less really is more

I want to put down something I've learned through years of driving one or two new cars weekly. Is is this: less really is more. It's easy to make a good expensive car; the trick is making a good affordable one.

Max Knudson, "Free rides hit end of the line," Deseret News, 28 Dec 2001, deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,355015105,00.html?

Why High-Tech Firms Can’t Afford to Ignore Patents," Knowledge @ Warton, Dec 2001- Jan 2002

An article I wish I had read before the company lawyer came asking about patentable inventions.

Janice Crotty Fraser, "Groundwork for Project Success," webtechniques, Jan 2002

Upfront steps to help make web projects a success.

Dan Bricklin, "Thoughts about the Segway HT: Why it's not just a scooter," Bricklin.com, 17 Dec 2001

You should look closely at disruptive technologies, and not just dismiss them out of hand.

Dan Bricklin, the creator of spreadsheets, points out the disruptive possibilities of the Segway. Well done with great links to Segway comics on Salon.

Jeffrey Zeldman,"Why Don't You Code For Netscape," A List Apart, 7 Dec 2001

The method outlined in the NYPL Style Guide (valid XHTML, tables for basic layout, CSS for all else) works in any browser, though the design may be ever–so–slightly degraded in 4.0 and older browsers. I often follow this method in designing projects for clients, and recommend it in my consulting practice as a means of bringing document structure and forward–compatibility to large–scale content sites.

Adam Greenfield, "The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes," A List Apart, 7 Dec 2001

...I believe that success in design strongly implies a satisfying the requirements of a user. This is what distinguishes it from art or self-expression...

"Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines," MSDN, 9 Feb 2001

This 18 page doc gives good ideas on making better task based user interfaces. The four basic steps are outlined as:
1. Focus each screen on a single task.
2. State the task.
3. Make the screen's contents suit the task.
4. Offer links to secondary tasks.
I think the suggestion of getting writers involved in the early stages of design to name the screens can make a big difference in software. I just the way word people think. They have a lot to offer development and marketing teams.

Noel Franus, "Fulfilling the Promise: Borrowing from 'Usability' for Better Customer Relationships," MarketingProfs.com, Dec 2001

All too often... marketing professionals fixate on selling the promise of a product, and skip out on fulfilling that promise. The delivery of a promise is best left to the product designers, the distribution folks, and the customer service people, right? Perhaps so, but if you're ignoring your customers after you've crafted your pitch, you're missing out on a chance to create a more precise, intimate and alluring pitch to your existing customers - and to convert them from single-shot statistics into long-term relationships.

Carbon IQ's User centered design methods, posted 26 Nov 2001

A nine page .pdf outlining methods for inquiry, participatory design, profiling, testing and inspection. Each method is rated by cost, time, resources, and expertise required as well as the quality of data it produces. I thought it was a great summary. I agree with the quality of data ratings. - Grant

Michael Schrage, Make No Mistake?, Fortune, 24 Dec 2001 (via Tomalak's Realm)

An ounce of prevention isn't always worth a pound of cure. Fixing your mistakes may prove a better business investment than preventing them. After all, it's customer perception--not Deming-trained statisticians--that ultimately determines product and service quality.

Stephen H. Wildstrom, "Finally, a Hybrid That Really Works," BusinessWeek Online, 17 Dec 2001

The Treo is a marvel of thoughtful design. At 2.7 inches wide and 4.3 inches long, slightly smaller than standard Palm handhelds, the Treo looks like a big flip-phone. When you open the lid, the Treo turns on with your speed dials displayed. Tap the phone button and an on-screen dial-pad appears. Another tap brings up your phone list...Not only is it small and light but the flip design means you're unlikely to get skin oil or makeup all over the screen. Little details like that make a vast difference in usability.

William Matthews, "Dot-gov by design," Federal Computer Week, 10 Dec 2001

After two years of research, Web usability specialists at NCI believe they have developed a prescription for designing Web sites that work. They start by finding out what Web users want and then studying with scientific precision which Web designs make information easiest for users to get.

Karen Holtzblatt, "Data from a few leads to optimum results," incent.com, 30 Nov 2001

People get hung up on numbers because they tend to focus on variations, on people's differences rather than their basic similarities. But focusing on people's differences leads to products designed with infinite customizations. It eventually de-structures a system with ever more customizable and slightly different options, or requires costly upfront customizations at installation.

Paul Festa, "Turning on the World Wide Web," News.com, 10 Dec 2001

My bottom line is that you must have a healthy, adequately funded scientific community, because we're solving problems you don't even know you have yet. And the Web is one of the most outstanding examples of that.

David Pogue, "Interface Design Is Trickier Than It Seems," The New York Times, 6 Dec 2001

The interface -- the layout of the controls -- determines how easily and effectively you can use the product: which buttons go where, how many layers down you have to burrow to find an important function, and so on.

Here's good interface design: A Palm organizer's Address Book screen has a New button—but the Delete command is hidden in a menu, because you add names much more frequently than you delete them. Here's bad design: Cell phones that make you dive into menus just to turn off the ringer.

"People Who Need People," CIO Magazine, 1 Dec 2001

Companies that have had little tangible business success with their online communities generally rushed to put them on their sites without evaluating whether they were really appropriate for their company, establishing a business goal or objective for them, or realizing that it actually takes effort to get visitors to participate.

Scott Rosenberg, "The Microsoft resistance," Salon.com Technology, 29 Nov 2001

For all its talk of innovation, Microsoft is rarely in the forefront of the new developments in computing that really take off -- whether it's the graphical user interface, the Web, Palm devices or trading music files. To be fair to Gates and company, they are probably more innovative than most companies their size. But companies as big as Microsoft is today never start software revolutions; at best they co-opt them.

Stewart Alsop, "My New Favorite Toy," Fortune.com, 10 Dec 2001

The iPod is not the first small digital music player with a hard disk....All have similar technical features to the iPod, except that they just aren't good enough. They are too big to fit into a shirt pocket. Their software is hard to use. Their batteries don't last long.

...I had it working and playing my music in about ten minutes. ...now I've got a significant portion of the music that I know and love stored on my Macintosh--and on my iPod. My music, where I want it, when I want it. Problem solved.

Robert D. Hof, "The People's Company," BusinessWeek Online, 3 Dec 2001

By using the Net to tap into the talent and imagination of its customers, eBay has multiplied the brainpower of its executives by millions. Imagine a retailer trying to do this: It would have to interview every single person leaving every store, post a list of what each thought of the shopping experience, then ask them to write up a merchandising plan and call suppliers to arrange deliveries--and oh, by the way, could they keep an eye out for shoplifters? That's what eBay's customers voluntarily do each day. Says Whitman: "It is far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system."

Charles Haddad, "A Much Cleaner Office for OS X," Business Week Online, 21 Nov 2001

You can make Word, the bloated grandfather of all Microsoft applications, look as clean, simple, and inviting as OS 9's SimpleText or OS X's TextEdit applications. Now that's progress.

Claire Tristram, "The Next Computer Interface," Technology Review, Dec 2001

The desktop metaphor puts the onus on our brains to juggle this expanding collection of files, folders and lists. Yet "our neurons do not fire faster, our memory doesn't increase in capacity and we do not learn to think faster as time progresses," notes Bill Buxton, chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront, a leading maker of graphic-design tools. Buxton argues that without better tools to exploit the immense processing power of today's computers, that power is not much good to us.

Thomas Hine, "Looking Alive," The Atlantic, Nov 2001

It's almost impossible to separate the engineering features that make the Fastskin work from its "design"—those qualities of form, texture, and color that make a thing memorable and meaningful. The Fastskin comes close to the ideal that form should follow function. However, most of the time function needs a little help. It falls to designers to make people feel comfortable with technology. Throughout the twentieth century they generally did so by dramatizing an object's benefits—speed, power, and efficiency, for instance—while hiding the things that made the object work. They took the early automobile, for example, in which each functional part was visible, and fashioned a steel shell that hid the machinery and gave the car a personality. In so doing they turned a contraption into a convenience.

Sometimes function has little to do with it. There was no practical reason for a 1930s refrigerator to be streamlined, but its new profile turned the erstwhile icebox into an embodiment of modernity and progress. The objects in which form follows not function but fantasy are often the most revealing ones.

Scott Rosenberg, "Inside Salon Premium," Web Techniques, Dec 2001

After six years on the Web we've learned to base our plans on the way users actually behave, not how we wish they would.

David Fore, "Whole lotta thwarting going on," Cooper Interaction Design Newsletter, Nov 2001

A system that disregards people will itself be disregarded by people.

Scott Kirsner, "Making Better Toys and Jumbo Jets by Sharing the Rough Draft," The New York Times, 5 Nov 2001

...making changes to three-dimensional objects and beaming them to colleagues around the world has become as easy as altering a sentence in a shared word-processing document.

Charles Fishman, "Design - Freeman Thomas," FastCompany, Dec 1999

"So I'm driving over here today in the Prowler, and I pass a car. There's a man driving, a kid in the front passenger seat, and two more kids in the back. They see the Prowler, and they grin and give me a thumbs-up," says Thomas. "And I give them a thumbs-up back. You only get one life; this life is not a rehearsal. So chances are, you want to have fun. You still want to act like a child. That spirit is a frame of mind, not an age. And the automobile gives you a chance to have an adventure every day. Say you drive 20 minutes to work every day. Your commute could be totally pragmatic, but it doesn't have to be. Having a really nice car is like wearing a really nice suit. It's like a role you play -- a role you get to play. Who doesn't want a thumbs-up experience?"
...
Thomas is always sketching cars. He has a simple, rough, freehand style, using whatever ballpoint pen is around. He uses lots of lines and cross-hatching -- capturing the mood and the shape, rather than the details. Sketching helps him think, helps him experiment, helps him explain.
....
In that world, Thomas has evolved a role that serves both his artistic and his bureaucratic needs. "I'm a storyteller," he says. "I think of a designer as a processor of information -- like a scriptwriter or a novelist." Thomas sees himself as a kind of cultural filter and architect: Listen carefully to what's going on out in the world, consider history and context, and create a vehicle that matches the zeitgeist. The Microbus is an artifact of its era; so is the minivan.

Thomas believes absolutely that every vehicle needs a story. "What's the plot?" he asks of the Prowler, before answering his own question. Being able to communicate that story to consumers is one thing. But being able to articulate it to people inside the company is perhaps more important, if your designs are going to survive, and if they are going to transcend "committee-ization."

"It's important to be able to communicate, not just to designers but also to nondesign people," Thomas says. "If people don't have a vision, you have to be able to walk them through what you're talking about. You have to be able to connect equally with an engineer, with someone from marketing, and with someone from the fabrication shop. The question is, How do you get people to work together? Most companies have 'committee design.' That's not what I like. I like 'consensus design.' In a committee, people don't speak up. They don't say what they think. Nothing is allowed to come out. Consensus design means that you all express yourselves, and your ideas, and at the end of the day, you all agree to do something. You might initially be against an idea, but if someone walks you through the thought process, you might then be able to say, 'I see what you're talking about.' "

Andy Raskin, "Are You Geek Enough?," Business 2.0, Dec 2001

Jeff Katz, CEO of Orbitz, the online travel agency, says learning to listen is how he made the leap from engineer to executive. With a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA, Katz concedes that he needed to improve his listening skills to make it to the top. "It's something I've had to cultivate," he says. "I've worked hard at listening to customers and to people doing the work."

Rachel Konrad and Sandeep Junnarkar, "Rival browsers benefiting from MSN gaffe," CNET.com Tech News, 1 Nov 2001

Berners-Lee sounded a more critical note. "Control over a person's desktop and their browser is control over their whole Net-mediated perception of the world out there," he wrote. "It is very powerful."

Scott Berkun, "Strategies of influence in interaction design," UIWeb.com, Nov 2001

A prototype of your new search page design reflects a set of design choices you think should be made. But what are the business impacts of those choices? How long will it take to build? How will it effect advertising rates, or partnerships? What code changes are needed to make it possible? In the abstract, some designers feel these are not design considerations, and instead are just matters of implementation for someone else to figure out. This is a trap. While it’s great to ignore constraints to inspire creative thinking, if your want your work to reach people’s web browsers or desktops, you have to plan to involve yourself in the practicalities of realizing your ideas. The more skilled you are at assessing those aspects of a design, the more welcome you’ll be to participate in the process.
....
The two most powerful forces of influence in the interaction designers toolbox are the video and the prototype. Humans are visceral creatures. We respond to things that call on our senses. Specs, code, and even bitmaps are all static, limited attempts to represent what the experience of interaction will be like. It takes an inventive imagination to read these things and accurately visualize anything. It’s typically only those few individuals with practiced imaginations, regardless of job title, that can do this well. If you need to convince someone that the current design has problems, you must show them... If you want to get people’s attention around your work and the user experience, there is no better way.

The prototype offers you another form of direct influence. It’s almost a secret weapon. While everyone in the room is debating in front of the whiteboard about what the design should be, or how it should behave, you can show the group a real live working example of your ideas . They can even interact with it depending on what you’ve done. It’s a huge advantage.

Walter Mossberg, "Consumer Technologies Make Startling Advances in Decade," The Wall Street Journal, 25 Oct 2001

... it's amazing how much better things are than they were just a decade ago. It seems like 100 years have passed, not just 10. Yet, some things haven't changed. The techie class that designs and sells these products still tends to make them too complicated and still looks down on average consumers, at least privately. The buying experience is still terrible. And in some ways, at least when it comes to the personal computer, consumers actually have less choice than they did in 1991.

Marcia Conner, "Our Shared Playground: An Interview with Michael Schrage," LiNE Zine, Winter 2001

...in researching the histories of disciplines like biotech and software development for the book, what I really found at the core of innovation weren't only creative individuals, per se, but rather creative relationships. Intriguingly, the key medium for managing those creative and innovative relationships was the shared space. I found that all collaboration, without exception, requires shared space.

"Making the World a Happier Place, One Web Site at a Time: Interview with Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir," WebReference.com, Oct 2001

At the same time, to get high quality design, you must have usability-directed design where you start out with studying users' needs and let that decide where you're going to go. That more integrated approach, where usability permeates throughout the lifecycle and becomes the way a company designs interfaces, I would say that is exceedingly rare. Basically, it almost never happens that way. I recommend that is the direction things should move because whenever products or websites are designed that way, they become so dramatically superior that they take over and gain some substantial market shares. So it's self-perpetuating.

Dan Bricklin, "Copy Protection Robs The Future, Bricklin.com, Oct 2001

Copy protection will break the chain of formal and informal archivists who are necessary to the long-term preservation of creative works.

Jennifer McFarland, "The Consumer Anthropologist," HBS Working Knowledge, 24 Sep 2001

When a new product needs testing for consumer reaction, companies traditionally turn to that old market-research mainstay, the focus group. Today, however, alternative techniques offer deeper insights that can inform the product development cycle like never before. Ethnographic market research—somewhat new to marketers but as old as the science of anthropology—is increasingly being used to provide new information about consumers. Using the anthropologist's tool kit of methods and theories, ethnographers are giving corporations an inside look at the cultural trends, attitudes, and lifestyle factors that influence consumer decisions about everything from bathtubs and toothpaste to insurance and batteries.

Such research can give companies an advantage in learning not just what customers want, but what they will want, says Eric Arnould, professor of marketing at the University of Nebraska. "Ethnography is a way to get up close and personal with consumers," he says. "As the cycle time for new product development goes down and its cost goes up, and as competition becomes fiercer, many firms are trying to get closer to the consumer to try to figure out the context of use for new products."

Whereas focus groups often work in artificial settings for short periods, ethnography situates consumers within the larger social and cultural context.... Ethnography looks not for opinions but for a 360-degree understanding of how a product might resonate with the consumer's daily life.

Tony Fernandes, "It's the people, stupid," CNET.com, 25 Sep 2001

Billions of dollars of investment have been wasted simply because companies have ignored people and their needs. Doing usability testing late in the process only refines a bad design and won't fix the problem. What the industry needs is to sign up for product design in advance of product development. I see the unwillingness to do this as a plague that increasingly affects the market advantage the United States currently enjoys.

Linda Tischler, "Simplicity + Technology = Sweet Success," Fast Company, Sep 2001

"If you really want a category killer, you've got to go simple, simple, simple."

The old design mantra "Less is more" has never been truer than in the world of technological gadgetry, Lovelady says. As consumers balk at the steep learning curve attached to each software upgrade and "time-saving" appliance, manufacturers and engineers are ceding power to designers who insist on simplicity, elegance, and user friendliness, even if it means sacrificing some technological wizardry.

Porter Anderson, "Scott Adams: Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle," CNN.com, 28 Aug 2001

"They've got this whole design process that starts with this incredible, chaotic brainstorming session where anything goes and nothing's criticized -- and at that stage, you're pretty sure nothing good can ever come out of this.

"Then you find out that they've done this before. And they actually do throw away the bad ideas. They do a rapid prototype and start building stuff."

Jay Conrad Levinson, "What do people want online? It's not what you think it is," CAP Online, April 2001

Some folks see the web as a vast, new field for advertising messages, assuming that while people may want to do something else, if we can entice them with Flash, we can sort of trick them into paying attention to our products and services. Guess what. That's not gonna happen.

What does this mean to emarketers? It means that if you're constructing a site for goal-oriented consumers, you'd better make sure you can help facilitate their seeking. Rather than focus on entertainment, Flash, and useless splash screens, the most effective sites are those that help people get the information they want when they need it. Straightforward data, information that invites comparison, and straight talk are going to win the day.

Charles L. Mauro, "Is a high priced usability 'Guru' a good investment?" TaskZ.com, 6 Aug 2001

When taken in this context, even the best usability Guru is unlikely to have a suitable understanding of your customer profile and their critical cognitive structures, such as prior learning, experience with other software, and motivation. Therefore, even though usability Gurus may have the best intentions in their criticisms, there is absolutely no guarantee that their recommendations will improve customer acquisition, retention, or migration. Granted, some design flaws are so obvious that they deserve a bit of rant and rave; but such reviews should always leave the motivation of the development team intact. It should never be a humiliating experience in front of the boss and the boss's boss. Want to kill UCD for the current generation of web development teams? Make them think that everything they did was stupid and wasteful.

Lewis Samuels, "Designing for Usability on a Shoestring," WebReview.com, 3 Aug 2001: The goals of the user are relevant because, again, it's the users who will determine the eventual success or failure of any site. This fact is worth repeating because it's frequently forgotten when defining navigation, functionality, and visual design. In my experience, Web professionals often lose sight of the end user, focusing instead on the opinions of their clients, coworkers, or worse yet, themselves. This is a natural reaction, but a very dangerous one. If it's the client that signs the checks, it's only natural to want to please them. However, the savvy designer will keep in mind that the client often knows nothing about the user and their needs.

Michael Kanellos, "The elements of style," CNET.com, 16 Jul 2001

How does the focus-group testing work. When do you start marrying your ideas with the average person's behavior?

We are mostly interested in where are people using these things, what are the tasks they are trying to accomplish, what are their key frustrations, how much space do they have.

A good example of that is the ThinkLight. That whole idea came out between collaboration between human-factors engineering, industrial designers and marketing. We were trying to figure out what user benefit we could link to our product. It was along the lines of making a better dashboard rather than a better engine.

One of the things we came up with was that often people were trying to use these things in places you wouldn't ordinarily think of, in a dark lecture hall, or maybe in the back seat of a car on a trip in the middle of the night, and you are trying to write a report. Everybody talked about, "Well, you can tilt the screen down and light your keyboard and lift it back up again." But then we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a light that would illuminate the keyboard?"

HannaHodge User Experience Architects 1 It is with both sadness and great pride that I must inform you of the end of an era for us at HannaHodge. As of July 2001 we will cease operations. We have used two measures to inform our decision. In March we got the same word from Argus Associates. What is making what appear to be successful user experience and information architecture firms fail? There are enough sites with problems that there should be plenty of work.

Design for Process, Not Products If users feel pushed through a process or can't figure out what to do next, you're skipping steps that matter to them. Don't design Webpages. Design support for users' tasks.

Dear World: Loose Lips Sink More Than Ships Ms. Turkle of M.I.T. says that many Americans equate e-mail with paper mail, which enjoys strong legal, and social, protections against snooping. Even though they know e- mail might not be secure, she said, many people think of it as being like talking with friends in a bar. "You're surrounded by other people but you don't experience those other people as having a microphone at your table," she said. Ms. Turkle also notes that sending and receiving e-mail are very different experiences. Composition occurs in a zone of intimacy, which leads people to write things they might not otherwise risk broadcasting to the world. "The act of composing e-mail occurs within your private mindspace," she said. "The only place where people are quiet and not being bombarded is in front of the machine." But the recipient is often in a completely different state of mind. "A hundred messages come up; the experience of receiving this thing is that you are being bombarded," Ms. Turkle said. This breeds an attitude that no e-mail should be taken too seriously. Instead, the harried recipient thinks, "Oh, cool, I'll pass this on," and with a mouse click sends a piece of correspondence around the world, like a computer virus.

HBS Working Knowledge: Special Reports: Scott Cook: The Power of Paradigms What is clear, Cook said, is that the fundamental activity underlying paradigm shifts is directly related to the practice of good business in general. "That means getting the decision makers close to the customer," he said. "That's one of the distinguishing characteristics of HBS, in fact—to drive research and teaching close to practice, close to executives in their day-to-day lives." "The customer is the compass; that's where the learning comes from," Cook concluded. "And don't forget to truly respect surprises."

HBS Working Knowledge: Special Reports: Scott Cook: The Power of Paradigms "The biggest business innovations are not technology-based. Major breakthroughs come through a unique mindset or paradigm," said Cook (HBS MBA '76), citing eBay's revolutionary e-commerce model as an example. "There was no inventory, no guarantee that merchandise was authentic, and no easy way to pay for or receive goods—it might take a customer one week to buy a $10 item, and another two to three weeks to receive it," he remarked. "Needless to say, retailers and venture capitalists ignored him, thinking he was either irrelevant or crazy." When Benchmark Capital finally took a chance on the new auction site, eBay's IPO and subsequent stock movement rewarded the investment company with the single largest gain in the history of venture capital. The technology supporting the eBay Web site took its founder, Pierre Omidyar, less than a week to build, Cook continued. "What was significant was the power of this new paradigm or mindset," he said. "People who shift paradigms have the same facts as everyone else, but they see them differently. The end result either revolutionizes the customer experience, or the economics of the business, or both, as was the case with eBay."

Grow Your Site, Keep Your Users | Computerworld News & Features Story Sometimes even false user perceptions must be considered in designing new features. On a home-page redesign in March of last year, eBay produced a page that was "very colorful and looked very graphically intense," yet took less time to load than the older version, says Borns. However, in testing the page with a few thousand users, concerns arose. "We showed them an image of the page—it didn't actually work—and they said, 'This page has so many graphics on it, it's going to take forever to load,' " says Borns. "We knew it loaded faster, but because they thought it wouldn't, we ended up paring it down a little bit."

DaveNet : The power to publish as an individual Weblogs are the anti-newspaper in some ways. Where the editorial process can filter out errors and polish a piece of copy to a fine sheen, too often the machinery turns even the best prose limp, lifeless, sterile and homogenized. A huge part of blogs' appeal lies in their unmediated quality. Blogs tend to be impressionistic, telegraphic, raw, honest, individualistic, highly opinionated and passionate, often striking an emotional chord.

Innovating For Humans In general, though, software demands constant innovation for two reasons: to differentiate one product from another and to justify upgrades. If an innovation sets your product apart enough to increase its market share, others will imitate it and the differentiation will slowly disappear; to keep your software distinct, you have to constantly innovate. And to keep generating profit from existing customers, you work to improve your product in a way that is compelling enough to make people want to go out and buy it again. Innovation becomes a careful, strategic game in which everyone tries to innovate enough to distinguish their product and justify upgrades, but not so much that they alienate their installed base or step too far away from the familiar.

Stalk Your User (Web Techniques, June 2001) Technology seldom becomes important until it becomes invisible.

Salon.com Technology | Miles of aisles When Web sites began selling stuff the conventional wisdom was that they might be able to offer bargains, and even make money, but they'd never be able to offer as rich and seductive an experience as a bricks-and-concrete store. Guess what? That wisdom was dead wrong. It's possible to make shopping for books and music online not just a task but a pastime and a devotion. Amazon.com proves it.

Technology Review - The Net Effect: May the Best Interface Win! By making its online store easy to navigate and use, Amazon has created an environment where money is easy to spend.

Michael Schrage, "Beta Version," Technology Marketing, May 1, 2001

Which brings us back to marketing: an inherent tension always exists between complexity and convenience. The folks at Nokia and Motorola quietly—and blushingly—confess that people only use a fraction of the programmed functionality of their cell phones. That's less true of Palms and Visors, but those PDAs represent an unusual marriage of productivity and convenience—with the accent on productivity.
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Alas, it's so much easier to sell convenience than to design it.
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Want a useful metric to evaluate convenience? Consider "Mean time-to-payback"—how long does it take someone to feel like they're getting value from a function. The faster; the better. Architecting the trade-offs between productivity, payback and convenience is what will determine whether people buy phones that are PDAs or PDAs that are phones—or neither, or both.

Fortune.com

A lot of people are working on alternative engines. But this one," he says, patting a silver prototype fastened to a worktable, "has a better chance of succeeding because it is simple. Simple, simple, simple, with only one major moving part, and that means less cost. And there's a big market need."

hypergene | tufte: don't get it original - get it right

Tufte responded with a revelation: “Do no harm,” he said. “Don’t get it original – get it right.” There it was – the Hypocratic oath of design. It hit me hard because it had been staring me in the face all those years. Design is not about vanity, it’s about responsibility, integrity. It’s self-effacing and at it’s best invisible. “Good information displays get people thinking about the information not the design,” Tufte said.

developerWorks : Usability : The usability world according to Tog

• "Effective interfaces are visually apparent and forgiving, instilling in their users a sense of control. Users quickly see the breadth of their options, grasp how to achieve their goals, and do their work.
• "Effective interfaces do not concern the user with the inner workings of the system. Work is carefully and continuously saved, with full option for the user to undo any activity at any time."
• "Effective applications and services perform a maximum of work, while requiring a minimum of information from users."

Internet World Daily News: Nielsen on Usability: Is Usability Really Worth Anything? - 05/01/01 Usability also helps with services that users will pay for. Field research can identify needs that are so important to a person's work or life that a service that meets these needs will offer great value. User-centered design can produce solutions to the needs that are easy to learn and efficient to use and thus unlock the full potential of the service. And traditional Web usability can ensure that a service is described and promoted in such a way that people can understand it and will sign up for it.

HBS Working Knowledge Operations & Technology The most remarkable finding was that getting a low-functionality version of the product into customer's hands at the earliest opportunity improves quality dramatically.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Second sight Just look at how fast these pages load, even on a regular old modem! Experiment with how effortlessly you can move from article to article, cut and copy text, email links to friends, or use the data in any way you like. No frames, no JavaScript, no special applets to download. No tracing your pathway, no spy programs nested on to your hard drive, no compliance-inducing interface designed to pull your finger towards the "buy" button. Experience this lightning-fast, user-friendly world for yourself. Then you'll understand what it is people like me have been complaining about for the past five years. This simple, open and accessible information architecture is the closest you can get today to the internet that those of us who were online in the early 90s keep talking about. Now you know why we whine so much. It is not that we are nostalgic for the innocence of our interactive youths. We merely have a very clear recollection of how much better early web interfaces served the needs of students, researchers and anyone looking for some information.

VCs risk outpacing consumers - Tech News - CNET.com As new investors begin to evaluate business plans, he said, they should rely on certain litmus tests. One is that the right strategy is unknowable in advance. "Have a strategy to learn, rather than a strategy to implement," he advised. If a technology enables "the larger population of less skilled and less wealthy people to do something that historically they could not do or that only specialists could do," it also has high potential for success, he said.

Jazzed About Work It's almost impossible to determine which comes first -- technology or the need for technology. But for me, the starting point is always human need: You can't build a technology without first thinking about how people might use it. Early on, at least, the development process is not about technology; it's about sociology.

Fast Company -- Jazzed About Work
If people are going to use computer technologies to augment their interactions, those technologies need to have the directness and spontaneity of a phone call, the visual immediacy of a fax, the asynchrony of email, and the privacy of a closed-door meeting. All of this started to crystallize for me one night, when I came home and found my son playing a modified capture-the-flag version of Quake. He and his friends had actually designed their own virtual environment: They could look up, look down, look left, look right. They could jump up and grab the flag. They could even talk to other team members. I sat there and watched him for a while, and then it hit me that this was his way of communicating. He was socializing with other people by playing this game on the Net. And I realized that those of us in business -- who have so much to gain through effective communication -- were using lame, document-oriented tools. Our own kids were using technology far more effectively than we were! They were operating in an environment where small groups of people can self-organize and interact. And they made me think that I should be able to use technology in the same way.

Darwin Online - Read Darwin -Nice Guys Finish First - Customer Relationship Management QVC has also changed the job descriptions of customer service reps to make it clear that they are "customer advocates" who are rewarded for uncovering glitches and suggesting new processes—not just "complaint handlers" who respond to one gripe and move unthinkingly on to the next. It was fairly easy to get the reps to make the shift. Call center managers were another story and had to be encouraged to listen to reps. "Unfortunately, some people had to leave," Hunter says. "They didn't get it."

Darwin Online - Read Darwin -Nice Guys Finish First - Customer Relationship Management Before Hunter arrived from Citibank nine years ago, QVC kept track of company-focused metrics: calls per hour, sales per minute, profitability per customer. Now QVC emphasizes customer-focused measures: How friendly are the call center reps? How knowledgeable are they about the products? How clear are invoices and product instructions? How many people does a customer have to speak with to get an answer? How often does a customer have to call a second time to get a problem resolved? QVC gathers these metrics by fielding customer satisfaction surveys (quantitative and qualitative, run by outside companies) and by tracking every last phone call. Cross-functional teams made up of call center staff and systems staff review customer service reports every week and figure out what areas need work. For example, when Hunter arrived at QVC, 15 percent of customer service callers had to ring back a second time to get their problems resolved. Since some of those calls were from customers who had returned items and wanted to make sure their accounts had been credited, QVC began crediting customers' accounts more quickly and sending cablegrams to let customers know. Thanks to changes like this, the number of callers who need to make repeat calls to customer service has shrunk to 3 percent, Hunter says; the goal is for it to reach zero.

Economist.com The reasons for such failures are complex. Some designers bet too much on technology and forget simplicity. Asking consumers what they want is not necessarily the answer: many of them don’t know. Only expensive and time-consuming direct observation, says Mr Nielsen, will tell you where they encounter problems with a site. .... “If the PC was about adding features”, explains Mr Rifredi, “hand-helds and cellphones are about what to cut.”

Let me write that down: the genius of documentation But there's one more important, overarching reason to create documentation for a Web project. It forces you and your team to decide what you want to do. It forces you to design. It forces you to strip away ambiguity and fuzziness and indecision, to decide just exactly what needs to be done. In short, it forces you to think.

Hawkins Talks In general, I think messaging is one of the really big applications for people. There's PIM-personal information management. That's what we did at Palm and Handspring. There's voice communication-the cell phone. And there's messaging. There's also a fourth [application], browsing and transactions, but that hasn't taken off yet from a wireless point of view.

Critical Thinking in Web and Interface Design The most common failure of development projects is the inability to correctly define the problem. If the goal is vague, it's impossible to know whether it's been solved it or not. And even if the goal is well defined, it may be the wrong goal for the situation in which the design will be used. A well-built machine gun won't help you repair a flat tire. So these two kinds of failure, vague goals and the wrong goals, have nothing to do with technical acumen. If you can't prevent these kinds of failures, even the best developers or designers in the world will not succeed. You may write great code or create wonderful designs, but if you don't solve the right problem, your efforts are wasted.

Technology Review - The Net Effect: Rememberance of Things Past Today it is data, more than money, that is the lifeblood of our society. And yet more than three decades into the "Information Age," data is something that we still don't quite understand how to steward. Data is not physical, not something that you can lock away today and hope you'll be able to access in 10 or 20 years. Large collections of data are almost impossible to safely maintain—especially over long periods. At the same time, data is just as difficult to dispose of properly. Indeed, individuals and businesses now have so much data in so many different formats on so many different computers that we are all heading for our own individual data catastrophes.

The church of usability - Web Building - CNET.com Who are these special individuals, the prophets of effective Web user-interface design? We sought out and interviewed six of these inspired souls, scribed their words, and made them Web. You may already belong to one of their factions, but we've placed each on his own mount so that you can contrast and compare and pick a path to usability salvation. (Note: The editors of Builder.com take no responsibility for crusades, jihads, or other religious warfare inspired by these individuals.)

Debunking the myths of UI design

MYTH: Design is a luxury.

REALITY: In his 1990 book, The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman offers the traditional antidote for all those who underestimate the role of design in our lives. The issue is not whether design should happen -- it always happens. Everyone in product development does design work, whether they know it or not. Moreover, the design is the dimension of a product that customers see and feel; it is what satisfies or disappoints them.

In software development, design is widely misunderstood and undervalued. Often no explicit user interface design is done separately from the code. Iterative design then becomes recoding. This is a short-sighted strategy because it results in significantly more code being written in the long run. Because design is unavoidable, the real issue is whether it is left implicit in the software being developed, or made explicit and captured separately. The useful debate is about how to do design work well, and how to capture it in an optimal form for communicating to those who implement it.

An explicit user interface design can focus on how a product satisfies customer wants and needs rather than on how to build it. This can make implementation more difficult, but that is the price to be paid for focusing on the real goal of product development. An explicit design allows for early detection of implementation issues, as well as for placing the primary focus on satisfying users. Simultaneous design and implementation sometimes occurs on small projects. However, this approach is not scalable and requires some very special, multitalented people. Software development superheroes are in short supply.

News: The prerogatives of innovation When I step back from all of the effort to create appliances and products that provide complete solutions, I realize the products that are supposed to do me the most good aren't selling as well as the simpler technologies that enable me (and us) to create our own solutions.

Beyond the Wireless Bubble
But that future presence, like the company's past success, will be driven as much by what makes Orange tick as by how well its phones work. "Your values need to be austere," says Hirschhorn. "At Orange, we picked just a few: dynamic, friendly, innovative, trustworthy. Those values create a framework that helps people understand us -- and they cross all cultural lines."

TheStandard.com: BlueLight Special A short article on what it took to build a big site for Kmart.

FEED | Digital Culture - Stories on a Rail "One of the best fundamental principles that anybody ever expressed to me about game design is that games should teach you how to play them,"

ZDNet: Interactive Week: Back To The Drawing Board All the experts agree on basic goals: Devices and interfaces need to be made simpler; the interface or Web site should closely match the task the user wants to accomplish; the brains of the device should work to adapt to the user and the task, not vice versa. Sounds easy enough, but the experts said they often feel they are swimming against a strong current. Real change won't come without a fundamental change in an industry that gives engineers primacy over designers, and that relegates usability to late-stage testing under tight time limits. No such change is likely, they said, unless users refuse to buy poorly designed products or patronize aggravating Web sites. If not, only a generation raised on badly designed products will be able to figure them out.

hypergene | amazoning the news The web is not conducive to story telling as we know it. Which is a shame. Because good story telling is transforming. It conveys meaning. But the web can offer a meaningful experience — just not in the traditional story-telling way. The web is really about people, and people come to it with certain goals that they want to satisfy. If you help them fulfill their goals you will create a meaningful experience.

The Role of Flow in Web Design I think of flow in a design as the movement of a person from their desire to their satisfaction, in as natural and easy a way as possible. A good developer, designer, or creator of anything strives to allow users to experience this kind of flow.

DaveNet : How to Make Money on the Internet v2.0 But listening to users is actually not that easy. It's easier to *be* a user and make products for other users. And that my friends, the combination of user-based information exchange and products that reflect user experience and wants, is where money will be made on the Internet.

What is Interaction Design and What Does It Mean to Information Designers - by Craig Marion

Fortune: 2.19.2001 Software's Humble Wizard Does It Again Groove and peer to peer.

The Interface Revolutionary | Computerworld News & Features Story Adaptive interfaces are a disaster. When an interface "adapts," it changes without warning, and you suddenly have a new interface where things work differently or the menus are mixed up. Windows 2000 has some adaptive features, and every user report I've seen says that they are a nuisance. What people want is a stable environment that works well from the get-go, doesn't crash, doesn't lose your work or even lose your place, and which doesn't change.

ZDNet: Interactive Week: Top 25 Movers & Shakers "Software-based products are not inherently hard to use," Cooper writes. "They are that way because we use the wrong process for creating them."

Yaahoooooo--argh! Genuine People Personalities The most salient phrase from the book describes the whole philosophy of the company: "Their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws." Or, you're so happy when you get the damn thing to work, you ignore that it's a terribly useless thing to begin with.

CNN.com - Technology - 'Geocaching' offers high-tech treasure hunt - January 31, 2001

You're a What? - OOQ Online, Winter 2000-01 You're a what? Usability engineer Olivia Crosby

CBS News Finding Yourself 25 Jan 2001. A review of several GPS systems including the Geode that Wendy is working on.

FORTUNE.com: 1/21/2001 - Valley Talk: Healing the Web

Alan Cooper :The Iteration Trap

Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction.

Tonight I was watching the special features on the Guns of Navarone DVD. One of the comments the director made about Anthony Quinn struck me. He mentioned that Quinn could act out a scene in a hundred different ways -- many of them brilliantly. While watching special features on Toy Story 2 I heard a similar comment about Tom Hanks. What does this have to do with software you might ask? In both cases the directors said they had a hard time choosing the preformance they put into the movie. They had a wealth of riches to choose from and they made great films. In software we often try to do it with one preformance -- the first cut of code. Or we try to put all the code in the product.

Internetworld ...usability is not concerned with assigning blame but with defending users and their rights to a pleasant and effective user experience. Users don't care who is to blame for a delay. All they care about is the time they have to spend solving their problem. Also, when considering whether to use WAP today or in the foreseeable future, one has to take into account the network technology that is actually in use around the world.

Jakob Nielsen, "Nielsen on Usability: Testing Tips and Notes on Task Time," Internetworld, 17 Jan 2001.

ABCNEWS.com : Nightline: Trackers (Transcript)

Alan Cooper : Defining Interaction : uidesign.net An interveiw with Cooper.

Redirect | Invasion of the Usability Experts (Web Techniques, Feb 2001) Dangers of taking usability "rules" without a grain of salt.

The pattern is to start modest and improve according to the dictates of the users. It is far better to have an underfeatured product that is rock solid, fast, and small than one that covers what an expert would consider the complete requirements. If it has value and becomes popular, there will be pressure to improve it, and over time it will acquire the quality and feature-richness of systems designed another way, but with the added advantage that the features will be those the customers or users want, not those that the developers think they should want. Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 218, 219, 220. --==::|::==-- --==::|::==-- --==::|::==-- --==::|::==-- --==::|::==-- --==::|::==-- "It's relatively cheap to do paintings and drawings. It's expensive to make movies."

Sam McMillan, "Thinking Smaller at Pixar," Communication Arts, July 2000, p.164-171.

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"Creating an interface is much like building a house: If you don't get the foundations right, no amount of decorating can fix the resulting structure."

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 2000, p. xi.