Don Norman wrote a great piece on The Paradox of Wearable Technologies. He starts by covering some familiar ground on the dangers of these devices:

While the supplementary, just-in-time information provided by wearable computers seems wonderful, as we come to rely upon it more and more, we can lose engagement with the real world. Sure, it is nice to be reminded of people’s names and perhaps their son’s recent skiing accident, but while I am being reminded, I am no longer there—I am somewhere in ether space, being told what is happening.

We see this argument a lot, most recently in an article that came out on the same day as Don Norman’s, Wearable tech VCs pan Google Glass:

“It’s too big a change of behavior. It’s technology that sits between you and other people… it feels to me that it’s too impersonal,” said [John Frankel, a partner at ff Venture Capital]. “It feels more like the Segway than anything else, which is, ‘hey, this looks great on paper but I probably wouldn’t have one in the garage.’”

What I like about Norman’s piece, though, is that it refreshingly covers the positive aspects of wearable tech that don’t get as much press, like this:

I am fully dependent upon modern technologies because they make me more powerful, not less. By taking away the dreary, unessential parts of life, I can concentrate upon the important, human aspects. I can direct high-level activities and strategies and maintain friendships with people all over the world.

It’s a balanced view, well worth reading.

Breaking Development is a conference about the future — as it should be. But as I reflect on the past couple of days of talks about going beyond the desktop, there’s one thought I can’t get out of my head:

We need to push the limits at both ends of the technology spectrum.

I’ll come back to that. First, I wanted to summarize the major themes that stood out for me at the San Diego conference on 22-23 July:

• Forget about device classes like phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop. Instead, let ergonomics, input methods, and multiple-screen experiences guide design decisions.
  • We need to start thinking about designing for wrist devices (smart watch) and eye devices (Google Glass), as well as wall devices like TVs (think Xbox One) (see my notes on Luke Wroblewski’s talk).
  • The biggest development challenges are going to come from new input methods like voice control and gesture devices like Leap Motion (see the slides from Jason Grigsby’s talk).
  • The problem is that we can’t reliably detect screen sizes and input methods (keyboard, mouse, touch) to adapt content appropriately.
  • The good news is that we can look forward to advances in CSS3 that allow for full control over content layout (see the slides from Divya Manian’s talk).
• So, how should we adapt to these changes?
  • Design for touch first. Josh Clark points out that “every desktop UI should be designed for touch now.”
  • Design for user need, not a specific form factor or input (for example, see Vimeo’s Couch mode).
  • We need to think of mobile as just another screen, and design for cross-screen experiences (see my notes on Cameron Moll’s talk).
  • We need to dump our linear workflows and adopt a much more collaborative way of working (see my notes on Ben Callahan’s talk).

These are important themes and I got a lot value out of the talks. We should absolutely explore the boundaries of new input methods like voice and gestures, and play around with experimental CSS features that let us take more control over content layout. This is how we move technology forward, and where we get to take advantage of the latest hardware and software standards.

But I’m a bit worried that we tend to push into the future so fast that we abandon fields of existing technology to whither and die before they’ve reached their full potential. It’s fine to experiment with the new and exciting, but innovation doesn’t happen only in the forward direction — lateral jumps often result in really innovative ideas.

I’m not sure if this is the best way to illustrate what I’m trying to say, but here’s what it looks like in my head. If we focus only on pushing the boundaries of the future, we end up with a pretty small “area of innovation”, for lack of a better word:

But if we also work on pushing the boundaries of what we already have, we increase that area by a large amount:

One example I keep coming back to is USSD. It’s a low-end mobile technology that got completely skipped over in the U.S., but is widely used all over Africa since it’s supported from the most basic feature phones all the way to the iPhone. Projects like MAMA (using mobile technologies to improve the health and lives of mothers in developing nations) and messaging platforms like Vumi already use USSD in really innovative ways. We’re not talking about these low-end product solutions enough, and that’s a shame.

There are really two sets of questions we have to explore when designing and developing beyond the desktop. First, what can we do at the far edge of technology? How can we push the boundaries of the future? How can we go further?

But we also have to ask, what can we do at the low end of technology? How can push the boundaries of the present? How can we do more with what we already have?

As much as what I learned at Breaking Development will help evolve our company’s processes for future-friendly development, the most surprising outcome for me is how much it got me thinking about the potential to use existing technologies to solve the problems we run into while we push into the future. This is why I got more out of Breaking Development than I expected, and why I can highly recommend it to anyone who designs and builds digital interfaces.

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I’m attending the Breaking Development conference in San Diego this week, and will be posting my notes from a few of the talks here.

I really enjoyed Cameron Moll’s talk entitled “Pitfalls and Triumps of the Cross-Screen Experience”. One of the things that I appreciated is that it’s one of the first talks here I’ve seen that looked a bit more critically at Responsive Web Design. Not that Cameron isn’t a fan of responsive design, but he does bring up some interesting questions about its limitations. Here are my notes.

The need for multi-device experiences

• “We don’t know what will be underneath Christmas trees two years from now, but that’s what we need to design for today” - Brad Frost
• The best interface is the one that’s within reach.
• Forget mobile. Think multiscreen.
• At any time during the day, I may have 2-5 screens in use.
• Would be more if you include screens in cars, other internet-enabled devices.

Five guidelines for multi-screen experiences

• Discrete: an experience on one screen independent of, but ideally cohesive with, experiences on other screens
  • Twitter.com and NPR.com have great multi-screen experiences
• Sequential: An experience capable of flowing from one screen to another
  • Amazon.com cart is available across multiple devices
  • 67% use multiple screens sequentially for online shopping
  • 90% use sequential for online activities in general
  • Up to 49% email themselves a link for continuing the activity on another device
• Complementary: An experience complemented by a device’s unique capabilities
  • Day One and Google Maps apps utilize device capabilities of desktop browser and native apps
• Extensional: An experience that controls, or is controlled by, another source
  • Instagram photos can be reposted to other networks, or pulled into apps like Flipboard
  • APIs essential for these types of experiences
• Simultaneous: An experience involving multiples screens used simultaneously
  • Watching TV while going online with phones or tablets

Some do’s and don’ts for cross-screen experiences

Don’t:

• Stereotype devices (or their owners, for that matter)
• Fall prey to the convenience of device silos — we’re using multiple devices for multiple purposes
• Unforgivingly force your app on users — let them use the web if they want to

Do:

• Respect users’ mental models, aesthetically & functionally
  • Flipboard iPad and iPhone apps have different scrolling directions (left-right vs. up-down)
  • The iOS App Store “Update All” button is on opposite sides on iPhone and iPad
  • Simplenote has a “Done” button on iPhone, but not on iPad
• Sequence tasks across screens (to the extent possible)
• Make it vertically responsive, too
  • Gmail: row heights adapt as you change the screen size vertically
  • Check out Vertical Media Queries & Wide Sites
• Leverage outside expertise

A closer look at Responsive Web Design

Don’t believe responsive design is a one-size-fits-all solution:

• RWD is a must… for the browser, that is
• How did native app development escape the same scrutiny?
• Why don’t we have Media Query Snippets for native apps?
• Amazon’s lack of RWD is not a concern — most of us rarely use their web site on mobile devices
• You have to figure out the cross-screen experience for your product, because there’s not a single solution that applies to everyone
• Remember, No One’s Forgotten How to Pinch and Zoom
• What if pinch & zoom utilized media queries to render the layout differently (for those wanting denser content) vs. one size fits all? Demo: Gesture-Enabled RWD Proof-of-Concept

eBay CEO John Donahoe gets it:

We understand mobile to be just another screen…

It was a great talk with lots of food for thought.

I’m attending the Breaking Development conference in San Diego this week, and will be posting my notes from a few of the talks here.

Luke Wroblewski kicked off BD Conf 2013 with a talk entitled “One Design to Rule Them All”. It was a bit of a State of the Nation on what’s going on in the device landscape today. Here are my notes from the talk.

• It’s impossible to determine what kind of experience we should design for by looking at standard device types (phone vs. tablet vs. laptop, etc.)
  • For example, smartphones now go up to 7” screens and even a bit above.
  • Tablet sizes are equally all over the map, and to make things worse, you now have devices that are basically giant desktops that can transform into tablets or even phones.
• What is the difference between a phone and a tablet anyway?
  • Pixel densities are not that different any more
  • Can’t reliably determine how big the device is
  • Can’t rely on feature detection (like if it makes phone calls or not)
• We can no longer rely on knowing what type of device it is to figure out what to build.
• It’s not clear any more what a mobile device is, what the difference between a tablet and a laptop is, and whether it’s touch-enabled or not (see Leap Motion).
• We have to stop thinking about designing for phones, tablets, and laptops (device-specific).
• Instead, what makes more sense is to look at the ergonomics of each device:
  • You get eye-sized or wrist-side devices, palm-sized devices, lap-sized devices, desk-sized devices, and wall devices like big-screen TVs
  • Each of these types require subtle differences in the interfaces, which is where responsive design come in.
• This brings us to the principles of multi-device design:
  • Work mobile first
  • Support a continuum of screens
  • Account for high resolutions
  • Optimize for touch (can’t use mouse/cursor easily for touch)
  • Support cursor & keyboard
• Good news: you only need one web design.
• Bad news: it’s a new and different way of doing web design.
• But wait, do we compromise the large screen experience if we go mobile first?
  • No, we’re creating a good experience everywhere, and we enable people to do more things in more places.
  • Look at Currys, Skinny Ties, and O’Neill as good examples.
• And what about “the mobile context”?
  • Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh: on mobile, they bubble up relevant content like how to get there, and they deprioritize that content on larger screens.
  • So you can still have one design, but use different priorities on mobile.

Smaller screens show important information about visiting like directions, hours, and contact details:

On larger screens that information is deprioritized:

It was a great high-level introduction to the conference, and I’m looking forward to the rest!

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Ethan Zuckerman in Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World:

Because Reddit connects strangers, it has certain advantages over Facebook, which connects friends. Ideas may spread more widely from Reddit than from Facebook despite a smaller pool of users. An idea shared between Facebook friends may peter out quickly as social networks reach saturation: an idea spread through friends who went to the same college may lose momentum when all alumni have heard about it.

Reddit users are connected to many different communities, and an idea spread on Reddit’s front page may go on to spread in thousands of different groups of friends on Facebook. This power to disseminate ideas to many different social subnets may explain why Reddit memes often go viral and why Reddit has emerged as a key node in online activism.

In social network theory terms, Reddit has figured out how to tap into “the strength of weak ties”1, whereas information on Facebook tends to keep getting recycled among people who already share strong ties offline.

Luke Kingma also touches on this strength in his interesting post The Next Great Social Network Will Not Put Relationships First:

The vast majority of us are not fortunate enough to have an incredibly diverse and interesting network of friends, family, and colleagues. Reddit works because the measure of a user is the content he shares, not the company he keeps. Moreover, visibility on Reddit is directly proportional to one’s utility in a given conversation. As a result, we are exposed to more interesting people, ideas, and perspectives.

This access to experts on any topic imaginable is what makes Reddit so powerful. The principle of content > relationships is probably also why Medium doesn’t have a follower model for its authors, but instead organizes content in topic collections. But Medium is a different topic altogether — I’ll post some thoughts on that platform soon.

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1. See my article How to increase the value you get out of social media for an extensive discussion of social network theory and weak ties. ↩

I’ve been using Google+ a bit more frequently over the past few weeks. Of course, if you read this blog you wouldn’t have noticed. I know this because referral traffic to the site from Google+ is virtually non-existent. I find the whole narrative around Google+ extremely strange, so I’d like to get some of my random thoughts out in the open to see if anyone can add some insight.

First, viewed purely on its own merit Google+ is a fantastic social network. The interface manages to bring together all the best parts of Twitter (short updates, follow model), Facebook (pulling in short article summaries, good conversation mechanism), App.net (longer updates), and Flickr (beautiful photos). At the same time, it leaves out most of the annoying parts of those respective networks (like advertising, lack of context, and the inability to carry on a conversation). It’s my favorite social network to post links to, because I can add short commentaries or pull quotes from the article, and it automatically pulls in important metadata (sure, Twitter Cards also do this, but those aren’t supported by all sites and in all apps).

Second, Google+ feels like a parallel universe. As an active user of both Twitter and Google+, my experience has been that there is almost no overlap between the people who use those two networks on a daily basis. Further, users behave very, very differently depending on the platform. Twitter users comment more about Apple (well, the ones I follow anyway…), whereas Google+ content is much more slanted towards Google/Android news (not surprising, of course). Twitter users are more angry and combative, whereas Google+ is more like summer camp. Twitter feels frantic, Google+ feels relaxed.

And the weirdest thing — to keep beating a dead horse — is that the users on each network seem blissfully unaware of each other. It’s like going to a farmers market full of hipsters and young parents. Both are present, but it’s as if each group is invisible to the other1.

Getting actual numbers to compare the size of the networks is a fool’s errand. I don’t think we’ll ever really know how big each of the major networks are. But one widely reported statistic says that Google+ is now the #2 social network globally, behind Facebook but ahead of Twitter.

And this is why I’m confused. I think Google+ has a superior product in terms of its features. There appears to be lots of traffic on the network, and people are still reasonably nice to each other when they interact. And yet there’s no way I can even begin to think about moving off Twitter, because most of the people that I interact with and want to keep up with are on Twitter and not on Google+.

Does it mean that Google did too little, too late? Does it mean that the major social networks are all syphoning off their own unique customers that will never overlap? Is Google inflating the numbers artificially and it is, in fact, dying a slow death? Or, most disturbingly, does it mean that having a superior product doesn’t matter as much as strong network effects?

But then again, perhaps Google+ is not competing with who we assume they’re competing with. In line with Google’s vision to organize the world’s information, the focus on Google+ seems to be shifting to content more than relationships. And as Luke Kingma points out, the foundation of the next great social network will probably be the quality and relevance of the content, not the person who posted it. In that sense, I wonder if Google is more interested in being Reddit2 (the front page of the Internet), than it is in being a Facebook/Twitter clone (what your friends are up to).

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… on Google+, of course.

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1. By the way, in this analogy Twitter would be the hipsters and Google+ would be the young parents. ↩

2. Must-read article: Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World ↩

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By now most people have read Paul Miller’s I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The article is certainly deserving of all the attention it received back in May. I’m not sure what I expected — perhaps a gloating, holier-than-thou account of the virtues of going on an internet sabbatical to “find yourself”. But that’s not what this is. It’s a raw, often sad, always authentic account of a year that didn’t go at all as expected.

There is much to discuss and analyze in Paul’s experience, but I’d like to focus on this particular paragraph:

What I do know is that I can’t blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I’ll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won’t, to be honest. But at least I’ll know that it’s not the internet’s fault. I’ll know who’s responsible, and who can fix it.

Paul touches on a really important point here. Over the past few years we’ve increasingly started to blame the internet or technology whenever we feel like we’re failing at being human beings. It all started with Nicholas Carr’s famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, a theme that is carried through in Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants.

These (and other) authors make great arguments, and I don’t doubt the validity of their assertions. But I do think the pendulum has swung too far away from the importance of personal responsibility. It has just become too easy to play the victim and blame technology for our own inability to resist it. Some people feel so powerless against the relentless pull of technology that they pay hundreds of dollars to go to what is essentially rehab for technology addicts. NPR tells the story in the article At Tech-Free Camps, People Pay Hundreds To Unplug:

Digital Detox co-founder Levi Felix attributes the high demand for tech-free retreats to a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of technology in our everyday lives. “People are feeling like something’s not right here,” he says.

With no iPhones or computers to distract them, campers at Camp Grounded participated in “playshops,” featuring yoga, laughing contests and writing sessions.

What the hell? “Laughing contests”? Isn’t that just called “going out to dinner with friends”? Sure, many of us find it hard to unplug, and we end up spending a lot of our time alone together1, but we can’t throw our hands in the air and blame inanimate objects for our woes. We have to take responsibility for our actions and realize that we have nothing to fear: our devices won’t become self-aware and attack us if we turn them off every once in a while.

I think Theodore Rooseveldt said it best:

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Image source: Jean Jullien

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1. This is a great book. Well worth your time. ↩