You could almost hear the gasp in Palo Alto.

And that’s just the start. Next week is going to be way, way worse for Facebook when Apple opens an entire second front with Game Centre. In the iOS 4.1 update, Game Centre will provide a switchboard for game apps to establish multiplayer sessions. Leader-boards and achievements will provide the start of a more public social dimension which Apple can build out as it pleases. The 120 million iOS devices already out there, growing by 250,000 a day, is a space that Facebook can’t touch and a play that will spark the second great humiliation of Flash.

Facebook games, the Farmvilles, the Mafia Wars, are all Flash-based, meaning they won’t play on iOS devices without being ported to native apps. The recent demonstrations of mobile Flash on devices like the Nexus One, a capable device if a failure in the market, suggest Flash won’t cross the chasm to mobile anytime soon. Without a viable platform for its games in Android and Game Centre introducing a social infrastructure for iOS gaming, Facebook has no chance to gain a meaningful foothold in mobile gaming at this point. It’s stuck on desktop/laptop island, the place that casual and social computing is dwindling.

Ping and Game Centre are odd ducks as social networks as they exist to augment existing experiences. These aren’t places to see what your friends are doing but rather what they’re doing for entertainment. Entertainment that you can also partake in through the stuff Apple sells. These are social sales channels with a direct line to revenue. Evaluating them as social networking sites in the traditional sense misses the point that Apple isn’t hitting Facebook head-on but stealing from it diagonally.

The Big Board

The grand game board that Apple, Facebook and Google are playing on is one of surfaces, the surfaces where interaction takes place. As for Google, well they’re buying up companies but the runway for doing anything coherent with them is looking mighty long, but when they do take flight they’ll have devices to exist on. In the meantime, more Android surfaces is more places to show ads, which is fine by them.

But pity Facebook. By dithering around making recommendations obliquely through ads targeted via a “social graph” rather than direct, real value that people will pay for (like entertainment content), and by betting on Flash, they’ve been shoved aside on the ascendent surfaces of the next decade, where people will be spending their entertainment dollars more and more.

Links

A recent demo of mobile Flash on a Nexus One

To make the most of learning to live with a broken arm, I created the J. Walter Weatherman Game in tribute to Arrested Development’s one-armed man of lessons. While couched in humour, I hope to make the most of finding accessibility issues in everyday designs that I never noticed previously and to share workaround tips with others who might find themselves with an arm in a sling or cast someday.

Scoring is as follows:

• Every time I figure out how to do a two-handed operation with one hand: 50 points
• Every practical design improvement I come up with in doing so: 100 points
• Every design improvement I blog about: 150 points

The goal is to hit 50 points per day. Every day I don’t hit the goal scores -25 points. If the scoring seems generous, I expect that coming up with new innovations will get harder as time goes on.

You can read how this all started with the kickoff blog post.

Progress

Current Score: 475

Day 1

• Opening jars with the help of your hip
• Moving a whole espresso setup (or other counter-top appliance) with one hand
• Tamping espresso grinds with one hand

Score: 150 points + 150 for blogging it.

Day 2

• Dressing: when putting on a shirt, sleeve the bad arm first. When taking it off, removing the good arm first seems to work best. I might modify this one over time.
• Dressing: the top button for pants can be tight, so grip it in the second and third finger, using the index finger to hold open the button slot.

Score: 100 points

Day 3

No progress

Score: -25

Day 4

• When putting on a belt, thread it towards the side with the broken arm. The healthy arm will be able to reach around and pull it through. If you thread it to the other side it’s almost impossible to put on.

Score: 50 points

Day 5

• When opening jars with tighter lids, sit on a chair and place the jar between your knees, or on the floor and hold it with bare feet. Remember to initiate the force from the shoulder blade to get the most torque.

Score: 50 points.

My dominant right arm will be in a sling for at least six weeks. I’m ambidextrous on the computer, but quickly finding just how many two-handed moments in life I take for granted.

Making way around the house today and thinking of the learning curve I’m in for, Jane McGonigal’s story of recovering from a head injury through an inventive game came to mind. My situation isn’t as serious as what Jane faced; my arm will get better in time, and out of curiosity I see a cool opportunity on hand (yes, it’s a pun).

The J. Walter Weatherman Game

Named for the fictional one-armed man of lessons and a personal favourite from “Arrested Development,” the game centres on what I can learn about ergonomics and accessibility. Here’s how it’ll work:

• Every time I figure out how to do a two-handed operation with one hand: 50 points
• Every practical design improvement I come up with in doing so: 100 points
• Every design improvement I blog about: 150 points

The goal is to hit 50 points per day. Every day I don’t hit the goal scores -25 points.

To kick things off, I scored 150 points today by learning how to move my espresso setup in one action, open jars and tamp an espresso dose with one hand. The demo is in this video shot by Kathleen, who came over to treat me to breakfast.

One-Handed Espresso

Links

I’ll be tracking the next six weeks’ progress on the J. Walter Weatherman Game page

Jane’s post on Super Better, the game she invented to aid recovery from head injury.

The designers of technology products are a restless crowd. We can’t seem to stop fiddling with how we define ourselves. We’re content with new labels for a while, then start to pull at the pieces like a Jenga tower, half-afraid and half-hoping that the current definitions will tumble down so we can rebuild them anew.

Are we engineers or designers? Maybe we’re architects. Sometimes we’re advocates, even evangelists. By still more turns we’re usability designers, interface designers, user-centered design engineers, experience designers… It’s kind of a mess.

But not a bad kind of mess. Instead, the instability of role definitions for the, shall we say, softer sciences of tech, is the mark of a field still sorting out the proper distribution of tasks that turn a practice into a craft. We’re still a very immature industry, moving step by step to something that understands itself more completely and seems close to favouring refinement over revolution.

We know the value of what we do, but how do we get that across to those who don’t? When I kvetch about explaining the value I bring to clients, it’s sometimes suggested that I make a Venn diagram to show all the disparate ways of thinking that experience design pulls together.

Since the best way to avoid doing hard work is to see if someone else has done it first, I went hunting for Venn diagrams that describe experience design. Maybe the perfect one was out there, or maybe they missed something I could add.

Information Architect Emily Leahy-Thieler started a blog post with her take on a Venn diagram and through the helpful comments that followed produced several versions of an experience design Venn diagram.

Four versions in, however, the diagram starts to become pretty complex, if more accurate. Emily’s current version is shown here:

Update: Emily wrote in the comments that the simpler version of her diagram is actually the most recent, so the refinement has gone from more complex to simpler. Thanks for correcting that, Emily, and props for refining towards simpler! Do check out her post on this for the full story.

Kimmy Paluch’s post was one I remember reading a couple years ago, and easily re-found for a second read. It’s worth looking at, and also ends up in a somewhat busy Venn diagram, shown here:

My own take quickly got out of control without breaking new ground. I ended up with a meta-Venn diagram to show for it.

That didn’t get me very far, but I did recall talking about something similar last summer. While guest-rocking a LiFT Studios Broadcast with two other Vancouver designers, we were asked to define interaction design and to talk about how we work. The definition I gave then still holds and makes good sense when trying to get across the essence of experience design.

To paraphrase myself…

Being an [experience designer] is to be a curator of countless future moments for people you’ll never meet and never know.

What I meant was that experience designers need to think through the many possible paths a person’s experience can take. We groom the desirable paths and ease the lesser traveled routes. Sometimes we block paths that shouldn’t be taken at all because they don’t fit the product, or would cause harm to the people in that experience. At every step we anticipate what can go wrong and eliminate the problem, or provide an out for wayward souls.

I do a lot of things in my work: I help product managers and marketers make their ideas happen with workshops, information architectures, task flows, interface wireframes, and working as closely as I can with developers. But when I need to get across the real value that people like me try to bring, that line above is the one that truly seems to work best. For now.

The upshot is that I have more space to work with people I contract to help out on larger jobs, which is happening more often, AND I can offer the coworking desk as a permanent feature.

So if you need a place to hang your hat and set down your laptop for a day, the desk is back and it would be great to see you. More information is available on the coworking desk page.

We structured the four days around creating something concrete rather than just hearing the faculty wax philosophic, and with hypothetical design briefs in hand, the students applied each lecture across the four days and on the final day pitched their concept designs. It was simply incredible to watch the ideas take shape and turn into concepts that I would have loved to work on.

In addition to speaking on research methods, card sorting and sketching, I also presented on usability. There was a real challenge here, as I had 40 minutes or so to speak, but the lessons and methods of usability are too numerous and in-depth to pack into such a small amount of time.

The approach I took was to boil things down to three golden keys, crafted to pair with Kathleen Moynahan’s presentation on usability testing methods. I also included a fourth tip on creating engagement through progressive disclosure and the idea of the Mystery Box, but I won’t go into that to keep that part unique to those who were there.

I could tell you those three keys, but Crissy Campbell at Boxcar Marketing has done a great writeup of them as part of a guide on giving websites an autumn tuneup. Thanks Crissy!

Links

• Haig is the founder and creative director of LiFT Studios
• Kathleen’s website
• SFU Summer Publishing Workshops
• JJ Abrams talks about the mystery box as essential to compelling narrative

Two topics come up regularly in these conversations: why I call what I do “experience design” over “user experience design,” and the struggle for a succinct definition of just what experience design is.

The answers seem ripe for not one but two blog posts, and this is the first: why I shy from “user experience” (or user-anything for that matter).

For an industry often struggling to keep human needs and limits at the centre of it’s product-making processes, isn’t it strange that we so tightly cling to such a radically homogenizing term as “user”?

Someone once quipped to me that are are only two industries that refer to their customers as “users,” and the other one has a major PR problem. It might seem academic, but if you believe that the words we use matter because they are the shape of thinking and communication about interaction problems, then you likely agree that it’s worth trying to do better.

To that end I avoid the term user as much as possible. When laying out the audience for products I work on, I’m careful to find words that segment along lines of real-world behaviours, relationships and roles. Some examples

• Visitor or Guest to describe a non-registered person and Member for a registered person on a public-accessible website
• Manager, Supervisor and Customer to describe the people involved in a retail sales system.
• Agent and Traveller to delineate the people using a booking system.

Going User-Less

It takes extra research and thought up-front. It takes extra keystrokes to write these terms in every scenario, use case and diagram. It takes extra effort to recall and air to speak each different term. But the benefits outweigh the costs.

1. Scenarios and use cases become much more elegant.

Writing about who is doing what becomes much easier when we use words that naturally differentiate those people. In earlier days, I used to write use cases that identified actors and stakeholders by User 1, User 2, and so on. By replacing those with real-world terms drawn from the product’s domain, scenarios and use cases are more natural to both write and read.

2. Needs and constraints are kept in the forefront of the design process.
It’s hard to forget that customers are customers when we keep calling them customers, and the same goes for any role that people using technology might be playing in that use.

These words might be everyday vocabulary but they encode a lot of knowledge about the world; they unfold into relationships of power, responsibility, access and need that, in turn, inform the experiences we set out to design for them. Why should we exchange that rich knowledge for the generic and start from scratch each time?

It’s hard to move the needle on entrenched vocabularies, and it’s not like me to try and get a whole team to buy into changing the way they speak wholesale. But little by little, project by project, I try to make this way of thinking a new, more expressive and more humane norm of the design process.