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Last week we had the SA UX Forum Cape Town meet-up. 16 people braved the rain and cold to show up and share ideas about user experience.
Because user experience is just getting a foothold down here, we started at the beginning.  I did a talk called "What is user experience and why do we care?"  [PDF 8MB]

Led by Bertus "AJ" Kock, the group also took a look at various attendees' computer desktops. We pondered what the different layouts said about them, and about the limitations of the desktop GUIs they used.  Fun and fascinating.

Web and mobile services are growing fast in South Africa as broadband prices drop. And all the South African businesses I speak to are keen to get the benefits of UX. They know they need input, but don't always know where to start. Hopefully the UX forum, and the face-to-face meetings, will help spread the word and raise awareness.

A few attendees (whose websites I know):

• Piet Alberts from Clayant
• Dennis Williams from DNA
• Jacobus Van Niekerk from Azapi
• Anne Sophie Leens from Apartment
• Vanessa Clark from burgeoning social media consultancy TwoKats
• Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden from Yuppie Chef
• Shaun O'Connell from Career Junction

... and many more wonderful people whose website addresses I can't recall now. That's just the Cape Town gang. The Johannesburg gang had a larger gathering a little while back - and there's another one scheduled soon.

Overall the forum has 80 people.  Maybe you should join too. (It's free).

Organised, industrial society creates left-over time for its citizens -- and that time has to be used up somehow. At first it was with gin. Then TV. Now it's just beginning to be with mass creation and collaboration.

Thanks to Anne Sophie Leens for the pointer. And "wow" to Clay Shirky for such a great post. I hope the book is just as good.

I have to say - it really shifted my mindset.

...if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

See? Read the whole thing...

If if the 1st Gen iPhone was so "bad" - what was Apple thinking when they launched it?

Lots of people are excited about the new iPhone because they think it will address many of the annoyances present in the first one. (Well - not all of those issues are getting addressed, in fact. But some are.)

There was much complaining about the iPhone 1.0. And vocal user complaints are not usually a great recipe for a popular product and strong sales. In fact often, companies that rush products out to be "first to market" end up having their lunch eaten by products that arrive a little later, but offer a better UX. Apple themselves demonstrated with the ipod that late-comers can steal the the show by being "best-to-market."

Here are 5 reasons I can think of why Apple launched a "bad" product, braved all that negative publicity, and gave companies like Samsung and HTC a chance to take a shot at them.

1. Launch simple products first.

Apple like everyone else had to launch a version 1.0. Business reality and human psychology demand it. At some point you have to get something out the door becfore you run out of cash or go insane. iPhone 1.0 was a product of controlled project scope.

2. Get feedback from beta testers

Getting live market feedback works well - but mostly with early adopters. So perhaps Apple didn't want go mainstream yet. Did they elect to keep sales constrained and stay with the iPhone *BETA crowd until they had perfected the product?

3. Move the focus to UX

The iPhone caused a stir because it moved the focus to a different aspect of the mobile UX. Were Apple deliberately saying "it's not about hardware. Stop competing on hardware. This new phone is all about the user experience." So in a way, the hardware shortcomings drew attention to the UX. People complaining about missing hardware could be accused of "missing the point/having no vision" - and frequently were.

4. No competitors stand a chance anyway

Apple decided it didn't matter if their prodcut wasn't perfect, because they were confident that none of the existing mobile manufacturers could get their act together to compete on Apple's UX turf nearly fast enough. Efforts from HTC and Samsung were hardly mind-blowing. Nokia's device is still in development.

And realistically, that wasn't hard to predict. For traditional electronics companies try to squeeze into the Apple mold seems to be all but impossible. So Apple put their money where their mouth was and went first to market with an incomplete product. They knew they would get a way with it.

5. And now they can generate more buzz by launching version 2.

All publicity is good publicity.

Are people going to buy iPhone2? Some more will. That I suspect that question doesn't matter to Apple too much. We're still, arguably, in beta 2. One more release and it's going to get interesting.

Tower Bridge has joined the ranks of an increasing number of intelligent objects that can tell us things about themselves.

My colleague David Whittle uncovered this beautiful little story: Tower Bridge is now on Twitter. Effecitvely the bridge is keeping its own micro blog of its activitiy and notifying anyone who cares to subscribe about what it is doing.

This makes Tower Bridge into a spime - an object that is in some why aware of its's own position in space and time, and able to report it to interested parties.

You've found your keys

Spimes offer a lovely way to connect the world of physical objects to the information flow of the Internet.

Lost your keys? If they were spime keys, you could Google for them.

Lent a book to someone but can't remember who? If it were a spime you could Google for who had it. And maybe even if they had read it.

Bruce Sterling describes a vision of the future where product designers can iteratively enhance spime-products using spime data about when and where the products were used. Kind of like Web analytics but for physical products too. (Fascinating and useful for the designers, but no replacement for experience labs and other ethno techniques. Why? Because a spime will still not be able to capture and relay its users intentions, motivations and desires.)

Spimes and spime kludges

You can't yet google your keys or get analytics about how someone used their new shoes. But there is already a lot of spime-like stuff out there, beyond Tower Bridge.

Track packages: Express parcels are spimes. They have barcodes and RFID tags, so that you can track where they have got to. There was furore a few years back over the idea of RFID tags embedded in clothes to help with inventory tracking. If you forgot to remove the tags, then conceivably, people could track you!

Find children: Mobile phones and cool sneakers with GPS are being used to help worried parents keep track of their children. (No need to implant the chip in the child, just give them a kid-friendly phone or trendy sneakers and they'll take their treasure with them everywhere).

And this low tech but ingenious approach is helping people find lost digital cameras. If you find a lost camera, just mail four pictures from it to the Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures blog, and maybe the owner will find them and claim it.

Spime your stuff now

If you own something that you feel need to be searchable by others, Google can help. Google Base lets you store any information about anything online now, so that others can search for it. But unless you can find a way to update the information in real time, then your object won't yet be a spime.

Know any other good spimes? Do tell.

Flow Interactive is hiring. I thought maybe some insights into life at Flow might be interesting for everyone - and might persuade some of you to come work with us. If you've got a talent for user-centred design, you'll love it here.

Here are some quick snapshots.

Here are some Flow consultants eating cake. This happens every Friday. It's a great opportunity to exchange tips and ideas, as well as to wind down for the weekend. We also have a quarterly internal mini-conference called Holy Flowday, and weekly lunchtime sessions called Flowlite. It's a great way to learn.

Also note:

• Football table: Esential kit for every Clerkenwell office.
• Large shelf of UX books in the background: Not so often seen in Clerkenwell offices. We really value knowledge, innovation and best practice - not just cake and football.

Here's a usability lab. We have three of them in various configurations and with good quality microphones and cameras, plus Morae or DVD recording. You can also see the magic mirror behind which observers can lurk. There is no better way to prove the value of user-centred design to a product team than letting them watch real target users trying out the design ideas. Project politics tends to evaporate.

We also use these rooms for conducting "experience labs" - sessions where we use all sorts of techniques and games to help target users show us the reality of their needs and behaviours. The very best way to work out what people need is often go and hang out with them. Contextual enquiry and ethnography are all about getting out of the lab - a very popular activity with Flowsters.

And finally, here's a project war-room. Research and design generate a lot of facts and ideas that need to be marshalled, soaked up and communicated. Flowsters are obsessed with using sticky notes for this purpose. So we do have a lot of project war rooms where individuals and groups can surround themselves with their work. We're convinced that this technique leads to better quality results.

So, fancy working at Flow? It's a chance to work on a real diversity of projects for top-grade clients, and do design the way it should be done. With a team who are passionate about UCD. In a great space. For a good salary. UCD heaven.

• More about Flow's work
• More about Flow's people
• More about the vacancies, and how to apply
  

As mentioned in a previous post, many inboxes are overflowing and the situation looks set to get worse.

What's the answer:

• Better discipline?
• Email bankruptcy?
• Choosing to use a different medium (like IM) for some conversations?
• Better email clients?

Probably all of the above.

Xobni have had a go at improving outlook - by making attachments and emails easier to find, and by making conversations easier to refer back to.

Yet more information to process: xobni's coloured bar chart shows data about your email frequency.

It's nothing radical (just adding functionality that outlook needed to stay competitive with other email software), but the philosophy is that every little bit helps, I suppose. Reducing the time it takes to file things, and retrieve things makes emailing more efficient. You can process more information faster.

Trouble is, I don't think I can handle much more information. I appear to have reached my maximum rate of decision making. To to answer more queries and solve more problems in a day might well finish me off altogether. The bottleneck isn't in the mechanism of sending and receiving mail. The bottleneck is my brain's capacity to come up with worthwhile answers fast enough.

Anybody else feel like this?

The gag: take the interaction that you have with friends via facebook, and transpose it into a real life conversation. It's hilarious and cringe-provoking.

An old contact comes knocking on your door wanting to be your "friend" and brandishing compromising photos of you that he will share with everyone.

Watch the video on YouTube.

It highlights a couple of interesting points about designing online interactions.

When a new communications medium appears, it takes people a while to understand good etiquette. There are stories of people shouting at each other in the corridors when e-mail started to become widespread in companies in the early nineties. People said things to colleagues in emails and didn't think of the real-world consequences. Similarly, I heard a recent tale of people being fired for posting defamatory comments on an internal corporate blog without thinking that everyone would actually read the comments.

Designing an interactive product like a website is designing communication. And understanding the rules of etiquette is important. A few years back, e-commerce websites had a tendency to engage you in dialogues like this...

Customer: I'd like to buy these shoes.

Salesman: Certainly. Where did you hear about this shop? And when is your birthday? And would you like me to send you some email every week?

Not appropriate in real life, and interestingly, not appropriate online either.

Site designers are becoming much better at understanding the rules. It's now easy to unsubscribe from just about any email newsletter that's plaguing you. Most marketers have realised that even though email is a huge driver of traffic (driving 48 dollars of business for every dollar spent), unwanted emails drive no traffic, waste marketing time and resources and have a negative impact on a customers perception of their brands. In the UK, it's also illegal to send unsolicited email.

Gaining permission from your target customers is the trick. And that takes a long dialogue between customer and website, probably over several visits. Creating a dialogue that builds trust and engagement is one definition of good user experience design.

Thanks to Karl Sabino for the link.

Choose a better tool than email for some of your communication jobs.

Mark Hurst has been blogging about email bankruptcy a fair amount recently - the idea that overwhelmed executives sometimes feel there's no option but to delete their inboxes and start again. With estimates saying that the average knowledge worker will send/receive 199 corporate emails per day by 2010, it's clear that something is very wrong.

Mark lambastes a number of people for asking for a technological solution to the problem. He also advocates a change in behaviour - his "bit literacy" approach. All sensible enough - but then I noted that there already is a technological solution the problem. Sort of.

But first you have to reframe the question. Intead of "how can I get through email with less pain?" try this one: "How can I optimise the way I communicate overall?"

My colleague Kelsey Smith has been working on a project for a global organisation that makes it money handing information. His experience there showed him an organisation thriving by using a range of different communications media:

"Email is a blunt knife. So they use multiple channels, each with different properties and used in different scenarios. Email is a data flow - a continuous stream of low-urgency background conversations happening on various lists. Blogs and Twitter fulfil a similar purpose: context. Instant messaging is used for near-synchronous conversations without being as intrusive as a phone call. And face-to-face conversation is used for urgent and complex subjects that require focus and nuance."

So - the best solution to email overload comes from selecting the right medium for each conversation you want to have.

Try an experiment. Find a contact or colleague who is already a happy to use IM. Next time you want to sort something out with them, force yourself to use IM instead of email. See if you get better results with less effort. It worked for me.

I could be way off, of course. Jakob Nielsen classified IM as "information pollution" back in 2004. And Linda Stone reminds us that monitoring too many information channels at once can be very stressful.

On the other hand, Facebook has just introduced chat, and GMail has had built-in chat for several years. And plenty of younger users dismiss email as too much bother. (If you are going to use email, here as some good tips from a 19-year-old).

We have a landscape of communication tools - including blogs, wikis, twitter IM and email. Using them right, can help stave off email bankruptcy.

This diagram shows a patent application recently filed by Apple for an OS X gesturing control panel.

Thanks to macRumours.com

Apple are leading the pack in gestural interface design at the moment, with iPhone, iPod and Macbook Air. (But synaptics, who make most of the the worlds touchpads, are in hot pursuit. They say they expect that "80 to 90 percent of consumer notebooks will have these new multigestures by the end of the year.")

I've found myself sitting at my desk "trying out" these gestures. Would the three-finger paste gesture, above, be easier than the gesture I already use for pasting - Ctrl-V? Note that typing Ctrl-V is a gesture in itself. And when you're well trained using a QWERTY keyboard it's pretty easy to remember and perform.

Try it yourself. Tap on the desk. What do you think?

I wasn't sure at first, but on balance, I think Apple's gesture for paste is better than Ctrl-V.

Designing the right gesture

What makes touchpad gestures better than key combinations?

• The most valuable gestures seem to encompass "degree" - not just "zoom in" but "zoom in this much".
• But even for a binary operation like paste or cut, a gesture can be simpler, more comfortable and slightly more memorable than a keyboard shortcut, if it's chosen to match an analogous real-world action. It will be easier to use if it's closer to what our caveman brains evolved to cope with.
• The position of the touchpad itself might also play an important role. I find myself wanting to throw out my mouse but keep a modified the mouse mat - a multitouch version connected to my computer. With my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mat, I could mix keystrokes and gestures very comfortably.

New book on gestures

Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path is working on a book called "Interactive gestures: Designing gestural interfaces." He points out the importance of well-designed gestures. They must be comfortable to perform once or several times. And they mustn't embarrass the gesturer, or inconvenience people nearby.

The first chapter is available for free and is a good read. There's also a blog and a wiki.

As remote controls and mobile phones become increasingly baroque in their complexity, more and more of us find ourselves pressing the wrong buttons at the wrong times. I press the wrong button three times a day on my K800i.

But Grandma has an extra problem: she worries that by pressing the wrong button she will break things or hurt herself.

Big picture here at Book of Joe. And you can buy the cartoon from the New Yorker.

Designing to overcome that is a major challenge. But if you can do it, the magic part is that millions of other people who thought they were more sophisticated than grandma will suddenly love your product too. Because it's simple and supportive.