The Harvard Business Review says they have proof that Henry Ford never said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s an interesting piece, but it’s the conclusion I want to quote here:

The real lesson learned was not that Ford’s failure was one of not listening to his customers, but of his refusal to continuously test his vision against reality, which led to the Ford Motor Company’s failure of continuous innovation, resulting in a catastrophic loss of market share from which it never recovered.

Translation: regardless of where your innovative ideas come from, make sure you test those ideas with users and learn from their feedback.

The iPhone might have been one man’s vision, but the way users interacted with the first generation iPhone paved the way for the iPad and the iPhone 4. They tested their vision with a real product, and then learned from it.

Back in 2004 Adam Greenfield wrote down some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings. He starts off as follows:

Principle 1: Default to harmlessness. Ubiquitous systems must default to a mode that ensures their users’ physical, psychic and financial safety.

That might sound a little overly dramatic, but as we’ll soon see, it’s a very important principle for a designer to keep top-of-mind. Adam goes on to say this:

Principle 5. Be deniable. Ubiquitous systems must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point. As an absolute ethical imperative, users must be afforded the ability to make their own meaningful decisions regarding their exposure to ubiquitous perception, the types and channels of information such exposure will necessary convey, and the agencies receiving and capable of acting on such conveyance. Critical to this is the ability to simply say “no,” with no penalty other than the inability to make use of whatever benefits the ubiquitous system offers its users.

Now. Think about those principles, and then have a look at the newsletter preferences page for eBucks:

The text in the opt-out line reads:

I’m not concerned with my eBucks balance and I don’t think I should be the first to know about all the latest news.

It’s an interesting content approach taken by eBucks, and one I would argue violates both principles I quote above. They are basically making you feel out of touch (“be deniable”) and a little bit stupid (“default to harmlessness”) if you don’t subscribe to their newsletter. Are they also implying that you won’t be able to view your balance if you don’t subscribe? Probably not, but it can be interpreted that way.

Fast forward a few years after Adam’s article, and we now even have a name for this type of tactic. It’s a classic example of persuasion design:

Persuasion design doesn’t share User-Centered Design’s ethical neutrality. Instead, it makes an implicit but undeniable judgment that certain behaviours are preferable to others.

Persuasion design prioritises business goals above those of the user, and its values are irreconcilable with empathy, the central value of User Experience.

This is just one example, but you can see it everywhere. It might seem innocent at first, but it’s such a slippery slope to the evil of dark patterns. We need to consider the implications very carefully before we employ such techniques.

Frank Chimero on why designers should learn to code:

Design decisions are not only affected by the characteristics of the content being designed, but also the qualities of the format. The best way to understand the characteristics of the web is to speak its language.

Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside. HTML and CSS give another venue to provide structure to content in the native language of the web, and learning these guides decisions by surfacing the affordances of the medium. Design decisions are affected by both the content and the format, like how a sculptor would make different decisions if she were working with clay rather than marble.

Spot on. The whole post is worth a read, and Frank gives some good suggestions for resources to help designers get started on coding.

A couple of weeks ago our 2-year old daughter threw my wife’s phone in the swimming pool. The resulting journey through the Vodacom customer service labyrinth to replace the phone was frustrating, but it also gave me a new level of understanding and empathy for the immense challenges of providing customer service to hundreds of thousands of people.

This is an article about social media, customer support channels, and the principles every company should establish in their culture to serve their customers better. And (spoiler alert!) I do manage to get a new phone for my wife.

”Umm, So, Our Daughter Threw My Phone In The Pool”

What’s most surprising about getting a call about my wife’s phone suddenly finding itself at the bottom of our pool is how completely nonplussed I was about the whole thing. When you become a parent the kinds of things that upset you change significantly. I think I’ve discovered a pattern: if there is no blood involved, there’s really no reason to get upset. So after establishing that there was no blood involved, I proceeded to the next step - trying to replace the phone.

My wife had an LG Generic (or whatever it was called) on one of Vodacom’s cheapest plans, and the thing has been driving her nuts. She’s had her eye on my iPhone for a long time, so I decided to try to upgrade her. The problem is that I’m not eligible for an upgrade until the end of December. And that’s where this journey starts.

My first step was to walk into a Vodacom store to ask for assistance. This is pretty much the extent of the conversation that took place with the support representative:

Me: “Hi. My daughter threw my wife’s phone in the pool, so I’d like to get her an iPhone please.” Rep: “Your contract isn’t due for an upgrade until the end of December.” Me: “I understand that. I’m saying that my wife’s phone is now wet and doesn’t work any more, so I would like to give you more money by going onto a more expensive plan.” Rep: “It’s against policy to do an early upgrade. That’s why you should insure your phone.”

Imagine that conversation with a “Sucks to be you!” look on the representative’s face, and you’d have a really good idea of how it went down.

Having failed with the first point of contact, I took to Twitter:

The response was very quick, asking me to DM my number so that someone could call me. I sent my number, and a representative called me the next morning. I thought this was getting somewhere, and I was already starting to write this post in my head. My headline (“Social media works!”) needed some work, but it was going to be great.

But not so fast”¦ I told my story to the representative, who looked up the account and told me the same story: “Sorry, it’s against policy.” (At least this time someone was sorry about it). I threw out what would become my standard line throughout this process: “You realize I’m trying to give you more money, right?” But no luck. The conversation ended when the rep told me, “I will ask the upgrades department if there is anything we can do.” Translation: “You’ll never hear from us, ever again.”

After not hearing from the “upgrades department” I sent another DM, and got a call from another rep. Same story. Against policy. “You realize I’m trying to give you more money, right?” Sorry, against policy. I then took it to the next level and told the rep that I will be taking my business to MTN, convinced that this statement would trigger some script alarm somewhere and get me a free ticket to a ride up the “escalation path”. Not so much.

Rep: “Oh. Well that’s not good.” Me: “No, it’s not. Anything you want to do about that?” Rep: “Well, this is our policy. Can’t be changed.” Me: “You don’t want to tell someone that I’m about to take my business elsewhere?” Rep: “I’ll make a note in the system.”

At that point I gave up and decided to wait until I am eligible for an upgrade. That decision lasted about 3 days. I decided to give it one last shot, and tweeted Vodacom’s CEO:

And this is where the story gets boring, in a good way. Pieter Uys tweeted me back (in my first language, which means he looked at my profile and thought before responding). 4 hours later I got a call to say we can do the upgrade. End of story. No questions, no statements about policy. I can do the upgrade = happy customer + more money for Vodacom.

Your Call Is Not That Important To Us

Before moving on to the main point of this article I want to tell another quick story. I’ve been banking with ABSA all my life. I’ve also been unhappy with ABSA all my life, but that’s a story for another day. I recently mentioned ABSA on Twitter and linked to this post. The post got retweeted a few times, and then I got this:

That really interested me. Here is a bank (FNB) that monitors what people are saying about their competitors, and joins the conversation in relevant ways. Notice that he wasn’t pushy, he was merely getting in on the joke. I tweeted back:

I said this would be a short story, so I’ll just say this. One week later someone from FNB was sitting with me, filling out forms to transfer all my accounts from ABSA to FNB. They took care of the whole thing, I didn’t have to fill out a single form. All because of a tweet. And I’m pretty sure ABSA doesn’t even know (or care) that they lost another customer.

It’s All About The People

All customer support revolves around people, processes, and tools.

CRM and community tools like Salesforce, Get Satisfaction, and Twitter give support reps the means to communicate with customers. Processes set guidelines for what those interactions should be like. But all of that is useless unless the people doing the support understand and live out the culture of the organization. The ease of establishing that culture also depends a great deal on the support channel used.

Synchronous, 1:1 support like in-store interactions and phone support is expensive and extremely difficult to manage. Unless you’re Zappos and call yourself “a support company that happens to sell shoes”, most companies don’t have a deeply ingrained support culture. So it’s very hard to filter the right processes and culture through to the 1:1 support channels, since they are generally pretty far removed from “management”. They are therefore very rarely empowered to make decisions that might not follow policy, but would be the best thing for the customer (and the company).

I would argue that my early upgrade situation is a good example of this. That representative in the store should have been empowered to ignore policy and upgrade me on the spot. It’s not her fault that she’s not allowed to do that, it’s just the way it is.

On the other hand, asynchronous, 1:many support like live chat, online forums, and social media platforms are much cheaper, and I would argue also easier to manage from a support culture perspective. You’re able to set appropriate guidelines (more on that later), and in general the people who manage those channels have a much more direct path to different resolution scenarios (and therefore more decision-making power).

All this to say that I am not upset any more about my bad experiences in the store and initially on the phone. Because I recognize how incredibly difficult it is to nurture a true culture of customer-centric support. And to find that balance between empowering everyone in the company to break policy when they feel it’s needed, while still having enough process in place so you don’t give away control of your short-term and long-term business strategy.

I don’t have an immediate solution for this, but I want to write about it because I believe it’s a very real problem that a lot of companies are struggling with. Especially now that social media support channels are getting so much adoption.

Lessons In Customer Service

Even though I don’t have the perfect answer, I do want to spend a little time discussing some recommendations I have for better customer service, based on my recent experiences with FNB and Vodacom.

1. Understand what engagement really means

There is no substitute for authenticity. When Pick n Pay asks what I’m going to be doing today, it doesn’t feel like real engagement. Why would I want to tell a supermarket that? When Vodacom sends me the scripted answer “I heard about the problem you experienced”, that tells me they didn’t really take the time to think about the response when sending it (“Well, of course you heard about it, I sent you a tweet!”).

When FNB joins a conversation in a natural way, or when the CEO of Vodacom responds to me by name - that’s engagement. It’s such a simple rule: read, think, respond like a human.

2. Web governance is essential

Web governance “defines decision-making processes for the web, and sets policies and standards for web content, design, and technology””in a way that respects subject-matter expertise” (from Web Governance: Become An Agent of Change). Defining user-centered standards for every touch point with an organization is enormously important to those who want to succeed, and it’s not getting enough attention at all.

One part of web governance that needs more attention in particular is content strategy, which “plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content” (see The Discipline of Content Strategy for more). Among other things it defines the tone and language and underlying principles for talking to customers. Every company should do this before they open their Twitter account or create a Facebook page. (Btw, if you’re in South Africa and need help with stuff like this, talk to Kerry-Anne)

How you talk to your customers makes a huge difference to their experience, and if you don’t define a strategy for it, your community will define you and you’ll have no control over it. That’s not a good place to be.

3. Empower support representatives

I want to come back to this. As mentioned earlier, I recognize how difficult it is to walk the line between empowerment and total loss of control. But I think there are ways to test this out as a strategy without giving the whole house away.

Start with one specific department, call center, or representative. Allow them to make some decisions based on what they feel is right for the customer and the company, and see what happens. If they break some rules/policy, ask them why they did it, and follow up with the customer to see how they felt about the exchange.

This kind of empowerment isn’t a binary switch for the whole organization. Start small, test, and see if it might be possible to build a culture that encourages doing The Right Thing.

All’s Well That Ends Well

My story had a happy ending. But I know there are an enormous amount of customer support stories that don’t end that way. The rise of cheaper, more efficient channels for customer support can make experiences better not just for customers who engage in those channels, but for everyone. We can take the lessons from the asynchronous channels and apply them to the 1:1 interactions.

Be authentic, get in on the joke, and break some rules every once in a while. Because they did that, FNB has a new customer and Vodacom didn’t lose one. I think that makes it worth it.

In There Will Be No Files In The Cloud Fred Wilson argues that file-based cloud computing will become a thing of the past:

This is why I love Google Docs so much. I just create a document and email a link. Nobody downloads anything. There are no attachments in the email. Just a link. Just like the web, following links, getting [stuff] done. I love it.

That’s the future. I’m pretty sure of it.

He has a point, but I think it’s important to clarify what he means by “file”. Sorry to go all Wikipedia on you, but I promise ther’s a point on the other side. Wikipedia defines a computer file as follows:

A computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage. A file is durable in the sense that it remains available for programs to use after the current program has finished.

The point being that a file is a block of data that is accessible to the programs that need it. Based on that definition files are certainly not going away, because software will always need access to the data that makes it more than a pretty shell.

What is going away though is the need for users to care about files: where they’re located, what file extensions work with what, etc. The best example currently in the wild is probably Notational Velocity, a text editor for the Mac where you don’t need to worry about where your files are located. From the web sit’s description:

The same area is used both for creating notes and searching. I.e., in the process of entering the title for a new note, related notes appear below, letting users file information there if they choose. Likewise, if a search reveals nothing, one need simply press return to create a note with the appropriate title.

Those files still exist, you just don’t have to go into Finder and start a search from there. Ther’s no File | Open command because it’s not needed. The data is in the app, and you interact directly with it. So if that’s what Fred Wilson means by saying “That’s the future. I’m pretty sure of it.” then we agree. But if he means that w’ll lose the “computer file” as an entity, I disagree. Fred ends his piece with this:

So if you are working in the cloud storage space, I think you’ve got a bit of a conundrum. The reality of the market today is that people use files. You need to support that use case, enhance it, and make peopl’s lives easier. But over time, that use case will go away. And what people will want is a service that doesn’t have files as the atomic unit.

I don’t think it’s that big of a conundrum. Notational Velocity doesn’t care where I store my .txt files, but I happen to store them in Dropbox. It doesn’t mean I now have to think about my files and wonder if they’re ok over there. It just means that the app pulls its data from a folder in Dropbox.

So taking that example all the way to the future of the computer file, this could be a great selling point for cloud storage companies: we host your files/data so that your apps will work anywhere and on any computer. (Ok, that sentence might need some Marketing magic, but you catch the drift).

Even if manipulating files becomes a thing of the past, data isn’t going anywhere. BBEdit 10 is already going down this road - they are encouraging users to sync application support files with Dropbox so you can easily maintain multiple installs. My guess is that many apps will take this approach where they add seamless data syncing to their offering without having to go into the cloud storage business themselves.

We don’t have to kill files. We just have to build apps that allow users to stop thinking about them.

When I lived in Australia there was an ad for Pizza Hut that ran about 5 times a day for over a month. It featured Dougie the delivery guy — always on time, always courteous, always immaculately dressed. As he hands over the pizza and gets his money, he asks, “So… how’s about a tip?”

The customer thinks for a bit, starts closing the door, and then says: “Work hard; be good to your mother.”

No, you’re right, it’s not a very funny ad. Nevertheless the words have stuck in my head for over a decade now. Because I realise that in life, as in business, these might be the only two non-negotiable rules we all need to adhere to in order to be successful at what we do. Work hard. Be good to your mother.

Work hard

I recently made the mistake of using the hasthag #leadership in a tweet. I immediately got 5 auto-follows, and they all fit the same profile:

• Their bios all had some version of the term “leadership coach” in it.
• They all had more than 20,000 followers, and they followed almost exactly the same number of people themselves. (This is, of course, because they auto-follow everyone who mentions the word “leadership”, and automatically unfollows that person if they don’t follow back in about 3-4 days)
• They all tweet excessively, usually through API’s that generate random “inspirational” quotes every few minutes.

They basically automated their social media presence, and fine, that works for them. But that doesn’t inspire me. Mitch Joel says the following in a brilliant post called Wanting Something:

In the end, the majority of the answer is not about the talent or the ability to pull a thought together, it’s about the commitment. The blank screen does not care… it’s agnostic. If you write, good for you. If you don’t, good for you. That being said, if you keep at it… If you use these platforms to think deeply about what you’re about and why you think your industry is the way it is, then slowly over time you’ll find your groove and your talent will shine.

Sadly, most people want it fast and easy. That’s good news for those who are truly committed to it, because they’re the ones who actually get what they want.

Or, as Dave Duarte says in The Ultimate Social Media Strategy is Not Having One:

Ultimately, social media is not just a set of technologies to be mastered, it is a cultural reality to be engaged with. It promises to expose the corrupt and reveal the extraordinary, and if nothing else it is guaranteed to keep us on our toes. It is chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. So the best social media strategy, then, is not a strategy at all, it is to be purposeful, ethical, and transparent and let our communications and behaviours flow from that.

Those are the people I admire, and the ones I want to follow on Twitter and in life. The ones who show up every day, work hard to get better at what they do, and don’t look for shortcuts.

Be good to your mother

Well, not just your mother, but everyone around you. Be nice. There really is no excuse to be rude to people on Twitter or elsewhere on the web. But of course, you only have to spend 2 minutes reading comments on YouTube to give up the dream of a civil Internet forever.

In a great post on commenters online, Dmitri Fadeyev quotes the following Thomas More passage from Utopia:

Ther’s a rule in the Council that no resolution can be debated on the day that it’s first proposed. All discussion is postponed until the next well-attended meeting. Otherwise someon’s liable to say the first thing that comes into his head, and then start thinking up arguments to justify what he has said, instead of trying to decide what’s best for the community. That type of person is quite prepared to sacrifice the public to his own prestige, just because absurd as it may sound, h’s ashamed to admit that his first idea might have been wrong””when his first idea should have been to think before he spoke.

If only we could follow this rule before we reply/comment, the web would be such a nice neighborhood. Sure, it would probably be less interesting as well. And maybe I’m getting old, but I’d actually prefer nice at this point.

By the way, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize where it’s appropriate. It just means we should be respectful when we do it. As Mike Monteiro says in Giving Better Design Feedback:

Good feedback is not synonymous with positive feedback. If something isn’t working for you, tell the design team as early as possible. Will they be hurt? Not if they are professionals. A good designer will argue for their solution, and then will know when to let go.

By all means, be respectful, but don’t hold back in order to spare an individual’s feelings. Taking criticism is part of the job description. The sooner they know, the sooner they can explore other paths.

So make this your motto for a week or two, and seek out those who do the same. Who knows, maybe a nice Internet is out there after all.

My favorite sentence from John Siracusa’s epic review of Mac OS X Lion is this one:

Apple appears tired of dragging people kicking and screaming into the future; with Lion, it has simply decided to leave without us.

And nowhere in Lion is this more apparent than what appears to be everyone’s least favorite feature: inverted scrolling on the trackpad. As I’m sure you know, what this means is that scrolling now mirrors how it works on iOS devices: you essentially drag the content up and down the screen, as opposed to moving the viewport of the application like we’re used to.

I love this change - it took me about 5 minutes to get used to it. But I appear to be in the minority with this opinion. It sounds like the first thing most people do once Lion is installed is head over to Settings and change it back to the old way of scrolling. So I’d like to step back a little and use this change to talk about UI conventions and when it’s ok to change them. To do that, let’s first look at what we know about Apple’s direction for their operation systems.

Data Is The Future

We got our first glimpse into Apple’s future at WWDC, where John Gruber summed up the keynote as follows:

Googl’s frame is the browser window. Appl’s frame is the screen. That’s what w’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.

Robert X. Cringely touched on the implications of this in an article about Facebook where he says this:

The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the computer” to what’s next, which I believe is “the data is the computer.”

The point is this. Up to now the metaphor we’ve had about computers is that data = files, and we view this data through windows (with a small “w”). We then manipulate these windows around to get things done. With the introduction of iOS, Apple noticed that the metaphor is not only unnecessary, it’s also not the most effective way to do things.

Instead, Apple wants us to remove the current abstraction from our data (the file system and the “window”), and instead focus on and interact with the data itself. Our data no longer has to be served to us through a middleman - we can go straight to the source. In this context, inverting scrolling behavior makes total sense. Why would you move a window around to see data that sits somewhere behind it, when you can manipulate that data directly? If the data is the computer, scrolling down should move your words down the page, not up.

Inverted scrolling is only one piece of the puzzle. Full-screen mode, disappearing scroll bars, auto-save - these are all new features in Lion that build on this fundamental shift away from file-based computing to data-based computing[1].

But there is a problem with this shift, as we’ve seen from the outcry. People are used to doing things a certain way, and you can’t just go ahead and change that without asking permission. So how do you deal with a change like this?

Floppy Disks And UI Conventions

Another example of this kind of conundrum is the trusted old “save” icon - the floppy disk. My 2-year old daughter will probably never see a floppy disk in her entire life, yet she will learn that the floppy disk icon = save action. Some have tried to change this - recently David Friedman proposed a baseball home plate as replacement icon.

But getting every software developer (and user) in the world to adopt a new standard like this seems nearly impossible. So, we’re stuck with the floppy disk for now[2], even though it is an outdated metaphor, similar to how scrolling currently works.

So this is where we need to go back to the theory. In essence, reversing scrolling behavior lines up with one of the fundamental heuristics of UI design: there has to be a match between the system and the real world:

The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.

There is a tension here. Users are familiar with the current concept of scrolling. Yet, I’ve tried to argue above that the new way is actually more natural and logical. Apple is essentially caught in the middle of this UI heuristic, and they had to make a choice. So the question becomes, when is it ok to change what’s familiar to something that’s different but more natural and logical?

You’ve Got To Leave It Behind

The answer is that you make such a change when you believe it’s part of a much bigger trend in computing, and you’re willing to take the negative backlash because you know you’re doing it for the greater good. Ok, stop rolling your eyes. Yes, I’ve been accused of drinking the Apple Kool-Aid just a little bit too much lately. But hear me out, and re-read that Seracusa quote in the beginning of this post.

Apple is undeniable moving iOS and Mac OS X closer to each other. And in their future, direct manipulation of the data (primarily through touch) is at the center of a larger computing shift first introduced by the iPad. So they are making this tough call now, saying, “this is where we’re going, don’t get left behind.”

In short, I implore you to take John Gruber’s advice on this:

My number one Lion tip: No matter how wrong it feels, stick with the new trackpad scrolling direction. Give it a week.

Six months from now I think we’ll look back at Lion and iOS 5 as the operating systems that ushered us into the era of the data as the computer. And we’ll be better for it.

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1. Apps like Notational Velocity have been going this route for a while, where the file system is completely hidden. You don’t interact with it at all, unless you really want to.↩
2. At least until all developers follow Apple and Google Docs (to a certain extent) and replace save icons with auto-save options.↩

This morning I read an article about something that’s been on my mind for a while: Banner ads on media sites/blogs. In The Truth About Display Advertising, Mitch Joel writes:

Go to the website for your local newspaper. How many display ads, banners, buttons, text links, etc… do you see that are ads? Mine has over 15. That’s not in consecutive order… that’s all at once. It’s hard enough to get consumers to sit through four TV ads in a row, so what did you expect to have happen when you blast them with 15 ads on one page, all at once? Foregoing the aesthetics and the basic Marketing lesson that an ad will experience diminishing returns based on how cluttered the environment that it’s placed in is, does anyone really believe that this is the best way to advertise to consumers in the digital spaces?

No. I don’t think this is the best way to advertise to consumers. In fact, I don’t even think advertising is the best way to monetize media sites either. But are there viable alternatives? I think there are at least two business models that could work.

Distraction-Free Reading

One of my favorite services on the web is Readability. Users sign up for at a low monthly fee (minimum $5), and it then allows them to read articles in a beautiful distraction-free environment with all the ads stripped out. But here’s the best part: publishers also get something out of it:

70% of all Readability membership fees go directly to writers and publishers. Every time a subscriber uses Readability on your site, a portion of that subscriber’s fees are allocated to you. Whether in a web browser, iPhone, or just about any mobile or tablet device, Readability puts reading ”” and your content ”” at the center of the experience.

Here’s a 1-minute video that summarizes the experience:

You’ll also see that the Readability buttons are the only content sharing buttons I have on my blog apart from the Tweet button. There are many reasons for only choosing those two, but with Readability it’s simple - I think they have a fair business model where both reader and publisher win.

How would this work as a replacement for ads? Sites could integrate the “Read Later” functionality in some innovative ways. Sites that publish a lot of content could provide an ad-free home page with content snippets and “Read now/later” buttons to get to the full article. Users without a Readability (or an equivalent) account could view ad-supported full articles if they prefer. My hope is that content would win and readers would start to prefer paying small amounts of money for ad-free reading environments.

This is by no means a well-explored alternative for ad-supported sites, but it could be the beginning of something great that rewards both readers and publishers.

Business Class Subscriptions

Oliver Reichenstein recently posted another very interesting alternative to traditional paywalls on sites like the New York Times. He refers to it as Freemium for News, and the idea is that instead of paying for additional content like with traditional paywalls, you pay to get a better experience (just like paying for Business Class still gets you to the same destination, but in a much more comfortable way). Think of it as a Readability season ticket for a specific site. Here is one example he shows:

Now, think about how this might work for ad-supported sites. I would certainly pay $0.99/month to access a Business Class version of TechCrunch. Would you?

But Can Any Of This work?

Realistically, could either of these ideas provide viable alternatives to the traditional ad model for media sites and blogs? Probably not yet. But I don’t think we’re seeing enough discussion about alternatives, particularly those that focus on user experience as opposed to “monetizing traffic”. I also don’t think these ideas would ever replace ads completely (just being realistic), but at the very least it could provide an additional revenue stream that’s actually based on what users want, not on what advertisers want to push down our throats.

Let me end with something I probably should have begun with. I am no expert in the area of publishing, so it’s easy for me to back-seat-drive media sites out of their biggest source of revenue - after all, it’s not my car. I am in the lucky position where I don’t need to monetize this blog, so I don’t really have to make tough decisions about these things.

But I do hope that if I ever need to make money here, there would be a viable alternative to putting ads all over the page. I just don’t think an ad-supported User Experience Design blog is a good idea. So from the back seat I just ask those who make a living in the publishing industry: Can you please figure out how to do this so I don’t have to?

I like Google+. I like it because it’s clean and well-designed. I like it because it feels fresh - like moving into a new neighborhood after the one you came from got taken over by fake farms and endless profile picture changes. But most of all I like it because it’s quiet.

Since it’s in limited Beta it means it’s still mostly populated by early adopters. So I can interact with brands like Mashable and Smashing Magazine and feel like I’m part of the conversation - something you can’t really do on Twitter and Facebook with mass-brands like that.

This thing is going to be huge

But alas, this will probably not last. Sooner or later the floodgates will open, and before you know it the once pristine Google+ neighborhood will once again get overrun and fall prey to the meaningless graffiti that also transformed Facebook from social network to chaotic metaverse. Rocky Agrawal sums it perfectly in When Google Circles Collide:

[Google+] doesn’t do anything to solve the biggest problem with social networks today: increasing the signal to noise ratio.

So the masses will descend, and we’ll be back to hunting for pockets of information among the endless streams of data. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

Well, maybe it won’t be such a big deal

I could be wrong. The smart money might actually be on betting that Google+ never even gets enough adoption to become the loud mess that Facebook is today. The reason for that lies in an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago, A Brief History Of The Corporation:

Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

What does this mean? Google+ time has to be stolen from Facebook time. And good luck with that, Google. It’s all because we have this stupid thing called limited time:

Each new “well” of attention runs out sooner. Every human mind has been mined to capacity using attention-oil drilling technologies. To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources.

So that’s the real problem for Google. Theirs can’t be an acquisition strategy, because most people who are on a social network are already on Facebook. So it will have to be a migration strategy. As Dare Obasanjo put it:

For Google+ to be successful it means people will need to find enough utility in the site that it takes away from their usage of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps even replaces one of these sites in their daily routine. So far it isn’t clear why any regular person would do this.

Google+ wants Circles to be the thing that convinces users to switch. They’re betting that enough users will want to share different things with different groups of people that they’re willing to give up their networks and start a new one. I just don’t think that’s a strong enough argument. Coming back to Agrawal’s point: the real problem is how to get better signal out of the noise of social networks. That’s a need that no one has filled yet.

There’s a parallel to the tablet market here. Trying to compete with the iPad is absolutely futile - you will lose. Instead, HP has a very smart strategy with their TouchPad:

HP acknowledged Appl’s dominance in the tablet market, but said Apple wasn’t its target with the TouchPad.

“We think ther’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in it’s infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow.”

They looked for a gap in the market, and they’re working actively to fill it. So it’s certainly not impossible that enough people migrate to Google+ for Metcalfe’s Law to kick in and we start to see some real network utility. But it’s going to be a tough sell unless they find that real gap in the market.

So which one is it?

Which way do I want it go? I’m on the fence. For now I’m enjoying the peace and quiet in the new neighborhood. But that can also get boring pretty quickly. So I want my cake and eat it too. I want Google+ to scale and at the same time figure out how to solve the signal to noise problem in social media. Is that too much to ask?

In this post I argue that we need to communicate the differences between the science and art of Visual Design better to help change the common perception by stakeholders and clients that user experience is purely subjective.

One of the most difficult aspects of visual design is finding the right science:art ratio to accomplish user goals. I’ve always subscribed to what Tim van Damme calls the mathematics of design. You start with the science:

If art is about talking and expressing yourself, interface design is about listening and disappearing into the background. You listen to the content and its context, and take it from there, one step at a time. Don’t worry about the looks, just start with the variables. 1 + 1 + 1 + ”¦ Baby steps, over and over again until what you have on your screen feels right.

And then you mix in art where appropriate:

But sometimes, even 1 + 1 is too much to handle, and you need to clear your head. This is where art comes into play, in the broadest meaning of the word: Paintings, illustrations, architecture, human beings, even nature is art. They won’t help you decide whether you should draw a 1 or 1.5 pixel highlight, but allow you to take a step back and just decide on what’s more suitable or pick one and move on.

Of course, this is not a serial process. Great designers are able to design within that delicate balance between science and art, and find the right ratio as they’re doing it. And even though it’s not easy, I do feel that most designers inherently get this - that visual design is science and art combined in different levels based on the needs of the user and the application.

What’s even harder is explaining this to stakeholders and clients in a convincing way. Over the past week I’ve seen so many comments about how “UX is subjective” and “standards always change” that it got me thinking about a possible solution to this problem. I haven’t figured it out, but I’d like to write down some initial thoughts for discussion.

The problem with Visual Design

I think as a UX community we’ve done a good job of splitting out the different elements of UX Design. Stakeholders and clients are slowly starting to understand the difference between Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Interaction Design, etc. And most people also now understand that those functions are not just gut feel or whatever is the trend of the day. We’ve done a decent job of showing the evidence behind the decisions we make - thanks in large part to the results of user experience research methods like ethnography and usability studies.

But Visual Design is the odd one out in this equation. It walks the line between science and art so tightly that most stakeholders and clients only see the art part. So they look at a design, make a gut call, and think that it’s all just whatever style the designer fancied on that particular day. Sure, some of it is our own fault, and many designs don’t have enough science at all. As Zeldman pointed out:

When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name ”” at least, in some circles. Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and hardcore usability where most of the web must be built.

We have to find a better way forward.

Breaking down the elements of Visual Design

So how do we fix this? One way is to provide a much clearer distinction between the different aspects of visual design. I’m not saying we should split the job title into two functions, I’m saying we should be more explicit about the goals and outcomes of visual design. And it needs to be simple, so it can’t be too detailed. I’m not 100% sure how to do that yet, but here is one suggestion:

• Hierarchy Design could refer to decisions made during the design process that sets the appropriate visual hierarchy based on the scientific principles of visual perception (such as contrast, grouping, balance, symmetry, etc.). See Designing for the Mind as an example.
• Aesthetic Design could refer to decisions made during the design process to help the design fit the brand promise and elicit an appropriate emotional response (such as choice of color, typography, button styling, etc.). See In Defense of Eye Candy for more.

Now, as I already mentioned, there is a lot of overlap between these activities, and you can’t have one kind of visual design without the other. But there has to be a way for us to talk to our stakeholders and clients about the visual layer of design that is not based on style preference but on “hardcore usability” as Zeldman puts it.

As we continue to grow and define the different elements of user experience I believe that Visual Design has the most baggage to overcome simply because of the history of web design and its initial focus on what’s pretty vs. what works. What works is not subjective, and we need to communicate that effectively to our stakeholders and clients. It’s not their fault for not “getting it”, it’s our fault for not explaining it properly. Let’s change that.