RSS feedDesign of everyday things
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.
See also: 10 Perfectly Pure Gadgets.
Hey Twitter, here’s why we’re annoyed
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Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone.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.
Digital rights in a restrictive age
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.
Agile and the horizon effect
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.
SXSW 2009 - vote for me!
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.
The illusion of control
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” - Mario Andretti
Control is a slippery thing. It’s important to our lives; we need it to rationalise and justify our decisions, but sometimes it’s simply beyond our influence. The well-known fundamental attribution error is a clear example of how we overstate human involvement in random events - in short, we don’t like the idea that we or, failing that, another human, are not in full control of a situation.
With technology this is particularly prevalent. When we are asked to to let a machine act on our behalf we become nervous if we don’t feel at least partially in control. One example of this is the excellent writing tool Scrivener which has an elegant autosave built in, running after every pause of two seconds. This ensures that flow, very important for writers, isn’t interrupted, but provides the peace of mind that reams of text won’t be lost in the event of a crash. However, even with this tight policy in place, Scrivener offers a force save mapped to the regular keyboard shortcut Cmd-S.
Gmail offers a similar redundant safety net when composing a new mail. State is of course saved in the background via Ajax but Google again allow users the comfort of saving at a point of their choosing.
Sometimes genuine control is not possible, in which case the answer can be to hide this from the user to keep them happy. Lift buttons are a classic example; below, a picture of the lift controls in my apartment block.
Lift / elevator passengers essentially volunteer to be shut inside a metal box suspended hundreds of metres off the ground. Not only that, but they abdicate responsibility for their safety to a computer. Few sane humans would be willing to do this on these terms. As a result, lift designers have to be very careful to ensure passengers feel in control of the system, even though in reality they have only partial control at best.
The Door Close button is a result of this pretence of control. On the majority of lifts it has absolutely no function since the lift is on a predetermined timer. However, tests show that users like the peace of mind of the Door Close button, providing as it does the belief that there is no element of the lift experience that we cannot influence. Ethically, there might be concerns that this is flat-out manipulation of users. However, situations where a little interaction white lie works to reduce anxiety of users, it’s probably acceptable.
Appendix 1: As it happens, some lift models do have an important role for the Door Close: enabling debugging modes for engineers. Certain button combinations (e.g. floor number + Door Close) activate express modes, stop the lift running, and so on. Other models use a lock and key to prevent public access to these functions.
Appendix 2: For more info, try Up And Then Down, an excellent New Yorker feature article on elevators, their design challenges, and a mildly terrifying account of Nicholas White, who was stuck in a lift for 41 hours.
Wolfenflickr 3D
Some mashups are unlikelier than others. However, none as unlikely as the collision of Flickr and id’s classic shoot-em up Wolfenstein in Wolfenflickr 3D.
The Web truly is a mysterious place.
Vive la FIP
At last I have broadband. Too many stories to relate, but there’s one I’d particularly like to share.
While setting up my bedroom basics (alarm clock, airbed - thankfully now usurped by a real bed) I chanced upon a French radio station playing some very listenable French hip-hop. I stuck with it, and over the next couple of weeks it remained my humble alarm/snooze companion until, late last week, I took a short lie in and actually listened to it properly.
Brilliant! No ads, no DJs, just a very short hourly news update; and otherwise totally dedicated to a spectacularly diverse playlist taking in The Divine Comedy, Chopin, Parisian indie (Cocosuma, apparently), Prince and old music hall numbers. Yes, it’s a little Radio 2 and as such there’s a little ‘Ceefax music’ in there too, but it’s always of the quirky arpeggiated strings variety rather than the xylophone variety.
Curiosity piqued, I turned to Google and learned that I was listening to FIP (France Inter Paris) Radio, which turns out to be something of a cult Brighton institution. Instead of floating across the Channel as I’d first assumed, it appears that it’s rebroadcast in the city. Legend (well, the local rag) has it that the perpetrator was previously stopped by Ofcom, but vowed to return. Either he kept his word or my neighbours have a very powerful iTrip. Brighton’s love for the station has even stretched to a website set up in its honour and a Bastille Day FIP club night which I’m dying to go to.
Delighted, I immediately concluded that any city that shares my love for this quirky station has to be a good one. And that was the moment I felt at home in Brighton.
Reboot10
The concept of “free” was, in retrospect, a little incongruous with Copenhagen. Although, according to the locals, Denmark is the cheapest of the Scandinavian nations, £6.50 for a pint is still something of a sting. Plus, of course, there was the irony of the Free Beer, released under a Creative Commons licence but which, at £9 a bottle, was particularly hard to swallow.
Price of beer aside, Reboot10 was enjoyable; relaxing yet stimulating, and a great chance to meet old friends and new.
Most of the presentations seemed to have been written specifically for the conference, focusing as they did on the concept of freedom, openness and collaboration. I didn’t have the energy for that, so I reheated my old BarCamp presentation “Beauty in Web Design”. It seemed to go well. Standing room only in a sweltering upstairs room, and several vague, rambling follow ups from keen audience members. We are told videos will be up shortly, although I have some doubts given that last year’s aren’t yet up either.
At the risk of nepotism, I have to say I did enjoy my fellow Clearlefters‘ talks the most. Reboot is undoubtedly an intellectual conference and there are some undoubtedly clever people there. However, the presentations varied wildly - some swimming in philosophical rhetoric and way above my head, some pitched rather too low, and others quite entertaining.
I can’t say it’s a conference I learned much of practical value from, but it has given my brain some new questions, which makes it the perfect antidote from the entry-level stuff I’ve been fed at recent conferences. So I do hope to go again next year, by which time perhaps the exchange rate will have swung in our favour.
dConstruct buttons
I’m very fond of what Paul’s done with the dConstruct 2008 buttons: in addition to the usual branded colours, you can also supply your own background image (from Flickr, or elsewhere on the web) to create some a sort of social mashup button. Here are a couple of my attempts:
I’m also rather starstruck at the prospect of meeting one of the speakers. Can you guess who?