Rodrigo Madanes

In san francisco for a few days

And it's sunny. I forget how sunny it is. After months of london greyness, it's quite refreshing.

And there's no double-deckers, people don't say they're knackered. Cars are bigger. There's fewer investment bankers in the streets (but probably more VCs).

And it's crystal clear. Wow. So crisp. And the 10 hour flight from heathrow is not that bad. Considering you can have a nice lunch at Carluccio's in terminal 5 which just opened.

And san francisco is just like I remembered it. Maybe even better. Happy happy joy joy. ;-)

company oneliners

So let's think about company oneliners. I like the exercise, as it goes to the heart of a company's strategy.

As an aside, my old screenwriting flatmate in san francisco was an expert at pitching hollywood movies. So I quizzed him on it. I asked him "How do you describe E.T.", imagining he'd say something about the yearning for home, being lost, etc... He thought for a second and said "Lassie from outer space; alien gets found by kids, they hide him from parents, kids get in trouble, saves the day; lassie". Funny huh?

So... company oneliners.

Facebook..."A better television, cause it's my friends on it." After all, its replacing time people would spend in front of the tube, no? I'd say it's entertainment + communication.

Let's do Android... Would this be "iPhone meets Linux"? You know, cool experience meets open source. Bah. Explaining it takes the fun out of it.

One more, one more. Twitter. Why not. Everyone talked about it (on it) at some time. So this could be "SMS on steroids meets social networking?" Hmmmm. A bit boring maybe. Think more on this one...

The 3 amigos

Celebrating my 40th birthday in Prague with my colleagues / friends. Love the picture of ott, taavet, and jonathan with an old map of the czeck republic behind them. Wonderful night.

Just turned 40, on April 1st!

So I just turned 40. Wow. Not sure whether it's a big deal or not a big deal at all. As Kevin Spacey says in "American Beauty" - 'Never underestimate the power of denial'. Ha!

My friend Ott took some pictures that day and put them on his blog ...

This is me blowing out the candles. My colleagues had a cake made as a surprise, and it was a great surprise! This was in luxembourg. I particularly like the fact there were only 4 or 5 candles as opposed to 40. It would have been a bit too scary to see a vast number of candles on the cake.

http://okmobile.blogspot.com/2008/04/rodrigo-40.html

And then this is when we stayed up later that night with gareth and ott and sten drinking some Grappa (which they hated me for ordering it... but hey... how often do you turn 40?). This is gareth, being pensive.

http://okmobile.blogspot.com/2008/04/grappa.html

So that was my birthday photos. April 1st, 2008. From 1968 to 2008... how time flies...

the web in 7 years, two orders of magnitude bigger

If you look at google and search, we forget the past and the problem its trying to solve. Fundamentally, search is a solution for finding relevant content in a web universe of size X.

When the size of the web was two orders of magnitude smaller (say 1998), then directories were good enough (yahoo, dmoz). There just wasn't that much stuff there.

Google thrives because the size of the web grew 2 orders of magnitude.

The obvious question to ask is, what will happen when the web grows another two orders of magnitude? Will keyword navigation be the best way to find content still? (typing two or three words in a search box). I'm not sure.

We all know that the ideal is AI and natural language processing. But I think the web will grow faster than our advances in nlp interpretation.

I'm guessing that social relevance will be very important in helping guide navigation to content. How to blend all these approaches in a reasonable UI is a nice challenge. I'm excited to see how the web evolves.

By the way, if you like thinking of these kinds of things, I recommend you read nicholas carr's blog in www.roughtype.com. He has some interesting ideas.

Let's start blogging again.

So this post is not very exciting. I just wanted to start blogging again.

It's a new year (2008)... Yes, I know, it's been 2008 for a while. "Where was I" you say? Busy busy busy, would be my reply.

Ok, so here's a fun idea. One of my favorite recent ideas is that of an overlay network in terms of historical development of businesses. So I've been doing some business history archaelogy (what!?). And these are some of the more fun network overlays:
- Fax which grew by overlaying on PSTN
- The internet, which grew by overlaying on PSTN (remember those 56k dialup modems?)
- The web which grew on top of the internet (TCP/IP runs everything!)
- Hotmail on top of the web (remember when you could only access email via Eudora and Outlook?)
- Youtube (which grew on top of Flash and the web; and of course, on top of MySpace)

Interesting isn't it. You look and find that many networks were built on top of other ones.

Sometimes the underlying network disappears and is replaced by a more robust technology to support the top network. For example, the internet grew on top of PSTN dial-up, but it is now sitting on top of broadband while dial-up has largely disappeared in many places.

(I had to use a dialup modem a few months ago while they were changing broadband providers in my new home; gosh, painful)

That's it. Short blogs I will try now. None of this book-chapter-like blogging.

Amazing Vannevar Bush

I just wanted to write about Vannevar Bush (no relation to the president) because I think most people in technology probably underestimate the influence this man has had in our industry and most interestingly the world at large. Bush was the science adviser to FDR (Roosevelt) during world war II. He is credited with creating the National Science Foundation (NSF), the military funding of science (which led to ARPA, the internet, etc), the memex (which seeded hypertext and modern personal computing), and the thinking after WWII that science is a precursor to technology which led to the creation of R&D divisions in modern day companies. He was close friends to James Conant, president of Harvard who modernized that institution from being a finishing school for the wealthy to a meritocracy for leaders, introducing achievements tests for entry and other things like it. Some of Bush's graduate students included Claude Shannon, one of the founders of information theory, and Frederick Terman, who seeded silicon valley as provost of Stanford University and whose PhD students included Bill Hewlett and David Packard. (Him and Shockley, of Shockley Labs are credited with the foundations of the valley).

I might as well highlight to non-americans that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered the most important president of the US in the 20th century, and only comparable in his stature to Washington and Lincoln. Really. So Bush having been an adviser to him is amazing. FDR was elected 4 times, yes 4 times! to the presidency as this was before 2-term limit were imposed (1933-1945). He's the only US president to have served more than 2 terms. Now just to give you some perspective, he was elected in 1933 in the throes of the great depression. He rallied the country of this economic misery to take them through 13 years of growth and betterment (he died in office) all across WWII.

Now just to try to give you a feel for the span with which he took the country, below is a photo of the great depression, with its barn-like poverty feel you can imagine the country he began with in 1933, and then the one he left it with, a photograph of Gen MacArthur landing on the Philippines in 1945. These are two completely different countries. The great depression was an America still closely tied to the 19th century. It's misunderstood economic system (leading to the mistakes which became the great depression), still very rural, vast poverty, and industrialization and technology which was either barren or uncontrolled. And the America he left in place is the one we know today, technologized, with a social doctrine (compared to the great depression it was huge advance), a science program, the atom bomb, able to take care of its citizens, etc.

I'll write more about Vannevar Bush in the next post. Trying to keep pieces shorter.
(photographs are all from wikipedia, just linking to their site to get the photographs shown and make the articles more readable, not just text)

books i liked in 2006

So I might cheat a little bit, but I figured I'd post a list of books which I read in the last year which I enjoyed. This is a mini-reading list for an imaginary course I would teach to user experience designers who needed to brush up on product design for the internet world of 2007. To get a background in economics, and social dynamics, and industry change, and stuff like that. Enough, here is the list:

Clayton Christensen
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
(a classic of disruption)

Chris Anderson
The Long Tail
(a new classic about user-generated-content and catalogs and choice)

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life
(an interesting book on the economics or physics of networks and network effects; written by a physicist)

Barry Schwarz
The Paradox of Choice
(nice summary of how people choose stuff, and how strange this phenomenon is; nice complement to long tail)

Geoffrey Moore
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers
(a nice book to understand the way products path to becoming mainstream)

And a couple of fun reads. Historical novel-like stories of the beginning of computings. Particularly in product oriented computer companies. Both of them are either pulitzer prize winning or written by pulitzer prize winning authos. I forget.

Tracy Kidder
The Soul of a New Machine
(a nice story of how a team at data general built a new computer... the high energy creative teams and what they set out to do)

Michael Hiltzik
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age
(a wonderful story of PARC, and the invention of the Alto, which was the first personal computer, with GUI, with networking, and the word processor, and the laser printer, and so much more stuff it's amazing; the people who participated at PARC reads like a who's who of today's world...)

company one-liners: google, apple, myspace

This post is about one-liners. So in honour about that I will be brief. It's about describing in one sentence what some companies are about.

My roommate in SF was a screenwriter in Hollywood for a while. And he was great at summarizing a movie and stating what it was really about. So to challenge him, I asked him to pitch me ET, the amazing Spielberg movie, which I thought was about going home, the Oddyssey, finding friends, all kind of stuff. He said, "easy, it's Lassie from outer space... kids find stray alien, bring him home, alien saves the day". How's that for a pitch?

So these are my pitches. Advertising is a very competitive industry, where agencies fight each other to try to win over clients with creative slogans, shnazzy graphics, wonderful branding. I think Google is an engineering company that's gotten into advertising. And it's wreaking havoc. Advertising companies don't know how to compete with this powerful engineering company.

In the same way, Apple is a computer company that's gotten into music. Music business has been about breaking new bands, cross-promotional deals, finding and nurturing talent. The music industry is having a hard time competing with a computer company.

What is Microsoft? Microsoft has been a software company, and it still is. That's why it's having such a hard time today, given that the internet is central these days. But I'll admit that MS is doing a good job at reinventing games.

Myspace is the LA music scene brought online. Everybody wants to hang out at cool bars and listen to hip new bands. Why not bring that hanging out online, so everyone can participate. So it's really a place to hang out. No wonder that their tag line is "a place for friends".

some thoughts on google, myspace, yahoo

I don't have much to say. (nice preface to a post, huh?). I guess one of the things I was thinking about the other day is about search, and internet sites, and what are they. So let's see if this makes sense.

What is Google? It's an internet site (located at google.com) which gives you access to an algorithm tied to a large database composed of internet sites and their content. If you type some keywords, it returns the sites that most closely are related to those keywords.

Some interesting things about it. There is no user generated content. All the content is composed of crawled content readily available on the internet (and collected by the googlebots). The algorithm is very fast given the size of the database (a flavour of the entire internet). It has no network effects (you find a better search algorithm and nothing forces you to stick to the old one... except for familiarity with the interface).

Now for fun, let's contrast it to another site, MySpace. This is also an internet site (located at myspace.com), which gives you access to a large number of personal blogs. You can search through these blogs by attribute, but typically people make their own and visit their friends blogs.

Some interestings about this other site. It is ALL user generated content. There is no crawled content. There is little engineering. There is a somewhat meaningful network effect (if you are on it, you want your friends to be on it). It is easily replicable (remember geocities? how hard is it to make free webspace?). The activity on it is mostly like being in a beach or a bar, whereby young guys and gals want to attract each other's attention. Clearly of value to a particular age group, for a particular need.

Let's see, why not think about Yahoo. This site is very mixed. Hard to pin down (is this good?). Some areas are about user generated content (Yahoo 360), while others are about engineering (Yahoo Search). A number of areas are about commoditized services packaged for a semi-captive audience (email, news, etc.). So I think the best description would be that this site is about delivering to an audience the most used types of applications on the internet.

The internet is an interesting place. There are a couple of trends in opposite directions. One trend is the webification of everything, from photos (flickr) to video (youtube) to socializing (myspace). The other trend is its opposite, the non-webification to deliver innovative experiences (slingbox for tv/video), podcasts to deliver videos & audio programs to devices. Let's not forget the internet is not just about the web.

I guess I'll stop rambling now.

why is it so hard to promote a small website?

So this is a pet peeve of mine. Why is it so hard to promote a small website, and how come no one has fixed this problem yet as there are soooo many small businesses out there?

I mean, sure, there are SEOs out there who will tweak your website to make it rank higher in organic results in google and yahoo. And they will optimize your dollar spend in terms of buying the cheapest keywords for your most valuable visitors. But if I have a small website for my business that does plumbing in san francisco... how do i make sure I show up in some reasonable searches ("plumbing san francisco"?). And without having to spend $1,000 a month on SEO.

Today it's the luck of the draw.

I mean, there's not much that this site/service would have to do:

• Submission: Submit the small website so it can be crawled by major search engines (google, yahoo, msn,...)
• Organic ranking: Give you a couple of hints to improve your ranking (good page titles, good domain name, etc)
• Buy some traffic: Allow you to buy some traffic with PPC easily (don't direct people to adwords, which in my opinion it's still too hard to use, I mean most people don't understand this buying keywords thing... that's hard)
• Monitor: Let you know how you're doing in rankings, and in visitors, so you can see the results you're getting and rewards you.
• Social network: Suggest places you should submit your site in order to get more inward links. (directory of small businesses in SF, plumbing association, etc)

That would be a good start. Of course, make it easy and simple. I know lots of people who would use this. It's a huge market. Huge.

it's about network effects

So I figured i'd write more often... i've been a bit lazy. Only writing long posts when I had something to say. So I'm trying bite-sized thoughts.

Thought for the day: I remember being at a talk (VC investors/entrepreneurs) and somebody saying that it's very important these days to invest in stuff that is being given away free. This is very disruptive. And I was thinking "Why?". Why does free give you an advantage.

And my conclusion is, it's not about free, it's about network effects and speed of growth. See, network effects are fantastic, because you can then protect yourself from competition and make a buck or two. So if the space you are in moves really really fast, then whatever gives you that superfast acceleration to start achieving network effects is worth it.

Giving stuff away for free is one way to get there.

how is our web universe growing?

So i was thinking. How is our web universe growing? And for how long will this continue?

See, I was going back several years... say 1996... and thinking of the time when portals were around. At that time, portals figured most people wanted a few things. A website directory (links), news, webmail, a search box, that kind of stuff. So each portal bundled that stuff, and gave it to their audience, and people didn't seem to have a need for more sites. The portal offered everything.

It's not that different from the thinking behind the emergence of discount retailers in the 1950's, where they reasoned most people want a few things. A nice sofa, some cheap garden chairs, a couple of suits. Discount retailers thought it was easier to stock the stuff most people wanted and deliver that easily and conveniently, than stock a very wide array of stuff most people didn't need (the long tail). So the retailers ended up beating the traditional retailers who carried vast inventories and had low turnovers.

Yet the web flourished substantially after 1999, and it appears that the web universe is vast. So people search to find this stuff. And in a universe which is growing, the tools to find stuff are valuable. Hence the big competition we have today in search.

But what if the web universe stabilizes. And yes, content continues to grow, but in only a few places... so a few sites own the vast troves of content in the web. In such a universe, what is the value of search?

Thinking in terms of retail, how valuable is a 3 story video store with 50,000 titles when everyone wants to rent one of the latest releases from Hollywood (blockbuster).

I'm not sure where I'm going. But I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what is happening to the web universe we have, and how fast and in what ways it's growing. Because it can hold the key to explaining where things will go. Is it growing in unusual places, like grass on a prairie, or is it growing in big clumps in only a few sites. I don't know. What do you think?

disruption

Haven't written in a while. So figured I'd put a thinking piece to spur a dialogue.

Why is it so hard to predict disruption? I don't know, but it sure is easy to do monday morning quarterbacking about disruption, after it happened (this is an american phrase I like that refers to sunday night football games; it's easy to say what the quarterback had to do when it's monday morning, after the game was played the night before; nevermind, I probably got this wrong, as I'm not from the US).

So who would have said that search was going to be so important? In fact, who would have said in the early 80's that OS's were going to be so important... I'm sure IBM didn't, or they would have tried to keep it.

See, what's interesting is that when the game is being played, you think what counts is something else. Only to realize the next day that you missed something critical. IBM thought it was about the hardware. So they didn't mind not keeping the OS on the desktops (only to find years later they were paying attention to the wrong thing, the hardware got commoditized). And for a while, everyone thought/thinks it is about the OS, but maybe this is getting commoditized (isn't it about the web now?). Who knows... Netscape thought it was the server software, actually they had the whole stack, the server software, the destination site (netscape.com), and the browser on your desktop... but they made money out of server software, do you know what software is running these webpages you are reading (is it Php?)? Do you care?

I'm still confused how no one in the late 90's realized how bad search technology was and how big an opportunity it would become. I remember using search then and finding all kinds of horrible pages in the results, it was unusable, so you went to directories because that was the only reliable thing around. But the web got bigger, a lot bigger, and directories didn't scale to cover the entire web. So people stopped using directories and started using search. And now people stopped using bookmarks (when was the last time you bookmarked something), and rely on the search box.

Are we not noticing something as broken today? How come these things are so invisible in the present and so obvious after the fact? Does this post have a point? Kind of. Maybe not. Maybe this is just hard.

But when you are playing the game, you got to keep focused. And do the things that make sense, that make a difference to users, that create value. That, at least, makes sense to me. Just focus on that.

It's about activities!

So you might have heard of activity-centered design, or you might have not (see also this book). It's a reasonable concept that is becoming vogue recently. The key difference with user-centered design is that you chunk up stuff into typical activities people engage in, as opposed to according to classes of users (personas), or bodies of knowledge users have (mental models, visual metaphors, etc).

What ends up happening is that you then design products that are closely aligned to a type of activity people engage in. The artifact might:

• Replace a current artifact in the activity (mobile phones replaced walkie-talkies). This is the case when a more powerful technology can be leveraged.
• Might be complementary and enhance the activity (the flash complemented cameras to take pictures at night). This improves the quality of the activity.
• Might change the way people do things (desktop computers changed the way people wrote essays, as copy and paste afforded this, and malleability led to less time thinking and preparing and more time on the computer keyboard).

So what are the origins of activity centered design? I have a hint that some of my classmates at Berkeley had something to do with this, as when I was there in the early 90's my PhD colleagues were focusing on creating new frameworks for understanding how people use computers. And we would often get into very intense conversations about ontologies. My friends are now mostly professors somewhere, like Chris Hoadley, Noel Enyedy, and Bruce Sherin.

One camp would go back to the user (the traditional or symbolic cognitivists), and they'd say we need to understand people's mental models, artifacts affordances, user's goals, and all that stuff. These people considered users' the primary ontology, and their knowledge, goals, and beliefs were what their theories were made of. A secondary phenomena for them was users' social interactions. This group was closely aligned with traditionaly cognitive scientists such as Chomsky, Newell & Simon, and the mental models crowd.

Now, another camp, let's call them the social scientists (or alternatively called "situated cognitivists") would say that the primary unit was the social interation. All other cognition emanated from that, as we are fundamentally a social phenomenon. This group were more aligned with Vygotsky, Gibson, and Schon.

What was interesting was that both camps were equally represented at the university, and that we would often found ourselves in the same rooms, and classes, building on each other ideas. In many other places the two camps were more divided into different departments, but here, we were intermingled. So we contributed to this effort to improve how we design, and as a research community, I think it can help to have activity centered design as one more color in the palette when you consider how to go about your design work.

Videos of early personal computers like Sketchpad (1961), Engelbart's NLS (1968), and Xerox Star (1981)

This is meant to be a short post. I have been watching videos lately of the design of the first graphical computers. These were Sutherland's Sketchpad (running on a room-sized TX-2, roughly in 1961), the  first graphical UI, Doug Engelbart's NLS (in 1968) demonstrating the first word processor, personal computer, information worker, mouse, etc., and Xerox Star (1981) with windows, WYSIWYG word processing, laser printers, icons, desktop, etc.

The following images come from guidebookgallery.org and Stanford's site

We have Sketchpad

Engelbart's NLS

the Xerox Star

The fun stuff is the videos. Sutherland's videos remind us of the world he was building on. These were transistor-based room-based computers dedicated to batch processing (paper cards to store programs and all). This was coming back from the WW2 efforts (only a decade earlier, in the 1940s). The TX-2 was an MIT computer built in 1958. His contribution was to think of one of these computers as controlled by a single person, in real-time, while looking at a "scope" (now commonly referred to as a "computer monitor", but then it was more like an oscilloscope), and giving instructions with a handheld control (not quite a mouse, but getting there). At this time, each computer was for community use, programmed by a team, who spent much time creating the programs and then seeing the result of their efforts in a few minutes, then going back to the drawing effort. Sutherland's videos are not quite collated in single place, and are long downloadable files. You can find a long video filmed at MIT here, a reporter asks some top level questions and then there is a demo. It's quite amazing, with the MIT senior scientist introducing this work as "a man talking to a computer for the first time in a way never seen before". Weirdly prescient about what the world of today would look like, it almost feels like science fiction movie played forward (whatever that means).

Doug Engelbart worked at SRI in California and has an awesome demo he gave in 1968 about what the "future" might be like with an augmented human intellect, whereby personal computers would change the way we do things. It's very cool. You can see the list of Engerlbart video snippets. I like his snippet of a word processor, and his idealistic notion of a workstation that would be at your disposal all day.

Finally, and most funly (yes, that is a word for me), I have some videos of the Xerox Star. A few of these videos are from a 1998 event when they decided to demo the Star for the last time. I am very amused at this because I was still in California then and remember talking to Dave Smith (one of the main UI designers and the one who wrote the first version of Star in smalltalk) about this event. He said that this was the final final demo as they had done a final demo a couple of years ago and there was always a final final final demo that people wanted.

You can watch his shpeel and demo on the Star and how it was designed, which is very funny. He shows how you would use it creating icons, putting stuff on a desktop, and using the word processor. I always tell the story of how I got to know about his past work when I was an intern at Apple. I spent the summer there and he shared his office with me, so I got to work closely with him (he's very funny in case I forgot to mention this).

Now, you have to realize that I had no idea of his background. All I knew was that he was always talking about how we want to help people think visually and that pictures and drawing are very easy things for people to do. And I kept thinking how this seemed a bit fluffy and too high-level, but whatever. But whenever we went into a talk in ATG (Advanced Technology Group), when he had a comment, everybody listened, so something was up. One day I told him I could not come in to work near the end of the week, as I had to present a paper on the Xerox Star, and he mentioned he had worked at Parc. I was amazed at this and asked him if was involved in the Star project. To which he replied yes. That he had thought of using icons and designing the desktop. I thought this was a bit odd, "what do you mean you thought of icons?". That's when it dawned on me that Dave Smith was probably the author of the paper I had to present that week, which was authored by Smith, Kirby, Kimball, and Verplank. Funny.

Don't focus on faster horses

So my friend today reminded me of Henry Ford's saying "If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse". This got me thinking.

All the time I get asked by people outside the design group to involve users early in the design process; why not invite them to the brainstorms; why not get them to critique the design; why not this and why not that. I mean, it almost seems like I might as well hire users as opposed to designers to do the job -- apparently, they know themselves better. But we know this is not going to work. Users are great users, but not necessarily great designers. I mean, there is a talent to designing, and one should respect that.

Here is where the fine line needs to be walked. Users are great at behaving like users, yet they are not very good at telling you what would really solve their problem (just get me a faster horse). They cannot think outside of the current paradigm (as Thomas Kuhn might say). Macs would be nothing more than awesome typewriters if we had listened to users all along. (do you remember the dedicated "word processors" of the day, computers that could only do word processing; unbelievable).

(new part in this post: So I realize I have a story to tell here. When I was an undergraduate at MIT I decided I wanted to take a class with Thomas Kuhn. I mean, this is the guy who coined the term "paradigm", a brilliant guy who had shifted our thinking about our society's knowledge and how it goes sometimes in incremental development, but sometimes it undergoes revolutions, or "paradigm shifts"... his work was admired throughout MIT... So anyways, I finally find a class he's taking and enroll on it, and try to find the room for the first wednesday that it takes place... and I'm running around in building 20, which is a bunch of army barracks constructed during WWII to house scientists working on improving radar so it can be used by aircraft, as opposed to ships...

(picture from MIT libraries)

this is where linguistics at MIT was started and where Noam Chomsky had his offices for 3 decades... so anyways, I get to the class 20 minutes late, and the door is shut, and I wonder whether I should knock or walk away, so I decide to knock... silence... an old man opens the door, Thomas Kuhn, and asks me who I am and what I want... a few students sit inside... I explain my interest and he manages to dissuade me, I should focus on my senior thesis he says, there will be plenty of time later on to take other classes, focus on what I'm doing, make my contribution... wise words... and that was the only time I met him)

Returning to my thread, users are fantastic as a source of information on what the issues are. But we must respect basic experimental practices. Think Aloud methodology describes what one can ask a subject to do (please think aloud while doing this task) and what one cannot ask them to do because it would produce contrived data (more accurately, users would produce introspective reports, which tend to be constructed for the purpose of the experiment and not a true representation of what goes in the subject's mind).

In brief, the think aloud method says (it's a verified method of cognitive investigation) that you should ask a subject to carry out a task while thinking out loud. The subject will use their mental schemas to solve the task, and when verbalizing will expose how they are thinking ("let's see... to multiply 21 times 75, I'll do 20 times 75, which is 750 times 2 or 1500, and then I'll add 75 to it... so it's 1575..."). With this verbalization you get a window into their thought process: heuristics, deconstruction of a multiplication into pieces, final assembly, etc...

Now, if I asked a user to explain to me how he solves multiplication problems, he might tell me he writes numbers in two rows and applies the typical algorithm. But we know this is not the case, as clearly often, he solves multiplication problems in a different way. The problem here is that we asked him to introspect his own mind, and we got an invalid response.

So one needs to watch what people are doing, understand their activities and goals, and design to support that, rather than ask them what they would imagine they would need (a faster horse). Mr Ford would not want us to design otherwise, I would think.

Less is more

It's amazing how difficult it is for UI designers to make hard decisions. By this I mean the decision to leave stuff out. To choose that less is more. To remove functionality out of a product. To throw stuff away that is not really needed.

Instead, many designers tend to see their work as how to package that additional feature somehow into the product. It's as if cleaning your room always has to consist of rearranging stuff, never chucking away those old pair of jeans, or the book that someone gave to you for your birthday and you never had time to read. Many designers marvel at their ingenuity of somehow managing to keep everything in the room, just in case it's needed. And the room contains more and more stuff in it.

But decisions must be made. And things need to be thrown away. So that users entering a room find stuff easily, and everything there is wonderful. And they can go about doing their things in an enjoyable way. But it's not easy making those decisions.

Why can't there be more UI designers with that discipline? A deep belief that sometimes, less is more.

( more thoughts on less is more: Mies van der Rohe, who coined "less is more", a minimalist architect )

The big difference between user experience, usability, and HCI

Well, this is an unusual post. It's not about current events regarding internet and technology, but rather it's a look back at the field of usability and how we got to call this user experience or HCI or UI design.

Way back when... maybe in the 60's, the field was called ergonomics.Ergonomics then was the study of comfortable and human adapted furniture, architecture, and others... the goal was to make comfortable chairs at just the right height, for instance. So this was applied to computers, so that monitors were not too bright, and keyboards felt just right.

The word User Interface, and it's importance to the design became important in the early 80's. Probably one of the more important developments in the field was the Xerox Star, which contained some of the more important inventions in UI's, such as a Desktop, icons, WYSIWYG, property sheets, universal commands like Copy and Undo, etc. The interesting thing was that this was the first computer to have its UI designed before any code was written. I was lucky enough to work in a project at Apple with Dave Smith, who was one of the main designers of the Star, and one of the authors of the article above.

So by then, talking about User Interfaces became common. And the importance given to it became higher. In the early 90's, two terms appeared that were close, but somewhat similar: User Experience, and User-centered design. User experience was a term coined by Don Norman while at Apple to cover more aspects of the interaction than simply what was on the screen. Given Norman's background in psychology, it made sense to look inside people's heads and talk about experience. This term became really popular with web people in the late 90's, and most people who say they focus on user experience tend have a web background.

A little earlier than this, in 1986, the term User Centered Design started being used. This one is funny. A book called User Centered System Design (UCSD) was edited by Norman and Draper with articles from a number of trailblazers in the field. (including my advisor at Berkeley, Andy diSessa). What is funny about this, is that Norman at the time was the chair of the cognitive science department at University of California at San Diego (UCSD). So the acronym was kind of a joke.

Then in the 80's, academics in the field started meeting in an annual conference called CHI (Computer Human Interaction). But some people thought that humans should come first, and decided to call their field HCI, for Human Computer Interaction. So now we have a CHI conference, but academics who go to it do HCI. Great.

Lately, many products have won battles and dominate their categories based on their ease of use and prettiness. iPod is one: easy to use and cool. Nokia many people say it's easy to use. People don't have time these days, and any product which is easy to use and cool will win over one that is complex and boring. So it's not just about the experience, it's about making things usable. Hence the term Usability. The focus here is on easy to use.

So when I meet someone these days, I say I do HCI, or usability, or user experience. It's all sort of the same thing, it all depends on where you learned your chops and what community you feel you belong to. In the end, it's all pretty much the same thing.

Search: New Media or New Transport?

The other day I noted that there are foundational differences in the big search companies out there. And I was wondering how this will play out in the game taking place (an interesting game I think). I noted this distinction while in a conversation where a friend of mine said "search companies are new media companies" and I disagreed vehemently launching into a long argument.

My friend asked "what are they then?" And I said "well, media companies, to me, are companies that want you to SPEND TIME WITH THEM so they can throw advertisements at you, like a newspaper, a tv channel, you name it". So their metrics, particular tv companies, are measured in how much time per month you spend with them. Say 6 hours a month watching their channel.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. Some search companies ARE MEDIA companies. They focus on how to get more of your attention. But there are others (fill in the name) who want you to spend MINIMAL time with them, they are TRANSPORT companies. They just want to get you where you want to go. So the LESS time you spend with them and the faster you get where you want to go the better. It just might be that when you are looking for where you want to go you see an ad for a relevant destination and you head that way, and they collect some money for that.

This model is that of a TRANSPORT company, helping you go where you want to go. And the faster you get there, the better the experience. Imagine an airline or train company that tried to make you spend MORE time on a plane, and the executives tried to figure out ways to distract you along the way so that a 4 hour trip became an 8 hour trip with additional distractions at the airport, in customs, and other stuff. Come on! Be serious. How long would they be in business?

This is not to say that transport companies don't want your business. They do. They just don't want you to spend time on a plane or a bus. They DO want you to use them whenever you want to go somewhere. Their mantra might be "travel often with us, we'll take you where you want to go faster than anyone else".

Of course, transport companies are valuable if there are plenty of destinations to go and I have a hard time getting there. In a small universe, I'll walk everywhere. So the LARGER the universe and the harder it is to travel the maze, the more valuable a transport company.

One more thought before I finish this. Have you noticed that some internet companies resemble pharmaceuticals? They have hundreds or thousands of projects and from these only a few make it along the pipeline to become marketable products. They run experiments. Other big internet companies, instead, resemble automakers, with few projects along the way. What is better? Well, I would say it depends on what era we live in. In an era where there is a lot of room for innovation/disruption, then the pharma model wins, while in an era where there is little disruption, then the automaker model wins (more conservative and only incremental improvements).

Hola Mundo

I figured I should get on with it and start a blog, to keep in touch with friends, to braindump some of my intellectual meanderings onto the web for others to read, to explore the medium and be a bit more public about my stuff.

So this is my first post. Little to say. A beginning maybe.