Archive for August, 2008

Planning and failing

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

I enjoyed Lloyd Davis’s post Stick your five-year plan, in which he argues the futility of long-term planning when it comes to one’s own life. I think in some respects he’s absolutely right. While it’s useful to have some structure, some framework to life, anything beyond a couple of years is likely to be wildly inaccurate. Even in my relatively short life so far I’ve changed my tack quite dramatically. Taking a few five-year leaps backwards:

1993: Aged 14. Shrewsbury, puberty, spots, awkwardness. The usual. Also choosing my GCSEs. At my school there was a heavy sense of trajectory to this – GCSEs were chosen very much with A-Levels in mind, which in turn were chosen to optimise Oxbridge entrance. Therefore I was already on a science path, that being where my teenage tendencies lay.

1998: Aged 19. Nottingham – got into Oxford, but missed the grades. About to start second year of Physics degree after a pretty dismal first year. I’d already lost almost all interest in the subject, and spent a lot of time lingering on the web and publishing my first public website. Frames, tables and all.

2003: Aged 24. Nottingham still, but recently graduated from an IT MSc I’d entered with expectations of being a programmer. However, I became absorbed by HCI modules along the route, and therefore was trying to convince the a government agency I worked for that they needed me to become a full-time Information Architect. Permanently skint, single after four years, still never been on a plane, and feeling abject pity towards uni mates now living in London.

2008: Aged 29. Brighton, after a year in London. Still single, less hair, less skint. I’m living on my own, working for a web agency, doing some pretty cutting edge stuff and beginning to make a name for myself. Travelling regularly, wearing glasses, developing quite a taste for expensive gin.

The way I’ve made this transformation from left-brained science kid to this apparently quite creative and visually-focused adult is puzzling and, from my present viewpoint, quite wonderful. There’s a whole blog post in how that happened, and whether my science background has helped or hindered me as a designer. Once dConstruct is done I’ll write it.

I’m also a lot happier now I’ve relaxed my attitude towards my destiny. There comes a point at which too much self-drive causes you to miss the serendipitous little currents that come when you go with the flow.

As for the next five years? 2013: Aged 34. No idea. Hopefully Brighton. Hopefully not single. Probably not a father. Hopefully still working in user experience. But given the U-turns I’ve made so far I’m not going to rule anything out.

Posted in personal | 2 Comments »

My new filing technique is unstoppable

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

It should come as no surprise that, as both an IA and a music snob, I keep my ID3 tags pretty much immaculate. Correct spellings, title case throughout, even proper diacritics, until they were ruined by the iTunes v7.7 update.

As part of my curatorial approach, I classify for optimal findability – which means, since I have an iPhone, that I arrange my artists the proper/anal way – by surname for solo artists, and by name for bands. The definite article is of course excluded and appended as a suffix. Hence:

Mitchell, Joni
Smiths, The
Add N To (X)

But those last.fm upstarts think they know better than me. National, The “is an incorrect tag for The National. If this non-artist appears in your charts, do last.fm and yourself a favor. Fix your artist tags.” Also – the injustice – a big red image imploring me to adhere to their wrong-minded tagging policies.

Non-artist? The cheek! They’ll regret this, I tell you. Oh, and favor? They’re based in Shoreditch! Grr!

Posted in music, user experience | 4 Comments »

Design of everyday things

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

I have a policy of muting TV adverts due to their inherent idiocy, but here’s one I actually unmuted. I’m a sucker for under-appreciated nick nacks.

Hey Twitter, here’s why we’re annoyed

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

$Twitter\'s infamous \'fail whale\' graphic$

It occurs to me that the reason people (myself included) are pissed at Twitter’s removal of UK SMS service is that it discards information and nullifies coping strategies we’ve built up over time.

Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone. It tells users directly, wherever they are, that information is awaiting their attention. It’s far more urgent and personal than, say, email – which is why there is such strong emotional resistance to unwanted SMS marketing. Email falls some way behind in the priority stack, with RSS lower still.

It’s natural for users to choose how they want to be notified of incoming information, based on its importance. Twitter is no exception. Over time, a hierarchy of importance has emerged on Twitter.

Direct messages (DM) to you
@replies to you
Friends’ timeline

You could say there’s a fourth tier, the public timeline, but that’s so fast moving that we can safely ignore it.

Light users who follow a handful of close friends (as with most Twitter users) have tended to use texts to notify them of activity on all of these tiers. This way, you get told when a friend posts an update, when they @reply and when they DM you. For small numbers of friends this is manageable.

However, as you start to follow more people, the stream of information becomes too great. The solution is to bump the text threshold higher, so that only the important stuff (@replies or even just DMs) fires off a text and the resultant interruption.

Most power users I know had text alerts just set up for DMs. It was an elegant way of handling priority, and added information to the incoming message. In effect, it said “Hey, this message is important enough to interrupt you with”. Twitter DMs thereby became treated with exactly the same attention as a standard text message, and were just as entwined in a user’s life.

By abandoning SMS support, Twitter are collapsing these tiers. No longer do we have the ability to assign importance to incoming messages; that information is now lost to us. Overnight, Twitter has overwritten the emergent behaviour that the network has created over months of use. Not smart.

Posted in web | 4 Comments »

Digital rights in a restrictive age

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

One of the difficulties of working in the internet industry is we sometimes feel like we’re fighting a losing battle against regulation. Despite the new horizons the digital age offers:

state databases of our information are growing, yet our access to public information is being eroded,
copyright is becoming more restrictive, making a criminal out of a bedroom DJ who creates a mashup of old songs,
the songs, films, phones and hardware we buy are so crippled with copy protection and DRM that we sometimes can’t even use the damn things legally.

None of this is necessarily the government’s fault. In the absence of their own technical knowledge, legislators regularly turn to Big Business for advice. Unfortunately, some of Big Business (not all) profits by keeping these very restrictions in place. The customer, the end user, the public misses out.

The Open Rights Group was set up as the voice of the other side of the debate. They don’t want anarchy and piracy on the open internet seas; just a chance to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology.

Of course, ORG is a volunteer organisation and needs funds. As they’re on a big recruitment drive, they’ve asked supporters to help spread the word: so, without wishing to be too brazen, I do recommend you check them out if you’re not familiar with them, and maybe consider whether you could support the consumer side of an often under-reported and one-sided debate.

Posted in links, music, privacy, web | No Comments »

Agile and the horizon effect

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The 1960s saw the first ideological skirmish in computer chess programming (and by extension much of the nascent field of AI) between two schools of thought: ‘brute force’ and ‘selective search’. Brute force methods involved looking at every possible position on the board, whereas selective search advocated pruning the game tree by ignoring moves that looked plain wrong.

With the hindsight of Moore’s Law, this was never really a contest. Brute force’s superiority was reinforced with each new clock speed, and this is how all chess programs work today. Each move is considered, as is each reply, and so on. A computer will typically analyse ~250 million positions per second, evaluate them all and choose the computationally best branch of play.

Early brute force machines were set to calculate all variations to a fixed depth, such as five moves. However, programmers soon found that this seemingly fool-proof method was still leading to some terrible chess. The cause was a phenomenon dubbed the horizon effect, whereby the losing move lay beyond the point at which the computer stopped calculating. A computer playing to a fixed depth may therefore set out on what seems the best path, unaware of the disaster lurking around the corner. Frustratingly, it even may ‘see’ the losing move but find a way to delay it by a couple of meaningless forcing moves, thus pushing it beyond the fixed horizon. Out of sight, out of mind.

For humans, the horizon effect isn’t much of a problem. Intuition plays a surprisingly large role in chess, and experienced players can vocalise when a position “feels like trouble” even though the fireworks may be a few moves off. Famous studies by Adriaan de Groot show that much of this intuition is based on pattern recognition, so that over time a skilled player builds a pattern library and, with it, an innate early warning system.

Programmers, of course, wished to mimic this intuition in computers, and did so by introducing a concept known as quiescence; in effect, a measure of a position’s stability. At the end of each variation, quiescence is calculated. If the position is placid (quiescent), the variation can terminate and work starts on another branch. However, if the position is still deemed to have danger in it, the computer is allowed to look a little further, until it again finds a quiescent state. Quiescence fills the role of the human’s alarm bells, and substitutes for the intuition that certain scenarios are going to need a bit more care to solve.

Any system where work is conducted to a fixed depth is susceptible to the same effect, and of course Agile is no exception. As we all know, Agile often doesn’t afford us a long discovery phase, and asks us to focus on short, practical iterations. This goes against a designer’s natural instincts; one of the more common complaints designers have of Agile is that it rarely gives us the chance to conceive an over-arching ‘solution’ of the problem space. The horizon effect again. We work on each piece, not knowing whether or not disaster lies around the corner. We have to delay solving potentially tricky problems, and can never be really sure that the site will work until we’ve completed it.

Although in theory Agile is comfortable with the idea of rework, the real world penalties are high. At worst, we might have to scrap a whole approach because of an unforeseen problem in a future iteration, repeatedly pushed beyond our horizons until it is too late. Try telling your clients that the last £10,000 they paid you were wasted and see how far theory gets you.

As good designers, we therefore need our own quiescence search. Just as the computer develops an intuition for choppy waters ahead, so must we. We build up a box of tricks to handle these scenarios: starting work on tricky stories early (while keeping it secret from Agile dogmatists!), pushing easier user stories up the chart to buy us time, and so on. But these techniques only come with years of experience. As with the chess player, we rely on pattern recognition, experience and skill to act as our early warning system and flag difficult stories in advance.

The more I think about Agile design, the more I’m convinced it needs senior staff. Send a junior IA into the middle of an experienced Agile team and they’ll struggle to keep their heads above water. With senior design staff still at a premium, I suspect many companies will have to compromise the integrity of either their user-centred design or their Agile processes. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is more likely.

Posted in user experience, web | 1 Comment »

SXSW 2009 – vote for me!

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The South By Southwest session picker has just gone online and I’m not too proud to shamelessly solicit votes for my session:

Divorce / Retry / Fail: Keeping Users Infatuated
We know all about lust. Our websites pose, preen and seduce, and it works – those users just can’t keep their hands off our bits. But, as romance fades, can we stop them yearning after younger, more attractive options? It’s time for some website marriage counselling.

If you like the idea, or just appreciate the smutty innuendo, then please do vote for me. Thanks.

Posted in personal, user experience, web | No Comments »