I've posted my presentation on website psychology to slideshare. It looks at cognitive psychology and how this should be shaping our choices in web development. It is best viewed with the notes on slideshare, but you can review the themes below.
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Tags:
social software, web development, psychology, barcamp, barcamplondon3, cognitive, experience design, flow, schema
Prompted by reading Everyware
The first is the best, my car key is a flat black card about 4-5mm thick which fits in my wallet. When I'm close to the car it senses the presence of the card and then when I put my hand into the door opening mechanism, I break an infrared or similar circuit and the car opens the doors. So keyless entry, then I sit in the drivers seat and with the card still in my pocket I press the start button whilst pressing down on the clutch. The car starts and the electronic hand brake disengages as I move off. So no ignition key and all I need concern myself with is setting off into traffic. At eurofoo, last summer the size and capability of the card really surprised some of my friends.
The other two devices are light sensing headlights, which turn on and off at dusk and in tunnels, again I don't need to think about the lights. Occasionally I put the sidelights on if the gloom warrants it. The last clever device is rain sensing windscreen wipers, they work well, but there is a setup issue. They rain sense on position 1, but you need to turn the car on with the wipers in position 0 and then turn them to position 1 to turn on rain sensing.
So three everyware devices in our car already. They are mostly seamless in their implementation and make the driving experience more satisfying. I have to think less about the process of driving and can concentrate on the more important issues like the view and road position. They also help in the anthropomorphism of the car, it feels more alive.
Steve Jobs on design: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
This is as much true for websites, as it is for the products that Steve Jobs is talking about. Old news for some of you I know, but I like this quote, as it gives clear value to the visual and to the internals. On websites it is easy to see the visual, and be aware that some where in the background there is a server with code on it.
The bit in between those two is my domain these days. None of it is code, very little of it is visual design, it is the "how" that is important for me. The intangible nature of it makes it hard to explain to people what I do, as the design word just means visual communication these days. I end up clarifying and calling it product design, service design might be better, but both those mean different things in other industries.
I'm at the interaction design training course next week, given by Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, as part of the User Experience 2006 conference. I'll also be attending the Scott McCloud day too, which I'm equally excited about.
Both these training sessions and various conferences (etech, xtech, sxsw, reboot, lift etc) give a gesture to the space I work in, probably most formally taught at the RCA Interaction Design course, something I'd love to have done. I find process, or workflow, and psychology are the key to understanding what to build and how to support the context of action, or understanding, which is your purpose in creating the website.
Happily, I'm by no means alone in this space. The closer websites come to being part of social interactions the more important this becomes. We've moved through several cycles in web development, from brochures to shops to the rich ecology of interconnected services we have today. Each time the human involvement is richer, today we have the chance to offer up more of ourselves to the internet, the architecture of participation as Tim O'Reilly and others put it. danah boyd has done a lot to promote this thinking too, culminating in a cfp for a special issue in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
If we are to make websites that involve humans then we need to build products that fit in with their psychology and pick tools that allow us to do that, one of the reasons I'm a fan of Ruby on Rails. This also means a displacement (not removal) of the content producer (publisher, broadcaster etc) as the most interesting conversations are not one way. Again there is nothing new in this, collaborative media tools have existed for a long time, but now it is not just an mass amateurization, but one that draws on the media consumer, bringing them to the fold.
The ongoing race of media companies buying social tools (YouTube, Reddit etc) is a key sign of this. However it is not spray paint, you need a passionate desire to engage your audience / readership if you want these tools to work. I'd argue that this needs to be engagement with your content, not a separate community space. A weakness of Comment is free is the lack of engagement on the behalf of the Guardian columnists, whose content is put on that blog. Top marks for taking on this project, but CIF shows that there is more to this than a comment box at the end of each article.
To return to my point, much of the new web thinking, beyond the tech, is psychology in a different branding. Sociology gets a lot of attention, but I think psychology and how humans relate to information has much to offer. These social sciences are the key to making good web products and knowledge of them needs to spread out beyond the niche interaction / product design fraternity to visual designers and programmers, so that they can be empowered to make intuitively good choices.
Over the past year or so, the lack of wearing of watches amongst my London geek contemporaries has been frequently commented on. I'm sorry to break ranks, but I'm back to wearing a watch again. It is partly needing to be prompt for things, but the main desire was to be able to track time when Lucy was close to her due date. Also a phone in your pocket is just not enough as my main time piece, the awkwardness of getting a phone out of a jeans pocket made me check the time less often.
Relying on my powerbook to tell me the time is great when I'm in my office or sat using it at home, but I've spent a lot of the last few months away from my computer. Firstly doing lots of DIY, where the task was actually more important than the time. Then looking after Oscar when time sort of is irrelevant, but also a way of remaining sane.
So now I'm back with a watch on my wrist and it feels good, you should try it.
I spend much of my life doing non-physical tasks, usually in front of a computer, thinking things out in Omnigraffle or talking in meetings. The last two months have given me a different focus, doing house repairs and decorating.
There is something immensely satisfying about making physical things, O'Reilly have tapped into this well with Make, but restoring and repairing a house is a pleasurable job. Getting to see the results everyday of a sanded step or firmly nailed down floorboard encourages you to do it well, as you have to live with it.
Something I have found from this is that jobs like painting are all in the preparation and the finish, the actual named task, painting the wall is actually the smallest part of the job. The prep in particular is key, you can't make things smooth with paint.
Lastly, doing these physical tasks has made me more aware of the passage of time and my ability to fill it with tasks of my choosing. Office life is slow in comparison, there is no meeting to have, just a list of jobs to do. The list is less apparent with intellectual tasks, as they are just not as real. If you sand a set of stairs, then you are absorbed in that task, then it is complete and you do the next task. There is less fallow time or maybe it is just more apparent productivity. Maybe it is just that these tasks are easier to start or have more obvious beginning and end points, compared to intellectual tasks.
They certainly have a different nature these two types of job, gardening is similar, but has a longer time span. Maybe if doing things with my hands was my full time job, I'd see things differently. In my job I do make things, but none of them have a physical existence, so perhaps this is just the appeal of change. Yet there are echoes of it in climbing, hiking and running, so maybe it is just the pleasure of controlling your body to make it do things correctly and making yourself physically tired in the process.
The ACM is the Association of Computing Machinery, the American professional computer society. I've been a member before, but recently rejoined to gain access to their digital library, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Real downloadable conference papers and journal articles on every computer related topic under the sun. All, in pursuit of information for my two etcon/etech papers.
There is a free service, but it is limited to search and abstract only, joining the ACM is about 100 dollars, then I think it is better to join some SIGs rather than the library, I joined SIGCHI and SIGWEB and get access to all relevant papers via the two SIG affiliations. I've been feeling like an academic again, which is nice.
Flat / house as a user interface - I like it, management of clutter by optomizing clutter reducing activities. My difficulty is with piles of paper, there are never enough shelves. Yet most available shelves are filled with read books. To take your methodology I'd sacrifice space for utility, but in a London flat this is hard. Vertical space is easier, but we have eight bookcases already.
I need surfaces that afford assessment rather than storage, so a contained space for clutter will result in a full space and the need to assess the clutter, interesting. I already have a good system for recycling all waste paper, it is the other paper that collects.
I read this article a couple of months ago and it is gradually seeping into my life, things are organised around their proximity to usage more and the less used things do not get the prime spots. eg near my desk where my technical books sat, from O'Reilly etc, they are now slightly further away on a different shelf. This is for two reasons, the first that I can use the space for books that I have not yet read, the second that when I need them I get an inforced break and a moment to stretch..
Some immediate reactions to Delicious Library, which is a new product for cataloging all the books, music and dvds you possess. It is a nice application with a simple concept. Use the unique identifiers present in UPC or ISBN codes and do a product lookup on amazon.com. I guess that they make money on amazon affiliate income too, through recommending similar books. The application is priced at 40 dollars, which is fair enough, but to make a real use of it you also need an iSight or a bluetooth based barcode reader, typing in 11 and 13 digit strings will get dull quite quickly.
I'd really like a mechanism to sync my amazon wishlist with Delicious Library, the ability to get my wishlist on my iPod would be a real benefit. Related to that I'd like a mechanism to visually flag books I have on loan from others or aspirational items from my wishlist. The wishlist thing was one of my first reactions to the product.
In terms of the application UI, there is no obvious mechanism to stop a net search for information, you get the spinning cursor, but no stop control. Also when the search returns no information there is no clear prompt on what to do next, a failed UPC search gives no indication of why it failed.
I think that this is particularly apparent for CDs, though this is probably a uk product UPC issue. Thus getting support for amazon.co.uk as soon as possible would be fantastic for those of us in the UK.
I think the shelves and collections metaphors will work pretty well, one suggestion they have is to mimic actual shelves in your house, though there is an obvious maintainance issue with this. Genre based or author based smartlists (like iTunes) might be another means for controlling the data. Lucy and I have (guesses) 3-400 CDs and probably over a thousand books, plus 40 odd DVDs.
I think that this usage profile for books is different to the one for music and the same interfaces might not be enough. Music is a much more fluid and easily accessible medium, it is random access and supports repeated enjoyable access. A book is often read once then put on the shelf, but it might be a reference text or recommended to another person. Another competing programme that springs to mind, other than the media libraries, is Endnote, but this is more focused on academic papers rather than whole books.
Lastly, I share my book library and music collection with my wife, we'll both want a copy of delicious library, but with the ability to sync libraries or put the list on two different iPods. A license scheme for a couple would be great, or if the license applied to a single library, but multiple clients. I realise that this is quite a jump in terms of complexity, as data syncing is really hard.
On the whole I like it, but I can see that it will take some time to setup and get in to the swing of it. The benefits of having a record of all of my books and music with me all the time are clear to me. It is a nice realization of the ideas in projects like Aura from Marc Smith and others at Microsoft Research.
It'll take me a few weeks to build up a library and understand how it will affect my behaviour. I'm hoping that it will solve those conversations where I know I have read a book on X and want to recommend it to someone, but the moment passes by the time I get home.
About 15 months ago I wrote about how I managed my personal todo lists, via bits of paper inside my moleskine. Since then I have taken this approach and extended it to work to do lists too. It is kind of like the 43folders idea, but expressed in a different manner around task mangement.
I have a job in which I need to satisfy the needs of a range of clients and often walk from one meeting straight into the next. Usually generating reams of notes in the process, or lots of text in SubEthaEdit etc. I guess this sounds familiar ?
So, rather than bury my tasks inside the pages of my notebook, I put them on three bits of the larger post-it pad, see photo. Why three, the first two capture what I need to get done, the third is for overspill, when I have not had time to consolidate tasks from the first two. I put the post-it sheets on the inside front cover of the A5 notebook, which I use for note-making.
There is no order to the list, it is just a list of things to do, two pages keeps things to about 20 tasks, trying to subdivide these into categories is a waste of time, things are often too fluid for this to work and there are only 20 tasks. Some prioritization is useful, an asterisk usually suffices. See Paul Hammond on why more than 20 is bad.
Why does this work? It keeps a current, easily replaceable, list of things to do in a fixed location. Thus I always have to hand the next task to complete and so avoid the endless email checking; coffee-making etc distraction tasks that many of us are prone to.
There are some drawbacks, this strategy can lead to action led, short term thinking, so a background set of tasks framing what you need to do over the course of the next month is useful. A hidden advantage is that you have a list of tasks to hand for weekly reports or other audit tasks.
I've been doing this for personal tasks for about 18 months and for work for about a month or so, it works and I feel more on top of my smaller tasks. It is a very minor life hack. Try it and see how you like it, it doesn't cost much to implement.
I was initially quite impressed with the London Film Festival website (lff), that was until I tried to buy tickets from their tickets site.
The normal website has a simple and effective planner facility, it works and you can build up a daily list of those films you want to see from the 280 available. You need to register to use it, which is fine, so that they can identify you. A small semblance of worry rises when the planner has no obvious link to buy the tickets on your plan. However the true horror is not apparent until you try to actually buy the tickets on your carefully crafted schedule.
The festival site with the programme and the ticket purchase site are built by two separate companies and there is NO integration between them, save some visual elements. Not only that, but they have different registration systems and do not clearly state this, which given the common visual look is unforgivable. You need to create a separate identity to actually buy tickets from the LFF site and you cannot import the plan you have made.
Each film must be selected again individually, also the ticket selection system tells you that you have selected to book two tickets, you click next and are told that you have selected no tickets, as the drop down at the bottom also needs to be set to two, regardless of the information onscreen.
Lastly, the registration on the non-secure site emails you a password to login with, thus at least verifying that you are who you claim to have the email address for. The secure site just emails you and takes you straight to the entry screen for your credit card details, there is no verification of identity, save billing address for your credit card.
Thus the clever and elegant planner is useless, the simple process of linking planning to purchase was obviously too complex, as they had managed to commission two companies to build their single site. Inept is the word that springs to mind.
I hope the festival does well, it was great fun last year, but they really need to try a bit harder with the website offering.
