Brand in the Machine

Following on from my previous post about Design, Norman divides good design into 4 stages:

1. Visibility - simply looking at something (with no direct knowledge of how it works) gives the user the state of the device and the alternatives for action.
2. Conceptual Model - a 'model' designed into the operations of a device to give the user a coherent and consistent image of functionality.
3. Mappings - making it easy to determine the relationships between actions and results, between the functions and their effects.
4. Feedback - the user receives full and continuous feedback about the results of their actions.
   

For building anything with a User Interface (UI), I don't think you could get four better principles.

The only one I would add though, would be 'Tone'. Tone is almost the physical manifestation of each of the above four ideas. It's really the 'aesthetic' delivered in a consistent and coherent manner.

For the innately visible aspects of design (visibility, feedback, even mappings) it's easy to see the importance of Tone - all great products have it. But for certain products, I think you can even extend the idea to the Conceptual Model. It's about having an elegant, or easy, or recognizable, or familiar (a subtle difference) idea running through a product.

Every PC has a basic conceptual model regarding how files are stored - folders. It's a very structured, almost rigid idea that lends itself to very linear thoughts (file size, position in hierarchy, order, etc.). If you use Google Desktop, the conceptual model of 'folders' is replaced by 'search' - files now have relationships to other files based on commonalities of content and meaning, not a position in a hierarchy. 'Search' is less structured, more fluid, less linear.

Conceptual Models thus have 'tone'. Either one may be appropriate. Which one fits best with the design you have?

All of this is Branding - well removed from what many people typically believe Branding to be all about - but Branding nonetheless.

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The Design of Everyday Things

I think I let a bit of frustration out in the last post. I'm back to thinking and working on things that matter more to the issues at hand for our business - designing a software product.

And on that note, I thought I would make a brief mention of The Design of Everyday Things - a great book by Donald Norman. What intrigued me about it the most was that Norman first published it back in 1988, yet many design experts consider it recommended reading for today's design issues. When you read it you understand why. The principles he talks about are timeless - conceptual models, visibility, natural mapping. They all hark back, in some way, to the notion that we use visual cues to form expectations of function - that whole 'new language' issue I posted about before.

I am only a third of the way through the book, so look for a more complete review later down the track (and when I get some time as work has seemed to engulf me this week and last).

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Why it's so hard to figure out what's going on

A recent post over at Jaffe Juice caught my eye regarding what sources of information Millennials use to find out about 'trendy and hot products' (paraphrasing here, but that's not far off).

I remembered reading something else about TV advertisements recently among tweens, and found the article here.

So from Jaffe's article, only 29% of Millennials find TV ads informative for new trends and cool products, yet 87% of tweens feel that TV ads are one of the best ways for companies to inform them about new products. (?)

But wait, there's more! 78% of Marketers today believe TV advertising is less effective than it once was. However, if you include animals in your ad (particularly Monkeys), effectiveness improves! But unfortunately, Monkeys aren't any defense against ad skipping - 20% of households have DVRs that allow them to skip over the Monkey Ads! And, believe it or not, ad skipping has been going on for ages - 25% of people channel surfed during ads back in 1999.

Maybe all these tweens just love the humorous ads, because it's been proven humor works. Although people are less likely to buy products from humorous ads - but that's beside the point, isn't it?

Forget TV, we'll just put up a whole lot of 'wow' inducing pop-up rich multimedia, targeted, online ads - oh, 81% of people will block them, hmmmm.

Ok, Word of Mouth (WoM) to the rescue. It's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that 90% of people believe 80% of all WoM messages told to them by half of their friends (still trying to find a link for this one).

The lesson for Marketers then is that a humorous Monkey posing as your friend is about the most effective messaging tool there is.

I'm glad it's so clear.

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“the truth is nonsense”

I love reading the interviews of Bryan Appleyard. He writes for the Sunday Times in London and re-prints a lot of the longer form articles on his website (after they have run in the paper).

Reading blogs all day long and then reading Bryan's interviews is like eating spam and then being introduced to filet mignon - not that all blogs are 'spam', it's just that good writing is an art form, and we're not all artists (and we don't need to be either).

This one caught me eye recently. It's a sit-down interview with screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, Last King of Scotland). A small excerpt:

With Frost/Nixon, the emotional landscape was “two desperate, emotionally complex men, unable to be intimate”. For both of them, the American television interviews set up by Frost with the disgraced former president had to be a huge success. Morgan discovered so many different versions of what actually happened, he came to the conclusion that “the truth is nonsense” and regards his play as just one more version, “just another fiction”.

I don't know why this particular paragraph caught my eye - or why the phrase 'the truth is nonsense' stuck...

I think it's because it's so obviously right! The truth IS nonsense. Morgan was trying to piece together the events from other people's versions. When no one can agree what happened, what DID actually happen becomes irrelevant, nonsense.

How many time have we tried to search for the 'truth' only to discover a 'whole lot of fictions' - and that ours is just one more.

I don't really know if that's a useful thought. Definitely too deep to worry about right now.

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The greatest ever data visualization

This is an oldie (at least in web terms), but a goody.

Link to the video (I couldn't get it embedded due to some login error).

I showed this to a colleague of mine who was about to buy a house - I think it left a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach (nothing to do with the ride itself).

Why is it the greatest data visualization ever? Because it makes one point, and one point only in the most effective way possible - scaring the bejeezes out of you!

Thanks to the guys at Freakonomics for first pointing it out.

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Other components of 'user' language...

Since my last post on UI design and thinking about the common language we all use when interacting with objects, I've given some more thought to how we access 'functionality' in today's browser dominated environment.

'Functionality' is just a fancy work for 'stuff we like to do' - like email, IM, picture sharing, information sharing, etc. When we want to do one of these things, we'll go to the site we use. These sites are either boomarked, in our browser History, shortcuts on our desktop, or even links on our customized browser home page (iGoogle anyone?).

Considering we access all this functionality through our browser, wouldn't it be easier to access ALL functionality the same way? i.e. not having to actually open a desktop application? Say you want to run Word - www.msWord.com. Excel? www.msExcel.com. And so on.

Of course the url would be meaningless, as these are local desktop applications, running locally. Although some functionality could be remote. And of course, they wouldn't open and run the way they do now. They would exist more as 'tabs' in some hybrid browser environment

You could re-design the entire desktop environment to act seamlessly with the way we access functionality on the web. I think it would work.

I guess these things float around in your head when you're building a SaaS product.

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A language we never knew we learned

Have been doing a lot over the past week or so to do with Interface Design for applications. There are some really good resources out there, many linked to on the Adaptive Path blog.

It was a post on this blog recently that caught my eye. Dan Saffer was talking to Bill DeRouchey of Ziba about Interaction Design - how you actually create the interactive user experience (of a software application, a website, a physical product, etc.). It's a good interview, well worth a read if you are designing any sort of interface.

The piece that Dan actually quoted from Bill (below), was what struck me (and obviously him):

We’re surrounded by buttons and icons and little blinky lights that can give us examples of how people think about devices and interaction design because there’s one thing that’s definitely true, people don’t approach the product from a void. They’re taking the learnings that they’ve experienced with other products and they apply them to a new product: that’s why you tend to see the same icons over and over that mean the same thing; they have a stock meaning within the language of interaction design. An arrow tilted on its side and pointing to the right means play because it always means play, and because people know it means play when they approach a new device and they see that, they think, “That’s play.” It’s such a simple thing, but it comes down to the core of a visual language that we all share, and I think it’s important to try to deconstruct that language so we know how people are approaching a new product, a new device. So we can make it intuitive and they can tap into what they already know.

So basically, without even really knowing it, we've all learned a new language. It's the language of icons, buttons, knobs, links - all the interface components of modern technology. We expect certain symbols to convey specific functions and we expect these functions to work in the same way across applications - on the web or desktop. 100 years ago this language was non-existent. Hell, 20 years ago it was almost non-existent. My Dad still doesn't know how to use a web-browser!

Adhering to this 'language' when developing an application interface makes the actual design invisible - we spend no time decoding the interface, it just all works as expected. We all know who does this best.

It's a simple idea. But a powerful one.

Now to just try and figure it out myself...

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