For more than ten years, Bolt | Peters has worked with our clients (plus a robot and clay dinosaurs) to improve the design of their sites, apps, devices, video games, and cars. We did that with 238 projects, 24 talks, 18 articles, 11 events, 1 book, 19 weird videos, and 1 app.
But the time has come for our next adventure — at Facebook. The consulting practice of Bolt | Peters will be closing operations on June 22nd, 2012.
While we’ll miss working with our amazing clients, we’re stoked about Facebook’s commitment to user experience, and the design team is a critical part of this.
What about ethnio?
Last week we announced that after five years of growth, ethnio deserved to be its own company. That has not changed. Ethnio remains committed to supporting its customers with real-time research recruiting and more. We know Ethnio is in good hands with some of the people who have worked on it for years at the helm. I will no longer be working there, but will retain ownership. You can find out more about the new team at ethnio and who will be running it by following @ethnio or watching their blog.
User Research Friday and 1197
I’m thrilled to say that our friends at User Interface Engineering will be taking over User Research Friday. They pretty much rule at events. URF lives on. And the fine folks at the New York Soho Gallery for Digital Art will be taking over our mobile photography conference, 1197. Basically, both our product and the events that we’ve enjoyed putting on will live on after Bolt | Peters closes up shop.
Feel free to get in touch with us with any questions, and you can keep up with all of us individually here. Our VP, Cyd Harrell, deserves 100% of the credit for running the consulting side of the business for the past six years. She rules. Thank you, Cyd. And a huge thanks to my co-founder Craig Peters, who has been a friend and advisor for years. But especially, all the team at Bolt | Peters past and present that I’ve had the pleasure of working with – you’ve made our success possible. Thank you guys.
Well. It’s been our privilege to be a part of the the interaction design and UX community as a consulting firm since January, 2002, and we plan to continue to work in that community as part of Facebook. I want to mention that this decision did not come lightly. Our clients, colleagues, team, and advisors are simply the best. They are our partners. They are our friends. And we sincerely thank you.
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?
If I search Egypt, as Pariser reveals, I get a different result than you do, based on 57 signals that Google uses to personalize your search results. The biggest issue, he suggests, is that we don’t see what is being filtered out. It’s not as though certain results are ‘grayed out’ or off to the side. We just flat out see a selective list. Now, I want some information filtered the same for everyone – like the news, for example. It is disturbing to think I could be viewing news online and only see travel stories while my neighbor sees stories about riots when we both search for ‘Egypt.’ But, is there information that is actually beneficial to personalize? If I go on Netflix, YouTube, Epicurious, Yelp or Amazon do I want to see the same results as my neighbors? What’s in my best interest? Or what’s in the collective best interest? Is there a metric that we can use that helps us figure out when personalization is harmless and when we should stay away?
I had the privilege of Jared Spool attending and critiquing some of my recent talks, and in preparation for a UIE webinar I’m giving, he took time to rip me apart give me some awesome feedback. His advice reminded me of notes I took almost ten years ago at an Edward Tufte seminar about giving great talks, and so the next logical step was to make old-timey boxing photos of them both and write a mashup of their talking tips. RIGHT? Both Jared Spool and Edward Tufte are known to be kick-ass speakers in the technology field – Tufte is all up in the freaking white house, and Jared speaks roughly 400 days a year around the world. I think we can learn a lot from their advice, and despite the artificial conflict introduced with boxing pictures, their tips are mostly complimentary.
Tufte would simply like everyone who gives a talk to be ready on-time and finish early. Simple right? He thinks nobody ever complained at having an extra few minutes for questions at the end. He also makes the point that we have a tendency to dumb down information too much, and feels that this is disrespectful to the audience. He says that just because people show up for your talk, they are not all of a sudden stupid. So speak to them like you would a trusted colleague, and finish a few minutes early. You’ll leave people feeling grateful and they can always come talk to you with any burning questions. This shows respect for peoples’ time, in addition to their intellect.
2. Don’t Be The “Fun Cool Guy” at The Expense of Content
Jared’s first feedback for me was that I sacrificed content in previous talks to seem fun and cool, and still did this a little in my most recent talk at Interactions ’10 in Savannah. I tend to agree, so this one is pretty straightforward. I concentrated more on creating fun slides and jokes, which meant sacrificing some focus on the serious meat of the talk. I’m sure nobody would look at this blog post here with 4000px of photos and 945 words and make the same criticism. But I would add that doing the opposite – putting your content at the expense of audience engagement – also sucks. Ever been to CHI?
3. Your Intro was Seven Minutes. Stop That.
As long as you have a somewhat established background in what you’re giving your talk about, skip the introduction and dive into the material right away. Jared timed my introduction and it came out to seven minutes. He suggested that was “way too fucking long,” and that I could have given contextual background information at the relevant parts of my talk. For example, when I mention how we did remote card sorting for Oracle, say that it took over 8 years and 200 studies to experiment with these methods. If you consider this paragraph analogous to the structure of a talk, I just nailed this very principle. Oh, and I’m Nate Bolt. This coincides almost perfectly with what Tufte calls the “Particular-General-Particular” strategy. Speaking of which…
4. Particular General Particular (PGP)
The first thing you do in your talk, before you even say hello, is to give your audience a nugget of information – something of value. Say right away that less than 5% of user research is conducted remotely, to give people an information pay-off right away. Then explain it in general. Repeat. This point is so crystal clear it’s almost ridiculous, but I dare you to remove your boring intro slides and canned spiel about who you are. It feels wrong. But it works great.
5. Reference Specific Work Examples
Jared said that the most interesting points of my talk were when I referenced research we did for Princess Cruises as a success, or Habbo Games as a failure. For Princess, we were able to recruit groups of family members to conduct research with them about their cruise-planning process, and it turned out that their behavior (emailing each other and not talking) didn’t match their description of the planning process (we all talk about it). Are you wondering about Habbo now? See what I just did there?
6. Giving a Talk Means Never Having to Apologize
Don’t call attention to the meta-structure of your talk and thus take focus away from the content. A friend of mine, Steve Dodson, calls this “editorializing” during a talk. For example, avoid the temptation to say “Sorry this slide is a little hard to understand, but I’ll explain it.” That is a huge mistake. Nobody will notice anything wrong with your slide, and if they do, let them silently judge you and keep going. For the 90% of people that didn’t notice your mistake, you will have never interrupted their experience.
7. No Telegraphing
Jared pointed out that in my most recent talk I told the audience three times that I was going to “cover this more in detail later,” and he was quick to make it clear that this was a really bad idea. It pulls the audience right out of the talk. It’s also a form of editorializing from the last point, and it starts people thinking right away about something else that will happen in the future. This means they stop paying attention to what you are currently saying because it has suddenly become less interesting and important. My tendency is to want to assure people that I’ll cover everything they might be wondering about, but the truth is if I respected my audience more I would know they have the patience to at least wait until the talk is finished to judge me. So don’t be afraid to be judged at the end of the talk, instead of during the middle.
8. It’s a Story, Stupid
If there is any possible way to construct a traditional Hero’s Journey, or Monomyth, do it. Don’t skimp on the story in your talk. Even something as mind-numbingly boring as remote user research can have a story built around it. Jared’s suggestion was to tell how we begin looking at this vast world of UX tools and methods, whittle it down to one, what successes and failures we ran into with that method, and how in the end we triumphed helping our clients build some amazing experience. I’ve since created a character named “Marv,” inspired by our stop-motion animation studio, to use in presentations:
9. Leave Something For the Q&A, Bro
If you neurotically anticipate every question your audience could possibly have, and include answers in your slides as a desperate attempt at seeming wise, there will only be silence at the end. Think about a few potential common questions about your talk, and leave room for the audience to ask those questions. You know what’s coming, and they get to ask. This is also called “Winning.”
Watch Me Fuck Up and Learn
Now for the most embarrassing part. I make almost every single one of these mistakes in my talk at the IxDA conference “Interactions” in February of 2010. It’s gut-wrenching for me to watch this and see how badly I violate most of these rules, but maybe you can learn from my mistakes. MAYBE. Got any tips of your own? Think you’re tough enough to take on Tufte and Spool with a disagreement? Drop it all in the comments.
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:
That last one is really only included as proof that this blog has sort of been eclipsed by our use of Twitter. I mean we use this so much less now. Kind of crazy. I never would have thought this, but maybe we’ll just replace this with a nice-looking summary of all our tweets.
Writers cling hard to the word, to semantics, to meaning and sensibility. Design, by contrast, is less verbal. Design is busily inventing new ways to blow itself apart. Design is taking more risks with itself than literature. That is why contemporary design feels almost up to date, while literature feels archaic and besieged.
Design and literature don’t talk together much, but design has more to offer literature at the moment than literature can offer to design. Design seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls-scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design.
My feeling is that most of what Sterling identifies as literature’s constraints—magazine word counts, typing apparatuses, readership and so on—speaks mostly to practices of publishing and disseminating fiction rather than creating and understanding it. He also speaks of language’s limitations as if they were a bad thing: in her excellent book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray makes the point that reading (as well as interaction) is as much about the reader’s “active creation of belief” as it is about the “suspension of disbelief”. In other words, the sensory and spatial completeness that writing lacks is supposed to be supplied by the reader, which makes reading an inherently challenging cognitive task.
Sterling aptly quotes the designer Charles Eames: “Design is a method of action. Literature is a method of meaning and feeling.” I more or less agree with this, but Sterling goes on to hazily suggest that the projects of design and literature (or at least science fiction) are fatally limited, and need to be scrapped in favor of some “new, more general, creative project”. Wuh? You mean like books about Twitter written in Powerpoint? Instead of thumb-twiddling about the inability of literature and design to “synthesize” and somehow anticipate the “new century’s grander narrative”, how about we just stick to the only methods that have ever improved design and fiction with any certainty: research, revision, iteration, and the occasional encounter with genius?
In the prognosticating manner of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think“, ReadWriteWeb has a piece on the future of the desktop, essentially predicting that desktops will be replaced by browsers, will all significant functions pushed out to the cloud:
Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal “home” and “workspace” — but it’s not going to live on any one device.
As we move into a world that is increasingly mobile, where users often work across several different devices in the course of their day, we need unified access to our applications and data. This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.
How soon these changes arrive also have a lot to do with location: in countries like South Korea and Japan, with higher broadband penetration, more pervasive wireless infrastructures, and more computer users who don’t own their computers (using internet cafes and kiosks instead), the cloud is both pragmatically and culturally more feasible.
I have no doubt that cloud computing is going to play a much larger role, especially as the heavy-hitting mobile platforms take hold (iPhone and Android). But especially in America, where concepts of property and proprietorship are so ingrained, some stuff is always going to be local. Take music subscription services–you might blame their failure on the lack of mobile broadband saturation, but more likely, people just want to own their music and do with it what they want. I suspect that security and privacy have much less to do with it than most people think (how much personal info do most people have on their Gmail accounts?).
The key factor in Americans’ willingness to delegate to the cloud may be money–if people buy something, they want to “own” it, even if it’s just as a file on their hard drive. (Which is why Napster’s “Have everything, own nothing” music subscription ad campaign was a catchy, but ultimately failed campaign.) If it’s ALSO available on the cloud, then all the better–but “we Americans” want to have our things, and own them too.
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?
What do expectant mothers have to do with Aunt Jean’s plans for her family vacation on a cruise?
We recently finished up a couple of fun studies where we ended up recommending that the client take a look at some websites that were from a totally different industry than their own. In the example above, we were trying to introduce methods that might heighten the anticipation of a soon-to-be cruise vacationer. Who else is super excited about an upcoming, very special event? Mothers-to-be! Baby Center has a service that will email you periodically with cute updates about how many toes your little one now has, or reminders to pick out nursery paint & furniture. We thought a similar style of email to cruisers would be fun and useful for them to receive- just little notes with prompts of what to pack, how to plan for their shore excursions, etc.
We also pointed our car insurance clients towards an unexpected source when we brought up the Anthropologie website during a recent presentation. We liked the one-page checkout approach that Anthropologie uses, and thought having all the info laid out on a single page might work well for users trying to complete their car insurance purchase. It didn’t hurt that the ladies in the room were psyched to check out the threads for sale during the process.
Since we have expertise across different fields from working with a bunch of diverse clients, it’s been hard not to notice some similarities between them, and we’ve found our clients responded well to these suggestions. It gets them thinking outside the box, sparking discussion, and bringing in ideas that they might never have encountered from just exploring their competitor sites. Anybody else have any positive (or negative) experience in sharing ideas from completely different industries as a possible example for clients to generate ideas from? We’d love to hear ‘em!
I’m not sure if Todd Wilken’s blog post on Why usability is a path to failureat 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.
3. Your Intro was Seven Minutes. Stop That.
5. Reference Specific Work Examples
6. Giving a Talk Means Never Having to Apologize
7. No Telegraphing
8. It’s a Story, Stupid
9. Leave Something For the Q&A, Bro
