Since posting a round-up of current AR projects the other day, I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback and engaged in a fair bit of discussion about the subject — apparently it’s a pretty hot topic.
Specifically two interesting projects have come to my attention, and they couldn’t be more different.
Practical Post
So far most AR I’ve been able to find has either been in the alpha stage, or pure gimmickry. So it was refreshing to find something that is practical and useful to average folks, right now, today. It’s not a game changer and it doesn’t redefine any paradigms, but if you need to know if your stuff will fit in a postal box without going down to the post office, this could be extremely handy. [Found on core77]
Finnish Fluff
If Nokia Research had set out to make a video demonstrating how augmented reality could one day become barely more useful than my iPhone, they couldn’t have done better than this concept video. Unfortunately, I think they really mean it. [Thanks to @MichelleGilmore for the heads-up]
If I’ve understood correctly, in the future I’ll need a hideous pair of glasses, a bracelet, cordless earphones and a phone in order to send and receive text messages, surf the web and check the weather. Okay, okay, I’m being a bit harsh, but let’s break it down:
The lady only ever sends smileys, which is convenient considering how difficult it would be to actually send text using the proposed interface.
Imagine yourself walking down the street in New York with a few hundred people & cars passing you every minute. Now imagine trying to keep your eyes focussed on your music player’s menu and not bump into anyone or get run over.
If we accept that she’s able to navigate through her music with her eyes, why does she need a wrist/bracelet twitch to accept an incoming text message?
I vaguely remember seeing a study of disorientation caused by goggles back in the bad old days of VR, and as I remember it one of the primary causes of nausea was projecting static, non-moving images over a moving background.
It’s a nicely produced video, and it does have a soft glow of cool, but does it really show an innovative way to improve how we communicate, connect, and navigate the world and our data? Meh, not really. If that’s what the future looks like, I’ll just keep my iPhone, thanks. My tip for the Nokia Research AR team: spend half as much on the next video, and put in twice as much time thinking it all through.
And it’s off-topic, but I’m curious: does anyone understand why the guy in the boat is wearing a kevlar vest?
Fluff with Style
A “one-day” vision video doesn’t have to fall so short of the mark. This video from the architecture faculty of Valle Giulia gives us a feeling for how AR might one day be used to make the study of architecture more engaging, fun and informative.
That’s what an exciting vision looks like! And apparently you don’t have to look like a complete dork just because you’re wearing AR glasses.
Yes, it’s a Game Changer
I loathe the phrase as much as anyone, but AR is a game changer. For us designers, the “game” for the last 20 to 30 years has been two-dimensional planes inside the monitor’s magic box. AR not only gives us a whole new dimension to work & play with, but also breaks the magic box and spills our interfaces out into the world we spend all our time in.
The only question Nokia Research answered above is “how can we get the functions of today’s phone out of the phone?” which to me doesn’t go nearly far enough and is, well, boring. The question I want AR to answer is “where are my superpowers?” Is that too much to ask for?
Who could possibly know more than Disney about guiding, exciting and entertaining people? Interface designers can learn a lot from “Mickey’s 10 Commandments”, developed by Walt Disney Imagineering President, Marty Sklar. (commandments in bold, my comments beneath)
Know your audience The first link in the chain. Be aware of who your users are, what they like & dislike.
Wear your guest’s shoes Put yourself in your user’s shoes, visit what you make regularly and try and see what it’s like for your visitors. Watch them and what they do.
Organize the flow of people and ideas Know where you want to lead people and offer clear pathways to help them find the goals.
Create a “Weenie” Like a hotdog on a stick, draw people on by offering clear visual attractions.
Communicate with visual literacy Use the basics of form, colour, typography, etc. to get your message across clearly.
Avoid overload Don’t confuse users by pulling them in too many directions at once.
Tell one story at a time Think in stories, and make sure you’re only telling one at a time. A well-told story has far more impact than an info-dump.
Avoid contradiction Be consistent in each experience you design, create a little world which is believable.
An ounce of treatment, a tonne of treat Sometimes users will have to work their way through the experience. Offer them a treat at the end, a reward which makes the work worth it and leaves them feeling good about it.
Maintain it Peeling paint gives a feeling of dysfunction. Spend time on upkeep: fix broken links, update content, remove or update outdated info.
Listening to Marty Sklar explain these made me think that there’s one commandment missing. When you hear his voice, it’s clear that he likes the people who visit Disney parks—“guests” in Disney-speak—and really wants to give them an enjoyable visit. Sometimes we interface designers develop an arrogant attitude, and look down on users who are too stupid to understand our genius. “The button’s right there you fool!” We need to remember that we’re trying to help people navigate through complicated functions and information. I’d add “Learn to like your users” between commandment 1 and 2.
From the time Sumerians first scratched pictographs into clay tablets, we’ve created content by making our thoughts physical, be it on stone, sheepskin or paper. That’s around 5000 years of sealing our ideas in atoms, which are pretty resistant to change. No surprise that so many people still think that way about their sites after only 15 years of web history.
Books Are Beautiful, But…
Although I’m more often than not online, I still have a few meters of books, full of stories I love. There’s no replacement for a beautifully printed object you can hold in your hands, or the feeling of a story unfolding through the turning of pages. No matter how much I love books as objects, I pick up a book, read it, put it back down, and unless it was extraordinary, I don’t remember it after a month. Making a book is the work of one person over months or years, and when it’s done, that’s it. You can correct and change by publishing a second edition, but does that change the first edition? In other words, a book is the exact opposite of the web. I know, this ain’t rocket science. Stick with me.
A web site is not a book—it’s not finished and perfect once it’s online. Most of us working online every day know this. Some web colleagues—or maybe just their clients—don’t seem to have made this leap quite yet though. There are stillplenty of books in the web. They’re beautiful, funny and entertaining, but after I’ve spent a few minutes looking at them, they’re back on the bottomless shelf, and the chances of me thinking about them again in two days (web time’s faster y’know) are close to zero. (aside:thankfully for my colleagues earning their daily bread with sites like these—if not their clients—it’s also close to impossible to actually measure their success in anything concrete like sales or even ROI).
If you’re working on a site so that you can put it online and forget about it until the next relaunch, you’re publishing. You’re making a book in bits instead of atoms. And if you ask me (I know, you didn’t) that’s not what the web’s there for.
The Web is a Garden
Truly good sites—sites that are in any way relevant to the world of the web—are gardens. They grow, in many cases faster and wilder than anyone can hope to follow. So what can you do to help your site along? Duh. Stop “publishing” and become a gardener, of course.
What does being a gardner mean? First of all, before you start with your new relaunch project, as client, agency, designer or developer, trash your publishing attitude. This means your site will never be “finished”. And yes, this is a good thing for everyone involved. Launching a site is only sketching out your garden and planting seeds. If that’s all you’re prepared to do, you’re planting fail and your garden’s already dead. If, however, you’re planning on tending what you’ve planted, the fun’s just begun.
To start with, build your site from the outset to be searchable, linkable and shareable. The less your site is like a book—the more open, distributable, changeable and participatory it is—the more sun and water your garden’s going to get.
Next, make sure your site encourages discussion. Give your audience tools to talk about you, your content and your products, and to talk with you. And although it may seem counter-intuitive to you, strangely enough the more the discussion takes place elsewhere the more you’ll benefit. And it’s about the discussion, which means you’ll have to talk back to them, and expend energy tracking and participating in the discussion, wherever it occurs. You’re hosting a garden party, and your guests will wander. Deal.
If you’ve planted and tended your garden successfully, the next and most harrowing step lies before you. Give up as much control as you can, without letting your fan-hoarde destroy your beautiful garden. If you’ve managed to get your web audience interested in you, you now, in a sense, belong to them. They live in your garden, and you can’t evict them without losing quite a few brownie points. Instead, pay attention to them, what they want, and how the use your site. Plant what they need, and trim it all so they continue to enjoy it.
Gods & Peasants
Publishing as we know it started with monks copying manuscripts of the Lord’s Word for the few who could afford a copy. Therefore, forgive me the religious metaphors, won’t you?
If you’re still “publishing”, you’re a god, handing The Word down to the peasants. Unfortunately for the publishing gods, there are more and more gods online producing their own content and participating in discussions, and fewer and fewer peasants passively accepting what the publishing gods are feeding them. That is (slightly over-dramatised) the power of the web. Some of the old gods are trying to protect themselves from the new behind ever thicker walls, but the web’s true gods are those with the wildest, fastest growing gardens, which are completely open to the public. The walls of the publishing gods are ensuring their own irrelevance. Once these walls crumble, the publishing gods will look over the rubble and no longer recognise the landscape revealed, and the new gods, the “edglings”, will not recognise them either. On which side of the walls are you standing?
Stowe Boyd responded to a typical re-hash of the “connectedness = overload = falling productivity” argument against social media, but to be honest, the argument (yawn) wasn’t nearly as interesting as Stowe’s response. It’s a lovely visionary rant about a future most people can’t even imagine, from a guy who sounds like he’s been there. This is what he calls Boyd’s Law:
Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity.
At the the risk of sounding like some sort of Boyd fanboi, this is the stuff that flashed my ass off last year at Reboot.
The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important — not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way — than making headway on this piece of work, right now.
As someone who’s got more friends who’ve never heard of Twitter than have, it all sounds pretty damned far out to part of me. But there’s also a part that has begun feeling incomplete without an hourly dip into the stream of contact that today’s net makes possible, and that part can see Stowe’s future from here, and is eager for everyone else to get on with it and get connected.
I have said for years that the centroids — media, religion, government, and corporations — would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.
I’d agree, but so far in my experience the biggest hindrance to a more connected world are the people themselves, and not the media, church or whatever. For example, I’ve been evangelising Twitter quite a bit lately, and the first reaction of most people is a pitying look—“Matt, my soft-brained friend… I hope he’s not dangerous…” Of the very few who actually give it a try (possibly only to pacify me), almost all come back to me after a day and say, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” When I try and show them, and see that they’re only following one person—me—I try and explain it’s about connectedness or as Leisa Reichelt calls it ambient intimacy, and that you can’t be very connected with only one contact, and, and… and then I often run out of steam and mumble something like, “you’ll get it if you do it long enough…”
The reason I know Stowe’s onto something, no matter how far-fetched and techno-hippie it sounds, is I’ve seen this kind of transformation happen. Firstly to myself (I didn’t get it to begin with either), and occasionally to someone I’ve browbeaten into trying Twitter for more than a day. The transformative power of social media is made clear by the aversion most feel to it at first—it’s foreign, unimaginable, and therefore threatening—and the “I get it!” moment most experience at some point after giving it a try. If it was just another fad, just something to play with and forget, everybody would try it without resistance and nobody would care longer than a couple of weeks. But for most, it’s becoming an essential part of everyday communication, and it’s changed who they are. And who we’re becoming is more connected, more aware and faster thinking people, through the influence and support of our networks. And that’s such an optimistic vision—such a rare optimistic vision of the future—that I can’t help but grin to be a part of it, and can’t help but thank Stowe for pointing it out to me.
We got onto some basic info architecture assumptions which define almost all sites my company makes, and most sites in the web. The more we explored the idea, the more both of us were surprised at how these assumptions often keep users from doing what they’re used to doing in the web — finding things fast.
Top-Down Boxes in Boxes
A new site structure usually starts with a number of assumptions. Big Fat Assumption Number One is that the content chunks will be stuffed into a hierarchy of boxes. The first group of boxes form the 1st level navigation, and each of those boxes usually has more boxes inside it. Often the 2nd level boxes have more boxes inside them, and I’ve seen this boxes in boxes structure repeated down to the 5th level.
A user can only try to guess which box what he’s looking for might be in. And instead of getting the content chunk he’s looking for when he selects a box, he gets a new set of boxes and starts guessing again. When he finally reaches real content (after guessing, guessing, guessing, etc.) the chances are relatively good that he’s not found what he wants, and the guessing game can start from the top again.
If individual chunks of content (or user goals) are the bottom of our structure, we’ve just built an info architecture from the top down.
Hierarchical boxes are also made of “conceptual steel” and separate chunks from each other. This works for a book: the boxes are chapters, which have boxes in them called paragraphs, which are full of chunks called sentences. But once a book’s printed it doesn’t change. Web sites change constantly, and boxes are change-resistant.
Bottom Up Piles & Lenses
Instead of imposing a structure on content chunks from the top down, why not look at the chunks themselves first; i.e. bottom up? If we find common attributes for the chunks, e.g. colour, and label each chunk either blue, green, yellow or red, then we have a labeled pile of chunks.
To find something in a colour labeled pile, users could use “lenses”. A red lens would make all blue, green and yellow chunks disappear, leaving only the red chunks visible. If our chunks also had an attribute size—with labels big, medium and small—they could then combine size and colour lenses to quickly find large/red chunks, or small/green ones.
Old Hat?
Sure, none of this is particularly revolutionary—it’s the way a great deal of those sites we insist on calling “web 2.0” work. Flickr is a gigantic pile of images whose labels are tags, but also technical details such as which camera made the image, Creative Commons license, interestingness, etc. Most of Flickr’s navigation doesn’t throw the user into a box, it provides them with a lens through which they can look at the chunks they’re interested in, and ignore the rest of the pile.
Where The Hell am I? Who cares?
The assumption that drives us to make top-down box architectures is that without a structured, categorised series of boxes in boxes, the poor user will lose his orientation. I think this is seriously outdated thinking, which comes out of the interface thoughts of the pre-internet software design era. It might make sense in the focused, daily-use context of an application, but a user who can find any page in your site from google, and jump directly to it, doesn’t give a crap where he is as long as he finds what he wants. When I’ve asked a number of daily-use but less than cutting-edge users “where” in the web they are right now, the answer surprised me: “What do you mean? I’m in Google.” So much for that carefully thought out color-coded box hierarchy.
Hunters & Gatherers
Am I recommending that all of my corporate clients throw their hierarchies out the window? Hell no. But I would like to see them experiment a little more with piles & lenses to supplement their box hierarchies. Traditional boxes-in-boxes navigation is fine for gatherers, but google is teaching users hunter strategies: select a goal, focus on it, jump on it as quickly as possible. The next time you start a concept with Big Fat Assumption Number One, and begin stuffing content into boxes-in-boxes, take a step back, look at the chunks at the bottom, and see if you can offer the hunters piles and lenses to speed their hunt.
Early last year I lost a few extremely creative and intelligent colleagues, which was sad. What wasn’t sad at all was why they left—to work on a project which inspired and excited them all to the point that they’ve rarely spoken about anything else since. And now, finally, after plenty of sweat and stress, they’ve given birth. Tempodome is live. My first impression after a few minutes kicking the tires is good. They’ve built it with a nice, simple design which creates a suitable mood, and at the heart of it is an exciting idea: live concerts online. The idea of doing something cool online with events and music seems to be in the air this year, judging by how many cool ideas I’ve heard about, but Tempodome is the first so far to get their ideas online. So a hearty congratulations goes out to the Tempodomites, and I’m looking forward to your first concert and your future!
Those of you who don’t live in the design world or aren’t Apple Believers might not have heard of Dieter Rams, the world-famous designer of the world-famous Apple Look… ah, urm, wait a sec.
Dieter Rams is actually a kick-ass industrial designer mostly known for the products he designed for Braun from the 50’s onwards.
Jonathan Ive is the guy responsible for the Apple Look.
I’ve been aware that Jonathan Ive is a bit of a Rams fan ever since I saw the iPhone calculator (open it next to Rams’ calculator design from 1978), but, not being that familiar with Rams’ work, I’d always thought this was a one-time-only tribute to Braun’s designer. The gizmodo post “The future of Apple is in 1960s Braun”, and especially the images of Rams designs standing next to Ive designs made it clear that Ive has been inspired by Rams in almost everything he’s ever done for Apple, and hell, inspired may be too polite a word.
To be honest, I’ve been thinking of Mr. Ive as an innovative designer for so long that I’m not sure where to go with my reaction to these overwhelming similarities. It’s a never-ending discussion which I’ve started before: where is the border between inspiration and outright theft? Should Apple products, widely known for innovative design, better be known as a Braun rip-offs? If you were Dieter Rams, would you want to whup Jonathan Ive’s ass? I’m mulling all these things over, and would definitely be interested in your opinion.
Other than the whole rip-off subject, one very worthwhile part of the gizmodo article was Rams’ “Ten Commandments on Design”. Some are surely redundant, but it’s definitely food for thought for any designer. For more detail on them, see Rams’ Wikipedia page.
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Quite a list, and some of it certainly debatable, but his three word motto is on my wavelength (and far easier to remember): “Less, but better.”
I’ve been designing websites professionally since 1995, and never has any site I’ve worked on been discussed as much as the new Sinnerschrader site, and, to be exact, it’s not even a site at all.
Let’s get the full disclosure out of the way first: I’m an Art Director at Sinnerschrader, and other than the occasional over the shoulder comment and discussion over a smoke, I had nothing to do with the idea, concept, or design of the new site. Go check out sinnerschrader.de, click around a little, and come back for my thoughts on it.
As you hopefully noticed, it’s just a link list. That’s it. All of our content is “out there” in the web. Of course most of it always has been, and now our site is the place where all of the disparate elements — job offers, client sites, employee profiles, how to find us, etc. — meet. Instead of a perfectly polished and organised glossy brochure, which is whatmostagencywebsitesare, ours is a knot which loosely joins our small pieces.
What’s Good?
I’ve loved the idea ever since one of my favourite coleagues, Ron (whose blog is still “coming soon”) told me about it. And, in so far as our site is just a list of links, I find it a logical and consequent execution of the idea. The web is not a book or a wall or a television, so a cover or a poster or a video is certainly in the medium, but not really of the medium.
As I explained in my Naked Relaunch article, I’m also a strong believer in the “it’s never finished” mentality, when it comes to web design and content. The most exciting aspect of the web is that it’s continually changing, growing and becoming more and other than it is at this moment. Our new site doesn’t take this aspect far enough (more on that below) but the idea of a living collection of links that are easy and fast to add, change and remove is where I hope the site’s going.
Those are just two short and small “what’s goods,” but for me they’re much more important than the more numerous “what’s not yet good” comments listed below. I’m a fan of ideas, and, when compared with ideas, niggling details don’t weigh very heavily on my scales.
What’s Bad Not Yet Good?
Well, the first thing that makes my idea-focussed brain itch is: the thing’s static. Nothing’s happened since it went online on the 5th of December (be careful, there’s German behind that link). If the most exciting thing about the web is the continual change, then an agency website which says, “our stuff isn’t packed away in a shiny wrapper, it’s living out there in the chaos” must have a site where something’s happening. For now it’s just a link list. There’s nothing new, nothing changes, it’s not alive.
The site is an idea, and it’s pretty brave, and I haven’t seen anything like it before, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from squeezing in at least a little wobbly, animated, flickering Flash. Maybe we were afraid it wouldn’t be “pretty” enough for an agency site; I wasn’t involved in the decisions, so I don’t really know. Personally I think the Flash is decoration which doesn’t serve the goal or message of the page itself. Although I actually quite like wobbly pink, gold and grey aesthetically, I don’t think the page would suffer much if it wasn’t there. In fact, Flash is a shot in our own foot as far as search engines, the back button, auto-discovery of the rss feed, and copying text and links are concerned. These are as much the nature of the web as are links and distributed content, so why did we ignore these? I don’t know.
Other than all of that, there are a few little details which picky usability freaks have been pinning on us — e.g. the newsletter field should make it clear that it requires an email address — but I think the basic function (open external pages in a frame and close the frame again) works and is understandable. A few tweaks, and we’ll shake the bugs out. No big deal.
How Could it be Better?
Number one on my wishlist: let it live. Collect feeds from employeeblogs, spit in whatever turns up under the tag “sinnerschrader” on Flickr, collect the Tweets of employees, friends and the company itself, mash it up and call it “The Secret Life of S2” or “S2nd Life”, whatever. We’re a web company, we make web stuff, and more than a few of us live in the web, so why not show it?
We could get our hands a little dirtier with the clients. Just linking to their sites isn’t really enough, or sometimes it could be too much — a link suggests we did all of it. Sure, we design and program complete sites for many of our clients, but we also produce banners, single pages, micro-sites, etc. Why not — in addition to the links — simply throw up some screenshots at Flickr, a case study in the blog, whatever it is that best describes our work for that client?
Kick the Flash out. As far as I’m concerned kick the graphic typography out as well — with the exception of the logo and the claim, of course. The flashier it is, the harder it is to change, as well as the problems mentioned above. If the idea is links, make it 95% about links. Right now we’re around 70%.
Oh yeah, and let’s put in a search, as Martin “Nielsen” Seibert suggested (Achtung! More German!), thereby proving that he didn’t even begin to understand the idea. But if you do, please link our search to Google.
How do you like our new site? If you were the boss, what would you add, remove or change? Let me know.
A user can only try to guess which box what he’s looking for might be in. And instead of getting the content chunk he’s looking for when he selects a box, he gets a new set of boxes and starts guessing again. When he finally reaches real content (after guessing, guessing, guessing, etc.) the chances are relatively good that he’s not found what he wants, and the guessing game can start from the top again.
