Tag Archives: user experience

Someone save ‘save as’!

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Lion-NoSaveAs

Um, but what if I want to rename this version of the file?

This post makes me feel old. I sound a little like my father, or grandfather. And who knows, at 43, maybe I’m crossing over into that time where adapting to changes takes a little more effort than my roll-with-it 20′s and 30′s.

In the tech space, you live like a shark. You can’t stop swimming forward or you die. I get it. From a business perspective tech companies need to update and refine their products continually to keep up with competitors and maintain their brand image as being leading edge or whatever. I know Google and other companies are looking 10 years ahead at a time when much more will be in the ‘cloud’ and some of the interface conventions of the past won’t be necessary. I know it’s all coming. Still, tech companies do a notoriously poor job of smoothly introducing changes. Maybe this happens because they have their eyes so far into the future that they aren’t watching the present.

Apple, of late, has surprised me with a few questionable introductions. As someone who does user-experience work for a living, I get why they do the things they do from an “UX purists” standpoint. However, I’m curious if companies like Apple take into consideration (or even care) about brand perception as people adapt to new releases. Facebook has certainly tarnished its reputation by making its interface changes abrupt, disorienting and at times even questionable in terms of user privacy. Over time, I would think those repeated moments of frustration would color someone’s decision making process. True people still flock to Facebook but perhaps that’s because there’s an absence of viable competition. As to Apple, yes people still look to it as the vanguard of all things consumer gizmo, but I hear more and more rumblings among Apple faithful as to some discontent. Of late, I’ve been joining that chorus.

Take for example iTunes. I’ve had versions of iTunes from the beginning. I update regularly and I have to say, the latest version is decidedly more difficult to get used to. I expect an initial level of irritation with any update. That’s just the by-product of reorientation. But even now, weeks later, jumping from the store to my devices, populating playlists, transferring downloaded content to my devices, etc. feels less obvious. I find myself jumping back and forth from left to right trying to remember which button does what and where those playlists are hidden and how I add to them. I can see what they were going for. Maybe they’re even there from that purist’s perspective. I’ve had trouble adapting though. I have to believe I’m not the only one.

itunes-11

Very slick, but tell me again, how do I add songs to a playlist?

The removal of ‘Save As’ from Apple software as a result of OS “improvements” also confounds me. For many, many years people have been using Save As. In theory, if I am using Timemachine (the Apple OS backup software), it makes more sense to track versions by timestamp and to auto-save. This prevents data loss, etc. All good. Except that many people (like me) rename our files for different drafts as they are passed to others. The minute a document is shared the whole TimeMachine-as-auto-save-version-backup thing begins to fall apart a little for me.

Of mice and men.
No doubt today’s changes will someday seem as natural as the Mouse/Desktop construct does now. And it’s worth nothing that the Mouse/Desktop probably took some getting used to for programmers more accustom to typing in cryptic command lines.

However, the brilliance of the Mouse/Desktop was that it replicated something we were all intuitively familiar with from the physical world- pushing objects around on a physical space and using a pointed object to highlight or mark space. I believe that’s why touch screens were so easy to get used to as well. They were tactile changes that mirrored physical world cause-and-effect experiences.

Many of the enhancements to interfaces today are reductive. We’re removing scroll bars, buttons, and tools because a fundamental of UX theory, which is to remove the unnecessary. However, the reduction happening now is not accompanied by a more intuitive replacement. Worse, in some instances leaps are being made between devices. I understand removing scroll bars from an iPad but Safari does this on my laptop too, which when plugged into a monitor and used with an adjunct keyboard and mouse, is a little more of a nuisance.

Where the mouse eliminated the need for cryptic command lines and replaced them with a pointer we could manipulate similar to a prosthetic limb, now menu options simply disappear in favor of processes that happen in the background. ‘Save As’ was a conscious choice. TimeMachine happens “unconsciously”, so the user is detached from it. TimeMachine also assumes file indexing and naming responsibility which is perhaps a power I don’t want to give up because renaming files may have benefits, especially in version tracking across a shared userbase.

In UX discussions I often come back to the steering wheel in a car as a useful analogy. In the United States that steering wheel is usually roughly the same shape and always on the left side of the vehicle. Sure, we could move it right, change it’s form, make it a joystick, etc. in the name of making some new and novel. Doing so, however, creates friction with how people have spent the last decades learning to drive.

Could be migrate toward something radically different? Absolutely. Should we? Perhaps. But to do so, smaller, incremental changes should be introduced over time so that the higher order – the actual utility of the interface – is not so radically different at any one release, that it stymies attempts to extract usefulness from it. This of course is in conflict with the idea of releasing something new, novel and headline worthy – which is the goal of any tech company looking to make or keep a name for itself. What’s right for the user is often not what’s right for the marketing game. That’s unfortunate.

Apple, I think, has been stepping a little too far lately.  I hope they continue to sprint ahead and reinvent the basic mechanics of digital interaction. I’d just like it if, when they ask us to run along with them, they’d set a pace where we wouldn’t be slowed down by having to adapt to their leaps of intuition, nor would we be left behind because they sprinted too far too fast.

The conundrum of responsive design.

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I remember when Netscape launched its frames tag. I remember how it blew my mind. I immediately tapped out some code that nested frames in themselves rendering a vortex M.C, Escher would’ve been proud of.

I also remember how frames collided with the classical design training I’d received. As did the notion of setting a table width parameter at some percentage, or even better simply ‘*’ to fill the gap depending on the browser’s width.

These were the earliest precursors to a unique problem facing the digital interface designer.

The Golden Ratio does not apply here.
When I began taking drawing and painting in high school and college I spent a lot of time studying laws of composition – from the effects of visual symmetry to the almighty Golden Ratio. An underlying assumption beneath all of it was that as an artist you had full control of your canvas. You chose the width and it was finite and fully contained and would not change. Early on, digital design began to wreak a certain havoc on this fundamental premise.

As digital media have evolved more and more control has been taken away. For the print designer converting to digital in the late 1990′s, it was a shock that the right and bottom edge of the browser ‘canvas’ could change outside of your control. Browsers also rendered code differently, monitors came in different sizes and resolutions. Way back when even certain colors were unavailable. Time passed and the technology progressed. With the move from static page (hard coded HTML) to data driven websites compiled on the fly, designers lost even more control over the consistency with which their choices would render across a userbase. Current best practices in SEO, social media, etc. exacerbate this issue still more today.

Where in print the designer has near 100% control over the rendering of the piece (last minute, crazy client requests, noted) in digital the capacity to define how a page renders is shared between multiple parties and systems. Suddenly the computer science concept of graceful degradation became a part of the problem the designer was tasked to solve for.

Convergent Pipe. Divergent Media.
Now we are embarking on an age where responsive design (the term isn’t even in wikipedia yet!) will likely move to the forefront of the digital designer’s mind. While pundits will say with great certainty that media are converging, I would argue the opposite. Media are diverging. If television, radio, magazines and outdoor are considered ‘media types’, then we today have far more media types than even a few decades ago. Today ‘online media’ is a misnomer as there are a multitude of types. I don’t know about you, but I own an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop and a Kindle. Many of my peers do too.

What has converged is the pipeline, not the media. The internet now feeds all of these screens (and increasingly the television, radio and even billboards). It is a common infrastructure underneath a variety of diverging media types. When you experience digital content, you tap into this pipeline with one of a multitude of devices that interpret and render that content as appropriate to the form factor of the device.

Content producers – from publishers to advertisers – have continually struggled to chase after the functional requirements across all these screens. Where once you’d publish to a single format, now your content is served digitally and needs to be viewable across a range of devices, each with their own rules and characteristics. Responsive design seeks to solve this problem with a technological efficiency. Rather than creating a separate experience for mobile, tablet, laptop and TV, responsive design uses code to identify a device and respond to it by serving up the best rendering for the nature of that device.

Interestingly, this very complex problem is being solved with simplicity.

Is keep it simple, stupid (or smart)?
I remember reading years ago Marc Cuban’s post on the Internet becoming more boring and his perspective has stuck with me since (though I don’t entirely agree with it). Borrowing from his premise, it could be argued that the increasing requirements of our data-driven, socially-enabled, multiple ‘last mile’ devices, environment is forcing certain commonalities on digital experience design. Could this, combined with general usability best practices which are predicated on a level of intuitive familiarity and therefore some degree of standardization, be painting us into a corner aesthetically?

At this time I want to clearly stipulate that there is still great diversity in the needs and outcomes within the broad spectrum of digital media. This is not to say all sites are starting to look the same. That said, I do think there are some strong arguments to be made that certain broad formats have arisen which many sites are adapting to out ofnecessity. I might typify some these as the information portal (e.g. a Google, Yahoo, or CNN.com style layout), the blog construct (used for sites primarily focused on publishing information) and the social network framework (profile handling, media sharing, rating and reviewing). There is certainly cross over as well. What each of the above has in common though is a lighter reliance on interwoven graphical elements. More and more the elements of design are moving away from ‘hard coded’ graphics (jpgs, pngs, etc.) and more to those elements that are rendered by parameters entered with code commands (e.g. CSS styles, system-rendered text).

Responsive design places a higher premium on the generous use of system rendered elements and a reduced use of hard graphics. When hard graphics are used, responsive systems mandate that they need to be considered in a variety of configurations and scalable sizes such that they can morph to meet a 320px width or a 1440px width or greater. Likewise copy is best rendered in system text – with its designer-averse limited number font options – such that is rags dynamically. Even the once locked-down ‘navigation bar’ now needs to be thought about in multiple configurations.

That, my friends, is a lot to keep in mind when doing a GUI design. It seems logical then that most responsive design is very open and minimalist. The fewer elements to juggle the greater likelihood of achieving a pleasant aesthetic balance across multiple configurations. That’s the up side. The downside is an increasing likelihood that sites will begin to look more and more alike over time as ‘best practices’ funnel most design solutions into a common suite of tools and tactics.

So in having to increasingly keep it simple, are we in effect dumbing down digital design? Maybe.

But maybe the highest order of usability design is coming to the foreground now precisely because of responsive design.

Looking ahead through print and television.
Among some UX professionals there is belief that a GUI – be it mobile, tablet or browser, should not call attention to itself. The role of the UX designer in this school of thought is to facilitate an experience with minimal distraction by the navigational system being used to do so. In this sense the GUI is the wrapper around content – whether that content is video, static images, sound, touch-responsive activity, a game, or even a passage of text. The site itself is not the art but rather the mat and frame through which the art is presented.

If UX design evolves in this manner, that too will fly in the face of traditional design. Graphic designers who work in traditional media like print and packaging treat every word and element – from the legal copy and nutrition information to the headlines and images – as a part of the final art. What navigation there is in a printed piece (the binding perhaps) is often, though not always, outside the designer’s primary area of interest. Similarly, a bag, box or jar is navigable through its folds and tabs but the package designer tends to work around these elements, not with them (most, though not all of the time).

With radio and television, the first media to contain content changed or disappeared with time, the navigation (turning the dial or clicking the remote) remained distinctly detached from the actual content (the music or TV show). Radio and TV program producers didn’t have to think about the dial used to change channels (except to be interesting enough to keep people from reaching for it). The mechanical navigational systems of televisions and radios were instead given treatment by industrial product designers whose objectives were of usability and style but not communication of content.

Navigation within navigation.
With digital media served on screen bearing devices the lines get blurry. In some ways even redundant. Today’s physical digital device has its own mechanical navigational system (power and volume buttons, etc.). Within its screen is housed a content distributing intermediary (the site or app) with a navigational system of its own. No wonder older people find computers much more difficult to use than televisions. There is twice the navigation to learn.

In this light it is obvious that companies like Apple are trying to evolve past this redundancy. The iconic iPod spinner (and the mouse before it) was an attempt to solve this by simultaneously addressing the mechanical and digital navigation with a single interface. Today Apple is trying to remove as much mechanical navigation as possible as witnessed by its “one button” iPhone and iPads.

Interactive design has until now had two navigational masters, that of the mechanical device and the GUI. Today’s touch-screen systems and simplified physical devices are now pushing the burden of navigation squarely into the digital GUI. Where a TV has a remote which is distinct and separate from the content, the interactive experience nests the navigation very close to the content. This may be why designers have struggled to decide whether or not the navigation is part of the designed content or the container, much like a TV’s channel dial once was.

It would seem that responsive design, if it continues to gain momentum, will begin to force that hand. With responsive design the best navigation is the most simple, fluid, flexible and out-of-the-way. This is contrary to the traditional designer’s goal of styling it to the same degree as the content. This means that the digital GUI, like the mechanical device navigation of TV sets and radios back in the day, will increasingly be under pressure to disappear into the background while the content – a served video, uploaded image, shared post or installed game – will be the focus of the experience.

I am inclined to believe that market forces (cost efficiencies), an increasing reliance on data, and technological innovation (new device form factors) will exert significant pressure toward the adoption of responsive design principles.

How designers address the conflicting agenda inherent in responsive design (simple, intuitive, undisruptive usability) with the commercial needs of content publication and its reliance on differentiation and novelty to garner attention remains to be seen.

Bridging the gap between creativity and usability.

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For the creative person working in marketing and design, ‘be different’ is important. From day one, creatives are trained and usually rewarded for thinking outside the box, pushing limits and breaking new ground. As a result, when a creative person perceives a pattern in an industry, category, approach, etc. their natural reaction is to zag when others zig. In advertising this is often the difference between breaking through work and being lost in the noise.

The agenda of the user-experience designer is different. Someone tasked with managing usability needs to make sure the person engaging with their interface can quickly and easily navigate the system, accomplish their tasks and find their way to the next logical place. This has much to do with leveraging existing paradigms and conventions as appropriate. So where the creative person sees ‘different’ as an advantage. The UX designer sees it as a potential barrier to usability.

Much of the interface design work that goes into websites and apps falls on the shoulders of people who are classified as ‘creatives’. While a digitally native designer might snap to the needs of usability quicker, there is still an overwhelming urge among most creative people to substitute in the ‘new and different’ whenever possible. That could be in anything from the placement of navigation to the use of icons instead of words.

I recently stumbled upon a useful analogy for helping creative people understand where and how creativity and usability should meet and merge. I thought I would share it with you as you might find it helpful too.

My analogy is the automobile. There is all sorts of creativity in automobile design. From aesthetics, to the placement of cup holders, to the shape and position of taillights. However, every car manufactured has some common elements. A steering wheel on the left side is one (for cars in the U.S.). the gas pedal on the right and brake on the left, is another. The shape of those pedals (vertical vs. horizontal orientation) is yet another.

It’s fair to assume that car designers have entertained other replacements for the steering wheel. Joysticks, video-game like controllers, etc. And certainly, some modifications have been made (like adding buttons to the steering wheel for controlling the sound and climate systems). But by and large the steering wheel looks the same now as it did 20 years ago. That’s because the steering wheel is directly related to the utility of the car. If you can’t steer you can’t drive. And if every time you get into a new car, you need to learn to steer again there’d be many, many more accidents on the road.

In fact, when you think about it, if a car’s usability is compromised it can be immediately frustrating. Most of us have rented a car where the lights and windshield wipers are on different sides. Imagine you’re driving. In comes a flash rain shower. You quickly reach for the wipers and accidentally turn on your high beams. Think about what that does as you’re trying to keep your car in its lane and dealing with rapidly diminishing visibility. In a addition to frustrating, it’s also dangerous. Fortunately, digital design usability issues aren’t usually lethal (though they may lead to products being killed).

With web and app designs, it can be tempting to move the navigation or treat buttons in creative ways. Though one should exercise extreme caution in doing so as it can be the equivalent of swapping the wipers for the headlights on the steering column of a car.

Now, you could dig in here and call up the iPod as an example. The now iconic spinner wheel was a huge shift in interface. It was very different, very new and ultimately very successful.  That said, I have two thoughts on the spinner. One, Apple probably spent a small fortune testing usability before it released the product. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m guessing they did. Second, the spinner found its home in a whole new device without a prior paradigm to reference. MP3 players were far different from the mechanical needs of portable CD players. If you’re creating a new product category, the opportunity might arise for a complete break from convention. But if you’re designing for a device with a history – like computers and I would argue even by similarity, tablets (which still rely heavily on the visual concept of buttons) – you’ll likely get better usability by keeping critical aspects of the interface familiar.

By the way, the car analogy is also useful for clients. An agency’s clients often seek to be new and different just like their creative teams. Marketers know that sameness in advertising rarely lead to gains in marketshare. However, websites and apps are not really advertisements. Sure it helps a brand, but by the time someone is on your website or using your app, the goal has changed. No longer are you looking to ‘break through’ or ‘stand out’ in the advertising sense. The job instead is to deliver on a promise and experience. Good experiences can have a degree of novelty, true, but they also should be efficient and easy. They should feel satisfying and never be confusing. Navigating the experience should be quickly familiar even if the screens loaded are full of new information, ideas, games, videos, tools or whatever. This is precisely why designing a website or app is like designing a car. You’re getting into it to go somewhere and do something. Anything that makes that harder in turn makes the vehicle less useful, no matter how sexy it is on the surface.