Happy Bastille Day!

At Think Brownstone, we’ve started a tradition of celebrating Bastille Day in honor of Phil’s fantastically French heritage. Instead of storming the local prison-fortress, we’ve taken to assembling a world-class collection of “dangerous cheeses” and enjoying them wherever Phil happens to be that day. So today we celebrated with a group of clients (friends) who were treated to Phil’s guided tour through the cheeses of France – complete with fresh bread, grapes, cherries, almonds, saucisson sec (French salami), and cornichons (French pickles). Of course we also supplied the soundtrack, including the French National Anthem, “Foux Du Fa Fa” by Flight Of The Conchords, a host of French Canadian ditties from Russ’s collection and of course, “Bastille Day” by Rush.  Will we be celebrating with you next year? Vive La France!

Phil As Master Of Ceremonies

The Suggested Path Through The Fromage & Accompaniments

Mike C's Plate Of Glory

Motivation-By-Numbers

In case you missed it, our last post declared Stephen Anderson’s “Serious Play: Designing Seductive Business Apps” our favorite talk from the Philly stop of the UIE Web App Masters Tour (not that there weren’t plenty of other highpoints!).

I made a note during that talk to revisit Malone & Co.’s Theory Of Motivation, because although that model was first proposed in the context of instructional design (specifically, in the early days of computer-based instruction – we’re talking like mid-1980′s here), the concepts that Stephen was employing seemed to be the same universal ones captured and organized by Malone & Lepper all those years ago.

Illustration By Mike Colibraro

I found some great practical discussion on motivation and a Spartan but incredibly useful chart (content is king, after all) in the course notes for one of Edward Vockell’s Educational Psychology courses at Purdue Calumet. Check out the chart here, and pay close attention to the Related Guidelines column…because IT’S ALL RIGHT THERE! One little chart, and it’s the instruction book on how to design for motivation – no matter the technology or the channel. These are the keys to the kingdom, friends!

P.S. If this stuff brings out your inner geek the way it brings out mine, be sure to click through some of the links below the chart as well.

Review: UIE Web App Masters Tour

We received some great feedback about our reviews of An Event Apart Seattle 2009 (AEA) and ePatient Connections 2009, so we figured we’d make it a tradition. Earlier this week we attended the Philadelphia stop of the 2010 UIE Web App Masters Tour – brainchild of UIE (User Interface Engineering) founder, and host, Jared Spool. Putting on an event tour like this takes moxy and a lot of coordination, so kudos to Jared & Co. for pulling it off quite smoothly in Philly. Overall, we had a very pleasant experience and were glad we attended; we walked away with both new insights and new ways of articulating concepts we’ve been batting around with clients for some time now.

Brian's Sketch Notes (Click the image above to see 'em all)

First things first… “Web App Masters” is a bold claim…did the speakers live up to it? We give that a solid “yes”. Whether or not the topic was in our particular wheelhouse, there were still solid takeaways from each talk even if some connected a bit more than others. Plus, we were also very encouraged by the undercurrent of experience design throughout the two days – we felt like these folks were speaking our language, and that they clearly understood the importance and value of user-centered design.

Luke Wroblewski wowed once again by combining his “greatest hits” around web form design with great new insight on collecting user input using mobile devices and beyond. Other highlights included the peek behind the curtain at 37signals (we’re fans, and use their products every day), Mark Trammell’s Twitter insights and Jared Spool‘s wise words about Vision, though the talk we found most inspirational was Stephen Anderson’s – a brilliant piece called “Serious Play: Designing Seductive Business Apps” that not only covered off nicely on the scope of the title but also offered principles and insights that can be applied more universally. Inspiring.

Stephen Anderson & Mental Notes

It also helped that Stephen was an engaging and dynamic presenter, which brings up the first of a few suggestions – that the overall energy of the conference could probably have used a shot in the arm. Granted, we’ve got our experience at AEA to compare this to – but there were a few things from an experience design standpoint that we thought could be tweaked.

Great authors and great designers don’t necessarily make for great speakers, and things tended to get a bit monotone at spots. Make no mistake, at conferences you get out of it what you put in – and there was plenty to be mined… evidence: Brian’s Sketch Notes. But to make it feel more like an “event” and keep things crackling, maybe pulling back from 75 minute presentations to a tighter and punchier 30-45 would help. For talks that got deep into execution that sometimes weren’t relevant to the entire audience, the next attention-getting topic shift was a little too far away.

Witticisms From Jason Fried, 37signals

Also, as far as execution goes – it was indeed fascinating to hear how web apps like Netflix and Basecamp were dreamt up and iterated. However, several talks were very focused on lengthy, in-depth use cases that not everyone could necessarily relate to. Certainly there were nuggets in there for people to take away and match up against their own experiences/organizations, but they weren’t always clearly pulled out as usable tips and pointers that could be more universally/practically applied. Put simply, there was more “here’s what we did” than “here’s what we did, here’s the broader concept it exemplifies, and here’s how you might think of applying it.”

Still, these are minor quibbles with a conference still finding its feet. The crew of speakers was down to earth, good hearted, and approachable – there was a great sense of community in the room and a sense of common purpose. The Twitter stream was equally collegial and respectful, and though it contained few new insights from attendees, it did provide great bite-sized takeaways for those unable to be there in-person.

Tools Of The Trade, As Suggested By Mark Trammell

If you’re looking for a solid conference to attend and are interested in the topics, you’ll certainly get good bang for your buck from this one. There’s one more stop on this tour in 2010 – July 12-13 in Seattle…so don’t delay!

Memorial Day w/ The HTC Incredible

About three weeks ago, I spent an excessive amount of time in a Verizon Wireless store and finally made the decision to order the new HTC Incredible. I’ve been in the market for a smart phone (my first!) for some time now. I played with a couple of friends’ iPhones when they first came out and really loved the touch interface and the variety of apps. Then another slew of friends picked up Motorola Droids and, once again, I found myself green with envy. Yet I waited, wrestling with the knowledge that the next best thing is always 3 or 4 months away from being released.

The HTC ended up winning out over other smart phones for a few reasons:

1. I was already a Verizon customer so it was a simple upgrade
2. It was being touted as a multiple app running beast (very appealing to the multi-tasker in me), and
3. I thought there might be more interesting apps coming out of Google’s Market than the more strictly moderated iTunes Store

After running around all holiday weekend with it by my side, I think I made the right choice.

Observations:

Easy setup: Even though I was upgrading from an older model phone (Motorola W385), I was able to transfer my contacts without any issues using Verizon’s Backup Assistant app. The Incredible downloaded them all, sorted through the rather disorganized mess of numbers/addresses/emails and did a great job of linking everything together into an usable directory (finally!).

QR Barcode

Fun apps: I immediately downloaded a number of apps that I had heard about, like Barcode Scanner, Pandora Radio, FourSquare, Google Sky Map, and a new battery widget that let me easily manage the WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and screen brightness. I’m really taken with the Barcode Scanner, as it ties right into Google Shopping so you can quickly check out price ranges on anything you can scan. It also supports QR Codes, which you may or may not have seen before. They can be used to quickly share a URL or short message and are great for accessing something quickly on a mobile device without having to type anything.

Holy 8MP Camera, Batman: I’m exceedingly impressed with the camera. It’s not the high megapixel count that does it for me, but the performance of the autofocus. My last phone came with a VGA camera which was useless unless I wanted to know what something would look like if I was underwater with a clear plastic bag over my head. The Incredible on the other hand takes great pictures and the Photo app is very intuitive. I also like the app FxCamera which provides a number of filters to apply to photos to make them look like Polaroids (nostalgic), overexposed (hipsterific), or Warhol-esque (groovy).

These camera pics turned out far better than I expected...

Battery usage: The battery life seems to be alright. I’m very aware that anything I decide to do will use it up but I’ve been good about enabling/disabling services as needed. I can definitely go through the whole day on less than one charge. (As I’m typing this, the phone has been up and running with moderate usage for 8 hours and I still have 70% of the battery left). Because my previous phone could go for 3 or 4 days without a charge, I initially felt cheated – but the Incredible has far more in common with a laptop than a phone. That point of view helped massage my expectations into something more reasonable.

I feel the need – the need for speed: Thus far I’ve experienced nothing but great performance while navigating features and running apps. The phone is very responsive and the haptic feedback (the buzz whenever you click or type) is very nice. Last night I started running all sorts of apps to see if I could make the phone sweat and, even while using Google Earth, Layars, generating directions in Navigator, playing music, and recording a video; the phone never stuttered. I don’t know if that should be expected but I was impressed.

Call quality and messaging: To be honest, the calling is only so-so. My last phone was unable to do anything but make calls and double as a doorstop, but it did both of those things exceedingly well. The Incredible falls down a bit here. I do like the way it handles SMS messages, however. It displays them like a chat log, increasing the feeling of natural conversation rather than uni-directional texts.

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Anyway, my iPhone lovin’ friends at Think Brownstone were interested in my gut-level thoughts on usability with this very alien device after the first 72 hours and I thought maybe you would be, too. Has the battle for the smart phone throne just gotten even more intense? For me, it’s over. For now, anyway.

Cool ≠ Useful

If you’re anything like me, then whenever a friend sends or posts a message that says, “this is cool…” you follow the link. And if you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time playing with cool things on the interwebs, eventually forwarding them on to other friends until it grows faster than Heather Locklear’s recommendation for Faberge Shampoo.

Here’s the thing we all seem to forget: cool doesn’t always mean useful. Cool just means cool. Cool is relative and difficult to measure while useful is easier to recognize. Those of us who like to build things that are useful like to believe that useful is universal, but that’s not always the case (see Charron v. McIntire).

NYT Globe Interface

To me and the friend who forwarded it to me, the NYT interface for looking at images and videos from news feeds is cool, but its usefulness eludes me. Ignoring the bugs I discovered with the search field on the right, I’m not really sure when I’d go to this for a purpose. I go to it to play, and I have fun. Then, when I want to find an image about a specific news story, I use a well crafted image search tool like Google or Bing. Why? Because they fulfill my need in the most convenient way. If, someday, I have a need to see the frequency and location of images on the earth, I may go to a globe-based navigation tool. For now, it just adds a cognitive and psychomotor load that I don’t need. Don’t get me wrong, I still like to spin the globe and play with the stacks of photos, it just doesn’t fulfill any needs of mine other than entertainment.

A whole host of UI and UX companies out there have elaborate navigation systems that show off the design and flash-coding skills of their staff. I’m not going to point out any because that’s not our style here at Think Brownstone. They’re easy to find, I’m sure you’ve seen them, and once again if you’re anything like me, you’ve said, “Hey, that’s cool!” and forwarded it on to a friend. The problem with those fancy navigation systems is that they may impress your friends and attract the attention of a client or two, but are they doing anything to help your users?

One of the fundamental principles of design is to focus on goals: in the UX world these goals are most often Business Goals and User Goals. The designer’s job is to address those goals. Period. If you have determined that one of your goals is to provide entertainment, then the “cool” types of interfaces that require users to invest time to learn how to interact and explore for content are legitimate options. If not, then all you’re doing is appropriating your user’s time and they don’t like that. No matter how good the content is, if you obscure it, they’ll go somewhere else.

Don Norman likes to use the impossible teapot to demonstrate Cool v Useful:

Impossible Teapot: Cool, But Not Useful

If you’re a child of the 70s and 80s, think of it this way: you spent hours on end in a shady arcade somewhere navigating the mazes of Pac-Man (with an all Rush and Van Halen soundtrack, natch). It was entertaining. It was cool. In fact, it was so cool that a few days ago Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by putting a working version of the game as the banner on their search page. Hours of productivity were lost around the world. Google drew even more traffic to their site.

Google Pac-Man: Cool, But Not a Recommended Search UI

If Google Pac-Man was sooo cool, why didn’t they force you to clear the maze to conduct your search?
Because Cool ≠ Useful

Simple Things That Are Awesome

Sometimes you stumble on things that are simple and awesome. This Gmail feature is far from perfect, but I stumbled over it the other day. I was sending an email and referred to the attachments in the email, but forgot to attach anything. When I hit “send” I saw this:

Gmail

I played with the feature a bit and there are some holes in it… for instance, if I write, “In the attached files…” and don’t attach anything, I don’t get the same warning.

Perhaps it is looking for generic phrases that indicate attachments or perhaps they’re looking at my linguistic tendencies around attachments. Regardless, I’m sure the feature will improve over time. The main point is the intent is there. We know Gmail is looking at the content of your emails to place ads (hooray). While they’re there, they may as well do some good (non-sarcastic hooray).

Google Labs has a slew of lab features you can add to Gmail, including two of my favorites, “Don’t forget Bob” and “Got the right Bob?”. Pretty much any feature that involves Bob has to be good – everybody likes Bob.

We have been spending some time with our clients talking about the Google Labs model. Google didn’t invent the idea of fostering small R&D projects from within. One of the best examples of how lab projects can benefit a company is the story of 3M and Post-It Notes. Few people realize Gmail itself was a lab project as well. Fostering innovation from within and freeing it from the typical bureacracy of your organization can result in simple, awesome things.

Then, once you’ve built it, you can name it Bob.

Information = Action!

Recently I watched a highly recommended video of Eric Topol discussing the future of smartphones in health care and wireless medicine. The potential inherent in the technology he discusses is enormous…but it got me thinking a little more deeply about how this type of technology might affect human behaviors – and more specifically, how this type of information might affect them.

One of the issues with leading healthy lives is that people know that there are things that are “Good for You” and “Bad for You”, but they have traditionally had no way of conceptualizing and internalizing just what that really means. In most cases, that kind of knowledge only comes with experience – sometimes when it’s already too late to change things. There’s a lot of wiggle room when defining “healthy” (plus, it varies significantly per individual), which is why we need more information to be consistent. More on that in a bit…

First, a disclaimer: I’m the type of person who likes more information. Give me HUDs and readouts, maps, charts, and figures! I want as much information as possible, about everything around me, and then I’ll sort through and reprocess it. For instance, my parents’ car has a cool little display that provides all sorts of information about the car; which doors are open, if the tire pressure is low, the temperature outside, which direction you’re driving, etc. It also has a gauge to show you both your overall and real-time fuel efficiency:

The Dashboard Setup in a Honda C-RV

As we learn to drive, we each develop a working mental model of how we think a car operates. I suppose I believed mine was pretty good but in fact I never really thought much about it. Once I started driving a car with a meter that told me exactly how much gas I was using, I found myself making conscious adjustments: accelerating a little softer, or laying off the gas to coast to a stop instead of slamming the brakes. These behaviors weren’t completely new to me, but that little meter helped reinforce them and made me more consistent.

Now let’s take that concept and apply it to our own health:

• What if your Smartphone helped you track your blood sugar levels, so that when you had an enormous slice of cherry chocolate cake you could see quite clearly the effect it had on you? How long would it take before the food selections you made and portion sizes would start to change?
• What about applying that same principle to cholesterol levels?
• How could continuous blood pressure monitoring help you consciously make decisions to control your stress levels?
• If you had access to a sleep diary like the one Eric Topol discusses, and you found out that the nights you had a late dinner or fell asleep with the TV on resulted in an hour or two less REM sleep, would you act on that information to feel more rested and alert?

For years we’ve obeyed the gauges in our vehicles, but we didn’t have gauges on our bodies and so it was easier to make decisions that deep down, we knew probably weren’t the best for our health. It’s going to be a lot harder to turn a blind eye to destructive health decisions with this kind of technology becoming available to the masses – and if that’s what it takes to turn more people onto the benefits of preventative health behavior, then I say bring it on!

Lessons in Redesign: Popular Contributors Know Their Audience

Some interesting things have been going on over at The Atlantic’s online magazine. Several days ago, the organization launched a redesign of the entire website.

Interestingly, none of the regular editorial bloggers for the site were pleased with the results. Political blogger Andrew Sullivan showed his displeasure in a few fair, critical, complementary and informative entries on his blog. According to the original entry, Sullivan’s blog accounts for 55-60% of the traffic for The Atlantic.

Rather than launch into a lengthy deconstruction the entire redesign to extract the good ideas from the bad, I’d just like to point two elements of the process that could have been used to predict the outcome:

1. Andrew and his staff are constantly in touch with their audience. He says he has passed on feedback from his users to The Atlantic for the past three years. His blog is responsible for 55-60% of the site traffic, yet he wasn’t directly consulted by the redesign team for ideas.
2. Andrew admits that he “signed off in advance” based on paper prototypes of the redesign (except for the removal of the search tool). He takes responsibility for this misstep, which is appropriate.

Working with stakeholders is not only about buy-in. Content creators are often the closest to the users and can provide insight on not only the content itself, but how users consume the content. At the same time, content creators should not sit back and let redesign efforts happen without insisting on providing input. Content is not only about content, it’s about your connection to the audience. If you’re generating that much traffic, you have insight others cannot capture – find ways to share it.

The good news is that The Atlantic has continued to work through the concerns and has already begun to address some of the issues expressed by the staff.

OK, now two critiques:

• Removing a search tool on a blog that generates up to 300 posts a day doesn’t seem very wise (there’s a search tool on the parent site, but not on the blog).
• I’ve always regarded the continued reading feature that requires rendering an entirely new page as a naive attempt to increase pageviews. Come on, there are ways to track interest without frustrating the user.

Do You Believe In “It”?

As you read this post you’ll likely be able to identify an early interaction that made you conscious of “it” on a grand scale – for me, one of those would be using an “Automated Teller Machine” for the first time. 24/7 access to cash and all I needed was a card and a PIN – it was truly magical. Still, some folks were apprehensive about those machines – some fearing that they wouldn’t receive the correct amount of money, and some simply not understanding exactly how the machines interfaced with their accounts. Fair enough, but many of those trust issues have been ironed out over the years and today only the most stubborn banker still avoids ATMs.

Moving on, as I started making more customer service calls of my own, I became aware of another instance of “it” – phone trees.  Calling the airline, the phone company, the electric company…being directed through endless sub-categories only to reach an “answering machine” or be disconnected…terrible, hair-pulling experiences that haven’t improved much in 20 years.

What Is “It”?

The “it” I’m referring to is the endless march toward self-service that began sometime in the late 70s and early 80s as a way for companies to cut costs and outsource client and professional services to the customers themselves.  What may have seemed like a radical concept at the time is now ubiquitous. In fact, we’re so used to it that it only becomes obvious to us when it doesn’t work, and we really NEED some insightful help that is nowhere to be found.

I thought the image below was extremely telling of our collective response to the concept of outsourcing services to end-consumers (click to see in its full glory):

Courtesy Of Mike Sacks At www.mikesacks.com

Of course, almost everyone knows who IKEA is, and for the most part they do an excellent job creating a customer self-service model that works. However, what the illustration cleverly points out is that there can be a heavy burden placed on the end-customer when previously in-sourced roles and services (in this case, furniture assembly) are placed in the hands of the uneducated consumer without a full set of tools (clear instructions) to bridge the gap.

What Does This Example Have To Do With Customer Experience? 

More than you might think. If we go back to ATMs and phone trees, and think about all of the additional things outsourced to customers (those who don’t wish to pay a premium to continue to “have it done for them”) since, the list is lengthy – here are just a few:

• Pumping Gas
• Purchasing Stock
• Assembling Furniture
• Doing Taxes
• Instigating Legal Procedures
• Banking
• Checking Out (Retail)
• Booking Travel
• Managing Investments

Of course, the list will continue to grow, and will someday encompass areas we would today never consider as a category for self service such as professional medical services, or university education (although those areas are already becoming encroached by semi-self service).

Why Should We Care?

Well, last week I was at the grocery store checking out with my milk and eggs preparing for the impending nor’easter, and this is what I encountered:

Niiiiiiice. For All The Sordid Detail, Click To Enlarge

The user experience is so bad, the staff at the local grocery store has resorted to 3 different post-its with varying messages in the hope that the customer will read them before and during their use of the machine.  Need I say more?

The direct correlation on the web is that more and more applications and services are being placed in the hands of end-customers, and I fear that companies of all types (SAAS or on applications on-demand anyone?) are largely unprepared to fully understand and translate the needs of those customers in applications that are easy to use, and fully functional.  I suspect the “virtual post-it notes” will continue to grow in size as firms struggle with the onslaught of customer frustration they will unwittingly generate all under the guise of “making it easier for consumers to help themselves”.

If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Right

Don’t get me wrong, customer self-service can be a GREAT thing – for companies and customers alike. Back to the ATM – do you remember how things used to be? Trying to get to the bank before it closed (or risk being without cash for the entire weekend)? Being forced to wait in line for a simple transaction, behind folks with all manner of requests (large and small) and all degrees of financial (and social) aptitude? Who would want to go back there? And why should banks pay tellers to preside over the kinds of basic, repetitive transactions that can be handled by ATMs? The efficiency gained and amount of money saved that goes directly to the bottom line can be astronomical.

Once again, it’s about allowing innovative ideas like customer self-service to truly flourish by applying design thinking to their deployment. It’s about reducing the cognitive burden on users, providing the full set of tools necessary for interacting via the selected channel, and being honest about where the line should be drawn: sometimes the best solution will still require human interaction at some point. This in no way constitutes failure – after all, the goal is not simply to put as much of the process on the customers as possible, it is to drive them to completed transactions (satisfaction) as intuitively and efficiently as possible!

Facebook’s ‘Evil Empire” One Year Later

It has been nearly a year since I penned my original rant about Doomsdayers and Nay-sayers terrified about Facebook wanting to own their content. As many predicted, FB changed their entire business model and made a fortune selling all of those riveting lunch updates and pictures of sleeping cats. My guess is they’ll probably pull all ads from their site soon because the revenue they’ll make on all of that inanity is worth much more than the targeted ad revenue they could make off of a community of 350Million+ users.

Seriously though, in the comment thread for that posting, KS posted an understandable comment that the issue is more about privacy than content ownership. KS must be some kind of fortune teller, because the latest doomsday meme concerns Facebook making all of your content accessible to public search engines.

I fittingly put my feelings about this issue in my FB status last month. It was so funny, four of my friends copied it to their status… I practically went viral, yo:

Attention People: time to panic. As of forever, things you put up on the internet may be available for people to see on the internet. This is a clear violation of your privacy on this completely voluntary system. To disable this, go to your start button and choose “Shut Down.”

This posting mostly annoyed Mac users who could not find the start button…

Most of the rumbling calmed down once FB instituted a series of messages and annoying dialogue boxes to warn you that this meme isn’t 100% true. Then Zuckerberg opened his yap again and some chicken littles kept venting about it. Essentially, FB is allowing Search Engines to crawl the profile information that YOU determine is part of your public profile.

Many aren’t taking issue with the fact that FB has done this, they just take issue with the fact that the default settings made more of your information public than the average user would like. Novice users are probably completely in the dark. These points make sense, and are much less alarmist than the folks who are using the social networking site they (theoretically) despise to terrify the masses.

My Public Facebook Profile: Most of these people don't even like me

For me, I stand by my original thoughts: FB is a business. FB is enjoying tremendous growth. The more users, the more money there is to make. The last thing FB wants to do is make decisions that will cause them to go the way of MySpace. FB even reacts appropriately when they make a decision and forgot to consider the viral reactions of some alarmists. However, when they made the decision in 2007 to create PUBLIC profiles and recently to open them to PUBLIC search engines, it wasn’t part of some Orwellian plan to make a few bucks or deceive their users. Their thought process probably went something like this:

FB1: You know what – if an old friend of yours isn’t on FB and they’re looking for you, they can’t find you.

FB2: Well, they can search for your public profile through FB…

FB1: But wouldn’t it be better if they Googled your name and found a link to your public profile in the results? I mean, it’s a public profile, and that way they may join FB to become your friend.

FB2: Hey, good idea… it would certainly increase our organic search placement. Let’s get on that!

So, what’s the lesson here? It’s not really the privacy issue as much as it is the way FB approached the change. Somehow they have to work into their updates a communication plan to explain exactly what changes they are implementing and why. They need to get into the heads of the alarmists and defuse the bomb before it goes off. They need to be proactive rather than reactive. That’s a tough order when they’re probably making hundreds of minor changes regularly…which ones are the alarmists going to pick?

Or they could follow the path they’ve been walking and lose the folks who are terrified of Big Brother lurking in the darkness. What does FB care, though? Those people only cause trouble and the noise doesn’t seem to be impacting their market share… yet.