we're done here

plain and simple... dfarkasdesign.blogspot.com is now moving to a new home at brainfarks.wordpress.com

I thought (not so) long and hard about it and i like the wordpress interface more... its easier to edit. I also contribute to other wordpress blogs so its easier on my brainspace.

Nothing stays asynchronous

To quote fight club, "on a long enough timeline, everyone's lifespan is zero".

To translate this to technology, "on a long enough timeline, all communication vehicles are immediate". Meaning, there is no permanently asynchronous communication service.

Take the phone for instance. In it's initial form one individual would call an operator and leave a message for another. This asynchronous messaging service provided a catalog of calls over a long duration of time. Enter the answering machine and messages can be left directly for a specific user. Enter the cell phone and you are reachable anytime, anywhere.

Take the pager. Before an asynchronous method to ping an individual, text messaging has filled the gap and is much more immediate.

Take mail. We have come a long way from horse delivered mail to overnight delivery. Enter email and we have instantaneous communication. Enter smart phones, PDAs, and laptops and we have near zero latency to what was previously a weeks-long endeavor.

So nothing stays asynchronous for ever. Technology is constantly decreasing latency and making it easier to be reached. As appliations like google's latitude saturate the market meeting locations will be replaced with spontaneous 'run ins' thanks to big brother type trackings.

To reiterate an overused question, when do we give up too much freedom in exchange for immediate access to all of our communiation devices?

My center click gripe

A simple gripe about web browsers and navigation.

When searching through the Internet, I often come across links to pages I want to further investigate. This is, of course the intent of the Internet. My typical interaction is to cnter click a link to open it in a new tab. This solves a variety of browser based issues. It minimizes the number of windows open. It loads data I want while reading the current page. It is a single action.

Now enter javascript. Many sites use javascript to open links in new widows or tabs (browser specific). This is great in the case of FAQ pages and third party sites. In fact, one could argue it negates my need to center click.

That is the problem though. It does not negate it. Instead of opening my new tab, I am directed to a tab with a single line of jss and no actual content. Why does the hack provided by developers negate the hack I have taught myself? Shouldn't center click still work, especially if my hack and the jss solve the same interaction dilemma? Users should not learn a hack because of an application's shortcomings only to have a workaround sparingly implemented come along and cause that solution unhelpful. There needs to be more standardization across development and, perhaps more importantly, more acceptance from the system to a variety of inputs that aide the same result.

MVC and alan cooper's inmates

MVC stands for model, view, controller and is the idea of separating Interface from functioning code to interactive elements. That is a blanket statement with many gaps but let us assume it is true. With that in mind, code and user interface happen in separate places, completely unique from eachother. In the web world, this means you may change the layout without consulting the owner of the content.

Now take into consideration alan cooper's book "the inmates are running the asylum". Again to paraphrase, cooper suggests that developers and designers need to work hand in hand from the beginning for a sucessful product. All stakeholders involved in development need to have a mutual understanding of eachothers needs and motivations and willingness to find solutions. So how does that model, that I agree with, compare to MVC?

If the design and the code are fundamentally separate, what is instigating their interaction? I do not think a new model has to be made for code. Instead, there needs to be a change to how the mental model of development is taught to parties involved. This happens in some academic program such as Carnegie Mellon's HCI program that I am a product of. Still, the majority of design and computer science education lives remote of the other fields involved. Until joint education is widespread the inmates issue cooper described by cooper will continue to exist and design, marketing, and developers will continue to struggle in the attempt to find a cohesive product.

Design persepecive

This does not warrant a long post. Nor can I write much on the topic considering my recent perspective is and will always change.

Still, an interesting experience today as I interviewed a potential Carnegie Mellon design student. I was able to see my views about design in his responses and compare them to what I know now and there was a lot of interesting and surprising differences.

Smart phones that aren't

I have decided that society as a whole has settled for mediocracy in the department of mobile devices. We have the term 'smart phone' and believe our devices are augmenting our lives. True they keep calendars and contacts in order, let us check our email, and even write this blog. That does not make them smart. It does make them feature ridden.

I believe smart phones are more like trained dogs. Teach a dog a command and he responds. Sit and he sits. Speak, paw, roll over. Alarm, schedule, call. Are smart phones really that advanced? I see them as conditioned beings.

To side with Alan Cooper, I am the sole user of my iPhone. It should know I always want the device to turn on to the homescreen and should load the highest level of a feature upon load. That is what a smart phone would do. Instead I find myself following a series of actions to go back in hierarchy followed by hitting the home button so that the device is ready for my next encounter. That is not a smart phone. My need to take these steps are the same as needing to clean a dogs paws after taking him for a walk. The only difference is the dog might learn to expect this and wait while you put the leash up before tending to the animal. Smart phones have no memory of past events and dart into the house first chance they get, tracking mud for the owner and user to clean up.

There has to be a fundamental change in what users expect before technology will be updated. There has to be a movement for device names to accurately reflect their abilities. This change will not come from developers as it requires coding and learning on the devices part. Users don't know to ask or what doesn't exist. Which leaves the void to be filled by interaction designers. The only problem there is how to speculate on what should and should not be learned in a polite, wizard free manner?

I am open to ideas as technology becomes more pervasive innour lives.

The answer is right in front of you

Users are conditioned through little or poor design, unforgiving code, and a time before usability was a popular term to believe that systems and devices are inherently difficult to use. Show a user a new product and they will be hesitant to use it expecting the experience to be unpleasant. Similarly, provide a user with a simple task and they will search high and low for the answer expecting it to be hidden in some lost corner.

I have witnessed this most recently not with software, but with elevators. Waiting in the lobby of my office building an individual saw the elevator call button turn out. The user looked all around them to five of the six machines to see which had arrived. Not discovering the answer, she reluctantly turned around and sighed in frustration as she realized the available elevator was the unit she was staring at while waiting.

I see this incident as being very similar to the question "where are my glasses?" where a user will wander around searching for something to find that is on top of their head. Users have been presented with so much inept software that we no longer accept a simple solution. If an application doesn't require 20 steps to load a new document we don't trust it. That's not to say we won't complain about 19 of those steps, but we as users have become conditioned to poor interactions.

Users no longer look in the box labeled batteries for a fresh set of AAs for the flashlight. We expect the linen box to have our answer. It is the role of interaction designers to regain the trust of users in systems that they can be useful, usable, desirable, and polite.

Social networking

An interesting observation about my personal life that I would be shocked if it didn't expand to most of my generation.

I am comfortable if not overly willing to network via the Internet but am hesitant or unsure in person.

I don't mean to say I don't like meeting new individuals in my field. In fact it's quite the opposite.

Instead it is the method. I have spent the last few month expanding my digital footprint, updating linkedIn, Coroflot and facebook profiles, starting a Twitter account, and posting on various design blogs. All of this is natural if not second nature to me. Then, about a month ago, I met an individual and exchanged business cards. A seemingly natural transaction, I have become used to digital networking and this physical transaction threw me off.

Now there are many articles out about new social media and networking. What they all fail to address is the need to preserve physical networking as well.

Technology is moving social networking forward and it is infinitely easier to stay in touch with people, but are we losing simple human interactions?

More funny mental models

The first design post of 2009 and immediately I am going to criticize my innapropriate mental model of how the real world works.

Usually I catch the 6B bus to work. It's a standard bus with a front and back door and I always get to stand for a lack of seats. Occasionally, I catch the 6C. This bus comes earlier an is nothing like a bus... More like a party bus for bar crawls. All seats ad nowhere to stand, it is generally full but not crowded.

Now riding in today I happened to catch the early, smaller bus. About halfway through my mile and a half journey I began to think:
Wow the bus is stopping a lot more than usual.

My brain had made the assumption that being a smaller bus it should have fewer stops despite the routes are the same between the two busses between my apartment and work.

Once again I had to laugh at myself and how my brain makes assumptions based on observations.

I will never st tired of matching incorrect mental models with the physical world.

Back from break

A week and a half of design observations can be found on my Twitter feed www.Twitter.com/dafark8

Back from a brief vacation my writing will resume this week.

The saturation point of interaction design

The saturation point is generally referred to a product in society when it has reached the tipping point to use a more common metaphor. Some examples are the abundance of cell phones, text messaging, and in the early 90's fax machines.

Interaction design has reached a saturation point in my personal life. I realized that this holiday season as I bought gifts.

I hate wrapping gifts and have been known for giving them to people in the store bag. My plan was to follow this tradition.

That was until I realized the whole point of gifts is the experience of unwrapping them. I don't see the purpose of wasting paper wrapping a gift but I more than respect the experience expected. Receiving a gift is not about what is inside. Instead it is similar to a video game. What I am talking about is the element of discovery.

Give someone a bagged gift and it is opened and done with. Wrap it and there is the piece by piece reveal of what's inside.

I took this a step further this year. Giving one friend a series of similarly sized gifts I wrapped each in white printer paper. This effectivley blindboxed the gifts in the baseball card or Kid Robot style of packaging.

After wrapping these toys I could not help but laugh at how much design has saturated my personal life. I have been examining signs and interfaces for years now but this is the first time I conciouslly designed an experience for a friend knowing both the expected goal and the work flow to reach it.

Now at what point is the line drawn between designing social interactions and me just being crazy?

Failed psychology of waiting lines... Airlines

Airlines fail at pleasing passengers because they fail to sucessfully follow Don Norman's psychology of waiting lines.

Without rewriting Norman's paper, airlines fail to give an accurate wait time.

Sure they give estimated departure and arrival times but they are often delayed, updated, and still incorrect.

Sure there is a line to take off and land but toss bad weather into the mix or low fuel and cutting in line is common.

Add the stale air, confined space, and lack of entertainment, can someone redesign the experience of flying?

And I am back

The last two weeks my iPhone app has not allowed me to publish. I am now enabled to mobile writing again.

Smart phones destroy the forgotten password

Smart phones have enabled us to view email anytime, anywhere. With this we have entrusted our devices with our user ID and password to ease our desire for instant gratification.

Now a brief thought experiment...

You lose your smart phone. Your user ID is saved in the device for your bank, facebook etc. All a dishonest individual needs is five minutes of patience after selecting the forgotten password link and they have full access to your account, thanks to the saved access to your email.

So now I ask: how useful is that link when the reset is sent to the least protected account a user owns? What good are passwords at all if they can be so easily reset?

The next step in mobile security needs to be developed and sent to market immediately. If I had the solution I would be doing more thanbloggibg about the problem. Instead I wait and watch. What will we see.

Biometrics?

Face recognition?

An increase in challege questions?

The balance has always been between uniqe passwords and memorable passwords, ease of access for account owners and protection from fraud.

Good Marketing?

Driving out to Squirrel Hill recently I saw a billboard that read:
Text BELIEVE to shortcode.

Now I don't remember the short code and have no intention of sending that message but it got me thinking about some new marketing technology has enabled.

The billboard was consumed with maybe 18 characters total. And they were white letters on a red board. Very noticeable-very clear- the message told me what to do and it was my decision wether or not to follow it.

I am curious though what type of information I would have received had I sent that text.

I assume it is put up by a religious organization so would I get a quote from a book of prayer?

Would it start an SMS conversation with a higher being?

Would it charge my account an absurd amount of money?

What type of spam list would I be subjecting myself to?

Or is it all an elaborate social experiment of a bored researcher to see how many hits the billboard will actually summon.

Regardless of the reason the direct messaging is fascinating and I am curious how the marketing team decided on a brief viral campaign over an image or text heavy message.

Is print dead? How we get the news

An interesting observation today as I eat my lunch.

I sit in my chair eating and reading articles from my iPhone.
The other designer in my office sits, eating his lunch, reading news articles from the newspaper.

So I ask, is print dead? Many would say yes or at least that it is a dying media. It is interesting though how two people can access the same information from different sources.

Really that's not the interesting part but our choice in methods. I have a background in industrial design and HCI. His background is in graphic design and information architecture. That being said our choices for how we reach media is clear.

He is grounded in the tangible print while I am grounded on the multimedia realm. One is not better than the other and there is no right and wrong. I find it curious though how our training permeates through every part of our lives. It also shows the importance of understanding the entire work flow and process of a user. People don't describe their motivation. Look a little closer though and reasons for choosing chocolate over vanilla are clear.

My airport rant

I have always beleived that airports are the one place that show people in their true form. Everyone has a destination a mission and it is interesting to watch the different personalities. I am no exception to this either.

Today, the Sunday at the close of Thanksgiving weekend, I have missed my connecting flight. A combination of weather, human error, and preventable measures by the airline such as waiting five minutes for my flight to arrive could have avoided this post and my now four hour layover.

Still all of what I have written is just to introduce the true confusion. Knowing I need a flight to Pittsburgh the airline attendant tells me I am on standby for a two-legged flight leaving in five hours. I was already on one leg and did not want two more on top of my new-found delay so I ask if there are flights on any other airlines. I am told they cannot interface with the other airlines from within security and they cannot help me. Calling my family we are able to find a direct flight leaving in half the time weather permitting that is cheaper.

So now I am waiting for the cheper, direct flight and I ask:
Why can anyone with an Internet connection reroute my travel plans from essentially anywhere in the states but the attendent at the airport can't even col up my flight information?

When do names catch up with technology?

The carriage became the horseless carriage and is now called the automobile or the car.

Cellphones are slowly going through the same transformation. As technology changes the actual system no longer exists. Cell phones are being called mobile phones or mobile devices on a more frequent basis. This is an appropriate transition considering fewer and fewer calls are made using the cell technology of the early eighties.

Still on the plane today the pilot asked that all electrical devices be turned off including cell phones. This prompted this thought knowing that mobile phones do not interfere with plane signals. Believe me, I am glad people cannot talk on phones in airplanes. It does make me wonder though when society catches up to technology.

At what point will airlines no longer refer to cell phones? Is it one final technological leap we are waiting for or is there a social tipping point when terminology changes. What is the needed saturation point for technology's appropriate or correct term to make it into the mainstream?

Everyone understands usability

It's true. On some basic level everyone understands usability and the difference between what is said and what is meant. It is the common example when a user says they want a handle on a product they really are saying they want to be able to move it from one place to another with ease.

The same happened on my at to the airport this morning. Pulling into departures the cab driver asked what airline. Tired and without thinking I responded that I already have my boarding pass - any door will do. Now I was not thinking "what does he mean by this question?" instead I implicitly understood why he as asking my airline - not to make conversation but because he knows the pairing of doors to airlines and he can make my morning easier. As the passenger I would normally make this assumption and provide my flight information.

Maybe it us because Pittsburgh is a central check in with the gates in a separate building and drop off points are limited but this brief interaction shows that everyone understands usability. The driver did not ask what door I wanted and I did not respond with unecesarry data.

It is always interesting to see real world applications of tools and methods that interaction designers and researchers use and act as if we discovered.

No wonder users are confused

The topic says it all. I have been in my apartment four months and just this morning I noticed what is wrong with my range. And no I am not talking about the mapping of burners to controls. What I mean to discuss is the labeling. Both my microwave and oven are Whirlpool and one is positioned above the other in typical kitchen layout.

Still, the control on one reads "cancel/off" an the other reads "off/cancel". Now these ate two devices, often paired and the language is different for be same action. This then led me to think about other repetitive and confusing commands. Keyboards have enter and return keys. A logical and necessary separation in the days of typewriters. But wholly useless and confusing in modern day computing. I can tell you the technical separation between the task but not the axtuallbreapn the two are still separated in modern computing.

Even in he iPhone there is a done send and return button on my interface. Which performs what action? The only way to learn is to try and risk losing my data.

It is with this in mind that I challenge designers and corporations to design consisent products and identities. I can offer more examples both win the iPhone an elsewhere but I fine it interestingbto discover where systems are inconsistent. A company can not assume a user should see a solution without proper design and the first step toward this is consistency in one direction or another.