Cennydd Bowles on user experience.

Archive for the ‘web’ Category

Why “best practice” must die

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Traffic light showing redAnyone who’s worked in the web is aware of the “best practice” cult. To me, it’s a lazy creed that exhorts us to switch off and plunder others’ work, and the time has come to rebel.

Firstly, there’s the pure language involved. “Best” implies something that cannot be improved upon. A world of best practice gives us creationism, chariots, and gramophones. It negates progress.

There’s also a more sinister side, which is when it’s wheeled out as an argument in design projects that are heading off the rails:

“Ah, but that’s not how eBay do it”.

The unspoken implication is that eBay know better than I, and therefore I should defer to their wisdom. It’s an argument that I find misguided more than insulting. The web runs on the basis of meritocracy in a way that many other industries cannot. “That’s not how eBay do it” is industrial, corporate thinking, entirely irrelevant to the 21st century. For the truth is that large companies often don’t have a clue about design. One’s skill and knowledge are entirely independent of the size of your employer: I’m confident I know as much about my profession as the employees at any large company.

The best practice trump card also fails because it doesn’t understand the nature of practical design. It’s not a transferable commodity: you can’t just screw a design solution into place. Good design must be appropriate and relevant to the particular problem. The factors involved—technological, strategic, sociological—are far too complex and variable for a plug and play approach. To say “Well, a dropdown worked here…” is to ignore factors that can actually work in your favour. A company that rejects the easy route and takes the time to understand technology, strategy and users can offer designs that makes it stand out from the rest.

I’m not advocating isolating oneself from the surrounding environment. For instance, at Clearleft, we regularly perform competitor analysis at the start of a project. It’s useful to see where others’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and helps us understand the landscape. However, not once has it given me the answer to a design problem. That always comes later, with thought, with detail, and after many failed attempts.

So let’s not allow the enforced limitation and unvoiced threats of “best practice” to pollute our thinking. It’s harder work, sure, but standing out and being better always is.

Posted in creativity, design, web | 8 Comments »

Coping with a mainstream Twitter

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

January was the month that Twitter lurched towards the British mainstream. Stats show an astronomical rise in site and search traffic, and the rich and famous are now falling over themselves to connect with their fawning public.

Hitwise stats for Twitter in January

One may ask why this tipping point has happened first in the UK, rather than the States or elsewhere. One possible explanation is that a small number of influential celebrity types have hastened this outcome, and it’d be easy to fall into a daft sociocultural analysis of Britain the country and Britain the network. Stephen Fry as the powerful Gladwellian connector, uniting the geeks and the unwashed, previously so suspicious of each other!

My money’s on random chance. The initial conditions were set, after which chaos theory is the dominant force (yes, perhaps I have been listening to Jeremy too much).

The practical upshot is plenty of new users, including several of my real-life friends. They’re perhaps still on the early adopter side of mainstream but they’re not the type to, for instance, write blog posts about why people are joining Twitter. While it’s great to have them on Twitter, I have my own selfish concern: will I be able to cope?

I’ve previously mentioned that I have an approximate following threshold of 250. My workload and lifestyle enforce that personal limit, and I can’t realistically keep up to date with more people. So if my less geeky friends continue to join, whom do I drop? The model’s different from Facebook, where I can simply accumulate “friends” (a virtual notch on the bedpost) and then largely ignore them. So do I drop existing Twitterers, many whom I’ve never met but still give me a wealth of inspiration and knowledge, or friends whom I miss and am always eager to hear from? Ambient intimacy or friendship?

It’s a quandary. I’ve been trying to convince friends to join Twitter for a long time and it would be an irony if, once they join, I admit I don’t want to follow them. Yet I’m already operating a one-in-one-out policy, and something will have to give. My likely approach will be to take a much more relaxed and liberal approach to unfollowing people. Just as I’ll go and talk to various people at a party, so my attention will shift around a bit online. It’s either that or I face a cacophony in which I can hear no one.

However, I’m aware that people have very different attitudes to being unfollowed, so I’ll treat this post as a prophylactic excuse. Seriously, it’s not you, it’s me.

Posted in personal, psychology, web | 3 Comments »

Intern position at Clearleft

Monday, January 5th, 2009

Clearleft logoThe time has rolled round again when Clearleft fancies having a fresh face in the office, so we’re currently looking for a Design/Front End Development Intern.

It’d suit someone with talent and enthusiasm (or, better, passion) for web design, UX and standards-based development, but who maybe lacks the commercial experience and wants to take a strong step forward into the industry. As Andy has commented, it’s a fairly challenging role, because we’re known for having opinions about stuff. So the sort of person we’re after has opinions too. Someone who reads, comments, blogs, tweets and generally likes to be a part of the conversation would fit in brilliantly.

Unlike many intern programmes, this one’s actually paid, and of course the right person would stand to learn an enormous amount from the likes of Natalie and Jeremy. Personally, I’ve learnt more in six months of working here than in any other position, so the rewards are definitely there.

The internment internship runs for ten weeks this Spring. See clearleft.com/jobs to find out more.

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

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.

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:

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 »

Bonfire of the vanity

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Twitter quote

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 »

The survival of web apps

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

I’ve had a busy time of late, in particular thanks to a couple of days in Switzerland and Austria, followed by the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in the Docklands. FOWA’s a little large for my tastes, but it’s undeniably well organised. Three sessions stood out (the uniformly excellent Gavin Bell, Benjamin Huh’s history of Icanhascheezburger and Kathy Sierra being her enthusiastic self) but my particular interest, and one I’d love to have heard more about, is in the eponymous future bit.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how our field will develop and while I believe mobile, the Cloud and the Semantic Web are going to be big factors, I’ll park them for future posts and talk about the clearest issue on our horizon: the economic downturn.

Truly this was FOWA’s cri de coeur. A majority of sessions made mention of it, and Sun’s Tim Bray scrapped his keynote at the last minute to deliver Get through the tough times – which, although somewhat cataclysmic, is definitely worth 30 minutes of your time. Over a matter of days, the economy has become the dominant topic of the web. Dan Saffer asks what designers can do to help (in short, make stuff). Khoi Vinh cautions us to be careful about our data. Andy Budd talks about how to survive a global recession.

I’ll admit it: I’m a little scared. I was too late for the bursting of the first bubble; every year I’ve spent in the industry has been one of growth. A potentially contracting market is a new thing for me.

Of course, self-correction is a fundamental part of the system we live in. Boom precedes bust. And I’m confident there’ll always be work for smart people at the top of their game. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, if capitalism has one strength, it’s that it has a knack of creating new jobs to replace those that are lost.

But our environment will undoubtedly change. Andy makes the point that it’s now even more important for businesses to understand their customers; after all, retention is far cheaper than acquisition. He’s right, but unfortunately I think few will accept the perceived risk: tight budgets make waterfall, big requirements and long research phases a thing of the past, if they weren’t already. UX designers in particular might find it hard to be relevant in these short-term times. To survive, we have to become more agile (both lower-case and upper-case ‘a’) and demonstrate our value from day one. Quick, practical research. Quick, volatile design. I’m currently writing an article on how we can do this; but, looking beyond survival tactics, is there still room for user experience to make a difference strategically?

Perhaps, if we make the case clear. Now is a particularly bad time to compete solely on features – the cost is of that arms race is simply too high. I forsee UX people increasingly filling the role of strategic chaperone, dragging businesses away from unsuitable functionality and focusing them on the core product. Cash-strapped businesses are already going to build just half a product; we have to help them focus on the right half.

I also think lower levels of capital will catalyse a far deeper trend: the end of the website as destination. Once upon a time, creating a brochureware site or, recently, another social networking app was a viable strategy – there was market share to be gained, and there was capital available. ‘Me too’ sites captured their share of eyeballs, CPA and other such meaningless trivia. These days are gone, and if this is your future model, the question will be one of survival, not expansion.

Historically, companies that thrive in recessions aren’t those that drive efficiency and cut costs: they’re those who can execute on an idea that changes everything. So the next phase of the web, now upon us, will see it evolve as an enabler, not a medium. The real value now is in getting devices talking, connecting products and services, and synthesising information in new, valuable ways. Services like Dopplr are already halfway there: so laden with APIs and interconnectedness that they exist as intermediaries – a ‘social physics engine’, to use Matt Biddulph’s wonderful phrase – the site itself is largely redundant. All that counts is the value that it brings to people’s lives.

The good news is this is still very much dependent on a user experience focus – it’s just a different flavour of UX. It’s less about making fractional sales improvements or reducing numbers of customer service interventions. Our role now has to be more about trying to make a genuine difference to the world through innovation. This is noble and, as I said earlier, scary. Change always is, and it’s appropriate that we remain alert in difficult times. But, for good people, the sky isn’t falling quite yet.

Posted in user experience, web | No Comments »

Escalation

Monday, October 6th, 2008

More and more, I find myself less interested in what web designers have to say.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some very clever people out there – hell, I’m lucky enough to work with some of them. However, I’m worried that as a community we are blinded by our self-importance. Proudly we don the mantles of digital pioneers and imperiously believe we’re the first to encounter the problems we face. How do we make things that people enjoy? How can we help people to share and learn from each other? Can new technologies alleviate social ills? The more I learn about other fields, the more I find that bright minds have been tackling identical problems for years, and the less surprised I am by this discovery.

I’ve reached a stage of my career where I learn more about user experience from outside the field than in. My non-fiction reading list, previously full of every reputable web/UX design book I could devour, now bulges with architecture, Tufte, typography and semiotics.

Most of the intelligent, ambitious web people I know seem to be undergoing a similar escalation of interests. Whether I can count myself as one of them is moot, but I do know that I’m increasingly skipping RSS feeds that talk about web methods, techniques and tricks. I spend my conference budget on inspiration, not tuition, and endeavour to aim equally high when I’m fortunate enough to present to others.

The UX mailing lists, a barometric aggregate of the field’s current interests, seem to be moving upmarket too. Discussions about design thinking are in the ascendency; those about the location of confirmation buttons are bottoming out. Despite the occasional futile game of Defining The Damn Thing, the trend is increasingly highbrow and diverse.

Below, an example of some advice I’ve recently found particularly enlightening:

“Engineers tend to be concerned with physical things in and of themselves. Architects are more directly concerned with the human interface with physical things.”

“Being non-specific in an effort to appeal to everyone usually results in reaching no one.”

Crystalline, and applicable to all design fields. These quotes, as of course you guessed, are not from a web design book. Instead, they are two of many useful aphorisms from 101 things I learned in architecture school by Matthew Frederick – and yet are still more a commentary on design process than advice on a specific discipline.

In similar circles, I’ve recently been inspired by Stewart Brand’s marvellous documentary How Buildings Learn, the companion to the elusive book of the same name. The first episode alone has so many parallels with web design that we ought to be ashamed at how we’ve not drunk more deeply from a well some thousands of years older than our own.

There is, of course, an exquisite irony in a web designer harping on about the questionable wisdom of web designers (particularly when opening with such a shambolic oxymoron). I do think the industry has a great deal to offer its devotees, and there’s still a place for learning from our experts (and I’m looking forward to UX London hugely for this reason), but I do think our community would benefit from removing the blinkers every now and then. Forming a human pyramid is no match for standing on the shoulders of giants.

Posted in design, web | 2 Comments »

Beauty in web design

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Just found out that the video of my talk at Reboot in Copenhagen has been posted to the conference site:

Slides themselves are on Slideshare, albeit with some minor font inconsistencies. It’s also worth checking out Andy’s session on the user experience curve, and I particularly enjoyed Eric Reiss talking about e-service. Be great to hear any comments.

Edit: I’ve now updated this presentation for SXSW 2010 and written it up into three detailed articles. See Beauty in web design, part 1.

Posted in creativity, design, web | No Comments »

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