South African bank Absa just rolled out their new online banking portal. There are two things about this launch that raise red flags for me. First, from ABSA rolls out new Internet Banking revision:

This launch follows a successful trial with the bank’s 36 000 employees over the past few months. The trial allowed the project team to identify and solve any defects and gauge the response from users, via over 1 300 feedback emails received from employees.

It’s shocking that we still have to talk about this, but let’s just state it again, as clearly as possible: You are not the user. You cannot test a system on employees — who know all the intricacies inside and out — and think that you’ve done appropriate user testing. There are plenty of solid arguments and evidence for this, but for now I’ll just quote Jakob Nielsen:

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders. The antidote to bubble vapor is user testing: find out what representative users need. It’s tempting to work on what’s hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value.

Also see Myth #14: You are like your users and You are not your user, which both have a lot of great points and research around this.

Second, there’s this quote from the Head of Retail Markets at ABSA:

The development of Absa Online saw up to 140 individuals, working across three continents, putting in an astonishing 450 000 man-hours of development work. Four million lines of code were written in this, a “first-of-its-kind” technology deployment in South Africa.

Well, that is just silliness. As one of the commenters on the article points out, it’s Bill Gates of all people who said, “Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs.”

The size of the project, how long it took, and how many people worked on it is completely immaterial. What matters is if the thing works well to help real users accomplish their goals. I really hope it does, because this looks like an outrageously expensive project. Hopefully it doesn’t become South Africa’s version of the Four Seasons $18m redesign.

Michael Wolff shares a brutal, apocolyptic view on Facebook in the MIT Technology Review. From The Facebook Fallacy:

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits.

You may not agree with Wolff’s conclusions, but the article is worth reading — if for not other reason than to see an extreme argument delivered with relentlessly articulate conviction.

I’m a big fan of Stephen Few and his approach to data visualization. His book Show Me The Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten has been immensely helpful in my work as a user researcher, and I’ve been lucky enough to attend one of his excellent seminars. So I’ve been really interested to hear his viewpoint on the latest Infographic craze that’s taking the pageview world by storm.

I am personally not a fan of the Infographics that are passed around on Twitter every day. Most of them are confusing and only meant to drive eye candy-derived traffic with no intention to communicate data clearly. I think we pretty much hit rock bottom with this Mashable monstrosity called “The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain”. For some fun reading, also see Dan Frommer’s How Infographics Are Ruining The Web, and Megan McArdle’s Ending the Infographic Plague.

But now, Stephen finally weighed in on his blog with a very sensible argument about the nature of data visualization, and where common web infographics fit into that universe. He starts his article Data Art vs. Data Visualization by making an important distinction:

There are as many definitions of data visualization as there are definers, but at the root of this term that has been around for many years is the goal that data be visualized in a way that leads to understanding. Whatever else it does, it must inform. If we accept this as fundamental to the definition of data visualization, we can judge the merits of any example above all else on how clearly, thoroughly, and accurately it enlightens.

By data art, I’m referring to visualizations of data that seek primarily to entertain or produce an aesthetic experience. It is art that is based on data. As such, we can judge its merits as we do art in general.

He goes on to give three reasons why it’s harmful when data art masquerades as data visualization.

I was reading an article called The Internet’s Battle For Our Digital Souls on Big Think when I stumbled on this sentence:

We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.

That just didn’t sit right with me. I’ve posted plenty of updates on Facebook and Twitter, and it definitely didn’t… ok, I’ll stop there. I don’t want this to get awkward. All I’m saying is that this doesn’t feel right. So I decided to trace the statement back to the original study that it’s talking about, to see what’s going on.

The post on Big Think appears to be a rehash of an article in the LA Times called Study helps explain why we over-share on Facebook, Twitter. The first thing I found interesting is that their conclusion about the sex thing is a little more measured:

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex. It’s all a matter of degrees of course, (talking about yourself isn’t quite as pleasurable as sex for most of us), but the science makes it clear that our brain considers self-disclosure to be a rewarding experience.

The LA Times links back to the original research paper, which has the decidedly less sexy title Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding (PDF link). The paper explains that the study was about whether or not people would give up money to talk about themselves (my emphasis added):

Just as monkeys are willing to forgo juice rewards to view dominant groupmates and college students are willing to give up money to view attractive members of the opposite sex, our participants were willing to forgo money to think and talk about themselves.

The word “sex” appears six times in the 6-page paper, and only once in the context that these other news stories use it. The “Discussion” section starts off as follows (my emphasis added):

Despite the frequency with which humans disclose the contents of their own thoughts, little has been known about the proximate mechanisms that motivate this behavior. Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex. Intriguingly, findings also suggested that both parts of “self-disclosure” have reward value. Although participants were willing to forgo money merely to introspect about the self and doing so was sufficient to engage brain regions associated with the rewarding outcomes, these effects were magnified by knowledge that on’s thoughts would be communicated to another person, suggesting that individuals find opportunities to disclose their own thoughts to others to be especially rewarding.

Note that they talk about “rewards”, not “pleasure” like in the news stories. The core research hypothesis is that sharing about ourselves has intrinsic value. To quote from a different section (my emphasis added):

Interestingly, a number of earlier researchers have put forward the hypothesis explicitly tested here — that self-disclosure will act as an intrinsic reward; however, despite calls to do so, this notion has not previously been tested empirically. As such, the current study validates a long-standing hypothesis that self-disclosure arises — at least in part — from the subjective value associated with it.

No mention of sex there, whatsoever. It’s also important to know what the phrase “intrinsic value” means in the philosophical sense of the word, because it’s essential to understanding the results of the study:

The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.”

So let’s be very clear about what this research shows. The hypotheses tested (and confirmed) is that people like talking about themselves on social media because it has intrinsic value. In other words, we like sharing because it’s enjoyable for its own sake as a social activity. They make the point (in passing) that this is similar to other activities with intrinsic value such as food and, yes, sex. It’s not that posting on Facebook makes you feel the same way that having sex does. It’s that all these things share a common thread: the subjective, intrinsic value that they possess.

But hey, that message isn’t nearly going to rack up the same number of page views as saying that “We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.” I read so many “a new study suggests that…” articles that I just take at face value. Today I decided to read the actual research paper, and realized what kind of distortions happen the further you get from the source of a story. I’ll certainly be a lot more cautious about these kinds of stories going forward. Welcome to the new age of journalism, I guess.

Hey, I dislike the word “gamification” as much as the next guy. The topic of game mechanics has been twisted and applied to everything with almost as much success as the recent “infographic” craze. And yet, I can’t help but link to this excellent post by Michael Lopp. In Two Universes he provides one of the few worthwhile explorations of game mechanics in software that I’ve seen:

The plethora of online Photoshop tutorials demonstrate its power and its flexibility, but I believe they also demonstrate its poor design. Think about it like this: what if each time you plunked down in front of World of Warcraft, you had to spend an hour trying to remember, wait, how do I play this?

Great design makes learning frictionless. The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. Designers’ livelihood is based on how quickly and cleverly they can introduce to and teach a user how a particular tool works in a particular universe.

His observations on what it takes to motivate people to learn are spot on.

Klouchebag - a satirical response to “influence” measurement site Klout - is making the rounds today. It’s a lot of fun (I’m apparently quite a nice person), but it’s more than that. At the bottom of the page, creator Tom Scott gives some excellent advice on how you should view your Klout score:

But… but my Klout score is important!

No it’s not. It’s like search engine optimisation, only for yourself. Ignore it. Concentrate on making amazing things, caring about the people around you, and not being a douchebag. If you do that, then you’ll soon realise that it doesn’t matter one jot what an algorithm thinks of you.

Not one jot. Sometimes only British English can describe a thing accurately.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long but interesting review of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Entitled Shift Happens, the article goes through all the misinterpretations of Kuhn’s work, as well as some of the major criticisms his ideas have received over the years. I found this part particularly interesting:

Scientific revolutions, according to [Kuhn’s book], don’t occur when an apple happens to find the head of a genius, or when enough facts have slowly painted a new picture. Rather, in yet another of Kuhn’s inversions, new paradigms emerge to explain the accumulation of anomalies: findings that do not make sense within the current paradigm. For example, if your paradigm tells you that fire consists of the release of phlogiston embedded in flammable materials, then the fact that some metals gain weight when burned is an anomaly. When a new paradigm is conceived that makes sense of the anomalies, science is in for a revolutionary shift.

There is a definite parallel with design work here. We often try to shift users to a new interaction paradigm because we think it works better. That’s fine, and can be successful - tab-based browsing comes to mind. But these are incremental changes/improvements, and they happen whenever designers approach an existing problem in a new way. They’re worthy pursuits, but rarely essential for an application to still fulfill its purpose.

By contrast some interaction changes are absolutely essential, and we need to keep our eyes open to recognize those elusive circumstances. Essential interaction changes need to happen when existing paradigms can’t cope any more, and new ones are needed. For example, clicking with a mouse isn’t a thing on touch devices, so that particular interaction became an anomaly that couldn’t be “explained” by existing paradigms any more. Therefore we are legitimately creating new paradigms for mobile design to accommodate the change from mouse to touch. We’re still navigating our way through this change, as apps like Path and Clear emerge to challenge our views on what we consider good design.

We often spend our time trying to improve existing designs, and we need to do that. But there is always the danger of hitting a local maximum - “a point [where] you’ve hit the limit of the current design”. To fight this danger, let’s remember that our energy is sometimes best spent identifying areas where existing paradigms are bursting at the seams in their ability to accommodate the design status quo. That’s where the opportunities for design revolution truly lie.

Matt Gemmell posted some interesting reflections on the difficulties of translating paper-based media to digital devices. It includes another reason (not that we need any more reasons, mind you) why skeuomorphic design practices are so problematic. From Augmented Paper:

It’s so easy to saturate electronic representations of paper with what I call “digital artifice”; the gratuitous and ultimately heavy and objectionable skeuomorphisms and decorations that betray a simplistic thinking process: let’s just make this look the same. That’s a damaging frame of mind, because it enforces a false dichotomy between the real and the virtual. Software should be an enhancement, not a replication.

Paul Ford wrote the best article I’ve seen so far on the Facebook/Instagram deal. When Your Favorite App Sells Out includes gems like this:

Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience, Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever ”” a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life ”” that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world ”” but man, does it work.

Anyway, he goes on to explain why he thinks people are so upset about the deal. Just go ahead and read the thing - it’s worth it.

Jon Mitchell in Websites Have to Get Better:

Read-later apps are competition for noisy, ad-ridden websites. They represent a simple fact: Users hate our sites.

Websites should think of Instapaper as competition. People are spending their reader-experience (RX?) dollars elsewhere, period. They don’t want to pay publisher sites with impressions on ads they don’t value, so they pay Marco Arment for a better reading experience. If publishers want to get those RX dollars, they have to deliver a great experience Instapaper can’t provide. It’s pure and simple competition.

I agree with the conclusion that web sites have to provide better reading experiences. But I don’t agree with the causal relationship being drawn with Read Later apps.

First, the main purpose of Read Later apps is revealed right there in the name: they’re for reading things”¦ later. So even though some people probably use the Instapaper web view to read articles immediately without ads, my guess is that most people use it to save articles for later reading.

What the DVR does for TV shows, Instapaper does for articles. And just like with a DVR, you get to skip the ads - but that’s just a wonderful, added bonus. The real benefit is having a place to store and watch/read all the things you want to get to without being bound to the time and place where you first discovered it. This means that if major ad-supported sites start to provide better reading experiences, I won’t suddenly stop using Instapaper. The need to save articles for later reading would remain. This brings me to my second point.

The reason web sites have to provide a better reading experience is not because Read Later apps are their competition, but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s how you show that you value and respect your readers.