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What is the "new social" really?

30 Jun 2011
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design social ux

I've been thinking about this a lot in the last six months or so, and the hubbub over Google+ in the last few days has brought this back to the front of my mind. My question about "the new social" (a term I've heard people use more than I'd thought possible) stem from a situation like this, I'm sure you've been here if you're not a crazy facebooker/twitterer:***

Friend A brings up some new, never before mentioned information about herself in conversation like, "So, when I have the baby I think I'm going to continue only eating only raw foods."
I/you react in shock, shocked not by the intended news of the statement, "I'm going to continue only eating raw foods," but by the news of something big like a pregnancy. Says something like, "Wait....what? You're pregnant?!?"
Friend A responds rather disgusted with,"Yeah, I posted about it on my Facebook wall/Twitter stream/Online social media do-dad, I can't believe you're not reading my updates!"

First of all, yes the above example is completely made up, so no I'm not talking about you if we're friends and I didn't know you were pregnant. I might be talking about you though if you rely on social media as a primary, one way, 24-hour news-esq stream about you and expect your friends to be following your every move there. This kind of situation is where my question comes from; is this the "new social" everyone is talking about?

What the heck is social anyway?

According to Twitter and Facebook (or Foursquare, or whatever your favorite "social" app is) the act of sharing some piece of information where everyone can see it is a social act. As a UX designer, that doesn't feel very social to me. Social interactions at there most basic look something like this:

or maybe something like this in the case of internet scale social interactions:

These diagrams happen everyday online. The first could be something like AIM, GTalk, or ICQ (no I'm just kidding, no one uses ICQ anymore), a DM on Twitter, a private message on Facebook, an email or a text message. It's a conversation. You know, that thing you did on your phone before you texted all the time.But it's just so much easier to text than have a phone call! I know, I'm right there with you. (For real, I'm a big texter.)

The second diagram could be comments on a blog, twitter @replies, a chat room, or the comments on a facebook wall post. It's still a conversation, it's just happening with more than two people. (The diagram should show the flow between the three smaller guys too, but that would have been a lot of arrows to deal with, and you get the idea.)

So by now I'm sure you're saying, "Thanks Tony, your diagrams are swell, but I already know this. What's your point?" The point is this is how these services were intended to work back in the before time — in the long long ago of 2005-07. And it's how they did work for the most part. I used Facebook in college and had actual conversations with people I had met briefly the night before, or in a class or at a football game, all after the fact. When I joined Twitter in 2007 I met lots of great people and had lots of great conversations. These two diagrams were how you would describe the systems back then. That was before it was "the new social" though. Before there were hundreds of millions of people and billions of dollars in advertising revenue at stake. Before your mom was on Facebook (but not before jokes about your mom were on Facebook, those were always there) and before Ashton Kutcher found Twitter. The new social, at least in my experience looks like this most of the time:

And it's this diagram that leads to conversations like the fake one (based on similar real conversations) above. This is your Facebook wall or your Twitter stream now, for the vast majority of users. This is "social media" that lets your great aunt Edna share pictures of her 55 cats with you and your whole family, or Kim Kardashian make $10,000 per tweet, or your best friend tweet about how great she felt after that run and that blueberry muffin with the smiley face blueberries from that cafe down the street with that cute barrista. It's also the "social" component of apps that you and I love like Foursquare, Facebook Places, DailyMile, Nike+, or Posterous (the platform this blog is running on.) Sure, there's a mechanism for 2 way communication, but how much do you really use it? How many of your friends use it? How many of their comments do you respond to? Remember, social now is simply the act of putting information out there to be consumed by your friends and followers and anyone who searches for you or your friends and followers on Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos (no, I'm kidding again. No one uses Lycos anymore either.)

And the most scandalous part of this whole "new social" thing is that it's not even new! We are already familiar with this model, it looks like this:

And it wasn't even new when the TV came out! Hell, TV stole it from radio, which stole it from the newspaper, which stole it from books, which stole it from scrolls...etc, etc. It's called broadcast, and there's nothing social about it.

So what's the big deal?

No, this isn't a rant about how my friends, or your friends, or society in general is slowly coming to expect social interaction to more closely resemble voyeurism or stalking, although that's probably something someone should write about. The problem is that more and more stuff is coming out claiming to be social when it's not, and that's stifling innovation for real social technology. And it's the designers' fault.

"Social media" is a great thing, don't get me wrong, it's just not very social anymore. It's enabling broadcast, and it's designed to be used that way. Why? It's easier to sell ads using these platforms if they're actually broadcast platforms, because marketers don't like to be talked back to and marketers are paying for it. Enabling almost a billion people to create their own, personal broadcast channel that's available to the whole world is a huge achievement. But it's not a social interaction. It's not a social experience.It's not a social technology. We all know what a social experience is, and if you ask those early adopters of current "social media," the possibilities felt endless in the early days, and the gratification of connecting with other people in a way where physical location didn't matter was huge. Social media was about collaboration, because social IS about collaboration.

Social interactions are not just about sharing, they're about interacting with other humans in a way that's meaningful for everyone involved. You don't have a social relationship with the cast of Glee, even though they're sharing their delightful story of overcoming high school adversity through singing the pop hits of the 70s, 80s and today. But according to the rules of social media you do. They're sharing content and you're consuming it. See how it's a broken definition? (unless you're actually friends with the cast of Glee, in which case, think of some other example smarty pants.)

In the last two and a half years we've actually not made nearly as many advances in social technology as have been claimed, we've just made great leaps in personal broadcast technology. I don't have an invite to Google+ yet, but when I get one I hope that the claims that it's "Just like Facebook, but it's not run by Facebook" are wrong. If they actually did it right, Google+ could be the first truly big breakthrough in social technology since Twitter...before it got really popular at SxSWi and started retooling to become a personal broadcast platform to bring in more VC money and ad revenues.

*** Full disclosure: I am actually quite guilty of saying, "Didn't you see that, I posted it on Twitter?"

Ohhhhh you said the F worrrrddd!!!

15 Apr 2011
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Design Rant Research

It's very funny (to me anyway) that I came out of college decrying research, it "ruined design," and a few years later my love for research informed design pushed me back into college to learn more about it. It's also funny (probably still just to me) that I continue to run into these two seemingly opposed design camps all the time, the pro and anti research designers. I'm among friends in one, and inevitably find myself defending the dreaded F**cus Gr**p in the other. It's like a bad word in a lot of circles, f**cus gr**p, and as I always end up explaining, "it's because people don't run the dreaded f**cus gr**p right." They don't ask the participants the right questions. They use it to answer the wrong kind of research questions. They blindly follow the majority opinion as if it was handed down on stone tablets. Bottom line, they fuck it up. Worse yet, this is the only research method a lot of designers, including fresh out of design school me, know. At the very least the only one they think of when someone says "research."

Research isn't a bad word for designers (even f**cus gr**p)

This is the basic argument I find myself making when in the company of the anti-research designers. I'm a designer, not a researcher. I have a heavy-weight, framed piece of paper that says just that, and in December I'll have two. (This is the only "trust me, I'm a doctor" style statement you're going to get from me, I promise.) As a designer, research is just another tool in my toolbox for solving design problems. It's just like photoshop, or illustrator or my sketchbook. Research does NOT dictate design decisions, it informs them. This is something I usually have to repeat, so I will in an obnoxious type treatment to make it stand out

RESEARCH DOES NOT DICTATE DESIGN DECISIONS, IT INFORMS THEM.

(Sorry, I it wouldn't let me make it blink too.) If you're a designer and you think back to your design classes, you'll likely remember doing some kind of asking around or looking at what other people had already done in that space for every project you did. That's research. AND it isn't a f**cus gr**p. (It's likely a competitive analysis or an unstructured individual interview, for the researchers in the audience keeping track.) Your research didn't totally take away all your choices as a designer, and you probably didn't completely change your initial gut feelings based on it. It didn't dictate your design. But it did inform you, and you might have modified some of your initial assumptions, and you may have abandoned bad ideas if they proved to be bad, or already done, or whatever you found. It may have even given you an idea because you saw something new and it sparked something awesome in your crazy designer brain. This is why good research, used correctly is magical.

Let's talk about the damn f**cus gr**p for a minute

(Warning: this is a rant, you have been warned.)

Most people (especially in advertising) ruin focus groups. This is not an "ivory tower" opinion. This is my on the ground, in the trenches throwing grenades, practitioner's opinion. They're not looking for additional information to inform the design, they're looking for truth. Worse yet, they're not just looking for a truth, they're looking for "The Truth," a totally generalizable (ecologically valid for you researches still keeping track) truth. One that describes everyone like their group everywhere. A group that is usually structured to represent everyone on the planet. Sorry, a f**cus gr**p is the wrong test for finding "The Truth." It's a qualitative test that is at best going to give you an idea of your specific group's opinions, if and only if you recruit the right group and ignore the idea of group think and follow the leader mentality in groups like this, and dont' have one guy who does 80% of the talking for the whole group. At best you're going to be able to say "we showed it to 10 people and 2 of them told us all these things." F**cus gr**ps are not generalizable, period! The are not "The Truth," and to use them as such is foolish, and you should feel sorry for those people because they're likely going to lose a lot of money.

If you're going to hate the f**cus gr**p , hate it for these reasons. Don't hate it because "research kills creativity." it doesn't, it focuses creativity, and gives you new jumping off points if it's done well.

Design is not art, deal with it.

This is the other argument that is used to try and defend the anti-research designer position, "Design is art." This is a horse that's been beaten to death, and I'm usually one of the people holding a bat. Design is not art. It can be objectively evaluated because the whole goal of design is problem solving. The goal of Art is expressing the ideas, emotion and opinions of the artist. You can't do that wrong. That's what makes it art. You can't look at art and realistically say, "The artist totally failed to capture the way she was feeling in this piece." You can look at design reasonably say, "this piece fails to capture the attributes of our brand," or "this product is hard to use and it's even harder to look at," or even "why would you design a shirt with no neck hole, no one can wear this!" Design can be wrong. The confusing part is that there are usually many solutions to the same design problem, and all of them are right, but the wrong ones are still wrong.

There is absolutely an art to design, and great design often does the things art does too, but design is not art. It's design. Even when it conveys emotion. Even when it conveys opinion. Design is concerned with solving a problem that most likely has multiple solutions, and this is why research is such a great tool. It can help you sift through those worse solutions, that are still technically right, to find the great ones. Why wouldn't you want something to help you sift through an endless pile of hay to find the five needles you're looking for?

So what...?

Research is your friend, dear fellow designers. It can lead you to new ideas, better ideas, by pointing to the right path in the tangled map of options we have; and if it's done well that's all it will do. Research can't ever substitute the thoughtful work of a good designer, because good research isn't creative. To quote Dr. David Evans of Psycster research (one of my graduate school instructors):

A research study by it’s very nature is a cheap, fast proxy to reality.

It's a peak out the window. A designer takes all the information she has about a problem, combines it with everything else she knows and turns it into a solution. Well done research is just one more thing the designer gets to know and use. If you want to be an anti-research designer, why not be an anti-bad-research designer?

Why kids are almost always better at new tech than you

15 Mar 2011
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Design Random UX

A few days ago I was walking back from lunch in downtown Seattle when I overheard the women behind me talking about the Microsoft Kinect. One of the women was talking about how her young daughter "jumped right in" using the device, without having to be told much about how it works. She was also talking about how after almost a month she still has problems using it. "I don't know how she can be so good at it and I'm so terrible," the woman asked her friend.

They grew up with it, duh

This isn't anything new, and as you can probably guess the friend replied, "Kids are just better at this stuff because they've grown up with it." This is a pretty standard response whenever someone younger than you figures out some new-fangled technology that you can't. But is it really true? This little girl didn't "grow up" with the Kinect, it's only been available to the public for about six months. Sure, she did very likely grow up in the age of consumer electronics, but none of them use the natural human interface that the Kinect does, and even non-standard (i.e. buttons, mice, keyboards, control sticks) input methods are fairly new. Apple's multi-touch devices have only been around for three and a half years, and Nintendo's Wii is only a year older. I will admit that three to four years is a long time for a little kid, but even with that much exposure to similar (although still very different) devices I don't buy the whole "They've just grown up with it" rationale.

Some say tech, it is a river...

Technology is a constantly evolving monster. It doesn't exist in nicely posed snapshots until the next big thing comes out and replaces it. New things are released to augment the existing tech until companies can afford to push the next big thing into production. Upgrades and add-ons and accessories. All of these things make learning technology a constantly moving target. For example, it's very likely that your iPhone today doesn't just do the things it did last week, thanks to new apps, new accessories or new software updates pushed by Apple or app developers. This makes me think that just because the stuff existed doesn't make "they grew up with it" a very valid explanation. You don't just know everything about technology that is produced while you're under a certain age. There's another explanation that fits much better. Kids are more creative than you are.

It's all about Imagination

I don't know about you, but I've spent at least 24 of my 28 years being told what is not possible, what not to do because it's "weird" or "different", and just generally having people in positions of authority closing doors and building walls around my imagination. I'm talking about parents, teachers, and peer pressure, all slowly pushing us toward the norms and mores of our societies It's probably the same way with you, give or take a few years depending on your age. We've constructed these ideas of "normal" because it makes things work better when everyone has more or less the same expectations of common people and things where they live. We can all agree that a red light means stop, and that generally a person on the street that waves at you is just saying hi.

Little kids don't have that inhibition yet. They don't know all the rules, so they just make stuff up as it makes sense to them. They let their imaginations fill in the gaps in their understanding of the world because it's all they have to fall back on. Their minds aren't programed to see a TV screen and immediately think "passive viewing experience," they talk back to the characters, interact with them. If you don't believe me watch an episode of anything made for kids aged two to five and see how many pauses for audience participation there are. So of course it makes sense that waving at the TV makes things happen, that jumping up and down makes you on the screen jump up and down. Why wouldn't it? The idea of the TV seeing you isn't more familiar to a child, it's just less impossible. Why wouldn't the TV see you, you can see it? It's only fair. This is how it is for most new technology, and why kids learn it faster. They don't have to unlearn the old things.

So what...?

The absence of preconceptions is what makes kids better at new technology than adults, because it's not "weird" to them that it's not like anything else. As experience designers we need to keep this idea in mind when designing new and possibly "weird" things, but we also need to try and reinvigorate the imaginations of our users. It's possible but you have to prime the pump, so to speak, and get the user into the mindset that "this is unlike anything else." Once you can do that, imagine what other ideas these newly freed users, including you, will think up?

Reading Recommendations

26 Feb 2011
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Design How-to Interaction Design Research UX Usability

In the last few weeks I've had a few people ask me if I could recommend any books on design. The short answer is yes I can, but mostly only because I have a thing for books and I can't go into a bookstore without buying at least four, so I just happen to have a lot of books. (Yes, I have read them all, thank you very much.) The reason this is the short answer is because I'm firmly in the camp that to become a designer you simply have to start designing. A lot. A whole lot. It's a very learn by doing skill, even interaction and experience design. However, there are a lot of great books I've read that have added a lot of little interesting tidbits to the experience of just being a designer for years and years, so I thought I'd make that list and share it with anyone who was interested.

These are by no means the definitive reading list, just what I've read over the the years, or have on my current reading list. I've also thrown in some movies and a couple card decks that I really love. The best advice I can give any designer is the advice given to me during a junior year portfolio review by John Jay, a creative director from Wieden + Kennedy (I majored in Advertising and Graphic Design for my undergrad, so I had mostly words of wisdom from designers working in advertising) and it is:

The great ideas are out on the streets, in a club or a bar or a park, not in your office or at your desk. Make sure you get up from your desk every once and a while and experience it.

So read some of these books, but then go out and experience the world and find inspiration and solutions to your design problems in those experiences. If you want to be a designer, or you want to be a better designer, just start designing lots of stuff. Practice makes perfect.

The List

Interaction/Experience Design

The Design of Everyday Things - Norman
Designing Interactions - Moggridge
Sketching User Experiences - Buxton
Emotional Design - Norman

Design Basics

Design Basics - Pentak
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative - Eisener (this is technically a book about making comics, but I've found it very helpful to know these concepts designing interactions, because I can use them to help tell other people about my ideas via storyboard)

Design History

History of Modern Design - Raizman (this is a must read in my opinion)
Dictionary of Design since 1900 - Julier
Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers - Livingston

Design Documentaries

Objectified
Helvetica

Graphic Design Quickstarts

The Non-designer's design book - Williams
The Mac is not a Typewriter - Williams
Making and Breaking the Grid - Samara (this is a must have reference if you're doing any visual design)
Lettering for Production - Gates (out of print)

Ad books that could be helpful

Hey Whipple Squeeze This - Sullivan
Hoopla - CP+B
Pick Me - Vonk & Kestin

Other Fun stuff

Art and Copy (movie)
Please Exit Through the Giftshop (movie)
The Story of Stuff (the 2007 original) (movie)
Ideo Method Cards
Handbook of Usability Testing - Rubin & Chisnell
Mental Notes Cards
Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology - Mills
Emotions Revealed - Ekman
ReInventing Comics - McCloud
Comics and Sequential Art - Eisener

Books I'm Currently Reading (but can't recommend beyond that because I haven't finished them yet)

Living with Complexity - Norman
Unmasking the Face - Friesen
Behavioral Analysis and Measurement Methods - Meister
Ambient Findability - Morville

If you have any suggestions (stuff I could add to my currently reading list), leave them in the comments :)

The UX Implications of Watson

23 Feb 2011
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Design Future UX

Unless you were either under a rock or not a techno-geek last week you've probably heard about IBM's Watson natural language processor and it's spanking of the two best Jeopardy players on the planet. It was amazing to watch the way the computer looked at all the data it had access to (and it was a lot) and found the answers. It wasn't perfect, when Watson was wrong it was hilariously wrong, but it was right more than it was wrong.

Why this is something UX folk need to keep an eye on?

You may be thinking, "Tony, this is a great achievement in computer science and engineering but why should I, the illustrious user experience professional reading your blog, care?" Well, very skilled and attractive reader, I'm glad you asked. Let's play the imagination game for a minute.

Imagine a world where systems like Watson aren't giant, expensive, out of reach systems that exist only in R&D labs. Imagine a world where systems like Watson are commonplace in offices or neighborhoods or households. A world where the computer can take input in natural language and it's hooked up to the Internet.

"Computer, I need a list of all know cultures who believe the colour red means anger."

What does that system look like? What does it sound like? How does it respond or present its answer? Do you have to say "computer," every time? Should these interactions be more like a conversation with another person or still like giving orders to a machine? These are just the experience questions I could think of in a few minutes.

This kind of computing, while it answers many engineering problems, opens a whole new area of HCI that we've only really thought about in Star Trek and other science fiction. Think about the possibilities of a computer that can understand what you're saying to it without using special commands. Think about the frustrations and the usability issues it will bring. Think about the effect a computer that is fluent in your language will have on the psychology of how we interact with computers.

Back to The Future

Like most of the stuff we talk about in the blogosphere, this falls into the category of "The Future of ________" but this future is coming at us faster than a lot of that other “Future Stuff.” IBM is already talking about utilizing Watson to help doctors do differential diagnosis. The possibilities are nearly endless; we just need to start thinking about them. Yay future! (But I still want my hover board.)

Your phone is not the computer of the future

Everyone keeps buzzing about how smart phones are little computers, and that's true. They are. So is an iPod touch or your GPS in your car. Those things aren't going to replace your desktop or laptop, now or in the future. And neither is your iPhone / android / windows phone 7 / blackberry / webOS phone. I know, that's contrary to what almost everyone is saying, but it's true.

What phones are good at

A good phone is good at being a phone. Not just in the 135 year old definition of a phone as an electronic voice relay system. At it's core, the telephone is a system that let's us transmit and receive information over long distances almost instantly. That's really all it does. It's a device that enables near instantaneous communication, like the telegraph before it, beyond the sight of the sender. In 1876, the year the first patent was issued for an electric telephone, that information was sending sound over electric lines. Today, in 2011, it's sending bits over radio waves. Even the voice part of your cell phone works this way. The GPS too. At it's core the thing that makes a smart phone really valuable is it's radio(s). It's connected to the world, via the Internet, via radio waves.

What phones are bad at

The main thing smart phones are bad at is being big. (Although many are trying to get bigger.) Big is an important quality they lack if they're going to be the "computers of the future." Small screens, small keyboards don't make for good computers. That's why you can buy a 30" LCD display for your desktop or desk parked laptop. Big screens are good for the things we use computers for, especially if those screens are going to be displaying soft-keyboards too. Phones are also bad at real multi-tasking (this is one of those things we need big screens for.) This is mostly an issue of power consumption and battery limitations, but it also has to do with the small screens. It takes a lot of power to run a high performing CPU, and phone batteries can only be so big, not to mention they also have to power backlights and radios and flash memory and RAM and GPUs and ect, ect. Multi-tasking is near essential part of modern computing, no matter what Steve Jobs and the team working on OS X Lion say. Don't believe me? Spend the next hour only letting your computer run one application at a time and see how futuristic it feels.

So what is the future?

I don't mean to imply that smartphones aren't an important part of the future of computing, quite the contrary, they're a key part. They're just not going to take the place of any real computer. Phones are great at being the gateway to connectivity, and that's their place in the ultra fractured, multi- device future of computing. They're going to keep being phones. Your tablet and your smart watch and your other crazy ubiquitous computing peripherals are all going to need an on ramp to the Internet, and your little smart phone is damn good at that.

It's also pretty good for acting as a quick window into larger, cloud-based applications with multiple points of user interaction. A quick entry into your personal finance application, updating your workout application with your latest gps and hear rate monitor workout info, setting your thermostat or other simple Internet enabled appliance, uploading pictures to your shared albums, etc. The phone is a small window. It's not good for making things, or really for consuming content larger that text messages or tweets or maybe text only emails. It's good at grabbing information from the world around it with it's sensors, (think cameras, microphones, gps) not your keyboard pecking. Its great at displaying small chunks of information, and its great at sending these things along to a more capable platform for any kind of manipulation.

Your tablet will be much better at normal laptop style tasks. It's got a bigger screen, a larger keyboard, stylus input, and a larger battery more capable of running a more powerful CPU. And most importantly, it doesn't have a radio to run. It doesn't need one. None of your future computing accessories do, because that's your phone's job. It's part of being a phone in the future. Sending your bits beyond the horizon via radio waves. And it doesn't care what you used to make those bits. We need to keep this in mind as we're designing and building smartphone apps. Focus on the things the phone does well and stop trying to stuff in features that the phone does poorly.

The future of your phone is not as a laptop killer, it's as your laptops ride.

Why nobody likes research

7 Feb 2011
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Design Rant Research

Ok, not nobody. I love research. You might. Your boss probably doesn't. Her boss almost certainly doesn't. Yes yes, this is only the case most of the time, not all of the time. But why is that?

Research is Expensive

It costs money to do any kind of research. Even if you're just looking things up on the internet, that time costs someone money. If you're actually doing research with research subjects you usually have to pay them. You usually have to buy materials to conduct your research, if you don't have them already. Some times you have to travel. Bottom line, it hurts the bottom line. (ok not really, but we're not there yet)

Research Takes Time

You have to design a study. Find people to participate. Run the study. Analyze all the data you collected. Make sense of all your analysis. Even a "quick little survey" isn't really that quick most of the time. And "time is money." (See above pun about the bottom line.)

Henry Ford Ruined Research

Or at least he did in the minds of people who are too busy to understand an often quoted Henry Ford snippet:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. — Henry Ford

I've heard this "famous quote" more times in the last six months than any other, often to justify to me why we can't do research. First, I can't actually find the source of this quote. I haven't spent hours and hours searching, but an hour on Google, GoogleScholar, wikiQuotes and wikipedia have left me with no source for it. The point is, he may have never said it. He did not invent the automobile, he just was the first to mass produce it cheaply. But it doesn't matter, because he's getting credit for saying it. And because he's a great name in American business, it carries weight. The problem is, it misses the point entirely.

There are no silver bullets, and Henry Ford probably knew this, even if you (or your boss) don't

This has been beaten to death I'm sure, but "asking people what they wanted" is simply asking the wrong question. Yes, if you ask someone directly "what can I make you?" they're going to define it in terms they already know. Like "faster horses." You're not looking for THE answer with research, your looking for clues to AN answer.

Assuming the Ford quote is true, then yes had he asked people what they wanted they likely would have told him something about horses. They were the primary means of travel at the time. Followed by walking if you couldn't afford a horse. He also might have gotten lucky, if he'd asked enough people, and gotten a couple cars and an airplane. Those would have been the "crazy outliers." But, if he had asked them "What is it about travel now that you dislike the most?" he likely would have learned things like: horses have to rest every few hours while pulling a wagon, it's not easy to take care of a horse, it's expensive to take care of a horse, dogs and other animals can spook a horse and that's very dangerous, etc. He would have found problems to make solutions for. Problems that the mass production of the automobile would eventually solve.

This is what the people who swear that research is a waste of time fail to see, because they expect it to be a silver bullet and it's not. It never is. It's more about finding out what the problems really are, if you're making your thing for the right people, or if your solution is correct but not defined in terms the right people understand. These are the qualities that make the great things you love. I guarantee it. You can't make something great on purpose without knowing the answers to these kinds of questions, and it's very expensive to try and stumble into greatness all the time.

In the end...

The Ford quote is often used to defend the stance of the "lone genius" even if sometimes that "lone genius" is a team at a company. That's simply not the way to make great things. Awesome doesn't happen in a vacuum, or a silo or sitting at your desk with the blinders on for 18 hours. It happens when you ask the right people the right questions to figure out what that "awesome" is, before you start searching. Had Ford "asked people" (and I don't know if he or anyone else did for him) he may have found out that things like "with electric lights, people can more safely drive in the dark." And maybe he did. The point is, Model-T aside, the only way you can know if you're solving a problem is to ask the people you think have it. Not to ask them what the answer to your design problem is, because they won't know. But to ask them what their problem is, so you can design a solution to it. It's these well researched, well designed solutions that make the research effort pay for itself many times over. They're the solutions that become the next big thing, which is actually good for the bottom line (see, I got there). Those well researched solutions are the only kind that will consistently lead to a great experience for the user, even if Henry Ford supposedly said otherwise.

It's all about sharing awesomeness today

7 Jul 2010
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Design Random

I wrote a ton about ice cream cones on Monday, and I've been pretty busy the last two days, but I came across this video and it's FANTASTIC. Making cool stuff like this is why I became a designer (no, sadly I wasn't involved at all in this project, it was done by Vitamins Design in London) in the first place, now I just need to find someone who will pay me to make them cool stuff like this. Great UX and beautiful graphic design. Wonder why Apple isn't doing their manual like this?

Out of the box - book from adrian333 on Vimeo.

Holiday Edition

5 Jul 2010
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Design Random UX

It's a holiday weekend, and despite having so far written only about things I thought were doing UX wrong, I thought I'd take the theme of the holiday for me and dissect the UX of one of my favorite things about summer time, the ice cream cone. Yes, in the spirit of the three day weekend, and totally goofing off (and lack of any other ideas of what to write about) I'm going to attempt to write a UX blog about ice cream cones. Join me, won't you?

The ice cream cone may very well be the most single efficient food cointainer/untensile ever invented. It's environmentally friendly, because when you're finished with it you eat it, it's so simple even untrained children can use it, while there are a few variations on the cone, the basic form and function of the ice cream cone are the same across the cone spectrum. In my fairly extensive experience, there are three basic types of cones to be found at most ice cream stands/stores/bars/eateries: The flat bottom "cake cone, the cone shaped sugar cone and the bigger cone shapes waffle cone. The waffle cone is my personal favorite because of it's larger ice cream carrying capacity, but all three have their merits when it comes to their designs.

The original, the sugar cone:

I don't actually know if it's "the original", as I have done no research for this piece, but in my mind this would be the place to start. It's the most simple of the cone designs. Sugarly dough, bakes into a conical shape. Nothing fancy, it's just there to do it's job, hold on to your ice cream momentarily, and then be delicious after. There are a few downsides to this elegantly simple design though. It's prone to leaking, usually because there is a small hole in the bottom. They also tend to be rather small, so they have to hold most of their ice cream on top, which makes double and triple scoops more spill prone. Overall the sugar cone does it's job well, and as long as you're not eating a tower of ice cream or planning on take longer than 10 or 15 mins to eat, the sugar cone is all you need.

The high-tech cake cone:

The cake cone takes the cone design and does it one better. Not technicaly a cone, but a cylinder, the cake cone brings a flat bottom and reenforced multi-chamber design to the party. They tend to last longer, and you can set them down on a flat surface. These are big improvements but they come at the cost of flavor. As an edible container, the cake cone is the least appetizing of the cones, often made of some sort of "cake" that more closely resembles paper. A great cone for a slow eater, like it's sugar cone cousin, it's lack of interior space makes it less desirable for multi-scoop treats, it's advantage comes purely in it's ability to stand upright.

The new commer, the waffle cone:

Again, I have no idea how "new" th waffle cone is. I do know that it costs more than a regular cone, but it's advantages make it worth every penny. A true innovation in ice cream cone technology, someone must have asked "What would happen if I made a really big sugar cone, but made it out of delicious waffle batter instead?" This the waffle cone was born. It's sheer hugeness makes it perfect for holding not only multiple scoops of ice cream, but toppings. While it lacks the flat bottom innovation of the cake cone, the waffle cone tends to be thicker, and so holds up to a slower snacker. It is also the safest cone for multi-scoop endeavors, or people who don't want to get ice cream all over their face, because it's often served with a spoon as well.

No matter what your preference, enjoy some ice cream or frozen something this weekend, it's sure to be user friendly. Until next time...

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