something in the way

[Thanks to Yaniv Sarig, who translated this post into Hebrew.]

Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.

Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.

We thought about that and wondered what the rationale was for keeping such an important feature turned off. We thought that maybe they were concerned about people running off floppies or those who had slow or small disks. Autosave does have performance implications, so maybe they were optimizing the behavior for the worst case, assuming that users who had the luxury to use the feature would turn it on.

We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. We explained our hypothesis about optimizing for performance. They asked around and told us our hypothesis was incorrect.

It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.

Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program.

It seems programmers and designers like to customize their environment. Who would’ve guessed? Could that be why they chose their profession?

(Big takeaway: If you’re a programmer or designer, then you’re not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn’t mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.)

We’ve repeated this experiment in various forms over the years. We’ve found it to be consistently true: users rarely change their settings.

If your application has settings, have you looked to see what your users do? How many have changed them? Are the defaults the optimal choice? Does your settings screen explain the implications of each setting and give your users a good reason for mucking with the defaults?

If your music and sound collections seem like outwardly-expanding universes, two new tools promise to bring order by representing media as virtual planets and stars. One works on albums and tracks on the iPad; the other uses computer-aided analysis of loops and samples (not just music) on Windows. One will make your eyeballs pop; one might help you manage gigs of samples for a game design project.

Built in the open-source framework Cinder by an all-star team of media artist-designers (Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, Jesper Sparre Andersen and Robert Hodgin), Planetary should satisfy space nuts and eye candy lovers. The metaphor is pretty direct: artists are stars, albums are planets around the artists, tracks are moons around the planets, and you can filter “constellations” by letter. That means the actual structure is heavily hierarchical, actually, in the tradition of iTunes (and, before it, its predecessor SoundJam). I’m not sure what happens with, say, compilations. But let’s face it: the real draw is that it’s incredibly beautiful to look at. I’d be just as entertained looking at a visualization of my system folder if it looked this pretty.

For now, Planetary is some fascinating eye candy with at least basic playback capabilities, iPad-only. That brings some good news – Airplay wireless works, and since it makes use of standard media code, even features like Last.fm scrobbles function. It also brings some bad — while Apple added support for libraries to third-party apps, Home Sharing isn’t included, so you’re limited to what’s on your iPad. Playlists aren’t supported, either. But hook this up to a projector or large screen TV with some of your favorite music, and I don’t think you’ll be complaining. And as a free tool, it’s incredible.

Planetary is available now; free for the iPad. As seen on creativeapplications.
http://planetary.bloom.io/
iTunes link

Less pretty, but with greater facilities on the utility side, is the Windows-only Soundtorch. (Thanks to Kristian Gohlke for the tip!) Visually, it offers a similar metaphor: media assets live on a continuous plane. Functionally, though, it’s more algorithmic than hierarchic, using something called the Computer Aided Sound Exploration engine (C.A.S.E.). The set of algorithms, which the creators say were based on evaluation of human listening, performs a sophisticated set of extractions of some 600 features from each sound file.

Rather than limit itself to albums and tracks, C.A.S.E. is tuned for audio files and loops. It’s fast enough that it can plow quickly through gigs of material. So, if you’re on Windows and have amassed an enormous collection of loops, samples, field recordings, sound effects, and the like, Soundtorch will use C.A.S.E. to first map all those relationship, then visualize them. You can use the mouse to produce new collections of assets, map relationships visually, export those relationship to XML, copy sounds to the clipboard, export to WAV, or open them in Windows Explorer. That is, all that eye candy is a genuine interface, not a barrier between you and what you might do (as so often happens with these sorts of experimental interfaces).

In fact, you might argue that, despite outward appearances, Soundtorch is entirely different from Planetary, but they share one common conceptual assumption. Related media “orbit” or attract to common materials. The difference is that Soundtorch is relational. In Soundtorch, if you “magnetize” a file, it – and any similar files – become attracted to attractors called “magnets.”

As is appropriate searching for media, the “torchlight” metaphor shines a light through files. Everything under the light plays back simultaneously, so you don’t have to audition sounds one at a time. (That sounds slightly terrifying to me, but I have to spend more time with it in an actual library.)

The creators describe the magic thusly:

Have you ever listened to a sound and felt that there was a similar one somewhere on your hard disk? And the sound you can’t find would just work so much better right now? Well, Soundtorch also remembers all sounds that you ever listened to. Just select any sound on Soundtorch, and let the system suggest the most similar ones from your whole collection.

In other words, SoundTorch is as much about what you can’t see as what you can – the intelligence to determine similarity behind the scenes. Check out the tech talk in the video above for more information on how “aurally and visually-enhanced audio search” could also apply this technology. More research at:
http://www.accessive-tools.com/

Soundtorch 2.0 entered a free public beta last week. It was developed in Microsoft’s C#-based XNA framework.

Grab the download:
http://soundtorch.com

Finally, if you want to hear the “Optimist” track by Zoe Keating without that voiceover and just enjoy Planetary’s gorgeous visuals, here you go:

From innovation in the visual interface to the intelligence underneath that changes how the computer interprets relationships between files, finally, there’s hope. Music and sound might not forever be trapped in views borrowed from spreadsheets, tables modeled on the needs of accountants 30 years ago.

“I don’t have to know anything about technology because I know that whatever I think up there’s always someone who can build it.”

I’ve heard this statement, or a variation thereof, proffered by copywriters, art directors and creative directors. And it’s true. Chances are that no matter what you conceive – experience, installation, interactive film, video game, touch-screen, augmented reality – there is a team of developers somewhere who can bring it to life.

There’s just one problem. Without some knowledge of technology, social media, API’s, HTML5, LBS, etc. you probably won’t think up the very coolest of ideas.

The last time someone shared this sentiment with me I agreed, as I always do, but then asked a series of simple questions. Holding up as an example Google’s Arcade Fire video, Wilderness Downtown, I asked if he could have thought that up. I showed him Breakfast’s Instaprint and asked the same question. Ditto as I reminded him of Wieden and Kennedy’s Old Spice Twitter campaign, Garmin’s Garmin Connect and Mr. Youth’s spinoff action platform Crowdtap.

I don’t have to tell you what the answers were.

But if we believe that storytelling has changed, that agencies need to build things and create utility, yet that it still takes creativity to distinguish the best ideas from the also rans, then all writers, art directors and creative directors need at least a cursory knowledge of today’s digital technology and all that it enables.

Shit, they might even have to learn something about data, at least the personal kind that inspires the likes of Garmin Connect.

You don’t need to take a lesson in writing code. But you may want to make friends with the nerds and learn a little bit about what they can do before you bring them your next ad like object and ask them to make something digital out of it.

For people coding for visuals, Processing just keeps getting better. And for people who aren’t … well, you might just want to give it a second look, as a growing global army of people who never fancied themselves coders suddenly start typing up new creations. A new release makes mobile development easier and corrects lots of bugs. But specifically of interest to readers here, powerful libraries for 3D help make Processing an intensive tool for creating visuals. With the aid of running of your GPU, they can also deliver eye-popping real-time performance not normally associated with Java.

Processing 1.5

In a surprise release, much of what’s coming in Processing 2.0 this summer is now available in a stable, general release of Processing 1.5. It lacks the new built-in renderer – OPENGL2 – but does incorporate new features for developing for Android and, via the third-party library GLGraphics, you get all sorts of new OpenGL goodies. (Note: Processing 1.5 = 0196. The previous pre-release version, 0195, is worth downloading if you want to play with the new OPENGL2 renderer and its examples. Both are on the download page, and they can be installed side-by-side.)

Most importantly, for anyone publishing to the Web, you need to download this version now and re-export sketches. Applets were seeming to run very slow in Chrome and Firefox 4. (While I vastly prefer the Java version for things like performance tools or installations, I also appreciate the Processing.js JavaScript fork for Web delivery – but this fix does make applets work pretty well.)

New to Processing 1.5:

• Tons of editor fixes in the PDE development environment
• An essential bug fix that corrects slow performance when exporting for the Web.
• Android development support – in preview builds, but now in a stable build. (I think this is still considered a pre-release feature, but it means you can run the stable build to try it out.) Now go make stuff for phones and tablets easily.

Processing 1.5 is a good start, but for me, the live visual workflow isn’t complete without two additional libraries, toxiclibs and GLGraphics. A new GLGraphics update improves integration with both toxiclibs and the new Processing release.

toxiclibs

toxiclibs represents over 270 classes in 7 libraries, some 25,000 lines of code, written by digital artist Karsten “toxi” Schmidt. There’s gobs of stuff in there. The most useful is a basic set of classes for things like geometries, meshes, and 3D vectors which you’d otherwise have to build from scratch, and which are generally built in fairly standard ways. With elegant math, Verlet physics, and color libraries, and wonderfully-usable API design, Karsten gives you all the essentials in a way that will inspire you to use them and make something truly original. (A full tour is probably a good subject for another post. Just ignore the toxi.audio packages; with the libpd crew, I’m working on something with Pd I think you’ll find more useful and stable.)

I had a discussion with one colleague who felt that, indeed, toxi’s libraries are so powerful that people are simply using it as a crutch. That may be true to an extent: people should prominently credit toxi’s work, and to do otherwise is plagiarism. But with proper credit, I feel that standing on the shoulders of someone else’s work can be a good thing. Digging through toxi’s libraries is like going to school for the sorts of math and geometry that you need to learn to understand 3D generation. For many of these classes, involving essential mathematics operations and 3D modeling, I’d have no idea where to start, would spend weeks or months writing something inefficient, and would come out with something that reinvented the wheel. A lot of the techniques themselves in those 27,000 lines of code weren’t developed by Karsten, either: it’s more like seeing the wisdom of a master teacher, assembled from a wide variety of sources and passed on.

In fact, this is a rant that I should probably invoke elsewhere, but to me received knowledge is the essence of any craft. Composers don’t invent new rules of harmony (well, at least, not tonal harmony). Engineers don’t work out the laws of physics from scratch each time they build something.

And most importantly, because all of this exists in code, you can read and modify anything you find. It’s a black box if you want it to be, but I very often dig directly into the code to understand how things work.

There’s a bunch of documentation and a showcase for great work:
http://toxiclibs.org/

GLGraphics

All of this, though, brings me to GLGraphics. As I’ve been saying for – gee, years now – GLGraphics is the future of Processing. Now, that’s come to pass: gifted developer Andres Colubri authored the new OPENGL2 renderer that is similarly based on native OpenGL calls, and now runs the Processing Android port and upcoming Processing 2.0.

GLGraphics is separate from OPENGL2, but it’s your best bet for work on the stable Processing 1.5 build. Version 0.95 adds compatibility for that latest release, and adds two essential other features:

• An example of how to integrate with toxiclibs
• GLSL shader support, which can in turn be used for complex mesh generation.

See yesterday’s blog post announcing the update:
Processing 1.5 / GLGraphics 0.95

And there should be still more coolness to talk about soon, at least for Mac users, with the availability of Syphon for Processing. Stay tuned on that.

I think I have to hide away in a hole and do nothing but code this weekend. Anyone want to hop on IRC or PiratePad and pass code snippets back and forth?

Previously, WRD had shared HTML5 Boilerplate which was an HTML/CSS/JS template to be used as a starting point when building a HTML5 website.

The same team now presents Mobile Boilerplate which aims to be a base template when creating a mobile web application.

It is not a framework and works well with popular frameworks like jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and others.

Rather, Mobile Boilerplate offers a ready-to-use offline caching setup, fast button clicks, a media query polyfill, and many common mobile WebKit optimizations.

The template works with all modern browsers and has fallback support for legacy Blackberry, Symbian and IE Mobile.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

Advertisements:
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SSLmatic – Cheap SSL Certificates (from $19.99/year)

The other day my attention was drawn to the new Nike Better World website designed by Ian Coyle. I just love this site and I think it deserves to be shouted about. The graphic design, imagery, typography and colouring are beautiful. The site tells the story perfectly and the clever scrolling is the icing on the cake! Amazing job Ian!

These photos from the backstage of Star Wars absolutely blow my mind. Thanks for the tip Mr Hicks.

Whether freelancers, small agency founders or website owners, too many of us work alone. The downside of the digital revolution is isolation. The Web allows us to do alone what previously would have required a team of people. It also frees us from the constraints of geography, allowing us to work from home. But while these are benefits, they also leave us isolated.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

The Dangers Of Isolation

Over time, working in isolation (even if you function as part of a team) can prove harmful to your mental health, business and website. In fact, even if other people are working on a project of yours, if they are junior to you, you can still feel isolated.

If you don’t find a peer with whom you can share ideas and discuss your business or project, you face a number of dangers:

• Dry up creatively
  Creativity is born of interaction. Being consistently creative on your own is hard. The best ideas come from people brainstorming together and from one great idea leading to another. Without someone to bounce ideas around with, your business or project will lack a creative spark.
• Lose confidence
  Over time we can lose confidence in our abilities or our business. This is especially true when we make mistakes and things go wrong. Without someone to encourage and reassure us, we can begin to second-guess our decisions.
• Become over-confident
  While some suffer from a lack of confidence, others are over-confident and need to be challenged and questioned. This is a trait I suffer from; I would happily dive headlong into disaster if my fellow directors did not constantly question my ideas. Without people like this, moving your business in entirely the wrong direction would be too easy.
• Reach the limit of your knowledge
  We can’t all be experts at everything, and yet running a website and a business requires a broad range of skills. When working in isolation and tackling problems beyond your comfort zone, you can easily reach the limit of your expertise and flounder.
• Have a blinkered perspective
  Another problem with working alone is that you have only a single perspective on your work. By adding another set of eyes to your problems, you gain a broader vision and can approach your challenges from a different angle.
• Feel overwhelmed
  Running a business or a business-critical website can feel like a burden. You are often required to make big decisions, particularly with hiring and expenditures. Making these decisions alone is a big responsibility and can be really scary. Having someone to share that with would make a big difference.

So, can you identify with any of these traps? If not, then I suggest you read the one about over-confidence again! I don’t believe a single website owner or entrepreneur couldn’t benefit from an outside perspective.

The question, then, is how do you find someone?

Getting An Outside Perspective

The most obvious solution is to partner with somebody at the outset. Whether you work with someone on a website or form a business with an associate, partnerships can be very beneficial. This is what I did with our company, and I haven’t regretted it for a minute. I would be lost without my two co-founders, Chris and Marcus.

That said, I know that not everyone’s experiences with partners have been rosy. Also, by the time you read this, the opportunity for this kind of partnership may have already passed.

What can you do then? What other options are available to those seeking an outside perspective and someone to bounce ideas around with?

Here are some options:

• Sleeping partner
  This is the approach we took. We have a non-executive director named Brian who works with a number of companies and keeps us on our toes. He has a radically different view of business and constantly challenges us. In return, he has a small stake in the business. He is worth every penny.
• Paid consultant
  If you don’t fancy having someone so entrenched in your business, why not consider an external consultant with whom you could speak on an ongoing basis? Admittedly, this kind of consultant can be pricey, but they do bring an outside perspective to the table.
• Mentor
  Another option is to approach a Web designer or website owner you admire and ask them to mentor you. Obviously, these people are probably busy with their own work, but if you are willing to pay for their time, you might get some valuable advice. You’ll usually need only an hour per month to stay on the right track.
• Buddy
  A buddy would be a cheaper option, someone in a situation similar to yours. The two of you could agree to chat regularly and share the challenges you face as business or website owners, discussing different approaches and ideas.
• Community
  Yet another option would be to look not for a consultant, mentor or buddy, but for a supportive online community. Loads are around, but make sure the one you join is not too big. You want people to remember you and your circumstances.

Whatever you decide is entirely up to you. The point is, if you want to realize the potential of your website or business, you need the help and encouragement of others. Humans by nature work best in groups, and you are no exception. We are not meant to do it alone!

(al)

© Paul Boag for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: isolation, Workflow

I'm a devotee of TED talks. I was once assigned to watch several TED talks to deconstruct what made each a good or a bad presentation. TED topics are wide-ranging, though they generally relate to the categories that make up the "TED" acronym: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. I tend to stick to the design topics, but during my research I came across a video of Martin Seligman talking about positive psychology.

Happiness is a topic I've been interested in for a while. According to Darrin McMahon, author of Happiness: A History, happiness is a relatively new construct in the history of humanness. It's only been in the last 250 years or so in the West that we've been safe and healthy enough to think about how we feel emotionally.

After watching Seligman and skimming through McMahon, it occurred to me that the experience design field is undergoing a similar evolution. When I started out at the same time the field was starting out in the early 1980s, teams did usability testing on products to learn where the users would encounter problems, and where they would get lost or frustrated. It was a kind of human factors quality check, and it was often done two seconds before launch. No changes could be made, but these teams could at least incorporate what they found out into training, which almost everyone needed to use technology back then.

Fast forward to somewhere between 1997 and 2005, and the usability testing dynamic shifted. Teams started performing usability testing earlier and earlier in the product development process to inform their designs. Usability professionals were still concerned with identifying issues post facta to eliminate existing problems and frustrations, but they also learned about user behaviors and habits and used this to influence design decisions earlier in the product development cycle. This was a very important step in the evolution of user research. It happened because teams started testing early designs and prototypes and using what they learned to refine designs well before they launched.

Only recently has technology improved, proliferated, and become cheap enough that design is less and less about solving problems, testing less and less about eliminating frustration. It's all becoming more and more about making a good experience for users. Sure, we're still eliminating frustration, but it's happening earlier in the design process. Finally, design is at the table with engineering and business. Now we talk about experience design rather than just usability. Now it's not good enough to just be usable. The design has to fit into peoples' lives. It actually has to make people happy, and anticipate their needs.

It seems we're all aspiring to an ideal of designing for delight, but most of us are landing somewhere short of delight, but at least better than frustrated. Users can use our designs, but they're not excited about it. (Okay, you can't be excited about everything.) We want users to trust our designs, but there's still too much overhead for users to easily reach their goals.

... Read the entire article at UX Magazine.

Editors Note: In his second article for Think Vitamin Paras Chopra looks at how human photos can increase dramatically increase your conversion rate. For further reads check out Paras’ first article “The Business Case for  A/B Testing” and ways in which you can “Designing for Conversion Experiences” by Chrissie Brodigan.

Independent Tests Yield Same Result

I have analyzed two A/B testing case studies of Visual Website Optimizer users and have concluded that the sure fire way of catching visitors attention is having human photos on a website.

What’s interesting is that even though both tests were independent, they (surprisingly) tested the same aspect and arrived at the same result. This gives me confidence that there is something special about having human photos on a website which increases conversion rate instantly. Let’s have a look at the two studies.

Case Study #1

Medalia Art sell Brazilian and Caribbean art online and they recently got pleasantly surprised when photos of artists on their homepage increased visitor engagement by 90%. This wasn’t their first A/B test as they keep playing with their homepage. In the past, they successfully reduced bounce rate by 20% by testing the placement of their promotional message.

As can be expected from an online art shop, they showcase paintings from three famous artists on their homepage. This time, for no good reason they decided to see what happens if paintings are replaced by the artists’ photos. I tried to probe Medalia Art for reasons why they came up with this idea but they said it was a completely random choice to test paintings v/s photos.

The goal for this A/B test was to increase visitor engagement (defined as a click on any link on the homepage; it is the inverse of the bounce rate). They didn’t use sales as a conversion rate as many of their sales happen after interaction on the telephone (and a lot of haggling) with the customer.

Here are the screenshots of the control (paintings) and the winning version (photos).

Control (Paintings)

Variation (Photos)

Test results are as follows:

Clearly, version with artists’ photos had a much better conversion rate that the version with artists’ paintings. In fact, the winning variation almost doubled the conversion rate on the homepage.

Case Study #2

EmptyMind is a web analytics and optimization blog by Jason Thompson. There is a large phone icon in the blog’s sidebar which links to his contact us page. Unlike Medalia Art who did the test just to check what happens, Jason had a reason for running a phone icon v/s his photograph test on the site.

While attending a summit, he got several comments from other people that he didn’t look like his (then) Twitter icon. So he thought it would be best to have a single photo representing him across all the social network sites he uses. Testing the photo on the blog was just an extension of that thought.

The goal for the test was visits to Jason’s contact us page and here are the variations and their performance:

Control	Variation

Here is what Jason said about the test results:

People want to connect with other people emotionally, the photo makes that emotional connection so much easier and as the test is proving, drives people to the contact form more than a nondescript icon.

The Key Lesson

Both case studies independently arrived at the same (statistically significant) result that human photo(s) increased conversion rate. This proves that there is certainly something magical about human photos.

I am going to try this test on Visual Website Optimizer homepage (perhaps using customer photos for testimonials).  If it is relevant for your website, I recommend you try an A/B test to see if a human photo can do wonders for your business too.

If you try out a test involving human photos and get positive results, then we may have discovered a great formula for increasing conversion rates!