Random UX

Random thoughts, questions, observations, infographics, links and video about user experience design.

[randomux-blog]

Figure out your community, [and] what you know then walk in the opposite direction. Groupthink [is] both boring and dangerous.

Jan Chipchase

Corporate anthropologist, Nokia Design, on what it takes to become a successful user experience researcher.

http://twitter.com/janchip/status/3733324296

[randomux-blog]

The Vendor-Client relationship in real world situations

How many times have you had a client who approved, accepted and used your work, then tried to short you when time came to pay the invoice? I've heard too many stories about bad clients and experienced one or two of my own.

Since the global economic meltdown became evident in late 2008 I've heard more stories of this and other kinds of unethical behaviour than I ever have. All too often, the cautionary tales come from user experience professionals.

Is there something endemic to UX that makes us more prone than other specialists?

The video is funny because of the truth in its pointed humour: There is no other context or endeavour in which this type of behaviour is acceptable. So why do clients think that it is acceptable in a vendor-client service relationship?

Source: http://www.vendorclientvideo.com/

[randomux-blog]

It was September.

The highway stretched westward to the horizon on a long upward grade. I drove over a rise into a wall of white: Snowfall so heavy that it erased the landscape. In the failing light, the rearview mirror reflected a ribbon of road parting freshly mown fields of green and gold, strewn with gargantuan rolls of hay. Ahead, the sudden summer snow storm and my destination: Banff.

Three harrowing hours later, through one foot of snow, ice and fierce winds that nearly blew my car into a mountain lake, I arrived. It was my first trip to Banff and my first time at Canux. It was worth the journey.

I'm an independent user experience practitioner who is very active in my community. I've made Canux my destination three times in a row, through good years and the turbulence of the 2008 global economic meltdown.

I spend a great deal of my time mentoring and guiding junior UXers and peers, and helping them solve tough problems. I spend even more time creating opportunities for diverse UX practitioners to meet, interact and learn from each other to build a real, sustainable UX community that reaches beyond boundaries.

As an independent UXer, Canux is the most useful, enjoyable and best investment I've made in my career. Each time, I have left Banff with new, practical skills, new perspectives, new energy and been newly inspired to create great experiences that make people's lives better. I share that knowledge with my community and those I mentor.

Senior UX practitioners like me rarely have good opportunities for professional development and mentorship. Over the last couple of years, I've travelled around the world to find those opportunities. A friend observed that I've attended more events than anyone he knows and asked how he could get as much professional development. I told him he would have to quit his job and pay for it out of his own pocket, as I have. It's an expensive investment that doesn't always pay off.

Canux is one of the few events that is useful and meaningful to senior practitioners. Unparalleled access to thought leaders with perspective, insight and mastery that I haven't yet attained are among reasons why Canux is a must-attend event. It's a rare respite from daily demands to interact with a diverse group of fellow UXers.

The Canux 2009 theme -- doing more with less -- resonates in the most challenging economic environment I've faced in my career as an independent UX practitioner. It is essential for me to gain new skills that put the doing-more-with-less ethos into tangible practice.

I just concluded a project with a mid-sized corporation. The client wanted a fully developed product on half the necessary budget in a third of the time required. It didn't help that no invoice was paid on time. Although we had great successes, the project was cancelled because of a client-side issue.

Clients want more than ever. Their budgets are smaller. We're pressed to show a return faster than ever.

My first trek to Banff for Canux and the client story encapsulate what I face daily: Great hope and optimism at the outset; sudden changes in conditions and plans; embracing unexpected challenges; balancing unknown risks; evaluating and adjusting strategies; and celebrating and learning from successes and failures along the way.

The journey is the experience. It is that experience which compels me to return to Canux every year.

(Photo courtesy of Kevin Cheng)

[randomux-blog]

iPhone Iterative Design: Convert Design Evolution video Time-lapse video shows design evolution tweaks of taptaptap's hit Convert iPhone app. The original design session took place 390 days before it launched in the iPhone App Store. That's 13 months of refinements. The result? Convert is currently ranked the #3 paid application in the App Store with 40,000+ sales in 2 weeks. Good design takes time, focus and effort. It pays for itself.

[randomux-blog]

From the Cinemek company website: Hitchcock is the worlds first mobile story boarding application. With Hitchcock you can have your first story board up and running in a matter of minutes. Hitchcock streamlines the process of storyboarding by allowing you to compose storyboards using photos rather than the tedious hand drawing process. This allows professionals and students to portray their vision to others in a easily controllable and transportable format.

[randomux-blog]

If you want to be a thought leader, it’s best to start your career by fine-tuning your thinking, not your PR.

Eric Reiss http://twitter.com/elreiss/status/3491227796

[randomux-blog]

The most cogent piece of writing on social experience design I have read. A landmark article.

From the ASIS&T Bulletin August/September 2009 edition

The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) by Christian Crumlish

Christian Crumlish is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and the author of The Power of Many. He is writing a book called Designing Social Interfaces with Erin Malone. He is also a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program. He can be reached at xian [at] pobox.com.

Designing and building a successful social website or application is no mean feat. Adding a social dimension to an existing experience is trickier still. Nevertheless, the skills to do so are well worth cultivating, as the ubiquitous, pervasive, massively interconnected world of the Internet and allied digital networks, such as mobile SMS (short message service) connections, have unlocked a growing panoply of opportunities for social relationships, remote presence, real-time interactions and the capacity for self-organized groups of people to coordinate their behavior and collaborate on changing the world.

So when your boss, client, teacher or mentor drops a project on your lap and asks you to "add social to it," where do you start? I'm thinking you start with the information architecture and in particular your conceptual models.

The pattern language that Erin Malone and I are working on (inspired by Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, the Gang of Four, Jenifer Tidwell, Matt Leacock and Bill Scott, among others), describes patterns we've observed roughly sorted to focus on three major elements of our concept model: people, objects and relationships. Over several years, and with input from many people, we gathered a large list of potential patterns to investigate, and so far we've codified 96 of them, with 56 other principles and practices, and five major don'ts, classified as anti-patterns.

Five Principles

Of the myriad principles we've unearthed so far, five cut across the entire experience:

Pave the Cowpaths

Talk Like a Person

Play Well with Others

Learn from Games

Respect the Ethical Dimension

Pave the Cowpaths. Pave the Cowpaths means, essentially, look where the paths are already being formed by behavior and then formalize them, rather than creating some idealized path structure that ignores history and tradition, human nature, geometry and ergonomics, and common sense. Sometimes this principle is applied on campuses – and sometimes a rear-guard “keep off the grass” action is fought instead to no avail.

In the design of social interfaces, this rubric has two applications. The first is simply to do your ethnographic homework – study some of your potential customers. How do they do what they do today? Yes, of course, the thing you want them to do will be better, but is it really entirely different? Can you offer people a way to continue doing most of the things they’re comfortable doing today as you introduce new possibilities into their lives, or are you really going to insist on them changing everything at once?

The second application of Pave the Cowpaths comes later in the lifecycle of your site, when you’ve got a user base and they start doing things you never anticipated. Often the impulse is to stamp out these rogue behaviors and enforce draconian rules requiring only the behaviors you had planned for. This course of action really only makes sense if the behaviors you are trying to stamp out are truly destructive or evil. There are many anecdotes about thriving social sites that killed themselves off by legislating against fun and forcing their users into exile to find the activities they had been improvising “incorrectly” in the site they had to leave.

A better plan is to support the behaviors your users are engaged in. Let your users tell you what the best and highest use of your interface may turn out to be. Don’t be so arrogant as to assume you know everything about how the social dynamics you’ve unleashed need to evolve.

Talk Like a Person. When many of us started putting together personal sites, art projects and other creative or informal objects starting in the 1990s, the air of informality online was palpable, but when business came online a bit later in the decade, many of the first business-oriented websites reproduced the remote, inanimate, almost robotic corporate voice you tend to find in annual reports and catalog copy.

Even there, the more savvy enterprises appreciated the value of communicating to potential customers in a human voice. The corporation has always been a mask that disguises the human nature of the people who do the actual work of the business. Revealing the humanity of the people at the other end of the wire has a softening and welcoming effect.

Sure, there are still times where great formality and even perhaps distance are useful, but in an age where authority emerges from collaboration rather than by being handed down from on high, the remote, formal, stylized tone of printed communications is continually in the process of giving way to a more natural, conversational tone.

This is all the more true in the context of social sites. If a website does not communicate from the get-go that it is peopled – and written – by ordinary human beings, how will people ever feel comfortable there? The antiseptic air of a hospital or the bureaucratic formality of the department of motor vehicles is no environment for fostering connections, relationships or collaboration. Bear in mind that the writing on your site or in your application is a key part of the user interface (UI). Call it web copy, nomenclature and labels if you like, but it’s as much a part of the UI as the buttons, windows and sliders.

Play Well with Others. Carry out this principle by designing an architecture that's as open as possible, in particular:

Embrace open standards

Share data outside of the bounds of your application

Accept external data within the sphere of your application

Support two-way interoperability

To be clear, we’re not religious about any of this. If a proprietary protocol, technology or model works best for you then use it in good health, gain whatever benefits you get, but be aware of what you may be giving up in exchange. Where possible, though, we’ve found that the more you can build your app upon the rock of proven, well implemented, open standards and technologies, the easier it is to participate fully in the social potential of the web and the always-on digital environment we now live in.

Learn from Games. The intersection between game design and social design is opening up new possibilities for social experiences in game environments and introducing playful elements to social interfaces. An application doesn’t have to literally be a game or be presented as a game to employ many of the same design techniques that make games fun to play. It’s no coincidence that Ludicorp’s first product was something called Game Neverending (their second was Flickr, which owes at least some of its success to the almost addictive game-like quality of its user interfaces).

Even in the enterprise, interfaces don’t have to be dry and tedious. Think about how to delight your users and encourage them to engage with each other.

Games are among the oldest social interfaces. The rules and tokens of a game provide a set of affordances and an environment in which people interact. In fact, people will make up their own games with whatever elements they find handy. Many of the memes that spread on sites like LiveJournal, blogs, MySpace and Facebook ("Which Buffy Character Are You?” “37 Things You Didn’t Know About My Cat” or “iPod Shuffle Ouija”) utilize built-in posting, commenting and polling features, which isn’t to say that you couldn’t encourage your users to invent games for each other by giving them generative tool with which to do so.

Respect the Ethical Dimension. When you are designing experiences for people or designing frameworks within which people will create their own experiences, there is always an ethical dimension. What commitments are you making explicitly or implying when you open your doors for business? Are you promising to keep people safe, to keep their information secure or to respect their privacy? Are you willing to bend ethical rules to cheat your way through the cold start problem and rapidly build your social graph?

Balzac once wrote, “The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly,” and many successful social sites today founded themselves on an original sin, perhaps a spammy viral invitation model or unapproved abuse of new users' address books. Some companies never lived down the taint and other seems to have passed some unspoken statute of limitations.

Five Anti-Patterns

You'll find that some of the forces that must be balanced to apply many of these patterns involve ethical dilemmas. Is opt-out good enough? Is this disclosure adequate? Is it your responsibility to stop the bullying? The five anti-patterns:

Cargo Cult

Don't Break Email

The Password Anti-Pattern

Ex-Boyfriend Bug

Potemkin Village

Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work. Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response. The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information. The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity. Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths).

A Pattern Language Framework

With those major principles and caveats in mind, consider now the following pattern language framework. You could almost consider it a meta-information architecture – a taxonomy of patterns that can be selectively recombined and implemented to create new social information architectures that learn from the best of what has come before. The framework has three major buckets: concepts of the self, activities around objects and relationships and community dynamics.

Concepts of the self. Patterns in this cluster deal with how people inhabit the social space, represent themselves and appear to each other:

Engagement (patterns for invitation and signup)

Identity (profiles, avatars, user cards)

Presence (availability, status, activity streams)

Reputation (levels, labels, awards, points)

Activities around objects. Patterns in this cluster involve the activities and interactions that people engage with around social objects. Without objects to congregate around, social networks can end up becoming static lists of connections. These objects include the following:

Collecting (bookmarking, tagging)

Sharing (sending, sharing, gifts)

Publishing (broadcasting, blogging, right)

Feedback (rating, comments, reviews)

Communication (forums, public conversation, private conversation)

Collaboration (governance, getting work done)

Social Media (tuning, filtering, real-time search)

Relationships and community dynamics. Patterns in this cluster involve connections between people and among larger groups of people and coordination of events in space and time. They include the following:

Connecting (reciprocity/symmetry, followers, adding friends, publicizing relationships)

Groups (group formation, moderation)

Community Management (norms, role models, community governance)

Place (being local, geo, scheduling)

Other factors you'll want to consider include context (recreational, enterprise, government?), and demographics (boomers, elderly, youth?).

Conclusion

Obviously, this discussion is just an overview, but you can delve into any of the patterns in this collection on the web at http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki or you can wait for our book, Designing Social Interfaces, coming from O'Reilly in September 2009.

[randomux-blog]

Should we consider how a user experience is produced as part of good design?

From Umair Haque's Harvard Business blog:

...How much would it cost to produce a "Good iPod"? One not produced in a sweatshop, but under decent labour conditions. Like, for example, one produced in the USA — hardly a paragon of labour standards, but a starting point.

That's what I calculated. The Sloan Foundation data estimate just $4 of an iPod's cost is the final assembly in China. Using average Chinese hourly compensation costs, that's about 2.7 hours of labour. I then used American hourly compensation costs to adjust for what that final assembly might cost in the States.

The results are surprising. An American made iPod Classic costs just 23% more than a Chinese made iPod Classic: $58 more, to be precise....

[randomux-blog]

Those who work thru meetings organize days in hour-long chunks. Those who create organize days in blocks. The two aren't compatible.

danah boyd AKA zephoria http://twitter.com/zephoria/status/3107871226

[randomux-blog]

Infographic: Measurements of 2.0, 50 and 97.5 Percentile of US Males (centimetres) from The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design by Henry Dreyfuss.