1. User Experience and Politics

    Two great articles: 

    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/

    http://gigaom.com/2010/03/08/obama-appoints-infographics-guru-tufte-to-explain-stimulus-funds/

    I liked these because they articulate in concrete terms the world-changing consequences of all those seemingly insignificant design decisions we face on a daily basis. Without a sophisticated but usable get-out-the-vote infrastructure, Obama loses. Without readable infographics, no one knows where our recovery money is going and trust (and elections) are lost. And I especially like the description of Romney’s aptly named “Orca” voter tracking system; at the risk of sounding glib, I can just picture the GOP’s excited faces when whoever built that thing read them the features list, only to realize post-election that the thing is unusable by real people. I wonder how Obama’s past experience as an actual community organizer influenced the design decisions behind their system? And I wonder how it compared to the clearly checklist driven decision of the GOP, which reminds me of every CTO that has ever bought a crappy enterprise solution and forced their users to adopt it without ever trying it themselves. 

    I’ve always felt that the need for good design and usability extend far beyond the walls of gadgets and web services. Part of what attracted me to design in the first place was the idea that seemingly mundane design decisions have their consequences multiplied exponentially when the are unleashed on the world. For example, a butterfly ballot, or a touch screen voting machine, or a system of healthcare that is confusing as hell and results in billions of overhead just to correct design errors that shouldn’t have been there to begin with. 

    I don’t think anyone will dispute that policies, regulations, social programs etc are all things that need to be designed with human behavior in mind. The part that usually freaks people out is the question of who will design the solution. We’ve developed a system where policy design by consensus is baked into the process. People know that and abuse it. It’s not that I would want it any other way, but anyone who has had to sit through a consensus based design process knows the special hell that it is, and the crappy outcomes they tend to produce. 

    How do we change the design of policy to be less about consensus, and more about what’s best for mankind? We all know that in design, sometimes a decision will leave users behind. How does that translate to policy design? When do you decide that it’s ok to inconvenience or leave someone behind? 

  2. Bad Packing

    Poking fun at bad package design is a frequent pastime in Human Factors. Here’s a montage of people dealing with the poor package design of the new Google Nexus 7. 

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2012/07/17/nexus-7-unboxing-montage/

    It’s still not as funny as this one :D  

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIfkDG7HNM

  3. No more coasters

    Filed under why the hell didn’t I think of this; a mug that requires no coaster. 

    no coasters

    http://www.core77.com/blog/kickstarter/tigere_chirigas_no-coaster-necessary_floating_mug_22790.asp

  4. For our over-notified selves :)

  5. Heat map of NYC’s most popular jogging routes

    Super cool visualization of 1000 Nike+ users swarming over NY. The compressed real time video where you get to see everyone out and about is super cool. 

    http://cargocollective.com/coopersmith#1327371/Nike-Plus-Visualization

  6. Skeumorphism

    The newest design buzzword. It means to design things that emulate real-world objects, like how the iPhone notes app looks like a yellow legal pad. For two interesting perspectives: 

    It sucks: http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy

    It sucks, but I guess it’s ok: http://www.andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-people/

    I tend to waver, but I think I agree with Andy. Disguising a sophisticated new UI as a familiar but defunct design has an air of pandering kitsch… but it is in fact an extremely effective tactic to soften the design of a new piece of technology so that a normal person feels comfortable approaching it. If you truly believe in the democratizing power of technology, this should be ok with you. If you value innovative designs and aesthetic integrity over all else, it is abhorrent. Personally, I think these things are bad only if one is unable to ever move past them. We still send mail right? That’s why it’s ok that every email app still has an envelope on it. But no one uses floppy disks anymore, so maybe that one should go. Some people still take notes on yellow legal pads…. so maybe we should just lighten up and deal with it :D 

  7. Sneaky Menu design

    I read this article, unfortunately, right after I got back from lunch where I bought the curly fries that were highlighted in the bright yellow box on the menu. Now I feel like a sucker! They highlighted a few best (most devious?) practices:

    • Make the dollar amounts appear visually smaller by rounding up and omitting cents
    • Make the dish titles scannable, but not the prices (i.e. don’t right-align the price column)
    • Put the highest margin menu items on the right hand first page with a a box to draw attention to them, as that’s what you see as soon as you open the menu
    • In the rest of the menu categories (other than the attention getting first right page), front load the most expensive items. If you’re familiar with order of presentation and memory retention, this is the Primacy effect. You remember the expensive stuff and everything else then seems cheaper by comparison.

    Interesting analysis on this particular design challenge. They are either trying to hide the price from you (the cynical view) or they are selling you an experience and are trying to improve it by getting you to focus on the food instead of the price (the apologists view :). Call it what you want, I’m only ordering from the bottom left of the last page of the menu from now on!

    http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/02/22/how_menus_manipulate_diners

  8. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

    Thanks Alex Zane for turning me on to this great documentary about technology and its effects on the philosophies and policy decisions of our leaders. The descriptions of a tech-driven utopia are inspiring and horrifying at the same time. 

    I certainly agree with many of the basic points here, that information technology has the means to be a great equalizer, to destroy the need for rigid political hierarchies and truly free mankind. Still, watching the misguided application of that philosophy using immature technologies is scary to say the least. I also have to take issue with the idea that we’re going to be “watched over” by our technology. To me, that’s a betrayal of the human spark in its most depressing form, designing a new cage for ourselves when we should be building a world without cages. I believe instead that we will use technology to distribute power, to give us all the ability to watch over ourselves. In short, haven’t we seen enough movies about this to know what to do? Get that freaking blue pill away from your mouth!!

  9. Trash the turntables? Not so fast…

    Lately I’ve been noodling around with my iPad, using it as a controller for Ableton Live. It’s amazing; if you are so inclined, I highly recommend trying out LiveControl, it’s free and it’s the best clip launcher I’ve ever used. Turns your iPad into a Kaoss pad, custom controller for anything in any device chain, and standard MPC type drum pad/piano controller. Just incredible that it’s free, and so flexible; I would have paid out the nose for it. 

    So when I read this article about ditching turntables, I thought the guy might have hit on something… Alas, I must disagree with the basic theme, that turntablists are elitists hipsters clinging to outdated tech for no good reason. No doubt the touch UI is great for beatmatching, but that’s really mostly powered by Traktor or Serato or whatever he’s using, and it’s only one of the things that a DJ does with turntables. Physical turntables still provide haptic feedback that simply can’t be matched by a touch screen, and physical feedback is incredibly important in any music performance. Sure the software does great beat matching, but how does a touch screen replicate the feel of the record sliding on the slip mat as you scratch, or the friction of pinching the spindle to nudge the beat down? It doesn’t, and both those things are crucial to the feedback loop that lets the DJ identify playback state of the song and manipulate tempo. And the car analogy is weak; preferring a real turntable is more akin to preferring a real paintbrush over Adobe Illustrator. 

  10. Google+

    Just got my account! It’s pretty interesting stuff. My initial take is that it absolutely has the capacity to compete with FB, 1) because it’s a near perfect clone of its key feature of the feed stream but also 2) because it can integrate and enhance many of their other products very smoothly. Some key advantages I see Google+ having:

    • Circles seems to address some of the most glaring policy/privacy holes that FB had up front, and it’s slick and looks easy to maintain. Needs a list view though…
    • Sparks are essentially topical aggregation, in practice. They seem to have chops in semantic data processing that can really make this useful. Integrating feeds full of things to share with a perfect outlet for sharing them is a great move. 
    • Picassa integration makes it a real social photo sharing service, rather than FB’s lower res service. 
    • Geotagging check in data + photos could enhance Maps significantly with non-google streetview pics of real world locations.
    • They own Chrome; early adopters love Chrome and they can integrate sharing and +1 capability directly in to the browser.
    • Docs. Imagine the feed showing on the side the last 10 docs you worked on with so and so… Google Docs immediately beats the pants off of FB docs, which are pretty much just collaborative text files. I can see if an SMB wants to become “socially enabled”, there are implications for this that are very exciting in terms of providing fully integrated workflows.
    • Reader and Search are +1 enabled; I think this will greatly increase the value of Google’s search results in general.
    • Calendar + Huddle chat make for a great event planning tool with your friends.
    • Video hangouts are pretty interesting. Someone said to me “it’s like IRC, but video”. Watching youtube vids with your friends is great fun, something we do anyway in real life. I can see people leaving this on by accident though… I turned on hangouts in the morning yesterday, and I’d forgotten it was on until suddenly a friend’s giant face popped up on my screen. 
    • Data mining and user trust; I refused to let FB mine my gmail for potential contacts, but Google can just do it… which was a huge screw up the last time they did it with Buzz, but this time it worked really well because they just used it to power suggestions, rather than rudely creating my friends list for me. A few people I hadn’t talked to in ages showed up as potential contacts, and I was able to immediately contact them to say hi even though they weren’t signed up for G+, because it’s email. The FB brand, with Zuck making headlines for glibly violating user privacy, doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. They seem to be driven by a dogma of total openness that most people I know don’t jive with.

    I agree with the opinions in Wired that most people on FB actually aren’t exactly fans of it, and only use it because it has a critical mass of users no one else can match… but once there is a second critical mass of users on +, I know I’ll be using it less and less. I also think that with the more robust OpenSocial integration Google has with other social networks, the whole idea of porting over friends and not having critical mass isn’t going to be as much an issue as the hand-wringers say.