Our first line of T-shirts is here! Catering to that inner geek, the “Standards Compliance” line tips its hat to Shepard Fairey, the W3C, the BLINK TAG, Lou Montulli, and Bert Bos. Declared “Simply Evil” by Jakob Nielsen, this shirt is a cultural gem, a tribute, and a must have for every geek-at-heart. Get yours today!
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Spreadshirt Market Place Product
Second life is an amazing platform, a world where you can buy/sell virtual property, build/buy/sell virtual objects, and meet interesting people. Recently I dusted off my avatar (born in 2006) and re-experienced my second life for my second-first time. The following live blog illustrates some of the challenges faced by individuals new to Second Life. Don’t give up hope though, once I left orientation island the people I found and the subsequent people and conversations were worth the effort.
* 19:35 – Downloaded new SL client, installed. Had to use recover name and password function on site. Response email went to junk mail.
* 19:40 – Logged on to find myself underwater with no way to swim. I walked for a few minutes in a couple of different directions. Was assaulted by an auto-bot that kept inviting me to spend $100 to spend 30 minutes on a boat with “24 Sceneries.” The boat was floating above my head. No you can’t fly under water. (NOTE: This would not happen to a new member, I must’ve been at this location when I last logged out two years ago.)
* 19:50 – Located Teleport Home function and BAM! found myself in a strip mall (orientation island).
* 19:51 – Found group of people using talk function to harass an English sounding fellow who was shouting rude things about race, and America. Listened for a few minutes watched people. Very negative. Not sure who was more of an ass.
* 19:52 – Wandered off to track what looked like monorail. No monorail arrived. I walked down the tracks to another city center. This appeared to be a fishing town. Witnessed smoke bombs and two flying cars (very little realism). Lots of gun shots. Nobody appeared to be hurt.
* 20:01 – Accidentally sat on a man on the bench. He jumped up and flew away.
* 20:02 – More rude insults from miscellaneous people standing around.
* 20:10 – I think a giant space ship just landed on me. Not positive what it is except there are three large pipes facing outwards and an entry way in the center
* 20:15 – Cars are back, just sitting there.
* 20:30 – Machine gun fire and someone just handed me a “landmark.” Reads, “Neon Nights Complex, Sim Camping, Free Lindens, Make Money. There is a picture that is a series of pink geometric objects. I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Buttons to Teleport and Show on Map.
* 20:34 – Got up to inspect car, walked right through it. Am now watching tiger stripped dancing girl with tiger teddy bear and mini skirt. Nice tail, no really, she has a tail.
* 20:35 – Someone just started playing a really terrible hip-hop song (I like hip-hop, this is just bad). Can’t figure out where the sound is coming from.
* 20:36 – Strange skinless (all grey) woman figure is swimming in the air in front of me. Strange!
* 20:37 – 2.5 seconds of a song… stop… 1 second of a different song… stop… repeat
* 20:38 – Buttless chaps wearing tattooed man with nipple piercings (connected by a chain) is doing spin kicks in front of me.
* 20:39 – Seems to be a rash of stupid banter on the chat window. “Don’t step in my wee” and “I need to lose three pounds so I bought a pint of ice cream.”
* 20:40 – Loud Fart noise.
* 20:42 – a woman just stood on my head. I looked up for a crotch view. Yikes. She’s a zombie.
* 20:43 – Random typing noise is annoying
* 20:44 – Sound keeps jumping from a hard shoed person walking in a very long echoing hallway to euro trash dance music… Ooops now it’s both sexy hip hop and Beasty Boys with Saturday Night Fever overlapping it. This is a special kind of hell.
* 20:45 – There is a woman standing in front of me in a feather dress with nothing but her hair covering her boobs. Nice looking but dead behind the eyes. 
* 20:46 – Lots of these girls look like prostitutes. I just realized chaps guy is a match pair with tiger lady. They are dancing together to “Shake your Ass”
* 20:46 – Is that a chainsaw sound? Definitely a whip crack.
* 20:48 – Almost walked into a canal. Walked right through fence. Wouldn’t have been able to get out of that if I fell. Whew!
* 20:49 – Attempted to walk further down the road and was stopped by an invisible wall. A message just popped up saying I could not enter that zone because the server was full. I am now standing knee deep in the street.
* 20:50 – Quote of the minute – “Bestiality is bad”. More disembodied typing sounds.
* 20:53 – The region you have entered is running a different version of the simulator. What does that mean?
* 20:55 – Not sure what the map I’m standing on is but the random walk-through, walk over behavior is disorienting.
* 20:56 – Someone has a voice processor that makes them talk like a chipmunk.
* 20:59 – Just fell into the sidewalk in front of “Furry Slut.” She’s dancing erotically and her hair is flowing very realistically. Strange Grey boxes are emanating from here like a disco pattern.
* 21:01 – A black man in camouflage pants just urinated next to me. Complete with sound effects and a penis coming out of his pants. Yes a yellow green stream and a puddle were included.
* 21:04 – Blue message pop-up – Duane Scarborough’s “Hypnose Homme” Are you interested in men’s fragrances from the perspective of a BUTTON=MALE, BUTTON=FEMALE, BUTTON=IGNORE
* 21:06 – Seems to be a lot of urinating right now. Woman in funny hat just whipped out a penis and peed on the first offending urinator.
* 21:07 – I’m leaving now. Wondering what the hell was the point of that? Bad rendering, obscenity, lot’s of people doing nothing but standing around.
* 21:08 – As I log out the last sound I hear, besides the incessant typing sounds, was a single bird chirping in an idyllic manner. Almost surreal.
Stay tuned for follow-up posts where we will be addressing ideas for a Captivate, Convert, Continue process that could help Second Life build relationships with customers, improve the quality of the overall experience, and increase their population.
DUX 2007 is a wrap. We came, we saw, we laughed, we loved, and we even learned. I thought I would spend a few characters writing up some observations. I think first, it’s always important to understand the massive amount of work that goes into putting together one of these events and I know the team that gave us DUX ‘07 was spared no amount of grief. They did a truly admirable job and I would like to thank them.
Thank you!
DUX is not TED, nor is it HCI International, but instead fits nicely in-between them where Living Surfaces used to flourish. A day doesn’t pass when I don’t reminisce about the buzzing energy and enthusiasm for all things interactive that used to eek out of every corner of the Living Surfaces conferences but that’s a story for another time. DUX ‘07 had a nice mixture of creative sensitivity (design) and scientific reason. There were discussions about robots designed to dance with humans, the definition of simplicity, and a ton of thinking done on social networking; fun stuff. Presentations were an interesting mix (about half and half) of representatives of corporate giants and student masters theses. There was a smattering of cool independents, but I couldn’t help cringing when yet another Google or Yahoo! employee got up and started speaking. To further emphasize the vortexes they represent Google even put job postings on the give-away jump drives presented to each attendee. Yikes!
I’d have to say my only complaint about the proceedings was the same one I have at all of the UX / HCI / Ergonomics / etc. conferences; a lack of attention to a few key details. We are experience designers, we care about all of the aspects of interaction and communication and yet repeatedly show a lack of concern for the experience of our conference attendees. For some reason, they decided to pass out printed cards after each speaker’s presentation that were gathered for the purposes of a Q & A session afterwards. This didn’t work out once, questions were poorly worded, lacked relevance, and were often too lengthy to merit responses. The fall-back became, “We’ll post your questions and the answers on the blog.” Why didn’t someone use a live blog to capture questions from cell phones? They could’ve even designed a cool concept to facilitate live conversations the moment the topic was hot in our minds. Real conversations are good things, right?
The other thing that kills me is when the logistics folks provide a really cool looking slide advance gizmo that none of the presenters could use. Yes, I’ve seen this before. The best part is that no one noticed (except for the audience who had to wait for each presenter to regain their momentum after a pooched slide) that there was an issue with the control and made an attempt to correct it. Some presenters in later sessions were even refusing to use the little UFO shaped thing-a-ma-jig.
I realize this is really silly, petty stuff but for me user experience is all about the little stuff. It’s the little stuff that dents brands. Catching the little stuff means you are passionate and engaged and excited about your craft and the industry. This was never a problem at Living Surfaces.
Pilots are interesting creatures that offer us a lot of opportunities to learn if we observe them in their natural habitat. I recently spent several weeks locked in a bunker covered in camouflage observing their ritual behaviors. Ok… not really, but I have been working closely with Naval pilot Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and during a recent user testing exercise I was faced with an interesting discovery. Boy I should have seen this one coming.
Pilots don’t like innovation.
When we started our charter to evolve the pilot cockpit interface I had heard the infamous stories of the unanimous rejection of life-saving technologies based simply on the fact that they didn’t look cool. I can’t say why I didn’t pay more attention to these stories except that I thought they were talking about electrodes on the skull and giant diaper shaped gravity suits. Surely a pilot would eagerly accept a new and better way to read the information his cockpit was providing him. I am here to say this is not the case. Pilots are the quintessential expert user. They spend no less than 2000 hours of training to become experts of an information system that is a metaphorical nightmare. It follows logically that they are a little apprehensive to reinvest their time in a new, albeit seemingly simpler, set of informational metaphors. During our first concept reviews for our Ev1 prototype we presented the “Combined Metaphor,” an interface that took all of the various information displays in the pilot cockpit and combined them into a single congruent presentation. Simply put, we removed gauges that tipped opposite directions to illustrate the same event and placed them all into a single top-down display of the craft in its environment surrounded with performance statistics and trend indications. What could be better, right? I knew I was in trouble when a pilot asked me if I had my instrument rating (I don’t yet, but am more than half-way finished with the training). He went on to tell me that the gauges we combined were showing completely different things and that they were fine the way they were.
I was dumbfounded… How could he not see that this system was better by far than the hundred year old aggregate in production today?
It was simple really, he couldn’t see it because he had spent 2000 hours learning to love the old interface. He, like every other expert user we encounter, has made an investment in learning the vocabulary of the system we hope to evolve. The difficulty by which his learning came is directly proportional to the resistance he has for its change. Believe me, there aren’t a lot of users that have a larger investment than pilots.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. I had to figure out what our new interface could offer pilots that they truly desired. A little ethnography and a whole lot of interviewing later I had my answer.
Pilots Love Workload Reduction.
Don’t get me wrong, pilots aren’t lazy but sometimes they have to do a lot of work to get something done. A perfect example is the process of entering waypoint coordinates into a flight plan. You’d be surprised how many attributes are used to describe a waypoint in a flight plan and entering or editing them can be tedious even when you’re not being fired upon. When we showed that our combined metaphor could facilitate single touch flight plan correction we got their attention. Even more exciting to them were our cognitive assistance features. When we discovered that pilots were often tasked with being at a specific location at an extremely precise period of time and were tasked with repeatedly calculating their performance to meet that objective, it was easy for us to design a system that did the same calculations dynamically. User testing recently proved that pilots showed a significant improvement in acquisition of Time On Target (ToT) when using our Ev2 interface. We had pilots laughing with joy as they executed their scenarios because it was so easy to monitor their performance. Best of all, once they saw how the new Ev2 interface could make their life easier they very quickly got over the metaphor shifts. Several of our recent flight testers would pout (in a tough and cool way of course) when they had to execute a mission on the “old” interface.
Mission successful, users engaged.
So what can we learn from this? You don’t need to be a pilot to make an investment in an interactive system and see that investment as valuable. As we architect we must always consider the costs of adoption and make sure we involve the user in helping us find their solutions. In doing so we’ll make some friends and maybe even fans.
Merlin Mann recently gave a talk to the folks at Google about his Inbox Zero process for managing high volume inboxes (www.inboxzero.com). While Merlin’s talk was entertaining and well done, I have to be honest, I was left feeling a little underwhelmed by his overall message. He says himself his method is simple common sense and that’s what it is. Luckily, I chose not to end my journey there. Desperate as I was for any help with the hundreds of emails I get a day (some at the talk claimed an unfathomable 600-a-day!) I decided to give Inbox Zero a try. I’m happy to say there’s no turning back now; I am officially a fan and I learned something about myself along the way.
The basic premise is the practice of scheduled email processing sprints (short 5-10min) with the goal of getting messages out of your inbox. There are five actions you can do to any message: delete, delegate, defer, respond (only if you can do it in a few lines), and archive. You may be wondering why it is so important to get email out of your inbox? It’s all about your state-of-mind and the impacts are huge. I had no idea the weight my inbox placed on my life as I spent the entire day using it as a to-do list and watching messages come in minute-by-minute to be responded to in near real-time. Managing my email took so much time I often found myself looking at the clock wondering where the day had gone. Some days I had no time to do my job (or at least the fun parts). The one thing I did get from my email-as-chat behavior was stress, giant fattening scoops of it. Stress has been a very big issue in my life as of late with a new baby, a growing business, a new house being manhandled by contractors, and Russian bomber flights resuming. To my surprise, my wife noticed a change the day I started practicing Inbox Zero. She keeps telling me how much calmer I am now.
The benefits of Inbox Zero don’t end there for me, I learned a little about myself along the way. As I started processing emails, I discovered some actions happened more frequently than others. To some extent this is supposed to be the case, but I don’t think my order is, well, optimal. Take a look for yourself. Here is my current processing ranking:
Here’s where the bump on my head starts pushing the anvil towards the sky. Delegate is last? This is not good. As a Director working with a whole bunch of extremely talented folks who can do most everything better than me, it’s a bad thing when the last thing I do is delegate. My job description starts with the word delegate. So what do I do now? Well the first thing I’m going to do is go through my Action folder and delegate as much of that work as I can. After that I’m working very hard to increase my delegation ranking. I’ve done some thinking about why this pattern formed and I’ve boiled it down to my control freakish nature. That means I will have to pay special attention that I don’t slip back into this pattern. CFS is a sneaky sneaky disease. Hopefully now that I’ve admitted there is a problem, I will find the road to recovery. Isn’t it strange where and how you learn about yourself? Maybe Inbox Zero won’t solve your woes, maybe it will. I can only recommend frequent questioning and exploration of your daily activities as a means of learning more about yourself. Thank you Merlin Mann!
Welcome to the spill. The overflow buffer for the passion we have for interaction.
Spill is the blog from Tanagram, Inc. a user experience (UX) innovation and design firm based in Chicago, Illinois.
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