John Barber writes about the problems with reading on tablets in Books vs. screens: Which should your kids be reading?:

The hyperlinked, text-messaging screen shapes the mind quite differently than the book, according to Wolf. “It pulls attention with such rapidity it doesn’t allow the kind of deep, focused attention that reading a book 10 years ago invited,” she says. “It invites constant change of attention, it invites multitasking. It invites, in other words, a kind of triage of attention.”

Such a skill is certainly necessary in the 21st century, she adds. “But it does not have a place in the deepest kind of immersive thought.”

I’ve definitely noticed this in myself. I get fidgety after reading a few pages on my Kindle, wondering what I’m missing elsewhere on the web. I find myself struggling to embrace boredom. It’s not a good trend.

Related: it’s a good thing I just bought this.

David Eaves wrote a great review of Clay Johnson’s new book The Information Diet:

With information, our problem isn’t that we consume too much. What’s dangerous is consuming an overabundance of junk information – information that is bad for us. Today, one can choose to live strictly on a diet of ramen noodles and Mars bars. Similarly, it’s never been easier to restrict one’s information consumption to that which confirms our biases.

In an effort to better serve us, everywhere we go, we can chomp on a steady diet of information that affirms and comforts rather than challenges – information devoid of knowledge or even accuracy; cheaply developed stories by “big info” content farms like Demand Media or cheaply created opinion hawked by affirmation factories like MSNBC or FOX News; even emails and tweets that provide dopamine bursts but little value.

In small quantities, these information sources can be good and even enjoyable. In large quantities, they deplete our efficiency, stress us out, and can put us in reality bubbles.

It looks like a considered, non-alarmist analysis of the problem, with some good practical advice on how to address it. I just bought it – here’s the Amazon link if you’d like to do the same.

When I arrived at kalahari.com in December 2010 the site hasn’t seen any significant UI improvements during the 10+ years of its existence. My job description was pretty straightforward: do something about that.

In this post I’d like to talk about the work our team did over the past 12 months to get where we are today. When I look at the site now I still see so much wrong with it – there are way too many things that we still need to fix. So this isn’t an attempt to hold up our work as some kind of standard. I’m doing this in the interest of sharing our methods and lessons learned with the larger design community. I’ve learned so much from others who have shared their stories that it seems only fair that I do the same. So here’s our journey so far.

Making sense of the landscape

Here’s what kalahari.com looked like on December 1, 2010:

If you stepped through the site back then you probably would have felt as overwhelmed as I did. Where do we start? What order should we do things in? After the first few days of having too much coffee and talking to people all over the organization I realized that we had two primary challenges:

• No formal prioritization or product development process. It was the same situation I’ve seen many times before. Requirements went straight from “The Business” to developers. That kicked off an endless back and forth about what was needed, with only a cursory nod to Design. The “First In First Out” approach to prioritization was also quite common. The result was, well, not ideal. We needed to fix this.
• No formal user experience design. This was no surprise, and it was the reason I took the job in the first place. There was no user research, no content strategy, no interaction design, and no visual design beyond marketing and merchandizing materials. This is the part that really excited me: the opportunity to introduce User Experience Design into an organization that was (to their enormous credit) hungry for it but didn’t know where to start.

So we immediately got to work on both those problems.
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I love opening the App Store to see what updates are available for my iOS apps. Sometimes I forget to go there for a week or so and as the loading spinner comes up I play a little guessing game – will there be four updates? Seven? Double figures!?

Yes, I know I need to get out more. But I do believe my irrational excitement about something so inane points to an underutilized product marketing opportunity: Software version numbers as part of a delightful customer experience.

Before SaaS and the ease of over-the-air updates, version numbers made sense. In most cases v2.0 came after v1.0, and it was followed by v3.0, or maybe v2.1 for a non-significant update. Companies like Microsoft went a little more granular, but that was usually the exception. 1985-1992 saw the release of Windows 1.01 through 3.1, with only a few point releases in between^[1].

These days, with updates and releases coming with much more frequency than it used to, it’s not uncommon to see an update screen like this one:

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Marty Cagan argues that splitting the Product Manager and Product Ownership roles into two positions is a mistake:

This approach has two common negative consequences.  The first is that there is no clear owner (neither person takes responsibility for the product), and the second is a common lack of respect or understanding between the two (the “product manager” doesn’t appreciate the technical complexities, and the “product owner” doesn’t appreciate the customer’s pain).

I agree, and I would actually go one step further. I view Product Ownership activities (representing the voice of the customer, interacting with the development team, managing the backlog, etc.) as a subset of the overall strategic Product Management position (product planning, execution, and marketing). I’ve resisted calling my team Product Owners, and prefer to say that they are Product Managers who fulfill a Product Ownership role on Agile projects.

The problem is that splitting these roles into distinct job titles also splits their goals. It’s easy for one to become all about the market, and the other to become all about internal development tasks. Instead, a Product Manager should ultimately take end-to-end responsibility for the development of product solutions that meet user goals and business needs. That’s the job. Managing the backlog and working with developers on specifications are just part of that overall function, not a thing on its own.

Mike Rundle sums up how many of us feel about Twitter’s new new iPhone app in Twitter For iPhone Takes A Step Back:

The new app will be more inviting and accessible to new users, but I don’t like that this comes at the expense of the user experience and existing gesture shortcuts. There’s a way to make both novice and advanced users happy, and I hope Twitter 4.1 does a better job at appealing to all sides of their userbase than 4.0 has done.

If you step back from all the interaction and visual changes, this is the overarching theme that stands out for me as well. Expert users are suddenly left out in the cold. The new approach breaks the fundamental UI principle of flexibility and efficiency of use:

Accelerators – unseen by the novice user – may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.

A great example of accelerators done right is Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. They’re there to increase efficiency for expert users, but they don’t get in the way of novice users. The same functionality is there for all users, yet expert users have the ability to become more efficient by learning these shortcuts.

And that’s where the new Twitter for iPhone falls down. The biggest culprit is the now defunct swipe gesture on individual tweets. I’m with Ben Brooks on this one:

What is absolutely crazy – what drives me nuts – is the ditching of the swipe-to-act gesture. In previous versions you could swipe left or right on a tweet to slide open an action menu. From there you could quickly favorite, retweet, Instapaper, or reply to the tweet.

But let’s get real about this. I don’t think any of the design decisions the team made were an accident or an oversight. This is just all indicative of a company that is shifting the balance from being purely user-centered to a company that needs to sacrifice some user needs in order to make money. Dan Frommer summarized this well:

This is the beginning of Jack Dorsey’s real vision for Twitter combined with Dick Costolo’s vision for a real-time social advertising product. The main components: writing and Tweets, obviously; having conversations with other people; discovering what’s happening in the world through Twitter; and seeing a promoted message from brands here and there.

Spot on. I mentioned this morning that they should have just come clean and called the “Discover” tab the “Monetization” tab. Some have complained that users should be able to remove that tab, which is true, but it’s not going to happen because the balance has shifted. Our needs are going to be sacrificed more and more in favor of business goals^[1].

So here’s the truth in all of this: the new app isn’t a mistake. It’s a deliberate and effective redesign to reduce all the pesky “distractions” (like viewing your lists and favorites easily) so that you’re more likely to “discover” the “promoted messages from brands here and there”.

I don’t think we should pass judgment on Twitter for making these decisions to increase revenue – we want them to stay around, after all. But I think we can request and expect a 4.1 version that at least meets us in the middle. Simplifying is not just about taking features away, it’s about making complex actions easier to understand and use. We need our accelerators back, please.

1. I will say this though – I really like the “Connect” tab. The labeling might be horrible, but it’s a great feature.  â†©

When Google+ first came out there was plenty of praise for its UI design^[1], particularly the “un-Google like” design of the Circles feature. Oliver Reichenstein wrote:

Every interaction seems to have been thought through and designed until its last little bits (and those matter as much as the big bits). It even has room for some warmth (like the circle rolling away when you delete it) which is rare for Google’s cold UID approach.

We’re seeing the same thing with last week’s release of Path 2.0. I agree with the entire Internet on this: the design is gorgeous with lots of small delightful details. Here’s Geoff Teehan in Going down the right Path:

It feels familiar, but they’ve made some smart decisions that break away from the norm without wandering off into obtuse interactions or under/over-designed visuals. The decisions they’ve made not only make things better, they add personality and delight ““ something that is crucial, and often overlooked when designing something functional.

Here’s the thing. Google Circles aims to solve a real problem with social networks, but the solution is tedious. Path has a beautiful interface, but I can’t figure out what user need it’s trying to solve. And those issues are problematic if you want to get to product/market fit.

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The Monster Engine is one of those projects that make me love the Internet for its ability to expose amazing creative talent to a worldwide audience. Illustrator Dave DeVries started with a simple question: What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically? In his own words:

It began at the Jersey Shore in 1998, where my niece Jessica often filled my sketchbook with doodles. While I stared at them, I wondered if color, texture and shading could be applied for a 3D effect. As a painter, I made cartoons look three dimensional every day for the likes of Marvel and DC comics, so why couldn’t I apply those same techniques to a kid’s drawing? That was it… no research, no years of toil, just the curiosity of seeing Jessica’s drawings come to life.

The Monster Engine is the 48-page outcome from that curiosity, and it looks wonderful. He describes the process as follows:

I project a child’s drawing with an opaque projector, faithfully tracing each line. Applying a combination of logic and instinct, I then paint the image as realistically as I can.

Below are some of my favorite illustrations from the project. Be sure to check out the whole gallery.

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