Usable Interfaces

The whole phrase is ‘Now we know what the future looks like, what would we like to do with it?’

For the second post in a row I’m afraid I’m in a rather idealistic mood. But it seems to me, now, that we look at the structure of business and marketing as it’s being done by the market leaders, we look at posts by visionaries like this one, this one and this one, and we think we pretty much know how this is going to shake out…

The question of micro distribution of corporate reputation has been answered. The question of finding value inside organistations through enablement of individuals has been proven. The question of whether we think better separately or together has been answered.

So, my point is this. In the Future (doesn’t really need a capital does it, since it’s only a couple of minutes away), if we assume that we will broadly have a marketplace of ideas where we all now can have our say. If we will have a world where communities of interest can be powerful, and massively devolved. If we will have a world where companies can thive by coming up with powerful ideas and finding ways to communicate them quickly and powerfully. Then what do we want out of that world?

It probably sounds a bit irrelevant but it’s an important question. Because we’re not, any of us, I think really after better mp3 players, nor mobile phones, nor fruit smoothies.

But we also don’t really have the passions of the past. If we live in big cities, at least, we’ve started to see the back of racism, sexism, for the most part, intollerance; what are we worrying about now? Knife crime? I know it’s a serious question but it’s very recent and very media orientated. House prices? Economy? That’s just not intereting, really.

I think it’s about this (you’ll read a transcript of a Clinton interview about finding similarities rather than differences). For all the things that have been resolved, we live in a world where far too many inequalities exist for the wrong reason (there are good reasons for alot of inequalities of course).

But I’m in intrigued about views here.

If we’re all going to be a position where we have all this extra information, all this extra access to cheap, easy, global media, all of this ability to form communities, how do we use this to moderate our behaviour for the better?

And more to the point, what is we actually want to achieve? Or are we all going to turn into Miss World, and look for world peace and happy families.

An interesting comment on the last post came back to a topic which I seem to be asked, or ask myself, more and more often. If social media increasingly leads to closed groups, and tomorrow’s media consumers are increasingly avoiding the mass media, what will happen to mass-participation media events, and don’t we as a culture lose something if we lose common points of reference. What on earth will we talk about around the water cooler?

In particular, I’ve heard this as a strong initial response to Clay Shirky, who argues here that however ’sad’ it is to play World of Warcraft, it’s a better use of the ‘cognitive surplus’ than watching a re-run of Gilligan’s Island for the 100th time. (Incidentally, what was the cognitive heatsink that we had as kids in the UK? Clearly Neighbours later on but before that? Rocketman?).

Of course, this is not a new idea. I remember years ago, a planner explained to me why you couldn’t advertise cars with direct mail - it wasn’t enough for me to know how cool my new Audi is, I need to be certain all my neighbors knew too.

Perhaps the point about ‘mass-participation media events’ isn’t that their power is diminishing (witness Apprentice this year), but rather that they are fewer and more extraordinary.

There also seems to be a point now that whole social groups can have ‘mass-participation’ events which they all know about but which are entirely closed to those outside of the group: that wierd feeling you get when everyone in a room’s been reading the same status’ and knows each others business without having ever discussed it.

It remains worth remembering a serious challenge that has been raised by commentators including Esther Dyson and Andrew Orlowski, about how these groups aren’t necessarily healthy, challenging or participatory. Often preferring to define very strict group rules and mores.

The final point, of course, is just what we mean by participation. By 2012, when the Olympic games is going on in London, what will the experience of watching it be like? If you’ve seen what NBC has planned for Beijing, the mind boggles about what it will be like in 4 1/2 years (three times the gestation period for a standard YouTube) but most certainly there will be opportunities to observe almost everything about the event, to turn the event into a private mass media event for your network, to ‘virtually’ compete and to compile, annotate and share your own coverage. 

With apologies for shoplifting to Hugh MacLeod, mass participation media events have always - of course -been social objects. So in the era of mass media, it’s not a surprise the objects themselves tended to have the same traits. Whilst we may still have global events to built frameworks around, surely local (and group) interpretation and meaning can be added to createsocial object which can be more intimately shared.

The reason, it seems to me, that nobody understands microblogging unless they do it themselves, is that they don’t understand how small social objects can be.

And, to revisit the negativity of small disconnected groups (and ever-decreasing differences of opinion in those groups), technology can take these objects and make them available to huge audiences. Anyone can write a blog, anyone can produce a LOLcat (as Shirky jokes), and by 2012, everyone will be able to participate in our global media event.

It is this access to open social objects which is at the heart of participation in all cases. It’s what got all the bloggers I know addicted, it’s what makes teenagers turn the telly off and Facebook on, and it’s what makes Amelia’s wired retired fall in love with Skype, so they can share the smallest of social objects - not  just their grandchildren’s first words or their first tooth, but their everyday stories about the day at school.

And do I really need to know how many people watched The Apprentice altogether if I know that my family, friends and colleagues watched it. Isn’t that enough?

Remember the first website you built. I remember doing them at university a bit but they were really awful. And then I did one for the company I worked in. And then, rather suddenly I was running a company that made them. And in the start people would argue about everything. Should there be persistent navigation? were all-flash sites bad? how about skip-intros? What about those ticker things that used to flash across the page?

And how should you do the coding? Make sure all your fonts are fixed size, and be brilliant with tables. Remember: It’s all about the home page.

And then accessibility was a thing, and then standards. And then we started sneering at people that couldn’t build a website without using tables, or who used fixed fonts. And then it was all about buttons and big fonts. And for a while there, it all seemed to be about being ugly, and then simple, and should it even have a logo any more? And wasn’t persistent navigation a bit tired, and surely users are now clever enough to navigate more complex interfaces.

Every year we think we’ve codified one more chunk, got closer to having all the design patterns sorted out. And every year we get new and - it has to be said - interesting challenges to think about. Does save make sense any more? Do we even care about the home page any more? Is Google your most important user?

Well I think the next one’s going to be bigger, more conceptually difficult, require more complex teams to figure out, and be the beginning of the end of the period where you can work out what to do by just looking at your competitors. It will also be a bitter showdown between the big web agencies (who build where the user ends up) and the digital marketing agencies (who try to get them there), finally standing squarely on each others’ turf.

Because the next phase is where we let go of the concept of domain. It’s about thinking about the users’ lifecycle as needing managing before they even get to you. It’s a question about thinking about the opportunities to capture intent in more than search engine landing pages. And it’s going to be a question of becoming a lot more sophisticated in thinking about what content you will share, how you will consume and repurpose content, and how your users will see your brand.

Possibly my favorite factoid about the internet is that 50% of all searches on Yahoo! (and they must love this) are for the word ‘Google’. In a world where the average punter doesn’t know - or doesn’t care - to this extent, but they are willing to tell Google or all of their facebook friends that they’re looking for a new car or interested in a boob job, the way in which we concieve of capturing and converting intent just became a whole lot more interesting. And so did CRM (or rather the management of a users lifetime value), and so did sales and service.

Early approaches, especially behavioral targeting of advertising have looked like privacy invasions - or as google would have it, ‘increased relevance’. Privacy will be an issue, but skills and dexterity are the main problems and it will be fascinating to see who’s got the most of those. Not advertising agencies, of course, but quite possibly the media agencies, the digital marketing agencies who are a bit more interested in the detail, and of course, the marketing teams in large corporations; not to mention digital media owners like WordPress (scroll down for relevance targeted links!).

Amid the phenomenal suprise of the new… 3G iphone, Jobs also slipped some other news into the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It seems Apple is re-releasing an old favourite from Microsoft: 

Yes, it’s the sick older sister of Windows ‘98. The ill-fated ‘millennium edition’ of Windows which barely made it into the noughties.

This new platform,  (apple) mobile me is a ‘breakthrough web 2.0 app interface’ allowing the user to access their calendar and mail over the internet:

And here once again, Apple shows it’s tremendous audacity:  re-inventing Outlook Web Access some five years after Microsoft built it, and declaring themselves ground breaking and market leading.

You’d be forgiven for thinking they were poking fun at their own addicted fanboys with the ridiculous ‘me’ reference.

Amelia’s amusing analysis of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 came coincidentally on the same day that I was at a conference thingy and had been having exactly that discussion: what was 2.0 and how much of it was pure marketing sentiment. I couldn’t disagree more. I think 2.0 is a radical shift in society. It is, as Amelia says the shift from an internet of geeks and possibility to an internet of the mass market and reality.

What, if anything, 3.0 means is another matter. Clearly there is a quasi-technical meaning being discussed (as on the Wikipedia page), but surely we should be concerning ourselves instead with the social impact of these changes.

• Expectations about data integration will go through the roof. Just as information became ubiquitous in 2.0, the joining and manipulation of data will become so now. Brands will have to respond to this. Expect some powerful movements in traditionally data orientated services, particularly FS.
• The ladder of involvement will continue, with a new rung being added above ‘blogger’ or ‘publisher’ for ‘providers of utility’
• Concepts of enterprises and the borders of corporations will continue to be challenged

Amazon and Google (and to a certain extent, Microsoft) have clearly started their engines to take advantage of this next generation with app development, elastic computing, utility computing and so on the subject of much debate this week.

There’s a powerful version of inverted marketing too (where consumers are rewarded for hand-raising) which feels like the inevitable consequence of abstracting and linking data.

How will it impact your brand?

Couple of good quotes / stories I found in a desperate attempt to do some catch-up reading of my Economist stockpile. Strangely enough both items from the same page in the July 7th issue (p. 69).

In A change of tune  (paywalled), we have Warner Music chairman, Edgar Bronfman saying “The music industry is growing, [but]… The record industry is not growing.” In these few short words, he’s surely captured an important truth.

Interest in music and music listening has probably never been more healthy, but the record companies seem unable to find a role for themselves. The economist writer moves on to suggest that artists will replace their lost (record sale) revenues with tours, merchandise and personal appearances, leaving the labels to become glorified managers. The tracks themselves become marketing material for the artists. Seem far-fetched? Look at how Prince took his latest album to market - as a ‘free’ giveaway on the Mail on Sunday.

An interesting piece, although there remains the huge hole in the rights debate about what on earth might happen to great film and TV shows, how do they get paid for? If we want Studio 60 and The Shawshank Redemption, we’re going to have to fund them.

The second piece is an article about the release of the iPhone: Where would Jesus queue? (also paywalled). Having marvelled at the hype, fervour and - perhaps most impressively - lack of disappointment once in consumers’ hands, which surrounded the launch of the “Jesus phone”, the writer recounts a story from outside the store where he was queing.

It seems a passerby who had just arrived from Mars wanted to know what the queue was for. “What are you all standing in line for?” she asked. The response from some wag in the queue was “Zunes!”. That’s a good joke and it goes to really demonstrate the extent to which Apple has captured the public’s imagination with innovation and great, user-centred design.

In the Spring ‘07 Market Leader (the Marketing Society publication from WARC), Y&R’s Simon Silvester talks about how it is the limitations on our ability to learn and adapt to new technologies which will actually restrict their spread; that innovation is useless without usability.

He points out that the “geek” audience of super-early-adopters have a very different (and dichotomous) set of needs from later adoption groups and certainly from the mass market and the laggards. Most people don’t use most buttons on their remote controls, most people use a small fraction of the functions available in software packages, and even most teenagers can’t keep up - Silvester’s own research could not find one teenager who knows how to use every button on their phone.

Refreshingly Silvester calls for a more human-centred approach to design, debunking some powerful myths:

1. That consumers want convergence - actually the most successful products often do one thing well
2. That later adopters will not just have different needs, they will have a different entire framework (the example given is that the first round of mobile-phone users saw it as a tool  for urgent calls if - for example - arrangements changed or went wrong. The second, youth, generation in contrast have re-orientated their entire lives around phones).
3. Once technology works, consumers forget it exists
4. Female audiences are increasingly key drivers of communications technology
5. Changes may take a generation to take hold
6. People simply don’t read manuals - don’t even hope

This is all grist to the mill for those of us that are passionate about the user-centred (or human-centred) design approach but it also ties in rather well with a Gapping Void post that “Human Beings don’t follow Moore’s law” or in Hugh’s own words “Humans don’t scale”. There’s all this new technology but it’s being used by the same over-developed apes. So we’ve got to really work hard to make it immediately understandable and usable.

If Web 2.0 is Web 1.0 done better and adopted more widely, and the truth is that alot of the technology was around in 1999 - it’s just that people couldn’t or didn’t want to use it, then we need to keep up the good work. Let’s hope the voice of the customer voice just keeps on getting louder and louder.

NetVibes (which is like iGoogle, Live.com or Page Flakes) is now allowing brands to take their personal home page and publish it so everyone can see it (they call it ”Netvibes Universe”).

Obviously, you’ll include different content on a page you or your brand is going to make public than from your personal start page but otherwise it’s an obvious evolution. And, it doesn’t take a lot to make the jump to start to see how an organisation could build its whole website this way (see the Time “universe” above).

When put in that context, the concept of building pages from constituent units seems remarkably similar to the big CMS systems like Vignette or MOSS. The advantage of NetVibes (except price) is that the elements can easily be repurposed to other sites and customers’ personal portals. It’s a way off yet, but an interesting convergence to watch , especially when  we see what blogs (essentially smallscale personal CMSs) did for personal publishing. 

When it comes to technology innovation, it’s interesting to hear some people still talk about a ”five-year plan”. After all, YouTube went from zero to £1.65bn in 18 months. Google only lost their beta tag 7 years ago. Paradigms can change literally overnight.

In this fascinating interview, Jobs and Gates reveal that they’ve not got a clear view five years out, although they both broadly are expecting hardware to continue to evolve in a fairly linear way. Gates is sticking to his software-only stance (noting the exception of the X-box, the new and very exciting surface computing - although I’m not sure why that couldn’t be a pure software play for Microsoft - , a new meeting conference hardware called round table, and of course the ill-fated Zune).

While Jobs is clearly still in the hardware+software mode, he sees software as the driver, simply noting that he will continue to make the “nice boxes”. He sees the ipod’s dominance for example as a result of great software. And indeed the majority of the criticism of the Zune has been software related, and that certainly would seem to be the biggest barrier to adoption.

Both believe that users will continue to have multiple devices. Basically this means a laptop (or tablet), a mobile phone (or “post pc” device as Jobs calls it, pesumably to make the iPhone even more significant) and home entertainment equipment which will include what’s been done with media centre but will also, surely, extend to include ubiquitous computing device like the Surfaces product mentioned above.

As well as 3D visual interfaces, which have not yet lived up to their promise, Gates identified other changes in input method as big driver. In fact he talked about several different input methods - the multi-touch approach that Jeff Haan has been on about for years and appears in Surfaces and on the iPhone; what I would call passive video input - again on Surfaces, this is cameras which map how devices relate to each other (well worth watching the demo for that), and possibly in whatever this conference tool is to identify who’s speaking or presenting; and finally a general nod in the direction of natural language input.

Jobs was very tight lipped about innovation although dropped a few hints about improving .mac, most likely in some sort of 2.0, SNS kind of direction. Hugh MacLeod also spots a vieled comment from Gates about re-entering the internet space with renewed vigour from Gates. I’d guess he’s refering the Live Services platform but who knows, perhaps there’s something else about to be launched. I wonder if Hugh knows more than he’s letting on.

Both men seemed suprisingly oblivious to the threat posed by SaaS to their desktop operating systems, with both citing a mix of local applications with cloud services in support.

Interestingly, Jobs also argued that a turning point for Apple’s corporate strategy was when they realised that their success was not contingent on Microsoft’s failure, although his attempt to characterise the “Mac vs PC” advertising as not attacking Microsoft was rather unsuccessful.

A great video on Ted Talks from Sir Ken Robinson challenges the targets which we set for kids in school. He argues that modern teaching methods are virutally designed to hamper creativity, polarising right and wrong and setting a premium against exprimentation.

A brilliantly witty presentation in its own right, this talk brings to bear some of the same thinking that lean manufacturing brought to its world. Considering we don’t have, really, any idea of what our kids will be doing when they leave school in ten years time, Robinson argues that teaching creativity will be as important as teaching literacy and numeracy.

(via sixtysecondview)