I’ve had Esther Dyson’s article Technology’s Mental Frontier on my mind for a few days now. She raises some great points about education and technological advancement:

Indeed, perhaps the biggest culture/value challenge of all is short-term thinking. Around the entire planet, we are approaching some kind of singularity, with the market pandering to our fundamental short-term natures by offering us instant gratification and long-term destruction.

Education does the opposite. It enables us to improve our lot by building things — using first fire and wood, and now computers and machines — to overcome our physical limitations and to create technology to extend and enhance our lives. Will technology and learning prevail, or will our susceptible, long-evolved weaknesses overcome us?

I think she raises a question that is more important than we might think. One of the things I worry about is that the instant gratification Esther talks about is making us less likely to be curious about increasingly difficult problems. I’m not arguing that Google is making us stupid. Instead I’m arguing that the ability to get answers to almost any question we can dream up has consequences. By filling our brains with easy answers we become less likely to go after those wicked problems — problems that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize”.

To combat this issue we need to cultivate curiosity in our schools and workplaces. Cap Watkins recently mentioned how curiosity is one of his hiring requirements:

If you’re intensely curious, I tend to worry less about other skills. Over and over I watch great designers acquire new skills and push the boundaries of what can be done through sheer curiosity and force of will. Curiosity forces us to stay up all night teaching ourselves a new Photoshop technique. It wakes us up in the middle of the night because it can’t let go of the interaction problem we haven’t nailed yet. I honestly think it’s the single most important trait a designer (or, hell, anyone working in tech) can possess.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher also talks about this in her article On Content and Curiosity:

Curiosity keeps us hungry. It leads us to tackle new challenges when the easy questions have all been answered. It makes us wonder how things could be better — even when they are, if we’d just pause to admit it, pretty damn good already.

If answers come to us too quickly too often, we lose that essential sense of curiosity that drives us to solve difficult problems. If you don’t believe me, just spend some time with a 3-year old. Sometimes when I build puzzles with my daughter I get carried away and help a little bit too much. My daughter always responds by slowing down her own efforts, eventually declaring that she can’t do it. But when I hold back, and give her just enough guidance instead of solving the problem myself, her curiosity — the need to see that final picture — takes over until she forces herself to figure it out.

We need to cultivate this on two levels. First, we need to guard ourselves against a loss of curiosity. Skip Google and think instead. Don’t use an app to help you with Words with Friends (it’s ok, we’ve all done it). Solve the problem the long, hard, stupid way every once in a while.

Second, we need to do everything we can to grow curiosity in those we have influence over — employees, co-workers, kids, etc. And how do we do that? I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said it best in his French poem Dessine-moi un bateau1:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

I’ll let your curiosity drive you to figure out what the “endless immensity of the sea” looks like for your situation.

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1. Link via Kevin Kelly ↩

Scott Adams in Rewarding Work:

Whenever you see the x-factor in someone’s output — that little extra something that turns the good into the awesome — it’s a marker for intrinsic motivation. Monetary motivation plateaus at the point you think your work equals your pay. For most people, that happens when the product is good but not awesome. To get to awesome you need to think you might be changing the world, saving lives, redeeming your reputation, attracting the mate of your dreams, or something else that is emotionally large.

I can’t shake this nagging feeling that we’re changing our focus from “mobile context” to screen-size thinking and responsive design so quickly that our users won’t know what hit them. Although I fully agree with articles like Mobile Context Revisited and Design Process In The Responsive Age, I think there is a missing step we haven’t explored enough: how to change the mental models of users who have become used to separate sites on their mobile phones and desktop computers. Let me illustrate with an example.

During usability testing last week I noticed an interesting trend. It was dormant the whole time, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it until one participant explicitly articulated the problem. I asked her if she has ever visited the e-commerce site we were about to use. She told me that she’s never gone there on her desktop, but that she has browsed the mobile version of the site on her BlackBerry1. So far, so good.

But then she mentioned that when she found a product that she liked, she decided to switch from the mobile version (.mobi) of the site to the desktop version (.com) — while still on her phone — to try to buy it. Her reason? She assumed that the desktop version of the site will have more information about the product than the mobile site has.

The rest of the story gets even bleaker. She tried to force the .com version of the site, but her BlackBerry couldn’t handle it — she tried multiple times and it just kept hanging. So she gave up and never went to the site again.

The experience highlights a few assumptions made by this participant:

• She assumed that the site will have separate mobile and desktop versions.
• She assumed that these two versions will have different information on them.
• She assumed that it is up to her to decide which version will best suit our needs.

Can we blame her for these assumptions? Isn’t this how we trained her to think about mobile sites vs. desktop sites? We kept building sites with reduced feature sets on mobile phones because we didn’t want to overwhelm users. We taught users that mobile sites are inferior versions of their desktop counterparts, and now we have to live with the consequences.

Now, fast forward to the future we’re all driving towards: fully responsive sites that don’t abridge content, but adjust to the screen sizes they are being served to. Considering this participant’s assumptions, you can imagine how confusing a site like that would be to her. She’ll wonder where the mobile site has gone. She’ll wonder what content she’s missing. She might try to enter .mobi and not know why the thing keeps going back to .com. She (and millions like her) has never heard the term “responsive design”, and couldn’t care less about it. We’ve cemented users’ mental models over the past few years of mobile-specific sites, and it’s going to take time to change that.

So, what can we do? When we build responsive sites, we need to communicate to users that they don’t have to worry about finding the mobile site any more — everything they need is right there. This can be as simple as a message on the home page, or relevant microcopy at key stages of the journey, like on a product page.

I’m not trying to stand in the way of responsive design or screen-size thinking over mobile context thinking. But I am arguing that most normal users will be confused by this trend, and we need to manage that. Because we don’t want incorrect user assumptions to cause lower-converting sites that end up killing organizations’ commitment to responsive design.

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1. Nope, I’m not misremembering what phone she used. ↩

One of the hardest things we have to do as a User Experience Design agency is to sell usability testing to clients. The concerns are usually some combination of the following:

• It will take too long (no, it won’t).
• It’s too expensive (not if you consider the potential ROI).
• You can’t learn much from 6 users (yes, you can).

But we keep at it, because we know that if we’re successful in our efforts to convince clients to try it just once, we’ll never have to sell it to them again. It’s a methodology that completely sells itself. Once a client sees real users struggle with their product, they immediately become believers and staunch evangelists of usability testing.

The situation was a little different for a recent project we worked on with Obox, creators of premium WordPress themes. They came to us already sold on the benefits of usability testing, they just needed our help with research design and execution, and to work with them on some of the design recommendations based on the data we collect.

Yesterday, CEO and co-founder David Perel did a write-up of the project where he explained the process and the changes they’ve made. It’s great to see such an open discussion about how they are implementing their relentless pursuit of delivering value to their users. And even though they already understood the value of usability testing going into the project, I still loved this sentence from The User Experience Experiment:

The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how good looking your site is. Watching a layman use your product will blow your mind. You cannot even begin to imagine how your users interact with it.

If that’s how they reacted, just imagine the power such a revelation can have on people who don’t believe in the method. David also says this in his post:

We’ve been so taken aback by what we learned that when we looked for new office space, the most important requirement was that it had an extra room for user testing.

I know this means that they won’t need to hire us again, but I don’t care. That type of full-scale adoption of user-centered design makes me infinitely happy.

Be sure to read the full post, it’s a great case study.

Birth of a Book is a beautiful video of a book being created using traditional printing methods. Watch it before you continue reading:

Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

Merlin Mann often defines a priority as an activity you both care about, and are willing to sacrifice something for. That phrase — care and sacrifice — immediately sprung to mind as I watched this video. You can sense the care that goes into the book’s creation, and you can easily imagine the time sacrifice needed to make sure it comes out perfect.

I am not on some kind of crusade against ebooks. I read way more ebooks than traditional books. But there is still something exciting about opening and reading physical copies of books like The Shape of Design or The Manual. The level of care and sacrifice becomes tangible, and transfers from creator to consumer. It’s why I still buy vinyl, and prefer a manual coffee making process.

As much as I live online, I recognise that there is a level of tangible craftsmanship to certain physical things that can inspire us in ways that an Instagram filter just can’t do.

(video via Daily Exhaust)

I wasn’t going to say anything else about the Apple v Samsung patent case, but Dmitri Fadeyev’s article The Cult of Progress is just too good to ignore. Dmitri discusses the case through the broad lens of progress in consumer technology, and what that means. Along the way he talks about the dangers of copying a design without knowing why those design decisions were made:

Copying the surface level implementation without the regard for the constraints of your own project is bad because good design in the context of consumer tech products is an optimal reflection of the underlying constraints. Taking the results and applying them to your own product doesn’t work so well because your own case is slightly different. It’s like trying to fit tailored clothes on someone else — there is a chance they will fit OK, but more likely they won’t, or at least won’t be very comfortable to wear.

He goes on to explain how this is the problem with what Samsung did with the Galaxy S phone:

They didn’t succeed in extracting the essence and making it better so what they ended up with is another me-too product. Probably good for sales, but not a product the public would see as being innovative.

But what makes this piece really interesting is that it’s not just another defense of Apple. Dmitri takes a very balanced view and makes the point that it’s hard to pick a “winner” in this case, because we don’t have a good definition of what we mean by progress.

Even if you’re as tired of this topic as I am, you should read Dmitri’s essay. It’s a great addition to the discussion.

Craig Mod wrote a very interesting essay about community and content for Contents Magazine. In Our New Shrines he talks about building a community first, before deciding what you’re going to do with them. It’s a contentious topic, but it’s worth entertaining Craig’s argument:

There is a reality those of us long steeped in the web are reticent to admit: for many, Facebook is the internet. More than Tumblr. More than wordpress.com. More than Twitter. For a certain person, a very commonly found person, Facebook is a Yahoo! portal, personalized Google news, Gmail, Flickr, iPhoto, and Xbox. If you look closely, companies don’t post URLs to their home pages, they post URLs to their Facebook pages.

We facilitate lots of usability tests here at Flow. I’ve asked the question “So, what do you do when go online?” enough times to know exactly what the answer will be. It is always, without fail, a variation of “Well, I Facebook, of course… A little bit of email… Some Google… Umm, well, mostly Facebook.”

This might change, but I completely agree that for most people, Facebook is the Internet at the moment. I personally don’t like Craig’s proposal of building a community around something vapid before you decide what product/service you want to provide to them. I think it’s a dangerous game. But denying the short-term effectiveness of such a strategy would be naive. For better or worse, this is the attention economy we live in. For now.

Jason Fried has a great interview on Fast Company:

Look at what the top stories are [on TechCrunch], and they’re all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don’t matter. What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well? In the coverage of our industry as a whole, you’ll rarely see stories about treating customers well, about people building a sustainable business.

The story about his business icon is great as well.

NextDraft is one of my favorite things on the Internet at the moment. It’s a daily newsletter with 10 interesting news stories, written by the brilliant Dave Pell. It also made me like email again, which I didn’t expect to be possible. But it makes sense now that I’ve read this great interview with Dave where he explains why email is still relevant:

Email has always been a great medium. It’s the content of most emails that’s problematic.

Email is still the killer app. It looks great on all your devices and the user experience is always exactly what you’ve come to expect. Look at the rise of Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket. People love plain, glorious, readable text. Email is also a technology that everyone understands, and it’s personal (if someone wants to respond to me, all they have to do is hit reply).

Tweets and status updates flow by and disappear into the black hole that is the Internet of five minutes ago. Interesting links and stories you find in an email newsletter are always right where you left them.

Also check out the NextDraft iPhone app. It’s fantastic.

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.

— Samsung’s statement in response to their patent case loss

Conflation is the practice of “treating two distinct concepts as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings, as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts.” This is one of the things that’s happening with the Apple v Samsung patent case. Saying that Apple won the case against Samsung because OMG PATENTS ARE BROKEN is conflating two separate arguments.

No one in their right mind is arguing that the current patent system promotes innovation (as it was originally intended). If, for some reason, you are still trying to make this argument, just have a listen to the This American Life episode When Patents Attack! It’s sure to change your mind.

So, we agree that the patent system is broken. But this begs the question: How should Apple (and any other company) go about protecting their intellectual property? Is there another way except through the (yes, broken!) patent system?

Let’s say you have to be somewhere, and the only way to get there is on a crappy gravel road full of potholes. What do you do? Do you say “ah, screw it” and turn around, or do you rent a Land Rover and grit your teeth through the wobbles? “This road is horrible” and “I got to my destination” are not mutually exclusive truths in that scenario. Likewise, it’s completely legitimate to say “The patent system is broken”, and in the same breath, “We were able to stop Samsung from copying us”.

Please, let’s stop conflating these arguments. We have to work to reform the patent system, while we simultaneously work to stop blatant copying. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”