I really enjoyed Sarah Doody’s article in UX Magazine called The Flâneur Approach to User Experience Design. Flâneur is a French word that means “to stroll.” Sarah explains:

The flâneur’s mind is always in a state of observation. He or she connects the dots through each experience and encounter that comes his or her way. The flâneur is in constant awe of his surroundings. In the article “In Search Of Serendipity” for The Economist’s Intelligent Life Magazine, Ian Leslie writes that a flâneur is someone who “wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map.”

In the world of product design and start ups, there’s growing pressure to focus prematurely on the solution, to connect the dots backward instead of forward, to design the system before you’ve addressed the story. But, as user experience designers, we know that our greatest purpose is to develop the most intimate understanding of the people we design for and the problems they’re facing. To do this, we must be flâneurs.

It’s really worth reading the whole article to see more of Sarah’s conclusions and advice.

Derek Powazek pulls apart the saying “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” in his post I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet. His conclusion:

We can and should support the companies we love with our money. Companies can and should have balanced streams of income so that they’re not solely dependent on just one. We all should consider the business models of the companies we trust with our data.

But we should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

This is, of course, in response to the Instagram TOS debacle, which resulted in an update from Instagram to clarify their terms in a post with the “please stop shouting at us!” title Thank you, and we’re listening. But as Faruk Ateş points out in What Instagram did wrong:

Bad language is merely a symptom of the bigger mistake they made. Their failure lies in not acknowledging—or understanding—the change in expectations that took place amongst their users when they sold themselves to Facebook for a billion dollars. […]

Once you sell to a frequently-criticized juggernaut like Facebook, users’ expectations change from supportive to skeptic, and, especially because of Facebook’s long history of privacy-related mishaps, you may very well lose all benefit of the doubt amongst some of your users.

Oh, how many PR disasters could be avoided if companies would learn to respect their users, and be more in touch with their needs and goals…

Amber Naslund’s How Twitter Works Today… And How I’m Using It Now got me all riled up about something I didn’t even realise bothered me as much as it does. This is the part that really got to me:

Let me explain this very clearly: a Twitter follow is not a validation of your worth as a human, nor is it a stamp of approval from someone online that you’re awesome or not. If you even slightly see it that way, you might need to reset some priorities.

Twitter is simply a tool, a mechanism. Everyone uses it differently, and heavy users like me need to rejig the system once in a while so it continues to work and stay manageable. In short, the system of follows and lists and DM access and what is useful to me to pay attention to is not about you. In this case, it’s about me and what makes Twitter valuable for me personally.

You get to say the same thing about your experience, and you get to shape it according to your own needs. Hell, unfollow me and put me on a list (or don’t) if you want. Your Twitter is yours to shape, and you don’t owe me anything either. I’d wager that a good portion of the people I’m most interested in at a professional level don’t follow me back. And who cares?

I’ll be honest — the decision to follow someone on Twitter makes me really nervous. It feels like a huge commitment. Because if I realise a few days down the line that I’m not as interested in someone’s stream as I thought I would be, I find it very difficult to unfollow them — people take this stuff very personally. So when I find someone I might want to follow, I usually put them on a list first for a few weeks, and if I find myself clicking on a few of the links they tweet, I’ll go ahead and follow.

But it’s not a foolproof system, and every time I realise I actually don’t want to see this person’s tweets in my main timeline I feel trapped. I know I shouldn’t feel bad about unfollowing, but I do. The point Amber makes is so true, and bears repeating: “a Twitter follow is not a validation of your worth as a human, nor is it a stamp of approval from someone online that you’re awesome or not.”

The fact is that I use Twitter as a business tool, not so much as a way to communicate with friends. That means that I have very strict criteria for the kind of stuff I want to see in my timeline. I don’t want to see Foursquare checkins, I don’t want to see constant updates about a topic not related to my work, and I don’t want to see only tweets about a person’s product/app. And I’m sorry if that seems selfish, but to paraphrase what Amber says in her post: I get to choose what makes Twitter valuable for me, just like you get to do the same with your stream.

I like Chris Bowler’s distinction between the two main ways to use Twitter in his post The Purpose Varies:

One fact that I do my best to keep in mind is this: there are two very different ways to use Twitter. Option A is as a social tool to interact and joke around with others, to connect. Option B is to use it as a source of sharing information, usually in the form of links to content or pithy blurbs of opinion.

Some people like the service for one, but not the other. Some people manage to strike a lovely, harmonious balance between the two. The catch is that — in my opinion — we mostly want to follow folks who use the service in the same way we do.

I’m an Option B guy myself. I still love having conversations with people who use it more in the Option A way, but I’m not going to follow them. And one more time, with feeling, “a Twitter follow is not a validation of your worth as a human, nor is it a stamp of approval from someone online that you’re awesome or not.”

So let’s agree that we’re allowed to be selfish about how we use Twitter. I’ve learned from experience that I go insane with information overload if I follow more than 200 people, so I’m not going to break through that barrier. And you get to make your own rules, and follow and unfollow whoever you want. That is still, after all these years, the simple beauty of Twitter’s follower model.

So hey, let’s be selfish, and find the measure of our self-worth somewhere else.

Here’s an important reminder that tools don’t matter as much as we think they do. What matters is how the tools enable people to accomplish their goals. From Chana Joffe-Walt’s Why Legos Are So Expensive — And So Popular (my emphasis added):

But Lego did find a successful way to do something Mega Bloks could not copy: It bought the exclusive rights to Star Wars. If you want to build a Death Star out of plastic blocks, Lego is now your only option.

The Star Wars blocks were wildly successful. So Lego kept going — it licensed Indiana Jones, Winnie the Pooh, Toy Story and Harry Potter.

Sales of these products have been huge for Lego. More important, the experience has taught the company that what kids wanted to do with the blocks was tell stories. Lego makes or licenses the stories they want to tell.

No one cares about your product as much as you do. But they do care about their stories. And understanding that can help you make better products.

Speaking of Ryan Singer, I recently re-read his answer on the Quora startup thread Should I focus on a good user experience, or push something out quickly? He makes a really good argument for investing in design very early in the product development process:

Design is a path-dependent process. That means the early moves constrain the later moves. On the very first iteration the design possibilities are wide open. The designer defines some screens and workflows and then the programmer builds those. On the next iteration, it’s not wide open anymore. The new design has to fit into the existing design, and the new code needs to fit into the existing code. Old code can be changed, but you don’t want to scrap everything. There is a pressure to keep moving with what is already there.

Our early design decisions are like bets whose outcome we will have to live with iteration after iteration. Since that’s the case, there is a strong incentive to be sure about our early bets. In other words, we want to reduce uncertainty on the first iterations.

This is why variation, not just iteration, is so important during the early phases of a product.

I know I’m late to the party, but I finally saw Looper last night. It is, of course, as brilliant as everyone says it is. After watching the movie I went back to all my Instapaper’d articles about it, and my favorite so far is an interview with the director called Noir to near-future: ‘Looper’ director Rian Johnson talks sci-fi, Twitter, and the fate of film. This answer, in particular, jumped out at me (my emphasis added):

The minute you say “science fiction,” the question of world creation comes up. Was that something you were thinking about when you were writing?

No, that was the production designer. When I was writing I was really just disciplining myself to focus on getting the narrative as tight as possible. To tighten the screws on everything, and to make sure that it ticked and that it ran from start to finish and that it had a solid spine.

And so I was focused on that and I wasn’t even thinking about the world-building elements at all. Which I think was good because it meant the designers and I just worked together. Every design decision, it wasn’t preconceived, it came out of the needs of the story. And so making the world seem like such a desperate place was a way of accentuating that feeling of “you better hold on to your slice of the pie, or else it’s destitution,” you know?

I love that approach, and I think we need more of it in web design as well. Start with the story — the core functionality of the product. Then look at that functionality, and only add the “production value” (styling) that will help tell that story. Nothing more.

It reminds me of a point Ryan Singer makes in his article UI and Capability. In the excerpt below, think of story as “capability”, and production design as “style”:

Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not. They are more objective. That person standing at the edge of the chasm cares more about accomplishing their task than the details of the decor.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that, just as we’ll forgive a movie’s shoddy special effects if the story is great, users will forgive a style they don’t love if a product helps them to accomplish a goal effectively.

Callum J Hackett gives some good advice in Reading the Unexpected:

This is why I prefer to follow people rather than topics. I’m able to get a good sense of their character and interests, and while I know what kind of wonderful links and commentary to expect 90% of the time — all part of the initial attraction — I also look forward to that remaining 10% which I’d never have predicted or sought out myself, but which I still enjoy reading.

We need that kind of spontaneous discovery. We need to be exposed to the unfamiliar and the unexpected, even if it’s only truly interesting one time out of a hundred. If all our interesting content is redirected from individuals to subject-specific sources, we will inevitably place subtle, unnoticed restrictions on the things that we see, and we will continue to reinforce our prejudiced ideas and interests without thinking.

This ties in well with a very interesting discussion between Susan Greenfield, Maria Popova, and Evgeny Morozov with the New York Times, weirdly titled Are We Becoming Cyborgs? Here’s Maria Popova:

The Web by and large is really well designed to help people find more of what they already know they’re looking for, and really poorly designed to help us discover that which we don’t yet know will interest us and hopefully even change the way we understand the world. […]

When you think about so-called social curation — algorithms that recommend what to read based on what your friends are reading — there’s an obvious danger. Eli Pariser called it “The Filter Bubble” of information, and it’s not really broadening your horizons.

I think the role of whatever we want to call these people, information filters or curators or editors or something else, is to broaden the horizons of the human mind. The algorithmic Web can’t do that, because an algorithm can only work with existing data. It can only tell you what you might like, based on what you have liked.

At first glance, Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost might come across as typical nostalgia for times gone by. But he makes some really good points about the changes we’ve seen over the past few years that have closed down the web in significant ways. I especially like this conclusion:

I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.

Let’s briefly look at the two fallacies Anil points out.

The fallacy that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth

I think designers and product people were so traumatised by the aesthetic crimes committed on MySpace pages by giving too much flexibility and control to users that the pendulum has swung way back into the opposite direction. One of the things that are cited as a core component to Facebook’s early mass market success is the complete lack of flexibility when it comes to the design of “your page.” By taking that choice away Facebook not only introduced consistency, but by making everyone’s pages look the same they also took the burden away from users to spend countless hours making their pages unique just to impress their friends. Instead, they could focus on the content.

But times they are a-changin’. There is a renewed expectation for customisation (Android!) and personalisation (Zite, Flipboard, Prismatic). Read Frank Chimero’s The Anthologists, where he talks about users looking for “new ways to select, sequence, recontextualize, and publish the content they consume.” The challenge for designers now is not how to hide complexity, but how to work through complexity and arrive at what Karen McGrane calls “appropriate visibility” in her essay for The Manual called Ear Trumpets and Bionic Superpowers:

Designs that make technology completely seamless to the user often deserve admiration. But can we balance our desire for intuitiveness with a wider recognition that some tasks are complex, some interactions must be learned, and sometimes the goal isn’t invisible technology but appropriate visibility?

We have to figure out how to provide flexibility and control without hurting user experience. And like Fred Wilson says, “Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to do it.”

The fallacy that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks

On this one I agree with Anil unreservedly. The best analogy I can think of to illustrate the problem is to look at online publications’ link policies. Some publications make a point of linking to source articles prominently and early on in any piece they’re writing, while others hide the source link (if it’s there at all) at the bottom of the article in the hopes that no one will see they’re not actually the ones who wrote it. Matthew Panzarino explains the difference this way in Stop Not Linking:

If you truly believe that what you’re writing is worthwhile then you’ll trust that your readers will come back to you the next time you have something to share. So please, start sharing more liberally and encouraging your readers to view the source materials if they feel that they want to, without making them dig for them.

They will appreciate it and, if you’re honest and passionate, they will still happily read what you have to say. You are not diminished by the fact that other people have original thoughts as well.

The same goes for social media sites, ecommerce sites, everything. If you are confident in the value you provide to users, you don’t have to try to control them and lock them in with fancy tricks. You’ll just provide the value and know that if you meet a real need, those people will be back, and they will be the most loyal customers in the world because you respect their freedom.

And if they don’t come back, you’ll learn from it and tweak your offering until they do. By doing things the long, hard, stupid way you’ll sacrifice short-term returns for a long-term sustainable business with happy customers. And I think we can all agree that’s something worth pursuing.