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Everything doesn’t need to be automated

In Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage Derek Sivers makes the case that automation isn’t always the best option:

When everyone else is trying to automate everything, using a little human intervention can be a competitive advantage. The problem is when business owners see it as a cost, instead of an opportunity. Trying to minimize costs, instead of maximize income, quality, loyalty, happiness, connection, and all those other wonderful things that come from real human attention.

You can buy a fancy phone routing system, so people have to listen to 9 options, choose option 5, then listen to 6 more options, or you can hire a charming person to pick up the phone on the first ring, and make a great impression. Which one do you think will win you new fans? […]

I know what you’re thinking — how does this scale? Derek explains that in the post as well…

What the demise of online services means for the web

Ryan Holiday’s Our Regressive Web is the best thing I’ve read so far about the importance of services like Google Reader and Delicious. He starts off with this statement:

The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.

Ryan explains how RSS helps to reduce noise and clutter, and he provides a theory for why it never really took off beyond geek circles:

In an ad-impression and pageview-driven business, a service that allows users to opt out of the noise and get content delivered directly to them is dangerous.

Maybe I’m just suffering from confirmation bias because I’m still pretty bitter about Google Reader’s shutdown, but this is a really good analysis. Well worth reading the whole thing.

Combining Big Data with Small Data for a more complete picture

Kate Crawford wrote a very good critique of Big Data methods in The Hidden Biases in Big Data:

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

Kate uses some interesting examples from Hurrican Sandy and the City of Boston to make her argument, and ends with the conclusion that is a common plea among qualitative researchers:

We know that data insights can be found at multiple levels of granularity, and by combining methods such as ethnography with analytics, or conducting semi-structured interviews paired with information retrieval techniques, we can add depth to the data we collect. We get a much richer sense of the world when we ask people the why and the how not just the “how many”.

[Sponsor] Shopster: a new groceries list app

Thanks to Shopster for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week — I’ve been looking for something like this for a while!

Shopster is a new kind of groceries list app that learns what you purchase and where, so it can remind you later on.

Whenever you check an item as purchased, Shopster learns the location where you got it. The next time you look for the same thing, a geofenced alarm will be triggered when you are near the location.

Features:
– Autolearning of locations when checking items as purchased.
– Geofenced reminders for your products, based on your prior buying history.
– In-place editing table, for quick corrections and editions.
– Unique ruler to quickly enter the number of items you need to buy.
– Smart autocomplete, to assist you entering frequently purchased products, based on your previous history.
– Reorder items with a simple tap and hold.

Check out Shopster on the AppStore, it’s only $0.99

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Giving users a way out of a responsive design

Jordan Moore wrote a very level-headed post about giving users the ability to switch off the breakpoints of a responsive design to show the “desktop” site1 instead. From Claustrophobia:

This is my overriding concern — there’s no way out. There’s no way out of a bad design, an incompatible plugin, a browser bug, missing content, the endless list of potential issues someone could potentially encounter with a website whether it is responsive or not.

That’s an excellent point, and providing a “way out” echoes one of Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design, written in 1995:

User control and freedom. Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.

Jordan argues that giving users that control and freedom on a responsive site might feel like a cop-out, but it could be necessary:

The last thing I want is to lead users into a mass exodus from a responsive design I have put so much thought and effort into. I just think if it helps the odd user out in doing something they happen to find more comfortable in a pinch and zoom environment for whatever reason then we should probably do it rather than prevent them from doing it.

That’s a very sane, user-centered approach. It’s also worth noting that if the mass exodus does occur, it’s a clear sign that something is wrong with the responsive site. That’s valuable data.

But it all comes down to execution, of course. Users shouldn’t be asked to choose between entering the building or going straight for the emergency exit the minute they arrive at the site. It’s ok to make the exit visible, but forcing a deliberate, upfront choice between the mobile/responsive site and the desktop site puts an unnecessary burden on users.

In short, this kind of placement is ok (although the “Full Site” language is problematic):

OK

This is not ok:

Not ok


  1. Whatever that means these days… 

Accuracy vs. precision in the context of product decisions

Kenton Kivestu defines the difference between accuracy and precision, and then discusses what it means in the context of product decisions:

There is a significant opportunity cost in consistently prioritizing precision over accuracy. Accuracy is about launching what the market needs, precision is about optimizing and delivering relentlessly on it. Unless you’ve nailed the former, material effort on the latter is going to be wasted because you’re optimizing something too far from the true north (the accurate goal) you should be pursuing.

This is an important point. Any call for data-driven design (in the quantitative, 41 shades of blue sense of the word) needs to come with a disclaimer that it’s an extremely useful approach to get closer to the middle of a target (precision), but it’s useless if you’re shooting at the wrong thing (accuracy).

(link via @ixhd)

Introducing two Flipboard magazines on UX and technology

Flipboard 2.0 was just released for iOS, and with it came a feature called Flipboard Magazines. From the blog post announcing the new version:

For the first time, you can collect and save articles, photos, audio and video by organizing them into beautiful magazines. These can be private, or if you want to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, you can make them public and share them on Flipboard and beyond. Now everyone can be a reader and an editor.

I’ve been playing around with this feature a bit, and I like it so far. It’s definitely an early release, so there are a few things missing. For example, you can’t edit the title of an article you’re adding to a Magazine, and you also can’t move articles around to be in a different order. But I’m sure those features will come. For now, it’s a great way to organize1 content — and the timing is particularly good with the impending demise of Google Reader.

I’ve created two magazines so far, which you’re welcome to follow on Flipboard. UX Design is all about design and related disciplines. Technology and us desperately needs a less cheesy name, but it’s a collection of articles about the various ways technology impacts our lives.

Flipboard magazine

Enjoy!


  1. We’re all so desperately trying to avoid using the word “curate” since Matt and Marco spoke out about it, but that’s really what this is. Anyway, I’ll stick with “organize” so as not to offend anyone’s Internet sensibilities. 

Gadgets that adapt to our skill level

In The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill Philip Battin applies some existing ideas around progressive disclosure and Flow to tech gadgets:

User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account. But they could. Here, I present a model for how designers can use the fundamentals of video games and the psychological principles of flow to design enhanced user experiences.

Philip proceeds with an example of how such a model could work for a Samsung E8005 SmartTV. We’ve applied these principles in traditional software design for a long time, but it’s interesting to think about how it could be used to improve the design of physical gadgets.

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