Living in the cloud

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Once upon a time, boys and girls, we had a computer.  In my case, it was an Apple IIc with a floppy drive and 128k of internal memory.  It was a large and bulky thing with a lot of wires and a heavy green-screen CRT monitor and stuff, and even though it had carry handles and was billed as “portable,” we left it on a desk at home.  If we wanted to do something on the computer, we had to go home to that desk.  When we wanted to show what we were working on to someone else, we either printed it out or copied it to a floppy disk and prayed that the person we were sharing it with had the same kind of computer with the same version of software.  If they didn’t, we were out of luck.

Fast forward 30 years. Today, I am no longer tied to a single device. The internet has become my “PC” – Personal Cloud.  I have two laptops, a chromebook, two tablets and a mobile phone.  They all access my data real-time through the internet, so synchronization is not an issue.  My email, contacts, calendar, documents and music are all online.  Regardless of what device I’m on, or even if I own the device, I can securely access my data to get the job done.  The software is a service in my cloud, so I don’t need to install a program on a local device.  As long as I can get a browser and onto the internet, I have everything I need.  Jumping between devices isn’t an issue when the contact I saved on my phone is automatically available on any device I use to access the internet.  My family is the same way, so we can share a device and the customization is done online for us.

One efficiency tip I’ve heard over and over through the years is you shouldn’t maintain multiple calendars.  Everything should be visible at once.  With Google Calendar, I can see a combined view of multiple private and public calendars, and give people access to mine.  Iif I schedule something on my calendar, it is automatically available to my family.  Group calendars, such as for Boy Scouts or the Marching Band, are included in my view so I know how many conflicting events I have.  When someone asks if I’m free on a given day, I no longer have to tell them I’ll check with the paper calendar at home and get back to them.  My calendar rides in the cloud.

I review and edit papers with my college daughter on Google Docs.  She writes the paper and adds comments and questions, then sends me the link.  I can see her paper and we can even interact real-time within the document.  After I make suggestions and comments, I can watch her make the edits.  I do the same thing with organization meeting agendas.  People on the list can add to the collaborative agenda throughout the month so we don’t have to remember to bring something up.  This was nearly impossible before the cloud.

I’ve nearly gone paperless at work.  I take notes on my tablet using Evernote and can access them on any device anywhere.  The tablet is smaller, lighter and more portable; the battery lasts all day.  The tablet is large enough that typing isn’t an issue, and the autoprompt and autocorrect can actually increase your speed once you get used to it.  One of my favorite advantages the tablet has over paper is the ability to take a photo of the white board we’ve been brainstorming on directly into my notes.  When I’m back at my desk, I can review the notes online and sort by tags or do a full-text search through hundreds of notes to find the information I’m looking for. When I’m away from my desk, all of my notes are always with me, either through my laptop, tablet or phone, or even someone else’s computer.  Try doing that with paper.

The only reason I switch between devices now is for convenience (laptops are easier to type large blocks of text, tablets for watching movies, etc.) or for a tool that hasn’t been ported to the Internet.  I’m starting to resent applications like Axure that require a dedicated installation at one device. In the cloud, I don’t have to worry about whether my software is up to date, or if my version is compatible with yours.  The cloud updates for all of us.  I also have not run into a cloud-based application that costs more than $10.  $600 for Office? When Google Docs is free?  Sure, it does things I can’t do in Google Docs, but the price difference has caused me to rethink a lot of application loyalties.

To be fair, the risk online is greater.  Servers could be hacked, the system can go down, the cloud is outside my control.  If I don’t have access to a wireless network, I have to work tethered to my phone.  If I don’t have a 3G connection on my phone, I’m out of luck.  But really, if I am that remote, I don’t really need to be on my devices.  The risks have to be weighed against the convenience and capabilities, and for me, that decision is easy.

The cloud is where I live, and where everyone will live in the future.  The cloud democratizes computing, in that everyone has access to the power and reach of the Internet. The cloud allows for faster and greater collaboration and sharing and connects us as never before.

The Future of User Experience

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The field of user experience design has roots in human factors and ergonomics, a field that, since the late 1940s, has focused on the interaction between human users, machines, and the contextual environments to design systems that address the user's experience. With the proliferation of workplace computers in the early 1990s, user experience became an important concern for designers. It was Donald Norman, a user experience architect, who coined and brought the term user experience to wider knowledge.

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

—Donald Norman

The term also has a more recent connection to user-centered design, human–computer interaction, and also incorporates elements from similar user-centered design fields.

Elements of user experience design

User experience design includes elements of interaction design, information architecture, user research, and other disciplines, and is concerned with all facets of the overall experience delivered to users. Following is a short analysis of its constituent parts.

Visual design

Visual design, also commonly known as graphic design, communication design, or visual communication, represents the aesthetics or look-and-feel of the front end of any user interface. Graphic treatment of interface elements is often perceived as the visual design. The purpose of visual design is to use visual elements like colors, images, and symbols to convey a message to its audience. Fundamentals of Gestalt psychology and visual perception give a cognitive perspective on how to create effective visual communication.

Information architecture

Information architecture is the art and science of structuring and organizing the information in products and services, supporting usability and findability. More basic concepts that are attached with information architecture are described below.

Information

In the context of information architecture, information is separate from both knowledge and data, and lies nebulously between them. It is information about objects. The objects can range from websites, to software applications, to images et al. It is also concerned with metadata: terms used to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, process, and organizations.

Structuring, organization, and labeling

Structuring is reducing information to its basic building units and then relating them to each other. Organization involves grouping these units in a distinctive and meaningful manner. Labeling means using appropriate wording to support easy navigation and findability.

Finding and managing

Findability is the most critical success factor for information architecture. If users are not able to find required information without browsing, searching or asking, then the findability of the information architecture fails. Navigation needs to be clearly conveyed to ease finding of the contents.

Interaction design

There are many key factors to understanding interaction design and how it can enable a pleasurable end user experience. It is well recognized that building great user experience requires interaction design to play a pivotal role in helping define what works best for the users. High demand for improved user experiences and strong focus on the end-users have made Interaction Designers critical in conceptualizing design that matches user expectations and standards of latest UI patterns and components. While working, Interaction Designers take several things in consideration. A few of them are:

  • Create the layout of the interface

  • Define Interaction patterns best suited in the context

  • Incorporate user needs collected during User Research, into the designs

  • Features and Information that are important to the user

  • Interface behavior like drag-drop, selections, mouse over actions, and so on

  • Effectively communicate strengths of the system

  • Make the interface intuitive by building affordances

  • Maintain consistency throughout the system

In the last few years, the role of interaction designer has shifted from being just focused on specifying UI components and communicating them to the engineers to a situation now where designers have more freedom to design contextual interfaces which are based on helping meet the user needs. Therefore, User Experience Design evolved into a multidisciplinary design branch that involves multiple technical aspects from motion graphics design and animation to programming.

Usability

Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

Usability is attached with all tools used by humans and is extended to both digital and non-digital devices. Thus it is a subset of user experience but not wholly contained. The section of usability that intersects with user experience design is related to human’s ability to use a system or application. Good usability is essential to a positive user experience but does not alone guarantee it.

Accessibility

Accessibility of a system describes its ease of reach, use and understanding. In terms of user experience design it can also be related to the overall comprehensibility of the information and features. It contributes to shorten the learning curve attached with the system. Accessibility in many contexts can be related to the ease of use for people with disabilities and comes under Usability.

Human–computer interaction

Human–computer interaction is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.

Human–computer interaction is the main contributor to user experience design because of its emphasis on human performance rather than mere usability. It provides key research findings which inform the improvement of systems for the people. HCI extends its study towards more integrated interactions, such as tangible interactions, which is generally not covered in the practice of user experience. User experience cannot be manufactured or designed; it has to be incorporated in the design. Understanding the user's emotional quotient plays a key role while designing User Experience. The first step while designing the user experience is determining the reason a visitor will be visiting the website or use the application in question. Then the user experience can be designed accordingly.

 

Consistency is the hobgoblin or small minds... or is it?

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In my career, I have heard the quote “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” when a client or business owner wanted to do something new, often for the sake of doing something new. The full quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson is ““A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” There is a very important distinction there.

Consistency is essential to reducing the cognitive load of your interface – the mental effort required to complete a task. When a design is consistent, every interaction feels smooth and frictionless. When it is too inconsistent, the user must expend unnecessary effort figuring out the interface instead of completing the work.

Design patterns, like cliches, are used over and over again because they speak to an underlying truth. UI patterns are design solutions to common usability problems. Patterns benefit everyone – users already recognize how to use them from previous exposure, and designers don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Knowing where to find a home button, or how links are styled, or how to interact with a list builder are important to a user because few people sit down with an express goal of “I want to use this interface.” Instead, they want to complete a task, and your interface is either the tool that allows them to accomplish their goal or the roadblock keeping them from getting things done.

On the other hand, inconsistency is not all bad. You need to know when and why to break the consistency without leading to design chaos. There are several reasons you may wish to be inconsistent within your established style or conventions and patterns in the market.

All established patterns were once new. Without stretching our designs, we cannot progress. Doing the same things over and over will yield boring, uniform designs. Sometimes experimentation is necessary to see if social assumptions still hold true. When I first started developing CBT courses, the first module was always “How to Use a Mouse.” Times have changed and many advanced interaction patterns are now considered commonplace.

Sometimes the goal is to slow the user down. A friend of mine, Dr. Steve Fedorko, once floated the controversial idea that sometimes an organization should deter or prevent learning in order to force the user to slow down and contemplate their decisions. Actions with extreme consequences may be designed to change from use to use, so a user cannot mindlessly blast through without considering the consequences.

Intentional inconsistency can draw attention to your site for novelty, but must match the context – having a parallax slider and infinite zoom interface may be flashy, but would not work well for most purposes in a tax preparation organization. For that organization, reducing cognitive burden, streamlining performance and minimizing risk of error has to outweigh a “really bichin’ interface.”

The key, as is most often the case in design, is balance. Consistency does not equal uniformity. Design shouldn’t be a game of templates, but should reflect the usability advantages of existing patterns.

Where Does UX Belong?

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If you ask ten people where user experience belongs in an organization, you will likely get eleven answers, but first, you might get asked what you mean by user experience (UX).

  • Client (or Customer) Experience (CX), refers to the impression you leave with your client, resulting in how they think of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. This involves every step from advertising, brochures and public websites to forms, call centers and correspondence.

  • User Experience, the way I am defining it, is focussed on the time the client is interacting with the website or web application to accomplish a task.

I work in Information Technology (IT), and our team is integrally involved in the requirements and design of systems.  We focus on information architecture, interaction design, visual design, accessibility and usability testing.  When our organization needs user research, personas, client journeys, concept testing, content strategy, brand guidelines, etc. we have marketing partners who collaborate with us.  It's not a clean division, and we run into issues doing pure research that can't be charged back to a specific IT project.  On the other hand, the collaboration we have with Marketing rarely gets to the level of detail needed to integrate legacy back-end systems and databases.  The concept testing gives high level direction, but does not reflect the complexity of our existing systems.

I wish we had more time and resources for user research.  Given the right budget support, that would be easier to accomplish on a team within Marketing. 

I am also proud of the team's ability to partner with development and quality assurance to make systems that benefit our users on tight timeframes, that would be more difficult if we weren't part of the IT organization.

I don't have a good answer for where UX belongs in an organization.  This is a question that will probably not have an answer, or many answers depending on your specific circumstances.

In Defense of Clippy

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Clippy the Microsoft Agent

Clippy was ahead of his time.

I'll let that sink in.

Clippy, the infamous Microsoft Office assistant,  was introduced in November 1996. He was refined three years later, in Microsoft Office 2000. He went into retirement two years later, when he was turned off by default. And he finally departed this digital veil in 2007, when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together.

While he was eventually consigned to the dustbin of failed software, like Microsoft Bob, at the time, his novelty spun off a wave of "conversational agents." I worked on "Seemore the Sock Puppet" - a conversational agent for Payless ShoeSouce back in the 90s who you would click to "See more" - get it?  He waggled his eyebrows, and danced around the screen.  In a juvenile Easter Egg, there was one pixel on the screen that would make him pass gas, if you knew where to find it.

Clippy is famous for being one of the worst user interfaces ever deployed to the mass public. He stopped users to ask them if they needed help with basic tasks, like writing a letter or making a spreadsheet. In user experience terms, Clippy was “optimized for first use”: amusing the first time you encountered him, and frustrating after that. He was a puppet who only knew one script and kept repeating it, at you, throughout the workday.

Today, we have Conversational Agents again!  Apple's Siri, Amazon's Echo and Google Home, not to mention all manner of chatbots on the web are all examples of the evolution of the conversational agent. A conversational agent is a software program which interprets and responds to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. It integrates computational linguistics techniques with communication over the internet.

Why are these agents so much more successful than clippy? - I have a few hypotheses:

  1. They are user-invoked. Instead of interrupting your work or conversation with proactive suggestions, these agents do not speak until spoken to. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if Siri were to interject "You seem to be having an argument with your spouse - would you like me to read emails relevant to the situation?"

  2. They demonstrate semantic learning and artificial intelligence. Technology has developed to the point that these agents are much more flexible and "conversational." Google Home can keep track of context and respond correctly to unclear pronouns.  For example, while playing music, you can ask, "Hey Google, who is this?" and Google will accurately interpret you are asking about the artist for the music currently playing.  In addition, you can ask Google about a nearby sushi restaurant, and then ask "How far away is that?" and Google will understand you are referring to the restaurant you were just asking about.

  3. They are often voice-controlled.  With the exception of chatbots, these conversational agents are triggered with voice cues, respond audibly and can be used hands-free.  The ease of being able to wonder out loud who played the Joker in the 60's Batman series (Cesar Romero), and have Google tell you without pulling out a phone or laptop or reading and parsing text is a game-changer.

  4. They have personalities, but not overwhelming personalities. Each of the conversational agents have fans and Easter Eggs of questions you can ask to get funny answers programmed by developers.  They tell jokes, play games and sing songs, but only when explicitly requested.  Otherwise, they are all business. 
    Personalities have been added to chatbots as well. Students at The Centre for Psychology at Athabasca University developed the Freudbot, with whom a student can engage in an online conversation with a simulated Sigmund Freud.  Freudbot is capable of discussing a range of personal and psychological topics.

Conversational agents only work when they are truly conversational.  They require the semantic awareness and ability to follow a conversation that has only been recently possible in technology.  Poor Clippy was just a victim of timing (and poor animation).

 

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