Archive for 2008

On 2008

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

It is of course customary at this time of year to review the twelve months past in a lengthy and uninteresting blog post. So I’ll condense it to a paragraph.

In 2008, I watched Cardiff City in a Cup Final, saw My Bloody Valentine live, met some marvellous people, was published in A List Apart, moved to a new city I love, and worked with some of the best in my field.

More of the same, please.

Posted in personal | No Comments »

Getting real about Agile design

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Thrilled to see my article Getting real about Agile design published on A List Apart today. Hopefully it’ll stimulate some lively discussion about a subject that I feel has often been treated rather shallowly. If you have any thoughts on the article I’d love to hear them in the “Join the discussion” section (but please go easy on my pun/neologism “user-scented design”, of which I’m embarrassingly proud).

If you find the topic of particular interest, you may like to know that I’m running a half-day workshop on Agile user-centred design at UX London next year. Alternatively, if you find me of particular interest (I suppose someone must), you’re very welcome to say hello on Twitter or grab my RSS feed.

Many thanks to the ALA team, with whom it’s been a pleasure to work, Clearleft of course, and Johanna for the research help.

Posted in design, personal, user experience | 1 Comment »

Can we avoid redesign backlash?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Users hate redesigns, or so we’re told. To be fair, the evidence does seem to support the argument: the last year or so has given us some clear examples of user backlash.

• Facebook: Right now, the largest anti-redesign group has 1,656,258 members. I’m with them in spirit: I think the Facebook redesign is weak, although it happens to suit my particular needs well (i.e. a lifestreaming service for non-geeks).
• last.fm: A site I dearly love, but whose redesign did little to address its IA problems, while introducing a gap-toothed NME-meets-Facebook visual direction that does it few favours. I wasn’t alone in my disappointment; there were quickly over 2,000 comments (warning: link may choke up your browser), often wildly negative.
• News sites: The Guardian, FT.com, and the BBC also transformed themselves within the last year, with ‘robust’ opinion voiced on each. News sites also have to handle the added complexity of politics: even if the Beeb were to find a cure for cancer, there would still be someone complaining it’s a waste of his licence fee.

All of these redesigns followed the familiar backlash pattern. To begin, post on your blog that you’re rolling out the redesign, and explain your rationale. Bonus points for words such as “widgets” and “personalised”. Having lit the touch paper, retire to a safe distance as the Kübler-Ross hatefest commences:

• Denial: “Why on earth did you change it?”, “The site was fine the way it was”
• Anger: “My twelve-year-old could have done better!”, “F— you, I’ll never use this site again”
• Bargaining: “At least give us the option to use the old version…”
• Depression: “I used to love this site. Now I can’t bring myself to use it.”, “I miss [feature X] :(“
• Acceptance: “Actually, I’ve been using it for two weeks now and…”

The accepted wisdom on the cause of this backlash is that users learn how to navigate the site and achieve their goals, only for these strategies to prove useless in a redesign. Something akin to the way we learn the layout of a supermarket and optimise our routes accordingly.

I don’t buy this argument. Navigation may have a minor impact but users are notoriously good at satisficing—finding a good enough option—in unfamiliar waters. Instead, I think the reaction has a psychological basis. A favourite site has an emotional connection for us: we like it, it likes us, and we can depend each other. We fear the disruption of that equilibrium: a redesign raises the question of whether the site will grow in a direction we don’t want to follow. As Hugh MacLeod says in How To Be Creative:

Your friends may love you, but they don’t want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you also changes. They like things the way they are, that’s how they love you – the way you are, not the way you may become.

Ergo, they have no incentive to see you change. And they will be resistant to anything that catalyzes it.

So, following from my earlier post, why has the New Xbox Experience (NXE) been so successful where other major redesigns have failed? Remember that this is Microsoft, a company not afforded the grace period that, say, Apple or Nintendo are.

My first thought is that the NXE is another good example of the MAYA principle in action. In particular, the quick interface, a cutdown version of the dashboard launched from within games, is structurally very similar to the old UI. I don’t know much about the NXE’s design process (although if anyone has any links I’d love to read them), but certainly it’s easy to imagine usability tests showing this was a welcomed feature.

The new UI also didn’t push boundaries particularly far, since in some areas it was simply catching up. The real value came not in the interface but in service innovation, incorporating new and desirable functionality (Netflix, HD installation) as a key part of the new design.

Compare this with Facebook’s lurch towards lifestreaming, which is at odds with the popular model of the site and therefore unlikely to appeal to many users. The public’s opinion seems to be that Facebook is a place to get in touch with people, rather than see what they’re up to. It could be argued that as friendship saturation reaches 100% (i.e. you have no friends left to add), lifestreaming becomes more useful. So perhaps Facebook are ahead of the anticipated user curve, but I doubt the 1,656,258 care.

We must also consider the fundamental question of whether a major redesign is wise idea in the first place. Jared Spool, for instance, argued long ago that big relaunches are dead. To a large extent I agree, and there are usually alternatives; for example, the classic eBay redesign story, which I assumed to be apocryphal but have been assured by insiders is true.

In a nutshell, a meaningless background was removed from a seller page. Pandemonium. After strong resistance the background was reinstated, to everyone’s satisfaction. In fact, the rebellious users were so placated that they failed to notice the designers slowly adjusting the background’s hex values over the next few months. The background got lighter and lighter until one day—pop!—it was gone.

To return to my initial question, I think it’s a brave and lucky company that can find a way to redesign without creating unrest amongst a large userbase. Your best strategy is to sweeten the deal with desirable functionality and an interface that matches users’ current mental models; if you don’t have those, batten down those hatches and prepare yourself for retaliation.

Posted in design, user experience, web | 12 Comments »

Social topiary

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Our tiny brains are reaching social saturation point. Any heavy email receiver, Twitter user or RSS subscriber will tell you that there comes a point whereby the flow of inbound information is more than we can handle. The result is a flood which can often only be stemmed by giving up and hitting that reset button.

200 inputs is my approximate upper limit. Any more and I struggle to keep up, and eventually have to admit information bankruptcy. I can handle a few more on Twitter, a few fewer on RSS subscriptions, about that number on Facebook. This ballpark figure isn’t particularly surprising, as anyone who’s read The Tipping Point or read about Dunbar’s number will tell you, but I’m interested less in the theory as the consequences of overconsumption.

An elegant social dance is being performed across the web, as people realise they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, and decide to cut back. The resultant social politics are fascinating. Is unfollowing someone on Twitter a meaningful act of disapproval? At what level of ‘busy’ is it ok to ignore a friend’s forwarded email? Can a friendship survive a Facebook defriending?

Mostly these are rhetorical questions, or at least ones where the answers are so personal it’s hard to give a definitive judgement. Whatever the answers, this phenomenon is occurring so regularly I’m amazed we don’t seem to have a name for it yet. So what the hell, I’ll try: “social topiary”.

Posted in politics, psychology | 1 Comment »

New Xbox Experience

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Yesterday the ‘New Xbox Experience’ (NXE) upgrade was finally rolled out to all Xbox Live users. The old system (created by AKQA and known as the “blades”) was more dated than bad, but the market has shifted during its five-year lifespan. Online is now the default platform for many, casual gaming is the new black, and the previously masculine bias of the games industry has softened substantially in recent years. The NXE is an attempt to catch up, so the changes aren’t huge, but it’s interesting to see how they affect the overall console experience.

The avatar

Yes, that’s me on the left. We can see the avatar as the natural extension of the Xbox gamertag, created back in 2003. Personification is the trend: game companies are keen to give players flexibility to define an identity for themselves online. Certainly a name alone no longer cuts it. It’s worth remembering that Xbox Live controversially remains a chargeable service, so there is a clear impetus to at least equalise with competitor online services, the Wii being the obvious parallel.

Rare, the avatar designers, say they were keen to find the balance between toylike and overly realistic (there’s that uncanny valley again), but I think the result is bland: approachable, but far too close to Nintendo’s territory and too limiting to create anything with real character.

However, the new avatars do have a couple of interesting features. A friend’s status is now reflected by their avatar’s pose (eg. asleep = offline) and apparently avatars will be embedded in small games in future. Microsoft have, in essence, created a hook around which gaming experiences can hang, which is a smart move.

Functionality

There are some minor functional changes, probably the most significant of which is that you can now install games to the hard drive and run them from that. Not only is this long overdue, given that it’s been standard practice on PCs for 20+ years, but it also tackles one of the 360′s major flaws: its extremely noisy DVD drive. It also allows for faster switching between games, which will suit those players who like to throw tantrums when they start losing.

There’s also the new ability to ask your Xbox to download items remotely, although this does of course rely on you leaving it on all the time.

Interface and IA

The interface itself isn’t much changed, except that the blades have become panels and adopted the increasingly-clichéd Cover Flow stance. More usefully, there’s a welcome tightening up of the IA, which means hours wasted fishing around in Settings should be a thing of the past.

Migration

The detail I’ve been most impressed by was the migration experience itself. Upgrades are one of the areas where just a little user focus can have a huge impact: compare firmware upgrades for the iPhone with most older handsets. The entire upgrade took just four minutes (excellent for what is essentially an entire OS upgrade), with seamless plug-and-play operation and an explanatory video upon relaunch.

Reaction

Somehow, we’ve reached the age where a firmware upgrade for a console can create a buzz—almost universally, people seem to love the NXE. The really interesting question is why, which I’ll write a followup post about shortly.

Personally, I’m not as glowing as others. I actually quite liked the old Xbox personality: hardcore over casual, masculine over feminine. This update softens that stance, and I think it’s a mistake to drift towards Wii territory. Minor gripes aside, it is an undeniably well-crafted piece of work, tackling known problems, creating extensibility and, most importantly, getting people talking about a rather old console in the lucrative run-up to Christmas.

Posted in games, user experience | 1 Comment »

The C word

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I know, I know, it’s still five weeks away, but these things take a lot of forethought. My travel arrangements to The Lizard are already made, but the main plans revolve around the parties. As well as the Clearleft bash (mercifully an afternoon thing), I’m going to the BBC Backstage party to catch up with the London folks, then heading to the Open Rights Group party the following week.

Booze aside, this will be my fourth year of opting out of the commerce of Christmas. I find the traditional Christmas whirlpool of money towards the retailers rather distasteful, given the millions of people who actually need it. As a result I’ll be donating rather than spending money on presents, and once I again I ask others to do so on my behalf instead of buying me anything. ORG will be one of my recipients (along with The Wikimedia Foundation and Asthma UK); as it happens they’ve just released their annual report (pdf), which is definitely worth a read.

The fun bit is that I’m committed this year to making little presents for people to make up the gap. Any ideas?

Posted in personal | 3 Comments »

Bonfire of the vanity

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Some things aren’t meant to be measured. It’s bad enough that people read so much into their blog stats, follower numbers etc, but now we have more evil forces like Twitterank. The number of people willing to surrender their privacy to its password anti-pattern is even more astonishing given its payoff: a dimensionless, reference-free number. Can this really tell you anything of value? Every day, social networks are clogged with this kind of pointless egotism, not mentioning the high-end vanity apps like Qwitter, which just add more fuel to the flames.

I understand that people love hearing about themselves. But if you listen hard enough there’s plenty of real human feedback on a network like Twitter. You don’t need to run an algorithm to tell you how much you’re getting out of it.

Posted in psychology, web | 2 Comments »

Farewell to anti-intellectualism?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

Until recently, I equated politics with duty: something that I must participate in, but that was never elevated above a choice between deeply unsatisfactory options.

I find most politics ideologically empty, and it is almost a truism to say that we know very little about how President Obama will govern. However, I do believe that yesterday’s election will make a profound difference to the world, and for the first time I’m genuinely excited at the prospect of political change. Of course the race issue is important, but my personal hope for Obama’s presidency is the end (or, at worst, the long suspension) of a culture of anti-intellectualism that has plagued Western politics for years.

Anti-intellectualism is not a uniquely right-wing stance, but it has been used with alarming regularity by the current US administration. Bush himself is the archetypal example but, consigning him to the history he deserves to inhabit, we’ve seen examples in the recent campaign too. Sarah Palin’s attempt to champion the cause of the “real America”, by conflating intellect and elitism, failed profoundly.

The right’s attack has not been constrained purely to intelligence: it has also involved the devaluation of education, reason and evidence. All have been systematically discarded by the incumbent government, state education boards, Supreme Court Justices and hawkish military generals.

This framing of intellectuals as The Other is counter-productive, dangerous, and hopefully moribund.

It is clear that Obama is an acutely intelligent man and a gifted orator. As such, he received his mandate from two ends of the spectrum: those with the lowest and highest privileges. His race and his stance on welfare made him attractive to disenfranchised minorities, while his sharp, rational demeanour made him almost entirely dominant amongst liberal urbanites. This top-and-bottom split was complemented by a generational shift: a fierce reaction against the hegemony of old, rich, white men. The campaign itself owes much of its success to the internet and, yes, even graphic design. Fairey’s Hope poster will stay with us as one of the most important political design works of our generation.

Republicans may wish to blame their loss on the economy. 63% of Americans say it was the primary issue. But I think the Republican attitude that the economy needs to be restored to its former glories is fundamentally wrong. It doesn’t. The way forward is a new, sustainable, evenhanded economy with environmental conscience, and checks and balances protecting the public purse from the risks of the free market. Where the poor get richer, not just the rich.

While I’m concerned I’ve compromised my cynicism and have gone a bit gooey over a single politician, yesterday feels to me as significant as 9/11, and as constructive as the aforementioned was destructive. I believe that, given the pace of innovation and change in our society, we are already caught up in a second Renaissance. Politics, historically, always lags behind social trends. Yesterday it caught up, and the 21st century can really begin.

Posted in politics | 1 Comment »

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