My Curious Life

Streetsblog.org posted some information last week about the new sidewalk compasses that New York will be using at select major intersections and metro stations throughout the city.

Despite posing some potential pedestrian traffic flow issues, I think this is one of the more creative and useful ideas for navigating a town that I’ve seen in a long time. This just further influences my opinion that New York, for all its size, wants to be as friendly to visitors as it is to locals.

I’m beating my head against the wall again, being forced to design a web application for an ethereal “customer” that I’ve never met and only heard of in terms that would make a sociologist cringe. The attitude I seem to be running into is this:

“We, product management, already know our customers and we are building our requirements based on that fact. Design to the requirements.”

This, of course, puts the designer in an awkward position and sets the whole project up for, if not failure, a mediocre success at best. It’s a lot like drawing blindfolded. Even if you have a clear vision in your head of what you want to draw, with a blindfold on, you lose visual references and relationships that help hold the whole thing together. You will typically get some well-drawn elements, which individually look wonderful, but which don’t work in conjunction with the other elements in the drawing to convey a clear, concise image. Even talented artists have difficulty rendering familiar drawings while blindfolded.

Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to demand access to customers or get direct interaction with them. So, to try and peek under the blindfold, I’ve interviewed the product manager(s) in order to gather what I can of their direct customer interactions (if they have any). What I’m finding is that, while they can tell me a lot about what the customer said, they can rarely tell me much about what the customer did and what the context of the customer’s existence is like.

Another idea has been to review competitors’ sites to see what they’re doing and to try to learn more about the industry and its customers in that way. Again, most of what you get is anecdotal evidence that, while helpful, is far from completely accurate.

The irony to me is that the company won’t spend the money up front on customer research and interviews because it’s “too time consuming and expensive”, yet they are willing to absorb the additional development, support, training and advertising costs associated with vague requirements and a mediocre product.

Anyone out there have suggestions on how to convince a very complacent and secure client that a bit of money up front on good design research will save them a bunch of money in the long run? Any ideas on how to build a better picture of a customer without direct interaction/observation?

It’s amazing how keyed in we as humans are to touch. We interact with many things by feel almost intuitively, reading surfaces, distances and tactile sensations like a keypress without consciously registering it all. Despite this, the best touch interfaces we’ve seen until recently have been keyboards, mice, stylii and crude touchscreens.

Advances in touch technology have been mostly behind-the-scenes or in specialized niche industries. Apple’s announcement ealier this year of the iPhone was a glimpse into where touch technology might be taking us in the future. Their multi-touch interface is a move toward more touch-oriented interfaces across a variety of devices. Rumor has it that some of Apple’s upcoming iMacs might even feature multi-touch, though I’m not sure that would be a practical use of the technology, except perhaps on the largest iMac model.

Recently, though, Microsoft has been promoting its new Surface technology, even featuring a cameo appearance of Bill Gates on NBC’s Today show to talk about the technology launching just before Gates steps out of direct management of the corporation he helped found. Ironically enough, I saw a video about this technology back in 2005, but the interface was still primitive at that time. What’s appealing about Surface (formerly known as Milan) now is not so much the touch interface itself, which is strikingly similar to Apple’s multi-touch, but the interesting example uses that the Microsoft team has put together, which can be seen in several video snippets on the Surface website.

Touch surfaces suffer from one common flaw and one shared challenge that was even talked about when the iPhone was announced … touch surfaces lack strong tactile feedback, like physical keypresses, that help us unconsciously register that our input has been accepted. Without that feedback, some users will feel disoriented and interaction with the touch surface will require additional focus and concentration to register the visual feedback necessary to fill in the gap. Some people find this uncomfortable and as a result, dislike touch surfaces.

The shared challenge is that when interacting by touch, we are often much less precise, expecting tactile feedback to help us adjust. Without that feedback, errors are more common, especially on small touch screens like the iPhone. Apple accomodates this by having their UI make some judgement calls on your most likely action and tries to minimize errors in that way. What’s interesting in the Surface examples is that Microsoft is accomodating human behavior by maximizing its real estate and using larger surfaces (can’t help the pun) plus the addition of some very significant visual effects that overemphasize the action being taken. This is a very clever move on their designer’s part, because the overemphasis draws your attention and focus. This is in contrast to the lack of tactile feedback requiring your attention and focus.

It will be interesting to see how this techology gets used … Microsoft has already posed some very clever uses, like ordering from a menu and divvying up your restaurant bill or sharing photos among devices, that benefit from both the visual and the tactile. They also hint at technologies “under the surface” that recognize devices like cell phones or digital cameras, and also read or register magnetic strips from credit cards. This additional tech starts to bring to life the idea of ubiquitous computing as well.

Day two of WebVisions pretty much brought my brain to overload … mostly because of the chance to step away from the projects at work that have been consuming all my cycles (or more likely, killing brain cells and deadening my senses).

It’s been an opportunity to regroup and rethink a bunch of design concepts that I’ve been kicking around for months, and after all the mental stimulation and inspiration (it’s so nice to be with other people who actually practice good design and have lessons to share), I basically hit the wall by midday.

Still, the morning sessions continued the quality from yesterday …

• Lane Becker and Thor Muller (Thor, I can only imagine what you went through in school with that name) of Satisfaction Unlimited gave a fantastic presentation called Let Go! 8 Steps to Succeeding in a Post-2.0 World that is definitely worth reviewing, though the slides won’t have the full depth without Lane and Thor’s playful banter. Regardless, I came away with a full page of scribbles, ideas and thoughts that will work their way into my future design plans. The thing I took most to heart was something the dynamic duo said about control:
  

  Get accustomed to that uncomfortable feeling that things are just slightly beyond your comprehension and control. It’s a sign that you’re in the right place.

  It goes nicely with the concept of continual growth, which in my mind means that you’re only growing if you’re constantly pushing the boundaries of your current comfort zone and knowledge. Note to self: you’re getting too comfortable in your current capacity, find ways to stretch yourself.

• Chris Baum of Jaman.com and Boxes and Arrows fame gave his presentation on The Rise of Collaborative Innovation. I have to admit, I felt a bit awkward in Chris’ session, because, despite his obvious knowledge and experience, it felt quite loose and disconnected. He made some good points about T-shaped people and how a good team is built by overlapping T’s, but there was one quote (can’t recall if it was his or someone else’s) that really resonated with me:
  

  Innovation dies not by one big blow, but by little cuts (constraints) over time.

  Chris is obviously a busy guy and he had a lot of stuff to share. I’ll be tracking his blog for a bit to see what other gems he might have to share in the future.

By lunch time, my brain was full and I spent a bit of time reviewing notes from both days of the conference, then decided it was time to let things percolate … which meant shuttling things to the back of my brain and finding something to distract the loose cycles in the forefront of my brain. That distraction ended up being Spider Man 3 …

It’s been a couple of years since I attended WebVisions, but I’m glad I went this year. The event seems to get better and better over time, and just the talks from the first day were worth the price of the conference … I can’t wait to find out what tomorrow brings.

Here are the highlights of the workshop and two sessions that I attended …

• Garrett Dimon’s workshop on Improving Interface Design (PDF here) was a nice review of interaction design concepts, and he mentioned a number of fantastic books that I either own or plan to buy. The thing I loved the most were the many quotes he used in his presentation, such as this one from Khoi Van:
  

  Design groups really need a strong, diplomatic leader who can help engender a climate for good design.

  Anyone who knows me knows that I love to collect quotes, especially those that deal with design, imagination/inspiration or human behavior. Garrett’s presentation was like an all-you-can-eat buffet in that department.

• Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path gave one of the most engaging presentations of the day on User Experience Design. He was entertaining and informative, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the four views of “users” that he posited:
  1. Homo Economicus
     More features for less money and effort
  2. Type A’s
     Completely task and goal driven – all about efficiency
  3. Sheep
     Docile, gullible and all about group think
  4. The Gullet
     Gulp up products just because they can and crap cash

  That last one was the best. Having worked for a company that saw its customers this way, I could barely contain my glee at how Todd phrased this. A+ for accuracy and the use of “crap cash” in a conference presentation.

• Sean Madden’s Social Architecture session was the most thought-provoking of the day and I spent the rest of the afternoon pondering self-organizing systems and how various technologies might play a key role in such systems, like RFID tags, mobile phones w/GPS, OpenID, metro WiFi and intelligent devices.

  I especially liked Sean’s descriptive use of calm technology (hiding complexity through intuitive systems) and beautiful seams (glimpses of what’s under the hood that are powerful, yet approachable). As a member of one of my favorite design shops, frog design, I’m not surprised at the depth and intriguing concepts that came out of his presentation.

All in all, not bad for one day … I have pages of notes, ideas and musings that will have to percolate for a bit.