1.The future in beta

The Web is the future of digital information in beta

It is easy to develop for, has a wide installed base, and is well-understood

But his does not mean it is the right medium in which to deliver information, services and entertainment

Computers are universal tools: thus jacks of all trades, masters of none

They have no physical affordances to give clues about what a particular tool does, or how it is to be used

They are not portable, sturdy, or particularly reliable, and rarely suit the user’s context of use. (Note the prevalent of ‘printer-friendly’ versions of pages, which are also Personal Digital Assistant [PDA]-friendly.)

They cannot display much information (and there is increasing competition for pixels between traditional applications, email, the Web, instant messaging and audio-visual services), and don’t address competition for use in the home (though the computer server is starting to address this by allowing ‘dumb clients’ to interact with a ‘smart server’)

But the Web is still a useful medium in which to experiment

2.The principles of digital interaction

Interaction design is the discipline associated with digital devices and interfaces. The basic principles of interaction design state that interfaces to systems (such a London Underground ticket machine) should show:

• What they do: allows tickets to be purchased and Oyster cards to be charged
• What state they are in when the user approaches them: ready for customer, waiting for last customer to complete interaction
• How to effect a particular task: select a destination, single or return, number of passengers, payment method
• What the new state of the system is (success, error, etc): success indicated by tickets being dispensed (as long as they are the desired tickets), failure might be a result of failure to make payment in time, machine having no change to dispense for non-exact payment, debit card not being recognised or lack of sufficient funds

Read on: ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ Donald A Norman: a lay introduction to interacting with objects, both analogue and digital[i]

3.Looking sideways at the problem

Looking sideways is a term associated with celebrated designer Alan Fletcher, a partner at London-based design company Pentagram. He wrote the book The Art of Looking Sideways. Ways of thinking around and broadening an understanding of a problem are important, particularly when designing in interactive media.

A typical approach to Web site development is to define the path a generic user needs to take to be able to complete a task

Following this approach it is easy to ignore the other paths a user may take, some of which would lead to errors that would need correcting, and other un-obvious problems

Or to assume that you are the typical user (and ignore the project knowledge you also have), or assume that there is only one type of user

These challenges can be addressed using scenarios and personas: stories of use, and of the people who use the site.

Personas might describe the interests and concerns of a person, where they work and how busy they are, how familiar they are with computers and IT, and their motivation for using a site.

They help focus and anchor the discussion of site features and design, and remind you why you are creating the site: for these people!

You may be familiar with some of these techniques from working with Flow Interactive, who I understand have done some consulting.

They are also relate to the testing of site features and design.

4.Fitting systems to people

… not people to systems!

People operate in many different environments (including the home and ‘third places’), they are mobile (static and moving); they are inside and outside, with the associated environment; standing up, walking, sitting or lying down; they may work alone or collaboratively

Information, services and entertainment need to fit into people’s lives. The nearest comparison is electricity, which is pervasive, portable, and flexible. This is how the network should be.

Products also need to adapt intelligently, for instance drawing on the user’s location, the time of day/the day of the week, and drawing on known (perhaps inferred) user preferences.

Not all information needs to be sought or directed to a person. It can be ambient: always available, at the periphery, simply presented and thus glanceable. Like a clock.

The semantics of products and interfaces are important: a hammer tells you what is does, how it is to be held and used. With integrated electronics that connection between form and function has been lost. We need to re-create it.

Read on: ‘Design for eGovernment’ Nico Macdonald[ii]

5.Designing for the ‘forgotten users’

We need to remember to design systems for the forgotten users. The most common example I come across are an organisation’s editors and staff.

Of course the really important people are the users, but the people who are likely to use a site most are the editors. They are typically forgotten as they have a commitment to a Web site as part of their job – but their needs can be addressed using the same techniques are applied to design for the public users.

We should remember that the Web browser began life as a read-write tool, when Tim Berners-Lee created the first one in 1990. We haven’t yet returned to that model… or an understanding of directly interacting with information.

Some good work has been done in editing systems for intranets and online publishing, but typically editors are forced to use different and unfamiliar tools from those they use for writing and editing. They lack the features or their more familiar and dedicated tools, and their personalised elements such as dictionaries.

The search engine ‘crawler’ is also the forgotten user. (Note the implications for meta information and page structure.)

6.Designing to encourage contribution

… and stakeholder inclusion. Four concepts:

1. Simplicity: make publishing as simple as possible (but no simpler) and support it using tools with which people are familiar. Reduce the number of steps to publishing, eg: Word, email. Not going through IT departments. Note the lessons learned from Weblogging.
2. Enhancement and association: make it easy to enhance material by adding rich references or contextual information.
3. Instant results: make it easy to preview a contribution. And make contributions available instantly (or as soon as possible) and ensure the contributor knows. Seeing the results of your work is very satisfying.
4. Feedback: make it easy for readers to report errors, comment on, or praise a contribution. Include URLs for pages in feedback forms (note the need for good URLs). Make it easy to link to stories, eg: session- or user- ID information (perhaps put fixed URL on the page).

Read on: ‘The future of Weblogging’ Nico Macdonald: for a salutary review of the commentary on and developments around Weblogging[iii]

7.New publishing models

Structured information and syndication: we need to abstract content and presentation, and this seems to have been done on the FCO Web site. This allows pages to be re-presented as printer-friendly, or the text to be sent as an email. It allows for:

• re-use by other tools, eg: the MacOS Internet information utility Watson use for flights and other services, or Grokker which uses data from Teoma, Google, and other search engines to present search results using visual techniques
• incorporation into other services, eg: FCO updates syndicated to travel Web sites (legal and insurance issues aside), Amazon Web Services, Usability News JavaScript-based feed
• access on other platforms, eg: PDA for publications
• creation of new/bespoke/customised services

The Semantic Web: using machines to read new meaning into online information. Creating new structures of information based on explicit or implied semantics, using ontologies and taxonomies. There are implications for using ‘Click here’ for links.

Meta-publications: logically follow from structuring and syndicating information. They may be created by a combination of syndicated material or headlines, and commentary on what has been published, primarily in Weblog form. Eg: PlanetHCI, Plastic.com

Search: the browsing model is broken as we are dealing with thousands of documents, on millions of computers, and sub-document information. Thus search is being built into the core of the next versions of Windows and Macintosh operating systems, and is being pushed on local area networks and desktops by Google and others. The challenges here are to ensure that documents have enough meta-information, making indexing invisible to the user, and visualising the search results to exploit our visual powers. Search also has implications for the design of sites, as it is a kind of syndication which can lead to your site being disaggregated. Someone using a search tool may get information from your site without ever visiting it.

The end of email: email is so flexible, widespread and well understood that it is has been used for everything from business correspondence to discussions, announcements, and newsletters. Junk mail is making these other functions unreliable. Soon people are likely to subscribe instead to RSS news feeds for discussion and announcements. These can be downloaded in the background and read offline in a ‘news reader’ (just like email), and can also be read on a PDA, or combined into a bespoke ‘publication’. [You can find a list of news readers on UsabilityNews.com]

Read on: ‘Scamming the spammers’ Nico Macdonald[iv]. The second half of the article deals with challenges for email.

Conclusion

To be able to create appropriate and satisfying products now, and anticipate changes in the future, we need to:

• Remember the big picture of technologically-inspired (not driven) change
• Appreciate that technologies are typically developed to make an existing process more efficient and that new uses only develop later
• Remind ourselves that although new technologies are initially adopted by enthusiasts, ordinary people don’t really care about technology, and are more concerned about practical benefits and ease of use
• Adopt a human-centred design approach to anchor and inspire product development, but remember to lead not following users
• Note that many of the benefits of digital and networked technologies will come from areas other than speed and instant access, and this is where they will address the benefits of paper and other media that are currently superior

Footnotes

[i] ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ Donald A Norman Basic Books (Perseus) Norman’s most celebrated book, this is a sophisticated introduction to human cognition in relation to the design of products and environments. His example of the way door design communicates use (flat panel for pushing, fixed handle for pulling) sticks in the mind of every reader. The book also outlines a useful model for understanding interfaces (see page 80). http://www.jnd.org/books.html#DOET

[ii] 'Design for eGovernment' Nico Macdonald, eGov Monitor, 15 September 2003 http://www.egovmonitor.com/features/design01.html

[iii] ‘The future of Weblogging’ Nico Macdonald, The Register, 18 April 2004 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/18/blogging_future/

[iv] ‘Scamming the spammers’ Nico Macdonald, spiked-IT, 21 July 2004. An analysis of current developments in junk mail (and anti-junk mail systems). Argues that the spammers themselves are the main victims of online scams, and that as they wise up junk mail will tend to wither. Also critiques the crass models of junk mail filtering implemented by corporate IT departments, and warns that in 'dealing' with spam we may destroy the ease-of-use that has lead email to be so widely used. Concludes that we mustn't lose sight of the improvements needed in emails systems, at the front end as well as the back-end, some of which are highlighted by the proliferation of junk mail. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA60D.htm