Compete on Usability

Simplicity is not the ultimate goal

I saw a hotel telephone last week that perfectly illustrates one of my favorite themes: simple is not always more usable.
Here's a phone without any buttons. It doesn't get much simpler than that!  Yet most people wouldn't even consider it a real telephone, because essential features are missing. How do you choose who you want to call?

If a simple interface is your goal, it's critical to know the essential feature set. Simplify past a certain point, and you risk making your product or system unrecognizable. The best way to know the essential feature set is user research, although a survey of competitive products can substitute in the short term.

But wait, there's more!  Over time, the essential feature set increases for a given product.  Early phones used to come like this one, with no controls other than a crank to signal an operator to help you. These days, most people won't buy a phone without a display for caller ID, redial and  volume controls, and more.  Heck, wired phones can seem like a relic compared with the versatility of mobiles.

The ultimate goal is user satisfaction. Meet expectations by delivering the essential feature set, then delight users with a better, more usable interface on those features.

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.

 

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.

Usability named a Best Career

This week U.S. News & World Report magazine included usability / user experience specialist on their list of 31 top careers in the United States.  They do a reasonable job of explaining the position and putting it in context with a day-in-the-life feature, and they also include professional organizations and important books.

Although the article made good use of its concise column space, I think it would have been more interesting to interview actual practitioners. Without any quotes from real people the content feels artificial. Still, it's nice to get some mainstream recognition.

OLPC Give One, Get One, for One Week

For the next seven days, the One Laptop per Child XO device is available to consumers in the United States and Canada. You can pay $400 to buy one for yourself and donate one to a child in the developing world.  Half of the price is a tax-deductible donation.

In general, the cool laptop for kids and its foundation have not been as successful as I hoped when I first blogged about them. The price is still twice what the founders predicted, and their model of working top-down with government ministries has only yielded one sale. I'm disappointed that the device as North Americans will buy it lacks the yo-yo attachment for recharging with people power. On the other hand, my new boss believes that, whatever else happens with the OLPC program, the child-sized device will be a collector's item.

I'm not really sure what I'll do with the device, since it's not very capable without the mesh network of peers it was designed to work with.  Probably, I'll give it to a child I know, after I've messed around with it.

If you have a child old enough to try out a laptop, check out this thoughtful post and discussion about how to introduce kids to programming.

Two dimensional barcodes

The collage of black-and-white blocks pictured on this page means "user experience" to a Nokia cell phone.  Two-dimensional barcodes are coming to user interfaces near you.  The 2D block design allows more information to be stored than on familiar linear barcodes.

You may already have seen 2D barcodes on UPS packages, print-at-home airplane boarding passes, or US drivers' licenses. I spotted them on street corners and parking permits in a recent visit to Portland, OR.  Parking enforcement police scan them to quickly bring up data on the street's parked cars. 

Old-fashioned 1D barcodes still have the advantage when it comes to redundancy. They're easier to scan than 2D.  But when cell phone cameras can read and operate on 2d barcodes, it opens up a wide array of possible applications.  Do you think humans will ever be able to read these?

UX practitioners rated

Edit: Please note the chart at the left is to satirize the "guru factor" in user experience. It does not represent my thoughts, and it's not taken from any site listed here.

The recent redesign of information architecture site Boxes & Arrows puts heavy emphasis on reputation ratings. Online ratings are applied to all registered users on the site (authors and commenters) as well as site articles. I've almost always agreed with the article ratings on Boxes & Arrows, so it seems like a useful feature to me.

Ratings of people, however, is less straightforward. The rating system is heavily weighted towards content contributors, in effect making them "superusers" with scores or hundreds of reputation points. Whenever they post their opinions in comments, their status is obvious. Although rating points are meant to be a broad range, the system as implemented creates a clear binary divide among members.

Taking the ratings trend a step further is a new site, UX Zeitgeist. They attempt to rank books, user experience topics, and even people. Its publishers "believe our ranking system is wildly, brilliantly innovative and one of the most useful features of UX Zeitgeist." Perhaps it is, but they beg the question why is it useful to rank people at all.

UX rating sites bring to my mind the concept of A-list bloggers. Popularity equals wisdom and power in the blogosphere.  But the problem is, you can't accurately judge the value of information in a single swift rating. An article useless for one person with one kind of goal, is priceless to the next person with different goals.  A-list ratings create a winner-take-all information ecology that can obscure a long tail of personally relevant content. Instead, user experience experts ought to professionalize and promote the field with a system that less resembles the United States homeland security threat indicator.

Scratch the surface of UX Zeitgeist, and there's one immediate hole in the person rankings. Where's Jakob Nielsen? Perhaps he didn't reveal his favorite books -- participation that appears to be required for listing. If so, I think opting out of this attempted Who's Who of UX is laudable.

What's user experience?

Some may consider user experience a trendy term, soon to join the oft-mocked verbiage of the tech implosion.  For me, it's here to stay. Under whatever name, more and more businesses are competing by learning about and designing for their customers' needs. 

Explaining usability to business folks can be troublesome, because how a product can be effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily used resists easy quantification.  Usability depends on the user first: knowing them through customer research, designing for them, and testing the product with real users.

When you expand usability techniques beyond the product, to touchpoints such as advertising, fulfillment, and customer care, you're in the user experience zone. Bringing a user focus to the traditional business areas of customer service, marketing, and sales can optimize all your business practices.

So, what's the opposite of user experience?  Companies that make decisions not based on customer needs, but to serve their own internal processes. Designs based on what the design team prefers personally, or what the CEO mandates on a whim. Poorly trained customer service. A marketing team that doesn't know its customers, and a sales force that speaks the wrong language to prospects.

Good companies will all get user experience, because it makes so much business sense.