4 posts
Here’s a phrase I’ve been reading a lot on blogs and comments recently:
“I’m finally through with Facebook. Seriously, I’ve made my mind up and I’m going to quit (I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer every day.)”
It’s sad. They sound a bit like smokers when they’ve got to the stage where they hate cigarettes but they can’t give up.
I should know. Somewhat shamefully, I am a smoker and I’ve been on Facebook since 2006.
Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard’s post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of ‘Service Design‘ and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this..
JJG: I think any distinction that you could draw between service design and user experience is purely academic. In practical terms, the overlap in the problems being solved, the methods applied to solving them, and the philosophy of practice is so huge that anything you could say was purely a service design issue or purely a user experience design issue would be an extreme edge-case. They may persist as separate areas of intellectual inquiry, but as fields of practice I think they’ll inevitably converge. So in that sense, SD vs. UX is the new IA vs. IxD.
I’ve worked in SD for a while now and some things have always interested me:
One response among designers and UX folk to Apple’s new iPad has been to criticise the effort required of users to command the haptic interface. Microsoft’s Surface had the same response, as did the interface that Tom Cruise used in Mission Impossible.
‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.
I found this on Mike Laurie’s ace blog the other day – it’s a video put together by Ji Lee, Google’s Creative Director at the Google Creative Sandbox (just launched). The video demonstrates how much real people know about the Web. It’s a salutory reminder for anyone whose job it is to discuss complex ideas with customers and end-users: despite the nodding you shouldn’t assume they understand *anything*.
