It was a strange interview. A phone call. I don’t like interviewing over the phone. I feel handicapped without the social cues that come with face-to-face interaction. Also, I was sitting outside our midwife’s office (my wife was inside – we’re expecting our first baby), so the setting was not ideal for focus.

So I was unfocused, but not just because of the setting. I was complacent. I’m content with my work situation right now, so I don’t need a job. I approached the interview with the attitude that he needed to convince me, not the other way around. I suppose I was a little bit cocky. I expected him to be convinced already, and to offer me the job (eventually). The wrong attitude.

Also, he started the interview – a 30-minute phone call – by asking if I had any questions for him. This threw me a bit. Wasn’t I the one being interviewed? Shouldn’t he be asking me questions? When he finished answering my first question, he asked me, “what else?”

Eventually he asked me something – his only question during the entire call, as it turned out. It was a good one. To paraphrase: “Tell me about your experiences evangelizing user experience within an organization. How would you go about doing that?”

My answer was terrible. I rambled on about the importance of diplomacy and challenges around organizational politics (although I didn’t use those terms). I do think diplomacy and organizational politics factor in to the process of evangelizing user experience, but they’re hardly the most important considerations. It’s not the resonant or inspiring stuff.

I’ve worked hard to evangelize user experience in several organizations, through a variety of challenges and obstacles, so I’m disappointed in my answer. If I’d had more time to think about it, I would have started with the ‘why’ of it.

I believe I’m in the delight business. That’s the real goal of user experience design. Engineers can get on board with this idea as much as anyone. Who wouldn’t want to be in the delight business? I’ve helped engineers get excited about delighting customers. I’ve encouraged them to be a little competitive about it even.

Next I would have talked about science. User experience isn’t touchy-feely. It isn’t based on some designer’s intuition. You might start there, but there are lots of robust tools and processes for testing and validating. Quantifying success. Demonstrating objectively that A is better than B.

Finally, I might have talked about diplomacy, but I would have talked about how I would lead the conversation. It’s important to get engineers to talk about what’s working, what they’re good at, what’s going well. A lot of engineers are good designers, and it’s much more important to rally around what’s great than to identify the problems.

Ultimately, I don’t think it was the right job for me. The company is interesting, even important. But I don’t have enough of a connection to their industry or market. Still, I wish I’d put my best foot forward.

Not to make excuses, but a 30-minute phone call isn’t hospitable to best feet. When I interview people, I send them my most important questions in advance. I usually give candidates an assignment as well. Otherwise I’m only seeing their improv skills, their ability to think on their feet. This is an important skill for sure, but not the cardinal one.

No related posts.

Today you’d be hard pressed to find a commercially available vacuum that requires a bag. Nearly all vacuums are bagless now. This fact alone is sufficient to call Dyson a game changer, but going bagless wasn’t enough for the iconic inventor. He did two other things to revolutionize this humble household appliance.

He let you see the dirt

This is the kind of counter-intuitive curveball that only a genius comes up with. Who wants to see dirt? Perhaps it was hubris on Dyson’s part. Showing off. Or perhaps he conceived it initially for sales demonstrations, as a sensible way to show how much more dirt the Dyson sucked up than the competition (he was not only the company’s engineer, but its pitchman). As it turned out though, everyone wanted to see the dirt. People delighted in knowing that this filth they could see with their own eyes was safely trapped in the cannister and no longer soiling their shag carpet.

He made it look like a toy

The Dyson vacuum is nearly all plastic, which isn’t so unusual now, but it was in 2002 when his DC07 first entered the US market. Higher end vacuums at the time were mostly sturdy and serious, and the all-plastic Dyson DC07 cost more than most of them. Instead of trying to hide his product’s “plastic-ness” however, James Dyson embraced it. He made his vacuum cleaners look like toys, using bright colors and whimsical shapes. As a result, you don’t feel like the janitor of your house when you vacuum with a Dyson.

It’s actually sort of fun.

No related posts.

It’s often difficult to recognize when something changes the game. A few months or years down the road, you can usually trace a trail of copycats and wannabes back to the original idea, but even then, sometimes it’s not immediately apparent how something changed the game, or which aspect of the thing was responsible.

Other game changers are instantly recognizable. The first game changer I planned to write about was the Apple iPhone, but after thinking about it for a few seconds, I decided to inaugurate this series of posts with an ode to Apple in general.

The Mouse and GUI (1983)

Apple has built its house on one game changer after another. They introduced the mouse and GUI concept to the mass market way back in 1983, which may be the biggest game change in the history of personal computing. In many ways, the mouse and GUI is the very essence of personal computing. If you’re not a developer or a sysadmin, can you even imagine a command-prompt universe?

“Lifesavers candy” iMacs (1998)

In 1998, Apple released its candy-colored “Bondi Blue” iMac, and the world said “hold on, you can design a computer?” Now every previously overlooked appliance and utensil is designed, from toothbrushes to toilet brushes.

The iPod and iTunes (2001)

In 2001, Apple unveiled the first iPod. Portable music wasn’t revolutionary (Sony’s walkman was first to blaze that trail). The ability to carry all your music with you was new, but not revolutionary either. The scroll wheel UI was innovative, and super efficient, but not game changing. The real game changing thing about the iPod was what it did for MP3. The iPod made MP3s mainstream, and it’s no coincidence that the music industry killed Napster just as the iPod took off, paving the way for the iTunes Store (or iTunes Music Store as it was called at the time).

The iPhone (2007)

In 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone. Hard to believe it was only four years ago, since it’s become so deeply nested in my life. Everyone was wowed by the touchscreen. So sensitive, responsive and precise. And the way it bounces! So kinetic! But it’s not the screen that makes the iPhone a game changer. I played with various touchscreen prototype devices back in 2002-2003 when I worked for Vodafone. I recognized the touchscreen as the future of mobile phones, and so did everyone else who used them. The touchscreen was simply inevitable.

So it’s not the screen that changed the game. It’s the App Store. Apple opened the mobile phone up to developers, and lo the developers didst come. Now there are lots and lots of touchscreen smartphones, and lots of would-be App Stores. There’s the Android Marketplace, Blackberry App World and the Nokia Ovi Store, not to mention app stores launched by the various carriers. But if you ask iPhone users why they don’t want to switch to Android (or ask users who did switch what they miss most), many will still say it’s the apps.

No related posts.

I’m talking about two services that rescue online content from the twisted carnival of banner ads and assorted noise, and restore the pleasure of reading on the web. I’m talking about Instapaper and Readability.

With one click of a bookmarklet, Readability can turn this…

into this…

Instapaper does the same thing, but for stuff you want to read later. You just click a little “Read Later” bookmarklet, and the item is saved to a kind of to-do list. When you click the item in your list (or tap it, in the Instapaper iPhone or iPad app), it’s presented to you in its clean and simple glory, stripped of ads, navigation, related links, and anything else that might distract or annoy you:

But this is a bubble. A reading bubble. Most online publishers depend on the revenue they get from people eyeballing (and clicking, I assume, although who does that?) the banner ads. If services like Instapaper and Readability catch on, then there are two ways it can end.

The first possibility is a kind of arms race, where publishers find ways to prevent their content from being accessible in apps like Instapaper and Readability, then the apps find ways to work around the preventions, and so on. In this story, the best you can ultimately hope for is something like what has happened with RSS readers. Most big publishers only allow excerpts of their content to appear in the RSS feeds, and readers must visit the publisher’s website to read the whole thing.

The second possibility is some kind of advertising compromise built into Readability and Instapaper – maybe toned down ads that look more like sponsored text links?

So like any other bubble, enjoy this one while it lasts.

No related posts.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game or a productivity app, free or paid, the typical mobile app is dumped like a cheerleader after prom night. Most are all but abandoned within a month or two, which means they’re either ill-conceived, poorly designed, or both. It’s especially sad when you consider how hard it is to get your app onto someone’s phone in the first place. With a million apps in the iTunes store competing for the same real estate, it’s tough to get yours discovered, much less downloaded.

Every developer wants to be one of the lucky few who break through, but they should also want to make their apps sticky. So what does it take buck the curve? To answer this, it’s important to look at the ways mobile apps are used.

I organize mobile app usage scenarios into concepts I’m going to call the 3 Cs, and the more of them that factor in to an app, the stickier it is.

Continuity

These are apps that keep you connected to things you can’t stand to be away from. The great grandfather in this category is mobile email, which is what made Blackberry into Crackberry. Newer, sexier examples are Facebook (iTunes store link), Twitter and any other app for accessing time-sensitive content (NetNewsWire, Sportacular). The common thread is freshness – a steady stream of new content. Push alerts are key to Continuity apps, since they tell users when there’s something new to see.

Context

Mobile devices and ubiquitous 3G and GPS created whole categories of apps built around the here and now. Location and presence. If you find yourself wandering around a city block in search of a public restroom, you can check SitOrSquat. Hungry? fire up Yelp, or Foodspotting. These apps keep you coming back because of their contextual relevance and utility. Yelp’s iPhone app has become my de facto Yellow Pages to the half-mile radius.

Capacity

Modern culture has killed our appetite for idleness. We’re uncomfortable with silence. When we have some extra capacity – for lack of a better alliterative term – we fill it as quickly as we can. Mobile apps are ideal for this, especially almost any kind of game. As far as stickiness goes, though, this is the weakest of the 3 Cs. Most games lose their appeal after a month or two, and there are certainly a lot of games represented in the Pinch Media curve.

The stickiest apps are the ones that span more than one of these concepts. Foursquare, for example, covers all three. There’s Continuity in the need to know where your friends are, Context in the location features, Capacity in the gamelike mechanics around acquiring status and collecting various rewards.

Mobile video apps make up another category that spans several of the Cs. People watch short-form videos during idle moments – while riding the bus to work or waiting in line for the ATM – which is another way of saying people use them when they have some extra Capacity. Kyte (my current employer) makes it easy to distribute video content to mobile devices, which enables publishers to keep it fresh, which in turn means Kyte-powered video apps check the box for Continuity. The Kyte Mobile App Frameworks take Continuity further with turnkey support for integrated Twitter updates and RSS feeds, giving brands and publishers a multi-dimensional engagement opportunity.

No related posts.

New since the last round…

Evernote: I once called this the best free application there is, and I’ll stand by that. I use it for everything imaginable. I take snapshots of whiteboards at work and save them in Evernote, and they become searchable. I use the iPhone app on the bus to quickly jot down the little ideas and inspirations I have. I do the same while driving, except I use the voice note feature. I forward useful emails – or snippets of emails – from local mailing lists like Urban Daddy and K & L Wines to my Evernote email alias. And lots lots more. I can’t believe all of this costs me nothing.

Dropbox: I work with a user experience designer who’s based in Israel and a development team based in Romania, and Dropbox has become absolutely essential to me. I keep all my current projects in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, which looks and behaves like any other local folder except that it syncs with a folder on the Dropbox website, plus a folder on my Israeli colleague’s computer, and one on my home computer, one on my iPhone, etc. So I’ll work on a file during my workday, and – with the time difference – my colleague in Israel takes over after I leave for the day. We can do this without changing our normal way of working.

Things: A basic to-do list app for Mac (desktop) and iPhone. I haven’t found the perfect to-do list manager yet – they’re either over-engineered or overly simplistic – but Things is pretty good.

Instapaper: One of those ideas that’s so simple, it’s amazing that no one did it before. Then again, its utility is very narrow and specific. I use it like this: I read my twitters on the bus ride to work, over a spotty 3G connection. Within any given tweet I might see a link to something that sounds interesting. I usually don’t want to read web pages on the bus, on my phone because of the slow connection, and also because I want to get through a day’s worth of my friends’ tweets in 40 minutes. So I just send the interesting links to Instapaper where they wait for me to read them later.

Twitter: I kept my distance from Twitter for a while and dismissed it as something that seemed trival, noisy and pointless. I was wrong, and I admit it.

Facebook: I’ve changed my tune about Facebook too. Now that no one seems to “poke” me much anymore, and I’m not constantly being challenged to quizzes, I find myself spending a lot more time on Facebook. I use it mainly for the news feed – to stay connected with friends.

Still awesome…

Google: I use Google for pretty much everything now it seems. Just today, we were ordering prints of some photos from Shutterfly Smug Mug, and we had a choice of matte, glossy and something called “lustre.” Unable to find a definition on the Shutterfly website, my wife asked me, “What’s ‘lustre?’” So I Googled ‘matte vs. glossy vs. lustre’ and immediately found the answer in the first search result. If a piece of information exists, then you can be pretty sure that someone has put it on a website somewhere, and Google can take you right to it. That is all.

Google Groups: This was essential during our wedding planning last year. The members of our group included me, my wife (then fiancee) and a couple of family members who were helping us with the planning. Whenever one of us would email one of our vendors, we would CC our Google Group’s email alias (groupname@googlegroups.com), and everyone in the group would receive a copy of the email. More importantly, the whole thread was recorded and available to all of us on the web.

G Reader: Blogs are supposedly on their way out (I don’t see it), but G Reader is still a big part of my daily web travels.

Delicious: I use Twitter and G Reader to discover things. I send the good things to Instapaper, which is kind of like short term memory. Delicious, then, is like long term memory. If something seems good enough that I think I might want to refer back to it a year from now, or share it with someone down the road, then I save it as a Delicious bookmark.

Wordpress: It’s just an amazing blogging platform. This year I customized a new theme. I also added Facebook Connect login, plus social sharing (at the bottom of each post), related posts (in my RSS feed only), Google Sitemaps support, and more. Each of these things took me about 10 minutes, thanks to the community of WordPress devotees out there making the platform better and better every day.

Yahoo Pipes: I use it mostly to aggregate and filter RSS feeds, which I can then consume or republish. Check out my Bay Area food events Twitter feed to see an example: FoodFeed SF. It’s made up of a dozen or so RSS feeds, aggregated and filtered (to remove duplicates and irrelevant posts) then sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed.

Plaxo: I use it to keep my local address book and calendars synced with Gmail and my iPhone. Love it.

Pandora: Great music a click away, and the iPhone app is awesome too. I hook it up to my stereo and rock out. Also a great place to discover new artists.

Yelp: I rarely contribute anymore, but I still use Yelp all the time – especially the iPhone app. It’s effectively my Yellow Pages to San Francisco. I can find things near me, read reviews and then call businesses with one click.

Standing by…

Foursquare: I love the idea of Foursquare, but I haven’t carved out the time to start using it. I’ve been known to dis it and dismiss it like I once did with Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t want to eat my words again, so I’ll just say it hasn’t found its place in my digital life yet.

Also, tumblr, posterous, ommwriter

Awesome but not for me…

12 Seconds: I’m using this as an example, but I could just as easily use Ustream, Qik, Blip, YouTube or even my own employer – Kyte. Online video has arrived, and there are a lot of amazing tools out there. The mobile apps are especially exciting to me. I’m just not really a video guy. I don’t like to talk into a webcam or see myself on the screen. Just too introverted I guess.

Related posts:

1. My Favorite Web Services

Once I verified the specs, I started making my design templates for the Droid in Omnigraffle, and I ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the scale of my document to get the right amount of stuff on the screen. I was struck by how different everything had to be compared to the templates I use to design for other devices. In fact, each of my device-specific templates uses a different scale.

This seems strange when you consider that the devices are all roughly the same size, physically:

I was suddenly curious, so I decided to see what things would look like if I scaled the various devices as if the pixel densities of their respective screens were equal, and everything else was relative to that (actual pixel density of each device is noted in the image below):

As you can see, when you adjust for pixel density, the Droid is practically a tablet compared to the iPhone.

To better illustrate the difference, here are the two images with one overlaid on the other:

I hear designers talk a lot about the differences in capabilities and design vocabularies across the range of mobile devices, but variations in screen resolutions are another challenge designers have to confront in the mobile world. It’s especially important with touch screen devices, since the right target size for a user’s finger tap is a physical question more than a matter of pixels. Apple’s guideline for buttons is a height of 48 pixels for example, but the same physical height on the Nokia N97 measures about 58 pixels.

Related posts:

1. Why Android Will Win the Mobile App Wars
2. Branding and visual design in iPhone apps
3. Are iPhone apps the new CD-ROMs?

What the hell is wrong with Nokia? It’s as if they got together as a company, identified all they ways their software could suck, and then aimed for the bottom.

I’ve been using some of the latest Nokia handsets at work for a few weeks now. The N97, for example, is awesome on paper. Big, high-resolution touch-screen display. Decent amount of memory, power, battery life. 5 megapixel camera – with a flash even. In person, Nokia’s handsets are still nicely styled – a good size, weight and form factor. But man oh man, the user experience of these devices has me shaking my head every time I try to do anything.

The touch screen doesn’t really work. The phone prompts me 50 times every time I need a network connection. And take today. I fired up my N97 Mini and it prompted me, “Do you want to check for software updates?”

Sure, I thought, and tapped the on-screen button to continue.

Then a dialog: “There’s an important software update for your phone.”

Cool. Go on… [tap].

A message. “Go to http://www.nokia.com/softwareupdate in your browser”

Wait, a message? I can’t just download and install the update using my phone?

OK, that seems dumb, but I fire up the browser and struggle my way through typing out the URL. Which takes me to a web page (not a mobile web page) that has a horizontal scrolling iframe containing all the Nokia handsets. I’m supposed to find my handset model, but I can’t operate the scrollbar/iframe using my N97.

Don’t ask me why I even bother pressing forward at this point, but eventually I find a search box, and I enter “N97 Mini” which brings up an image of my phone.

I click on the image, and I see the following message:

Nokia Software Updater can be used with most Nokia devices listed above and need only be downloaded once.

Requires: Windows Vista or XP, USB cable to connect your device to your PC.

Then a button to download a 23 MB .exe file.

WTF? I have to use a special app installed on a Windows machine (I’m a Mac user) to update the software on my phone? You couldn’t have told me about five steps earlier in this process?

No related posts.

Whenever the conversation turns to Apple, there erupts a certain amount of troll vs. fanboy squabbling. Usually there are a few would-be referees in the mix too, telling everyone to shut up because the topic is worn out, or pointless, or both.

And so it has been lately with the iPhone App Store saga.

Nonetheless, I’m going to give the dead horse one more kick in the ribs.

In my last post, I linked out to some of the recent indictments of Apple on other blogs (Factory Joe, Calacanis.com, GigaOm, TechCrunch). In the comments of these posts were many devil’s advocates (the devil in this case being Apple), and the defense seems to come down to three main points:

1. Apple has always been closed, and Steve Jobs has always been a control freak, but it’s precisely because of this that Apple has had such a track record of quality and success.
2. The iPhone and the App Store are actually awesome. Seriously, the thing is sweet, and there are like a gazillion apps for it. Stop whining!
3. It’s really AT&T’s fault.

There’s certainly truth in all of these, but they ultimately leave me asking, “what is an iPhone, really?”

When Apple was just a computer company, and the Woz was still around, Apple catered to geeks and hobbyists, because they were the people who bought computers. Steve Jobs saw the future early, however. He knew that computers would be a mass-market product, and he helped make it so. He made it so by deciding (or understanding) that a computer should be like any other piece of consumer electronics – like your stereo or your tv. Most people don’t want to program those things, they want to play with them.

Apple took this philosophy to another level with the iPod – a bona fide consumer electronics gadget. No more, no less.

And now, there’s the iPhone, a product that is so firmly somewhere in-between (plus, a phone). And therein lies the problem…

Steve Jobs has always tried to have it both ways. He wants Apple to be the best computing platform on the market, and he wants Apple’s products together to make up a sexy, plug-and-play personal electronics ecosystem.

When you look at it this way, it’s surprising how well he’s managed to make this work.

So, what about the iPhone?

If the iPhone is a little computer, then I expect it to be open and infinitely customizable. Anyone should be able to make any kind of software they want for it, and I should be able to buy the software wherever they want to sell it. Furthermore, it should connect me to the Internet and all that the Internet offers.

If the iPhone is a personal electronics device, then first and foremost I expect it to be plug and play. It should be super easy to get my media onto it, and the experience of consuming or interacting with that media should be fun and easy.

If the iPhone is a phone, then well, first and foremost I expect the supreme suckage of the phone company. I expect to be able to make calls and send texts and get monthly bills that I don’t understand.

The problem of course is that the lines between these things are getting fuzzier and fuzzier. People are either satisfied or dissatisfied with the iPhone depending on which of these three perspectives they favor.

I tend to favor the idea that my iPhone is a little Macintosh computer, so I get cranky when I can’t install a different web browser or get rid of the stupid Yahoo! weather app.

But I also think it’s an awesome little gadget for listening to my tunes and my stories, and I appreciate the gazillion apps I can get for it.

Related posts:

1. Are iPhone apps the new CD-ROMs?
2. Why Android Will Win the Mobile App Wars
3. Branding and visual design in iPhone apps

Remember CD-ROMs? Remember how cool they were and how for a brief moment in the early 90s it seemed every possible thing was being CD-ROMified – from children’s books to topo maps to baseball cards? CD-ROMs were briefly so cool that people would pay $200 a pop for the latest and greatest titles. Then they became so ubiquitous that you’d get them as giveaways and even in your junk mail. Then after just a few years, the Web came along, and most CD-ROMs suddenly made no sense at all.

So what does this have to do with iPhone apps? Well…

1. There are a whole bunch of iPhone apps that are really just repackaged websites and don’t make a lot of sense as apps.
2. There are a whole bunch of apps that everyone would dismiss as pointless and annoying if they weren’t wrapped in an iPhone.
3. iPhone apps have a stupidly limited distribution model.

I want to focus on #3. The idea that our mobile phones are small personal computers is still somewhat novel. Other than the simplest of games, we’ve never been able to install software on our phones before, and so the App Store is a little like going from Communist Prague to the Las Vegas strip – except we still have a dictator (albeit a benevolent one) called Apple.

If Apple or any other company tried to exercise complete control over what people could install on their computers they way they do with the iPhone, the reddit kids would go absolutely bananas. Having just arrived from behind the iron curtain, however, we think the App Store is like the best candy store ever.

But people don’t really want one company to dictate what they can install on their phones, even if it’s Apple. There’s no reason Apple should be able to force me to keep the Yahoo! “Stocks” app on my phone, or prevent me from installing a pair of virtual iBoobs (somewhat NSFW). And developers – not to mention companies – would love it if they didn’t have to deal with the whole iTunes Connect process in order to make their apps available to you.

Here’s a hypothetical example: If there’s a problem with the New York Times website, or they want to add a new feature, they have complete freedom to make any changes they want. Not so with the New York Times iPhone App. First they have to find a developer who knows the iPhone platform – a much smaller labor pool than that of web developers. Then, once the work is done, they have to submit it to Apple and wait. Usually about two weeks. And there’s no guarantee that Apple will accept it into the iTunes store. If Apple doesn’t like the way the New York Times has decided to, say, monetize the app by displaying ads, then the New York Times has no choice but to change it, re-submit and wait again. There’s no way the New York Times can make their app available to you outside the iTunes store (jailbroken phones excepted).

Now you might say the New York Times makes no sense as an iPhone App, but why should Apple get to make this decision for the market?

Apple has a huge advantage right now, not just because of their head start. Their SDK is light years beyond anything I’ve seen from Nokia/Symbian, Palm, RIM or J2ME. Apple provides better tools and guidance than anyone else for creating amazing, beautiful, elegant apps. Philosophically, Apple looks at the phone differently than those traditional players do, and this is Apple’s real advantage. They see the phone as a software client first and an extension of the phone company second (and the latter as a kind of necessary evil at that). Android is the only other platform that looks at the phone this way, but at some point in the not too distant future, this is just what phones will be.

When you think of the iPhone as just another computing platform, then it doesn’t make sense for Apple to hold a monopoly on distributing software for it. The iTunes store might always be the best and easiest place to get apps for your iPhone, and Apple surely loves their 30% cut, but someday nothing will prevent people from selling you their apps by way of their websites or Amazon or even in the form of… gasp… CD-ROMs from old-school retailers. Count on it happening sooner rather than later.

Apple always has impecable timing, and they will probably open things up right around the time that Nokia’s new app store comes online.

Related posts:

1. What the F**k is an iPhone?
2. 5 dumb iPhone app genres
3. YouTube, Yahoo: iPhone Parasites