After waiting six months on a pre-order waiting list, I finally got my Fitbit two months ago. I was really looking forward to it — as a big fan of the Nike+ running tracking system, I was excited about Fitbit’s promise to not only track my running and walking, but to track my sleep patterns as well. And the design was extremely seductive — small in size, elegantly combining form and function (it doesn’t have a clip, it is a clip), and with a magical blue led screen that is invisible when the device is off. How could I resist?

And I was right: I love the Fitbit!

But I don’t want to use it any more. How is that possible?

First, though, you may be asking “What is Fitbit?” Fitbit is a personal health tracking system consisting of a small electronic device that you clip to your body to track your movements and a web site that uses the data from those movements to give you detailed reports and analysis of your fitness and health. The Fitbit device contains an accelerometer to detect anything from a single running stride to tossing and turning in your sleep, and it wirelessly syncs to your computer via a small radio transmitter. The Fitbit has a small digital display indicating the number of steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve walked or run, and how many calories you’ve burned.

Basically, you clip the Fitbit on your waist all day long, and to a wristband at night, to collect 24/7 data about your body’s movements. The Fitbit web site then slices and dices that data to present some pretty fascinating insights into your personal health.

Sounds simple? It’s supposed to. There is an emerging trend in personal electronics and software to stop bothering users with long explanations of “how it works”, and to instead keep the interactions simple and just make sure the damn things work.  Fitbit is right on that wave. The documentation doesn’t say much about how it works, the web site doesn’t have a big “how it works” page. You’re just supposed to start using it.

So Fitbit cuts to the chase in most of their user experience designs. In fact, I can’t find anything on the Fitbit home page that says “Fitbit is …”. Fitbit is what it does, which is count your movements and interpret that information.

I think that’s part of Fitbit’s strategy: to experiment with giving users a minimal level of explanation to get people focused on changing their behavior and thus their health, and not on requiring users to constantly be manipulating the technology.

Getting Fitbit

Let’s first discuss the centerpiece of the Fitbit system, the Fitbit device itself. It’s about the size of a money clip or a small pack of gum, clips easily to clothing and fits easily in a pocket. Some users complain that it is easy to lose, and while I managed to hold on to it for two months, I can only attribute that to luck. I am really impressed by the “clip” form factor (versus a wristband, a strap, a card, a keyfob). Given the required size, it’s a clever solution.

The digital display is incredibly nice to look at. When it’s off, it’s just a detail-less smooth black surface. When you press the Fitbit’s single button, however, the display shines through the now-translucent plastic like shining a flashlight through your fingertip.

When you bring the device near the charging/base station, it automatically uploads the latest data from the device. The base station is clever, but I think it over-fetishizes the Fitbit itself by literally placing it on a pedestal, as many upright docking stations do for the iPhone. And its 18″ cord is overkill. While it is quite clever to allow the device to sync automatically, you still have to turn your computer on in the first place, and if you’ve got a laptop you have to plug in the base station anyway. So syncing isn’t invisible for most people, I suspect, but is rather a conscientious and deliberate daily act.

A syncing solution like the original iPod Shuffle’s, where the device itself had a USB plug built-in, would permit charging and syncing without an additional base station device and, as I contend, without adding an additional sync action for most users. A Bluetooth version to sync with high-end laptops without charging would be even better.

The web site is fantastic. The data displays are lovely, and it’s easy to get around and play with your data. I do have problems with many of the specific information design and charting decisions, but I am not going to complain because the Fitbit folks are constantly evolving and improving the site, tweaking features, responding to user feedback, adding new stuff.

Interestingly, you can use the Fitbit web dashboard without owning a Fitbit. First of all, the site lets you manually enter your food consumption information in order to establish your caloric intake each day. Also, it lets you manually enter your exercise activities as well.

I actually suspect the designers must have conscientiously kept the site device-agnostic, to support future Fitbit devices and to invite non-Fitbit users to join the web community.

Using the device as a pedometer, which is by far Fitbit’s core function, is simple. I can see the distance I’ve walked at any time during the day, and when I get home I can see a day-by-day report on the web of how far I’ve walked, and how far I walk each day on average. The device’s step-counting accuracy is astonishingly accurate: I did a test, walking and counting up to 1000 steps in my head, then checked the Fitbit and saw it counted 1004. That’s plenty accurate for me.

For running, Fitbit detects the nuances of difference between a running and walking motion, and then recalculates your distance traveled (based on longer stride length) and calories burned accordingly. There is simply need to tell Fitbit that you’re running and not walking. It’s smart enough to tell, based only on the nature of the data it’s collecting. As for running accuracy, I wasn’t able to do a counting test, but the distances Fitbit reported on several over-5-mile runs were 10-20% different from the distances reported in Google Maps. Far from ideal, but on par with the similar inaccuracy of Nike+.

Where Fitbit gets really clever, however, is with sleeping. Obviously a motion sensor isn’t able to tell if you are sleeping or just lying on your ass watching TV. Fitbit requires you to press and hold the devices’s single button for a few seconds, putting the device into a kind of “special activity” mode. Fitbit comes with a surprisingly non-obtrusive wristband that holds the Fitbit device while you sleep. As you sleep, the Fitbit detects your body’s movements and uses these cues to determine how long it took you to actually fall asleep, how many times, and precisely when, you moved around in the middle of the night, and when you woke up. In the morning, you press and hold the button again to indicate that you’re awake and walking around again.

The sleep data collected is fascinating, and this alone is worth the price of admission. You probably have no idea about how long it takes you to fall asleep, or how often you toss and turn. I certainly didn’t, and was delighted to see the results. I found it incredibly interesting to see the day-by-day durations of my sleeps for an entire month (little more 2 hours more than a few times, around 6 hours most of the time, and 12 hours on one blessed Friday night).

For other activities, such as cycling or weightlifting, Fitbit isn’t so smart. For such things, Fitbit literally requires you to manually manipulate the data. Again, for people in highly-structured weight loss programs where counting calories in and out is important, Fitbit’s web dashboard offers the ability to manually enter your non-walking or running activities to make sure your overall caloric burn rate is kept accurate.

An amusingly large number of people in the forums ask about the fitbit’s ability to measure calories burnt during sex, some with a measure of sexual bravado (”wear on my hip?”), others innocently but rather seriously dedicated to counting every calorie burned. While I admire the free spirited nature of these inquirers, I cannot offer any additional insight into this matter as I, perhaps overly romantically, still beleive that some things remain well beyond quantification.

The Fitbit Ecosystem

The Fitbit web site is constantly changing, and they keep adding features to the site, extending the functionality of the fixed hardware system. This is part of the clever concept that the features entirely lie in the interpretation of data. It’s a radical simplification of what software is all about: Fitbit’s one motion sensor and one binary button (ternary if you count the long 2-second press, and potentially more if you add longer presses, or even double and triple presses as on the iPhone earbud controller) have the potential to enable a lot more interaction and communication than one might think at first blush.

In a way, they are squeezing as much functionality out of the tech as possible. Fitbit is a small embodyment of Don Norman’s recent claim that technology leads and design follows. For Fitbit, it’s an inspired design response to the question “how many things can we do with just this one bit of technology”?

To contrast this with Nike+ for a moment, Fitbit feels far more like a living thing, run by engaged people dedicated to incremental changes in response to the actual usage by their community and feedback in their incredibly active and helpful forums. It’s a Web 2.0 product. Nike+, however, is a more traditional product, with huge and infrequent X.0 product launches. Nike+ stagnated with the same beautiful and innovative — but buggy and slow — web site for years, only to upgrade this year to a new, buggier, and unfortunately even more awkward user interface. Nike+ still never remembers users passwords, for example. I wish Nike+ would follow Flitbit’s lead when it comes to incremental, simple improvements. Focus on a UI that can scale and evolve, and not on one that is sexy and “bold”.

Product Conclusions

There are probably two kinds of Fitbit customers. First, casual users: people who want to know more about what they do with their bodies, people who are curious about their health and the potential to use technology to keep closer tabs on how well they’re doing. This describes my interest in Fitbit.

The second group is serious users: people who are actively trying to change their personal health behaviors and want a way to measure those changes. If you’re trying to change an overly-sedentary lifestyle, to lose weight through careful monitoring of calories burned versus consumed, Fitbit might be a huge help. For people involved in a structured weight loss program, a device that adds to that regime is perfectly normal. But I walk plenty each day (4-5 miles every day). I am an athlete and run often, but I don’t count calories. I’m not trying to lose weight. I use Nike+ to measure my special activities (running), but I don’t want a new device attached to me all the time just to give me data about my normal activities, just to satisfy my curiosity.

So while I found Fitbit useful and delightful, it was only temporarily. But that’s okay. It’s a fantastic tool for self-analysis, to get to know your sleep patterns, your typical daily walking distance. Great information. But once you have that information, if you’re not engaged in a program to change those things, you’re done with Fitbit. I know everything Fitbit can tell me. Maybe I’ll try it again in six months or a year, to see if I’ve changed. I’m a casual user.

The Fitbit is not what I and other casual users might have hoped it would be. It’s not going to be a permanent part of your life, a constant and consistent way to monitor your health. The biggest obstacle to this, I think, is unfortunately still technological. It’s just too big to carry with you in every possible context, so you end up taking it on and off over and over again all day. When you change clothes, you have to move it from one garment to another. At night, you have to strap on a wristband and clip it to that. You have to take it off in the shower.

Inevitably, I ended up forgetting to bring it to work occasionally. Or I’d have it unclipped for part of a day. Which is far worse than it sounds: If you miss a day of walking in a week, it completely ruins the accuracy of your weekly average. Miss a few days in a month, and your monthly average is shot to hell. Fitbit lets you manually enter your information, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to do Fitbit’s job for it! You’ve got have your Fitbit on your person almost 90% of the time for it to produce accurate trends and summary results, the kind of results that justify integrating it into your life in such a serious and committed way.

If the Fitbit was the size of a fingernail, attached with waterproof glue or embedded under my skin, well, then we’re talking. But because of its size, it becomes one more thing to inhabit my intimate attention space, something I have to remember to never leave home without, like my phone, my wallet, and my pants. It’s like having a little adopted pet you have to take care of all day.

In short, you just can’t lead a normal life with Fitbit. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Fitbit experience, a lesson about the future of personal informatics, it’s that we simply won’t have accurate and reliable personal systems until the devices themselves are immune to these everyday emergencies and accidents and inconveniences. Until they’re virtually invisible and forgettable, probably embedded under the skin, we will be forced to consider personal informatic hardware as intrusive medical devices rather than as the ethereal, ambient data sources I think many people envision.

If you want an informatically-based weight loss program, with increased walking as a core element, and if you want to count calories in and out, Fitbit is for you and might help you with your program over the months and years.

If you are interested in just finding out about your body and how you use it, it’s great for that, too. Give it a spin, then hand it off to another person. Want mine?

• Leave a Note (5)

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young undergrad interested in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program (where I teach a class in the fundamentals of interaction design).

The student, a talented web designer, was curious about the relationship between “web design” and “interaction design” and “user experience”, and what the future holds for UX and IxD. I thought it would be nice to share some of my response:

It’s hard for any IxD program to avoid the overwhelming presence of the web as the epicenter of most people’s (technological) interactive experiences. And the faculty of the program at SVA certainly draws deeply from the web design world. But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

There is definitely a lot of demand for people who can bring this higher and broader thinking to projects. What I like about the SVA program is the dialogue students have access to — with each other and with the faculty. It’s something you can’t get in most workplaces, and especially not so rapidly and intensely. You are required to talk not just about what you did, but how and most importantly WHY. It’s one thing to design something, it’s another thing to justify why in the world the world needs what you designed. Hopefully, that’s what the program gets students to think about and know how to express.

Finally: I wouldn’t be in this field, or teaching in the program, if I didn’t think that UX was *the* most important factor in creating beauty and happiness in the coming decades. Making stuff that people like to use, well, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid making stuff out of paper and legos.

I hope that gives a little more insight into the program and perhaps even into my thoughts about IxD and UX overall. Good luck, and let me know if I can help any further.

• Leave a Note (10)

I’ve submitted two talks for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. As you might know, SXSW’s selection process includes a period of public review to gauge general interest in the panels submitted (they call them “panels” even though many of the submissions, including my own, are single-speaker sessions).

I would be deeply grateful if you, gentle Graphpaper reader, would put in a vote for my sessions. If you want to comment on my ideas — and I’d love it if you would — please do so at the SXSW site. (You have to register to vote, but it’s an easy and painless sign up.)

Here are my proposals (click the title to see the voting page):

• The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)
  More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level — just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.
  .

• Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process
  It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

I’m particularly excited about the first one, as it ties together so much of what I love and/or things I know a lot about: interaction design, science fiction, culture and literature in design, artificial intelligence, human behavior and emotional design. It’s kind of like “The Graphpaper.com Experience, Live!”

Sharing the love

There are a few other talks I think you ought to consider voting for, as well, from people I like and think people should be listening to: MORE…

• Leave a Note (10)

Here’s an awesome idea for the camera industry. Like most of my seemingly awesome ideas, someone else has probably already thought of it (UPDATE: someone has already thought of it, sort of… skip to the bottom of this post). But just in case it’s at all novel, I offer it up for public review:

Yesterday I saw a little kid yawning, and I thought it would have made a really cute photo if only I had a camera in my hand, ready to shoot. Of course, I had a camera in my hand: my iPhone. The moment, however, went by just too fast: I noticed it, but could not photograph it.

Being able to take a photograph spontaneously, with as much ease as pointing your finger or blinking your eyes, would change the world of photography even more than the profound effect digital photography has already had. It would make available the ephemeral and fleeting moments of beauty and inspiration in a way that current photographic technology still cannot deliver.

Today’s cameras, however, still have too many obstacles to this goal. The camera has to be in your hand, with the lens cap removed, and if electronic it has to be powered up. And then you have to adjust the exposure and focus on your subject.

Most of these obstacles can be overcome: small, cheap, and fast cameras are already here. A camera mounted in a pair of glasses or on a fingertip is easy to imagine. And you can adjust exposure, to a limited extent, after the fact in Photoshop. It’s the focus part that seems the biggest barrier: Choosing the subject in the frame and then adjusting a mechanical lens array to focus on that object takes both time and human intelligence. Automating this would seem impossible.

But I think I’ve figured it out.

Multifocus: Fix it in post!

Instead of taking one photograph upon clicking the shutter, my camera would shoot 50 photos as fast as possible. Each photograph would have a slightly different focus setting, zooming on different points in space. Cameras are pretty damn fast these days, and getting faster, so it seems possible that taking 50 good photos in a fraction of a second is reasonable.

Some of the 50 photos will focus on nothing, and will be useless. But among the rest there would almost certainly be one image that is nicely focused on exactly what you wanted to shoot.

The idea is that we use brute force (that is, speed) to capture a variety of photos, then we pick the one we like best. Basically what photographers have been doing for years with motor drives, but ridiculously faster.

The key to this concept is the post-production software. You could just view 50 photos, but I picture it being more interesting than that. The interface for choosing the photo could feel like taking a photo, where you look upon a scene and move a slider to change your focus on the scene. I imagine an interface like the one Harrison Ford used in Blade Runner to investigate the space in a crime-scene photo, but instead of exploring a 3D space, it permits the viewer to explore the image-space by moving the point of focus.

Many years ago I made a Flash experiment showing how a focus effect might work. You can try it here. If you play with the demo, you can imagine the UI for my multifocus selector tool, choosing the best-focused image from the 50 images originally captured by the camera.

If the system was fast enough (say, fast enough to take 200 photos in a second) the lenses could also take each photo at several zoom levels or exposure settings, too. So you point, snap, and then do all of the zoom, focus, and exposure work later, almost as if you were freezing and capturing time itself.

This idea isn’t so far fetched. It’s influenced by a bunch of other ideas along similar lines:

• Bullet-time camera: Popularized in The Matrix, the “bullet-time” effect is achieved by a brute-force technique of taking dozens of photos at the same time from many different angles. Cool example here.
• Page scanner concept: The idea behind this concept is that instead of slowly photographing the pages of a book one page at a time from a fully-flat perspective, a machine could scan the book’s pages a hundred times faster by simply photographing them at an angle as they are quickly flipping by, adjusting the image later to appear flat.
• iPhone’s “always on” camera: Lonelysandwich’s Adam Lisagor recently speculated and tested that the iPhone is able to take photos really quickly because it doesn’t wait for you to click the shutter to record the image in memory. It just takes photos constantly and then keeps the one it already took at the time you click the shutter.
• Focus Stacking: In microscopic photography where the depth of field is miniscule and getting an image of an entire tiny object is difficult, a technique called focus stacking allows the photographer to take many photos of the same object at different focus lengths, then combining them all into a single composite image where everything is in focus. Check out this cool focus stacking animation.

Most of the conceptual and technological pieces are there. Another issue would seem to be the lenses themselves: how to move a physical lens array quickly, but given the size of cameras these days it seems that we’d only need to move the lens a few millimeters to get all 50 focal lengths.

Now, someone please tell me this already exists.

UPDATE: Okay, it already exists. The plenoptic camera, or light-field camera, which uses an array of tiny lenses to take multiple photos at different focus points. Different concept (mine relies on a single moving lens), same result. Either way, I hope someone figures out a way to build this kind of thing into cheap phone cameras.

• Leave a Note (5)

Someone recently pointed me to an interesting book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, by Toby Israel. The book’s thesis is that a designers’ childhood environment profoundly affects their professional and adult design choices. The environments and objects children see and touch in their formative years will, according to Israel, have a deep and lasting effect on how they perceive and how they create the designed environments around them later in life.

I haven’t read the book, but the basic premise as far as I understand it strikes me as very likely. Childhood experiences drove me to become a designer in the first place, why should it not also shape my day-to-day decisions as a designer?

And wouldn’t childhood experiences with interactive things be especially emotionally powerful, whether positive or negative?

I was really curious if this idea rang true for other people in the UX design world, too. So I asked the twitterverse:

chrisfahey: UX people: Which interactive experiences from your childhood shape your decisions as a designer of interactive experiences today? #uxorigins

I got a few dozen delightful responses (most of them using my suggested hashtag #uxorigins). It’s interesting how many of them share common themes: video games, science fiction, dashboards, doors and light switches.

chrisfahey: I remember 2 light switches that controlled the same light. Each switch also reversed the on/off orientation of the other (bad!).

peterme: Simon, Merlin, Mattel Electronic Football, Intellivsion, the cable box where you pressed a button for each channel

strottrot: I remember my mom’s thrill at the development of school desks & scissors designed for people who are left-handed.

soldierant: great idea . I learned narrative, flow balance & symmetry from the modeling diorama books of François Verlinden.

martinpolley: Auto-reverse Walkman — Which side is it playing? Which button do I press for FF and which for RW?

jarango: Videogames, Legos, Disney World, Chris Crawford’s “Art of Computer Game Design”.

gielow: Mine was: Being 1stborn = lots of early individual open-play. Growing up w/Apple II & living near Smithsonian

Braindonut: Acknowledging great game UIs help me to focus on the challenges I actually CARE about and seeing bad UIs obstruct fun

odannyboy: Making robots and spaceships out of cardboard boxes and figuring out the controls. Playing detective.

octothorpe: When I was young, I made siege weaponry (trebuchet, catapults, etc) out of common household items (hangars, mousetraps, etc)

ladylynnet: Pull-doors that look like they should be pushed, can openers, lots of SciFi, and growing up as the Internet grew up

mjbroadbent: @octothorpe Good fun! I’m curious: were your foes real or imaginary? Or perhaps the creative joy was simply in the making.

ConeTrees: reading Enid Blytons & watching cartoons where all things/ interfaces just work and everything is simplified

davin: . Speak & Spell, Merlin, text adventures on Vic-20, 20-sided dice, Lego/Star Wars mash-ups

mikeym: Hammond organs, analog Buchla synthesizers, backlit toggle switches (love!), tube amps, aircraft flight controls.

daveixd: I think it was the Odessy game console. I LOVED that game controller more than anything! The circular disc w/ the 12key punch.

mjbroadbent: Baking, cooking, and serving food were formative for me. Planning everything to yield a fabulous end result was (is) great fun!

nikkirmz: Light switches located on walls behind doors. You must walk in, partially close the door to turn on the light.

jeanphony: Helping my dad design and build a custom family camper from a former delivery van

rayraydel: It’s always been about sketching for me. Both figuring stuff out and communicating it with pencil & paper. The best.

strottrot: Another : My dad cursing through toys with “some assembly required”

noahmittman: As a kid, pirating software without any manuals or help, using only the software’s end design to learn its features.

cchastain: Putting on a carnival in the back yard.

jspahr: Devouring Isaac Azimov’s SciFi stories; building/re-building lego houses/cities; hypercard.

mjbroadbent: Oh yeah! My brother and I created spooky fun houses in our basement. RT @cchastain: Putting on a carnival in the back yard.

jeffpiazza: - Drawing dashboards of real (space shuttle) and futuristic aircraft.

austingovella: Magic: tell a story, misdirect their attention to what they want to see, and delight them.

It’s interesting that about half of these are about experiencing frustration and wanting to fix the experience, and the other half are about being inspired with wonder and delight — precisely the dichotomy that UX designers seem to perpetually wrestle with today

Do you have any childhood experiences that you are convinced still influence you as a designer today?

• Leave a Note (6)

Apple is famous for their minimalist aesthetic, and infamous for occasionally taking the aesthetic too far and sacrificing usability. There’s the famous round mouse for the original iMac. There’s the symmetrical third-generation iPod remote control whose identical volume and previous/next buttons are impossible to distinguish.

While not as egregious as the previous examples, Apple’s iPod and iPhone earbuds have, to me, always suffered from just a tiny bit of this over-aestheticization. The earbuds are specific to your left and right ears, but are differentiated only by a microscopic and light-gray “R” and “L” to tell you which earbud is which. It takes a few seconds to figure out which ear each bud is intended to go into.

But for years I’ve had a solution. I’ve been using a little strip of tape to hack/solve the problem of undifferentiated iPod headphones.

A single wrap with a thin strip of tape, and viola! At a glance, or even by touch, it is now easy to tell which earbud is which: the one with the tape goes in the right ear. And design-wise it looks pretty good — simple, consistent with the Apple aesthetic, fairly subtle. Steve Jobs would probably have a fit over the asymmetry, but I think this solution is is something so obvious that every earbud manufacturer should do it, or at least something like it.

• Leave a Note (23)

Touch Sight, a fascinating “camera” for blind people.

For my entire design career,  my colleagues and I have wrestled with the terminology we use to segment and focus our work, both in our careers and in our critiques. Whether it’s the “information architecture vs. interaction design” debate or the “visual design vs. graphic design” debate, our neat little linguistic boxes don’t always seem to be able to contain the conversations we have about our work.

The term “look and feel” has been particularly troublesome. Too often it is used to simply mean “visual design” — that is, just the “look” part — with the “feel” part understood as simply a polite nod to the fact that visual design has an emotional aspect.

Andrew Crow at Adaptive Path suggests that, because of this kind of abuse, “look and feel” should be discarded.

I propose that we never use the phrase “look and feel” again. Ever.

Visual design is often subjective and can be difficult to describe or judge. Often, people lack the language or understanding of the work to accurately express their opinions. Consequently, we use simple terms of the way an object “looks” or how it “feels”.

Speaking in terms of these qualities does a disservice to the design. We cheapen the value of the work by paying attention only to the superficial aspects.

I think he’s being a little hasty. How is the term “visual design”, which Andrew uses here and repeatedly throughout his essay, any better than “look and feel”?

“Look and feel” at least suggests (indeed specifically acknowledges) that the surface-level user experience involves more senses than just the visual. In contrast, “visual design” often dramatically constrains the conversation about our work, and indeed might even constrain the scope of responsibility for a person working under that title.

I’ve always interpreted the “feel” part of look and feel to mean not just the emotional aspects that are usually associated with it, but also the tactile (or seemingly-tactile) effects of how a UI moves and transforms, how it sounds, the speed and pacing of the unfolding experience, its overall voice and personality, and countless other ineffable qualities of visceral experience. “Feel” can include words and language, transitions, motion, rhythm, haptic feedback, symbolism, melody, texture, temperature, and much more.

So while I agree that “look and feel” is often abused, it is precisely the conflation of (a) the vast potential of that term with (b) simply equating it with “visual design” that is the essence of the problem. Replacing “look and feel” with just “visual design”, as Andrew seems to perhaps unintentionally suggest, would only make matters worse. The scope of the term “visual design” simply cannot contain those aforementioned ineffable aspects of user experience, which is why we cling to “look and feel”.

While I confess to using both terms every day, I do think they are often insufficient for effective design communication. But simply throwing away “look and feel” isn’t a solution. We either need a more powerful and understandable replacement for “look and feel”, or we need to do a better job investing the conversation around “look and feel” to include those ineffable qualities. We need to ensure that we can have broad critical conversations about what Christopher Alexander calls “The Quality Without a Name” (QWAN) and that we can have narrow and focused critical conversations around the technical nuances of visual and graphic design.

I’m conservatively inclined towards the second approach: evangelizing a new and broader understanding of what “look and feel” means in the universe of interaction design. But I’ll admit that, Alexander’s declaration of namelessness notwithstanding, I am quietly and subconciously thinking of new names.

[This post’s title is the a tribute to one of my favorite drone/dub bands, seefeel]

• Leave a Note (10)

Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know he (or she) is not just spending every night sleeping at his desk?

The Detex Newman watchclock was first introduced in 1927 and is still in wide use today.

If you’re a technology designer, you might suggest using surveillance cameras or even GPS to track his location each night, right? But let’s make this interesting. Let’s go a century back in time to, say, around 1900. What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?

An elegant solution, designed and patented in 1901 by the German engineer A.A. Newman, is called the “watchclock”. It’s an ingenious mechanical device, slung over the shoulder like a canteen and powered by a simple wind-up spring mechanism. It precisely tracks and records a night watchman’s position in both space and time for the duration of every evening. It also generates a detailed, permanent, and verifiable record of each night’s patrol.

What’s so interesting to me about the watchclock is that it’s an early example of interaction design used to explicitly control user behavior. The “user” of the watchclock device is obliged to behave in a strictly delimited fashion.

But before I go into the interaction theory at work here, let’s look at how the watchclock system works in a little more detail. The fundamental innovation — the trick, if you will — is that the device itself is only one part of a larger, external system.

Photo by Jeremy Brooks.

The Key is the System

The key, literally, to the watchclock system is that the watchman is required to “clock in” at a series of perhaps a dozen or more checkpoints throughout the premises. Positioned at each checkpoint is a unique, coded key nestled in a little steel box and secured by a small chain. Each keybox is permanently and discreetly installed in strategically-placed nooks and crannies throughout the building, for example in a broom closet or behind a stairway.

The watchman makes his patrol. He visits every checkpoint and clicks each unique key into the watchclock. Within the device, the clockwork marks the exact time and key-location code to a paper disk or strip. If the watchman visits all checkpoints in order, they will have completed their required patrol route.

The watchman’s supervisor can subsequently unlock the device itself (the watchman himself cannot open the watchclock) and review the paper records to confirm if the watchman was or was not doing their job.

This is an idea with long legs. The watchclock is built like a revolver, of good old fashioned brass and steel and encased in a thick leather holster. It requires no batteries and almost no maintenance. The “guard tour patrol system” concept, too, has a timeless elegance. The mechanism itself has barely changed for a century: although some more recent models incorporate GPS and other technologies, the mechanical key-based watchclock system is still in wide usage, with many buildings still employing the same keys and the same clockwork devices they’ve used since the 1940s. It’s a genuine example of an “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” kind of technology.

From a behavioral perspective, I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived. The watchclock is a primitive form of technology-mediated interaction design and narrowly-focused social engineering: The “interface” is the whole system: The watchclock, keys, and paper records.

Designing for Control

Many in the interaction design field(s) argue that user experience design most definitely is not about behavioral control, or at least it shouldn’t be. Dan Saffer entitled his excellent book “Designing for Interaction“, the “for” being a nod to the idea that users don’t need to interact with systems in exactly the way the interaction designer intended or envisioned. Interactive systems — whether social networks, desktop apps, or multiplayer online games — often shine best when users break the rules. Systems that explicitly and deliberately give users the freedom to interact in creative and unforeseen ways are some of the most interesting and powerful kinds of interaction design.

But the watchclock is another kind of interaction design, one whose function corrals the user into a single, linear, constrained sort of behavior. The night watchman has a fundamental social constraint — the desire to not get fired from their job. This constraint allows the watchclock patrol system to work so effectively (some would say insidiously) as an interaction design instrument of control.

As a former game designer, I think it’s important to recognize that a really fun user experience will often exist somewhere between these poles of freedom and control. The player can kill the bad guys in whatever clever way she wishes, but she’s got to collect the three crystals to operate the teleporter — there’s no other way off the ship, and no other way to get to the next level. (I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that so many systems of controlled-play in games involve the use of keys, just like the watchclock.)

Giving a user freedom to interact however they wish seems admirable in principle, but requiring the user to jump through precisely the hoops you, the designer, want them to jump through is also a powerful way to create an emotionally and intellectually compelling experience. In a practical sense, it’s also a way to make sure that the user doesn’t get frustrated or even fail to do what they really need to do.

The watchclock’s user experience isn’t compelling or stimulating, to be sure, but in my mind it is truly an archetype of the “behavioral control” side of interaction design.

• Leave a Note (40)

A week ago, Jesse James Garret veritably bellowed the words “user experience designer” in his plenary address at this year’s IA Summit in Memphis, attempting to create some common ground between the information architects and interaction designers in the room and across the industry. In a strong and deeply-felt speech, he admonished the community (-ies?) for their factionalism, but in doing so may have helped stoke some controversy around the very term — user experience — he thought would help bring unity and focus.

I, for one, have called what I do “user experience design” for a decade. In 1999, working at Rare Medium before starting up Behavior, all of the visual designers, information architects, and HTML and Flash technologists were grouped in the UXD department, thanks, I suspect, to the vision of our creative director Gong Szeto. In 2003, I went to speak at my first IA Summit, serving on a panel entitled “User Experience and IA“, with no less than Peter Morville, Terry Swack, Jess McMullin, and moderated by… Jesse James Garret. The panel generated a lot of discussion, mostly about the meaning of “user experience” itself.

After this year’s summit, this conversation has sparked up yet again, most notably on the IxDA mailing list. I shared my own thoughts on Jesse’s argument there, and reproduce them here:

I found nothing whatsoever to disagree with in Jesse’s plenary. In fact, it all seemed obvious and non-controversial. Of course, it was neither. :-(

I hope that folks don’t see Jesse’s declaration as being synonymous with some kind of death of IA or IxD or whatever. He’s not asking anyone to change what they do, but merely to recognize that we are all involved in a broad but very special community of practice. “UX” describes it in a way that includes lots of people who should be working together more closely than it seems we are.

From day one at Behavior we’ve used the term “user experience” to describe everything we do — including visual design, sound design, and copywriting, for example. It’s enabled everyone on the team to feel like we share the responsibility for an important result: a compelling user experience.

On the other hand, we rarely actually use the word. It’s our ambient expertise, it’s the air we breathe. So ubiquitous and appropriate for describing the things it is that it’s almost not worth mentioning except when trying to distinguish it from something it is not.

Which is, of course, why humans have terminologies in the first place. We like the term UX because it doesn’t draw a line between IA and IxD and visual design and writing, but it does draw a line between all of those things and, say, database design, marketing, fashion design, and basket-weaving. Which we often have to do when, for example, we are pitching our services to clients who need to understand how we fit in to their needs.

It’s useful when discussing the strategies behind businesses making products, for whom executives need to distribute dollars between different areas — having a UX budget that’s distinct from a tech or marketing budget helps strategize how a product can succeed or fail.

And as said already, it’s useful when creating communities of practice: A UX conference, or a UX track at a conference, is a sensible way of organizing speakers and panels. Narrowing it down to IA or IxD (or writing or sound or video) might make sense if there are enough sessions narrowly focused on those areas, but I’ve found that most practitioners find it difficult to talk about any of these without talking about the others. It happens, and it’s a good thing that it happens, but it’s also a good thing that we blur the lines and wander across the borders.

In short: No need to throw down any walls here. Just open some gates.

Then, over this past weekend, I noticed David Gray from Xplane tossed his hat into the fray, this time on Twitter. An interesting Twitter-debate ensued (”askrom” is me):

davegray: #ux = hUman eXperience

billder: RT @davegray: #ux = hUman eXperience

askrom: @billder @davegray If we don’t say “user” then we’re not talking about interactivity. hUman eXperience would then include books, movies …

askrom: … It defeats the purpose of carving out an area of practice when it’s defined to include everything under the sun.

ggertz: @askrom @billder @davegray I define UX as an aesthetic not just an area of practice.So in tht sense it does involve everything under the sun

davegray: @askrom people don’t interact with books?

ggertz: @davegray <<

apolaine: @davegray People don’t interact with books in the sense of interactive media, no. They interact on a psychological level of course, but …

askrom: @davegray Sure. And people also interact with movies and sculptures. And to the extent that they do, we can certainly call them “users”.

askrom: @davegray I firmly beleive that interaction design has been with us for millenia, but it’s the concept/focus on “use” that’s especially new.

askrom: @davegray Only someone living in an era of pervasive machines — and their users — would consider a book something that can be “used”.

davegray: @askrom isn’t that the nature of design? Don’t all designers design interactions and human experiences? Why not just say “designer?”

askrom: @davegray I would agree, but realistically “design” includes perfectly valid but passive forms like wallpaper patterns and curtain fringes.

askrom: @davegray … and yet, at some level, even wallpaper has an experiential impact, too. Hmmmm…

mediajunkie: sorry, guys, but “human” is not any sexier (or, ironically, more humane) than “user.” human is a sci-fi nerd word in most ears

askrom: @mediajunkie Right. And some of the best UX designers (Temple Grandin) don’t design for humans at all!

davegray: @askrom Utility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. defined by the context not the designer. I am losing your point.

askrom: @davegray Heh, I lost my point, too. I’m articulating both sides now. My core point, still, is that thinking about “users” has unleashed a..

askrom: @davegray … new way of designing things and a new way of thinking about design. Real utility is, indeed, a new kind of beauty.

davegray: @askrom if #ux designers only design things that can be used in a mechanistic sense, that seems needlessly limiting

askrom: @davegray Hmm. Can you clarify a “use” that is not mechanistic? Trying to wrap my head around that one.

davegray: @askrom nice. “utility has unleashed a new kind of beauty” I like that thought. I feel that way about clarity.

akacolleen: @davegray “I feel that way about clarity.” Now, I like *that* thought. #editorsforclarity

cchastain: @davegray @askrom How about: an exp that has a “user” must also have a function that requires interaction?

cchastain: Use, therefore, is not limited to pure utility….and it could include museum spaces, conferences, and, yes books.

askrom: @cchastain “requires” or merely “invites” interaction?

cchastain: @askrom Ah…invites, I think. That sounds much better. :-)

davegray: @askrom LOL just reading thru some of these tweets. I like the sound of “Wallpaper Experience Designer” :)

zakiwarfel: @askrom but do we really need to worry about being confused with someone who designs wallpapers? Really?

The conversation continued later in the day and into the night, and was similarly transcribed by Steve “Doc” Baty. Continue the thread there…

• Leave a Note (5)