Resistance to disruptive technologies is common. But why can’t we see progress more clearly? Paraphrasing a million conversations going on in 2011:

“Kindles are nice, but I’d never get one as I like the feel of a book in my hand.”

Then 6 months later:

“Kindles are so easy. I can’t believe I used to carry a heavy book to work every day.”

Or a argument conversation with my brothers a while back about personal interaction in shopping; they argued strongly that people like, no, expect and demand personal interaction with a shopping assistant in supermarkets. But themselves, given the choice, both use the impersonal bleeping, touch screens of automated checkouts. Because it’s quicker.

Despite what we might think, speed trumps personal service, convenient form factors trump pleasing physicality.

It was too long ago for me, but I imagine there where the same stuckist arguments about vinyl and CDs. There certainly were about film cameras and digital cameras; digital would never be able to replace film—it just doesn’t have the same ‘grain’ as real film. But 15 years later, it turns out that the grain that some photographers took so much care over in their darkrooms was entirely unconnected to taking great photographs.

This kind of resistance is common. I imagine we’ve all had it some form or another. The reason is that we confuse incidental attributes of the current technology with being qualities essential to the experience. It’s not that we just don’t like change but we think the change will diminish our experience by removing things we feel are important. It takes some time for us to understand what our basic needs are and separate them from an entrenched technology.

The longer a technology has been around the more likely it is for its users to conflate their needs with attributes of that technology. The groove in the vinyl was high quality music. Turning a page was reading. A friendly chat with your local grocer was shopping. These are things that had no alternative for generations, so they became entrenched; they became part of how we understood what we needed.

So what?

A fair question I suppose, but not what I was hoping for when all I asked for was some proof reading. So this:

• An appreciation of this will allow us to design better solutions for encouraging people to adopt new technologies or designs.
• Challenging ourselves to guess what tomorrow might strip from our designs and experiences might lead to better, simpler, longer lasting designs. Which parts of our designs will be rendered quaint and unnecessary in a few years?
• It also goes some way to explain skeuomorphic designs. Maybe some (bad) designers feel that faking the attributes of the old technology will allay user’s doubts about the change. (I don’t believe users are that gullible and I’m sure people would be better served by designs that highlight the benefits of the new technology by being “authentically digital”.)
• I’m going to guess that it’s these discarded attributes of technology that we once thought so essential that go on to fuel nostalgia. The discarded attributes are nice—physical objects are nice but, as it turns out, just not as nice as having easy access from hard drive, a friendly chat is nice but not as nice as shorter queues. So tapping into this historic but orphaned niceness makes sense if you want to evoke past experiences of technology. (For digital products I’m not sure that there’s a difference between skeuomorphism and nostalgia.)

Crystal ball gazing

So what are the things we think we can’t live without but are really just attributes of current tech? I’m no futurologist, but here are some not very profound or original ideas from the top of my head:

• Browsers? I’m sure how we access the web will be radically different in a few years and I’m not sure browsers will survive.
• Email? I hope so anyway.
• Telephone numbers are beginning to go away but not fast enough.
• Mobile phones? One day soon we’ll give up the pretence that mobiles are still phones.
• Car steering wheels? Self-driving cars are making fast progress.

Does this make any sense? What would you add to the list?

Sarkozy warns of disintegration,
Inquiry into unfair exam advice,
Child killer Black gets 25 years,
Lodger quizzed on double killing,
Dying woman calls for law change,
Double decker destroyed by fire,
Twitter did not incite rioting.

It almost made sense. I was just reading through them without any reflex to click. Links need to look like links. If not they might work for the aware and the awake, but a lot of browsing happens in people’s half-focused down time or in the evening with a beer and one eye on Master Chef.

So my tip of the day is to design for knackered, half-cut, attention depleted zombies.

“Hi”

“Hi, I’d like to buy doodad”

“Great, here are the doodads we stock, we think this one is especially good.”

“Thanks, I’d like more details on that one”

…. etc.

It’s not exactly rocket science but hopefully someone might find it useful. Callouts are probably an oddity in the Axure world, as Axure is more based on prototypes rather than wireframes. But at work we use Axure more for traditional wireframes than prototypes so need callouts for on-page documentation. In this environment Axure’s killer feature is it’s SVN based system for collaborating on a shared file. (Try getting three people to successfully update a 100+ page Visio document at the same time without errors…)

Anyway, here are some simple callouts in a widget library that you might like to use. I’ve made them a light blue, similar to the Konigi OmniGraffle wireframe stencils as it seems that that is what many people think callouts should look like. As it happens, we use orange callouts but it’s easy enought to edit the library to have whatever colours you like and change the callouts’ colours in your Axure document.

Get it here: EE_Callouts.zip 

(It’s under the Creative commons attribution license so use it for whatever you want, but if you reshare it please give me a credit.)

I was recently reminded of a thought that’s been knocking around in my head for a while: when will we stop learning to write? When will children stop being taught to write with a pen? Will, in the not-too-distant future, pens and pencils become quaint antiques, as we see cassette tapes or non-digital cameras? If you where a toddler today why would you bother learning to write? It’s hard, messy, frustrating, slow and largely irrelevant to everyday life. Signing my name is about the only time I write anything now. If I have to write something longer it takes a few lines for my fingers to remember what they’re doing—it’s surprisingly easy for us to forget even skills we take for granted.

I’d guess everyone is more or less happy with the idea (if not reality) of a paperless office but less so the corollary of a penless office. But if (when?) people stop learning to write, it’d follow that they’d stop buying pens. There’d be no more desk draws full of half used ballpoints.

I still draw and sketch (for work and occasionally fun), but with touch screens undoubtedly becoming ubiquitous, will our children be given a iPad and drawing app instead paper and crayons? If so will we forget how to make any kind of physical mark in the world? The death of physical mark-making would be a pretty significant moment in our culture. It’s what humans have been doing since we settled down in caves, probably before. At least 32,000 years of leaving marks behind in the world would end.  We often think of digital as being more permanent than the physical, but really what will be left in 20,000 years?  30,000 years? I could go and carve my name on a remote, sheltered, rock face and have reasonable expectations that my writing would out survive our culture. I think it’d be a safe bet that anything written on this blog won’t be around for those time-scales.

I’m still unsure exactly what a NUI is…

..but this video, from last year, of Bill Buxton talking about touch interfaces is worth a look: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TechTalk-NUI-Whats-in-a-Name

Directions  = recommendations?

People asking for directions to location can be seen as a ‘vote’ for that venue: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-of-google-maps-directions-logs.html. There’s probably a lot in it but the semantics of “I need to get to … ” are quite different to “That place was great!”. Not least as one happens before the event and one after.

Boris bikes API

Boris bikes finally open up their API : http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/cycle-hire/livecyclehireupdates.xml

W3C DeviceOrientation Event Specification

http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source-orientation.html

It’ll probably be a while before this is usable in real websites, but it’d be super useful.

Custom vibration patterns in iOS5

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/06/10/ios-5-lets-you-customize-your-own-vibration-patterns/

I’m not totally clear how useful this implementation is, but it’d be interesting if vibration was extended with richer ways to provide feedback to users of mobile devices.

Windows 8 and OSX Lion move towards touch

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664020/how-apple-and-microsoft-borrow-from-smartphones-in-new-desktop-uis

I’d put a different take on it than Fast Co.—it’s not so much about borrowing from mobile devices as moving towards touch-based interfaces. Both companies have had to address how touch UI works on mobile platforms so it’s natural that they will carry that learning forwards as the PC operating systems try to cater for touch. It’s not so much mobile vs desktop as it is touch vs mouse.

Persuasive design is the new trendy

http://uxmag.com/design/why-persuasive-design-should-be-your-next-skill-set

Lots of talk about persuasive design, but I’m so fed up with talk of ethics in design/UX/creativity. If I’m working on a ecommerce website it’s my job to increase the likelihood of someone buying something. There’s no ethics involved in that. If the site was a book shop specialising in hate literature then there’d be a question of ethics as to whether I wanted to work for them, but that’s a question entirely outside design. If you think that using design to get people to do something or change their behaviour has ethical issues you need to grow up.

Semantic web a-go-go

http://www.schema.org/docs/gs.html

Google, Bing and Yahoo throw their weight behind some structured markup. If they can’t make it work no one can. There’s a need for this, even if it’s imperfect, so I hope it gets some traction.

Content management systems

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/134791/4-ways-content-management-systems-are-evolving-why-it-matters-to-journalists/

A nice look at CMSs. CMSs are important and often undervalued. If you’re building a content based site, the IA and UX of your CMS is as important as that of audience facing site. Your users want nice content so give your content creators a nice site to create content in and they’ll create nicer content.

And finally…

http://www.datacollective.org/sparkblocks.html

Because we all want more graphs in our tweets.

GTA street view

http://www.gta4.net/map is a nice use of Google Street View that allows  you to explore the GTA world. It reminds me of these interesting uses of custom Google maps:  http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2009/08/design-portfolios-on-google-maps.html I’d like to see this sort of stuff used more/pushed futher.

Social Epidemiology

“Sickweather scans social networks for indicators of illness”: http://sickweather.com/#2 Sounds like a  nice idea for networked hypochondriacs. Seems like a logical extension of http://www.google.org/flutrends

Dumb and Dumber

The Wisdom of Crowds effect get less when members of the crowd influence it: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline (This makes me think we should ban all press once an general election has been announced.)

Normalize.css

Looks like a good alternative to CSS resets (that normally do too much). I’ll probably be using it soon: http://necolas.github.com/normalize.css

Content as interface

“Make the content the interface” seems like a compelling design principle:  http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1347 Similar sentiments expressed here http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris on Edward Tufte’s video of the iPhone UI  (http://vimeo.com/633740). “Computer administrative debris” deserves to be a wider used concept.

Digital decay

Something that has been growing on me recently has been the idea of decay in social media interactions. This blog post on asks if Facebook Likes should have an expiry date: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/05/should-facebook-likes-have-an-expiration-date

That’s a very simple example. But what would it be like if Instagram photos faded over time (unless you did something to preserved every so often). Or if friends on Facebook were given access rights to your profile based on how often you interacted with them – if you haven’t interacted with then recently they get fewer and fewer access rights to your profile then drop off your list of friends (“Connect with James in the next month or you’ll lose his connection.”). Or if tweets that weren’t retweeted, replied to, linked to or shared just fell off the bottom – content would have to prove that it’s worth keeping.

People could be made to be responsible for and tend the trail of data they leave behind or it would gradually disappear. It’s easy to suspect that most of it wouldn’t be missed. @adrianshort pointed me towards Wabi-sabi, I’m not going to pretend to be an know much about that, but what if our information system had some of this built in?

A hundred apologies

“A Malaysian social activist will apologise 100 times on Twitter in an unusual settlement with a magazine publisher in a defamation case.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/02/malaysian-tweet-apology-defamation

I love this. It’s a trivial punishment guaranteed to bring huge publicity to the original defamation. If Fahmi Fadzil wanted to spread the message that his friend had been treated badly he couldn’t have wished for anything more effective than his punishment. A nice twist on the Streisand Effect.

We’ve all committed design crimes…

…but there are some fun confessions here: http://checkthis.com/creativeamnesty

My confession would be a terrible job of photoshopping an orange faced Martin Brundle into a photo of the other F1 TV presenters. I tried to colour match his skin so it fitted in, but the client said he really was orange and made me put him back to his image’s original day-glow brightness. It was thankfully a long time ago.

Thisismykea.com is a nice website that sells designs on sticky-back plastic that you can add to your plain Ikea furniture. It’s a good idea, and the website is well designed but this article is not really interested in most of it.

The part that has the earned the accolade of IotW is the product listing images that, when moused over, changes to show the design on different Ikea products. Moving the mouse from left to right scans through the images, here’s a quick video to illustrate:

Why this is nice.

What isn’t nice.

My prediction <drum roll…>

In 2011 websites will become more produced. By ‘produced’ I mean something like ‘using time based effects to engage the user’.

Two powerful and extreme examples of this trend are:

• http://benthebodyguard.com/
• And http://agirlstory.org/

If you’re not amazed and entertained by the first and moved by the later, then you’re a cold hearted cynic. Both these websites show how strong the effects of using time based effects to engage the user can be.

Two more subtle examples are:

• Google experimenting earlier in the year at the end of 2009 (how time flies :-) with just showing the basic content on page-load then fading in the secondary menu items a moment later. (See a video here.)
• And the Apple homepage for the MacBook Air. When the page loaded users saw a simple picture of the new laptop and headline on a black background taking up the full browser window, it had the effect of a highly produced advert. Then after a moment the surrounding black-space around the advert faded, keeping the image of the laptop, to reveal the rest of the normal Apple homepage. (There’s a video here—in HD on Vimeo this time, not YouTube, ‘cos Apple geeks are posher netizens than Google geeks.)

Users are going to start expecting that their browsing experience is fluid, slick, delightful and entertaining without losing the efficiency and usability we’ve working on so far. Interfaces are going to start to incorporate elements of story-telling; web designers will have to add some of the skills of a film director to their quiver.

(If you have any other examples of ‘produced’ websites, let me know in the comments.)

And my wish

My wish, as ever, is that Lightbox-style popups will die (this will bore my colleagues). Lightbox-style popups are a good solution only when the content requires a modal popup and when pressing the back button closes the popup rather than take the user to different page. These situations are rare, and pretty much every other use is just lazy design (“but it’s easy with a jQuery plugin.” Arrgh!)

But this year I’m given hope enough to make it a wishful-long-shot-hope-of-a-prediction that Lightbox popups will start to the beginning of a death. Why? I think the new Twitter site has shown that non-modal popups work. When you reply to a tweet, a reply box popups up, but what make this different is that you can drag it out of the way and, more importantly, interact with the rest of the page while you are composing your tweet.

So hopefully some of the people who previously lazily slapped Lightbox style popups on the page might start lazily copying Twitter. Or even better think about the differences (I did say this was a wish…).

This week’s interface of the week is the interface of a new mobile phone : First Else. (No, I’d not heard of it either—and don’t visit that link—they have a hugely long and dull Flash intro that proclaims, apparently without irony, “Technology was supposed to make our lives easier”, ho hum…) Do look here, on Behance.

Image from High in the Sky on Behance

Thumb-centric.

What caught my attention long enough to earn the accolade of “Interface of the week” is the way the interface is built to match the natural movements of the thumb. The curve of the menu gives a nice affordance for how to touch the screen and appears to leave all the items in a easily reachable position. I assume and hope that the phone knows which hand you are holding it in and swaps the UI from left to right as needed.

It’s nice to see an interface that built around human anatomy not the device it’s sitting on. It seems to give an extra level of interface ergonomics that will probably become more common as touch interfaces mature.  (However the rest of the First Else interface—the non-semicircular parts—doesn’t look so noteworthy.)

I’ve recently had a chance to use a Windows Phone 7 phone for a few days, in preparation for some IA work and I think it’s probably not tool long a shot to call the WP7 UI thumb-centric. The side to side swipes of the panorama and pivot pages come very naturally to a thumb when the phone is held in the palm of the hand; where as iOS and Android seem more finger-tap based UIs.

Blue glow of tech.

One major thing that does irritate me about the First Else UI design is the liberal use of the ‘blue glow of tech’ style, relied upon to by designers everywhere to show that what they are designing is TECHNOLOGY. Look at Tron, tacky PC case mods and cheap stock imagery; if you want to indicate something has to do with technology and electricity and stuff like that—as most smart phones do—then slapping a blue glow on it in Photoshop is the conventional way. (Does anyone know where this style originated?)

If they could have styled the interface for real people as opposed to fifteen year-old boys or investors, it could have looked a whole lot better.