Tobias & Tobias Ltd.

Mastering the Art of Sketch-Writing

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:19:00 -0400

One of the most obvious yet commonly overlooked elements of being a designer is the need to be a deft communication facilitator. Pictures are very often better than words, and mastering the art of “sketch writing” is so important. You don’t need to be an artists, but you do need to be able to capture thoughts and ideas visually, or translate information into something that can be consumed and understood quickly.

In meetings with clients, this is an effective way – often the most effective way – to describe their requirements, and explore solutions in a meaningfully and inclusively.

Even for good sketch artists, there’s no better way to master the art of sketch notes than to practice. But there are some fundamentals that will help you to become successful:

Listen to everything. Information that might seem insignificant at the time may prove to be the key that unlocks a puzzle later in the design process.
Think ahead. Think smart. When drafting your sketch, plan the space you will need for each section or component.
Explore different styles. Find your own. This will make the presentation and communication of your sketch notes more effective. And this process of self-discovery will improve your communication more generally, across a broad set of design methods.
Put pen to paper. A natural ability to draw – and a “designer’s eye” – will help, but you don’t have to be good at drawing to create effective and powerful sketch notes. Be adventurous, find your flow, even if you don’t feel confident at first.

Every designer will develop his/her own style, but it’s important to explore alternatives. No two sketch notes will be the same, because no two sketch notes will be designed to communicate the same information or do the same job.

This example illustrates how a particular designer uses text and titles to illustrate key information gathered during a client interview. Some designers prefer to use images to get a message across, but just because we’re designers doesn’t mean we’re tied to pictorial visualization. Understanding how to design with text is just as important.

In his Dual Coding theory, Paivio elaborates on the idea that we learn faster with mental images. Using sketches, we can help people to understand and absorb ideas quickly; and to build consensus and make good decisions. Iterations are important. Sketches improve as ideas are better understood. And, from the design hot seat, you will find that you process ideas more quickly with every sketch. As your sketches become rich with information, you will find yourself facilitating real communication; real collaboration. It can be exhilarating.

Lastly, as with everything, be prepared.

Make sure you have a good seat with a clear view. If you’re in charge, make that clear by positioning yourself correctly.

Make sure you have all your tools ready and to hand. You’ll miss ideas if you’re hunting for the right pen.

Keep a cool head. There’s going to be a lot of information to capture. Don’t expect to catch it all. Learn to be selective and to multi-task. Listen for key points that you’ll want to re-visit. Look out for great quotes and take note of images that pop into your head. (It doesn’t have to be art, just make sure you capture the essence in a quick sketch.)

And remember to have fun with it! Make sure there’s plenty of you in your sketch notes. Your own voice – your own personality – is important. Use styles and typography that appeal to you. If you’re enjoying yourself, your notes will reflect that. And you’ll want to do it again.

If fortune favours the bold, what happened to Windows 8?

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:08:11 -0400

In the past, Star Trek devotees didn’t need to watch new Star Trek movies to decide whether they were any good. A simple rule, known as the Star Trek Movie Curse, could be applied: even-numbered films were good, while odd-numbered films were bad.

According to the Star Trek Movie Curse JJ Abrams’ successful 2009 reboot would have been a failure, leading many to question whether the curse still applies. But fans of sequential superstitions have found another highly prominent yet geek-friendly franchise that seems to fit a similar pattern. It’s called Microsoft Windows.

Let’s assume there is something called the “Windows Curse” which states that successive major Windows releases alternate between good and bad. It might provide us with an output like this:

Windows 95: Bad
Windows 98: Good
Windows ME: Bad
Windows XP: Good
Windows Vista: Bad
Windows 7: Good

…which just leaves Windows 8.

This putative Windows Curse would have told us long ago that the Start-button-deprived OS was destined to join ME and Vista on Redmond’s naughty step. And as the Windows 8 release approached last year, I started to suspect that this would indeed be the case.

The business problem Windows 8 set out to tackle, Microsoft’s diminishing mobile presence, was real enough, but its success was always going to depend on it solving real user problems too. So what were those problems? The two that sprang to mind were dissatisfaction with Windows 7 and dissatisfaction with established touch operating systems, both of which seemed flimsy at best.

It’s now over six months since the official launch of Windows 8 and it looks like my concerns were justified. Sales have been languid, OEMs have been grumbling, Ballmer is under fire, and rumours abound of a forthcoming U-turn from Microsoft which the Financial Times describes as possibly “one of the most prominent admissions of failure for a new mass-market consumer product since the New Coke fiasco.”

They say that fortune favours the bold. Yet while few would deny that Windows 8 has been a bold step, fortune hasn’t been particularly favourable towards Microsoft so far.

Is Omni-Channel the correct term?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 06:44:08 -0400

paula-jago:

The term Omni-Channel Marketing has been gathering momentum recently, having first been coined a couple of years ago in response to the continued evolution of Multi-Channel Marketing to envelope an ever-increasing number of digital-savvy consumers, using an ever-increasing diversification of devices, to access an ever-growing online marketplace.

When I first heard the term ‘Omni-Channel’, it jarred somewhat - it didn’t feel right. Every time I heard someone cite it in a keynote or interview, it made my lip curl, but having not invested the brain cells to consider why it invoked this intrinsic reaction, I filed it away for later.

Last week I had the luxury of a few hours thinking time, having been delayed at the crushingly boring Newark airport for several hours, and I realised that the issue is a simple one; its the incorrect term for the product - it’s NOT ‘Omni-Channel’ - its Multi-Channel Marketing delivering an ‘Omni-Experience’.

Marketing is no longer solely a push activity, and hasn’t been for several years; advocates of the Omni-Channel term explain it as putting the consumer in the middle and delivering a seamless brand experience (which is strategically correct) but, with regards to the terminology, putting the consumer in the middle surely means that the marketing delivery needs to be termed in line with the receiving experience, not the channel approach?

The emergence of the term Omni-Channel only serves to prove that those using it still fail to grasp the central position of power of the consumers behaviour in this increasingly digitally enabled world.

Consumers engage with your brand in different ways according to the way they choose - because the channel they select will be the most relevant to that particular engagement - they won’t turn on their desktop to give you a call, any more than they’ll use their mobile data allowance to spend an hour window shopping on your site when they have their office desktop and a lunchtime to hand.

Omni-Channel as a noun is therefore missing the mark - it fails to grasp the fact that the tactical provision for each individual channel should actually be different; not consolidated, whilst sitting within an overarching brand marketing strategy that delivers seamless relevance (and a great Omni-Experience) to the consumer.

You need to study the user to establish the way they use different channels, and importantly, devices, according to their context and desire.

No mean feat, with more scenarios than the National Lottery.

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Predicting the future of the smartphone market - a fool's game?

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:32:00 -0500

Steve Ballmer was wrong about the iPhone, but he wasn’t the only one. In 2009 Gartner published its projections of how the mobile landscape would look in 2012 - and they got it wrong too.

It’s not easy to predict the future.

Steve Ballmer found this out when he said in 2007 that Apple’s iPhone had no chance of getting significant market share. And he’s not the only one to get things wrong when talking about the future mobile landscape.

In 2009, Gartner produced a projection of smartphone OS market share in the year 2012, which I often used when vainly trying to convince people that the mobile landscape would actually change at all. Recently I found myself wondering how accurate Gartner had been, so I dug through my archives until I found the data in a dusty old corner of my hard drive. As it turned out, they weren’t very accurate at all.

_{(click for full size version)}

I made this chart to illustrate the discrepancy between 2012 as Gartner saw it and 2012 as it really happened. The prediction is on the left, reality is on the right.

As you can probably see, Gartner got two things wrong. The first was that Symbian would remain the leading smartphone OS in 2012, and the second was that iOS and Android would be fighting for the third place position. You don’t need to be a mobile expert to realise that neither of these things are happening.

When I look back at the Gartner projections from 2009, it seems strange that some people were so resistant as they’re actually quite conservative. Maybe it felt strange to think that Android would grow beyond a niche platform. Maybe it was hard to imagine Microsoft would drop the ball so badly. Maybe Nokia’s track record made it hard to see how they could possibly surrender such a large slice of the market.

Whatever the reason, a lot of people got it wrong - including Gartner, including myself, including those who felt the state of affairs in 2009 was set to last. So next time you feel tempted to smirk at Steve Ballmer’s mistaken iPhone prediction, take a moment to ask yourself if you’d have done any better.

_{Sources: Global Smartphone Sales Report Q2 2009, Canalys (2009), 2012 Smartphone Market Share Forecast, Gartner (2009), Global Smartphone Shipments Q3 2012, IDC (2012)}

How I tied myself in knots over crosses

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:25:00 -0500

In foreign exchange people are always talking about “pairs” and “crosses”, words that I always thought I understood. But after a bout of soul-searching prompted by a tweet from Katie Martin, I had to accept that I was wrong.

When I saw this tweet from the Dow Jones currencies & bonds editor a few weeks ago, I was gripped by a vague sense of panic and self-doubt:

A question like this wouldn’t usually send me into such a state, as I’m one of those pointlessly pedantic people more likely to get annoyed by the misuse of language than to provoke that annoyance in others. But in this case I had to accept that maybe I was on the wrong side of the fence.

For a few years now I’ve been close to the world of FX, or foreign exchange, and have picked up a lot of the jargon. I can follow a conversation even when it’s thickly peppered with terms like “cable, “tom next”, “pips” and “stop loss”. I’m long past the point where I consider “pairs” and “crosses” to even be jargon, in fact - they’re elementary stuff as FX terminology goes, the sort of words you pick up on day one if not earlier. Yet I’d never really stopped to think about how their meanings were separated, and might have committed any number of unwitting solecisms as a result.

Thinking back over how I understood the terms and how I used them, a distinction suggested itself:

A currency pair is a single entity made up of two specific currencies - for example, EURUSD (euro / dollar) or USDJPY (dollar / yen)
Currency crosses are a group of currency pairs with a single currency in common - for example, “euro crosses” would include EURUSD, EURGBP (euro / sterling) and so on.

The mental model that I’d formed to handle this distinction involved a two-dimensional grid of currencies. A “cross” happened at the intersection between two of them - so when someone said “euro crosses” I imagined a euro row flashing across this grid to be intersected or “crossed” by the other currencies:

Applying this mental model, it’s possible that I might once have used the word “cross” to refer to a single intersection, a single currency pair. If I had, then I might have entered the category of people who mix up crosses and pairs, rather than those who get annoyed when that happens. So my worries remained.

The next day I had a chat with one of our resident FX design experts, Lyzbelle Strahan, about this question. Like me, Lyzbelle hadn’t really thought in detail about the distinction between “pairs” and “crosses”, but after considering it she suggested a mental model of her own. Interestingly it was completely different from mine.

In Lyzbelle’s mind the term “cross” referred not to an intersection in a two-dimensional grid, but to the X character that’s sometimes used to denote a wild card. Examples of this include the x86 processor family, various Intel-designed chips whose names all end with 86, or the use of “Internet Explorer 5.x” to mean any copy of IE whose version number begins with 5. So when someone says “euro crosses”, Lyzbelle would imagine EURx or, in other words, any currency pair where one constituent is the euro.

Even though our mental models were quite different they had more or less the same effect when it came to how we defined and used the word “cross”. But by now I felt it was time to stop worrying about mixing up “crosses” with “pairs” and put the matter to bed once and for all - so I did what I should probably have done as soon as this question presented itself and turned to Google.

The first definition of “cross” that I found was at babypips.com and took me by surprise by stating that a cross is a pair of currencies that doesn’t involve the US dollar. This was quite far off the assumptions Lyzbelle and I had formed during our time in the world of FX, so I double-checked it on a few other sites and it turned out to be completely legit.

The term cross, as it turns out, originates from the time when the US dollar was far more central to the foreign exchange market than it is now - a time when all other currencies were valued against the dollar, and all FX trades were basically dollar trades. In that time, if you wanted to exchange British sterling for the New Zealand dollar, you’d need to do a USDNZD trade and then a GBPUSD trade, effectively “crossing” the dollar like you’d cross a river.

Using this definition it’s not surprising that a currencies & bonds editor at Dow Jones would pick up on the frequent misuse of the word “cross”. I’ve certainly heard people who work within the FX market refer to “dollar crosses” to mean a group of currencies that include the US dollar, which stands in stark contrast to the true meaning of the word.

So, armed with this new-found knowledge about the word “cross” I asked myself a final question - should I start to use it with a technical precision, correcting other people when I hear it being mixed up with “pair”? Or should I just relax and accept this mixing up as a kind of innovation in language, semantic shift in action, in which “cross” is slowly adopting a new meaning that will one day become common usage? As tempted as I am to side with the pedants, an easier life may await those who choose the latter path.

Learning Enabled Design

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:09:00 -0500

By employing our disciplined design process, Tobias & Tobias was able to design and deliver an effective teaching tool for the Beatrice Tate School within the scope of a small pro-bono project.

Located in East London, Beatrice Tate is a secondary school for students with severe and profound multiple learning difficulties. As part of their acclaimed curriculum, teachers there created a ‘social network’ which allowed the students to collect music, videos, photos, and ‘friends’ in a cleverly-constructed PowerPoint file. The app showed potential, but it needed improvement. The school asked Tobias & Tobias for help.

Everyone at Tobias & Tobias was eager to lend their expertise, and as the team generated ideas the project quickly outgrew the original scope. But lead user experience designer Kathryn Tanner stuck to her design process and started with the users.

‘[Project Manager Mark Hundley-Appleton] and I went along to one of their computer lessons,’ said Kathryn. ‘You could see a lot of problems with the PowerPoint, but the main problem was speed. When the students engaged in an action it took too long, they got bored. They started looking at a friend or talking to a teacher or just not doing anything.’

It wasn’t just the students having trouble, Kathryn observed, ‘The teachers were running around to work with each child, then trying to update the PowerPoint at the same time. It was a difficult lesson for them, too.’

Kathryn was convinced the severity of the performance issue made it impossible to accurately evaluate the rest of the interface. She and lead technical developer Daniel Simmons decided to take an iterative approach, rebuilding the existing design as a web application before redesigning it. ‘Dan and I did have loads of conversations about “should we do this?” and “oh, this would much better!” But with lots of small changes, you don’t know “well, was it that change or was it this one that made the difference?”’

Daniel finished the rebuild in less time than originally estimated, leaving time for a second round of research before the redesign. He also developed keyboard shortcuts to allow teachers to add photos and videos to students’ accounts without running back to their computer to edit a file.

After the web app was deployed, Kathryn and I returned to the school to see how it worked for the students. The results were good. ‘They were much more engaged, much more empowered, much more in control of their interactions,’ said Kathryn.

Kathryn also saw something exciting: the students were adding their own photos, videos, and friends using the keyboard shortcuts Daniel had put in for the teachers. ‘They were able to do more things — look at more photos, add photos…just take more control. That was the most interesting bit: I realised I’d underestimated them. I actually thought that they couldn’t do anything, not that the system didn’t enable them to do anything.’

Fixing the performance opened up a whole range of functionality we hadn’t thought possible. As Kathryn put it, ‘Knowing them, and knowing how much more capable they were than I initially thought, you can then start brainstorming much more interesting things.’

Starting with good user research and following an iterative approach has enabled us to both deliver an improved experience more quickly than if we had tried to make a ‘big splash’, and design a much more effective tool for both the students and the teachers.

We can’t wait to see what we all learn in the next round.

The relationship between time and good design

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 05:19:00 -0500

Time, says Andy Budd, is the most valuable resource a designer can have. I agree - although, like many people, I’ve spent most of my life refusing to acknowledge its true importance.

Andy Budd wrote a great piece for the Pastry Box project a few days ago, about the importance of time in design.

We live in a world of instant gratification, so is it any wonder that clients expect their projects to start yesterday and ship tomorrow, irrespective of how long the work actually takes?

He concludes by revealing our industry’s “dirty little secret”, that the best designers don’t necessarily have the most talent: they “simply have more time”.

And now, we reach the point in a blog post like this where the author would usually say “I wholeheartedly agree”, or words to that effect, before recommending that the reader head over to the linked article forthwith and digest it in all its glory. But I’m going to break with tradition here and say something else.

It’s not that I disagree with Andy’s sentiments. I do, in fact, wholeheartedly agree with them. It’s just that, being completely honest, I wouldn’t always have agreed. As ashamed as I am to admit it, my appreciation of time’s importance has formed more recently.

A few years ago, I would commit to deadlines that seemed generous on day one, start work on a project, and quickly realise that I’d have to work lots of extra hours to meet those milestones. Rather than accept that the deadlines themselves were realistic, however, my habit was to blame other factors - my productivity, my time management, other projects & commitments getting in the way. The projects would usually end with the goals having been achieved, but at a considerable personal cost, and me telling myself that things would be different next time because I’d be more productive or make fewer mistakes.

What I’ve learnt since then has, in some ways, been quite difficult to accept: that no matter how productive or organised I am, it can take a lot of time for good ideas to form, and even longer for those ideas to germinate into fully-formed design concepts.

It’s a process that can certainly be slowed down: by distractions, by poor productivity, by the things that prevent us from really focusing on a problem. Oh yes, and by Twitter. But can it be accelerated? Not really. It can help to have other people thinking about the same problem, but in my experience more designers tend to make better things in the same amount of time rather than average things more quickly.

Time is one of the reasons why I think design problems are such useful tools. When these are properly understood, a design team has the clarity and focus that are essential to delivering high-quality work. Of course, it takes time to identify those problems, and it can be frustrating for some clients to hear that their design team is spending time defining problems when they should be coming up with solutions. Organisations that overcome that frustration and see the value in properly defined problems will, however, get the most out of design in the long run.

But it’s not just that early activity of identifying design problems that requires time. At every stage of the design process, time yields huge benefits. When time is constrained, a design team might still produce something that’s fit for purpose, something that fulfils the team’s contractual obligations, but in many cases what a client needs is something that goes beyond that.

In those situations - as hard as it may be for them to accept - what they need to give their design team is, quite simply, more time.

In Defense of Allegorical Design

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 04:43:00 -0500

Another iOS release, another round of wailing about Apple’s kitschy UIs. Meanwhile, in a surreal twist worthy of David Lynch, Microsoft is being hailed for the minimalist beauty of the Windows 8 UI. But the enthusiasm for a minimalist, ‘authentically digital’ aesthetic risks sacrificing usability for a chimera.

Eliminating superfluous decoration — famously dubbed ‘chartjunk’ by Edward Tufte in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — is a worthy goal. But not every decorative element is superfluous. Some convey important information.

A bit of text by itself may be ambiguous. Is it a static heading? Or is it a UI control which activates a function when tapped? Add a drop shadow, and the ambiguity is gone: it’s a button begging to be tapped or clicked.

Donald Norman terms this phenomenon ‘perceived affordance’: an actionable property of the world recognised by an actor (in this case, the click– or tappability of the text recognised by you). In a good design the bevels, borders, and other ‘decorations’ are signifiers that help us to recognise interface elements as interactive — to perceive the affordances. They make interfaces discoverable.

Take the much-maligned leather texture at the top of iCal. Kitschy it may be, but it indicates where the window can be dragged around the screen, and serves to differentiate the control area (the toolbar) from the display area (the calendar). A different execution — say, the default OS X application appearance — would be more elegant, but the texture serves a purpose. Eliminating it altogether would make iCal less usable.

Signifiers don’t just identify controls. They can also identify apps, and screens within apps. With the proliferation of small-display devices like smartphones and tablets, screen space is at a premium. Labels are often small, if they’re present at all. And even the best label must be read, requiring the user to refocus on the label then back to the content of the app.

Judicious use of texture, rules, and other design elements results in multiple small differences between apps or screens. These multiple differences reinforce one another to help users recognise one screen from another with minimum conscious effort. As well, they are located right within the screen so they provide cues without requiring the user look elsewhere, stop to read, or even consciously think about them at all.

Signifiers don’t just help uses learn interfaces, however. They help users remember them. Many apps are used only occasionally — most people won’t need a units converter every day, for example. Even apps you do use every day may have screens or dialogues you use only rarely, like the advanced formatting dialogue in Microsoft Word. It may have been some time since you used a particular interface, so it takes a moment to remember how. A well-signposted interface puts that information ‘in the world’, to borrow another phrase from Donald Norman. You don’t have to remember where to tap or click or which screen you’re in; the interface reminds you. That lowers the cognitive load of the interface, making it both objectively and subjectively easier to use.

More, as with Proust and the madeleine a few familiar details can trigger more extensive memories. Just as hearing an old song can trigger memories of a childhood summer, a party, or an ex-lover, so seeing a particular combination of shape, texture, and colour can trigger more extensive memories about how to use an interface.

In principle, a purely digital interface — one that doesn’t employ metaphor or borrow elements from the material world — can include signifiers. But the variety, subtlety, and complexity of natural textures, shapes, and colours provide ready-made building blocks for visual language far beyond what human imagination can conceive. More importantly, users are already familiar with material-world building blocks; they don’t have to learn them from scratch.

Even ‘digital natives’ live in the physical world. We start learning how it works before we ever touch a computer, and even the most dedicated nerd spends more time interacting with physical objects than with digital interfaces. It doesn’t take additional learning to know that an object casting a shadow on another is in front of that other, for example. Failing to leverage that existing knowledge is tantamount to shutting down whole swathes of users’ brains.

That’s not to say interfaces should mindlessly ape the real world. As Bruce Tognazzini has pointed out, borrowing inappropriate metaphors can lead to disaster. And applying UI metaphors too literally imposes the restrictions of rigid physical materials on mutable pixels which are nonetheless incapable of replicating their physical counterparts. As Alan Cooper argues, this results in stunted interfaces hindered by the limitations of both worlds.

But careful use of real-world references can make designs more usable. Mozilla appears to have the right idea with Firefox OS: considered use of appropriate metaphors and cues from the physical world adapted to a digital environment. Interfaces that are inspired by, not representations of, the richness of the physical world. This ‘just enough’ approach allows us to take advantage of users’ familiarity with physical objects while retaining the inherent advantages of software.

When is a Presentation not a Presentation?

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:38:58 -0500

The deckument - a cross between a PowerPoint deck and a Word document - is a recipe for confusion and boredom. We should all make a pledge to never inflict them on innocent people again.

When Angela Garber coined the phrase “Death by PowerPoint” in 2001 she tapped into a deep vein of discomfort felt by everyone who had suffered at the hands of Microsoft’s presentation app. When Edward Tufte criticised the traditional presentation in his 2003 essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, few rushed to its defence. Even the US military are battling a PowerPoint-driven culture that produces such complex presentations that one general, confronted with a spaghetti-like depiction of Afghan conflict, remarked, “when we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

There are many reasons why presentations - whether created in PowerPoint, Keynote, or OpenOffice - are so difficult to endure. So many reasons, in fact, that if I tried to list them all here I might break the internet. So I’m going to look at just one tactic that helps creators of bad presentations make us regret ever accepting that meeting invite. I call it the deckument.

Introducing the deckument

The deckument - a cross between a “deck” and a “document” - comes about when a presentation’s author forgets about creating an even vaguely visual experience and simply pastes reams of text, often from a Word document, into each slide.

The decision to create a deckument has terrible ramifications for the audience or, to be more accurate, the victims, because deckuments probably constitute the very worst form of PowerPoint presentation. Our eyes are assaulted by hundreds of poorly typeset words scattered across a glaring ten-foot high screen. Our ears are harassed by the presenter’s accompanying speech, distracting us from the task of reading all those words. And our brains, beaten into submission by this confusing sensory overload, seek solace in the safe haven of sleep.

Presenters in these situations will wonder why people are so disinterested, but even they probably realised midway through making the deckument that it wasn’t going to work out. Maybe they tried in vain to fix it, adopting tactics similar to the below:

But this superficial tinkering fails to address the real problem, which is more fundamental: by putting document content into a presentation, the presenter is confusing one type of media for another. It’s a category error, a basic mistake, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing films where the script’s text scrolls along the cinema screen for two hours in silence. Yet if it’s tackled early enough, it’s a very easy problem to avoid.

Steering clear of the deckument trap

The very first thing any content creator needs to do is to understand the medium they are creating for and presentations are no exception. The presentation is a bad medium for text documents because audiences cannot read at their own pace, are forced to hold their necks in the same position for upwards of an hour, and are being repeatedly distracted by the presenter. Presentations are, however, great for spoken exposition accompanied by visual aids. Presenters who understand this can avoid the nightmare scenario of the deckument.

Of course, not every presenter feels able to create visually effective presentations. You risk falling into the deckument trap when you think it’s something only designers can do, or that deadline pressure leaves you with no time to do anything other than paste text into PowerPoint.

These are both fallacies. Firstly, it doesn’t take Neville Brody to improve upon a block of dense text. Your slides may not end up in the Design Museum but even a half-decent stab at visual communication will be appreciated by your audience. And secondly, you should think about your audience’s time instead of your own: a slide that confuses an audience of 30 for 5 minutes wastes over two hours of precious human existence. So isn’t it worth you spending 20 minutes making that slide easier to understand?

Each deckument created shows a lack of respect for the medium of the presentation and - even worse - for the audience and their time. So let’s make a pledge: let’s never inflict deckuments on anyone again. We might not fully eradicate death by PowerPoint in our lifetimes, but by killing the deckument we’ll be off to a good start.

Designing for Hyperlocal Communities

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:25:00 -0500

Earlier this year, Civil Exchange published the first audit of the Big Society initiative. Unsurprisingly, it contained some pretty damning statistics.

They illustrate, for example, that in deprived areas of the UK, only 55% of people believe that their community pulls together in times of need. This compares to 78% of those living in affluent areas.

Or should you come from an ethnic minority and believe that you can trust in your neighbours, you’re amongst a tiny 27% that feel the same way. If you’re white, that figure almost doubles to 52%.

And if this study is to be believed, 70% of Britons don’t even know who their neighbours are.

It’s fair to say, therefore, that the Big Society has failed in it’s explicit goal of strengthening communities.

And it’s easy to imagine it failing harder and faster: the voluntary sector -on which so much of the success of the Big Society depended- is facing a funding shortfall of £3.3 billion between 2010 and 2016.

Perhaps the implicit goal of saving the treasury some money is fairing a little better…

Still, when opportunity knocks, business often rises to the challenge, and so it has been on this occasion; witness the rise of the social enterprises. These businesses are seeking to pick up the pieces of Big Society, bringing communities together to effect positive change all while making enough money to be self sustaining.

Early on, organisations like Village SOS and Your Square Mile (full disclosure, YSM is a client of ours) latched on to the mind-multiplying, connective benefits of the Internet. They set about building hyperlocal community platforms that would help us to get to know our neighbours better, facilitate the formation of community project groups and open up channels of communication with other communities across the country.

Except they didn’t. Apart from a few isolated successes where digital literacy, access and community spirit was already relatively high, the sites remained largely unused.

So what went wrong?

Well, it seems that in using technology to try and drive community cohesion, too much focus was placed on the technology and not enough on the community itself. It was a classic case of build-it-and-they-will come. Or not.

I recently had the honour of presenting at the UCD 2012 conference in London on this very conundrum, during a talk titled Designing for Social (Ex)Change. Over the past few years, I’ve helped a number of brands, including Barclays and Intercontinental Hotel Group, understand community building and how it can be used for better brand engagement. I’ve also had the chance to put much of what I’ve learnt to the test, nurturing an online/offline community in the shape of CreativeMornings/London.

The following list captures the four most important things I’ve learnt and what we at Tobias & Tobias are keeping in mind as we work with Your Square Mile.

Here goes:

1. Find the common need

In online, hyperlocal community building, it’s the common need that matters. Note that need is singular. There’s a tendency to want to answer all needs from day one, but to do so risks diluting the dialogue that makes an online community a vibrant, interesting place to be a part of. Working to solve the most galvanising need first helps the community focus their efforts, increasing their chances of success and the positive reinforcement that comes with it. It also allows us to focus our design efforts, ensuring the tools we develop are the right ones for the job at hand.

2. Reflect the swagger

Nothing acts as a barrier to adoption like feeling you’re in an unfamiliar place. Brands use ethnographic research to recognise, assimilate and reflect the way we see our world in their products and services, lowering the barrier to entry. We’re doing the same for the communities we’re working with. We’re unearthing the narratives, personalities and landmarks that make each loacale unique and ensuring that the platforms we build reflect this.

3. Be inclusive

You’d think this was a no-brainer in this day and age but a relentless focus on the sexy channels (app, mobile web and even plain ol’ web, I’m looking at you) means that those with lower levels of literacy or access get left out. We’re making sure that the benefits of the community platforms we design can be accessed via email, SMS and, yes, even paper. This way, we can ensure that citizens who might be SMS literate, seniors for example, can tap into the support available in their local online community. We’re also designing news pages that can be easily printed and distributed to those without regular access to a web terminal.

4. Go bottom-up

Brasilia is known as the three-day city. Despite the stunning Niemeyer-penned architecture, its imposed model of living and working has alienated people to the extent that they can only bear it 72 hours a week before jetting off to somewhere more fun. The imposition of an “ideal” model of online community development has similarly resulted in three-visit sites. While recognising the cost and scalability benefits that come with a top-down approach, we’re not imposing a one-size-fits-all model on the communities we’re working with. Rather, we’re developing a set of modules -think media galleries, news feeds, forums, data collection tools and channel interfaces- that will enable communities to build their online platforms as they see fit, when they see fit.

It’s early days for our engagement with Your Square Mile. But by aligning around these four factors, we’re giving the communities we’re designing for the best chance of success in making the change that they want to see. Which is more than you can say for the Big Society.

Links for further reading:

A Different Kind of Excellence

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:41:00 -0500

I recently attended Typo London 2012: Social. On the second day, lawyer and typographer Matthew Butterick gave a talk on design excellence. In the talk, he said the silliest thing I heard all conference — ravings of drunken football fans on the train home notwithstanding:

“Web standards punish anyone who aspires to excellence on the web.”

L. Jeffry Zeldman on a rubber crutch, was this guy serious? He was.

Twenty minutes into his talk, Matthew showed us some newspaper home pages: Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Guardian. All awful, he said, all in the same way. Because they were all built on a rotten core: web standards.

Mr. Butterick declared it a case of pursuing the lowest common denominator rather than excellence. His problem with doing so is that web standards have three fatal flaws:

They’re not really standards; they’re only recommendations.
There is no reference implementation.
They are controlled by a bureaucratic consortium.

Sir Timmy wept.

They’re ‘not standards, just recommendations’? Sure. Unless you count JavaScript (ECMA-262). Or Unicode. Or HTTP (RFC 2616). And speaking of RFCs, if ‘recommendations’ are so problematic why do email, ethernet, TCP/IP, etc. all seem to get by just fine as mere ‘requests for comment’?

No reference implementation? De jura, no. Nor is there for any of the IETF’s standards, necessarily. Just two independent and interoperable implementations. But there have been de facto reference implementations — Netscape 3 and Internet Explorer 6, for example. Other browsers targeted their interpretations of web standards, right down to the bugs. And the web stagnated as a result. Reference implementations are a boon to implementors. They’re also controlled by one organisation, typically a for-profit company. That organisation then controls the standard, and they develop it on their schedule and for their benefit. That may result in faster development, but it also results in lock-in, and precludes development of capabilities the maintainer doesn’t deem worthwhile. Microsoft could have given us CSS gradients, multi-column layouts, or alpha transparency in IE6.5, but they didn’t. They decided the browser was ‘finished’, and shifted resources to more pressing endeavours. It was only when Firefox and Webkit started drinking their milkshake that they got back in the game and the web started progressing again.

Controlled by a bureaucratic consortium? Matthew is not the first person to complain. But but the ISO, the IETF, ECMA, or any of the other myriad standards bodies are also typically ‘bureaucratic’ agglomerations of private companies and invited experts. And while the W3C has been a roadblock at times, people have routed around the damage. As a longtime standards advocate once told me, ‘standards are like sausages: you don’t want to know how they’re made.’

So where does that leave us? ‘Pursuing the lowest common denominator’? I suppose. Or you could call it, ‘making your publication accessible to as wide an audience as possible’. What’s the alternative? Excluding whoever doesn’t have the right device? The newspaper industry has been declining faster than any other since 2007 at least, and shows no signs of turning around. So Mr. Butterick’s idea is to exclude a substantial portion of the audience? Good luck.

Design that excludes people isn’t ‘excellence’. Using web standards isn’t ‘pandering to the lowest common denominator’. We have web fonts. We can achieve elegant, responsive layouts. Using web standards makes it possible to use the latest capabilities of the newest browsers and reach the broadest audience — and to do it as cost-effectively as possible. That was what we fought for in 1998, and it’s what we have today.

The web is special because it enables us to design experiences that can be shared by a wide range of people, with a wide range of abilities, on a wide range of devices. That’s excellence. A different kind of excellence. A more socially — and commercially — responsible kind of excellence.

The Simple Chair Necessities

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:36:00 -0400

I am a strong believer, as I’m sure many of you are, that the world needs less waste and should reuse and recycle where ever possible. I like to encourage this in the office, and get the team to do their part.

When I came across this website beunpackaged.com, I was impressed by their philosophy; their vision is a world with less wasteful packaging. Unpackaged encourages customers to do the right thing for themselves and for the environment. In the shop, customers can reuse their containers to refill all their daily essentials.

Their recent project is to recondition chairs for their new cafe, and they want people to donate chairs. We had an old chair that has been with Tobias & Tobias for a long time, and rather than disposing of this one chair, it was time for it to find a new home.

What better way than to donate it to a worthy cause set up by Unpackaged. All donated chairs get a plaque on the back marking the contribution. Once the cafe is open, we will have the pleasure of seeing our trusty chair being used to its full potential.

There are now so many ways people can reuse and recycle old products, from car boot sales, to donating to charity, to passing it on through organisations like the Freecycle groups. I really like Unpackaged and their beliefs. It’s inspiring and emotive to know that people are acting to make a change, and I hope it will encourage other people to do the same. Let’s save the planet one chair at a time!

Dating a Dancer: Living with Windows Phone 7

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 05:11:00 -0400

For about a month my only phone was a Dell Venue Pro running Windows Phone 7.5. It was like dating a stripper: at first it was sexy, unconventional, and exciting; but as time went on I learned it was also shallow, difficult, and sometimes acted like it was smoking crack.

Sexy, Unconventional, Exciting

This is a beautiful piece of software. The buttery-smooth animations, minimalist graphics, elegant typography, and dramatic background photos are sex on a screen. The ‘Live Tiles’ start screen is undeniably unconventional — and the better for it. And Microsoft’s ‘hubs’ offer the exciting prospect of seamless integration of disparate communications media. Microsoft needed something that would attract attention among opinion makers, and among designers and geeks this phone attracts attention like a Chippendale at a hen party.

Shallow

When I first started using it, I could forgive WP7 anything. It was just so pretty. But infatuation was gradually replaced with frustration: I never quite got comfortable using it. And the problem was precisely the thing that makes it so gorgeous: its spartan, no-pixels-wasted aesthetic.

To start, WP7 lacks perceived affordances. Is this bit of text a label or a tappable widget? The lack of borders, icons, or other indicators often made it impossible to tell. Even after you’ve tapped to see, the absence of visual cues means you have to memorise the result. Skeuomorphic buttons may be kitsch, but they put knowledge of which bit is tappable and which not into the environment so you don’t have to keep it in your head. The result is less cognitive load and a more fluid experience.

WP7’s lack of chrome, economy of typefaces, and limited colour palette also means there is little variation from screen to screen or even app to app. The lack of variation gives you few signposts to signal which screen you’re on or which app you’re using. You have to keep that information in your head, too. Yet more cognitive load.

More, the app model includes no wayfinding beyond which screen you’re on — if you drill down in a screen you don’t know if you’re 2 levels down, 3, etc. Cognitive load again.

The result is a UI that’s taxing to use, rather than feeling as slick as it looks. This is a soluble problem, of course. But like educating a dropout, it’s going to take time and effort and I need a phone now, not after it’s gotten it’s GCSE in night school.

Difficult

WP7 makes some things more difficult than they should be. Playing music, for example, is part of the Zune app. That means it’s mushed in with watching videos. And I listen to music on my phone a lot more than I watch videos, so drilling down from a top menu to get at my tunes. While there’s an icon on the opening screen you can tap to just start playing music, it’s not obvious what music it will play.

Once you get into the music player, shuffling a playlist requires first tapping it’s name to play it, then selecting ‘shuffle’. You end up either listening to the first track an awful lot or always skipping it. A minor irritation, but it’s an oft-used function that takes more taps than it should.

While I’m on the subject of music, there must be a way to search the Zune library on WP7. But I couldn’t find it. And it doesn’t seem Microsoft can either.

Then there’s the Maps app. At maximum zoom, you can only use ‘aerial view’. After providing too little information many other places, WP7 suddenly does just the opposite. When you zoom in fully it’s usually because you want a clear view of intersections, street names and so forth. A satellite image clutters all that up with trees, buildings and the like which. It takes more effort to comprehend the image than it would a good graphical map.

Another ‘convenience’ in Maps: search for directions and Maps helpfully starts you off on the first step of turn-by-turn directions. That’s great, except it obscures the route you’ll be taking. So how do you get a view of the route? Why, you hit the ‘Back’ soft key, of course. ‘Back’ to a screen you’ve never been to before. Obvious, really.

These things can be fixed, of course. And probably will be in WP8, which is due out soon. But added to the cognitive load from WP7’s excessive minimalism they just make it feel like too much work.

Smoking Crack

WP7’s ‘Back’ soft key is about as predictable as a loaded crackhead. Depending on which screen you’re on, tapping ‘Back’ may mean:

‘Cancel’ (if you’re editing an email)
‘Go to the previous page’ (in IE — but only if there is a previous page)
‘Open the previous app’ (if you’re at the top level of an app, there’s no history to browse, and the app was opened from another app as when you tap a link in an email)
‘Go to the home screen’ (if you launched the app from the home screen)
‘Go to the previous screen’ (in the Twitter app)
‘To to previous step’ or ‘Stop doing step-by-step’ (if you’re using Directions in the Map app)

As a special treat, if you hit ‘Back’ while on the first entry in IE’s history — meaning there’s no web page to go ‘back’ to — it takes you to the previous app (or the home page, if you launched IE from there). And IE promptly loses your history.

Do you see the pattern? I don’t. I’ve met panhandling junkies that were more consistent. You have to memorise what the ‘Back’ button does in different situations based on app, function, and what you did right before you hit it. Cognitive mother load!

That’s WP7 in a nutshell: it looks great, promises lots of excitement, but makes the user work too hard. That’s probably down to Microsoft’s priorities. It’s version 1, and like a 20-year-old gym rat in a mankini, it doesn’t yet have the skills to do a real job. But it certainly draws attention, which Microsoft desperately needed in the mobile space.

The important thing will be whether the soon-to-be-released Windows Phone 8 starts getting more of the mundane things right. There is a lot of smart, original thinking in this OS. And it certainly looks the part. But like that gym rat, WP7 needs to grow up, get educated, and start acting like a mature platform. Because good looks only get you so far.

In order to build, first you must destroy

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 05:25:00 -0400

Large organisations are encumbered by yesterday’s platforms like never before. Many address this problem by creating new ones but this just adds to the mess. The real answer is not to create, but to destroy.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been captivated by demolition of the building next door to our office. We’ve gathered at our windows to watch the “High Reach machine” claw at its crumbling walls and retreated to our meeting rooms as the unbelievable sound of “percussive breaking” assaults our eardrums.

Watching from the window, I’ve become fascinated by how much work goes into tearing down a building like that. When we think about demolition, we picture the cooling tower or council block suddenly felled by a controlled explosion: the countdown, the loud bang, the spectacular sight of a huge structure collapsing before an unseen, cheering crowd. But the reality is that demolition must be careful, methodical, incremental; it takes a long time and it’s extremely expensive. No-one would fund those projects if there wasn’t a good reason to carry them out.

Meanwhile, at the recent TradeTech FX conference across the Square Mile from our office, I got talking to someone familiar with the technology of a large Swiss investment bank. This organisation had recently discovered to its horror that it had over 3,500 IT systems in active use, many of which were over thirty years old and did things no-one currently working at the bank actually understood. Worse still, these old systems couldn’t just be turned off; because no-one knew what they did, there was no telling what disasters might ensue if their life support was switched off.

It occurred to me that the last thing this bank needed was a new generation of IT systems to add to the mess. Yet we shouldn’t be suprised if that’s just what they’re doing. Management teams generally like to build, not to destroy. Making new toys often seems like the most obvious way to solve a problem even in organisations that clearly have too many toys already.

This mentality might need to change. As businesses accumulate ever more websites, platforms, systems and applications, the rusty pipework of yesterday’s technology will become an ever more limiting liability. We might need to start celebrating a new breed of demolition experts: those who shut down old systems, who gently euthanise ancient applications, who unplug the dusty old servers that house them.

A new mentality may be required among people working in business and technology, especially in mature organisations that genuinely want to thrive in the future. The CVs of tomorrow’s executives might boast about the many systems they’ve shut down and killed off during their tenure, not the ones they commissioned and built. Creating without first destroying, and destroying with care, could come to be seen as a sign of laziness, the easy way out for those who don’t think of the longer term.

Can technology and design truly deliver on their great promise of the 21^st century while encumbered by the creaking legacy of the 20^th? I don’t think so: it’s time for the hard hats, heavy diggers and pulverising drills to move in. Let’s just be grateful that demolishing old IT systems, as difficult as it might be, doesn’t create the sort of racket we’ve been putting up with here in the office.

DB Autobahn wins best FX Platform award

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:03:00 -0400

T&T would like to convey our congratulations to the Deutsche Bank Foreign Exchange team for winning ‘Best single Dealer in FX Platform’ category at the Financial News 10th annual Awards for Excellence in Trading & Technology.
A well deserved award for a team that has worked tirelessly over the past three years, to bring together a platform that delivers the best execution and trading experience to the market.

We are specially proud to have played a part in the design of Autobahn and are delighted that the platform has been recognised as setting the standard in a competitive market.

The shortlist for the award highlighted the stiff competition in the global FX market place;

Deutsche Bank Autobahn,
Barclays BARX,
BNP Paribas Cortex FX,
Citi Velocity 2.0,
Morgan Stanley Matrix.

All the winners on the night can be seen here.

Congratulations!

More Often, More Easy

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 05:19:00 -0400

It seems like an easy rule to follow: design your application so the thing users do most often is the easiest thing for users to do. Yet Apple got this wrong in iCal 5’s Month view.

I don’t know about you, but I look at events more often than I create new ones. And as it’s common to have a number of events on any given day, I often see a bit of text saying ‘2 more…’ or the like at the bottom of a given day. So I often need to switch to week or day view to see what’s on for a given day or to find a particular event.

Double-clicking in most of the area of a day doesn’t do that: clicking an event (sensibly) expands that event, while clicking whitespace creates a new event. Those two items — whitespace and existing events – account for most of the available target area for a date. Only clicking the ‘[n] more…’ text or the teensy little date numerals displays the day view.

By comparison, in Week view, double-click-to-create makes sense as you’re already seeing all events listed. Week view also lets you specify the time of the event within the ‘create’ interaction by clicking and dragging over the appropriate time range. In Month view, you only get a truncated view, and can’t create an event at a particular time (new events are initially slated to run ‘all day’ — another frustration for another post).

Week is a detail view, suited to creating and editing. Month is a summary view. And in a summary view drilling down is a more common task than editing. It should be prioritised as such.

Write Once, Run Anywhere?

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 09:29:39 -0400

I recently happened across the very interesting Brackets - an open-source text editor built with HTML, CSS and Javascript in an embedded browser framework. It’s an example of the recurring ‘HTML5 vs native’ debate leading to a hybrid approach - but on the desktop rather than mobile. I wondered if developers were any closer to achieving WORA - without sacrificing performance and usability in the process - or if Write Once, Debug Everywhere (as Java developers are wont to say) was still the unfortunate reality?

Brackets is being developed by Adobe, with the strapline “built with the web for the web”. The About section of the Brackets site focuses on the opportunity for web developers to customise and enhance the application (“if you can code in Brackets you can code on Brackets.”), but I was more intrigued by what this meant for the prospects of massively cross-platform development with a single code-base.

Brackets uses the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) to render the HTML, CSS and Javascript UI and business logic, with a thin native wrapper to provide access to lower-level operating system functionality like the file system. This means the application can be compiled to binary distributions for both Windows and OS X (and it would also be possible to do the same for Linux, although the developers of Brackets haven’t done that yet). This is similar to Phonegap, which lets developers write HTML, CSS and Javascript (maybe now is the right time to coin the acronym “HCJ”…) and compile to a native application for a wide variety of mobile platforms. And of course HTML, CSS and Javascript (or HCJ, if you prefer) are already native to the web.

This combination, of CEF with a native wrapper and Phonegap, means that it’s theoretically possible to develop a single application UI in HTML, CSS and Javascript that would run on the web, native desktop and native mobile platforms, only having to change the build process for each. Nirvana!

Of course this isn’t the first time this has been suggested - in the fact it’s not even the first time I’ve thought of it. A couple of years ago, I was discussing with a client using an embedded browser to upgrade a (Windows only) java application. A primary motivation was to avoid rewriting functionality for the web, while another was potential availability (in the browser) on mobile devices. After some investigation, the idea was reluctantly shelved, since the consensus was that CEF at the time was too experimental, and that a web UI wouldn’t be able to replicate the smoothness and speed of a native application in [Java Swing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java)).

Steve Jobs (in)famously once tried to convince developers that web apps were the way forward for the iPhone but a native Software Development Kit was announced not long after - thought to be in response to jailbreakers and the developer backlash - and the App store and third-party native apps swiftly became a cornerstone of the iOS ecosystem.

Showing that these issues haven’t yet gone away, Facebook recently switched from HTML5 to native for their iOS application, citing performance and user expectations as their primary reasons.

It’s natural for developers to want to use the same codebase across multiple platforms, and for some applications that’s going to work - perhaps for more applications over time as hardware acceleration in the browser becomes better supported and understood by developers. But even in the web browser we’ve not yet achieved consistent support across browsers for all features, and it’s still often the case that to achieve the very best performance and usability native apps are the way forward.

So perhaps what’s more exciting than the dream of WORA is that technology like Phonegap and CEF can make native application development accessible to a whole new group of programmers coming from - and bringing ideas from - a much wider range of disciplines than tradiitional computer science.

Can A Design Entice One Billion Users From Facebook?

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:23:00 -0400

In August 2003 we weren’t Facebooking each other, we weren’t Tweeting each other, most of us were probably texting, maybe even talking, some of us however, some of us were on MySpace.

MySpace started in 2003 and was purchased by News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million. Between 2005 and early 2008 it was the most visited social network site in the world even surpassing Google in 2006 as the most visited site in the US.

However, it was in 2006 that Facebook opened its virtual doors to the world, or anyone with a valid email address at least, and this, as it would turn out, was MySpace’s decline.

It took just two years for Facebook to surpass MySpace’s unique visitor numbers and despite attempts from MySpace to redesign the site time and time again the visitors continued to defect.

In 2011 Specific Media Group and popstar Justin Timberlake purchased MySpace for $35 million, a colossal loss for News Corporation.

Since then MySpace has become the butt of many jokes and these days is mainly used by musicians, bands and DJs to showcase their ‘talents’ and hopefully get noticed.

So what next for a site that has changed hands so many times? What next for a site that has around 25 million unique US visitors per month, compared with Facebook’s 138 million?

The answer would seem to be, again, design. The site, and various parts of it, have undergone a number of designs over the years even the logo wasn’t immune to the tinkering.

This time however, MySpace have really gone for it with a complete overhaul that looks heavily influenced by touch screen technology and tablets.

The new design is ‘swipeable’ to the nth degree with an almost Pinterest look about some parts of it, it appears much more interactive than previous versions and more than Facebook, in fact you could argue it leaves Facebook looking a bit, well, 2000s.

As my colleague Alastair Roberts noted ‘the choice of music for the MySpace video is inspired’:

‘Maybe I’m ashamed to want you back.
Maybe I’m afraid you’ll never stay.
Thought I hated you a long, long time.
There was my mistake.’

But is design the answer for MySpace? Can a newer, slicker design really make nearly 1 billion people switch from Facebook to MySpace? MySpace have previously said that Facebook isn’t a rival anymore and that they will focus more on being a ‘social entertainment website’, but this still requires users, it still requires content.

It’s difficult to find statistics later than 2006 for MySpace but back then they had just over 100 million accounts. Even if you were to double that figure, being overly generous, it’s still less than half the users Facebook has.

There’s no denying this will be a good looking site but if there’s nothing to read, why would users come? It will be interesting to see what happens and, perhaps, how Facebook responds given how much their users hate the design being touched!

See a video of the new design over on Vimeo.

Further than you can throw a survey

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:14:00 -0400

I was elated when our clients started asking for user research, but upon having the cake, the challenge turned out to be eating it from a distance.

Remote research has always felt lacking to me. There’s a richness of insight that can only be achieved with face-to-face interaction. Unfortunately, users cannot always afford us such luxuries, and that’s certainly the problem in one of our current projects. The users are busy people, peppered across multiple time zones. Here are some notes from my journey towards embracing remote research.

The briefest brief

Interviews are unpredictable by nature and even more so when factors include differences in culture and language. A couple of times, I found myself drowning in awkward silence after asking what I thought was an innocent question. The first time it happened, I just about managed to make an apology and say thank you before the call ended. The second time, I managed to recover and continue the session. There’s not been a third time, and it’s all down to managing expectations.

We always brief the interview subject in the emails leading up to the call. Then, we brief them again with a short intro at the beginning of the call before the questions begin. But we’ve learned that some people neither read nor listen. To be fair, I don’t like reading either. And when my bank calls me up about why I need x, y, and z, I also don’t listen to that. So now I begin a call by introducing myself and asking them what they’ve been told about the interview. This engages sooner in the conversation and gives me a chance to fill in any gaps and gauge their comfort level with the topics that are coming up. It’s worked a treat so far.

Have a backup and an exit strategy

We use Webex to take the subject through visuals on their web browser, but we use it in conjunction with a phone call instead of Webex’s built in VoIP. We also email a PDF version of the visuals to the subject ahead of time. This sounds like a lot to deal with, but we’ve had no complaints, and it makes the session near bulletproof. If the Internet drops out during the session, the user is still on the line and we can ask them to refer to the PDF.

If they haven’t downloaded the PDF, then asking the subject to describe how they currently deal with the problem at hand is a good way of revealing areas to explore, “Could you walk me through how you do …?” “At this point what are you looking for to get to the next step?” This doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a go. People are happy to get time back, but a fruitless interview will still be perceived as a waste of time on your part and theirs. Give them a chance to contribute, you never know what surprising insight you might uncover.

Leave it to the machines

Quantity is where remote research really excels. Card sorting, for example, can be done without a human facilitator. Yes, it’s much more insightful to watch someone do card sorting, but doing it remotely means you can test many more subjects with much less effort. We’ve used Optimal Workshop’s suite of tools in the past and I would recommend having a look for the following reasons:

Setup is extremely easy
Results are live, and processed into dendograms, similarity matrices, and other popular analysis methods
The data and the graphs are downloadable in csv/svg format so you can edit them
Clients can view the live results on a password protected page

Some caveats, though:

Card sorting does not support a card going into multiple categories
The surveys require Flash support (participants on iPads will not be able to contribute!)
You cannot conduct two types of testing. For example, start a participant on a Card Sort, then move them onto a Tree Jack activity

There’s a work around for the last problem. Each survey ends with a thank you page that you can edit. Here, you can put add a link to the next survey. So after a card sort, the user will see “Thank you! Please click here to continue to part two of the survey.” Not particularly elegant, but participants do make it to part two, so it works.

Conclusion

Remote research has its own set of pitfalls and benefits. Make time to plan for failures in technology and in understanding between you and your subject. Automation and quantity is where remote research really shines. Don’t be afraid of it, and have fun exploring.

BuysideFX speaks with Chris Tobias about the role of design in electronic FX platforms

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:05:00 -0400

Ty Danco, CEO of BuysideFX speaks with Chris Tobias about the role of User Experience (UX) and interaction design in electronic Foreign Exchange (FX) platforms. Chris talks about the complexity of designing for FX trading, and the importance of focusing on the specific trading environment and end user needs. Complex application design requires a clear understanding of the subject matter, and this is particularly important to any successful product design within financial services.

See the video here http://buyside-fx.tumblr.com/