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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As I was subtly hinting at in my last couple of posts, I have changed my Windowy ways. I have switched (back) to Mac. Finally.

This is the first in an ad hoc series of articles documenting my experiences with this transition, looking at it from many perspectives: personal and cultural observations, usability and user experience design inspirations, and technology and business considerations. And, not least of all, I hope that it will also serve as my formal introduction to the Mac community that I have for many years only been able to observe from the outside.

How I Became a Windows Addict

After college, when I landed my first real multimedia-industry job in the early ’90s, I was required to use Windows (version 3.11) as my day-to-day work machine. I had never used Windows before — in fact, I’d never even seen Windows before. I instantly found it awkward to use, and I immediately recognized it to be a lower-quality imitation of the Mac OS. Still, it wasn’t long before I owned a Windows PC at home.

Little did I know that this would be the beginning of a thirteen-year relationship with Microsoft Windows.

Earlier in my life, between the ages of twelve and twenty-three, my computer platforms were very diverse, including the Apple II, the TRS-80, the TI-99/4a, and the only computer I actually owned myself before the age of twenty-five, the Commodore 64. My father had a Mac SE, and I experimented with Hypercard on it in High School. Later, as I made my way through art school at Cooper Union, the professional platforms of the Mac and the Commodore Amiga became my tools of choice.

At college, I focused on conceptual installation and sculpture. I didn’t take any design courses whatsoever. I was cutting steel and casting plastic and reading about Marcel Duchamp, not learning how to use Photoshop or manage Suitcases. As a result, my exposure to the Macintosh was unusually light compared to that of most people who would become design professionals. What’s worse, back in the early 90’s Cooper Union’s design department owned all of the art school’s Macs, and they were very strict about who could use them. For several years you were literally not permitted to use the computers in the Mac Lab until you had completed several prerequisite courses in setting movable type in a medieval letterpress! Very old school policy, one that pretty much put the Mac out of reach for me.

And then Windows entered my life.

In all the intervening time, over a dozen different computers, four jobs, and starting my own company, I never went back to Mac. I just kept renewing my vows with Windows. Has it really been thirteen years? It’s hard for me to even believe it.

Why I Waited So Long to Switch

Computer ownership involves a lot of inertia, a comfort with the status quo that’s hard to overcome. You become invested both in your own expertise and in the tools you own. In my case, I became a bona fide Windows “power user”, and a pretty decent Windows system administrator to boot, and I accumulated an extensive collection of PC components and peripherals, piled up in drawers and toolboxes all around my home office.

My reasons for sticking with Windows for thirteen years are pretty simple:

Games: My career began as a computer game designer. Naturally I was also a player. And all of the best and most innovative games in the mid-90’s were PC-based (this was in the console “dark ages”, the lull between the NES and Playstation eras). Desktop PCs were miles ahead of everything else, and the Macintosh was barely on the radar at all. One can only play so much Sim City, after all. From the classic graphic adventure games from LucasArts, to the great isometric sims and strategy games from Warcraft to Civilization, to the thrilling genesis of the first person genre with Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal, I was up to my knees in pixilated blood thanks to the smokin’ PC platform. The Macintosh offered me nothing.

Now, of course, the Mac has plenty of games available for it. And honestly I have less interest in games than I did five or ten years ago. And the best gaming, of course, is on the Nintendo Wii anyway.

Tinkering: One of the things I liked most about PCs was how easy and cheap it was to open them up and experiment with the hardware guts, and how much software there was for further mucking around. It wasas if I owned a fancy sports car that I could trick out in the garage every weekend. Over the years, I’ve built dozens of PC computers from scratch, scavenging parts from older computers, discount stores, and even from the trash. I’ve also accumulated a lot of software: apps, utilities, hacks, tweaks. But in the last couple of years, I have retired from my hobby of tinkering with computers. The first step was realizing that the amount of money I save by building a PC from scratch was not worth the hundreds of hours I’d invariably spend dealing with hardware incompatibilities, OS glitches, and assorted Windows and PC bullshit.

At some point I decided that I should be using my computer for things besides playing with my computer. Getting a Mac is definitely part of this philosophy.

Cost: In 1997, before the iMac came out, I could build three smokin’ Windows workstations for the price of a single low-end Mac. Even after the low-priced iMac came out, I really never saw the Mac as an affordable computer given my budget and salary at the time.

I’ll be frank here: The Macintosh has always been a luxury product, targeted at the higher ends of the American economic class scale. And even now that Apple’s pricing gets comparatively lower and lower, there are still millions of people who cannot justify the cost of a Mac when a powerful new Windows machine can still be had for half the price. It’s a Wal-Mart mentality, making significant sacrifices on style and even quality in favor of price, but it’s an approach that I can hardly begrudge millions of Americans for taking when the other option is economically impossible.

As much disdain as I have for the Windows PC platform, I will not stoop to berating people just because they cannot afford a fancy Macintosh computer. I’ve been there, and I know how it feels.

Which brings me to probably another reason lots of Windows users resent the Mac: It’s a class thing. For a long time, I didn’t want to identify with style-conscious and wealthy computer buyers who were willing to pay twice as much for something just because it carried a certain cachet. Conversely, there’s a certain admirable asceticism to using a PC, like wearing a hairshirt. I’ve gotten over it.

Visio, Project, and Outlook: At various stages of my career, Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio have been the centers of my professional computing life. As a project manager, MS Project is the essential project planning tool in the business world, and as an information architect, Visio has always been the industry standard. And Outlook has always been my dashboard for my business PIM needs. I am an expert power user of all three of these programs, and all three are only available on Windows.

The emergence of windows-compatible Intel Macs have made all of this obsolete, since now Mac owners can run Windows on the same machine via Boot Camp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion. In a pinch, I can always run these apps in a Windows partition on an Apple machine.

But more importantly, I have come to have faith in the emergence of alternative, non-MS tools for every single application MS currently has a stranglehold on. Tools that are not only just as functional as the MS products they seek to replace, but that are already achieving an astonishing amount of adoption momentum. People are using non-MS apps more and more every day, including, surprisingly, many people within our enterprise-level clients. OmniGraffle is fast becoming the preferred alternative to Visio among my fellow information architects, for example, and tools such as Merlin and are viable MS Project replacements.

But more generally, tools that go beyond the desktop and aren’t mere feature-by-feature replacements. Google Spreadsheets, for example, is superior to Excel for much of my spreadsheeting needs: I can share it over the internet, it saves versions automatically, and it’s far easier to use than Excel. 37Signals‘ Basecamp and Backpack do a lot of things that no project management or PIM software does. Google, Yahoo!, AIM, Twitter, and Wordpress comprise a great deal of my day-to-day computing tools. None of these are anything like what Microsoft is developing for the desktop.

Down with the People: Finally, since I am a web user experience designer, it’s important that the tools I use allow me to understand and empathize with the tools my end users are using. Getting a Mac will surely decrease this empathy, but you know what? My Windows usage is so idiosyncratic that this empathy is probably minimal. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but again, I’ve gotten over this reason, too.

Why I am Switching

So clearly there are very few good reasons for me to stay with Windows, besides pure inertia. So why should I upend my entire computer life and adopt a whole new platform? That’s for next time, Why I am Switching: What I Expect and What I Fear.

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I’m pretty well-known among my friends and peers to be a gadget geek. But over the last 5 years or so, my gadget-acquisition pace has crawled to a near standstill. Most of the electronic hardware gadgets I’ve been using lately are actually pretty ancient:

1. Mobile Phone: 2002
2. iPod (3G): 2003
3. Canon PowerShot Digital Camera: 2003
4. Alienware Desktop PC at Work: 2002
5. HP Desktop PC at Home: 2002
6. Sony PictureBook Subnotebook PC: 1999

Even my Sony headphones go back to at least 1997, and the racing bike I ride today uses the same steel Olmo frame I’ve owned since 1988 when I was in high school.

People often develop an almost emotional attachment to their everyday hardware. Sometimes people even cry when they have to finally give up on a device they love. But in my case it was simply inertia. I didn’t have the time or inclination to upgrade or replace anything.

Until now. Yes, these (admittedly crappy) photos were taken with my new iPhone. I can now strike numbers 1 and 2 from the above list, and to a large extent number 3 and number 6, too. Quoting AG, the iPhone is, like the iPod, a “gateway drug”. It is the last straw, and it has now driven me to replace everything else in that list with Apple products.

It’s finally happened.

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In a recent interview, Michael Beirut noted that wine labels are one of the purest branding experiences: All wine bottles contain the same basic product (wine), so if you don’t know anything about a particular bottle of wine the graphic design of the label and the shape of the bottle are quite often the only methods you have (besides whatever knowledge you might have of the intricate and faceted namespace of wine metadata) to decide whether or not you should buy that Burgundy.

In other words, packaging is a fundamental part of the overall customer experience (aka the user experience). Whether contemplating, holding, carrying, opening, or unpacking a product, it’s “packaging” is everything between (a) the time the customer didn’t even know they wanted it to (b) the first moment actually using what they’ve bought.

And the best (and worst) practices of physical product packaging are, I think, applicable to the digital/virtual product user experience, too.

Here’s an example from the physical world: The other night I opened a bottle of Rioja with a rather unorthodox cork, and I was reminded again of just how much the experience of merely opening a product is one of the most powerful opportunities available to a user experience designer.

The Rioja’s actual cork was perfectly traditional and conventional, but the plastic seal enveloping it so closely hugged the bottle’s lip, and was made of such stiff, thick plastic, that it took me several profanity-laden minutes to finally wrestle the plastic seal from the cork. The whole time my excitement about tasting this new wine turned into resentment towards the brand. A perfectly good branding opportunity utterly ruined by thoughtless user experience design.

Hostile Packaging

Sometimes packaging goes from mere thoughtlessness to downright hostility towards the customer. The day after the Rioja nightmare, I purchased a new USB PCI card for my computer, and was again confronted with a packaging nightmare.

Yes, it’s one of those dreaded clamshell blister packs deliberately designed, it seems, to slice customers’ hands open. I at first took the product here just to show another familiar example of user-unfriendly packaging. But then I started opening it and the example proved itself spectacularly. I tried scissors and an X-acto knife before I finally had to grab a powerful box cutter to cut through the steel-like plastic.

Look, I’m fairly skilled with my hands. I majored in sculpture in college, for crying out loud. How in the world do people without my kind of skills, and presumably without the necessary cutlery tools, actually open these packages without cutting themselves in the process?

Turns out the answer to that question is moot: I cut my finger opening the package — which suggests to me that a very large percentage of other customers must do the same. Is this possible? Can a brand survive when their products spill their customers’ blood? Apparently so, since this packaging is still in wide use. But do I have anything positive to say about these brands? Nope.

In fact, it’s probably no coincidence that I cannot even name any brand whose products come in this style of packages. If holding and opening a new product is a branding moment, shouldn’t opening that product be an opportunity for me to feel good about the brand? Instead of me writing them off as no-name, second-tier junk?

Compare these packaging nightmares/experiences to (naturally) any Apple product, where the box is easy to open, the first exposure to the item itself feels like a revelation, and most importantly the product itself can be touched and admired within seconds.

There’s even a word for this: unboxing. Technology review sites like Engadget and Gizmodo make sure to specifically evaluate the unboxing experience as part of their overall product reviews. In fact, many consumers are so enamored by the unboxing experience of their products that they have created web communities centered around sharing their unboxing experiences with the world, often in obsessive compulsive detail.

Opening the Software Bottle

It’s easy to imagine how these very different modes of thinking about the hardware customer experience translates into interactive and software user experience design. There are just as many risks to absolutely ruin your customer’s experience through careless design, and there are just as many opportunities to enhance the experience, and your brand, through deliberate positive experience designs.

• Is the product easy to install?
• Is the sign-up or registration process easy?
• Does the setup process actually make you excited to start using the product?
• How quickly can you actually start using the product in your life?
• What risks must you take (with your time and your privacy) to get set up? Does the setup process feel intrusive on your privacy or your finances?
• How quickly can you complete your first intended task (e.g., create your first document or make your first phone call)?

Think of your next interactive user experience design as analogous to designing a piece of hardware that comes in a box — and then imagine that you have the power to design the box.

Or imagine that your web site is a bottle of wine, and that the first user’s visit is like uncorking the bottle: Now design the bottle.

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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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