The One Laptop Per Child, officially known as XO, is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. The unboxing photos are up on flickr. The OLPC buzz is hot!

But I’m a little sour about it. It feels like I have read nothing but breathless praise for the design and implementation of the devices, both the hardware and the software. Mixed with the kudos there have been some critiques of the methodology and pedagogy behind the whole project, questioning the idea of giving laptops to third-world kids in the first place and criticizing the designers for arrogantly avoiding user research and for not testing the device with real third-world kids. But even the harshest critics of the project seem to have nothing but praise for the design and even for the usability of the devices.

So why am I not excited? Well, to put it bluntly, I find the positive reviews of the UI design extremely hard to believe. From what I’ve seen, the UI bears all the hallmarks of a user interface disaster, a case study in designer-driven design. I don’t understand why the whole UX world isn’t awash in skepticism over an OS that looks all the world like a Microsoft BOB for the Wallpaper* set.

At some level I suspect there is a certain degree of reluctance on the part of user experience critics to stand up and say something bad about a project whose objectives seem so noble and generous. Maybe it’s a “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” thing.

So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something nice about the Sugar UI. Or say something critical. But talk about the user interface for real, in detail, and don’t hold back.

Don’t just talk about how awesome the project itself is, about the great minds behind it, or about the clever hardware and the cool mesh network functionality. Talk about the usability of the software. Think of how the design might be different, how it might work better.

I’ve not actually used an OLPC yet (I hope to very soon). I have seen a lot of screenshots and videos, however, and have used the emulator a little bit. But even the screenshots give me a deep, gut feeling that something is very wrong with this user experience. To wit:

• The game-like and oft-abused spatial metaphor, suggesting that the relative positions on the screen are where other people actually are in the real world.
• The circular menu — a darling of academia, unproven in any real-world context. As with the spacial metaphor, I think this idea has promise, but seeing it on the XO tells me that the designers simply want to prove a point.
• The idealistic and haphazard usage of language-agnostic iconography, which falls apart at every turn whenever words become unavoidable, defeating the whole point of using icons.
• The frequent lapses into a menagerie of half-baked and crappy open source user interfaces.
• The exposure of hard-core programming tools to extreme novice users (especially the choice of the ubergeek language Python!).

And, oh, those icons!

I can’t get over the creepy similarity between the Sugar UI’s icon for a person and the internationally-familiar “skull and crossbones” symbol, in particular its incarnation as the icon for minefield warning signage. Wealthy first-worlders might not see it this way, but if you live somewhere where minefields actually exist, and where children have been injured and killed by them, this might not be such an extreme connection. Not to push this too far, but the military term for a minefield/landmine is “UXO” (unexploded ordinance).

I hate to come across as bitter or petty here — I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea that technology can play a big part in the education of kids living in poverty around the world. I actually hope to be able to read some convincing arguments that the Sugar UI is great. In particular I would love to hear that it can and does work well for third-world kids.

The key word here is “convincing”. So far, much of the design commentary has been praise based on the pedigree of the team behind it — MIT Media Lab, Pentagram, Fuse Project etc. I want to get beyond that and talk about the UI itself and how people use it. Of course, this may take a while to emerge as the devices make their ways into the hands of children around the world. This is obviously a developing story.

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When I write a blog post about something I’m not an expert on, which is pretty much everything I write about, I usually Google the hell out of it first to (a) make sure I don’t say something stupid, (b) get some ideas I can build on to make myself seem smarter, and (c) avoid writing something that someone else already said.

But sometimes I don’t bother to research the things I’m writing about. I may deliberately avoid spending time looking at what others have said about something before I go ahead and bloviate on the subject myself. Sometimes, I’m essentially blogging blind.

Besides laziness, why would I want to deliberately avoid the benefits of expressing an informed opinion? Well, this ignorance allows me to explore the idea in a little bit of a vacuum, to see where the idea takes me without the influence of other people’s thinking, however clever they may be.

But more importantly, I think, I will sometimes keep my head in the sand simply to avoid the discouragement that I am prone to once I realize that something I may have thought was quite clever has actually been explored by others already.

This is, I think, a key to innovation — making sure you are well-informed about prior art without ever throwing up your hands because of some misbegotten fear that it’s all been done before.

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Every person, place, thing, and idea whose name can be found on the Internet has an existence that can be detected and measured by search engines. The relentless spiders of Google will find you and rank you (and let’s leave for another day the techno-philosophical question of whether web pages that have no incoming or outgoing links can be said to exist at all). This measurement is, to me, a kind of “pulse”, telling us how strong — how healthy — any given idea is in our collective digital mind.

So whenever we Google our own names (and you know you’ve done it!), we are in effect checking this “Googlepulse” to see how healthy we are in terms of our visibility and connectedness on the Internet. We are, in a sense, measuring our very digital existence.

This measurement will fluctuate over time as the number and freshness of the links to a particular topic varies, much as a person’s pulse will vary during their life as they grow, get in and out of shape, and undergo the natural effects of aging. In January of 2006, if you Googled “iPhone” you probably wouldn’t see much, but in January of 2007 you’d find a hell of a lot. In a sense, this measurement is like what doctors do when they take your vital signs — pulse, blood pressure, etc — and take note of how they change over time. Google is our digital doctor.

(Of course, Google isn’t the only way to do this. You can also gain insight into a concept’s digital pulse via overall site rankings at Alexa, blog tracking at Technorati (especially Technorati Mini), del.icio.us, blog trackbacks, any news web site’s internal alert systems, Neilsen’s Blogpulse metrics, news and blog aggregators, and of course any other search engine. Even Twitter now allows you to essentially measure your Twitterpulse through an alert system. I’m focusing on Google simply because it pretty much encompasses all of the above.)

Being the health nut that I am (and being highly narcissistic), I am no longer satisfied to simply Google myself every so often. I need a constant blinking light telling me my pulse. Which is why I love Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a new (?) feature that allows you to set up persistent search queries and then receive notifications in daily emails about any new activity with that keyword.

So I’ve set up some of my own Google Alerts for several variations on “Christopher Fahey” and “graphpaper.com”, and it’s fun to see them roll in every morning telling me who is talking about me and where I am showing up. My awareness of my “footprint” on the Internet (to introduce another metaphor) has gone up a bit, I think.

The ironic thing about this is that most of us probably have a better idea of our own Googlepulse than we do the pulse of our own living beating hearts.

UPDATE: I’ve set up a Google Alert for “Googlepulse” to measure the Googlepulse of “Googlepulse”. My haste to move this post from draft to live was inspired by an offhand remark I made on Twitter, and the response I got from David Armano urging me to move quickly. This meta-experiment should be fun. So far, even my original Tweet doesn’t show up on Google. Now that I’ve linked to it, I’m sure it will.

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In this final chapter of Pronoun vs. Pronoun (see previous chapters User vs. You, User vs. Tron, and You vs. I), we will now weigh in on the great schism between Me and You.

Almost every web design team I’ve ever worked with has had to, at some point, wrestle with the “Me vs. You” question. In this great debate, the winner was You over at YouTube and YouSendIt.com, and many years ago You won at U-Haul. But the winner was Me over at MyYahoo!, and at MySpace, and at countless other personalized “my.foo.com” sites.

This debate between Me and You, or My and Your, comes up whenever we try to name a personalization feature, or when we need a name the part of the site where personalization appears, or whenever we want to communicate directly to the user in a conversational way. How shall we, the designers, address the user when speaking to them this way? Is the user the “other”, an external, second person with respect to the site or the company, or to the site’s designers? Shall I address the user conversationally as “you”?, or should we try to keep the user distant and only use the third person?

Or does this “conversation” between the web site and You feel a little distant, impersonal, maybe even a little phony? I mean, it’s not like Amazon.com is a sentient person who can actually talk to us. You’re reading computer generated text about your books, your account. Maybe some site designers feel as if the site’s voice should be your voice, as if you were talking to yourself. (e.g., “This is my site!)

It seems like You is used for conversational or imperative modes of communication, while My is often used for nomenclature and branding. Frequently-asked-questions are also usually told with My voice (”How do I format my Windows hard Drive?”), while instruction manuals are generally addressed directly to You.

Product designers, copywriters, and information architects will argue about this forever, but we get really agitated when we see Me and You alternating on the same page!

Thank you for being a Beta user for My Times? Wait, whose Times is it? Is it My Times, or is it Your Times?

Of course, the worst is when computers refer to themselves in the first person. Unless the computer is a certified Turing Test-winning AI, I’m not comfortable with a machine acting like a person through the use of human pronouns. Machines should never use the pronoun me to refer to itself.

As far as I am concerned, the only products that should be allowed to refer to themselves in the first person are made by Apple and begin with the lower case letter i.

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Lately I’ve been starting a great number of blog posts, saving them as drafts, and then leaving them, unfinished, in my blog’s drafts queue for weeks (and now months) until at some point I realize the post is either no longer inspiring to me or somehow irrelevant. For example, Khoi Vinh recently posted a great article entitled “Designed for Deterioration“, about how products should be designed to deteriorate more gracefully, but meanwhile my own draft article entitled “Wearing In vs. Wearing Out” has been sitting around for three months, half-written.

The sad part is that these articles often linger at what I feel to be 80-90% completeness. Maybe it’s procrastination, maybe I’m a perfectionist… or maybe something critical is missing and I just can’t figure out what it is.

But then again, maybe I should, instead of just waiting for the final inspiration to appear to me in a vision, periodically pick out one of these draft essays, spend a maximum of five minutes finishing it the best that I can, and then just go ahead and publish it in whatever form I can get it to in those five minutes.

Maybe these hastily-completed essays will come out a bit half-baked, maybe a little haphazard… maybe it won’t even reach any kind of clear conclusion, leaving the reader waiting for me to finish my idea. But maybe it will finally

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I am speaking at two upcoming events sponsored by several New York-based information architecture organizations. When my wife asked who the organizers were, I said “It’s the IA Union!” At both events, I will be delivering a version of my informative, fast paced, and fun IA Summit presentation, “Interaction Design Style“.

July 19: IA Summit Redux

This Thursday, July 19, the NYC IA Meetup is throwing an “IA Summit Redux”, featuring six New York-area presenters from the 2007 IA Summit, sharing abridged versions of their Summit presentations. Avenue A|Razorfish is hosting at their midtown offices at 1440 Broadway (map).

The evening’s presenters will include:

• Chris Fahey (me!)
• Garrick Schmitt
• Joe Lamantia
• Lou Rosenfeld
• Michele Tepper
• Victor Lombardi

Doors open at 6:00, speakers begin at 6:30, wrapping up around 9:30. Refreshments will be served throughout. Seating is limited, and the event may well be fully booked up by now, but if you would like to attend, the RSVP address is rsvp-UX@avenuea-razorfish.com. Make sure to send your name, company name, and job title (so when you arrive you don’t have to indignantly ask “Do you know who I am?!?”).

This event is sponsored by the IA Institute, the NYC IA Meetup, and by Avenue A|Razorfish.

July 26: NYC IxDA

This is a solo show for me, a full hour of speaking and a dazzling display of all 250+ slides. It’s the extended epic story of Style and Interaction Design. All the essential information is here, more details coming soon…

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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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I was browsing through the CSS Zen Garden recently, and I was struck again at just how great it is. [If you’re not familiar with the CSS Zen Garden, go there and you’ll figure it out]

I don’t mean to say that I think the designs are all excellent (more than a few of them are a little cheesy). But I deeply appreciate that all of the examples are art directed, in the traditional sense of the word, to a degree that I rarely see on commercial web sites these days — even on sites for very stylish products and magazines.

Compare this to offline (i.e. print) editions where bold and dynamic art direction changes, often radically, from article to article or issue to issue. Flip through any issue of Wired, The New York Times Magazine, or almost any fashion or lifestyle magazine, and you’ll see new and different design approaches — different art direction — for nearly every feature article. Khoi wrote a very thoughtful peice about this over a year ago, lamenting that web design is more about safe, functional systems than about creatively ambitious art direction, but since then this unfortunate state of affairs has still not changed.

Most contemporary web sites strive to be effective content platforms, with a unified but flexible style in which the actual content — the words, pictures, and media — can shine. My own site is certainly of this sort. Very few of the biggest and highest-budget content web sites, in fact, have any strong sense of style or art direction outside of the limited set of page templates (often less than ten) used to deliver the aforementioned content, templates that differ so little from one another that they are essentially variations of the same page.

So if content is king, then design is at best the royal tailor. This is because, for most sites, the design of the site is not considered content at all.

But this is not how many of the best art-directed print magazines work. They’re more like the CSS Zen Garden, customizing the design as needed to not just work with the content but also to be a kind of content in itself.

Why can’t online magazines (especially online-only magazines) do exactly what the CSS Zen Garden does?

• Keep the site’s content normalized, semantically consistent, as it resides in the content management system — but apply a different, customized style sheet to many, or even all, of the articles posted in the site.
• Treat the site’s various cascading style sheets as another kind of content, integral to the article and to the site’s overall content strategy. Hire art directors and graphic designers proficient at CSS to build new style sheets for every new article and issue just as their print counterparts have been doing for decades.

In this model, when the user browses from an article about fashion to an article about science, the page template can change dramatically. The “cascading” part of this scheme will ensure that some underlying design essentials are kept consistent — for example maybe the body copy fonts and the core page grid — even as the page’s layout, illustration, colors, headlines, and other design elements change dramatically.

It’s a shame that for many of the talented designers at CSS Zen Garden, this free work may be some of the best work they’ll ever do, since so much of the real web design world is still unfortunately focused on eliminating idiosyncratic style wherever it crops up — instead of using it to make sites and user experiences better.

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