I just stumbled across a post by Dave Rogers of UXCentric from about a year ago where he plays with the idea of misdirecting users. Reacting to some thoughts from Peter Morville about ambient findability, Dave worries that we are on an “inexorable march to make everything on the Web plodding and pedantic.” He offers misdirection and intentional ambiguity as a way to bring magic and enjoyment into the experience of using information systems of all sorts. Based on his example of trying find a hotel for a business trip, it sounds like he really is just bemoaning boring old search interfaces and the (possible) loss of serendipitous discovery in a time when everything is findable. He seems to want to build in ambiguity and misdirection as means of creating contexts for serendipity. I see where he’s coming from but I think he is missing a few important points.

The most important point is that the flexible, user-centered Web 2.0 paradigm that everybody and their mom is talking about will never be “plodding and pedantic” because it is — or should be — so inextricably tied into the mess of social and cultural systems. Having done a bit of academic sociology and read a lot more, I can say with certainty that the unexpected ALWAYS happens when people interact. Thus, by concentrating on creating flexible, responsive, socially-oriented interfaces and systems, we’ll get more misdirection, ambiguity, and serendipity than we know what to do with. (Dave touches on this in a comment to his post.)

Secondly, there are some tasks that really should be completely straightforward. (Dave doesn’t deny this but he also doesn’t address it specifically either.) Misdirecting users or making things ambiguous while they are doing their taxes, ordering their groceries, or communicating with friends and family would likely have disasterous effects. I think that’s why it might be “safer” to concentrate on the importance of serendipity in browsing rather than misdirection and ambiguity per se. While they are clearly related, I see the former as less likely to send designers in the wrong direction.

Of course, adding some sense of play or mystery is important. For more on the importance of play, check out just about everything Anne Galloway has been talking about for the last few of years. For example, this and this.

Adam Richardson (improperly attributed orginally to Richard Anderson — oops!) has an excellent post ruminating on when we should and should not listen to users as well as the importance of timing in innovation.

It reminded me of some of the research we did on Open Video regarding fast-forwards. We evaluated different frame rates looking at both performance (i.e. grasping the gist of the video) and subjective experience (i.e. did they feel comfortable with the speed). This research is reported in several papers. One of the more interesting outcomes was that subjective experience deteriorated much more quickly than performance. In other words, we could have people watching clips at frame rates that they thought were too fast for accurate comprehension but not see any real deterioration in performance.

This prompted a lot of discussion about what the “correct” framerate should be. If we listened to the users, the framerate should be on the slower end. But did they really know what was best? Based on our research, it seemed like we might actually know better than them. In the end, of course, it really depends on the context of use. For personal use in the context of, say, searching for a movie to watch tonight, it is better to pick a speed that people are immediately comfortable with. But in a context where speed and accuracy are of great import, say digging through security footage or quickly choosing clips during a live news cast, subjective pleasantness is less important.

As with Adam’s discussion, this post doesn’t actually lay out where the line between stupid and clever is either. But I wonder if there are specific criteria or at least rules of thumb for when designers should assume they know better than the people they are designing for. I think the fine line between stupid and clever is perhaps the same fine line between perceptive and arrogant.

Jan Chipchase has some great thoughts on how to do more effective field work. He does a good job of explaining some of the experiences I’ve had working on my own projects. We ran into similar situations working on the NSYR. In the first wave of data collection we interviewed ~260 teens but found serious diminishing returns. On the second wave, we only interviewed ~130 and were already seeing a lot of overlap. Of course, these were all U.S. teens being interviewd by other Americans. Does it pay to do more interviewing and spend more field time when the researcher is not from the country under study?

I’m also a huge believer in the constant data processing approach that Jan advocates, though I’ve never had the luxury of dedicated data manager. This works for all kinds of research, not just ethnographic work in the field. Even when Peter and I were doing quick and dirty lab tests at Epinions, we would schedule time before and after every session to process what we had just learned and what we were learning overall. This happened more informally during the NSYR interviewing but it was still critical. The research team (yes, there should always be a team) needs to be processing field notes, photos, etc. constantly to ensure that the analysis can take advantage of the subtle, contextual information that isn’t captured on the video/audio recorder. If you wait days or weeks to do some initial processing, many of the important information that drove the use of contextual research in the first place will be lost.

Of course, it is extremely important to be wary of biasing your analysis too much in a particular direction. One particularly striking interview/session can lead you to grab onto a theme or thought that will heavily bias your interpretation of later ones. But that’s the fun and challenge of field work and research in general. It’s a subtle back and forth between what the world is telling you and what you are telling the world.

Update: Anne Galloway also did some thinking based on Jan’s post.

A week or so ago Xy and I were roaming around a giant warehouse full of used childrens stuff and I ran across this Bilingual Talking Laptop. I thought the design for storing the attached mouse was interesting. There’s a mouse-shaped impression on the top that the mouse sits in with a little locking mechanism. It pulls out with a little pressure and then fits right back in. This could be a really useful design for a real adult laptop with a small wireless mouse.

The cool thing about this jellyfish or ghost or whatever made of road tar is that it is actually functional. It really did patch a number of cracks in the road. These sorts of things just serve to remind me that everyone is a designer at one time or another. I think we design professionals can learn a lot from paying attention to the mundane or unexpected realizations of these inherent human tendencies to combine the functional and delightful.

There’s a lot of talk about annotation and tagging (for example, Rashmi’s excellent post) in the digital world these days but we mustn’t forget that it happens in physical space as well — and not just on paper. I realized that I pass these spray painted markings in the street all the time and never really pay attention to them. But the other day I was really grabbed by how complex some of them are. What do they mean? Who put them there? Is there a standard set of symbols or is it more ad hoc?

Later that same day, I saw a woman walking through the neighborhood checking some sort of meter buried in the ground at each house. I noticed that there was a spray-painted mark like a “|” on the road to point out where the meter should be. At one point there was a mark on the road like “|||||” right in front of a multi unit building.

This isn’t an earth shattering discovery but it is a reminder that even the hot new behaviors on the internet (e.g. tagging) have important precursors in meat space.

That’s right. You heard correctly. I’m leaving grad school and going back into the working world. The reasons are the same as when I thought about (attempted) to do this last spring so see that post for details. I’m officially on a “leave of absence” so I could technically come back if I wanted. It’s not outside the realm of possibility but I need some time to regroup first. I’ve got some exciting job prospects which I’ll write more about later.

I never in a million years thought that these words would be coming out of my mouth but…I have a great deal of respect for this marketing firm and I think that they have a lot to teach user experience professionals. I base this statement on this article and a few months of following their blog. Agenda is the brainchild of Lucian James whose approach to marketing seems to be based on two simple principles:

1. Truly respect people.
2. Be flexible and creative in your methods.

The first principle is the one I least expected to hear from a marketer but it appears to be one, if not the, reason for Agenda’s success. On top of that, he has a real appreciation for how culture matters in people’s lives. They tell their clients to forget about being cool and to concentrate on being relevant to the lives of their consumers. Another way to think about this is that coolness is not particularly user-centered but relevance clearly is. While simple, this is a powerful insight.

I wonder how UX practitioners could benefit from applying this sort of thinking. For the most part, even those who have grasped this insight have had a difficult time putting it into practice. For example, “relevance” is a major focus in in informationa and library science research but most of this work defines relevance as an association between a query and a document rather than anything truly tied to the person and the way they makes sense of the world. So much HCI and UX work on culture seems to try its hardest to take culture and meaning out of the equation or at the very least uses a fairly impoverished version of the concept. It would be great to move beyond “designing for multicultural contexts” where we see culture as just another way of differentiating groups to a real appreciation of how people make meaning in their lives and how the products and systems we develop are or are not relevant in this process. This could help us move beyond the strict cognitive model of people as essentially quasi-random computers or as consumers that must be persuaded and manipulated. Those models don’t truly respect humans (and I’m sure that most researchers who apply them don’t think of themselves that way). How can we move beyond cognitive or demographic models of people’s social location and behavior focusing on metrics likes clicks, time to target, income, and educational level? As Lucian James says:

“Brands are an integral part of society—they may not be terribly deep, or as worthy as earlier social indicators, such as where you were educated, or how much money you had. But they are no less arbitrary, and I firmly believe they have a role as a cultural leveler. In a global world, they are the way that we recognize each other.”

Other cultural work has shown that culture is not only the way we recognize each other but also ourselves. This has to be central to any approach to human-centered design.