Ten-Year Reflections

Is Personalization Always Dangerous?

Two days after recommending ‘personalization’ to a client’s site that wasn’t making use of user viewing history, I watched Eli Pariser’s TED talk about the filter bubble. He explains how personalization online—Google, Facebook, etc.— is dangerously limiting our world view.  I panicked, thinking I had subconsciously sipped the personalization potion. After all, much user interview analysis seemed to suggest that personalized suggestions—those that were taking into account viewing history—would enhance the already positive experience these users were having. For this client, I had assumed suggestions of relevant learning topics would be beneficial to their users. Am I wrong? I wonder, where do we draw the line between personalization that is harmless or helpful to our UX and that which skews our world view?

Giving Great Talks: A Mashup

ZDNet Writes an Article About Our iPad Article for UX Magazine

The guys over at ZDNet who cover all things Mac-related have written up a quick summary of our recent comparison of mobile interaction with the Square payment system between the iPad and iPhone. Cool to see this article get so many comments and shout-outs. Both links below:

Design, UX, and Literature

Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling writes a piece for ACM’s Interactions magazine about the relationship between design and literature.

Some thoughts on The Cloud and ownership

Stop Bullshit Research in Five Easy Steps

Anyone in the UX field who’s worked for a few companies will recognize a type of moderated research that gives off a reek of inauthenticity. Tell me if this sounds familiar: one moderator and six users sit around a table in a converted meeting room. The moderator tells the users, each of whom have been prescheduled and screened through a recruiting agency, to go to a prototype website and pretend they’re looking for a 20 GB googlydooter, or whatever. The users go into their cubicles, where the prototype is brought up on six identical, factory-default computers. Some of the users finish in five minutes, some don’t finish at all, but everyone gets exactly fifteen minutes to finish their task. (The early finishers drum their fingers in boredom, waiting for the moderator to call time.) Finally, the moderator brings up a projection of the prototype, and asks the users to voice their opinions, one-at-a-time, keeping their responses brief, to give everyone time to speak. The process lasts about 1-2 hours, making everyone kind of tired. The participants are paid their incentives, and the moderator drives home, wiping bitter tears from his eyes as he pulls into his driveway.

How could that possibly have been useful? he thinks to himself. What has my life come to?

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Quiz time!

What do expectant mothers have to do with Aunt Jean’s plans for her family vacation on a cruise?

Users Suck

I’m not sure if Todd Wilken’s blog post on Why usability is a path to failure at the adaptive path blog was just venting, or maybe even going for the “99% Something Inflammatory” blog topic methodology, but I took Todd to mean what he said, and I kind of dug it. Here’s why. For years I’ve been noticing that products with a lot of soul or strong vision don’t seem to need usability at all. Big Steve’s stuff of course, and even MySpace before it became dead to me and I deleted my account, seemed to rise above the need for any usability in the traditional sense. But products without a lot of soul, or a vision that’s naturally diluted by large numbers of stakeholders, seem to need usability hella bad. So in honor of products and services that are lucky enough to fall into the first camp, I’ve made this t shirt for Todd that you can order from Zazzle and the rest of us to wear to our next design research meeting for a product. For some unkown reason, the inspiration for this t shirt came from Jeff Veen’s awesome bet combined with that recent Entourage episode.