I don't care, and neither should you

With a (briefly, before I leave this job) new UX manager, I ran into one of my other terminology issues. I enjoy saying we solve "problems," which bugs a lot of business people, as it implies that there are problems! Which is true to me, but I often have to say "challenges" or "opportunities" or other (frankly) bullshit. But today's special challenge phrase is "I don't care." What I mean is that "either of the two options presented can solve the stated problem equally well. I have no personal opinion." Of course, what people hear is "I could give a crap about your stupid company and this pointless project, and am just phoning in my work on this one." Of course, I am aware of this, so never use it in front of clients; it's an internal term for the design team, which I usually remember to explain first. Usually. Ideally, I'd have another term for this, so someone offer me one. Because, I cannot just say that I have an opinion on everything. This speaks to the core of every issue I have with interactive design today. UX/HF/HCI/IA/IxD/Etc. has become such a populist thing that a lot of practitioners are untrained, or poorly-trained, and even if experienced are unread and do not get the basics. Sorry, but as far as I see it, it's true. That leaves everyone to work their design the way everyone else nearby, in marketing and product development, seems to work their jobs: opinion, previous-experience, anecdote and whoever has the most political power. But I base my design decisions on my understanding of the scientific underpinnings. See how we laid out Designing Mobile Interfaces (on the web also); the patterns are typical interactive design communication. This works, and this other thing doesn't, because people might get confused... But the beginning of each chapter (and a lot of information in the appendices) cover why this is true. Cognitive psychology and human physiology underlie all of this. If you don't understand these, or at least trust people who do understand them, then you are not pursuing UX from an informed, repeatable point of view, and are just drawing whatever seems pretty at the time. This same philosophy is why we distrust market research like focus groups, and get strict about how we interpret usability research, surveys, and analytics. So, when I present or see two or three or five options for a design, once the obvious issues have been pointed out, I sometimes have no opinion. I have no personal opinion, and it needs to be up to the marketing intent, branding, visual design, or we need to make sure that there is no other secret requirement (e.g. unexpressed future needs) that can drive us to one solution or the other. There are plenty of ways to decide on one or the other, but if two options are equally valid solutions from a UX point of view, either look harder, or feel free to have no formal opinion.

4ourth Mobile is a Thing Now

Long before I had a day job, I freelanced. I did design work when I was in Junior High. Actually, I recall that first paid job (sure, my dad worked there) they weren't happy with the results. Probably worth thinking about more and writing a whole post about how early failures made me the type of conscientious designer I am today. Later. I've made over half my income some years from freelance or contact work, and while it petered out in the past few years, when we all lost our jobs a year ago, making a virtual agency seemed a natural. I've been sorta calling the freelance work I do since then part of the 4ourth Mobile brand, and the Designing Mobile Interfaces book Eric and I are writing has a strong online presence at a wiki under that same site. But I haven't really marketed it in any particular way. Well, now I probably should get on that. Yeah, maybe this is old hat for everyone else, but I've never actually bothered to incorporate anything before. I just faked it, filed a Schedule C and made do. Accountant friends forced my hand here for tax reasons, but really it's a good idea. So, consider this the official announcement: 4ourth Mobile is a thing. Call it a virtual mobile design agency. If you think well of one of our tweets, or blog post, or The Big Book of Mobile Design, contact us. We can do training, or design, or user research, or just chat about your needs and see if our concept of a mobile strategy is the same as yours. We're even multi-national, and can travel, so whatever your needs, ask and we'll talk about it.

Fresh mobile design elements, just in time for Spring!

I almost can't believe it's been almost six months since my last update. I use this file almost every day. Which maybe is why I haven't gotten around to updating. I've been working a lot, working more (freelance in my "spare" time), writing a book for O'Reilly, and editing an entirely other book. When that comes out, I'll also be sharing the file I've used to make all those illustrations. But for now, I've got a few updates all throughout the old, well-used Mobile Design Elements document itself. As always, you can grab these from the same wiki where I'm writing the book, on the Drawing Tools & Templates page, where I also put up every other template, stencil and UI guideline document or link I can find. Remember, it's a wiki, so add your own if you find one. So, like I said, there are little changes all over. Mostly in the small components. But a few highlights: I've added an iPhone 4. Keeping to the resolution scaling didn't work for the doc size, so I had to make it different. Keep in mind. Just noticed I didn't get an annunicator row into the 4... Oh well. Sure, there are lots of places that have iOS device stencils, but if you like mine, now you have one. Compared to the smartphone fanbois, not everyone has this one. A featurephone. Specifically, a convertible one with 10-key one way, and a slide out keyboard. This is in outline mode only right now, but I will probably shade it someday, and will post that as well of course. Speaking of annunciators, I am trying to not just add items, but to organize them. So, all the system status items I could think of (actually, which resulted from research for the relevant section of the book) are now ordered like a typical annunciator row, and options have been added as I encounter them. Be sure to wander around and check out the rest. Pen input bits and pieces. More unscaled handsets for illustration. Lots of little icons and other pieces. A wholly new and fairly complete keyboard section, so you don't have to draw your own for quick comps. And more. Enjoy! Now, off to more writing and drawing.

Working Together for Mobile 2.0 (or 4.0)

Brian Fling's Mobile 2.0 thing is not quite a manifesto yet, and as he points out a lot in the document, has not even gotten the community traction that it needs, but is still something I mostly agree with. And, want to help with. I think things are mostly trending better. Worse a few places, but mostly better. I am thrilled with new things like Mozilla's Open Web App Ecosystem, so much so I talked about how much we needed one a week before it was shown off. Now, I'm gonna talk specifically to some of the points Brian makes in his document. And try to help with a couple of them.

A Mobile Web Coalition/Task Force: All my attempts to create a Mobile Web Coalition has failed since sending this email out. The problem is that no one has the time to invest in attacking such a hard problem. I’ve attempted to get corporate sponsors, but everything is just keen to do their own thing.

I have always agreed, and now that I'm applying for jobs, and am reviewing and trying to share what I made, I am annoyed how many are NDA restricted. It reminds me of Kim Lenox's post lamenting the good design of the iPhone because we all had many of these ideas already. And even aside from secret clients, I've worked for companies where you couldn't discuss anything. I once got smacked down for discussing on a UX forum information about the team that had been published in Business Week. This is all the antithesis of scientific exploration; we can't get far, much less consistent, without sharing, and collaborating. What am I doing to help? For several years now, I've been gathering up my mobile design elements (and other stuff, like touch guidelines, and type info) as a document, and sharing it with everyone as Mobile Design Elements. It includes a lot of components from deadly-secret projects, just pulled out of context and categorized so you can't figure out secret things. You can go get it from a page on my wiki there, where I share it alongside everyone else's stencils and templates. Use it as you see fit, share again, modify, etc.

Mobile Web Resource Site: Since the book came out last year it has sold pretty well, but I’ve still made no money from it, and all mobile inquiries that O’Reilly gets have been going to other authors. Looking back I would have been better off making all the text of the book free and public... but that is another story.

I agree we need one. I've been adding to a wiki of mobile resources for years under the Little Springs auspices. But no one else much did. And that is probably dead now anyway. What am I doing to help? I am one of those guys that O'Reilly is sending inquiries to. And (with Eric Berkman and some of our former interns) have been working on it pretty seriously for a month or so. It's just a patterns book, and it's general mobile, not just web, but I am trying to make it useful and well-researched. And most of all, part of our agreement with O'Reilly includes letting us put all the content on a wiki. So, I started a new one, and have added the whole outline, a dozen patterns (more every day) and a bunch of other resources: http://www.4ourth.com/wiki Please help. Or, don't contribute, but do feel free to use it so we at least all have the same language we work off. Since I am trying to write a book, and there's a deadline, try to be respectful of the info, and accept when we are jerks and cut off discussion in order to lock at least a version of a pattern, so we can move on. But do please help. I want this to be a community effort, so want to hear from you guys even if I disagree. And if you wondered about the name, it's mostly short and cool, but also because I think "2.0" is over used as hell. And if I think about it, I think we're in mobile 4.0. Explained slightly more at the home page for the whole site if you really care.

Mobile web zengarden:

I think even the desktop web is still missing the permanency and credibility of print design by having no big awards shows, or exhibit spaces. Mobile is far worse, due to the even speedier and broader variability of the devices. I am not sure the CSS ZenGarden approach is the way to go for this (and I'd like to see one less web-specific) but something is needed to let everyone see, to get good ideas (and preferably with implementation tricks shared also) and maybe a way to judge or rate for suitability, somehow.

Mobile 2.0 CSS Framework:

I know way too little about this one, so will leave it to others. I do worry a little about a major facet being so focused on the web. And not because I like apps. I like... everything. What about principles OS developers can follow? What about tools to encourage development of services, like SMS and location? Oh, and what about js libraries? And other plugin technologies, even for web alone?

I quoted Umair Haque in the final chapter of my book in his call for the Next Industrial Revolution and I’ll quote him again here...

There are days I almost hoping for someone to plot from their secret volcano base and take over the industry – even with something sorta crappy or restrictive – just so there's a single experience. Not just a single browser, but so interop becomes not an issue, and I can get location from the handset to the web, and... so forth. Way, way, way, too much stuff is locked out or restricted because of perceived quarterly returns, and I think everyone would be better off working together on standards. Clearly, none of us are CEOs and going to be able to go out on a limb (at least one strong enough the board won't fire us) and make this happen at any one company, much less across a whole chunk of the industry. So we need to start working, together, towards the goals Brian laid out. To work together, to gather ideas, to share them, to have goals as a community. And to talk about all these as a single community, so we speak the same language and start working together, instead of against each other.

My Mobile Mantra: People First

Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It's not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.

Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it's fashionable. It's not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.

Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people. As obvious as it seems, we're no longer tethered to wireline phones, or movie theaters and TVs, or pinball arcades, or typewriters, photocopiers and desktop computers.

Mobile works because it lets people work the way they want to, and the way they always have. Mobile lets people be mobile, and read what they want, and watch what they want, and take photos of their vacation, and share their thoughts with their friends, their family or no one in particular.

Designing for mobile – and I say now designing for anything – is an exercise in designing for people. Sure, it's always been a great idea to consider users; but not just how they interact with a machine, or a website. If you step back and look at the way people really work, and want to work (or play, or share, or create...) then you are on the right track.

Whether the product that comes out of this is (or works on) a large chunk of iron, a wheeled vehicle, a desktop computer, a website or a mobile handset – or many of the above all at once, is of no particular significance. When you consider people, and their context, and address it right, that is what I consider designing with a mobile mindset.

Certainly do not get locked in and decide before anything else to design a desktop website, but also don't design for mobile first. Design for people first.

I think this will be my position at 5pm on 21 September when I talk about "Why and when to design for mobile first" with Scott Jenson, Barbara Ballard, Luke Wroblewski, and Alan Tifford at Design for Mobile 2010. Come see us and join in.

Skipping, Time-Shifting and the Status Quo

My semi-casual observations of opinions on usage of PVRs/DVRs sets them into three camps:
1) Industry analysts who group all PVRs together
2) Pundits and bloggers who insist that PVR=TiVo
3) Those who like to look at these devices by interface class

The last one seems to be shared by maybe a dozen folks in the world. I am the only one who writes about it I know of (tell me different and I'll link and subscribe to them).

See, TiVo &mdash and all of the Dish PVRs &mdash have a commercial skip feature. In general, they are pretty much immediately reactive, and make sense. Lots, and lots and lots of others (like most given away by CableCos) are not. They are sorta terrible, slow to react, and provide a jumpy fast-forward feature, at best. These are more like using a VCR than anything.

The results of this study seem possiby skewed by this misunderstanding. Or maybe because the study organizers have never seen a PVR (having worked with researchers, not that big a stretch). They claim that most users don't skip commercials (except older folks). This bears out other studies where PVRs aren't scary (to ad-revenue based broadcast businesses) because commercials are still watched.

But I see usage, in my anecdotal experiences, as almost entirely divided along device functionality (or interface class) lines. People with terrible DVRs watch TV like always (static). They periodically watch like they have a VCR (turn on a recorded show and watch it without much pausing or fast-forwarding). People with good PVRs watch TV with almost complete time-shifting, skip intros and title sequences unless they are very engaging, and watch very few commercials (but go back to watch good ones on purpose).


As an aside, I think this is a typical trend of a certain kind of research:

Male, female, age. Demographics can only serve so much. This is where marketing and usability/UX diverge.

The award for the least web 2.0 company goes to...

I didn't get the whole web 2.0 thing in time to be cool about it. Luckily I'm not a guru who led my consultancy down the tubes as a result. I only really got it around the time I first saw this movie summarizing it rather cutely. I still find it easier to describe most things in the negative, what they are not, than what they are. Call it a character flaw, but it works for me. In that vein, IMDb is by far the least web 2.0 site I have used lately. Sure, lots of others are worse in absolute terms, but it suffers so much due to what it is. A huge relational data store (its got "Db" in the address!). The one, best one in the world for its data type. Traditionally, I have hated it for not being mobile enabled, for being bloated, for generally poor UI. I especially like the lack of deep-linking after signon. Oh, and the periodic intrusive advertising. And, none of this improved after their recent purportedly well researched redesign. But the big ah-ha moment came the other day. I add stuff to IMDb occasionally. Its not an encyclopedia with enough permanent staff to update it all, but more of a wiki, so needs user input. Of course, woe be unto you who think it should /act/ like a wiki. Lets walk thru it. I finish Alphaville and am wandering the page looking at interesting bits. A friend recalls a reference to it, which is not listed, and I remember one that I am sure about, so want to add. I remember in this one Homicide (life on the street!) episode there was a villain who used the screen name of Lemmy Caution. Bayliss even mentioned that it was from Alphaville. Great. Good reference that should be in there. So, lets update the Alphaville page. Um... how? Seriously, this took me five minutes to find. You cannot call users dumb, but as a designer, I'll admit I am dumb, so maybe its my fault. Anyway, look for yourself. Its the "update" button at the bottom of the page. Okay, so you click it. And... well, its not worth giving them crap about every bit of the interface. Its not clear right away (the most obvious part to me is the "forgot something" function, which I STILL do not understand) but eventually you see the pulldown. Its also weird, but you get there. And its reasonably contextual. At least its about the "movie links" page as opposed to having you drill thru everything. So, you get to the ability to add items by line. Its a bad sign that it needs to have four paragraphs of text in front of it. Probably hard to use. And way too many categories, but my issue is around the "other title" field. So, I want to add a link to Homicide. I go to the correct page for it, and add the title straight out of their search results ("Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993)) and get this: Hmm. Okay. Its not obvious there even /are/ episode pages to me before this. For example, I went to another site to confirm the episode name, because its so unclear. So, we go to find that. Which is hard. A search for the episode title leads nowhere. Eventually I see the "seasons" links at the top of the series page leads me to a huge list of all episodes in all seasons. I find the right one, and it even has a link. Click it and what do ya know, there's a whole page about that episode. Not super-clear that there's a superordinate series or anything, but there it is. So, I grab that title removing the carriage return, so it looks like ""Homicide: Life on the Street" Homicide.com (1999)" and try it. I even remember to remove the episode info from the description. Not even close: In fact, we're getting further away. Now it doesn't even know what that means! I sigh. I watch more TV. I eventually try again. Maybe its web-centric. Try the URI "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0604379/" Nope. Even worse (I won't show any more screenshots). Okay, maybe its all using codes. How about the value for the title "tt0604379." Again, not a finger. So I think, maybe they are as bad as some of the developers I have to work with, and stare blankly when you say "parse out irrelevant characters." Because its a title field, maybe it never occurred to them to accept anything but numbers. Yup, that's it. It works. I submit it. But by the time you are entering secret code numbers, not available anywhere ON the page, we might as well be using command line interfaces. Now that I know, its not that bad at all (like command line interfaces, really). But who would be able to get thru this process otherwise? I only finished out of a sense of self-sacrifice as an interface designer. I feel the post needs to end in some great, or at least witty, big conclusion. But there's not much to say. Its bad, in a way that's so bad it points to a cultural issue. And its easy to blame IMDb but my company has dozens of customer-facing web applications at least this obtuse. I suspect I'll write about it more, but clearly its beyond the scope of just designers. There needs to be a cultural change for developers, and business stakeholders. I'm just not sure when that might filter down to this level.