My favorite sentence from John Siracusa’s epic review of Mac OS X Lion is this one:

Apple appears tired of dragging people kicking and screaming into the future; with Lion, it has simply decided to leave without us.

And nowhere in Lion is this more apparent than what appears to be everyone’s least favorite feature: inverted scrolling on the trackpad. As I’m sure you know, what this means is that scrolling now mirrors how it works on iOS devices: you essentially drag the content up and down the screen, as opposed to moving the viewport of the application like we’re used to.

I love this change – it took me about 5 minutes to get used to it. But I appear to be in the minority with this opinion. It sounds like the first thing most people do once Lion is installed is head over to Settings and change it back to the old way of scrolling. So I’d like to step back a little and use this change to talk about UI conventions and when it’s ok to change them. To do that, let’s first look at what we know about Apple’s direction for their operation systems.
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This morning I read an article about something that’s been on my mind for a while: Banner ads on media sites/blogs. In The Truth About Display Advertising, Mitch Joel writes:

Go to the website for your local newspaper. How many display ads, banners, buttons, text links, etc… do you see that are ads? Mine has over 15. That’s not in consecutive order… that’s all at once. It’s hard enough to get consumers to sit through four TV ads in a row, so what did you expect to have happen when you blast them with 15 ads on one page, all at once? Foregoing the aesthetics and the basic Marketing lesson that an ad will experience diminishing returns based on how cluttered the environment that it’s placed in is, does anyone really believe that this is the best way to advertise to consumers in the digital spaces?

No. I don’t think this is the best way to advertise to consumers. In fact, I don’t even think advertising is the best way to monetize media sites either. But are there viable alternatives? I think there are at least two business models that could work.

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I like Google+. I like it because it’s clean and well-designed. I like it because it feels fresh – like moving into a new neighborhood after the one you came from got taken over by fake farms and endless profile picture changes. But most of all I like it because it’s quiet.

Since it’s in limited Beta it means it’s still mostly populated by early adopters. So I can interact with brands like Mashable and Smashing Magazine and feel like I’m part of the conversation – something you can’t really do on Twitter and Facebook with mass-brands like that.

This thing is going to be huge

But alas, this will probably not last. Sooner or later the floodgates will open, and before you know it the once pristine Google+ neighborhood will once again get overrun and fall prey to the meaningless graffiti that also transformed Facebook from social network to chaotic metaverse. Rocky Agrawal sums it perfectly in When Google Circles Collide:

[Google+] doesn’t do anything to solve the biggest problem with social networks today: increasing the signal to noise ratio.

So the masses will descend, and we’ll be back to hunting for pockets of information among the endless streams of data. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

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In this post I argue that we need to communicate the differences between the science and art of Visual Design better to help change the common perception by stakeholders and clients that user experience is purely subjective.

One of the most difficult aspects of visual design is finding the right science:art ratio to accomplish user goals. I’ve always subscribed to what Tim van Damme calls the mathematics of design. You start with the science:

If art is about talking and expressing yourself, interface design is about listening and disappearing into the background. You listen to the content and its context, and take it from there, one step at a time. Don’t worry about the looks, just start with the variables. 1 + 1 + 1 + “¦ Baby steps, over and over again until what you have on your screen feels right.

And then you mix in art where appropriate:

But sometimes, even 1 + 1 is too much to handle, and you need to clear your head. This is where art comes into play, in the broadest meaning of the word: Paintings, illustrations, architecture, human beings, even nature is art. They won’t help you decide whether you should draw a 1 or 1.5 pixel highlight, but allow you to take a step back and just decide on what’s more suitable or pick one and move on.

Of course, this is not a serial process. Great designers are able to design within that delicate balance between science and art, and find the right ratio as they’re doing it. And even though it’s not easy, I do feel that most designers inherently get this – that visual design is science and art combined in different levels based on the needs of the user and the application.

What’s even harder is explaining this to stakeholders and clients in a convincing way. Over the past week I’ve seen so many comments about how “UX is subjective” and “standards always change” that it got me thinking about a possible solution to this problem. I haven’t figured it out, but I’d like to write down some initial thoughts for discussion.

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South African movie site Ster Kinekor just relaunched their web site to much fanfare. Much of the discussion I’ve seen on Twitter about the new site is about their decision to remain completely reliant on Flash. I agree with all the technology arguments against Flash, but I want to take a slightly different approach here and talk about Flash as an enabler of bad user experience.

You see, Flash is like the guy who keeps giving your alcoholic uncle a drink while the rest of the family is trying so hard to help him get sober. Every time he gets close to quitting he gets “one more drink” from somewhere and falls back into bad habits. And this is what Flash is to user experience.

Every time you might get close to following standard UI conventions or have a simple flow, Flash comes in to whisper sweet animatic nothings in your ear… “Just one more flyout,” it says. “Just one more hover state – come on, everybody’s doing it.” Designing a boring old button? “No man,” says Flash, “we can make this thing move and light up with Flash, wouldn’t that be cool?”

And before you know it, you have this:

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Perhaps the most succinct summary of Monday’s Apple WWDC keynote is this tweet by Dustin Curtis:

I understand the sentiment, and a lot of the post-keynote blog posts echoed this general statement. The most measured response, in my view, came from Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper:

If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve their needs better. And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store.

I’m certainly not going to stop using Instapaper. I’m deeply invested in the service and can’t see myself moving to Safari any time soon. But that’s beside the point. Here’s the point.

I find it strange that people are freaking out about how Apple is going after successful apps and integrating them deeply into Lion and iOS. Here’s Rich Mulholland (well, censored a little bit):

For my part, I agree much more with Justin Williams when he says:

Some people grow frustrated by Apple continually making inroads in existing developer’s territory, but it comes with being a part of the platform. The key is to ensure your product lineup is diverse enough that you can survive taking the blow Apple may offer at the next keynote.

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Over on the 37signals blog they just reposted an old article entitled Product roadmaps are dangerous. Jason Fried says the following:

Instead of the roadmap, just look out a few weeks at a time. Work on the next most important thing. What’s the point of a long list when you can’t work on everything at once anyway? Finish what’s important now and then figure out what’s important next. One step at a time.

It’s hard to disagree with a person (and a company) you have great admiration for, as I do for Jason and 37signals. But I do think it’s important to set the record straight on product roadmaps – particularly when it comes to large organizations. The post highlights two main concerns with product roadmaps:

• Product roadmaps assume you know what’s going to happen 6 – 18 months from now
• Product roadmaps set expectations, so you can’t change them (and if you do change them it becomes a worthless exercise)

So let’s look at each of these points in turn.
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These are my notes from Oliver Rippel‘s talk at NetProphet 2011. Oliver is the CEO of MIH, a group company overseeing African and Middle East online properties like Mocality and kalahari.net.

The state of e-commerce in Africa

• As soon as e-commerce becomes more than 1% of retail sales, that’s when it becomes mainstream
• US not the most successful e-commerce market – Korea is, with 9% of retail sales online. US is at 4%
• E-commerce in Africa is still nascent:
  • Egypt – 22% Internet penetration, less than 0.01% online retail penetration
  • Nigeria – 29% Internet penetration, less than 0.01% online retail penetration
  • South Africa
    • 6 million Internet users, 12% penetration
    • 0.4% online retail penetration
    • 16.7% credit card penetration
    • 14 e-commerce sites in Top 100 SA sites

Positive e-commerce macro-indicators in Africa

• Big average projected real GDP growth
• There is a growing middle class of 320m Africans
• High mobile penetration (World average: 60%; South Africa: 92%)
• The promise of accessible and affordable broadband Internet is there

Lessons for building a winning e-commerce business in Africa

MIH’s focus is on the full e-commerce value chain
The brands cover the whole purchase cycle: awareness, interest, decision, action, post sale, resale

• Embrace mobile
• Leverage offline
  • Go where the users are – online marketing on its own simply won’t work
  • Go to shopping malls and put up posters – whatever works
• Cash is king
  • 50m million banks accounts in Africa, 95% of transactions are cash-based
  • The only mobile payment system that is scaling is M-Pesa in Kenya: P2P payments
  • They are converting a cash economy into a digital economy, so that can now also be used for e-commerce
• Build trust
  • Open marketplace model is inadequate in low trust early stage environment – unlike eBay
  • Instead, MIH uses controlled marketplaces that reduce barriers for buyers by building a trusted brand