk, digging down and finding the fire, or coming up with a clever trick (that Karate Kid broken ankle thing). In the Olympics, many of the events give athletes three shots at getting it right, so that third attempt is a chance at making up for a suboptimal performance and bringing a lot of heart to win the gold. In distance events or timed sports, there’s always a hope that the runner can pour it on in the last five minutes, or the team can put together a series of scoring drives (touchdown!, on-sides kick!, touchdown!, interception!, gadget play! touchdown! ZOMG we won!).

But interactive isn’t like that. Notions of heart, digging deep, fishing something out of your bag of tricks doesn’t work. You’re usually up against laws of physics. As Fred Brooks reminds us, nine women in a month can’t make a baby — no matter how much character they have.

Interactive is like chess. It’s built on a foundation, there are virtually no clever tricks, no ways to surge and overcome a bad position. If you play a poor opening, your middlegame options are limited — you’re on the defensive. If your middlegame position is weak, you can’t go on the attack, even if you have a lot of heart for it. If your endgame is technically lost, all you can hope is that your opponent makes a mistake. But no pep talk or chirpy can-doism can change the fact that you have a lost position. You need to play to win from the beginning, you need to begin with a view of the end, you need to be in the now and be in the future calculating possible nows that may arise.

For my software surfer movie, some gems:

Measure twice, cut once.

Have a plan.

Explore the implications of your moves.

When you have a problem and hear someone say “oh, it’ll be fine, I’m not worried” a half tone higher than their usual voice, smack that person on the forehead until s/he starts worrying.

Track your projects early, not just two weeks out from launch.

In fact, don’t bother checking in two weeks out from launch, cuz if it’s broke it’s too late and you’re only gonna screw it up.

Don’t trust the happy optimists, fill your team with people who like solving puzzles and loathe inelegance and easy solutions.

Most important, keep your head in the game, look at the whole board, and calculate.

Categories: craft, UX

Nifty Cross-Channel Experience with B&N

Posted on February 20, 2010 by kipbot
2 Comments

B&N’s “pick me up” is a great cross-channel integration. I’m using my fantasy baseball drafts as a reason to finally learn a Mac-OSX database program, specifically FileMaker Pro. According to bn.com, “The Missing Manual” for FMP appears to be available at the Park Slope store. I signed up to have someone to reserve the book for me and here’s the confirmation:

bnpickmeup.png

In the next couple hours, I’m supposed to get an email telling me the book is there. I love how they took any possible confusion out of the process — ‘don’t come to the store’ till you get the email, give the email about an hour. I just did it a few minutes ago, so the only possible room for annoyance is if I just don’t get an email and I have no idea how to track the request. Still, it’s pretty cool.

====

UPDATE: In less than an hour, I got both my email and a text message. Pretty sweet.

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Categories: analytics, UX

Minimalist UX, ID, IxD, Navigation

Posted on October 6, 2009 by kipbot
4 Comments

I used to give interaction design candidates tests as part of the interview process. I would put a site on my computer screen, brief them against imaginary client requests and biases and then give them a half hour to analyze and respond to the brief.(*) Sometimes, I would pick a site that was related to their work or the client I was hiring for. But frequently, I would test them with the McMaster-Carr tool site.(**)

The virtue of the McMaster-Carr site was that is was almost perversely ASCII-Nielsen and, in many, many ways right to do so. The company has literally dozens and dozens of categories and subcategories of equipment and parts and the home page used to list them all in a spray of text with only titled line breaks to separate them into the highest level categories. And when I say sprayed, I mean that they weren’t even in table form. They were strings of links, like sentences without verbs.

It was right in many ways: it supported the CTRL-F behavior (which is faster than scanning any large list); the hierarchy and arrangement was familiar and unchanging; and it resembled the much more familiar tool catalog method of scanning. In short, text was efficient, and tables were unnecessary and even obstructive.

So yesterday, I’m talking to my boss about interaction design and described this test (as a way of illustrating taste and judgment in design). When I went to the site, I was shocked to find a new design!

mcmastercarr1.png

mcmastercarr1.png

Previously, the page would have had something like this:

Fastening & Joining
Screws & Bolts, Threaded Rods & Studs, Eyebolts, U-Bolts, Nuts, Washers, Shims, Helical &Threaded Inserts, Spacers & Standoffs, Pins, Anchors, Nails, Nailers, Rivets, Rivet Tools, Staples, Staplers, Key Stock, Retaining Rings, Cable Ties, Lanyards, Magnets

But now they’ve added illustrations of the categories and pushed content lower. The illustrations still feel on-brand, as they have that grayscale line art feel of a big fat cheap paper catalog. But I’m not sure they’re adding any value. Does a seasoned contractor, craftsman, builder, etc. really need a picture of a lanyard? Isn’t he or she better served by that list that puts everything right in front of him and minimizes the need to scroll?

Part of the answer may come in a later, and very useful, screen:

mcmaster3.png

Now when I say useful, I mean useful to me. Following my trip to MAKER Faire, I have gotten all middle-aged “Mister-Make-It-Fix-It-Tinker-I-Have-That-Tool-Guy” and am trying to fix anything that comes my way, including most recently, replacing a fastener on a new briefcase. During that repair effort, I got to use my Dremel(!) on a threaded rod(!!). I went to Home Depot with the fastener I needed to replace and the guy took me to a wall of drawers labeled threaded rod. I had no idea such things existed — a rod with threads! Not a screw, cuz that would have a cap. This was just a rod that was threaded. The picture above is a nifty guide for a reasonably intelligent, barely handy, person to solve problems, find products and get ideas.

So perhaps, this was a rebrand to help McMaster-Carr reach out to a new type of DIYer. That would make sense of the home page. Someone at my level or slightly higher might find it really useful to see a U-bolt labelled as such or the difference between an anchor, a pin, and a rivet.

Still, I’m sad to have lost my old test. It was great fun working at a hip shop like R/GA and asking people to evaluate a site so obstinately retro, yet well-designed. (Even more sadly, wayback doesn’t seem to have the old version.)

(*) Disclaimer: I’ve had plenty of interviews where I was the candidate and was asked to give comments on the current site and the interviewer would site back and reject every idea: “done that” “users didn’t like it” “breaks a part of the site that is no longer there” “tech can’t do it”. A fairly obnoxious dynamic to my mind — if someone can do better than you with a site that you’ve been managing for years, you must be incompetent or not paying attention. Anyway, I’m always very clear with the candidate that there are no right answers, but that I just want to have a discussion, see the thinking, and watch the organization of the case he or she makes.

(**) Not my idea originally, and not an original idea. I know several people who use the site as a benchmark of various ID philosophies and ideas.

Categories: design, DIY, UX

Will the Wave answer the promise of the cloud?

Posted on May 28, 2009 by kipbot
4 Comments

One of the funnest things about working in interactive is the tea-leaf reading that happens when screenshots of upcoming apps are released. Windows Longhorn, the annual Macworld run-up, console releases, game beta screens are fodder for endless speculation, geek-talk, and fantasies of what the new app might be.

Twitter is all a-twitter about Wave today, and normally I would be skeptical, but something in Google’s ability to help me get excited about something in a single page with less than 500 words and a couple unremarkable, unpretty, completely un-Apple-shined screenshots makes me hopeful.

From the site:

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Frankly the screenshots add almost nothing to the page. The words somehow reflect not only the promise of what they’re offering, but an understanding of the problems that needed to be solved for this to work and the open source ethos of “pick one thing and do it well . . . then do another” which usually result in elegant solutions.

I’ve experimented with a fair number of “collaboration tools” — 37Signals stuff, MSFT Windows Live, Google sites — and am currently struggling with a whole bunch of file sharing/cloud concurrency issues. I’m dying to have a place where I can share pictures and documents with coworkers with easy commenting, versioning, and non-networked-but-secured accesss. The beauty of Google sites was that it allowed people to write HTML in pages that were open to self-organization without the constraints of content management/versioning controls and it was in the cloud. But, you still had trouble with versioning when people got lazy.

If Google gets the rewind action right (presumably that’s what’s Wave-y about it), you’ve got version control built in, along with conversation tracking and a dynamic de-archiving process that doesn’t depend on search (which sucks even on Google apps). The beauty and the hope is that playback and rewind and wave implies a product based on a concept firmly adhered to rather than a laundry list of features that people would like to string together. (Something 37Signals did nicely with Basecamp.)

The real-time collaboration piece is also intriguing, surprisingly so, since we’ve heard that phrase 100 times — “see the changes as they’re made in real time!” (Wonder: how many people understand the phrase ‘real time’ . . . do they actually know what un-real-time is?) Google, however, may have the potential to beat the WebEx client in performance and simplicity if they nail the browser code (I’m starting to pendulum back to a notion that software needs to get back to the browser (even chromeless browsers) for speed, interoperability, and true cloudness).

Weird. I’m not sure I was even this excited about a software launch when Wrath of the Lich King betaed.

Categories: computing, design, UX

Kindle Evolution — nice touch from Amazon

Posted on May 28, 2009 by kipbot
No Comments

I don’t know if this was always the plan, or if this was an easy thing to do, but I feel well served as a Kindle owner (almost enough to be not pissed about the big Kindle), and impressed by Amazon.

Got an email this morning:

kindleemail.png

This is a for-real need I’ve experienced often — I highlight a passage in a book I’m reading on my Kindle. Later, when I need it for a blog post or to send to someone in a mail or for use in a document I’m writing, I have to open the Kindle, find the quote and type it in. Hard to read and type, hard to find, and little context (when you can only see small sections of a small number of notes). The Kindle site, sparse but pretty fast fixes (most of) that:

kindlesite.png

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Categories: design, UX

MYST on iPhone: A lesson in immersion

Posted on May 22, 2009 by kipbot
No Comments

Been playing MYST on the iPhone and having fond memories, renewed admiration for the game, and a useful sense of disappointment.

Fond Memories
I loved MYST when it came out. It was a revelation — a rich, lush world that I simply liked looking at, a strong enough (though not great or self-sustaining) story that gave me a sense of urgency and grounding in the game, and puzzles that had a certain logic in the milieu and were genuinely interesting in and of themselves. That last point was a big sticking point in the doomed adventure game genre. All too often in the 90s, game designers would drop in really dumb puzzles (put the broken coffee mug together to see the picture and get the clue!), cliches (the puzzle toy Simon was repurposed in literally dozens of games), or byzantine pixel/scavenger hunts that required you to work but not think in rewarding ways. MYST puzzles were interesting systems that needed to be figured out, or riddles that you could actually think about away from the game, or visual puns that were intrinsically engaging. But that’s just me bemoaning the genre’s demise.

The key for me, though, was how much I wanted to be in the game. There were the crazy brothers, trapped inside a book:

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This moment was iconic for several years. The guy is trapped in the blue book (his twin is trapped in a red book), needs you to fill the book with blue pages to free him. As you explore the world of MYST (an island based on Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island), you gather clues about the moral and psychological soundness of the twins. Every time you go to the book, the brothers implore you: “The blue pages, bring me the BLUE pages!”, a line/device which was spoofed in subsequent games.

The game is also beautiful if you enjoy a steampunk/Verne look:
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In addition to looking great, this was the first great, and may still be among the best sound designs. Each image and sound gave me flashbacks to the first sense of discovery and wonder at the game (where am I? how cool! how did it get built?), and made wandering around the world fun. I orginally played this with my girlfriend (another gaming landmark: the elusive game your girlfriend will play!) and distinctly remember saying things like “let’s go to Channelwood first, I like it there” or “wait wait, look around a minute”.

Renewed Admiration for the Game

There is much lore around the game’s production. Two brothers with a small number of computers, using Director, 3D Studio Max, home made sounds and a couple computers for rendering, pulled it off. Of course, in those early-WIRED days, when everything wanted to be a movie or would benefit from being more like a movie — rather than being its own form — they were talking to film studios, getting repped by big agents, blah blah blah. But the game was and still is a remarkable thing, proof that tight constraints, even absurdly tight ones like 1990s era PCs, create great designs.

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Failure to Immerse

The only disappointment with the iPhone game, and I think it’s instructive, is that MYST just doesn’t pull you in. The screen resolution is fine for the conveyance of information, the screen size is adequate for finding hotspots with a blunt finger-tip, and the sounds still help with gameplay and location cues. But the screen doesn’t take up enough eye-width, or field of vision to be truly immersive.

This was interesting to me, since I actually watched the entire run of Firefly (sf western style TV show that run for fourteen episodes before being unjustly cancelled) on the first generation iPod video, on an elliptical trainer on the gym. Screen size isn’t a general requirement for absorption in a narrative TV show. But a decent screen size is needed for the active suspension of disbelief and immersion. I say active suspension rather than willing, because for a game like MYST, which relies on stills, involves some clunky transitions, and occasional howlers in the dialogue, there is more artifice to overcome — probably more aritifce, even, than reading a book where you don’t have trip-ups that break the flow and risk snapping you out of the undisbelief reverie.

The other artifice that you’re constantly reminded of is the screen itself, which you have to hold and interact with directly. This is an instance where a mouse that is remote from the screen is actually superior to the intuitive touching of the screen. By separating the viewing area from the interface and the hand from the eye (at least physically) you have fewer intrusions into the environment.

Ah well, ten dollars that didn’t result in gaming joy, but did teach me something about narrative, HCI, and immersion.

It also inspired me to dig out the game (or buy it again) and maybe dig out puffy headphones and wander around the Ages again.

Categories: culture, design, games, UX

Twitter will go one of two ways

Posted on May 14, 2009 by kipbot
5 Comments

it will die as a marketing channel and survive as a social tool, or continue to grow as a marketing tool and die altogether. For the umpteenth time, I get a note alerting me to a follower. Having a spate of friends who have found me start to follow (a word I still don’t like, it’s like we bake competition and brand right into the experience), I clicked to see who it was:

twittershit.png

In the last three weeks, perhaps post-Oprah, I’ve been getting followed by friends, professional contact, and various marketers and bots. The marketers and bots are still the bulk of the emails I receive. This is the kind of thing that will cause me to make my account less public, turn off the email alerts or ignore followers altogether. When that happens, twitter becomes less important to me as a social tool and I fade back to just using FB statuses, or stopping it altogether. Cuz, let’s face it, it’s really not that important to me and I managed to quit smoking, so I can kick this habit too.

Categories: advertising, marketing, UX

TimeOut Azeroth: Social Calendar in WoW

Posted on October 15, 2008 by kipbot
No Comments

World of Warcraft‘s newest “Echoes of Doom” patch was a big one sizewise. Getting ready for the “Lich King” expansion pack, probably. (This expansion pack will add a new world and the possibility of advancing ten more levels. In general, they’re a big deal, and almost always worth the fuss.) When I loaded this one, there was a new icon which, when clicked, shows a calendar:
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Not only does it have a listing of fun events — the Brewfest, a Faire, the Halloween games — this calendar is available to your guild mates for scheduling things such as raids, guild meetings, and resource sharing. This game’s a gas.

Categories: games, UX
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