Archive for category User Experience
Ways the iPad changed my behavior at the 3-month mark
Posted by Jay Morgan in meditations, User Experience on October 30th, 2010
After a few weeks of having the iPad, I came up with a loose schedule for how and when to use it. Earlier, it had served as quasi-eye-candy: I spent time exploring the broadness of possibilities and apps. I balanced that with a touch of UX analysis.
And, then, I got into one particular iPad productivity app. Omni Group’s OmniFocus for iPad marked the turning point. The interaction design reflects a sound approach of planning in the vocabulary of the platform, if you will (a lá LukeW’s “Mobile First”). At this point, I realized I had a reliable set of tools that didn’t interfere with the work/consume habits I’ve developed when using a laptop.
Here’s the rough plan I came up with for using the iPad:
#1 Use: An always-visible productivity toolkit while I’m working on the MacBook Pro.
The results:
I can stay in place on the MBP while keeping what I need to reference or to do secondarily on the iPad.
The Apps:
- OmniFocus for iPad, managing to-dos and projects;
- Mail for iPad, keeping up with project-related emails;
- DropBox for iPad, sharing and accessing project files;
- Evernote for iPad, taking and reading notes;
- MindMeister for iPad, mind mapping IA, project plans;
#2 Use: A multi-purpose tool while I’m at home and not working on something or playing.
The results:
I can quickly switch between productivity & planning, reading, drafting work ideas, researching, or shopping.
The Apps:
- Productivity at home splits between OmniFocus, Mail, and Evernote. Additionally, I use Safari for web apps like Harvest or Mint, since personal and family productivity includes managing our finances.
- Planning and drafting work ideas when not focusing on work means I’m sometimes simply using the iPad as a tablet upon which I stabilize a notebook so I can write, sketch, and brainstorm on paper. (When can I get Balsamiq for iPad?!) I seem to use MindMeister in any platform much less ever since they put that folder-based dashboard on the web interface. I do use OmniFocus, Evernote, and Mail at home.
- Reading apps are typically not the ones I used on the iPhone, mostly because the iPad news apps aren’t as high-quality as the iPhone versions. I tend to use Safari when reading on the iPad because the browser size is fine for most non-optimized sites. Also, because many sites I view do optimize for iPad. Note: There’s just as much strategic skill in knowing when and how to optimize a website, and not to force something into an app.
- Researching might be something light, like Maps for directions, or something more involved like looking for instructions for a home maintenance project.
- Shopping on the iPad is a nascent activity for me: I’m ok navigating a NYTimes.com, but I’m not interested in the agony of the typical B2C or B2B site.
When I look for a prototype for shopping on the iPad, the one and only is Ebay’s AIR app for desktop that came out a couple of years ago. What a coincidence that LukeW worked on that, huh? And, I remember how people used to look at it with a blank stare. It wasn’t immediately clear to most the value or potential of the interface dynamics the Ebay team had established in their AIR app.
A careful eye for what I’m not using much on the iPad:
- The NYTimes app situation reflects a broken or weak strategy. I presume it’s not about follow-through, since they managed to launch the iPad-specific app that is clearly differentiated from the iPhone app. Given how they’ve adapted for the better in many respects of product and UX strategy, I expect something better will be here soon.
- Twitter apps in general, and Tweetdeck specifically. It’s worth noting I don’t use Twitter much these days.
- OmniGraffle for iPad, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. These tools are hobbled – if not useless – without the ability to leverage the templates I rely on when using these tools on the desktop. This might sound like I’m asking them to break the rules of planning for the platform, but the templates are neither simple accelerators nor crutches for newbies. In fact, templates are the foundation of applying those awesome tools to your purpose and craft.
The heuristic nature of algorithms under development
Posted by Jay Morgan in applied cognition, User Experience on July 17th, 2010
In the unofficial top-ten list of a good user experience gone wrong is the variant of: “Yeah, but Amazon is stupid because I bought a children’s puzzle once two years ago, and they keep recommending children’s puzzles to me. I’m never gonna buy another one, but they keep asking me about them!”
The second most common algorithm, if you will
Amazon uses algorithms (Wikipedia, Wolfram) to process what you do while on their site and then predict, anticipate, or guess what you would do next. But, this is created by humans and subject to human error*. And, as I understand it, they adjust, adapt, revise, and tweak the algorithm over time.
(*) This is what I mean by the “heuristic nature” of algorithms. While this algorithm is an enviable personalization tool and/or recommendation engine, it clearly produces spurious and annoying results. Heuristics (Wikipedia article) are “rules of thumb”, as opposed to mathematical equations which we optimize.
A flavor-of-the-month heuristic
This flavor-of-the-month is brought to you by Twitter-meets-marketing. Rather, it’s brought to you by people who blindly pursue a broad idea in a way that wastes their time more than it wastes others.
Today, I twice tweeted about “diet”, more specifically, tweeted about planning our family diet for the week ahead:
http://twitter.com/jayamorgan/status/18801092461
http://twitter.com/jayamorgan/status/18800989687
And, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but spurious and annoying new followers who focus on diets and dieting. After two tweets in which I mention diet, fools rush in.
- What do they do if it’s another six months before I tweet about diet?
- What do they do if I don’t tweet about diet again ever?
- What do they do if I don’t follow them back?
- Did they check to see if I were connected to other people they follow? other people who discuss diet regularly?
Admittedly, I am connected to people who discuss food-related topics – more specifically, people who discuss natural and local foods. But, that’s clearly not about diets or dieting. And, my history of tweets rarely (if ever) mention diets.
This isn’t the first time a rare keyword like “diet” has set off a flurry of spurious new followers. And, I hear about this from other twitterers.
I presume these people use search-based tools to monitor tweets using keywords of interest to them. I wonder how this will play out. Will they stop the idiocy of following anyone who tweets their keywords? (After all, it’s common that these people are following upwards of 10k people, which is an absurd number of people to follow with anything resembling attentiveness or care.) Who is making tools for these fools? I presume that just as their are horrible websites and poor technology everywhere to be found, that there are tools enabling the bad habit of following a person after they tweet your keyword once.
Something akin to My Treatise on Mental Spaces
Posted by Jay Morgan in applied cognition, cognitive science, User Experience on November 13th, 2009
That each practice, craft, art, emotion, occupation, trait, or other aspect of existence is a mental space.
That each mental space is multi-dimensional itself.
That humans encounter mental spaces by realizing and understanding them.
To describe how a human encounters a mental space:
- At first, we have no awareness, understanding of the mental space.
- Then, they realize it as uni-dimensional. Geometrically this is a point, dot in the mental space.
- This encounter creates an event horizon, behind which there are new possibilities within the event horizon that present further access to the dimensions of that mental space.
- Gradually and progressively our capacity for realization and understanding increases. That is, our capacity for experiencing more dimensions in that mental space increases.
- So, we begin to realize and understand a mental space dimension by dimension.
- Readiness, fitness, experience, will, motivation, ability, or other characteristics contribute to and define the capacity for experiencing more.
That this encounter is a mental or cognitive singularity. (As opposed to a mathematical, algebraic, technological, etc., singularity.)
- Not all cognitive singularities are devastating, say, as one might interpret a singularity Kurzweil discusses.
- Cognitive singularities vary in capacity and intensity.
- The maturity of cognitive singularities could be indexed, measured.
That the entirety of mental spaces I would call a “chromatic latticework” of mental spaces.
- The chromatic lattice’s fabric is described by the dimensionality of three kinds of mental spaces:
- Intra-mental spaces: those regarding one’s own mentality.
- Inter-mental spaces: those regarding mental spaces shared between interacting individuals.
- Extra-mental spaces: those regarding social, cultural, and that span multiple individuals. These exist beyond individuals, regardless of their awareness of them.
- The entirety of these spaces describes human knowledge.
- Are there a-, pre-, or para-cognitive spaces?
< End of Part 1 >
Pre-searching : coining a term for a new search behavior pattern
Posted by Jay Morgan in User Experience on July 6th, 2009
Pre-searching is a behavior pattern I’ve noticed as people key in potential search terms to a search box that gives suggestions.
Foraging behavior begins before the search results page, since users can check their idea of what they want to find based on what’s suggested by the engine. Much like the “QuickLook” design pattern eliminates the pogo-effect on retail sites, the suggested keyword can eliminate a pogo-effect from search results page (SRP) to a new entry.
This reminds me of the earliest ‘suggested search keywords’ I remember, which were on the SRP – either at the top or bottom of the SRP – and suggested related keywords, especially more detailed variants or subtopics.
Variations on where and how pre-searching happens
Google’s Chrome address bar is the most familiar “suggested keywords” to me. Of course, Google added this to their www.google.com search box a few years ago, if my memory serves correctly. I recall Firefox having a robust URL suggestion in version 3. Around that time, I was in frequent working sessions with a projector. I watched with amusement as people would use that suggestion as a pre-processor, if you will, for where they wanted to go or what they wanted to find.
Prospective suggestions would serve up keywords not in your history. Retrospective suggestions would serve up keywords, URLs, etc., in your history.
Some sites provied “popular terms”, which serve a similar function as suggestions, but they’re ‘canned’. It seems that most ‘popular’ keyword collections are: (a) not dynamic; (b) stuffed with marketing-oriented keywords; (c) extremely limited.
Am I coining “pre-searching”? Or, is it already documented?
Perhaps someone’s already coined this or another term for the same behavior pattern. I take the step – as my science education compels me – to formalize the idea for future reference. After all, having this in hand might help me convince a client that suggested keywords are worth the effort.
If you know of a reference to behavioral pattern matching this one, please comment so I can keep up with it. And, perhaps update this post.