I’m a big fan of Clive Thompson’s writing, and in The Hidden Truth of Counterintuition he explores the increased popularity of what he calls “a seemingly unending series of tomes claiming to upend everything we believe about talent (Talent Is Overrated), decisionmaking (The Upside of Irrationality), motivation (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us), personality (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement), and dozens of other subjects.” He ultimately believes that the popularity of these books is a good thing:

Perhaps our willingness to have our basic beliefs overturned is a sign of intellectual health. This mindset is, after all, key to the scientific method. Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein were all purveyors of a “hidden side” to reality, right? (The Principia could have been subtitled Why Everything You Know About Gravity Is Wrong.) Good scientists understand that there’s a good chance today’s knowledge will eventually be proven wrong. And the really good scientists welcome that prospect — they’re thrilled by it.

Even though I usually agree with Clive, In this particular case I’m going to side with Callum J Hackett’s counterargument entitled The Popularity of Counterintuition:

First, it’s important to distinguish between two conceptions of “skepticism” that are often conflated. There is ‘Skepticism’ as a mode of rational inquiry — the kind that relies on logic, evidence, and varieties of scientific consensus — and then there is ‘skepticism’, almost synonymous with ‘cynicism’, that is a mere compulsion to question everything, no matter what logic and evidence underpins it. This is an undiscerning, shotgun skepticism — it questions sound scientific knowledge as much as bad ideas, and is perhaps the cause of problems like climate-change denial in reasonably well-educated people.

If the readers Thompson is talking about have any kind of skepticism, it’s only cynical skepticism — it’s not driven by the urge to reveal the truth without bias, it’s driven by that same urge which craves the unmasking of conspiracies wherever they can conceivably exist.

I recommend both articles, if for no other reason than to witness how it’s possible to disagree respectfully with another human being on the Internet.

Joshua Gross’s post Nothing is Quite What it Seems struck quite a nerve for me:

In this world of constant communication, it’s easy to feel as though everyone else’s life is amazing, while you’re still sitting there eating cereal in your underwear.

Of your 2,000 Facebook friends and 300 people you follow on Twitter, it’s inevitable that some small percentage are doing something interesting at any given moment.

Looking at it the other way around, though, the vast majority of people are sitting around wondering why they seem boring, just like you.

As a father to a 3-year old, I feel particularly boring these days as the exotic photos fly by on Instagram. Joshua’s post reminds me of Sherry Turkle’s phrase “Who will hold a brief for the real?”, which I referenced in this post.

I’ve had Esther Dyson’s article Technology’s Mental Frontier on my mind for a few days now. She raises some great points about education and technological advancement:

Indeed, perhaps the biggest culture/value challenge of all is short-term thinking. Around the entire planet, we are approaching some kind of singularity, with the market pandering to our fundamental short-term natures by offering us instant gratification and long-term destruction.

Education does the opposite. It enables us to improve our lot by building things — using first fire and wood, and now computers and machines — to overcome our physical limitations and to create technology to extend and enhance our lives. Will technology and learning prevail, or will our susceptible, long-evolved weaknesses overcome us?

I think she raises a question that is more important than we might think. One of the things I worry about is that the instant gratification Esther talks about is making us less likely to be curious about increasingly difficult problems. I’m not arguing that Google is making us stupid. Instead I’m arguing that the ability to get answers to almost any question we can dream up has consequences. By filling our brains with easy answers we become less likely to go after those wicked problems — problems that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize”.

To combat this issue we need to cultivate curiosity in our schools and workplaces. Cap Watkins recently mentioned how curiosity is one of his hiring requirements:

If you’re intensely curious, I tend to worry less about other skills. Over and over I watch great designers acquire new skills and push the boundaries of what can be done through sheer curiosity and force of will. Curiosity forces us to stay up all night teaching ourselves a new Photoshop technique. It wakes us up in the middle of the night because it can’t let go of the interaction problem we haven’t nailed yet. I honestly think it’s the single most important trait a designer (or, hell, anyone working in tech) can possess.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher also talks about this in her article On Content and Curiosity:

Curiosity keeps us hungry. It leads us to tackle new challenges when the easy questions have all been answered. It makes us wonder how things could be better — even when they are, if we’d just pause to admit it, pretty damn good already.

If answers come to us too quickly too often, we lose that essential sense of curiosity that drives us to solve difficult problems. If you don’t believe me, just spend some time with a 3-year old. Sometimes when I build puzzles with my daughter I get carried away and help a little bit too much. My daughter always responds by slowing down her own efforts, eventually declaring that she can’t do it. But when I hold back, and give her just enough guidance instead of solving the problem myself, her curiosity — the need to see that final picture — takes over until she forces herself to figure it out.

We need to cultivate this on two levels. First, we need to guard ourselves against a loss of curiosity. Skip Google and think instead. Don’t use an app to help you with Words with Friends (it’s ok, we’ve all done it). Solve the problem the long, hard, stupid way every once in a while.

Second, we need to do everything we can to grow curiosity in those we have influence over — employees, co-workers, kids, etc. And how do we do that? I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said it best in his French poem Dessine-moi un bateau¹:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

I’ll let your curiosity drive you to figure out what the “endless immensity of the sea” looks like for your situation.

Scott Adams in Rewarding Work:

Whenever you see the x-factor in someone’s output — that little extra something that turns the good into the awesome — it’s a marker for intrinsic motivation. Monetary motivation plateaus at the point you think your work equals your pay. For most people, that happens when the product is good but not awesome. To get to awesome you need to think you might be changing the world, saving lives, redeeming your reputation, attracting the mate of your dreams, or something else that is emotionally large.

I can’t shake this nagging feeling that we’re changing our focus from “mobile context” to screen-size thinking and responsive design so quickly that our users won’t know what hit them. Although I fully agree with articles like Mobile Context Revisited and Design Process In The Responsive Age, I think there is a missing step we haven’t explored enough: how to change the mental models of users who have become used to separate sites on their mobile phones and desktop computers. Let me illustrate with an example.

During usability testing last week I noticed an interesting trend. It was dormant the whole time, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it until one participant explicitly articulated the problem. I asked her if she has ever visited the e-commerce site we were about to use. She told me that she’s never gone there on her desktop, but that she has browsed the mobile version of the site on her BlackBerry¹. So far, so good.

But then she mentioned that when she found a product that she liked, she decided to switch from the mobile version (.mobi) of the site to the desktop version (.com) — while still on her phone — to try to buy it. Her reason? She assumed that the desktop version of the site will have more information about the product than the mobile site has.

The rest of the story gets even bleaker. She tried to force the .com version of the site, but her BlackBerry couldn’t handle it — she tried multiple times and it just kept hanging. So she gave up and never went to the site again.

The experience highlights a few assumptions made by this participant:

• She assumed that the site will have separate mobile and desktop versions.
• She assumed that these two versions will have different information on them.
• She assumed that it is up to her to decide which version will best suit our needs.

Can we blame her for these assumptions? Isn’t this how we trained her to think about mobile sites vs. desktop sites? We kept building sites with reduced feature sets on mobile phones because we didn’t want to overwhelm users. We taught users that mobile sites are inferior versions of their desktop counterparts, and now we have to live with the consequences.

Now, fast forward to the future we’re all driving towards: fully responsive sites that don’t abridge content, but adjust to the screen sizes they are being served to. Considering this participant’s assumptions, you can imagine how confusing a site like that would be to her. She’ll wonder where the mobile site has gone. She’ll wonder what content she’s missing. She might try to enter .mobi and not know why the thing keeps going back to .com. She (and millions like her) has never heard the term “responsive design”, and couldn’t care less about it. We’ve cemented users’ mental models over the past few years of mobile-specific sites, and it’s going to take time to change that.

So, what can we do? When we build responsive sites, we need to communicate to users that they don’t have to worry about finding the mobile site any more — everything they need is right there. This can be as simple as a message on the home page, or relevant microcopy at key stages of the journey, like on a product page.

I’m not trying to stand in the way of responsive design or screen-size thinking over mobile context thinking. But I am arguing that most normal users will be confused by this trend, and we need to manage that. Because we don’t want incorrect user assumptions to cause lower-converting sites that end up killing organizations’ commitment to responsive design.

One of the hardest things we have to do as a User Experience Design agency is to sell usability testing to clients. The concerns are usually some combination of the following:

• It will take too long (no, it won’t).
• It’s too expensive (not if you consider the potential ROI).
• You can’t learn much from 6 users (yes, you can).

But we keep at it, because we know that if we’re successful in our efforts to convince clients to try it just once, we’ll never have to sell it to them again. It’s a methodology that completely sells itself. Once a client sees real users struggle with their product, they immediately become believers and staunch evangelists of usability testing.

The situation was a little different for a recent project we worked on with Obox, creators of premium WordPress themes. They came to us already sold on the benefits of usability testing, they just needed our help with research design and execution, and to work with them on some of the design recommendations based on the data we collect.

Yesterday, CEO and co-founder David Perel did a write-up of the project where he explained the process and the changes they’ve made. It’s great to see such an open discussion about how they are implementing their relentless pursuit of delivering value to their users. And even though they already understood the value of usability testing going into the project, I still loved this sentence from The User Experience Experiment:

The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how good looking your site is. Watching a layman use your product will blow your mind. You cannot even begin to imagine how your users interact with it.

If that’s how they reacted, just imagine the power such a revelation can have on people who don’t believe in the method. David also says this in his post:

We’ve been so taken aback by what we learned that when we looked for new office space, the most important requirement was that it had an extra room for user testing.

I know this means that they won’t need to hire us again, but I don’t care. That type of full-scale adoption of user-centered design makes me infinitely happy.

Be sure to read the full post, it’s a great case study.

Birth of a Book is a beautiful video of a book being created using traditional printing methods. Watch it before you continue reading:

Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

Merlin Mann often defines a priority as an activity you both care about, and are willing to sacrifice something for. That phrase — care and sacrifice — immediately sprung to mind as I watched this video. You can sense the care that goes into the book’s creation, and you can easily imagine the time sacrifice needed to make sure it comes out perfect.

I am not on some kind of crusade against ebooks. I read way more ebooks than traditional books. But there is still something exciting about opening and reading physical copies of books like The Shape of Design or The Manual. The level of care and sacrifice becomes tangible, and transfers from creator to consumer. It’s why I still buy vinyl, and prefer a manual coffee making process.

As much as I live online, I recognise that there is a level of tangible craftsmanship to certain physical things that can inspire us in ways that an Instagram filter just can’t do.

(video via Daily Exhaust)

I wasn’t going to say anything else about the Apple v Samsung patent case, but Dmitri Fadeyev’s article The Cult of Progress is just too good to ignore. Dmitri discusses the case through the broad lens of progress in consumer technology, and what that means. Along the way he talks about the dangers of copying a design without knowing why those design decisions were made:

Copying the surface level implementation without the regard for the constraints of your own project is bad because good design in the context of consumer tech products is an optimal reflection of the underlying constraints. Taking the results and applying them to your own product doesn’t work so well because your own case is slightly different. It’s like trying to fit tailored clothes on someone else — there is a chance they will fit OK, but more likely they won’t, or at least won’t be very comfortable to wear.

He goes on to explain how this is the problem with what Samsung did with the Galaxy S phone:

They didn’t succeed in extracting the essence and making it better so what they ended up with is another me-too product. Probably good for sales, but not a product the public would see as being innovative.

But what makes this piece really interesting is that it’s not just another defense of Apple. Dmitri takes a very balanced view and makes the point that it’s hard to pick a “winner” in this case, because we don’t have a good definition of what we mean by progress.

Even if you’re as tired of this topic as I am, you should read Dmitri’s essay. It’s a great addition to the discussion.