For the last eleven months I travelled to the North from London for work. I caught the train early every Monday morning, stayed in hotels during the week, came home Thursday.

After work I would return to a hotel. It might have been the same hotel every week, but it would be a different room each week. I would pack up my things on Sunday evening, unpack them on Monday evening, and repack them on Thursday morning. I became very good at packing, and guessing what I would need during the week.

‘Travel’ up until now had been a sexy word. It meant I would get to see and experience different parts of the world, usually within a constrained frame of time, after which I could return home with a bunch of photographs and memories.

This kind of travel is different. It starts to feel, about two months in, as if someone has hit a ‘pause’ button on your life. Five months later, it still felt like that, and I felt surprised when I noticed the date, feeling stuck several months behind. My life felt that it was split in two, going at different speeds, depending on where I was. Someone hit ‘play’ on Thursdays, when I returned home, then ‘pause’ again on Monday morning.

Fast forward to April. Now I’m based in London, I have renewed appreciation for the mundane chores in life.

Groceries: specifically, buying groceries without worrying I won’t be able to finish it all by Sunday. A fresh, full-size loaf of brown bread. An entire two pints of milk. A whole bunch of ripe bananas!

Cooking: I lived on very lavish, delicious meals for a while. Even so, I missed the effort of making things for myself. The satisfaction of frying some fat prawns, cooking pasta, or making simple hot buttered toast and a cup of tea, at home.

Rubbish: I can take my rubbish out whenever it needs to be taken out, any evening in the week!

Laundry: no longer the rush of doing laundry on a Sunday, before travel – I can do laundry and leave clothes lying around my flat to dry, with that fresh laundry smell.

Cleaning: instead of watching shows on my laptop, I can do my dishes before I go to sleep.

Facetious? Only a little bit. All of the above is a privilege of being able to come home after work.

That’s not to say it was all bad. It was a new and interesting lifestyle. I lived in excellent hotels and dined out at fancy places every night. I didn’t have to think about groceries, cooking, rubbish, laundry, or cleaning. If I wanted some food, I could just pick up the phone and dial room service. I could leave my bed unmade, and come back later to find it magically made.

I could write a whole other post about hotels and hotel customer service: when you stay in nice places week in week out, you start to notice the little differences.

So yes, not all bad. But this travel lifestyle is only sustainable for a short time. I’m looking forward to putting some roots down for a while. Perhaps literally, since the flat I’m moving to in London has a communal garden.

The user experience field is reaching a level of maturity, although it’s still quite young. A rough process for defining user experience looks something like this:

User research → Information architecture → Interaction design → Visual design 

As a graphic design graduate, visual design is close to my heart. In my graphic design years I learned about information design, the evolution of printing technology and techniques, the contributions of master typographers and graphic designers. Graphic design as we know it started in the Industrial Revolution, when we started needing things like tickets and timetables.

So one of the weirdest things as a graphic design graduate turned UX designer is hearing variations of the following:

“Visual design means making it pretty!”

Lolwut?

This has led me to think about how visual design fits in with user experience. The point of wireframes is that they’re rough and unfinished. They encourage gradual iteration, and it doesn’t matter if it’s not neat. Wireframing software Balsamiq and Axure have means of adding a rough, unfinished look to designs to reaffirm the fact they’re drafts. The designs are not finished and are subject to change. This can be incredibly helpful.

The rough process, again:

User research (identifying target audience) → Information architecture (defining navigation) → Interaction design (defining wireframes, interaction mechanisms) → Visual design (defining how it looks)

… in this process, visual design is left to the final phase, after the navigation and interaction mechanisms have been worked out.

Left to the final phase, it’s not surprising that visual design is treated like dropping a skin on top of the wireframes. Leaving the visual considerations to late in the design process means we miss out on a great deal of design insight that visual communication could bring. We end up with the superficial application of visual design, so visual design is demeaned as a ‘skin’ or ‘prettiness’ on top of the greater complex stuff going on underneath.

I personally find this view frustrating. We can learn a lot from graphic design as a field. Before user experience, we had printers and graphic designers who had the task of organising the great influx of information available, and making it readable, usable, clear. We can look to Isotype, Die neue typographie, and identity system for the 1972 Munich Olympics as great, successful examples of visual communication.

Basically, I think the distinction between ‘how it works’ and ‘how it looks’ is blurrier than we think.

How long do animals live? From Vintage Visual Language: The Story of Isotype.

In the end, I really enjoyed the research component. I was worried I would be less motivated to finish it — I lacked the peer support I’d had throughout the rest of the course. But it was fine in the end; research requires you to be independent and self-motivated.

MSc thesis: User-Centred Identity Management: Evaluating the Role of the Browser

To complicate things, I decided to switch from the planned topic (a cognitive science project comparing what people learn from different displays of the same information) to a different topic. I struggled a bit to find something appropriate, settling eventually on identity in the browser. The idea for the project grew out of looking at the problems with OpenID. My entire project was going to focus on improving OpenID, but I ended up looking at the bigger, and much more interesting and complex, problem of web identity.

I decided to design and evaluate a browser that made identity management easier for users.

The basis for my research:

1. Identity management systems on the web favour service providers and technology over humans. The major model of identity on the web requires users to create a new set of credentials for every service they sign up with. This is scalable and cost-effective for service providers, but not for people. Human memory capacity is not great. People can’t cope with the requirements this model imposes. They take shortcuts: they reuse passwords and identifiers, write passwords down. A great paper explaining identity management is this one: Jøsang and Pope, 2005 [PDF]
2. Identity should be scalable for humans as well as service providers. So: why not use the browser to support identity management and allow better identity ‘scalability’? This has been raised by a few people in academia and industry, but there has not been a thorough evaluation of a) user perceptions, and b) feasibility of this approach.

I planned a study that explored user perceptions to identity management and, in the second half, evaluated a browser prototype. I designed and mocked up a prototype browser in Flash.

I interviewed 10 people to discover how well they were coping with managing their credentials. In this small sample of fairly technologically-savvy UCL students, people talked about the fairly drastic measures they took to manage their credentials — writing them down on paper and locking them in a physical cabinet, encrypting them in a text file, storing them in pinyin in a spreadsheet. One participant kept PayPal’s password reset phone number in her mobile address book. Despite these drastic measures, participants didn’t seem to think they had a major issue with managing their web identity. :)

The second part of the study evaluated a prototype that allowed a user to do three things:

1. Sign into an existing account,
2. Sign up for a new account using a predefined identity,
3. Manage existing credentials.

Several browser add-ons support identity management in this way already (look at Sxipper and 1Password). These have limited reach and accessibility, requiring people to download extra software. Remember that users follow the path of least resistance.

Perceptions to the prototype were mainly positive — participants thought the browser was a convenient way to manage accounts, sign in, and create new accounts. Yet the convenience of signing in also created concern: users can sign into an account by pressing a button. What if a stranger accessed their account? The browser’s design should provide security mechanisms to reassure users and allow them to be in control.

A browser that integrates identity transforms the browser from being something used quite casually to something directly tied to a user’s identity, making it more like an operating system.

Further research: a working browser prototype could be developed and used in combination with a diary study over a longer period of time. The research should also address the problem of browser data being local on a user’s machine. Google Chrome has addressed this by syncing with the user’s Google account.

I really enjoyed the research project and felt I learned a lot about my topic and how to plan and execute a substantial piece of research.

My own attitude to using a browser to handle web identity was skeptical at first. Browsing the web in retrospect, it’s crazy to suddenly notice all the different login design patterns. I don’t think design patterns and conventions are enough for imposing a level of order. I wonder what web identity will look like in 10, 20, 50 years!

A few people have asked me: what was it like to spend a summer working at Google?

A little intimidating, initially … it’s Google! Overall, I had a fantastic experience. I adjusted quickly and met a bunch of other interns (mostly engineering, with one other UX intern). Over the four month period I developed my design skills, technical skills, soft skills. I did a lot of design work, which I really missed in academia. I made mockups and prototypes, and wrote HTML and CSS. That felt really good.

The perks of working for Google are great. I can’t avoid talking about the food. I ate almost all my meals at Google over the summer, so my grocery expenses were low. The food is good, and my favourite meal there was breakfast. The range of breakfast options were amazing: they included typical cooked options (scrambled eggs, omelettes, baked beans, sausages, bacon), waffles, different kinds of bread, cereal, porridge, fresh fruit (raspberries, blueberries, grapes, apple slices, pineapple). Oh, and there’s freshly-made fruit smoothies.

There was a machine that dispensed Minstrels approximately 12 steps from my desk, just outside one of the microkitchens (these are snack bars that also work as chill-out areas, and are furnished with hammocks and objects to sit on). Obviously, proximity to Minstrels can be quite a dangerous thing, and required self moderation!

Perhaps the hardest thing about adjusting back to ‘normal life’ is learning that you can’t walk into a café and just start grazing.

Apart from the food, one of the best things about working at Google is the number of interesting people you get to meet. There are people visiting the London office all the time, and I ended up meeting people from other Google offices around the world.

There are a great number of inspirational role models who can be found in the company: a huge benefit is that the people who work at Google are incredibly passionate about what they do, and it’s hard not to be infected by their enthusiasm. For a relatively junior designer, this is really important: seeing the work other people are producing and discussing it with them is very motivational, and helped me to figure out what skills I want to learn, and what I can work on to get better at.

One of the key things I learned was the value of selling ideas within a company.  Static mocks are helpful at the production stage, but the designs have to get that far; a design idea needs to get traction and interest. Screencasts are a great (and trendy) tool for getting ideas across. These are short videos that demonstrates an app or new idea, which you talk the viewer through. Similarly, a Flash prototype is great for demonstrating how a design should actually work. An interactive demonstration of a design has far more power than static mocks. It helps people to imagine these designs working in reality.

I really enjoyed my internship at Google. I learned a ton, pushed myself as a designer, met fantastic people, and had a lot of fun. If you’re a student and passionately interested in technology, I’d definitely recommend applying for a summer internship at Google.

Similarly, friend additions are more smartly grouped. Back in the day (not so long ago), friends you added on Facebook would appear in a linear list, even if many friends were added in a short time period:

Bob is now friends with E.
Bob is now friends with D.
Bob is now friends with C.
Bob is now friends with B.
Bob is now friends with A.

An economical solution appeared when Facebook reported new friend additions in a list: Bob is now friends with A and 2 other people.

More recently, profile picture thumbnails were added, which would show the full name of the friend on mouseover.

How these groupings occur are a little mysterious, like the algorithm that displays friends in the left hand panel on new December 2010 profiles (side note: apparently these friends are randomly selected based on public interactions with these people. But many of the friends picked I’ve never actually publicly interacted with).

I’ve noticed that some friend additions get grouped into a list of thumbnails, some additions remain as strings. It’d be fun if you could select a friend addition and drag it to a nearby story to group it with another list. Or choose which story to highlight by dragging it to the top.

There’s tension between what users are able to customise and what is automatic. How far should users be able to customise their feed by dragging, grouping, and modifying stories?

I started my MSc project focusing on one of the solutions to the problem of identity management, which is OpenID. This is an open federated identity protocol for sharing an identifier across different services, made up of identity providers (such as Google or Yahoo) and relying parties (a website that allows users to login using their Google or Yahoo account). I’ve moved away from sole focus on OpenID as I think “What should usable identity management on the web look like?” is a more interesting research question.

OpenID has a terrible user experience. Signing in with a URL is confusing for average users who have learned that authentication requires a username and a password.  Learning how to use OpenID has a higher cognitive overhead for novice users than simply signing up via HTTP authentication. The redirects — an undelightful part of the OpenID experience — are also a phishing risk.

Ben Laurie explains how OpenID is a phishing heaven with a kitten site story:

“…I just persuade you to go anywhere at all, say my lovely site of kitten photos, and get you to log in using your OpenID. Following the protocol, I find out where your provider is (i.e. the site you log in to to prove you really own that OpenID), but instead of sending you there (because, yes, OpenID works by having the site you’re logging in to send you to your provider) I send you to my fake provider, which then just proxies the real provider, stealing your login as it does. I don’t have to persuade you that I’m anything special, just someone who wants you to use OpenID, as the designers hope will become commonplace, and I don’t have to know your provider in advance.”

There are too many identity providers, not enough relying parties. And there’s also the NASCAR problem.

But anyway.

I think solutions to web identity management are trying to handle identity on the wrong level. I like the “big momma identity backplane” idea. How about an interim identity backplane: a smart browser that knows who you are. Aza Raskin creates a great argument here. It absolutely baffles me that this doesn’t already exist (apart from a fledgling Firefox plugin that supports Yahoo and Google).

A smart identity-enabled browser seems far more valuable to me than a browser that has social services built in. The identity-enabled browser should:

• allow a painless login and signup: users select a bundle of attributes — their identity — to sign up with, and select an existing identity to sign in with
• allow anonymity
• not remove control from users that they already have
• allow users to see clearly what data they are sending to services, and what data services own from them
• hide the complexity of authenticating with web services from the user
• keep the user safe from phishing

The success of an identity-enabled browser depends on how well it implements the above. One problem is the conflict between identity handled in the browser and interfaces that invite identity management on the web canvas.

In conclusion, I seem to have picked an enormous and deeply complicated topic, and I’m dipping my toe in the water.

In early November I returned to UCL to finish my MSc. All I have left to do is my project. I say ‘all’ like it’ll be easy, but it’s actually going to be a little different from what I’ve done so far. I’m doing a HCI research project which is going to focus on OpenID. I interrupted my studies to do an internship with Google, so my classmates have all completed their projects and have graduated—I’m doing the project solo. Of course, I’m not complaining!

As many of you readers are probably aware, OpenID has a lot of interesting user experience problems. I’ve been reading up on the discussions around it, as well as usability research, and I feel a little intimidated by the level of passion in the community around identity management. I’ve also kept my eyes peeled for other Single Sign-On ‘trends’ on the web.

I recently came back from a vacation in California. I stayed in San Francisco but visited Mountain View a number of times, including the Hacker Dojo where I got to see a number of projects people are working on. I saw three projects and all had implemented a nice “Login with Facebook” button. It makes it easy to get users on board, but it also feels a slightly dirty solution to me. I’m not entirely happy clicking that blue button, but the lazy part of me enjoys the convenience of instantly accessing a new web service without struggling through web forms and passwords.

So this is where my mind is right now, and will be until around February: login forms, identifiers, identity management, open and decentralized federated identity.

Between now and October I want to learn as much as I can. Specific learning goals will centre around putting theory I learned at UCL into practice, developing my design and user experience skills across the board, and learning as much as I can from the smart and talented people around me.

I’m very excited to get a taste of what it’s like to work for a company that’s adding tremendous value to the web and people’s everyday lives. I am, of course, going back to UCL in the autumn to finish my MSc research project.

I’ve just switched my loooong domain (rebeccacottrell.co.uk) to a shorter one: rcottrell.com. It is easier to type and easier to remember. Although I’m proud to be British, I’m not a fan of the .co.uk domain ending for, er, typographic and literary reasons. It’s rather ugly. My undying gratitude to Chris, who helped me shift my blog over intact.

Like my blog, I’ve survived most of the recent changes—in particular, the recent barrage of coursework and revision.

I have learned a lot from my MSc so far. The taught portion is all wrapped up now, and I’m going back in late October to carry out a three month research project. The MSc project is on displays of dynamic quantitative information, and will be a cognitive science project that aims to determine what displays of information are easiest to understand.

So! While I’m excited about that, I’m also dying to return to making things. I’m grateful for my 4 month academic hiatus. (Speaking of the word ‘So’, here is a great theory by Anand Giridharadas about why the word ‘so’ has become a popular sentence opener in Silicon Valley.)

I start at Google on Monday and I’m very excited.

Sorry there hasn’t been an update for a while. I’m currently mired in coursework. I am writing:

• A critical reflective essay on Soft Systems Methodology
• A critical reflective essay on designing a social robot
• An essay about persuasive technology and creating healthy habits
• An essay about Distributed Cognition

I’m also preparing for an exam on Applied Cognitive Science on the 1st June.

My current lifestyle is very different from how it has been since September 2009. I’m working solo most of the time, taking a lot of walks, reading a lot of books and PDFs, and trying to keep myself motivated (and social). I’m also seizing opportunities for procrastination, which is what this blog post is really about. Naturally, I’m keeping Flickr and Twitter up-to-date.