100 Years Ago, a Match was an iPhone

Today, the magical device in your hand that illuminates the world and makes knowledge accessible is an iPhone: tapping on a piece of glass is all it takes to make or get words, movies, photos and music.

100 years ago, when you had to light a candle to read a newspaper, draw or play an instrument, a match to kindle the flame was the special tool that let you get and create information.

When fire was the only way to bring light to darkness, matches were precious objects -- the technological equivalent of an ISP.

People carried match safes in their pockets in those days, made of gold, from Faberge; silver and enamel, or brass -- with a matching pocket inkwell, for 19th century texting. The  small boxes were so well made that collectors buy them now, at auction houses and on eBay and etsy.

100 years from now, what will people carry in their pockets? What will the updated version of a Vespa case look like? What will bring knowledge, words, pictures, music and light out of darkness then?

If You're Not Going to Let Me Buy the Song, At Least Make it Simple

Subtitled: Why Piracy Will Never Go Away
Also subtitled: Reducing Friction for Content Is the Definition of Digital

So, I had a musical flashback to "Jokerman," which is on a couple of Dylan albums I have on CD and in iTunes. Awesome.

Is there a live version on iTunes? Yes, but it took two clicks to find out why and how I can't buy it.


The first message said it's not available in the US store, and directed me to the Ireland store.

Clumsy, but okay -- until the second message said nyah, nyah, nyah; people in the US can't buy a song from a store someplace else.

This is two levels of foolish.

1. If iTunes won't sell it to me, one message saying so would suffice.

2. A backend that can deny a sale to a US IP address/iTunes ID should also be smart enough to prevent a pointless redirect.

Of course, just allowing a sale to someone who wants to buy something would have been the smart customer experience.

The forced restrictions took me back to college, when my music geek friends who had really enormous speakers were enraptured with their latest "import" album purchases -- social objects that were obscure and expensive and difficut to acquire.

But digital should mean the end of all that. Digital doesn't care where you are. Digital crosses all borders. Digital just is.

And there are many, many, many live versions of "Jokerman" on YouTube, from everywhere.

Postscript: A friend who used to work at a music label said the restrictions are probably more of a case of forgetting to manage the back catalog than attempts to restrict markets geographically, which is worse in some ways and better in others.

Exit Strategy UX

So, I thought it was pretty well established that EXIT signs (in the US) use red capital letters, sans serif font.

Apparently not.

If you search for "exit sign," the Google returns "About 16,500,000 results."

Narrowing the search to images produces: "About 3,600,000 results." Here's a screenshot from this morning:

What's your exit strategy?

Do you communicate your calls to action clearly, in standard and instantly recognizable ways?

Word Crimes Against UX: Puffery, and Bloviation

The Upscale Shopping Mall has two floors, and it has an elevator.

Should the buttons say 1 and 2?

You would think so.

But they say ★LL and UL, as shown here:

Elevator interface at the Upscale Shopping Mall

LL (for lower level?) and UL (for upper level?) are the opposite of an empathetic, clear and simple UX that is helpful for users.

The puffery and bloviation inherent in these labels are word crimes. Such language is bad enough in a rental agent's pitch -- "Put your store on the Upper Level, where the other expensive stores are, and the lease costs double!" -- and worse in an interface.

Crimes against language are word crimes against users.

Machines Should Be Quiet, Unless It's Something Urgent

The new microwave does its job well enough. It reheats coffee. It cooks frozen cha siu baau and dumplings quickly and conveniently.

But its personality needs work.

It.will.not.stop.beeping.when.something.is.done.

Unless it's a smoke detector, or an alarm clock with a snooze button, one round of beeping, followed by a reminder, is all the noise I need.

UX: Why Apple Won't Allow Flash on iAnything

I missed this when it was posted, but here it is now

Thoughts on Flash: Steve Jobs, April, 2010

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

That also pretty much covers Silverlight, SharePoint ...

Typing on my MacBook Pro and Talking on my iPhone: UX of Apple

In order of remembrance and thanks:

• Every day that I don't have to use a machine with a Microsoft OS.
  
  
• Rip. Mix. Burn: There was a building-high ad along the West Side Highway, on your left, heading south, just before the World Trade Center came into view.
  
  
• Tek-Serve
  
  
• The rubberized "Batman" laptop that everyone had in the first Silicon Alley boom. Its hotness cannot be exaggerated. Mine is still in the house, someplace.
  
  
• The original iMac (Mine was blue.)
  
  
• The commencement speech at Stanford.

Quotes:

http://www.macstories.net/roundups/inspirational-steve-jobs-quotes/

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/24/steve-jobss-best-quotes/

• A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
  
  
• Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works
  
  
• "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products."
  
  
• “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

Facebook UX: Thank You, Google+

"Profile and post controls have been moved from the settings page and placed on an inline menu, so you can quickly change who can see your details and who can read your posts. You can also change your mind about who can read a status update after you’ve posted it, which wasn’t possible before." -- via PSFK

Facebook is improving the user experience by making its privacy controls easier to use: they are surfacing the menu, and allowing privacy edits to posts.

Would this have happened without Google+?

Three by Three, They Came

Why the WordPress Three-Column Layout Became the Web Standard, Until It Wasn’t Anymore -- A Discussion of User Experience Evolution and the Adoption Curve in Pattern Libraries, Interaction Design, Visual Cues and Calls to Action, with References to The Wayback Machine, Popular Culture, and Art

Prologue

Changes in the pattern libraries, interaction designs, visual cues and calls to action of web sites, mobile tools and online applications come in waves, and they follow the typical adoption cycle: bleeding edge, everywhere, over.

While we don’t always have a working theory of where these changes are going, --  just the knowledge that change is the only constant --  the law of evolution is:

(a) observable in action and

(b) enforced by the market.

Figure 1: The Technology Adoption Lifecycle, as it Applies to Anything that Plugs In or Has a Battery, plus Popular Culture and Art*

* The version of the adoption lifecycle referenced here is from Crossing the Chasm.
This custom illustration is from Wikipedia. 
The adoption curve concept also applies recursively to the adoption curve.

The Present and the Recent Past

Here are three examples of  user experience evolution in full effect: adaptations in pattern libraries, interaction designs, visual cues and calls to action that appeared in a few places, spread, and are already fading out of coolness into ubiquity: 

1. Three-column webpage designs: Totally new at first, these clean and simple slabs of content and color upended overly art-directed sites. But now they’re as prevalent as daisies; they’re everywhere.   
Prediction: Something else is coming soon. 

2. AJAX/jQuery Action Bars and Plugins: Functional and sleek, these tools do so much that used to be handcoded or impossible.  
Prediction: They’re here for a while, until they aren’t.  

3. My Account / Login / Sign Up: Typically tucked into the top right corner, the utility nav area has been around for long enough for an overhaul.
Speculation: Something will replace it in the future. What will it be?

Compare and Contrast: The Present vs. the Ancient Past (in Internet Years)

Using the upper righthand corner of websites for account management tools is typical today, but it wasn’t always thus. In the beginning, these functions barely existed.

Q. How did the toplevel utility nav come to be the way we expect to see it today?
A. Like most things -- slowly, then all at once.

On the Amazon.com homepage from 1998,  “Buy Books” was a category, and “Shopping Cart” and “Checkout” were subcategories:

Figure 3: Amazon.com, Earth’s biggest bookstore: July 1, 1998 
(via The Wayback Machine.)

Today, the old interaction metaphors Amazon used feel like the website equivalent of maps from the "here be dragons" era of cartography, but without the cool drawings.

The Future is Already Here — Just Not Evenly Distributed

Websites, online tools and mobile apps of a given time and place go through periods of change and equilibrium:

1. They look and work the same

2. They differentiate

3. They start looking the same again.

This cycle of user experience evolution follows the older adoption curves of popular culture and art:

1. Styles and schools are invented

2. Defenders of the status quo cling to the old thing

3. The new thing becomes standard, and upstarts differentiate.

The law of evolution doesn’t predict how things will change: just that they will.

Love songs are examples of popular culture calls to action, and here are two examples of how they have changed across four centuries:

“Had we but world enough and time” Andrew Marvel, 17th Century

“Rah rah ah-ah-ah!Ro mah ro-mah-mahGaga oh-la-la!” Lady GaGa, 21st Century

Online, the ways we create engaging user experiences have already changed at least this much, in much less time.

What will happen tomorrow? 

----------------
I can't take credit for discovering the evolution of online user experience, but if I wanted to name it Laurie’s Law, and say it was discovered by you, that would be an appropriate example of Stigler's law of eponymy. *

*Stigler's law of eponymy is a process proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication "Stigler’s law of eponymy".  In its simplest and strongest form it says: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law",  consciously making "Stigler's law" exemplify Stigler's law.

 

UX Leadership - See, Speak, Share

Here's my SXSW panel proposal for 2012: UX Leadership - See, Speak, Share

Your clients aren't sure what UX is, or IXD, IA, or content strategy, but they know what sites they like when they see them.

Teaching clients, colleagues and staff how to recognize that "blink" moment, and giving them the vocabulary and concepts to evaluate and recreate engagement, interaction design, features and functionality, conversion paths, calls to action, content strategies and brand appropriate coolness factors, across the user experience -- well, that's win x win for them and for you, plus awesome sauce.

Also, it makes work more better.

Putting tools in the hands of the people you work with -- clients, colleagues, consultants or vendors -- so they can see, speak, show and share UX

(1) helps them make the best choices for their sites, and

(2) helps you structure and deliver the right results.

How do you teach others to see UX, to speak UX, and to share UX collaboratively?

Areas of attack include conversion, calls to action, content strategy, navigation structure, interaction design and emotional design.

There's also intuitve stuff -- capturing that "blink" moment and the vocabulary for describing it -- and objective stuff (put calls to action at the end of the line and on the right because that's where the line ends and the eye stops, and it's closest to the hand.)

1. How do you help clients know what you do so they want you to do it with them, and so they can do it themselves?
   
   
2. Content strategy: Do you do it at the beginning, the middle or the end? (Hint: All the time)
   
   
3. Interaction design: Coolness vs. users still using the mouse vs. iPad vs. mobile -- how to choose
   
   
4. Visual design: When to dial it up and when to dial it down; apps vs. web applications vs. e-commerce
   
   
5. Agile, Sprint Zero, Waterfall? Yes. Also: learn the rules, blend, and cook at 450 degrees, altitude adjusted. 

Sound good? Vote it up here.

Also, leave a comment if you want me to do it as a presentation for you.

Unicorns, Hedgehogs and Foxes: Which are You?

There's a great post by Jeff Gothelf on the roles UX people play: Unicorn: a Visual Designer with UX Chops. It's earned a long and thoughtful string of comments.

My take on it: As engagement architects, user experience consultants, and customer experience practitioners, we share core skills and deliverables, and we bring our own extra bonus knowledge. People can be unicorns; they can also be hedgehogs or foxes.

In my case, I'm a little of each -- a UX and CX lead who is originally a communicator. I worked as a newspaper reporter in the dark years before Senator Gore invented the internet, and the years I spent asking questions, synthesizing information, writing it down, and making sure I got it right is pretty much the foundation skill set of #UX and #CX -- plus boxes and arrows, which I learned working for Seth Godin's startup, Yoyodyne, back during the late 20th century.

For others, coding, visual design, marketing or project management are the deep competencies they bring along with their #UX and #CX skills.

Shorter: Where you stand depends on where you sit.

In the future, I see the creative hierarchy looking like this:

Experience Director / Engagement Architect
o UX director / UX staff
o Art director / production artists
o Content strategy director / editorial staff
o Marketing Director / Online marketing team

On any given project, these hats all need to be worn by someone, but people can wear more than one hat.

These are my UX skills and capabilities; what are yours?

---

The internet was originally a government program, and Senator Gore supported it. He began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computer science at UCLA. The bill was passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Al Gore called the "information superhighway".


Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have noted: When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.^[3]

CX, UX: Chicken Fingers, and Cancelled Flights

The ice was already melted in my to-go cocktail from the bar down the street (they look the other way, as long as you return the glassware) when I realized that the two lines at the Chicken Fingers ʻnʼ Beer Place for After Soccer were roughly equal, but I was waiting on the slow line.

As a professional Engagement Architect and User Experience consultant, I had questions.

Fortunately, I also had a framework:

1.0 Why?
Always the first UX question

1.0.1 How hungry were the children and parents waiting for me to order for them?
Create personas for users, and prioritize their needs

1.0.1.1 When would the inevitable meltdowns begin?
Time the rollout of phases and features for user acceptance and engagement

2.0 If I left the line to get another cocktail, should I (a) come back at the end of the fast line, or (b) ask someone in the slow line to hold my place?
Consider and plan for social options

And then a phone behind the counter rang, revealing the workflow issues throttling the slow line, and proving once again that there's no substitute for observation in the field in UX work.

Figure 1: Customer Service Workflow: Chicken Fingers ʻnʼ Beer Place for After Soccer

This was amazing to behold:

i. Two cashiers.

ii. Two lines.

iii. One phone.

iiia. The cashier on the slow line answers all the phone calls

I perceived a pattern here, and I had questions:

(a) How many people in the slow line had no idea they were also effectively in line behind people calling on the phone?

(b) How many noticed?

The situation reminded me of the debacles at airport gates when flights are cancelled and some people start banging on and shrieking away at their phones, while others remonstrate with the ticket agents.

I had a proposition to test: What if, while I was standing in line, I called my order in?
Would I see the cashier answer the phone and take my order ahead of, well, me?

I pondered the ethics, until it was my turn.

And I thought about how situations like this are everywhere, and how the questions around them are always the same:

• What will it take to fix this?
  
• What is the price of not fixing it, vs. letting things continue as they are?

At the chicken shack, the possible solutions are obvious. Only one phone? Get another. Too short staffed? Staff up.

What are the issues where you are? How would fix them?