Designed in California, Built in Hell

FIlm Still from Cocteau's Orpheus

 

Inhuman working conditions within Apple’s manufacturing supply chain stand in stark contrast to the superlative usability of Apple designs. It should give ui designers and software design engineers pause—especially those of us that talk about user-centered design.

“As our society becomes increasingly focused on accessing and manipulating information and on communicating digitally, it’s very easy to lose site of the physical reality right around us, let alone on the other side of the planet.”

Right here in New York we use our iphones amid crumbling infrastructure while the best design and engineering talent is applied to the next generation of handhelds and software.

Now we learn that the sleek Apple products we’ve come to love and depend on are produced in factories with exploitative policies and dangerous working conditions, routinely exposing workers to toxins, dangerous machinery and numbingly long shifts that exceed reason.

The fact that these conditions are an integral part of Apple’s pricing structure—and, thus, their profitability—has been widely commented upon. What has not been discussed is how this implicates the design community.

Q: What does it mean to talk user-centered design philosophy and then ignore the manufacturing and supply side of the process?

A: It implies an inherent bigotry embedded in the assumptions. It would seem that we believe that users of the products are entitled to the best possible user experience while those involved in manufacturing the product are not entitled to any consideration whatsoever.

And it points out the extent to which user experience design has become obsessed with the interaction between some humans and computers at the expense of other humans and the physical world.

Public knowledge of working conditions may build and exert pressure on the industry to clean up its manufacturing act.

Physicists and basic technologists are on the path to developing ever-smaller transistors, and progress in nano-tube transistor technology is moving ahead as I write this. It is predicted that one day soon processors will be small enough and cheap enough to embed in everyday objects, allowing us—perhaps—to truly realize an intelligent world.

“Perhaps this will enable us to reconnect the world of pure information with our physical infrastructure.”

And perhaps the brilliant designers who are now working on yet another redundant mobile app will turn their focus to making our physical world more humane.

 

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Published on February 1, 2012 7:13 pm.
Filed under: Design, Mobile, Technology, UX

Proliferate, Aggregate, Repeat: Why App Aggregation will be the Next Big Thing

Archimboldo, The Librarian, 1566

Looking at the path the internet has taken over the last ten years, a repeating pattern is emerging. The pattern starts with the establishment of a new asset or application class. It proliferates throughout the web. Then the aggregators come along and start skimming the cream off the top and presenting the best in single package. This pattern began with pages, moved on to shopping, news, reviews and downloads.

Today, with the proliferation of stand-alone applications, the environment is ripe for the next level of aggregation.

A Glimpse

An early entry into this space is If This Then That (ifttt.com).  ifttt is a meta application that allows users to build custom programs that uses separate apps as triggers and components.

How It Works

Using ifttt, you can create a task (or recipe) that automates a process that you used to do manually. For example, take a Facebook status update as a trigger to create a tweet, a new blog entry and update a photo automatically. Or, it might use a weather report or new information on an RSS feed to trigger a series of actions across personal sites, social networking pages, email or micro-blogging. While it is still rudimentary today, don’t shrug it off as just a novelty item.

Going Beyond the Individual

Consider instead how an application like this could integrate with Google’s social graph. The potential to trigger actions that are rules based, broadly social and widespread are staggering (and potentially virus-like).

While we shouldn’t underplay the concerns about security and the stultifying effect that automated messaging can have on human-based social interaction, the promise of this next phase of aggregation is beginning to come into focus.

Image: The Librarian, oil on canvas, Archimboldo, ~1566

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Published on January 27, 2012 11:50 am.
Filed under: Design, Healthcare, Mobile, Technology, UX Tags: , , ,

Post-humanism (in the Flesh)

Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother 2005

What is Post-humanism?

Let’s start here: What does it mean to be human if we are disembodied?

As someone who is active in both technology and the arts, I think I’ve got a unique perspective on this. The postulate of the post-human movement is predicated on the belief that the mind can be abstracted from the body and housed within a machine. The scenario was played out in science fiction but is now thought by adherents to be within reach. The human subject is connected to a powerful computer and all the thoughts, memories, beliefs and associations are extracted through a digital process and recorded in a computer. The subject continues to think, communicate and exist but without a body. If you hook the computer up to a system the extracted brain can be used to run operations.

I suppose you can consider this a kind of singularity.

Let’s examine the underlying assumptions that support this model:

Our experience of the world manifests to us vis-a-vis the brain and the brain is just like an awfully powerful computer. Given the ever-increasing power of computers, we should soon be able to create a computer that can function equivalently to the human brain. Once this has been achieved we can extract our sentient selves and live, in perpetuity, in machine form.

This is not a technological fantasy: it reflects religious, social, and economic beliefs.

The post-human belief system is based on a shared social understanding of what it means to be human. It may frequently be expressed through a technological fantasy of the computer-based human but it is just as visible in the way that we picture our selves.

But where does identity reside if we are disembodied? Look no further than social networks to envision what this can look like. A new framework to understand and contextualize friendship, social membership and human contact. And with it the awkward reconnects with high school sweethearts now grown so different as to be barely recognizable and the friends whose context is the network and not corporeal.

Reconstructing Social Systems in Our Own Image

Google’s social graph attempts to quantify and operationalize our emergent identities. In the industry we tend to see this effort as a marketing opportunity or, to put it more kindly, a more accurate way to deliver meaningful and relevant content and experiences to people. In addition to that we may see an emergent phenomenon: With the introduction of highly integrated social applications that respond to and build upon each other (i.e., ifttt, storify) the door opens for automated connections and consequent actions that are not triggered by individual actions but by the collective action of multiple systems.

It promises to be increasingly easy to lose control, not only of the posts that display in your Facebook timeline, but in the actual social connections, recommendations and communications that are generated on your behalf.

Why it Really is Post-human(ism)

It’s an easy shot, but just for laughs and giggles, compare the fifteenth century immaculate conception with the twenty-first century version that displays at the top of this post.

The Renaissance version by Bellegambe depicts the fetus as a vision, a thought in the process of becoming. In Bellegambe’s day anatomy was in its infancy, yet more importantly, it didn’t represent the truth that mattered. What did matter was theological and interpersonal. Hirst’s may be purely anatomical, (and it is modeled after scientific models used by medical students) but, intention is important and the title, Virgin Mother, is Hirst’s way of pointing us back to the religious subject and forcing the comparison. Students of art history will see this as a trope in the Dechampian tradition, but viewed in the context of the post-human movement it could just as easily be our David.

Views and attitudes are never final nor are they ever independent of the social conditions from which they emerge.

Image top: Virgin Mother, Damien Hirst, 2005 Bronze, approx. 33′

Image bottom: St. Anne and the Conception of Mary, Jean Bellegambe, c. 1515, oil on wood, 36 x 26 cm

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Published on January 25, 2012 11:16 pm.
Filed under: Art, Technology

Everyone Wants to Be a Cowboy

Kiefer’s “Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem” (“Let the Earth Be Opened and Send Forth a Savior”), a 2005-6 painting with poppylike blossoms.

The surge in start-ups is bursting out all over.

I’ve seen a vast increase in the number of people with good (and some not so good) ideas, looking for input on ux, ui and technology. I love it. It shows that web services technology and especially the availability of open protocols and APIs has lowered the technology bar while enabling execution of sophisticated interactive concepts envisioned by subject matter experts vs. technologists.

This is a democratizing movement enabling doctors, dancers, fashionistas, psychologists and other professionals who have no special knowledge around technology to develop viable business models. Whether these are financially viable is another question. But that aspect of the technology world has always baffled me. So many fantastic applications have no clear path to profitability that I can discern.

Perhaps they will rely upon the old model of building a viable and dedicated user base and then selling to the highest bidder that covets the user population. Perhaps there’s an advertising or subscription model lurking under the covers just waiting for critical mass to emerge.

In the meantime, the creative juices runneth over and the inclusion of mainstream, non-technical participation in building our digital environment is a welcome addition to the hardcore techies that have run the show so far.

Image: Anselm Keifer: “Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem” (“Let the Earth Be Opened and Send Forth a Savior”) 2006

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Published on January 24, 2012 5:40 pm.
Filed under: Technology, UX

The Movable Feast: Persistent Social Identity

if this then that allows users to build trigger-based action recipes using open authorization


With the wider adoption of Open Authorization combined with the critical mass achieved by social networks we’ve reached the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of the interactive culture.

For a glimpse of what this may enable, look no further than the logical engine ifttt.com (If This then that ).

Using open protocols for authentication, ifttt allows non-technical users to build logical arguments that trigger and execute actions. Ifttt calls them recipes to make them more accessible and they done a great job of making them easy to understand and use. A recipe might automatically generate a twitter message when someone follows you, or update your WordPress blog when you post a status to Facebook. Many of the recipes are real time savers others suggest a runaway world of increasing quantities of robotically-generated noise.

Perhaps what’s most interesting for the UI/UX design and for anyone concerned with user experience, is how open authentication protocols allow us to carry our social identity, as it exists online, with us wherever we go.

Like the proverbial movable feast we no longer leave. Instead everywhere we go, our social network is ever-present.

In the same way that AJAX technology moved us away from the concept of web pages as static assets hyperlinked together, open authorization moves us away from the idea of browsing. Instead we travel with our posse ever present and perhaps more importantly ever visible to others.

Image: ifttt (if this then that) allows users to build automatic tasks based on integration of social channels.

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Published on January 16, 2012 3:41 pm.
Filed under: Design, Technology, UX

Social Listening Needs Standards

Robert Egert, 1992, Pinocchio, 72" x 72", oil on canvas, collection of Mary Ziegler

In the last two years smart brands have turned themselves inside out to focus on what customers are saying about them instead of focusing on their own marketing messages. This has begun a slow but steady sea change, shifting marketing focus from creative ideas to smart analytics.

Agencies (both traditional and media) are challenged to step-up to the plate and deliver insights based on social listening. Media agencies are often in a good position to take advantage of this opportunity since they have an infrastructure already in place around analytics—extending that to include social listening is a lot less challenging than establishing a new service.

The marketplace is overflowing with analytics tools that range from high-priced industrial strength products to free, web-based products that are open to anyone and new entrants are emerging ongoing. The products vary in quality and some have a deeper feature set, more expansive options or inclusion of third party research data that adds to the depth of the insights and comparisons that can be made as well as contextualize insights against demographics as well as media saturation and spend.

As this market expands and enters the big league what is really missing are industry standards. Conduct a sentiment analysis of the same terms in two or more different platforms and you can expect to get wildly varying results. The reason is partially inherent in the subjectivity of language. (What is social listening if it isn’t linguistic analysis?) But at every step along the way: rules that govern how data is collected, sample size and finally the analytics engine itself vary from platform to platform.

In the race to develop the best product we run the risk of undermining the value of the service if we don’t address the need for standards.

Image: Robert Egert, 1992, Pinocchio, 72″ x 72″, oil on canvas, collection of Mary Ziegler

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Published on January 16, 2012 4:12 am.
Filed under: Branding, Healthcare, Mobile, Technology

Someone Fix this Experience! Carsten Höller at The New Museum

Carsten Höller at The New Museum, photo by robert egert, 102' slide for museum goers

What’s Wrong with this Experience?

They say this exhibit is breaking attendance records at The New Museum and it’s been described as an amusement park since it includes a 102 foot slide that cuts through the floors of the building as well as a mirrored merry-go-round. The problem (well, one of the problems) is that if it were compared to an amusement park it would fail in comparison to even the poorest amusement park you have ever seen.

But it gets worse: the exhibit is filled with objects and constructions that are supposed to deliver a physical, emotional or sensory experience but in fact, most of them fail to deliver much of anything.

  • A glass vial filled with a liquid that was supposed to elicit a feeling of emotion similar to love: no smell and no effect whatsoever
  • A mirrored merry-go-round was slow and boring
  • An electronic vibrator that, when applied to the arm and in combination with holding one’s nose, was supposed to simulate the feeling of having a long nose: Users following the instructions got no result
  • A fish tank with platforms that allowed visitors to stick their head into the tank presumably to simulate being in with the fish: I felt like I was on a platform with my head stuck into a hole and I could barely see the fish.

In sum, the Höller exhibit was more like an old, neglected children’s science museum than an amusement park—the kind of science museum that hasn’t been well maintained and simply doesn’t work.

Ever since Duchamp brought the urinal into the art gallery we’ve accepted the notion that context is everything. Accordingly we judge objects in a gallery by an entirely different standard than equivalent objects out in the world.

Judged as art, in any conventional sense, the Höller works are poor. Judged against a true amusement park or thrill-seeking enterprise, they fare even worse.

Perhaps it is time to apply higher critical standards.

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Published on January 3, 2012 5:29 pm.
Filed under: Art, Reviews

What the facebook literati are really saying about Google+

Well, this is an n of 8, but telling nonetheless

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Published on December 22, 2011 12:56 pm.
Filed under: Reviews, Technology

Pattern Recognition and Defining Users

From data to design: building a user-centered navigation One of the biggest challenges to developing websites for large organizations is managing the needs of vastly different target audiences. Given the need for speed to market there’s a very real need to develop lightweight and rapid methods for understanding constituent audiences, what their goals are, and merging them into a comprehensive user experience design. The questions that the method needs to answer are: 1. How do we rapidly segment audiences in a meaningful way? 2. How can we identify primary and secondary goals for each audience? 3. How much emphasis should we put into satisfying user needs vs. pushing brand messages or goals? 4. How do we serve all of our audiences needs while still keeping the result simple and easy to use? How do we rapidly segment audiences in a meaningful way? Audience segmentation is a process similar to pattern recognition; two individuals can look at the same information and both correctly discern entirely different patterns. It is also a function of the objectives of the initiative. Here are some conceptual ways to frame an analysis of user types: 1. What is the objective of the initiative? Is this an application, a corporate website, a marketing initiative, a networking tool or a lightweight single-purpose app? a. In examining the marketing site it is conventional to think about audiences in terms of brand sentiment or progress along a purchasing continuum b. If it is an organizational website, it is more helpful to think about constituents; e.g., customer types, internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, partners c. For applications, users are typically defined through task analysis; what is the individual trying to accomplish and how must the system respond to the user to enable them to satisfy their needs? d. For social networking tools, functions need to considered against to coordinates; the social platform into which it will integrate and the user’s goals Regardless of the type of initiative, it is critical that the audience segmentation is as concise as possible. Ideally, aim for no more than seven user types. But if you run higher keep in mind that once you go on to break down the primary and secondary goals you may find that some segments are so similar that their distinction is not significant enough to justify maintaining the separation. Photo: MAURIZIO CATTELAN, Super Us, 1998 (detail). 50 acetate sheets, 29.8 x 21 cm each

From data to design: building a user-centered navigation

One of the biggest challenges to developing websites for large organizations is managing the needs of vastly different target audiences. Given the need for speed to market there’s a very real need to develop lightweight and rapid methods for understanding constituent audiences, what their goals are, and merging them into a comprehensive user experience design.

The questions that the method needs to answer are:

  1. How do we rapidly segment audiences in a meaningful way?
  2. How can we identify primary and secondary goals for each audience?
  3. How much emphasis should we put into satisfying user needs vs. pushing brand messages or goals?
  4. How do we serve all of our audiences needs while still keeping the result simple and easy to use?

How do we rapidly segment audiences in a meaningful way?

Audience segmentation is a process similar to pattern recognition; two individuals can look at the same information and both correctly discern entirely different patterns. It is also a function of the objectives of the initiative. Here are some conceptual ways to frame an analysis of user types:

  1. What is the objective of the initiative? Is this an application, a corporate website, a marketing initiative, a networking tool or a lightweight single-purpose app?
    1. In examining the marketing site it is conventional to think about audiences in terms of brand sentiment or progress along a purchasing continuum
    2. If it is an organizational website, it is more helpful to think about constituents; e.g., customer types, internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, partners
    3. For applications, users are typically defined through task analysis; what is the individual trying to accomplish and how must the system respond to the user to enable them to satisfy their needs?
    4. For social networking tools, functions need to considered against to coordinates; the social platform into which it will integrate and the user’s goals

Regardless of the type of initiative, it is critical that the audience segmentation is as concise as possible. Ideally, aim for no more than seven user types. But if you run higher keep in mind that once you go on to break down the primary and secondary goals you may find that some segments are so similar that their distinction is not significant enough to justify maintaining the separation.

Photo: MAURIZIO CATTELAN, Super Us, 1998 (detail). 50 acetate sheets, 29.8 x 21 cm each

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Published on December 19, 2011 2:39 am.
Filed under: Design, UX

From thought to design: building a user-centered navigation


One of the biggest challenges to developing websites for large organizations is managing the needs of vastly different target audiences. Given the need for speed to market there’s a very real need to develop lightweight and rapid methods for understanding constituent audiences, what their goals are, and merging them into a comprehensive user experience design.

The questions that the method needs to answer are:
1. How do we rapidly segment audiences in a meaningful way?
2. How can we identify primary and secondary goals for each audience?
3. How much emphasis should we put into satisfying user needs vs. pushing brand messages or goals?
4. How do we serve all of our audiences needs while still keeping the result simple and easy to use?

How do we rapidly segment audiences in a meaningful way?

Audience segmentation is a process similar to pattern recognition; two individuals can look at the same information and both correctly discern entirely different patterns. It is also a function of the objectives of the initiative. Here are some conceptual ways to frame an analysis of user types:

1. What is the objective of the initiative? Is this an application, a corporate website, a marketing initiative, a networking tool or a lightweight single-purpose app?
a. In examining the marketing site it is conventional to think about audiences in terms of brand sentiment or progress along a purchasing continuum
b. If it is an organizational website, it is more helpful to think about constituents; e.g., customer types, internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, partners
c. For applications, users are typically defined through task analysis; what is the individual trying to accomplish and how must the system respond to the user to enable them to satisfy their needs?
d. For social networking tools, functions need to considered against to coordinates; the social platform into which it will integrate and the user’s goals

Regardless of the type of initiative, it is critical that the audience segmentation is as concise as possible. Ideally, aim for no more than seven user types. But if you run higher keep in mind that once you go on to break down the primary and secondary goals you may find that some segments are so similar that their distinction is not significant enough to justify maintaining the separation.

Image: Christopher Wool, “Untitled” (1988) courtesy of the Broad Art Foundation

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Published on December 8, 2011 5:36 pm.
Filed under: Design, UX

User Testing and Intuition

Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing Instructions, late twentieth Century.

As much as I believe in user testing I find it difficult to advocate for it.

In the last few years it seems like most of our projects are on a compressed schedule that doesn’t allow for formal testing. We compensate by designing variables (A/B testing) into the launch, randomly displaying two versions of the same interface to see which one performs better. The result most of the time: no significant difference. In a few occasions we’ve conducted eye-tracking studies with essentially the same result.

Most of us can quickly recognize a well-designed interface from a poor one, can recognize the established patterns and combine (and recombine) them to form complex systems. THe result is that doing ux produces predictably usable results. This is a result of patterns becoming ingrained not only in the practitioners of ux but also in our audience who are essentially internalizing behavioral interface patterns.

What’s the most fascinating thing to me is that some of the most popular websites still have poorly designed interfaces that are extremely difficult to use (amazon, ebay, google ex-search). And what this proves to me is that the role of familiarity often trumps good design.

Photo: Sol Lewitt wall drawing instructions, late twentieth century.

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Published on November 26, 2011 2:21 pm.
Filed under: Design, Technology, UX Tags: , , ,

Invention, Reinvention and the Wheel

Working with my team today on a new interface that uses a horizontal transition between pages. The entire site is designed using just HTML5 and JQuery so there’s no Flash to worry about.

It’s another example of how interaction design can largely abandon the concept of pages in favor of a more responsive interface. But how did we get here?

When I was first educating myself on software design, one of the first concepts that I cam across was the idea of control systems. This generally refers to hierarchical relationships between key parts of a logical system that govern which parts of the system give out orders and which parts respond to those orders.

This is what prevents a malicious website from taking control of your computer. It works because in the hierarchy, the operating system is above the browser, and in turn, the browser software is above the website. The OS can’t be controlled by the browser but the browser can be controlled through the OS. (You launch or quit and application via the OS, not the other way around.)

From an end-user perspective, these relationships are somewhat intuitive through common convention, however from a ux designer’s perspective these hierarchies are what delineate the possible from the impossible in design.

The recent history of interaction design can, in large part, be described as the blurring of these hierarchies.

The two key factors at work in this process are asynchronous web programming and app culture. The first eradicated the concept of the web as a series of pages in favor of a dynamic display that can be continually refreshed based on user actions (vs. hyperlinks), and the second changed the act of downloading and installing new software into a casual act from what was previously a considered purchase.

Illustration: Dominance hierarchy of a single population of elephant seal males during the mating season, from From Marianne Riedman, The Pinnipeds, page 206.

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Published on November 16, 2011 6:41 pm.
Filed under: Design, Mobile, Technology, Truths, UX