Thoughts

A youtube clip has been circulating recently and getting a wide range of reactions from viewers. It shows a child interacting with a magazine trying to apply pinch and touch gestures she has learned from the iPad. While viewing this I see is an amazing opportunity for interaction designers to build the next generation of interfaces for this young lady. She will have the baseline expectation of natural interactions and find the keyboard and mouse a quirky artifact of past computing technology to be viewed in a museum. What will really arm the IxD repertoire is when computers will be able to interpret brain waves legibly and get better at semantic understanding of language. Experiments like Siri and Watson are just the beginnings of a ubiquitous interface we are building with technology. Our technical capabilities are finally catching up with the promise of natural interaction and ubiquitous computing.

Kristina Bjoran from UX Booth posted some important and interesting stats about user expectations with mobile. Some notable highlights:

• Mobile is a critical part of overall brand experience
• Usability and experience are more important to mobile app users than brand name alone
• Experience is important – mobile app users look to others for recommendations on mobile apps
• 38% are not satisfied with most branded apps
• 76% want ease of use
• 69% of users have a negative perception of the brand if the app is not helpful or useful

As with all user experience understand the problem space clearly and provide usefulness through your product or service. Ensure you do a few things exceptionally well and be known for it rather than extending your brand into fringe territories you cannot win.

If you’re a user of LinkedIn you probably have noticed 3 headlines near the top of the page. LinkedIn’s new service LinkedIn Today has harnessed the data of articles shared to create a dynamic newspaper that showcase newsworthy articles based on a user’s personal network. It’s a first in a series of updates that are surely coming down the pipeline to enhance the social network’s relevance beyond an online rolodex and recruitment tool.

An eMarketer study that surveyed Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US, found that 77% of women are apprehensive about using tools such as Foursquare. Simply put, the sentiment from women may be “I just don’t want you to know where I am.”

Prominent mobile blogger Luke Wroblewski recently tweeted

“Scientists said with enough info about past (mobile phone) movements they could forecast someone’s future whereabouts w/ 93.6% accuracy”

Suggesting humans are creatures of habit but also raising concerns of privacy.

Twitpic caused a bit of a stir when it modified it’s terms of service to allow them to sell user photos as long as they are hosted on Twitpic as well as hold those photos for commercial use after they are deleted.

Jeff Sonderman has a nice summary of the competing odds between journalists, users, and Twitpic in having accurate pictures for breaking news, being able to proliferate photography, and monetizing the content.

Twitpic and similar services want to make money. They want images to be viewed on their own pages (next to their ads) and don’t want to be a distribution service for photos to be used elsewhere, unless they get paid for that.

Citizen journalists and other users want exposure for their images. They uploaded them to share them, to have them go viral. They want to retain copyright, but may not care so much about their images being reused on other sites if they’re credited.

Media companies want access to content, ideally at no cost or low cost, quickly. They want clarity about copyrights. They want access, under whatever terms, to stunning newsworthy images such as the plane landing on the Hudson River, destruction in Haiti, a hole in the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines jet, or Monday’s space shuttle launch captured from a passenger jet above the clouds.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to sit in on a week’s worth of competitive testing for an eCommerce site. We learned a lot of valuable lessons in terms of discoverability of UI elements and what works best for users to complete their purchase. What works great on this project is that there is a clear intersection between user goals and business goals.

Users have the intent to browse a catalog of goods and if they find something appropriate want a clear path to purchase

The business wants to sell their goods through the online store

Wonderful

So why aren’t all projects as smooth sailing as this one? Well it’s not you, it’s me and actually it’s the truth this time. The client knows their business. The expertise of your team should be bringing those business goals to life through UX.

A tale of two designers:
The process police
First you have the designer who is such a stickler for process that they will not back down what so ever until every process tool is used without regard for relevance. Marketing campaign site that is all about brand? The designer’s paralysis through process begins to show “We need to test this so I know how to place every element on the page” Before this request can be filled what’s the ROI for your client? If it’s about driving an experience i.e. Halo Believe maybe the IA isn’t that great and the usability isn’t so fantastic but it tells me a story and that might be ok. Breathe, we missed a tool or two but your client got the exposure and positive sentiment they wanted.

The thing maker
Other side of the coin you have a genius designer who wants to work lone wolf style and create mind blowing innovation. Problem is that there are established conventions in eCommerce that are being broken and the persona you are working with is mass market. The UI makes sense to designers but no one else can make a single purchase on the site. The genius designer wins an award for his effort and the client severs the relationship.

Clearly the two above designers are quite extreme but you will find many variations of them in your travels. Ultimately it’s about the right tools for the right problem and an open honest conversation with the business about what we’re trying to accomplish.

One concluding thought. If we look at the most recent incarnation of Burberry.com we have an eCommerce experience that probably doesn’t care how much they sell online. They’re business goal is to drive in store sales. From a user experience perspective they want to communicate desirability not usability and that’s ok.

So to those gate keepers of User Experience think about your client’s business goals and what levers to pull from your UX toolkit to service them.

As the year comes to an end the social media giants are releasing their data for public consumption. Take a look at some of the top mimes being socialized in 2009.

Facebook Trends

Twitter Trends

YouTube Trends

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global):
1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island “I’m On a Boat” (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (35+ million views)

I’ve speculated to myself for a while that TV is going to get a revamp really soon. From torrents to Hulu to the distributors providing the content on their site: Why do we need the notion of “channels” anymore? I see it similar to what happen to music. The functional unit is no longer the channel but to the show level, similar to the album being less important than the individual songs (although as a music fan I definitely do not consume music this way but I know for the majority this is the case).

Those who passively watch TV will still want to be able to turn on the TV and allow the TV to dictate what they watch. But for those who are interested in allowing the power of data and their previous watching habits influence what they might like, they are ready for the next evolution of TV. Why the cable providers hold on so dearly to the concept that the computer and the TV are so different is somewhat mind boggling.

The cable companies have blocked efforts from companies such as Boxee who are providing an all in one service with a hardware component. They tried to remove Hulu from Boxees service but as a work around Boxee just used Hulu’s open XML feeds to provide access to content. Comcast is trying to head into an interesting direction offering TV everywhere: a single subscription for a user who can access content from their mobile, computer, or TV. If the service is easy and comparably priced I see it as an attractive product as long as I can consume that content wherever I travel as well (which probably won’t be the case).

The future of this landscape looks really interesting but for now I’ll stick to my Xbox, streaming video/music content from my computer with integration to Last.fm and Netflix, waiting for the dust to settle.

I love when companies release their data into interesting visualizations. Last.Fm’s Best of 2009 takes the trend data of users to compile their top 100 list. They also superimpose your scrobble activity on top of it to see how you’ve trended compared to the aggregate. I just start to imagine when all these data houses hook up to each other… the singularity anybody? If not the singularity then at least it will help some people get really good at predicting the future and really rich at the same time.

(Update) Fun visualization of music New Yorkers listen to compared to the World. (looks pretty accurate )

I guess I’m a little behind on my news but this was the presentation Stephen P. Anderson presented at IA Summit 09. It’s a great presentation that speaks to the subtle nudges we can give users to incentivize their participation. If you want data there needs to be a fair value exchange. Stephen goes through a range of tools designers can use to entice users and then get them to stay.