William Kremer’s Why did men stop wearing high heels? is a fascinating look at history, gender inequality, and the peculiarities of seeking status. This part stuck with me:

In the muddy, rutted streets of 17th Century Europe, these new shoes had no utility value whatsoever — but that was the point.

“One of the best ways that status can be conveyed is through impracticality,” says [Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto], adding that the upper classes have always used impractical, uncomfortable and luxurious clothing to announce their privileged status.

“They aren’t in the fields working and they don’t have to walk far.”

So, people wore high heals because impractical clothes showed off one’s status. This seems very similar to how expensive sports cars are viewed in our current society. They’re highly impractical if you want to take anything with you where you’re going (or if you have kids), but having one certainly shows that you have a lot of money.

This got me thinking about technology products and their link to status. I remember that before the iPhone came out, during meetings people used to leave their cell phones in their pockets (well, on their belt clips…). Then, once the iPhone came along, pulling out your phone and placing it face up on the table became a status symbol. Suddenly the phone wasn’t meant to be hidden, but meant to be shown off. The iPhone is designed to be seen.

Companies like Nike tap into this sense of status by making the Fuelband extremely wearable. It’s not something you hide away, like the Fitbit. It’s something that’s meant to be shown off. From Dan Hon’s excellent article Fitness by design:

A few hours up the US west coast though, lies a company built upon not just sport performance, but also personal expression, fashion and style. Nike’s FuelBand is worn around your wrist. It looks and feels better, with its black rubber and distinctive pinpricked colour display inviting discussion. […] Though it is a silent device that constantly logs your activity, it is not out of sight — it is permanently visible, a wearable statement. You’re not given the choice of hiding it.

Of course, most technology products are very different from high heels in that they’re actually useful. So I guess some things have changed since the 1600s. Where impracticality used to be a sign of status, with technology we now associate that status with good design — a mix of utility, usability, and aesthetics.

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I’ve been watching the responses to iOS 7 with great interest. I’m most surprised (even though I shouldn’t be) by the extremely forceful and visceral negative reactions to the visual direction of the new OS. Most tweets about about it sound something like this:

First reaction: everything about iOS 7 feels… wrong.The typeface is hard to read, controls are totally inconsistent, and it’s flatly ugly.

— dustin curtis (@dcurtis) June 11, 2013

First, please let’s remember to give it five minutes before dismissing an entire operating system. iOS is an interface, not art. You can’t judge it without using it. You might think it’s ugly, and that’s fine. But you can’t go around quoting Steve Jobs’s “Design is how it works, not what it looks like” quote to everyone, and then get all worked up when Apple uses some colors and typography that you don’t like. If you truly believe that design is how it works, then you have to use iOS 7 to determine whether or not it works.

Also, why is it ok for startups to launch something unpolished, but when Apple redesigns their entire mobile operating system everything has to be perfect? Cap Watkins put it well in iOS 7. Unpolished By Design.:

And now we’re complaining that this completely revamped, new, version one interface isn’t perfect. Isn’t polished. Isn’t honed. We asked for a revolution and were delivered one which, all complexities considered, amounts to more than any one of our best first launches.

And then there are those who are calling this a copy of Windows Phone 8, and/or lamenting the fact that the design is flat as a board. No, it’s not. The icons might be flat, but as a design system, as John Gruber notes:

There is a profound reduction in the use of faux-3D visual effects and textures, but iOS 7 is anything but flat. It is three dimensional not just visually but logically. […] There’s a sense of place, depth, and spatiality in iOS 7 that makes it feel like hardware. A real thing, not pixels rendered on glass.

Finally, I agree with Jim Dalrymple’s assessment in Apple’s confidence:

One thing that became very clear to me early on in today’s keynote is that Apple was having fun again. They were really enjoying themselves.

And that’s a good thing. They’re finding their feet in the post-Jobs environment. So instead of tearing our clothes in despair, let’s celebrate the fact that Apple is moving forward with iOS, and that this new OS is a great new baseline for future improvements. Let’s give it five minutes.

Baruch Sachs makes some good points in Part 1 of a series called Practicing Great UX Consulting:

You are not there to educate people. You are there to advise your client and guide the creation of an amazing user experience. You are the expert; that’s why they brought you in. Collaboration and openness are key here. People need to feel invested, not put upon.

I agree that collaboration is key — the problem comes when collaboration gets confused with consensus. Consensus cultures often produce watered down, unexciting products. Products where endless rounds of give-and-take have worn down the original idea to a shadow of what it once was. Consensus cultures also wear down the teams working on the product, because no one really gets what they want, they just get some of it.

Collaboration is different. In collaboration cultures people understand that even though everyone gets a voice, not everyone gets to decide. People are able to voice their opinions, argue passionately for how they believe things should be done, and try to negotiate compromises. But it certainly doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with every decision. And that’s why the client/agency trust relationship is so crucial.

One great collaboration technique that works well with clients is called Design Studio. Jared Spool has a great write-up of how to conduct a Design Studio worskhop, and it’s also worth reading Paul Boag’s thoughts in Never wireframe alone.

In Small Ads Dushko Petrovich turns our attention away from Facebook and Google to take a philosophical journey through those small, weird, completely non-targeted block-ads that appear in magazines:

At first you think these little rectangles are amusing because they offer monogrammed sweaters and self-publishing opportunities—things that are undoubtedly funny, in a sad, Skymall sort of way. But sometimes the funny sadness goes deeper than that, like the sadness of “unique diamond fish jewelry” for $15,000. And then sometimes you are plunged so deep into these ads, you wish there was a German word, or school of social thought, that could sufficiently describe the experience.

There might not be a German word for the experience, but Dushko’s troubled thoughts on the matter is entertainment enough.

Luke Wroblewski explains why those overlay introductory “tour” screens you often see in apps is such a bad idea in Designing for real world mobile use:

These issues stem from the fact that introductory tours show up before you ever get a chance to use an application. Most people are eager to jump right in and as a result, they skip reading the manual. The ones that do read haven’t seen the interface yet so they don’t have any sense of where and how the tips they’re learning will apply.

I completely agree, and have written about this before in Best practices for user onboarding on mobile touchscreen applications, where I give three guidelines for app onboarding:

• Make sure that users have familiarized themselves enough with your app to have the correct mental model before you start teaching them how to use it.
• Show users only the information they need to take the immediate next step(s) for using the application.
• Make sure users have a clear link between the information you give them and how to access/use that information in their everyday use of the app.

Rick Robinson wrote a really interesting article on the huge differences in life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest areas of a city, and how the move to Smart Cities is trying to combat that. From Death, life, and place in great digital cities:

At the heart of the Smarter Cities movement is the belief that the use of engineering and IT technologies, including social media and information marketplaces, can create more efficient and resilient city systems. Might that idea offer a way to address the challenges of supporting wealth creation in cities at a sustainable rate of resource usage; and of providing city services to enable wellbeing, social mobility and economic growth at a reduced level of cost?

Rick goes on to explain some counter-intuitive dangers of this approach, and concludes:

We are opening Pandora’s box. These tremendously powerful technologies could indeed create more efficient, resilient city systems. But unless they are applied with real care, they could exacerbate our challenges. If they act simply to speed up transactions and the consumption of resources in city systems, then they will add to the damage that has already been done to urban environments, and that is one of the causes of the social inequality and differences in life expectancy that cities are seeking to address.

It’s a long, dense article, but it provides a much-needed realistic view of the power of technology to transform cities and the people who live there. The article also taught me this really good principle of urbanism:

Consider urban life before urban space; consider urban space before buildings.

That immediately jumped out at me as a good principle in software development as well: Consider user needs before applications; consider applications before individual pages.

On the topic of Smart Cities, also see Smart cities and smart citizens, a very interesting write-up about this year’s FutureEverything summit. It makes a similar point about the importance of life over buildings:

Perhaps part of the problem in current dialogues around smart cities is the failure to understand what a city actually is. The smart city vision has tended to focus on buildings and infrastructure or traffic management and how technology can increase efficiency. Catherine Mulligan of Imperial College London says the reverential tones with which some smart-city speculators talk about technology is worrying: “They say these systems and computers can now make better decisions than human beings. But if you take the human beings out, it’s just a bunch of buildings talking to each other… and that’s not a city. The city is what it is because of the people.”

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