one part truth, two parts mixer

A living room adventure

Repost from Run on Toast

I had a rather lovely Saturday over at Lift @ living room, an informal satellite of the Lift conferences. For some bizarre reason I didn't take any photos, but here is Amanda's picture of Charlie giving his talk, so you can get an idea of what it was like:

As always, a couple of bits that I found interesting:

One of the themes of Charlie's talk was about how we can incorporate the charm of patina/analogue into digital services. It is starting to happen (Flickr's hello in different language, the awesome Handbrake piña colada visual, phone software which responds to the time of day), but much of service design is currently so focused on the functional that there is no room for stories.

He also talked about the shift to an intelligent networked city, which bought up some interesting ideas about privacy from the group. Namely:

• The generation behind us don't have the same privacy worries that we do
• If everyone has a certain type of information about them in the public domain, you become conspicuous because of an absence of this information
• Without privacy, will behaviour change to become more socially acceptable?

Stephen Molloy spoke about craftsmanship and how it is losing out to mass production. It's a shame that craft is a luxury proposition because of a dearth of craftsmen. Someone evoked a future scenario where outsourced production ceases to be cost-efficient meaning that furniture production, etc, would have to bought back home. The demand would result in a boom in the number of craftsmen to address the need. There were some questions raised about immediacy, and whether demanding consumers would be prepared to wait, but I think that as consumers we're very understanding of the fact that bespoke takes longer. We can see examples of people waiting to have something bespoke to them already, from Bodymetrics jeans to Tossed salads to Nike iD.

There was so much other amazing conversation, will post again soon. Thanks to Charlie for inviting me and to Felix for organising. Was an awesome day.

Worldwide web

Repost from Run on Toast. Sorry if you're doubling up.

Should I ever have to see a screen like this?

It annoys me that I have to. The site knows from my ISP where I am, surely it could just direct me to the relevant page? Surely over 90% of people in the UK looking for [insert brand here] are looking for the UK version of the site? What purpose does this page serve apart from telling your customers what a big, global company you are?

I've been thinking about usability recently, and about how, as savvy internet users, we expect certain information to be in a certain place on the page. It wouldn't be so hard to have a button that says change country now would it?

It strikes me that a lot of how we plan websites is still with a mind to manage our processes and requirements and not what the end user wants.

Usability bites

Last Friday was Likemind - if you don't already know, get to know - and thanks to Tom, Guy, Al, David, Cassie and Jon (?) for making it a very enjoyable morning. 

Something that I've been mulling over is a discussion that Tom, Al and I were having about site usability. At the end of the day, we crave usability because it should equal higher levels of conversion (as Tom pointed out, this isn't necessarily conversion in the commercial sense, it might be an attitudinal conversion we're seeking out), 3-clicks and all that. 

Working out how to make the most usable site is largely trial and error, research and testing, but will we get to a point where we create the perfect template for site performance within a genre and all sites in that genre will be built to more-or-less the same template? If a particular thing works and people respond to it, then it almost doesn't need to be pretty. That was the beauty of Google in the first instance.

Anyway site usability is on my mind a lot at the moment and therefore I'm noticing it everywhere else. I liked this quote by Julie Larson-Green of Microsoft: 'user interface is customer service for the computer'; with Windows 7 Microsoft are trying to make an OS that is intuitive to use so that users can 'reduce the amount of thinking about the software that they have to do' (here via here). Dhiren wrote something about how Go Compare are advertising usability as a USP. Wired have an article about Sian Townsend of Google whos job is 'finding the thing tht people find confusing, getting rid of that, and reducing stress' (p26, can't find a link). I like the fact it's called UX (user experience). I hadn't heard that before, but I'm going to start saying it whenever I can whether or not it's appropriate. UX.

Anyway, a random jumble of thoughts. Someone (Al?) please make sense and send me a postcard.