While desire paths are essentially short cuts made by users within a system, I noticed something the other day: when the system goes out of its way to create a new short cut specifically for users, often it’s hard to get users to adopt this easier option.

For me I realised this at Euston Underground station last week. From the Tube station ticket hall, there had been two escalators (one up, one down) and a stair case in the middle. The stairs were rarely used and for the past several months they had been blocked off while an escalator was put installed to replace them.

Heading out of the ticketing platform, the escalators are on a sharp right angle off a straight walk. Without realising I went for the first up escalator, which already had a queue forming. But then I realised the new escalator was now running right next to the original one, but with no one using it.

Commuters had become so used to the walk straight/turn right/queue for first escalator routine virtually no one had noticed the new one.

Over time Euston commuters will obviously notice the new escalator. But for me the most interesting aspect of this was how they had become so preconditioned to the system they failed to see a new and better way to navigate the system.

Perhaps a sign pointing to the new escalator might’ve helped? There are two solutions for new features such as this: either promote it or just wait (and hope) users find it.

Unfortunately, you can never guarantee users to find such things — so perhaps promotion of new features is always the best route.

It was colder and wetter in Austin than London for the first three days. Not fair in the slighest.

Bigger

First and foremost: it was busy. Bigger. Much bigger! I heard various numbers about how much larger the attendance was. Someone in my hotel said there were 7,000 extra attendees this year. Day-to-day it was hard to notice this surge — it was only during the mammoth registration queue and equally mammoth queues to get into the after session parties that this really became apparent. The parties last year were fantastic — but I didn’t go to anywhere near as many this time because of the staggering wait times. But the upside of this was just enjoying local Austin bars and food — or being studious yet boring by going back to my hotel early to write up notes and ideas from the day.

…and better

Generally, as well as bigger, it was definitely better. The quality of the talks and panels this year were fantastic. Last year was great, but this year was greater. (Or I just chose better this year!)

Data is still a hot topic

The amount of presentations about data (and visualisation) were telling of what the SXSW organisers are thinking: that this is still a very important and topical subject. But a look at the titles of these presentations is also telling: sex sells. And so does putting ‘sexy’ and ‘data’ together in your panel idea. Sexy dirty data. Sexy data for public transit systems. Data is sexier than sex. Data is a sex machine — it honestly makes me wonder why the organisers didn’t create a special venue called the Data Bordello or something similarly flippant. If anything, the presence of ‘sexy’ in so many talks about data viz makes it clear that interest in the topic has definitely moved into the mainstream.

But what concerns me is the future of this mainstream interest in data viz: will it be more Hans Rosling or more chart junk saturation that is already dominating the web with 3mb high-res graphics with little or no value?

Science and design

While data visualisation wasn’t mentioned in Ben McAllister, many of the points he raised are very relevant. Specifically Ben discussed what he calls “scientism” – what feels like science, but it isn’t the real thing. We’re all both guilty of this and also victims of scientism in day-to-day life: making arguments (or fighting other arguments) by using pseudo-scientific reasoning. We’ve all done it: avoided something a client or stakeholder wants by saying ‘research’ or ‘testing’ showed it was ‘a bad idea’. Basically, so much of what we do in design is formed by pseudo-scientific method. User testing can be highly scientific and can be very insightful: but it’s also incredibly easy to skew results and taint the users being tested with what we actually want to hear. Ben has a great article on the topic on The Atlantic — definitely worth reading.

Interaction design as brand interaction

Another theme at SXSW was the idea of how interaction design is ultimately brand design. It cropped up in a few talks I saw, but specifically Marc Shillum really went into this at the panel he chaired entitled ‘Brands as Patterns‘. I’m still getting my head around the finer points, but I think it’s a very interesting concept — you can read more at the Method 10×10 site.

For example, something that occurred to me after the session: the Ryanair website is often criticized for its poor usability, poor design and shady-bordering-on-dark usability patterns. But thinking about Ryanair’s general brand, the interaction experienced on the website is an absolutely faithful interaction with Ryanair’s brand. The airline that wants to charge you a pound to use the toilet is of course going to hide ‘fees’ and ‘extras’ until the very end of the booking process.

Touch on the web

Josh Clark presented a brilliant talk on designing touch interfaces in Teaching Touch: Tapworthy Touchscreen Design. As someone who does most their work in a browser, Josh pointed out a very large elephant in the room: our standard interaction toolkits on the web are appalling behind their native mobile and tablet cousins. Even getting simple swipes working with jQuery is buggy at best — nevermind pinch, zoom and multi-finger gestures. How long before we can natively make use of these new touch gestures in the browser? It might be quite a while.

Sports and fandom in the digital world

I managed to catch some great presentations about how sport and fandom is changing in the face of social media and new technology. Not only was it a great mix of different sports and presenters from different countries, it was also very thought provoking. Ticketmaster now lets you find your Facebook friends at events so you can sit near them. This is just scratching the surface of how technology and social networks will change the sporting experience — and there are some very exciting opportunities here.

Free food

And most importantly, the best free food? Definitely the Turner Recharge Lounge, who served up incredible jalapeño chorizo and jalapeño gravy to boot. Absolutely delicious.

Now, how am I going to get to SXSW 2013…

Chirostenotes (Copyright Luis Rey)

However, with the discovery of feathers on a dinosaur in China in the 1990s, suddenly Luis Rey’s artwork seemed perhaps not as fantastic as originally thought. He is now one of the foremost and well-respected paleoartists — working with many leading palaeontologists on the amazing Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages.

During the talk Luis spoke of how the Tyrannosaurus rex has — and still is — often very inaccurately potrayed.

First ever published reconstruction of a Tyrannosaurus rex

The classic image of a Tyrannosaurus rex is that of a lumbering predator with a bipedal posture. But how could the Tyrannosaurus rex possibly catch anything with a stance like this? Scientific theory has changed its view of the Tyrannosaurus rex dramatically over the years — and now sees the infamous dinosaur as standing parallel to the ground with its tail extending behind.

How the Tyrannosaurus rex’s posture is now seen by science

While science’s understanding of the Tyrannosaurus rex has changed, that classic image of Tyrannosaurus rex walking on two feet is still very strong in everyone’s minds. If we were playing a game such as Pictionary and you had to draw a Tyrannosaurus rex, would you not at least consider drawing the ‘traditional’ view of the Tyrannosaurus rex in the hope that your partner may guess it faster — spurning science for the sake of victory?

I definitely would — even though I’d feel like I’d betrayed science just a little bit.

During Rey’s talk I realised that no matter how inaccurate a perception of something is, the most common perception is still the most powerful.

Looking at icon design, it’s this very fact that explains why in this world of rapidly emerging technology we still live with some incredibly out-dated yet universally understood icons.

My favourite day-to-day icon — mostly a British thing I suspect — is the symbol for speed camera:

When was the last time anyone saw a daguerreotype-style camera like this? Or the last time your parents or even grandparents saw a camera like this?

Yet the old-style camera icon still remains strong — through the ubiquity of appearing on every major roadway in the UK. Shown in isolation and it would probably confuse people at first. But amongst red, amber and green lights and other traffic-related furniture it is immediately recognisable.

The BBC Global Experience Language was only launched a few years ago but it also contains many strong images of old and almost extinct technology. Old wind-up clocks for alarms, cogs for settings in devices that are wholly electronic — and of course let’s not forget another classic time traveller in the icon world: the floppy disk for save.

The old faithful ‘save’ icon: the 1.44mb floppy disk

The wonderful video below shows some French children being shown an array of old technology. Their reactions are fascinating — especially around 44 seconds in when they are presented with floppy disks.

Yet children learn so quickly I’m sure in the context of a computer desktop they would be able to ‘save’ something by using the save icon with a floppy disk. They know it in the context of a computer desktop, just not in a real world manifestation.

Just like Latin is used in scientific circles as a ‘dead language’ that won’t change, I wonder if one reason these anachronistic icons survive is not dissimilar.

The floppy disk is not going to change any time soon because it’s dead. However, think about the storage devices that have preceded it. Zip drives (100mb — wow those were the days), CD-Rs, portable hard drives, USB thumb drives… and now we head into the world of cloud storage. Updating a save icon to reflect current technology would not only require constant iteration but it would also dilute the power of the iconography and convention that has already been established with the old floppy disk.

Whether it’s dinosaurs, speed cameras or floppy disks there’s no doubt that there are far more appropriate ways to symbolise these as icons. But for better or worse, the most powerful icon is the one that resonates most widely: whether it’s the terribly inaccurate Victorian view of how a Tyrannosaurus rex looked and stood or the use of an obsolete form of storage that most kids today have never seen — and probably will never see.

This is a post born from spending hours trying to squash bugs and zap gremlins.

In an attempt to streamline content re-versioning in different languages, I had created a work flow that went like this:

1. Create Google spreadsheet for easy collaborative editing
2. Pull down a Microsoft Excel version of the Google spreadsheet (alas, not CSV as the Google-generated CSV wasn’t playing ball with MySQL)
3. Import this into MySQL
4. Generate static HTML with translations inserted where appropriate for each language

The process was fine, but somewhere within all these steps something was going awry. Latin characters with accents weren’t showing up properly and apostrophes were rendering in all different ways — �, `â, ? — anything except what I needed. Furthermore, Cyrillic, Chinese and Arabic weren’t even displaying at all.

I tried many things in PHP — preg_replace, utf8_encode, mb_convert_encoding, and even iconv — but all to no avail.

Finally, I spotted a snippet on the MySQL site from 2006, written by Lorenz Pressler:

after mysql_connect() , and mysql_select_db() add this lines:
mysql_query(“SET NAMES utf8″);

…and that was all I needed. In fact I didn’t even need to convert anything into UTF-8 in PHP. Once MySQL was outputting UTF-8 correctly, everything was fine. The database was encoded in UTF-8, so I assumed too much in thinking that meant it would automatically output it in that way.

So, if ever you have problems with MySQL and UTF characters not displaying, try SET NAMES and hopefully that’l fix the issue.

Apart from this being inconvenient, it struck me that being able to take screenshots — and more importantly sharing them — really adds a lot to the experience of a device.

Damn You Autocorrect! is a perfect example of this: people collecting examples of the iPhone’s quirky autocorrect and sharing them.

On Facebook many of my friends share screenshots. I often do as well when I see something worth sharing. For instance, last week I saw this bizarre image on the Malaysian Airways website and put it up on Facebook:

Oh, men! Yes we’re so trying, but you women still love us!

Had I not been on my desktop, I would not have been able to share this given the capabilities of my Android phone.

But many friends with iPhones do post screenshots from their phones.

One friend, @bendog, was recently listening to ‘Common People’ by Pulp. He wanted to make a comment on Facebook about the song, so he took a screenshot on his iPhone and uploaded it to Facebook:

Another friend, @Louiseontwitr, was looking for a Google Shopping app. But a funny thing happened: iTunes took her straightforward and innocent search and suggested something fairly inappropriate. So she took a screenshot on her iPhone and uploaded it to Facebook:


And I’ve seen plenty of weather-related screenshots from friends in London with iPhones (this one in particular from @indeox):

On iOS, screenshots are a piece of cake.

Apparently newer versions of Android make taking screenshots possible: but for other users of older Android devices the only way to take a screenshot is by rooting the phone or following this ridiculous process.

iPads too can take screenshots — but how about Android tablets? It’s not much better. And how about the iPad’s latest competitor, Amazon’s Kindle Fire? Well you can just follow these 21 simple steps. Yes, TWENTY ONE. On iOS? Hold the power button and sleep buttons. Done.

Android users could snigger at iPhone users for a while when they didn’t have copy and paste: but to me the screenshot ability is just as essential to any piece of hardware.

Just like a camera captures your experience in the real world, a screenshot does the same for any digital experience.

This problem is just as bad on game consoles. I’ve long played games on PCs, but have only just recently switched to the Playstation 3. One huge thing I miss is the ability to take screenshots.

For me, killing two people in Battlefield 2 at once was worth a screenshot, even if I died seconds afterwards

Steam understands how important screenshots are to sharing experiences. So much so they give all users 1GB of free cloud storage purely for storage and sharing of screenshots. (And beyond just screenshots, video capture for gaming is another great way to share game experiences).

Newer Android phones such as the Galaxy S2 can take screenshots: hopefully all new Android models will soon follow suit. But there are so many other phones and consoles that just lack this functionality: Windows 7 mobiles, Blackberries, Sony PSP and PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS and Wii. On some its possible, but not without connecting it to a PC in some way.

App and games publishers should be livid at these platforms not having this feature. Sharing screenshots is sharing your experience of a piece of hardware and/or software. It’s a critical feature that Apple nailed long ago.

Furthermore, it’s brand exposure: everyone knows the unique chrome of the iOS because iPhone users so often share screenshots from their phone. Android, Blackberry, webOS, Windows Mobile… sure you’ve seen these phones, but you’ve never seen screenshots shared around. However your knowledge of the aesthetics of iOS is no doubt far greater than any other one of these in part of the simple fact you can share screenshots from Apple devices.

My next phone — Apple, HTC, Samsung or other — will definitely have to have this feature. But until then, at least I can rely on my old trusty iPod.

The old chestnut of Flash banners overlaying any object on the page. But the irony here is that the Flash banner is advertising Eurostar’s flash sale. Oops.

Actually, I choose to blame UKBA — if it wasn’t for the strike next week, the info box here wouldn’t be pushing the banner down.

But kudos to Eurostar…

Stellar social media service!

It first happened to me on the IMDb. I remember my reaction — “yeah, IMDb app, great idea — I’ll use that all the time!”. I downloaded it and then I never used it again.

But this post isn’t about how pointless website apps can be if you have a perfectly good mobile website (Responsive design, anyone?)

Actually, it’s about a Kanye West-style attitude towards user experience on mobile websites.

Remember the 2009 MTV awards when Kanye West grabbed the microphone off Taylor Swift?

(And of course there’s also a gold mine of memes to go along with this.)

Kanye West was universally lambasted for this. Not only was it a bit weird, it was just plain rude. Although, to be fair, it did move the word “i’mma” into widespread use — for better or worse.

Going back to mobile UX, of course there’s nothing wrong with telling your mobile users you have an app. But how that’s communicated is often the problem.

Let’s consider Taylor Swift our content and Kanye West the promotion for an app.

Now consider some real world examples, starting with Amazon.co.uk — a good experience:

Amazon have made their app prominent, yet not obtrusive. In fact the Kindle promo is probably the only potentially obtrusive feature of this design.

But let’s look at a bad experience — from the usually brilliant Guardian website:

The worst thing about this pop up is that it’s also sale’s pitch. I totally understand The Guardian trying to make money off their app, but surely there’s a better strategy for this? I don’t feel like I’m being sold anything useful here: I’m just being harassed.

But the worst thing about this? We’ve been here before.

So please be a bit less Kanye, and think more about Taylor: it’s what your users would want.

Since this launch, I’ve noticed that Google is keen to hear my feedback on the new design.

Really keen.

At first I just hit the close button. The second, third and possibly fourth time I did the same. Possibly the fifth time it appeared, I actually gave them feedback, telling them not to worry — the new design was fine, but please stop pestering me with the pop up.

Yet it kept coming back. It’s like a zombie: it won’t die unless you shoot it in the head. But the problem is, I don’t know where the head is.

Last Sunday, I knew I was going to be on my computer most the day doing work. First thing that greeted me when I checked my email? Of course, the pop up. So between now and then I’ve been taking screenshots every time it’s appeared. Between now and then, I’ve restarted Chrome and my computer several times, logged in and out of Google, submitted more feedback begging for them to stop bugging me and even took the damn tour of their new Gmail in a vain effort to get this black box out of my inbox. And it’s the same situation on my work computer: at least a few times a day, my little black box friend will rear its ugly little head.

I’ve feedback to Google twice about this, and heck I’ve even tried tweeting Gmail. What can possibly stop this menace?

Now, this is where I’m interested to see whether this is just a personal overreaction to a tiny detail. I’m a bit obsessive about details. I have zero unread emails in my inbox, and it sends a cold shiver down my spine when I see people with even a few unread emails not attended too. Perhaps this pop up is annoying me because it’s interfering with my carefully groomed email environment?

Or maybe it’s more that when a user sees an ‘x’ icon on anything, it’s an expectation that once you have clicked on that ‘x’, whatever dialogue is attached will disappear, forever, unless the user takes action that justifies its return.

And I haven’t done anything to justify its return. Why are Google doing this? Is the code to keep it hidden broken, or is a strategy to painfully wring as much feedback out as possible?

And is this annoying anyone else as much as me?

Update, 17th November 2011: Well, seems I’m not the only one who’s been bugged by this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google+new+look+feedback+popup

But, that said, I haven’t seen the pop up for a few days. Hooray!

Entitled ‘Flags and languages: Redux (Part I)’, I’d obviously planned writing a Part II that would deal with the entire issue in some detail.

Well, I tried, and it’s quite amazing how complex the issues involved are — which for me is just more proof as to why using flags as languages is a really bad idea.

I quickly realised there was far more than a simple blog post involved. So Part II is actually a whole new blog: Flags are not languages.

Hopefully this blog will help in someway to curtail these bad design practices, as well as exploring and promoting best practice for displaying and presenting different language content.

So next time someone suggests plonking a Spanish flag on the link for Spanish (or German, French, Arabic etc.) — hopefully you can just send them this link and they can understand why using flags for languages is wrong.

But when I got home this evening and logged into Spotify, it dawned on me that Spotify and Facebook really, really want me to combine my accounts:

(Update, 27th September: this morning this same dialogue now comes with a ‘No thanks’ button. Phew.)

There’s a few things that worry me here. First: the single button: ‘Get started’. Where’s the opt-out? Or is this the point of no return? Well, to be fair, there is a cancel dialogue on the next screen when Spotify asks to connect to Facebook. But I get the impression it’s going to get harder and harder to avoid the inevitable ‘merging’ of Facebook and Spotify.

Secondly: the idea of Spotify suggesting songs based on what most of my Facebook friends listen to scares me (I’ve blogged about social media and the subject of personal taste before). Certain friends, however, I’d be really interested in keeping tabs on; but haven’t we been here before with the likes of Last.fm?

Third: there’s a signal versus noise problem here. For starters it’d be virtually impossible to keep track of all the music my friends are listening to. Secondly, how would I know if there’s something I really would enjoy listening? That brings us back to what made social media great in the first place: sharing. Human curation. A good friend of mine recently shared The Lonely Island’s latest single with me:

She knows me and knows my sense of humour. I loved the song and shared it on Facebook. Would I have listened to it if it had been a fleeting link on a Facebook update screen? Probably not. Showing what all my friends are listening too is a cool feature and all, but it will never beat person to person recommendations.

I read a great blog about this by Mark Sorrell today which really nails this music sharing business:

There are two more nefarious and subtle elements to the lack of new connections on Facebook. Firstly: sharing is boring. If I share music, by listening to music on Spotify, you see me listening to that music and you decide to also listen to that music. We sit there, both listening to that music. We were listening to different music. Now we’re listening to the same music.

He also goes on to my final point: privacy and the right to listen to eighties power ballads without ridicule.

One of the best things about the internet was how it let you be weird in private. It let you look at anything you wanted, anything at all, no matter how strange, unsavory, socially unacceptable or simply at odds with your carefully curated public image. The world had been a place of mass-production and mass consumption. There are four cars, which one do you want? There are twelve bands, which one do you want to listen to? Be normal, you have to be normal, we can only do normal.

(The rest of Mark’s blog is really worth reading, especially about the ‘social panoptican’.)

I’m sure Facebook is going to do some cool things with music and Spotify. But generally I’m worried Facebook is aggregating so much of our online life automatically that so much of what made it great in the first place is going to be lost. The serendipity is under threat: I may not talk to a few of my Facebook friends much, but I love the random links that appear on my timeline from some of them. And that’s still one of Twitter’s massive strengths: it’s fun, chaotic and with such an unfiltered stream from so many contacts (many strangers), there’s never a shortage of bizarre, interesting and fun links to enjoy.