http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005850.html

this is why Google's old design (2003 - 2009) was friendly and approachable even though Google was still a corporate behemoth. It was a little sloppy; you could tell that real people had been involved. Google's visual branding is now much more streamlined; things all fit with their "visual brand identity". I also find it cold and mechanistic versus the "googly" feel of yesteryear.

this is also why Craigslist still has the visual brand identity of 1994 minus the gray background. it feels real, it feels created by people.

note that you don't want this chummy feel on, say, your bank's website or a car website. there, you want stodgy professionalism and the polish that says "there are a LOT of people paying attention to EVERY detail here. no one goes rogue."

Expensify is supposed to save me from all that. But this marketing imagery -- on their site and on the billboard on 101-N in San Bruno -- invokes the YUCK. It LOOKS just as tedious and horrible as the process I used to have to go through. It tells me that to use Expensify I need to pull up a cup of coffee and dig in for a multi-hour session processing my expense reports.

A better marketing story would be to show the mobile app snapping a photo of a receipt clearly at a bar or after a business meal -- you know, the kind at a conference where you've drunk enough that you've expansively volunteered to be the one to pick up the $800 tab for the entire team and then quickly lose the receipt on the way home?

Won't Someone Take iTunes Out Back and Shoot It?
Apple's horrible, bloated program needs to die.

"Each new upgrade brings more suckage into your computer. It makes itself slower. It adds three or four more capabilities you'll never need. It changes its screen layout in ways that are just subtle enough to make you throw your phone at the wall. And it adds more complexity to its ever-shifting syncing rules to ensure that the next time you connect your device, you'll have to delete everything and resync."

Word up, good sir.

I recently questioned whether executives, CEOs, and some product managers are even able to truly listen to the findings of user research. Quite a few of them, I've seen, are not able to truly absorb feedback that fundamentally conflicts with their [necessary] view that their product is useful / necessary.

These usability study videos from Microsoft via Wired perfectly exemplify this issue. If I had been watching these studies, my email summary to the team and to every executive in the upchain would have had the subject "DO NOT LAUNCH. DISASTER RESULTS FROM USABILITY."

If I had been in charge of the product, I would have said "We can't launch this as-is, because it will make us look bad, waste money, and contribute to the downsliding of our brand image as a producer of shoddy goods." And then my VP would probably have said "But we're Microsoft. People love us. Of course we're going to launch it anyway." (Google, for the record, would frequently not launch under such circumstances.)

And for the record, it's a dick move to release study videos publicly. They're ALWAYS supposed to be confidential, although it appears that at least the participants' identifying information has been obscured.

I agree completely with Klein's premise:

User research is critical to startups. How else are they supposed to understand their potential customers and find product market fit? ... learning about your customer is the single most important part of your startup. If you're outsourcing that to a person who isn't directly responsible for making critical product decisions, then you are making a horrible mistake.

I also agree, to a point, that everyone in the startup (and company!) must be user-centered. This is nothing new: it's part of the old business wisdom of "know your customer" and "the customer is always right". Methods of understanding your users and what they really need and want have to be baked into your DNA: not only do you have to be able to identify unclear language in the interface, you have to understand people's real problems and provide a solution that they're willing to pay [money, information, attention] for.

Klein goes on to say:

I see startups do this over and over. They hire a consultant, or even a regular employee, to come in and get to know their users for them. That person goes out and runs a lot of tests and then prepares a report and hands it over to the people in charge of making product decisions. Half the time the product owners ignore the research or fail to understand the real implications of it.

She's completely right: this is a big problem. It's "abstracted research". It doesn't trigger our human empathy to read a research report the way our brains get triggered when we actually watch human beings struggle through a product, or hear the utter "meh" in their voices when they encounter a new product concept. At a previous company I worked at, we'd send report after report to the CEO that users just didn't really care about a particular product that he was gung-ho about, and that it needed to be reworked into a smaller feature of a larger product. It wasn't until he was visiting another CEO, who got onto his company's loudspeaker, called up a dozen random employees, and conducted an impromptu focus group for our CEO, that the message finally sunk in: users didn't get it and when they did, they didn't really care all that much.

Klein suggests that business owners should be doing all of this work themselves, rather than having a designated staffer:

The reason I talk so much about user research is that I want you, the entrepreneurs, to learn enough about it so that you can DO IT YOURSELVES... But having somebody else do the research for you is not an option. At least, it's not one that you should use if you're still trying to find product market fit or learn anything actionable about your customers.

It's not that I disagree with Klein per se. It's that I think there are personality traits common to many CEOs, startup founders, and product managers that make them more or less incapable of listening deeply to their users. It's a Myers-Briggs thing: strong leaders have to believe in their vision of the world and rally others to it. Ideally it's a reality-based view of the world -- and a very good leader, and businessperson, will be able to do this, like Steve Jobs seeing a world of beautiful and friendly electronics. In Myers-Briggs, this is a Judgmental type.

To be an effective user-centered researcher, you have to be much more of the Perceptive type. You have to be willing to see the world as it is, not as you want it to be. And somewhere in the intersection of both perceiving the world as it is, and shaping the world into something it could be while still adhering to its basic and deep laws of human nature, is where the best businesses are found. (I wrote about this dichotomy recently in Design and Uncertainty.)

I think the problem is not so much whether entrepreneurs do the work themselves or have someone else do it for them: it's whether they're really, truly capable of listening to the outcome even when it doesn't agree with their vision of the world. If that is the real problem, then it doesn't much matter who does the research, although to Klein's point it's more likely to sink in when the entrepreneurs are observing the test participants themselves rather than through an additional layer of abstraction.

Registering for Clear (www.clearme.com), their password field says:

Password:
(minimum 8 letters, must include 1 number, no special characters)

So I type a nice long passphrase. (What are "special characters"? Is a space "special"? Is a period "special"? Is the problem that the site is coded in a language that somehow doesn't have character-escaping libraries?) I get this delightfully cryptic message:

Password needs to be 12 character long or shorter.

Grrrr.

Also, it took me a second to parse it: almost ungrammatical, seems written by a non-native English speaker. (Now, as someone who really only speaks one language, I am absolutely NOT mocking people who are non-native speakers of English. God knows I've worked with plenty of native speakers whose spelling and grammar leave much to be desired.) But language matters. It communicates. You need to copy edit everything in your interface for clarity. Whoever wrote that error message was probably an engineer jamming through the validation piece, and bless their heart for at least providing an error message that described the validation rule more or less properly. The management of Clear's website clearly has no processes in place for designing, reviewing, and copy editing error messages.

RULE: Your validation rules need to be displayed in the page's instructions.

RULE: Copy edit all of your text.

@hunterwalk "But what do you want to save time FOR?" "...For mumblety-peg, if that's where your heart lies." -- Frank Gilbreth

— Ellen Beldner (@ellenbeldner) August 1, 2012

The full quote, from Cheaper by the Dozen (Amazon):

Someone once asked Dad: "But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?"

"For work, if you love that best," said Dad. "For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure." He looked over the top of his pince-nez. "For mumblety-peg, if that's where your heart lies."

Will Oremus published a column in Slate about the Tesla S luxury sedan. The column was part tech review of the car and part cultural commentary on what it felt like to him to be driving a luxury forefront-of-technology vehicle. He spent the lede and much of the article discussing his emotional reaction to experiencing the Tesla brand promise:

I prefer not to think of myself as the sort of person who would harbor feelings of superiority on the basis of a material possession. But it is extremely hard, as drivers in their BMWs and Lexuses crane for a glimpse of my ninja-quiet ride, to keep from thinking one thing: suckers.

Such is the insidious appeal of Tesla's new all-electric luxury sedan, built from the ground up in the nation's smugness capital, the San Francisco Bay Area. I don't even own the damn thing. I was merely offered a 15-minute test drive. But in that short time I experienced a level of self-satisfaction that would make a Prius owner blush.

Finally, he concludes

The main obstacle, for those not blessed with great wealth in addition to taste and an environmental conscience, is the price tag. As I've pointed out, the widely touted base price of $49,900 will not get you the standout performance and battery life that set the car apart.

America has a car culture. Our suburbs are shrines to the automobile; our highways are monuments; our economy relies heavily on the internal combustion engine and its fuel. We know this is bad for the environment (smog, CO2 emissions) and expensive (not only do we invest a huge amount of resources into car-having and car-driving, we also have to pay the political costs of having to secure oil from the Middle East).

And yet over the past couple of decades, just as we were learning about climate change and as gas started getting more expensive, Detroit switched to brand campaigns that capitalized on Americans' need to be tough and rugged. Small fuel-efficient cars are effete, European, girly, weak; gas-guzzling light trucks are tough. Rather than Detroit trying to make fuel-efficient cool, they made it, at best, a political statement of liberal hippies.

What Tesla's doing is making fuel-efficiency elite. They're creating a material object that is only accessible (right now) to the very wealthy, and through their design and performance / technical decisions, they're creating a vehicle to compete with other luxury vehicles. The electricity is almost a brand afterthought. They're not appealing directly to the green aspect -- they're appealing to the macho sex "I can afford to drop $100k on this depreciating asset" keep-up-with-the-Joneses aspect of our collective psyche.

We're all monkeys, and our brains always look for markers of status and group affiliation, full stop. Tesla is making electric cars sexy, powerful, and rich. They're removing the status tradeoff between going green versus ostentatiously displaying your wealth. Not only do you get people to gawk and think "that guy is rich" (women seem to prefer displaying wealth via other objects), you also get to feel smug that you're not burning petroleum as you cruise.

Smart, Tesla. Very smart.

Me: Hmm, it's been a little while. About time to save this Fireworks file! [CMD-S]

Fireworks CS5: *CRASH*

Me: Good thing there's on-crash file recovery.

MacOS: BigComplicatedProjectFile.fw.png size 232 bytes

Me: Oh fuck. It lost my work. Why doesn't the fucking file recovery EVER seem to work? I wonder if the file autosave itself is causing the crashes. Maybe I will search the Interwebs to see if I can turn it off.

Interwebs: Recovery files are not generated in the following cases: ...The Save operation resulted in the crash.

Me: Well now, THAT is super fucking useful, Adobe! Thanks!

"But what if your belief is wrong?"

When I was graduating from CMU's HCI program a while back, I was asked to chat with some of the prospective new members of the program about why I found the program valuable. CMU put a great emphasis on research and usability testing; having seen the power of data to improve my ideas, I had learned that I was wrong a lot of the time. I told the students that the HCI program taught me that I could be wrong. It taught me humility.

At the time I was coming off my Ayn Rand phase. I had believed it was morally virtuous to have an opinion that I fought for against all the world. Now, in my old age, I still believe this is true: but only if that opinion is formed by a relentless dedication to the Truth. The "problem" is that the Truth is an "arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move" (Tennyson, Ulysses). Our measured knowledge of the world is imperfect and localized. We are biased in what we think we should measure. We have limited time and resources to objectively measure, with FDA-like rigor, our software design decisions.

It is a Good Thing that in the software industry we've recently gotten obsessed with data. I briefly knew DJ Patil at LinkedIn and loved the work he did. It wasn't a challenge to my authority; it was a marvelous input that helped me do a better job. A good designer, a good product manager, a good businessperson: they'll all seek to enrich their positions with knowledge of the world.

The people who are endowed with the title of "designer," or "UX person," are often the people who are charged with challenging the data. They're the people at the organization who are asked to look to deep understandings of the human condition and from that derive a set of recommendations about what the product should do or be. At the same time, our recommendations only have clout (that's with a "c", not a "k") if they're more real, more Truthful, than the measured data we can collect. The value of a great UX / product person lies in them being able, presumably, to see deeper human and social truths than are afforded by the statistics we collect. And at the same time, the statistics and usability studies hone our intuitions and our knowledge of what people actually do when they encounter our products.

I've recently been re-reading French Women Don't Get Fat by Mirelle Guiliano. Her philosophy, the French philosophy, shuns much of modern statistics and medicine about weight management. Michael Pollan similarly argues that if you want to be fit and healthy you should reject most modern food science and, to paraphrase: don't eat something your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize; eat real food; not too much; mostly plants. Despite our plethora of research into food, nutrition, and vitamins, our "intuition" and "ancestral learnings" about food really seem to be the best way to stay healthy and fit. Vitamin this or carbohydrate that; those isolated experiments are still too crude to give us better answers than our "intuitive" understandings of what to eat. It's because what we eat is deeply entwined with our human needs for pleasure, sociability, nutrition, and psyche in a way that we don't yet know how to measure accurately.

Much of the HCI curriculum when I was at CMU was focused on helping software designers understand domains that they didn't understand. This was in the late 90s, concurrent with the rise of consumer internet, but before tech got involved deeply in our lives. We focused on research to understand domains in which we weren't expert, like medical, weapons, or manufacturing technology. Our mantra was "I am not the user." Once designers started working on all these consumer technologies, our direct real-life "my mom" intuitions could often, successfully, be leveraged to create good products. Gmail is a great example of this: it's a marvelously designed product that was largely based on the correct, complex intuitions of its original team.

The problems come when you don't admit, as a designer or product person, that intuitions based on your mom or yourself may or may not extend to what most other people actually do. So a designer who seems like a hotshot Howard Roark out of college may be great for that one particular project. But when you ask him or her to work on a design for a domain that they don't "intuitively" understand (since they don't have years of experience being within that particular community) they'll flail if they don't know how to turn to research and data to inform their opinions.

Now that I've been in industry for a while I've honed my intuitions. I've had a lot more data to inform my notions of what works and what doesn't. I've been fortunate to see my designs launched: some of them were epic wins and some of them were failures. Personally, this has created in me a quest to continuously refine my intuitions based on real measurable data.

When I was at ChoiceVendor, the startup that got acquired by LinkedIn, I learned that I wasn't thinking vigorously enough about the big picture: what makes someone realize they need your service? Were we being too optimistic: did they really need our product as much as we hoped they would need it -- enough for us to create a business out of it? I was overly focused on the intimate details of usability for what a startup needed; we didn't focus enough on our value proposition and on acquiring new users; I spent too much time on the internal usability of our product -- which was really good, but not enough.

When I was at LinkedIn I redesigned the signed-out homepage. Instead of articulating three bullet-pointed value propositions, my design showed people telling a visitor what they used LinkedIn to do. Why? Because I had talked to people who had heard they should use LinkedIn, but didn't really understand why or how. So we showed visitors what they could get from using LinkedIn, and how it would help them be great at their jobs. (The conversion rate went from about 4% to 9%.)

As a designer, as a UX person, because I've seen my shit fail, I'll only rarely guarantee that what I'm recommending will work. It's very rare that I'll back against a wall and fight to the death for a particular design. Because, you know, I may be proven wrong.

But I will always say: based on what I know right now, this is the best design for what we're trying to do. I've thought this shit through, pulling from the best of all my experiences, criticizing myself and my assumptions at every step, admitting where my (our) knowledge is imperfect and flawed. And with all this, I think it creates the effect that we want: makes sense to the people who use it, solves a real need; and solves it in a way that makes them efficient, cheerful, and empowered. They leave their experience with the system thinking "that was cool. I'm glad I got that done."

But show me the data and I'll throw all of it in the trash.

More: Design like you're right, listen like you're wrong by John Lilly.

A skeptic faces possible charges for debunking Mumbai's miracle statue.

Sanal Edamaruku faces a Catholic backlash after insisting that the "holy" water dripping from a statue of Christ in Mumbai, India, came from a leaky drain. Edamaruku is the founder and president of Rationalist International, president of the Indian Rationalist Association, and honorary associate of the U.K. Rationalist Association.

"The promotion of superstition and belief in paranormal phenomena dulls people's minds and establishes dangerous misconceptions about reality in our society."

If you aren't sure why this is important, think about this quote from Jonathan Ive regarding Steve Jobs' reverence for ideas:

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Emphasis mine.

This drives me nuts whenever I use Keynote. Most common tasks: Bullet points, type style changes, and borders on images. I just want all these fussy little panels to always be available to me. Look, I have plenty of space!

1. I have to visually parse all of the inspector icons and either remember which one allows me to set a stroke or click into a few to see. The icons are tiny and they lack text labels.
   
   
   
2. Once I find the proper inspector, I usually have to operate multi-tiered controls, with multiple dropdowns and those horrid little twiddly up/down controls. 
   
   
   

I get that you need an interface for discovering and navigating through these different options on a small screen. You know, like the small screens we had 15 years ago. But what would be way less shitty are some big-screen versions where I don't have three clicks of navigation to get to what is, for me, a common feature. 

Omnigraffle, for example, overrides the OS default behavior and affords locking-open different tabs within their inspector palettes. Adobe allows you to group, ungroup, or tab different panels depending on how you work. In both of these cases, the features I need, use, and want are available with zero clicks. They're visible onscreen and I can track my mouse directly to the control I want without having to fuss around. 

-- Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding, Jacobina Martin and Judith Martin. Kindle Ed., Loc. 3,305-16.

* Obviously she's discussing etiquette as it relates to weddings, but the point is exactly the same. Human psychology still responds to sites and devices with the same emotional wiring that we use to respond to other people's actions. Poorly behaved people and poorly behaved sites receive roughly the same treatment: people stop wanting to hang out with them or do nice things for them. 

A while back on Quora, I wrote:

Interaction designers are like Miss Manners. We teach websites how to behave; we teach them to say "please" and write thank-you notes and to tidy up when visiting at a friend's country house for the weekend. 

Visual designers are makeover stylists. They ensure that the hair is perfect, the clothes send the right message, the makeup is tasteful, and the accessories match.

Both aspects are important to nail if you want to be a well-socialized and respectful person or website.