Later on I discovered that I was haunted by a mix of two ideas, first that in the future things would be better and second that through taking risks and hard work one would always become successful. And as far as I’m aware, I’m not alone. If we no longer believed that buying new and better products would lead to happier lives, if progress could no longer be linked to faster computers, and if a seventy hour work week no longer represented the road to success, the Western world would go downwards fast. Lucky for us most people do buy into the idea that technological progress is essential for the progress of us as a species, and that progress is good beyond questioning. Thanks to this unquestioned faith we now sit behind our glowing screens, drinking fake Italian roast fresh from the machine, burning through our lives for a better tomorrow.

The problem with those two ideas is that they are quite hard to reject. When asked most of us would admit that our lives did become better since the eighties and that we do enjoy the benefits of modern technology. It looks like it is the ideal system of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those noble enough to work hard and take risk will be rewarded, and those faint of heart and plain lazy get the empty lives they deserve. These are the ideas that have made America great, and created a model for the rest of the world to live by.

I want to take you to a place where these ideas collide: the internet start-up. An intense mix of courage, extreme ideas and long working hours that should make up the best chance to meet the future first. The internet-entrepreneurs, the dreamers and the constructors, they are often celebrated and praised by the captains of state and industry. The scene of high-tech start-ups seems to constantly deliver on their promises, innovation is at a speed never seen at any time in any area, and every year it seems to be delivering more new millionaires than the Russian mafia.

Who in their right mind would ever want to be sacrificed in the name of innovation, who in full knowledge would accept an seventy hour work week for unhealthy low pay, who educated by the best would spend their days in cheap office space with Spartan furniture. One look on Techcrunch gives you the answer: the internet entrepreneur! Prince of the future, horseman of innovation, fighter for the revolution, always awake, glued to their desk, only separating from the computer for fellow knights. They fight their solitaire battle, kept warm by fire-side stories of nerds become billionaires like Gates and Jobs; they expect that anytime now victory will be theirs.

But there is a darker side too, a side all too well known by the Googles and Microsofts of this world. The internet industry needs waste, innovation needs failures, many of them. Before a great idea can be turned into a great product it will demand millions in cash and wasted centuries in labour. Who are the minds behind the curtains, who benefit most from keeping these dreams alive? Who try to hide the burn-outs, the wasted lives and capitals, who celebrate the winners and keep all failure hidden, who speak badly of the office drones and hail all young nerds who give up safety and security for sleepless nights? They are the same Steve and Bill who eagerly wait for the very few survivors of the innovation battle. When the day breaks they will reward them with diamonds and glory and enough champagne to help them quickly forget their brothers who wasted their long hours for the beast of innovation.

So what should one do in a battle that knows no victories? Waste one’s days away in the safe factory of the large institutions? Play the endless games of bureaucracy and office sucking up and back-stabbing? Or should one fight the hopeless battle as described above? Maybe it is a good thing that we are human after all, driven by irrational emotions and wild desires. If one would ask me, I would say saddle the horse, bring me my armour, for god, glory and the country, I’m going to battle.

We are moving from representing ourselves online to being online. The expression of our online identity is no longer what we’ve accomplished in the past, but what we are doing in the now. Just like us brands  can no longer work on their heritage, but are challenged to actively engage in the now.

Something that has been distorted by the thick clouds of mass media, became clear once-more: a brand (is only) a group of people working together with a common interest. In that way it comes as no surprise that brands become more like individuals. The lack of two way communication allowed brands to act like aristocrats directing the world from within their invincible castles. These days however the villagers found ways to unite against the aristocrats. Making it impossible for anyone to hide and deny responsibility behind the anonymous face of a brand. In a way it can be seen as a step backwards in time towards an older model where people bought their products from local craftsmen with whom they had a personal relationship.

Top-down, directed and centralized communication its being replaced by a bricolage of presences that are dynamically generated by the multi-directional and decentralized interactions of the crowd. The brand identity is the result of this complex interaction, and it’s defined every day anew by experience. This connected and shared experience is made out of a multitude of conversations, faces, comments, quotes and images that float around the brand (but no longer controlled by it) and they define a liquid and ever changing identity.

The reason that the top-down brand strategy became obsolete so fast, is because they turned out to be even less useful than pre-social media. The consumers got together faster than their rulers could divide them. More and more we will see it happening that a group of people who all have a strong personal brand come together to form super groups. A famous example of course is CSNY, but you can see it happen in every industry. Brands should avoid being an abstract entity, and start to make clever use of the strengths of the group of people they represent. Only by putting individuals in the foreground there will be enough trust generated to truly engage.

Social media is a tool set that allows the villagers to unite themselves, the old aristocrats are still welcomed within them nevertheless, but only on the condition that they’ve leave their shield and sword at home.

• Goal based design
• Flow design
• Emotional / experience design
• Play and fun as a way to achieve goals

They are all part of the same process, and describe our relation with technology, we create and use technology, not because we are such fan of technology an-sich, but because we want to get something done.

Goals
It’s important not to confuse goals with tasks, as Norman points out, tasks change with every update of technology, I used to write a letter with a pen, than I switched to typewriter, than I used Word to write it, and now I’m even using Wordpress to express myself. So the technology, and tasks have changed pretty dramatically over the last decades. The goals however -to bring an idea across- is already the same for millennia. So by looking at how to get the most done, we shouldn’t focus on how to preform a certain task as optimal as possible. Instead we should ask ourselves (as creators and users of technology) how we can achieve a certain goal as easy and good as possible. (There are some nice books about order versus chaos, and how much wasted time there is spent on creating order in systems that function as well with a little mess)

Constructing Flow
A flow is a certain series of sub-task that together will form a finished task. Flow is where man and machine meet for the first time, the person want to achieve a certain goal and is using certain technology to reach that goal. (Or the other way around, certain technology can facilitate certain goals but needs users to achieve those). Flow is also the name of a state of being.

Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience. (source)

To facilitate a flow therefore, a website should focus on delivering only those tools the user needs on that particular moment. You can already see the problem here, how does a website (that is most likely been build to support multiply goals by users with different flows) facilitate a user with the the flow that will work best on that moment. There are a few known solutions already, but all seem to have their down sides. To name a few:

• A user can hide the non necessary tools (as Wordpress does)
• Depending on a predefined kind of user the interface will have certain features (Photoshop and Dreamweaver for example)
• The Interface can learn from your actions (text input on the iPhone in theory) and MS Office 2003 (?)
• Facebook and Linkedin (at least in the past) have a you are now on 30% do something to go to 40%

As you can see from the last example, both designer of the flow and user of the flow run in the same problems. The designer does not know what each specific user want to do at each moment, and can’t therefore not optimize that particular flow. And the other way, the user might know what to achieve but will not no what the most efficient way is to achieve the goal. From the list above, hide and move at own choice and being encouraged to explore the rest of possibilities seem to be the best solutions, since they don’t force the user to make decisions / or make decisions for the user without informing. Enable and encourage to play seems like the best solution. (And also why an undo function is so important (2)

Emotional design II

First lets find a place for emotional design, as far as I consider, we should keep it as far from the new age crap as possible, but we should acknowledge that we are humans, and we use a lot of emotional power to make decisions and not only rational constructed thoughts. Because the decisions made are not rational or well thought out, they are however real and can also be tested, just not as easy as just asking the question. Another point where we should keep design away from is being purely business (money?) driven, as a designer I would state ‘create great products that users love, and the money will come’. A good example where money focus will lead us appeared in an article on UxMatters. this article mentoined emotional design as a selling’ point beyond user experience design itself (or maybe not beyond, but as an important part of). The post is both worrisome as fascinating

By leveraging the science of persuasion in new and insightful ways and designing specifically to optimize the elements of persuasion, emotion, and trust, we can systematically influence customers’ online behaviour. (source)

Not only becomes a website a place where people can get a happy experience, you might also get the feeling that people are subconsciously forced to inhale whatever business has cooked up for them. It has quite an unethical feel surrounding it, than again, if it makes the people happy, why not. As appears in the comments, the blog post turns out to be one large commercial for a user experience company. Though, it touches some interesting points, where usability is not enough to create a good site.

Emotional feedback

The last point in this post (that is already all over the place) is the point Norman makes about how people are extremely well equipped for social interaction -and his chapter about how robots should have emotions- made me wonder how we could apply those ideas to web interfaces. The idea that interfaces can be more than just stating facts is slowly becoming common ground. Flickr keeps us learning different languages to say hello in, Wakoopa allows you to reach all kinds of awesome levels, and also the 404 messages of many website have become opportunities to engage people.

To end this rambling, here are some nice slideshows:

Measuring user experience
Design is measurable in goals of clicks, visits and conversion, but does this equal user experience too? If your conversion goes up by 10 %, does that mean the user experience went up by 10% too? One way of approaching this problem is by measurement, although not as easy as financial goals, there are several methods available to measure user experience, and get their experience expressed in numbers (for example see here: Measuring Usability and a paper about Single Usability Metric or Usability Benchmarking or the work of Nigel Bevan and this great thread) This might solve the problem of measuring how usable your product is, and might even being capable of measuring some emotional states. And therefore you could start expressing statements, as our overall user experience is now 7.1 by the end of the year I want it up to 8.0. For those who love numbers this is a wonderful method, is does not really solve the problems of design visions though. As Donald Norman states in his book, ‘as easy it is to create usable products, it can be pretty hard to create useful products. For usable most times applying the rule ’simple is better’ will the job, and eventually you will end up producing hammers and nails.

Future visions
An other popular but more expensive way is the future visions that Microsoft and IBM for example push out every year