Marco Arment recently wrote an excellent post about the differences between Apple and Microsoft customers. It got me thinking about Windows 8, Metro UI, and a slightly different theory on what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with the next version of their operating system. Here’s Marco:

People who aren’t willing or able to compromise on their needs regularly are much more likely to be Windows customers. The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them: “You can do whatever you want, and w’ll attempt to glue it together. It won’t always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for.”

He leaves out one important group of people who are also more likely to be Windows customers: regular users who don’t care about computers at all, and just want something to perform their daily email / browsing tasks on. Matt Gemmel sums up this crucial market really well:

The biggest (and most lucrative) set of customers is ordinary people, without a computing degree or specialist knowledge. These are people with no interest in specific technologies, but only in how easily they can finish today’s tasks without reading the manual. Apple caters to that market; companies who loudly proclaim their device supports CSS3 and MPEG4 and SDHC don’t even understand that it exists.

I agree with Marco’s (and Matt’s) main point: one of the main reasons for Apple’s success is their ability to compromise in the way that designers use the word: saying no to the right things. And that the Microsoft team will need to learn to compromise like that if they want to compete seriously on the tablet front.

Still, most people buy Windows PC’s not because they care about extensibility or because they have moral objections to Apple’s supposed walled garden. Most people buy Windows PC’s because they are just plain indifferent. It’s what they know, it’s what they’ve always used, and they don’t care enough about computing to consider other alternatives. This isn’t a good or a bad thing in itself, it’s simply the way it is.

One OS to rule them all

Microsoft’s decision to combine the desktop and tablet UI (Metro) on PC’s and provide access to both from the same device is the most interesting part of the unfolding Windows 8 story - particularly because we don’t know how regular users will react. Gruber nails the main problem with this approach:

I’ve been thinking all along that I’d rather Microsoft have let Metro stand alone as a next-generation OS, separate from Windows. I’m hung up on the question of how any OS that lets you do everything Windows does could compete with the iPad, because the iPad’s appeal and success is largely forged by the advantages that come from not allowing you to do so many of the things Mac OS X can do.

Surely Microsoft knows that this might be problematic for developers and users alike. I have to believe that they’re not that short-sighted. So why would they go ahead with this awkward combination? We have to consider that combining the two UI’s is part of Microsoft’s response not just to the fact that herds of people are abandoning Windows PCs for Macs[1], but also to how these users are finding their way to a new Mac on their desks.

A story that got a lot of attention recently is how Mike Elgan, the editor of Windows Magazine, made the switch from Windows to Mac. He talks about the beginning of his… um”¦ “conversion” using the phrase “gateway drugs” to describe his experience with Apple’s non-Mac devices:

The perfect out-of-box experience with the iPhone, the elegance of the whole experience of using an iPhone, re-set my expectations for how consumer electronics and computers should function. I started looking at the out-of-box experience of buying a Windows PC with a new contempt. The crapware. The stickers. The anti-virus software problem where the cure is worse than the disease. The flimsy hardware. It’s not so much that I despised Windows PCs, but that it felt like Microsoft and the PC makers despised them, like they all have no respect for their own platform.

Be afraid, Microsoft

This, more than anything, should scare the crap out of Microsoft. Apple is using iPods, iPhones, and iPads - considered “non-threatening” devices by the masses - to get users to reconsider their computing worlds.

Suddenly regular users start doing something they’ve never done before: wonder if maybe, just maybe, the Mac experience can be as pleasant as that of an iDevice. So when their Dell crashes for the 10th time in a week and it’s time for a new computer, that iPod in their pocket serves as a not-so-silent reminder: why not just walk into an Apple store and see what all the fuss is about?

So maybe that’s what’s going on with Windows 8 and Metro. More than just their version of a tablet UI, Microsoft could be placing their bets that regular users will pick up a Metro style tablet, like it a lot, and remain comfortable on their Windows PC’s knowing that the Metro UI is available for them there as well.

Everyone is uncomfortable with change, so if Microsoft can promise a consistent experience across mobile and desktop devices, it could stop the hemorrhaging to Apple products that we’re currently seeing. I’m not saying that it will work, just that it’s an interesting strategy for which they should at least get some credit.

I’ll leave the final word to Marco, who wraps up his post articulating what a giant gamble it is to combine the very different metaphors of desktop and mobile UI’s:

But how will their customers react?

Will Metro be meaningfully adopted by PC users? Or will it be a layer that most users disable immediately or use briefly and then forget about, like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, in which case they’ll deride the Metro-only tablets as “useless” and keep using Windows like they always have?

Still, Metro is the first thing to come out of Microsoft that I’m interested in since the Xbox. It looks genuinely innovative in many areas, and I can’t wait to see how this all plays out.

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1. Be honest: when is the last time you heard a story about someone switching from a Mac to a Windows PC? ↩

James Gleick provides a very interesting excerpt from his book The Information in the article How Information Became a Thing, and All Things Became Information. In the excerpt he discusses the inventions that allow us to record and preserve information (like the transistor and the “bit” as unit of measure), and how this fundamentally changed society:

The information produced and consumed by humankind used to vanish””that was the norm, the default. The sights, the sounds, the songs, the spoken word just melted away. Marks on stone, parchment, and paper were the special case. It did not occur to Sophocles’[1] audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show[2].

Now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or city street; every volcano or tsunami on the remotest shore; every card played or piece moved in an online game; every rugby scrum and cricket match.

It looks like a great book. James, if you’re out there, when will the Kindle edition be available?

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1. The Wikipedia entry on Sophocles is fascinating.↩
2. Speaking of enjoying the show. â†©

Frank Chimero in Stand Clear of the Closing Doors:

Noticing is important, but what’s more important is sharing what one observes to define the edges of the experiences we share. This overlap bonds us, and the best part of paying attention is that it reminds us that we are occupying the same space at the same time as others. We are a part of the world, even in those in-between spaces.

I’ve read many books and articles about writing and why we write, but this is probably the statement that comes closest to my own feelings about writing. I want to share the things I notice in an attempt to find some of those shared experiences and the overlap that bonds us.

C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone.” I guess I write to know we are not alone - especially in an industry like ours that can sometimes feel very isolated.

Ok, that came out way heavier than I planned. In my defense, it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon. Anyway, here’s a video of a dancing cat to balance things out a bit.

I recently wrote about persuasion design on the web. In How Whole Foods “Primes” You To Shop, Martin Lindstrom gives some great examples of how grocery stores use persuasion design tactics to get people to buy more:

Ever notice that there’s ice everywhere in this store? Why? Does hummus really need to be kept so cold? What about cucumber-and-yogurt dip? No and no. This ice is another symbolic. Similarly, for years now supermarkets have been sprinkling select vegetables with regular drops of water—a trend that began in Denmark. Why? Like ice displays, those sprinkled drops serve as a symbolic, albeit a bogus one, of freshness and purity. Ironically, that same dewy mist makes the vegetables rot more quickly than they would otherwise. So much for perception versus reality.

I get it, and I understand that businesses need to make money, and this helps them do it. I don’t have to like it though, right?

I’m becoming increasingly fascinated with the parallels between architecture and web design. Dan Lockton recently published Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review - it’s an extract from his PhD thesis where he discusses how architecture can be used to influence behavior. It’s a long article, but well worth your time - I highly recommend it.

It’s full of architecture concepts that can be applied to designing for the web, but I want to discuss one in particular - the idea of “paving the cowpaths”:

One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term [”¦] is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles ”” “the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. [”¦]

[T]here is potential for observing the formation of desire lines and then ‘codifying’ them in order to provide paths that users actually need, rather than what is assumed they will need. In human-computer interaction, this principle has become known as “Pave the cowpaths” ”” “look where the paths are already being formed by behavior and then formalize them, rather than creating some kind of idealized path structure that ignores history and tradition and human nature and geometry and ergonomics and common sense” (Crumlish & Malone, 2009).

Particularly with websites, analytics software can take the place of the worn grass, and in the process reveal extra data such as demographic information about users, and more about their actual desires or intention in engaging in the process. [”¦] This allows clustering of behaviour paths and even investigation of users’ mental models of site structure. [”¦]

From the point of view of influencing behaviour rather than simply reflecting it, the principle of paving the cowpaths could be applied strategically: identify the desire lines and paths of particular users ”” perhaps a group which is already performing the desired behaviour ”” and then, by formalising this, making it easier or more salient or in some way obviously normative, encourage other users to follow suit.

This is such an interesting perspective on user-centred design. We all know that we need to design for real user needs, and not what we think they want, but it’s often so hard to do all our design work from that perspective. That’s where real-world analogies like this can be extremely helpful.

By starting a redesign project with an explicit goal to “pave the cowpaths” we’re always pulled back into that frame of mind. The same questions will keep jumping into our minds:

• Do we have analytics to back up this behavior?
• Are we sure this is what users naturally do on the site?
• We know most users click on this navigation element to get things done - how do we make that behavior easier for them?

One real-world example we can look at is the recent announcement about upcoming changes to Windows Explorer. The team made a big deal about their data-driven approach to the design:

Over the years, Explorer has grown to support a number of different scenarios, many unrelated to file management ”“ launching programs, viewing photos, playing videos, and playing music, to name just a few. We wanted to know which of these capabilities customers were really using. Using telemetry data, we were able to answer the question of how the broadest set of customers use Explorer in aggregate.

The resulting design leverages this data in a very real way:

The Home tab is the heart of our new, much more streamlined Explorer experience. The commands that make up 84% of what customers do in Explorer are now all available on this one tab.

You can make a strong argument that by following this approach Microsoft is paving the cowpaths they discovered. But let’s look at a sentence I left out of the original quote from Dan Lockton’s article:

The counter-argument is that blindly paving cowpaths can enshrine inefficient behaviours in the longer-term, locking users and organisations into particular ways of doing things which were never optimal in the first place (Arace, 2006).

This brings a very interesting perspective to the design. Are the most frequently used commands in Windows Explorer really the most effective way to accomplish user goals? Was there an opportunity to drastically reduce and combine certain paths to simplify the interface?

It’s certainly not easy to figure out how to balance paving existing paths vs. using that data to design systems that guide users to more efficient ways of doing things[1]. But it brings me back to the main point: an analogy like this forces us to think hard about these questions and at least make informed decisions about the design.

The alternative is to just let it happen and possibly get caught with a blind spot we didn’t even know existed.

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1. This is where qualitative user research methods like ethnography and usability testing can be extremely beneficial, but that’s a topic for another article.↩

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Sherry Turkle tells a story about having dinner in Paris with her daughter, Rebecca. While they are eating, Rebecca gets a call from a friend in Boston, asking if sh’s available for lunch. Rebecca simply answers that it won’t be possible, but that Friday could work. She doesn’t even tell her friend that sh’s currently in Paris. Sherry has mixed feelings about this:

I was wistful, worried that Rebecca was missing an experience I cherished in my youth: an undiluted Paris. My Paris came with the thrill of disconnection from everything I knew. My daughter’s Paris did not include this displacement.

I told me wife this story later that evening, and we started talking about our own tumultuous 30-day backpacking trip through Europe at a time when our relationship was”¦ well, let’s just say it was on less stable ground than it is now (remind me to tell you how we broke up on top of the Eiffel tower and got back together in Venice).

We talked about the truth in Sherry’s words - how being so utterly disconnected from the rest of the world played a big role in our ability to immerse ourselves in the newness and strangeness of the culture around us. We were only able to check email about once every 3-4 days. I can’t even imagine how I’d be able to go that long without email now, but back then it wasn’t a big deal. Less email = more time for walking through the streets of a new city.

Fast forward to today, and I am incredibly fortunate to travel for business reasonably often, but I must admit that it doesn’t fill me with the same excitement as that Europe backbacking trip did. And I think that’s partly because the constant connection means that I’m not really immersed in another culture, I’m just working from a different office.

Shelly comes to the following conclusion after her trip to Paris with her daughter:

Adolescents have always balanced connection and disconnection; we need to acknowledge the familiarity of our needs and the novelty of our circumstances. The Internet is more than old wine in new bottles; now we can always be elsewhere.

And that is perhaps the real issue here. If the Internet lets us be elsewhere any time we want, what point is there in physically moving ourselves across the world any more? Especially if we use the Internet to bring ourselves back to where we came from the minute we get there?

Alain de Botton recently tweeted:

The problem with the net: it prevents us from boredom and all its many advantages.

One of those advantages is the ability to sit in a restaurant in Paris and truly take it in without wondering what everyone else is up to. Even just sitting in your own back yard without wondering what everyone else is up to would probably already be a huge step in the right direction. Oh, the thinks you could think.

Her’s to being bored.

Ryan Singer in Identifying conflicts in a UI design:

When I’m working on a UI design I look for things that are wrong. I have to do that because ther’s no checklist of things that are “˜right’ that make a perfect product. You can’t check a requirements list and say “Yep, everything’s there!” and conclude that you made a good design. You have to look at the design itself and hunt around for problems: things that cause friction, things that aren’t clear, things that take too long, things that break expectations.

These conflicts are the heart of design. If we could just pile features one on top of the other, we wouldn’t have to do design. Design is what you do when piling elements onto each other doesn’t work. It’s the process of identifying and resolving conflicts.

This is so true. As the debate about unsolicited redesigns rage on (most recently on ignore the code), I often think about the dangers of pointing out the flaws in designs. I try to remind myself that there are most likely missing details and nuances behind design decisions that I don’t know about. As Rebekah Cox says:

Design is a set of decisions about a product. It’s not an interface or an aesthetic, it’s not a brand or a color. Design is the actual decisions.

That said, Ryan’s article reminded me that pointing out what’s wrong with a design (based on objective principles, not feelings) is the most effective way to figure out what’s right. And that process has to start at home. If we’re serious about relentless quality we have to be the biggest critics of our own designs.

The Wall Street Journal in Deluge of Content on the Web Swamps Yahoo:

As Web traffic explodes, Internet companies are struggling to profit off ads shown next to the articles, videos and other content offered to viewers.

It’s a simple rule of any market. The more information that is created, the more the value is reduced. And despite attempts to woo spending with bigger, bolder and more targeted ads, services that help consumers navigate that content, namely search, remain the big money makers online.

As I (and many others) have written before, it doesn’t look like display advertising is a sustainable business model for media sites going forward (and I think we can agree that it makes for a pretty bad user experience). This puts content creators in quite a predicament: how do you make money from producing content? The WSJ piece points to the central problem here:

“People tell me that content is king, but that is not true at all,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the digital-media unit of Publicis Groupe SA. “Most people make money pointing to content, not creating, curating or collecting content.”

Although the value of pointing to content is indisputable, we need a better way than display ads for content creators and curators to make a living. And I don’t think we quite know what that looks like yet.

Alex Faaborg for UX Magazine in Debating the Fundamentals: The geographic, temporal and political nature of usability heuristics:

On the surface, usability heuristics provide a simple checklist for making any interface perfect. But what is fascinating about them is the extent to which all of the heuristics are actually in direct opposition to each other, the extent to which they are geographic and temporal, and the extent to which they expose the designer’s underlying political views (at least in the domain of things digital). Usability heuristics present a zero-sum game with inherent tradeoffs, and it is simply impossible to achieve all of the heuristics simultaneously.

This is the best UX article I’ve read in a while. Like most UX designers I live and breathe the usability heuristics, and have always been reasonably comfortable with the tradeoffs, but this article perfectly articulates the complex interplay at work.

But it’s not just a theoretical exploration, I really appreciate the thought put into the practical approach to managing these complexities:

Novice designers memorize the list of usability heuristics and try to employ them in their work. As a more experienced designer, you may have already seen a deeper dynamic at play here. Instead of using heuristics as a simple checklist, try placing pairs of the heuristics against one another in a spider graph.  Achieving every ideal isn’t possible because the pairs exist in direct opposition. Realizing this, the challenge shifts to shaping a design that captures as much surface area as it can, given all the opposing forces.

This is one of those “I wish I wrote that” articles.

There’s a scene in Hot Shots! Part Deux (shut up, we all have our guilty pleasures) where Charlie Sheen’s character (Topper Harley) rescues Rowan Atkinson’s character (Dexter Hayman) from prison. The conversation goes something like this:

Topper: Dexter, I’m here to rescue you. Dexter: You don’t understand. I can’t walk. Topper: Why? Dexter: They tied my shoelaces together. Topper: Bastards!

The joke is funny, of course, (shut up, it is funny!) because of the ridiculous nature of the claim that tying someone’s shoelaces together can somehow stop them from walking around. We look at the situation from the outside and think they’re idiots - don’t they realize they can just untie Dexter’s shoelaces?

I often think of this scene when I hear designers defend their decisions by insisting that users will “figure it out”. I hear statements like “it’s not our fault that they can’t use this feature”, and I think about users with their shoelaces tied together, unable to move. We look at them with pity in our eyes - if they could only see the obvious and untie the knot, they would have no trouble using the site.

You Are Not The User

But of course, that’s not how it works. We think users are stuck because they aren’t untying their shoelaces, while they’re actually knee deep in the cement of poor usability we put them in. We can make T-Shirts that say “I am not the user” and wear them all day long, but somehow we still manage to find a way to blame them when something goes wrong. Not cool.

We will never be able to design web sites that don’t confuse users unless we observe them using our sites, and fix the issues that uncovers. We cannot think like our users - as designers we are simply too close to the product, and way too proficient in all things web. It reminds me of something Douglas Adams once said:

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

There is a great post on the Agile Bits blog that talks about the difficulties of designing security systems. In one part they discuss the problem of designing for users and sum up the issue perfectly:

Security systems (well, the good ones anyway) are designed by people who fully understand the reasons behind the rules. The problem is that they try to design things for people like themselves ”” people who thoroughly understand the reasons. Thus we are left with products that only work well for people who have a deep understanding of the system and its components.

Stepping Into Their Shoes

We have to be able to step out of this cocoon of deep understanding, and the only way to do that is to regularly observe users as they make their way through our applications. Whether you take your laptop to a coffee shop and ask random people to give you a few minutes of their time, or set up full-scale usability tests, the payoff of uncovering usability issues on your application is so worth the time. What’s the upside, you ask? Matt Gemmel sums it up really well:

The biggest (and most lucrative) set of customers is ordinary people, without a computing degree or specialist knowledge. These are people with no interest in specific technologies, but only in how easily they can finish today’s tasks without reading the manual. Apple caters to that market; companies who loudly proclaim their device supports CSS3 and MPEG4 and SDHC don’t even understand that it exists.

If we can get into the heads of those ordinary people who use our products every day we’ll be able to meet their needs so much better. I agree with Jeff Gothelf on this one: test everything, regardless of its polish or fidelity:

Increasing your time with customers throughout the design and build process improves the outcome of your project by continually nudging the interface in a more appropriate direction. As an added side benefit, you also begin to build a user-centric culture within the company if it didn’t already exist ”“ a huge plus.

I’ll end with the words of Jeffrey Zeldman in Style versus design, because it articulates so well why this is such an important issue:

Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and hardcore usability where most of the web must be built.

Most of all, I worry about web users. Because, after ten-plus years of commercial web development, they still have a tough time finding what they’re looking for, and they still wonder why it’s so damned unpleasant to read text on the web ”” which is what most of them do when they’re online.

Let’s realize that the problem is a little more complex than untying shoelaces. Better yet, let’s realize it’s our problem if users get stuck, not theirs. And best of all, let’s allow them to help us fix it.