Archive for November, 2007
The design blog, Core77, has published an interview with Don Norman, author of a series of books on user-centred design (the best known of which, The Design of Everyday Things, was the first, and possibly only, book on user experience to become a bestseller).
Norman always makes interesting listening. I loved his recommendation to his interviewer, Bruce Tharp, that he should ‘question authority, even if that authority is me’ so was frustrated that Bruce didn’t go off-script a little more to pick Norman up on some of what he said. So I’ll do so here on his behalf.
The ‘question authority’ comment came about a third-way through the interview where Norman criticises the techniques used by companies who are committed to user-centred design. His comments focus particularly on ethnographic research and the creation of personas. Norman complains that, interesting as these processes are, they fail to connect to the engineers and designers creating products and services and so are, in effect, a waste of time. What Norman wants, he says, is processes that focus on the task, rather than on people. I know what he means, but worry that he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
So let’s take a short step back from Norman’s comments and remember what preceded the typical user-centred processes many companies now use. Often, nothing. Or, if you were lucky, focus group research on a product that was in the final stages of development, when it was too late to have any impact on its fundamental design. Products were shaped by engineering dictat and the styling of the designer (think back to VCR controls of the 1980s). As Norman mentions, a typical company reaction to problems users encountered with their products was that the users were stupid. It’s certainly true that people feel stupid when dealing with products they can’t work. And that has implications for the company selling the product. Would you buy again from a company that had made you feel stupid? Probably not.
So how do companies take that step from thinking ‘right product, wrong customer’ to thinking that their customers have a right to products and services that meet their needs and are genuinely easy to use? I think it’s through empathy with the user (so does Norman). And how do you get that empathy? By meeting your users and seeing how they use products and services and by hearing what their concerns and preoccupations are; that is, through observing people in context, precisely the ethnographic research that Norman dismisses. Then you need to find ways to keep those end-users in mind so that, even when you’re not talking with them, something of their attitudes and concerns remains with you while you design. Not an easy task, but one in which the personas Norman writes off can be a useful tool.
These research tools rarely answer detailed design questions. That’s what iterative prototyping and user feedback cycles do. But they help focus design thinking on what people want, they support understanding of gaps in the market and decisions about what to design, and sometimes, yes, give insights into design detail too.
What I think Norman is criticising is the unthinking application of research techniques, and the failure to connect them to design process. That isn’t a problem with the techniques themselves, but inflexibility in some organisations in how they are used. There was a similar rigidity about 15 years ago when many companies established ‘usability labs’ to test products during development. Over-scientised in their approach, over-staffed and unwieldy, they couldn’t provide nimble enough input to be useful. In most cases they were abandoned in favour of a leaner approach, often involving designers directly in testing their own products.
As with usability testing you need to understand ‘ethnographic research’ as a portfolio of techniques to get close to users; for example, shadowing them as they go about their daily tasks, talking with them in context, asking them to create diaries, to take part in workshops with designers, finding out what they’re saying in their blogs or on forums (no, this isn’t ethnography, in its academic sense, which is why I prefer to call these techniques observational research). There’s no single true way. And since many real-life interactions are private and it’s hard to predict when or where’ll they’ll take place, finding a good way to research them requires some creativity.
Norman comments that the best design is often found in gardening, farm and workshop tools. But these have evolved over scores, sometimes hundreds, of years into the familiar implements used today. Not so for new technology tools, where there are no long-standing traditions for what they do and how they do it, where there often isn’t a readable relationship between form and function, and where, as I’ve commented before, the people designing the tools may not be those who will use them. That’s where understanding the people as well as the task is so important.
A rhetorical (I assume) question in a review by Alan Cane of improvements to text entry for mobile phones (FT, 24 November) highlights the importance of understanding both people and task. Cane questions whether developing better text entry techniques than we have presently is worthwhile: ‘…surely inputting text through keys is simply a passing phase before voice input takes over?’. I suspect not, and think Cane would be convinced too if he were to observe the detail of how text is being used. Voice input may take over some tasks, or even facilitate new forms of messaging, but text is so embedded in people’s lives, I’ve no doubt it’s here to stay. Take a look at the many contexts where text is used because talking wouldn’t be practical or acceptable; look how text allows editing in a way voice input might not. Text is not just a cheap substitute for talking, it’s a channel with a role of its own. By looking at the task alone, you might miss that. But you’ll know that it’s worth the effort of developing more usable text entry systems, if you look at the people as well as the task.
November 29th, 2007
Moving from a closed circle of networked communications, that is, me and my friends towards one where brands come into play is transforming certain platforms, namely mobile phones and television. It is a fact. There are two big rules in programme scheduling: choose your audience and sell advertising space that they are receptive to. This is why during the Rugby World Cup final, AUDI showcased its latest powerhouse of an engine… wowing everyman in the pub. And our “Britain’s Next Top Model” is sponsored by a make-up brand. In the case of youth audiences, brands are beginning to segment more than ever. It looks like the battle of the sexes is up and you are either a fashion-crazed aspiring kitten or an mbox-addict/sports-mad dude. What is to happen to unisex brands, like music or design-driven brands, which is a harder kind to juggle?
I call these brands the “Life Soundtrack Brands”. They are not trying to sell me anything in particular, because the market is well aware of who they are and what they sell, but are reminding me of how great it is to live in this world with them around me/on me/ in my house. Perhaps their message to my phone is for me to come to one of their shops to checkout the new interior, their new stock of goodies - this is Apple’s super stores strategy, or download a mini video of their latest campaign, designed to interact with me on tv, the web and my mobile. Whatever it is that comes to my phone, I repeat, has to be under the following expectations:
(a) the brand is known to me and I like it;
(b) the brand is new to me but the ad is so cool, I actually like it;
(c) the brand is not known to me but their stuff rocks and I want to know more about them (and the ad is cool, too);
Most of the time, we get (d):
(d) the brand has no impact on my psyche, probably because they are using the same campaign on TV (and I’ve already watched their ads five hundred times whilst watching “Hollyoaks”) or the campaign is just lame… visually unengaging, boring creative, old advertising stereotypes…
It’s also about not bombarding the same ad a hundred times a week. A given ad is as good as its limited broadcast. Remember Budweiser’s “Wassup?” ads… they only got better when people began to do mash-ups online… eventually, the ones broadcasted on TV managed to annoy the whole nation… as half your friends began to greet you with such parody every time you’d show up at their place and rang the doorbell… I have little patience for this lemming behaviour, you may have noticed…
People like ads when they are good. They even watch them in youTube. Not every ad on TV falls under this category. Current washing up liquid ads are just domesticity at its worst. Or softdrinks. By the way, have you noticed there has never been a RedBull ad on TV? And you want to know why? Because they came to where their audiences were and built a presence there, sponsoring bmx events and creating a drink that would serve the demands of hardcore clubbers.
Brands have an excellent opportunity to make themselves loved and respected in the mobile sphere, but the same rules will apply here to that of niche sports events sponsoring:
(a) put your money where your mouth (desire to market to me & my friends) is;
(b) understand the rules of my game and how I will let you into my inner circle (see rules above);
(c) come to me with a product that truly will improve my lifestyle and let me know about that product with bespoke mobile creative output: this is my phone, not the public TV broadcast network…
… is that alright with you? It is that simple…
November 26th, 2007
In 2005, Mimi Ito and Misa Matsuda published Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. This groundbreaking work contains a collection of essays by Japanese researchers about how the mobile phone (or keitai) is transformed from a business tool to a personal device for communication and play. Much of the scholarship centers around what Japanese youth do with the mobile phone. One of the essays in this book, Misa Matsuda’s “Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality,” focuses specifically on how youth have adopted the mobile phone to build and maintain a “full-time intimate community.” Rather than being reachable by just anyone, Matsuda finds that keitai allow youth to control the flow of communication, making themselves available to “intimate friends or selected others [with whom they] want contact.” While youth may have hundreds of numbers in their addressbook, the collection of people with whom they regularly maintain contact is far smaller. 
From the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, youth text a small group of intimate friends, building a network through ongoing chatter. While the actual substance of a particular message may not have great meaning, the aggregate helps build and sustain bonds, bringing youth into each other’s social sphere even when they are physically apart. Physical spaces often require people to socially organize around who is present, regardless of desire. School environments, for example, create social situations where people socialize with others even if their bond is not strong. What is unique about the connections built and maintained through texting is that individuals choose to maintain these ties, creating a context out of the people instead of the environment. The “full-time intimate community” that youth build is critically important to them.
Social contexts like the one that Matsuda describes have social norms and rules of decorum. For example, reciprocity is a critical component in the process of building and maintaining connections. There are understood rituals for reaching out and for signing off. While texting may not be synchronous, an apology may be necessary for responding at an interval other than what is collectively expected. Because these social contexts are extremely local to each network of friends, there are no universal norms. Yet, as is true in any medium, participating in a particular community involves sussing out the social norms and learning how to behave properly.
Marketers and politicians are trying to become actors in these networks. Typically, they want to leverage the networks that people build to engage directly with consumers. Yet, all too often they come barreling in with their own norms and expectations like a bully or a narcissistic princess. By broadcasting instead of engaging, they demand attention. By pushing their agenda, they rupture the social context. To combat this, they are typically ignored or ostracized, treated like a pariah unless they volunteer to give something back. When having them in the network serves a functional purpose, they are tolerated, but not loved.
There are exceptions and those are intriguing case studies. Consider the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans that emerged on MySpace. Bands needed fans to friend them so that they would be validated for promotional purposes and they wanted a mechanism by which to disseminate information to fans. Fans loved bands and wanted a way to show their affiliation and get validated from those bands. The MySpace friendship between bands and fans initially supported both groups, especially when bands solidified the relationship through a comment that would enhance the individual’s identity in front of their friends. (It should be noted that the rise of “band spam” and the lecherous nature of the labels disturbed this dynamic.)
So herein lies an interesting question… What does it take for brand, politician, or institution to sit meaningfully at the table in the mobile world of the “full-time intimate community”? Blyk is betting that consumers will tolerate these groups’ presence in return for free connectivity. Is this mutually parasitic relationship the only tenable one or are other mutually beneficial relationships possible? If so, what might those look like?
November 23rd, 2007
Survey reports, telling us how new technologies are being used, are part of our media landscape. We take what we can from their snapshots of people’s lives, remembering that their publication is often a PR exercise for a company or organisation. Sometimes somewhat uninterpretable data detracts from their role as PR pieces, at least if we think a little further than the press-released headlines. Recently, the data security company, Garlik, published snippets from its survey of internet use, including the finding that internet users in Wales blog more than in the rest of the UK. Earlier this month Carphone Warehouse, working in partnership with London School of Economics, released its annual survey of mobile use, Mobile Life, (now in its fourth year) showing, among other things, that although Britain leads the texting league in Europe, the French are more likely to end a relationship with a text than the Brits. It’s hard to know what to make of data bites like these, and probably the best option is to make as little of them as possible. We often can’t tell the full story behind them, as Carsten Sørenson, one of the LSE academics commenting in the Mobile Life report concedes.
But these data snapshots can grow legs and take on a life of their own, sometimes unfairly. For example, 18 months ago easyMoney published a survey of 18-29 year-olds, dubbing them the ‘Won’t wait, won’t do generation’ because they often miss doctor, dentist or hair appointments, and sometimes social engagements, rather than queue or wait for them. The behaviour was attributed to conditioning by high-speed interactions on the web and, yes, the charicterisation of an impatient generation has an intuitive ring to it. But what about the 30+ generations? I don’t know anyone, of any generation, who enjoys queuing for an answer from a telephone help-line. And I expect many pensioners would join the 18-29s in abandoning their shopping trolley rather than waiting at an understaffed supermarket checkout. We don’t know if there are inter-generational differences in impatience, because easyMoney confined their research to their target age group, found answers they might have expected, and didn’t look any further.
Large scale surveys have their place but they are a limited methodology. The set of questions that can be asked is relatively fixed. There’s no opportunity for probing behind the answers. And that’s before we get on to the question of how accurately people can self-report on past behaviour.
So its refreshing to see that the Mobile Life report includes some video diaries of mobile phone users, as a supplement to their report. The diaries aren’t linked topically to the report itself, they don’t have international coverage and are collected from individuals who have agreed to spend a week living without their phones. One might argue that they are contrived to elicit people’s emotive responses and don’t show phone use in context. Nevertheless they are a step away from the over-certainty of quantitatively-based reports, and give an insight into the less-than-tidy world of real people’s technology use. This kind of reporting doesn’t have the impressive numbers behind it that quantitative research carries; even with relatively small numbers of people it’s labour intensive to do; it requires a subjective integrity to extract an accurate summary representation of what has been captured on video, often over many hours. But in my opinion, even with its potential practical and intellectual flaws, it’s powerful and potentially more memorable than data bites.
Which it why I found MIT Technology Review’s recent interview of Twitter’s founder, Evan Williams, and two (very articulate) Twitter users so appealing. If you had not understood the potential for ‘ambient intimacy’ that Twitter enables, the real user experiences described in the video would go a long way towards convincing you. Fantastic PR. And not a data bite in sight.
November 21st, 2007
For peculiar business reasons, Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages (although much of Canada has shifted away from this). This creates a stilted social dynamic whereby a friend forces you to pay $.10 (or use up a precious token msg in your plan) simply by deciding to send you something. You have no choice. There’s no blocking, no opt-out. Direct to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Needless to say, this alters the culture of texting. From the getgo, Americans have been very cautious about texting. To be on the safe side, many Americans did not add texting to their plan so sending a text message was often futile because it was never clear if a text message would be received by the phone in question or just disappear into the ether. Slowly, mobile users figured out who had SMS and who didn’t, but they were still super cautious about sending messages. It just felt rude, or wrong, or risky.
Teens, of course, never had this filter. They were perfectly happy to text. So much so that their parents refused to get them plans that supported it because, not surprisingly, there were all sorts of horror stories about teens who had texted up $700 phone bills. Sure enough, every family that I spoke with told me their version of the horror story and. In the U.S., we don’t have pay-as-you-go so going over minutes or texts just gets added to your monthly bill. If you’re not careful, that bill can get mighty costly. Unable to declare a max cost upfront, parents have been tremendously wary of teen texting simply for economic costs (although the occasional predator or cheating-in-school scare story does surface). Slowly, things have turned around, primarily with the introduction of cheap all-you-can-eat text messaging plans (and those that are so ridiculously high that it’s hard to go over). Once the barrier to participation is dropped, sending and receiving text messages switches from being potentially traumatic to outright fun. What a difference those plans make in user practice. The brick leash suddenly turns into an extension of the thumb for negotiating full-time intimate communities.
I’m fascinated by how U.S. teens build intricate models of which friends are available via mobile and which aren’t. Teens know who is on what plan, who can be called after 7PM, who can be called after 9PM, who can receive texts, who is over their texting for the month, etc. It’s part of their mental model of their social network and knowing this is a core exchange of friendship.
Psychologically, all-you-can-eat plans change everything. Rather than having to mentally calculate the number of texts sent and received (because the phones rarely do it for you and the carriers like to make that info obscure), a floodgate of opportunities is suddenly opened. The weights are lifted and freedom reigns. The result? Zero to a thousand text messages in under a month! Those on all-you-can-eat plans go hog wild. Every mundane thought is transmitted and the phones go buzz buzz buzz. Those with restrictive plans are treated with caution, left out of the fluid communication flow and brought in for more practical or content-filled purposes (or by sig others who ignore these norms and face the ire of parents).
All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. For that matter, plans are relatively rare (while pay-as-you-go options were introduced in the U.S. relatively late and are not nearly as common as monthly plans). When a European youth runs out of texts and can’t afford to top up, they simply don’t text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren’t actually kept out of the loop; they just have to call to respond if they still have minutes or borrow a friend’s phone. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. As the U.S. goes from 0 to all-you-can-eat in one foul swoop, American texting culture is beginning to look quite different than what exists in Europe. Whenever I walk into a T-Mobile and ask who goes over their $10/1000 text message plan, the answer is uniform: “every teenager.” Rather than averaging a relatively conservative number of texts per month (like 200), gluttonous teen America is already on route to thousands of texts per month. They text like they IM, a practice mastered in middle school. Rather than sending a few messages a day, I’m seeing 20-50+. College students appear to text just as much as teens. Older users are less inclined to be so prolific, but maybe this is because they are far more accustomed to the onerous plans and never really developed a fluid texting practice while younger.
Whatever the case, it’s clear by comparing European and American practices that the economics of texting play a significant role in how this practice is adopted. It’s more than one’s individual plan too because there’s no point in texting if your friends can’t receive them. As we watch this play out, I can’t help but wonder about the stupidity of data plan implementation. Just last week, I went with my partner to AT&T to activate his Nokia N95. He was primed to add data to his plan because of the potential for the phone, but we both nearly had a heart attack when we learned that 4MB of data would cost $10 and unlimited would cost $70. We walked away without a data plan. More and more phones are data-enabled, but only the techno-elite are going to add such ridiculously costly plans. (And what on earth can you do with only 4MB?) It’s pretty clear that the carriers do not actually want you to use data. The story is even scarier in Europe with no unlimited options. Who actually wants to calculate how many MB a site might be and surf accordingly? And forget about social apps with uncontrollable data counts. There’s a lot to be said about paying to not having to actually worry about it.
November 16th, 2007
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