Ceci n’est pas les useurs. (Is the use of little iconic, anonymous, faceless, android-like icons even more dehumanizing than using the word “user”?)

There’s a huge debate going on in the UX community about the use of the word “user”. Some argue that the word demeans the people we are trying to help, that it distances us from them, and that it makes us unable to truly empathize with their wants and needs. Words like “people” and “humans” are suggested instead, reminding us that our users are, in fact, human beings just like us.

I am at best bemused by the arguments, honestly. They feel a little phony, like a way for traditional usability and HCI folks — or marketing people for that matter — to feel or appear a little more folksy and less clinical about their approach to understanding their, um, users. Calling them by a new, friendly-sounding name seems like an effort to undo a possble perception that one may be out of touch with the emerging power of social media and user(oops, I did it again)-generated content.

Jim Drew on the IxDA List said it best, I think:

I find the push to avoid “user” as parallel to referring to employees as “cast members” or any of the other terms which seem clever the first time and make you roll your eyes thereafter. Some weird combo of branding and political correctness.

Does replacing “the user” with “the person” really an improvement? Does using “the person” endear the user (or person) to a product’s designers any better? Does the word “people” engender more empathy than the word “users”? I don’t think so. To me “the person” is equally dull and abstract than user. It’s more awkward and contrived, too — I mean, who actually talks that way?

Besides, the word “user” is a perfectly decent and useful word for when you want to describe an interaction design in a general sense, such as when describing the way a combo box works. I intend to keep using it. I also intend to use other words whenever they are more relevant and appropriate, such as “customer”, “player”, “reader”, “viewer”, “employee”, “renter”, or whatever other term most accurately describes the person or type of person I am talking about.

I call this kind of description “engagement specificity” — articulating the user’s mode of engagement by using the correct word to describe that engagement’s fundamental nature. This is basic English here: just use the right words at the right time, and don’t resort to buzzwords and catchy truisms. In other words, let’s simply try to write accurately and write well.

And besides, we already have the perfect word, and we use it every day in our informal conversations: It’s you.

The Second Person

When describing how to use something to a friend, you (there I did it) will usually say things like “You press the button on the top, then you slide your finger across the slider at the bottom” or “You enter your name and password in the upper left corner”. This is how we already talk about user experiences and indeed about almost anything descriptive, and it is an immensely empathetic manner of speaking. It is the linguistic manifestation of pure empathy: Me imagining what it’s like to be you, and describing my own knowledge through your eyes and actions, using (in literary terms) the second person perspective.

But the weird thing is that we hardly ever write this way, especially not professionally. In fact, in contemporary writing the second person is limited almost exclusively to Choose Your Own Adventure books. The construction has a juvenile, unsophisticated ring to it. It’s seen by many as overly informal, treating the reader a little too familiarly and casually.

But what if we wrote our documentation with the word “You” instead of all of those other euphemisms for users? A very compelling interface specification technique, suggested by Don Norman among others, is to write the user’s manual first: Document all the features as if you were writing the final instructions for the end user, then build the product described in this pre-emptive manual:

Want to know what designers of manuals should do? They should design and write the manual before the product is designed. Make the manual simple and elegant. Then insist that the designers build it the way they have described it. Then we might actually get usable products. and simple manuals.

The best designed products won’t even need manuals.

And why not take this method one step further: Before designing anything, write the product’s manual in the second person as if you were simply speaking informally to a friend about how to use the product, or describing how it works to a colleague or a family member?

I may try this on an upcoming project. Should be interesting, at least.

(Next User vs. Tron)

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I suppose it’s as good a time as any to admit that I’m never going to read any Harry Potter books.

I’ve got nothing against the series, actually. I’m sure they’re fine books and I’m glad so many kids, and many adults, enjoy reading them. It’s just that I can’t imagine actually sitting down to read all seven books when there are so many other books I’ve been kicking myself to read for years, books of all sorts ranging from fiction classics to history to current tech. My backlog of “must reads” is hundreds of books long — do I really want to bump 7 rather large children’s books to the top of that list? I don’t think so.

Even when I’m an old man, I am certain that I’ll still have hundreds of books to read that will be more important to me than Harry Potter. Comrade Greenfield is in the same boat, telling the world on NPR that he, too, will never be interested in Pottermania.

Same, by the way, goes for the Potter movies. I saw the first one on cable and thought it was pretty dumb and even rather poorly made. The broom-riding sequences were hamfisted and dull when compared to similar scenes in Miyazaki’s delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service, made over a decade earlier. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of other films to see, mostly old but the occasional new blockbuster — I will, for example, see The Golden Compass.

Otherwise I am fully content to miss the boat on the whole Potter thing, and occasionally feel smug that all I needed to do was randomly browse my way to Wikipedia’s “List of deaths in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” page to learn, generally, everything one needs to know to be au courant with Potter lore.

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We recently stopped for coffee at an urban intersection where a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts sat on opposite corners, facing off in a classic retail rivalry like Macy’s & Gimbels. Deciding to avoid Starbuckian yuppiness (okay, we drink there all the time), we walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts.

But something seemed wrong… the DD looked a little, er, fancier than normal. The lighting was dimmer and less antiseptic, the signage and typography more upscale, the furniture made of wood instead of plastic. Even the logo had a playful little twist to it.

Turns out we had walked into one of DD’s new experimental brand environments, where the traditionally downmarket store is aiming for a more upscale clientele, or at least to catch up with the aspirational brand feeling of Starbucks. This experiment in environmental design was recently featured in ID Magazine (illustrated above).

We walked out with three medium iced coffees (and please note that the DD medium is equivalent to Starbucks’s biggest size, venti – and the DD large looks like damn near half a gallon of coffee) plus three donuts for $5.81, probably 1/3 what we would have paid across the street. The upscale decor and merchandising apparently does not translate into upscale prices. And the coffee was great.

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A few months ago during an intermission at the 2007 IA Summit, Christina Wodtke and Bill Wetherell accosted me in the hallway of the Las Vegas Flamingo hotel. The next thing I knew, Christina was interviewing me for a new series of Boxes and Arrows podcasts.

The 16-minute interview has just been published, and I’ve just finished listening to it. While I can barely handle hearing myself speak, I think you might find our discussion pretty interesting, especially if you want to know a little more about the challenges facing practicioners who want to head down the entrepreneur path or if you want to learn more about how Behavior came to be and what we’re up to. Enjoy!

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Several bloggers I know have confessed to me that occasionally they’ll compose and publish articles or posts that they don’t feel especially passionate about, writing things that they aren’t particularly proud of or inspired by, simply because they know that certain topics, ideas, or opinions will give them an easy and predictable traffic boost.

For example, they may sometimes “dumb down” or oversimplify their normally nuanced perspective, or they will overly sensationalize their opinion, or maybe they will take a firm position on something they don’t actually feel very strongly about at all, almost out of a sense of obligation. They will do this to reach out to a broader web audience, to attract new readers, to fire up or inspire their regulars. They will, in short, “write down” to their audience.

I have no problem with this, by the way, since I do it myself now and then. It’s something every blogger has to grapple with: Write for myself? Or write for the people who I want to visit my site?

Jakob Nielsen’s latest AlertBox, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” (in which he suggests that a writer’s biggest audience consists largely of people dumber than they are) makes me wonder just where I stand with respect to you, my own reader. Do I want you to look up to me? Do I look up to you?

The Bell Curve

Nielsen’s essay opens with the following short summary:

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

(Okay, this is a perfectly nice and pithy insight, something to take into consideration when devising an editorial strategy, I suppose. Still I can’t help but laugh at the double irony that follows this abstract. First, Nielsen spends the next several thousand words defending this “no duh” thesis not only by violating Steve Krug’s elegant “Omit needless words” web copywriting strategy, but also by trampling all over his own admonitions to online brevity. And in an almost comical measure of Nielsen’s attempt to avoid hypocrisy, this edition of the AlertBox seems to be packin’ a higher word count than many of his usual, shall we say, “quickly written” AlertBox postings.)

The essay also includes a diagram that seems to capture Nielsen’s core idea that a good content creator must look down on his or her readership. The diagram explicity suggests that bloggers should try to “dumb down” their ideas to reach the broadest possible audiences, the same big audiences that less qualified writers are reaching.

In this diagram, Jakob asks us to imagine that we are a leading expert in our field and that our content has immense value to our audience (an important assumption for any writer or publisher to make!!). He puts “You” at the head of the class, on the right side of the graph. He then plots out other writers — your competitors — and shows that many of those writers who are “less expert” than You clearly draw a far bigger audience than You do.

Notice how this diagram implicitly assumes that the most valuable audience (that is, the biggest audience) for any given content producer are those readers whose “expertise” is half that of You, the publisher/producer. If You want to reach the broadest possible audience then, according to Nielsen, You should aim not for the thin dimwit end of the scale on the far left, nor should You aim for your own immediate peers in the slender expert end on the right, but You instead should aim for the big fat mediocre center of the bell curve.

Of course those who are more expert than You simply don’t show up on Nielsen’s chart at all, which probably speaks volumes about Nielsen’s self-image. If you read between the lines, then it becomes clear that the more expert You are in the world of usability and user experience design, then the less useful Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox will be to You, since presumably Nielsen is following his own advice and generally writing for an audience half as “expert” as he is. (Note: All of the following diagrams have been altered from Nielsen’s original.)

Bloggers and their Readers are Equals

But this is where I think Nielsen misses the mark the most: If there is any real social innovation to blogging, it is the fundamental destruction of the age-old (and IMHO baseless) assumption that simply by virtue of being a content publisher you are automatically superior to the people who merely consume what you publish. Now anyone can publish anything they want to a broad audience, and the lines have been blurred: between formal and informal writing, between fact and opinion, between institutional and personal perspectives.

Of course, many great blogs make deliberate decisions to gain or retain popularity by, for example, publishing often on topics their readers seem to enjoy most, or avoiding alienating readers with controversial content (when was the last time Signal vs. Noise posted something about politics?). But in the world of blogs this is the exception, not the rule. Bloggers generally have the freedom to publish primarily for themselves when they want to, and most of us exercise this freedom fairly often.

Bloggers Want to Reach Upwards

What’s more, bloggers publish aspirationally, hoping that people smarter than us will notice us and read what we have to say. This may not be how Nielsen sees his job, but that’s how I work: I write graphpaper.com assuming that readers of all kinds will reach my site, some less expert than I am, some more. I know that people at the “stupid” end will stumble into graphpaper.com now and then, but at the same time I am always hoping that people at the “expert” end will find something they enjoy here as well. Assuming that my audience is entirely “dumber” than me is not just arrogant, it’s simply not an option.

And because I have the freedom to publish on whatever subject I wish, from user experience design to art criticism, from politics to my personal life. The subjects of my posts will even sometimes land me way over my head on a subject I know little to nothing about (see “Me”, left, below), which can be at best amusing and at worst humiliating.

But this freedom also allows me to occasionally write about something I think my professional peers might find interesting and useful (see “Me”, right, below), something that I genuinely have “expertise” in. In other words, I can be all over the bell curve.

As is clear, there is no real “juicy center” to my audience at all. In all honesty, my audience, in my mind, is generally (a) me and (b) certain people I know and respect. My editorial capriciousness is hardly a good example of user-centered design, and it’s probably also bad business (in that it probably doesn’t help grow graphpaper.com’s loyal readership base). But it’s how blogs work, it’s an essential, fundamental dynamic of today’s user-generated/self-publishing culture.

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“Simple is Best” is the motto of Jinbei Yamada, founder of Japanese bicycle maker Arrow Bicycles. I love this motto for its elegant phrasing, completely devoid of pretention and utterly consistent with its own meaning. There is no false dichotomy of “form versus function” to drive a pointless wedge between functional and decorative simplicity and pure visual design elegance. Who needs ten complicated laws when one law sums it up so well?

Arrow makes less than 1,000 bikes per year, and most of them are custom-ordered to some degree. As for the bikes themselves, I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing or riding one, but they look lovely. There are no logos to be seen, either, which is something I deeply appreciate.

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The online auction site eBay recently redesigned their site, and (as it usually has in the past) the new design is being subjected to some pretty harsh critique.

When critics bash eBay’s design, they usually focus on the site’s general visual design, or on the information design of individual pages. Even I have in the past focused in on the site’s downmarket, low-class visual style. But there is much to say about eBay’s fantastically complex interaction design as well.

The process of becoming an eBay seller is central to eBay’s entire business. I once tried to sell some of my old bike parts on eBay. Now I don’t want to disparage the talented people who have spent years developing the eBay user experience, but it was probably the most difficult and nerve-racking user interface I have ever used.

Setting up my eBay store was confounding. I never quite understood what step in the posting process I was in, I was constantly scared that I was going to do something wrong and break a rule (or even a law), and I was never confident that I was doing the best I could to ensure that my items would be visible and attractive to prospective buyers.

And yet half a million people make their living using this UI!

Good interaction designers usually assume that our end users are less sophisticated users of technology than we are. I’m not being elitist when I say that for mass-market web sites this assumption is almost always true.

And yet for eBay, I am awestruck at the fact that millions of normal everyday people have managed to figure out how to navigate one of the most complicated interaction designs I’ve ever seen.

How is this possible?

Muddling Through Interaction Challenges

eBay users are just like many other Internet users — reckless and ignorant. They are the same people that open random email attachments, type URLs in the Google search box, and willingly install spyware apps on their own computers. When it comes to technology, they aren’t afraid to take risks, and they are not overly upset by failure. If they screw up their eBay posting and their photos don’t show up, they simply chalk it up as yet another example of how technology is just messy. And they muddle through… If they forget to set a reserve (minimum) price and their item sells for peanuts, they blame themselves, not the UI. And they muddle through…

I suspect that the most successful eBay sellers “muddle through” dozens of botched and sub-optimal sales before they figure out how to do it right.

If any other online business had such a difficult process at the core of their business model, they’d go broke overnight. What is it about eBay that makes it able to succeed with a difficult user experience for their most important kind of user? Is it because they help people sell things (as opposed to enabling them to spend money on things), and thus the user’s tolerance for obstacles is higher than it would be when the user is actually paying money?

Don’t get me wrong: The IA and user experience design challenges for eBay are astronomical. The site is complicated because online auctioning is complicated. The business rules for eBay are probably more complex than anything 99% of the world’s information architects have ever even dreamed of. I have met many people from eBay, including interaction and customer experience designers, and they are super smart and know a lot about how to make UIs that work. So why the complexity?

There is a whole chapter in Steve Krug’s “Dont Make Me Think” entitled “How we really use the web (Scanning, satisficing, and muddling through)”. In it, he identifies similar reasons why we, as users, are often content to muddle through difficult interfaces:

• It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring. In the great scheme of things, it’s just not important to us.
• If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works—no matter how badly—we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.

Is it possible that eBay, by “satisficing” their own design process (instead of working endlessly to make it perfect for all users) is deliberately enabling users to do what they would do anyway, that is, muddle through? Or is it simply an example of an application’s complexity — and the market’s demands — outpacing the design team’s ability to improve and perfect the system?

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Large retail stores and fast-food restaurants have a simple choice when designing their checkout customer experience:

• Multiple registers, multiple lines, one line per register
• Multiple registers, single line

This problem is known in the retail industry as “queue management”. The New York Times today features an article comparing the checkout experiences of several New York City supermarkets, and concludes that Whole Foods’s single-line approach is the most efficient. The article suggests that the multiple-line approach is common in the suburbs, but that a different approach is needed for Whole Foods’s New York stores… so a “single-line, bank-style system was quickly chosen for its statistical efficiency.”

Um, duh. Don’t we all know this yet? Isn’t this common knowledge. Isn’t it just common sense? Well, apparently a lot of retailers haven’t yet gotten it.

But customers know it.

Lately I’ve noticed that when presented with multiple registers, customers (at least in New York City) will naturally form into a single line when given half a chance, even when store policy doesn’t ask for a single line. Maybe it’s because it just seems rude to slide up to an open register when somebody else is already waiting in line behind another customer at another register. It’s taking advantage of another person’s bad luck or complacency.

In fact, the multiple-line system almost deliberately encourages people to treat each other as rivals, asking them to think hard before choosing a line, to make tactical decisions to switch lines to maximize their own efficiency, even to send spouses and children to “hold places” in multiple lines to hedge their bets… all of this adds up to a kind of laissez-faire capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest model of the customer experience. In short, these stores are making the customers do their queue management for them.

This system is not only statistically inefficient, but (more importantly) it is a bad customer experience on an emotional level. It implicitly treats customers as animals, like pigs at a trough fighting for food. While some customers may complete their checkout happily, others will feel screwed because they chose the wrong line, or because they didn’t quickly switch to a more efficient line at the right time. It alienates customers from each other, too, by forcing them to focus on tactics and not on normal social niceties, which can’t be good for the store’s sense of community.

In short, the multiple-line system lacks grace. Customers want to be polite and social, not rude and anti-social. We feel better about our experiences when they don’t bring out the worst in us. We want experiences that enable us to behave graciously.

I can’t believe this is still subject to debate, but many retailers are sticking to their guns. In the local CVS and McDonald’s stores near my office, whenever the customers naturally and politely queue up into a single line the staff has to step in and practically yell at them to break up and form separate lines.

Why do they do this? Is it because, as the Times article suggests, customers are scared by long lines and, presumably, can be fooled into thinking that 10 lines with 5 people in each is a far shorter wait than 1 line with 50 people in it? Is it because of space/design constraints? Is it in order to better discipline and monitor unskilled cashiers? Is it because in many communities customers don’t yet understand the mechanics of the single-line approach? Or is it just plain old corporate inertia and stupidity?

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Will Wright’s cryptic, clip-art crazy PowerPoint slides make sense when he’s right there talking about them.

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is frequently blamed for the poor quality of many presentations and for a supposedly- disastrous state of communication in both the private and the public spheres. Public speakers are lambasted for their wooden stage presence, crippled by their over-reliance on projected slide shows and meaningless bullet-points. The slides themselves, too, are often rife with design crimes ranging from clip-art diarrhea to impenetrable verbosity.

And because of the ubiquity of the tool and the technique, because public speakers from Al Gore to members of Australia’s Parliament use slideshows to support their speeches, the software itself has become the de facto target of criticism. I don’t think this is quite fair.

[For the purpose of this argument, Keynote on the Mac is basically the same animal as PowerPoint, so with apologies to both Microsoft and Apple I’ll just use the term “PowerPoint” to mean any slideshow method or tool.] MORE…

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A fascinating article in last Sunday’s New York Times documents a recent study in which it is shown that predicting the success of cultural products (such as movies or music) is impossible, and that a phenomenon called “cumultive advantage” — where people prefer something largely because other people already prefer it — will usually overcome any empirical qualitative preference individuals may have for one product over another.

Marketers, for all their reliance on research, have long suspected this, which is why for years they have been looking to “coolhunters” to help them locate emerging tidal waves of coolness while the “cumultive advantage” is still building up steam. Instead of trying to create new products that will succeed because they were designed to meet a known and measurable consumer demand, they try to emulate products that are ascendant and that reveal previously-unknown consumer preferences.

This phenomenon may seem perfectly reasonable when it comes to movies and music, but I think it’s also true for user interface design: To the extent that any given UI can be called a “cultural product”, it is vulnerable to the wild unpredictability of culture. We may not always recognize it, but almost every UI is a type of cultural product.

This might seem hard to accept. Obviously, Justin Timberlake and Star Wars are cultural products, but the iPod, too, is a cultural product. The Nintendo Wii is a cultural product. Windows Vista is a cultural product. Amazon.com is a cultural product. These products have particular timeliness, particular aesthetics, and particular creative voices — thus they are cultural.

All of these cultural products have pure usability components to their user experience, but the cultural component — the product’s style — is often a major factor in the product’s success or failure. Sometimes it is the predominant factor, outweighing usability and feature-richness, as I think is the case with the iPod.

The ability to predict the success or failure of a UI design before a product is released is the foundation for the entire careers of many of us in the user experience design profession, so this argument may be troubling to many of us who think that there are empirically right and wrong ways of designing a UI. It’s hard to accept that a product’s hot color scheme, seductive finish, or ornamental trimmings — not to mention the brand name, ad campaign, or celebrity spokesmodel — could be far more important to the product’s success than the product’s long feature list or elegant ease-of-use.

I see the Times article as further evidence that no matter how many tests we do to show that one UI convention is better than another, when it comes to cultural products the “it depends” option is so overwhelmingly dominant that no conclusive best practices can ever be stated with confidence. Until you actually build something and have people use it, you will never know. And until then, the product development team’s resident “coolhunter” may have better insights into the product’s potential for success than anyone on the user research team.

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