The most interesting part of today’s Amazon announcement is not whether or not they have an “iPad killer” (ugh), but the news of the new Silk browser that will run on the Fire. The details are getting lost among all the “Is Apple dead?” talk, so I wanted to point you to a couple of important articles about the implications of Silk. Here’s a recap of what it does, from their blog:

Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture.  All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform.  Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.

Silk will use Amazon’s EC2 service to pre-cache web browsing, and in the process return heavily compressed images to the browser. There are two things that might not be immediately clear from their announcement and accompanying video.

First, this is not a new idea (and it can have pretty negative effects on user experience). Here is Mark Wyner in Amazon Silk. Just Like AOL Used to Make:

This is quite exciting news for the laymen. But does anyone remember AOL and their promise of accelerated browsing? They, too, elected to compress images and run a proxy server to deliver websites faster.

The result was horrible. Professional web designers take great care to build websites which are optimized for speed while retaining as much quality and visual integrity as possible. When ther’s a middle man degrading our work, it causes problems.

Second, the data mining and aggregation implications are quite staggering. Here is Chris Espinosa in Fire:

But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about these issues (and of course the privacy implications) in the days to come, but for now these are two very interesting posts on the implications of Silk – definitely read through them both.

One of the talks I do at speaking events is a general introduction to the elements of user experience design. The slides are always evolving so I’ve been hesitant to upload the presentation to Slideshare since it will be outdated pretty much immediately. It’s also a presentation that relies heavily on the voice-over – it’s not really something you can just read from front to back.

Having said that, I think it’s time to put at least a version of the presentation online, with a bunch of disclaimers about how this is a simplified view of what UX is, that it requires explanation in a lot of areas, and that it’s definitely not exhaustive or the only way to think about UX. Here’s the summary:

In this talk I give an overview of the elements of User Experience Design, and more importantly, why you should care about it. The goal is to provide some baseline knowledge of the user-centered design process to equip anyone to take those skills back to their daily work and start applying it immediately. I discuss user experience research, content strategy, interaction design, and visual design, and how those elements work together to build great experiences.

So, here you go. I hope you find it useful.

Frank Chimero reflecting on Facebook’s advances in “frictionless sharing” of content:

Any physicist knows that it’s impossible to exist in a frictionless universe, and that friction hasn’t been diminished with Facebook’s sharing model so much as transferred the work of making sense of things from the one sharing to the audience.

I recently mentioned that reducing the effort needed to share and communicate with others might be inching us closer to a post-literate society. Frank’s remark adds another consideration: the reduced effort required to share information places the burden of understanding much more on the audience than on the person sharing.

“Frictionless” sharing of what song you are currently listening to sounds interesting at first, and then it just starts to sound creepy. But even if you can get beyond the creepiness factor you’re faced with the fact that it becomes the audience’s responsibility to make sense of that information. How interesting is knowing what song I’m listening to without an explanation why I’m listening to it and what it means to me?

At what point will all this lazy sharing result in lazy audiences who can’t be bothered to go hunting for the meaning in the information? At what point does the audience become mere “consumers” of content in the true sense of the word – “to destroy or expend by use” – and end up in a similar situation as the obese passengers on the Axiom?

Somehow my wife and I found our way to The Coffee Roasting Company at Lourensford Wine Estate on Saturday. We’ve never been there, and the experience was fantastic. I recently referenced an article on how architecture can be used to influence behavior, and this place is a prime example. The coffee shop is designed to encourage talking and not rushing.

You’re greeted with the almost-overwhelming smell of different coffees blending together. Next you notice the unpretentious, “we’re just here to brew good espresso” decor, followed by the rustic tables and stacks of well-read books about coffee scattered all over. This is how coffee should be enjoyed.

As my wife and I settle in to wait for our cappuccinos I pick up a book called Coffee by Claudia Roden. I read out loud to her:

In Turkey at one time, a man promised when he married never to let his wife go without coffee, and it was considered a legitimate cause for divorce if he neglected to do so. So important is coffee in Oriental life that it is common for beggars to ask for money to buy it. It is inconceivable that they should go without. Business and bargaining are always done over a cup of coffee served before the argument starts. Whether in a shop or a market stall it creates a bond and an obligation between buyer and seller.

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Here’s Mashable in an article with a title that sounds like it was created in a random buzzword generator: Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity:

Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

So in essence they’re saying that clicking the Like button is too much of a commitment; the action is too heavy. We need something a little more indifferent and “lightweight”.

With the Like button you already didn’t have to use words. With Facebook Open Graph you grant permission to an app once, and then it silently and passively starts broadcasting what you’re doing. No thinking required.

By continuing to reduce the effort needed to share and communicate with others we seem to inch ever closer to a post-literate society.  In his essay Like, the Post-Literate Society, James Shelly discusses this phenomenon and quotes Bruce W. Power:

What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

He goes on to say this:

Thus I ponder: do we become a post-literate society at the moment we manifest an incapacity to discuss our own potential status as such? If so, are we already there?

These are good questions on a day like today.

I love Tom Armitage’s post Asleep and Awake, about the differences between the Kindle and the iPad. Here’s how he describes what happens when you wake each device up:

The Kindle blinks ““ as if it’s remembering where it was ““ and then displays a screen that’s usually composed of text. The content of the screen changes, but the quality of it doesn’t. Ther’s no sudden change in brightness or contrast, no backlight. If you hadn’t witnessed the change, you might not think there was anything to pay attention to there.

When the iPad wakes up, everything else in the room disappears; your attention’s been stolen by that burst of light.

He goes on to describe the Kindle as having a “quiet confidence” while the iPad constantly seeks your attention. The conclusion serves as a healthy reminder of the scope of true user experience:

The Kindle, much like a paperback book, is just as happy “asleep” as it is in use. It’s a reminder that the design of genuinely ubiquitous devices and products is not just about what they are like in use; it is also about what they are like when they are just present.

We need to remember that even on the web, we’re not just designing online experiences. All the touch points with users have to be designed. Yet we often don’t apply user-centred design principles to areas like customer support and logistics. Let the Kindle’s “asleep” state remind us to do so.

Kelly Sutton provides a great reminder of what design thinking is all about in Your idea is terrible, a post about startups and the current obsession with “social layers”:

The problems that your project solves shouldn’t start with “Wouldn’t it be nice if”¦” Instead, they should always be phrased, “X sucks because Y and Z.” You may not even have a solution. Technology may not even be the right solution. But please stop adding social layers to social layers and raising 5 million dollarbucks.

Every UX project should be framed in the same way.

Don’t start with “What would happen if we move this button over here?” Instead, start with “Our checkout process sucks because our research shows that users are not seeing the ‘Pay now’ button.”

Marco Arment recently wrote an excellent post about the differences between Apple and Microsoft customers. It got me thinking about Windows 8, Metro UI, and a slightly different theory on what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with the next version of their operating system. Here’s Marco:

People who aren’t willing or able to compromise on their needs regularly are much more likely to be Windows customers. The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them: “You can do whatever you want, and w’ll attempt to glue it together. It won’t always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for.”

He leaves out one important group of people who are also more likely to be Windows customers: regular users who don’t care about computers at all, and just want something to perform their daily email / browsing tasks on. Matt Gemmel sums up this crucial market really well:

The biggest (and most lucrative) set of customers is ordinary people, without a computing degree or specialist knowledge. These are people with no interest in specific technologies, but only in how easily they can finish today’s tasks without reading the manual. Apple caters to that market; companies who loudly proclaim their device supports CSS3 and MPEG4 and SDHC don’t even understand that it exists.

I agree with Marco’s (and Matt’s) main point: one of the main reasons for Apple’s success is their ability to compromise in the way that designers use the word: saying no to the right things. And that the Microsoft team will need to learn to compromise like that if they want to compete seriously on the tablet front.

Still, most people buy Windows PC’s not because they care about extensibility or because they have moral objections to Apple’s supposed walled garden. Most people buy Windows PC’s because they are just plain indifferent. It’s what they know, it’s what they’ve always used, and they don’t care enough about computing to consider other alternatives. This isn’t a good or a bad thing in itself, it’s simply the way it is.
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