I'm Todd Sieling, and I help design software experiences and strategies for the web. Here I write and can be contacted about creating humane, effective and memorable products for the connected world.
Learn about what I bring to making better softwareLike many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
Read more »
Over the holidays, I decided to make 2009 a year to explore the more physical side of interaction design. That thought is largely inspired by the Touch platform found in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and to some extent in the trackpad gestures showing up in the latest Macbooks. It’s also driven by my belief that interaction design is going to become a much more physical enterprise with… the rise of robots! Woooo…. read on, for more than ironic futurism gags.
The most common real-world automaton is still the single-purpose robot: assembling in factories, exploring on Mars, vacuuming the living room. The robot’s current lot seems to be one of dangerous places and mundane business. In other words, what people don’t like to or can’t be around.
Today is a big deal in the United States. In the midst of this historic election, there’s a lot of anxious uncertainty around the reliability of the voting process as it adapts to new technologies. At home in Vancouver, we find ourselves in the tail end of a streak of elections, from the federal level to the municipal (and likely the provincial before too long), so I’ve found myself reading and thinking about how elections work as a technology.
I’m still unsure if the right moniker is Get Satisfaction or Satisfaction, but either way the service found at http://getsatisfaction.com rocks. Their entire reason for being, built right into the brand, is to create positive outcomes between companies and customers.
This post kicks off an idea I’ve wanted to start writing about for awhile, but never found the right way to without a long post with a bunch of examples. It seems more appropriate to offer examples of the idea as I find them, and to let the tags tie the posts together. So, welcome to the debut of Outputs vs. Outcomes.
I often notice in applications an emphasis on surfacing the relatively raw outputs of various data aggregations. How many comments, followers, votes, signups, views, clicks, stars are questions commonly answered by social apps, and people using the application are expected to derive what they can from that.
But for my time, raw numbers leave application experiences stale and one-dimensional, defaulting to what computers prefer to offer rather than what works for non-calculator type people.
Where products really succeed, you’ll find a focus on creating great outcomes. That’s done by hooking up creative transformation of outputs (the raw numbers) into something that supports the needs and goals of the people using the software.
The examples in the ongoing Outputs vs. Outcomes series illustrate the difference better than my words can, and for each example I’ll declare it a win for Output or Outcome. Use the eponymous tag to find all posts on this theme, and call me out wherever you think I’m not being fair.
Via Megan, I learned about a really cool service added to Vancouver-developed Kinzin: your top 10 photos are automatically printed and mailed out to people who prefer physical prints for just under $4 (to Canada; $3 in the US) by monthly subscription.
I haven’t gone through the execution yet, but it’s an instant win for Outcomes as a product concept: a low monthly fee lets you generate happiness out of your online activity for someone who can’t use the web. This passes the Kathy Sierra ‘Make your users rock’ test with flying colours. Congratulations to the Kinzin team.
I’m a lucky guy when it comes to getting advice on web community relations: I have friends with experience and insight that I trust, who are also patient with my questions about the right approach or even the right words to address an issue.
Just the same, it’s good to brush up on the basics every now and then, as the state of the art changes and new ideas or ways of thinking can stir up new thoughts in an otherwise old hat. This week, the Capulet Communications team of Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, two of those kinds of friends I was talking about, released an e-book that promises to do just that as part of my holiday reading list.
Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook will be a welcome read for both old and new-school marketers who’ve seen how even small missteps in communicating with web communities can turn into anger and heartache. Darren and Julie have helped many clients run successful and responsible social media campaigns, and have gathered the most valuable lessons from their work, and the work of others, together into a tidy volume of good advice.
As if good advice isn’t enough, I’m pleased to have a spot in the book about my own approach to making the most of negative comments found on a blog. It’s heartening to see these friends bringing their insight and experience to a wider audience, and to be make a small contribution to the book as well.
At $29, Getting to First Base is easily one of the best investments in learning to communicate better on the Internet, with its ever-changing and sometimes baffling ways. It’s also a good way to divert attention from holiday hurly-burly, without any extra calories or the carbon-footprint of treeware.
I spent a few days on the far-west coast of BC this week in a small town called Tofino. In the summer, Tofino’s population goes up to about 20,000, attracting surfers and nature lovers. In the winter, the population is about 1,500. As you can guess, in February, it’s a quiet place to be.
I didn’t check email, turn on my cellphone, or tell anyone the exact place I was staying. I turned off status reporting widgets and read minimal news. I didn’t listen to my iPod once (for real). Late in the week, a surprise snowfall cut off all communication for about a full day, removing land-line phones, television and Internet access for everyone there, like it or not. Local radio is the only kind of radio there, and they lost power as well. Now that’s quiet, and perfect for exploring the beaches, taking in views that defy description and getting lost in the oddities turned up by the tides.
I didn’t fall into some kind of Luddite bliss, but I did notice, by their absence, the demand for our attention that the mere availability of these channels creates. Silencing the flow of incoming information seems to be a staple of the modern vacation, but I think that speaks to a need not being met in our approach to information technologies, and not some inevitable consequence of connectivity. That is, we shouldn’t have to turn off communication channels as a defensive action.
There’s some blue-sky thinking about how the devices we use to access these channels could become aware of our states and bring information to us accordingly, but that’s a post-iPhone world and I’m interested in what we can do now.
When thinking about this I keep coming back to the idea of information richness. The conventional wisdom is that offering depth and interesting pivot points on the information an application delivers is a good thing in itself. We want information, give it to us, relentlessly so. That takes us back to the beaches of the Tofino area for a moment.
On my first morning out I kept coming across Sand Dollar shells. I wanted to collect a few whole ones for some friends back home, but because they are usually partly buried in sand, each one has to be checked to see if it’s whole or broken.
Most are broken. Even after finding a few whole ones, I found that I had to resist an urge to check out each one I came across. It’s the beach-combing equivalent of leaving no stone unturned.
Leaving stones unturned is just something our brains don’t do well, for many good reasons. It’s not that info-richness is a bad thing in itself, either. It’s that it’s often offered without qualification, without meeting a true need other than that of data voyeurism. Always wanting to put lazy theory into a Quaker-like work mode, I’ve been putting together a sanity checklist that will keep the lessons of my week in Tofino in mind.
What is the one essential and concrete purpose that presenting a view of information serves? If the answer is highly subjective or vague, then it must connect directly with the core emotional experiences that the product is designed to create.
How deep does the view of information need to be to serve that purpose?
Applying these questions to previous projects, I see places where we came close to the sweet spot, and many other places where we really filled up at the Information Candy store. In About Face 2.0, a must-read book on interaction design, Alan Cooper identifies cardinal applications, or those that take up all of our attention for extended lengths of time. As the desktop computing experience dissolves into many and mobile devices, cardinality will be taking a back seat. Instead of designing for any one application, we’ll be designing more for an ecology of applications, each of them asking for some degree of attention from people. Being relevant rather than rich in the information that they provide will set applications apart more and more, I believe.
There are many rewarding and appropriate uses of rich information structures, and info-voyeurism certainly has its place. And, we all need to manage the channels that demand our attention, but not by dulling our natural curiosity and learning to ignore the scores of unturned stones presented on any given interface. Making information rich in relevance rather than data will be the key to making applications that fit well with our lives, rather than something we want to escape from every few months.
