Designing for the World
When we think of designing products for global markets, we often just think of translation, unicode, and other language-related issues. With the increasing importance of visual and interaction design, it is also becoming important to ensure the design of products is appropriate to various cultural preferences and sensibilities.
We've been aware of this opportunity at IBM for some years based especially on our experience with using our design centers around the world for the design of systems and websites for the Olympics. Each Olympics requires that the hosting country be responsible for a good chunk of developing systems for it. What we quickly discovered was that visual designs originating from certain countries were very different and sometimes differed significantly from North American preferences and sensibilities. It can therefore be quite a challenge to determine the best style to choose. Of course, that isn't any different from the other design decisions that need to be made based on user input. The point is though that this is another important factor to consider in design. It is also a great source of novel ideas to influence innovative design. A recent article in Fox Business reports Nokia Opens Satellite Design Studio in Rio de Janeiro and outlines Nokia's use of its world-wide design studios for the design of its future products.
Advances in User Interfaces
Many of us have been going to professional conferences like CHI for many years and seeing technology demos and other research into novel new advanced user interfaces. However, we typically go back to computers with their screens, keyboards, and mice. Although that environment is likely to be the optimal one for many people doing many of the things they do with computers now, it doesn't have to be the case for some edge type uses. I, like others, have been delighted to finally see some of that university research technology getting into products recently. The best examples are the Nintendo Wii and Apple's iPhone. Both use gesture as a primary input mechanism and do it really well. You know that a paradigm shift is happening when you can't just read about or watch someone else using one of these devices; you have to experience it for yourself. The first game you play on the Wii and the first time you flick your way through stuff on an iPhone, you've got it. Its a different experience entirely. I think this is an exciting development in the area of advanced user interfaces and one worthy of following - and one worth following first hand yourselves!
Read more in an interesting article Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine in the New York Times.
Well-Designed UIs Critical in Enterprise Software Buying
An article on Wallstreet Online reports on a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting on the importance of user interface design on enterprise purchase decisions. The study found that 82 percent of those who make purchase decisions consider an enterprise software application's user interface a determining factor when deciding to replace their enterprise software and 90 percent indicated the user interface as a priority when purchasing additional new software. This corroborates recent conversations I've had with people in large enterprises as well. I think this indicates two things. First, that user interface design is becoming much more important and we're starting to see actual numeric validation of it.
I would argue that users have seen the importance of good user interface design for a long time and this has resulted in us seeing better and better designed products for the consumer market. Remember that the user and the purchase decision-maker are typically one and the same in the consumer market. However, that is not typically the case in the enterprise market where users are not normally the decision-makers too. It has therefore taken longer for the importance of good design to be realized by enterprise decision-makers. However, this study and recent experiences I've had indicate that the importance of good UI design is now not only realized by enterprise purchase decision-makers but it is also seen as critical to them in making their decisions.
The substantive findings here are important but also the fact that they exist at all. Studies like this that examine the importance of design to business have in the past been all too few. We need more applied research like this investigating and quantifying the business importance of design.
Introducing the UXDesignCast Podcast Series!
I've been doing webcasts for many years and also podcasts for the past year inside IBM. A number of colleagues from across the industry asked me to consider starting an external podcast series. I thought it was a great idea as it would give me a chance to broaden the user experience and design specialists I can include in the sessions and, of course, broaden the audience of listeners.
The series will includes interviews with user experience and design practitioners from a cross-section of the industry. I will also feature a monthly panel discussion during which a panel of specialists will survey and discuss recent news, technologies, and research in the field of user experience and design.
You can access and subscribe to the podcast directly from the iTunes Store by searching on "UXDesignCast" or you can go to my podcast blog at karelvredenburg.podbean.com. Of course, the podcast is free and will be published approximately once a week.
Demographic Design Targeting
Increasingly, concepts from other fields are turning out to be relevant to contemporary approaches to design. It used to be the case that target marketing meant choosing which magazine your company would advertise its products in. However, now with everyone online, targeting also affects design. What's really interesting about this trend is that it is perhaps the most conservative industry, banking, that is breaking new ground here.
A recent article in Bank Systems Technology outlines how several banks are including social computing Web 2.0 features in the design of their web presence. They're doing it to appeal to a younger demographic and also to provide those customers a user interface experience that they're familiar with - including AJAX-based responsive Rich Internet Application user interfaces as well as blogging and commenting. It is also interesting that this trend tends to be more advanced in Canada. I think all designers should take note that the demographics like age are important to factor into their design work. While some may have done that previously, the new trend suggests that demographic design targeting may be key to addressing core business objectives increasingly being articulated by business stakeholders.
Web 2.0's Built-in Customer Input & Collaboration
During Web 1.0 and before that, companies had to go out of their way to collect feedback from their customers and when they did, it was in the form of customers communicating directly with the company. Web 2.0 changes all of that. Now customer feedback is an integral component of most social computing sites. And, the feedback is public. This provides great benefits to companies by getting more direct and regular feedback but it also changes the nature of the feedback process in that customers can also use the feedback from other customers directly as well. An article by Vicky Burger on Web 2.0 transformation addresses this topic.
However, things are not quite the way you may think they are in the world of social computing. Very few people are aware of a recent study which shows that less than one percent of visitors to social computing sites contribute in any way including providing feedback whether comments or ratings. So, the challenge here is that companies are now able to get additional feedback directly from customers but they may run in to two problems. The first is that unless the site gets a huge number of hits, the amount of feedback the site may collect will likely be very small (remember less than 1% contribute). The second, and perhaps even more difficult to deal with, problem concerns the likelihood of the sample being unrepresentative in some way. I haven't seen any research on characteristics of users who tend to contribute to sites versus those who don't and without that type of information it is difficult to determine whether the feedback a company gets in this way is representative or biased in some way.
Companies that are serious about making strategic decisions on the bases of direct customer feedback coming from Web 2.0 sites would be wise to adopt the best practice from market research of directly testing the non-response bias. The way that's done is to solicit input on the same questions from people who didn't contribute the information unsolicited and then comparing the results to test for a systematic bias. Without a specific focus on this aspect of Web 2.0 user feedback, companies could find themselves honing the designs of their sites based on the feedback of the small group of people who contribute feedback and these changes may not be optimal for the entire population of users who the company is trying to satisfy.
Importance of UI Design to Business Software
Anyone can look at consumer electronics and end user software and see that design is incredibly important to the success of products in that space. Apple's iPod and iPhone are great examples. Stellar visual, interaction, and industrial design has transformed the mp3 player market and is in the process of doing so for the cell phone market as well. End user software is also going through a transformation with visual and interaction design at the top of the features list. Both Apple and Microsoft are trying to outdo each other in the visual rendering of their latest operating system offerings (see my previous blog entry on this). In my view, delight results from a product that has been designed to address cognitive, behavioral, and affective characteristics. Traditional user experience design tried to eliminate user error (behavior) and tried to address the user's mental model by predicting what they would expect should happen. However, traditional user experience design didn't focus on the visual design of a system which directly effects a user's emotional reaction or affect. Getting all three of these attributes right, in my view, is when delight happens and when you see successes like I summarized above.
All of this is equally applicable to enterprise software, in my view, but the demand for great design hasn't been as strong in that market. Dennis Howlett has blogged on this topic and summarized some really insightful perspectives on this. He makes the point that users aren't the decision-makers in this market and, as a result, their preference for great design doesn't have as much impact. However, users in that market still demand great design. The incorporation of Web 2.0 user feedback mechanisms (rating and commenting) into enterprise software may well serve to make enterprise users' views on design more visible.
Social Networking Design - Privacy Settings
Do you know what your privacy setting are in Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter? Most people just take the default settings which are not very private. But you say, of course their not private, it is a "social networking" site after all. Social networking in Web 2.0 doesn't mean showing your embarrassing pics from last night's party or in the bath pics of your 5-year old to absolutely everyone!
Most people who have spent a bit of time looking into the privacy settings on Facebook (my favorite), for example, have learned to restrict certain parts of their profile to only their friends and also changed the default access to at least their network (which by itself can be a couple of million users!). A recent article from heise online provides some additional information on this topic. It is an interesting challenge to find the right default design point regarding privacy when the essence of the site is social sharing. Web 2.0 introduces lots of interesting challenges like this to designers.
Raising the Bar on OS UIs
I've just been looking at the demo of the Leopard release of Apple's OSX and I'm struck by how many of the enhancements could be considered Apple catching up with enhancements that Microsoft put into its Vista UI. While there are really cool unique UI features being introduced by Apple, I'm struck, and somewhat surprised, to see so many similarities to recent Windows enhancements. This is probably healthy though in that it raises the level of visual and interaction design in software products that are pervasive across all industries. I think that bodes well for the importance of visual and interaction design in general. Its always nice to see customers voting with their pocketbooks reinforcing the importance of great design.
Have a go yourself with the Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Guided Tour. Now, if I could only have a right mouse button and a backspace key on my MacBook!
Facebook teams with RIM
It often takes vendors of amazingly successful products to get together to push into a new paradigm. That may well just be happening with the partnership between RIM and Facebook. Social computing just entered into a new phase on mobile devices with RIM's Facebook implementation. While this is a significant development, I'm a little worried that it may also be creating a bunch of monsters. I already see many people around me wedded to their Blackberries while mobile and then being wedded to their computers using Facebook when not mobile. Now, what will they do. We may never be able to talk to them again! Of course, Facebook accessibility has already been available on mobile devices but in a much more limited way (its available on my mobile phone but only for viewing and updating my status).
Facebook teams with RIM for Web 2.0 on-the-go | The Register
Mashup Privacy Concerns
Mashups increasingly make data which were heretofore not made available easy to deliver to users or it is the process of putting together disparate data sources which is now possible. An article in Computerworld makes the case for privacy concerns from mashups much like the Kobe Bryant incident involving text messaging data. Access the article for more information on this.
Visually Stunning Charts and Graphs
In my experience, visualization of data is the most promising application of computer technology and yet it is often the most disappointing. I've usually seen either really horrible graphic treatment or beautiful graphics which don't have anything to do with understanding the data. This article presents an overview of tools, applications and techniques for visualizing data in charts and graphs which look really promising. Among other things both free and commercial chart tools, services, desktop-applications and web-based solutions (Flash, JavaScript, CSS) — you can use them on your server are presented.
An Interesting New Approach to Tag Browsing
The tag cloud appears to be the ubiquitous web 2.0 user interface control. When I first saw the cloud, I thought it was ugly. I did get used to it due largely to exposure. Despite its ugliness, the cloud packs a lot of useful information into a relatively small space and its fairly usable. However, I still think we need alternative design ideas for the function of the cloud. Here's one I came across which here is used to browse Flickr. You just type a tag word in, and you will get a 6x6 grid of thumbnails. When you move the mouse, you see a circle of related tags. Speed isn't its greatest feature but the idea is interesting especially the thumbnails in the center and the ability to drill down into them further within the control. The one addition I'd make is to make the circle of related tags illustrate relative relatedness by distance from the center. But still, some interesting user interface design work.
Simplicity vs. Complexity
John Maeda of MIT has gone through an interesting transformation career-wise going from computer science to art. That transformation has now led him to interesting insights into simplicity and complexity. Here's a recent talk of his on this topic. What I found most interesting is the insight that there is a lot complexity and simplicity in the world and humans like both, but in the right context. It is figuring out which context you're designing for that is the trick to great design.
Amazing 3D Street Designs
Do you normally think of graffiti as subversive art spray-painted illegally on the walls of a city? A number of arttists, including Edgar Mueller, Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner, defy that stereotype, painting and chalking openly on city streets and sidewalks. Check out these brief bios with 20 amazing images of their work from around the world! This stuff is truly amazing. I'd love to see it in real life.
RIA Competitive Landscape - Silverlight
Rich Internet Application user interfaces are the new competitive areas of focus on the competitive landscape and Microsoft's new "Silverlight" looks like a formidable player. It lets Web developers and designers create "rich, engaging user experiences with 2-D graphics, animation, images, media, and video," to use Microsoft's own description. Silverlight competes in this arena with Adobe Flash and Flex, with OpenLaszlo and Curl, and with a variety of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) frameworks.
Blasting the Myth of the Fold
Designing for the browser always brings up a discussion of designing above the fold. Well, this article sites some interesting research that questions the fixation many designers have on the fold. The author points out, "there is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users". Select the article below to read more...
UI Designers Learning from Animation Artists
Apple UI designers have learned how to grab the user's attention using a classic physical animation technique called squash and stretch. Think of a cartoon nose squishing exaggeratedly as it bumps into a wall, then going pop! as it pulls away—that’s squash and stretch. Animators have been using it for decades to give their drawn figures depth and weight As the newest Web 2.0 RIAs are getting more into what might be called cinematic, UI designers could do well to look to animation experts like apparently Apple has done. See the article below for more information.
read more | digg story
The World - Version 2.0
I gave a talk at Ryerson University on the topic of "The World - Version 2.0: How Recent Enhancements in the Design of Technology are Changing Companies, Universities, Society, and You". Here's the abstract of the talk.
Increased Revenue Due to Improved Design
All of us in the design business believe in the importance of good design. However, its good every once in a while to get anecdotal or better yet quantitative evidence. One company experienced a 13 percent increase in revenue linked to an improved design. See the "Read more" below for more details.
read more | digg story