motikon

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.

Share this article

How we adapt to machines and computers is anything but intuitive despite our obsession with the term usability

Recently I have spent quite a bit of my personal time helping people look for jobs. Call it my contribution to the failing economy or just the fact that I hate to see single moms on the street. At any rate, as you might guess, my first point is to help friends negotiate professional networking sites and to generally make their profiles visible to the companies and recruiters that are seeking to hire people with their skills.

For those of us in information technology, advertising and other digitally aware industries, this is a no-brainer and generally understood. However it is not the case for many people who work in other fields such as education, healthcare delivery, and social services.

It is a constant source of surprise to me how many people have no clue how to use social networking sites to their professional advantage despite the fact that most of them are regular users of facebook. After spending time walking them through steps such as taking and uploading photographs, adding biographical and resume entries and creating keyword sets a single observation has emerged: It’s all about how you handle frustration.

We are all confronted with new interfaces that are challenging and disorienting. It is part of the process of UI evolution that new patterns and paradigms are introduced and before they can feel intuitive they must be learned.

There is nothing intuitive about interacting with a computer. It is all learned behavior. Systems can feel intuitive, but that’s because their conventions conform to a pattern that has been previously learned.

In fact, we are all learning and relearning how to interact with machines all the time. We are constantly updating our knowledge, expectations and sense of normalcy. Once a new pattern is introduced it must be learned before it can become internalized: similar to muscle memory that is experienced by a violinist who intuitively knows where to depress a string to get the right tonality.

What does vary is the way we adapt to new interactive patterns. Here are two examples of adoption and resistance to change:

• Blackberry user has adapted to using an input keyboard that is tactile and refuses to move to a touch screen interface because they have become accustomed to feeling the keys in their finger tips and cannot easily adapt to a visual-only feedback system inherent in the iphone and android model of text input

• Website user is accustomed to finding a particular function interface, such as a button in a particular place. If, as a result of redesign, the button is moved, they become agitated and frustrated when they need to interrupt their task to find the new pattern

These examples point out two distinct classes of user resistance: The first is based on an established pattern of feedback (in this instance it is physical but it could just as easily be visual or audio). And, even though I am no fan or Blackberries, it is completely understandable.

The second example is more interesting. It is about a tolerance for interruption and constant adaptation to new behavioral patterns (vs. physical feedback).

What I am positing here is that how a user responds to the interruption of a task is a good predictor of how well they will be able to adapt to new technology. A user that is able to pause and switch focus from the task they are trying to accomplish to the means by which that task is attained and then back to the task itself will be able to learn the new UI pattern. Other users find the interruption to be intolerable will find it frustrating and may interpret the challenge of having to change focus as a direct threat to their goals.

What this points to is the fact that all of us are constantly adapting to technology. As my tag line says, technology changes what it means to be human. Our reactions, interpretation and behaviors are formed in large part by our expectations of what results from our actions.

I think it fair to say that nothing on a screen is truly intuitive. Particular designs just seem that way because they incorporate patterns that we are accustomed to.

Share this article

Turn back the hands of time, way back to the early days of the dot com boom. Web design in those days was devoid of templates real and imaginary. End users had no expectations and web interfaces ran the gamut from the audacious to the beautiful to the idiotic. Any new project was a chance to establish a new paradigm. And all bets were off.

Keep in mind that in the early days, web browsers were advancing and leap-frogging each other with a rapidity that made any design essentially obsolete within six months to a year. And even if it didn’t become obsolete, innovative new UI features, such as mouse-over effects, expanding menus, etc. were strong motivations for web sponsors to invest in redesign efforts.

I still remember vividly the ABC News site of the late nineties that featured the navigation on the right side of the browser. Eureka! More people are right handed, therefore this is a more convenient design. (They’d designed it to remain in sight regardless of the size of the browser window.) I was busy sharing the interface with my clients and team-members until one day soon after its release they flopped it back the left side, just like every other website.

It was a milestone day, like the day your favorite corner store closed and was replaced by gap or a starbucks. The day that conformity kicked in and a reign of standardization began.

Which leads me to my complaint about applications like Balsamic (For those of you who aren’t familiar, Balsamic is a template-based tool that allows people with no discernible visual skill to create UI mock-ups by arranging pre-made elements such as buttons, navigation tabs, form elements, etc.)

Balsamic has, depending on your point of view, opened up UI design to anyone with an interest, empowered sponsors to get hands on in the UI development process, or rendered the skilled UI/UX designers’ role irrelevant.

Perhaps it does all three of these things. But from my perspective, the larger issue is that it reinforces a standardized approach to UI design that will stifle UI innovation and further limit the kinds of interactions that we can invent or imagine.

Creativity is an essential component of innovation. And in order to remain relevant, designers must prove their worth by demonstrating true innovation, elegance and usability in the interfaces they envision.

Share this article

In the rush to release mobile apps and the proven success of rapid prototyping its no surprise that design has had to adjust to an agile methodology. This also means that the project sponsors are far more involved in design decisions than ever before.  It is in the nature of mobile design to rely on the OS far more than in browser-based application design. This implies (and demands) full integration of interaction design with software development in a way that hasn’t really been popular since before the emergence of the web.

Not a bad thing if you ask me.

Share this article