Phones Aren’t Flat: Designing for People, Data & Ecosystems
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A session at Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit 2015 Tuesday 23rd June, 2015 9:45am to 10:30am We like to think phones are flat slabs of glass our users touch, but it's not entirely true. Everything we design and build exists as a part of an ecosystem, the physical and digital environment in which the user perceives and uses it. Though we should always have been designing like this, multi-screening, smart homes and wearable devices give us an excuse to think specifically about the real ways people work. We'll discuss how to use technology to build products and services—not just apps and websites—for your business and users. We will apply this with a brief exercise, so bring along a current or recently-completed project, or a favorite (or least favorite) tool you use day to day to work on.
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Phones Aren’t Flat: Designing for People, Data & Ecosystems
- 1. 1 @shoobe01 #STC15 Phones Aren’t Flat Designing for People, Data & Ecosystems
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- 3. 3 1967
- 4. 4 1986
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- 11. 11 Ecosystem Design is Hard
- 12. 12 Time to Draw
- 13. 13 Time to Draw
- 14. 14 Sun/Moon Data
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- 17. 17 First, Don’t Draw • Graphical positions • Summary data • Detail views • Sunrise/Sunset time • Moonrise/Moonset • Sun/Moon transit times • Sun, twilight • Moon phase, percentage lit • Civil, nautical, astronomical • Key moon phase dates • Change date, calendar • Azimuth, distance • Sky cover (local weather)
- 19. 19 Primary • Graphical sun position • Graphical moon position • Times • Phase, % • Transit • Text labels Hierarchies of Information Secondary • Detail view • Calendar • Dates • Azimuth, distance Tertiary • Location • Nautical, civil, astro switch • Weather
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- 28. 28 • Design for data & ecosystems • Design for failure & uncertainty • Design for people Phones are not flat
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- 31. 31 Contact me for consulting, design, to follow up on this deck, or just to talk: Steven Hoober steven@4ourth.com +1 816 210 0455 @shoobe01 shoobe01 on: www.4ourth.com
Editor's Notes
- [No real intro…]
- Everything is an ecosystem, and good designers know this. Not just digital things either. The world is a complex, inter-related system, and physical products—especially information products—have been multi-channel for decades, at least. Newspapers and magazines are designed not just to be readable, but to be appealing to the newsstand. And, to have room for mailing labels for home delivery. Print is — in quite convincing ways — responsively designed.
- Today, a popular magazine sells around 3 million subscriptions a week. Well, from the 60s or so through the 1990s, TV guide was vastly, vastly popular. They sold 20 million copies a week of this [IMAGE]. What is all but a database dump you pay for, and which is also full of ads. You can see why the Internet did so well. The guys who actually gathered this data realized early on they didn’t make a magazine though. They had a data product.
- And when the first EPGs came along — the TV-Guide channel that is the first thing that came up when you turned on the early Cable TV systems — the data they had was all ready for it. They had already been storing short and long descriptions (reruns within a week don’t get the full description, or maybe space is an issue), as well as the concept of meta-data well before anyone called it that. Derived, with some improvements for history, from http://karenmcgrane.com/category/content-strategy/ though I saw it presented instead.
- Simplifying the story some, what with mergers and acquisitions over the decades, the content we see today on our much more high tech cable, satellite or streaming systems is not just the same basic format, but in some cases is the exact same content. There’s no need to write a new description for that Lawrence Welk show every time it airs, so the original 1967 description can still be pulled from the database and used. It’s all data.
- We care because now mobile is disrupting the market again, and “digital” is becoming more things than just “not print.” In 2014 more than 1 billion Android devices were activated. Smartphones are 3/4 of all new mobiles sold, and Android is over 80% of the market. For contrast it takes Microsoft four years to sell as many licenses. The desktop and laptop computer installed base is actually dropping. Mobile is no longer the next big thing. It’s here. It’s won. Successfully people know this. The New York Times blocks Their Own Website from their work PCs. Want to see what your story looks like: check it out on your phone.
- About 10 years ago now, we started getting reports from websites that after usage petered out for the evening, it picked up again. Consistently, by time zone. It was people logging off their computers, then picking up their mobile before they went to bed. And we mostly pick up our phones and start checking before we get out of bed in the morning. We use devices all the time, but the usage varies by device class, location, task, content, and intent. Know your audience. The Financial Times, for one example here, sees HUGE spikes in traffic in the morning, all from mobile phones, and another large spike in the early evening on tablets. You can take advantage of data like this when designing your website, app and services.
- And this is only getting more complex, with connected devices sending and broadcasting data in many, many channels. Cities are already wired up, with utility and roadway monitoring, and stores tracking inventory, and you, at increasingly real time speeds.
- It’s no longer desktop, or even desktop and mobile. How many of you have a wearable device on Right Now? RAISE MY PEBBLE HAND. How many of you have a smart device at home? No, you can all raise your hands. Even if you didn’t deliberately do it, self-aware set top boxes and tattling power meters are becoming the norm.
- And soon you’ll start seeing relevant, contextual, personalized information coming at you from Everywhere. This is real. A trial, but real subway info on the sidewalk above the subways in New York. We cannot design or create content just mobile first, but need to come up with strategies to make it work for arbitrary platforms, at any size, any time or place.
- Driving across Ohio on the way over here, I was on some state highways when suddenly these airplanes fly overhead. I am a huge airplane nerd. Went to aerospace engineering school before I did this stuff. So I think it’s cool I stumbled across some acrobatic team practicing. Till I come around a corner and see Airshow Parking Ahead. Airshow. Right on my route. The day I am driving through town. In a world where Google is supposed to know everything, why was I not told about this?
- Because ecosystem design is hard. Too hard to do in a few minutes, so I am going to use simple touchscreen phone or tablet design as a proxy for it. SO, pull out your favorite notebook, your favorite pen, and whatever project you brought with you…
- If you forgot anything to draw on or with, I have some phone and tablet sketching templates you can use, and some Sharpies you can borrow. If you didn’t bring something to work on, we all have phones. What app or site do you have to use that just infuriates you. Pull it up so we can make it better.
- I am going to try to improve this Sun/Moon data app. It’s something I use when doing outdoorsy stuff, and I have never really found a totally, completely good one.
- It’s highly information dense, and there are several ways to approach it. I rather like the Yahoo Weather graphical sun thing here. So that’s a way to approach this: You can also bring up good alternative ideas, competitors and patterns. Just don’t apply them blindly because they are trendy, make sure it’s relevant. Anyway, this is a good proxy for any complex data you have. Imagine you need to communicate process control, or results of research. Same principles. I will do this, as you do yours, so don’t wait for me. Get to work as I keep talking!
- And the first thing we do is Definitely Not Draw new solutions. First, we need to understand. What do we have to work with. Let’s take what we have now, and circle and annotate what it is important. When you have the time, post-its (or cards like here) are the best way to record this, as they feel like unitary items, and are easy to pick up, move around and organize.
- Here’s I’ve pre-written bullets based on looking at the various apps, cause it’s hard to do that and talk and look interesting at the same time. TALK THROUGH, GESTURE…
- Next, we arrange these. I think there’s a hierarchy to everything. Primary, secondary, tertiary. And you can apply these to any interface. This is a phone, and I’ll use that guideline soon, but consider a wearable. Primary is stuff worth notifying you of. It blinks, buzzes and appears on your wrist. Secondary is stuff you can use at a glance. Wearables are good at being ambient information radiators, as I’ll show you a little later. Tertiary is stuff you use more rarely (or which only some users need), so you make available but which requires deliberate action. Press a button to respond, or mark a point, see more data.
- Now, with that sort of thing in mind as to the consequences, let’s organize into these categories. TALK THROUGH MINE.
- Now I am going to take my hierarchy chart, and draw out a solution using that principle of design by hierarchies. This is what I really call Information Design, and when you aren’t sure what design pattern to follow, you don’t draw solutions but arrange boxes, or even just post-it notes. The relative importance of the elements is expressed, and you have a place to move to for design.
- First, I put the primary stuff in the middle of the page … ETC. DO THIS ALL IN INDD DRAWING.
- Okay, keep drawing if you must, but I am going to get back to talking at you. People are real, dimensional, and not quantifiable as pixels on a screen. They use their phone in real environments, so even when designing just a phone screen like we just did, we cannot assume that the interaction is entirely with a flat glass rectangle.
- Remember when I mentioned different people use their devices in different ways based on context and time of day? Well, they also have different expectations based on their device. Weather.com on the desktop has a home page. News, videos, info. A little weather box that shows me weather in a random carousel of cities. Munich? I am in Kansas, so they aren’t even risking IP location apparently. If I customize it, cookies remember me, but that places the burden on the user. On mobile, it uses the location service to focus on what you want anyway, but especially need when on a mobile: your weather, where you are now. Scrolling down, again if you see the pattern, gives you the rest of the home page content, but the first thing you see is content adapted to you, where you are and what you are doing now. It even passes this locational information to their advertisers, giving more customized information, and giving them more revenue.
- How else can we deliver weather info? I hear people say they can look outside. But that’s not so quantifable, and we don’t have individual time machines. Pushing to information radiators, as on my smartwatch, has changed the whole way information is understood to exist. This is an app called Glance I put on my Pebble. Weather alerts also pop up when something critical has happened, and I can click into it to see more details.
- Of course, the unexpected happens. Is this the best way to deal with it? Maybe not friendly, but is it actually worse than showing out-of-date info? System problems are one thing? How do you deal with the fact that users are falliable?
- I also still wear normal watches. One is a dive watch, because it’s shiny, not because I am a diver or anything. It is one of those with a twisty ring around the outside. That part with the numbers twists around. If you don't know, and I didn't until recently, this is used as a simple timer. But on mine, and on all dive watches (vs. Aviators watches), the ring only goes one way. The clicky detent lets it go counter-clockwise, only. WHY? … Because it's for timing remaining air. The ring might get bumped and change it's setting. Having it show less time might be inconvenient, but going the other way might kill you. And, you don't even need to know this. It just works. This is what I call Resilience Design. Systems are designed to prevent error, and to gracefully degrade or flex back into normal conditions.
- I have written about this a lot, but here’s one example: The happy path does not exist. If you map your process from the home page, drilling down, step by step… you are wrong. On a typical website, I find that home page as the entry point is rarely over 10%, and is often so low as to be ignored; hundreds of visits a month when hundreds of thousands visit the site. (This is real data.)
- So I leave you with that, and remind you of the title again. Design for people, design for systems, and design for failure. Because as much as the digital world changes, these are your unassailable constants, and permanent constraints.
- There is much more on this, and much of it from me. I have written books, and regularly write articles, even ones published in paper magazines.
- I have been designing since apps like this were totally awesome and ground breaking, for carriers, manufacturers and many more companies than I have listed here.
- And I do all this because I have an abiding sense of disappointment over where we are, and optimism over where we could be. If you have questions or need more info, follow me, or contact me directly. If you miss these addresses or your phone doesn’t have the resolution, just Google my name and you’ll find me. TIME FOR QUESTIONS? CLOSING: CARDS, STICKERS, TOUCH TEMPLATES FOR SALE