JoeLamantia.com

Starbucks and Stroopwafels

In two earlier posts about Starbucks and product metadata, I mentioned the strange sensation of a product experience overwhelmed by packaging - specifically the metadata aspects of the packaging. Now I'd like to share two more examples of packaging burdened with metadata cruft. The first shows an awkward translation that is an attempt to smooth a significant semantic transition or boundary, one created by a high degree of relative cultural and conceptual distance between Dutch and English food categories. The second shows a phenomenon I call brand subsumption. These examples of translation and brand subsumption broaden the original problem into one of inconsistency and misalignment with the overall experience. Starbucks has built an empire on the repeatable, predictable customer experience, and so this inconsistency impacts the Starbucks brand. [At least for those who read the packaging for their food...]

In the first example, Starbucks uses a marketing dictionary to transform stroopwafels into 'Dutch Caramel Wafers' that are 'rich and caramelly-sweet'. I can understand the inclination to change the product name; stroopwafel is a Dutch word that's likely outside the awareness of most Starbucks customers. And it's certainly further away in terms of cultural distance than 'madeleine'. But the resulting translation is awkward because it addresses a very narrow point of view: It's only if you've forgotten the proper Dutch word while trying to explain the concept of a stroopwafel that you'll need to fall back on a label that reads "Dutch caramel wafer".

Caramel Wafers Label:

Example two is a branding mashup, involving Walkers Short Bread Cookies and Starbucks. In addition to the standard labeling from the madeleines, we're now told the maker, the country of origin, and when the maker was established, for a total of six pieces of information. The new elements exactly match the standard branding of most Walkers merchandise. I call this phenomenon brand subsumption, when one brand subsumes another without breaking it down. The Walkers brand arguably has greater international recognition and a longer history than Starbucks, so I imagine the deal bringing their 'delectably buttery' cookies to Starbucks counters everywhere required this unusual compromise. The resulting experience is an uneven hybrid; not Walkers, not Starbucks.

Walkers Package Label:

Looking at all three products together, it's clear the new product family attached to both packages, 'International Treats', contributes to the brand impact by introducing a puzzling inconsistency. Compare the original item that started us on this path - madeleines, designated 'Traditional Favorites' - with the Dutch and Scottish products labeled 'International'. Labeling the madeleines French but not international makes no sense, until you turn over the packages: the stroopwafels are made in the Netherlands, the shortbread cookies are made in Scotland, and the madeleines are made in the US. The same product label on one package denotes a cultural category for food items, but on other packages defines the manufacturing location. The product family labels are used for different purposes, which belies their consistent presentation context across products, via similar style, layout, structure, colors, fonts, etc.

Altogether, the combination of metadata quantity, labeling inconsistency, and branding strategies of translation and subsumption, is unexpected from Starbucks - a company built on consistent customer experiences.

tags > joelamantia.com: brand culture metadata semantic starbucks user_experience ux
tags > del.icio.us: brand culture metadata semantic starbucks user_experience ux

Of Madeleines And Metadata

A few months ago, I put up a posted called Tagging Comes To Starbucks, in which I attempted to make the point that it's bizarre when a product's metadata *overwhelms the experience of the product itself in it's customary real world setting*.

My example was the metadata encrusted packaging of madeleines - "petite french cakes..." - at Starbucks. Like the famous toothpick instructions Douglas Adams immortalized in So Long and Thanks For All The Fish, this is a strong discontinuity of experience (though not necessarily one indicating things gone awry at the core of civilization) that implies new cognitive / perceptual phenomenon.

New experiences and frames of reference usually lack discriptive vocabulary, which explains why I can't pin this down neatly in words. But this is surely something we can expect to encounter more in a future populated with findable spimes.

The balance hasn't shifted so far that we're living inside Baudrillard's 'desert of the real', but we are getting closer with each additional layer of simulation, abstraction, and metadata applied to real situations and objects.

After all it is impossible to interact (smell, touch, taste...) directly with these very ordinary pastries without experiencing the intervening layers of metadata packaging.

Madeleines in situ:

The labeling:

From SLATFATF: "It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization I could live in and stay sane.” ~ Wonko the Sane

tags > joelamantia.com: baudrillard culture douglas_adams metadata semantics spime starbucks tagging user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: baudrillard culture douglas_adams metadata semantics spime starbucks tagging user_experience

Don Norman, Bruce Sterling, The Attention Economy

Over at uiGarden.net Don Norman clarified some of his ideas regarding Activity Centered Design originally published in the summer of 2005.

I'd like to be comfortable saying that I'm with Don in spirit while disagreeing on some of the particulars, but I've read both the original essay and the clarifications twice, and the ideas and the messages are still too raw to support proper reactions or to fully digest. Maybe Don's working on a new book, and this is interim thinking?

That might explain why the contrast between Norman's two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things - which also is a sort of design philosophy / manifesto - is so dramatic. Halfway throught Shaping Things, I'm left - as I usually am when reading Sterling's work - feeling envious that I wasn't gifted the same way.

Sterling is speaking at ETech, which this year focuses on The Attention Economy. No surprises with this matchup, given that Sterling's devoted a whole book - Distraction - to some of the same ideas proponents of the Attention Economy advocate we use as references when designing the future.

tags > joelamantia.com: attention_economy design futurism manifesto sterling theory
tags > del.icio.us: attention_economy design futurism manifesto sterling theory

New Amazon Features: Translating the Bookstore Experience On-line

Amazon is offering new Text Stats on "Readability" and "Complexity", and a Concordance feature, both part of their comprehensive effort to translate the physical book[store] experience into the online medium. The new features build on existing capabilities such as Look Inside, Wishlists, Recommendations, Editorial and Customer Reviews, Citations, and Better Together to create a comprehensive book buying experience. In the same way that bookstores include kiosks to allow customers access metadata and other information on the books for sale in the immediate environment, Amazon is offering on-line capabilities that simulate many of the activities of book buyers in a bookstore, such as checking the table of contents and indexes, flipping through a book to read passages, or look at select pages.

The new features appear on product pages for books, as well as other kinds of works. [Try this intro to FRBR for a look at the conceptual hierarchy differentiating works from items, and it's implications for common user tasks like finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items.]

Text Stats may be experimental, but it's hard to feel comfortable with their definition of complexity, which is: "A word is considered "complex" if it has three or more syllables." To point out the obvious, English includes plenty of simple three syllable words - like "banana" - and some very complex one syllable words - "time" "thought" and "self" for example.

The Text Stats on Readability seem a bit better thought through. That's natural, given their grounding in research done outside Amazon's walls. But with clear evidence that US education standards vary considerably across states and even individual districts, and also evidence that those standards change over time, I have to question the value of Readability stats long term. I suppose that isn't point...

The Concordance feature is easier to appreciate; perhaps it doesn't attempt to interperet or provide meaning. It simply presents the raw statistical data on word frequencies, and allows you to do the interpretation. Amazon links each word in the concordance to a search results page listing the individual occurances of the word in the text, which is useful, and then further links the individual occruance listings to the location within the text.

With this strong and growing mix of features, Amazon both translates the bookstore experience on-line, and also augments that experience with capabilities available only in an information environment. The question is whether Amazon will continue to expand the capabilities it offers for book buying under the basic mental model of "being in a bookstore", or if a new direction is ahead?

Here's a screenshot of the Text Stats for DJ Spooky's Rhythm Science:

Here's a screen shot of the Concordance feature:

tags > joelamantia.com: amazon books frbr mental_model user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: amazon books frbr mental_model user_experience

Building Channels To Customers With User Research

Proving that a well-developed sense of humor is required for success in product design -- especially for Lotus Notes -- Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next version of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny comment in reply to my suggestion that the Notes Design team offer customers a choice of unpleasant but related user experience themes. She used this as the occasion to invite all members of the community of Notes to users to register as volunteers for usability testing.

I've made three postings to date specifically discussing the Notes user experience: Lotus Notes User Experience = Disease, Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Better UI Tops Notes Users' Wish Lists. I'm not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I'm glad she did, because doing so is smart business on two levels. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly understands that while vocal critics may seem daunting to user experience designers, product managers, and business owners, engaging these critics in fact presents design teams with opportunities to build strong connections to users and gather valuable feedback at the same time. What better way is there to show the strategic value of user research?

I learned this at first hand while working on a redesign of the flagship web presence of a large software firm several years ago. Some of the most insightful and useful feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the user experiences I was responsible for came from 'disgruntled' customers. The user research I was doing on site structures, navigation paths, and user goals established a channel that allowed unhappy (and happy) customers to communicate about a broad range of their experiences with PTC products and services in a more complete way than by simply buying a competing product, or renewing an existing software license.

Based on these and other experiences building user research programs, I suggest that product managers, user research leads, and user experience designers first collaborate to define a user research strategy, and then define and create a simple but effective user research infrastructure (like registration gateways to volunteer databases, community / program identifiers and incentives, contact management tools, specific personas that technical and customer support teams can learn to recognize and recruit at all stages of the customer lifecycle, etc.) that will support the creation of channels to users throughout the design cycle.

At the second level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore collaboration methods, products, and technologies related to the very competitive collaboration suite / integrated electronic workspace / office productivity markets in which IBM, Microsoft, and several other giant firms are looking to secure dominant positions in the new culture of collaboration. [Note: I've posted a few times on Microsoft products as well - Backwards Goals: MS Office Results Oriented UI, and Microsoft's Philosophy On Information Architecture.]

Members of the community of Lotus Notes users can register as volunteers for usability tests during the design of the next version of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

tags > joelamantia.com: collaboration customer_relationships lotusnotes strategy usability user_experience user_research
tags > del.icio.us: collaboration customer_relationships lotusnotes strategy usability user_experience user_research

Backwards Goals: MS Office Results Oriented UI

In the overview of the new "results oriented" UI planned for MS Office 12, our friends in Redmond offer:

"The overriding design goal for the new UI is to deliver a user interface that enables users to be more successful finding and using the advanced features of Microsoft Office. An additional important design goal was to preserve an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so that they can spend more time and energy focused on their work."

Let me get that straight. Your first goal is to make it easier for me to find and use advanced features that the vast majority of people employ rarely if ever, and didn't need in the first place?

And something else that was also important - but not as important as access to all those shiny advanced features - was to make the workspace uncluttered and allow me to focus on my work?

Isn't that... backwards?

tags > joelamantia.com: collaboration microsoft user_experience user_research
tags > del.icio.us: collaboration microsoft user_experience user_research

Intrusive Online Surveys Damage Brands

I got caught in an on-line opinion survey trap last week. The setup: In exchange for 10% off my next purchase, a Banana Republic cashier told me, I had to answer a few questions about my shopping experience. Retailers often solicit opinions from customers in return for a variety of rewards. It's common enough that there's an understanding on the amount of information requested, in exchange for the expected reward. So I thought I was safe...

Twenty screens later, after answering more than fifty questions and with no end in sight, I was feeling a little cranky. Even my wife was irritated; I was holding up grocery shopping for dinner guests. Very quickly, the reward for my time shifted from a coupon, to using Banana Republic as an example of an on-line survey experience that undermines your brand.

The full survey ran more than thirty five screens, and ended with an error message. Very professional.

Thumbnails of the whole survey:

For kicks, I posted the screenshots to Flickr. If you run the slideshow, you can see where I became frustrated and started to give spoiler answers - like wearing a size 98, or spending $10 / year on clothing.

Why was the survey experience bad?

1. They didn't make clear how much time they were asking for. The opening screen said 10 minutes, this is misleading for a 100 question survey. If you're asking for my time, respect me enough to be honest about what's required.

2. They didn't make the real purpose of the survey clear. From the shopping experience itself, the questions quickly shifted to my age, income, marital status, and education level. This is a transparent attempt to feed data mining and demographic needs that relied on an amateur segue to turn the conversation around and ask for personal information.

3. They contradicted the experience I had in their store. The store staff were nice enough to keep track of the umbrella I left in a fitting room, and return it before I left, which was thoughtful. Consistency is the core of a successful brand, but the survey experience was inconsistent.

How does this damage Banana Republic's brand?

1. Banana Republic left me with a series of negative impressions that work against their brand values: I now feel I was chosen to participate in a survey under false pretenses, a survey that offers me little value in return for important personal information that is inappropriate to ask for in the first place.

2. Banana Republic closed a growing channel for conducting business with a customer. I may purchase more from their stores -- if I have no other retailer at hand, and I need business clothes to meet with a client CEO the next morning once again -- but I'm certainly not willing to engage with them online.

Merchants in all areas of retailing work very hard to encourage customers to form positive associations with their brands. Fashion retailers work especially hard at encouraging customers to associate values, such as trust and respect, with a brand because these values serve as the foundation for longer term and more lucrative relationships with customers than single purchases. Every experience a customer has with your brand -- every touch point -- influences this network of associations, reinforcing or weakening the link between a brand and the feelings that customers have about the products and the company behind it. A simple test any retailer should use when considering bringing an experience to customers is wether the experience will reinforce the right brand associations.

Loyalty programs, and their offspring the online opinion survey, are good examples of the intersections of customer interests and retailer interests in an experience that can reinforce a customer's perceptions of the brand and the values associated with it. Many retailers manage these kinds of programs well.

Just not Banana Republic.

The error message at the end:

I wear size 98:

tags > joelamantia.com: brand customer_relationships retail surveys user_experience user_research
tags > del.icio.us: brand customer_relationships retail surveys user_experience user_research

Usability Everywhere

Usability issues pop up in the strangest places. For example, Monday night, while I was sitting in the Lisbon Tourist Police office, filling out a report on how I'd just been robbed. The officer handling my report took a moment to apologize for how long it took him to complete the process. He said, "We have a new internet based system to fill out all the forms, and its very confusing." Seems that Accenture created a .net based environment for the Portugese police to record assaults on travellers, but they didn't pay proper attention to user experience and usability concerns. The officers use all the classic workarounds: composing text in a word-processor before pasting it into input fields, post-it notes for shortcuts and passwords all over the workstations; and they live in fear of hitting the wrong navigation button and losing all their in-progress work.

It's not as good as getting my wallet back, but it might make a good anecdote at the next IA cocktail hour.

tags > joelamantia.com: portugal travel usability user_experience user_research ux
tags > del.icio.us: portugal travel usability user_experience user_research ux

Better UI Tops Notes Users' Wish List

But not the new features list for the next release. In a previous post Lotus Notes UI = Disease, I cited a SearchDomino.com article in which Ken Bisconti, IBM Lotus vice president of Workplace, portal and collaboration products, is quoted as saying "Through improvements such as contextual collaboration and support for composite apps, we've gone *above and beyond simple UI enhancement*". [Emphasis mine.] Above and beyond? I think UI enhancement - which is often far from simple, especially when the existing user experience is fundamentally flawed - is exactly what Notes needs.

After watching software development first hand, I know that many Product Managers understand the importance of quality, design, and meeting users' needs, but do not feel empowered to work against the pervasive featuritis that leads to unusable bloatware. Good product managers and designers often work for organizations or managers who remain blinded by standard practices and marketing driven perceptions of priority, and thus feel it's impossible to step off the new functionality treadmill.

That is, unless they are armed with information that indicates to the contrary.

The article in Ken's statement appears, Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches 'Hannover' user experience, is dated June 14, 2005. Yet when digging it bit more, I discovered an earlier piece from May 9, 2005, titled Better UI tops Notes users' wish list, in which the same author, Peter Blochner, reports on the results of an open request for Lotus Notes features made by Ed Brill(Brill heads the worldwide sales group for Notes, according to Blochner). In his review of user responses to Brill's question, Blochner says, "the most requested feature was for an improved user interface for Notes."

Simple UI enhancement is all that the users want, and they've said it themselves. Yet Notes is going way beyond this? Despite repeated and public requests for this from committed users (Ed Brill's blog is a predominantly Notes-friendly forum) in their own voices, and in response to questions from your own team. Why not listen to them?

For reference, Blochner's article is reproduced below:

By Peter Bochner
09 May 2005 | SearchDomino.com

IBM is already working on plans for the next major releases of Lotus Notes beyond 7.0. Last week, on May 3, visitors to the blog site of Ed Brill, who heads up worldwide sales for Lotus Notes and Domino, were asked, "If you could add one feature to Lotus Notes 7.x, what would it be?"

As of May 9, his question has garnered 184 comments, although many respondents circumvented the question's one-feature limit by submitting multiple posts.

To kick off the thread, Brill provided his own request - multi-level undo - and that was reiterated by seven posters. However, the most requested feature was for an improved user interface for Notes. "It's time to give the Notes client UI a much-needed facelift," wrote one respondent. When people say Exchange is better than Notes, said another, "What they are saying is that the Outlook interface is . . .nicer than the [Notes] mail template. A top UI for the next release would top off a lot of end-user complaints."

Only a handful of responses mentioned specific suggestions for improving the UI. One asked for "a first-class, richly configurable Welcome Panel that resembles a Web portal." Another suggested UI improvements such as "more user-selectable columns in folders/views, having preferences all in one place, or rules that can act on documents already in the mail file." Still another requested "a sexy modern mail template with a single UI in Notes and on the Web."

Finally, one user said, "What would it be worth if every part of the Notes mail experience, which ...is the Notes interface for the majority of users, from the toolbars to the icons to interaction and behavior, was consistent, modern, clean and inviting? There is no point in having the superior everything if it's not appealing to look at."

P.S. Brill has requested a moratorium on suggestions, because the thread is now so long it has become unwieldy.

tags > joelamantia.com: customer_relationships enterprise lotusnotes user_experience user_research
tags > del.icio.us: customer_relationships enterprise lotusnotes user_experience user_research

Lotus Notes User Experience = Disease

Lotus Notes has one of the most unpleasant and unwelcoming User Experiences this side of a medium-security prison where the warden has aspirations towards interior design and art instruction. One of the most painful aspects of the Notes experience is the default settings for font size and color in the email window. The default font size (for Macs) is on the order of 7 point type, and the default color for unread messages is - ironically - red. The combination yields a user experience that resembles a bad skin rash. I call it "angry red microNotes" disease, and it looks like this:

Overall, it has an unhealthy affect on one's state of mind. The undertones of hostility and resentment running throughout are manifold. And naturally, it is impossible to change the default font size and color for the email reader. This is further confirmation for my theory that Notes has yet to escape it's roots as a thick client for series of unconnected databases.

After three weeks of suffering from angry red microNotes, I realized I was literally going blind from squinting at the tiny type, and went to Google for relief. I found niniX 1.7, a utility that allows Mac based Lotus Notes users the ability to edit the binary format Notes preferences file, and change the font size of the email client. I share it in the hopes that others may break the chains that blind them. This will only solve half the problem - if someone can figure out how to change the default color for unread messages to something besides skin rash red, I will happily share with the rest of the suffering masses (and apparently there are on the order of 118 million of us out there).

But will it always be this (horrible) way?

In Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches 'Hannover' user experience Peter Bochner of SearchDomino.com says this of the next Notes release, "Notes has often been criticized for its somewhat staid user interface. According to IBM's Bisconti, in creating Hannover, IBM paid attention "to not just the user interface, but the user experience."

Okay... So does that mean I'll have my choice of diseases as themes for the user experience of my collaboration environment?

According to Ken Bisconti, IBM Lotus vice president of Workplace, portal and collaboration products, "Through improvements such as contextual collaboration and support for composite apps, we've gone above and beyond simple UI enhancement".

I think simple UI enhancement is exactly what Ken and his team should focus on for the next several years, since they have so much opportunity for improvement.

tags > joelamantia.com: collaboration lotusnotes mental_models tools user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: collaboration lotusnotes mental_models tools user_experience

Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes

Several very unpleasant experiences I've had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.

The IAWiki defines a mental model as, "a mental model is how the user thinks the product works." This is a simplified definition, but it's adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse's thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users' Models of Computer Systems.

In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages - at least not as I experience it.

Here's what happens my mental model and my reality don't match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox - the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly - (I'm using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I'm unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it's frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.

2. I realize I need to respond to an email
3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages.
4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese.

5. I attempt to send this email.

6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like "We're really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can't send out any messages using your email client."

7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate')

8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not.

9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient.

10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.

11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can't send a message. I'm no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren't enough to change my model of how Notes works.

Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, "Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance." From an ecological perspective, resilience "is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system." The psychological view emphasizes "the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe."

Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since - in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself - seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.

Notice that I'm using a work-around - switching to Gmail - to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, "The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation." This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.

I also noticed that I'm relying on a series of assumptions - email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages - that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it's easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I'll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.

Here's a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?
2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?
3. What's the threshold of recovery for a mental model?
4. Put another way, what's required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I'm comfortable saying it's a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.

Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems
2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system
3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models
4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it's safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.

Time to close this post before it gets too long.

Further reading:

Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.

Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance

Garry Peterson's blog Resilience Science

tags > joelamantia.com: lotusnotes mental_models resilience social_systems user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: lotusnotes mental_models resilience social_systems user_experience

Hostile Error Messages: Peoplesoft

I know that most enterprise software packages have shockingly, egregiously bad user experiences. One of the most tortuous aspects of the common inexcusably bad enterprise software package user experience is the stunningly useless, hostile, and cryptic error messages these monstrosities return whenever users have the misfortune to step outside the bounds of their opaque, byzantine operating logic.

Here's a tasty example of the genre from an implementation of Peoplesoft, that leaves me feeling like I've been barfed on by a machine:

tags > joelamantia.com: design enterprise peoplesoft user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: design enterprise peoplesoft user_experience

A Very Postmodern 4th of July

I went to the 4th of July concert on the Esplanade this past Monday, for the first time in several years, expecting to show some international visitors genuine Boston Americana. After all, 4th of July celebrations are singularly American experiences; part summer solstice rite, part brash revolutionary gesture, part demonstration of martial prowess, part razzle-dazzle spectacle as only Americans put on.

I suppose a unique American experience is what we got: in return for our trouble, we felt like unpaid extras in a television production recreating the holiday celebrations for a remote viewing audience miles or years away. It was - de-centered - hollow and inverted. It's become a simulacrum, with a highly unnatural flow driven by the calculus of supra-local television programming goals. The center of gravity is now a national television audience sitting in living rooms everywhere and nowhere else, and not the 500,000 people gathered around the Hatch Shell who create the celebration and make it possible by coming together every year.

Despite all the razzle-dazzle - and in true American fashion there was a lot, from fighter jets to fireworks, via brass bands, orchestras, and pop stars along the way - the experience itself was deeply unsatisfying, because it was obvious from the beginning that the production company (B4) held the interests of broadcasters far more important than the people who come to the Esplanade.

There were regular commercial breaks.

In a 4th of July concert.

For half a million people.

Commercial breaks which the organizers - no doubt trapped between the Scylla of contractual obligations and the Charybdis of shame at jilting a half-million people out of a summer holiday to come to this show - filled with filler. While the commercials aired, and the audience waited, the 'programmers' plugged the holes in the concert schedule with an awkward mix of live songs lasting less than three minutes, pre-recorded music, and inane commentary from local talking heads. We felt like we were sitting *behind* a monitor at a taping session for a 4th of July show, listening while other people watched the screen in front.

I bring this out because it offers good lessons for those who design or create experiences, or depend upon the design or creation of quality experiences.

Briefly, those lessons are:

1. If you have an established audience, and you want or need to engage a new one, make sure you don't leave your loyal customers behind by making it obvious that they are less important to you than your new audience.

2. If you're entering a new medium, and your experience will not translate directly to the new channel (and which well-crafted experience does translate exactly?), make sure you don't damage the experience of the original channel while you're translating to the new one.

3. When adding a new or additional channel for delivering your experience, don't trade quality in the original channel for capability in the new channel. Many separate factors affect judgments of quality. Capability in one channel is not equivalent to quality in another. Quality is much harder to achieve.

4. Always preserve quality, because consistent quality wins loyalty, which is worth much more in the long run. Consistent quality differentiates you, and encourages customers to recommend you to other people with confidence, and allows other to become your advocates, or even your partners. For advocates, think of all the people who clear obstacles for you without direct benefit, such as permit and license boards. For partners, think of all the people who's business connect to or depend upon your experience in some way; the concessions vendors who purchase a vending license to sell food and beverages every year are a good example of this.

For people planning to attend next year's 4th of July production, I hope the experience you have in 2006 reflects some of these lessons. If not, then I can see the headline already, in bold 42 point letter type, "Audiences nowhere commemorate Independence Day again via television! 500,000 bored extras make celebration look real for remote viewers!"

Since this is the second time I've had this experience, I've changed my judgment on the quality of the production, and I won't be there: I attended in 2002, and had exactly the same experience.

tags > joelamantia.com: 4thofjuly boston culture customer_relationships media postmodernism television user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: 4thofjuly boston culture customer_relationships media postmodernism television user_experience

Don't Cross the Streams! The Terrible User Experience of Enterprise Software

Below is an excerpt from an email sent to all employees - a 'global broadcast', very Max Headroom... - of a larger company (name removed), in response to repeated plees to improve the nightmarish user experience of the time and expense system that all employees must use.

<begin transmission>
There have been a few issues with the submitting and/or processing of Expense Reports resulting from individuals using data fields which have no value to [company], but may have processing impacts within the system. At this time, there is no way to remove or 'grey-out' these unused fields. If you have not been trained on the use of a field and/or do not know what the field may/may not do, don't enter any data within that field - ask your branch admin or contact the help desk.
</end transmission>

What a fantastic example of a user experience directly impacting business: useless but open entry fields = garbage data = inaccurate financials!

Let's peak into the inner chambers, to see how this might play out:

CEO> "How are we doing this week for revenue?"

CFO> "No idea. I don't have any numbers to work with."

CEO> "Why not? That's ten weeks in a row!"

COO> "Another financials system crash."

CTO> "Some junior tech in nowheresville accidentally hit the drop select of death again, and now we can't get reports done for that half of the country."

CEO> "The analysts and the board are going to kill me - someone take care of this right now."

COO> "Fix it, or get rid of it!"

CTO> "We can't fix it - we didn't buy the configuration module. And we cut the deployment services contract from 24 weeks to 6 weeks, so there was no time to figure out which fields we needed from the generic installation..."

tags > joelamantia.com: enterprise maxheadroom user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: enterprise maxheadroom user_experience

The User Experience of Interactive Art: Boston CyberArts Festival 2005:

Prompted by curiousity, and a desire to see if interactive art really is irritating, I took in several exhibits for the 2005 Boston CyberArts Festival, at the Decordova Museum this weekend.

Sarah Boxer's review of Trains - a landscape made of tiny model railroad buildings and figures, adorned with movie images from famous movie scenes, and populated by passengers that appear only on the video screen of a Gameboy - offers several stellar insights about the emotionally unhealthy states of mind brought on by attempting to interact with computerized interfaces. Boxer says:

Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima's "Trains," at the DeCordova Museum School Gallery, in the Boston suburb Lincoln, which is a model train set guided by cellphone.

It's clear from this that the emotional or other content of the art installation itself was obscured by the user experience Boxer had to negotiate in order to engage with the piece. Boxer's expectations for user experience quality might have been lower if she were trying out a new spreadsheet, or Lotus Notes, but that's just an example of how the software industry has trained customers to expect abusively bad experiences. See photos of Trains here.

One of the more usable - if that judgement applies - is Nam June Paik's "Requiem for the 20th Century". Requiem - photo here - according to Boxer is less annoying "...a relief to just stand there and watch the apocalyptic montage! No interaction. No instruction. No insults."

Once past the interface, I found Requiem elegiac as expected, but unsatisfying for two reasons: first by virtue of concerning mostly Paik's work in video art, and second by being strangely empty at heart (or was that the point?). The svelte physicality of the Chrysler Airstream art-deco automobile contrasted sharply with the ephemeral nature of the video images showing on it's windows, in a clear example of concepts that were well-thought-through, but in the end, this is another example of art (post modern and/or otherwise) that is clever, yet incapable of engaging and establishing emotional resonance. "Requiem" is not even effectively psychological, which would broaden it's potential modes of address. To ameliorate this weakness, I recommend obtaining the audiobook version of J.G. Ballard's "Crash", and listening to it's auto-erotic on headphones while taking in the silvered spectacle.

From the description: "Requiem sums up the twentieth century as a period of transformative socio-cultural change from an industrial based society to an electronic information based society. The automobile and the television figure as both the most significant inventions of the century as well as the most prominent signifiers of Western consumerism."

tags > joelamantia.com: art boston culture cyberarts festivals jgballard namjunepaik user_experience
tags > del.icio.us: art boston culture cyberarts festivals jgballard namjunepaik user_experience

mSpace Online Demo

There's an mSpace demo online.

tags > joelamantia.com: modeling mspace ontology semanticweb tools
tags > del.icio.us: modeling mspace ontology semanticweb tools

Two Surveys of Ontology / Taxonomy / Thesaurus Editors

While researching and evaluating user interfaces and management tools for semantic structures - ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, etc - I've come across or been directed to two good surveys of tools.

The first, courtesy of HP Labs and the SIMILE project is Review of existing tools for working with schemas, metadata, and thesauri. Thanks to Will Evans for pointing this out.

The second is a comprehensive review of nearly 100 ontology editors, or applications offering ontology editing capabilities, put together by Michael Denny at XML.com. Depending on your purpose, you can either read the article Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools, or go directly to the Summary Table of Survey Results.

The original date for this is 2002 - it was updated July of 2004.

tags > joelamantia.com: metadata ontology semanticweb simile taxonomy tools
tags > del.icio.us: metadata ontology semanticweb simile taxonomy tools

mSpace: A New (Usable?) Semantic Web Interface

mSpace is a new framework - including user interface - for interacting with semantically structured information that appeared on Slashdot this morning.

According to the supporting literature, mSpace handles both ontologically structured data, and RDF based information that is not modelled with ontologies.

What is potentially most valuable about the mSpace framework is a useful, usable interface for both navigating / exploring RDF-based information spaces, and editing them.

From the mSpace sourceforge site:

"mSpace is an interaction model designed to allow a user to navigate in a meaningful manner the multi-dimensional space that an ontology can provide. mSpace offers potentially useful slices through this space by selection of ontological categories.

mSpace is fully generalised and as such, with a little definition, can be used to explore any knowledge base (without the requirement of ontologies!).

Please see mspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk for more information."

From the abstract of the Technical report, titled mSpace: exploring the Semantic Web"

"Information on the web is traditionally accessed through keyword searching. This method is powerful in the hands of a user that is experienced in the domain they wish to acquire knowledge within. Domain exploration is a more difficult task in the current environment for a user who does not precisely understand the information they are seeking. Semantic Web technologies can be used to represent a complex information space, allowing the exploration of data through more powerful methods than text search. Ontologies and RDF data can be used to represent rich domains, but can have a high barrier to entry in terms of application or data creation cost.

The mSpace interaction model describes a method of easily representing meaningful slices through these multidimensional spaces. This paper describes the design and creation of a system that implements the mSpace interaction model in a fashion that allows it to be applied across almost any set of RDF data with minimal reconfiguration. The system has no requirement for ontological support, but can make use of it if available. This allows the visualisation of existing non-semantic data with minimal cost, without sacrificing the ability to utilise the power that semantically-enabled data can provide."

tags > joelamantia.com: environments modeling mspace rdf semantics semanticweb tools
tags > del.icio.us: environments modeling mspace rdf semantics semanticweb tools