The Tools We Use
Sure, I could have posted this talk I gave at UX London last year sooner. But I decided to sit on it in case the global social, economic, and infrastructural system happened to go belly-up and people might want a little distraction.
I possibly went a little self-indulgent on this one, rambling through hammers, monkeys, 2001: A Space Odyssey, pencils tied to bricks, the Whole Earth Catalog, the Space Jam website’s HTML, and 1980s Toyota manufacturing all before arriving at a simple point: designers should iterate on how they work as much as they iterate on their work itself.
If that’s your type of thing you might enjoy it. If video or Irish accents are not your type of thing you can read the full transcript on the Intercom blog.
This Too Shall Pass
“This too shall pass” is often said to struggling new parents. Solid advice! You’re cooped up at home, minding a baby, unsure how to cope, no clue when things might be normal again. It’s a gentle way of advising someone: I know. But you’re going to have to dig in now. You will endure.
“The days are long, but the years are short” is the best parenting advice. In truth there’s a melancholy to being a parent: you’ll want to jump out the window at times, but when it’s all over you’ll wish for that time back again.
“When this is all over…” is something people have been saying a lot recently. When this is all over we’ll meet up more, we’ll have a new appreciation of nature, we’ll hug our parents, we’ll pay the nurses what they deserve, we’ll reinvent society, we’ll have the mother of all sessions.
When this does pass we won’t pine for it. But a couple of weeks in, I’m now trying to notice the little moments in all of this. Our little family cocooned away. We’re doing okay. This is going to be the only summer we’ll ever have with the kids being 6 and 3. There are small moments to be had. These days do feel long, but the year will be short.
TLDR: We’re in lockdown and my kids are giving me Stockholm Syndrome.
Design in Interesting Times
Just realised that I never posted my talk from the 2017 Inside Intercom World Tour. It’s about using system thinking to cope with rapid change, whether that’s inside a fast-growing startup, or a world that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. I gave versions of the talk in New York, Tel Aviv, and finally in San Francisco, which is what’s recorded below. Had a ton of fun working with lovely folks from our Brand Studio on the visuals for this one.
Full transcript on the Intercom blog, or there’s an audio version if that’s your thing.
Stories and storytelling
In my post last week about Google Duplex, I mentioned Tristan Harris’ 2013 internal presentation at Google about the ethics of attention.
I looked for a public copy of it, which didn’t exist last week, but does now: it was just leaked/released. It’s an interesting read in itself. But I still often think about this actual presentation — the slide deck itself — as an example of GREAT storytelling. The whole thing is designed to be viewed, not presented. Each slide is a single thought; just an image and a few words. There are no speaker notes. It’s an essay designed to be viewed rather than read. I remember it spreading like wildfire through Google at the time and immediately sparking conversation. It’s a object lesson in the power of presenting your ideas or work narratively.
Another post last week was about the Dissect podcast and how new types of media lead to new forms of content.
Tristan’s slides feel like a desktop predecessor of the most obvious new mobile-first content type: the Story. Invented by Snapchat and mainstreamed by Instagram, Stories are the ne plus ultra of smartphone patterns: atomic units of vertical rectangle content navigated via the simplest possible interaction. Tap, tap, tap, one pellet of info at a time. But done well it can add up to a fully realised narrative told across a single day.
There’s a lineage here. Robin Sloan’s 2012 “Fish” tap essay feels like a more literary precursor to Stories. Both Fish and Tristan’s deck are writing, but the delivery is edited into discreet cue cards to create rhythm and emphasis. Twitter threads are part of this scene too, being a series of atomic thoughts strung together into an argument. Bad threads are bad because they are nothing more than longer essays arbitrarily chopped into 240-character chunks; get a blog, dude. But a well-written thread can use the limitations of the medium to create pacing and tell a story, one thought at a time, and work better than it ever would as prose.
DVD commentary for music
I’m currently deep in binge mode with Dissect, a music podcast that picks an album and spends an entire season analysing it, one episide per track. It’s a one-man show entirely created by host Cole Cuchna, and it’s serious music nerd-out territory.
The first season takes on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, an album which I had already loved, but in retrospect had no real appreciation of the depth of theme and narrative throughout it. Kenrick’s album is genuis on a level that I hadn’t understood before listenting to Cuchna’s 12+ hour critical analysis of it. Which to me is not a bad return.
Dissect fits into what seems like a new category of “breaking down music” podcasts: Switched on Pop (previously recommended here) and Song Exploder do somewhat similar things with individual tracks.
It strikes me that this is a new genre that could really only ever exist in podcast form. More than ever music that deserves analysis like this has become an internal affair, listened to privately on headphones while working or commuting. Podcasts seem like a natural fit. They are well suited to audio exploration, obviously, but also match the intimate nature of how I think people dissect music themselves: largely as a private internal monologue picking apart tiny phrases or production touches. There are probably hundreds of brief moments in songs that I privately recognise as something that resonates, but it would feel weird to talk to someone about. Yet the one-on-one format of someone speaking directly into your ear with no time limit seems to create space for that, even if it does mean a 40 minute episode discussing a 4 minute song.
Looking back at the short period during which DVDs were actually a thing, I only miss bonus material: those little extras that were often included with a movie like a director’s commentary or behind-the-scenes featurette. For a certain type of person, me included, understanding how or why something was made only increases my appreciation of it; to me, that’s the main function of good criticism. The rise of YouTube video essays seems to have bridged the gap for movie criticism, but I can’t think of anything similar that had already existed in this space for music.
Which is why Dissect and other podcasts like it are exciting to me: the content is often great in itself, but it’s also cool that there are new types of media to be invented that are truly native to these new formats — in this case in-depth musical analysis. Who knows what further new art forms podcasts or Stories or messaging apps or whatever else will throw up.
Anyway, I reccomend Dissect, I guess is what I’m saying. Season 2 did Kanye’s epic My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which I’m fully here for. Meanwhile Spotify gave Cuchna a full time job and Season 3 (subject still a mystery) is dropping next week. Good times for music nerdery! /
Trusting Google Duplex
I’ve been at home in bed sick and started randomly Twitter threading about the Google I/O phone bot and realised NOPE so instead here’s a BLOG POST of sub-280 character paragraphs: https://t.co/oOOsMaGgiQ
— Emmet Connolly (@thoughtwax) May 9, 2018
I was interested to see how the big tech companies would adjust their PR message in light of recent tech controversies, but judging by Facebook’s F8 and Google I/O this week, the answer is not very much at all.
A not unreasonable reaction: that’s technically marvellous but is it really fair to the person working on the other end of the line? And what about all the ways this could be exploited…? How might you prevent that?
We should make AI sound different from humans for the same reason we put a smelly additive in normally odorless natural gas. https://t.co/2dYmeb70AC
— Travis Korte (@traviskorte) May 8, 2018
No mention of this on stage though. And the audience sure seemed to lap it up! So either: 1. Google can’t think of any way that this might be abused. 2. They won’t. 3. They just don’t want to acknowledge that stuff by talking about it.
Learn how we’re supporting #DigitalWellbeing so everyone can enjoy technology that improves life and doesn’t distract from it → https://t.co/IsaUmj4vl9 #io18 pic.twitter.com/v8APGLWHCU
— Google (@Google) May 8, 2018
But it’s at best a gentle take on what @tristanharris was advocating for internally within Google back in 2014. Which means that the half-life of features with potentially negative consequences is many, many years.
Yet a computer that can convincingly talk like a human is now 100% inevitable; it’s absolutely coming, many permutations are going to get thrown against the wall to see what sticks.
I worked at Google for 8 years, and can attest that it takes time for views from the outside world to seep in. It’s like a small country, albeit with the clout of a large one. Giant tech company leaders are politicians, and as such react to public opinion.
So although it’s kind of a downer to witness some magical new tech breakthrough and immediately jump to pointing out its potential flaws, it seems like there’s almost a kind of civic duty to it.
It’s also worth saying that thinking about how new tech may be used or abused is an interesting thought experiment! If the capability seems inevitable, the application is not. That sounds like a decent groove for designers to sit in.
I hope that the recent tech reckoning turns out to be a good thing, and will lead to better products. But it don’t come for free.
However, I fear that we may never disabuse Google of the notion that the world’s biggest problem is taking a break to run an errand.Most people hate errands and the small talk that goes with them, but maybe they have some value… https://t.co/Kx6L9dw2PG pic.twitter.com/x29qg5bh1r
— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) May 8, 2018
(I feel like the deep differences in the urban architectures of Jane Jacob’s Greenwich Village and Google’s Mountain View campus has a lot to answer for here. Of course errands are suboptimal… who wants to spend 20 mins each way snared in traffic on the 101?!)
This sounds right. The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic.
— Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand) May 9, 2018
Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust.
When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast. https://t.co/pnh2y45Z6k
Finally, this all reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut having a grand old time buying an envelope, which I’ll now quote generously in a showy display of the luxurious, unrestricted superiority of the blog format:
Anyway, I take my pages and I have this thing made out of steel, it’s called a paper clip, and I put my pages together, being careful to number them, too, of course. So I go downstairs, to take off, and I pass my wife, the photo journalist Jill Krementz, who was bloody high tech then, and is even higher tech now. She calls out, “Where are you going?” Her favorite reading when she was a girl was Nancy Drew mysteries, you know, the girl detective. So she can’t help but ask, “Where are you going?” And I say, “I am going out to get an envelope.” And she says, “Well, you’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.”
So I go down the steps, and this is on 48th Street in New York City between Second Avenue and Third, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. And I know their stock very well, and so I get an envelope, a manila envelope. It is as though whoever made that envelope knew what size of paper I’m using. I get in line because there are people buying lottery tickets, candy, and that sort of thing, and I chat with them. I say, “Do you know anybody who ever won anything in the lottery?” And, “What happened to your foot?”
Finally I get up to the head of the line. The people who own this store are Hindus. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes. Now isn’t that worth the trip? I ask her, “Have there been any big lottery winners lately?” Then I pay for the envelope. I take my manuscript and I put it inside. The envelope has two little metal prongs for going through a hole in the flap. For those of you who have never seen one, there are two ways of closing a manila envelope. I use both of them. First I lick the mucilage—it’s kind of sexy. I put the little thin metal diddle through the hole—I never did know what they call them. Then I glue the flap down.
I go next to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and Second Avenue. This is very close to the United Nations, so there are all these funny-looking people there from all over the world. I go in there and we are lined up again. I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. She doesn’t know it. My wife knows it. I am not about to do anything about it. She is so nice. All I have ever seen of her is from the waist up because she is always behind the counter. But every day she will do something with herself above her waist to cheer us up. Sometimes her hair will be all frizzy. Sometimes she will have ironed it flat. One day she was wearing black lipstick. This is all so exciting and so generous of her, just to cheer us all up, people from all over the world.
So I wait in line, and I say, “Hey what was that language you were talking? Was it Urdu?” I have nice chats. Sometimes not. There is also, “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to your little tinhorn dictatorship where you came from?” One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, finally I get up to the head of the line. I don’t reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker-faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating. And I give her the envelope, and she weighs it, because I want to put the right number of stamps on it, and have her okay it. If she says that’s the right number of stamps and cancels it, that’s it. They can’t send it back to me. I get the right stamps and I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock.
Then I go outside and there is a mailbox. And I feed the pages to the giant blue bullfrog. And it says, “Ribbit.”
And I go home. And I have had one hell of a good time.
Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
My Creative Mornings talk
I gave a short talk last month at the Dublin chapter of Creative Mornings.
The given theme was Curiosity, so I just talked about a grab-bag of vaguely design-ey things:
- The joys of discovering the early web as a teenager. The cyberpunk Wunderkammer that was the wild, DIY, zine-like mid-90’s internet was, to me, the greatest object of curiosity I’d ever encountered.
- How much the internet has changed since, much of it becoming centrailsed, commodified, and a battleground for our attention. Which is exhausting. Curisoity on the internet today is liability, and can even leave you feeling distracted and overloaded.
- Some thoughts on observing my own two children’s innate curiousity, along with my wife’s work as an early years art educator. Through them I’ve gotten get a sense of how powerful curiosity-driven learning can be.
- How Taylorism influenced both workplaces and schools throughout the 20th century, and why the move away from that model to more self-led working and learning remains so hard, even for self-proclaimed “knowledge workers”.
- How most design leaders (me included!) make the early mistake of thinking their job is to define some magical “design process” for their teams, even though all process is in fact doomed to failure.
- “Design Leadership as a subversive activity”: why the real job of design leaders (and teachers for that matter) is actually to be a learner.
It’s hard to talk about curiosity and stick to just one topic!
Maybe none of that makes sense in isolation, but if it’s piqued your, y’know… then check out the video. Thanks to Aiden and the crew at CreativeMornings/DUB for having me!
Design in the Age of Entanglement
This is a talk I gave in London and Amsterdam as part of the Inside Intercom World Tour in May 2016. It’s an attempt at tying together several trends that have driven the computer industry for over half a century, a prediction that they are all set to dramatically change in the next couple of years, and a look at what that change means for product designers.
Full transcript on the Intercom blog.
Design is a Conversation
This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Rebase conference in Dublin on 2nd October 2015. I’ve also written about some of the ideas below on the Intercom blog but the talk contains additional detail and some killer dad jokes. Thanks to Rebase for inviting me to speak.
This is the title of my talk today: Design is a Conversation. This can mean a couple of things.
First, the obvious one: the process of doing design involves lots of talking. Talking about your ideas with your colleagues. Talking to users to see what they need.
And in some ways design is a dialog with the world: we make all this work and put it out there in the world and see how the world responds, how it reacts. That’s a conversation too, I believe.
But I’m going to focus on two other ways that I think about design being a conversation.
One is just a bunch of interesting things that I’m thinking about at the moment, basically technology trends. Things that are happening and current and interesting. Conversation as gossip.
This is the addictive, ever-changing side of technology, the part of what we do that keeps you pulling to refresh your twitter feed like a rat conditioned to get another pellet from the never-ending stream of tech community chatter. This is the part of working in tech that’s exhilarating but perhaps sometimes a little bit like eating junk food. It’s sometimes valid though, it’s an ongoing conversation we’re having with ourselves and what’s happening around us and under our feet.
But the other thing I’m going to touch on throughout is something that’s the very opposite of up-to-the-minute news updates. It’s maybe a bit more reflective than that, and it’s about looking to the past. Because I also think that on a fairly serious level, design can be a conversation with the past.
So, not so much that dude up there as this fellow here:
Here’s someone who has obviously done a bit of thinking about the future. What can we learn from this fellow?
It’s generally considered among intelligent human beings that the past has something to teach us. Yet in the tech world we spend amazingly little time looking to the past for lessons. I suppose it’s because the future is so distracting, so enticing. But it seems like we’re missing a trick, because the past is basically a free cheat sheet for the future! Newsflash: we’re actually not the first people in the world to ever design products. Not only that, it turns out that there are some basic, fairly universal truths and it’s totally fine to copy from the people who figured them out.
So I’m going to also be looking to the past, and to my own past, and thinking about what I can find there.
OK, let’s get started. When we think about the past we think about our own pasts, primarily.
In many ways I think that a lot of what I do today is a conversation with both the past and my younger self. I count myself lucky that I work in a field where I can call on all of the interesting things that I’ve encountered throughout my life, filter and synthesise them into something new. And all of those things come from my past, they are a remix.
It easy to forget that when you’re on the twelfth iteration of horrible usability problem, but anyone who is a designer, your job is basically to take all the stuff you think it cool, and mash them together into something new. That’s quite cool. Five year old you would be impressed, I would think.
From one great man to another. No design conference talk is complete without a quote from either Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, so I figured I’d get this out of the way early and be done with it:
This is what I mean when I say that design is a conversation with the past. It’s almost like a collaboration. It’s a wonderful thing to look at what’s happened and then respond to it in a new way.
Although Banksy perhaps put it better:
So with that in mind, let us now plunder the past for clues about the future. I’m going to start with a history lesson.
Watches are interesting objects. Wristwatches came to be a little over 100 years ago, not as long ago as you might have suspected. Like many technological advances (computers, the internet) they were a wartime development.
Pocket watches had already been a thing for a couple of centuries. But towards the end of the nineteenth century, synchronizing manoeuvres during war was becoming increasingly important. Using pocket watches while in the heat of battle or while mounted on a horse or while sniping was impractical, so soldiers began to strap the pocket watches to their wrist.
So that’s how wristwatches came about, and perhaps after eyeglasses became the world’s earliest and more popular form of wearable technology. Wearable technology: another interesting conversation between humans and machines, and one that’s been going on for a long time.
As technology developed, people started to pull a Henry Ford and put existing ideas together. Computers and watches were two existing things. So the notion of a computer watch gradually took hold in people’s minds. Although for a long time it’s fair to say that it was more of a sci-fi or comic book trope that a real possibility. Dick Tracy is the obvious reference here although as a child of the 80s I must admit that these are more relevant cultural touchpoints for me.
My own background and interest in this type of thing goes pretty far back.
I studied art in college over 10 years ago, and part of my practice involved building art projects that cobbled together portable computers into systems that did interesting things: recording and playing back sounds in certain locations, mapping spaces. Computers were mostly desk-bound, and it was quite different to wear these and go walking with a computer. So I was always partially interested in the adjacent possible for this type of thing.
Because of this interest I kept an eye on wearables developments in general. I saw amazing things like this. Small computers were becoming possible and people wondered how you might wear them.
As Chairman Jobs said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it”. So this obviously isn’t right. How do you figure out what is? Again let’s look at what happened in the past and using that as a lens for what might happen in the future.
This is Gordon Moore. He worked at IBM for many years. Most of you are probably familiar with Moore’s Law: the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every year and a half. Basically that means that computers for nigh-on 50 years now have been getting faster at the same pace.
This, for me, is the single most interesting chart in the history of technology. Here we’ve got a plot of the computing power of modern computers over time, and you can clearly see it maps very closely to a linear path. So if you keep drawing this line here, through the magic of extrapolation you can figure out what’s going to happen in the future!
So a few years ago I was looking at this graph and the smartphones that were starting to appear. Hmm, you know, this thing is about the size of a deck of cards, but in a couple of years you could make one of those the size of a matchbook!
What would a computer that small even look like, how would it behave? How would you design it? I mean, at some stage these will be small enough to not just fit in your pocket, but to wear.
I was working at Google at this time, so I had the chance to try the idea out: I co-founded 20% project and over several years that project morphed and became Android Wear. I’ll talk about that in a minute.
But first I want to point out that this was amazingly prescient of me, right? To correctly predict that this would happen?
No! Not at all! I just looked at the graph and drew a line! Zero brain power required! Looking at the past provides clear hints of what will happen in the future.
By the way, this is one way to have product ideas: look for converging trends. Steal liberally. Some of this stuff is so obvious that it’s not even stealing. Like Henry Ford said, it’s inevitable.
This is how we started off in 20% time, we built some software and got it running on the lock screen of an Android phone and strapped it to our wrists. We explored various ways of developing our ideas.
Lest you think even this was not a stolen idea, look at this.
This is a wooden prototype of the first Palm Pilot, from the mid-1990s. A guy called Jeff Hawkins worked at Palm was working on building one of the world’s first portable computers. It’s possibly hard to really appreciate this from our perspective today, but at the time computers were desk-bound. There was no frame of reference for what a mobile computer would be like, or what it might be used for.
So Jeff made this little prototype, it’s a piece of paper glued to a wooden board. And to imagine what it would be like to actually use a device like this, he carried it around with him all day and pretended. So if someone asked him if he was free to meet that afternoon Jeff would whip this piece of wood out, and using a little sawn-off chopstick as a stylus he’d pretend to look up his calendar. He’s count the number of steps it took to complete a task, and try to figure out what was good and what wasn’t. He was trying to figure out what it was like to actually use it.
Rooted MotoACTV Brings Web Browsing And Angry Birds To Your Wrist http://t.co/FlgXefyP by @chrisvelazco
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) December 25, 2011
Then I saw this story about these GPS sports fitness watches that Motorola built, and that they were actually running Android, and that if you were super-cool you could root them and install your own software.
So we ordered about 10 of them from Amazon and bribed some Engineer friends to help us, and starting hacking our own thing on it. So we thought these Motorola devices were great. Within a week we had something basic working, and a day after in an expensive stroke of luck Google announced that they had acquired Motorola. Fast forward a couple of years and we launched Android Wear.
So having a conversation of sorts with the past can certainly be instructive. Although that’s not to say we should replicate the past wholesale. There are plenty of cautionary tales to be found too.
If you looks at the arrival of new devices in the past, it seems like the default reaction is to take what already exists, and port it over. So most early mobile phones adopted the dominant UI paradigm of the day and shrank it down to a tiny screen, menus and pointers and all. It wasn’t until we broke away from this and moved to a model that feels much more native to the new device that smartphones really took off.
Here the past is warning us: a new type of device deserves a new UI paradigm.
Yet you’ll see the same mistake being made with some early smartwatches. The dominant paradigm of the day being ported over wholesale. So you end up with grids of apps crammed into this tiny screen, but it’s obviously all wrong. Nobody wants to walk down the street swiping and tapping away at a stamp-sized screen looking for an icon.
So, we’re left with a question. If a new type of device deserves a new UI paradigm, what’s the new paradigm for watches? What questions do you need to ask to really go back to first principles?
To start with, what would you do with a wrist computer? What would that even by like, realistically, if you were to think about it as a product designer? What are the affordances, the opportunities?
You might come up with something a bit like this. Here’s a fairly simple layout: it’s just a vertical strip of cards. You can swipe up and down on them, and some of them have more info off to the side, so you can swipe over to that. All of this navigating is done with big gross gestures, so there’s not a lot of fine-grained manual dexterity needed. Even tap targets are the entire screen.
And to save you having to hunt for apps, we just remove the concept entirely. Instead the system itself decides what’s important to show based on the sensors on the device and the context that it can detect you’re in. You end up with just the right information, at just the right time, at a glance.
And that’s what we ended up making.
A lot of this started as a way of working around the limitations of a small screen. But one thing we realised was that this in many ways was better. No apps meant no app management: no downloading, no updating, no launching or managing. In many ways this post-app model is much simpler and more helpful.
What’s interesting is that these aren’t just static notifications. They’re somewhere in between really rich, powerful, interactive notifications and really simple, minimal apps. So I can do things with them: I can call a cab, reply to a message, unlock a door, whatever. The important thing is that all of this happens in a common UI, with lots of different apps acting as services, not destinations.
Post app.
So is that it? Is the post-app future already here? Not exactly. It seems promising, but it’s slow to come.
One thing I learned while working on Android Wear is that it can be difficult to make dramatic changes to an operating system; for example, attempting to make apps redundant on a well-established platform like Android that’s already has apps at it’s centre.
In fact something I came to realise that there are different layers to the computing that we use.
The things at the lower layers, they change very slowly. There are standards involved, and often physical infrastructure to be created. That’s why SMS, a big standard, has been slow to evolve and was overtaken by WhatsApp and others.
But the further up the stack you go, the more open that layer is to big dramatic changes; there’s not too much baggage, things can move much more quickly. At the OS level (so Android or iOS), things are still pretty slow. Yearly updates, long development cycles.
But things suddenly become a lot easier to do at the app level. Many apps update to a new version every two weeks. There’s a ton of opportunity for innovation. It may seem counter-intuitive, but individual apps are actually better positioned to quickly become a platform than Android or iOS are.
And taking this one step further, I’d like to propose that one type of app in particular is well suited, and that’s messaging apps.
Look at the list of the most popular apps in the world. It’s dominated by social apps and messenger apps. All 10 are social in nature, 6 are primarily for messaging.
This is despite the fact that typing on your phone is a shit proposition: a tiny keyboard trapped behind a pane of glass and hidden underneath your thumbs.
But we still do it. We message all day long, in bursts and binges. We message family, friends, colleagues.
It’s because we’re humans, and humans are innately tuned to converse. It’s how we share knowledge, it’s how we share emotions. Through conversation. Through dialog.
But just a few years ago this wasn’t the case. The most popular apps weren’t messenger apps. Something massive is happening here, and it is dramatically changing everything that everyone here works on.
I believe that the change will likely lead to these social and messenger apps becoming platforms in their own right - in fact that is already happening. But even further, that these messenger apps may be the operating systems of the near future.
So continuing from this post-app idea that I was exploring with Android Wear, the idea I want to submit to you now is that messaging apps, not the OS, are the perfect host space for these post-app ideas to really come to life. To do that, there are a three things I’d like to briefly recap and draw together.
First, messaging apps are simple, well understood, and massively popular. They work in the way humans are attuned to work, by communicating. They are, simply, a good well-understood interaction model.
At the same time we have Contextual systems. Think Google Now, Siri. These are systems that take in a whole galaxy of information about patterns of behaviour and attempt to predict or guess what I might need; and suggest it to me rather that have me explicitly ask for it. There is a lot of deep technology here, things like natural language processing, machine learning, basic AI, pattern matching algorithms.
The final piece of the puzzle is what we might call push-button services. Uber is the canonical example here. These are basically apps that provide you with a service beyond the app itself. Although there’s an Uber app that you can download from the App Store, that’s not really the product; the service is the transportation that you get. The product is the ecosystem - all of the drivers, the cars. This product and service is what Uber is selling, and the app really only exists as a wrapper. It contains a button that you push to say, “I need this thing now” and then gain access to the system. Where the button lives barely matters.
So what do we get when we add these things together? Messaging interfaces, contextual smarts, and access to services.
Well, one thing you can get is an experience where you type what you want into a messaging app, just like you were sending a chat to a friend, but a smart system understands what you’re looking for and routes your request to the right service.
A very simple example of this: you might be able to type a message that you need a lift, the system figures out what you mean, routes it to a taxi company, and messages you back that the cab is on it’s way.
This may seem trivial, but think about it: if I can ask for anything, suddenly there’s a whole host of apps that I don’t need any more. I can interact with the service that the app would have given me access to, and many others, via a messaging UI. That’s kind of amazing.
So when you’re doing this typing… who are you talking to? Who’s behind the curtain? Some startups like Magic or Path Talk have banks of support people reading these messages, fulfilling each request manually, and then typing out replies. This is the mechanical turk approach. The Wizard behind the curtain in Wizard of Oz. But there’s another way that I think is far more interesting…
And that’s to use bots. What is a bot? At it’s simplest, it’s a piece of software that runs inside a messaging app that can perform basic tasks. You can think of is as being a bit like Siri, if she were just a friend in your contact list that you could text. So you can send a message to a bot, and it can send you a reply, but it can also do things for you. When you need that taxi, just tell the bot that sits in your messaging app and it takes care of the rest.
Let’s look at a real-life example from Slack. This here is Slackbot, a simple bot that’s already in your contact list when you sign up. So Slackbot will welcome you to Slack, and start chatting with you: what’s your name, your job title, etc. So rather than having to go fill out a profile on some awful web form somewhere before you start, you can do it all inside the conversation. And it’s actually incredibly effective and frictionless and feels totally native to the broader messaging experience.
What’s most exciting about the prospect of bots, I think, is that you can build your own. And they can be really simple to write, often just a little script, and then integrated into existing messaging apps. So suddenly you have the opportunity to build something new right where the action is, inside the messaging apps that people are already using all day every day. You can replace lots of existing disjointed app experiences with something simple. You can already write bots for Slack, for the Telegram messaging app, for Twitter, soon even on FB Messenger.
Look to the past again. Think back to the mid-2000s and the “Web 2.0” era. This was a period of huge change for the internet, where the web changed from being static pages to being applications. A huge number of modern tech companies emerged from this period.
One of the defining things of the whole Web 2.0 movement was that a lot of sites like Google Maps or Flickr opened up their APIs, meaning anyone build something else that pulled in data. They morphed from merely being sites into being services. It was huge, and it led to a ton of innovation, because suddenly lots of people could build new things on top.
And that’s exactly what appears to be happening again today. Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0. A way to build on top of other services, experiment, create a new way of interacting with these services. And I expect similar opportunities in this shift.
There’s a ton of innovation that can be build on top of these simple ideas. We believe this may be nothing less than the start of a significant new way of interacting with computers. That’s a big deal, as as designers it’s really something to think about. What does it mean to design one of these chat bot experiences?
What role does design have to play here? Today we have all these roles, is conversation user experience the next frontier? “Hi, I’m a conversation designer” is going to be a weird conversation starter.
So what might a conversation designer produce?
Well, this is a sentence diagram: a method of diagramming sentences to break them down into their structural components: verb, subject, object, so on. It’s like musical notation for words.
And that’s just a single sentence. This is an attempt to map out an entire conversation: they can branch and flow in all kinds of directions. Crazy stuff.
And by the way, lest you think this is limited to messaging apps, it’s not. There are loads of contexts and inputs possible here.
We’ve got things like Amazon Echo, Siri, our watches, our cars… all of which involve voice input as the sole or main input method. It seems likely that we’ll be interacting with our computers by talking to them or chatting with them.
So this conversation UX stuff seems like it’s going to be hard. How do we even start? Where do we go to steal ideas for?
Wait a sec. This is supposed to be about a conversation with the past right? We’ve been veering dangerously towards the future. All this bot stuff seems pretty out there to me. What can we look to the past to learn from these? In particular, how can we learn about how to design conversations? What else can we look at that can tell us about how this might play out?
Here’s an old Apple concept video from 1987 pitching the Knowledge Navigator:
I’m going to pause it early because A, it’s actually surprisingly boring. “Deforestation lecture notes” is the sexiest use case they could think of? And B, It’s the best case scenario. Even when things go wrong, the system recovers somewhat well.
No, if what you really want is things going badly wrong with technology, you need sci-fi. Again, I’m fortunate here that I can dive into some of my childhood obsessions. Old sci-fi movies have loads to offer here. HAL and 2001 is an obvious one. Don’t let the robot talk you into getting locked outside.
What other warning signs can we learn from sci-fi about the future of conversation UX and how we’ll talk to computers? I mentioned the interaction modes of cars maybe changing. What does conversation look like layered onto that scenario?
Renowned UX Researcher Arnold Schwarzenegger there illustrating the importance of manual override in conversational UI. Where else can we look?
Here’s another childhood obsession of mine, Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980s. You probably how these work, on each page you’re faced with a choice and you flip to a different page to continue. They’re branching narratives that change based on how you respond to prompts.
And it’s interesting, people created these intricate maps, that lay out all of the branching possibilities through the game. They came up with this method of diagramming the possibility space.
Another formative part of my childhood, The Secret of Monkey Island (1990). A lot of the interaction in this game is based on talking with other characters, and they say different things based on what you say. A lot of your progress is based on conversation. But the game designers also invented fun touches like insult swordfighting, where you win the fight by choosing the most appropriate comeback to an insult.
What’s happening here is that conversation is used as the base model of a new interaction paradigm; you control the game through conversation.
This last example is newer, this is from an upcoming game called Oxenfree. But I couldn’t resist including this because there are some really interesting touches here, I think, about how to visually display a conversation. It’s ongoing, in real time, augmented. I love this. There’s a ton of ways we as designers can play with ideas like this for presenting conversation in novel ways.
Conversation is something that has existed for millions of years. Millions. And yet here we are still inventing new ways of representing conversation. That’s quite exciting.
What’s interesting to me about all of these examples is that they are all essentially chat bots. They are simulated conversations with a computer or system that in many ways feel like normal conversation, but in other ways they facilitate new types of interactions to happen.
Furthermore, they suggest to me as a designer many new ways of doing things.
There’s a ton of innovation that can be build on top of these simple ideas. I think this may be nothing less than the start of a significant new way of interacting with computers.
That’s why we’ve decided to build a bot right into our main user-facing product, the Intercom Messenger. If you don’t know, the Intercom Messenger is a messaging UI that you can embed in your website or app to chat with your customers.
We call it Interbot, and it’s basically a helper bot that can also be involved in the conversation at certain times.
So all these choose your own adventure writers, and these game designers, what can we learn from them?
Well, taking inspiration from the conversation diagrams we just looked at, here’s a diagram one of our designers, Shek, put together.
This is basically a state machine diagram for the conversation that you have have with Interbot. If I zoom in a bit you’ll see that these are specific conversation points with branching logic based on what the user responds with.
And if you’re busy when a customer says hi for the first time, a little bot will interject politely and let them know how busy your team is. If you don’t already know their email address, Interbot will ask for that too. At which point the team can then pick up the conversation properly. But boring admin tasks like this is what bots are great for, carrying out little chores, leaving the difficult and meaningful stuff to the humans.
This is just a tiny example that we’re still iterating on, and a lot of this has already changed. But it shows how bots can be useful in all sorts of little situations.
So, Design is a Conversation.
It’s a conversation with the past, of having an inquiring dialog:
And perhaps seeing some part of the future as a result:
It’s about looking at how we’re naturally primed to communicate:
And how that might suggest new ways that we can communicate next:
Of course, this is all speculative. If you look at the past you’ll also see that developing products is a long, hard road littered with the corpses of failed inventors. The good news is that you can stand on the shoulders of those corpses.
So looking to the past, and having a conversation with it, can be a wonderful way of figuring out what types of conversations we may be having in the future.
The irony of standing in front for an audience and droning on about conversation for the guts of an hour is not lost on me. Thanks for listening, and if design is indeed a conversation I look forward to continuing it with all of you afterwards, so please come talk about it and say hi.
Invisible Design
I’ve got a new post up at the Intercom blog, this time about design that’s so good you can’t even see it:
These products don’t want to be noticed at all. They want to be the background noise to your daily routine, infrastructure working away below the surface just like the underground subways, sewers, and cabling of a city.
It also has David Fincher, magic tricks, and that time I was almost killed by a rhino. Check it out.
In some way a follow up to my previous post on flat visual design, the idea this time is that a minimalist/less-is-more/reductive approach to design is often incorrectly seen as an easy route. Making something invisible is really hard. That’s not to say that every product needs to be invisible either: just because your distraction-free writing app tries be all zen doesn’t mean that Call of Duty needs to adopt the same approach. But it’s worth at least considering where on the sliding scale you want your design to sit.
For example, look at the public reaction to the various different wearable thingies.
Most people seem generally cool with the idea of wrist computers like Android Wear and Apple Watch. But the very same crowd seem aghast at the notion of a slightly less discreet eyeball computer like Google Glass. Oh, you think to yourself, maybe there’s a threshold for how visible these devices might be before people start to reject them. Watch equals okay, glasses equals not okay.
But VR devices like Oculus Rift and HoloLens are about as discreet as a bucket on your head, and yet regular people seem genuinely excited to try them out. Why is it that a prism balanced on a sleek titanium frame is considered awful and a giant helmet computer is just fine?
Yeeeah… I just had a brief conversation with the most powerful man in the world. On the downtown 3 train. Nice guy. pic.twitter.com/cx93BXKY
— Noah Zerkin (@noazark) January 21, 2013
It’s as if Glass fell into a sort of Uncanny Valley of invisibility: not unnoticeable but also not willing to fully accept it’s own prominence. VR on the other hand makes no apologies. VR embraces it’s own brash obtrusiveness. VR says screw everything, strap me onto your goddamn face and let’s go blow up some bad guys. We’ll have to wait and see how everyone really reacts to VR being a part of our lives, but my guess is that this inconsistent initial reaction has something to do with the invisibility of each device. Or rather, it’s inverse corollary: conspicuousness.
I mean, it’s fairly unlikely this fellow is secretly taking a photo of you:
Peak Flat
I’ve got a new post up on the Intercom blog, asking whether the aesthetics of software has stagnated and what styles might come next:
The status quo of visual design in software is pleasantly inoffensive, but also somewhat uninspiring. It is of course natural for styles to settle into a comfortable conclusion for a time. These things come in cycles and mobile UI design is clearly providing a lot of cues here. Who knows, we may even be nearing the crest of the trend: Peak Flat, if you will.
If current styles were precipitated by the introduction of touchscreen devices, it may be the case that newer technologies will trigger a whole new wave of visual styles.
Seeing as the entire piece basically amounts to poking them with a big pointy stick, the feedback I’ve received from designers so far has been heartening (some interesting reactions here). Of course, posing the question of what might come next is the easy part of this conversation. But it’s an opener.
Another question. What are the great works of graphic design?
Off the top of my head, I can suggest the usual suspects: Milton Glaser’s I ♥ NY or his Dylan poster, Shepherd Fairey’s HOPE poster (sorry, yes), the Massimo Vignelli’s NY Subway signage system (and the NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual), Harry Beck’s London underground map, Paul Rand’s logos, Josef Müller-Brockmann’s Zurich Town Hall posters, Penguin book covers, Saul Bass’ film titles, David Carson’s Ray Gun Magazine, Peter Saville’s Unknown Pleasures cover… there’s a fairly well-worn list that springs easily to mind.
Now, what are the great works of software visual design?
You might start with either Xerox Star of the original Macintosh (depending on which side of history you’re on) just for establishing the medium. The original releases of OS X and iOS certainly belongs there. I’d include Material Design, but time will tell. Joshua Davis’ Praystation, if you’re old enough. The NY Times Snow Fall article?
After that I’d have to start thinking hard. Send me your suggestions. There are probably a few fair reasons for this: we’re drawing on almost 100 years of history for graphic design, and only about 30 years for software design. The ephemerality of software design plays a part: there are not many websites frozen in time on the walls of museums, reminding us of how great they were.
Or, they haven’t been made yet.
Comparing the Android Wear and Apple Watch UI Guidelines
I wrote the Android Wear design guidelines before I left Google earlier this year, so I was curious to browse the well-written and thorough Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines that came out last week. It’s interesting to note some language and ideas common to both.
I’m not highlighting these to make some arch point — there are many striking originalities that differentiate the design of AW and, uh, AW — but only to dig into the vocabulary and design thinking that’s already naturally emerging around these devices.
Emphases mine.
Simple interactions:
Android: Android Wear focuses on simple interactions, only requiring input by the user when absolutely necessary. Most inputs are based around touch swipes or voice, and inputs requiring fine-grained finger movements are avoided. Android Wear is gestural, simple, and fast.
Apple: Apps on Apple Watch are designed for quick, lightweight interactions that make the most of the display size and its position on the wrist. Information is accessible and dismissible quickly and easily, for both privacy and usability.
Connectedness:
Android: Android Wear devices provide just the right information at just the right time, allowing users to be more connected to both the virtual world and the real world.
Apple: No other Apple device has ever been so connected to the wearer. It’s important to be mindful of this connection as you design apps for Apple Watch.
Brief interactions:
Android: Time a typical use of your Wear app. If using it takes more than 5 seconds, you should think about making your app more focused.
Apple: If you measure interactions with your iOS app in minutes, you can expect interactions with your Watch app to be measured in seconds.
Paged navigation structure:
Android: Cards in the stream are more than simple notifications. They can be swiped horizontally to reveal additional pages. …(https://developer.android.com/design/wear/patterns.html) Keep the number of detail cards as low as possible.
Apple: A paginated interface lets the user navigate between pages of content by swiping horizontally. […] A dot indicator at the bottom of each page shows the user’s place in the set. Keep the total number of pages as small as possible to simplify navigation.
Contextual relevance:
Android: The context stream is a vertical list of cards, each showing a useful or timely piece of information. […] This UI model ensures that users don’t have to launch many different applications to check for updates; they can simply glance at their stream for a brief update on what’s important to them.
Apple: On Apple Watch, a Glance is a quick view of a focused set of content from an app. Ideally, it is timely and contextually relevant. […] Configure the Glance based on the user’s current context. Stale or irrelevant information makes a glance less useful. Use time and location to reflect what is relevant to the user right now.
Short copy:
Android: Omit needless text. Design for glanceability and not for reading. Use words and phrases, not sentences.
Apple: Keep title strings short and focused. The space available for displaying title strings is minimal, so keep them brief and to the point.
Notify sparingly:
Android: Keep notifications to a minimum. Don’t abuse the user’s attention. Active notifications (that is, those that cause the device to vibrate) should only be used in cases that are both timely and involve a contact, for example receiving a message from a friend. Non-urgent notifications should be silently added to the Context Stream.
Apple: Be sensitive to the frequency with which you send notifications to users. Users might perceive a frequent notifications as annoying and disable notifications for your app on Apple Watch. Always make sure notifications are relevant to what the user wants.
Discreet notifications:
Android: Be discreet if necessary. Wearables are personal devices by nature, but they are not completely private. If your notification serves content that may be particularly sensitive or embarrassing (such as notifications from a dating app or a medical status report), consider not displaying all of the information in a peek card. A notification could place the sensitive information on a second page that must be swiped to, or an application could show different amounts of detail in peek and focused card positions.
Apple: A Short Look appears when a local or remote notification needs to be presented to the user. A Short Look provides a discreet, minimal amount of information—preserving a degree of privacy. If the wearer lowers his or her wrist, the Short Look disappears.
Notification actions:
Android: Actions should be limited to three for a single card row. …(https://developer.android.com/design/wear/structure.html) Bridged notifications, such as new message notifications, are pushed to the wearable from the connected handheld using standard Android notifications.
Apple: Long look notifications can display up to four custom action buttons. Apple Watch leverages the interactive notifications registered by your iOS app to display action buttons in the Long Look interface.
Engaging animations:
Android: A confirmation animation is an opportunity to express your app’s character and insert a moment of delight for your user. Keep animations short (less than 1000ms) and simple. Animating the confirmation icon is an effective way of transitioning the user to a new state after completing an action.
Apple: Beautiful, subtle animation pervades Apple Watch and makes the experience more engaging and dynamic for the user. Appropriate animation can: Communicate status and provide feedback. Help people visualize the results of their actions.