Usable Interfaces

Couple of good quotes / stories I found in a desperate attempt to do some catch-up reading of my Economist stockpile. Strangely enough both items from the same page in the July 7th issue (p. 69).

In A change of tune  (paywalled), we have Warner Music chairman, Edgar Bronfman saying “The music industry is growing, [but]… The record industry is not growing.” In these few short words, he’s surely captured an important truth.

Interest in music and music listening has probably never been more healthy, but the record companies seem unable to find a role for themselves. The economist writer moves on to suggest that artists will replace their lost (record sale) revenues with tours, merchandise and personal appearances, leaving the labels to become glorified managers. The tracks themselves become marketing material for the artists. Seem far-fetched? Look at how Prince took his latest album to market – as a ‘free’ giveaway on the Mail on Sunday.

An interesting piece, although there remains the huge hole in the rights debate about what on earth might happen to great film and TV shows, how do they get paid for? If we want Studio 60 and The Shawshank Redemption, we’re going to have to fund them.

The second piece is an article about the release of the iPhone: Where would Jesus queue? (also paywalled). Having marvelled at the hype, fervour and – perhaps most impressively – lack of disappointment once in consumers’ hands, which surrounded the launch of the “Jesus phone”, the writer recounts a story from outside the store where he was queing.

It seems a passerby who had just arrived from Mars wanted to know what the queue was for. “What are you all standing in line for?” she asked. The response from some wag in the queue was “Zunes!”. That’s a good joke and it goes to really demonstrate the extent to which Apple has captured the public’s imagination with innovation and great, user-centred design.

PSFK highlights once again that while the hype around Second Life is alive and well, the community itself certainly isn’t. And in even worse health are the advertisers who are flailing away with their empty Second Life spaces. As Wired points out, users simply aren’t finding the virtual reality world interesting enough: 85% of avatars are abandoned (I left mine in AKQA’s reception). And of those 15% that do hang around, they’re definitely not there for Visa’s Island (Visa couldn’t even come up with a good reason to go there) or Coke’s ‘Virtual Thirst Pavillion’.

Wired quotes stats where ‘Sexy Beach’, a popular area with sex shops, dancing and ‘no-strings hookups’ scores a metric of 133,000. Coke gets 27. 

Joseph Jaffe, author of ‘Life after the 30 second spot’ is responsible for Coke’s presence. Despite terrible traffic figures, he says:

“The learning is now. You are a pioneer, and with that comes first-mover advantage”

Wow, I think I’ve just been teleported myself. This time back to 1999. It may not be about ‘exposure’ any more, perhaps ‘engagement’ is more important. But that’s still got to be with more than 20 people. Perhaps the 30 second spot isn’t all that dead after all.

Of course, the empty warehouses of Second Life (a little reminiscent of Canary Wharf at the weekend as Antony points out) are a sign of brand managers desperate not to be left behind like they were with Social networks and the rest.

But of course, with virtually infinite space, it’s about what you’re saying not how loud you can shout. “My Island is bigger than yours” doesn’t really cut it.

And now we must brace ourselves for the ill-thought-through Facebook invasion.

I’ve been a member of the Marketing Society for a few years now. The thing that normally convinces me to cough up the membership fee each year is Market Leader, the great quarterly publication.

I’ve always been amazed at how the society markets itself. We all know about the problems of coblers’ shoes, but it is in the field of digital marketing that the society really is out of its depth

Until a couple of months ago they would send an email every fortnight to all members with an animated gif of a conveyor belt in it!

 Just last week I received this bulk email:

The title is “Are you sure you know what’s going on?”. Somewhat bizarrely, the from address is “Email from Hugh Burkitt” (as if it wouldn’t be immediately obvious it were an email). It still has all that legal stuff at the bottom like a normal email. It has one of those bizarre scanned in signatures. The first paragraph says:

It’s easy to get a false sense of security. You’ve strolled around Second Life and read a blog or two. But are you as knowledgeable about today’s social or economic trends as your consumers?

Readers are then encouraged to take this somewhat bizarre test which ranks how modern you are on the basis of whether you know the market valuation of Google. Perhaps I’m just bitter because I only got 16%, which also appears to imply that I’m a 35-44 year old woman (marketers!).

Apple and Epic staged a contest for fans of Modest Mouse to make the video for the second single from their new album, “Missed the boat”. Entrants were provided with high quality source video of the group and allowed to use as much or as little as they liked.

 The results are amazing and varied. From weird robot sci-fi love story, to high production values stylised treatments, and various pastiches in between. The amazing thing is the overall standard – all created on final cut pro on home computers, many of the submissions are as good as or better than their professional equivalents.

The original title of this post was going to be “classification satisfaction”. It’s a follow up to a post about taxonomies and truth which was written on the back of this interview David Weinberger did. That original post generated a great discussion about essential properties which took the whole thing to a different and more significant level (slightly above my head), and one which really got me thinking.

(Now I’ve got a bit of an admission to make. David’s book arrived at my office practically the next day but I’ve still not managed to read it as it got veritably whisked away by a colleague who spotted it on my desk. So the following may be a footnote in Chapter 59 of “Everything is miscellaneous“. If so, please accept my apologies).

The thing which has had me thinking is the obvious satisfaction which clasifying or filing something has. Watch someone as they struggle with a new concept and as soon as it’s become an extention of their overall framework of understanding a visible relaxation can be seen. This is actually how we’re brought up. Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?

But it’s not limited to childhood. Do you remember the slightly odd feeling you got when someone explained Live 8 to you? The oddest thing, for me at least, was that Live 8 was not an example of something which had been done before. Live Aid may have been unprecedented in its scale, ambition etc. But it was fileable – classifiable. It was an example of fundraising – albeit with music and entertainment at the core. But Live 8? That was an exercise in hand waving and immediate mass participation. It was Athenian democracy reinvented, it was…, it was… something no one had done before.

Another example? When’s the first time you saw Twitter? I bet you thought – like me – ‘this is just nonsense, who’d want to do that?’. When was the first time you heard it classified as ‘micro blogging’, didn’t that make you think ‘I get it now’?

When we classify ‘X as Y’, or more often ’X as a type of Y’ (a subset or superset of Y) we’re actually doing something pretty impressive, we’re saying that the properties of X now apply to Y – even though those properties remain fluid. Or more often, the mental models of X now apply to Y. That is why it is satisfying. That is why we like doing it. And that – I think – is how we’ve managed to leap to the idea of exclusive taxonomies (not animal and/or vegetable and/or mineral). Is this how our brains actially work? No they seem to be able to clasify without exclusion very well.

And here’s another one. “OK” is one of the most used words in the English language. Yet it’s not even a word, it’s an acronym without an abbreviation. A phrase which we all use everyday, but for which no one understands the etymology. Well dictionary scholars will debate that until they’re blue in the face, but isn’t it interesting that this most primevil of noises, is the one we make when we understand a classifcation or place one thing within an existing framework or model.

OK may mean ‘average or satisfactory’ but it also means ‘I undertand, I have mentally filed the information you have given me’. OK?

This burst of conversation about the new project from the Economist (where I admit, my cynicism got the better of me, although I do think it could have been better explained) got me thinking about the broader convergence which we seem to be seeing from sources likes Bill Gates (Harvard Commencement address) and the great brains of the Ted Talks including the old smooth talker himself Bill Clinton (building a better world for his daughter’s generation). Indeed the view seems mooted in so many circles that it may even be possible to find a third post-major-job, superbrained Bill to join the… er… bill.

The popular conception is that markets are efficient but uncaring, and that people in general are happy to ignore problems on the other side of the plannet. But as Gates says:

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

…

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

Both Clinton and Gates sieze on the understanding that we all have massively more power to raise money, to raise issues and to express ourselves than previous generations.

And the solution isn’t to abandon the market in favour of some alternative system. The solution is to rebuild the market so that it rewards the things we care about. Much of Clinton’s presentation is also about the fact that actually the market arrangements in the most needy areas are the most disorganised. It is often a lack of knowledge and or organisation, not money which sustains the world’s problems:

The only thing that is keeping us from saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive is the absence of the systems necessary to diagnose treat and care for people, and deliver this medicine.

Not money.

He talks about reducing the price of AIDS medicine in the Bahamas from $3500 per person per year to $100 by driving efficiencies in the market. He describes this as changing the manufacturer’s business model from being a grocery-store model rather than jewelry-store model!

People will pay for the things they want. The market must enable it and for-profit charity is better than not-for-profit charity because it is more sustainable. 

Is this something Project Stripe will help? It’s a very bold mission. Certainly, they’ve got a very effective idol it follow in Muhammad Yunus. Best of luck to them.

Watching people in usability tests is fascinating. Anyone who has done this will know what I mean. Months of planning a system, of hours spent building in impecable logic are dashed irrefutably  against the rocks of reality when user after user simply fails to see  it the way the designer does.

The concept of mental models was first put forward by Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik in 1943. The idea is that humans are frantic interpreters and, to aid in the speed of interpretation, will create small scale pictures in their mind of what is going on. While these models continue to perform users will hold on to them and use them. But they are expendable. If the user hits a brick wall and their model fails to predict what happens in the real world, it will be abandoned for a new one. Philip Johnson-Laird extended this concept through studying how readers understood novels, saying that some authors would force the reader – through ambiguity – into holding several mental models in mind concurrently – each vying for selection.

In designing computer interfaces, we often have conceptual models (to a certain extent, the designer’s mental model, or the shared “mental model” of the design team), and of course there is also a functional model -what actually happens, how it actually works. Something that doesn’t get mentioned in HCI discussions is that there are very often business rules which also apply throughout the function, which are essentially part of the functional model. We need to work hard to try and get the often complex functional models to deliver simple, understandable conceptual models.

So take a new site where items can be added to a basket by drag-and-drop. There’s a number of models being combined here. The user is being asked to co-opt an understanding taken from the classic operating system GUIs (dragging and dropping). There is an underlying co-opting of the supermarket experience of baskets. I, for one, am not convinced that this later abstraction was a natural one to users to learn, although most users do now understand the concept of an electronic basket almost as well as they know how to shop in stores. Of course the functional model will be completely different and much more complicated.

It is suggested in this fascinating summary that conceptual models shouldn’t obfuscate what is really going on. Certainly in terms of HCI, I find that view insupportable. The user doesn’t want to know that their product going into the basket is just a new entry in a database join table having passed through a set of business rules. Although we do see sites regularly forcing customers into this level of mental gymnastics.

Sometimes, resembling other mental models is helpful (drag-and-drop in the example above). Often too, it is confusing. Picking only parts of a conceptual framework, or attempting to abstract it too far from its original purpose leads to a cognitive disonance that leaves the user unconfident, often taking them back to square one.

Stumbled upon this very good summary from James Gardner of Lloyds TSB of the questions that face enterprises in deciding if they should ‘unleash’ the power of web 2.0 inside their corporations.

My favourite insight into all of this – which I think I originally heard from Euan Semple and James also mentions -  is when managers say, ‘Should we really be giving our staff this level of ability to publish content?’

Of course, this is the illusion of a decision. Staff already have the power outside of the firewall and will use it as they see fit. And they’ll put their own systems in to do it internally – in Euan’s case several thousand BBC staff were, as I understand it, taking part in discussion groups running on a computer sitting under his desk.

And, since when did we enter into a pitch battle with the people who work in our companies? If you read any piece of corporate literature written in the 90s, you’ll undoubtedly find some contrite aphorism that “our people are our strongest (or only) assett”. Well shouldn’t we start acting like that?

The image at the top of this post (taken from Gaping Void like all of those in this article) is part of Hugh MacLeod’s great porous membrane post. Area B is the conversation which is happening about the company in the real world. Area A is the coverstation that is happening about the company inside the company. Besides the fact that you can prove any point using Venn diagrams, Hugh’s argument is that the membrane “X” is being eroded, whether corporates like it or not, every day. And surely that’s the way it should be. The question for companies isn’t “should we play along?” but “how do we get involved with this so that people understand what it is we care about?”.

A few other great cartoons from Hugh while we’re at it:

(I’ve never understood Creative Commons but these are all from Gaping Void and all the genius is Hugh‘s)

I was on the way home tonight, reading infantile inanity in Metro when I got this Twitter from the marvellous Russell Davies

the russians who’ve vastly improved our local chip shop are now also hosting chess tournaments

I think Russell remind us all that twittering is a skill not an obligation. Take your continuous partial attention how you please but we should all try to captivate which each word, twitter or not. So no more “at work”, “going to bed” please, myself included.

You kind of have to take your hat off to Chinwag for having a go at organising a massive summer bash for an industry once again in rude health. Big Summer ’07 is their attempt to bring the industry together for a big event, oodles of (social!) networking, a drink and a dance.

Well I met some nice new people, some very nice old people (not old old people, old acquaintances), had a good burger and some salad, and…. stood in queues and listened to people whinge about queues, rain and burgers.

I guess it’s a vicious circle. If the industry is on its knees then no one wants a party. If the industry’s booming then everyone expects waiter service and caviar, rather than being reminded of the last time they were in a student union without enough bar staff. Something tells me the sponsors’ pockets were deep but not that deep. Still I guess it’ll prevent a few unsightly hangovers.

Surely the next one should be some sort of Chinwag flashmob. Then everyone can bring their own drinks or drugs or whatever, and agency.com can still sponsor the lanyards.