28 Apr 2009 1844H

Doing no harm

Interestingly — I may have said this on another blog — “do no harm” appears nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath. It is believed that the words stem from the Epidemics of Hippocrates:

“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”

I am learning all manner of things about our users. See, in my past work, if something went badly, the user didn’t get their purchase. But now, when things go badly, someone could die. That’s the difference between a good and bad user experience here.

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19 Apr 2009 0724H

from “Beijing Modern”

‘‘Too often contemporary Chinese art is rooted in Western traditions,’’ he says. ‘‘Even my education was Western.’’ (Shao’s parents, acclaimed painters, began giving him painting lessons when he was 3.) ‘‘True contemporary Chinese art must evolve from Chinese traditions,’’ he says. ‘‘It must have a Chinese soul.’’

Link

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04 Mar 2009 2254H

Wow, what a difference a few months makes. . .

Long story short, work and non-work are conspiring to take time away from the blog and quite a few other things I used to do to while away the lonely hours alone. The big thing is that I recently took a trip to Germany to visit the HQ and learn about their UX practices, and all this on top of what I am doing here with the Axiom Sensis recording solution for cath labs. I’ll try and collect my thoughts about the experiences I’m having but in the meantime, hang in there. Hope you all are well and we’ll talk soon.

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10 Feb 2009 2159H

1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

That’s a lot of users. I know our family’s done our fair share of contributing to those minutes. It works pretty darn good, except, you can’t pick your movies in XBox Dashboard, you have to go to Netflix and put them in queue, which is half-assed, being a political decision to not cannibalize from Microsoft’s own video service on XBox. The quality is very good, all things considering, and the application seems to take into account highly dynamic network conditions. The other problem is that Netflix almost doesn’t want you to use their view-on-demand service: their IA on there is such that you really have to dig for movies to see what is available to view immediately and what is not, perhaps they are equally afraid of cannibalizing their own lucrative DVD rental service. I mean, God forbid you should want to make it easy to rent movies. So despite these two roadblocks which would have scuppered any other fledgling service, the whole enterprise is surprisingly popular. I expect it won’t be too long before that old commercial comes true, the one where you can order any movie ever made and have it instantaneously available wherever, whenever.

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06 Feb 2009 0740H

Wait. RED? Really?

New York Times graphic about red and blue

That’s what this New York Times article said alright: Red backgrounds for detail work, blue backgrounds for creative work.

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20 Jan 2009 2224H

My experience working in Windows apps

Working in Windows apps is a bit different from working on the web. We deal more with modes and modelessness than the web does, and the kinds of widgets or controls we can apply is a bit more diverse, but the tools and general rules of thumb remain the same. 

The details are not important but essentially, in both cases, there is a workflow where a user explicitly engages a mode. In the first instance, the mode allows a user to start and stop a process and then the results are displayed back for the user to edit. But what if the user wanted to approve the results without editing? Would we display a modal dialog before edit mode? This was perceived to interrupt the user’s workflow. Instead we automatically saved the result before edit mode was engaged, system state was communicated back to the user, and then if the user so chose to edit they could do so, otherwise they could escape the mode. If the user chose to edit, that action would be a modify, system state would be communicated back to the user, resulting in a kind of edit-feedback loop until the user decided they’d gotten what they wanted and got the hell out of that mode. In this case, autosave helped us avoid a design nightmare: the user is not interested in dealing with a constant barrage of dialogs, but getting an accurate result so they can move on to their next task. 

In the second instance, we had a case where for an action involving tools, like in Photoshop with the tool palette, but for a tool where one has a number of ways of turning on the functionality. Well, the tools in the tool palette in Photoshop actually are a number of different modes, as it turns out. So too, when you use tools in the toolbar in Microsoft Office, you’re actually engaging different modes. These modes actually serve to help us before we become perpetual intermediate users by not letting us go too far astray. In the advanced mode, we start using modeless tools, that don’t require us to explicitly hit, say, the BOLD button to bold our text: instead, we might use a contextual menu to activate the function, or a keystroke, like Ctrl-B.

In this case, though, there was a problem where, with the best of intentions, the functionality was designed in a consistent manner, so that if you used the modeless method, the corresponding toolbar/palette feature would engage. This was fine for the modeless (and typically, they are intermediate and advanced) users, whose work was not slowed down, but not so for those who were still used to pushing buttons. For the button-pushers, this particular tool is applied repeatedly, serially, within a short period of time. But the problem was that after the user applied the tool, the button would click off, in order to be consistent with what was going on in the modeless method. This then forces the user to re-engage the mode by going back to the toolbar to press the button again, just to perform the next task with that tool, then it would click off, and they would have to repeat the whole thing over again. Very frustrating. So what we have decided to do is to disaggregate the functionality: if you use the modeless method, the tool button will not engage: this will suit the power user who didn’t need that anyway. If you use the modal method however, the tool button will stay engaged now until the user explicitly disengages the mode, thus allowing them to use the tool as much as they would like, which is to say, very much. 

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16 Jan 2009 1307H

Circuit City throws in the towel

Sad to hear. While at Sears online services, round 2, we admired the work they’d done there. They did some great things there in my opinion to try and salvage the brand: in-store pickup worked like a charm; the website user experience was top notch. In the end nothing could help solve drastic market conditions and fundamental business problems. I feel badly for my former colleague, Bill Rattner, design director there, but expect he will be reborn, given his experience, in an even more glorious form.

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12 Jan 2009 2317H

Notes on “Designing Design,” by Kenya Hara

Today we have absolutely no means available to realistically imagine the extent of the brutality of the cultural revolution called the Meiji restoration (1867), which managed to transform completely the purely Japanese “Edo Culture” into a Westernized one. However, people in those days probably expended a stupendous amount of energy on information gathering and study about the West. And no doubt they were also pained by the discrepancies between their traditional culture and Western culture.

Self-colonialism and the shame of defeat at the hands of America first under the threat of Admiral Perry’s gunboats in 1854, then by atom bombs 90 years later, still leaves a stigma in the national imagination that will not heal. Yet Hara forgets to mention the great military victory over Russia in the Meiji era, which not only put Japan on the map in the Western mind, it also frightened the West into creating the notion of the Yellow Peril, and, then too, there is a list of Japan’s own militarist imperialist exploits in Taiwan, Korea and China. Finally, Japanese design doesn’t exist in an economic vacuum, and arguably has not only already changed American design forever but through Japan’s ascendant economic hegemony of the 1980s influenced the design of Pacific Rim countries like Hong Kong and Korean, even into the present day.

Even in Asia, the intentional simplicity of the Japanese culture and tension generated by an object placed all alone in an empty space are unique. Any example of ornamentation or decoration from another Asian region will reveal dense, elaborate details. On the opposite end of the scale is the Japanese concept of contentment with simplicity and emptiness.

Perhaps this is where Japanese exceptionalism and historic amnesia collide. Wasn’t this sensibility acquired originally from Daoist and Chan Buddhist aesthetics from the Chinese mainland, and later refined by the Zen schools?

Here’s my idea: if Japan had not modernized towards Westernization, but had been able to impregnate its own traditional culture with modern science and developed naturally, surely it would have produced a unique design culture that could have competed with the west. This design culture would have been completely different from that developed by the Japan that endured the Meiji Restoration. If we read [Tanizaki's book] as a design book, we should be able to bring into bloom, in a place still far beyond traditional Japanese culture, a modernity that is neither known nor has ever been experienced before.

This theory, the first time I have heard anyone else but myself express this notion of design colonialism, I continue to turn over and over in my mind vis-a-vis Chinese design. It irks me. What if? Perhaps that is nostalgia and romanticism for a time and place that may not exist but in our imagination.

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12 Jan 2009 1913H

In praise of the Pre

Congrats to Matias Duarte, Wes Yun, and the team who worked on making the Palm Pre’s debut such a success. (If you haven’t seen the launch keynote, check it out.) Backtrack a little over 13, 14 months to a conversation I had with Wes and Matias about working for a project that they could not talk about, except to say:

As for what’s going on here at Palm… let’s just say that it’s NOT business as usual. We are working on what is probably the most exciting project in the Valley, maybe the industry. I’m commuting to and from LA on the weekends to take up this challenge. Hopefully that gives you an idea of how exciting I believe this project to be. This is truly a rare opportunity.

After speaking to Matias and his team, or rather, from what they didn’t say, I was pretty sure that project was working on Palm’s next generation operating system, a competitor to Apple’s iPhone and a shot at recovering the glory that was Palm. Aside from moving to the Valley to toil for fame and glory, I had another nagging question in the back of my mind.

It’s quite clear that whatever leadership decisions led to the Palm Pre to be have produced a fabulous product. The real question now becomes, has the culture changed sufficiently at Palm so that they are now able to avoid the sorts of stumbles that brought them to the point where Apple was able to out-Palm Palm, or that caused Motorola, which was never a design-driven company to begin with, to fall into such a rut with the Razr.

The device, as we now know, is virtually irrelevant. For instance, paper still works great and it doesn’t require batteries. But, before digital cameras came around, and became integrated with cell phones, did anyone know that such a pent-up demand lay in taking photos wherever and whenever people found themselves? Did anyone know that people would use text messaging from their phones like an extension of their online messaging? These capabilities didn’t exist but tapped into people’s existing and unfulfilled wants.

User experience people, and in particular, interaction designers know this best: it’s really what the device enables the user to do — and how easily those devices are designed to make that happen — within his and her contexts that makes the device magical. But that’s just one product. It takes an entire company, aligned from research to sales to development and support, to make that experience happen over and over again. That can only happen if leadership is in position to make that culture happen.

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12 Jan 2009 1815H

E-commerce book wars? Hardly.

I see in today’s news that William J. Lynch, Jr has been hired away from HSN to head up Barnes and Noble’s direct commerce division, this after Borders named a new CEO. Considering that BN.com made $422.9m in 2008, and that Borders.com, in the first seven months it was open made $20.3m, and with BGP trading well under a dollar, even if the online division made 11% less than they did the year before, I would hardly say that Barnes and Noble’s position is in jeopardy, but, they could do better managing the relationship with their customers, online and off. Maybe Mr. Lynch’ll do the right thing and hire a director of user experience who will help him do that.

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