Cost of Interaction

Businesses always talk about ROI: the Return on Investment.

This makes sense. Every business takes a risk when they invest money in a product or service and they rightfully crunch numbers from predictors and precedent in order to feel confident about spending money up front.

But what about me?

Do I care what they spend on a service? No, I care what the experience feels like to me. With so many digital and technological experiences to choose from, I don't even really care if the product or service works -- I care if it works the way I want it to work. You may think that makes me lazy, but research shows I am not alone in this demand. In 2008 Accenture reported that of all the 'gadgets' consumers returned, 68% of them worked perfectly fine. They just didn't work the way consumers wanted.

Erik Stolterman, a human-computer-interaction-design researcher at the School of Informatics, comments on a new idea: the Cost of Interaction. I think his COI is an idea with which we're all familiar. The Cost of Interaction is that point at which you say "this is just stupid" and stop purchasing a good or service that you were otherwise going to buy.

And in 2007 at least, the COI of 68% of the gadgets out there was too high for users -- which I'm sure put a dent in many ROIs.

What's a design pattern?

Computer engineers, city planners, and architects use them. Writers, artists, and salesmen use them. Musicians, bloggers, and doctors use them. Football coaches, mothers, and bosses all use them. Basically, design patterns are found in both the best and worst of us. So what are design patterns? In its most abstract form, design patterns are simply: “things that repeat.”

The “thing” of repetition may be physical or behavioral in expression. The “thing” of repetition may be negative or positive in impact. The “thing” of repetition may be an annoyance or a delight. It matters not. The pattern has no politics. It is a property of repetition and its presence exists whether the designer intended them or not.

Design patterns are simply things that repeat in a design.

What is informatics?

Since I study and research at the School of Informatics, many people often ask, "What is informatics?" There are many good explicit answers to this question, but they're pretty abstract. To be concrete, I find it is helpful to be a little wrong about the definition up front and work down from there.

In the big umbrella version, "informatics" is the study of information. Being that information tends to be digital, informatics tends to be the study of information in digital contexts. The word is literally a mash-up of "information" + "automatic," i.e. the consequences and new uses of information that is easily replicated. In informatics, I currently focus on interaction design, which: 1) studies social and psychological consequences of information being so easily accessible; and 2) manifests more intuitive interactions made possible by new technologies and a greater understanding of the audience in context.

So, yeah, it's easier just to say "Informatics."

Same Pier, Different Place

I notice things have changed as I walk down the shore to the pier at Pompano Beach. The Atlantic Ocean to my left is gorgeous, quiet, and restful. But on my right, across from this gorgeous ocean, is a long, graying panorama of unkept windswept condos.

They all seem empty. It's weird. The beach should be littered with tan locals and pale tourists alike! It's high season. It's winter. This is the season where South Florida makes its money. But as I walk down the shore to the pier at Pompano Beach, it is empty. The economic recession is in full swing. It has punched South Florida in the face. The recession has already made life, as my father used to say to me when times where tough, "tough all over."

I reach the pier. I ascend the familiar sandy steps. When I reach the top? It has changed. Except for the beaten, wooden pier that extends out into the ocean...

Everything is gone! The crab shack, the bait shop, the pizza place, the bar with bad conch fritters, they're all gone! It's just pavement and sand. No longer is it the terrible fisherman's den that my father used to drag me to. It is the clean and winswept spot. I walk up to the man in the temporary little bait shop/bar/pizza shack and I ask him, Hugh, what happened. Hugh says they raized the old structure in order to build a new nicer plaza twice the size. I ask when they tore everything down. “About a year ago,” he says.

Have I been gone that long?

He points to the plans beside his window that show the architectural designs for the very nice, very wide plaza that will someday replace the old pier’s beaten, wooden shops with thatched roofs strewn over old wooden beams that look like they fell off pirate ships.

It’s a shame, really. While the architectural design is very nice in concept, it has the same look of any modern strip mall in Fort Lauderdale, the more popular city just south of Pompano. Same Spanish architecture. Same beige and coral hues. It’s a nice drawing, really. Not very Pompano Beach, but nice. Pompano is more… rough hewn than this nice thing. Pompano Beach is still more fisherman's town than Fort Lauderdale is. Less glitz. Less glamour. Less money. Much more Venice than Santa Monica, if you happen to know what I mean.

And it’s a shame the Pompano city planners chose to throw this identity out. For while the thatched, palm roofs and graying wood of the old shops were impractical as materials, incorporating the experience of those brandable elements into the new structure’d help preserve its identity. Perhaps even create a pride in the history of the 40 year old city structure, instead of implicitly showing embarrassment by erasing it

I ask Hugh when the plaza is supposed to be complete. "It's on hold because of the recession," he says. I shake my head, "Man, it's tough all over."

It's tough all over. Shops by the waterfront are closing down (for good) and yet no patrons are even around buy their 80% off items. I enter one of two shops still open on the block. The sign says, “Nothing is over $5.” I expect to find a stable of cheesy t-shirts, faux henna tatts, and Miami Vice colored trinkets.

Mostly it's cheesy Florida t-shirts and fake henna tattoos. But as I flip through those beloved cheesy Florida t-shirts, one actually catches my eye. The front says “Same Same." The back just says, “But Different." I like it. I buy it.

“Things are tough all over,” I say as I open conversation with Ayal, the owner. He nods. Ayal is closing down his small shop on Atlantic Blvd and is looking for a new state to live in. Florida, as a whole, is getting too expensive or him. “The summer was just dead, and that was tough,” he says, and “but now the busy season is dead now. No one is here. Nobody comes here. It’s dead.”

And it’s true. With this much beachfront property, I have to ask though: why does nobody come here? As I walk north on A1A, there is nothing but condos. Mostly empty. Even the newest ones - empty. All the space in the world to rent, but nothing – just nothing – to do. To build a more social community, people need good interaction spaces, not just space. Space is just the arena. Spaces are made memorable by the interactions made within them. But this space? No energy in the air. No people in the condos. No people in general.

That's what I'm missing from my walk today: the people that are normally here when I'm around the pier.

With nothing but condos to look at on A1A, I head back to the beach. At the pier I decide to pay a dollar to walk out where my father would occasionally take me to fish and talk. Mostly against my will and mostly to have those uncomfortable talks – sex, alcohol & drugs, finance – in some sort of public privacy. I dreaded those once.

But now he is gone, too. And the walk out there makes me think of him. Or rather, I’m in fact going out there to think of him and asking the old scenery to fill in the blanks of those wonderfully angst-ridden memories I have of him. I have no fishing pole, but I do go out to the edge of the pier by the fishermen. Some fishermen are teaching their children to fish. Some cocky teen with salt-broken blonde hair cleans a nice snapper with quick, skillful cuts. The young ones watch with amazement.

Another man with eight poles in the water wrings his hands. Watches the waters from edge-to-edge. He's desparate. I can tell he’s one of the fathers straight away. But what does not occur to me for awhile is that he's desparate because it is late in the day and he, it would seem from his actions, he needs to catch this food.

“Life is hard,” is what Dad would inevitably say to the end of those talks, “But Sean Ryan, things are tough all over.” I think of those words as I walk back to the base of the pier that no longer exists and I understand a little bit better that, yes, life is tough all over. And not only is it hard, time passes. And the even though this pier is the same, without the thatched roof shops, without the graying old wood, without bait shop, and without my father and his heartfelt talks?

Same same. Sure. But it's sure different.

There ain't one web

In a recent design class problem, students were asked to make a new browsing experience out of RSS feeds. What is interesting, is that many students chose to make the navigation and organization of feeds not only easier, but, more powerful.

So, given that I can now (conceptually) search, organize, browse, share, and 'favorite' my feeds in a plurality of ways, I ask: is a more powerful way to search, organize, and browse my feeds a way for me to create my own mini-web?

I keep thinking to this point a lot. Certainly there is the world wide web and there is no doubt about it. At the center of this web? Google. It unites the furthest reaches of the web better than anything else I've found (though I'm sure some will debate that).

But what about facebook now? Google doesn't search it (well, not really), but it is a rich environment all it's own. And I'm wondering, is facebook like another kind of web?

Meaning, the world-wide-web is composed of 'pages as objects' at discrete locations (URLs). Facebooks is web composed of 'people as objects' at discrete locations. Ning, for that matter, is a web composed of 'social networks as objects.' Lastly, to add this class assingment to the list, a large enough RSS-feed that was navigable would be 'personalized feed as objects.'

All of these objects are on 'the web' and there's no denying that the Google-web is the one in which all the others must be embedded. But as content and interaction continues to grow in these other macro-networks, do they become webs themselves? If they start with different objects, does that change how we will eventually come to navigate them? And if it does (or if it merely even more convenient to search them a different way), how can we begin to think of this plurality of overlapping webs? And, use this differentiation to a designerly advantage?

Heidi Klum's My Facebook Friend

I have a secret.

If you look at my Facebook profile, I think it’s pretty obvious that I am a straight male – not that there’s anything wrong with that. I have straight male tastes, I like straight male things, and I love Heidi Klum’s Project Runway.

I am so ashamed.

Now who cares, right? It’s Project Runway! It’s got Heidi Klum. It’s got runway models in lingerie. It’s got – heck – women looking good in tiny clothes that look good.

I so wish I watched it for that.

In truth, I watch it for the designerly minds. What’s a designerly mind? Well, that’s a later discussion. The issue at hand today? I was hanging with my neighbor and she asked if I was on facebook so we linked up our laptops and add-friended each other and, of course, immediately sat silent and stalked all over each others profiles awhile. I went for pictures, she went for “Info."

Male/female right there.

We went silent. After awhile I hear a practically disgusted, “Project Runway?”

Now, I understand I'm an unusual object. I’m accustomed to expressions of oddity. But holy cow, the way she said Project Runway I heard echoes of every straight female who’s ever laid eyes on my site. Project Runway??

As if, I was fine till that point. As if “yeah, good, sports, check, Seinfeld, check, penis, check, Project Runway??”

There was no doubt about it. I’d lost a point. I’d lost a penis point in the person’s perspective, and you know what? I like my points! I wanna keep ‘em. There are many things I can and cannot do and I am aware of what those things are. I have enough obvious negatives that I don’t need to send out a beacon to the world to take off some man-law points.

This bothers me for days.

“Should I remove it?” This was the question. It wasn't so much moral as it was a challenge. Should I take Project Runway off of my Favorite TV shows? Must I articulate all favorite shows if I am not around to articulate my liking of them.

An interesting question in interaction design is this question of on-line identity. Because, you know, in the real world, you can keep your work-friends separate from your school-friends and maybe we are a little different in the evening then we are when at the office. Which is normal in real space. We express different facets of a complex identity when we're in different contexts. It's like not painting your face for a promotion but doing so at the big game. Or being a nerd in the office and a freak in the... well, you get the idea. Many different facets.

How does one express a coherent and meaningful whole in one identity-page like facebook? Do I need to express the full complexity of me, really? Or just give the proper sound bite?

This question of a singular presentation of a complex identity is something I’d like to discuss more with you but for now let’s just assume Heidi Klum is hot.

Our (Victoria's) secret.

+ S

Steve Jobs: Audience Centered Design

Steve Jobs is the wildly successful leader of Apple. Recent product launches include innovative and pervasive technologies such as the iPhone, the iPod, and the series of MacBook laptops. How did he get such insight into what the consumer wants?

I believe it is user centered design.

I study and mentor graduate students in the Interaction Design Practicum class. The professor spoke of using personas and user tests as a way to prevent students from inevitably designing objects that are for people like themselves. He said it doesn't work well if you design for yourself. One student asked about Steve Jobs. The student said Steve Jobs considers himself the user, and designs for himself.

Well... that's not actually correct. Steve Jobs is a tech-geek billionaire. Yet Apple and Steve Jobs focus on a home computer market. IBM and Microsoft still dominate the workplace, where people *have to learn* the software their bosses bought. It doesn't matter how unpleasant the experience of use is. Employees *have* to do it. Apple focuses on the home -- where there is no "I.T. guy" to save you, no help desk, and no co-workers with the same product. There is only you.

Steve Jobs thought about *that* lone person. Or *that* lone family. What do they need? Ease of use. Positive interaction. Something that doesn't make me feel dumb but makes me feel techno-uber-savvy. I have sources and citations, but I'll talk about this often. For now it's enough to note that thinking of the user in context is what may enable them to have such success as computers step out of both our offices and our homes, and step into our pockets and cell phones. He understands the needs of the user in context.

Steve Jobs doesn't design for himself, guys. He'd be making platinum covered space shuttles. Steve Jobs designs for moms and dads in their homes. And that, is user in context.