Sender 11

Pecha Kutcha: Mobile Paradigms

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

A couple of weeks ago we had a Pecha Kutcha event at work. It was my first. If you don't know what Pecha Kutcha is, it's a presentation with 20 slides where each slide lasts 20 seconds. That makes your presentation 6 minutes 40 seconds long. It's about keeping the audience entertained.
I thought I'd talk about paradigms. Sounds daft, but it's really food for thought if you, well, take time to think about it. Which is precisely what you don't have in a Pecha Kutcha presentation...
I didn't have a lot of time to prepare, but I grabbed some previous slides from here and there and went for it. Here is the result, I've fleshed out my notes so they make sense to a reader.
If you are going to do a Pecha Kutcha presentation, don't do it this way, ha-ha. Way too much content. It's about 1/3 too much text, but a larger problem is that I'm trying to touch on too many points. You really need to limit the number of points you want to touch on, because the audience will need more than 20 second to digest each.

I didn't put in all the slides here, but I've numbered each 20 second slot as you see below.

1. We are in the business of organizing stuff visually, - not for ourselves, but for other people.
   One major problem we, as Interaction Designers, have is to understand how those “other people” think. We can't read other peoples minds just yet. Since people talk more than they draw, we listen to how they talk. What they say isn't that interesting, really. Lets be honest, he-he. It's how they talk, what words they use, that is interesting.
    
2. When we design something, we have a mental model in our head of how the thing work. And we use metaphors to make our design understandable. The metaphor defines the personality of the product. Using the product is basically a dialogue between the designer and the end-user, just separated in time. You put a button “here” telling the user “click me”. After the user clicks you say something else - it’s a dialogue.
    
3. How well does the metaphors we choose fit the users conceptual model? What do the people you design for bring to the problem you are trying to solve? A lot of their existing thinking is going to be a part of the system you end up designing - whether you are aware of it or not!
   If they look at something and think “Oh, it’s a thingamabob”, when it's really a doohickey, you’re in trouble.
    
4. And we are witnessing a pretty serious paradigm shift right now. The phones themselves are changing, the OS’es are changing and the form factors are changing.
   We invite users to enter a place or use a piece of software that we have created. In order to make it understandable and coherent, we like to use metaphors. The desktop metaphor is well known from the computer, we have used it for 25 years now. "Files" are in "Folders", the “Trashcan” is for deleting stuff and everything is placed on a "Desktop". The Desktop metaphor is the dominant organizing principle for the computer. Bill Verplank talks about Interaction design paradigms, or "computer paradigms":
    
    
5. Computer as Brain
   An early metaphor was the Computer as a Brain. Thinking machines. The machines will take over thinking for us.
   If the computer is a brain, then how intelligent is it? How do I talk to it? Can I use spoken language, handwriting? Artificial intelligence. You can see where this leads to all sorts of efforts to develop artificial intelligence where the goal often is a computer that  know how to do things for us.
    
6. Computer as Person.
   The computer is an agent, an avatar. The computer becomes a “personal assistant”. It pops on screen, is friendly, talks to you. It also distracts you. Give the computer some high-level instruction and it scoots off and come back with what you want.
   Verplank: An agent-based interface is going to require a lot of trust. And so far no one has been able to demonstrate anything remotely worthy.
   By the way, I think The Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is really a revisit of "Computer as Agent".
   
    
7. Computer as life is an extension of Computer as Person. You could argue that computers are already a life-form of sorts. Computer viruses are here and they can multiply. The robots are coming. Let's hope they will be vegetarian, not carnivores.
   Verplank: Should systems have magic in them? No, computers should not have magic.
   
     
8. Computer as Tool
   This paradigm is all about efficiency, empowerment etc. Users have tasks, they have jobs to do. The computer provides tools that empowers them to do good jobs. It's all very IBM and "Microsoft". This tool paradigm is where "usability" comes from. A good tool is half the work, right? Computer as Tool uses a desktop metaphor.
    
9. When computers became a tool, we started doing direct manipulation, grabbing something and using it directly.
   Verplank: Interaction style changed radically. Before this we "set up" a task; We entered data, adjusted levers and then clicked "Go". The computer went to work and after a while spat out the result.
   Web forms are indirect manipulation. Enter a bunch of stuff and click "Submit". AJAX promises to bring "toolness" back to the web.
   
   
10. Computer as medium
    The Computer as Medium: Right out of Nicholas Negroponte's Media Lab.
    Multimedia. Ways to publish, communicate, persuade, engage and entertain. Convey a message and deliver content. Doesn't this sound a lot like the media industry? Computer as Medium use a page metaphor from the web.
    Lately we’ve seen a lot of the river metaphors like in Facebook, Twitter, and a lot of others. Strong sense of time in this paradigm. 
     
    
11. What are the Mobile Phone paradigms?
    Ever since the phone manufacturers started adding features they have tried to figure out what they are actually making.
    What are people calling their phones? What are we as designers calling the phones? What is marketing saying? We're not using the same words.
     
12. A phone is a phone
    For many people, for most people actually, the phone is semitransparent – it has a very sub-servant personality. When people pick up the phone to call someone, they don't really see the phone. Their inner eye see an image of the person they are about to call or send a message. So they dont feel like they are interacting with the phone much.
    
     
13. Phone as computer
    “Smartphone” is a marketing term, “dataphone” is a people term.
    Originally Apple didn’t want the iPhone to be a computer. But developers saw it as a computing platform and started hacking it. But it didn't become a computer to the users. Still, smartphone-users interact directly with the phone. It is no longer semitransparent.
     
14. Phone as media
    Is the iPhone designed as an entertainment device? No, but it has become one. If you look at what sells in the App Stores, host people see them as entertainment devices.
     
15. Converged devices
    Nokia: Multimedia Computer. This is the voice of convergence delivering a (weak?) marketing message. Or the message is good, but the execution is not.
    Sony Ericsson has 3 product lines: Walkman Phones, Cybershot Phones and Smartphones. They have tried to brand these segments separately with good success. Now in trouble since the feature phone segment collapsed and their smartphone OS went the way of the Dodo.
     
     
16. Phone as Fashion
    Most of us don’t consider ourselves to be in the fashion industry. Apple is clearly into fashion when it comes to their products. According to Steve Jobs you have to buy a new iPod once a year in order to keep up. The iPhone would probably follow the same pattern was it not for the 18 or 24 month contracts.
    Apple markets a bolt of lightning that connects to your ears and lets you dance down the street.
     
17. If the phone has become a computer, what kind of computer is it?  A brain? Media? A Tool? Computer as person. Maybe it is neither.
     
18. Phone as a container
    Phone as container for your "life story". Christian Lindholm of Nokia has worked a lot on this with "Lifestreaming". The place that stores the content of my life. But is it on the phone or is it really on the internet, - and the phone is just a way to access it? The answer to that question is important for anyone who designs software and services for mobile.
    
    
19. The phone is my room, my personal place, my purse. What I have there is not for others to see? I share with others that I wish to communicate. Family, Friends. Flirting. It also have a work connection there, after all work is part of my life. Work and personal may exist on the same phone, but are separate parts of my life. I think this is what we are currently thinking as designers, when we work on mobile phone software. So let's hope the users see it the same way :-)

Somewhere in there, there was one more slide...but I can't remember what that was. Anyway, I encourage you to check out Bill Verplank for more on computer paradigms.

Run for cover

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

The americans are coming!

Now, Robert Scobble is not my favorite blogger either, but you got to admit that he has an uncanny ability to put the finger where it hurts on interesting stuff.

He has just put up a post on the Travelling Geeks site about the sad state of affairs in European mobile. Just a few years ago the americans were way behind in mobile in most every aspect. Their phones were sad little things - they only turned them on when they had to make a call outside the house. Their operators were terrible and there was no coverage anyway. And they lacked interoperability - they couldn't even send an SMS message to a someone on a different carrier. Not that they would know how to anyway.

But what is the situation now? The iPhone, Android and the Palm Pre is setting the standard. Granted that the tech press is predominantly US based and more or less blind to anything going on outside the home turf. But the press over here in Europe is touting the same. And they are rignt. Not to mention the europeans that are buying iPhone and Android phones by the boatload.

I usually am polite and say I’ve seen some stunningly cool companies, like Spotify (who won four TechCrunch Europa awards last night) but in the back of my head I remember how cocky the same entrepreneurs used to be when showing me their cell phones and noting how far ahead of the world they were. That cockiness is done and that has deep implications for entrepreneurs across Europe. They must now visit Cupertino and Mountain View to get access to customer bases.

Read the post here: Europe no longer matters to lead position in mobile.

Appstores: Google and RIM don't want entertainment

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

Appstore developers: All our charts are pointing down and to the right
The price of apps is racing to the bottom. Apple could have turned that around, but it makes no sense for them to do so. Google and RIM tries to keep the prices up but throws the baby out with the bathwater.

What is the mental model?

There are two dominant mental models for the iPhone. The consumers and Steve Jobs agree that the iPhone is a consumer gadget. The early adopter/geek and programmer is that the iPhone is a computing device.

This is not specific to the iPhone, it applies to all of the new large-screen smartphones coming to market these days. And entertainment outsells productivity tools 10 to 1.

The people who buys them do so because they want a hip and cool "must-have" gadget. In case of the iPhone, they quickly discover that it allows them to take much of their behaviour mobile. Some of the things they did on a PC can now be experienced acceptably on a mobile phone.
And regardless of all the web 2.0 hype from the digerati, the primary behaviour of mainstream consumers is still media consumption. The iPhone is designed as a media consumption device, and it excels at that.
When mainstream iPhone owners enters the App Store, they do it as media consumers. They come to browse, to  be amused and entertained. The iPhone Apps compete with spending time browsing the web, or reading a newspaper or a magazine. Spending $0.99 seems to be below a treshold where people don't have to think about the price.

Most apps bought from the App Store is used 3 times or less. How many laughs do you get out of a fart app? One or two? That's ok for $0.99.
In light of this, the recent decisions by Google and RIM to discourage low cost apps is hard to understand. Don't they want the same success as the App Store? The lowest price for an app in the RIM store is $2.49. That's too high for fart apps. RIMs customers has clearly said that they want more and better multimedia features from their Blackberries. But RIM is cutting out the main portion of Apps from their store.

Android has decided on a 48 hour free return policy. That means customers can return any app within 48 hours for a full refund. Consumers can basically download and use as many light entertainment apps they want without paying. Anecdotal evidence suggests return rates between 30 and 60%. If developers have problems making money on the iPhone Apps Store, making money from the Applications Market seems doubly hard. Its like selling a movie with a 48 hour return policy. Simple entertainment may not have a place on the Android device.

Where are the yachts of the Apps developers?

These policies are probably attempts to establish a higher price point. Whether this leads to more revenue for developers remains to be seen. But from a pure handset manufacturer perspective it does not make sense at all. Having 25.000 - practically free - apps in your App Store is an invaluable asset. Whether the average developer makes money does not matter as long as one developer in a thousand hits the jackpot. Yeah it's cold. But that is the mechanics of the current iPhone Apps Store.

Make it inviting

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

Conundrum:
In order to sell something, it has to be different. If is is different, it is unfamiliar, and unfamiliar stuff is hard to use. Ergo, in order to sell something, it has to be hard to use.

Problems with this:
Something does not have to be different in order to sell. People buy the same old stuff all the time. Selling the familiar or following general industry trends then comes down to marketing muscle. Who has the biggest marketing budget?

Unfamiliar stuff is not always hard to use. Familiarity is a scale, its not either or. Is is a little unfamiliar? That's ok. Is it very unfamiliar, in fact completely alien? That's not so good. Affordance and learnability is more important that ease-of-use. Make something inviting, provide natural feedback and people will learn it quickly. In fact, they will enjoy learning it. The advantage of learning something is that it gives people a sense of accomplishment. Very important motivator, and one of the strongest indicators of happiness.

Don't worry about making stuff different. Try to make it inviting.

One-Two-Many

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

There is a common misconception that, because humans have ten fingers, they have the innate ability of counting to ten. People generally fancy that, if a child was raised by wolves, he would come to the idea of counting just by looking at his hands. (_)

Counting is not intuitive to humans, it is a learned skill. Or to be more specific, the human brain seems to naturally count objects as "one", "two", and "many". Our numbering system and number words emerged fairly late in the evolution of human society and was due to "socioeconomic factors" (Fancy word. But I for one believe it was the tax man.)

Counting is by no means important for our survival. In fact, entire societies has come and gone without having pretty basic math skills like the ability to count to more than 3, understand abstract numbers or the concept of zero.

Our brains has a pretty vague sense of numbers. Looking at a pile, is there seven or eight apples in that bowl? Hard to say without looking close and count. A simple thing like subtracting six from eleven takes a little bit of conscious effort.

Tons of research (scientific term) shows that our brain is content with this limited scheme. One-two-many may be the innate capacity granted to us for handling plurality. Language reflects our cognitive processes and examples of one-two-many is easy to find in most all languages.

 

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana

I've noticed this one-two-many scheme seems to be dominant in other mental processes also. When we think past events, we seem to group events into "now", "near past" and "distant past". While we obviously have the (learned) ability to precisely specify a point in time (Friday 18th of May, 1987 at 12:34 PM), this is not how we mentally store of even think about events. When we think of some past event, we don't seem to store it on a timeline at all. We have an emotional anchor that enables us to recall the event, but it's not tied to a timeline, it is always anchored to a person or object. Unless you spend a lot of time thinking about your past, you probably have a pretty coarse notion of when, and in what order, past events occurred.

Time, as it is expressed in the grammatical machinery of language differs from Newtonian time in not being measurable in units. […] The imprecision in the way language expresses time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it.

(Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought)

As Jared Spool pointed out, and most usability testers can attest to, a test subject will claim a website loads quickly if he is able to find what he is after, but will claim it loads slowly if he can't find it. The passing of time is subjective. Time flies when we have a good time, but a minute feels like an hour in a dentists chair.

If I held you any closer, I'd be on the other side of you

Ok, we have trouble with counting, we can't keep time, but we are pretty good at estimating distance, right? Sadly no, the same effect seems to govern our notion of distance. According to our language, objects seem to be mostly either here, there or far away. That our perception of time and distance is similar should not be a surprise, as we often use space as a metaphor for time. We talk about the length of time, timeframes, the past is behind us, the future in front, etc.

So

So I think it could be worth exploring how our one-two-many thinking brain should influence user interface design. There is nothing in our nature that dictates that a timeline must be linear. On the contrary, the further in the future or past, the coarser our sense of time is. There is nothing that suggests that we need much precision when representing spatial relations either. Our mental image of our surroundings is probably more like a tube map with nodes for relevant places and nothing like a geographic map with correct scale and distance. And designers spread out objects in nice even grids floating in space anchored to absolutely nothing, when sometimes a big uneven pile on the floor would be better and more approachable.

Mobile software with an attitude

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

It’s really hard to create polite software for mobile phones.

What purpose does your software have? Is it to enhance productivity, empower users, move stuff from the inbox to the outbox? Is it to keep its owner informed and up to date on the latest news? Is it to maintain a Bluetooth connection between the phone and the laptop?

Should your software be upbeat and helpful, should it be efficient and toned down, or should it simply be invisible and out of the way? Software has a predominant manner of representing themselves to the user. Programs whose appearance and behaviour conflict with their purpose will seem jarring and inappropriate, like a clown at a wedding, to quote Alan Cooper.

(I have quoted liberally from the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines and especially from Alan Coopers book About Face throughout this post. Both are necessary reading.)

 

Application posture

Cooper describes three application postures:

Sovereign posture programs takes over the entire screen, for example a spreadsheet or a word processor. Since Sovereign posture programs are used for extended periods of time, the users tend to be quite familiar with the program. Speed and efficiency is far more important than ease-of-use. Colours are muted and it's OK to display a large number of UI controls. Toolbars? Bring them on!

Programs having Transient posture come and go. They perform a single, high-relief function with a tightly restricted set of accompanying controls. A printing dialogue box could be an example. Transient posture requires clear, easy-to-understand appearance and use. Bold and large is good. Come and go quickly. The taxicab of applications.

Cooper also groups desktop widgets/gadgets with transient apps. The purpose of desktop widgets is to give easy access to changing information with zero interaction. A desktop widget should be easily glanceable while staying out of the way so you could argue it had more in common with the next posture:

Daemonic posture is a program that normally doesn't have a screen presence or lives in a control panel. It's mostly invisible, doing its thing in the background. Only when important events or errors happen does the daemonic program alert the user.

Mobile application types

Apple doesn't talk about postures but suggests 3 different application types; Productivity, Utility and Immersive.

A Productivity Application enables tasks that are based on the organisation and manipulation of detailed information. People use productivity applications to accomplish important tasks. Mail is a good example.
Data is often organised hierarchically and the user interaction model in a productivity application  typically consists of organising the list, adding to and subtracting from the list, and drilling down through successive levels of detail until the desired level is reached, then performing tasks with the information on that level

A Utility Application performs a simple task that requires a minimum of user input. People open a utility application to see a quick summary of information or to perform a simple task on a limited number of objects. The Weather application is a good example of a utility application because it displays a narrowly focused amount of information in an easy-to-scan summary.
A utility application tends to organise information into a flattened list of items; users do not usually need to drill down through a hierarchy of information. The user interaction model for a utility application is very simple: Open, scan information, close. Optionally, change settings.

An Immersive Application is what it sounds like; full-screen video, fun and games.

Mobile application postures?

Are Coopers postures relevant for mobile? Yes, to a large degree. Sovereign posture is relevant in for example email applications. Use the pixels efficiently and provide as many shortcuts as you can.

Transient postures are for all types of dialogs like “send this picture as an email”, and for the current crop of mobile widgets. Daemonic postures for the battery indicator and the SMS alert.

The trouble is of course that the choices 3rd party developers have when developing an application is the following:

A little bit exaggerated perhaps, but true in essence. All the iPhone application types have sovereign posture. The reason is because that it is the only way to build apps on that phone. The same goes for Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson (albeit to a slightly lesser degree).

If you want to build a weather app and you think it makes sense to add it into the calendar? Or maybe add it to the idle screen? Sorry, you have to build a full screen weather app. Want to build a sync app and add it as a menu choice in the phone book? Sorry. Want to build an image manipulation app and plug it into the camera app? Sorry.

There is no basic human right that says that you should be able to plug your software into anyone else's. No one is required to open up their apps or data to others. But for smartphones, that is the smart thing to do. It is hard for one piece of software to serve all users’ goals. Let applications behave cooperatively. It works on the internet…

Efforts

There are some examples of efforts towards different behavioural stances in mobile apps. See for example a previous post about living icons (read the comments).

Google made a search app that is available from the idle screen.

Photo from www.allaboutsymbian.com

For the most part, current phones have siloed applications built with a Single Document Interface. Do you have examples of applications that successfully integrate or cooperates? Please share in the comments.

Designing the Sprint Instinct

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

At the Design for Mobile conference last week Mike Lundy, Design Lead for the Sprint Instinct, talked about the design and development process for the phone. He had some pretty interesting things to say.

(This is my impressions and takeaway from the talk, any errors are mine, etc, etc.)

The Instinct has become the most successful device launch in Sprint history. The Instinct represented a change in the design relationship between a carrier, an OEM and application providers. More importantly, it represented a fundamental change in development tactics and design authority within the carrier. 

 

In addition to selling well, the Instinct also got some pretty good reviews. Mike Lundy and his cohorts must have done something right.

The degree to which an operator customizes a phone before they sell it varies a great deal. Some operators do nothing, they sell phones just as they come from the manufacturer. Some customise the look with colours and icons and their own web start page. And some, like Sprint, put a lot of extra software on the phone.   

The Old Approach (meddling)

Sprint has a multivendor approach where many different companies (OEM’s) deliver different parts of the phone software. In addition to the phone manufacturers own OS, there may be a dozen more applications, all with slightly different different buttons, menus, user experience.

For each feature, like music, email, navigation etc. operators have their own product managers with different budgets and objectives. This often leads to a very bureaucratic development process. Typically, product managers fight to give their service highest priority, without worrying too much how much this may affect the overall user experience of the device. They are after all measured on how well their service are doing, not everybody else's. In short: there are way too many cooks in the kitchen.

The UE team may have the task of creating a unified experience, but often not the means since the UE team does not own the overall design. Sprint used to do feature level requirements, and only bug level enforcement were possible. This means handing off a word document or a wireframe to the developers, and all you can do if you don’t like the result is file a bug report. More, when design decisions were made, there were no engineers and no visual designers in the room.

The new approach adopted for the Instinct

A small dedicated team of only 12 people (The Tiger Team). Visual lead, Design lead, some engineers, some product managers and one exec who informed externally. The team had clearly defined roles, clearly defined goals and executive backing.

Development was done in isolation from the rest of the organization. The rest of Sprint didn't know about the project, if I understood Mike correctly. The team moved out to a different building with their own security (I guess that was to keep product managers out). Samsung sent 20 or 30 developers to the Sprint site to work on the phone.

Very fast turn around. 24 hours to come up with a design suggestion to any given problem, 48 hours for the design lead to evaluate it.

With the Instinct, the design team were owners of the overall design.

Why did they do it?

Competitive pressure from the company that shall remain unnamed, the touch trend and experimentation with a new design approach.

Design goal

The design was centred on habitual use, not on ease of discovery or ease of learning. "When you adopt it, it is so efficient to use that you don't want to change".

There was very little user testing or input, it was a very heuristic design process.

Challenges

There were only 9 months from project start to shipment and 36 apps to redesign. 13 vendors contributed, all had apps that had to be adapted to the new UI.

The hardware/software platform was chosen before the team started their work. The hardest thing about the entire project was that the hardware was underpowered for the task, it was never designed to do what they asked it to do. To make matter worse, the various applications to be included ran 4 different systems (Native RexOS, Java, BREW and TAT.) The effect can be seen. The address book runs native code and the list scrolls very smoothly. The music player is written in Java (that runs on top of BREW in this implementation, making it very slow) and the lists doesn’t really scroll, the text jumps to simulating scrolling.

Tech enforced consistency

All existing Samsung UI code was thrown out. The design team created a a common set of UI widgets that all vendors had to adapt (framework widgets). This drove design consistency. When the vendors complained about UI shortcomings, this brought attention to exceptions.

Dedicated Visual Design support

No more “paint by numbers” for the visual designers. Visuals was included in the wireframes sent to engineers so they had pixel perfect designs in hand. Visuals were also used to improve and clarify interactions including the physics of the interactions, acceleration and deceleration formulas for gestures.

Feature purge

Screen real estate is at a premium on a touch screen device because everything has to be visible on the screen.   
The Swiss army knife approach was rejected. All features were removed by default and every feature was interviewed again for inclusion.    
For example; 70% of revenue for one music service came from a banner ad (presumably because the service has hard to use and people didn't buy music). The new design did not include the banner ad, and the music product manager was upset. 70% sounds like a lot, but on closer examination it turned out that it was 70% of very little. It would be better to improve the service so people actually bought music. The ad was not included in the new design.

The phone was going to be sold on unlimited data plans only. That meant they could remove a lot of warnings and alerts. It also reduced user anxiety over billing and reduced purchase anxiety (there is no choices to be made by the buyer. It's one package only.)

Leanings from the process

• Enforce consistency through code, not through wireframes
• Determine how to make money. Subjugate all other considerations to design.
• Use visual designers up front
• Have a clear goal
• Limit complexity
• Make the product managers work for their salary. Why should the feature they want go into the design? If they want something in the design, make them make a case for it, dig up numbers, state their case.

Here is an interview of Mike Lundy where he talks more about designing the Instinct.

Visual Signs and Symbols

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

When I was travelling last week I spotted this sign on the side of the plane engine:

This is not a men's room? No urinating on the engine please?

What is a men's room sign doing on the side of a jet engine? To me it looks like an example of how symbols evolve over time and take on a different meaning. The symbol used to be a generic "male" symbol. In the, um, waste management context, it was used as a secondary symbol, under a "Toilet" sign to separate the men and women. (If you are American and the topic of toilets troubles you, I'm sorry :-))

The male and female symbol has been promoted to take over the meaning of Toilet. It is so widely used for this that it takes on the meaning of Toilet even out of context. Is this a loss or a gain? I believe it is probably more of a loss than a gain.

There are a number of other examples of symbols taking on new meaning. The peace sign ☮ used to mean peace, it now means "the 60s".

There are also numerous examples of symbols that depicts objects that no longer exists. This is generally the problem with symbols. They don't age well. For example the floppy disk used for "Save" (look it up in Wikipedia, kids). There is a generation growing up who has never seen a floppy disk, yet they a still merrily clicking it to save their torrent files. The floppy disk has gone from being a symbol (a metaphor) to being a sign.

Signs and Symbols are not the same

There is a difference between a Sign and a Symbol, in the semiotic sense. *

A (Visual) Symbol stands for something. It is connected to something through some form of relation (visual similarity, history, etc). It often depicts a real world object and is often metaphorical.

 

A (Visual) Sign on the other hand signifies something. Its form is arbitrary and it simply has to be learned. For example currency.

37signals has recently added currency signs to some of their their software. The sign to the far right is supposedly a generic currency symbol. Even if I have if right here on my home keyboard, look: "¤", I never knew what it was until I read it on their blog today. (The sign is not on my UK work laptop keyboard.) The sign was introduced in 1972. I guess it is a good example as any that you don't learn signs that you don't need in your daily life. It takes a lot of time and effort to establish a sign.

Symbols as metaphors

The advantage of symbols used as metaphors is that they can symbolize "invisible stuff" without requiring learning. You can understand their meaning without explanation or prior experience.(And hopefully it's the same meaning as the designer intended). Many designers believe metaphors are superior for this reason. You don't have to know or learn anything, and that must be the ultimate ease-of-use, right?

Well, it would be if there were an easy to understand metaphor for everything. Unfortunately there isn't. Symbols are limited, they can have a hard time representing abstract notions or verbs. What is the metaphor for "Power", "Stop", "Yes", "No", "Fun", etc? There are a lot more abstract notions and verbs than real world objects that can be given a recognisable shape on an icon.

Signs on the other hand are practically limitless. The number of individually distinguishable shapes are, well, more than plenty. The problem with signs is that their meaning has to be agreed upon beforehand. If you haven't seen a particular sign before, it's hard to know what it means. And to be really useful to designers, signs has to be understood in the same way globally.

Cultural differences

In reality, not many signs are globally understood. What signs are? My guess would be the numbers from 0 to 9, the exclamation mark, the plus sign, Play/Pause/Stop, the dollar sign... maybe a dozen more?

Someone should set up a website to "crowdsource" how various signs and symbols are interpreted around the world. Maybe that already exists(please share in the comments if you know about such a site).

MotoFone

The Motorola design team tried to tackle universal icons a couple of years back with the MotoFone. The phone is an ultra-low-cost phone designed for emerging markets. It uses icons and voice prompts instead of text for the menu system and the design team tried to come up with a set of "universal icons" (shown below) for basic phone functions. Can you understand these without explanation?

Most should be fairly understandable; Trashcan is delete, Envelope is message, Book with plus sign is "add to address book". These metaphors are close enough. The 123, ABC and OK are straightforward direct depictions and not metaphorical.

"No reception" is where the designers ran out of metaphors. The House with a cross means Out of Network. The other icons feels user-centric; it's my contacts, my messages. I own them. The house with a cross over is not my home. It's the the phone operators home so to speak and I don't own it (If you're willing to stretch it, you could say that I rent a place there). It is clearly system-centric. How do you draw a self-explanatory symbol for "no reception"? I'm not sure it's possible.

 

MotoFone icons with explanation

 

Ovi

Another attempt at universal icons, this time with a Web 2.0 slant. These are "Social Networking" icons from the Nokia Ovi website (and will be used in upcoming Nokia phones as well).

Nokia is currently changing the icons and compare the old stylish charcoal gray (standard designer issue) to the new colour version below. The new version is both more detailed and more playful. The game icon has changed from Tic-Tac-Toe to a game controller. A Nintendo game controller has a stronger identity  than Tic-Tac-Toe on a global basis? Well, there should not be any reason to doubt that, as with the Motorola icons above, these has been thoroughly researched according to the respective companies.

Nokia Conversations will post a video interview next week with one of the head designers in the Nokia Design team who were responsible for these icons. Might be worth a look.

 

On and off

You might think that a symbol for a basic function like on/off should be possible to agree on, but no. The US version of the iPhone uses the text ON and OFF on switches, the international version(s) uses the I/O sign. Is the US is less visually literate than the rest of the world?

Btw, a pet peeve of mine is misuse of the IEC power symbol. Look around you right now, and you will probably see it several places. Your mobile phone, your monitor, your PC. The symbol is 0 (zero) for "off", 1 (one) for "on" and a a combination of the two for "standby".

IEC power symbols are universally recognized. Except in the US.

Most mobile phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and Blackberry) uses the "power on/off" symbol to turn the phone on or off.  Motorola used to use either, but seem to have settled for "on/off" on recent phones. HTC and Palm uses the "standby" symbol on the on/off button. Software like Yahoo Go also erroneously uses the Standby symbol to exit the application.

 

The meaning is in people, not in the symbol

This means interpretation of symbols may and will vary.

Symbols change their meaning according to context. A Crescent moon can mean sleep when printed on a button, but mean other things when printed on a flag, or in a book about astronomy, etc.

The difference between signs and symbols can be unclear. Signs may contain symbolic properties and vice versa. A dollar sign like "$" is a simple sign, but when someone writes Micro$oft, it gets a ton of symbolic meaning. Sign and symbols are a central to a rich visual vocabulary and is really at the core of what visual design is all about.

 

Care for the little ones

The few globally understood symbols we have at our disposal are precious gems. The main reason signs (and symbols) change their meaning over time is that they are introduced into a different context with a slightly different meaning, and the new context may become more prevalent than the old one.

To be truly "intuitive", the meaning of a symbol have to be transparent to someone who have never seen it before, and that happens less often than you may think! Watering down the few globally understood signs, symbols and metaphors that we have might not be in our own best interest as designers. For example, many designers don't like the power symbol, it's ugly, it's designed by engineers, it doesn't feel, um, powerful enough. Let's invent something else! It's like saying "I don't like the form of the letter "A", it doesn't really say 'aaaaah' to me".

Forget it, spend time on stuff that really needs improvement and let's instead try to strengthen the few globally understood symbols we have by using them consistently and correctly.

*) I did not link to the Wikipedia entries for Signs, Symbols and Semiotics in the text because the Wikipedia articles are somewhat contradictory. Semiotics belongs to the soft sciences, where nobody is ever able to agree on anything. (They would be out of a job if they did.) Anyway, my point is the same regardless of nomenclature: Some signs and symbols are worth saving because they are globally understood.

Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies.

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

I have accepted an offer from Vodafone Group to work in their User Experience team in London.

Crazy, I know. I've certainly done my part of operator-bashing over the years and expressed healthy and loud skepticism on how operators have acted arrogant and clumsy. Now, I'm meeting myself in the door with a resounding thump! (I'm not sure how well that proverb translates... you get the Zen of it!)

But, I got to admit it, I'm excited about this! It's going to be interesting to be sitting on the "other side of the table". And working on applications and services that goes out to 260 million users certainly has its appeal!

Ecosystem

Speaking of tables, a lot of musical chairs is going on at the moment. The current "Internet ecosystem" looks like this (simplified):

Hardware	Network	Applications
Commodity	Commodity	Unique

A lot of value is generated in the "Applications" box. This is where Google, Ebay etc. resides. However, for the majority of the players, the value of their software can't be monetized directly. It is monetized indirectly via advertising. (Advertising revenues is also the driver for most innovation on the Internet and this can be troublesome if we are facing a global recession).

If we compare this to the mobile ecosystem:

Hardware	Network	Applications
Unique	Commodity	Not much here, really. Core applications are embedded in the handset.

In the "Internet ecosystem", after people have bought a computer and a broadband connection, they go out and buys software and uses services that generates revenue. In the "mobile ecosystem", after people have bought their phone and their subscription (often the same purchase in most countries), they don't buy anything else. The core functions are already in the phone and they can't be changed. Android promised to change this, but they have hit a few bumps in the road.

But what about the App Store, you say? Back in March I predicted a $22 per user turnover and now that seems likely according to Apple. And this is direct monetization. People are actually paying for software.

For the "Internet ecosystem" to work in the mobile space the operators and phone manufacturers has to be commoditized, meaning that they have to support standardized common runtimes like web browsers. Or do they? Many seem to believe that the mobile platform that attracts the most developers will win. A complete reversal of the current model is required for this to be true.

Not only is there a battle rising over that third "Applications" box, over the last 8-10 years we have seen half-hearted and failed attempts to create a working mobile ecosystem. So forget the value-chain, now the thing is to provide door-to-door services ala Apple. Environments that looks "open" but is run by a benevolent dictator.

Is it the manufacturers  like Nokia with Ovi, Apple with AppStore that are going to win? Is it the operators with their portals and pre-installed software that are going to win? Or will the winner be Google and the "mobile web" guys?

What I think? Call me wide-eyed, but I believe the end users are going to win.

Mobile IxD work

This blogger has moved!

I want to invite you to my new gig over at Rift Labs. We are devloping Open Source Hardware for photographers. Come join us if you are into UX, design or photography at some level. Visit Rift Labs

 

Since my self-inflicted work hiatus, I've had time to think about where I want to go next. Some things I know: I'm going to continue designing software for mobile. Getting closer to the metal would be fun. New angles would be interesting.  There are a number of options for a mobile IxD, for example:

A Design Studio

Lots of IxD's work in design companies/design studios. There is a fair number of companies that specializes in mobile. All projects are short term. You work with clients, and a big part of the work is structuring the clients mind. You need people skills and communication skills. In fact, communications skills is what this job is all about. All your design methodology means nothing if you can't pull the client through the generative phase and through the sign off phase. However brilliant you are, the client decides in the end, and often you only see parts or even none of your work in the end product.

You get to do a lot of different things and other designers are usually fun to work with. Offices are in a warehouse or industrial building with a big italian espresso coffee machine in the corner.

You get a MacBook Pro with a 23-inch Cinema Display. Bring a pair of headphones, these places are noisy.

A Phone Manufacturer

Contrary to what they should do, few phone manufacturers actually hire IxDs. Almost all their software design work is done by 3rd party design companies. With few exceptions, in-house design groups mainly spend their time modifying phones to suit operator specifications.

Currently many manufacturers are working on services in addition to phone hardware. Strategy work is in-house but most hands-on work is outsourced. You work in a building that is so big it has its own tube station.

You get a laptop, after all this is a mobile company. You also get your choice of phone, of course. You pick the top smartphone and think you are cool, only to discover that the really cool people are those who walk around with the prototypes, odd looking phones with wires and stuff hanging out of them.

A Dev Company

Dev companies are driven by engineers. They write software for other companies, the ones you want to look at writes for consumer hardware companies. These guys tend to be open-source loving, pinko, commie, tree-huggers with a bad neck-shave, right? Well, yes, but what's wrong with that? If you join the right dev company you can get to work on seriously cool stuff with very dedicated developers. Projects are mostly longer term, with deep involvement.

The down side is that good developers tend to be pretty stubborn individuals. You need to be able to explain your design choices in a way that developers can relate to. And you really need to understand the technical constraints and possibilities or you get zero cred.

You get a Linux box, a 17" crt screen found in the attic, and are asked to download GIMP.

A Startup

All mobile startups are currently making location-based social networking services. With an API. Startups pay next to nothing but you get shares and that entitles you to a tax refund when the company folds.

The good thing about startups is that you get to do everything. You are most likely the only IxD on board so you have an opportunity to really make a difference. The founder is probably a propeller-head, not a techie and that poses some extra challenges as he or she will change everything from the background colour of the site to the business model several times a week.

You bring your own computer. The founder fixes you up with Adobe CS3 Master Collection on a nondescript DVD with the serial number on a Post It note.

An Operator

If you are going to work for the Evil Empire, you want to be Darth Vader, right? But before that can happen, you must endure years as one of the guys with the peculiar looking hats. You know, these guys:

Please note: Stormtroopers don't do IxD. The helmets are laced with tin foil on the inside and that interferes with the cosmic vibes necessary for quality design work.

You get a stationary Windows machine with two 21" screens. Your request to the IT-department for Adobe Illustrator is denied. You get CorelDRAW Lite instead.

Freelancer

Freelancing works for some people. You are your own boss, you do what you want, when you want. Right?

In reality, you have no colleagues and that drives you crazy so you rent space with others. That costs money. You spend most of your time networking trying to sell your services, but most of the people you meet are other freelancers. You need money so you take on projects that are off or too big, you have to hire other freelancers to get things done and before you know it you run a design studio 24/7. I've been down that road.

As an "investment in your future", you order a top of the line MacBook Pro with a second 30 inch HD Cinema Display, Bose speakers, an A3 Canon printer, Nikon D200 digital SLR and an iPod for your spouse on "affordable monthly rates". Ouch.

You can't have responsibility without authority

Options are numerous if you are into small-form-factor design. For me the important thing is that the powers that be understands the importance of design. And that responsibility is accompanied by authority. It's exciting times indeed.