Brian Frank responds to That Newsweek Article that everyone’s talking about this week in Three Things I Believe About Technology:

Some critics write as if people are helpless automatons who’ll play Angry Birds all day, mindlessly clawing away like beetles turned on our backs unless a clever journalist or wise English professor comes along to flip us around and peddle us in the right direction.

That’s my favorite line, but read the whole thing — it’s an interesting post on some of the larger technology trends we’re currently experiencing.

Andre Torrez wrote a great piece about how his online habits are starting to change. From We met on the Internet:

I’ve been posting about this a bit, but I think my time off pushed me even further along to where I was going. I won’t say “off Twitter”, but I feel like focusing more on things around the edges of Twitter.

And maybe I am just looking for examples””seeing patterns where there are none””but a few things have appeared that makes me feel like other people are feeling the same way.

He goes on to cite some examples of this pattern — Mike Monteiro’s Evening Edition, Dave Pell’s excellent NextDraft, and Dustin Curtis’s Svbtle network.

I’ve also recently found myself yearning for these kinds of off-Twitter experiences that are more substantial, without closing the door on Twitter completely. Now I finally have a phrase for that, thanks to Andre: they’re things around the edges of Twitter.

I often wish I could move all my link-sharing off Twitter and onto this site, but I know that’s not really possible, because the readership isn’t quite there yet. But I much prefer not just tweeting a link, but also adding some thoughts, or even just trying to set the context so people can decide if it’s a link they would be interested in, or not. That’s an “around the edges” experience, since Twitter would still remain central to my workflow, but it wouldn’t be the main activity. Maybe one day I’ll get to do that.

Anyway, that’s quite a tangent. Please read Andre’s excellent post, and think about what that means for you. Does Twitter still add the value to your day that it used to? Bitly did some research recently and found that the average half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours. After that, it’s pretty much lost forever. Is that ok with you, or are you also starting to cherish the slower, more deliberate communities where you’re allowed to pause and take a breath before moving on to the next thing?

(link via @Mike_FTW)

The gap between the technical skills required to use the software we make, and what the majority of people are actually capable of, is widening at an alarming rate. Not only that, but we often appear to not even like the people we design and develop for. We champion empathy as a core tenet of user experience design, yet we are mighty quick to point out how bad our moms are at “computers”, and how we hate going home for the holidays because we end up spending all our time on family tech support.

I worry that technology is advancing so quickly that it’s no longer able to ground our thinking in a bit of reality. Some might see this as a good thing, but I don’t. Unless we make a conscious effort to get back into the minds of our users — and not chuckle at what we find when we peek in there — we’re going to run away with the web and leave most of the world standing around in bewilderment, wondering what just happened.

Don’t believe me that this is a thing? Ok, here are some examples. First, CNET’s Greg Sandoval describes the downfall of Netflix in his must-read article Netflix’s lost year: The inside story of the price-hike train wreck. It’s long, so it’s easy to skip over this sentence that perfectly sums up why things went so wrong for Netflix:

But even visionaries can misread their customers when they are blinded by their past success.

CEO Reed Hastings thought he had his customers figured out, but he didn’t. At all.

The second example is Digg, which, of course, made headlines last week because they were sold to Betaworks for $500,000 after once being valued at more than $160 million. From Kevin Rose: Digg Failed Because ‘Social Media Grew Up’:

Among the missteps: Digg botched its re-launch in the summer of 2010, and, more importantly, he said the company was slow to respond to the criticism. ‘We were desperately trying to figure out how to get traffic back,’ he said. ‘A bunch of the community had already revolted by the time we fixed it.’

Once again, they thought they knew their customers, and once again, they didn’t.

For the last example we’ll go even further down the technical totem pole, lest we forget what goes on in the bottom half of the Internet. In 2010 ReadWriteReb wrote an article about Facebook Connect and AOL Instant Messenger called Facebook Wants To Be Your One True Login. But their SEO was so good that if you went to Google and typed in “Facebook login”, that article would be the first result. It wasn’t long before they started receiving comments like this:

That’s right — people thought that they were on Facebook, and that the “new design” had inexplicably taken away the ability to log in. Things got so bad that they had to put up this message in the middle of the article, which is still there today:

The editors of ReadWriteWeb made one more mistake, though. They assumed that people know what a browser is. Watch this:

You may be asking yourself, “How do these people survive on the Internet? How do they get anything done online?” Well, we’d better believe it — they’re here, walking among us in plain sight. One can argue that things have gotten even worse since that article and video came out. Matthew Berk recently did an analysis of 1.3 Billion URLs and found that 22% of Web pages contain Facebook URLs. Google used to equal Browser for most people. Now Facebook is becoming the browser — it is people’s viewport to the Web.

And what are we doing about this? Well, mostly nothing, because we can’t be bothered to notice. We’re too busy arguing about Twitter’s API, and whether it’s worth reviewing a tablet that doesn’t exist yet. Speaking of the Surface, let’s not forget Greg Cox’s point about the people who are likely to buy it, which serves as another example for the point I’m trying to make:

Ha ha, we scoff. Who wants to do Microsoft Office on a tablet? Office is boring. And tablets have a completely different use case to laptops. Who would want one to run full Windows?

Answer: Lots of people. People with different priorities, working different jobs, living in different countries. People we don’t quite understand.

The rabbit hole just doesn’t end, no matter how deep you go. We haven’t even talked about YouTube comments or Clients From Hell. But I’ll stop here, and just say this: the landscape we create software for is scary. It’s terribly comfortable over here on Twitter, but how can we design software and applications for people we don’t hang out with?

It seems like such a simple problem to solve, but I’m not seeing much evidence that talking to customers is a widespread thing among startups and even many established companies. We love talking about User Experience Design in the abstract — especially if it means we can argue about whether it exists or not.

But you know who are the real heroes of UX (you know, if it actually exists)? The ethnographers. The user researchers (who had to change their name from “usability engineers” because definitions blah blah blah). The real heroes are the people who spend their days understanding user needs, and fighting with all their might to get people to make things that solve real needs, not things that floor us with their beauty and radiance and lack of utility. Douwe Osinga’s description of Google Wave comes to mind:

Wave started with some fairly easy to understand ideas about online collaboration and communication. But in order to make it more general and universal, more ideas were added until the entire thing could only be explained in a 90 minute mind blowing demo that left people speechless but a little later wondering what the hell this was for.

Let’s stop that from happening to the things we make. We don’t have to leave this job to The Researchers. We can all talk to the people who use (or might use) our software. We can go to a coffee shop and get feedback on wireframes for the price of a few cappuccinos. We can sit and watch some of our family members use the web, and make notes. We can try to spend a fixed percentage of every week talking to users. If we don’t, we’ll continue to widen what Jakob Nielsen calls the Usability Divide:

Far worse than the [digital] economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn’t use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don’t achieve the modern world’s full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand.

Whereas the [digital] economic divide is closing rapidly, I see little progress on the usability divide. Usability is improving for higher-end users. For this group, websites get easier every year, generating vast profits for site owners. That’s all great news for high-end users, but the less-skilled 40% of users have seen little in the way of usability improvement. We know how to help these users — we’re simply not doing it.

We know how to help these users — we’re simply not doing it. We don’t have a choice, we have to talk to them. It’s easy to start: take your laptop with you on one of your coffee breaks, and ask some people if you can show them what you’re working on. They’ll love giving you feedback, and you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the usability divide — and some very real ideas about how to narrow it.

The impact of the Internet on society and relationships is a common theme on this site. I recently stumbled on a few articles on this topic that I think are worth highlighting. Yes, this idea has been covered a lot, and Sherry Turkle’s recent New York Times article brought the discussion to the forefront yet again. But don’t roll your eyes — there are some interesting arguments in these articles. As usual, I’m going to quote some key sections from each, but I highly recommend that you queue all of these up in Instapaper and read them in order. It’s great weekend reading!

It all started with Nathan Jurgenson’s The IRL Fetish — an excellent reflection on the stark (and fairly recent) distinction we make between being online and offline:

We are far from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with being offline more than ever before. We have never appreciated a solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or even our boredom better than we do now. Nothing has contributed more to our collective appreciation for being logged off and technologically disconnected than the very technologies of connection. The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. In short, w’ve never cherished being alone, valued introspection, and treasured information disconnection more than we do now. Never has being disconnected — even if for just a moment — felt so profound.

He goes on to describe the obsession with the analog and the vintage — like the resurgence of vinyl — as the “fetishization of the offline”. An interesting, provocative phrase. The core of his argument follows:

In great part, the reason is that we have been taught to mistakenly view online as meaning not offline. The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.

Nathan’s essay kicked off a slew of thoughtful responses that commend him for the article, but also disagree on some key points. First, the always brilliant Nicholas Carr responds in The line between offline and online:

I’m going to resist the temptation to quote some Wordsworth or Thoreau, but I will say while our present age may be tops in some things, it’s far from tops in the area of solitary strolls. The real tragedy — if in fact you see it as a tragedy, and most people do not — is that the solitary stroll, the camping trip, the gabfest with pals are themselves becoming saturated with digital ephemera. Even if we agree to turn off our gadgets for a spell, they remain ghostly presences — all those missed messages hang like apparitions in the air, taunting us — and that serves to separate us from the experience we seek. What we appreciate in such circumstances, what we might even obsess over, is an absence, not a presence.

I find that comment interesting because where Nathan claims that being online is inseparable from the experience of being offline, he doesn’t say anything about the negative effects of that. Nicholas points out that even though online experiences can enhance our offline relationships, it’s also true that those relationships can be affected negatively by our inability to let go of the online.

Next up, Michael Sacasas has similar objections in his piece In Search of the Real, but he also adds this thought on the distinction between being offline and online:

I would not say as Jurgenson does at one point, “Facebook is real life.” The point, of course, is that every aspect of life is real. There is no non-being in being. Perhaps it is better to speak of the real not as the opposite of the virtual, but as that which is beyond our manipulation, what cannot be otherwise. In this sense, the pervasive self-consciousness that emerges alongside the socially keyed online is the real. It is like an incontrovertible law that cannot be broken. It is a law haunted by the loss its appearance announces, and it has no power to remedy that loss. It is a law without a gospel.

Aha — now we’re getting somewhere. The distinction between online and offline is legitimate, but calling one experience real and the other not doesn’t work. Instead, the only part of this discussion where the word “real” should come in, is when we talk about our realization/self-awareness that there is a distinction between online and offline — and it behooves us to figure out what that distinction means.

Adam Graber takes the discussion in a slightly different direction in Offline:

The same is true for every technology. It makes new things possible, but it also alters what we consider normal. Every technology is a new normal. The point though is not to try and “fix” it by logging off or downgrading or abandoning technology altogether. The point is to be aware of it. To understand not only what technology makes possible, but also what it normalizes, and even what it makes impossible.

There’s the “awareness” concept again. He continues:

Impossible like living offline IRL and seeing a beautiful sky without being tempted to Instagram it or having a brilliant idea and not writing a blog about it. Because online, the only things that exist are the things you put there. Otherwise, offline, all the ephemeral grandeur and intricacy of our daily lives does not exist unless we somehow capture it with our technology. The only other way to revel the fleeting moments of our lives is to experience it with someone else — a meeting of sorts. But technology makes it so we don’t have to.

The theme is clear by now. Online and offline experiences are both real, but they have positive and negative effects on each other. As we discussed earlier, online experiences can enhance offline relationships because we bring our online interactions into those relationships, but they can also be broken down by online’s constant and relentless hold on our consciousness.

Finally, Nicholas Carr weighs in again and pulls it all together with I was offline before offline was offline:

But the fact that we now consciously experience two different states of being called “online” and “offline,” which didn’t even exist a few years ago, shows how deeply technology can influence not only what we do but how we perceive ourselves and the world. Certainly we didn’t consciously choose to look at our lives in this way and then formulate the technology to fulfill our desire. The defense contractors who started building the internet didn’t say to each other, “For the good of mankind, let’s create a new dichotomy in perception.” And when we, as individuals, log on for the first time (or the ten-thousandth time), we don’t say to ourselves, “I’m going to use this new technology so I’ll be able to think about my life in terms of being online and being offline.” But that’s what happens.

It’s not that technology “wants” us to think in this way — technology doesn’t want a damn thing — it’s that technology has side effects that are unintended, unimagined, unplanned-for, unchosen, often invisible, and frequently profound. Technology gave us nature, as its shadow, and in a similar way it has given us “the offline.”

Some might say that these types of discussions are a waste of time. That people react with hand-waving alarmism every time a new technology emerges — the telephone and the printing press were going to make us stupid long before Google might be doing it. And it’s true that for every good discussion about this, there’s an equally bad one (looking at you, Newsweek). But I think that we have to keep talking and arguing about this, because it is in the extremes of these arguments that we find the middle ground that approximates the true impact of technology on our lives.

I recently went searching for my first tweet, and it’s about as inane as I expected:

I have no idea how this thing works

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) April 4, 2008

I can honestly say that after more than 4 years, I still don’t know how this thing works. I know that being connected has altered my life in profound ways — some good (I get to write here!), some bad (I definitely struggle to put the phone down). But I think I’m ok with not knowing as long as enough people are coming together to try to understand how this online/offline thing affects us — and to challenge each other’s ideas in a thoughtful way.

I agree with Nicholas — technology doesn’t care what we do with it. But we cannot stumble blindly ahead without striving for the self-awareness that this still-real new reality requires. Because once we understand it, we’ll truly be able to regain control over the technology that is shaping us.

I don’t want to quote too much from Matthew Berk’s fascinating URL analysis because it’s worth reading the whole thing. So I’ll just tease the following line from Study of ~1.3 Billion URLs: ~22% of Web Pages Reference Facebook:

It’s taken roughly a decade for Facebook to not only accrue roughly a billion users, but to entangle itself in about a fifth of the Web.

Ok, maybe one more bit, where he talks about the implications of all this traffic flowing through proprietary web properties:

Increasingly, people and organizations will seek to write themselves not to Web sites, but to the big “platforms” (APIs) like Facebook and Twitter. And more and more, Web sites are being rewoven into those social networks, whether by simple inclusions of “like” or “+1” buttons, or through more complex reflections of social connection. [”¦]

My key takeaway here is that although Facebook may know about a sizable portion of the Web, the Web barely knows anything about what’s inside of Facebook.

Check out the full post.

Sam Grobart is not a UI designer — he’s a technology blogger for the New York Times. And in Good Features Demand Good Design he succinctly articulates one of the most difficult aspects of our jobs, and one of the cornerstones of Information Architecture:

But all the features in the world don’t mean a thing if you can’t present them in a welcoming, intuitive way. Take a look at that Smart TV interface: there are 26 places you can go, and that’s before you scroll to another page. The tangled mess of cables behind my TV may have disappeared, but ther’s a new source of confusion right on my screen. [”¦]

I’m no user-interface expert, but it would seem to me that you want to present viewers with a few, limited supercategories ”” not everything all at once.

The day of the Information Architect might be over, but Information Architecture is alive and well.

I do most of my online reading through RSS, and I don’t think I’m alone. For the most part this is a good reading experience, but there are a few things publishers can do to make it even better. So if you publish a blog, here are three proposed guidelines for RSS feeds:

1. Have an RSS feed and make it easy to subscribe. Contrary to popular belief, Twitter did not kill RSS. It’s alive and well. So please don’t bury or hide the feed — it should be easy to find the link and subscribe. Also, do some work on your feed - use a service like Feedburner to customize it (and give you analytics on your subscribers).

2. Unless it’s central to your revenue model, don’t provide article excerpts only. I understand that there are subscription sites that require payment to get access to full RSS feeds — that’s a conscious business decision, so if it works, great! But for the rest of us, RSS excerpts are a bad idea. It places the burden on anyone following your shared items to click through to see the article, and that slows people down. As a general rule (with the above stated exception), please provide a full feed - you’ll grow your audience and eventually get those click-throughs because of it.

3. Remove the metadata from your feed URLs. If I do click through to an article to comment, share it on Twitter, etc., a URL like this looks bad and makes sharing harder to track: http://uxmag.com/design/debating-the-fundamentals?utm\_source=feedburner&utm\_medium=feed&utm\_campaign=Feed%3A+UXM
   +%28UX+Magazine%29.

   The stuff after the ”?” is added by Feedburner so you can get detailed analytics on item link clicks. But unless you really want to see where your RSS feed clicks come from you don’t need this level of detail. All you need to know is the number of Item Views in your feed — the rest of your analytics can come from Google Analytics. It’s very easy to turn this tracking off to remove the metadata and make your URLs more friendly. In Feedburner, go to “Configure Stats” and uncheck the “Item link clicks” box. Here’s a screen shot:

In Luke Wroblewski’s new project Future Friendly, they discuss their thinking around universal content:

Well-structured content is now an essential part of art direction. Consider how it can flow into a variety of containers by being mindful of their constraints and capabilities. Be bold and explore new possibilities but know the future is likely to head in many directions.

If you publish content on the web it’s not future friendly to ignore and/or limit its use in RSS, which is one of the most important containers we have at our disposal.

I’m linking to Sam Biddle’s Does Google Have Any Social Skills at All? with some caveats. I’m not a fan of headlines like that (here’s why), and there are way too many hyperbolic, trolling statements like “Nobody really uses Google+”. Still, the article makes some good points about Google’s lack of understanding of their users:

The keynote sounded one futuristic clarion call after another: Glass, the wearable computer; Google Now, a smartphone system that provides intricately tailored life information; the Nexus Q, a social media streamer; and a fancy new way to throw parties with Google+. But underneath each of these feats of technology you could see a hollow, lurching weirdness that makes you wonder: Who will use any of this stuff besides the actors in Google’s promo videos? [”¦]

In each case, Google has balanced on golden fingers a product — clearly with a lot of time, thought, and money behind it — that just doesn’t seem to jibe with the way we actually live our lives. There isn’t any lack of effort or innovation here, but rather a gaping disconnect between the way data geeks and the rest of us see the world.

I know Google does a lot of user research on their flagship products, but it doesn’t look like they do any Product Discovery or user need analysis on these new products. Maybe they’re genius designers, so they don’t need to do research. Or maybe not.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the data mining of e-book reading habits. In Your E-Book Is Reading You they discuss, for example, what Barnes & Noble has learned from Nook data:

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

The article goes on to discuss how publishers are now using this kind of data to guide everything from the subject matter to the length of future publications. The whole thing makes me a little uncomfortable — I think I agree with Mr. Galassi here:

Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. “The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn’t have anything to do with,” says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “We’re not going to shorten ‘War and Peace’ because someone didn’t finish it.”

I realize there is a hint of hypocrisy in my feelings about data-driven book publishing. As a practitioner of user-centered design I am a big proponent of data-driven decisions (this presentation by Joshua Porter is a constant companion). But this feels different. I guess I’m worried that publishing books with the explicit purpose of satisfying some imaginary, averaged-out reader drone will pull us all towards a safe middle ground where no risk is allowed.

In my version of a nightmare scenario, my 2-year old daughter will be awash in Dora the Explorer books with no access to dangerous, crazy stories like Oh, The Places You’ll Go or Where The Wild Things Are. I don’t think a data-driven approach to publishing would have let those books see the light, and that would have been a tragedy.

Here’s to writers who take risks.

John Carey makes an interesting observation about the Macbook Pro with Retina Display in Progress:

Photography is a place where philosophy and technology mix with art and its ease of entry has diluted its user base to the point of over saturation. While chemistry and technology have always been a central pillar in this space, I fear it could drag it down even further unless we start to greet some of this forward momentum with at least a whisper of skepticism. I guess the best way to break this down is simply to ask, when will we ever be satisfied? When will sharp be sharp enough, or big be big enough? When do we reach the point within some areas of consumer technology where we are making progress simply for the sake of progress?

Just when I thought maybe we’re starting to come to terms with certain technological advancements and actually enjoy ourselves within our technically enhanced lives I have been quickly reminded that it will never end. I don’t mean to be overly pessimistic but you have got to admit it does feel a big daunting at times does it not? It is a subject I have long explored on these pages and I know I am not alone.

Even though he’s speaking from a photographer’s perspective, it’s easy to relate to John’s point. Yesterday, while the Google I/O keynote was going on, my only emotion was relief. I was relieved that I’m so securely locked up in Apple’s Prisonâ„¢ that I couldn’t care less about all the tweets and live blogs about Google Glass and the Nexus 7. I was relieved that I’m not a reporter for Engadget or The Verge, who have to live and breathe every single new thing that comes out day after day after day. Most of all, I was relieved that it wasn’t another Apple keynote, because those take up all my time and attention since I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO KNOW WHAT I’M ABOUT TO MISS OUT ON.

All this to say that I empathize with John’s mixed feelings about the Retina MacBook Pros. I, too, want more from technology while knowing that more isn’t necessarily what we need. What we need are bicycles for the mind, and to do that, we need some time to practice so we can take the training wheels off. Could it be that continuing to invent better bicycles all the time are actually preventing us from riding the damn things?