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January 29, 2004
emotional design
I've just finished the new book by Don Norman, "Emotional Design".
His previous books got me excited and enthralled by usable product design. The Psychology of Everyday Things and the Invisible Computer remain two of my favourite books, grounded to the real world, making a real case for user centred design. So expectations were high.
Why do you just want to pick up an iPod? Why are rollercoasters fun? In this book, Norman tries to put his finger on why some unusable products sell, and how usability can design the fun out of products. To do this, he proposes three types of design - visceral, behavioural, and reflective. Usability focusses on the behavioural design, and now he implores us to consider the other two types.
The problem with this book is that it offers little answers, or even tools to help these kinds of design. POET gave us affordances, the Invisible Computer showed user centred design methods working in real product teams, and thoughts on big-I IA (reorganise the company). Here there is little... other than robots.
I quaked slightly when the book turned to robots. Suddenly we lurched from products that induce emotion, including a good section on machine-mediated communication, to things that have to be emotional - a far easier topic, and one that AI, CS and roboticists have been thinking about for decades. For the last few chapters, we veer from one side to the other. The first example of good emotional robots is a vision for a robotic kitchen, with dishwashing robots, cooking robots and butler robots. This would almost make sense if robots were taken in their widest reading (doing physical things, but not necessarily moving), but a dystopian Tati-esque dream is painted, with the robot butler worrying so much about your lack of coffee that it cannot collect the cups needed by the dishwasher robot.
Norman's solution is to imbew robots with more emotion functionality. This seems to mean little more in the near future than wiring up sensors to replicate pain, danger, and hunger. We briefly visit Asimov's 3(ish) robotic laws. A few good examples of how these affect product design are given, such as Mercedes designing the break pedal to break fully if sharp pressure is applied, even if not fully depressed ("harm through inaction"). But then we've back on emotional robots, why cars should drive themselves, robots used for nefarious means and the ethics of building such robots, how robots may replace teachers... it reads like a poor episode of the Jetsons.
The epilogue had a title that sent bigger shudders through me - "we are all designers". The thrust of this essay is that everyone is a designer now, because we can pick and choose the best solutions (I pick this pen, this paper and this desk to write with). Whilst this is true, it doesn't mean anyone can pick up a piece of paper and start designing new things, nor know how to take the designs, test them, and get them built. We finish with a pretty-good overview of customisation and personalisation.
The post-epilogue offers a clue as to why the book is a bit of a mishmash - it started out as a manuscript entitled "The Future of Everyday Things", which didn't seem to hold together. The work on emotion was a separate project Norman was involved with, but then used as a framework for this book.
It's a rollercoaster. This book is worth reading for the examples, even if you disagree with some of the analysis. He quotes from several other good books (including The Media Equation, The Humane Interface, Persuasive Technology, A Pattern Language), so to me a lot of the ideas aren't that new. Less-voracious bookreaders will probably find a few good titles to hunt down. There seems to be a trend in academic books to quote from websites and the more populist press, which means, more than ever, you should check the sources for more depth.
If you're involved with designing things for people, you should give it a read, to be completist and to spark thoughts (including the awful Alessi juicy salif juicer on the cover). Just don't expect to come out of this book rabbleroused and tubthumping. Or wanting a robot.
A few chapters are available here.
I've just noticed that Don Norman is the latest keynote speaker to be added to Etcon. If you see someone trying to corner him, that'll be me!
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January 25, 2004
the fatal flaw of formalised social networking
As you've seen, I've been playing with Orkut, and previously with Friendster and Tribe. My general review is "mnyeh", and I'm beginning to put my finger on why.
This is the basic setup of social networking sites:
You have friends, who have friends. By declaring your groups of friends, you gain easy access to their declared groups of friends.
Now here's a big assumption: social networking sites actually work, and you genuinely meet and interact with new people (I don't think this is true, especially on the newer sites, filled with the same people as all the other sites).
The folk math of this says that everyone is related within 6 degrees - a chain of 6 friends of friends. If you convert friends-of-friends into friends, these chains get smaller.
Taken to its conclusion, you have no friends of friends - anyone you like has become a friend, and anyone you really don't get on with is disowned.
This isn't just happening to you - everyone's doing it. Everyone becomes one degree away.
Then the only way for sites to keep going is to attract new blood. Only new people cause new connections. To foster this, members become incentivised to sign up new people. Maybe you can only remain a member if you keep on signing up people.
Luckily, life isn't like social networking sites.
Currently there are technical limitations - these sites only let you have 500-2000 friends. I can think of several people who have complained that they have reached them.
There are, I feel, bigger social limitations: how many friends can you really support? Can you really keep in contact with 500 friends all the time? (Orkut in particular encourages mass friendship, as many pages are ranked in order of number of friends).
I remain unconvinced by the big assumption. Friends will introduce you to friends in the real world if they see a link - technology doesn't foster social etiquette and skills.
Technology can help introduce complete strangers with a common interest, and it's a pity that there hasn't been much movement recently on topic-based community sites (I still mourn Usenet).
Maybe after the social network bubble bursts we can get back to designing for community, rather than spending all the time on the hard UI and technical problems of social networking, and tacking communities, or dating, on at the end.
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ivrea
I finally got to visit Interaction Ivrea on Friday. I was there to give industry feedback on an Applied Dreams workshop that Orange is collaborating on. The visit was all too brief, but there was some really interesting work, and hopefully I'll be back for a bit longer soon. I must thank Jan-Christoph Zoels for the very gracious hospitality, and all the students for an awful lot of hard work over the last two weeks. Met Molly, but we didn't get a lot of time to chat - see you at Etcon.
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orkut
Orkut is the social networking site du jour, and it's certainly getting a lot of attention on the net.
Now, I joined this morning, and the thing I see that it lacks is innovation. Just where are the new ideas? It borrows bits from all the other social networking sites, tries to get you to fill out an anal probe of a profile, makes a pretense of being about business networking, but tries its hardest to be a dating site at every turn.
Why aren't they exploring different ways of defining relationships? A friend is not a friend is not a friend (this is a really hard problem, that the FOAF community has thought a lot about). How about when you accept a friend, you point them towards a few other friends they might have something in common with?
This implementation isn't bad: it's quick, and some of the action interactions are nice (no reloading of the entire page). I find the pale pastel blue, and use of fonts (especially the font with letters made out of people) to be really far too hippy for my tastes. It's certainly not clean design, with bad graduated borders placed over photos, and standard link blue on a pale blue background.
You can tell it's written in California - it asks far too many questions about 'body art', and has absolutely no understanding of non-US addresses. It does some geographic searches on zipcode, but doesn't understand anything foreign. Even worse, the box for zipcode or postcode isn't long enough for a UK code.
Most interesting to me is that the people on it are just kicking the tyres and try to hack the system. It's the same people who are on all the other social networking sites, which leads me to believe the orkut craze may not last very long at all. Sites like these need a long-term community to survive, but there can only be so many active users on this kind of service, and it's rapidly reaching the point where users are spread too thin.
New ideas are what's needed. Sites like del.icio.us and metafilter got a community without trying, as they were truly innovative, easy to use, and are run by people passionate about usable, useful software. You can only have so many friends(ters).
(oh, and it's poncily invitation only, so if you want a shoo-in, email me)
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January 18, 2004
no news
I'm rushed off my feet. For a variety of coincidences, I'm doing two people's jobs at the moment, which, whilst stimulating in one dimension, and mentally challenging for minutes at a time, means I have no space to think about my own ideas, and certainly no time to write anything other than Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations.
And on the other foot, the things I do want to talk about have self-imposing contractual obligations. So, tackling my middle-class blogger's block, I'm going to write about business travel.
There's nothing more whiny than complaining about travelling for free... but Heathrow at 5 in the morning sucks. Terminal 3 sucks at any time. Only seeing airport terminals, planes, a taxi, and a meeting room sucks.
Luckily this week I got to stay in a design classic, the SAS Radisson Royal in Copenhagen. It's a landmark of the jet age, the first hotel SAS constructed, and originally housed a city centre airport terminal. The lobby remains an Arne Jacobsen masterpiece, full of Swan and Egg chairs, and a sweeping spiral staircase.
My room was the coolest hotel room I have stayed in. A corner room with a great view of Copenhagen, a Swan chair, and sympathetic Jacobsen-inspired design.
And I got to make a snowball. But no one else was up for a snowball fight.
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January 05, 2004
relax
Two weeks off work, and I finally started to relax. I could tell because I had a huge stupid grin on my face (assisted by a Jacques Tati double bill), and also, when I relax, my brain just lets completely go. In the last few days I have started doing really really stupid things, including: leaving my rucksack halfway around Ikea, leaving the oven on all night, getting on the Jubilee Line going the wrong way (and not noticing for several stops), and today I put my pants on backwards, and didn't notice until it became urgently apparent.
I go to work, and how long does it take me to become stressed?
2 hours and 45 minutes.
Sigh.
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January 03, 2004
answers, and Ikea aside
Here are the answers to the London quiz. 5-10 seems to be a good score for anyone who doesn't live in London, or doesn't eat London with their own eyes, 10-15 is a very good effort, and anything above means you're a London genius, or you're me. blech gets to go to the front of the class and give the pencils out, with a score of 22 (not that I was expecting him to get the most or anything).
Each has a link to a map, and is therefore geolocated. If someone explains to me how to geoencode the images, I will.
Anyway, it was a crude way to point to loads of London things that are a bit neglected by tourists and Londoners alike. In particular, the new Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum, the Wellcome 4th and 5th floors of the Science Museum, Crystal Palace park, and Canary Wharf are all well worth a visit, even if you've seen them before. It's been years since I went to the Wellcome galleries - it's a far bigger selection of stuff than the recent exhibition at the British Museum (and you can still see the Brothers Quay video).
Sorry for the lateness of the answers - yesterday consisted of an early start, an hour of public transport, 2 hours of Ikea, and 6 hours of wardrobe assembly/carrying several hundred kilos of stuff up and down four flights of stairs.
Now, I don't think Ikea instructions are too bad. You do have to study them carefully, because very important details,such as ridges, tend to be the key to assembly, yet are not emphasised. What they don't supply are some of the finishing touches, and basic woodworking knowledge, that can make the job a lot easier. After all, it's at least 10 years since I did CDT, or picked up a junior hacksaw (and learning to make bird boxes is probably not a real-life transferable skill).
Important information, such as clearance needed to assemble and put wardrobes up (or to get sofas up the stairs), or that wall fixings for tall units are needed but not included, or that certain range combinations are impossible, are not mentioned at point of sale or in the catalogue. Frustratingly.
There's definitely a book idea here - Ikea: The Missing Manual - covering techniques such as room planning, how to drill, how to line things up, as well as range-specific additional information, tricks, and pitfalls.
Another idea is to provide an instruction video (or DVD) for some of the ranges. This has the ability to highlight what is important (and what is happening), which can't be done in a one-colour no-text instruction booklet.
Huge thanks to my dad for transportation, tools, assembly in small spaces, and waste disposal.
