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England’s recent friendly against Brazil gave me my first glimpse of the new Wembley stadium. For an architectural structure that’s created so much controversy, taken so long to build and cost so much it seems a bit, um, underwhelming.
The ‘triumphal’ arch is impressive from a distance, but there’s no element of surprise or delight to the stadium. No emotional connection.
Contrast that with Munich’s Allianz Arena.
The outer shell changes colour depending on which of the local teams is playing. Red for Bayern Munich, Blue for 1860 Munich (with white for derbies and Internationals). Amazing and guaranteed to ignite passions. Imagine being a home supporter and seeing your team’s colours enveloping your stadium. The simplest, yet most visceral connection for any football fan. Suddenly, all of the triumph seems to have disappeared from that arch.
Talking to a friend who’d visited Wembley a few weeks ago it seems that the architects got some things right. He marvelled at the number of toilets (it’s always details); 2,618 of them according to the official Wembley site. A lesson learned from the limited facilities at the old stadium which lead to some, er, interesting workarounds from spectators. At half-time there were usually three queues of people waiting to relieve themselves: one for the cubicles, one for the urinals and one for the sinks. Still, I suppose it makes for easy access to the taps afterwards.
Photography from sismastery, rp72, gonzales2010 and probek on flickr.
The paradox of interface design is that when it’s done well you shouldn’t notice it. Good interfaces seem natural because everything you want is to hand. (A principle described as what-you-see-is-what-you-need by software interface heavyweights Constantine & Lockwood.) It means that you can get on with what you’re trying to do rather than worrying about how to do it. When you don’t see what you need breakdowns happen; flow is broken and suddenly the interface is the problem.
Consider this screen from Amazon’s Marketplace service. The idea is to provide feedback on your purchase to help drive their reputation system. And it works well, up to a point. The designers even remind you of the information you need to complete the task in the ‘Questions to consider’ panel, but then don’t provide an interface to all of it! Look at the second question. It’s probably one of the most important things in any transaction: ‘Did the seller accurately describe the items?’. Yet, despite having this information in their database, Amazon expect you to to recall the original description from memory.
This constantly frustrates me because it makes it difficult to give accurate feedback; the cornerstone of any reputation system.
Here’s my revision. Simply adding the original description (by exposing a field in a database) gives me the information I need to properly rate the book purchase.
To know what people need in their software interfaces you have to appreciate how the software is being used; what the people using it are trying to achieve; and the information they need to get that job done. And having made the effort to understand what’s to be done you need to make sure that your application supports it.
There’s a useful new twist on an old technique over at frog’s Design Mind. In their digital diary study participants used voicemail, e-mail and digital cameras to record their behaviour. These insights were sent daily by e-mail and free phone numbers to researchers who followed-up through the same digital technologies. Frog believe that this rapid feedback created a conversational dialogue and a more responsive study. According to them, the technique is:
- Efficient (digital methodology and remote facilitation require no travel)
- Rapid (digital data collection accelerates response)
- Scalable (process allows for parallel investigations in many countries)
- Dynamic (immediate communication permits follow-up questions)
I can certainly see the advantages, and use of the technology would fit perfectly with certain groups like teenagers. But whilst Frog’s view is that the application of ‘digital’ facilitated the more conversational/ethnographic approach …
Feedback fostered a dialogue between researchers and subjects that mirrored true ethnographic interviews…. Traditional diaries allow for no interaction between researchers and subjects…. Data is restricted in one direction.
… I would argue that there’s no reason why paper-based studies can’t include a dialogue with the participants.
The paper form that I created for my student technology study. Participants reported and categorised their activities throughout the day. The form was based on the work of John Reiman.
I was in regular communication with participants when I used diaries to investigate the way students integrate technology and studying into their lives. I met with the students to brief them about the study and then followed-up each week with a face-to-face or telephone interview. Participants were given disposable cameras, alongside paper forms, to help document their behaviour and surroundings (this was before camera-phones or cheap digital cameras had become widely available). E-mails and texts helped to arrange formal feedback sessions and provide informal support between meetings. Not quite the information deluge that the Frog Design team solicited, but enough to keep this researcher busy in-between.
Digital diaries are definitely an exciting and agile method, but with many technology-driven approaches the technology itself can often become a barrier. I think there’s still a lot of scope for mixing the digital and traditional.
… what do I have to do to make sure this film is shown in Birmingham?
Cool, straight-laced Swiss type (50) seeks partner for illicit liaisons and fun. GSOH essential.
Glorious! But, alas, no digital version. (Now where did I put my film setter?)
See more beautiful bastardised fonts in Typographica’s fantastic interview with Phil Simmons Martin. (Oops! Thanks to Stephen for pointing out my mistake.)
I hoped that the ‘mirrored everything’ effect would disappear before I got a chance to write about it. It’s just such a useless ‘me too’ fad, like drop shadow 10 years ago. Take this example from the .net framework website. It actually makes the headline more difficult to read because the letter shapes are less distinct.
And what to do with those pesky descenders? (They do so tend to break the illusion.)
If you want my advice, lose the reflection and stand out by being different.
Foldschool’s child-friendly cardboard furniture appeals directly to the tightfisted, recyling, origami-loving, paper prototyper in me. (And having just moved house I’ve got an abundant supply of old boxes I can re-use.) Brilliant!
Whilst clearing out the attic the other day I found a load of old notebooks full of various doodlings. As often happens when I’m clearing out, I became much more engrossed in the things I was supposed to be clearing out than the clearing out itself.
Flicking through the notebooks I noticed a sketch for a new Open University logo that I drew just before I left in 2003. The Marketing department were beginning to ‘revitalise the brand’ with Wolff Olins, and the whole identity was destined to change. (I know that a brand is about much more than the logo – imagery, ‘voice’, colour, type, layout, experience all work together to create the most successful ones – but the logo is high impact and remains consistent across media.)
OU logos past, possible and present
I wanted to retain the familiarity of the hole-in-the-shield mark, but soften it a little and make it more approachable than the old corporate look. I tried to use the shield to frame what I believe is at the heart of the OU – people; the transformational effect that open access to learning has on people’s lives and the passion education ignites in its students.
The new OU logo wouldn’t look out of place in this rogue’s gallery
You can make up your own mind as to how successful I was, but I’d ask you to contrast my sketch with the Wolff Olins version. Yes, the University was desperate to appear more modern and shrug off its 1970’s ‘housewife university’ tag, but the result is sterile; a pastiche trying too hard to be cool. They were ahead of the curve with the visuals (anticipating the Web 2.0 look, or possibly ripping off Apple depending on your viewpoint) but being fashionable is a difficult game to play. Too cutting edge and you risk appearing silly when things move on. Just look at ‘Corporate World meet Web 2.0′ on Flickr (originally uploaded by gtmcknight). That’s a joke. Unfortunately for the OU, their ‘revitalised’ logo is for real.
Sad to see that one of my heroes, cyclist Jan Ullrich, has announced his retirement from the sport. In a discipline dominated for so long by the machine perfection of Lance Armstrong, Ullrich represented the more human, fallible side of cycling. His annual battle with weight and fitness to prepare for the new season resonated with many amateurs. And in an event as competitive and as controversial as The Tour de France, Jan showed his sportsmanship by waiting for Armstrong to catch up after Lance had been unseated. The Tour wasn’t the same without Ullrich last year and he will be sorely missed in the future.
In 1995 Alan Cooper’s About Face coined the phrase ’stopping the proceedings with idiocy’. He was describing the needless dialog boxes that blight our interactions with computers. About Face 3.0 is due this year so I might send my original copy to Microsoft. Why? Windows Updates.
The good thing is that updates happen more-or-less in the background so I don’t have to be troubled by them. No, the trouble starts once the updates are complete.
Up pops the Automatic Updates dialog box. Windows arrogantly assumes it is more important than the diagram I’m drawing or the document I’m writing. My concentration is broken and now I must choose, not whether I want to restart my computer, but when.
I imagine that only the most ardent security nut is going to want to restart immediately – to save all their work, close all their open applications and wait for several minutes until Windows comes back up. Most people would rather get on with what they’re doing oblivious to the inner workings of the operating system. Presumably Restart Later is Microsoft’s concession to the rest of us. But even this choice is illusory; the dialog being dismissed only to reappear later on. What’s the big hurry? I’ve managed just fine without these changes up ’till now. The fact that they’ve been released shouldn’t override what I’m doing. Why not just wait for the computer to be restarted naturally, at the end of the day or whenever it usually happens? Or, even better, engineer the software so that it doesn’t have to be restarted at all.
The computer is a tool, not an end in itself. It’s good that Microsoft takes security seriously, but not at the expense of my work. Excellent interfaces respect the user. They tiptoe, working in the background, presenting things when they’re needed and very rarely interrupting. They don’t blunder straight in, assume they’re the most important thing on the computer and then wrest control away from you. These kinds of dialog boxes are the idiot in your computer talking. Every one that we can remove means the idiot’s voice gets a little quieter. As interface designers its our job to try and silence him.