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?

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What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made.

A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, from the addictive TV fan site Lostpedia to the new and astoundingly-awesome online typography reference Typedia, Wikipedia is still the mother of all wikis. Wikipedia has so thoroughly conquered our mental model of what an information reference is supposed to be that its most salient concept (social editing) has become inseparable from its fundamental purpose (complete information).

(In fact, I’ve started to notice people using the wordlet “pedia”, rather than “wiki”, to indicate “socially-powered content”. It seems that, for some people, a “wiki” and a “pedia” are the same thing, which to me is tantamount to thinking the “hi” in “hijack” means “airplane”, justifying “carjack” as a legitimate word.)

The “pedia” in Wikipedia is a nod to the “encyclopedia”. The wikipedia, we are supposed to infer, is an encyclopedia powered by a wiki. It’s beyond encyclo, it’s wiki!

The word encyclopedia means “complete or well-rounded” (i.e., encyclo) + “knowledge or learning” (i.e., pedia). So, interpreted one way, “Wikipedia” can mean “People getting together to record knowledge”, which of course is exactly what Wikipedia is.

But Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales could just as well have called it “Encyclowiki”, meaning “people getting together to describe everything”, which in many ways is what Wikipedia, in its blossoming omniscience, has ultimately and more resonantly become.

For it is no longer impressive, at least to me, that Wikipedia is community-generated. Big deal, I get it, I agree with it. I buy into the Here Comes Everybody premise. I take the wisdom of crowds for granted. Like millions of others, I am thoroughly sold on Wikipedia, especially after seeing topics I thought I knew everything about described in informative, passionate, and sometimes astonishing detail. It’s the content that draws me, not the phenomenon that caused the content to get there (if anything, the phenomenon has, and continues to be, Wikipedia’s biggest perceived weakness).

This is why I am glad that Typedia is Typedia and not Wikitype or Typewiki. Typedia is, above all, a compendium of knowledge about type. The fact that it is socially-powered is something we can and should take for granted (and, of course, participate in). This kind of comprehensive one-stop collection of esoteric knowledge simply isn’t going to happen, ever, without social participation.

Basically, we’re all wiki now. We already work together. It’s the pedia part, the knowledge itself, we’ll always be striving for.

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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…

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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.

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When it comes to social media, it is easy to be dazzled by big numbers and strong opinions. But often what is really needed isn’t a comprehensive strategy with metrics and targets, but a charming and intelligent human personality.

The majority of people who today call themselves social media experts, even the legitimate ones who actually know what they are doing, were complete social media newbies only a couple of years ago. Some very likely took the plunge only a few months ago.

I’ve seen people who didn’t have a Facebook page, people who’d skeptically asked “What the hell is this Twitter crap?”, jump in head first and, within a few months, become absolute masters of social media with tens of thousands of connections and followers and influence over some of the biggest names in their field. I’ve seen people in their teens and in their 60s become social media virtuosos, at least within the fields they really know and love, some of them virtually overnight.

I also know hundreds of people who have lots of friends on Twitter, who regularly blog and speak about social media, and who know all about the different companies, people, and technologies in the social media space, but who would be absolute freaking disasters if they had to put those skills to the service of a brand or company. I know this because they have volatile personalities, crummy writing skills and sloppy grammar, glaring personal issues, or are just ignorant of important subject matter. But with thousands of friends and immense popularity across lots of social media.

In other words, jerks, blowhards, and idiots are perfectly capable of mastering the logistics and technologies of social media, but do you really want them managing your social media?

There is undoubtedly a kind of social media skill that has nothing whatsoever to do with expertise with social media tools and technologies, but which all great social media success stories have in spades. Social media tools and technologies can be learned in a matter of days or weeks by the right people as long as they have other important skills: A passion for the product or the field they are working for, for example, is essential. A great personality. Great interpersonal communication skills. A sense of dignity and balance, and political sensitivity. Empathy.

In fact, this traditional stuff is WAY more important than having any experience whatsoever with social media. A so-called social media expert with thousands of hours of experience managing and building social networks and products could easily ruin your social media strategy simply by being a bad cultural fit with your audience and customers. And a total newbie — a kid from the mailroom, a user interface designer, or maybe the CEO herself — might become your company’s social media rainmaker simply because they completely understand your audience and believe in your product.

Charm can be bought, and it can be taught. But usually it’s simply a matter of finding it and letting shine.

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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.

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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.

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Two weeks ago, BusinessWeek’s next Design and Innovation blog asked for my thoughts on this month’s Facebook home page redesign, as a kind of follow-up to my thoughts in those same virtual pages a year ago.

I was asked to opine on the new design without having viewed the actual live site, which was launching the following week. This seemed reasonable to me at the time given that the site’s new features were announced, illustrated, and widely-known ahead of time (via a very comprehensive home page preview announcement) to anyone who was paying attention to that kind of thing.

I was really excited about the real-time feed user experience described in the home page preview. My exact words:

The new FB real-time home page is pretty cool, actually… it’s crossing the line between the old-fashioned page-based web and the live experience of television and broadcast media. In this case, it’s broadcasting from friends to friends — which it always was, of course, but now it’s more visceral and more real. I think people will love it. They’ll be glued to their screens, and will want to add more friends and applications just to increase the flow of content on their home page.

This is “Web 2.0 Complete”: When web people use the term “Web 2.0″, they mean two different things. First, they mean the social web, where *people* make (and are) the content. Second, they mean the pageless web, where web sites react dynamically and fluidly, without page reloads and refreshes. The new Facebook design combines both of these.

I thought it was kind of clever, if a little corny, of me to note that the new Facebook home page was simply conforming to some kind of basic “Web 2.0″ bandwagon orthodoxy, bringing the two flavors of Web 2.0 niftyness into one delicious treat.

But a week later when the new home page actually began to roll out and replace millions of Facebook users’ old home pages, the backlash was immediate and seething and nearly unanimous (a Facebook poll found 94% of users didn’t like the new design). Oh man was I embarrassed! To have praised a user experience so breathlessly only to have my opinion immediately contradicted by the public’s rabid scorn!

Turns out, however, that users were complaining about the new page’s lack of real-time status updates from your friends. And yet Facebook had already clearly and prominently promised that feature as part of the redesign. In fact, I based the core of my analysis of the new site on that very feature, which they had already promised to deliver. They deployed the new design with much fanfare but without real time status updates.

Betrayed! Betrayed by a press release! There I am, praising a non-existent feature. Like an idiot.

Well, happily my premature praise no longer needs to cause me so much shame: Today Facebook has announced that the real-time reporting is going to occur after all. So the BusinessWeek report won’t be such an embarrassment to me after all.

Of course, this is the second time Facebook has announced this feature before delivering anything. Fool me once…

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One of the problems faced by designers trying to integrate their work with most software development processes, even (or possibly especially) with Agile development, is that the literature makes no distinction between software development and software design, or at least no distinction that makes any sense to dedicated user experience designers.

The common complaint among interaction designers working with Agile is that, with some important exceptions, the design of the “user interface” is seen as a cosmetic final stage in the overall software development process. The fundamental designing of the software itself, however — the interactions, the mental models, the metaphors and behaviors — is built-in to the overall Agile process, woven in with with and indistinguishable from the software architecture and code development.

In Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto, originally delivered in 1990 and included in Terry Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software (1996), it’s clear that this ambiguity has deep roots:

Software design is not the same as user interface design.

The overall design of a program is to be clearly distinguished from the design of its user interface. If a user interface is designed after the fact, that is like designing an automobile’s dashboard after the engine, chassis, and all other components and functions are specified. The separation of the user interface from the overall design process fundamentally disenfranchises designers at the expense of programmers and relegates them to the status of second-class citizens.

The software designer is concerned primarily with the overall conception of the product. Dan Bricklin’s invention of the electronic spreadsheet is one of the crowning achievements of software design. It is the metaphor of the spreadsheet itself, its tableau of rows and columns with their precisely interrelated labels, numbers, and formulas—rather than the user interface of VisiCalc—for which he will be remembered. The look and feel of a product is but one part of its design.

On my first read, the whole terminology of this felt alien to me. Is the paper spreadsheet metaphor not the “user interface design”? It seems “look and feel” is being equated with “user interface” here, but I think he’s implying that what I consider the user interface is, in fact, the software itself. I suppose this is a more glorified definition of the word “software” than what I am accustomed to, one in which the software design included the mental model of the user’s approach to the software.

On my second read, though, it became clear that Kapor is in fact laying the early groundwork for what we now call interaction design. He still sees it as closely bound with programming, although he is clear that it’s not the same thing. He is also working in a climate where user experiences are far simpler than they are now — graphic capabilities were primitive, network interactions were almost non-existent, and interfraces had few modes, even few features. Today, with the high level of complexity of both computer code and user interfaces, it’s easier to consider the two challenges (user experience and code) separately — or even better giving primacy to the user interface — the part that people actually see and use.

Design and Technology

It’s obviously important that interaction designers are well-versed in what the technologies they are designing for can actually do. I wonder, however, what interaction designers today would think of the degree of technical expertise Kapor requires of designers:

Technology courses for the student designer should deal with the principles and methods of computer program construction. Topics would include computer systems architecture, microprocessor architectures, operating systems, network communications, data structures and algorithms, databases, distributed computing, programming environments, and object-oriented development methodologies.

Designers must have a solid working knowledge of at least one modern programming language (C or Pascal) in addition to exposure to a wide variety of languages and tools, including Forth and Lisp.

In preparing the syllabus for my upcoming course this fall at SVA, I am quite certain that I don’t share Kapor’s technical requirements for a software design education, neither specifically (Forth?) or generally. Instead, I think a firm grounding in a broad range of designed experiences far outweighs any need for hands-on experience in the deepest challenges of technology implementation.

Yes, some designers will delve deep into technology, being hands-on coders and fabricators of interactive artifacts. In fact, some great interaction designers already spend most of their days thinking of themselves primarily as technologists. Others, however, will focus on the design parts of interaction design. These people will most often work closely with other individuals and teams to implement their designs.

In short, great design will come from great designers, and great technologists will make those designs happen. Sometimes these skills will be found the same person, but increasingly not. An interaction design education should support both models, of course.

Interfaces and Software

Despite my difference with Kapor’s admonition, I still think that in a way we are coming full circle. The recently-articulated idea that the “interface is the spec“, or even “the interface is the product“, isn’t so different from Kapor’s thinking. The metaphors, mental models, and processes that users experience using the software are, in both cases, the most definitive and salient qualities of the “design” of the software (not, as many software development processes presume, the architecture of the code or the technical features that happen under the hood).
The important thing that Kapor left out, however, is that the “user interface” — the stuff that comes between human beings and cold hard technology –  should be thought of as including graphic design as well as the underlying conceptual models of the interactive experience he rightly praises. In fact, the “user interface” concept should also include the software’s motion graphics, its sound and music, the copywriting, voice and personality, the community that builds around the product, and so many other qualities of software design that, frankly, had not really come to maturity yet in 1990.

We are only recently starting to appreciate the idea that interaction design is really about the intersection of the behaviors of systems and people (a favorite word of mine for obvious reasons). The explosion of new and innovative software experiences brought on since 1990 by the World Wide Web and console video games, I think, has fundamentally changed our understanding of what software can be.

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The Innocent Eye, 1981 Mark Tansey

In the web design consulting business, there’s always been an unspoken assumption that our clients just don’t get the web. I’m sure this is true with many other consulting businesses, but for web consultants this has been particularly true.

And it’s easy to see why: Until recently, it actually was kind of true. Clients used to hire web designers and developers to do something they had no clue how to do themselves. Sometimes they were even desperate, lost in the woods.

Until about 1999 or so, almost all web design projects started from scratch. If someone hired you to build a web site, it was likely that almost nobody on the client side had ever built a web site before. And the few individuals who did have any experience often operated in a culture of ignorance and inexperience, requiring a tangible dumbing-down of the whole client-vendor relationship. Consultants with a few site launches under their belts would have to spend a lot of time explaining to their clients some very basic concepts about the Internet and HTML, or were forced to repeatedly illustrate how the client’s ideas were impossible to implement or would create impossible user experiences.

On the other hand they could also get away with some blatant snake-oil salesmanship and techno razzle-dazzle, and often didn’t have their work closely scrutinized by their clients. God knows how many pre-dotcom-bust web consultancies built thriving businesses whose revenues were possible only by virtue of this expertise disparity.

But around the end of the last decade things started to change. Site designs became site redesigns. One-off static web sites became ongoing dynamic web businesses. Experienced consultants jumped the rails and joined client teams. Clients built up their own internal competencies in all areas of web site strategy and implementation: design, technology, usability, marketing.

By the early 2000s, web services vendors would frequently encounter clients who had more experience working with the web than they did. Now it’s an everyday occurrence.

Today’s clients know as much as we do.* It’s now hard to find a person responsible for a company’s internet strategy who hasn’t been making web sites in one way or another for a decade or more. Sure there is the occasional outlier, people who have landed or kept their jobs despite manifest technological incompetence, but no more so than in any other corporate arenas.

And yet I still regularly hear designers and consultants stereotyping their clients as if it were still 1999, as if they were still dealing with people who had never bought a book online and don’t know how search engines work, much less joined a social network or had their own blog. This is just wrong. This kind of attitude doesn’t help you as a consultant, nor does it help designers and consultancies as a whole. If this sounds like you, I suggest you drop it. You’re making your clients mad and probably coming across as more than a little condescending.

[* Perhaps you noticed the asterisk above. I want to be clear that I am not implying that consultants are irrelevant, or that our clients don’t need us anymore. Naturally clients hire designers precisely because we know things they don’t, because we have experiences, talents, skills, and competencies they lack. And there are huge swaths of corporate culture who are still clueless. It’s our job to be at least one step ahead of our clients (and our peers for that matter, to think about and tackle problems with an eye towards learning lessons that can apply to future challenges and future clients. It’s our job to bring fresh new ideas to our clients. That much has not changed and should not change.

My point, really, is that by assuming your clients are profoundly ignorant about technology and design, you are missing a chance to collaborate with people who may be your peers in a lot of ways, people who often know their own businesses and objectives extremely well. You are missing a chance for a truly harmonious relationship where client and designer bounce ideas off each other to produce greater results than the designer, no matter how visionary they are, could have accomplished on his or her own.]

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