Stop Designing Products - experiences are what count...

Peter Merholz has an interesting article on industrial design blog Core77, declaring that "Experience IS the Product, and the only thing users care about." It rambles a bit (as do we all), but the fundamental point is made well enough: products exist only for the experiences they offer. Therefore, when designers constrain themselves to products instead of the underlying experiences, they miss the opportunities for real innovation.

Merholz uses several examples that are pretty well-worn in the product design world--Tivo, iPod, Flickr, ClearRX--and with varying success explains the product as the result of the experience rather than vice versa. However, by invoking the products which currently deliver these experiences, he leaves us in the mindset that these new products are the perfect solutions. Of course, they're not; and it can be pretty fun to speculate about how future products will deliver better experiences.

Take the iPod - the experience being delivered by this product is the ability to hear any of your music, anytime. That experience is limited by the size of the hard drive; simply improving the product would mean increasing the hard drive capacity. But improving the experience may mean removing the hard drive entirely, and having music wirelessly streamed to the user, on demand, from the Big Jukebox in the Sky! That's not even too far out in the future. But consider these others which are:

-Tiny speakers permanently implanted in your ears, so you'll never need headphones. Or...

-Focused sound projected down from satellites (this one's really out there) to your exact, tracked location on earth...

-Mind control of track selection, music to match your actual mood, etc...

-Any more ideas? Anyone?

Traveler's Phrasebook Shirt - wear your tourist-ness on your sleeve...

Designed by Art Lebedev, the Traveler's Phrasebook T-shirt shows language-independent universal symbols for some of the most common needs while internationally out and about. Gives a neat impression at first, but on further thought, it seems more like a good start on an incomplete concept. Check it out:

-Wearing this thing on a shirt screeeams that you're a tourist, not something you want everyone to know. You're suddenly a target for both haggling merchants and shadier elements that are best kept uninformed. The first change I'd make is to transfer this whole pattern to a small, pocketable card. Unless you're the urban-hip-geek-chic type who wants to wear this kind of thing anyway.

-The question mark goes without saying. I guess it centralizes and emphasizes your cluelessness (a good thing?), but pointing to a symbol will already prompt a passerby to give you directions, no question mark needed.

-The number pad ain't easy. Presumably this is for price haggling, but trying to communicate a long number one digit at a time can get hairy when there's already a language barrier in the way. In street markets which frequently cater to foreign travelers, merchants usually use a basic calculator to simply display numbers when asked about prices. Since we're moving this whole product from a shirt to a card anyway, including a small solar calculator--or just an LCD number display, no calculating functions needed--would be a no-brainer.

-The iPod pocket. Since this shirt is specifically intended to be worn while traveling, how about a little security? Add buttons or a zipper to keep fend off pickpockets. And as a non-iPod-user myself, I'm annoyed that the description implies that that's all the pocket could be used for. Then again, we iPodless folks are a dying breed...

-The instructions. The product page says: "Point a finger at the pictogram you need and then point it twice at the question mark, which means, 'Where is it?'" It's a good goal to design products so intuitively that they don't need instructions - and this is especially true where language barriers are involved. I think this product is already intuitive enough that those instructions aren't needed, and to boot, they're ridiculous - those on the receiving end of the use of this product won't have read them!

-Sexual harassment. This shirt is available in women's styles. Think about it.

Rental Car Keys - permanent linking defeats the purpose!

I'm currently on vacation, and enjoying the very best $10,000 car that Alamo has to offer. Surprisingly, it's not the car that's been on my nerves -- it's the keys. Both keys, and a fabulous fob ("fobulous?") were permanently linked with a crimped steel cable keyring.

There are plenty of good reasons to give two keys to a car renter - keys can get lost, or other people may need access to the car (even if, as I was often reminded by the automated check-in, nobody else can drive it). But every conceivable reason for having two keys is obliterated by those keys being inseparably linked. And don't get me started on that bulky, yellowing-plastic, handwritten-tagged piece of pocket pollution that's along for the ride...

So I cut the keyring, and now carry only one key and something a little more useful. The full set will be returned on a standard keyring and hopefully passed on in that state to the next renter. And if they fine me, well... it was even kinda worth it.

Computers in Movies, Part 2: Systems designed for suspense...

Following up on the previous post, we're again dealing with how movies on TV and in movies differ - dramatically - from those in real life. Last time it was the sounds they made, this time it's how they're set up - specifically, for security and access. Don't worry, this won't get technical - I don't know much about the nuts and bolts (or bits and bytes) of large-system computer security. But I do know that a lot of what we see on screen has to be just plain ridiculous.

Once again, go ahead and view any movie or TV show where computer access or control plays an important role; and as always, "24" is a perfect choice. You'll invariably find systems designed purely for suspense, not for defense: you need access to a specific terminal to get some data or shut down a system. That terminal is in some remote or special location; maybe you have to break in, defeat some sensors (laser arrays are a favorite - and they always leave just enough room to get through, right?), hack a password, or fake your identity to biometric sensors. And yet, even in such beefy security systems, the right pieces are always missing to just barely allow access with the right skills and usually a quirky sidekick or two. At the same time, the enemy has been able to compromise the system remotely, to thicken the plot. Nifty. But rigorous security design can and does close these loopholes.

More generally, there are plenty of examples of TV realities being made up as they go along, bending and twisting to fit the needs of the plot. A favorite example is Springfield, hometown of the Simpsons, which is (according to various episodes) a small town and a metropolis situated around several mountains, a grand-canyon-style gorge, a river, an oceanfront, and forests. This is more acceptable because it's a comedy, and doubt is further suspended because of the "reset" that tends to happen with every episode of most cartoons. But once the show gets serious ("24" for sure, and "Star Trek" definitely had a piecemeal approach to technological capabilities and limitations), a coherent and somewhat plausible model of the underlying truths becomes more desirable.

In the end, what's the big deal? It's easy to say that these shows are just entertainment, and the worst result would be plot holes created by implausible computer systems. But in a world where fictional entertainment is increasingly substituted for real information and news, and where the electorate judges the effectiveness of counter-terrorism techniques based on fictional demonstrations, I can't help but worry that elements of the flawed computer designs onscreen will work their way into real systems. Just because we're too willing to believe what we see on TV!

Computers in Movies, Part 1: Computers making sounds computers don't make...

Anyone who's watched TV or a movie with me knows that this is one of my favorite pet peeves: Computers in movies and on TV constantly make sounds that computers don't make! Go ahead, check it out - watch anything where someone looks up something in a database, programs a system, analyzes an image, yadda yadda yadda. ("24" is a great place to go to find a good mix of all of these.) I guarantee that with every onscreen action - text coming up (usually scrolling onscreen in a way that it doesn't, by the way), images appearing, windows opening, passwords being accepted or access denied - there are bleeps, bloops, chirps, and squinks that don't happen in real life. It's enough to drive any PC poweruser nuts.

But, as usual on this blog, there's more to discover here. Putting my personal rant aside, let's notice that this isn't an isolated incident; it's ubiquitous, which suggests that there just might be a good reason for it. And here's a theory:

Computers are interactive experiences, where our expectations are closely guided by our own actions; we type and click to input, and then we're naturally tuned in to the expected output. TV and movies, on the other hand, are passive experiences, where we expect things to announce themselves sufficiently to gain our finicky attention. When we're watching a computer being used on TV, it's still a passive experience for us - after all, we're not the ones typing, clicking, and inputting. So, the computer within the movie needs an artificial way to command that attention - and the way to do that, much to my (and anyone else's?) chagrin, is with gratuitously added sound, scrolling text, great big blinking "ACCESS DENIED" signs, and so on.

And it works! Our attention is grabbed, as a mundane computing task magically becomes an cinematic event worthy of white knuckles and breathless suspense. Nobody complains about the extra sounds (except me) - but imagine how annoying it'd be to have those bleeps and chirps on your real computer. Eesh.

Tune in to the next post for Computers in Movies, Part 2: Systems designed for suspense...

Ambient Devices Umbrella - smart devices for forgetful folks...

Ambient Devices has been providing fuzzy, decorative information to savvy users for a few years with devices that indicate the status of weather, stock markets, etc, with non-quantitative colors. (Data is sent via the old pager wireless network; perfect, since it's low-bandwidth and those networks are hardly used at all these days.) However, it's been a small niche market so far, and the implementation of this ambient information has been mostly for novelty rather than for compelling new usage scenarios.

But this time, they may really have something! The Ambient Umbrella has a handle which lights up to indicate rain in the forecast - a reminder to bring an umbrella when and where a user really needs such a reminder. It's the "when and where" aspect of this information that finally makes it worthwhile. The product page also mentions "light patterns that intuitively indicate rain, drizzle, snow, or thunderstorms," which may be helpful or just muddle the message, depending on how intuitive they really are. In any case, pick the darn thing up if it's lit; that much is tough to mess up!

Starting from this notion of providing reminders when and where you need them, it's easy to envision a Smart Closet; knowing the weather and your schedule, it'd point out the recommended or necessary items to not forget. Cold? It can spotlight gloves and a hat. Got a tennis game later in the day? It can cue you to bring your racket and gym bag. If things get any smarter, we hapless users won't need to think for ourselves at all...

Email "Metanotification" - what you're saying without saying it...

John Tierney has a wholly worthwhile article in the New York Times on the "Metanotification" that exists in emails. That seven-syllable beast is just fancy word for the signals that you send to your email recipients by putting their email at the beginning of the "To:" list or the end of the "Cc:" list; by sending them a personal email or merely including them in a hundred-recipient distribution. The problem is that this metanotification is usually unintentional and unknown to the sender - but often noticed vested with unjustified meaning by the readers. For example, Hatfield didn't mean anything when he put his best friend McCoy's email second-to-last on the "To:" line for his upcoming hoedown. But Hatfield noticed it, and couldn't help feeling less important than all those other yokels who "done got invited afore me." And look what happened...

Anyway, the cause of this problem is the combination of (1) a system which allows metanotification to exist, but (2) doesn't cue users to consciously consider it. Change either of these, and a lot of bad blood could be avoided! Some examples:

1) Remove the metanotification: Imagine a plugin for your email client which caused all the recipients' email addresses to be placed in the "To:" line, rearranged into alphabetical order, and the "To:" tag itself changed to "To (in alphabetical order):" No question about why you're first or last anymore!

2) Cue users to consider metanotification: A little more annoying, but this could take the form fof a pop-up warning in between hitting Send and actually sending, where the sender is instructed to consciously and properly adjust the order and To/Cc locations of all the addresses. These kinds of warnings never work, of course - they're ignored and become useless annoyances, but that's another post for another time!