Google TV’s Chaotic Interface
David Pogue reviews Google TV for the NYTimes:
This much is clear: Google TV may be interesting to technophiles, but it’s not for average people. On the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in the wrong direction: toward complexity.
For starters, it requires a mouse and keyboard. That’s right. For your TV. Hope you weren’t going for that rustic look in your TV room.
Another sign that Google TV might not be ready for primetime: Seemingly every TV station and TV streaming service blocks access from Google TV. That’s right, you have many more options for streaming TV content to your PC than to a Google TV device…
russell davies: designing behaviour and robospam:
This seems like a potential darkside in waiting. Aside from all the surveillance concerns you’ve suddenly got objects that can swarm in three dimensions and might get cheap enough for the economics of spam to apply. Never mind walking past a Starbucks gets you a coffee voucher on your phone – we’ll just soak the area with robovouchers that’ll get in your hair until you buy a cappucino.
I like his pre-wired-deadline ruminations.
Dan Saffer on User Experience
What is User Experience? Well, there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about it…User Experience for me is kind of the overall picture, what used to be called “creative direction” is now called User Experience, because it contains everything from architecture to industrial design to visual design to interactive design to sound design. A very kind of holistic umbrella term that encompasses all of those things under it.
All those disciplines to me are in service to an overall experience. To me there aren’t very many actual user experience designers. There are people who are doing different disciplines sometimes at different times under this user experience banner.
Dan Saffer: The Want Interview | Want Magazine
Previously, previously & previously.
The Meaning of UX Design
Oliver Reichenstein posted an interesting article on user experience design. It makes the assertion that a user’s experience cannot be determined, but shaped at best (an argument more pointedly expressed in this earlier piece).
It also addresses the question of what constitutes user experience design. Unfortunately it didn’t help much with my own qualms about the definition of user experience design as a discipline, as the article seemingly muddles various disciplines like interaction design, web design and, of course, user experience design.
The more i keep reading about user experience design, the more i get this uneasy feeling that the term itself and the concept it represents have been stretched and warped to a point where they can encompass any kind of design activities and goals whatsoever. It seems to have swallowed graphic design, interface design, interaction design, game design, industrial design, product design and web design as a whole, with a dash of marketing, architecture, psychology, anthropology, sociology, software engineering and cognitive science thrown in for good measure. I’m getting wary of using the term because i’m less and less sure of what it’s supposed to mean aside from some vague, grandiose notion of a hollistic design discipline and it thus seems impossible to me to convey anything meaningful or accurate by using it. In that sense i increasingly subscribe to the tautological definition of UX, which renders the term meaningless:
The design of a product-voluntarily or involuntarily-defines the interaction between human and artefact. Interaction leads to experience. From this point of view, all design is experience design. Used like this, the term “user experience design” doesn’t mean anything.
Every user interface designer needs to be a UX designer. Every web designer needs to be a UX designer. Every industrial designer needs to be a UX designer. Every graphic designer needs to be a UX designer. Every architect needs to be a UX designer. The list could go on. If you design something that people engage or interact with, you need to be a UX designer, because otherwise you are probably not very good at your job.
Dark Patterns (and an example)
Dark Patterns is a collection of user interface design patterns that trick people into doing things that are contrary to their own interests. A study in black hat interaction design, so to speak. I find it slightly disappointing that there aren’t more examples of well-known, high profile companies engaging in these practices on the site, so here’s my own example of how Apple uses the forced information disclosure pattern to lure people into handing over their credit card details:
When you sign up for an iTunes account using the “Create New Account” button in iTunes you are forced to enter your credit card number (click through for full screenshot):
This really doesn’t make a lot of sense because there are many ways to use the iTunes store without ever paying with your credit card. First, there are a great number of free apps available on the App Store that you don’t need to pay for. Second, you can also use iTunes gift cards if you want to buy something on the iTunes store without handing over your credit card number.
So it’s no big surprise that there is a way to sign up for an iTunes account without a credit card, it’s just cunningly well hidden. There’s even an official knowledge base article by Apple available on the matter, because apparently a lot of people need some help with this convoluted process. When you follow this needlessly complex and completely unintuitive procedure, the sign-up form shown above transforms and it’s no longer necessary to enter a credit card number (again, click through for full screenshot):
Suddenly there’s a new radio button! I wonder how many users wouldn’t have shared their credit card details with Apple if they had made this process more straightforward…
On UX
A while back there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the term “UX professional”, triggered by a slightly inflammatory tweet by Ryan Carson:
‘UX Professional’ is a bullshit job title. It’s just a way to over-charge naive clients. All web designers should be UX pros
Which begs the question, are all UX pros web designers? Many people responded to this link-bait, but Scott Berkun’s is the best response by far.
It seems to me that very few people have a clear understanding what the term user experience entails (and what it doesn’t), and that the understanding of this term among people who think they know what it means differs wildly.
