Archives

An Archive for Interaction Design

Designers are terrible at saving what we do. Most of us know that we should take the time to document what we’ve done for our own portfolios, if not for posterity. Yet few of us take the trouble. We usually wait until we leave our jobs and a portfolio becomes an imperative, or when a potential client spurs us to write a case study of a finished project.

In the analog world, this is merely an inconvenience. We scramble to dig up old mock-ups, assets, tearsheets, samples, and digital files. It’s tedious, but the definitive nature of analog design — the fact that there’s a canonical version of every brochure or book jacket — makes the archival process a straightforward one.

Archiving digital design, on the other hand, is far less clear-cut. It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating that digital media is a conversation. To design for digital media is to design systems within which wildly varying kinds of interactions can happen, virtual systems that are conducive to great conversations. Conversations, however, are notoriously difficult to fully capture.

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Uncommon Cures for the Common Cold

I was thinking about medicines this morning. As I’ve complained before, it’s been a terrible winter and so I’m fending off what seems like the fourth or fifth cold of the season already (having a toddler who brings home germs from play groups is part of this too).

My medicine cabinet is full of open boxes of cold remedies like Cold-Eeze, Zycam, Robitussin and others. Most of these over-the-counter medicines would taste neutral, bitter or worse were it not for the window-dressing of artificial flavorings like cherry, citrus or that generic, unidentifiable kind of sweetness you might associate with Smarties and other completely unnatural candies. Similarly, they’re all far too sweet for my taste; almost all of them make me a little nauseous.

Part of the reason for this of course is that it’s probably unwise, for obvious concerns, to make medicines so tasty that you look forward to the next dose. Still, it seems possible to me to create a sub-class of cold remedies that have more subtle, less powerful flavorings. I’d probably buy a cough syrup that tastes like some kind of lightly sweetened tea, for example, or a throat lozenge that has the flavor of rice candy, or a zinc supplement that comes in butterscotch. These could and probably should still taste a little bit unpleasant, but they don’t need to be as brutally sugary as they are now.

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Facebook, For the Win

The Social NetworkThis week’s episode of KCRW’s excellent radio show The Business features a great interview with Dana Brunetti, producer of the critically lauded and Oscar-nominated movie “The Social Network.” In it, Brunetti goes into fascinating detail about how the book and the movie came to be.

“The Social Network” is of course based on the book “Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich. Apparently, Mezrich and Brunetti have a standing, informal book-to-movie deal — the former writes books that make for good movies, and the latter options them, sometimes before they’re even done. (The Kevin Spacey film “21” is another example.) Such was the way “Accidental Billionaires” turned into “The Social Network”; screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was working on his script while Mezrich’s manuscript was still in progress, working practically in parallel, with the two comparing notes and research. You can listen to or download the interview here.

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Explanations Worth Reading

In my post yesterday about instructional screens, those meta-states that apps sometimes use to literally explain how their functionality works, I said that if an interface has to be explained, then it’s probably broken.

Of course, there are no absolutes in interface design, so a declaration like that should be taken with a grain of salt. The concept of coach marks can work, and quite well, but usually not in the static, superficial manner of the examples I cited in that post.

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Unnecessary Explanations

Introducing users to a new app or set of functionality is a difficult task for which there are no easy answers. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to create a kind of instructional screen in which the interface is explained, either diagrammatically or through the use of elucidating circles, arrows, lines and notational text (what Apple has in the past called “coach marks,” a term I haven’t heard elsewhere but that I really like) directly over the interface. The idea is to add a meta level of guidance to help acquaint the user with the key parts of the interface and how to use them.

I’ve been noticing these more and more lately, a trend that I find regrettable. I’ve designed products with instructional screens and coach marks in the past, and they were miserable failures. In my experience, these types of parenthetical interfaces are almost always misguided, mostly because they run up against one of the (nearly) immutable laws of interface design: people don’t read interfaces.

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This Could Be Google’s Design Moment

Last week’s news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence led many people to wonder whether the company truly has a vision that will sustain it in his absence. I happen to think that in the short term, at least, Apple will be just fine, but it’s interesting to note that implicit in this worry is whether Apple’s singular attention to good design will continue to prosper. Which is to say, perhaps the paramount anxiety surrounding Jobs’ leave — and his inevitable departure, whenever that is — is whether it represents the point at which Apple’s ability to design wonderful products went on the decline.

It’s true that when visionaries leave a company, a lot can go wrong, though of course right now it’s impossible to know for sure what will happen. But by the same token, major shifts in leadership are also an opportunity for a company’s design acumen to improve.

This is what I’m hoping happens over at Google where, as also reported last week, Eric Schmidt is handing over the reins to co-founder Larry Page. Page is an engineer, of course, and quite private, so I have no particular insight as to whether he has any meaningful appreciation of design. But as a founder he has a unique power to influence the priorities at his company, and as the new CEO he has a unique opportunity to imbue his organization with a new design sensibility. If he wants to.

And hopefully he does. Few companies seem to understand the concept of design so cannily and yet so incompletely as Google does. It’s abundantly evident that they pay exceedingly close attention to usability and they slave over getting that right. And yet the total, intangible effect of their hard work is little more than the sum of its highly efficient parts. Google products are rich with design intelligence, but they also suffer from a paucity of design inspiration. They could be so much more than they are — they could be surprising, witty, fun and, yes, they could be truly beautiful. (Read former Google designer Doug Bowman’s notes on this for added perspective.)

We tend to think that design is a function of good process, well-structured organizations, and copious time and budgetary resources. But design is just as much a function of leadership. Who’s in the top seat matters very much to whether a company can design well. If the leader cares passionately about producing amazingly well-designed products, then you can get a string of indelible successes that capture the popular imagination like we’ve seen at Apple for the past decade-plus. We haven’t seen that kind of result from Google during that same span of time, though. Beyond the iconic minimalism of the original Google home page, not one of their subsequent products has truly inspired us. I hope that Larry Page realizes that, with the resources and design talent he probably already employs, there’s no reason that has to continue to be the case.

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Mad Men’s Furniture Showroom

Part of the awesome responsibility inherent in having your own blog is admitting when you’re wrong. People should do it more often, including me. So here goes: I was wrong about “Mad Men,” cable television’s zeitgeisty dramatization of life in the American advertising industry at its mid-century peak. I originally pegged it as being tedious and overblown, but now, having just caught up with all four of the seasons that have aired to date, I have to correct the record and say that it is not tedious at all, and that it is in fact, a very, very good show.

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Listening to What Movie Lovers Have to Say

In my post from earlier this week about the drawbacks of Blu-Ray, one of the points I tried to make was that all of the extras that Blu-Ray discs provide really amount to very little of interest to me and, I would guess, to most consumers — especially if they cause the total user experience of Blu-Ray discs to be slow and problematic (they do). Contrary to what the entertainment industry believes, most of us can easily live without all the deleted scenes, interviews, outtakes, trailers, and commercials disguised as documentaries — to say nothing of the uniformly dismissable interactive features and supplemental content that Blu-Ray makes accessible over the Internet.

What matters is the movie itself, the core content. If you don’t believe me, you can believe Netflix. Through their success they’ve inadvertently proven that the concept of “DVD extras” is hardly a necessary component of providing good entertainment. Their discs-by-mail service treats a two-disc movie release (one for the movie itself, one for the extras) as two different rentals, and so it’s probably safe to say that very few people go to the trouble of renting that second disc. And of course, their streaming service offers up no extras at all and has proven to be a big hit nevertheless.

In an age where entertainment journalism is so popular and when everyone is interested in the backstory of practically every movie, regardless of how good the movie itself is, it’s interesting to me that extras can be regarded as so inessential. But they really are, and user experience designers across all media would do well to keep that in mind. Cherries don’t sell sundaes.

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Verizon Monologue

Over the past dozen years or so, I’ve used mobile phones on the AT&T, Sprint and Verizon networks. Of them all, AT&T’s service has been the worst, but it’s much better now than when I first tried it in 1998. By no means am I completely satisfied with AT&T, but I spend little time lamenting its shortcomings.

On the other hand, my experience with Verizon’s customer support — in the years just before the iPhone debuted — was by far the worst of any of the three carriers. The worst. I found them unhelpful, often rude and sometimes even hostile. They also seemed to operate under a set of corporate rules that seemed decidedly unfriendly to customers. I disliked every minute of my time with Verizon, and I was glad to be rid of them.

So I just hope people who have been anxiously awaiting the now-real Verizon iPhone are greeted with a revamped customer service experience, that Verizon has turned a leaf and found a new focus on making life easier for their customers. In any event, I’m going to stay with AT&T.

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