Putting People First

Living with Complexity
Norman, Donald A
MIT Press, October 2010
280 pages
Amazon

If only today’s technology were simpler! It’s the universal lament, but it’s wrong. We don’t want simplicity. Simple tools are not up to the task. The world is complex; our tools need to match that complexity.

Simplicity turns out to be more complex than we thought. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It’s not complexity that’s the problem, it’s bad design. Bad design complicates things unnecessarily and confuses us. Good design can tame complexity.

Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. But even such simple things as salt and pepper shakers, doors, and light switches become complicated when we have to deal with many of them, each somewhat different. Managing complexity, says Norman, is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools.

Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

Read first chapter

Donald Norman
Business Week has named Don Norman as one of the world’s most influential designers. He has been both a professor and an executive: he was Vice President of Advanced Technology at Apple; his company, the Nielsen Norman Group, helps companies produce human-centered products and services; he has been on the faculty at Harvard, the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and KAIST, in South Korea. He is the author of many books, including The Design of Everyday Things, The Invisible Computer (MIT Press, 1998), Emotional Design, and The Design of Future Things.

Experientia, the international experience design consultancy based in Turin, Italy, will be designing the new website of the training arm of the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation (ILO).

The International Training Centre of the ILO is an advanced training institute located in Turin, that sits at the forefront of strengthening the capacities, capabilities and competencies of governments, workers’ organisations, employers’ organisations and other development players in the areas of labour, social justice and development.

In its collaboration with Experientia, ITC-ILO wants to develop a richer and much more dynamic and interactive website, to increase the Centre’s effectiveness, to foster its means to engage partners and beneficiaries, and to facilitate finding and sharing knowledge and assets.

“The centre’s website is a strategic tool in our outreach and involvement of potential participants, donors and stakeholders,” said Robin Poppe, chief of Learning and Communication at the Centre. “The user-centred approach of Experientia with its thorough integration of usability, information architecture and design will allow us to strongly enhance the Centre’s operational capacity.”

Experientia is honoured to have been selected for this prestigious assignment and to be able to work within the United Nations system on a project of such crucial social value on a global scale. After all, the focus areas of the Centre are the issues of poverty and social exclusion, child labour and forced labour, migration and trafficking, social protection, safety and health at the workplace, as well as discrimination, freedom of association, social dialogue, employment and development.

Although thousands of people from all over the world come to Turin to take part in seminars, workshops and courses every year, most of the Centre’s activities and projects do take place in people’s home countries and regions, which makes a strong and effective website even more important.

The project covers the definition of the website information design and information architecture; the development of templates for departments and course websites; and the creation of web design and communication guidelines. The launch of the new site is foreseen for early 2011.

Four new articles in today’s edition of UXmatters:

Juicy stories sell ideas
By Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks
Storytelling fits into the design process in many places. You probably know that collecting stories is key to user research and ensuring your UX designs tell a clear story makes the resulting user experiences better. But in this column, we’ll focus on that big moment when you have something to share and want everyone on your team to pay attention.

Three reasons why persuasive design isn’t enough to influence change
By Colleen Jones
While there is a lot to like about using design to improve our behavior and our world, achieving that is a tall order. If persuasive design is going to work on a large scale it needs to be complete. Colleen Jones lists three reasons why persuasive design is not enough to make all of its good intentions come to life.

Recruiting participants for unmoderated, remote user research
By Jim Ross
It seems new, online tools for conducting unmoderated, remote user research emerge every week. While this method of doing user research and these tools have generated a lot of interest and discussion, it is also important to consider how best to recruit participants for unmoderated studies. Though one might assume this would be similar to recruiting for moderated studies, very different methods of recruiting are necessary to find the large number of representative participants unmoderated studies require and convince them to participate.

Usability for mobile devices
By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain
The mobile space is the new Wild West of technology. Much like the Web during the 1990s, mobile is the new domain at the forefront of innovation. Users are discovering new capabilities, integrating them with their daily lives, and experiencing new interaction models. The tech equivalent of indie bands, independent developers—working solo or in small teams—can create innovative new software in the form of mobile applications. These apps have the potential of launching a few software engineers from dorm rooms and garages into tech giants, in the tradition of Google or Facebook. Of course, accompanying this new era of innovation is a new set of usability concerns for software that runs on mobile devices small enough to fit in your pocket, which you can use while simultaneously walking around and interacting with the world around you.

TAT, a Swedish software technology and mobile interface design company, recently ran a two-week open innovation experiment, during which they collaborate with the web community to sketch out an idea for two weeks and then build a video of the concept that gets most contribution and attention – measured in votes, ideas, and comments.

They concentrated the open innovation on three areas: the future of driving, the future of communication, and the future of screen technology.

The latter – screen technology – became the winner of the initiative. After concept design and video production, which TAT conducted internally, the movie which aims to showcase user interfaces in 2014 is now ready and available online.

Watch video

The way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life, writes Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd in the Technology Review.

“Each time Facebook’s privacy settings change or a technology makes personal information available to new audiences, people scream foul. Each time, their cries seem to fall on deaf ears.

The reason for this disconnect is that in a computational world, privacy is often implemented through access control. Yet privacy is not simply about controlling access. It’s about understanding a social context, having a sense of how our information is passed around by others, and sharing accordingly. As social media mature, we must rethink how we encode privacy into our systems.”

- Read article (subscription only)
- Read article (full text)

Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle. The Economist reports in an article that quotes Danah Boyd and Ethan Zuckerman.

“A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.” [...]

All this argues for a cautious response to claims that e-communications abate conflict by bringing mutually suspicious people together.”

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Adrian Chan of Gravity 7 and Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com and lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley, together wrote an article on how best to respond to the world of social data, how to metabolize it, and incorporate it as if it belonged to the very company DNA.

“If social data powers the new business ecosystem, then we must ask how it affects company fortunes. The business climate today is tough. It is highly competitive, customers have more choices than ever before, and loyalty is fickle, if it exists at all. Power has moved to the consumer side of the equation. Purchases and consumer power are no longer a matter of branding and brand image, but a matter of customer choice and decision-making. Consumers drive company fortunes today, and they do so with the help of an open marketplace that is overflowing with information. Consumers are empowered by their knowledge.”

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Stowe Boyd went to BlogTalk in Galway, Ireland and came back inspired: sociality, he says, has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web.

“The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of things that programmers care about, like files, directories, and access controls. The average person could care less.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.”

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A few days ago sociologist Ms Lucía Merino presented her PhD thesis entitled, Digital natives: a study of the technological socialisation of young people, at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

“Considering that young people nowadays are natives of the so-called digital culture, Ms Merino explored their relationship with the new technologies and how they learn and socialise through them. With this research, the author wished to set out guidelines as a basis to continue studying the so-called digital natives in the future.

Ms Merino used, for example, data from EUSTAT (the Basque Institute for Statistics) as a source of information for her thesis but, above all, she undertook an ethnographic study of 306 students between 14 and 17 from three secondary schools in the Basque province of Bizkaia (capital Bilbao). [...]

the thesis underlines the phenomenon of socialising on the Net. Young people use the new technologies as a means of relationship and interaction, and mainly within the context of leisure. For them they are tools that bring them closer to their peers. As regards this, and in the case of Internet, the PhD reminds us that on the Net everything can be seen and shown. According to the study, this represents great symbolic satisfaction for young people, and they themselves accept practices on the Internet where they can see and be seen.”

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(I have not been able to find the thesis online, and will update this post if I can find it)

Should we focus on changing the behaviour of people OR changing the behaviour of devices? That is the key question in article by Ajit Jaokar on his blog Open Gardens.

“The many privacy related issues raised by the Web will be amplified in the world of mobility and even more so, in a world dominated by sensor networks. Current thinking seems to converge on one important conclusion: through the combined interaction of law, technology and Internet literacy, people should be in a position to control how their own personal information is made available and used for commercial (or other) purposes.

In this post, we explore the feasibility of users managing their own data .. i.e. if we indeed want users to manage their own data, what are the issues involved in making this happen? We also look at an alternative i.e. allowing devices to mirror social privacy norms. Hence, I see the discussion as ‘Changing user behaviour to incorporate new device functionality’ OR ‘Changing device behaviour to mirror privacy expectations in human interactions’”

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People pushing sustainability don’t tend to be the same types who love our digital-crazed iWorld. And that’s a problem because it means they don’t push one of the great advantages of dense, energy-efficient cities: urban life integrates far better with mobile devices than does its car-logged suburban cousin. Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic’s lead technology writer, explains.

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Libraries will have to build a new foundation if they are to recover from these economic hard times—a foundation of valuable services, of user experience, not just free content, writes Aaron Schmidt in Library Journal.

“We need to stop focusing on giving away free content and do something different—something no other institution, civic or commercial, is doing.

This is where user experience and design thinking come into play. We spend a fair amount of time idly discussing what the future will hold. But this is a fool’s errand. It is this passivity that got us squeezed out of the containerless content game in the first place. Our time would be better spent observing the core needs of our communities and thinking of exciting ways to meet them.”

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Researchers say that touch screens are the start of a trend to make computers more open to human gestures, argues the New York Times.

“Device makers in a post-iPhone world are focused on fingertips, with touch at the core of the newest wave of computer design, known as natural user interface. Unlike past interfaces centered on the keyboard and mouse, natural user interface uses ingrained human movements that do not have to be learned. “

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Really? It is thought provoking from a UX point of view to read this article after first reading the criticism on gestural interfaces by Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen in the current issue of Interactions magazine (see also previous post).

The current issue of Interactions Magazine is generally on the nuances of what makes us human, writes co-editor-in-chief Jon Kolko, and more in particular “about authenticity, complexity, and design-and the political, social, and human qualities of our work”.

Here are the articles that are currently available for free:

interactions: authenticity, complexity, and design
by Jon Kolko
Frequently, designers find themselves reflecting on the nuances of what makes us human, including matters of cognitive psychology, social interaction, and the desire for emotional resonance. This issue of interactions unpacks all of these ideas, exploring the gestalt of interaction design’s influence.

The meaning of affinity and the importance of identity in the designed world
by Matthew Jordan
When a designer is thinking about ways to create experiences that deliver meaningful and lasting connections to users, it is helpful to consider the notion of our personal affinities and how they affect perception, adoption, and use in the designed world. In our cover story, Matthew Jordan explores the term “affinity,” leading us to consider new and useful ways of informing design thinking and ultimately help us design with more success.

Why “the conversation” isn’t necessarily a conversation
by Ben McAllister
Architects have long understood that the structures we inhabit can influence not only the way we feel, but also the way we behave. This turns out to be true in digital environments like social networks, too. Subtle differences in the underlying structures of these networks give rise to distinct patterns of behavior.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst: interaction design and the tipping point
by Eli Blevis and Shunying Blevis
Typical interaction designers are not climate scientists, but interaction designers can make well-informed use of climate sciences and closely related sciences. Interaction design can make scientific information, interpretations, and perspectives available in an accessible and widely distributed form so that people’s consciousness is raised.

Gestural interfaces: a step backwards in usability
by Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen
The new gestural and touch interfaces can be a pleasure to use and a pleasure to see. But the lack of consistency and inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery, threatens the viability of these systems. We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company-interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

All look same? A comparison of experience design and service design
by Jodi Forlizzi
The comparison of experience design (or UX, as it has been labeled) and service design seems to be a topic of interest in the interaction design community. Can we and should we articulate differences among these fields? Can the methods and knowledge of one successfully transfer to another?

Relying on failures in design research
by Nicolas Nova
The investigation of accidents within a larger process can be inspiring from a design viewpoint. Surfacing people’s problematic reactions when confronted with invisible pieces of technologies highlights their mental model and eventually has implications for design.

Solving complex problems through design
by Steve Baty
What is it about design that makes it so well suited to solving complex problems? Why is design thinking such a promising avenue for business and government tackling seemingly intractable problems?

On academic knowledge production
by Jon Kolko
Now, as design enjoys the corporate credibility of “design thinking” and with the social problems confronting the world growing increasingly intractable, the need for bridging the gap between practitioners and academics is more important than ever.

The latest issue of the International Journal of Design, eer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to publishing research papers in all fields of design, is devoted to the aesthetics of interaction design:

This special issue attempts to provide an overview of current research in the Aesthetics of Interaction. We believe there is no such thing as absolute Aesthetics. Aesthetics always refers to culture, to what people in a specific culture find valuable. In other words, aesthetics refers to ethics.

Table of contents
- Special issue editorial: aesthetics of interaction (Caroline Hummels , Kees Overbeeke)
- Designing behavior in interaction: using aesthetic experience as a mechanism for design (Philip Roland Ross , Stephan Wensveen)
- “It’s so touching”: emotional value in distal contact (Charles Lenay)
- Perceiving while being perceived (Patrizia Marti)
- Studies of dancers: moving from experience to interaction design (Lian Loke , Toni Robertson)
- Pleasantness in bodily experience: a phenomenological inquiry (Marco C Rozendaal , Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein)
- Computational compositions: aesthetics, materials, and interaction design (Mikael Wiberg , Erica Reyna Robles)

Read issue

If a provocative new study is to be believed, the world lives in a situation where American undergraduates monopolize our knowledge of human nature, writes Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times.

“In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals.

Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies.

According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.”

Read article

Two new articles in UX Magazine:

Don’t become a digital dinosaur
by Samantha Starmer
UX professionals can’t constrict a user’s experience to specified devices, touchpoints, or time periods. As devices integrate with each other and with the real world, we have to design for this integration and blurring. UX pros must work on the holistic customer experience—across channels, devices, time, and space. More specifically still, they need to design for the space between—the space between touchpoints, interfaces, and channels.

Unusual settings
by Stephanie Weaver
Seeing how UX design can improve physical-world experiences gives a new perspective on the field. Stephanie Weaver uses the UX design approach to the design of a physical public garden.

Mostly the young are interested in letting others know their physical location. Others are reticent for safety reasons, or against providing too much information. The New York Times reports:

“Internet companies have appropriated the real estate business’s mantra — it’s all about location, location, location.

But while a home on the beach will always be an easy sell, it may be more difficult to persuade people to start using location-based Web services.” [...]

“For now, many people say sharing their physical location crosses a line, even if they freely share other information on the Web.”

Read article

The New York Times reports on how online start-ups are allowing people to rent out their belongings locally, for a small fee.

“The Roomba was mine for only 24 hours. I had rented it through a service called SnapGoods, which allows people to lend out their surplus gadgetry and various gear for a daily fee.

SnapGoods is one of the latest start-ups that bases its business model around allowing people to share, exchange and rent goods in a local setting. Among others are NeighborGoods and ShareSomeSugar. Other commercial services are springing up, too, including group-buying sites like Groupon, the peer-to-peer travel site Airbnb and Kickstarter, which allows people to invest small sums in creative ventures.

The common thread of all these sites is that access trumps ownership; consumers are offered ways to share goods instead of having to buy them.”

The final quote by Rachel Botsman, co-author of the forthcoming book, “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”, is worth reflecting on:

“This new economy,” says Ms. Botsman, “is going to be driven entirely by reputation, which is part of a new cultural shift — seeing how our behavior in one community affects what we can access in another.”

Read article

Le Monde newspaper published (Google translation) today a summary of an ethnographic research project on smartphone use by young adult, presented yesterday at a Virgin Mobile press conference in Paris.

The research was conducted by Olivier Aïm of the Celsa Graduate School, Laurence Allard of the Lille 3 University and Joëlle Menrath of Discours & Pratiques.

Three key conclusions were mentioned in Le Monde:

• Most use only five apps, and few explore the Web via a browser, as surfing is not something they like to do on their devices.
• The smartphone has not only become a new status symbol, but the type of smartphone defines your core identity values – with the fight primarily between the “iPhone” people and the “BlackBé” people. No mention is made of Android.
• Apps are often used in the many moments “in between”, while for some the smartphone replaces the computer entirely