matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

In the 21^st century, few consumer services follow a neat linear model of awareness, consideration, purchase and use. Instead we see a web of customer expectations and perceptions where little things can make a big difference.

It’s the job of service designers to cut through the mass of insight to find the decisive moments where you can make or break a customer relationship. And sometimes you can find those moments in unexpected places.

David Armano recounts a story from Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” that sums up one of these moments perfectly. You can read “Disney’s $100,000 Salt + Pepper Shaker” here.

To the RCA for Innovation Night, tied in with the college’s summer show. The evening included awards for students in the Helen Hamlyn Centre, which uses people-centred design to support independent living and working for ageing and diverse populations.

Focusing on the needs of people often ignored by mainstream business and design is obviously a Good Thing, and no matter how young and healthy we may be it comes with a dose of enlightened self-interest. Not for nothing are the awards titled “Design for our Future Selves”.

But designing for “extreme” users can also reveal truths and perspectives highly relevant to the rest of us. Consider, if you please, Matthew Holloway’s Virtual Breadcrumbs project, in collaboration with people with dementia. In the words of the awards website:

This experimental design proposal looked at the problem of memory loss and began to explore means in which information we collect through our lives could be summarised and communicated back in meaningful ways. From key findings visual outputs were designed, such as wallpaper that contained important events in a person’s life. Further experiments were also carried out with travel images reduced into a single strip and tested on people who had been involved in the travel to assess their ability to provoke memories.

… and in this case a picture is almost certainly worth 1000 words…

So it was a delight to see this theme come through again at an unrelated talk on Dopplr, hosted by the Information Design Association, this time for a different kind of extreme user - the business traveller.

Matts Jones and Biddulph gave us a fascinating insight into the design principles behind their elegant and useful website, where a key piece of the brand identity is the algorithmic use of colour to represent places. As a user builds up a history of travel, the places they’ve been displace Dopplr’s standard “sparklogo” colours. This…

… slowly becomes this…

Matt and Matt have stayed true to Dopplr’s laser-focused mission - not to replicate other more general social networking sites, but to be the best in their chosen niche, making the experience of travel more delightful with added serendipity, and helping people look back on their travels afterwards.

Far from making life boring, this clarity of purpose gives them the freedom to play, to make multiple ways of capturing our travel plans, to wallow in the giant ball pool of trips and coincidences that we create. Their enthusiasm for the data is infectious.

It would be easy with all this eye-candy for the human stories to go untold. While the Dopplr crew are painting a model of the world with MD5s and RGB values, their website is making real stuff happen. Coincidences are spotted, meetings are arranged, dinners are eaten, drinks are drunk, people have conversations, and who knows what more. Somewhere in the world, sometime soon (if not already) a Dopplr baby will be born.

What’s the colourful thread running through these two stories? Well I think it has to do with the dividends we all get when design focuses on the needs of a well-defined user-group, even if we’re not part of that group ourselves. Fortunately few of us suffer from dementia, but we’re all forgetful from time to time, and could all do with visual cues to link us back to past experiences. Fortunately few of us travel at the speed of a whippet, but most of us travel a bit, and those who don’t have friends who do.

Naturally there are risks in this: high tech businesses can fall into the trap of designing only for “power users.” But it does mean that only ever looking at the average customer will only ever yield average results. Sometimes it takes the people at the edges to show us the way.

A few years ago when we extended our house to create a new entrance hall we greatly enjoyed flicking through the relevant pages in Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”. So much of it rang true with those “oh yeah” moments as we looked with fresh eyes at the way we used our home. The book is also just a joy to read. I challenge anyone to read the Entrance Room pattern without smiling and nodding.

Some of the elements, such as the size of the hall, the need to create a defined threshold and reorienting the front door to improve the Intimacy Gradient, were baked into the building itself. Others were to be added by us after the builders had gone, and among this latter sort was the famous Waist-high Shelf pattern, often cited as an example of how Alexander’s system works.

We never got around to putting in that waist-high shelf, but the other day I noticed that a strange thing had happened. We’d taken a delivery of some flat-pack furniture. We were busy, so instead of getting assembled it just got dumped inside the front door. And at once it attracted papers, hats, a school sweatshirt - everything the waist-high shelf was meant to absorb.

So here’s the warning: Find room in your home for the waist-high shelf, or the waist-high shelf will find you, whether you like it or not.

Maybe it’s just me, but as we enter the latest phase of convergence with more and more big web properties moving onto mobile, I’ve noticed a trend for work in progress to be developed and presented mainly on PC screens.

In my (possibly mythical) golden age, presentations and design reviews were stacked full of phones in all shapes and sizes. Now stuff seems to come to me in neatly zipped PDFs and Powerpoint docs, which immediately place the work into the wrong context. They introduce implicit assumptions that were set in stone in the old days of the deskbound internet. The web’s moving on - but sadly many of the ways we design it are not.

So I started wondering: could we have a mobile design process which deliberately avoided deliverables on the PC screen? You can, if you must, use a desktop or laptop as a tool (Mitchell or Webb is up to you, it’s so irrelevant :-) What matters is that the design is presented in more appropriate media. It goes like this…

Paper wraps phone: The big visual canvas of a web page can hide a multitude of sins in site strategy and structure, but on mobile they’ll be painfully laid bare. So spend some time getting straight the objectives of the mobile interface, underpinned by the things you know about your users, their relevant needs, and their existing use of mobile. Write it down in complete sentences, you know, the things they taught you at school with a subject, a verb and an object. Banish any preconceptions about the context of use - for example, 27% of mobile internet-enabled phone users in a Pew Survey had used it in the home. Sketch out the information architecture and user flows on big sheets of paper. Then get out the scissors…

Scissors cut paper. Chop up the sitemap, give the resulting scraps a shuffle and see how a user will experience your work. Yes, mobile really lends itself to paper prototyping. As the small, handheld interface takes shape, how about mocking it up on small, handheld pieces of paper? Take a stack of index cards or PostIt notes and use one per scene on the mobile screen. Or to simulate the act of scrolling, cut a card with a hole in the middle to mask off all but a screenful of content at a time. I saw this trick used really effectively in early stages usability testing on our mobile portal a few years ago. It makes for a more realistic low fi test, and gives the designers an insight into the tunnel view that users have of their mobile interface. Then it’s time to hit the handset…

Phone blunts scissors. As soon as possible, get it mocked up on a mobile device. With XHTML and Flash Lite it’s much easier than it used to be, and immediately helps you get a feel for certain issues: Which buttons will be the main controls? How will the user enter text? How quickly can they scroll up and down the screen. Critically, get the design up and running on a few different kinds of phone that represent the spread of devices your users will have. This is not something that comes naturally to web designers for whom these things come down to narrow choices of screensize and IE/Firefox version, but it’s worth the hassle. If you don’t have all the phones yourself, beg or borrow them from friends, family or colleagues. If you’re doing the work for a big corporate or telco, ask them about access to the target devices. And if it’s a consumer application, make sure you don’t inadvertently introduce a bias towards business devices, which may well have bigger screens and more capabilities than those of your target users.

Now step outside. Stand in broad daylight on a busy street corner, preferably in a slightly dodgy area of town, and most likely realise that the fontsize needs to be even bigger than you thought. And if the fonts are bigger, than means fewer lines of text, which means revisiting those flows. Paper wraps phone once again in our iterative process :)

What do you think? Who is doing mobile design like this already? Who is doing it even better?

Matt

Unlike some people, I’m partial to a spot of anthropomorphism, which is why I was delighted to receive this email after ordering some cards from Moo…

Hello Matt

I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on its way to you.

Please do not remove the photos you have chosen from your account until the cards have been printed, or some of your cards may come out blank.

You can track and manage your order at: http://www.moo.com/account
Please note, as your order will be shipped via Royal Mail First Class/Airmail, it should be with you in around 10 working days, but it won’t have a tracking number.

Remember, I’m just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions at: http://www.moo.com/faqs/ and if you’re still not sure, contact customer services (who are real people) at: http://www.moo.com/service/

Thanks,

Little MOO, Print Robot

It’s a simple positioning seen through with total conviction. I love it. And so does my email client, Fluffy.

A delightful letter to today’s Guardian contradicts the fashionable received wisdom of modernist architects as purists riding roughshod over the interests of users. Defending Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool at London Zoo, his daughter Sacha writes:

I was astonished to read that “nobody thought to ask the penguins” about the design. My father steeped himself in literature about penguins; he consulted the specialists at the zoo itself, as well as Julian Huxley, Solly Zuckerman and other authorities.

… which, in the circumstances and barring the sudden appearance of a tap-dancing prodigy, seems about as good as he could have got in terms of user involvement. The letter goes on…

Now, alas, there are no penguins in the pool, because the zoo put burrowing penguins in the enclosure - and found, unsurprisingly, that they were unhappy there.

So that’s the answer: the design was great, it was just the wrong kind of user!

It’s been a while since my trusty work-issue Compaq Tablet PC gave up the ghost, and I’m finally getting around to writing about it. We’d been together more than three years, the TC1000 and I, and the day the man from IT pronounced it dead (a motherboard issue, apparently) it felt like a bereavement. A pet bereavement, admittedly. Well more a small pet, say a goldfish or a gerbil, rather than a cat or dog kind of pet. But a loss all the same.

The Compaq Tablet PC was possibly the world’s slowest laptop. Even after the Service Pack 2 update fixed some of the obvious user interface problems with XP Tablet Edition, windows still opened and closed and switched from landscape to portrait and back again in slow-motion, like the flight of the bumblebee reduced to one frame per second to expose every tiny flap of its wings.

But it had an organic quality that made these things so easy to forgive. Let me count the ways.

1. The smooth rounded edges made it a joy to handle
2. The whole unit was warm to the touch, about a warm as my newborn baby sons, but without the nappies
3. It breathed. The internal fan pushed out warm air - essential for long meetings in my director ’s office, where the ice-cold aircon posed a risk of frostbite
4. It was polite. In meetings, it lay flat on the table, not raised between me and the rest of the room like the Berlin Wall of regular laptops.
5. It could read my writing, a feat beyond most humans. Reeves and Nass should study this feature as a driver of their “media equation”
6. The gratuitous swivel action to reveal the keyboard - more reminiscent of quirky French design - an old Citroen car, Terminal 1 at Charles De Gaulle Airport, a font by Porchez

Fortunately, my Tablet PC’s twin is still going strong - I bought another for my personal use and am typing this post on it right now. But for work use, it seems the Tablet PC just hasn’t got the traction to be worth the trouble for cookie cutter corporate IT. That’s a shame, because I really believe Tablets can improve productivity and make the workplace move human. No one ever got fired for buying a Dell, but no matter how much more practical I can’t imagine holding a wake for a D420.

There are places a cameraphone just cannot, umm, go. Places like the men’s toilets at King’s Cross Station. (Stay with me on this one.)

There you’ll find a sticking plaster product design solution that would be at home in a Don Norman book: a hand-dryer so sleekly built into the wall that someone’s sellotaped the laser-printed word “HAND-DRYER” in Times New Roman bold caps onto its brushed steel surface.

[is it the same in the ladies? reports from the other 51% of the King's Cross traveller population would be much appreciated].

At this point, I’d inline a picture to show you what I mean - but taking photos in the men’s toilets at King’s Cross would be wrong on so many levels.

Update: 2 December 2007 - apparently there’s now one of these in the gent’s at Leeds Station, and I shall shortly be parting with 20p to investigate. Unlikely that pictures will follow. Also (have to be careful how I say this) I stumbled upon Clive Grinyer blogging on the toilet. As it were.