Yu Centrik

Our readers often tell us they want to know how to improve their skills in technological design. Hopefully you’re interested in this as well. Maybe you stay honed by reading technology blogs and Twitter, and perhaps you occasionally get swept up by the hype of marketing gurus who claim we’re part of a new revolution. The problem is, the real information revolution was over a century ago!  Of course it’s important to keep up-to-date, but let me tell you why it’s equally important to clean the dust off some old books and start learning design from history.

We can’t afford to believe the hype.
If you spend a lot of time on the web, you probably believe that we are on the cusp of some kind of “information revolution”.  If this is something that motivates you to push further, don’t let me steal that from you - certainly the latest in sleek, smooth and functional technology which participate in a global network is remarkable and unprecedented.  However, if you’re a critical thinker, you have the potential to see beyond the hype!  When you engage in major projects, you have a responsibility to make the right judgements by learning from the history of media.

Designers who dip into the interdisciplinary depths of human knowledge are an endangered species, mostly due to hype: do you really think computer technology is a fundamental game-changer in the context of human progress?  I’m often surprised at how many simply assume this to be the case without thinking about it themselves.  It is in response to this fallacy that I wanted to remind our readers that the notion of an “information revolution” is simply not ours to claim.  Nowhere is this more important to consider than in our fields of research and design.  Believing our generation’s selfish hype causes narrow vision, a serious obstacle to drawing upon the diverse sources necessary for good interaction design.

When was the REAL “information revolution”?
In a quick read called “The Victorian Internet“, Tom Standage draws extensive comparison between today’s Internet and the 19th century telegraph.  Many attributes of today’s so-called “information revolution” actually surfaced in the mid-19th century.  While the Internet gets the credit, the telegraph was the true breeding ground for instant messaging, e-mail, piracy, use of abbreviated language, and more.  However, all of these developments pale in comparison to the telegraph’s biggest contribution: the increased scope of news media.

In the mid-19th century, the average person’s daily reading transitioned from local, month-old news in a small community to global events from the previous day.  In a world where reporters traditionally took their time piecing together stories from past months, the telegraph built a competitive news industry by communicating daily news and events around the world in minutes.  This development was arguably the seed for our globalized media environment.  The people of this time period saw a much more profound change than us: a true information revolution.

Designers: embrace the history of new media.
The telegraph exemplifies why people working in technology would be smart to avoid focusing only on the work of our generation.  While today’s technological design concepts certainly have merit, one should not ignore the historical progression of media.  Important lessons and inspiration lie in traditional approaches to literature, painting, music, architecture and more.

• Consider the Rosetta Stone, an artifact which contained an identical message in Greek and Ancient Egyptian.  This stone served as a key, allowing us to use our knowledge of Greek to interpret and decipher the Ancient Egyptian language.  Similarly, mapping complex technical terminology to recognizable words and metaphors helps facilitate the learnability of complex interfaces.
• As another example, recent work by Steve Dipaola studying the art of Rembrandt has shown that this master painter was using techniques which manipulated the audience’s experience of the work.  Whether intentional or not, Rembrandt was painting for the user experience in the 17th century.
• Finally, consider the advent of functionalism in early 20th century architecture.  This movement, captured famously by Louis Sullivan’s “form ever follows function”, directly connects to today’s doctrine in user interface design.

In a few examples, you can see that we are not in some completely new field.  Instead, our work fits neatly with historical precedents, suggesting that we would be foolish not to draw upon the work of our ancestors for inspiration.  This is why I firmly believe that people who work in technology should embrace older ideas and techniques.  By all means, keep following blogs and Twitter, but don’t forget to pick up some inspiration from your media ancestors.

Working in web?  Learn about the printing press.  Designing graphics and visuals?  Learn about painting and portraiture.  Working in physical ergonomics?  Take classes in sculpture.  Specializing in information architecture?  Learn about the history of language.  You will be surprised how useful a foundational approach can be in providing progressive and impressive research methods and design solutions for your clients.

I recently returned from a month-long foray through India.  As the country from which both of my parents immigrated to Canada, the trip was enlightening in many ways.  Among the countless revelations lay a few economic and technological insights which I thought might interest our readers.  Are you a global traveler?  These thoughts are obviously anecdotal and I welcome your comments from your own experiences in other parts of the world.

While the major cities of India have become increasingly “westernized” and the country’s reputation as a hotbed for technology grows, the proliferation of technology has reached beyond the cities into rural villages and remote farmland.  Let me paint you a picture: imagine a young indian farmhand, shirtless, his legs draped in a cloth dress.  He’s riding one of his family’s bulls, slowly bringing it to the other side of the village.  He’s got a stick in one hand, which he’s using to whack the bull for navigation, and a cellphone in the other.  Despite my limited understanding of the language, he’s clearly discussing farm work.  This was a bold image I witnessed first-hand on a rural farm village in northeastern India.  This is a sugar plantation with no consistent residential electricity, no water pipes or hot water, and two small mobile phone towers.

The third world is collectively skipping 100 years of technological development.  While we painstakingly iterated from basic gas-guzzling cars, rotary phones and vaccuum tube computers to the current technological world, the fruits of our advance have globalized.  This child went from having no phone or communication lines whatsoever, directly to a mobile phone.  In the near future, I can imagine these third-world children engaging with technologies that access e-mail and web browsing (perhaps the iPad is a step in this direction as a simplified internet interface?).  Many talk of the “digital divide” as an emerging problem in our already-imbalanced world.  I would argue that this gap is destined to be filled through the globalization of our most modern, efficient and cheap technologies.

What does internet access mean to rural villages and third-world citizens?  Despite attempts to create structured and organized education systems (I visited several rural Indian schools), there is a clear lack of dedicated teachers with international-level skill and knowledge.  However, stories of intelligent people emigrating out of the third world have spawned a generation of young rural kids with intelligence and a passion for education which is simply unparalleled in the developed world.

The fire I saw deep in the eyes of an 8-year-old village girl who studies english and biology textbooks twelve hours a day of her own volition is a testament.  Her clear and firm intention to “become a doctor and move abroad” is in stark contrast to what interests the 8-year-olds I’ve met in the developed world.  Her smooth conversation with me in a self-taught english represents a calculated move from her remote village to the world stage.

As mobile technology develops and these young rural children get access to the wealth of information on the internet, it seems possible that this feverish appetite for education will be satisfied through self-directed learning.  The untapped potential of the intelligent-yet-uneducated workers I met at the nearby sugar mill could cease to be a reality with the advent of information technology.   Especially in the midst of this past decade’s collapse, the economic implications of a techno-savvy, self-educated and passionate third world are astounding.

How can we prepare for this onslaught of new talent?  First of all, the selfish question: how can we stay competitive by highlighting what makes our skills and experiences unique?  More importantly, how can we alter our economic systems and requirements to evaluate and embrace these talented people, knowing that they might be able to help solve major global problems despite not having an official degree or diploma?

Engaging with socially-powered technology for the past decade, I’ve noticed the slow, natural formation of ‘digital etiquette’.  In the same way that researchers have found information-seeking behaviour to be akin to animalistic ‘foraging’ behaviour, it seems that our typical social behaviour manifests itself on the web as well.  As online tools are appropriated by real users in a social context, we are starting to see the natural development of online ‘politeness’.  Some examples…

Re-Tweeting and Sharing Posts
When finding an interesting link posted by another user, it is polite to credit them when sharing it with your own network.  Twitter users accomplished this by creating and following the convention of re-tweeting (which is now being integrated formally into the system by twitter).  Along the same vein, Facebook has recently added a share feature which allows you to auto-distribute any post to your own network. However, Facebook’s system does not automatically include any information about the original poster with a user’s “re-post”.  This can result in a reaction from users; unless you mention whose post you’re sharing, you’re likely to receive a friendly “hey, you stole my post!”.

Multiplayer Gaming Conventions
Since their inception, multi-player games have been steeped in their own customs, language and culture.  Upon the release and adoption of a new game, its player community naturally tends to form rules and customs surrounding the freedoms and limitations of the game.  Starcraft, a classic strategy game from Blizzard, became extremely popular due to its balanced and engaging gameplay.  After an online community of players developed, a weakness of the game was revealed: advanced players could bypass an involved war by rapidly training a few troops to kill off beginners before they even get a chance to start playing.  The process was named rushing and an abundance of players started hosting games with “no rush” in the title, resulting in civil games based solely on players’ trust that fellow players would show politeness.

Selective Photo Tagging
Photo tagging is a useful feature on Facebook.  Users are able to tag the people in a photograph, automatically notifying them and attaching the photograph to their profile.  This creates a delicate situation, as anyone has the power to add pictures to your profile.  At first, users would tag every picture added to the network.  As users become more and more aware of this phenomenon, they have started tagging only the best pictures.  This creates an environment where all photos are accessible, but only the best are attached to a users’ profile.  Selective tagging is a clear display of respect and politeness for fellow users of the service.

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There are many more examples of online politeness.  As social technology becomes more central, the trend is not likely to slow down.  What does this mean for designers?  We should take note of this trend and improve the user experience of any socially-driven system by considering and accomodating digital etiquette in our designs.

On its official blog, Google has recently announced the production of a new, lightweight, simplified operating system:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

To commemorate the occasion, I thought I would vocalize my stance on what operating systems today are missing, and how Google might be able to fill that hole.

Macs have a reputation of providing smooth, sleek and usable interfaces.  Linux is well-known as a base for full customizability: tech-savvy users can build their own machine’s architecture.  Windows has many reputations, good and bad, which place it somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.  The spectrum lies between offering a practical solution to many of life’s problems and offering the techno-philic an opportunity to customize and create a machine that works to their exact specifications.  The implied question asks whether we are stuck with many different operating systems, each tailored to a different point on this gradient.  Are we doomed to segregation?  Is our technological future littered with incompatibility and a lack of standard?

Technological development may seem divergent, but it’s not too late to move in the right direction.  Operating systems started with cryptic, technical command prompts and eventually evolved to the smooth, intuitive GUIs we know today.  However, the answer is not to simply shove a system’s implementation model behind the scenes in favour of creating a usable mental model, but instead to allow users a practical interface which implicitly builds a foundation of systemic understanding.  Put simply, we are oversimplifying our operating systems so much that, to the laymen of the next generation, computers are considered mere ‘tools’.

The ideal situation is to build a system where users’ practical needs are met while they also enjoy the experience of learning the system.  If done well, their desire for enjoyment will develop into a curiousity which will eventually manifest an urge to explore the system as its own entity (and not just a tool)!  At this point, users begin to form an intimate understanding the true potential of technology to solve problems in all fields (something i learned tinkering with my first DOS machine as a child).  Google is working on a simple OS which seems useful for specific contexts, but I’m skeptical to consider minimalism as the future.  If they, or anyone else, can create a practical and usable operating system while simultaneously accommodating a transparency which engages curiousity and promotes ‘tinkering’, I believe it would be a step in the right direction: toward a unified, practical and educational technology.

I consider this concept as an example of inclusive design as it focuses on generating systems which include all users in the long-term iterative design process.  On the generational time-scale, an operating system which encourages tinkering is providing the next generation with the tools it needs to continue progress.  An inclusive system elegantly solves your general problems while inherently teaching you how to design your own unique solutions in the future.  One part Mac, one part Linux, and a whole lot of hope for the next generation.

Being a simultaneous programmer, interface designer, songwriter, musician and sound engineer has led me to draw an interesting parallel which I thought I would share with the bloggers out there.

Much of the defining literature in our field clearly distinguishes design from development (see ‘The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” by Alan Cooper for a good example).  I suppose the assertion is based on psychological bias.  It is inevitable that the hard programmers will bring their ‘utopian’ designs down to earth by considering technical implications too early.  The inverse is also true, as designers will tend to target main use cases with a higher risk of ignoring fringe cases.  An effective design-development relationship with two independent minds seems to be the ideal path to a technological solution.  From my experiences working in usability and design, it’s clear to me that this is actually the case.

This has all been written before, so why do I repeat it?  The startling insight here is the parallel that can be drawn to the music recording process.  Being both a musician and a sound engineer, I have produced many of my own creations from the creative to the technical side: writing, arranging, performing, recording, mixing and mastering.  I have also served each of these roles individually with other musicians and producers on various projects within the music scene here in Montreal.  As is true for design and development, the best results seem to come from keeping creative and technical aspects of the process localized to independent minds.  The songwriter dreams of utopia while the sound engineer works to make it happen, just as the designer creates ideal solutions while the developer considers technical feasibility.

For example, a songwriter might be sure that a particular song needs a banjo; he shouldn’t be dissuaded by the fact that he doesn’t have one.  Leave it to the sound engineer to consider performance, time and budget when deciding whether to rent one or simulate one on a high-end synthesizer!  Dialogues between these creative and technical forces serve to push the project to its optimum.  On top of this logical parallel, similarities between the feelings associated with either role in either context are uncanny.  I wanted to suggest that this ‘tug of war’ makes both a great recording and a great technological solution.

Have you seen this same creative vs. technical tug of war work in any other contexts?

For the past few years, the BBC website has been my primary source of news.

The website design team is able to keep the navigation simple despite the large amount of information in multiple languages, without falling prey (it seems) to the temptation of creating a pizza-like homepage, as is often the case with news sites.

Is this the results of an internal motivation to focus on user needs instead of the demands of the different departments always asking for their place of choice on the home page? I am simply hypothesizing; if you have more information on their internal strategy, please let us know.

The new layout and organization of the website, significantly influenced by Web 2.0, astounds me by its simplicity, efficiency and ease of use.

Many strong aspects come to mind:

* Minimalist design and simplicity
* Reasonable flexibility and customization for content presentation and page layout (users can move the information blocks on the home page, users can change the colors and are able to reduce information density by displaying less info)
* Includes additional rich interface elements, videos and allows for user participation
* Transition to the Web 2.0 version of the site was smooth and well executed

The new design has yet to be propagated across the entire website, but it is great work. Impressive!