All posts tagged as "Theory"

This is a statement I see all the time; it's explicitly stated in documentation for software, but is increasingly implied for all sorts of consumer products.

Instead, I think complicated things are just complicated.

It used to be that it was okay to let the machine do the work, just push a button and behind the scenes the right thing happens. But at some point it seems the problem of feature creep has made its way out into the wild, such that a product without a long list of features is not worth as much as a product that does a few things really well.

And complex interfaces are not just going to reduce usability and usefulness for your consumer product. Lots of aircraft- and industrial accidents have poor interface design as at least a contributing factor. Even well-trained, experienced operators can get confused or miss the key component when confronted with too many conflicting or unclear signals.

So, how do you solve this? The pat answer is "hire designers." Engineers (and developers) do a fine job engineering and developing, but tend to want to throw every feature right up top.

But specifically, there are processes anyone can follow. When I am designing very strictly, I make sure to explicitly:

• Gather the features (from marketing and technical requirements, user research or competitor product evaluations) and turn them into functions or information to be presented
• Filter out all the functions that are easier to just let the system deal with, or don't need to be done
• Group all the remaining functions and information logically
• Prioritize so that the most key functions and info are the most visible and easily accessed

As you might expect "filter" is the hardest step, entirely because you have to justify everything to every stakeholder.

But you can apply the rest of the process anyway. A few years ago I had to redesign the desktop web interface for a 2-way SMS system. It ended up being fearsomely simple; there's no longer a help system and the only error messages are for system outages. But aside from the basic sending and receiving components, there were another fifty requirements that just "had" to be included — difficult things like blocking, international sending and network-type selection. So a few went into a contact management system, and the rest into settings. Once the user gets into these sections, large hierarchically-organized groups of information and selectors are presented. The vast bulk of the users (way over 99%) are not burdened with it at all.

And this is successful. Hundreds of thousands of messages a day, practically no abandoned sessions, and certainly no complaints for either simplicity or complexity from anyone.

One of my favorite niche blogs is AAS, or All About Symbian. Saturday (my birthday!) they posted this commentary on what exactly is the difference between a featurephone and a smartphone, anyway.

The commentary is more enlightening than the original post, so read all of those as well. I tend to agree with the bulk of the statements; its about customization, customization and also customization.

Most of the people I know have classic smartphones — some Blackerries, and lots of Window Mobile devices, as we're in the U.S. Most of these are of the new, cheap variety — like the Centro or Moto Q. And they are used like the featurephones they replaced. They make calls, add up to 15 people to the address book, take photos, and download a game or two from the operator store. They are terribly excited to show off that this phone can browse the web(!)

When I show off how much more they can do with their phone by whipping out my phone, and showing off some of the 27 (yes, I counted) apps I have downloaded and use all the time, I mostly get blank stares, but sometimes hand waving that its all too complicated.

So, I have to add another facet to what defines a smartphone, the user. Designing around user-intent is not impossible, but I have yet to figure out how to to get a device data repository to encode that.

And I could seriously use a header for "savvy user." Among the biggest design worries I have is getting people to understand that their device — whatever it is called — is almost certainly capable of doing other than those core items, so that the app I am designing gets downloaded, and used.

I have seen the concept (and phrase) digital footprints discussed before, and I’ve rather liked it. I am a closet ubicomp fan, after all.

The other day Tomi Ahonen wrote a long futurist vision of increasing digital footprint tracking, and I guess the social consequences of it being more or else in your control. When you have time, I suggest you read it:
http://communities_dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/04/datamining-our.html

This got so in depth, I was suddenly struck by how similar the whole concept is to any remotely clever marketing folks of the pre- or barely-computer era. It has been eminently possible to track user behavior (purchase patterns and so forth) not just demographics, for a long time. Its traditionally been easier if you sold a wide range of products (Reader’s Digest had this range, and this business intelligence and data on customers stored on computers since the 50s).

Disregarding privacy bits, and the need to set up business relationships with other organizations, it should be even easier more recently with the internet encouraging data interchange. Even more disregarding privacy and business relations, is should be trivial with mobiles for all the reasons Tomi outlines in his post above. You can get a huge amount of information, as an operator or with access to their data, with just traffic analysis, and post-event location tracking, before you even crack into the signaling and messaging channels.

BUT, no one seems to do this. Why? Occasionally when meeting with business owners, on almost any product with high repeat-use rates, I can show off some neat, theoretical, future possibility of reporting and analysis data, mention “1:1 marketing” and eyes light up. But nothing ever seems to come of it.

And its not just my projects. My junk mail is about as poorly targeted as television advertising (the ultimate shotgun approach and the antithesis of targeted marketing possible with mobiles). And those that try to leverage user data often seem to fail in funny ways. Actually, even the mobile advertising I see is targeted almost entirely not at me, implying its not what I would call targeted /at all/.

When I do see something remotely targeted at me or a narrow segment, I notice it because it’s unique and interesting. At home we get catalogs for commercial nursery operators, because we bought a greenhouse for the back yard; HDNet is filled with advertising for high-def DVDs, 5.1 surround systems and related products, because everyone watching the channel has an HD system.

Okay, I gripe a lot. How to fix it? Well, I was all ready to blame the marketing folks for having no vision, but Barbara has an MBA, so I just had to run this by her first. She assures me that people are working on this, but aside from taking money, will and smarts, it takes money.

Yeah, I said money twice. Aside from initial investment to move from the current model (and the perception of what’s wrong with it, anyway), the data is only theoretically free. Aside from actually being charged per transition by operators, et. al. there are inefficiencies associated with all this one-off data retrieval and processing.

Once that is cheaper, then we’ll be ready to figure out how to get over legal, database design, privacy worries and all the usual stuff. Then, maybe the ubquity, awareness, contextuality, individualization and personalization of mobiles will be able to enable relationship marketing the way Tomi dreams.

Another good discussion along some of the same lines (sharing, depth, privacy, legacy data systems) is posted here with plenty of neat links worthy of saving.

Now, you tell me. How would you solve these issues? Or, if you know someone doing it today (or you are, and can talk about it) point it out and let’s discuss.

While preparing for a recent interview with a member of the Japanese media, I struggled to articulate why user experience and usability are important. Leveraging the Japanese quality culture of the recent half-century (and my own training in industrial engineering), I realized that user experience including usability is precisely analogous to quality of design in physical products.

Further investigation revealed the majority of defintions appear to have customer experience explicitly included. Definitions selected from the Wikipedia entry:

• Philip B. Crosby in the 1980s - "Conformance to requirements". The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats this as a separate problem.
• Joseph M. Juran - "Fitness for use". Fitness is defined by the customer.
• Noriaki Kano and others - A two-dimensional model of quality. The quality has two dimensions: "must-be quality" and "attractive quality". The former is near to the "fitness for use" and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about.
• Gerald M. Weinberg - “Value to some person".
• Genichi Taguchi - Taguchi's definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system, and he relates Quality (or, more precisely, the lack of it) to "The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped".
• American Society for Quality - "A subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:
  1. the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.
  2. a product or service free of deficiencies."

Customer expectations and perceptions are squarely considered in the above definitions. The entry explicitly notes, “The quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer's expectations.”

Do keep in mind that in these definitions, “customer” is not necessarily the person on the street. Indeed, extracting that person's requirements is challenging, and a task performed by marketers and user experience professionals. Further, the person on the street does not typically have the knowledge to measure highly technical aspects of quality.

While the person on the street does not experience many of the individual features & bugs that make up a product, she does experience the product, interaction, features, support, feel, sales, and even disposal process as a whole. Thus, fundamentally, user experience is quality.

All the players in the mobile industry work, only sometimes in concert, to deliver the user experience. Consider:

• The iPhone would not be nearly as good with a pay-per-megabyte from the operator.
• UK phones support internet, but the process for setting it up with the operators is arduous.
• Applications work well, but the device displays frightening messages about their safety (at the behest of the operators).
• The device reports its characteristics via the user agent string, the operator passes it through, the developer incorporates it into the application or web site design. More on that later this week.
• The device reports its type via the user agent string, but a gateway strips it out and replaces it with data unrelated to the device.

Let's improve user experience. Let's improve quality. Our users deserve it, and so do our profits.

If you haven’t seen it yet, there is some deep information provided by the French Association of Mobile Operators on evolving French behavior and attitudes towards their mobiles. You can find an English translation of the summary over at Experientia.

When I was writing Designing the Mobile User Experience, I investigated a wide variety of such studies. Mobiles and their roles in gossip and social grooming, A Tale of Three Cities comparing social behavior in London, Paris, and Madrid, and so forth. You can find some of this information in the book. This type of study is ongoing, and provide ever deepening understanding of the ever evolving social experiment that mobile phones are providing.

Just to ramble a little bit, I was just listening to a lecture by Sir Jonathan Sacks, in which he talked about four major revolutions in communication: invention of writing, invention of alphabets, invention of printing, and invention of Internet (mostly as person-to-person communications). He asserted that the Jewish faith was revolutionized by the second, the Christian faith by the third, and the Muslim faith is currently undergoing a revolution in the fourth. I find myself wondering whether mobile phones as communication are part of Internet, or are part of another revolution. If the latter, what faith might be revolutionized? Mormons? Buddhists? Hindus? (the first seems odd but is to one measure part of the same line of faiths outlined by Sacks).

I recently joined Slideshare.net, since three different people connected to me in some way recently recommended or used it.  If you want some fun, do a search for "mobile" and "design".

In the meantime, I'll post Slideshares of some of my presentations here on occasion.  Many of them can be downloaded from Slideshare. This one is a brief overview of The Carry Principle.