Category: ixd

Inter­ac­tion design! Mak­ing the world an eas­i­er place to inter­act with. It's what I do for a living. 

Categories
flickr ixd the ancient past travel

Archaeology of UX Weeks past

Flickr photo


It's kin­da strange (and thrilling) to browse through the many alley­ways and avenues of Flickr and sud­den­ly unearth a pho­to of … your­self. Just now I came across this pic­ture of myself and a shad­owy fig­ure, who I sus­pect is UX it-guy Jan Chipchase tak­en last sum­mer dur­ing UX Week. My hazy rec­ol­lec­tion: We met and hung out dur­ing a late-night trek through the Mall to the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment, a epic walk that includ­ed UX Week speak­ers, the entire event staff, and the mul­ti-tal­ent­ed Mag­gie Mason of Mighty Goods (and, more recent­ly it seems, Mighty Junior), who record­ed the jour­ney here. We left late, got back *real­ly* late, and some­how Jan looked none the worse for wear dur­ing his keynote the next morn­ing; epic, indeed. 

Categories
ideas ixd web

Idols / Khoi Vinh of NYT.com

I've fol­lowed Khoi Vinh's excel­lent blog, Sub­trac­tion, for a long time. A cou­ple of years ago, he became the Design Direc­tor of the New York Times web­site, and in the mean­time the site has real­ly changed, for the bet­ter, most­ly, I'd say. This week he's doing a Q&A about his work, the NYT, design, and all of that.As I've always been curi­ous about what he does in his role, and the struc­ture of the NYT.com UX depart­ment, I was glad to see that some­one went there right off the bat:

As the design direc­tor, my respon­si­bil­i­ty is to over­see the cre­ative aspects of these con­tin­u­al improve­ments. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and dis­crete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the mem­bers on my team: infor­ma­tion archi­tects (who are charged with orga­niz­ing the fea­tures and the flow of infor­ma­tion so that peo­ple can make use of them most intu­itive­ly), design tech­nol­o­gists (who do the actu­al cod­ing of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visu­al design­ers (who han­dle the over­all look and feel, includ­ing lay­out, typog­ra­phy, col­or, pro­por­tion, etc.).You could say that all put togeth­er, the final prod­uct of our efforts is the user expe­ri­ence, or the sum total of the con­tent and the frame­work as it's used by vis­i­tors to the site. Of course, it's not true that my design group is the only team respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing this expe­ri­ence; it's real­ly the result of con­tri­bu­tions across the board, from edi­tors and reporters to project man­agers and soft­ware engi­neers and many more.

More here.

Categories
ixd mobile urban

UX / Cellphones & world poverty

Jan Chipchase seems to be the "it" guy1 of user expe­ri­ence these days. He lives in Tokyo, works at Nokia, and plays this kind of swash­buck­ling, Indi­ana-Jones-ish role in research­ing mobile tech­nolo­gies in devel­op­ing cul­tures. He keeps an intrigu­ing blog called Future Per­fect, where he doc­u­ments UX-relat­ed nuggets from the shan­ty­towns of Lagos, the mar­kets of Accra, the Sin­ga­pore air­port, and so on. This week's NYT Sun­day mag has an arti­cle about him — "Can the Cell­phone End World Pover­ty" — which, aside from hav­ing a some­what puz­zling title, pro­vides an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive on the field of UX in general.

Indian bike ride
My own per­son Jan Chipchase expe­ri­ence: Walk­ing through a back alley in Bom­bay, from my trip there to deliv­er design train­ing to GE engineers.


First, what's the title all about?

It's called "Can the Cell­phone End World Pover­ty," but it's real­ly a pro­file of a researcher rather than an eco­nom­ic analy­sis of the effect of mobile tech­nolo­gies. And Jan's research — if his blog and con­fer­ence keynotes are any indi­ca­tion — focus­es on the ways in which peo­ple in devel­op­ing cul­tures *use* and *adapt* the tech­nol­o­gy, not about the ways in mobile tech­nol­o­gy can effect macro­eco­nom­ic change. It's a quib­ble, real­ly, but it seems strange to describe mar­ket research as an effort to "end world pover­ty," and to cast Nokia in an altru­is­tic light when what they're doing is real­ly iden­ti­fy­ing and under­stand­ing a unserved mar­ket and poten­tial customers:

… No com­pa­ny churns out phones like Nokia, which man­u­fac­tures 1.3 mil­lion prod­ucts dai­ly. Forty per­cent of the mobile phones sold last year were made by Nokia, and the company's $8.4 bil­lion prof­it in 2007 reflects as much. Chipchase seems dis­tinct­ly uncom­fort­able talk­ing about his part as a cor­po­rate rain­mak­er, pre­fer­ring to see him­self as a most­ly dis­pas­sion­ate ethnographer …

I also sym­pa­thize with Jan. It would be impos­si­ble to do the kind of research he does with­out a high­er pur­pose, and I know I've spent a lot of time ratio­nal­iz­ing some our client work (which is always about the ben­jamins) with what I imag­ine the greater good to be. It's easy to say that Nokia's stock will ben­e­fit from tap­ping the bil­lions of peo­ple below the pover­ty line, but it also seems pos­si­ble that mobile tech­nolo­gies and con­nect­ed­ness in gen­er­al could effect pos­i­tive change. Nev­er­the­less, I real­ly think that the arti­cle should be called some­thing like, "How the devel­op­ing world sees tech­nol­o­gy," or "What the devel­op­ing world tells us about tech­nol­o­gy," or some­thing way less catchy than end­ing world poverty.

What methods are used to gather input from folks in developing nations?

I was most curi­ous to hear anec­dotes of what exact­ly he was ask­ing peo­ple, how exact­ly he was gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion, whether he was sim­ply observ­ing or con­duct­ing sur­veys, or what. (He has a num­ber of inter­est­ing entries on "field research" on his blog, but none that give much insight into his meth­ods). The arti­cle has an inter­est­ing descrip­tion of the out­come of an exer­cise in which peo­ple around the world were asked to draw their ide­al mobile phone:

[Jan's research­ing cohorts] said they'd found … [that] the phone rep­re­sents what peo­ple are aspir­ing to. "It's an easy way to see what's impor­tant to them, what their chal­lenges are," [a cohort] said. One Liber­ian refugee want­ed to out­fit a phone with a land-mine detec­tor so that he could more safe­ly return to his home vil­lage. In the Dhar­avi slum of Mum­bai, peo­ple sketched phones that could fore­cast the weath­er since they had no access to TV or radio. Mus­lims want­ed G.P.S. devices to ori­ent their prayers toward Mec­ca. Some­one else drew a phone shaped like a water bot­tle, explain­ing that it could store pre­cious drink­ing water and also float on the mon­soon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one design­er drew a phone with an air-qual­i­ty mon­i­tor. Sev­er­al women sketched phones that would mon­i­tor cheat­ing boyfriends and hus­bands. Anoth­er designed a "peace but­ton" that would halt gun­fire in the neigh­bor­hood with a sin­gle touch.

Hmm. I can see how some of this stuff could be help­ful in aggre­gate. Peo­ple see the phone as a plat­form — and per­haps there's a sense that it's some­what mag­i­cal — a "peace" but­ton, a land­mine detec­tor, a cheat­ing boyfriend mon­i­tor, etc. (Maybe?) But does the per­son in Liberia real­ly want a phone, or does he want a land-mine detec­tor? I won­der about this.1 Not I.T. guy. It guy, like it girl. It's sort of amus­ing to me that it's total­ly clear what is meant by the words "it girl" but that the words "it guy" just seem to relate to the guy who fix­es your internets.

Categories
ixd

Microsoft Sync / There will be blood. It will run from your eyes.

A few nights ago, I was watch­ing the War­riors on TNT, when out of the blue appeared a com­mer­cial that fea­tured inter­face design (!!!!). As my man Baron Davis would say: Ya dig?! It was a car ad — for the Lin­coln MKZ — and it fea­tured Microsoft Sync, a voice-acti­vat­ed tech­nol­o­gy for use in the var­i­ous limos, grand­pa-mobiles and ghet­to sleds pro­duced by Lin­coln. The voice-over assured us that when Microsoft and Lin­coln "join forces," "all things are pos­si­ble." From what I saw, though, the only thing that was clear­ly pos­si­ble was the GUI being ugly as hell. Maybe the whole point is the voice-acti­va­tion, but I'll say this: It bet­ter damn well be usable by voice, because it does not appear to be usable by brain and finger. 

There will be blood while using Microsoft SyncIt's true: I haven't actu­al­ly used Sync yet. So I real­ly shouldn't talk. I'm just dis­ap­point­ed that this inter­face gets prime time.
Ugly Microsoft Sync radio interfaceIs it safe to assume that the R&D mon­ey was spent on the voice acti­va­tion part rather than the GUI-spe­cif­ic inter­ac­tion design part?

My ques­tion: Why would Lin­coln fea­ture the GUI in the com­mer­cial? Have the peo­ple who made the com­mer­cial seen the iPhone? What about soft­ware inter­faces like, say, Office 2007? Do they not real­ize that there are stan­dards here? Expec­ta­tions? I guess there's a remote pos­si­bil­i­ty that some mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants found that Lin­coln cus­tomers have very lit­tle over­lap with peo­ple who desire ele­gance (relat­ed to tech­nol­o­gy any­way), or that some some stodgy fed­er­al body reg­u­lates con­sole inter­faces (NTSA?), pre­vent­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of ele­gance in the inter­face. My sus­pi­cion: Lin­coln just doesn't know or care about inter­face design, and that Microsoft bick­ered inter­nal­ly and churned out the low­est com­mon denominator.(Lastly, I'm not try­ing to lay on the Win­dows Hatorade. Every com­put­er I own runs Win­dows. My phone runs Win­dows. I'm up to my ears in the stuff.)

Categories
flickr ixd tech web

UX / Flickr pisses me off

My Flickr page

Yes, I appre­ci­ate Flickr. After all, it allows me to store my pho­tos online, share them with oth­ers, and dis­play them on my web­site. Yay. Thanks for that. Still, it frus­trates me dai­ly. Here's why:

Sequence of photo display is set in stone

If I drag a dozen pic­tures into the Flickr Uploadr, God only knows the order in which they'll appear on the site. But I care about the order in which they appear on the site, because the LAST pho­to uploaded ends up being at the top of my Flickr home­page, and in that posi­tion of promi­nence it says some­thing about me. It annoys me that I can't con­trol this more.1

Little control over homepage layout; no way to make stuff sticky

So, if I can't con­trol the order of upload­ing, can I con­trol what's dis­played on my Flickr page? No. Can I make a set sticky, so that it stays at the top of the list? No. Can I dis­play only sets? No. Of course, Flickr has intro­duced new lay­outs, but all of them are sim­ply ways of arrang­ing the most recent stuff. Not help­ful to me.

No concept of new-to-a-user

I'm think­ing of my grand­par­ents here. Wouldn't it be nice if a meta-set (or some­thing) was cre­at­ed of stuff that's new to the view­er? I could just cre­ate a book­mark here, and they could check for new stuff.

Tagging is a royal nightmare.

Maybe no one has total­ly solved this yet, but here's some­thing that would work for me: I usu­al­ly upload mul­ti­ple relat­ed pic­tures at a time, and these pic­tures tend to share a lot of the same tags. So I'd like to cre­ate small groups of tags for a groups of pic­tures, and then quick­ly drag and drop, or mul­ti-select and apply, a tag to a sub­set of those pic­tures. del.icio.us's tag­ging inter­face is rudi­men­ta­ry, but it's vast­ly more help­ful than Flickr's:

What del.icio.us does well in tagging


The navigation confuses everyone except geeks and experts

Col­lec­tions? Sets? Archives? What's the diff? As my mom once asked me, "Where are the albums?" At the risk of sound­ing irre­triev­ably old-school, this par­tic­u­lar set of group­ing con­cepts is a frus­tra­tion to cog­ni­tion. (Also, if the dis­tinc­tion is made in this nav­i­ga­tion area, why aren't the things (sets) in the right col­umn labeled as such?)

Flickr secondary nav


No record of blogged pictures?

When I cre­ate a blog entry from a pic­ture, why isn't there some kind of record that the image has been blogged? A link? This just seems so basic to me. 1 Inter­est­ing side note: I bumped into some Flickr peo­ple at CHI, and I asked them about this. Their ratio­nale: The pho­to­stream is what Flickr is all about, and the strict­ness of the sequence is a use­ful gov­ern­ing prin­ci­ple. Umm, yeah. Flickr peo­ple may think of upload­ing as a con­tin­u­al stream, but I upload pho­tos in clumps — I don't always think about my pho­tos in the terms of the last pho­to uploaded, I often think in terms of the last group. I feel like I should have con­trol over the way those clumps are dis­played. If you force me to always show the most recent­ly uploaded indi­vid­ual pho­to, shouldn't you also give me some con­trol over the order of upload in your Uploadr?

Categories
ixd tech web

Adaptive Path UX Week / One of ux, one of ux1

I attend­ed (and spoke at) my first UX Week last week in Wash­ing­ton DC, and it lived up to its billing as a good ol' time. I met many amaz­ing peo­ple, stayed out too late, and yet was still moti­vat­ed to get up ear­ly every morn­ing to see the keynotes. That's say­ing some­thing. Most con­fer­ences can be con­sid­ered suc­cess­es if just one of those things happens.

UX Week 2007 ProgramThe UX Week pro­gram with my lucky cat.

Breaking it down

The ses­sions came in three vari­eties: (1) prod­ucts and inter­face imple­men­ta­tions; (2) design tools and process­es; and (3) ideas and inspi­ra­tions. Sarah Nel­son at Adap­tive Path orga­nized the con­fer­ence, and she recruit­ed speak­ers who were not the usu­al talk­ing heads.2 The mix of back­grounds, expe­ri­ence, and sub­ject mat­ter kept things live­ly. I espe­cial­ly appre­ci­at­ed the dis­cus­sions of process by AP folks like Indi Young, Kate Rut­ter, and Jesse James Gar­rett dur­ing the pan­el dis­cus­sion of CNN.com. All of these opened my eyes to new design tools and tech­niques, and exposed the fact that there is a lot of inno­va­tion going on out there. In terms of the flashy prod­ucts on dis­play, I'm inher­ent­ly too inquis­i­tive and skep­ti­cal to believe what peo­ple tell me dur­ing prod­uct demoes — I need to get immersed in them myself, and ask: How did you get there? Where did that come from? What need is that address­ing? How did the design evolve? Because I'm a nerd.3

Design is story-telling

As Leisa Reichelt point­ed out dur­ing our pan­el, a lot of speak­ers addressed the top­ic of sto­ry-telling in one way or anoth­er. Kevin Brooks of Motoro­la Labs led a work­shop on sto­ry­telling tech­niques; the folks behind the recent redesign of CNN.com described the way in which they craft­ed the sto­ry that they told their inter­nal stake­hold­ers; peo­ple from BestBuy.com and Sachs dis­cussed the use of video­taped cus­tomer sto­ries to make a case for a redesign. Of course, sto­ry-telling and design are inti­mate­ly inter­twined — two strands of a busi­nessy dou­ble-helix. I was inspired by the vari­ety of ways in which design­ers are telling sto­ries about the prob­lems to be solved, and the tech­niques and nuances involved in their approaches. 

UX is real

I go to few­er con­fer­ences than I should (so I may be a bit shel­tered), but I'll say this any­way: at the con­fer­ence, I got the feel­ing that UX was much fur­ther along to becom­ing an actu­al pro­fes­sion. UX prac­tices are no longer out­posts in the Wild West of dig­i­tal prod­ucts; our work is now iden­ti­fi­able ter­ri­to­ry in the busi­ness land­scape. Not long ago, there were very few things that wouldn't be con­sid­ered with­in the purview of user expe­ri­ence; now, the bound­aries of our prob­lems are a lit­tle more clear, and our expe­ri­ences as prac­ti­tion­ers have more com­mon­al­i­ties than dif­fer­ences. I feel like Tom Han­ks in Big. Now, if only I could explain what I do to my par­ents … 1 From one of my favorite movies of all-time, Freaks, i.e., one of us, one of us, we accept you, one of ux.2 Okay, except Jared Spool, but it's always good to hear what he's think­ing. 3 I admit: The inter­face for One Lap­top Per Child is ele­gant and intrigu­ing, but I'm polit­i­cal­ly ambiva­lent about the project itself. I'm fas­ci­nat­ed by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cre­at­ing an infor­ma­tion pipeline the devel­op­ing world, but I guess I'm not enough of a tech evan­ge­list to believe in the idea that dis­trib­ut­ing lap­tops is bet­ter than dis­trib­ut­ing more imme­di­ate aid. Maybe I'm not think­ing big enough.

Categories
ixd urban visual

NYC subway maps / The great debate of 2007

A graph­ic design­er named Eddie Jab­bour has pro­posed an alter­na­tive design for NYC sub­way maps. The New York Times wrote about it last week, and since then blogs have been blow­ing up over it. 37 sig­nals eval­u­at­ed it, and applauds the effort to increase usabil­i­ty at the expense of geo­graph­ic accu­ra­cy: "Sub­way map read­ers want to know how to get from A to B a lot more than they want to know the exact curve of the tracks along the way. Some­times truth is less impor­tant than knowl­edge." If points A & B are always sub­way sta­tions, I whole­heart­ed­ly approve. As seen in snip­pet form below, the redesign much more clear­ly presents infor­ma­tion that is rel­e­vant on the subway. 

Brooklyn train line comparison

Eddie Jabbour's pro­posed redesign trades geo­graph­i­cal accu­ra­cy for read­abil­i­ty But a sub­way trip is always part of a big­ger logis­ti­cal process. You're not just try­ing to get from Atlantic Avenue Sta­tion to Astor Place Sta­tion. You're try­ing to get from an apart­ment on Pres­i­dent Street to the place where your friend cooks near Wash­ing­ton Square Park. And often the opti­mal sub­way route is not avail­able to you; the line you want to take is extreme­ly delayed; anoth­er line is not run­ning; anoth­er is express past 9pm; anoth­er only runs to this sta­tion on Sun­days; etc; etc. The real­i­ty is that you need to be able to impro­vise when you're in the sub­way sys­tem, and a map that is not geo­graph­i­cal­ly accu­rate inhibits your abil­i­ty to adjust to the real­i­ties of the system.Which brings me to the Lon­don A‑Z. Lon­don can get away with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sub­way map because it has a com­pan­ion book that allows you to fig­ure out stuff like that. So the Cir­cle line isn't run­ning? Trust­ing the Tube map to go to the next near­est sta­tion may be dis­as­trous, but you can always find your des­ti­na­tion in your trusty A‑Z, scan for anoth­er sta­tion near­by, etc. More­over, mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers often place the A‑Z grid loca­tion next to an event list­ing. Remov­ing geo­graph­i­cal con­text from the NYC map may make it eas­i­er to scan, but at this point, I feel like it's per­haps pre­ma­ture­ly reduc­tive. On the oth­er hand, a reduc­tion of infor­ma­tion on the sub­way map may sim­ply under­score and high­light (and ital­i­cize and cap­i­tal­ize) the need for a NYC A‑Z. Or per­haps the MTA itself just needs to be more pre­dictable. Or maybe every­thing should stay the same so every trav­el­er can have that spe­cial scary feel­ing of being strand­ed in Brook­lyn at 2am on a weeknight.UPDATE: My friend Jonathan Gabel, a New York res­i­dent for the last 13 years, had some inter­est­ing thoughts on the matter: 

The cur­rent map is a total fab­ri­ca­tion of geog­ra­phy any­way — Man­hat­tan is made fat and short, and Brook­lyn and Queens lose all of their length. In fact, the L line through Williams­burg and Bush­wick is actu­al­ly more accu­rate in the changed map, as it makes a rad­i­cal zig-zag through the area. For instance, the L train runs: Lorimer, Gra­ham, Grand, Mon­trose. From Niki's house, 8 blocks north of the Gra­ham stop, to meet our friends who's live 4 blocks East of the Mon­trose stop, we often walk to Man­hat­tan Ave, one block West of the Lorimer stop because it is half way between our hous­es. Fig­ure that one out. I have nev­er seen the Lon­don A‑Z but I looked at one of the NFT (not for tourists) guides to New York and found it wasn't real­ly help­ful, specif­i­cal­ly because it doesn't real­ly help you find address­es. Even the address­es of things it is telling you about — like restau­rants. Say you want to find Snacky's in Williams­burg. It shows you a map of the gen­er­al area, and list­ings of all the restau­rants and oth­er things by street address, next to the map of the area. The map is bul­let-rid­dled with lit­tle icons to tell you where all bars/ restaurants/ laundromats/ clubs/ sweatshops/ motor­cy­cle-repair-shops are — but every bar/restaurant/laundromat/club/sweatshop/motorcyclerepairshop is only labeled with the sign for b/r/lc/ds/mrs and no num­ber. So to find your Snacky's you have to look at 20 r's and try to fig­ure out which one it is, and ignore 40 b's, 20 l's, 5 c's 50 s's that are cov­er­ing all the names of the streets. It's like that inter­face you described for the New York­er — it takes all the plea­sure out of car­tog­ra­phy. I would like to see a guide­book that makes dis­cov­er­ing one's way pleasurable.

Amen to pleasure.

Categories
ixd

ESPN.com / March (information) madness

To the edi­tors of ESPN.com,I vis­it your site every day, mul­ti­ple times a day. Today, I decid­ed that I've had enough. You need to stop. What­ev­er you're doing, just STOP. Years ago, ESPN.com was a use­ful col­lec­tion of online sports infor­ma­tion. It was rel­a­tive­ly easy to nav­i­gate, scan and read. Today, it is a dark, sprawl­ing infor­ma­tion apoc­a­lypse — the Blade Run­ner cityscape of web­sites. Remem­ber that ear­ly scene in Blade Run­ner, where Deckard is read­ing the news­pa­per while the ad blimp cir­cles over­head, repeat­ing the words: "A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies"? That's how I feel when I'm read­ing ESPN.com. The bar­rage of ads, news, tick­ers, scrolling con­tent wid­gets, opin­ion, com­men­tary, analy­sis, what­ev­er it is that Scoop Jack­son writes, and teasers for upcom­ing events on your cable net­work is an absolute mess, the kind of mess that makes CNBC seem Tufte-esque in comparison.

The ultimate dog's breakfast

Where did you go wrong? Years ago, you plas­tered that huge ban­ner ad across the top. This was annoy­ing, but plen­ty of sites (used to) do this and I learned to ignore it. Then there was ESPN Motion — or, as a friend refers to it "ESPN Suck-tion." It's a video play­er that peri­od­i­cal­ly demands that you stop read­ing to deal with a video ad or Sports­Cen­ter clip it has just begun broad­cast­ing. Over time, you added more and more flash­es and dis­trac­tions — anoth­er ban­ner ad above the con­tent, two lev­els of tab nav­i­ga­tion, mul­ti­ple areas of peri­od­i­cal­ly refresh­ing con­tent, and links in the mast­head (!). Final­ly, you mod­i­fied your pop-up ads so that they defy pop-up block­ing soft­ware (most of it, any­way). I have to ask: DO YOU REALIZE THAT THEY ONLY OTHER WEBSITES THAT DO THIS ARE SELLING EITHER PIRATED SOFTWARE OR PORN? Did you guys raid Asta­lav­ista to hire your cur­rent online prod­uct man­ag­er? Actu­al­ly, maybe it was MySpace or Col­lege­Hu­mor. To be fair to Col­lege­Hu­mor, though, it could teach ESPN some things about lay­out and navigation.Now, for any­one out there who wants to take the first step toward mak­ing ESPN read­able again, I sug­gest the following:

  1. Down­load and install Fire­fox.
  2. Install the Adblock add-on
  3. Restart Fire­fox, and sub­scribe to the first item in the Adblock list of filters
  4. Nav­i­gate to ESPN.com, observe that all ads have been removed. As the Sports­Cen­ter anchors would say, "Vic­to-ree!"

To the edi­tors of ESPN.com, I sim­ply request that you (a) kill the pop-up ads, (b) tear the home­page apart (and re-assem­ble it with the idea that it should facil­i­tate access to con­tent, rather than pre­vent it), © take a look at what the NYT has been up to in terms of inte­grat­ing tex­tu­al and mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, and (d) don't try to cram every con­ceiv­able prod­uct onto every page. Sim­ple, right?

Categories
ixd lit

National nightmares / Restoring a modicum of utility to the Complete New Yorker

I was one of the suck­ers who pre-ordered The Com­plete New York­er mag­a­zine. I am a long-long-time New York­er read­er, and the entice­ment was just too pow­er­ful — 8 DVDs filled with 60+ years of cul­tur­al com­men­tary, quirky car­toons and cool cov­er art, all in a dis­tinct high­brow-yet-prac­ti­cal-mind­ed voice and scanned in at super-high-res? For a few extreme dorks, this was intense­ly excit­ing. Expec­ta­tion-wise, it was like the release of a smar­ty­pants Playsta­tion 3.Upon arrival, it also resem­bled Playsta­tion 3, in that it sucked, big-time. My expe­ri­ence improved slight­ly after The Occa­sion­al Scriven­er post­ed a hack that allows you to copy issues from the 8 inde­pen­dent DVDs onto your hard dri­ve. An extreme dork after my own heart. Many thanks.The real­ly big, un-hack­able prob­lem: The search tool is a house of hor­rors. Imag­ine that you've final­ly been intro­duced to a long-time idol, let's say Bob Dylan, and he agrees to come home with you and sit in your liv­ing room and tell you any­thing you want to know. But then when you ask him to tell you the com­plete sto­ry of the "Judas!" show, you real­ize that he doesn't speak Eng­lish; he just sits there silent­ly, impas­sive. That's how this thing makes me feel. The whole point of get­ting Com­plete New York­er is to have your mind blown by the wealth of cool stuff in the old­er issues. There­fore, the chal­lenge faced by the inter­ac­tion design­ers is to facil­i­tate get­ting at that stuff, i.e. MAKE IT EASY TO SEARCH for what you want. The shot below rep­re­sents the Pro­crustean bed on which each searcher must lie.

The real­ly egre­gious crimes have been doc­u­ment­ed else­where, but I would just like to add: 

  • Per­for­mance that reminds me of the 90's. If this had been released in 1998, I could eas­i­ly for­give the lag every­time a but­ton is pressed or a search is exe­cut­ed. But real­ly, when I type "white" into the gen­er­al search field, and it churns for near­ly 20 sec­onds, I don't know, it makes me homi­ci­dal­ly mad. Anger at slow per­for­mance is like road rage — once you've got it, you can't get rid of it, no mat­ter how much you avoid being in a car.
  • Why the cru­el and unusu­al search com­plex­i­ty? Search­ing is nev­er made eas­i­er by sur­fac­ing every pos­si­ble method of doing so right off the bat. Google — the world's most pop­u­lar search inter­face — seems like an effec­tive guide here. Start sim­ple, and reveal sophis­ti­ca­tion when nec­es­sary. There aren't real­ly even that many ways I could con­ceive of search­ing the Com­plete New York­er — author, date arti­cle title, date range … That's about it.
  • Wast­ed ver­ti­cal real estate. Near­ly 33% of the ver­ti­cal space is con­sumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars seg­ment­ing the screen. Com­bined with the often biz­zare and most­ly use­less "Abstract" below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users (I) make deci­sions on what to launch in the view­er. Unforgiveable.
  • What the heck is this thing called?. The fact that the search results do not con­tain a high­ly valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion — umm, the title of the piece — makes it a pain in the butt to scan (for instance) the sto­ries of JD Salinger, the assort­ed work of EB White. Actu­al­ly, pret­ty much every search is com­pli­cat­ed by this.

I could go on and on, but I won't. Here's my sug­ges­tion for CNY 2.0: Con­sol­i­date the exist­ing wid­gets into one wid­get with mod­est dynam­ic behav­iors. The wid­get would have one sim­ple ini­tial menu that deter­mines how you want to search — key­word, author, issue, depart­ment. This selec­tion then deter­mines the fil­ters you'll need — if you choose "key­word," maybe you get "depart­ment" and "date" as fil­ters. In doing this, you buy back all of that chrome real estate, allow­ing more results to be dis­played. Win, win, win. Of course none of this mat­ters much if data­base per­for­mance isn't improved, but here it is anyway:A modest proposal

Categories
ixd new york web

My New York Times? Not quite.

The NYT just rolled out a beta of some­thing they're call­ing MyTimes. As a dai­ly read­er of both the print and online edi­tions, I'm intrigued by new devel­op­ments and ideas at the NYT, and I've been pleased with their recent site redesign. MyTimes, how­ev­er, strikes me as some­what misguided.First off, the name MyTimes sounds like a por­tal, recall­ing the con­fused era when every com­pa­ny want­ed to make a my-pre­fixed ver­sion of their site. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it also evokes the sub­se­quent real­iza­tion that what peo­ple real­ly want­ed was not con­trol over lay­out and con­tent, but greater sys­tem intel­li­gence — smarter defaults, recog­ni­tion of the things they nor­mal­ly do, a clever way of point­ing them toward relat­ed things. The por­tal-sound­ing name wouldn't even be so bad if MyTimes didn't look and act like por­tal. Alas, it's got all sorts of crap to add and move around and mod­i­fy, allow­ing the read­er to add RSS feeds from any­where on the web, view movie times, weath­er, Flickr images, what­ev­er. To me, the prob­lem is that the NYT isn't "what­ev­er." It's the author­i­ta­tive source. So why all the oth­er stuff?A bet­ter ques­tion: What prob­lem is MyTimes sup­posed to be solv­ing? What is the user goal is it address­ing? One would do research to answer these ques­tions, but — to be self-ref­er­en­tial — my own goals in read­ing the NYT: Get the author­i­ta­tive answer, enjoy great writ­ing, forum­late opin­ions on com­plex prob­lems. A major prob­lem of MyTimes is that the NYT is try­ing to be both the author­i­ta­tive source, and the deliv­ery mech­a­nism of any oth­er source you might want.So, my advice to the New York Times …

  • Bring relat­ed infor­ma­tion to me. Focus my atten­tion to the news of the day, but make it easy to nav­i­gate to relat­ed things. These things may be with­in the NYT, or out­side. Use what you know about me — from observ­ing my behav­ior — to point me toward relat­ed things. Think Ama­zon, not Google Home­page or MySpace. Ama­zon remem­bers what you like, points you toward relat­ed stuff, tells you what oth­er peo­ple have looked at, etc. It knows you; you don't HAVE to tell it anything.
  • Don't cre­ate a sep­a­rate place that requires con­fig­u­ra­tion and expect that I will go there and wait for the infor­ma­tion to start rolling in. The estab­lished frame­work works: Start at the home­page, drill to the detail. Why cre­ate anoth­er start­ing place?
  • Inte­grate the good things from MyTimes — the jour­nal­ist pages, for instance, are a cool idea, and they are most appro­pri­ate­ly accessed with­in the exist­ing frame­work. Local­ized con­tent like weath­er and movie list­ings are fine, but I don't under­stand why this needs to be sep­a­rate from the exist­ing frame­work of the NYT pages. Basi­cal­ly: Inte­grate the read­er into the NYT, don't cre­ate a sep­a­rate place for him/her. Learn my zip code, remem­ber it, push rel­e­vant local con­tent to me. End of sto­ry. (And just because Flickr has an RSS feed doesn't mean it's wor­thy of your brand. You're the New York Times! You've got the best pho­to­jour­nal­ists in the world! Get rid of it!)

While I'm on the sub­ject, two addi­tion­al things I'd like to see … 

  • More expo­sure to the Times' excel­lent archival jour­nal­ism. Why not plumb the back cat­a­log, and expose some of it to the read­ers? Many arti­cles about cur­rent events refer to past events. Why not pro­vide a list of relat­ed links to pre­vi­ous arti­cles more often? Of course, I'd expect that this con­tent would be free — not only because I'm a cheap­skate — but because I would think it would pique people's inter­est in see­ing more of it, which would of course cost money.
  • More jour­nal­ist blogs and dis­cus­sion. The Pub­lic Editor's col­umn has become one of my favorite parts of the paper, and he blogs about inter­est­ing jour­nal­is­tic issues as well.Here's a great one about Nicholas Lemann's arti­cle about cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism in the New Yorker.

In any case, there are rough­ly one thou­sand web sites offer­ing up cus­tomiz­able info wid­gets, web-wide RSS feed aggre­ga­tion, and so forth. The NYT should con­tin­ue to focus on the con­tent, and leave the aggre­ga­tion to some­one else.