Justin Baum

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Goodbye "Open" Hello Services

Umair Haque wrote an interesting post arguing that Apple's service and hardware businesses cannot succeed together indefinitely. The post wasn't very well received, but Umair sticks to his guns. The core of his gripes centered around how the iPad furthers Apples customer lock-in strategy and how openness is the future for businesses creating hardware that traffics in media "things." Related to my post the other day, I argue that this idea of openness as related to media, is going to matter less and less as services continue to evolve and play nicely with one another.

So apologies for a bit of a repeat from yesterday, but I am amazed by how fantastic the Netflix and Kindle apps are on the iPad. Seamless service experiences. iPad was just the avatar. You can cut right past Apple’s media, DRM etc. I wouldn’t call that being locked down. Thats very powerful. And that was Apples choice. Granted a choice they had to make to keep their savvy customers happy. I think that those applications (services) represent enough openness for the average person, ya?

What I am hearing Umair say, is that locked down = doing it wrong.

But historically…

Open & Open Source = less than ideal user experience (crappy if you want toss some mudd).

Geeks want open (lumping myself in this bucket). But people want great customer experiences. The more open you get the harder it is to maintain an awesome UX. Look at Android, its considerably more open than what Apple is doing, but it is also sloppy as hell in comparison to Apple. I cant get music onto my Droid easily, legacy hardware issues abound etc. Look at Boxee and XBMC, my non-geek friends can’t get those apps up and running in their living rooms. Open isn’t there yet and it may never be. Good services will eat Open’s lunch. Why? As Umair points out good services are healthy businesses and capable of delivering fantastic customer experiences.

Its not about openess in the geek sense. Its about services playing nicely with one another and high quality overlapping customer experiences. If things keep swinging in the Netflix / Kindle app direction this argument over openness changes if not disappears. I think Apple is riding a razors edge of being locked down just enough. They let people like Kindle and Netflix play on the iPad, but they would never let another proprietary media format like WMV onto their devices filesystems. Essentially Apple is saying we will let third party services play on our lawn but not third party technologies. An interesting distinction, and one that I think allows them to run both services and hardware businesses indefinitely. At the end of the day customers are going to care more about Netflix / Amazon style service experiences than the underlying technology lockdown. With iPhone OS 4.0 announcement showcasing the ability to run Last.fm and Pandora in the background instead of your iPod I see Apple in a position to be the best avatar/touchpoint for awesome services. While Umair is trying to get his mp3s off his iPad I will be happily streaming away with the rest the kids. :-P (Edit: I was wrong Umair likes streaming too)

In all seriousness, Bruce Sterling touched on this shift during is SXSW closing comments and it resonated with me. The Upcoming generations are going to care less about the philosophies (dogma) of the current web generation who scaffolded this whole web thing together. My nieces and nephews don't care about DRM or openness. They grab my iPhone from me and head straight for games and media they can get for free. This new generation is going to be brought up on good service experiences. Not principles from Napster era local MP3 hoarding 30+ year olds. A dogmatic approach to openness isn't solving any problems (not saying Umair is dogmatic).

"When I was your age I had to go to the AOL and get a massmail in the Zelifcam chatroom to have any fun on the interet! And I walked uphill both ways to school."

Shout out to Higgs at Made By Many who brought this to my attention. He wrote a nice post on the topic. Check out the comments for an interesting response from Umair.

Services Playing Nicely With Other Services

One of the most exciting things about the services that have emerged in the last decade or so is that some of them actually play nicely together. In the past when you thought about trying to get two products you owned talking to one another it was a bit of a far fetched geeky novelty. As our relationship to brands more often take the form of services, even in the consumer electronics world, handshakes between competitors and friends are a reality. Sitting here on day two of iPad ownership this is highlighted by the sheer existence of the Amazon Kindle and Netflix Instant watch apps. Two companies for which Apple has directly competing products, yet here they are in all their glory, and despite Apple's history of closing the gates to their customer experience. In the case of Kindle, there is more glory on the iPad than I have seen on Amazon's own hardware.

These two services, Netflix and Kindle, exemplify the future of service experience. They made the iPad feel more like mine by simply bringing what was already mine to the new device in a familiar way. Playing nicely pays off, it makes people feel welcome in new territory. Services like netflix/kindle have touch-points that extend beyond the proprietary and into the backyard of competitors. Continuity from touchpoint(iPad) to touchpoint(xBox) is not only maintained, but creates an interesting harmony. When thinking about the narrative of customer experience, it's clear that touch points like the iPad and xBox will continue to weave more brands/services together in ways that benefit people who choose to use them. Playing nicely with others is going to be one of the key factors for successful services and customer experiences going forward. It will be interesting to see how designers and businesses reconcile the fact that their customer experience is enabled by part of another brand's customer experience and vice versa. Begs the question is customer experience something that a brand owns? I'm sure I am not the first to ask that fluffy question. Any good reads out there about reconciling / accepting overlapping customer experiences?

Soundbytes from Managing Experiences 2010

I recently went to Adaptive Path's Managing Experiences conference and enjoyed it quite a bit. It focused primarily on people involved in leading multi-touchpoint customer experience work, not a group I rub shoulders with on a regular basis. MX was a nice balance of theory, case-studies, in-house/agency perspectives, and some random thoughtful bits. Bellow I compiled and paraphrased the soundbytes that stuck out to me into some raw notes...

• Successful teams and companies use "envisionment" to help articulate and establish vision (Spool). Envisionments on delicious.
• Teams often fail because they stop at envisionment and don't follow through with actually shepherding the vision (Spool).
• A good vision is a stake in the ground on the horizon. No one can get there right now, but everyone can see it and ensure their work moves the team a (small) step closer (Spool)
• A good vision is specific to the experience. Its something that is yours. When looking at your vision could it be easily co-opted by someone else? Avoid generic articulations of vision. (Spool)
• Don't go for a lofty enterprise wide vision. Focus on small butt critical pilot programs. (Spool)
• Less power points more envisionments (Craig Butler). Given the word on the street about Tufte and kittenz this is probably a good idea.
• Help articulate vision with philosophies (Merholz). Tenants, principles, mantras, not sure what to call them but I like them. Concise philosophies can be the jumping off point for bigger conversations or be reminders of those conversations for a team that is off in the details of a design. The Tivo example being Merholz favorite it seems.
• Based on his research, Spool says that the ability of everyone on a team to article vision is one of the three most important factors of success. While not the be all end all, lists of philosophies are a nice way to keep vision alive for the duration without having to flip through power points or read sleepy documents. For example, vetting design decisions against philosophies in addition to objectives.
• Experience strategy should ultimately provide clarity (Lara Lee). Seems obvious, but when I reflect on the countless 100 slide power points and mind numbing word docs created in the name of strategy, clarity seems under valued.
• Two kinds of experiences, adaptive evolving ecosystems aka youtube, and constrained fixed systems aka turbotax (Lara Lee). Both have there place, but the unpredictable and constantly evolving adaptive experiences have irresistible qualities. I would like to work on those please.
• Hiring out usability / observation is like hiring out your vacation. Its all about hours of exposure for designers (Spool). Hilarious way to put it, but painful to hear for those that are not able to always participate for whatever reason.
• Daniel Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule: The most memorable moment of an experience is either the best or the worst part of it. (Brandon Schauer).
• Successful teams are cross-functional (Spool). Not much more to say. He has done the research to back it up. Do everything you can to avoid the dirty waterfall hand off. It doesn't mean adopting a prescriptive agile methodology, it means working together across disciplines from the beginning to the end (if there is one).
• Celebrating design failures is a key part of successful teams / organizations culture. "Risk averse companies produce crap." (Spool)
• Management's job should be about setting the organization up to recover from small failures. From the learnings of many small failures come the big successes. (Lane Becker)
• To avoid becoming a dinosaur hire and promote people who annoy you. (Neff Hudsun)
• Documentation is a record of failed collaboration. (Lane Becker)
• What is your organizations currency? (Margaret Gould Stewart). She talked about how after her shift at Google from Consumer products to YouTube she noticed a change in organizational currency. Search / consumer products favored the ability of designers to get their hands dirty with the developers while YouTube's currency was more focused on quickly producing high quality design iterations. Whats your organizations currency?
• In fast moving organizations talking a lot about process is the best way to get yourself marginalized (Stewart).
• In organizations with complex evolving ecosystems (YouTube) situational awareness becomes the product strategy for fast moving cross disciplinary teams (Stewart). I love this one. It highlights the need for knowledge management and cross disciplinary collaboration tools.
• On style guides - Communicate boundaries so that people can knowingly break them (Stewart)
• Customer experience design requires balancing message vs functionality across all touch-points (Heidi Reinfeld). I like the idea of the focus on message or functionality shifting across different parts of a customer experience. Heidi showed great examples of how their Chipotle packaging, website, store and iPhone app designs pulled from the same brand promise / mission but brought the brand to life in very different ways. It reminded me of the Virgin America in flight safety video. The VA video is SO on brand but lacks any of the aesthetic attributes that sticks out so much in the functional parts of the customer experience.

QWERTY Keyboards and Living Room Remotes

The QWERTY keyboard seems to be making its way to living room remotes these days. I would assume the two needs driving this are "TV apps" and the increasing challenge of finding content on these systems.

The push for TV manufacturers to provide web connected application/widget platforms has made text input a barrier to entry (app authentication etc). The rush is probably driven more by a desire for feature parity from consumer electronics companies than actual customer needs. If you have spent time with these widget platforms, they tend to be lackluster, something akin to a dumbed down mobile app. Forcing mobile interaction models into the 10 foot experience is like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Sure you can hammer it in there with a remote that looks like a phone (at least they have familiarity going for them), but is it really the right place to start when pushing the connected living room forward?

The other reason that these keyboards are cropping up is simply for reasons of findability. Things like Boxee bring the fire hose of web content to the living-room and there has to be a way to cut through to what you want without drilling down through levels of hierarchy and long scrolling lists. Anyone who has tried to type out a movie name with a D-pad like the one on AppleTV knows it s a total pain in the ass. What happened to sitting back and vegging out? Are the days of passive lazy consumption over?

While it makes practical sense to bring QWERTY to the all of the boxes sitting in your living room I can't help but feel like its a bit of a short-term bandaid. Technology like voice recognition and gestural interfaces will eventually burry the remote control as we know it. Will the slide out keyboard remote be its last incarnation? Make these remotes any more robust and it just starts looking like a damn iPod Touch... then from a customer perspective you have to wonder why it needs to exist at all?

Set and forget location tracking with Droid and Latitude

Big win for my personal informatics quiver. I didnt even know it, but with Google Latitude enabled on my Motorola Droid and location history enabled on the Latitude site, I now have set and forget location tracking using Google's latitude apps. I enabled it last night and when I got to work this AM I check my latitude history and it appears my droid had been quietly phoning home while I trundled into the office through the Western Addition and Tenderloin (see above image). I didn't press record, I didn't hit go. It just did it. A+. Those of you grounded firmer in reality than I am may ask how the hell this is useful at all. Its not exactly useful yet. It matters to me because looking at our lives through the lense of data and tracked behavior is going to become more useful and powerful in the next few years. There is an interesting group of folks that meet under the guise of "The Quantified Self" and get together around the states to talk about this stuff. But the main reason I have switched on latitude is so that I can have a nice stockpile of data when the analysis and aggregation tools start to arrive on the seen.

Currently I track...

• Personal finance using Mint.com
• Productivity / software usage with RescueTime.com
• Listening habits with Last.fm
• Travel with Dopplr.com
• Now location with Google Latitude
• And soon, sleep and fitness with FitBit

Microcopy, A/B testing, content strategy and interaction design

"The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing." -Bokardo

One of my favorite web folks, Bokardo, has been talking about microcopy lately and even started a flickr goup for it. He has a post about Writing Microcopy which is a great place to start on the topic. In addition he has posted some interesting test results at A/Btests, some of which relate to microcopy. Microcopy highlights an interesting intersection of interaction design and content strategy. Small tweaks to copy can make a BIG difference. So who owns it? Paraphrasing Halverson - Who cares, get it DONE!

Less realtime, more filters

Facebook just made an interesting change to their home page. They introduced the option to view two "different" feeds. The "news feed", the highlighted stuff we are all used to, and new "live feed," everything all your friends are doing play by play. The way they designed the user interface and the language they chose is a bit clunky and creates some interesting problems going forward.

1) The design presents itself as if there are two separate feeds, a live feed and a news feed. This is reinforced through their awkward navigation-like treatment of the functionality. The truth is there is ONE feed with different filters to apply. Those filters are lists, networks, locations, apps etc... You know, all the stuff in that big left column.

2) There is an over focus on realtime. I can't believe they included an unread count for the live feed. Its probably there to get people to discover the feature and hang around longer. If people do discover and use the feature they are exposed to unfiltered information, a lot of which I find completely useless. Not exactly something new, and not helping solve the information overload problem. Is a raw unfiltered list of stuff really a new feature these days? Do I need an unread count for my Facebook news?

I would love to have been a fly on the wall for some of the design conversations that led to this. I thought facebook had a big filtering win with their last major re-design. The addition of lists, the ability to change the default filter on the homepage and the other application and network filters in that left bar were fantastic enhancements. So what happened here?

I sketched up a few other ways they could have gone...

"Live feed" as a filter

They introduced this powerful left-hand filter column last re-design... why not just make the live feed part of that? Certainly more elegant than adding another layer of clunky navigation on top of the news feed. The only logical reason to not do this is that they may want you to view other filters (lists, networks, geos etc) as both live or highlights in the future. So why did they not include the live option for all the filters? Why can't I see my TBG list bellow as both live and highlights? I would wager because it would take A LOT of computing power and other difficult tech. Understandable, but it sure would be nice.

"Live" as a persistent option

Computing power be damned, lets pretend. Lets also try something a bit more usable and clear. If you use the new feature you will notice the navigation items swap places and become headers for the news feed when clicked on, tisk tisk. Here is a quick n' dirty sketch of what it could look like if you were able to see all filters as either live or highlights. Even though this probably wasn't an option, I think it underlines the problem with the language they have chosen. News Feed and Live Feed imply two separate feeds... when in reality you are seeing either highlights or live updates of one activity stream. At least that is the mental model / agenda I am arguing for. All in all this approach is too busy. I really liked the simplicity of the filters on the left and a clean header. Although I am sure there is a more elegant solution in there.

My gut says the way they implemented this feature is going to feel confusing and not so useful to users. I think what Facebook chose not to include in the news feed was part of its charm. Giving the user the ability to see more information is not a bad thing, but getting there is not an A/B, black and white thing. Right now the faucet is either open all the way or at a trickle. Its the smart multi-levels of filtering, refinement and nuance that are missing. It doesn't feel like the same level of polish was applied to this as was to the lefthand filters.

The key to the realtime web is filtering and I like what Facebook did last redesign around it. But here, Facebook has backpedaled a bit and given its users the key to wide open faucet, again. Im being a bit hard on them yes, but these issues around filtration and pulling value out of activity streams are the problems to solve in 2010 for the realtime web. I was expecting more from one of the leaders in the domain, and hope they have some better thought out moves up their sleeve, or perhaps this a transitional interface to something new.