The Flicker Blog and Podcast

To the marketeers who think that it’s a good idea to insert promotional messages that disrupt the normal procedure of withdrawing funds from HSBC cash machines. You are wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong.

Casual observation should help you conclude that users have been through this procedure so many times before, that they barely read the screens presented to them.

They are 100% task focussed. They want cash. They are quite probably talking to a friend, and on the way to the pub; or off shopping. They are more likely to be looking over their shoulder at the impatient queue behind them than at your screen.

They have entered their PIN, they have selected ‘Cash Withdrawal’ and a desired amount. They are waiting. They are listening for the beeping that announces the imminent arrival of beer coupons. Please note – they are not reading the marketing message that asks them to accept or cancel your kind offer of information on a new service. Even if they were interested – with the queue behind them, they’re hardly in the mood, or context for hold-ups.

Just because there is a perceived opportunity, do not think it must be taken. Put yourself in the shoes (or the queue) of your customer and ask what the emotional response to an unwelcome, and disruptive delay in proceedings will be. If you conclude that a rational and reasonable response is anything other that ecstatic, ask yourself if this endeavor is a worthwhile one? Thank you.

Something has been (quietly) making be very frustrated recently – the environmental irresponsibility of designers and marketers.
Big businesses, particularly airlines and car manufacturers, are increasingly unable to escape scrutiny – not that this appears to significantly affect their behaviour. Rather than sorting one’s own problems out, it’s far easier, and cheaper to draw attention elsewhere – to a competitor or neighbouring industry (as illustrated by a Guardian article about the UK distribution of Hummer cars):

“It’s all debatable, but the dust-to-dusters argue that this vehicle could be more carbon efficient than the Toyota Prius, if you take the whole process from manufacture to final disposal into account.”
…And you ignore the fact that the car will actually, er, be driven you mean?

Still, the point of this post wasn’t to talk about big business. They are being scrutinised (for all the good it’s doing). No – what’s driving me insane is how mass market, non-essential products are being designed with scant regard for environmental science – and escaping scrutiny.

Two random examples that have wedged themselves in my consciousness recently (that I won’t attempt to link to because of their transient and disposable nature): Apetina Feta by Arla, and L’Oreal’s new anti-aging moisturiser for men (Men Expert Vitalift Double Moisturiser). Both appear to be marketing themselves on the deliberate use of (approximately) twice as much non-biodegradable plastic packaging as is actually necessary.

Let’s take the Feta – the print marketing is differentiating the product exclusively on the fact that inside the plastic tub, is another plastic tub – with holes! Great – now the consumer need not bother with that multi-purpose and re-usable tool – the slotted spoon. Instead, they can now deposit in a land fill, twice as much packaging when preparing their greek salads.

As for the L’Oreal packaging the separation of the moisturiser and anti-aging components within the dispenser serve the purpose of reducing the amount of product in the container whilst increasing the amount of packaging – wasteful yes, but profitable also (I imagine). It’s as if stripey toothpaste were never invented.

With enough change at the everyday, impactable level, we all have the potential to make a huge impact – designers should be playing their part (as should consumers with the their choice of products and lifestyle).

On a related tangent – Emily Thornberry, MP for Islington South and Finsbury illustrated in her Guardian article about cycling to work, that enough of us effecting a small, effective change in our habits could make a big impact:
‘…in the UK, we still have a long way to go. Just 3% of commuters here cycle, with around 4 million people still driving less than three miles to work – a 20-minute bike ride each way. If all of these people swapped their cars for bikes it would save around 1m tonnes of CO2 a year.’

To end on a positive note, Tesco do increasingly seem to be acting on customer demand and moving towards an environmentally friendlier practice. They will now deliver your shopping without carrier bags (allowing you to unload directly from reusable crates on your doorstep). And, increasingly, the packaging used for veg is compostable and bio-degradable.

Small steps yes, but if we all took them?

I have to admit to being completely blown away by this video. It presents several very complex interactions in a manner that’s both innovative and intuitive. Seeing synthesis approached like this underscores for me how poorly suited to the task, the interfaces of most virtual instruments are (Check the images of Reason for an example of what I mean). I’m sorry that I cannot link directly to the images – some people still insist on using frames on their sites!

Analogue synths of the 70’s and 80’s were restricted by the physical limitations of the components used to manipulate and program them. User feedback was predominately conducted via your ears, with the legending on knobs and sliders the only visual clue to what was happening inside the box.

I just don’t understand why companies resort to Pixel based renditions of retro analogue gear when designing virtual instruments. The video here shows what could be accomplished if only designers would move away from fetishistic renditions of retro hardware and embrace the possibilites afforfed by the platform they’re creating for.

In the world of hardware, physical limitations mean that you cannot dynamically represent the impact that parameters have upon one another. In the virtual world, these restrictions don’t exist, yet such limitations seem to be eagerly embraced.

Here’s what the Reactable creators have to say about their video:
‘Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.’

You can read more on the reactable website.

Apparently, there’s a quite ridiculous move within the UK Government to require anyone taking photographs in a public space, to require an ID card.

To quote from the petition:
‘There are a number of moves promoting the requirement of ‘ID’ cards to allow photographers to operate in a public place.
It is a fundamental right of a UK citizen to use a camera in a public place, indeed there is no right to privacy when in a public place.
These moves have developed from paranoia and only promote suspicion towards genuine people following their hobby or profession.’

The logistics of implementation aside (given the number of cameraphones out there) this is still an alarming, not to mention surreptitious move to limit individual freedoms.

I’d urge anybody who cares about such matters to sign the petition.

My initial impressions of iTunes 7 were very positive (read to the bottom for the very big BUT).

Top of the list of welcome new ‘features’ for me is that (finally) recordings that contain without pauses between tracks are now played back without (amazingly enough) pauses between tracks. This means that my collection of Fabric Mix CDs can now be enjoyed as intended, without the need to separately rip the whole CD as a single track. If only my iPod would exhibit similar behaviour!

Cover Flow – the ability to browse the contents of your library by the flipping through the album art, did initially seem like rather gratuitous (but nicely executed) eye candy. Nonetheless, I have to confess I’ve become rather seduced by it. The interplay between the visual display and the library text view is very useful. Click the genre column in the text view to sort your library by genre. Scroll to the desired genre, and you can then use Cover Flow to navigate visually through your collection by genre.

This turns out to be rather helpful – recognition of images is far easier than scanning (very) long lists of text for the desired item. Surely, this feature will soon appear in Front Row? The ability to navigate your collection with a remote from across the room in this way would be a useful, and visually seductive method of interaction.

Of course, any mention of the benefits of Cover Flow also requires mention of the fact that iTunes can now gather cover art automatically for you (assuming the images exist in the iTunes music store). There’s clearly the potential for privacy issues here – I can imagine Apple being subpoenaed for records of who’s been encoding what, by record companies. Still, for the time being, Apple states that they do not keep any information regarding the contents of your music library, and the CDDB functionality (present from day one) could theoretically, be used for similarly nefarious purposes. I’d conclude that we have to give up a little information if we want our applications to be more useful.

The administration of your iPod is now better implemented too. A mounted device now has a whole series of pages, directly accessible from within the application (as opposed to a preferences pane). This addition further improves the relationship between the device and the application.

Now… on to the negative. I bought 4 CDs yesterday. Arriving home late last night, I was hoping to quickly import them for inclusion on my iPod. What on earth has happened to CD Importing? It has become unbelievably slow! I actually thought that my Superdrive was broken, or that CD manufacturers have started encoding deliberate errors in manufactured CDs to cause ripping problems. I believe that the ripping of each CD was slower than playing the thing for real! At the very least, I ended up only encoding two of the four CDs before giving up and going to bed. I’m doing the remaining two this morning.

This is a huge step backwards for me, and compromises one of the core functions of the app very heavily. Conspiracy theorists will no doubt suggest that Apple are slowly trying to move users towards buying all music rather than encoding it (at the behest of the record companies) but I’d like to hope that is just a bug, and will be remedied in due course. Nonetheless, I’ve considered finding a way to downgrade to version 6 in the meantime. The new features are nice, but I need to import CDs in a time frame that’s measured in minutes, not hours.

Predicting the demise of the iPod and iTunes is clearly a popular sport, and a pretty safe bet given Apple could hardly become more dominant in this space. The only real uncertainty is the scale of the demise. I have begun to wonder this week however, if the change is beginning to occur.

The new iPod nano is the first new iPod whose design has underwhelmed me. I’ve only seen images, but the original Nano remains a far more attractive object to me – the new coloured cases leave the nano looking more like the original iPod mini, and consequently, as if Apple are running out of ideas. Of course, there are limits to how far the form factor can be changed, and why fix something that’s not broken? But on a purely subjective level, this is the first evolution of the iPod that hasn’t had me secretly wanting to go out and buy one, despite already owning a fully functioning 60Gb iPod Photo. Of course – the new Shuffle design does redeem them considerably!

Some time ago, Ian pointed me at a video of two new visualisation tools (Stack and Swarm) that have been developed for Digg. Now that they’re both live (on Digg Labs) I wanted to give them a mention.

Stack is a visualisation tool, showing ‘diggs’ as they occur in real-time. Taking the form of a bar chart, vertical bars along the bottom grow, as blocks (representing ‘diggs’) fall from above. Visually, it feels like an early 80’s video game, and the default zoom level tends to yield little in the way of information. Clicking on a bar (which at the lowest zoom level, requires the manual dexterity and speed associated with playing a video game) gives you a more detailed view on the respective story. Interesting stuff!

Swarm is definitely the approach that I find most interesting. As a real-time visualisation tool, it affords far more information at a glance. Individual stories are represented as circles, growing in size as they grow in popularity. Hovering over a circle reveals not only the headline, but connections (or lackof) to other stories – arcs temporarily appear to illustrate relationships between items as the user moves them.

There’s a nice application of physics employed in the visualisation – ‘loner’ stories push adjacent stories away whilst connected items have elastic connections (causing a lag in movement that’s dependent on the speed with which objects are moved). I did initially find myself questioning the value of some of the interactions. Moving items around seemed to have little purpose beyond sheer playfulness, and any attempt to organise items in the constantly fluid state is futile. That said, I have to concede that the interaction does help the user grasp the relationship (or lackof) between objects in a way that visual stimulus alone, would not.

As real-time visualisations of data go, both approaches are very impressive.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some pleasure in the email I received from Beatport yesteday:
‘Our team wanted to let each of you know about a recent issue created by the new Flash version 9.0 for PCs (Mac users can ignore this email.) Macromedia/Adobe released a new version of Flash that is creating a log-in issue for all Beatport customers who use the Firefox web browser and the new Flash version 9.0.’

I’ve written previously, twice actually, on the awful (Flash based) user experience offered by what could, and should be, a very attractive customer proposition.

I would dearly love to know who felt that building an entire e-commerce site in Flash was a good idea? Or what business need was being met by abandoning most of the commonly used, and widely understood interaction principles – those supported by the most humble of browsers and the HTML format?

I won’t say I told you so!

A couple of links that have been doing the rounds at work - some Qualitive and Quantitive studies into the most commonly used web fonts:
A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When?
and
Determining the Best Online Font for Older Adults

It’s interesting to read about the methods used, and the information may help inform (or at least defend) certain design decisions that are made, but it all unravelled for me when I read that Comic Sans, was one of the most favoured fonts by the participants!

The BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype movie shows a beautiful, elegant and seductive alternative for the contemporary desktop metaphor we’ve all known and used on our PCs since the 80’s. Whilst the demonstrated interactions are not 100% intuitive or self-evident, they do appear to be easy to learn (not unlike Grafitti on PalmOS).

Despite the impressive execution of the concept, I am a little puzzled as to what problem is being solved here. It would appear (to the designers of this prototype) that in the real world, the messy, cluttered desktop, with piles of documents scattered everywhere, is desirable. In the real world, your eyes can tell you in an instant, what you are looking at – making sorting and location of objects far easier. The resolutions of displays may be going up, but in this demo, all PDFs are displayed by their icon alone. Minus a filename or preview, how do you know what you are dealing with when sorting piles of documents?

For me, the most dissapointing aspect of this is that it just extends and polishes the existing metaphor. Piles of files – aren’t they just a new way of thinking of folders? With the virtual world, are such rigid presentational groupings appropriate? Wouldn’t an interface that shows connections and dependencies automatically be more useful?

I’m sure that there’s far more to the prototype than the movie shows, and that using the interface itself, would make the merits more forthcoming. However, I do feel that it’s wrong to assume that the actual, cluttered desktop is the optimum solution to the problem.

If I were to generalise hugely, and say that people fall into two camps – those that keep their desks tidy, and those who do not, who would this interface benefit? Aren’t those who keep their desks tidy most likely to save and manage files and folders as a matter of course, and those who do not, be most likely to dump everything on their desktop? My feeling is that the less tidy amongst us, are also those who are less likely to go to the effort of sorting a messy desktop into piles. To me, it would seem that this prototype is aimed at just those people.

On Boxes and Arrows, Andres Zapata gives a helpful tutorial on turning wireframe designs into dimensional narratives – communicating quickly, clearly and cheaply, the intended interaction conventions and patterns.