Global Moxie - Blog

Desknots

Josh Clark — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:12:48 UT

“Mobile” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Once upon a time and not so very long ago, “mobile” meant digital experiences for on-the-go phones. Now we use the word for experiences that are neither on-the-go, nor for phones. Mobile isn’t especially mobile anymore: it’s on the couch, or in bed, or stalled out at a three-hour layover. And even the crisp equation mobile=phone started to break down with the arrival of tablets of all shapes and sizes.

More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. Our usage overloads poor mobile to include gizmos like phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers, even TVs. Let’s give mobile a break. I propose a new catch-all term for our myriad non-desktop screens: desknots.

Desknots are connected devices that present alternative contexts and form factors for non-desktop computing. (The word “desknot” was suggested by Terence Tuhinanshu, many thanks!) But um, who cares, right? Why split hairs over what we call this stuff? Me, I think it’s useful to have a broad term to refer to this entire sweeping class of new personal gadgetry. As our industry slowly gets the hang of responsive design and progressive enhancement, it’s handy to have a term for all the screen contexts we’ve ignored (or that never even existed) over the last two decades of web and software design.

That’s what we’ve adapted the term “mobile” to mean over the last few years. In the beginning, that made sense. Mobile phones were the only other mainstream target for personal software and web interfaces. You had your desktop version and, if you were forward looking, your mobile version. As other mobile-ish platforms came along, we folded those in, too. Kindles, iPads, 7” tablets, all called mobile. As similar interfaces expand to near-future devices for TVs, refrigerators, car dashboards, household windows, bathroom mirrors, and so on, “mobile” will become even more inappropriate and confusing as a term. I’d love to see the meaning of “mobile” reclaimed by devices that are actually mobile (rather than merely portable).

Let’s call the rest of ’em desknots.

A transitional notion

A term like desknot is necessary only because the desktop still holds such a primary place in the mainstream understanding of computing. There’s a damaging assumption that the desktop represents the “real” web, and all these other platforms should just get lite versions of our websites and software, if anything at all. As more and more connected devices arrive in all shapes and sizes, though, it seems clear that our computing experience will be a continuous spectrum of gadgets, our information flowing among them as our context changes throughout the day.

Over time, we’ll understand desknots as having equal standing with the desktop. The desktop will be just one platform among many, on the same footing as the rest. When that happens, I suspect we won’t need a term like desknot, and we can focus instead on the specific characteristics of each platform.

Desknots aren’t (necessarily) mobile. Desknots aren’t (necessarily) wireless. Desknots aren’t (necessarily) personal. Every category of desknot has contexts, form factor, use cases, and usability considerations that are very different from the desktop. It’s useful to have a term that suggests: “hey, it’s not just about the desktop. Remember to do the design thinking for this whole collection of alternative devices.” Those devices began with mobile, but they don’t end there. Our mindset—and our language—has to embrace this sprawling landscape.

Tags: desknots, ffly, language, mobile

A Day Made of Glass

Josh Clark — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:11:30 UT

The folks at Corning put together a heckuva concept video that peeks into the near future of touchscreen interfaces. I’m not usually a huge fan of concept videos—they tend to veer into science fiction. While I appreciate the creative value of imagining “what if,” concept videos are often slight marketing vehicles for companies who are unlikely ever to deliver.

But this video splits the difference by looking to the very near (and very plausible) future. It also goes the extra mile to spell out what’s already happening, what’s emerging, and to put caveats around what’s more speculative. A lot of this stuff feels right around the corner, though, and it’s pretty marvelous.

I especially appreciate the emphasis on screens embedded in convenient places in our lives, rather than full-blown computers. Mirrors and windows and interactive dashboards that talk to our personal computers (phones and tablets) to build context-appropriate interfaces on nearly any surface.

This closet door is actually a display driven by Amy’s tablet. All this intelligence you see on this display—all these apps—they’re all residing and running on Amy’s tablet. This display spans the entire door. It has its own small-footprint operating system, and it’s smart enough to recognize Amy’s device. And based on proximity and other rules, it knows what to display and in what format.

It’s exciting and, frankly, not so far off. If you think touch-based phones and tablets are stretching interface conventions, just wait until this stuff lands.

Tags: ffly, gestures, touch, video

Designing for Touch

Josh Clark — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:10:16 UT

Fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head. For designers creating finger-friendly touch interfaces, there are entirely new conventions to learn and old ones to discard. The good folks at .net magazine indulged me by letting me grace their website with a slew of guidelines for touch design.

Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It’s not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand.

The article explores the ergonomic differences of designing for phones vs tablets, iPhone vs Android, native vs web. A few of the things you’ll learn:

Place primary tap targets in this thumb-thumping hot zone.
This rule of thumb applies to tablets, too, except that the thumb zone is different because we hold it differently.
Stacking controls in a touch interface should always be avoided, especially at screen bottom.
On iPhone, put app controls at screen bottom.
On Android, put app controls at screen top.
For the web, put navigation at page bottom (as opposed to screen bottom).
For the iPad, it depends.
The closer you squeeze buttons together, the larger those buttons should be.

Read the entire article.

Tags: android, design, ipad, mobile, touch, usability

QR Codes Are Footnotes, Not Ads

Josh Clark — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:15:42 UT

Who the heck actually snaps a QR code? Seriously, you’ve gotta be motivated: pull out your phone, find your code-scanning app, fumble for focus, and then wait for the network to take you to... what exactly? You’re never sure. QR codes are opaque. They’re intended to be gobbled down by robots (or barfed up), and so have no meaning to actual humans. QR codes ask for a leap of faith that is typically rewarded with only an advertisement on the other side. I remain deeply skeptical of QR codes as a marketing device, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t find their place in other domains.

Use QR codes as footnotes

Like QR codes, footnotes are opaque, offering only a whiff of information scent. But the kind of information we expect of footnotes is at least generally understood. Footnotes are portals to information that’s tangential to the text, offers technical details, provides a caveat to the main point, or otherwise takes a deep dive into details that are primarily of interest to a narrow sliver of the audience. They are paths to relatively obscure information, not the main event. Like footnotes, QR codes ask you to break out of a narrative to chase down a vague cloud of related information. You have to be deeply interested in what’s on the other side to take that plunge. They’re best for the truly motivated—not a casual audience.

That means QR codes are lousy for marketing slogans and simple ads, where a good old-fashioned URL is more effective, more memorable, and possibly even as machine-readable, as Kevin Marks points out:

With a URL they could type it in, take a photograph of it and type it in later, or if they have the right app, it will recognise the URL text from the image and make it clickable.

That is the irony of this. QR Codes ignore years of research and culture on how to communicate meaning in symbolic form designed to be captured by image processing tools behind a lens. We have this technology. It is called writing.

Written language has a set of symbols that are relatively unambiguous, that are formed of curves rather than hard edges making them resilient to noise, and have been market-tested for milennia. QR Codes don’t just ignore this, they ignore the relative success of one dimensional barcodes. Notice something about a barcode? It has the number printed on it as well, so you can type it in if the scan fails.

Then again, those barcode numbers don’t exactly hold lots of meaning for most of us, either. In fact, that’s when QR codes (and barcodes, too) are at their most useful: replacing impenetrable strings of numbers that are at least as opaque as the QR code itself. That’s especially true for information that you want to present out in the world to those who are motivated to fetch it. Shelley Bernstein of the Brooklyn Museum offered up some good examples of how New York City is using QR codes to fast-track mobile access to personally important information:

I think we are starting to see a tide change in New York City. For starters, the city is using them on all the building permits, so you can learn more as you pass construction sites. There are plans in the works for QR codes on all the restaurant inspections plaques. If there’s one thing that would motivate people to jump the technical hurdles of installing a QR reader, this would be it—the notion that we could see the actual violations that led to a restaurant’s letter grade makes QR truly useful for those of us who obsess about where we eat.

These examples reveal information hidden behind the inscrutable id of a bureaucratic permit or violation, both of which would make for tough-to-type, tough-to-remember URLs. The examples are well suited to a mobile context, too, ideal for someone who wants to know the information now. They’re motivated. These are footnote examples. QR codes are good for linking to obscure information tailored to a specific context and interest.

But will people really use them?

Even if we start using QR codes the right way, will they ever get traction? It’s still early, but we do see that people are starting to use them. According to comScore, 6.2 percent of US mobile users scanned a QR code in June 2011, and that number rose to 8.6 percent by October. That’s a lot of people, an increase from 14 million to 20.1 million in just four months.

It’s hard to know whether that increase is thanks to genuine interest in QR codes or a passing curiosity factor due to the deluge of these things flooding our environment. The top 100 US magazines saw the number of QR codes increase 439 percent over the course of 2011, according to Nellymoser. That study showed that QR codes are overwhelmingly used for ads, swamping the kind of editorial footnotes for which they’re better suited. Even editorial QR codes are moving in an ad direction: “In the beginning of the year, editorial codes were dominated by videos related to features in the magazine. By the end of the year, many of the editorial codes were for sweepstakes run in the editorial section.”

Banal use of QR codes for marketing is unlikely to keep drawing people, though, and it may even poison the well. Adam Greenfield and his crew at Urbanscale did some informal guerilla research in the streets of New York, showing people QR codes, asking them if they knew what they were, and then trying to coach them through scanning one. Awareness of QR codes was fairly high, but less than 10 percent were able to resolve a QR code into a URL, and most weren’t interested anyway:

A strong theme that emerged — which we certainly found entirely unsurprising, but which ought to give genuine pause to the cleverer sort of marketers — is that, even where respondents displayed sufficient awareness and understanding of QR codes to make use of them, virtually no one expressed any interest in actually doing so. As one of our respondents put it, “I’ve already seen the ad, and now I’m going to spend my data plan on watching your commercial? No thanks.”

If traditional ads aren’t motivating enough, what about more editorial content? It seems even there, with footnote-style information, people are slow to warm up to QR codes. At the Brooklyn Museum, Shelley and her team have been typically innovative in ways to use QR codes to supplement exhibitions, with mixed results. The museum was reasonably pleased by visitors’ use of QR codes that supplement wall text (“I want to know more about this”), but was disappointed in other areas. In one case, replacing a text-based scavenger hunt for mobile phones with the same game driven by QR codes resulted in a five-fold drop in participation. The codes actually chased the audience away. For advertising, it was a bust, too:

We put a QR code on all the advertising for [the exhibition] The Latino List, so people could download the exhibition’s iPhone app. Given the amount of advertising that was done, it seems incredible that the code was scanned only 118 times. Yes, that’s right, 118 scans, but this figure seems right in line with Adam Greenfield’s research at Urbanscale.

So, I think what we end up with is simply a project that isn’t an overwhelming success or failure. Certainly, QR on advertising didn’t do so well for us. QR use in the building is overall very low, with visitors seeming to favor application-like uses for it. However, compared to pre-QR code use, the use of those applications dropped significantly. This suggests that QR might be appropriate for special projects, but that we probably need to stay away from it as a baseline visitor amenity if we are to be at all inclusive about how we serve content.

Label the portal

Still, the relative success of the wall-text QR codes in Brooklyn suggests that QR codes are at their best when the benefits are evident and it’s clear what’s on the other side. That means there’s some important design work to do around QR codes: Let me know what I’m going to get from this hassle. Nellymoser says advertisers are starting to do this by offering explanatory captions next to QR codes in their magazine ads:

By Q4, more than two-thirds of all action codes (1327 or 70%) were accompanied by information that described what happens after the scan. This is considered by many to be a best practice and follows the pattern of many other calls to action.

Labeling QR codes is a good start, and it may likewise help to improve the design of the QR codes themselves. Turns out QR codes don’t have to be a black-and-white jumble; they can include color and even images. For example, Ralph Lauren’s agency, Red Fish Media, whipped up a custom QR code that featured the company’s iconic polo player, reporting that the designed codes see three times the action as the plain vanilla version.

It’s not hard to create a custom QR code, either, thanks to tools like QRhacker, which lets you generate a QR code and then customize it with colors and images, even changing the shape of the dots in the code. Using QRhacker I whipped up this QR code for the futurefriend.ly site in all of two minutes:

Captions, images, and color help give unwelcoming QR codes some identity and, more important, an information scent that hints at what’s on the other side. At a time when touch interfaces—and even the humble text link—are cutting through complexity by using content itself as navigation, an opaque, unadorned QR code feels like a step backward. Making the codes visually meaningful is helpful.

In the end, though, the thing that will most coax people to overcome the technical barriers of QR codes is simply linking them to actually meaningful content. Traditional advertising messages won’t cut it. Go figure, but pulling someone through a QR portal means we have to give people information they actually want or need.

Tags: advertising, content strategy, marketing, mobile, publishing, qrcodes, usability

Gifts for Designers, Nerds, and Mobile Mavens

Josh Clark — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:08:15 UT

What to get for the nerd who has everything? As a nerd who most certainly doesn't have everything, the best I can offer up is my own list of coveted items. Here's my Amazon wish list. Perhaps you'll find some inspiration for your nerd, too.

Below you'll find a few selections from that storied list, appropriate for all designers, nerds, and mobile mavens. And hey: Murray Christmas!

Murray Christmas tshirt by Luke Dixon.

Susan Kare Icons book

Susan Kare is the graphic designer who created many of the original interface icons for the Mac back. This book is a curated look at 80 of the icons she created between 1983 and 2011, with zoomed views and notes by the artist.

Susan Kare Icons

iPhone and iPad stencil kits

These sturdy steel stencils are ideal for app-sling craftsmen and craftswomen. Separate stencils available for iPhone and iPad.

iPhone stencil kit from UI Stencils.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter documentary DVD

A documentary about the husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames, widely regarded as a pair of America's most important designers.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter

Secret-agent phone holster

For tough-guy nerds and phone fans: a Bond-style shoulder holster.

Secret-agent phone holster

A no-kidding-around charger

This surge-protecting charger ombines traditional and USB plugs so your nerd's many, many devices will never go without power.

Belkin Min Surge Protector Dual USB Charger

Classy Laptop Backpack

Incase's Terra line has several nerd cases that are decidedly unnerdy, including this backpack, which has compartments for both laptop and iPad.

Incase Terra Campus Pack

Dieter Rams

Braun's longtime lead industrial designer had a huge impact on modern design, most notably in the clean aesthetic championed by Apple. Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams explores his work.

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Retro Phone Cradle and Headset

The mid-century telephone may not have been mobile, but man it had a great headset—you know, the kind that you could actually hold to your ear with your shoulder. The original hands-free headset! This nifty cradle charges your iPhone while you talk in old-school glory on the retro headset.

iRetrofone Cradle and Headset for iPhone

Future-friendly helmet

This junior astronaut helmet is a great toy, but even more important, it's the very helmet that inspired the future-friendly logo and that accompanied the gang at Mobilewood this year.

Aeromax Junior Astronaut Helmet

Stylish stylus

Speaking of astronauts, no wish list would be complete without the Cosmonaut, a new stylus for touchscreens. Chunky like a marker, it's easy to grip and pleasing to draw with.

Cosmonaut stylus

Nerdiest watch ever

Sure, I confess: I sported a classy Casio Gold calculator watch in my misspent youth. But baby, it's got nothing on this beauty. The Click Keypad Watch sports a giant keypad and no discernible display, flashing numbers on the keypad to tell you the time. Sublime AND ridiculous.

Click Keypad Watch

“Hero Mash” print

Because one hero just isn't enough, artist Simon C. Page's print mashes several into one EVEN MORE SUPER hero.

Hero Mash #1

Saul Bass monograph

This book explores the work of designer Saul Bass, creator of posters and title sequences for films including Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. He also created some of the most famous logos and corporate identity campaigns of the century, including those for major companies such as AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines and Minolta. One of the great designers of the 20th century.

Saul Bass

iCufflinks

When your geek wears a tuxedo, make sure that the nerd still shows. The LED on these power-button cufflinks gently pulses.

iCufflinks

iPhone boombox

This whole music-library-in-your-pocket thing is all well and good, but everyone knows it's not a music system if you can't carry it on your shoulder and blast that bass. Enter the iHome Portable FM Stereo Boombox for iPhone. Oh yes, friends, yes.

iHome Portable FM Stereo Boombox for iPhone

Giant LEGO heads

Every nerd loves LEGOs, and these giant LEGO heads double as containers for all of your geek's nerd gear.

LEGO storage heads

Sifteo Interactive Game Cubes

These little toys are miracles of network technology. Sifteo cubes can communicate with the others, detecting their neighbors, and "talking" to them to enable a slew of interactive games.

Sifteo game cubes

Peek into great designers' sketchbooks

Steven Heller's book, Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers gives a voyeuristic peek into the working process of some sensational designers.

Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers

Atomic disintegrator

An honest-to-heaven 1954 vintage toy ray gun. This will make your nerd's brain melt.

Vintage Hubley Atomic Disintegrator

Pass the Bat-Spatula, Robin

The Batman apron: when your nerd comes out the nerd cave for food, this kitchen protective gear is essential.

Batman apron

Bedside manner

Seems pretty much everyone uses their phone for an alarm clock now, but you can still relive the glory days of the radio alarm clock with this wood-replica phone dock, which also happens to charge your phone while you sleep.

AREAWARE phone dock

May I be so bold?

If your nerd designs mobile apps, many have generously told me that they've found my book useful for that. Tapworthy focuses on how to think iPhone and create terrific app experiences, but it's useful for designers on all platforms. You'll get the cheapest deal at Amazon, but O'Reilly sells DRM-free ebooks for all the major ebook platforms.

Tapworthy at Amazon or O'Reilly

And that oughtta get you started, but there's an embarrassing number of other things to discover in my Amazon wish list. Hey, happy holidays, full of merry nerdiment.

Tags: shopping

Gestures in #NewNewTwitter

Josh Clark — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 04:07:58 UT

Gnashing of teeth and rending of garments greeted the arrival of New New Twitter last week, and the iPhone app caught an especially stiff backlash. Much of the criticism focused on Twitter’s downplay of once-core features (direct messages and account switching) and the arrival of the Discover tab which pimps Twitter’s trending topics. The changes seem due to an apparent shift away from power users and toward relative civilians, as well as a try at positioning Twitter as a content discovery service as much as a communication service. In that light, many of the changes make good sense, and it’s clear lots of hard thinking went into it.

Me, I was most intrigued—both positively and negatively—by changes in the app’s gesture interactions. I put together a quick screencast that summarizes my thoughts, along with demos of the gestures at hand:

If you prefer your opinions in prose instead of video, here’s the skinny...

A swipe, swiped

Swiping left to right across the Navigation bar returned you to your timeline in previous versions of Twitter.

I was disappointed to see Twitter remove a little-known swipe shortcut. In previous versions, swiping left-to-right across the Navigation bar popped you back up to your Twitter timeline after you’d descended down through several layers. Twitter, like Facebook, is great for exploring content and profiles: tap a tweet to drill down through links and account profiles. This is terrific, but you can go a long way down the rabbit hole, which means lots of tap-tap-tapping of the Back button to find your way home. The swipe was a shortcut for teleporting directly back to your timeline without retracing your entire path, and I had begun to hope that this might become a de facto standard for iOS apps.

Trouble was, this shortcut wasn’t even close to widely known. A friend at Twitter confided, “Half of our employees didn’t even know about that swipe gesture,” let alone regular folks. So Twitter changed the action to something they hoped we’d all find more easily: another tap on the Home tab now zips you back to the top level of your timeline.

I support the motive but have misgivings about the change. It’s too easy to do a single tap by mistake, and here that mistap will lose your place if you’re drilled way down into the app—a form of data loss. By contrast, a swipe requires just enough intent to keep you out of trouble. That’s why a swipe is used in iOS to unlock your phone, power off, answer a call, turn off an alarm, or trigger the delete shortcut. Those are all actions that you don’t want to touch off accidentally. Losing a deep position in the app is just as serious, and should be protected by a similarly serious gesture. A swipe is good defensive design, an ideal shortcut for that.

Alas, few people knew about the swipe shortcut, so the gesture wasn’t serving its purpose. A better solution than changing the gesture, though, would be to help people find it in the first place. More on that in a bit.

This rabbit-hole problem is common enough in iOS apps that a standard shortcut is badly needed. I’d hoped that the swipe gesture might be it, and for a few brief weeks, it was beginning to look like that just might happen.

In Facebook, swiping left to right across the Navigation bar reveals the top-level navigation.

See, until last month, Facebook for iPhone had its own top-secret gesture for this. When you drilled deep down into versions prior to 4.0, you could tap the screen title in Facebook’s Navigation bar to zip back to the app’s home screen. So here we had two highly influential apps using different actions to accomplish the same task. But when Facebook 4 came out and reorganized the app’s navigation, the swipe was suddenly the common action for both. In the current version of Facebook, swiping left to right across the Navigation bar reveals the app’s top-level navigation, and from there you can hop to the top of any of Facebook’s sub-apps.

For a bare few weeks, in other words, both Twitter and Facebook used the same swipe to spring back to the top of the app. With two such big-audience apps supporting the gesture, it stood a chance of becoming a useful standard. But the latest version of Twitter removed it, and that suddenly seems less likely.

I’d love to see Twitter reintroduce the swipe gesture and take a fresh approach to helping folks find it.

Don’t prune. Teach.

Lots of designers avoid using gesture shortcuts altogether, because they rightly assume that their audience won’t find them on their own. Gestures are invisible, without the cues of buttons and other traditional controls. The answer, though, is not to prune gestures entirely, but instead to supply visual hints at appropriate times to help people find these shortcuts.

Before doing this teaching, though, there’s real value in having the app’s audience learn the slow way. Thumping the Back button to return home, for example, reinforces the mental model of the app. Before someone learns a shortcut, it’s helpful for them to know just what it is they’re shortcutting. But after they’ve done it a few times, it’s appropriate to reveal the shortcut—just like a video game rewards you for completing a level. Shortcut achievement unlocked! This is how games take players from novice to expert to master, and other kinds of software can benefit from this, too.

That includes Twitter and Facebook. After someone returns to the top level several times from, say, three or more levels deep, a text overlay and gesture animation should materialize to explain the shortcut. The best way to teach is to build in steps from a basic foundation to more advanced moves, and I believe these gradual, contextual lessons are the best way to teach gestures. This is how you help people level up.

In your corner

Meanwhile, I very much like two new shortcuts in the Twitter app. The new version buries direct messages and account switching under the app’s Me tab. That’s a double-tapping hassle for frequent users of those features, but two new gestures remove the sting. Swiping up from the right corner slides up your direct messages, and swiping left from the right corner flips to the view for switching accounts.

Twitter's new corner gestures let you swipe up to reveal direct messages, or left to change accounts.

Those swipes conveniently start on the Me tab, where both features live, but the fact that it’s the corner is more important. On both touchscreens and traditional screens, the corners are especially easy targets. On the desktop, you can just slam the cursor into the corner and you’re guaranteed to hit that one pixel. It’s not quite as easy on the touchscreen, but the corners are still more forgiving touch targets than just about any other part of the screen. Swiping from a corner is the easiest part of the screen to start from.

Corner swipes are great gestures for navigation shortcuts, with one caveat: iOS designers shouldn’t count on downward swipes from the top corners, where you’ll run afoul of the Notification Center. I imagine that’s one reason why you can’t dismiss Twitter’s direct messages by swiping back down; if you miss, you’ll instead pull down the notifications windowshade. (You can, however, flip back from the accounts view by swiping right across the bottom.)

So, the practical guideline for adding corner swipes in iOS is: you can swipe both horizontally and vertically from the bottom corners, but only horizontally from the top corners. (Ideally, you’ll reserve those top corners for zipping back to the top level, as discussed above.)

The foiled hijacking

Previous versions of Twitter let you swipe a tweet in the timeline to get quick access to a toolbar of actions to reply, retweet, and so on. That’s been removed; to get those actions you now have to tap the tweet to go its detail view and tap the action there—a quick swipe-tap combo replaced by a slower tap-tap combo.

I’ve long been conflicted about the old Twitter’s swipe gesture. In iOS, a swipe in a list typically triggers a delete action, though apps sometimes piggyback on that gesture’s familiarity to do something different. Reeder, for example, uses the swipe as a shortcut to mark an article read. No harm done there, since there’s no such thing as deleting a Google Reader article, and marking read is kind of delete’s cousin. But Twitter’s old swipe gesture didn’t just piggyback; it outright hijacked the swipe to do something completely different.

I generally frown on hijacking standard gestures for new actions. People who expected that swipe to delete a tweet either never found the action or were surprised when they did. That’s not ideal, but on the other hand, the swipe had such obvious utility. On balance, I miss that shortcut, and I’m sorry to see it go.

If it’s gone for good, then I’d at least like to suggest an alternative shortcut:

Tap-and-hold is a universal problem solver

I wish more iOS apps used tap-and-hold to reveal an action sheet for an iOS equivalent of a right-click contextual menu. It’s a quick win to give power users easy access to actions on the tapped object without distracting novices. In this case, tapping and holding a tweet could reveal buttons to reply, retweet, or quote that tweet. Previous versions of Twitter let you tap and hold a link to copy it, and I’d love to see the same offered in the new version, along with the ability to open in Safari, read later, and so on.

I count many of the folks at Twitter as some of the smartest people I know and, not least, as good friends. I see how much work and thought went into Twitter, and man, they had a tough brief: make the app easy for new and mainstream users, create an environment that will support advertising without damaging content, and surface (hopefully) interesting topics to explore. These goals suggest solutions that are at odds with the habits of many of the service’s most passionate users, as we saw in last week’s backlash.

I think, though, that the addition of a few well-considered gestures can give those users quick access to the features they care about without derailing the service’s evolving goals. The challenge of designing for gestures is that they’re invisible, but that’s also their advantage. They remove the chrome and clutter of advanced features, tucking those features away until newcomers are ready to tackle them.

Tags: design, gestures, iphone, touch, twitter, usability, video

Board Games

Josh Clark — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:15:54 UT

Photo by Derrick Collins.

You are the company you keep, or so the saying goes. And maybe the companies, too. I just joined the advisory boards of two outfits I very much admire, and I'm looking forward to contributing to the bright future of both.

I'm a freshly minted advisor to Mobiquity, a new firm focused on building mobile software for the big boys in the Fortune 200. Great team, great clients, great projects, great ideas. So, yeah: just great.

I'm also on the editorial advisory board of Rosenfeld Media, the publishing house of UX legend and all-around mensch Lou Rosenfeld. Lou's authors help shape the industry. As for the others on the editorial board, well, they're pretty much all my heroes.

This is an exciting way for me to end the year, and I'm flattered to find myself in the company of such good companies.

Tags: business, josh, publishing

Eve's Wireless

Josh Clark — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:15:46 UT

Combine a fire hydrant, an umbrella, and a heavy wooden box, and you've got the components of a circa-1922 mobile phone. Add a cheerful operator and a phonograph to the mix, and you've got your own flapper-era Siri playing music on demand.

When you think of early mobile phones, you probably think of one of these 1980s-style bricks:

Or perhaps if you're an old-timer, you might recall these spiffy 1970s numbers that basically required you to haul a car battery everywhere you went:

But friends, these technological marvels of the 1970s and 1980s were lazy latecomers compared to Eve's "portable wireless phone":

Eve's wireless was documented in a 1922 silent film recently uncovered by British Pathé. In the movie, Eve hauls her contraption around in a heavy box ("and won't hubby have a time when he has to carry one!"), grounds it to a convenient fire hydrant, and unfurls her umbrella antenna to make a call. An obliging operator answers and plays Eve some music on her new-fangled phonograph.

Hard to tell thanks to grainy film quality, but the device looks to be a Home-o-Fone, manufactured by New York City's own Radio Receptor Company, Inc.

Tags: history, mobile, video

Making Stuff

Josh Clark — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:00:48 UT

The conventional wisdom about the iPad is that it's for leaning back: reading, watching, browsing, a consumption device for a consumer market. Let the information wash over you, the thinking goes, because it's just not a good device for making stuff.

The iPad is a device suited for sitting or reclining, which certainly makes it a device of contemplation, and yep, that's the perfect state of mind for reading or watching a movie. But it's a mistake to think of it as "only" a new-fangled book or tv screen. Contemplation is not the same as passivity.

True enough, you'll never beat the world record for typing speed on the thing (216 words per minute, it turns out), but typing is only one form of input. Stubbornly linking productivity to typing speed ignores opportunities for what this new form factor of computing will yet enable. The tablet's easygoing touchscreen input makes it particularly promising for art-making, whether that's 3D modeling, music, drawing, or even collaborative collage.

So I was especially pleased to see the iPad ad that Apple released just yesterday. As usual, Apple emphasizes personal connection and emotion rather than technology in the new ad. But in a departure, it also shows people making stuff with iPad: designing basketball plays, mixing music, cutting a skate video, building a model car. Leaning back? It sure looks like everyone's leaning in to me.

"Getting lost in the things we love has never felt quite like this," the ad finishes. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the era we live in is how easy it is for any of us to grab a tool and start making. The iPad is just one of them, and it's a heckuva thing.

Tags: apple, ipad, marketing, video

Tapworthy in China (and Japan! and Spain!)

Josh Clark — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:17:41 UT

“Touch People's Hearts.” That's the translated title of the Chinese edition of my book Tapworthy (触动人心), and I couldn't be more tickled. Indefatigable translator Jason Bao sent me this copy, and it just arrived today:

Tapworthy is also available in:

Japanese (_思わずタップしたくなるアプリのデザイン, or “Applications you'll want to tap involuntarily”)
Spanish (Diseño y usabilidad de aplicaciones iPhone, or rather dryly, “Design and usability of iPhone applications”)
English, my mother tongue… and the only one, it seems, where the word “Tapworthy” makes any sense.

Tags: books, publishing, tapworthy

Creature Cups

Josh Clark — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:38:21 UT

Another Halloween find: Creature Cups plant hidden critters at the bottom of your cup o' Joe. Totally tentacular.

Tags: design, fun

Augmented Unreality

Josh Clark — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:58:04 UT

The game gets under your skin.

Skin-invading aliens seem like the perfect topic for Halloween, no? Because here's the hard reality of my world, friends: In the past few days I've stood by as hungry beasties devoured my eyeballs, laid eggs in my face, and made my brain their home.

Bedbugs? Nothing so fearsome. It's an iOS game called Skinvaders and an example of the best (and perhaps most commercially viable) flavor of augmented reality. After scanning your face, Skinvaders turns your head into a battlefield as little monsters crawl across it, bombard it with eggs, It's gross, twisted, totally fun. Give it to your 10-year old and let 'er rip.

My favorite examples of augmented reality have been games like this, apps that inject a whimsical (or ghoulish) element into your surroundings. The Hidden Park, for example, is a game that lets youngsters see dragons, fairies, and other magical creatures in parks around the world. Aim the camera at a tree, see winged creatures flying among its branches.

The Hidden Park.

Life of George is a more down-to-earth example of using the phone's camera for play, kind of like pictionary for LEGO. The game challenges you to build pictures from LEGOs and, when you think you've got it, stop the clock and take a picture of your creation. The app reads the blocks, confirms if you've got it right, and the game marches on. (You can also create your own LEGO challenges and use the camera to add them to the game.)

Augmented-reality browsers like Layar have an undeniable first-blush novelty, imposing signposts on your phone's camera view to show nearby subway stops, restaurants, and city landmarks. As technically impressive as these heads-up displays might be, I have to confess I've found little practical use for them. In the end, traditional map views seem to be most useful and efficient.

For me personally, the how'd-they-do-it magic of Word Lens is the only info-based augmented reality app that I've found useful day to day. (The app translates Spanish to English in real time, amazing.)

But in games, wow, augmented reality can paint an imaginative layer on everyday surroundings, making your world instantly more playful. Or gross. Happy Hallowen.

Tags: augmented reality, games, mobile

Newsstand Revisited

Josh Clark — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:10:18 UT

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about Newsstand, I had exchanges with a few folks whose work touches the publishing industry. A few themes kept coming back...

1. Newsstand is swell for magazines, not so much for newspapers

Apple requires Newsstand apps to update their icon with every background update. ”This stinks,” Rusty Mitchell told me. Rusty is creative director of Mercury Intermedia, the shop that built the USA Today apps, among many others. He shared some thoughts in an email and generously allowed me to echo them here:

The updating icon might work fine for magazines, where the covers are more simplified and the app more closely matches the print product, but they generally suck for newspapers. Apple created a requirement there that they didn’t think through. For a magazine that releases monthly and has a defined cover, it isn’t a big deal. Newspaper covers tend to be more dense, though. I think the newspaper icons are terrible. They don’t look as good as the standard icons, the branding is minimized, all of the newspaper app icons look too similar, and most damning, the icon is a representation of the days’ paper instead of what will actually be in the app.

Wait, what? The icon doesn’t represent what’s actually in the app? That’s because Newsstand apps are allowed to update in the background only once per day. For apps that update throughout the day (and really, why wouldn’t any media source update more than once?), that means that the icon will quickly become out of sync with its content.

This one-a-day policy also means that background updating doesn’t do much to speed frequently updated apps. It might be fine for The Daily, which releases its content just once per day (a policy I question), but it’s no good at all for outfits with rolling publication. When they launch, those apps will still have to download all the content accumulated since the daily background sync. In those cases, we’ll be stuck with the same load times that we’ve already seen.

2. Who’s in Newsstand and who’s not?

Not all newsy apps make the cut. It sounds like TV news sources won’t be allowed in Newsstand, for example. So now we’re making content/format-based distinctions about what kinds of media are even allowed in the service. It’s murky: The New York Times has video, but they’re allowed; CNN has text articles, but they’re not. Hm. Meanwhile, other organizations simply opt out of Newsstand, balking at Apple’s 30-percent take of subscription sales.

For readers, the result is that we have some of our news apps bolted down in the Newsstand folder, and others aren’t. This arbitrariness could damage non-Newsstand apps. “I don’t like the fact that some news apps can roam free outside of the Newsstand folder,” Rusty wrote me, “but don’t have access to some of the Newsstand features.”

Making this a bit messier for consumers is the fact that the App Store now has its own app category, separate from the News category. Newsstand apps appear in both sections, while non-Newsstand apps appear only in the News category. Confusing.

3. Are issues really so bad?

I had a brief Twitter tête-à-tête today with Mandy Brown, Frank Chimero, and David Sleight about my contention that publishing in editions is quaint and perhaps even arrogant in the digital content. “Issues are the way publishers understand content, not readers,” I wrote. “Issues also create an artifically imposed embargo. Why do I have to wait a week to get an article from Time if it’s already been written?” To which a thoughtful (for Twitter) conversation ensued about whether the problem is really collections of content or just the arbitrary way they’re gathered.

Me, I remain skeptical about the value of bundling articles into frozen blocks of content. For that matter, I’m skeptical that we should always treat articles or stories as the base level of content. I think that being able to address content at finer levels of detail than a page will be increasingly important and useful.

That said, I’ve got no beef with bundling sets of thematic content together; perhaps they’re better called anthologies than issues. (Such anthologies tend to be most useful to me as a reader when the content comes from varied sources.) In any case, I should be able to scan and download those individual articles separately, without being obliged to download an entire issue at once.

In general, I think that publish-all-at-once issues are likely to become the exception rather than the rule. To the extent that they remain, these collections should be the result of a thoughtful editorial conceit, not the arbitrary daily, weekly, or monthly schedule that holds sway now.

Tags: ios5, mobile, newsstand, publishing

Newsstand Is Promising, Yay! But Enough with Issue-Based Publishing

Josh Clark — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:49:29 UT

We’ll see if it lasts, but for now, Newsstand is a read-all-about-it moment for publishers. Newsstand is the new feature in iOS 5 that collects newspaper and magazine apps into a single folder, downloading new content automatically in the background. Whether through novelty or bonafide new habit, readers seem to love it so far. This makes me happy, but we can’t let this recent spike distract us from real problems with the issue-based publishing model Newsstand supports.

First things first. Let’s look at Newsstand’s remarkable success in its first two weeks:

Condé Nast reports a 268 percent hike in its weekly rate of new digital subscriptions since the Newsstand launch. Single-copy sales are also up 142 percent compared to the previous eight weeks. (Condé Nast publishes nine iPad titles, including The New Yorker, Wired, Glamour, and Vanity Fair.) (source)
The New York Times iPhone app saw 85 times more new user downloads in Newsstand’s first week than the week before (1.8 million compared to 21,000). The Times’ iPad app saw a more modest, but still impressive, jump of seven times as many new downloads (189,000 compared to 27,000). (source)
National Geographic’s rate of new iPad subscriber growth grew five times since the launch of Newsstand. (source)
Future Publishing reports two million downloads of magazine “containers” in the first four days of Newsstand, more than they see in a typical month. Future is a British publisher with titles including .net, Total Film, and Digital Camera. (source)
Exact Editions says downloads of its free sample editions jumped by 14 times in just a few days, while some titles’ actual sales more than doubled. (source)

You get the idea: people are digging it.

What’s the scoop?

No doubt, much of this spike is a novelty effect. As adoring iPhone and iPad owners explore the new features in iOS 5, they’re kicking the tires of Newsstand’s digital editions, too. Will people actually keep reading the titles they’ve signed up for? There are some behavior-changing factors at work that suggest they might.

Location, location, location

The Newsstand folder landed on the home screen of every iPhone and iPad. People can move it, of course, but you shouldn’t underestimate our species’ essential laziness about stuff like this. For many, these digital magazines are going to remain front and center.

Speed kills

Background downloading is a big, big improvement over the painfully slow entire-issue downloads that came before. In the wilderness of hotel internet, for example, it often takes me 15 minutes to download an issue of The New Yorker. That wait is now invisible to me as Newsstand handles the download for me.

It’s hard to overstate how important this is. Studies say delays of microseconds (microseconds!) can reduce browser traffic by as much as 20 percent in some contexts. Imagine how damaging a 15-minute wait can be.

This just in

In Newsstand, app icons change when a publication gets new content, just like the conver of a new magazine issue. Combined with home-screen placement, Newsstand’s fresh icons draw you in like magazines in the supermarket checkout line.

Collector instinct

The Newsstand icon starts out as a bare shelf, and it's hard to resist loading it up. Tap that bare shelf, and the Store button gives you a quick way to fill it.

Are digital editions saved?

We still have a long way to go. While Newsstand will likely expose tons of new people to the pleasures of iPhone and iPad magazines and newspapers, there remain serious problems with the whole concept of media companies’ stubbornly issue-based approach to publishing.

Until Newsstand, the speed problem was a tough one. By requiring users to download tens or hundreds of articles at a time in big blobs called issues, delays were inevitable. The new background downloading knocks that problem out.

But there are more fundamental problems beyond the technical. Issue-based publishing forces readers into a monolothic visual and navigational metaphor that doesn’t reflect the way we gather information now. Issues are the way publishers understand content, not readers. As readers, we’re engaged by individual stories and, online, tend to pluck out just the ones we want.

Digital magazines remind me of music before MP3s. Remember those bad old days? You had to buy the whole album just to have the one song you wanted. That’s how magazines feel today: all this overhead of extra content that’s sent my way whether I want it or not. Magazines smell spammy.

Issues also create an artifically imposed embargo. Why do I have to wait a week to get an article from Time if it’s already been written?

Publishers and designers have to start thinking about content at a more atomic level, not in aggregated issues. That’s how we already understand news as consumers, and we have to start thinking that way as publishers, too. This is why Flipboard, Instapaper, and other aggregators are so interesting: they give you one container for the whole universe of content, unbound to any one publisher.

Why does print get primacy?

The biggest reason publishers hew to issue-based publishing is that it’s what they know—as a business, as a workflow, and even in terms of tools.

Many publishers use products like Adobe Digital Publishing Suite or Woodwing, tools that let you take print layouts from InDesign, adapt them for the iPad, and pump them out to iOS apps. You can use the same tools, the same staff, and largely the same workflow as you do for print. Woodwing’s website trumpets the convenience: “It’s just like designing a print product.”

You can see the enormous appeal this has for publishers. With little overhead, you can turn the corner from print to iPad.

Thing is, designing an iPad app shouldn’t be “just like designing a print product.” It’s not the same design you want to bring to new platforms, it’s the content. Issue-based publishing puts a straitjacket on digital content, freezing it into a big arbitrary block of pages and articles, sealed with print metaphors. This approach privileges print and its design conventions, imposing them on new platforms. And why should that be the case? Looking out five or ten years, will print be the winner among these platforms? Nope. So why should we rely on print’s design conventions and workflows now?

Or for that matter, why should any single platform’s design conventions—web, phone, tablet, print, you name it—have primacy? Each of these devices should have their own conventions, standing shoulder to shoulder as peers without imposing the design values of each on one another. Print is just another platform and, for better or worse, will only become a more and more minor one over time.

Respect print’s lessons, but don’t be beholden

We have centuries of useful knowledge about designing words, and we should embrace that know-how. But we also have to be prepared to jettison how we package those designed words. The form and containers of our words are changing. It’s no longer about a monolithic issue or even a monolithic page. We have to be prepared to move in new directions that are appropriate to each medium.

I’m pleased to see that Newsstand has gotten some early traction with readers, and I hope it proves profitable for publishers. I’m sympathetic to the legitimate business and creative reasons for sticking with issue-based publishing for iOS. It’s a sensible short-term approach for getting on these platforms in the first place. But looking further out, magazine issues are already old news.

Update: I posted some additional thoughts on Newsstand after a few more conversations with folks in the publishing industry.

Tags: apple, content strategy, ffly, ipad, mobile, newsstand, publishing

Chatterbot Chit-Chat: Siri vs Eliza

Josh Clark — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:15:43 UT

Jordan Mechner had the inspired idea of introducing Apple superbot Siri to classic chatterbot Eliza. I've totally overheard conversations like this before:

 ELIZA
 Hello, I am Eliza.

 SIRI
 Hi.

 ELIZA
 How are you today? What would you like to discuss?

 SIRI
 I’m fine. Thanks for asking.

 ELIZA
 How long have you been fine. Thanks for asking?

 SIRI
 Hmm... Let me think...

 ELIZA
 Do you doubt you?

 SIRI
 I found three hotels matching “W” fairly close to you.

 ELIZA
 Oh...?

Read the whole transcript of the Siri-Eliza encounter…

Tags: fun, ios5, psychology, siri