by Joseph on September 30, 2009
by Joseph on September 30, 2009
The iPhone has a problem. There’s too much you can do with it.
This is a problem, you may be asking? Yes, it is, because there are so many things you can do with the device (thanks to hundreds of thousands of free or low-cost apps) that you lose track of things.
Yes, many other device makers would like to have the problem that Apple is having – millions of units sold, hundreds of thousands of apps, and a customer satisfaction rating in the 90th percentile. The problem I speak of is not a business problem, it’s a usability problem… one that I think Apple is aware of, based on the addition of spotlight search in iPhone OS 3.0 and the ability to reorganize apps from the desktop client in iTunes 9.
In the default iPhone Ui there is no hierarchy, and any structure the user creates by arranging apps on different pages is fragile (and can be broke by adding new apps from a similar “family”) – there’s no context provided. If you have more than two pages of apps, easy and ready access starts to become a thing of the past.
It’s all too much. And that leads to frustration (“where is that app?”) and a limiting user experience.
Success brings it’s own challenges, and it’s obvious that the idea of having some structure around apps is something that Apple did not think they had to deal with… until now. I fully expect that Apple will come up with some contextual visual cues (probably like how you can “label” folders with a color is OS X) that will help with this, but until then it’s a subtle problem that is causing needless frustration.
So, the lesson that this tells us? Plan for success – build into your design the appropriate information architecture that will scale as needed. And never present more options than your users are able to “handle” – that way leads to frustration (and, depending on how bad the cognitive overload is, madness and other unpleasant repercussions).
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by Joseph on September 29, 2009
by Joseph on September 29, 2009
by Joseph on September 29, 2009
The great This Week in Google podcast just had a very enlightening conversation about the new Google Sidewiki. This feature, just rolled out last week, allows anyone who has the Google Toolbar to open a sidebar on any site to add comments. The reaction of many on the panel was critical, in that it takes the editing power and content management ability of the site owner away (Google owns the content). Jeff Jarvis (author of the great book What Would Google Do?) said that in the end it was “a failure of empathy” – Google did a very “un-Google” like think in that they did not put themselves in the place of site owners and wonder what they would think about this new feature.
Now in the end this may be a very small tempest in a teapot (Google may end up dropping the feature or users may never adopt it in sufficient numbers) but the topic reminded me of an earlier article I wrote on empathy – more specifically, it made me wonder if Google may be losing some of it’s focus on user experience. Example #2 – also discussed on this program was the new Chrome Framewww that users of Internet Explorer has to install, as a plug-in, if they want to use some of Google’s new technology such as Google Wave.
Instead of doing the additional coding necessary to make Wave work in IE they gave up and now make users install this app to run Chrome “inside” IE. While I have not personally tried this out, having users take an extra step to do something because your developers can’t figure it out doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
The lesson I’m taking away from all this is simple: Google is the 800 lb. gorilla of the Internet, and therefore they should be even more careful and diligent when it comes to implementing new features. Millions of users rely on their products every day, and any drastic changes can be incredibly disruptive. This is not to say they should be paralyzed with fear – just that they need to ramp up their user experience efforts and follow the (paraphrased) Hippocratic Oath – “first, do no harm.”
I also can’t help but think “physician, heal thyself” in that I, too, am designing new features in systems that impact millions – which is why we do the due diligence of ethnographic research, usability testing, and user acceptance tests. In the end, we have to keep moving forward, and the challenge is always balancing out time-to-market versus quality. If you’re in a similar situation as a designer, it never hurts to be a little late but produce a better offering for your users.
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by Joseph on September 28, 2009
by Joseph on September 27, 2009
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Man, I miss this show.
The show I refer to is Homicide: Life on the Street, based on the fantastic book by David Simon (who has moved on to create one of the best shows of THIS decade, The Wire). Homicide was an incredibly ground-breaking series, one that introduced us to one of the best TV characters ever written, Frank Pembleton (portrayed by one of the best actors of this generation, Andre Braugher).
It was a show that defied expectations, that started out in a documentary style that made some viewers wonder if they were watching a fictional series or were actually eavesdropping on the real-world conversations that took place as detectives sweated paperwork and tried, desperately, to improve thier clearance rate and get all that red ink of The Board.
It was a show that shook up the status quo, killing off one of the main characters after the short first season (a suicide, we ten found out) and then threatened the lives of three other series regulars within a few weeks after that.
It was a show that threw us for a loop when the lead character, the aforementioned Frank Pembleton, suffered a stroke, making us weep openly as the character fought to get back on the force (Braugher, finally, won an Emmy for his performance in his final year on the series).
It was a show that was, in a way, the last of its kind for network television – a program where the bad guy is very often no caught, where the good guys are sometimes the bad guys… it was the spiritual godfather of The Sopranos, of The Shield, or The Closer… of all the great gritty crime shows that became so incredibly popular on cable. It was the last show of its ilk on network TV, and that in itself is evidence of how the broadcast spectrum has changed this past decade.
Homicide ended 10 years ago, and I still wish I could revisit those characters again. This past week, I was able to visit Baltimore, where the series was set and filmed (appropriately enough, also the home of Edgar Allan Poe, the creator of the detective fiction genre) and was able to visit a couple of the locations the show used. It was a surreal experience, after watching all those hours of the series so many years ago – I half expected to see Pembleton and Bayliss walk down the front steps of their offices – instead, only a screaming homeless man was there.
I miss it – and I think we will not see anything like it again.
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