Usable Interfaces

In the Spring ‘07 Market Leader (the Marketing Society publication from WARC), Y&R’s Simon Silvester talks about how it is the limitations on our ability to learn and adapt to new technologies which will actually restrict their spread; that innovation is useless without usability.

He points out that the “geek” audience of super-early-adopters have a very different (and dichotomous) set of needs from later adoption groups and certainly from the mass market and the laggards. Most people don’t use most buttons on their remote controls, most people use a small fraction of the functions available in software packages, and even most teenagers can’t keep up – Silvester’s own research could not find one teenager who knows how to use every button on their phone.

Refreshingly Silvester calls for a more human-centred approach to design, debunking some powerful myths:

1. That consumers want convergence – actually the most successful products often do one thing well
2. That later adopters will not just have different needs, they will have a different entire framework (the example given is that the first round of mobile-phone users saw it as a tool  for urgent calls if – for example – arrangements changed or went wrong. The second, youth, generation in contrast have re-orientated their entire lives around phones).
3. Once technology works, consumers forget it exists
4. Female audiences are increasingly key drivers of communications technology
5. Changes may take a generation to take hold
6. People simply don’t read manuals – don’t even hope

This is all grist to the mill for those of us that are passionate about the user-centred (or human-centred) design approach but it also ties in rather well with a Gapping Void post that “Human Beings don’t follow Moore’s law” or in Hugh’s own words “Humans don’t scale”. There’s all this new technology but it’s being used by the same over-developed apes. So we’ve got to really work hard to make it immediately understandable and usable.

If Web 2.0 is Web 1.0 done better and adopted more widely, and the truth is that alot of the technology was around in 1999 – it’s just that people couldn’t or didn’t want to use it, then we need to keep up the good work. Let’s hope the voice of the customer voice just keeps on getting louder and louder.

NetVibes (which is like iGoogle, Live.com or Page Flakes) is now allowing brands to take their personal home page and publish it so everyone can see it (they call it ”Netvibes Universe”).

Obviously, you’ll include different content on a page you or your brand is going to make public than from your personal start page but otherwise it’s an obvious evolution. And, it doesn’t take a lot to make the jump to start to see how an organisation could build its whole website this way (see the Time “universe” above).

When put in that context, the concept of building pages from constituent units seems remarkably similar to the big CMS systems like Vignette or MOSS. The advantage of NetVibes (except price) is that the elements can easily be repurposed to other sites and customers’ personal portals. It’s a way off yet, but an interesting convergence to watch , especially when  we see what blogs (essentially smallscale personal CMSs) did for personal publishing. 

In my favourite novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut invents the religion of Bokononism – a faith exclusive to the people on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo. As well as a number of practices such as semi-ecstatic ritual involving the touching of feet (‘boku-maru’), Vonnegut describes the idea of karass – A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident

When I met Thomas, I quickly got the feeling that he was part of my karass.

Throughout the remainder of Vonnegut’s career, this became a repeating ideal as he saw the explosion of the extended family as a considerable loss for society as a whole. In Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More!, Dr Wilbur Daffodil, King of Manhattan and US president, has declared a law whereby all US citizens must be given a new middle name. All people with the same middle name are then to become cousins who must look out for each other.

He returns to the idea in speeches and anthologies more and more passionately. I have been wondering what he would have made of the whole MyBook, YouFace, SpaceBebo phenomonen that has really only taken dramatic hold since Vonnegut’s recent death.

And the one thing that strikes me mostly strongly is our general willingness to be negative about the social change that is happening to us. To look for ways in which it exentuates existing negatives, is a threat to children and causes semi-addictive behaviour.

What technology is enabling, is for people to be present in each others lives more. What big cities, Margaret Thatcher, social mobility, geographic mobility, Norman Tebbit and our busy lives have set to tear apart; Facebook and its ilk puts back together. Is it socially dividing? Who cares? These are self selecting groups, not some New Labour attempt to make us all love each other. These are tensions that can bind some together and exist in our day-to-day lives.

But whilst not everyone will want to be in everyone else’s group or list of friends (as true online as offline) where our groups are broad and diverse, that will be amplified. No two users are likely to have precisely the same network, they will cross and extend each other. As Antony says, we’re hard-wired to enjoy sociability. I think it’s great. And I think Kurt would too.

Again, with suprisingly little fanfare, Google recently launches a free, automated (i.e. computer voice recognition) 118-style service – currently only in the US. Phone the free-phone number, tell it you want a pizza (or something else in rare circumstances) and you’ll get regular-quality google information straight down your phone.

If this really works; really is free to the searcher; really doesn’t feel like talking to Stephen Hawkins; and could be made to work in the UK, it would doubtless have a very disruptive on the fierce but relatively expensive directory model we have now.

That not good enough? They’ve recently announced the service now bundles links to Gmaps to show you how to find what you’re after. Pay 15c more and it’ll actually eat the pizza for you.

(cartoon from  Gaping Void)

Editor of The Register, Andrew Orlowski (articles) is never short of some ascerbic observations on the state of the music industry in its attempt to deal with the digitisation of its product. And recently there’s been no shortage of other opinion in that area either. With compact disc revenues falling 40% last year in some markets, the pressure for execs to react will only increase (doesn’t 40% sound low?) All signs so far are that they will do so in an inappropriate and old-fashioned way. 

Bear in mind that this is an industry which has systematically simultaneously shafted both users and artists for years. When things start going wrong for them, they lash out at both - criticsing and threatening their customers and treating their artists like ungrateful children.

This is also an industry whose current strategy is widely understood to be to try and get its consumers to re-buy their existing collections in a new format. And yet there is suprise when the customers are “revolting” and downloading and sharing music for free from Bit Torrent. What’s the alternative they’ve been given? Steal it or get overpriced, DRM-infected music? You can pay us for it now but we reserve the right to charge you for it again in the future.

In this country at least, we have taught a whole generation to see music as something which is best stolen.

One anonymous comment posted on Orlowski’s most recent entry would seem to provide some optimism that a reasonable middle ground could be found.

On behalf of the public, I want:

1. DECENT quality recordings out for me to download when I want. That’s high quality, so when I listen to the product I have just purchased I actually hear it properly on my new expensive sound system.

2. Freedom. Fuck subscriptions, I don’t care about them. Charge me 50p or something for the song, and as long as I don’t make it easily accessible for everyone to copy from me (putting it on BitTorrent etc.) you should ensure that I can put it onto a CD, or my phone, or my Creative MP3 player, or even onto another computer. DRM free please – When I pay for my music i’m paying for the right to listen to it when and where I want, using whatever technology I decide I want to use. i’ve paid for it, let me listen to it on what device I want when I chose.

3. Reasonable prices. Stop feeding us this crap. It’s still costing around £8 for an album on iTunes – nearly the same as what Play.com charge. If they can charge £9, and you charge £8 – then what the hell is all that crap about distribution and media costs for? An artist is in a studio, send it electronically to the distributors (Napster, iTunes etc), job done. There’s no comparision to the CD or cassette market, so stop pricing it like there is.

So in summary:

If I can get, for 50p a track (or £4.50 for an album) 320kbps quality tracks with no DRM then i’ll stop borrowing mates CD’s and ripping them, and I’ll stop using BitTorrent.

Then, and only then will I be prepared to part my hard earn’t cash – e.g. when the product and service is worth it.

Would people actually pay in this way? I don’t know. I do know that the only customers that suffer from DRM now are the ones that obey the rules. That’s got to change. And prices presumably must fall too. Why shouldn’t the consumer benefit from the reduction or removal of distribution costs? Will it take the fall of the major labels before a reasonable deal can be struck? That will depend on what they do in the next 12 months.