Mail Quotas, Shortcuts, & Other Horrors

OK, a quick one - I just sent a message to a friend of mine who works at Temple University in Philadelphia. Immediately I received a message with the subject “Returned Mail: Over Quota”. Now, I know enough about e-mail and technology that I was able to decipher the following to find out what had happened:

…which is a darn good thing because below that little “inline message follows” indicator? Yeah, you guessed it: there was no message following (although even if there was, that still might not get the point across (by itself) to some users).

1. Skip The Tech-Speak, Threepio
So my first gripe is that this is a techy and jargon-heavy message that wouldn’t make sense to a lot of people who, based on the appearance of this message and lack of any kind of context, might either a) think it was spam and delete it or b) not have any idea what it was trying to convey and in both instances might very likely have no idea that the message hadn’t actually been received by the intended recipient. We all know that universities frequently deal with time-sensitive and confidential information, so wouldn’t it be nice to let the sender know what had happened in no uncertain terms? What is a permnent delivery error? What exactly does that mean? Something like this could mean the difference in an application being received on time or something even more serious. It’s unacceptable for that to be at the mercy of poor interaction design.

2. Beyond the Message, Look at the Vehicle
In some ways though, even the poor messaging is beside the point because the sender of the message should NEVER be the recipient of an e-mail like this. Why? Because THEY CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. If I send a message to someone whose mailbox is over its size limit, well, that’s on them - it’s not MY fault - why am I made to feel like I’m being shut out with little more than what is essentially a “tough luck, kid”? What if I don’t have any other way of contacting them? What do I do now? If I’m crafty enough I might make a call to Temple to find a phone number or a name of someone else in the department I might be able to contact…wasting my own time as well as those who have to route my call (or another e-mail to an inbox that isn’t over its size limit).

3. Mail Quotas? Seriously?
OK, Temple is a large organization and I guess I understand mail quotas on some level, particularly if students are on the same server and they’re sending large movie/sound files around, etc. But for business users to be hamstrung by those same quotas feels incredibly inefficient. Regardless, here’s a newsflash: as a user; I don’t really care what your technical issues are - the experience is all I know, and it’s not good. Space and storage is cheap these days…so this feels antiquated. But even so, I’ve worked with organizations that have mail quotas that are instituted much more intelligently - the recipient gets a message that their mailbox is over it’s limit, all messages are still received, and they simply can’t SEND any messages until they clean up their room. It’s still a little old-school, but at least it’s on the owner of the mailbox to fix it.

GRRRR.
This is just one of those days that poorly designed technology is infuriating me. Add the fact that I had to type this twice because during my first attempt I hit “Backspace” (I know, hitting Backspace while typing? I should be committed) and my browser decided I wanted to go to the previous page and erased what I was typing. Thanks, Internet Explorer! That was a helpful keyboard shortcut!

And how about when I went to a page earlier to demonstrate some functionality, started typing my username and password, and after a few seconds the page automatically placed the cursor back in the first field and I exposed my password to the whole room?

As a designer, I know there are technical reasons these things happen. Let me reiterate: as a user, I don’t CARE. Enough apologetics. Fix it.

It doesn’t have to be this hard people. It really doesn’t.

Logitech Customer Support Gets It

Two years ago, my fiancé bought me some portable Logitech speakers for my birthday. I put them through their paces for two years, and they worked great – you could charge them up and take them anywhere.

Recently, I turned them on and the volume was blaring (they do get pretty loud too). Each time I tried to turn down the volume, the speakers would just turn it back to the max all on their own. I logged on to http://support.logitech.com to look for answers, and was greeted with multiple options to find my product: Search by Image, Search by Name.

I immediately found my product by looking for the image:

This approach is awesome; who actually knows what their product is called? Especially when technical items often either have cryptic names like “LS21” or else have names that are too similar to one other like “Pure-WiFi Anytime” versus “Pure-WiFi Anywhere”.

After selecting my product, I followed a few troubleshooting steps. The steps were easy to follow and complete, but unfortunately nothing solved my volume problem. I had to resort to the dreaded “Email Us” troubleshooting contact form.

I reluctantly filled out the lengthy form and sent it away to cyber-space, but did not expect anything – especially within the first few days. They must get millions of these, right?

I immediately got an automated response: “Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours.” While that’s a nice touch, it doesn’t do much to instill confidence. However, about 16 hours later, I got a very polite reply from “Ron”:

“Hello Amanda, Thank you for contacting Logitech Technical Support. My name is Ron and I will be assisting you with Incident # 0923-00442.”

Ron asked me to simply send him my original purchase receipt, and he would send me a brand new replacement set of speakers since it appeared that the set I owned was defective. Great! But I couldn’t find the receipt. It had been two years after all, so I let Ron know the bad news.

Amazingly, the reply was essentially “no receipt? no problem!” Ron sent me an email with several UPS links:

I was even more impressed that when I clicked “Find the Closest Service Location”, it knew my address and was already showing me the closest locations.

So easy! I immediately packaged everything up, slapped on the label, and dropped in the nearest UPS drop box I could find.

A couple of days later, I got another email letting me know that they received my speakers and were shipping out a new set. All correspondence was done in an extremely timely fashion with complete follow-through.

Maybe that seems like an obvious and logical transaction, but the fact that I was able to relate the complete story in a few short sentences (where there were no “pain points”) is exactly the point. I am amazed that this was so easy, and that I actually got a new set without spending a dollar. But why am I so amazed by this? Shouldn’t this be the way customer support always works?

Most of us will agree that it usually doesn’t. It’s sad that we’ve come to expect such a low level of service from most companies that we’re essentially resigned to bracing for the pain whenever we begin these interactions. In fact, there are plenty of us who simply assume it will be a waste of time and energy and don’t even bother.

Kudos to Logitech – smart companies know that especially in these times, it’s the experience that will win you repeat business, and I will buy their products again based on this experience alone. They truly “get it”.

The Tyranny Of Choice Strikes Back

I’ve experienced a few things recently that have brought something I first read a few years ago back to top of mind – the idea of Tyranny of Choice. If you haven’t read the excellent article describing this phenomenon by Scientific American, do yourself a favor and download a copy of it here – courtesy of Swarthmore College.

The gist is that providing people with more choices is not necessarily a good thing – and in some situations can actually be debilitating. It makes sense – maybe you’ve had a similar experience to me: I’m in no way an expert on investment funds, but when it comes time to figure out where to put my money, I’m faced with a daunting list of options – and I’m such a novice that I can hardly even make heads or tails of the differences between them aside from a few very broad categorizations.

(Illustration Courtesy of Scientific American)

What’s worse, once the decision is made, since it affects me on an ongoing basis I continually ask myself “did I make the right choice? Was/is there a better one? How will I know? What am I missing out on?” As a result, there are plenty of people who just disengage altogether because they can’t or don’t want to deal with the various stresses associated with it.

So how can we tame this beast?

1. Don’t Provide Choices That Are Invalid And Prevent Users From Achieving Goals

The first time this resurfaced for me recently was at An Event Apart, during a usability session where Robert Hoekman, Jr. was doing on-the-spot usability reviews and was looking at a website for an airline (we’ll let it go un-named and give them a chance to act on the collective feedback of the audience at AEA). Even though the airline only flies out of certain airports, in their “select a departure city” drop down list there are hundreds of major and minor ones – many of which (or most of which, based on our results) they don’t even have flights out of.

Oof.

Is this an out-of-the-box list or something? Why in the world would they do this? Better yet, the drop-down for destination city includes the same list, which isn’t truncated in any way after the departure selection is made. If selections are made that aren’t 100% compatible with available flights, the user feedback is simply “Sorry, there are no flights that match your criteria.” This means that even if you are lucky enough to select a valid departure city, if you select an invalid destination, you get the message above and no prescriptive feedback indicating where the problem lies. Aaargh, we could spend paragraphs on this alone – but the faults should be obvious. The user experience is only a few notches shy of this.

2. Don’t Provide More Choices Than Are Necessary in the Interest of  “Showing Off”

Next I had an interaction that I’ve experienced plenty of times over the years in different guises. Without going into too much detail it boiled down to a desire to use valuable screen real estate to display numerous options and features that aren’t available (and therefore aren’t helpful) to users. This was an effort to show off the robustness of the product with all of the bells and whistles turned on. Instead of considering the tyranny of including choices that are smugly turned off, the thought was that a user would want to know why they couldn’t access those options and would try to find out how they could pay to turn them on. To me this is akin to visiting a car dealership and the salesperson trots you past every make and model on the lot regardless of your price range or other personal preferences and parameters. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, does it?

Walk The Lot With Me...

It’s OK to provide users with information about what other choices are available, but at best it should be when they ask for it – and at worst, it shouldn’t be a hard sell. Most people will want to get in and accomplish their goals quickly, intuitively, and with minimal distraction – not be constantly reminded of (and confused by) things outside of their workflow. Otherwise, your advanced user will see what you’re up to, and your novice will be confused and frustrated. Make your core product a killer, and people will ask what else you can do for them on their own terms.

3. Don’t Make Users Responsible For Making a Choice Unless Absolutely Necessary

This one is more of a stretch than usual and my example isn’t technology based, but I still feel it’s a great illustration of the mental strain that choices can create. Without getting melodramatic, our dog very recently succumbed to a debilitating disease and had to be put to sleep. There’s enough emotional baggage inherent in that as it is – but as my wife and I tried to decide what to do, we came to the conclusion that we simply couldn’t make the decision while it was a CHOICE. There would be too many “what if” questions; so we would do whatever we had to do (short of completely draining our bank account) if things were still at a stage where it was a “choice”.

Even when things were looking pretty dire, initial meetings with vets at a few locations had them saying things like “well, you could try acupuncture…or you could try putting the dog on wheels” – both of which would have done nothing for our dog in his particular condition, but were choices thrown out there (somewhat offhandedly, and I felt, irresponsibly – because of the pressure they placed on us) that confused us and made us wonder if we were doing the right thing. Those additional choices just didn’t seem consistent with what we knew of the disease and what we could see with our own eyes, but still we lost sleep over them.

Finally we met with a compassionate vet at Rau Animal Hospital who removed the tyranny of choice, explained the fallacy of the other proposed choices, and suggested to us that the most humane thing would be to let him go. While that was tough to hear, it felt like someone pulled a 10 ton weight off of us. The burden of choice had been removed, and we could make the decision to let our dog go without further loss of dignity or quality of life.

Rau Animal Hospital GETS IT

This is an extreme example with a heavy emotional component, but it proves a point – often times when you think you’re providing benefit by suggesting choices, it’s an easy enough thing for you to do but can have crippling effects on the novice users of your system. We’ve all interacted with clumsy systems that have way too many nodes of choice even when they could easily learn from individual user behaviors (ATM machines, anyone?), and some that even force you to make choices when there is only ONE OPTION (don’t get me started on the haphazard implementation of EZPass).

You don’t gain repeat business and loyal customers by increasing the amount of time someone spends interacting with your system – you gain it by minimal inputs required to accurately achieve a desired result, minimal cognitive (and emotional!) processing, and keeping advanced features and functionality available for the nerds who want to look for them but out of the way of those who just want to get on with their day.

An Event Apart: Gets It!

There’s only so much money/time one can allocate to attending conferences. When your skills and interests overlap several fields, the available choices can be daunting – and deciding which ones are worthy of investment can be a real head-scratcher. This is especially true since in my experience, every one I’ve attended has either been a (sometimes thinly veiled) shameless sales pitch or otherwise so poorly planned and managed that I’ve often come away feeling swindled.

This is why it is so nice to be able to finally have a conference recommendation that comes with no caveats: An Event Apart (AEA), from the same great folks who bring you A List Apart (which is, quite simply, required reading).

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the “show” with Carl and Brian out in Seattle, and thought it would be nice to write about it from the User (Attendee) Experience standpoint – and about why An Event Apart GETS IT.

Seattle Skyline, 5/3/09

1. They’re Non-Elitist

One of the things I dread about conferences (especially those with any sort of technical or design component) is that for whatever reason, the vibe often tends to be competitive, elitist, and condescending. In turn, this breeds all kinds of unsavory behavior from the participants who, their feathers ruffled, actively snipe at the presenters (and each other) on Twitter and other mediums – the whole thing feeling like a skirmish and making you contemplate a career change when it’s all over.

An Event Apart was so refreshingly different; I was actually a little shocked – all of the tweets were positive and constructive, and the snark-factor was conspicuously absent. The room was jam-packed with talent from around the globe (literally), and the mood was collegial, convivial, and downright pleasant (owing also, I must say, to the fabulous soundtrack hand-picked by founder Jeffrey Zeldman). It felt like a movement to collectively increase quality and aesthetic value in our work rather than a few individuals flexing – in other words, a hand reaching down to help you up rather than a muddy boot in the face.

A lot of this is due to the fabulous selection of speakers, which can be seen here – all at the top of their game, and willing to share their tricks of the trade freely, humbly, and with deft delivery that sometimes verged on stand-up comedy. It was highly entertaining – but going one further, these folks were approachable and accessible; all genuinely nice people who were happy to kick back a few at the happy hour as well.

Zeldman's Web Design Parfait (As Imagined By Brian)

See, smart people understand that there’s more than enough work out there for all of us – and if you know what you’re doing, you’ll get your share. They also know what Paul Arden tells us: “Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.”

And, for what it’s worth, what my great grandmother used to say: “you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

2. They’re Well Rounded

Plenty of others have gone into detail about the content each speaker presented – but suffice to say it was all solid, professional, and there were more than a few “things that make you go hmmm…” that I know I’ll be considering as I push forward. But what I appreciated most was the breadth of content – it wasn’t all code, it wasn’t all design, and it wasn’t all strategy – instead, it bridged the gaps between the various disciplines and took great pains to point out where the dependencies lie and the pitfalls of not paying attention to them.
For a bunch of folks from pretty varied backgrounds, the agenda was mighty coherent in that way – and added up to a sum greater than its parts. Personally, even though I’m not much more than a mercenary tinkerer when it comes to code, there were still ideas in Eric Meyer’s CSS sessions that made me seriously think about how I design interfaces – and I was glad that people like Kristina Halvorson (I think 9/10 of the room walked out of there with a new professional crush on her) were putting eloquent structure to things that I think about often.

Kristina H. - Content Queen (Picture by Warren Parsons)

So again, if your interests and skills lie in a few different areas, you might feel that attending a conference focusing on any one of them would mean consciously neglecting the others – AEA provides a well rounded sampler that goes deep into special topics in several disciplines that are specific to some and useful to all.

3. Yet, Focused

To that point, so many conferences have several “tracks” and breakout sessions, which I think results in more anxiety than anything else.

“Did I pick the right one?”
“Oh crap, this one sucks – I should have gone to that other session!”
“This session overlaps with the other one I’m interested in, I’ll never be able to make both of them…”

Wisely, AEA goes light on the quantity and high on the quality - with one solid track on the main stage that is rightfully called “the show”. Tightly and respectfully time-managed, not only does this adhere to “Don’t Make Me Think”, but it exposes attendees to ideas from other disciplines they can use in their own work that they might not otherwise experience if they were only chasing down things they thought were 100% relevant to their skill set. Again, this is part of the point of AEA.

This also has the added side effect of making the group itself a bit more coherent – and it feels like more of a shared experience, even for just the two days (which, BTW, is the perfect length). Therefore, at lunch, it isn’t a lot of “nice to meet you, what session were you at?” but instead it’s a lot of “woah, Ethan Marcotte’s visual presentation was SICK, right? We’ve got to do more of that…” and “I’m picking up Luke Wroblewski’s book RIGHT NOW – we run up against that stuff with clients all the time.”

More Musings Captured By Brian

Hats off to you, AEA – we came because we heard great things about you (and because we’re old pals with Greg Hoy from Happy Cog – and we know he wouldn’t hang his nametag just any ol’ place), but we stayed for the little minty malted milk balls. Oh, and because you KILL IT.

Mmmm. Little minty malted milk balls.

Coming Up For Air: Updates & Links

Hey there fellow Think Bloggers - we know it has been a while since the last update, but things have been really hectic around 201 Fayette the past few weeks - not that we’re complaining! I know some of the other folks have a few entries cookin’, but until we get something more substantial posted, a few updates and links:

1. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our latest job posting for a Sr. Experience Designer on LinkedIn.

2. We’re headed to An Event Apart in early May to frolic with some of the big dogs in the design world - and are very excited for a little Think Brownstone field trip (”make sure you know who your buddy is, and don’t lose them!”) . Maybe we’ll see you there!

3. I’m continuing to catch up on reading books people have been talking about for a few years now - the latest being Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (a great read so far, with fantastic case studies). As usual, I’m gathering a little collection of favorite quotes from it that I’ll be posting after I finish it…and am again reeling at the juxtaposition of this book and Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 masterpiece Player Piano (which I just finished). The experience and usability undercurrents in that book, particularly how they play against self-worth, belonging, and satisfaction, are simply mind-blowing - it just goes to show that these concepts are universal, timeless, and sociological; they are certainly not tied only to computers or the computer age, although they may be exacerbated by it.

4. If you have a few minutes, check out our buddy Jeff Lyons over at Used Wigs and his latest design rant about the design of The Huffington Post website - a super solid design critique delivered in his characteristically snarky (and hysterical) style.

Over and out.

The Wild & Crazy World Of Inhalers

My wife had asthma as a kid and it has been coming back recently, usually when it’s time for the dog to have a bath. Every few weeks she gets a mild attack, and the last time it happened (during a snow storm) I asked her “well, can we do something about this instead of just waiting for it to pass? What did you do in the past?”

The Culprit

That resulted in my heading out to buy an over-the-counter (OTC) inhaler for mild cases such as hers – only to find out that at 4 out of 4 stores I visited, after being told the aisle in which I could find them, they were no longer stocked. None of the pharmacists seemed to have a clue as to why, except for the last fellow, who believed they had been discontinued…but didn’t have any details. The only alternative? Being told that perhaps taking some medicines designed to treat a multitude of unrelated things might help, or taking the one product I could find (in only 1 of the 4 stores) that was supposed to treat asthma….which turned out to be a pill, subsequently took hours to kick in, and kept my wife up all night. Score!

We had no idea why OTC inhalers were no longer available, just that they weren’t – and nobody seemed to know why. Even those who really should be in the know said it was a pretty mysterious thing and didn’t have any additional insight. To me, that felt like reaching out for a banister that had always been there - and finding it missing. It would only take escalation of a few conditions to turn that into a trip to the emergency room instead of just up to the drug store. I want to know why I can’t get that good hot salsa at my local grocery store anymore, but I really want to know why I couldn’t get my wife something she had previously relied on when she was short of breath and there was no decent substitute. Not only does the lack of communication feel insulting and make me resent those responsible, it’s downright dangerous. When they discontinued the contraceptive sponge, everyone knew it (heck, I did, and I was just a kid) and was abuzz about it – where was the communication this time?

So I turned to my most reliable source of information – Crazy Aaron, who, before I ever even asked him, sent me an article he had read in “Spray - Technology & Marketing for the Aerosol Industry” (I kid you not), because he was intrigued by the human factors issues involved with the discontinuation of CFC emitting inhalers. You can’t make this stuff up.

Spray didn’t provide an answer as to why there are no new OTC inhalers (although the change from CFC is probably at the root of it), but it seems that the folks in charge of the change-over to the new HFA 134a-propelled prescription inhalers (buy stock!) missed a few opportunities when switching to the new product. New mandates were designed to improve the product, but resulted in a bit of a bumpy rollout (particularly for life-long users of the previous versions) due to a lack of understanding of the full needs and habits of the audience. Here’s what some good solid user-testing could have helped avoid/better manage:

1. Dose Counter

Older products would, as you got close to the last few doses, become noticeably weaker - a strong indicator to replenish. A new regulatory requirement states that every dose has to be the same strength and potency. Sounds good on the surface, but how do you know when it’s kicked? You don’t, until it is. We can all do the math on the dangers of that scenario. Suggestions included telling patients that they’d have to keep track of the doses they’d already used themselves (talk about user-friendly). But chalk one up for GSK: they are (so far) the only ones to introduce an inhaler that has a built-in clicker on the side that tells you how many times you’ve used it. Win!

2. Taste

Apparently, the old stuff that everyone was used to had a mild taste of “rubber or cabbage” (sweeeeet). Not ideal, but it went with the turf and people had learned to deal. There are two kinds of formulations available now – one without alcohol in it (which is more tasteless than before and surprisingly garners mixed reviews for that reason), and one that has 10% ethanol and produces a burning sensation at the back of the throat and can taste weird due to impurities in the alcohol. I wonder if the lack of a standing ovation for that little development came as a surprise?

3. Speed/Energy

Older products would give patients a “punch” of “chilled” air that many of them equated to it “working” and getting into their lungs faster. The newer products deliver a slower moving plume of air with finer particles in it – proven to be more effective. Some patients think it is weaker and not working as well as the old ones. Sounds like solid communication and training might be the answer for that one.

4. Finer Particles = Nozzle Blockage

Those finer particles mentioned above? They get the medicine to the lungs more effectively, but they’re more likely to clog the nozzle – so now patients have to regularly clean it to prevent that – something they never had to do before. Is there a mechanical fix here that was too cost prohibitive to undertake? Is there some alternative to adding additional maintenance chores?

Beyond that are a few other issues like storage (the new inhalers are much more susceptible to moisture and can be rendered ineffective much more quickly depending on the environment) and even electrostatic charges making doses less effective. Did they miss the boat entirely? Absolutely not – the negative feedback came from a minority of patients, and we all know that when it comes to pharmaceutical regulations, you can have your hands tied in so many ways that you’re lucky if you ever get a helpful product to market – let alone one that doesn’t have associated gripes. But, things like the dose clicker in particular are easy wins that some more focus on the psychological needs of the patient, not just the physiological, can achieve.

Oh, and I never did find out for sure why OTC inhalers seemed to have vaporized. Anyone have any idea?

8 Random Reasons You Shouldn’t Have Panicked Over Facebook’s New T.O.S.

This is a bit of a departure from typical Think Blog postings, but it’s been running through my head for a few days so I thought I’d share this with you.

Recently, Consumerist noted that Facebook (FB for those of us in the know) revised their Terms of Service (ToS) to claim more ownership of content posted on their site. Other media outlets quickly followed the story. FB quickly responded in order to avoid the perception that they were salivating over the pennies they could make selling your profile photo - but as the firestorm continued to rage, a few days later FB retracted their new ToS entirely.

Many people in our industry are hissing and honking about it like a flock of geese at a breadcrumb convention. Not me. Here’s why I’m not concerned and why you shouldn’t be either:

1. Your Stuff Isn’t Worth Anything

I know it hurts for you to hear this, but that status update about your toes needing to be waxed, that photo of your kid kissing a one-legged goat, and that poem you wrote about your love for cheese isn’t really of any commercial value to anyone. FB doesn’t want to publish it. I’m going to make an educated guess here and say that approximately ALL* of the content on FB has no commercial value on its own. The value of FB to you is the ability to keep in touch with other people - the value of FB to FB is that they can focus advertising to you based on your profile, postings and behavior. I did a quick survey of some artists (one musician, one painter) last year and they both speculated that the folks who don’t get over this culture of ownership will be left behind.

(*margin of error +/- .0001%)

2. Stealing Your Stuff Isn’t Part of Facebook’s Business Model

They make money off of advertising, not selling your 2nd grade class photo. Sure, they could explore other ventures like publishing a book of the 25 worst “25 Random Things About Me” lists – but if they were smart, they’d go to the authors and offer them a few bucks for the mention in the book. If they DO publish that book, they’re not that interested in the pennies they’d make from it. It’s an idea from their marketing department to generate more traffic to the site.

3. Copyright Does Not Transfer That Easily

If I had purchased Andy Warhol’s original Campbell’s Soup 1 in 1968 and then sold 1000 prints of it, I’d be in trouble. Why? Because owning the painting does not immediately grant me the copyright to it. Andy would still have to sign it over to me.

I’m fairly confident that if FB started taking the small percentage of content on their site that is valuable and attempted to make a mint off of it, no passive ToS agreement would stand up in court. Under US copyright law, ownership doesn’t transfer unless there is an agreement signed by the owner (that’s you). Read all about copyright law here. So is a passive ToS agreement sufficient? I’m sure there are several copyright attorneys who would love to charge you $200/hr to advise you on that.

So, back to that Consumerist article. Technically, when they say, “Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever, because it’s FB’s now”, they’re being irresponsible. You are still the copyright holder, you’ve just passively given FB some rights to it. As they tried to explain, they thought those rights would help them maintain a feature set.

4. You’re a Thief

This again applies to approximately ALL of us (with a few self-righteous exceptions). You are likely to have something that someone else created and should have been paid for. It is probably in your music collection, or in that box of VHS tapes in your basement. If you’re over 35, you may remember that mix tape you stayed up all night making for that special someone…well, the second you handed it over, you became a thief.
Many agree that copyright laws are antiquated and need to be changed to reflect our digital world. This is enough justification for most people to yank that copy of “My Humps” from their friend’s iTunes and store it in theirs. I renamed mine “Pachelbel’s Canon.”

Guess what? You stole it. Guess what else? The publishing industry is starting to care less about you doing so, because you don’t have a lot of money. Guess who has money? Facebook! To protect themselves they wrote a ToS that – for the most part – they wouldn’t have used unless they needed to protect that huge pile of money they roll around in like Scrooge McDuck.

5. Technically You Don’t Have the Right to Publish a Lot of Your Content Either

Here’s one example: everyone has a right to their own image. These laws exist to protect you from libel, slander and other malicious behavior. Consider that photo of your college roommate lying in a pool of his own vomit in his bed. If he becomes a senator and you want to sell the photo to the New York Times, you may not be able to do it. The NYT will ask you for the signed image waiver. You can’t use a private photo of anyone for commercial purposes without an image waiver. If FB wanted to sell your work of art to the paparazzi, they’d need more than just your passive acceptance of their ToS to do it. The paparazzi get around it by taking photos in public places, where we don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

6. You’re Not Stupid

At least I hope you’re not. Look, if you finalized your plans for an engine that runs off of water or if your new toe-tapper is going to be the next “Safety Dance” – then don’t post it on FB. If you’re putting something you believe has some kind of commercial value on the Internet then you ARE stupid. Don’t blame FB.

7. The Folks at Facebook Aren’t Stupid

FB’s main revenue stream is likely going to remain advertising. That advertising is dependent on their ability to grow their user base. If they start alienating their users by stealing their stuff and making what amounts to pocket change off of it, someone will come along and create a FB clone and promise not to steal content.
Remember MySpace? It was all the rage way back in 2006. FB stole a ton of their users from them simply by making their site more usable, extensible and avoiding the clutter of poorly placed advertising. This market is volatile and users are fickle. FB knows not to mess with you. Everything will be OK.

8. Their New ToS Was About Protecting Their Business, Not Getting At Your Content

So why did Facebook do it? Beyond Mark Zuckerberg’s reasons, my guess is simply to protect FB. Call me naïve, but I doubt they have a grand scheme to use your content for some huge commercial gain. They claim it’s because they need these protections to share your content with other users. My guess is that they also want to be able to promote FB without having to deal with your petty lawsuits. So if they put a screenshot of a friend list in an ad, your face happens to be in it, and you decide to sue, their battalion of lawyers can march into court with the ToS and make you go home.

What Have We Learned?

There actually IS a User Experience lesson in here: your decisions have consequences. FB wanted the content you shared with people to persist beyond your life on the site. Some lawyer realized that didn’t jibe with the ToS agreement… so they changed it AFTER THE FACT. This caused an uproar.

Good UX designers know the landscape they work in and try to anticipate issues before they come up. What’s the outcome of the FB issue? Someone in UX may have to go back and write up a series of requirements around your content being pulled from every nook and cranny if you close your account.

Well, hey, the economy is a mess and jobs are scarce, at least FB is keeping a gang of UX designers, developers and testers busy as they change their minds.

2/19/09 Update

Something I didn’t articulate in the original article, but should have: FBs speedy reaction and apparent desire to include users in the formation of their ToS is what we should expect and demand from our social networking providers.

We are also starting to hear some rumbles in the press that call for more effective privacy laws. As KS notes in the comments of this post - privacy IS something to be concerned about when participating in any Social Media outlet. Much of our current legal system is antiquated when it comes to User Generated Content and Social Media. Perhaps this event is the catalyst for some actual reform.

False Interfaces are Today’s Loc-Bloc

My parents did a fine job raising their children - five kids, and not a felon among us. Not yet, anyway.

In my opinion they made only one critical error in judgment. This error will haunt them for the rest of their lives - mostly because I refuse to stop bringing it up. Sometime in the late 1970’s, my parents gave me a massive set of LOC BLOCs. What? You have no idea what a LOC BLOC is? Nobody did. All the cool kids had Legos. I was a Pariah.

Warning: these are not Legos

My father cited that the LOC BLOC set was ‘close enough.’ My mother noted that we got a lot more LOC BLOCs than Legos for the money. That’s all fine, but as the Wikipedia article states:

Incompatible

The blocks were of a very similar grid pattern to the Lego system, but not quite. The knobs were too tall and spaced just a little bit off. The result was that children who owned the much cheaper LOC BLOCs were often excluded from group play with other children who owned the overpriced, but more popular, Lego bricks. - (wikipedia, 2/12/2009)

Anyway, where am I going with this? Well, the feeling I had when I first tried to attach my LOC BLOC rocket ship to my neighbor’s Lego space station is the same feeling of disappointment that I experience when I encounter app-like interfaces on the web only to learn that they only look like apps - they don’t act like them. For example, behold the “Pictures of the Week” interface on time.com:

Time.com's deceptive interface

When I encounter what looks like a photo flipper with dedicated “Back” and “Next” buttons - I expect the items within the frame to update when I click a button. In the example above, the entire page refreshes. This was acceptable in 1998, but today, clicking on that “Next” button and watching the whole page refresh just feels like someone went for the cheaper, “close enough” version. Why pretend to be something you’re not? At the very least, simple text links outside of the image frame might have deterred me from thinking I would be interacting with a self-contained app.

I understand that there are business reasons for not wanting an actual image flipper on your site. Page refreshes provide those much-desired view counts advertisers want. Just don’t trick me into thinking I won’t have to sit through an entire refresh when I click your button. Apps are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and even casual users now have expectations regarding the style and speed with which they react. Be what you are, not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or, a LOC BLOC in the Lego pile.

UPDATE: there is hope out there. Some traditional print media outlets are exploring actual app behaviors in their interfaces - such as the New York Times’ Article Skimmer Prototype. Now, if I can only resist the temptation to rob a toy store for a set of Legos, maybe I’ll make my Mom proud and run for public office.

Mario and Zelda Get It

The last time I had a game console in my house (that wasn’t in a box in the attic), it was in my dorm room – a shiny new Super Nintendo that provided many hours of “nothing-better-to-do” fun often accompanied by a blasting soundtrack of Rush and 90’s grunge. I’ve always been a fan of video games but have resisted the urge to own a console since, for two reasons: (1) on subsequent systems the games seemed to go in the direction of becoming so complicated and needlessly complex that it just became unappealing, and (2) I felt like there were much more productive things to do with my time.

While the latter may still be true, it was the former that was the kicker. Sure, there have been a lot of studies showing the benefits of gaming such as building hand-eye coordination and enhancing problem-solving and relational skills (personally, I recently had a near-miss in the car that would have proven devastating had I not reacted the way I did – and I know without a doubt that the somewhat unconventional action I took was due to my video-gaming past) – not to mention the relationship building that is possible with more than 1 player - so it’s easy to make the argument that it isn’t completely “wasted” time.

But what DOES feel like wasted time, for me anyway, is thumbing through a two inch thick book of complicated button combinations to be prepared for everything a game will throw at you and all of its possible permutations, before even turning the darn thing on. It’s the same reason that complicated board games can be such a drag the first few times you play them.

So, you guessed it, for Christmas this year my wife suggested that we get a Wii. But where I’m going with this isn’t to talk about the more advanced and physical method of interacting (not that it isn’t the coolest EVER – we’ve got Wii Fit and the dancing game and the whole nine, and LOVE it) – but is instead to talk about how the better titles use the elaboration theory to teach while the user (learner) is immersed in the game rather than the “read first, then play” approach.

It isn’t an entirely new concept in video games (or software tutorials, for that matter), and I’ve seen it done with varying levels of success in the past. But being a fan of the classic franchises (Legend of Zelda, Mario Brothers) I of course had to pick up the latest installments – and they really, REALLY get it.

Both games are actually deceptively complicated – and they do indeed have a ton of different button combinations (with the added complexities of various hand movements on the Wii) for the numerous settings and levels. If it were all presented at once in a manual, it would be a daunting volume. Instead, when you begin the games, you can only perform the most basic maneuvers. As you encounter new enemies and problems, there are characters and signs and things that give you information and elaborate on techniques you’ve learned previously, teaching you the new twist you need to know to get past the present obstacle and ones like it in the future. It’s all presented in small chunks, just-in-time for the task at hand, with immediate practice and feedback, and before you know it your wife is yelling at you that “you have to use the Z button and wave the nunchuk back and forth to build things on this level! C’mon!”

But think about it – that last paragraph? Replace the game-speak with dance terms and the progression in a beginner’s dance class is identical. This is one reason why the Wii and these titles in particular are a breath of fresh air – they harken back to a simpler and more effective way of ramping people up to complex behaviors that existed before this type of technology (and technical writers) existed. They’re breaking the trend toward heavier cognitive loads being thrust upon users that some of that technology spawned.

In one of the classes I teach I always harp on applying Keller’s ARCS model to your (instructional) designs – and in particular I’m impressed at how well the techniques discussed above get at the Confidence and Satisfaction pieces of that model; concepts that can sometimes be a little esoteric.

There are certainly many more ideas we can take from games. It’s not a bad idea to look there for inspiration since the percentage of people that play them is growing at a huge rate - even moreso now that platforms like the Wii have blown the doors off of the traditional gaming demographic. Conventions that began with video games are slowly infiltrating other types of media if you know where to look. I recently pitched the idea of “unlocking” additional content in a video game style to encourage medical professionals to voluntarily progress through a system, and it went over like gangbusters. So “wasting” a little time here and there can actually add some additional ideas to your design toolbox.

Also, it’s just fun.

Refresh Philly Recap

Earlier this week, Russ and I presented at Refresh Philly. The best way to describe Refresh is to quote from their site:

Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.

The Refresh Manifesto:

Let’s Gather Great Minds

Let’s Share All Of Our Knowledge

Let’s All Grow And Learn

Let’s Promote Local Talent

Let’s Be More Than We Think Can Be

Let’s Make Our Cities Better

We were preceded by two great presentations: Shaun Gering showing off Chirp - (a new tool for online communities for TV viewers from CIM) and Tom Boutell from P’unk Ave walking us through Symfony, a technology solution that employs a full-stack framework and a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5. Our presentation was titled Experience Design Step 1: Starting on the Right Foot and focused on the first step of any design project: Problem Statements and SMART Goals.

One of the great things about Refresh is that it’s wide open - the members get to define what their intentions are and how they will execute the Refresh Manifesto in Philadelphia. Our interpretation was that this is a unique opportunity in the design & development community to use our skills in an altruistic way to improve the city - however we, as a group, decide where we can have the most impact. Russ’s analogy of us all being like the “Superfriends congregating at the Hall of Justice” focused on the fact that some of the brightest designers and developers in the Philly area were overlooking our city on the 45th floor of the Comcast Center looking for ways to improve it. We opened the floor to a discussion of the types of things that could “Make Our City Better” - trying to be open-ended and idealistic about it in order to eventually come up with some goals and then figure out what skills and technology could be used to achieve them rather than the other way around.

What was even more exciting to me were the conversations that occurred after the sessions. As the crowd dissipated, everyone was buzzing over what Refresh would/could become. The Think Brownstone crew retired to a local watering hole with some friends to talk about where we fit into the Philly design community. The next day, Tom posted an entry on the P’unk Ave blog that began a discussion over the difference between front-end, back-end and design - and what the most productive relationships between those in each camp might look like. Jonny Goldstein posted a napkin sketch of our presentation.

I hope Russ’s superhero metaphor continues to prove itself: by day we could be mild-mannered competitors, vendors and clients, but by night we could band together to use our talents to refresh our communities. It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.