Uservibe – Experience, Brand and Stuff

Thoughts on life and work.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Ask Not What Your User Can Do For You

Chances are your company is already doing a lot to get its audience working for it – buying traffic, SEO, promotions, advertising, you name it. But now those pesky advertisers, always examining your numbers and looking to optimize milking the audience cow, are looking for this mysterious holy grail called ‘user engagement’.

Now that there’s a price tag on it and ways to measure it – you set up to increase it. Shouldn’t be so difficult, right? After all, they're already there – what’s the big deal in getting them to stay? How hard can this ‘user engagement’ thing be? Can't we just study our numbers and optimize our product? Why not just look at what is successful out there and do the same?

If user engagement is an issue for your product or service then you should be asking yourself some more fundamental questions.

‘User engagement’ already suggests an aspect of a product or service, something that by following a few simple steps is easily improved. Using the term suggests, once again, trying to manipulate the audience to do something for you. It also suggests that users are other people, not us. This line of thinking leads to a ‘Shiny beads for the natives’ gold’ mentality. It rarely leads to any real traction.

Instead of debating how to make your product ‘engaging’, think and research how it can generate real value for the people who are using it, be it in being useful, entertaining or helping them feel better about themselves. Treat your users with the same respect you expect from a service provider. As basic as it may sound, it is not as commonly practiced as one would expect. If you are in position to, try to educate your advertisers about the value of doing the same – it’ll serve them better as well.

Focus on ‘value for the people using my product’ and not ‘user engagement’. It may seem harder at first, it’ll make it much easier in the long run – and you probably already know it’s the right thing to do anyway.

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Friday, April 10, 2009

The Ant and the Grasshopper

The Ant works hard in the heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper knows he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the government took the Ant’s supplies to keep the Grasshopper warm and well fed. The Ant has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

The 41 Blues Blues

“Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.”– John Gunther
It's hard, as a designer , not to feel for Douglas Bowman, the guy that left Google after leading a design team for three years after being frustrated by things like testing 41 shades of blue (Ordered by Marissa Mayer) on users to see which one generated more clicks. This is exactly the practice that kills innovation and makes me try the door of the silver Honda parked in front of my silver Toyota – they look the same because the people that manufactured them looked at the same statistics to generate the same car for the same demographic using the same understanding of mechanic principals. The designers were just executors with very little subjective input.
What made Google great is understanding of users’ needs – first, in building an audience by providing better search results and later with a scalable model that gave people a flexible solution, revolutionizing advertising, fitted to their needs and delivering better results for the buck than anything else. Many other great product followed.

My first encounter with Google was in 1999, when a colleague named Aaron Rutledge, who I’m a big fan of and at the time mainly a front-end wizard (he has done many other things since), pointed it out to me saying that I should really check out this search engine by these two guys from Stanford.

I remember the first glimpse – if it wasn’t recommended by someone I had trusted, I wouldn’t grant it another look. Not because of the simplicity, but because I thought it was so ugly;

The logo looked like a cheap rip-off of the Yahoo logo (Perhaps because it was) and the whole page looked dodgy. However, on second look I saw the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button and thought that this does look like a student project and these guys are cool, they do not take themselves too seriously. Ugly now seemed charmingly quirky. When I tried it, it produced superior results to other search engines I was using, so I haven’t looked back since.

Side note – When I heard the logo was redesigned, I was looking forward to see the result – I was disappointed. Still looks like a school project. Still ugly. By now, however, it may have become somewhat nostalgic.

Most people, when using the Google core product, only encounter a little search box on the top right hand corner of their browser and the search results page, yet the image everyone remembers is of the simple white search screen. This was what it looked like when they made it big – so many people attribute at least some of the success to it (and they may be right). It is also used by people to discredit designers – “ look what engineers and scientists can do without you”. My feeling is that Google succeeded in spite of it’s visual design, because it provided great products based on understanding of people’s needs.

While optimizing definitely hold water, measuring 41 shades of blue seems to me like a case of ludic fallacy

(from Wikipedia):
  • It is impossible to be in possession of all the information.
  • Very small unknown variations in the data could have a huge impact (the Butterfly effect).
  • Theories/models based on empirical data are flawed, as events that have not taken place before cannot be accounted for.
End Quote

There's a famous saying by Henry Ford: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses’’’. But it was when Ford concentrated in continuous optimization of his existing models that he lost the lead to the competition who started selling colored cars of all things (makes one wonder how many shades of blue they tested).

I hope Google will keep making great products by great leaps, addressing users’ needs, not slipping into mediocrity by constant petty optimizing and crushing of human creativity.

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Monday, March 23, 2009

Barrier To Entry

It is not often that one knows with certainty that on a certain subject one is the world’s number one expert, but that's exactly what happened to me a while ago.

I was looking at a profile of a company I have designed the logo for on Wikipedia. The logo rendition in the profile was a low fidelity approximation of the logo, uploaded by a user. I set out to upload the correct version. After all, this was the one thing I knew better than anyone else! Having edited Wikipedia a bit before, I was surprised at the long time it took me to figure out uploading images. Understanding where they were uploaded to was not trivial either and forced me to do some reading. Then, to my surprise, because I marked it as a copyrighted logo (which it was), I got a removal notice from an administrator. It took a couple of attempts, help from a Wikipedia wiz in our office and some inter-user communications to get the official logo up. This by a user not new to Wiki editing, pretty computer literate and, though not a lawyer (sorry, Grandma), with above average understanding of copyright law.

This is a issue we encounter with many computer based systems. They require us to learn the system instead of focusing on what we’re good at. A 72 year old biologist may be the top expert on gas exchange in vertebrate embryos and have computer experience dating back to the sixties, yet the level of expertise that correcting Wikipedia entry requires may prove to be a barrier to entry, leaving errors entered by someone with great understanding of wiki editing, but little biology knowledge, in tact. This doesn’t mean that it is not important to know the mechanics of what it is you do – a web designer benefits from knowledge of HTML and CSS just as a musician benefits from understanding MIDI interfaces or a driver from understanding how the car works– but the tools should be a jumping board and not a hurdle. You'll often hear Linux users mocking Mac users for having had decisions made for them; “The computer controls you, when it should be the other way around”. But when your goal is creating music, designing or typing an e-mail – that is exactly what you want to do – you don't necessarily want to have to write command lines or program your own interface. You are passionate about what you use your tool for, not about the tool itself and willing to give away some control for that comfort. Apple’s iPod is an example of product, in some respects inferior to products already existing in the marketplace, that defined what a digital music player is today – by focusing on users’ actual needs instead of the product’s features.

I've seen organizations forcing tools upon employees, making their work harder and less streamlined as they were designed to support the ‘system’, not the employees needs. Usually, it lead to frustration and tools were either neglected or people kept using them because they had to – as a bureaucratic burden pleasing a manager, not an aid.

Software is most powerful when it allows users to control the balance of comfort and control and facilitates transition from one to the other based on a users own needs and pace. Designers as well as marketers must strive to understand users’ needs, mindset and level of expertise in order to create great products.

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Sunday, March 22, 2009

Mexico City





















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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

What happened to the UGC* promise?

*User Generated Content

Not so long ago, the ‘next great thing’ was user generated content or UGC, anything form music and videos to news – young startups were lined up to stick it to the man and revolutionize the way content is created and consumed while boasting about the death of traditional media. Nowadays, advertising dollars are kept away from UGC and many of the startups are failing to monetize. Hulu and network sites, delivering anything but UGC, have become the advertising industry’s darlings. What happened?

Vanity
As with any new field, when startups ‘killed’ traditional media, they failed to see achievements founded and perfected by years of trial and error. Marketing, advertising, merchandising and even usability and design principals where re-invented from scratch – however justified in some cases, the baby was thrown with the bath water in others. Re-inventing a less rounder wheel may be confused with vision, but generates a less efficient vehicle leading to a rougher ride. As change was very quick, there was no time to optimize and perfect the new ‘wheels’.

Wrong Revenue Model
Many of these new companies, focusing on the audience battle, left the business model for later. A free ice cream parlor will have many clients – yet it probably won’t survive. Then, when VCs started asking ‘where’s my money?’ and the advertising was ‘slapped’ on, it was traditional banner advertising because that’s what the sales people, often closer in mindset to the advertisers than to the companies they worked for, knew how to sell. Many businesses said they were ‘experimenting’ with advertising, but advertising, marketing and sales were not well integrated into the products themselves, rather perceived as add-ons.

UGC, by nature, has lower production values and is more risqué than traditional media. This deterred many advertisers, weary of lower quality reflecting on their brands and cautious of having their ads ending up in ‘unsafe’ environments. Many a site, by chasing traditional brand advertisers failed in building an alternative scalable context-based model that would work better with the type of content they promoted. You can’t ‘stick it to the man’ and then ask the ‘man’ to buy your wears at the same time.

Not All Creators Where Created Equal
Under the flag of ‘Web 2.0 Democracy’, most barriers for self-expression have been lifted. Amongst them were many of the things that come with corporate culture such as addiction to ratings and dollars but also quality standards and craftsmanship. While a half-clad girl in a suggestive stance is likely be popular, resulting in higher serving costs, brand advertisers shy away.

Another issue is having to sift through endless amounts of badly tagged materials, from someone’s lame prank to everybody else’s kids (those are never as cute or interesting as your own); leading to attempted solutions such as ranking (which very few users bother with) to sorting by popularity (which tends to adhere to the lowest common denominator).

Many of the sites, with founders coming from a technology background, failed in understanding creator’s needs – those who did, failed in connecting them with audiences.

One group of creators was very quick in adopting these new ways of thinking – spammers. These new media parasites further frustrate users, keep advertisers away and pollute the brands they abuse.

Some UGC Models Worked
Not all UGC failed. In some cases it was so successful that it threatened traditional media and in others, new markets were created. iStockphoto, a user created stock photography site succeeded and was acquired by Getty Images after becoming a serious player in the field. Their secret was reliance on selling, not advertising and on a target audience similar to (or the same as, in many cases) the creators as well as clear guidance and quality thresholds.

Etsy, Spreadshirt and Ponoko are another examples where much was invested in understanding the creator community and relying on an audience that is similar or one and the same as the creators.

Other UGC, open source and collaborative projects, such as Wikipedia and Blender do not measure success in the money they make, but rather in the benefit they bestow on the community.

Not Over Yet
The UGC war is far from over as network sites, rising as a result of backlash from the chaotic fast rise of UGC, are still struggling to find a valid business model. UGC has conquered ground with audiences, but much of it is waiting for innovative thinking that will solve issues around monetization. Corporations have also identified the power of crowd sourcing and are experimenting with working it into their process.

So will the world be a democratic utopia where everybody’s a creator? Probably not. However, no longer is corporate media the sole owner of content creation and distribution.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Design Myths

Pepsi’s rebranding, having heavily bombarded the US streets has also stirred some waves in the adverting industry with it’s controversial pitch.

Most critics fulminate against alleged reverse engineering of a design and justifying the ‘North of a Million’ price tag in a pseudo scientific manner. While most posts critique the presentation as a whole, I want to touch on two specific points that many designers work into presentation.

In the presentation the golden ratio is mentioned several times: “The Golden Ratio establishes a proportion of one part (a) relative to another (b). Playing by these rules produces an aestheticism that is universally accepted to be in balance and harmony.” Also shown is an image of the Parthenon captioned: “Height and width of the Parthenon is proportioned to yield a Golden Rectangle.”

Whether the golden ratio supports the Pepsi pitch or not, most designers accept that the golden ratio yields more pleasing proportions, that it is known for ages – after all, in was used in planning the pyramids, right? Well, the answer is, as Ringo Starr stated when asked in the 70s if the Beatles will ever get together again; “probably not with a slight possibility of maybe”.

In his book The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number, Mario Livio lovingly debunks these and many other myths surrounding the golden ratio. Seems like it is a relatively recent concept, first appearing in the renaissance days. Also seems that when thoroughly examined, claims that people prefer these proportions over others have not been scientifically proven.

So why do so many designers and authors, e.g. Robert Lawlor in Sacred Geometry, accept these claims as truths without second guessing them? Because it sounds right. It is an appealing theory that proportions that appear in nature would be more appealing and withhold universal value. Hence people went back and found those proportions in Ancient Egyptian and Greek architecture – if you look in the right places and ignore some facts that don’t fit your theory here and there – you’re bound to find matches. Not only does it sound right, it also sells well – we now have ‘scientific’ justification for our designs.

Another virtue praised in Pepsi’s presentation that designers seldom dispute is simplicity. Simpler is often considered better, more communicative, usable and memorable in design – but is it?

Modernist certainly thought so. Jan Tschichold, in his book The New Typography preaches with religious like zeal for the use of sans-serif typeface which he claims are more legible because they are simpler. Later studies have shown that serifs play a part in providing horizontal tips when reading and increasing legibility be causing letters to be more distinguishable from each other (in print applications). To Jan Tschichold’s credit, he retracted many of his claims later and designed the serif typeface ‘Sabon’.

Studies of human perception and the way our memory works show that more ‘hints’ that at first may seem to be complicating things actually help us identify and remember things. One example is the way people with ‘super’ memory memorize a random sequence of names or cards – they add more layers and create a ‘story’ from the sequence, intentionally complicating things to make them more meaningful and therefore memorable.

Even following proven design principals is not always communicating better, as David Carson eloquently put it: “legibility is not communication”.

These design myths we as designers create for ourselves or have others create for us (e.g. Flash= 99% BadJakob Nielsen) become ‘truths’ used by anyone from designers to project managers to clients. We often rely on them instead of thinking and daring to experiment and innovate. Part of a design’s effectiveness is it’s uniqueness – something that cannot be achieved if everybody follows the exact same formula.

And while working within the confinements of Modernist style (and, yes, it is a style when the theories remain unproven), or following any other philosophy can produce beautiful, communicative and sellable pieces – we, as designers, should acknowledge that most design is not an exact science and that is part of what’s so great about being a designer. If this was not the case, computers could have done it. We should also respect our clients and ourselves by being honest about the way we approach and achieve a design. It may be a harder sell, but the client will feel they have been working with a professional, not a peddler selling them a magic potion.