Maybe you’re a UX designer who works at the early stages of the design process, doing the discovery phase, running workshops, producing concepts, sketches and setting the vision. Again, it’s so easy to pass the buck and feel vindicated when the quality at the end of the process is low.

Sometimes it feels like you’re a doctor advising a sick patient to give up smoking. If the patient keeps at it and eventually dies, it’s not your fault, right? Working agency-side makes this point of view even easier. You often don’t even see the end result – your agency gets paid and you move on.

Being teflon-coated feels safe, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. You’ll stop improving your skills and sooner or later people will realise you are delivering no value. UX people already have a bad reputation for delivering formulaic rhetoric and not delivering the goods. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for our industry as a whole.

Fight to make yourself more accountable. Critique, don’t complain. Work out how to fix the process. Remember, design isn’t just UI. Organisations are designed. Workflow processes are designed. You already have the analytical skills needed to make change happen, you just need to step up to the plate.

In some organisations you’ll have to pry the above-the-fold advertising real estate out of the cold, dead hands of the senior execs. As Leisa Reichelt said a few months ago: “Politics and egos are the main reasons that great design goes awry” […] ‘Show, don’t tell’ is a design principle that seems to work well.”

Some organisations just have too much invested in their full-fat desktop sites. A messy tangle of revenue streams, too many job roles and too many egg shells make disruptive change feel almost impossible.

The mdot site seems like a perfect candidate for bringing in change. It typically doesn’t get much attention as it’s not a great source of revenue. It’s often dated, and the organisation knows “something” needs to be done. This allows you to quietly go about creating a beautiful responsive site. You’re free to streamline the user journeys, ditch all the crap that’s accumulated on the desktop site over the years and do things the right way. It makes sense to start with a focus on smaller viewports, and gradually expand your attention to larger sizes until one day – maybe, just maybe, once the benefits have been proven with your mdot testbed, you can flick the switch and turn off that old desktop site completely.

Credit to Jeremy Keith and Josh Emerson for the ideas in this post.

It may be an old story, but it’s something we’re all doing somewhere in our work. The real challenge is finding out where and dealing with it. For example –

• Tinkering with the details on a single high traffic page, because that’s what’s easiest with your MVT package (Button colours and labels don’t push the needle far, but it’s so hard not to scratch the itch).
• Never going back to challenging design problems because “the decision has already been made”, and instead turning your attention to the new stuff because it’s shinier and more exciting.
• Focusing on areas that you’ve already been running research on, on the logic “we’re looking here already, there must be some gold here if we keep trying!”
• Looking at just one small area of the site because that’s what the client asked (UX problems are rarely polite and tidy enough to stay within the area originally scoped).
• Always reaching for the same research tools (e.g. just analytics), because that’s your comfort zone.

I’ve said this before, but we designers are very good at turning our lens of analysis on others, but we often forget to turn it on ourselves. If you’re doing your current project with the exact same approach your the last one, chances are you’ve missed the opportunity to do something better.

If you work in a UX agency then you’re probably used to paying about £70-£100 a head finders fee for some recruiter to trawl their database and make a few calls. It’s worth it if you’ve got a tough screener spec, but the rest of the time you’ve got to wonder if your cash is being well spent.

With Powwowapp you hook it up to your Google calendar, create your empty slots and you’re given a public facing URL for you to share. People can then pick a slot, book themselves in and give their details, which appear directly in your calendar. The neat thing is that the participants don’t get to see any other entries in the calendar, nor any of the other participant’s details.

I imagine it would work pretty well in combination with a targeted mailshot (if your client has an established user base), a targeted ad campaign, social media or a combination of all of them. It doesn’t give you the ability to pre-screen the participants (i.e. have them fill in a form and prevent them from signing up if they aren’t suitable), but you can achieve that with a bit of Wufoo magic if you need it.

Powwowapp was made by Viget as a side project to scratch their own itch. It is in alpha but it seems pretty solid to me. The real downside is that without a revenue model or any explicit commitment to running it long term, I’d be reluctant to use it on a big client project. With a bit of support from the UX community, I’m sure they might give it some more attention – why not drop them a line to show your support.

Getting stakeholders to think about their users is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when you start treating them as facts rather than hypotheses. Maybe it’s time to trot out that old argument again.

I’m going to miss this place. What I’ve loved about Clearleft is that it’s just so different to any other agency I’ve worked at. There’s no company process – everyone’s encouraged to experiment and try different techniques to suit the client’s needs. There’s hardly any internal meetings. I’ve never once had a conversation about my billing efficiency. The focus is on quality, and profitability is almost seen as a by-product. You’re encouraged to share your learnings externally rather than keep them in-house. Everyone’s trusted and given a lot of independence.

I’ve been a UX consultant of some form or other since the early 2000s. Even though I say it myself, I’ve been pretty good at “standard” UX practice for many years. It was working at Clearleft that made me realise that those skills alone are not enough.

Achieving good design for a client takes more than just good design. It’s providing education, therapy and facilitation. It’s about getting a client’s work environment ready so that good ideas have a place to grow and flourish after your project has finished. Your attitude to UX changes when a client hires you to make good UX happen and to see it through, rather than just to turn the handle of a small cog in the machine like user research or prototyping. In Dan Saffer’s Interactions talk last year he joked that UX designers are good at “keeping it vague” and that they focus on the “easy, fun part”. I’m happy that doesn’t apply to me anymore.

So if I’ve got so many good things to say about the company, why am I leaving? It’s simple really. I’ve always wanted to do this – it’s not a sudden change in heart. This is the point in the post that I was expecting to give you a sales pitch and plead “hire me, I’m available!”. In fact since announcing it yesterday afternoon, I’ve already been booked up until July this year
. It’s heartening to know that now I’ve made the jump, the water is warm enough after all. Thanks everyone.

Oh, and don’t be a stranger, connect with me!

Funnily enough, I agree with many of Cennydd’s and Jared’s individual points, but I disagree with the overall thesis that UCD is past its best. It feels kind of flame-baity to me. Back in the days when Devs used to argue about Agile all the time, Ron Jeffries wrote this this allegory about development processes and baseball. It was a joke about how a group of fictional developers read the rules of baseball, decided to tweak them a little bit and ended up playing a version of it involving a rolled up socks for a ball and very little physical activity, so to make it more efficient. It was easy but they didn’t have any fun, and they posted an angry rant online condeming baseball as “problematic”. Yes, it’s a daft story, but Ron’s point is solid: before denouncing Baseball, Agile, UCD or anything else, it makes sense to stop for a moment and work out if you’re playing it the same way everyone else is.

These days, UCD is seen as a pretty vague process. Everyone makes up their own rules and we all get different mileage out of it. Historically there’s been various efforts to formalize UCD, but most design groups keep it pretty open – you go through iterations of analysis, creation and evaluation; usually trying to involve real users in the evaluation activities. You start with broadbrush concepts and divergent, broadbrush research – then you hone in to detailed concepts and convergent, detail-oriented research. That’s it in a nutshell. It doesn’t somehow spit out innovative products when you turn the handle, but hey – it’s a process, not a fairy godmother.

About a year ago I did some consultancy with an agency who ran about 100 hours of usability testing on a shonky Axure prototype under the name of UCD. It must have cost them about $150k, with barely no difference in the design before or after. They said their client wanted to be extra sure that the design was highly usable, so they added more research – but somehow forgot about the analysis and design bit. There aint no cure for stupidity, but this isn’t the fault of any particular acronym.

Maybe I’m being boring here. I agree there is a lot of bad design happening out there, but does that mean we need to “look beyond” UCD? In fact, I think we should look directly at it. Let’s talk about the common mistakes and the flaws. Let’s evolve it. But please, let’s not coin any new terms just yet.

Which website would you nominate to win an award as the most deceptive, sneaky and manipulative of the last 12 months? I’m very interested in hearing from you, even if you feel it’s already common knowledge – so don’t be scared to nominate Ryanair or Facebook! Just email me your thoughts submissions@darkpatterns.org or post a tweet with the hashtag #darkpatterns and I’ll pick it up.

If you’re coming to SXSW this year, why not pop along. The Dark Patterns Awards are happening at 5pm on Monday, March 11 in Ballroom A.

So what do you when you’re usability testing on an iOS device? You can use a kit like Mr Tappy to mount a camera pointed at the screen, but it’s a little awkward and a software solution would be much tidier. This has historically been a blackspot, but recently Reflector has made it possible, along with a couple of hacks that I’ll explain below.

Reflector allows you to mirror iOS devices on your Mac’s screen.

Let’s start off with the viewing room. Reflector turns your Macbook into an Airplay receiver, so you can have the screen of your iOS device appear on your Macbook’s screen as if you were using an AppleTV. It’s simple (instructions here) although it only works on newer iOS devices. To get this footage showing in your viewing room, all you need to do is run a long HDMI cable out of your Macbook (which will be positioned in front of your participant) through into other room, then mirror the screen in System Preferences. Although it’s clunky, it’s reliable: unlike streaming there’s no risk of lag or drop-out. Next you’ll want to get audio and footage of the user’s face. Just stick a DV camera on a tabletop tripod and run an AV cable out of it into a TV in the viewing room. The picture you’ll get from any old DV camera is going to be pretty clear in comparison to a webcam, so it’s worth the effort. If, for some reason, you’re determined to stream it over IP, you could instead try using Wirecast (which looks like an awesome app and I’ll probably be reviewing it soon).

So that’s the viewing room sorted. Next up you want to set up that digital recording of the iOS device’s screen along with the user’s face. Silverback does the trick (disclosure: this is one of our products at Clearleft, where I work). It’s intended for recording your Mac’s desktop. With Reflector running, your Mac’s desktop happens to be showing the iOS device’s screen – so voilà, problem solved. Simply position your Macbook so that the built-in webcam is pointed at the participant’s face. There’s a sample video below.

Sample Silverback recording of a Reflector session.

There are two shortcomings you should be aware of. Firstly, you’ll notice in the video footage that you can’t see what gestures the user is doing. In many cases this isn’t a huge problem, but if you really need to see this then you might be better off using something like Mr Tappy to point a camera at the screen. Secondly, Silverback and Reflector have not been designed to work together and they might not be reliable on your machine. Having said that, they run just fine on my Mid-2011 Macbook Air.

Edit 1: good news everybody! Squirrels LLC are kindly offering 10 free licences of Reflector (normally $12.99) to readers of this blog.

Edit 2: All the licences have been snapped up, though you can still email Napkin Studio for an extended trial.

Edit 3: All the licences and extended trials are gone now. If you want Reflector, go buy it – it’s only $12.99!

Show us a video of you doing some public speaking
It’s obvious really: great slides on slideshare or well written blog posts are nice, but they’re not proof that you’re a good public speaker. There are plenty of people in our industry who still give dull, monotonous talks and we need evidence that you’re not one of them. Some iPhone footage of you giving a 5 minute talk at a local UX meet-up is all you need. Put the URL in your proposal.

Don’t assume we know who you are
Even if you’re well known in your city, if you apply to an international conference you might be assigned a reviewer from a different country. Don’t expect us to Google you and spend 15 minutes researching your background (15 minutes * 100 submissions = massive time drain). Put a short bio in your proposal and make sure it explains why you are able to speak authoritatively on the given topic.

Don’t try to use terminology or complex language to impress the reviewers
A lot of the talk summaries I read were wrapped up in elitist terminology. Don’t bother, it just adds mental effort for the reviewers – we have to decode your blurb. If anything, it can make you look like a blagger and can stack the odds against you. It’s kind of ironic that the UX industry never shuts up about plain english when we talk to our clients, but when we try to impress each other it’s all frameworks, methodologies and unifying theories.

Offer options
Are you willing to give a shorter or longer version of your talk? Would you be willing to change it into an interactive session? If you are, say so. Organising a conference track is like a tetris game and it helps your chances if you give us different shapes and sizes to work with.

Submit multiple talk ideas
This was one of the most unexpected tips I picked up: some of the most well known speakers on the circuit submitted numerous talk summaries on a range of totally different topics. As a result they were much more likely to get selected. It’s a perfectly valid approach so long as you actually know what you’re talking about.

Tell us if you’ve given this talk before
Chances are that if you’ve given the talk multiple times, it’s a good one that’s worth repeating in another location, so don’t be scared of your own success. It’s best to be honest – lay the facts out about where, when and who you’ve presented variants of your talk to.

Maybe I’m turning into a scratched record here, but dead ends and mistakes are inherent to a good design process. If this doesn’t happen to you in your work, you should stop and think for a moment. No mistakes means you’re not experimenting. It means you’re not exploring. No mistakes means you are doing very boring work. So if you’re sitting there smuggly thinking to yourself “this would never happen to me” then wake the hell up, it’s a bad sign.

One of the findings in particular struck a chord with me:

“Before even creating an account or logging in, users were immediately taken to the Home screen where they could start creating invoices, tracking time, logging expenses, and so forth — all within seconds of launching the app. No login or account creation required.”

When they took the prototype to usability testing they found:

“Beta testers expected to create an account or login immediately after the launching the app given the ubiquity of this paradigm.

Presented with just the Home screen, testers approached the app with hesitation and lots of unanswered questions. Where would their data be saved? To a new account? What if they already have an account? [...] Deferring account creation or login to an opportune time when its benefit is most relevant was novel, but ultimately just too radical.”

I came across the exact same finding a few years ago when working on a Job Board platform. We designed the job-seeker website to use lazy registration (aka “passive registration” or “progressive sign up”), so people didn’t need to register before they applied for a job or set up email alerts. This was so successful at boosting conversions that we decided to do the exact same thing with the recruiter job posting UI– this is the place where employers and recruiters post their job ad, categorise it in various ways and then pay. We took it to usability testing and it flunked with every single recruiter who tried it. Why? Because they didn’t like the idea of spending 15 minutes creating a job ad without the reassurance that it was definitely going to be saved somewhere safe. They far prefered the version of the app that required up-front registration.

It’s funny that for once, user research pointed towards the option that required substanially less development work. It’s also another nice little piece of evidence showing that you can’t just blindly copy and paste design patterns from one context to another and expect the success to be magically transfered. Context is key.

Edit: title revised for clarity (15-Dec-12)

A charming quote, made even more interesting by this biting counterpoint from Architect and Human-Centred Urban Quality Consultant Jan Gehl:

“Brasí­lia was the ultimate modernistic city, built on all the ideas of the modernistic manifests. It looks fantastic from the airplane. But if you are down at eye level, on your feet and going from one place to another, Brasí­lia is a disaster. Every distance is too wide. Things are not connected. You have to trample for endless miles along completely straight paths. Nobody ever started to think about what it would be like to be out in Brasília in between all these monuments.”

Jan explains: “As far as I am concerned, the people scale is THE important scale of all of them. We have the city plan scale, the site plan scale and the people scale. And definitely the people scale, where you touch the city, and where you touch the buildings – that’s what counts for quality. […] I find it striking that the quality of the urban habitat of homo sapiens is so weakly researched compared to the habitat of mountain gorillas and bengal tigers and panda bears in China.”

At Clearleft we often talk about what happens when you design at the wrong level of zoom. Dribbble, for example, encourages you to focus in on a 400×300 pixel rectangle, so you end up with something beautiful that has no bearing on the real user experience. It’s easy to marvel at the theoretical perfection of your work but ultimately it’s not your judgement that matters. The end users – the citizens who has to live in your streets – these are the people who determine its success.

The video clip above is from Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized, which you can now watch online for just $3.99. Highly recommended.

• Mike Kuniavsky: Co-founder of Adaptive Path
• Jim Kalbach: Author of the classic IA tome ‘Designing Web Navigation’
• Karl Fast: Professor of UX at Kent State University
• Alex Wright: Director of UX at The New York Times
• Ben Bashford: Internet-of-things Think-Tanker and Interaction Designer
• Sriram Subramanian: Professor at University of Bristol and Hardware Electronics / HCI researcher
• Guy Smith-Ferrier: Consultant, Author and Brain-Computer Interface Developer
• Mark Backler: Game Designer and Kinekt / NUI specialist at Lionhead studios

The conference will spread across two themes. Firstly, the history of interaction design – teaching us lessons from the successes and failures of past innovations, explaining how they can apply to our day-to-day lives as UX designers. Secondly, the future of interaction design – from brain computer interaction (there will be a live EEG demo on stage!) to NUIs and smart objects.

The good news is that I’ve talked Danny into offering a 10% discount to readers of this blog: just use the coupon code “90poe” in the checkout. Also, if you’re a student then you’re eligible for a huge discount: all you have to do is email Emmeline the events coordinator, with some sort of proof of your student status (e.g. photo of your student id) and you’ll be able to get a ticket for just £50 instead of the list price of £149. Not bad, eh!

“…instead of responding spontaneously to the task from a habitually assumed perspective, [the child] is encouraged to make their behaviour the object of their considerations [...], so creating a distance, a detachment from what they are actually doing, in terms of the question: ‘How would a clever person do the task?’”

Also, a slightly heartbreaking quote from one of the interviews:

“Do you usually do better than the person you acted like or worse?”
“– Worse”
“Why?”
“– Because I’m Paul Hanworth”.

It just goes to show the deep importance of self confidence – not just in the way we express ourselves to others, but in the actual thought processes that we engage in.

Sal looks out her windows at her neighborhood. Sunlight and a fence are visible through one, and through others she sees electronic trails that have been kept for her of neighbors coming and going during the early morning. Privacy conventions and practical data rates prevent displaying video footage, but time markers and electronic tracks on the neighborhood map let Sal feel cozy in her street.

On the way to work Sal glances in the foreview mirror to check the traffic. She spots a slowdown ahead and also notices on a side street the telltale green in the foreview of a food shop, and a new one at that. She decides to take the next exit and get a cup of coffee while avoiding the jam.

Once Sal arrives at work, the foreview helps her find a parking spot quickly. As she walks into the building, the machines in her office prepare to log her in but do not complete the sequence until she actually enters her office. On her way, she stops by the offices of four or five colleagues to exchange greetings and news.

Sal glances out her windows: a gray day in Silicon Valley, 75 percent humidity and 40 percent chance of afternoon showers; meanwhile it has been a quiet morning at the East Coast office. Usually the activity indicator shows at least one spontaneous, urgent meeting by now. She chooses not to shift the window on the home office back three hours—too much chance of being caught by surprise. But she knows others who do, usually people who never get a call from the East but just want to feel involved.
The telltale by the door that Sal programmed her first day on the job is blinking: fresh coffee. She heads for the coffee machine.

Coming back to her office, Sal picks up a tab and “waves” it to her friend Joe in the design group, with whom she has a joint assignment. They are sharing a virtual office for a few weeks. The sharing can take many forms — in this case, the two have given each other access to their location detectors and to each other’s screen contents and location. Sal chooses to keep miniature versions of all Joe’s tabs and pads in view and three-dimensionally correct in a little suite of tabs in the back corner of her desk. She can’t see what anything says, but she feels more in touch with his work when noticing the displays change out of the corner of her eye, and she can easily enlarge anything if necessary.

A blank tab on Sal’s desk beeps and displays the word “Joe” on it. She picks it up and gestures with it toward her live board. Joe wants to discuss a document with her, and now it shows up on the wall as she hears Joe’s voice…

– Mark Weiser (1991) “The Computer For the 21st Century”.

If you haven’t already, go read the whole thing now. Mark Weiser was such an awesome guy – CTO of Xerox Parc in its glory days, he coined the term “ubiquitous computing” all the way back in 1988 – describing a future of invisible computers embedded in everyday objects. And yes, the “pad” device he describes in this paper does sound an awful lot like an iPad, doesn’t it?

Try it for yourself:

Can’t see the embedded item?

“The deliverable will be a high level overview…”
– It’s gonna be vague.

“…very high level…”
– It’s gonna be incredibly vague.

“There are numerous opportunities for improvement”
– Your UI is a car crash but we’d prefer not to offend you until the contract’s signed.

“We’ve identified some low hanging fruit…”
– You’ve made some huge design mistakes. We could tell you how to fix them right now, but you’re more likely to listen to us after you’ve paid us five or six figures.

“Cognitive load”
– It’s just plain confusing.

“Our consultants have a background in Psychology”
– They’ll keep saying ‘cognitive load’ over and over again.

“Poor visual hierarchy”
– The page is a cluttered mess.

“Enhance the call to action”
– Make that button bigger.

“Most users had difficulty completing this task.”
– The intern didn’t write down exactly how many people it happened to… But that doesn’t matter because it’s a high level report, right?

This is an excerpt from a talk I gave at ProductTank in July. For the different angle on the same design process, check out Alex Watson’s Business Case presentation.

• Usenet itself: anyone can post anything to a usenet group (provided it’s configured to accept binaries) and the servers then sync with each other around the globe. It’s decentralised by design – invented in an environment where business models and copyright were not a concern.
• Sabnzbd: this little app manages the downloading process similar to a Bittorrent client. What’s different is that you can send it jobs remotely via RSS. So, if a friend tells you about a new show you haven’t heard of, you can whip out your iPhone and bookmark the show using a usenet search engine. The search engine then puts your bookmark into an RSS feed that sabnzbd will pick up and start downloading onto your home computer. Since it’s RSS you can give that feed URL to other people and they’ll end up with the same files as you, so you can share the same experiences. An amazingly simple way to ‘do’ social. Apparently, with a bit of tinkering Sabnzbd can run on the $25 Rasberry Pi along with XBMC which you can see here has an impressively polished UI.
• CouchPotato: so far what I’ve described is sort of similar to Netflix but a lot more illegal. CouchPotato is where it gets interesting. Once installed along with a Userscript, CouchPotato adds a “want” button to any page on IMDB, even if the movie is not yet released. When a user hits the button, CouchPotato patiently scans usenet for a matching file at the user’s specified quality level (e.g. Blu-ray). Again, this UI is also pretty impressive.
• Sickbeard & Headphones: these apps do pretty much the same thing as CouchPotato but for TV shows and music.

So why am I writing about this? Pirates will go to any lengths to get something for free, right? Well, actually, No. That’s the most fascinating thing. It costs about $20-35 US Dollars a month for Giganews usenet subscription, and they claim to have over 10 million subscribers worldwide (they’re just one of many different providers). Seriously.

So let’s just break that down. It’s expensive. It’s illegal. It’s a crazy hassle to set up. You’re at risk of being sued for a lot of money and maybe even losing your home internet connection. Once you’ve got it all up and running, you’ve got something that’s basically as slick as Netflix. So what does it give you that Netflix doesn’t offer? You get one thing – the ability to watch stuff on very same day it’s released, regardless of the publisher or region.

Does this tell us people will do anything to save a bit of cash? No. It’s telling us that people will do almost anything to get same-day releases – and that they’re willing to both pay wads of cash and break the law at the same time to get them. Sure, they’re not paying enough and the money is going to the wrong people, but that’s not the point. This is blazingly clear evidence that Usenet piracy is a response to an availability problem – something that the studios could easily solve if they put their minds to it.

Studio business models aside, it’s amazing that people have managed to cobble together such a well crafted, seamless user-experience on top of a 1980s technology. On the other hand, maybe we should shed a tear for the loss of everything that Usenet used to stand for – a democratic, open discussion forum that was the heart and soul of the internet for many years before the web even existed.


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