It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times:

The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to electronic versions that — with a touch of a finger — visitors can flip through, page by digital page, from cover to dog-eared cover. (The real notebooks can also be seen under glass nearby.)

Facsimiles they may be, but they instantly communicate the show’s intent, which is to clarify the way the silent, classical remove of Seurat’s impeccable, stylized paintings was distilled from an active, socially aware engagement with the world that registered most fully in his drawings.

If you haven’t guessed already, the touch-screen interfaces in question were designed and built by my studio mates at Behavior, both as kiosk installations in the MoMA exhibition gallery and viewable on the web as a gorgeous online exhibition.

Roberta Smith of the Times is one of the the most important art critics around. So when the opening sentence of Smith’s review of Georges Seurat: The Drawings focuses so enthusiastically on the interactive kiosk that my colleagues put together these past few months, it’s more than just praise for Georges Seurat and for the great curation and leadership by the team at MoMA. It’s also praise for Behavior.

Touch Screens in the Age of the iPhone

Most of the Behavior folks attended the exhibition’s lavish opening festivities last week, and we all got a chance to watch dozens of very fancy people interacting with the twin touch-screen kiosks. It was such a joy to watch the gallery-goers flip through the pages with looks of, I swear, genuine delight on their faces. No lie: I definitely heard “ooohs” and “aaahs”.

As with any usability test situation, of course, there were also the occasional moments where a user would try to do something we didn’t think of. Of particular interest was the fairly common attempt by users to treat the traditional touch screens as if they were iPhone-style multi-touch screens. People expected to be able to smoothly zoom in by spreading two fingers apart as they can on the iPhone. As with so much of what Apple does, the bar has apparently been raised in unexpected new places in the interactive landscape.

What About the Art?

Oh, and the show is absolutely luminous. I hope you check out the web site, of course, but if you enjoy art at all you must see the show in person. The sketchbooks are just a tiny piece of the exhibit. The rest of the show, and the online exhibition, includes drawings and paintings, historical conservation information, and of course the sketchbooks.

The exhibition is getting rave reviews from many other sources as well, and deservedly so. We’ve all seen Seurat’s famous pointillist paintings, especially the revolutionary A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But Seurat’s drawings reveal the intense thinking and talent that went into his painterly work.

The drawings excel in two areas simultaneously: Form and light. In a vivid metaphorical image conjured up by my wife Peggy (seen above), some drawings suggest that 19th century Paris would be transparent or even invisible if not for the industrial-era soot filling the air and collecting on any and all solid objects and forms. The charcoal on the page reflects the density of the matter in the space.

And yet other drawings emphasize light itself, with the space articulated only by where the light exists and where it does not — where traditional drawing marks like contour lines are banished. The relationship between this thinking and the daguerrotype photography of the time is hard to dispute.

The best works attack form and light at the same time, and it’s easy to see how Seurat’s eschewing of contour and lines — and embrace of volume and light — leads directly to La Grande Jatte, even without the extraordinary discoveries in color he is most famous for.

La Grande Jatte was painted when Seurat was just 26. He would die five years later, at 31. It’s staggering to imagine what he would have gone on to accomplish had he lived into the age of Matisse (born the same year as Seurat), Kandinsky, and Picasso.

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Leisa Reichelt coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the genre of social computing apps led by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. She was interested in the constant sense of closeness users feel with their circle of friends, no matter how far-flung, through technologies that informally reveal us to each other.

Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku (and newly minted Googleplexian), called this phenomenon “peripheral vision”, your ability to informally or even unconsciously know what’s going on in your social circle.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my Twitter stream contains a lot more than just what people are doing. They’re starting to use Twitter to express their emerging ideas and to begin tentative conversations about things they are thinking about.

In fact, even as I enjoy the ambient intimacy of having the incidental knowledge about what my friends are doing, I’m finding that the sharing of ideas is the most valuable part of Twitter. My Twitter friends send links to interesting sites, they announce their latest blog posts, and they talk about the new ideas they are reading about and hearing about, usually at the moment they first experience the idea. Or they’ll ask a provocative question (”Does anyone use friendster anymore?”) and see what it generates.

But most exciting of all is when someone shouts out their own half-baked idea (in 140 characters or less), and the rest of the group piles on to shape the idea further. Spontaneous “collective musing” occurs. This whole process is over in only a few minutes, and then the whole dialogue fades away into the ether. The ideas, however, live on in our heads, and eventually some even take more concrete form.

The Twitter medium allows these informal and impromptu communications to occur in a way that, for example, posting to a mailing list, publishing a blog post, or posting a question to a Q&A social site can never quite do. It’s something just a little bit less than a conversation.

In the same vein, Bruce Nussbaum today quotes Roger Martin from the Rotman School of management, who says “Blogging is intellectual prototyping.” If that’s the case, then Twitter is intellectual doodling.

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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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An article in the New York Times the other day discusses a study that suggests that there are differences between men and women in how pleasant or unpleasant they find certain normal everyday activities. Apparently, for example, men find spending time with their parents far more pleasant then women do, while men disproportionally dislike home repair work (so much for the handyman husband!).

What caught my eye was this: Nestled between “Read books” and “Cooking” was “Computer use”. It says that 13% of both men and women find using computers unpleasant.

This is interesting for two reasons. First, it quantifies the technophobe demographic at about one out of every seven people.

But in the context of the other activities asked about, it’s interesting to note that “Computer use” actually ranks pretty low on the overall unpleasantness scale. Watching TV is more unpleasant than using computers! This suggests that most people (the other six out of seven) seem to think pretty positively about using computers.

This interpretation fits nicely with my belief that people aren’t quite as fed up with digital user experiences as the usability finger-waggers might suggest. People muddle through the difficult parts and aren’t generally aware of where or how they might not be as efficient as they could be.

But this doesn’t mean that user experience designers can rest on our laurels at all. It means we must be more conscientiously competitive, that we must try to aim a lot higher than simply being “not unpleasant”. It’s like what Todd Wilkens wrote at the Adaptive Path blog: that merely aiming to “be usable” is a low target indeed, kind of like having your cooking objective to “be edible”.

A good product must not only be easy to use, but must also be pleasant to use in order to stand out in a universe of computer products that, all told, apparently aren’t even as unpleasant as, say, cooking dinner or visiting your friends.

Naturally, since the methodology of the Times study is unclear, and since I am interpreting only a small fragment of the study’s intended data set, all of this is speculation and not solidly supported by this specific research. Still, I suspect that this interpretation is pretty close and that people in general like using computers.

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I want to go to the IDEA Conference, which starts in two weeks here in New York.

Conferences generally come in two categories.

1. Conferences to meet people who do exactly what you do, and where you learn about how to do what you do better.
2. Conferences to meet people you can do business with, and where you learn about how they work and what they need.

IDEA looks different. While it is clearly aimed at people who design interactive experiences (and the lineup of speakers includes more than one card-carrying information architect), the speakers and the program are more specifically designed to spark innovative thinking, to expose and educate participants to interaction worlds they may not be familiar with, and to generate a broad spectrum of ideas from many inspirational and thought-provoking angles.

In short, it’s a conference to inspire you to do something you’ve never done before.

(I didn’t pre-register for this conference since I had already had plans for those days in October, but my schedule has recently changed. What’s more, the organizers are offering a free pass to the blogger whose published desire to attend pleases them the most. I shamelessly hope I am that blogger!)

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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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In the responses to my proposal to use the second- person perspective in interaction design documentation, Oleh Kovalchuke brought up an excellent concern:

The flaw with this approach is that “you, the developer” have different cultural background/ experience/ expectations than “her, the blog reader”.

This is one of the reasons for creating and referring to personas.

Good point. Using the word “you” in documentation can risk implying, if only subconsciously, that the reader of the documentation — usually a developer, designer, etc — is the same person who will actually use the system.

Still, I think I have a workaround. If the whole point is to foster empathy for the end-user of a product, explicitly demanding that the developer think of themselves as a user. Maybe a better formulation would be more literally like a traditional “Choose Your Own Adventure” literary model, prefacing and contextualizing the whole document and process around role-playing:

“You are Beth, the frequent shopper. You click SUBMIT and then click OKAY in the confirmation dialog box.”

By frequently reminding the developer just whose shoes they need to continually imagine themselves in, the second person is given this missing context of projection.

But what if we took it one step further? Most of the best designers I know have an amazing degree of built-in ability to imagine themselves actually being their customers and actually using their products (and conversely, the worst designers are borderline Asperger’s sufferers, with little ability to even imagine another person’s perspective).

Perhaps another approach, then, would be to require the designer him/herself to write in the first person, role playing as the user, writing a real-time account of using the system.

“I am Beth, the frequent shopper. I click SUBMIT and then click OKAY in the confirmation dialog box.”

Food for thought. Has anyone seen or used documentation using these alternative perspectives (second and first person?)

(Next: Me vs. You (vs. i) )

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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 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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