Art vs. Commerce! Commerce won.

Apparently it makes kids cry.

With a Dave Eggers’ penned first half detailing a lousy family life for Max, and a Spike Jonze 2nd half with Max becoming King of the Wild Things, this looked like the movie of the year.

I remember the book being a bit scary. I remember Max being a bit dicky and mean as kids tend to be. I remember monsters wanting to eat him if he dared leave.

It’s not really a “kiddie” book, but it’s doomed to be a “kiddie” movie.

The studio (you know, the guys who give us crap like Norbit and Bee Movie) have decided to send it back and have it re-written and re-shot. Link Here

And the rant goes on..

I am on my 3rd iPhone, entered refurbished replacement-ville in early Jan 2008. The reason for the latest replacement is the same from the previous replacement (touchscreen failure) prompting my gf to ask the Apple ‘genius’ if my latest replacement is actually my original iphone

Admittedly, I am an Apple evangelist and own some stocks. But this brand is going through some growing pains and it starts with customer service.

Scenario: You wake up on a Saturday morning and your touchscreen does not work, you reboot like 10x and the touchscreen is still completely dead, transparent to you of course because you think that continuously rebooting the software will make it go away.

I don’t know how capacative touchscreen works, but i know its cool (for similar humor try this quote from Zoolander). Abstractions aside, that Saturday morning I realized when you put your brand on the line as a mobile phone (basically your public communication ID) — you also need to approach customer service experiences from a telco point of view, not an IT point of view.

As a non-pro care member, which basically means I can’t just walk up to the Apple retail store and say: “Hey, I can’t receive or send calls from my iPhone…because my touchscreen is dead”. Instead I have to use a computer, sign up as a “guest” in the iPod queue and pick a date and a time slot to claim my troubleshoot ticket to my local Apple genius.

As a geek, i think an ATM like scheduler user interface to book your Apple genius is cool for IT requests, but when I could only choose Sunday (the next day) to service my phone over the weekend! Funk dat By the way, I did try the other retail locations and actually had technical difficulties with the scheduling application itself adding fuel to el fuego.

Adamantly, I went to the store Saturday morning anyways and presented my case waited approximately 1hr and got a replacement. The lesson here for me is that Apple is getting bigger and losing some intimacy with the loyal Apple consumers. Back in the day premium customer service membership like Pro Care was standard — that is what separated Apple from rest.

Another lesson overall from a user experience point of view is that customer service scenarios for phone service trump digital appliance troubleshooting issues.

A Brief Interlude

If you’ve not heard about the recent Maxim / Black Crowes feud, I’ll attempt to summarize.

Our players :
The Black Crowes, a southern rock band who are famous for 2 amazing records and a slew that followed of diminishing quality.
Maxim, the tits and ass magazine you look at in the airport magazine rack that’s full of instructional articles on how to maintain your lifestyle as a douchebag.

The Crowes have a new LP coming out, which is heralded as “a return to form.” Maxim ran a review of the album, giving it 2.5 stars.

The reason for the hubbub is that no one from Maxim has heard the album.

Here’s my .02….

If you are in the business of hype… fabricating emotion from ether, don’t be surprised when it backfires.

There is a lot of hype about the new Crowes album. I’ve heard all about a “return to form,” comparisons to The Southern Harmony and “the sonic majesty” or some other shit. I like the Crowes, I find their first 2 albums the be amazingly good… their second to be one of the better albums of the 90s, but like anything, I’m leery when I see so much bullshit built up over something that’s doesn’t exist yet.

Maxim wrote a review based on a combination of a few things : Response to massive hype, the Crowes reputation, and the quality of their last 3-5 albums which were also surrounded by the same type of hype.

Fair? Not at all, but if the Crowes PR can tell me it’s the best album they’ve ever released, why can’t a rag like Maxim tell me it’s just not that good with the same amount of credibility?

This is My Shed

Environments.

Why do we like to talk about environments?

What makes that such an appealing alternative to page, or event?

An environment combines several key emotional and physical aspects into a single, very understandable concept.
Architecture and interior design are very comprehensive disciplines. Both have an inherent combination of Art and Science that appeals to us all.

Living Spaces
Think of a room in your house
If it gets cluttered, it gets uncomfortable.
If it’s empty, it’s devoid of purpose.

Typically, when a space gets overwhelmed with clutter, we tend to take 2 actions:

• Spread it out (hence the shed)
• Throw it out

Online, we don’t tend to live in our own spaces, so we take less care.

To simply claim something is an environment is typically wrong
Each environmental space we create has 2 main reasons for existing :

• It Must have a Function
• It Must be Comfortable

Therefore
When we declare something to be an environment, it has to have the following defined:

What is the Purpose?

• What is the Size & Shape?
• What is the Decor?
• What is the Activity?

If we are unable to define the space, it is not a proper environment.

Worksheet
What is the Purpose?
Why are we creating this space? What is it meant to contain or describe?
What is the Size & Shape?
Does it contain multiple activities or spaces? Are there pre-defined constraints?
What is the Decor?
What is the aesthetic of the space? Is it unique or follow a previous direction?
What is the Activity?
What is the expected use of the space? What is its intended use?

A Bit of Clarification…

After sending the link to this around, I got hit with a response from a very talented code geek, she said “reading this blog makes me realize how little I really do know about IA.”

Despite having Information Architect in my title for a number of years, I never believed it.

I’ve always been in the business of design, without regard to scale or scope. Design is the action of solving problems, the manifestation of optimistic activity. That’s what I do.

For example, back in the early 90s, when the web was just getting moving, I built websites…That is, I did the art, writing, coding, FTP, server maintenance, etc.

It was all the same… if you didn’t know how to code, your design was shit. If you didn’t understand design, no amount of code could hide that.

Once people got all mixed up in trying to specialize, a bit was lost.

Here’s something I found very interesting :

In Greek techne meant ’skill.’ The ancient Greeks didn’t separate art from techne, but called all artists and craftsmen technitai (makers).

The Japanese don’t have a word for art, they use a word synonymous with function, purpose and aesthetics - geijutsu.
Exerpts from the Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fetcher

It’s that slight difference in perception that sepearates the iPod from the Kindle.

Once there was this separation of activity, I was exposed to this rather bitchy bureaucracy about who’s job was what, and what one group couldn’t do. This led to a lot of debate and name calling (F’ckn pixel pushers), but ultimately reminded me if you have something you feel you need to protect that badly, you’re probably afraid of being exposed as a fraud.

It was also odd that some people were so quick to jump into a group and adopt all the mannerisms and quirks of that group without question. I’m sure it was comfortable, and enhanced the continuation of constant employment, but I think Maude said it best:

Maude : I should like to change into a sunflower most of all. They’re so tall and simple. What flower would you like to be?
Harold : I don’t know. One of these, maybe. (holds a daisy)
Maude : Why do you say that?
Harold : Because they’re all alike.
Maude : Oooh, but they’re not. Look. See, some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences. You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this, (she points to a daisy), yet allow themselves be treated as that. (gestures to a field of daisies)

Anyways, my titles change, but I’m always in the business of design. I’m guessing there’s a lot more out there.

Hub it out bitch

As a fellow automotive IA, I was on the front lines of this scaling problem. Which asks a larger question, why does everything have to be on the same hub?

Why does a vehicle brand have to organize all the vehicle lines within the same site? It’s logical from a business point of view but too risky to make everything tiered and cumbersome to navigate. The hard part is getting the user experience to match the branding of the vehicle versus the car manufacturer’s holistic brand version of one site fits all.

Car organization should remain at the database level abstracted to the user. Keep the site simple and emphasize a “strong center” which is focused on supporting the user’s interests during the research phase.

Create an engaging (shell) introduction on determining who your user is, invest in an interaction model that is smart, easy and helps users frame guided factors on comparing and evaluating vehicle particulars, if they want more choices they’ll opt for it. Add behind the scenes business logic when referral sites push them to your site. So many ways to drive content into how a site should be organized.

From there you can anticipate and measure these preference-paths into scenarios that inform what categories match users interests. Get crazy and tell these big company cultures to hub it out, bitch!

The Hub

I was thinking back to an older project from a few years ago.

Based on the issues that large-scale sites have around content, navigation and user understanding, a radical approach was needed.

The tree had failed. I realized it’s just basic growth theory… when one part of something gets too large to sustain, it begins to decay.

Or maybe it was like the rat king, and it got so intertwined it became an abomination. (Thank you 30 Rock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king).

So I found my approach:

An ambitious piece that was based on chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching.

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
(The site can be formless, provided it has a strong center.)

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
(The site is nothing but an empty structure, it is only as good as what it contains.)

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
(The technologies we use exist to drive the site, they are not the reason the user is there.)

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
(The site works only provided others find their success within.)

Needless to say, it was overly-ambitious for the Automotive industry, but I still love it.

My Boss is on Ritalin

Next generation user experience is for kids. Kids are now the best multi-taskers ever thx to voice chat and console gaming. You are what you eat!

Keeping that edge in the technology sector, focusing on parallel workstreams — managing multiple tasks and still being a smooth operator, that is how a leader must keep up with a new workforce in a very fast paced field without resorting to becoming like Tony Montana in Scarface

Productivity enhancement can be just as calculated as other business domain skills required to be super star successful. Keeping that competitive edge in real-life games about success and money probably makes multi-tasking a pace nostalgic as a kid when you had to talk on your cell phone, chat over IM, send an email and finish a quest all in the next 5 minutes.

How multi-threaded can we go, how rich and intuitive can user interface designs be? — to push this “enhanced” human sense we are emerging as information search and retrieval junkies juicing cognition as fast as neuronal signals can transverse within the human body (thx McLuhan!)

Quote

“Without Brains, you are a fiasco. Without Means, you are an amateur. Without Heart, you are a machine… It has dangers, this occupation.”

- Vladimir Horowitz on playing piano.

Mark Rothko & the Fascism of the Box and Arrow

Boxes and arrows are fascist statements.

They indicate a herd mentality that we wish to push on our visitors. They show the world segmented into a series of non-contextual areas, but vaguely related spaces touted as an “experience”

Mark Rothko had it right… there is no edge to the box, no line connecting them.

the contents of the box should be a spectrum of interest as defined by the user. the path is an effort by the user of venturing further into each area.

Content should be sculped around a user’s position.

Simply, wherever they are is the best place they can be.

If current position is the best context, every item becomes a promising tipping point, or positive next step.

So what does this mean?

It means what most of us have come to find:

• Most navigation is junk
• All content should be multi-faceted
• Top-Down Tree-ing is dead

Some things we can do now

• Draw content maps instead of page maps
• Stop starting with navigation, and start thinking about how to indicate a story
• At each expected user point, think about what questions would stem from that content
• Stop aiming for the lowest common user
• Try for understandability over usability

Bushido and the Art of Concept

Lately, in my work, I’ve been coming full circle back to Bushido tactics, but on a different scale than before.

Back in the nineties, my approach was based on Hagakure, but the focus was on the unstoppable force.

It was the beginning of the bubble. It was better to accelerate than slow down, and I expected everyone around me to keep pace.

Fans of Ayn Rand have told me that I followed her Pragmatist ideals. I think Ayn Rand didn’t account for my rock star tendencies.

Anyways…

I’ve found my work to be centered on striving for a singular purpose… or at least a solid tiering of goals.

Do one thing, do it very well, go to the next. Basing very complex interactions in this model has led to some fantastic results.

It’s been a hard sell to the backwards UX people who are still counting clicks and using phrases like “well, it could go there”

“We could…” means “We’re not going to” in my vocab. If you have to debate, yoink it out. You’ll be much better off without it.

“You are neither cold nor hot, so because you are lukewarm, I will spew you from my mouth”

Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting

The singlemindedness of an idea is what will propel it.

When the idea takes on additional weight, it falls apart, or changes to something it was not meant to be.

The King of Kong

Last night I watched the excellent documentary The King of Kong : A Fistful of Quarters. (LINK)

It brought back memories of some of the best UX ever… Classic Arcade games.

Bear with me a second….

A couple weeks ago, I played Call of Duty with my nephew on their new XBox 360.

Needless to say, he smoked me.

After he killed me in all manner of enjoyable ways, he played solo. Since this was a rental game, he had to start at the beginning. This meant about 12 minutes of logo screens, and tedious story scenes that went into detail about a backstory that wasn’t really all that important.

Watching him play was a revelation in how mundane the game actually is.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s visually fascinating, the depth of user action is remarkable, as are the variations of weapons and fighting.

But it’s all the same. My nephew played the first three levels with the sort of enjoyment one usually gets from changing a lightbulb.

The gameplay was so scripted, he knew how to do everything. It was mechanical, predictable and ultimately boring.

Walk… stop… sight in… wait for sentry… shoot… jump… 2 sentries will come out door…

Repetitive patterns have been part of video games since they were started, but something about this was ridiculous. It’s one thing to figure out the patterns for Ms. Pac Man… at least it was fast, fun and a new level still held some chance at achievement (dang pretzel always eluded me).

It seems the randomness that made Donkey Kong such a difficult game has been replaced with a poorly written screenplay and cheesy voicework.

Perhaps I’m old and I can add this to my list of things that I can point to prior efforts done much better.

Now, back to the Classic Arcade.

The boards that ran them were feeble, the pixels were the size of my thumbnail, the memory and capability were severely limited and the controls were limited to a few basic inputs… so where did the effort go?

Into making 4 minutes of a good time that a 13 year old would spend a quarter on.

Early games like Tempest (the knob), Centipede (the trackball), and Galaga (the joystick) revolutionized HCI to a degree that Playstation and Xbox can’t come close to matching.

Don’t think so? Download MAME and give the old games another go. (MacOS) | (Other)

My Ghost Lives in the Machine

Not to digress, because that last post contains a lot to discuss… but another similarity between Twitter, Facebook and WoW is the user’s effort to project an image of themselves into the world.

WoW makes this very easy, you have an avatar, you accomplish things within the construct of the system, meet others and interact within a somewhat constrained storyline.

Your reputation is evident in your skills and experience, and compounded by your actions in play.

I’ve noticed a similar behavior occurring on various social networks.

Recently, I’ve noted some with a concerted effort to transfer the events of their life into a story-based construct through links, tweets, photos, and contacts.

By following their Digital Ghost, I can find out all I need about someone by the interactions that are made very visible online.

This is far more revealing than a bio, or the typical bullets-and-bullshit type of content seen in a CV or resume. First-person exposition is a fading concept when I can learn more about a person through following their own experiences.

By constructing their own story out of various pieces of media around semantically-linked points that are regulated by time, the adventure of life emerges.

Command lines, social networks and emulators

“You have entered a room with three other monsters, there is a door and a gnome standing in front of it what do you do?”

MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) and virtualization (being there while not being there)is really getting “alls grown up” in mass media. What Twitter, Facebook and World of Warcraft have in common is that real-time user generated interactions that are shared by other users is where popular media is headed.

This is not new and story telling is what makes us human.

As architects in this domain what is new is the opportunity to devine a language, a system, that frames a foundation to support and reflect user generated media in a compelling, interactive and entertaining manner. This is real hard. Relevance and context to what you are doing must be seamlessly tied to other possibilities and actions that automatically makes sense to you.

Again we go back to roles, tasks and objectives. But here the combinations are infinite in nature making it very difficult to hone in on an optimal user experience. Classic user experience methodology just no worky!

What to do? What elements of this new user experience can help us frame better engaging social media?

Twitter shows us to keep it simple and focus on 1 thing. Speed of sharing information. Even with a command-line UI, the essence of the experience is not about what people are doing but sharing it immediately, everywhere with others.

With Facebook, context is king. How you relate to everyone around you is automatic, fun and engaging. What binds all these possibilities is your preferences extrapolated with the preferences of others constraining all the possible combinations into what would be most fit for you.

And finally, a visual language that compels you to perform and drive your motivation. With World of Warcraft, the library of items, zones, and guilds is vast but fixed enough for players to visciously compete with peers to have the highest “epeen” (the most inspected gear). Even in a virtualized community, humans pursue what they see and value what is most desired. Building a robust and intricate inventory of virtual goods that helps to distinguish identifiable characteristics of your character is what makes WoW so addictive.

All these elements come together based on the sum of individuals playing in a shared environment. Building a next generation user experience framework must assume this foundation and sample the unique personalities and interests that will influence your virtual universe.

“Tell one monster that the gnome likes the other two monsters but not him”

Timeline Inspiration

In response to an earlier post about timeline inspiration, I have to point this example out.

I found this thrilling in it’s simplicity, interaction and detail. The graphics are crisp, subtle and effective… the interaction is smooth, with quick, clear transitions.

A great example of effective design.

Inspiration, brainstorming

The Approach

The Approach someone takes to solving a problem is very much like a signature song.

If you don’t have your own approach, you repeat the actions of those around you, typically to a lesser degree.

Much like a central theme or ethos, the approach is what forms the essence of the project.

The Approach is the way the mind looks at a problem, creates a framework for decision-making and produces outcomes.

Every decision made, or design created needs to be validated by the approach. If you keep changing as you go along, you are working like evolution in reverse… every revision will be one step further from remarkable.

Most UX pros have no approach, or use a very generic approach, based on past successes and the general web-at-hand. It’s very likely that they have never stopped to consider developing a series of approaches for different clients or problems.

If you can’t define your approach, you don’t have one. If you say your approach is “enhanced usability” or “common sense” you don’t have one.

If all you know is how to do is construct your concepts according to rules or standards (written, explicit or not) you have lost.

Have a good time in the middle, I guarantee you won’t be lonely.

Approach, Leaving the Herd

Screen Sharing and the iPhone

JM3 says: “I wish I could queue downloads to my home computer from my phone.“

I love Apple’s new Screen Sharing app that comes with 10.5…… How long til Screen Sharing comes to the iPhone?

I’m pretty sure that would get me to buy one.

The general idea of seamless ubiquity across multiple machines and locations is pretty awesome, and seemingly in reach.

Futurism

Speaking of tactical inspirations breaks

Working on a rich flash timeline piece for a client, found some good inspiration here and here

The best kind of sideways for me is really taking a step back. The trick is how to take a step back effectively to strip the interaction model/design out of your top-of-mind. Here are a couple approaches I do, in order:

1. Think what else you want to accomplish that day that is leisure oriented and gratifying
2. Spend a couple minutes following some RSS subject lines from various sources till you feel removed from where you are…(eg. in front of your monitor)
3. After at least 5 to 7 minutes of this mode, get back to task and keep your head empty so as design loads up you need to orient yourself
4. This is the cream part, figure out how you’re orienting yourself to the design, that should provide mucho insight

Of course there are so many other styles but the best is always getting as many eyeballs on it without cultivating that “too many cooks in the kitchen” effect where the account guy is busting out design tweaks when nobody is saying anything…and the mood has been a little silent for more than a few minutes because everybody wants to go do #2 (see above) instead of tweaking the design before the client presentation tomorrow! lol

Inspiration