Stay classy, Facebook...

A couple of paragraphs from a TIME Magazine article about Facebook caught my eye this week. First, the ubiquitous observation we see in pretty much every article -- about Facebook's design:

Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it -- a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.

But this next paragraph actually brought up something I haven't thought about before -- that social networks are as much about exclusivity as it is about inclusion:

Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid ... the most important function of a social network is connecting people and its second most important function is keeping them apart.

TIME published another article about Facebook a couple of months ago, where they made a related, also interesting point:

Facebook's News Feed updates me on whom these people have befriended, where they're vacationing, whether they went on a bike ride today, and the like. It's frivolous stuff, but you can see the potential of an online world arranged to emphasize the doings and opinions of those who matter to you most. You can see the pitfalls too, mainly in defining who matters. In the world of Facebook, friends don't drift apart. Either someone makes an active break, or the connection and the News Feeds go on forever. Get used to it.

There is a huge drawback in this binary view of friendship where you are either my friend or you're not, nothing in between. This is not how relationships work in the real world (apologies for calling offline connections the "real world"). There are different levels that is not reflected by this simplistic view of the world. Out there you grow closer to people, you drift apart, you get back in touch, you get mad at each other, you make up, you build a relationship over time... It's probably only a matter of time before online social networking evolves to reflect this real world behavior and give you the flexibility to define the intimacy level of your relationships.

Can design save the world?

Last month I wrote briefly about a story I heard on the radio regarding an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt museum called Design For The Other 90%.  It is a collection of design ideas to improve the lives of people in developing countries, and I really admired the effort.  Until an article by David Stairs called Why Design Won't Save The World made me rethink the whole thing again...

David argues that even thought the idea behind this exhibition might be noble, it is poorly executed and ultimately misconstrued:

Essentially, Design For the Other 90% is shot through with well-intentioned nostrums, familiar statistics, and a messianic calling to open peoples’ eyes to the disparities of the world.

He continues to tell a story from his life to accentuate this point:

Not long ago I visited Gulu, the epicenter of northern Uganda’s twenty-year insurgency, with my friend David Latim. David was born in Gulu, but fled to Kampala after escaping from the Lord’s Resistance Army in 1995. One day, I recounted a particularly gruesome scene in the movie, Hotel Rwanda. He responded by describing a similar massacre he had personally witnessed as a young man in Gulu. Before he was half-finished with his story, I blushed with shame at the realization that I was comparing my movie-going experience to his life experience. My well-intended faux pas is emblematic of the challenge facing outsiders, who cannot begin to imagine the vicissitudes of life in such distant places.

His point is that designers cannot begin to understand the complexities of the cultures in these developing countries, and therefore cannot design effectively for them.  He goes into a lot more detail, but I wanted to skip to his final paragraph, which sums up his views and on which I would to comment:

Is there a realistic response designers from developed countries can offer? A starting point might be to recognize that in many cases, we don’t need to remake other people or their societies in our image and likeness. The idea of design intervention — sustainable or otherwise — may feel very intrusive to people who are still reeling from 150 years of colonial intervention. (You don’t just waltz into a patriarchal society and aggressively advocate equal opportunity for women, or deliver pumps and boreholes to peasant farmers without understanding the sociology of migratory herdsmen). Living among other people and learning to appreciate their values, perspectives and social mores is an excellent tool of design research.  Education is also a wonderful access point, as is a required second language. But how many design curricula are supporting, let alone implementing such global initiatives?

Now, as someone who grew up in one of these "developing countries", and who intends to return in a few years, I tried to look at this issue from the perspective of a "consumer" of these design ideas.  Then I put my user experience & design hat back on to make sense of it all, and I have the following response to David's views.  Even though I appreciate his viewpoint and he is clearly passionate about his own altruistic efforts, I do think he is being too critical of the Design For The Other 90% effort, for the following reasons:

• Designers rarely get it right the first time.  Unless you're Apple, you're very rarely going to design a product that works perfectly as soon as you put it out -- no matter how much upfront design research and anthropological work you do.  Design research is mostly qualitative in nature and until a product is "stress-tested" you won't know all the flaws and areas for improvement.  And let's be honest, misfires happen!  So if some of these designs don't immediately seem to hit the mark, that's ok.  Bad ideas are ok as long as they lead you to better ideas...
• Leading by example is not a bad thing.  When designers from developed countries show an interest in the developing world and apply their skills to better the lives of the world's poor, I think it's a good thing even if mistakes are made along the way.  Yes -- these countries should develop their own curriculums for design and raise up designers who can tackle the unique problems they face, but you need someone to spark the flame, right?  Designers interacting with users in these countries can do just that, and even if it might feel paternalistic to some, this "teaching people to fish" approach is what is needed.  You need experts to train upcoming experts...
• Let's take what we can get.  I think any good-intentioned attention the developing world gets is positive in its own unique way.  Is it weird to see Brad and Angelina talking about impoverished nations?  Yes -- but they are raising awareness and getting people interested in the plights of these nations.  Can someone who lives in these countries be inspired and touched by flawed yet good-intentioned efforts by designers who take the time to apply their skills to these unique problems, and build long-lasting relationships along the way?  I think they can...

Which brings me back to the main question I started with: can design save the world?  Probably not, but I think it can do its part, as this exhibition clearly shows.  And besides, who are we to stand in the way of those who are trying...

Broken Experiences #1

In the first of what I'm sure will be a long series of never-ending posts about broken experiences on the web and in software, here is an error message I got today when I tried to open a Microsoft Publisher file that was created in a previous version.  There are so many things wrong with this message -- nonsensical sentences, instructions to select an option that's not available, impossible explanations of what the problem is -- but that's just what you get from running Windows programs...

By the way -- for a great collection of creative error messages, go here.

Usability testing on Halo 3

Wired Magazine just published an article about usability testing on Halo 3, the much-anticipated next installment in the Halo video game franchise, and the first Halo game for Xbox 360.  Video game usability has always fascinated me (and I try to get hands-on experience in this area as much as I can...), and this is the first time I've seen a mainstream magazine cover it in such detail.

Halo is a genre-changing first person shooter that brought gaming to a new level with its intricate story-line, cinematic feel and epic soundtrack.  And the creators got there through endless hours of testing...  Here are some excerpts from the article showing how they left no stone unturned:

The room we're monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player's expressions or see which buttons they're pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.

Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She's butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

"Here's the problem," Pagulayan mutters, motioning to a computer monitor that shows us the game from the player's perspective. He points to a bunch of grenades lying on the ground. She ought to be picking those up and using them, he says, but the grenades aren't visible enough. "There's a million of them, but she just missed them. She charged right in." He shakes his head. "That's not acceptable."

After each session Pagulayan analyzes the data for patterns that he can report to Bungie. For example, he produces snapshots of where players are located in the game at various points in time — five minutes in, one hour in, eight hours in — to show how they are advancing. If they're going too fast, the game might be too easy; too slow, and it might be too hard. He can also generate a map showing where people are dying, to identify any topographical features that might be making a battle onerous. And he can produce charts that detail how players died, which might indicate that a particular alien or gun is proving unexpectedly lethal or impotent.

Pagulayan and his team have now analyzed more than 3,000 hours of Halo 3 played by some 600 everyday gamers, tracking everything from favored weapons to how and where — down to the square foot — players most frequently get killed.

The article goes into many more interesting examples of how they solved user issues with clever design.  Be sure to check it out.  And if you haven't seen the Halo 3 trailer yet, here it is for your viewing pleasure...

Google ads unethical or just clever design?

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox is sure to get some defensive responses from the folks at Google...  He publishes results from a recent eye tracking study that clearly shows that users do not look at banner ads on web sites at all when they are looking for information or engrossed in the content on the page.  This isn't particularly new information, we've known this for a long time, but he does take it a step further.  First, he explains that there are three main design elements that are effective at attracting eyeballs to online ads (Plain text,  Faces and of course Cleavage and other "private" body parts).  Then he goes on to explain a fourth design element:

In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing's main ethical principles by making the ad look like content:

• The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it.
• Not only should the ad look like the site's other design elements, it should appear to be part of the specific page section in which it's displayed.

This overtly violates publishing's principle of separating "church and state" -- that is, the distinction between editorial content and paid advertisements should always be clear. Reputable newspapers don't allow advertisers to mimic their branded typefaces or other layout elements. But, to maximize fixations, that's exactly what you should do in a Web ad.

A specific ad may or may not be ethical, depending on how closely it masquerades as content. I caution against going too far, because it can backfire and mislead users. Unethical ads will get you more fixations, but ethical business practices will attract more loyal customers in the long run.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's taking a shot at Google here, because they're obviously really good at making ads look like native site components on their search results pages.  My question is if it's really unethical or just clever design?  How will we know if users are annoyed by these ads, or if the relevance of the ads makes it ok in their minds?  I would be interested to know what kind of answers follow-up qualitative research might uncover.  Eye tracking by itself won't show you how people are feeling about these ads.  My guess is that users wouldn't care as long as the ads are relevant...

Making the case for ethnographic research to inform design

As a big fan of ethnographic research, two recent articles caught my attention.  Though pretty basic and meant for audiences who are not familiar with this type of research, the articles do make a good case for using this methodology in a business context as part of the design process.  I wanted to quote a few paragraphs that showcase insights that can be gained from ethnographic research that you can not get as effectively from other methodologies.  Bold emphasis added by me.

From a United Airlines publication entitled Executive Secrets - Greenhouse Effect:

Though ethnography is indeed a social science, a number of companies use it to gain a greater understanding of their customers. Their objective is to garner information to help create and develop products and services that better meet customers’ needs — especially those that customers haven’t yet articulated.

Jan Chipchase is an ethnographic specialist with the communications firm Nokia. Last summer, he and a team of designers and other ethnographers spent several weeks in Uganda. They traveled to multiple villages and lived with and observed the residents going about their activities. “We’re charged with bringing the experiences of the local culture into the company,” Chipchase says.

While in Uganda, Chipchase’s team noticed local entrepreneurs who had purchased their own cell phones and then sold minutes to other residents. Because customers paid in advance for their calls, they kept close track of their allotted minutes. Drawing from these observations, Nokia designed phones for use globally so that callers could easily see on the screen the number of minutes used per call.

To determine which observations are significant, the researchers focus not on the sensational but on the patterns that appear. Their goal is to find the actions that are common across many participants and discern their meaning. The insight that results can be compelling. “When it’s done right,” says Chipchase, “ethnography can inform and inspire the design process.”

From a Business Week article entitled Nokia's Global Design Sense:

Our process starts with a team of anthropologists and psychologists working in our design group. They spend time with specific types of people around the world to understand how they behave and communicate. This helps us to understand better and to spot early signals of new patterns of behavior that could be harnessed into mobile communication. Our designers often go out into the field to understand the world they are designing for. All of these observations are brought into the design process to inspire and inform our ideas.

One thing both articles don't mention is the fact that for ethnographic research to be truly effective, it should never be done on its own.  Exactly where in the research process ethnography fits in depends on the specific situation:

• Ethnographic research is usually done at the beginning of the design process, as is the case in most of the examples in the articles I just referenced.  This research is used to uncover user needs and help designers come up with high-level concepts.  This should be followed up by quantitative work (desirability surveys, needs & attitude surveys) as well us additional usability testing to further flesh out the concepts.
• Ethnography can also be extremely useful as a follow-up methodology to quantitative research like segmentation studies.  Once a market segmentation has taken place, ethnography can help companies understand each segment better by "living a day in their shoes" and understanding how customers use their products/web site within the context of the rest of their lives.

Ethnography is not an easy methodology to get right -- observing people is easy; knowing what to look for and how to uncover unmet needs and desires is not.  But it can yield extremely valuable insights that all levels of the business can utilize.

7 User Experience Lessons from the iPhone

Below is a really good presentation by Stephen P Anderson about what UX teams do. I think this is a great summary of the misconceptions that sometimes exist about the industry, and our true purpose

It also talks about the iPhone and the fact that it doesn't have an enormous amount of new features, instead it's the great user experience that makes it such a cool device. The 7 lessons Stephen points out (with my interpretation in brackets) are:

1. Place better experiences ahead of more features (fix the things that are broken)
2. Start with actual experiences (always do your research on how users act and interact)
3. Solve the real problems (don't create "fixes" for problems -- spend some time to eliminate the root cause of the problem)
4. Play to think (false starts are ok as long as it leads you to a better idea)
5. Treat interfaces like conversations (don't show users everything at once -- show them only what they need to complete their task)
6. Lead with a vision (don't be discouraged by existing process such as engineering limitations -- if people catch the vision they will make it happen)
7. Obsess on the details (sweating over seemingly insignificant interface and cosmetic elements can make all the difference in the world)

Stephen's one-sentence explanation of what UX teams do? We make things work for people. I like that a lot...

BTW, the quotes from the slideshow are all from a Time magazine article about the iPhone.

Jesse James Garret on usability (and eBay)

The web site e-consultancy recently conducted an interview with Jesse James Garrett, the man who coined the term 'Ajax' and president of Adaptive Path. It’s a great interview and I wanted to highlight some of the things he said. First, on usability…

Usability doesn’t really get at the psychological and emotional context of use. Usability will tell you, from an ergonomic perspective, what people can do with a product, but there is lot more to making a product successful in the marketplace and making a product feel successful in people’s minds. Often, we find that clients come to us, thinking they have a usability problem, but it turns out that their products are pretty usable. The reason that the product is falling short is it is not satisfying an emotional or psychological need.

That is a philosophy that I wish can be top of mind for all designers and researchers -- what's cool isn't always what's best. You have to start by understanding the underlying user needs -- that's why I firmly believe in continuous user research throughout the design process. (I do think that very successful products can be created through genius ideas outside this formalized process -- iPod anyone??? -- but I'm referring to us normal people who need a little more help along the way to make our products work well...)

Then, on a question on if he agrees with a recent survey in which respondents rated Amazon, eBay and Google as the top 3 international sites in terms of usability, Jesse said the following…

It’s interesting to see Amazon and eBay so high on the list, because I think Amazon was delivering a really terrific experience a few years ago, but have found themselves in a land of diminishing returns in the design choices they are making.

If you compare the sheer number of navigational elements on a present day Amazon page with the way it was just a few years ago, they are just starting to load these pages up with features. I think the reason they are doing that is that they are trying to squeeze every drop of revenue they can out of these pages, but I think the overall usability is starting to suffer. It’s becoming so baroque - all of the different features and components they have loaded onto these pages.

eBay has almost the opposite problem, in that because they have this enormous community of people, the sellers, that depend on eBay for their livelihood, there are a lot of people that have really invested in how the site functions. eBay has been slow to change, because they haven’t been able to make changes that would appease this audience of millions of people that don’t want to see the site change.

My take on it is a little different... I think that if you ask regular Internet users about the usability of a site, they don't think of usability the way we do. They immediately jump to "how useful is it to me." And if a site is useful to them, i.e. it fills that underlying user need we talked about earlier, they will figure out a way to use it and make it work for them. This is not to say that bad usability doesn't matter -- good usability is essential for the sustainability of a site that fulfills user needs effectively. They go hand in hand and can't be separated. The point is that the value propositions of eBay and Amazon are so clear and so significant, and the sites so useful, that if you ask users about usability, they will immediately make the connections to these brands in their minds.

eBay and its user experience adrenalin shot

This is an exciting time to be working in user experience at eBay. You will see some major changes across the site in the coming months, and we are all extremely excited about the UX improvements this will bring to the eBay experience. Over the past few quarters eBay has shown a renewed energy and focus on user experience and this permeates through all levels of the company. In the Q2 earnings call, CEO Meg Whitman made the following remarks:

As you have correctly pointed out, making improvements to the user experience is one of our main strategic priorities. Let me tell you about a few of them.

First is to improve the finding experience, what we call Finding 2.0. You can see that we have actually done some work in something we call DefMatch, which is a relevant and algorithmic search engine that, based on your prior searches on eBay and what we know about other people who search for those same items, can get you to the items that you’re looking for faster and better.

Finding is only one of the many improvements coming down the pipeline, but I wanted to point that one out because it reminded me of something I read in the abstract of a recent talk by Peter Morville:

At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story. Access changes the game. We can select our sources and choose our news. We can find who and what we need, when and where we want. Search is the new interface of culture and commerce. As society shifts from push to pull, findability shapes who we trust, how we learn, where we go, and what we buy.

That is why Finding is such a big deal for eBay and any online company. With so much information out there, helping users to find what they are looking for not only becomes more difficult, but users are also becoming more sophisticated, expecting Web sites to do their thinking for them. If they type in "Apple", they expect us to know if they want an iPod or a Macbook. It is our job to figure out how to make that happen.

Speaking of Peter Morville and eBay... the challenge of findability is even more difficult at eBay because we deal with so much user-generated content and non-catalog items. In Peter's words:

Last month I had lunch with user experience managers at eBay. We discussed the challenges of designing a marketplace in which buyers and sellers game the system. For example, sellers have learned to increase sales by misclassifying individual components as complete systems. They know that users who search for mountain bikes may also buy accessories they don't know they want or need. And, while the resulting clutter can be frustrating, hardcore buyers enjoy the thrill of the hunt that eBay affords. They don't want the search to be easy.

But these are great challenges, and I'll say again that it is an exciting time to work here -- there is so much good work happening all over the company, and all I can say is that August is going to be a great month. Oh, and feel free to head over to eBay Sneak Peak and check out what's coming...

Bad Microwave UI

It is amazing to me that we're approaching 2008 and there are still microwave user interfaces out there that are close to impossible to figure out.  I tried to do a fairly simple but vital task on this microwave at a friend's house last night -- heating up my coffee -- but I just couldn't figure it out.  Maybe I'm stupid, who knows, but this was just too much for me.

Here are some issues I see with it:

• The "Start" button doesn't actually start the microwave.  And once you get it going (the only way I could figure out how to start blasting is by pressing the "Express" button), the "Off" button doesn't turn it off
• The labels are non-universal and therefore doesn't map to existing mental models of what microwaves should do.  What does "Combination" mean?  "Sensor"?
• The big round knob in the middle is for turning, and as far as I could tell, if you turn it, it does something to the length of time the microwave is on.  But there is no label on this knob and no way of knowing what it does.
• All the buttons are the same size, while different shapes and sizes can help users understand what the buttons are for (if you've seen the TiVo remote you'll know what I mean...).
• And a whole lot more but I'm already a dork for posting about this so I'll stop now

I actually do want to make a point here though...  Has anyone seen the user manual for the iPod or the iPhone?  It's only a few pages long.  That's how much confidence Apple has in the intuitiveness of the UI.  And they have every right to be -- it only takes a couple of minutes to figure it out, you don't even have to open the manual!

This microwave probably has an enormous user manual.  And for good reason -- it's a lazy design...  So anyway, it's a bad photo, but hopefully you'd be able to see what I mean:

Social Networking approaches for e-commerce Web sites

I came across this pretty cool ethnographic research study on cell phone usage that is also relevant to how we think about community on the Web.  It’s interesting both from a methodological and a findings point of view.  It’s a pretty short deck, so check it out:
http://sfaapodcasts.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/sfaa-2007-metcalf.pdf

This from the authors:

When we talk about the "user experience" the main emphasis is often on an individual's experience with a particular technology. Even with a purported social technology, for example a social networking site, we still tend to create for the individual's interaction with the site (how does someone find their friend, how do they access this site easily from a mobile device).

However, designing for sociability means thinking about how people experience each other through the technological medium, not just thinking about how they experience the technology. The emphasis is on the human-to-human relationship, not the human-to-technology relationship. This is a crucial difference in design focus. It means designing for an experience between people.

Of course designing for an experience between people doesn't mean ignoring the interaction with the device, but it calls for taking something else into account. That "something else" is often another person or people. How do we, as developers of communication technologies, make the communications more interesting, more exciting and more stimulating for the receiver? How do we help our users meet the needs of the other people in their social network? How do we create a shared experience that is equally compelling for all participating parties? When we begin to think like this, we truly start to think of designing social software, social applications, social media.

A lot of e-commerce web sites seem to be scrambling to figure out how to deal with the social networking phenomenon, and in my opinion there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions going on.  E-commerce sites shouldn't try to become social networking sites.  They should leverage their commerce platform to connect people to each other.

A great example is Facebook apps.  eBay has a brand new Facebook application that allows users to connect their eBay profiles to their Facebook accounts.  You can see others' watch lists and even add items to their list if you think they might be interested.  It's also another avenue for sellers to showcase the items they have for sale.  By using its commerce platform to integrate into an existing social networking site, eBay is building on its strength as an online retailer and plugging into an enormous network without re-inventing the wheel by trying to become a social networking site unto itself.