December 2000 Archives
Wednesday, December 20, 2000
Enjoy the Break: Good Experience is taking time off for the holidays. Have a great holiday season, and we'll return sometime in January.
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Tuesday, December 19, 2000
End-of-Year Thoughts: This evening I was fortunate enough to attend the "winter show" of the New York University's ITP (Interactive Telecommunication Program), where the students displayed their end-of-semester projects.
All of these works had something to do with interactive technology... and they were good. Some of them were more engaging, creative, and thought-provoking than anything I've seen in the Web industry this whole year. Several of the projects pointed toward the coming emergence of bit literacy and related issues; hence these end-of-year thoughts.
One of the most striking pieces was the "wooden mirror," built somewhat like the highway signs, or train station displays, that flip black or neon "pixels" (actually small plastic tiles) into place to spell a message. In this case, the pixels were made of wooden tiles, whose sides were light or dark-colored wood. The key to the piece was a hidden video camera that captured the image of a person walking up to the mirror. The wood "pixels" would then flip into place to display, approximately real-time, the image that the videocamera saw. You could wave your arm in front of the "mirror" and see the dark tiles do the wave, right about where your arm was.
I liked the irony in the wooden mirror: real bits (the videocamera) fed into the wooden atoms (the tiles) that pretended to be bits (pixels), which in turn formed an image that looked somewhat like the atom-based person (waving his arm). Bits to atoms to bits to atoms.
This idea of bits and atoms cooperating, of trading roles, appeared a few different times in the projects. One of my favorites used a video camera, a fish tank with two live goldfish, and three computer monitors. Here's how it worked: the video camera stayed focused on the fish tank, and fed the streaming video into the first computer monitor. So the first monitor showed an decent-looking video feed of the fish swimming around. Next to it, the second monitor showed a pixellated version of the first monitor (meaning the image was the same but much more blocky, since the pixels were effectively much bigger). Thus the second monitor asked the question: how few pixels -- how few bits -- before you'll accept that the image doesn't look "real"?
The third and final monitor was just a genius stroke: it showed the same image, except instead of pixels (big or small), it represented the fish with ASCII characters -- the pixels of each fish were letters. So on the monitor was a moving, fish-shaped image made up of several rows of "fishfishfishfish"... If you've ever seen "ASCII art" in some people's e-mail signatures, just imagine a fish-sized shape -- moving in the same direction as the real fish in the fish tank. Yes, it was real-time streaming ASCII video. This was one rich project.
The fish project asked: what kind of bits need to represent fish-atoms? Must they be conventional picture-element bits, or might they be old-fashioned text bits? The friction between graphical bits and text bits will become more apparent in industry in the next year or two.
I'll just mention a couple of other excellent projects. First, I saw a punching bag with sensors inside; speakers above the bag would groan, or cry out, or taunt the human, depending on how hard the person hit the bag. One of the student creators explained that the bag represented the frustration she felt from using her PC. So instead of "throwing the monitor out the window," she could just punch the bag. And how ironic; the bits in the bag (sensors, sound software) enabled an atom-based experience (the punch) that helped work out frustration about (PC-based) bits. Bits to atoms to bits.
Moreover, the punching bag's bits were acting solely in a support role. They weren't connecting with other bits, and other devices, as part of some global sentient Internet-brain, as the hypesters tell us the Net will become. They weren't even visible (i.e. there was no screen). Rather, the bits were limited to the bag itself and were there simply to enhance the atomic user experience. I think this will be the shape of many bit devices in the future: not linked to the Net, but with bits used in a single context, just to support the atoms in the device.
Finally, one wireless application was really striking. People could control parts of an on-screen multimedia display by dialing their cell phones into one of four phone numbers dedicated to the project. I dialed the number that allowed me to play different sound samples. Once dialed in, dialing 1 through 9 on my cell phone would play (loud) any of nine separate samples. With four people controlling their parts, it was quite an orchestra. This was genius because it provided a new experience from the technology we already had in our pocket. It required no new devices, no plug-in downloads, no WAP, no interface to learn.
Thus, the new frontier of wireless: not traditional hardware or software interface design, but rather the experience that people have using it, and participating in it together. I think the students want to introduce the wireless application in movie theaters, so that people have something to play with before the movie starts. I'd play.
More info is about the show is on the ITP website.
link to this column
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Monday, December 18, 2000
Provocative Thought for the Day: A recent ZDNet commentary by Andreas Pfeiffer offers this nugget:
...On a usability level, the Web is evolving less and less. We are refining, of course, and Web sites are getting better -- but there will be no more quantum leaps here, either.
Why? Simple. By now, users have pretty much figured out what they want to use the Web for: information gathering; community services; some shopping (but by far not every kind of shopping); game playing; or a mixture of all of the above. We also have increasingly accepted the fact that for many things we do, the Web is not the best answer.
I agree. Website usability and website customer experience have been well built out in the past four years; the next four years will bring incremental advances, deepening in some areas, and certain extensions... but no more grand theoretical leaps. Now is the time for practice; now that we understand customer experience, we must bring it out to site after site that needs it.
As this practice grows, theory will continue to develop -- but outside the boundaries of customer experience work that we know today. (The next "grand leap," in my opinion, will be into the area of bit literacy.)
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Friday, December 15, 2000
Interactive TV: Speaking of consumer technology, what about developments in the much-hyped "ITV" space? This recent roundup draws a conclusion all too familiar to those of us with Web experience:
The problem is that many ITV applications have been designed with engineering requirements and business strategies taking precedence over consumer needs.
Oops. Ignoring the customer is NOT the way to go about introducing a new consumer technology. Creative Good's own Zimran Ahmed is quoted in the article (emphasis mine):
"Whatever [device] does the job the easiest is the one consumers will pick," Ahmed predicted. "The big lessons from the Web are that you need to keep the experience simple and fast and let people easily do what they want to do."
It's such a simple recipe for success. Why is it so difficult for so many companies to follow?
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Thursday, December 14, 2000
Wall Street Journal: Coincidentally, the day after my column on PCs, today Walt Mossberg published his yearly look at the state of personal computing. Mossberg is one of my all-time favorite columnists because he tells the truth about technology.
In his column, Mossberg concludes that the PC has gotten worse, but that new bit devices have made some important "post-PC" advances. I fully agree with Mossberg's quote:
The PC itself didn't get better. If anything, it actually became more aggravating. The huge flaws in Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system became increasingly apparent with age... I remain convinced that a corporation as rich as Microsoft, one so ready to proclaim its own brilliance, should be deeply embarrassed by this state of affairs.
In response to my column yesterday, Good Experience reader Larry de Martin wrote in:
In 1982 my computer connected to Western Union's Telex service. My present desktop PC is a thousand times more powerful, yet it takes longer to log on and get my email. The reason is Windows: the slowest, least reliable, biggest resource waste by far of any operating system in history. I believe Windows is actually a virus: it took over all the computers in my environment, it slows them down, causes frequent crashes, and takes a low-level hard disk format to erase. I use DRDOS for all my complex work - CAD, acoustic analysis, mathematical modelling. My applications run non-stop between power failures, and I haven't paid for an upgrade in six years.
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Wednesday, December 13, 2000
It's Time to Simplify the PC: The New York Times points out in an article this week (and Creative Good has preached this for years) that those websites maintaining the simplicity of the Web's early years have become leaders. Yahoo and Amazon, for example, haven't succumbed to the lures of Flash, Java, random plug-ins, or other technologies irrelevant to customers on the site. Instead, they have built their sites around plain HTML pages full of blue underlined text links. Partially due to simplicity, both sites have handily defeated their online competitors.
But take a step back, and it hardly matters what Yahoo does. Unfortunately, even the simplest site on the Web can't escape the overwhelming complexity of the personal computer on which the site appears. Everything about today's personal computer - from the hardware to the operating system to the Web browser software - is complicated, unreliable, ridden with defects (not "bugs," as the industry would like us to call them), and focused on short-term profits at the expense of the user.
This complexity is discussed in Cheryll Aimee Barron's Salon article last week. She argues that today's flawed PC is the product of a flawed tech industry:
A culture of carelessness seems to have taken over in high-tech America. The personal computer is a shining model of unreliability because the high-tech industry today actually exalts sloppiness as a modus operandi.
Barron is exactly right in her diagnosis of the problem. But her prescription, based on interviews with experts trying to fix the tech industry, is not quite as on-target. Barron's experts suggest that new PC hardware or software from outside the U.S. will turn the tide, in the same way that Japan forced U.S. automakers into higher quality standards in the 80s.
My thinking is a bit different: the problem we face is one of too much technology, too deeply entrenched in inferior legacy systems, served up by a flawed business model of "upgrade taxation." In short, the tech industry has had plenty of chances to solve the problem of complex PCs. It has failed. Now it's time for people other than technologists to take over.
The solution to complex PCs is all around us, but it does not lie inside the technology. Simplicity is the solution, and simplicity doesn't come from a bigger motherboard or the next version of Windows. Simplicity also doesn't come from incrementally improving the usability of the deeply flawed hardware and software we have today. Simplicity calls for radical change, not reform; it must come from the users, not the tech industry.
Simplicity comes from the users' choice of simple tools, the users' skills in using only basic features, and the users' awareness of how NOT to react when the technology industry tries to seduce them with more complexity. Simplicity is abundant and free; it only requires the user's choice to make the switch.
The path toward simple PCs must be walked by users, not technologists. This is an essential point.
Furthermore, many users in the corporate world can't make a choice for simplicity, because the MIS or IT department makes the choices for them. Many home PC users also can't make a choice, because the vendor cluttered up the PC with irrelevant, self-serving chaff before selling it to the user. Therefore many users, to get to the path, will need a strong advocate, pushing decision-makers in board rooms and MIS labs to allow users to choose simplicity. (As for the economic impact of such a project: we do want technology to make people more productive, don't we?)
Thus the path toward simple PCs must be walked by users and user advocates, in the form of service or consulting firms, that will work on this issue. Creative Good will be one of these firms, and we will lead the charge - under our "bit literacy" banner - toward making PCs, and other digital technology, simpler and more valuable for users.
link to this column
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Tuesday, December 12, 2000
Boston.com: Last week's Globe article covered our Holiday 2000 report, which reported a greater than 40% buying failure rate in our consumer tests of eight major e-tail sites.
A failure rate of over 40% is abysmal, and that's on the e-commerce industry's best sites! So abysmal, in fact, that it takes a live demonstration to really understand the impact of poor online customer experience.
This past weekend I was at the Builder conference in New Orleans and, with Creative Good's Jacqueline Sheehan and Nicole Adams, ran a customer experience workshop to demonstrate the "listening lab" methodology. One by one, we asked three workshop attendees -- all experienced Web professionals -- to try to buy something on bananarepublic.com.
Result: all three failed. 100% failure rate, and this from experienced Web developers. Clearly the industry has a long way to go in improving the online customer experience.
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Thursday, December 7, 2000
Apologies: Some end-of-year activities have kept me unusually occupied the past few days and will likely continue for a bit longer.
In the meantime, one observation: Amazon has begun showing pop-up windows as customers go through the shopping process. AOL has done this for some time, as have certain websites. But Amazon is such a leader that we may soon see more annoying popups in the e-commerce customer experience.
Cat Fitzgerald here at Creative Good points out that Salon.com has begun showing popups, too. Since Salon is a leading content site, perhaps we'll see more popups everywhere on the Web. Ouch.
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Friday, December 1, 2000
Wall Street Journal: On this past Monday, November 27, the WSJ published a piece called "Organize Your E-Mail."
While users may have needed help sending and receiving e-mail five or so years ago, today they need help with the other end of the spectrum: bombardment.
The article goes on to cite a recent study that estimated "that the average office worker now spends about two hours a day dealing with e-mail."
This theme is familiar (and will become more so): People are getting way too many bits and don't have the skills or the tools to deal with the bits. Thus a positive, practical response of bit literacy is increasingly important.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article does not offer a very bit literate perspective. The article mostly lists features and technical tips within Microsoft Outlook for saving, searching, and filtering e-mail. My complaint is not with the tips and tricks but with the underlying, unspoken assumption: that engaging yet more technology will solve the problem of too much technology. This is false. Unless users have a better awareness of how bits work, all the Outlook features in the world can't make a simpler experience.
Software is now too prevalent and too complex to simplify the bits in our lives. We, the people, now have the primary responsibility for our own bits. Technology may enable us to do certain activities, but the effectiveness of one's bitstreams are ultimately dependent on the person.
As we teach users some tactical software tips for managing email, we must communicate the larger vision: bit management won't work unless people, not software programs, take responsibility for the bits.
(Here's the WSJ article, but you need a paid subscription.)
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