Archives / March 2010

Games are important to keep an eye on today, regardless of whether you consider yourself a "gamer." For one thing, they're a handy leading indicator of which technology platform will dominate a given market. Windows PCs have always had more games available than Macs, roughly in step with the 90% market share of Windows. But Apple has recently become a haven for mobile gaming, as the iPhone has many more games available than do other mobile platforms. If you're wondering (as many people have asked me) whether Google's Android phones will mount a challenge to the iPhone, just compare the number of currently available Android games to the games in the iPhone App store. So far, no contest.

Just why games serve as a crystal ball for a given tech market is a subject for another time. But consider that one of the earliest uses of mainframe computers (on the PDP-1) was a game called Spacewar. In short - where the users are, or will be, the games appear.

Games also give an essential view to the latest advances in user interface and overall design on a given platform. I don't just mean "where is 3-D rendering today" as much as what UI elements are being tried out. Indie game developers in particular take risks and try new things. This is a rare, accurate use of the word "innovation" - you do actually get to see new things tried out in indie games, some of which later become ubiquitous mainstream technologies.

Finally, playing games invites you to consider: is this a good experience, or a bad experience? What makes it so? This is important exercise to become more sensitive to experiences and a better evaluator (and practitioner) in this field.

The good news is that the Internet has made thousands of games available, for little or nothing, to be played at any time - alone or in groups. I've been watching this space for years.

Last weekend marked the five-year anniversary of Good Experience Games, my list of "games that offer a good experience." Almost all of them are available to play right now, at no charge, so you should take a spin through some of them if you're interested. (And check out the newly launched iPhone games page, too.)

User experience professionals need to come out of the ivory tower, expand their horizons, put down their frameworks, pick up their empathy and listening skills, and work with the people - facilitating a connection between stakeholders in the organization and actual real live customers. Such was my message in my interview with UXMag today (to be posted soon).

Then just now I came across a quote that describes the trend perfectly. I've edited it slightly from the original, which appears in David Brooks's column today:

One gets the sense, at least from the outside, that the intellectual energy is no longer with the [practitioners] who construct abstract and elaborate models. Instead, the field seems to be moving in a humanist direction. Many [practitioners] are now trying to absorb lessons learned by psychologists, neuroscientists and sociologists. They're producing books about subjects such as how social identities shape choices.

Brooks is actually talking about economists, but I think this could - or should - be applied to user experience professionals, if and when they really start a transformation of the discipline.

One good way to make the change is to attend Gel 2010, coming up next month in New York. Tickets still available.

Turns out Steve Jobs emails a few Apple customers a week, inspiring surprise and awe (one customer vowed never to empty his inbox again).

Writing personal emails to customers is a severely undervalued practice. For over ten years I've sent out personal welcome notes to new subscribers of my email newsletter and I always get surprised and delighted messages back. It does take a few extra minutes but the rewards are so great that I can't believe more people don't do this. Some new subscribers, in fact, tell me in their replies that Good Experience is the first newsletter they've ever been welcomed to (by a person, as opposed to a robot or database script). I can't believe it - no one else does this, really?!

Other subscribers tell me that they're returning to Good Experience after having changed jobs or just email addresses - and say that they came back because it's one of the few newsletters they actually read. I think it's due, in part, to their knowing that it's a real person writing the emails and a real person writing them back when they have a comment.

As for Apple - Steve Jobs is doing the right thing. And for those companies who want to jump on the bandwagon: please don't hand the job to the assistant PR intern, to cut-and-paste press releases and send them out From: the CEO. There's no shortcut to good customer experience. If the actual human CEO (or newsletter author, or whoever) spends a few extra minutes a week writing customers, results will arrive quickly and unmistakably.

Just a tip that "over-sharing" is a topic coming soon to your favorite media source. The story goes like this: with the rise in popularity of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.), users have been encouraged to share - usually publicly, with the world - all sorts of data about themselves, their relationships, and their activities. But now some people are beginning to question whether they should post their entire life online. Maybe there's such a thing as over-sharing your information.

Several things have contributed to this growing awareness of over-sharing. One of my recent favorites is a site called Please Rob Me, which showed the notices of users on Foursquare, a service that lets you post publicly, to the world, the restaurant or bar you're standing in right then. In other words, Please Rob Me showed you hundreds of people announcing that they were away from home. As the site says today (and it has since stopped showing the Foursquare feed), "If you don't want your information to show up everywhere, don't over-share."

It would seem to be a common-sense suggestion: think before you share something publicly. (Do people really want to know this? Is it actually helpful? Relevant? Are there any tradeoffs or potential drawbacks from sharing it with the entire world?)

The problem is, the social-networking sites don't do much to ask these questions. To the contrary, they're set up to encourage users to share as much as possible, as often as possible, as publicly as possible. That's intentional: these sites succeed by increasing the activity within the network. Yes, there are privacy settings to limit access to some data - but these settings are never the default. Only a tiny minority of users make the effort to opt out. Everyone else shares with the world.

Today the Times reported on the amount of personal data that can be gleaned from smart data-mining on social networks. While an interesting finding, I don't think it's even necessary to go that far: just browse around on practically any Web 2.0 site to see the incredibly personal information that people post. I'm just waiting for a site to launch where people enthusiastically display their birthdates and Social Security numbers because, y'know, everyone's doing it.

Don't misunderstand me: I like the social networking sites. I have accounts with most of them and post fairly frequently on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, which you're welcome to subscribe to. But I try to adhere to some common-sense boundaries about what's relevant and OK to share, and what's off-limits.

Much like the other skills of bit literacy, this boundary-setting is the responsibility of the users, since the companies don't have much to gain from encouraging it. I hope the coming discussion about over-sharing will help nudge users in the right direction.

For over ten years I've written an email newsletter about customer experience, and "good experience" in general, for thousands of readers. And until last week, I created every single newsletter in plain ASCII text.

I switched the newsletter to HTML last week and got a lot of reader responses, which gave me a bird's-eye view of the user experience of email newsletters, both in plaintext and HTML.

Overall, I'm happy with the decision to switch to HTML, but there are still reasons to argue for the ASCII format. Here's what I've learned over the years, and last week, about email format:

Why ASCII is good

ASCII is the simplest possible format for an email. This delivers several benefits:

• Philosophical purity: any enlightened user understands the value of using the simplest tool for the job. And in the digital world, it doesn't get any simpler than ASCII. It resists all fads, bucks all trends, confounds all efforts to complicate and obfuscate. Bits become words with perfect purity and clarity, with no company or standard or license mediating or toll-collecting or gate-keeping in the middle.

• Compatibility with every device, every platform, every operating system on earth: everything understands ASCII. No need to upgrade to a different version, or tweak the code to adhere to proprietary standards. ASCII works, exactly right, every time.

• WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get with ASCII. If I write "hello world," then "hello world" is displayed on every computer, phone, and other devices that receives that text. And by wrapping (inserting a carriage return) at a certain width - I like 68 characters - one can control the margins and layout of the entire document.

• Clean, virus-free content: ASCII is open and transparent about its contents. There's no way to hide malicious code in the body of an ASCII email, like one can do in an HTML email. ASCII is your guileless friend who may not be flashy or trendy, but is totally reliable and honest. (Which type of person do you prefer to hang out with?)

• Smaller file size, and thus shorter load time, than what one would get with HTML.

• A message to the universe: As one newsletter reader put it, an ASCII email makes a statement in its very look. Quoting his email...

I'll admit that the HTML newsletter looks prettier, but I still find the old-fashioned Courier typeface easier to read. There's something sturdy and sensible about a fixed-pitch font like Courier. To me, it has always meant, "What you are now reading is so true and so important that we don't even care that our art director thinks it's boring."

However...

Why ASCII isn't so good

With all the above benefits in mind, there are some real drawbacks to ASCII.

• ASCII looks crappy in Outlook. Microsoft Outlook, arguably the most popular email program in the world (and likely to stay that way for a long time), displays ASCII email in what has to be the ugliest font in its library. It just looks hideous. Over the years I've occasionally gotten emails from newsletter readers saying something like, "Why do you have to send your newsletter in such a gross font?" At first I thought this was strange, since ASCII has no font - it's just letters, nothing else - but I've come to realize that these were Outlook users who are stuck with the default way that Outlook displays ASCII. The crazy thing is that Microsoft could fix this problem with a single line of code: just changing the default to show ASCII in a perfectly pleasant and readable font, like Apple Mail and Gmail do.

• ASCII hyperlinks don't work well in Outlook. If you happen to type a space character after a URL, Outlook may not make that link clickable. (Or it's clickable, but Outlook adds a %20 at the end of the URL which breaks it.) I haven't tested fully to see what all the conditions are for this to happen, but I do know that Outlook is lacking some important, and totally basic, functions for interpreting URLs in ASCII.

• Wrapped ASCII can look strange on the iPhone. If you wrap an ASCII message at, say, 65 or 68 characters, the iPhone's email program (if held in portrait mode) can only fit 40-or-so characters across the width of its screen.

That leaves the iPhone showing lines that tend to
wrap strangely, like this,
and then are followed by much longer lines like this.

This isn't a bug in the iPhone - it's just displaying the text as it was created - but it's something worth noting. Unwrapped text looks better on the iPhone. (On the plus side, the iPhone shows ASCII in a pleasant-looking font.)

In short, Microsoft Outlook is the bane of ASCII email's existence. A conspiracy-minded theorist might suggest that Microsoft intentionally neglects to handle ASCII well, so as to nudge people toward using Microsoft-owned protocols, standards, and technologies to create their emails. But I think basic carelessness is more likely the cause.

Whatever the root cause, Outlook is just really, constantly, consistently annoying. I even took a photo. This is me shouting, "Outloooooooook!"

(Click the graphic to hear me shout.)

Now for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Why HTML is good

After I sent the HTML newsletter, I heard from many readers - a clear majority of the feedback - that they preferred the new format. My conclusion was that HTML provides a better reader experience, and thus is by definition a better format for the newsletter - which is, after all, named Good Experience.

Here's why they said they liked the HTML:

• The font is prettier/easier to read/more professional looking. I'd guess that most of these folks are Outlook users (since, as I said, Apple Mail and the iPhone and Gmail all display ASCII emails in a nice-looking font) - but, like it or not, Outlook is the email program for a huge percentage of the world.

• Links are easier to see, since they're blue and underlined - and as an extra bonus, they don't break in Outlook like some ASCII URLs do, as described above.

• You can display images, something that by definition is unavailable in ASCII.

• If you keep the HTML simple, the formatting - headers, bold text, etc. - make the message easier to scan. The caveat here is keep it simple - in other words, adhere to the principles that made ASCII great for so long. The deadly drawback of HTML is that it's so easy, and so tempting for some, to complicate the design and go overboard with features - which, according to my readers, most other newsletters tend to do.

• If you keep the HTML simple, Outlook can display it: I'm sorry to hammer on this point, but Outlook - much like its companion Web browser, Internet Explorer - can't reliably display HTML correctly unless it's extremely basic in structure. This limits the amount you can do - in my own newsletter, Outlook had trouble displaying text to the right of an image, something every other mail client seemed to handle fine - but this may be a blessing as it forces you to keep the design simple.

• A small point, but you can put a logo in the message. Interestingly enough, last week was the first time I've ever gotten comments on the Good Experience logo, which I like quite a bit, even though it's been up on the site for several months.

Why HTML is not so good

Although I think the benefits outweigh them, it's worth acknowledging the drawbacks of HTML.

• It takes a lot longer to create. I could whip up an ASCII newsletter in a few minutes... but the HTML version takes more time and effort, given that I'm manually adding the tags and hyperlink definitions. Some services (like Campaign Monitor, which I use) offer a WYSIWYG editor for HTML mails, but you give up some control of formatting - which I need to have for Good Experience. But even with the editor it's still slower than zipping along with a plaintext format.

• The iPhone displays most HTML email in miniscule text, forcing users to zoom in and then scroll right to read to the end of the line. Anyone sending HTML email should know how to get around that, and I'm surprised how few newsletters out there do it right. With a little research I've found it's not hard to make the code changes - for example, define all the tables with width 100%.

• HTML allows the publisher to collect ever more information about users that the users aren't aware is being collected. Within Good Experience I can see who opened each email and which link any given person clicked on - which is a nice feature for me, I'm not complaining - but I am aware that this is part of a larger societal trend toward companies collecting, tracking, and analyzing more about customers than the customers know. I have mixed feelings about even having this new ability, let alone using it. Privacy, security, and over-sharing are much bigger topics for another column, but I thought I'd bookmark them here.

Conclusion

My conclusion is, forget everything I've just said. In the end it's really not the format of the newsletter that matters. Instead, a good experience depends on the content more than the format of the content. With that in mind, I'll close on my favorite bit of feedback from last week... it's from the same reader I quoted above. Here's how he ended his note:

The new typeface seems to have not as much weight (i.e., the lines that comprise each character are not as thick as Courier), and the kerning (space between the characters) is a little too tight for my taste. In short, I'm squinting a bit to read it.

But I enjoy your newsletter so much that I'd read it even if you changed the font to Wingdings.

You can try it out for yourself: sign up for the Good Experience email newsletter.

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See also: Graph of the mail clients reading the newsletter (on first pass, appears that Apple software is most popular)