A title as loaded as Usability is Dead needs some sort of explanation that a presentation can’t really convey.
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KForum – a Danish site serving all those involved in communication, gave me an opportunity and asked for a write up. You can read it here (in English).Hopefully the article goes some way in describing how as a UX community we need to start collaborating more and moving away from formulaic thinking. Creativity is back in a big way, fuelled by context and relevance… |
On Wednesday (17 June), I attended the SIGCHI Interaction Design Day at Copenhagen’s ITU. It’s an impressive building and apt to host an event about technology and our interaction with it.
I also did a talk about Usability and user centred design and how user experience is always key in what we make.
You can see the presentation on SlideShare here and I will be writing an article about it published next week. I have placed the notes here
The human brain is complex but this book manages to break it down into parts that we can relate to and is a very accessible and quick book to read.
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The author, Dr Susan Weinschenk, tells of us having three brains in one. Which certainly explains why it is so necessary to embark on research – with three brains how can we ever second guess our users?
She lays out how this complex system works but also states that the unconscious mind makes many of the decisions in our lives. By influencing the unconscious mind though design techniques, we can effectively persuade users to interact with our sites and become more engaged. |
The book is not really a practical, by the numbers guide, but more about the concepts of why users do the things they do. As such its worth buying and an enjoyable read that gives us insights that are backed up with actual contemporary research.
Verdict: This book may well do for persuasive design techniques what Steve Krug’s Don’t make me Think did for usability. If you are involved in user experience I recommend reading this book.
Last month, at The Next Web 2009, Chris Sacca – investor in Twitter, was interviewed on stage and also chaired a panel about the Twitter ecosystem. The following post is a combination of his comments.
Before being a major investor in Twitter, Sacca worked for Google, where he ran the the alternative access division, whose ambitious aim was to get everybody connected to the internet. They mostly focused on user experience and solving user problems.
Google – a company misunderstood
He describes his proudest moment of that time, was to help people understand Google. He describes Google as a place of radical socialism with employees who want to change the world and where money is not a driver.
He said that often Google does not want to be a dominant player, they would rather be a catalyst to change an area, to allow users to choose a decent space for themselves.
It is a socialist viewpoint, (however capitalist it may seem) and if the consumer doesn’t have a choice we all suffer. He iterated that it is an open and honest view. It allows any user direct interaction without intermediaries.
Startups still excite
Sacca feels that Google’s monopoly of search doesn’t harm the consumer, or the quality of results. Users choose which is best.
In the same spirit, if you start a company and do not use your own product and are not passionate it will undoubtedly fail.
Food and rent is the biggest expense for a new company. Product guys are the helpful ones. Companies are not built on business plans. They are built on prototypes. Hacked together.
Simple and accessible
Sacca strongly asserted that Twitter is a cultural and not a technological revolution. The product itself is not a complex solution. It has 140 characters as its USP. With both Blogger and Twitter it is simplicity that is at its core. There is no training there. It is accessible immediately.
[Twitter] will be surpassed if it doesn’t evolve or listen to it’s users. Public conversations are very engaging, but it must enable interactions, must allow imagination.
Users distinguish success from failure, that is the real differentiator. He feel’s Twitter’s 600 million users are all in on something. It is hyper transparent, loose, flat – where all are equal.
He strongly believes that Twitter is becoming real time search. Where it is all about recency and relevancy, it is the engagement platform where conversations happen. That is why it is important, they are public conversations.
He then referred to the Obama campaign, in which he played a major part and the power of the Twitter platform to enable voters to speak directly with the president within four clicks. There were questions about everything, with no filtering and a chat about the country’s status in front of everybody.
The Twitter growth spurt
He predicts that Twitter, though big, will be bigger because it grows faster than a virus, it just keeps growing, maybe more than anything else. When it is simple we underestimate the elegance of it. It is an empowering and immediate communication channel.
Sacca and the panelists firmly believe that Twitter will make money – it is the finger on the pulse, the way of measuring and interacting with the largest opt-in communities in the world.
It is a platform where business can be built on top of it. He feels generally reporting of events is not good, and so Twitter is becoming the quality filter in this area.
Rules of Tweet
Sacca put up his own rules for the Twitter nation. He said that we need to be aware that we are stealing time from users every time we post.
Be aware of providing value, do not write rubbish, do not dilute your personal ‘brand’, treat each other with respect and don’t align yourself with personalities for the sake of celebrity.
He said it is the largest audience you will ever communicate with. It makes you a better and happier person. Its positivity is based on how strangers default to positive interaction with each other.
By setting internal values then publishing externally, the followers are making the Twitterers accountable people. It helps to keep them honest and helps them to achieve their highest ideals.
What’s the big deal?
Hearing Chris Sacca, it was evident that his enthusiasm and belief in Twitter was always going to be a bit of a Twitter love-fest.
However, there is no denying the importance of Twitter. For me, it initially had a huge so-what factor, so simple, so clunky, so basic, so who cares?
But if you look at the deeper underlying importance of a platform that allows people to converse across time zones and locations and to exchange relevant and interesting material in a simple, no-frills interface then it is important.
Tie in metadata, real time search, the ability to see what like-minds think about and see as useful, and it becomes something really important. It is timely, powerfully instant, but most importantly contextually relevant. There is a question about scalability but it represents the cultural change in usage that both Jarvis and Keen talked about.
It could be the product that signifies the tipping point from the organization to the user. The user is becoming more vocal, more organized and has real influence. The accepted rules of engagement on the web are changing because tools such as Twitter allow an immediacy and relevance that only human connections can supply.
We know the engagement metric is so important, but it is the conversation that actually tells you the feelings of a product, person or place. For this reason alone, Twitter is providing the means of conversation, which in turn gives us the meaning behind audience engagement. Now that is a big deal.
After Jeff Jarvis had his take on Google we had somebody from the inside – Bradley Horowitz.
Horowitz was the man who advised Yahoo to buy Flickr and after redefining his role there he made them acquire Delicious. Previously he had formed Virage (video categorization engine) and sold it to Autonomy after dropping out of his degree at MIT Medialab where he worked on image categorisation technologies.
It was no wonder with his background that metadata, context and categorisation formed an underlying theme to this talk. It was good to see these foundational elements of online user experience given the focus they deserve.
Moore’s law and the aim of Google
He stated that Google’s main perspective on technology was thinking big as a means of innovation. With this philosophy they have changed the world as we know it and their impact is massive. As silicon valley realised Moore’s law to be true, Google imagined a world where bandwidth, size and storage was not a problem. In doing so they created applications such as GMail.
Google’s aim is to provide excellent search to enable users to store and find everything. It is to solve one of the world’s biggest problems -that of information overload, its loss and its retrieval.
Ubicomp is here
He told of everyday devices that have achieved ubiquity – that can now record your entire life digitally. Ubiquity is here. The mobile phone is everywhere.
The problem as he saw it was that you can record everything but you don’t get another life to review it all. The challenge is harvesting metadata and defining context to give meaning to what we do.
So how do you use the information to a useful end? Horowitz (and Google) knows that the big problem is that we are dying from the start. Moments evaporate from the start. This fact drives Google to be fast. Latency is a key focus because time is of the essence. By being fast they give back the time to the world by speed of its services.
Be aware of our human condition
He told of, meditation, sleep, walking the dog that gives him perspective. A very pertinent point was that technology needs to adapt and enhance the human life. He asked how do we solve attention management? The moments of life that need revisiting amongst the morass of spam and junk we all wade through.
A key observation was that metadata is as important as the data itself. Even from biosignals. He stated that Wetware (using people’s minds and bodies as systems) will be as important as software or hardware.
Image understanding is an amazingly complex process if you expect to use machines to do this. Using humans enables it to be easy to create understanding around cognition of imagery. People can do this easily to give meaning to images and Flickr shows that by a simple means to ensure that the people can tag easily.
Though I appreciate his statement I feel we have along way to go before the wisdom of crowds can be used effectively here.
He stressed that a few dedicated curators can create value for the majority. Indeed, the collective intelligence and interestingness creates a relevance metric that goes beyond just page rank algorythmns. We see this in blogs, twitter streams and facebook communities but the curators still control the quality. That is an important point I feel, and one that Google obviously realises.
Then he briefly showed a mental model that reflected the Google approach to data, starting at signal and working upwards.
From a signal you may reach the pathway to enlightenment I guess, but it certainly has a clarity to it that is admirable.
The web is broken
What we did get from this talk was a refreshing personal perspective on the world of technology and how it affects us. He iterated that the conference had talked a lot about the current web, Twitter and real time search but he urged us to think about the real future.
In closing Horowitz stated how the browser is a bad model. It is not the optimal system to deliver the next web, the model is terribly broken, latency, code storage and caching are all frailties that have consumed countless lifetimes of development time.
He asked us to think about the ‘what if’ scenarios, take the long view and where the world is trending. Solving the problems that we expect to have tomorrow.
Create space in life
In many ways when somebody talks from Google you know they will not divulge what they do exactly, or certainly not their next step. They, like other successful companies, keep their products shrouded in mystery (ironic in this culture of open source and collaborative working don’t you think?).
With a slight nod to those who were wanting to know the next move he stated it will be Google Voice. A way of leveraging voicemail into the digital life and Gmail.
Closing the circle completely, he asked ‘how much do you want to invite tech into your life?’. He reminded us to create space in our lives.
That coming from Google was a surprise – or was it really? Their aim after all, is to make our lives easier to manage in the information age. Surely that can only be a good thing.
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