Stop trying to dismiss the task in order to create something different. Instead, transform the ordinary into something remarkable.
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Category Archives: Interaction Patterns
So my Killerclips.com co-founder and brother reaches out to NBC Universal about our cease and desist to remove their clip content from our site knowing that its for educational purposes (like DMCA section 12d).
This is the followup:
Hey bro, I left you a message. NBC-Universal are assholes. We will have to take our stuff down. By the way we were too slow and we didn’t step it up enough with our quote ideas. They basically copied our whole thing. The lady I was talking to said tehy have there own site Hulu.com. It looks surprisingly similar to our site, once you go into the movie clips portion. I am pissed.
That sums it up. The takeaway — trust your gut and phunk the rest, more importantly make it happen quickly because if your slow then you lose.
Got a couple emails from Universal and Sony about DMCA copyright infringement which are very broad stroke in their allegations.
Killerclips.com is an education site for hard core movie fans. It does allow downloads, sell movie clip content and it clearly gives credit to those involved in creating and distributing the movie content being played (for less than 60 seconds). In fact, it provides links to purchase the film being previewed from Amazon or rented from Netflix.
No matter. I got no bucks and I cannot cry, this innovator cant deny — you can suck my ding ding!
Just wanted to throw that out there…you can do whatever you want with it that the art of movie clip references in every dialogue is equivalent to sport geek out moments or even literary references popular to mention in parties.
What’s even more intense, are the mid 20 kids busting out nintendo game control unlock sequences for Contra, Mario Brothers and the like…
We regurgitate the media we consume and create more media by sharing it with others in interesting circumstances that allow for it to be entertaining. This is the passion of the modern individual to seek out the intersection of something very familiar in an unfamiliar context but making sense immediately.
Copyright restriction is a necessary thing, but it cannot choke the natural tendencies of human behavior to creatively reflect media in clever forms. Maybe is just not that sexy, but this guy is! 
I give loaded pistols to chimpanzees… sometimes they hit a target, sometimes they shoot their toes off.
I was talking with a friend about car configurators, which is a topic I spend a lot of time on.
He was discussing this idea about inline config, having a small window open at specific times and ask the user to add or select an option.
In essence, a very good idea, I have several prototype screens for this sort of thing.
The problem became that the designers were struggling to figure out how the window operated, how it minimized, how the user re-activated it, and so on.
Here’s the root of the problem : They devised a Method that did not support the Object or the Action.
The super-duper Tigerstripe Approach tells us every task-based design problem has three main components. In this case they were The Car (The Object), letting users do partial configs (The Action) and the small floating window (The Method).
When one starts with a method, as many people like to do (“Dude, what if it just popped up there randomly!”), problems usually arrive.
Similar problems arise when a site-based method or set of rules is used inflexibly for all manner of data display or user interaction.
Here’s a tip, go in the right order :
Q: What are we talking about?
A: The Object
Q: What is the user response we want to promote?
A: The Action
Q: What is the best way for the user to interact with the system?
A: The Method
Save yourself some grief, there’s a reason UX is a different discipline that UI.
Saw this today : Japan: URL’s Are Totally Out
Apparently, rather than advertise a URL, many ads in Japan are presenting a few choice keywords to search on.
With a decent URL harder and harder to find, and the rise of metadata, it makes a lot of sense.
It also makes sense if the use of the search can perpetuate a positive and high ranking for the right destination. Built-in rankings, baby!
It opens the question tho, with the highly competitive keyword mongering that corporations are involved in, would this work in the US?
To go to sleep.
That statement does not make sense when you read it. Its not intended to be funny. But if you think about it, or even better, if you appreciate moments of when you have had coffee and feel asleep right after then maybe you understand.
My point is user experience is an art and not a science because technology moves so fast. Faster than drinking 4 shots in the morning and 4 shots after lunch. I feel like this intro is very much like trying to get someone to do the no pants dance
In the last 30 years, how have humans increased their ability to communicate with each other? Check out Social Life of Information for the details…
The phone has gone from a telegraph to voice, to information services (operators) to personal communication id’s to media broadcast beacons. As it evolves, the mobile phone will re-invent how human conventions will be branded as information design and relevancy are enhanced with communication.
With so many possibilities, these standards are surfaced with habits familiarized with a digital brand experience such as Skyping, Twittering, Google mobile mapping etc. They will continue to bubble up as we merge context and media tagging.
“You are sleeping, you don’t want to believe, you are sleeping” – The Smiths
BTW: Right now I feel like a SPAM copy creator that has been trained to make intelligent jibberish relevant enough to squeeze past your junk filter and hopefully gain your attention for less than a second.
I’ve been accused on multiple occasions of being a music snob. I am not a music snob.
I’ve also been accused of hating what is popular, simply because it is popular. This also is untrue.
Popular is usually shiny, a bit too perfect, and ultimately quite fake.
This is why Joe Strummer will always be better than any auto-tuned, packaged, top 40, american idol.
Joe strummer was authentic. Not because he was perfect, but because of his flaws.
Authenticity is a hard thing to come by these days. Sometimes it’s hard to convey what is real.
I’ve been leaning hard on the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, The beauty of imperfection.
Wabi-Sabi carries emotion more than awe. The comfort of lived in furniture. The satisfaction of hand crafting a fence. The freedom from chasing the unattainable.
How does that relate to online UX?
Here’s how : The beautiful site has become ordinary and by that, untrustworthy. The site which promises value, but my not be pristine now has the advantage.
Oddly, the same ham-fisted “designers” who tell me they love things like Google and the iPod and Tivo, are the same to push a huge happy falsely designed world at me at every design review.
(sidebar: what the hell happened to subtlety?)
And then there’s a small, but very vocal group of people hollering about “Ugly Design” and promoting an aesthetic that is by design, horrific and just plain creepy.
Authentic is not beauty or ugliness… authentic is emotional reality, proven in design.
Grab a book on Wabi-Sabi… see where it takes you.
Apple no longer needs a tagline. Mini has build their own gestalt.
Starbucks flounders, Nike fights to stay on top.
And there are millions of brands with nothing to say.
The exercise I use is one my wife uses in Public Relations…
Are you The First, The Best or The Only?
If you are none of these things, you are telling someone else’s story with your own modification.
If that modification isn’t something wonderous, there will be trouble.
Sometimes entire brands are that tiny bit of difference, that little bit of magic love that causes notice.
I recall when Wired in the late 90s predicted the coming of the superstar geeks. Now user experience is just as much about interactive intuitive thinking as it is entertaining with dynamic frameworks derived from gaming metaphors and the like.
The wow factor is the discovery process that hollyweb architects prescribe with their palette of rich media, sensible organization filtered by context, and a visual system that anticipates change and movement.
Form and function in a funk all its own — naturally giving your online user an immediate pulse to relevant information, feedback, and branded distribution of self-expression.
Armed with digital appliances, they are capturing “the real”, making it engaging and clever enough to harvest more fans and motivate others to respond. Is your message compelling enough to trigger your community to self-organize and share?
Marketing an identity that empowers your audience to evolve the message itself. Steering that herd with an interaction model that gives each individual in the community the opportunity to sell your brand, that is web media.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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!)
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.
“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”
I found this definition of an “event” in my girlfriends CFA certification prepatory materials and found it quite appealing.
Especially in thinking about information architecture and rich media design this definition helps to identify and enumerate how a rich UI must be cataloged.
Proper user experience evaluation is filtering a set of task outcomes available through the user interface and determining which one is most intutive for the identified target user base and/or is the most efficient stepwise.
I’ve seen some good “matrix” event tables for mouse over behaviors but there needs to be a better way to map these outcomes visually in context. Any suggestions?
