Compete on Usability

What will we do with cognitive surplus?

Bloggers I follow are buzzing about the Clay Shirky talk on the post-TV cognitive surplus.  I understood it as "Passive TV-style media is going away, replaced by the interactive Internet, and now we'll all use our free time being busy content creators."

His actual talk, however, was more nuanced and believable than a simple, en-masse transition of humanity from passive consumers to active creators.  He managed to address two shortcomings I predicted with cognitive surplus.

TV is fodder for social interaction. When my coworkers chat about the TV shows Lost or 30 Rock, I can't do much but smile and nod, because I watch very little TV. In the workplace, opting out of TV talk is a real sacrifice. In diverse contemporary society, what can you chat with people about, without risk of confusion or giving offense? It's just easier to have safe common experiences outside of work to talk about.

However, Shirky was careful to emphasize that even a small amount of redirected TV time could spawn multiple Wikipedias per year of Net content. If it only takes a little attention to contribute, it's easy to see people playing an online game or posting to an online community while watching TV. They're doing it now, all the time.

TV is rest time. People like being passive. Depending on what you read, television is either the world's most tranquilizing addiction, or a cognitively demanding cultural simulator. Either way, for a long time pundits doubted the PC would ever replace the TV, because peoples' behavior is quite different using these two mediums. No one "watches computer," and no one "uses TV." It's not easy to find exactly what the difference is. Supporting these naysayers, hybrid systems like WebTV and the Apple TV have had no great commercial success.

In the past ten years, though, television has evolved into convergence with personal computing.
Or rather, the TV interface, not the content, is much more like computers now. Tivo changed everything, and new TV sites like Hulu promise to change things further.

My take is that we still must make online content creation easier. It's great that people can watch less TV, but creating anything interesting online is still inconsistent and frustrating for most people. We need standardized widgets for common functions, so that every rich interface isn't a new learning experience for users. We must clearly communicate state in Web applications, so people always know what to expect from our tools. And we need very quick feedback and results when using these applications.

 

Visualizations described with Chernoff faces

My final project on information visualizations was well received by my professor and class, so I want to share it here for thoughts and comments.  The goal of the project was to synthesize the key guidelines about creating visualizations and invite exploration of the subject, even from people not well versed in it.

Chernoff faces of vizualization (PDF, 32Kb)

I used information glyphs called Chernoff faces, line drawing cartoons where each face stands for a record and each part of the facial expression, one data dimension. The literature on Chernoff faces is mixed. Some sources report they can be effective at quick categorization of large, detailed datasets.  Other research seems to show they can lead to confusion and distraction, as people read emotions that the glyphs didn't intend to display.

Even if the use of Chernoff faces is not as well-regarded as scatter plots and Tufte railroad maps, I think the project was successful in inviting exploration of the subject in multiple ways.  One reason I chose Chernoff faces was they're a little humorous. I had a long, intense semester's worth of detail to summarize, and I knew I had some burnout to overcome.  It's okay to be a little goofy sometimes, if it gives you fresh energy for an important project.

As a result, I felt really good working on this project, from start to finish. Not only was I in flow the whole time, at the end all the work I put in came together efficiently.  My preparation was enough, but not too much, and the final layout almost assembled itself.  I hope you enjoy the visualization too.

The default book link

Just a quickie post, but have you ever realized that Amazon.com is the default book link of the web?  The vast majority of instances when anyone links a book title online, they're pointing to Amazon.  Two fairly obvious reasons why:

1.  Their selection is so broad, they almost certainly have a page for the book you're referring to.

2.  Meta-info and community book reviews make their pages feel useful for readers.  It's almost like it's not even an online store.  Almost!

Wouldn't it be amazing to become the default music link (iTunes)?  The default reference link (Wikipedia)?  Are there other content-type or general category defaults like these?

Thinking visually

One reason I haven't been blogging often is the graduate course I'm taking in information visualization.  Not only does it consume most of my free time, it's raised my mental bar for blog posts. There are several reasons I want to have better visuals to encompass my posted thoughts.

Usable information visuals break you out of text's serial tyranny.  It's the nature of verbal information to be linear, but visual encourage divergent, nonlinear thinking. As a consequence of this, techniques like mind mapping are great visualizations for creativity, even if they're composed of pure words. On the other hand, linear outlines are fine for organizing one's thoughts when writing a paper, but they're a poor way to take notes or categorize information for learning.

Unfortunately, one thing holding me back is poor drawing and sketching skills. Multiple books I've read claim that you don't need drawing skills to communicate and persuade with sketches. But I've endured one too many patronizing smiles from peers over my stick figures, spindly lines, and lack of perspective. There's nothing for this except a little guidance and learning, and a lot of practice. Perhaps over the summer, I'll convert this blog to documenting some self-assigned drawing work.  I hope I still have readers left by September!

There's nothing wrong with pencil and paper, but if you want to share sketches with your work team, it's helpful to create them directly on a computer. Some of my coworkers use slick tablet PCs for this, but I need a more conventional, powerful PC laptop that can run Visio and Photoshop at the same time without bogging down.  (As an aside, why isn't there a multitouch tablet Mac?)

Your keyboard and mouse are going away. Will usability go with them?

I had one of those blogosphere epiphanies last night, where different people opining about different stuff all came together for me.  It started with the new report I have to read from Bill Buxton's Microsoft research group about what computing interfaces will be like in 2020.

Add recent posts from Oz about eye tracking replacing mice, combined with other notes about the decline in personal computing, and even some near sci-fi news about operating computers with brainwaves, and the trend crystallizes.

Hey, take a good look at your computer, and compare it to machines you used ten years ago.  CRT monitors are mostly gone. Disk drives and ports have changed, shrank, and started to disappear in favor of wireless.  The oldest parts of your PC are the forty-five year old mouse and of course the two-hundred year old keyboard.  These venerable peripherals are on the way out now.

When I entered the workforce, people were beginning to accept as inevitable that everyone would change jobs many times in their lifetimes.  I think the next great trend will be people in technology changing careers completely, several times in a lifetime. If within twenty years everyone is communicating with everyday devices by touch, eye tracking, or brainwaves, the concept of an interface will be radically different.  Usability as we know it today could become obsolete.

Even within ten years, as people use next-gen iPhones and Google Android devices to accomplish everything they once had to sit and type to do, usability professionals can expect many of their skills to become dated.

We can be reasonably confident that cognitive psychology will remain relevant, at least, since ten, twenty, or a hundred years are not enough to evolve us into bigger brains.  But think again -- with chips in our brains enhancing working memory, grabbing any needed information instantly from a ubiquitous Net, and performing complex calculations trivially, many of the tasks we need a computer interface for today will become easy as thought. Humans will not have the same cognitive limitations we're used to working within.

I used to think all this stuff was either science fiction, or maybe for future generations to worry about. But I think everything in this post will be happening in my lifetime.  And I wonder what I'll be doing for work as a result.  Check out those links and let me know what you think.

SXSWi observations

 

I returned from South by Southwest today, impressed by the good vibrations I'm still feeling from a great conference. A number of themes kept coming up:

1.  Community and social networking

The image in this post is from one of the better sessions I attended, by Derek Powazek. In Crowdsourcing for Creatives, he cautioned clueless large companies and "community builders," he referenced GM's satirized Tahoe online ad contest.  His lessons were:

• Get the audience right. Invitations should have gone only to GM owners, not the whole web.
• Don't put users in a very small box or they'll rebel. GM only allowed captioning and resequencing of content.
• Don't be greedy with your content. Allow people to import their own graphics, collaborate, and share what they create.
• Don't be selfish. Believe it or not, GM didn't even allow users to sign their creations!

While there were other good lesson to be had, every other session, it seemed, had social networking in the title.  That felt faddish to me.

2.  Neuroplasticity

Not a term you often hear, but it came up a few times in Austin.  Broad interests and diverse experiences will make you smarter and age better. A limber brain, of course, also relates to creativity and problem solving.

3.  I'm a Mac

In the businesses I've worked for, you see ten PCs for every Mac. At SXSW, the ratio was reversed.  Blackberry was doing a little better, but there still was a great preponderance of iPhones among the smartphone-wielding masses.

 

You can see more of my random SXSW photos here.

making The Switch: The ineffable user experience

Ouch. It's been awhile since I blogged! 

I can weigh the pros and cons of my new MacBook, but when I add them up, 2 + 2 = 5.  There's something hard to quantify about the way the whole system works together, predictably and well.  I guess with Wintel boxes, I tend to assume that commonplace interactions will not go well the first time.  Whether it's hooking up a new printer, installing a new application, or even plugging in a new mouse, I don't expect it to work without plenty of tweaking and friction.  Most likely this relates to the enormously broad array of legacy hardware and software that Windows must be compatible with.

I once got in a conversation with a former Microsoft employee about the long turnaround time on bugfixes for Office.  He gave me a number of good reasons, including the many third-party add-ons the product supports, and the many platforms it runs on. Nevertheless, I instantly had to bite my tongue to keep from interrupting that I simply didn't care about any of those features. Clearly near-universal compatibility is important to Microsoft, but not to me, and probably not to any individual user. I wanted to respond that Microsoft needed to meet my individual needs faster, or I wouldn't want to stick around. Our different value systems meant we could barely understand each other's point.

Macs on OSX are unencumbered by decades of legacy code and hardware, and if I had to guess, that makes everything run just a little smoother.  That's good enough for me.

making The Switch: My MacBook user experience

I had several good reasons for purchasing a MacBook but, anticipating my new laptop's arrival, I still was nervous about switching.  About a month later, it's been a positive overall experience for me.  I hardly miss my old PC at all.

The positives

Great keyboard and trackpad. The keys are springy and let me type fast. The touch pad responds better than other pointing devices I've used in the past.  It's hard to describe, but a combination of the touch surface and the way it responds to fast and slow motions, somehow make it better.

It sleeps and wakes up intuitively.  I've dealt with multiple laptops and desktops where the sleep or hibernate commands don't work the way you set them in Windows.  It's common for machines to ship straight from the vendor with memory-resident software that messes up power saving.  Not so with this MacBook!  Close the lid and it sleeps immediately.  Open the lid and it comes back on almost instantly.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Lots of applications open?  No problem.  Mac OSX is designed to handle multiple open applications without cluttering up the interface.  I find that when the Windows XP Taskbar has more than four or five applications, all the rectangles and ellipsis text look crowded and bug me.  The OSX Dock holds many applications by icon, marking them subtly and without lots of cut-off text.

Quicksilver. Although I like the Dock, I don't use it to launch applications.  On the advice of coworkers, I downloaded the freeware Quicksilver launcher. Quicksilver opens with a key combination, and then typing only a few more letters launches an application.  It has many more functions, but I'm content with the fast, no-pointer-required application launching for now.

The negatives

My slippery, dirty case.  The matte surface of the black MacBook is quite slippery, almost like the inside of a nonstick pan. I've come close to dropping it more than once. Other times, I caught myself holding on so tightly that the case was flexing.  At length, I decided it's only safe to pick it up with two hands.

After a month, my laptop has picked up several noticeable fingerprint marks. Cleaning them safely is not straightforward, because Mac community resources are flatly contradictory on the best way to clean the case.  Is an isopropyl alcohol solution fine, or will it strip off your finish?  Does Apple's iKlear polish work on black MacBooks, or not?  My favorite comment from this post was that the dangerous wood fibers found in paper towels will scar your case like sandpaper. Hmm.

Keyboard layout.  The Command buttons for keyboard shortcuts are crowded close to the spacebar, unlike PCs, which puts the Ctrl button at either edge.  On my Wintel laptop, for keyboard shortcuts, I can easily reach the Ctrl key with my pinky finger and hit a letter key with my index finger. That's not possible with the Command keys on this keyboard layout.

I also miss the PC Delete key (aka "delete forwards").  It's difficult to remember (and reach for) Fn+delete for that.

It's a two (or three) mouse button world.  Come on, Apple. Is there any reason left not to ship your computers with two buttons for the trackpad?  After all, if you plug in a two-button mouse, it will work.  You even sell two button mice. We're years past the point when even diehard Mac fans could argues that Command-Control-Shift-clicking is a good idea.

On my PC the scrollwheel is clickable as a third mouse button, and I use it to open a link in a new Firefox tab. So, I really feel two buttons behind.

The Finder is so missing.  Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but since I know the file system is based on a hierarchy of folders, widgets layered on top of that make it more difficult to orient myself and save things where I want them.

In the Mac OSX Leopard screenshot to the right, there's a little Home row of breadcrumbs that mimics the UI I've seen in iTunes. However, that was turned off by default on my Macbook.

The button to create a new folder is also needlessly buried.  I guess I'll have to learn the keyboard shortcut for that one.

And the final score ...

I very much like the MacBook overall, but for reasons beyond all these pro and cons.  II'll need one more blog post to expound on those reasons.

making The Switch: Upgrade choices

Today was Steve Jobs's annual MacWorld conference keynote, a perfect opportunity to post about my experience with my new MacBook.  Last year I needed to upgrade my old Dell, but I really wasn't interested in "upgrading" to Windows Vista. The irritating security warnings I've read about, with a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, make me believe that Microsoft has lost any empathy for real end users. Still, I was resigned to limp along for as long as possible on Windows XP before grudgingly transitioning.

Instead, a confluence of events convinced me to take the Mac plunge. Reports of the diminished cost difference between PCs and Macs and Apple's growth in market share helped me think different, but not nearly as much as the examples set by my peers. My wife is a teacher, so it's not surprising she's a longtime Mac user. The tipping point came when I started my new job, however. I was impressed to find the most thoughtful engineers preferred not Linux boxes, and certainly not Wintel devices, but Macs.   

In the end, and say what you will about Apple's marketing hype, it's clear they are among the leading companies in the world who have chosen to compete on user experience. I want to support a company whose values are so closely aligned with my own.

So at the beginning of December, for my birthday, I purchased a black MacBook.  (I wanted the sophisticated black shell no matter what, but since my wife already owned a white MacBook, it was practical to get the different color for myself.)  This post is becoming a little long, so I'll follow up soon with my sense of whether the product has fulfilled my expectations.

Next: My MacBook user experience

Tips for presenting screen mockups

I just finished Dan Brown's excellent Communicating Design. It's a very practical cookbook of design documentation: how and when to use ten different types of deliverables. Brown writes from a consulting background, which is different from mine, so it was interesting to contrast it with my methods of working with internal company stakeholders.

When presenting a design to coworkers, I try to remember the following guidelines:

Do outline your specific goals at the beginning.  One mistake I used to make was presenting people with a mockup (whether in a meeting or over email) and simply asking for feedback without context. This laissez-faire approach tends to result in incorrect assumptions and irrelevant feedback.

Instead, introduce the mockup by explaining the rationale behind your design process, and ask for feedback on the specific aspects you need. If the conversation wanders, explain that parts of the visual aren't final enough to be ready for comments.

Don't show people many design alternates, even if you explored them yourself.  As Brown points out, this often brings about the dreaded Franken-design, when the stakeholder says "I like the header component from mockup 1, but the content component from login 2."  Research shows that comparing multiple choices can lead to greater dissatisfaction than if the stakeholder simply had one design to evaluate.

Moreover, stakeholders don't have time to look at your different directions and listen to you ruminate on the inevitable tradeoffs of design. So hang onto all your work, but don't introduce alternates unless they're needed to address a specific point that comes up.

Do tailor the process to individuals. On an internal team, you can learn what's aspects of design are important to each stakeholder and colleague. Ensure that your design addresses likely concerns and requirements and be ready to articulate how it does so.

Don't leave interactivity to a stakeholder's imagination. Web page mockups as a design deliverable are on the way out -- or, at least, they're no longer sufficient.  The nuances of how screen elements respond to users' actions can be critical for your larger team to understand, particularly when you're defining a new behavior not reflected elsewhere in your product.

Low-impact ways to model interactivity include keyframing and annotation.  For higher-fidelity prototyping, you can employ the interactive features of Visio or Powerpoint, or code a prototype using Axure or Flash.