Karen McGrane

User experience professional, content strategist, information architect, interaction designer.

January 10, 2010 • 4:49 pm 50

In Defense of Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is one of those things like silicone breast implants or orange spray cheese in a can that just seems wrong. It’s fake. It’s unabashedly fake. It calls attention to itself by being so fake, making you look at it in wonder, asking: “What is that? Can that be real?”

We don’t like fake, right? We like organic cheeses, and, well, organic breasts, and we’re 100% in favor of real content in our designs.

What you put in your mouth or have surgically inserted into your body is your business. What you put in your wireframes or your design comps? Well, that’s a heated public debate. With respected thought leaders asking us to pinky-swear that we’ll never, ever use Lorem Ipsum ever again, I want to say a few words in support of greek text.

A Symptom of a Bigger Problem

I’m a word person, okay? I start with the content, and design around it. I often show draft copy in design reviews. And yet, I still use Lorem Ipsum. I believe wholeheartedly that greek text has a place in the interaction designer’s toolkit. Even content strategists can find a place in their hearts for it.

Now, look. if you’re running a project where you mock up designs, get them approved, code them up, build a CMS, hook it all together, and then everyone looks around and says “Who’s got the content? Wait, this content doesn’t match the designs and it won’t fit in the CMS!” then you have a problem. A big problem.

But you know what? Lorem Ipsum is not the cause of your problem. It’s a symptom. The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way. Thinking you’ll solve your content strategy problem by signing a purity pledge that you’ll never use Lorem Ipsum is like saying “you’re a crapass designer and the solution is you should quit using drop shadows.” A step in the right direction, perhaps, but one that focuses on changing a superficial behavior rather than fixing the underlying problem.

Why They Say You Shouldn’t Use Lorem Ipsum (and Why It’s Okay)

The internet mob is out in force, waving sticks and torches and demanding Lorem Ipsum’s head on a platter. Why so much hate for nonsense text?

Designs can’t be evaluated without real content

I’ve heard the argument that “lorem ipsum” is effective in wireframing or design because it helps people focus on the actual layout, or color scheme, or whatever. What kills me here is that we’re talking about creating a user experience that will (whether we like it or not) be DRIVEN by words. The entire structure of the page or app flow is FOR THE WORDS.

—Kristina Halvorson, Death to Lorem Ipsum & Other Adventures in Content, Adaptive Path

For those who would argue that it’s impossible to evaluate designs without real content, let me ask this: why then, is it okay to evaluate content out of context of the designs? To review copy decks devoid of color, typography, layout, and styling means that readers are missing out on the important signals communicated by design—cues to priority, weight, and hierarchy of information, but also emotional and aesthetic appeal. If content strategists want to ask designers to stop using Lorem Ipsum, maybe designers should insist that content strategists add style sheets to their copy decks that match the proposed design direction.

Or maybe not. How about this: build in appropriate intersections and checkpoints between design and content. Accept that it’s sometimes okay to focus just on the content or just on the design.

Fake data breaks down in real life

Using dummy content or fake information in the Web design process can result in products with unrealistic assumptions and potentially serious design flaws. A seemingly elegant design can quickly begin to bloat with unexpected content or break under the weight of actual activity. Fake data can ensure a nice looking layout but it doesn’t reflect what a living, breathing application must endure. Real data does.

—Luke Wroblewski, Death to Lorem Ipsum, Functioning Form

For better or for worse, websites are templated. Content management systems and other publishing platforms make it possible to display different content in the same template. When you’re publishing thousands of articles, or product pages, or user profiles, each with variable sizes and business rules for different content elements, it’s easy to see how unexpected scenarios can break the design.

This is a complex problem, and the solution isn’t as simple as just avoiding Lorem Ipsum. Using test examples of real content and data in designs can help, but this doesn’t guarantee that every outlier will be caught and fixed. A prototype or beta site with real content published from the real CMS is the only way to really be sure—but you’re not going to get there until you go through an initial design cycle.

I’ve found that Lorem Ipsum actually helps in the design stage, because it calls attention to places where the content is a dynamic block coming from the CMS (as opposed to static content elements that will always stay the same.) A block of Lorem Ipsum with a character count range provides a tangible reminder to double-check that the design and the content model match up.

Or how about this approach?
http://businessguysonbusinesstrips.com/art/consistency.jpg

Distracting copy is your fault

If the copy becomes distracting in the design then you are doing something wrong or they are discussing copy changes. It might be a bit annoying but you could tell them that that discussion would be best suited for another time. At worst the discussion is at least working towards the final goal of your site where questions about lorem ipsum don’t.

—Kyle Fiedler, Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs, Design Informer

If the copy becomes distracting in the design it’s because it’s working.

Lorem Ipsum doesn’t exist because people think the content is meaningless window dressing, only there to be decorated by designers who can’t be bothered to read. Lorem Ipsum exists because words are powerful. If you fill up your page with draft copy about your client’s business, they will read it. They will comment on it. They will be inexorably drawn to it. Presented the wrong way, draft copy can send your design review off the rails.

Telling a client to ignore Lorem Ipsum is a one-time thing. They quit reading it because it doesn’t make sense. Telling a client to ignore draft copy can be a never-ending battle. I show draft copy quite frequently, and in every meeting I usually get a handful of confused questions about it. I’ve had terrible situations where work-in-progress showing draft copy gets passed around to client stakeholders who haven’t participated in review sessions, and then fielded angry phone calls about the “wrong” content appearing in the designs. Show draft copy—I’m not telling you to only use Lorem Ipsum—but make sure you’re prepared to handle the questions, confusion, and even meltdowns that can result.

Permission To Use Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum: a sign that you’re a traitor to all that is good and right and holy in the world of web design, or an occasionally useful tool that, used intentionally, may help solve some problems? I’m going to go with the latter. If you’ve got a problem with content strategy, fix the bigger problem. Otherwise you’re just treating the symptoms, not curing the disease.

Filed under: Content Strategy

January 6, 2010 • 7:30 am 1

Interaction Design History Sources

Want to learn more about the history of interaction design? This is where I started:

Pre-computing History

Early interaction design, from the earliest systems for tabulating and managing information. Starts in the late 1800s with innovations in business information systems, punched card systems, and major wartime innovations in human factors. Ends with the development of the first computing systems during WWII.

Professional Computing, Mainframe, and Command Line History

The role of computing and information systems in professional contexts, including post-war developments in academic, scientific, and corporate environments. Covers early mainframe systems, programming languages, and command line interfaces, the invention of the transistor, as well as early research and theory into hypertext and other support for human cognition.

Personal Computing, GUI, and Internet History

The onset of personal computing, in the form of low-cost computing systems available to individual users. Focuses on the development of the graphical user interface and its impact on personal and professional use, with some review of more recent history, including the internet and mobility.

General Interaction Design History Resources

Resources related to the overall history of user-centered design, including the history of human factors, HCI, and interaction design disciplines.

General Computing History Resources

Resources related to the overall history of computing, including major university and corporate archives.

Filed under: Machines with Brains

January 4, 2010 • 8:53 pm 7

What is Interaction Design History?

The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator

Image Credit: Columbia University Computing History

Learning more about computing history is a sort of professional hobby of mine; I have a fetish for pictures of old mainframes and this research lets me indulge my proclivities. When I tell people in the user experience field about my studies the most common response I hear is “I don’t know anything about the history of computers.”

I think that’s sad. Practitioners in other design disciplines—architecture, graphic design, fashion—would be expected to have some grounding in historical movements and trends. But most people have no formal education in interaction design, and so they’ve never learned the roots of the discipline. I taught a short course in IxD history in the MFA program in Interaction Design at SVA, and I hope that the students in the program know enough now to at least recognize key people and events when they come up, even if their introduction was a whirlwind 5-week tour.

The interesting question, to me, is how you separate interaction design history from the broader scope of computing history in general. User experience people gravitate toward the history of hypertext and the graphical user interface, direct manipulation and the mouse, the work done at Xerox PARC and Apple. In many people’s minds, that era marks the dividing line between the “us” of the design community and the “them” of computer scientists, because it’s the point at which it became possible to draw a separation between the work that was done to serve the needs of the machine, and the work that was done solely to meet the needs of the user.

I’m fascinated by the earlier history of punchcards and mainframes, green screen CRTs and command line interfaces, precisely because that process of shaping the machine to think and talk more like we do was more formative and more raw. And while many (if not most) of the decisions that went into the design of early computing systems were based on the memory and processor requirements of the physical machine, engineers were also making decisions aimed at making the device easier to use. Separate out the aspects that are focused purely on hardware limitations, and the history of punched cards, programming languages and mainframe operating systems is as important to the history of the discipline as the mouse, the GUI, or the touchscreen.

I’ve finally got around to uploading my classroom presentations to Slideshare:

Week 1: Course Overview

This was intended as a high-level flyover of some of the people and topics I covered over the next three weeks.

Week 2: Interaction Design before Computers

Make no mistake: my definition of interaction design is squarely focused on how people communicate and interact with machines. (I know it’s fashionable to talk about interaction design as influencing human behavior, regardless of medium, but that’s an awfully broad scope for a history class.) Of course, people were imagining or using complex information processing devices even before there were computers.

Week 3: Computing Technology in the Workplace

My favorite section; I wish I could spend more time on this era, exploring how early programming languages and operating systems made it easier (and yet harder) to use a computer—in fact, what it meant to “use” a mainframe. This quote always kills me:

Not only would a programmer hardly ever see the computer, he or she might never even see the keypunch on which the programs were entered into the mainframe.
—Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing

Week 4: Personal Computing

Seems like everyone has at least a passing familiarity with the history of the graphical user interface across Xerox PARC, Apple, and Microsoft. Equally interesting is the cultural shift from mainframes to personal computing, regardless of the interface metaphor.

Filed under: Machines with Brains, Presentations

November 10, 2009 • 5:27 pm 1

SURVEY: User Experience in Agencies

Take the survey now: UX in Agencies Survey

Do a Google search for “traditional agency” and you’ll find a page of results debating whether and how full-service agencies can integrate digital skills into their mix. As agencies change with the times, they build in new practices and disciplines, hire new people and explore new ways of working.

How agencies embrace digital skills and processes is a big subject, so I’ll limit myself to one area: how do agencies incorporate user experience into their existing toolkit? (If you’re needing a definition of user experience, there are many; Eric Reiss’s is a good one.)

Over the past ten years, many traditional agencies have hired user experience people — from bringing in one lonely information architect or usability specialist, to building whole teams of interaction designers and content strategists. Some even place senior UX pros at the same level as creative directors. How effective has this approach been at integrating user experience principles and values into the agency?

At the same time, digital agencies have grown larger (and more bureaucratic.) Many digital agencies brought UX into the fold early, and it’s likely that a large digital agency also has a large UX team. But digital agencies aren’t immune from challenges in integrating UX, creative, and strategy practices. How does the breakdown of roles and responsibilities work in digital agencies?

I’m working on a benchmarking report to examine how user experience fits into traditional and digital agencies. I’m exploring questions like:

  • How does UX fit into the overall organizational structure?
  • How do UX people work with other disciplines on project teams?
  • What makes for effective collaboration (and what are the barriers that prevent it)?

If you have ever worked for an agency and would like to contribute, here’s a brief survey:

UX in Agencies Survey

If you have a lot to say on this subject, please let me know so we can talk via phone or email.

Filed under: Advertising Business Model

September 30, 2009 • 2:02 pm 31

Widex Mind 440 Hearing Aid Review

I exchanged my pair of Oticon Epoq XW for a pair of Widex Mind 440s. The Widex Mind wasn’t even on my radar to begin with, because I was completely focused on Bluetooth.

Once I realized that Bluetooth integration wasn’t good enough yet for what I wanted to do, and I realized that the Widex family was a good fit for me because it offered superior noise reduction and a sound quality that I liked, I decided to stick with that brand and get their best model.

Problems, Problems

My initial fitting went badly. Widex sent the wrong hearing aids, and then gave my audiologist very specific instructions that caused him to break the earhook. I went home disappointed, but they promised to send the correct pair with a rush order.

CAMISHA Domes

I was told that I would do better if I was fitted with custom-made “CAMISHA” domes instead of regular domes. I spent $150 to have custom domes made that would sit deep inside my ear and connect to a thin, unobtrusive wire. The goal of the custom fitting was to reduce feedback.

These were a disaster. Blame it on my weirdly-shaped head, but the custom domes would not stay in my ears. The left earmold in particular popped out to such a degree that the hearing aid was useless. It was obvious from the second I put them on that they were not going to work, but I was a good sport and tried them out over the weekend.

Open Fit Domes

I then swapped out the custom domes for generic open fit domes. (Does anyone want to buy a pair of barely-used custom-made ear molds? I’ll give you a good deal.) I was pretty unhappy with these as well. I teach a class and when I wore these in class the first time, I couldn’t hear the students talking on the other side of the room.

I was told that the open-fit domes might not work as well for me, given my audiogram, and I’d get feedback. This was true! I had the sensation that the hearing aids were always just about to start feeding back, like an annoying whistle just below my range of hearing. Imagine what a teakettle sounds like when the water is just starting to boil. I was told that these fancy new hearing aids do a better job of recognizing and removing feedback, but that was not my experience here.

Back to the Drawing Board

During my trial with the Widex Mind 440s, I did not feel they were an improvement over my current Widex Senso Divas, which are 5 years old.

I did some research and learned that Widex makes an even newer hearing aid, the Passion 440. I’ve returned the Widex Mind 440s in exchange for the Passion 440s. I haven’t tried the Passion 440s yet, but I’ll tell you right now what my sense of the benefits and drawbacks are:

Benefits

  • Receiver in the canal: I was pretty annoyed that the Mind 440 didn’t offer RIC, but it looks like that’s what the Passion 440 does. In exchange for Bluetooth, it will at least permit me to wear earbuds on top of them, which should make it possible to listen to music or answer the phone. A low-tech solution, which means it will probably work.

Drawbacks

  • Size: Good god, these things are tiny. You might be asking “why is small size a drawback?” To me, this is just baby-boomer vanity. I’ve worn hearing aids for 25 years, I don’t care if anyone sees them, and I don’t need a hearing aid that’s the size of a dime. The smaller aids will have more moisture problems than the large ones, and they’re easier to drop. I’d be happier with a larger aid that I could hold onto more easily.
  • Size 10 Batteries: This goes hand-in-hand with the smaller size of the aid. I’m going to have to change these things twice a week, and the small size means it’s going to be a pain in the ass. I have tiny little fingers and even I don’t relish the challenge of popping these things in and out. I’m looking at my Senso Diva with its luxurious Size 13 battery and thinking I’ll miss it.
  • Remote Control: And yet another drawback because of the size! These aids are too tiny to include a button to switch between programs, so I have to buy a remote control to switch between programs. This is one more thing I have to schlep around in my purse, possibly lose, spill stuff on, etc.

I’m getting super cranky about this process. I think I’ve spent about 40 hours just going to the audiologist, I’ve plunked down over $7500, and right now I have nothing to show for it. I’m genuinely not happy with the options available to me. I hope the Passion 440s provide a great listening experience, and persuade me that the money and time are all worth it.

Filed under: Bionic Hearing

September 18, 2009 • 8:41 pm 16

Oticon Epoq XW Hearing Aid Review

The first hearing aid in my trial was the Oticon Epoq XW. I did a comparison test with it and the Phonak Audeo Yes in the audiologist’s soundproof booth. The Oticon was the clear winner in that test. I liked the sound quality better immediately, and the brief hearing test he gave me scored the Oticon significantly higher in word recognition than the Phonak. I picked both of these hearing aids to test because they offered Bluetooth integration, and I was excited to take the Oticon Epoq home and try it out with my Bluetooth enabled devices.

Bluetooth and the Epoq

I spent about $7500 on the Epoq and its Bluetooth enabling companion, the Streamer. A comparable pair of hearing aids without the Bluetooth would cost around $6000.

In other words, I spent $1500 to get my hearing aids to act like a Bluetooth headset.

If I spent $1500 on a regular Bluetooth headset, I would expect it to work FLAW-LESS-LY.

The Oticon Bluetooth did not work flawlessly. Not even close.

Pairing with multiple devices

I wanted to pair my hearing aids with my iPhone, my MacBook Pro, and my Mac Mini. I ran into immediate problems when trying to connect to multiple devices. Although the documentation says that you can connect up to eight devices, after unpairing and repairing I was only ever able to connect to two at a time. This wasn’t a dealbreaker, but I was frustrated by the troubleshooting I had to do, and disappointed when I realized that I was better off only connecting two at a time.

Wireless Streaming from Computer

I watch TV and movies from a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. Usually I watch with captions, but when that’s not possible, I sometimes put on headphones so I can listen more closely. Wirelessly streaming audio from the computer to my hearing aids was a compelling prospect, but a disappointing reality. The sound quality was very soft and unacceptably tinny — so much that a Bluetooth connection was in no way better than just normal listening.

Wired Streaming from Computer

I also tried listening to music from my laptop with a wired connection. The wire ran between my laptop and the Streamer (worn around my neck), and then the sound was sent wirelessly between the Streamer and the Epoqs. The sound quality was so weak and tinny that I can’t imagine ever choosing it over listening to music with headphones. My old hearing aids are Widex Divas, and they have a good music program. I was really excited about the potential for wireless music streaming to my hearing aids. The reality was a poor quality, wired connection. Headphones plus hearing aids were still a better solution.

Mobile Phone

I was able to successfully make and receive calls on my iPhone using the Streamer. If this is the only Bluetooth integration you wanted, it would probably suffice. The sound quality was good and there was something magical about being able to push a button and have calls come in via my hearing aids. The downside is that you have to wear the Streamer around your neck in order to make and receive calls. Also, some of the people I talked to on the phone complained that I sounded like I was on a bad speakerphone.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

I really, really, really wanted to love these hearing aids. I was so psyched to get them. But a couple of things pushed me over the edge:

Background Noise

Never have I appreciated my Widex hearing aids so much as the first time I took my Oticons into a noisy restaurant. I am accustomed to being able to hear relatively easily in restaurants, at conferences, and in other noisy situations. I assumed that all hearing aid manufacturers had similar noise reduction programs to the Widex. I was wrong.

Now, I admit that I am accustomed to the Widex and so a shift in manufacturer may have been more disorienting for me. Someone who was not as familiar with Widex may not have experienced the same dissatisfaction that I did. But I was shocked! There was a dull roar of noise in the background of the restaurant that I was used to having filtered out. This extended to other environments — I particularly remember visiting my mother and asking if her birds had always been so loud. I found myself thinking that smarter hearing aids would have made better choices about what sounds to filter out.

Streamer Fail

The last straw for me was the failure of my Streamer, only two weeks into my trial. I went on a ten-day trip and the Streamer stopped working on Day 2. It refused to charge, but it would blink a flashing orange light to let me know that it was still doing something. I couldn’t find any documentation or guidance online about how to fix the problem. The instructions in the user’s manual about how to reset the Streamer didn’t work.

Onward

So back they went. Let me offer some proactive defenses here about why this was a reasonable solution:

  • I had three fittings. I went in for fittings on three separate occasions, and spent a fair amount of time with my audiologist on the noise reduction program in particular. I don’t believe he could have done anything else to resolve that problem.
  • I tried to get help on the internet. Someone might be able to tell me here how I could have fixed my Streamer problem. And if everything else had been great, I might have been willing to sort that one out. But I was not willing to pay a significant premium for spotty Bluetooth on hearing aids that weren’t meeting my basic needs.
  • I’m an expert user. I am probably in the top 95th percentile in terms of technology savvy hearing aid wearers. I am willing to experiment to get things right, and I’m comfortable searching the internet for help. But the balance between cost and effort on one hand, and benefits on the other, was just not good enough with these hearing aids.

    • My next choice was the Widex Mind 440.

Filed under: Bionic Hearing, TV in the Future

June 16, 2009 • 7:10 pm 2

Content is King, or, if you don’t have a content strategy you’re living in a fairy tale.

This year, I was invited back to Malmö Sweden to give a new workshop at the From Business to Buttons conference. Because I was so close to the home of Hans Christian Andersen, I organized the presentation around a fairy tale. Like most fairy tale people, the ones in my talk made some mistakes.

I’m super excited by all the momentum around content strategy right now. From our local NYC meetups to Kristina Halvorson’s new book, there’s a community of people that I am delighted to be a part of.

Filed under: Content Strategy, Presentations

May 22, 2009 • 6:33 am 7

Why Web Ads Suck

I’ve been researching and writing about the advertising business model for a while now, and for one simple reason: I hate online ads. They suck.

And yet, I’ve come around to believing that despite its flaws, advertising is only chance we have of making any real money off the internet. Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, advertising is the worst business model for the internet, except for all the others that have been tried.

Brian Morrissey of Adweek asks Are designers to blame for bad Web ads?

There are any number of reasons that web ads are terrible, but most of them sit far upstream from the beleaguered agency art director asked to churn out banner ads each week.

Advertisers Don’t Spend Enough
If you want better online ads, why not pay more for them? When you pay more for something, you often get better quality. CPMs for online ads are between 1/7 and 1/10 of print ads. That means that for every dollar an advertiser like Chanel will pay to get my attention in a magazine, they’ll pay only a dime to show me something online.  Do you expect to get the same quality from your $10 sushi from Whole Foods as you would get if you spent $100 at Nobu? It’s a chicken and egg problem — advertisers want to see better returns before they will spend more — but the advertisers will have to start paying more before quality will improve. Lower CPMs are the main reason that traditional media businesses are floundering; even if publishers devise a somewhat-palatable way for users to pay for content it still won’t make up the difference.

Measurability is a Double-Edged Sword
The saving grace of web ads — measurability — is also their downfall. Publishers tout measurability as a key reason to shift to online media, yet the metrics used to evaluate success are too simplistic. Click-through is a terrible way to measure people’s interest and engagement. People will click more often on things that are annoying, but that doesn’t mean they like the ads. Take the example from those subscription cards in periodicals (“magazine seeds”) which were previously the most intrusive form of advertising known to man, before the invention of Eyeblaster. Subscription marketers know that if you put five cards in a magazine, you’ll get more subscriptions than if you put four cards in — regardless of how much you annoy the people who don’t subscribe. Similarly, the more irritating you make your ad, the more likely it is someone will click on it. If that seems like a flawed way of doing business, don’t blame the designers who are encouraged to make obnoxious ads. Blame the system that focuses on click-through metrics to the exclusion of more meaningful evaluations. (If you still think that measurability is the end-all-be-all of the internet, and you haven’t read Doug Bowman say Goodbye, Google, now would be an opportune time.)

Industry-standard Sizes are Too Constraining
I’ve designed sites for dozens of newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and I can confidently say that having a limited palette of ad sizes (and thus grid structures) to work with really constrains your creativity. The only ad format anyone wants to buy is a 300×250 rectangle. The IAB and other industry organizations put Soviet-style pressure on publishers and advertisers to force them to conform to a single standard. The argument for standard sizes is that it widens adoption, since advertisers are assured of being able to place their banner on as many sites as possible. In practice, it retards growth, because sites are unwilling to branch out to new formats. I’ve been advocating the half-page ad (300×600) for years now, but few sites have re-architected to support it, and so agencies don’t design for it. I asked one client why they didn’t run more of the larger ad size, and he replied “We can’t run it unless 12 of our competitors run it. And they don’t.”

Advertising is About More Than Awareness
Much has been said about how the traditional marketing funnel has been turned sideways and inside-out by the internet. Not enough has been done to educate clients and creative teams about how to change the way they work to engage and persuade people throughout the transaction funnel. Everyone still focuses on banner ads and microsites, which are the equivalent of bus sides and TV commercials. Says Bob Greenberg of R/GA in Art & Commerce: Funnel Clouding (also from Adweek):

I suspect the reason agencies haven’t tackled consideration and preference is because they are far beyond their capabilities rather than simply outside their comfort zone. Real engagement requires entirely new teams of people—like information architects, data analysts and an army of technologists of various stripes. The traditional teams found at agencies simply do not possess the skill sets needed to tackle areas that are deeper inside the funnel, where purchase decisions increasingly take place.

You get flashy, glossy microsites because you’re dealing with an industry of advertisers and publishers that haven’t had a chance to develop and assimilate a new set of values. The digital agencies are schizophrenic, emulating backwards as often as they strive to set new standards. And the cult of measurement ensures that content, tools, and guidance that go beyond mere banner click-through just don’t “count.”

Is it any wonder that online ads suck? Frankly, I think it’s a wonder that agency designers do as well as they do.

Filed under: Advertising Business Model

May 18, 2009 • 1:36 pm 1

Ad relevance is the next big cash cow

Umair Haque argues that the way to beat Google (and, presumably to be the next internet company with eleventy billion dollars) is to serve ads that are more relevant. Google got part of the way there, can Ad Block Plus go farther?

Ad Blocker Plus is on the verge of turning into an open network that (finally) does the same as Google does: massively boost ad relevance, stripping out the useless junk — by factoring in whether or not people find ads useful or not. Ad Blocker plus is, almost unwittingly, making the world’s first reverse ad network. It doesn’t aggregate more ads to push — it aggregates people’s preferences about ads, so better ads can be chosen.

via How to Challenge Google (And Win) – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org.

Filed under: Advertising Business Model

May 5, 2009 • 9:36 pm 3

Bionic Hearing Wish List

I am kicking off the process of buying new hearing aids, starting tomorrow! My audiologist asked me to make a wish list of what I want. Here’s my advanced, futuristic version of what I want from them.

1. Bluetooth

Bluetooth hearing aids would take me from feeling like someone with a disability to feeling like I’m a superhero. I’m reminded of Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was blind, but he could see with his visor. He couldn’t see the way everyone else sees, but he could see better. Ever since I was in high school and I’d listen to my Walkman with headphones on, I’ve wanted to be able to pipe music in directly through my hearing aids. I’ve spent more money than most people will ever spend on expensive audio equipment, and I expect them to play music directly into my head. Frankly, if you’d asked me about this even 10 years ago, I would have been happy just to listen to music directly through the aids. Now, I also want my my phone calls piped into my aids, and while I’m at it, I plan to connect via Bluetooth to all of my computers, so I can hear movies, TV shows, and videos too. This will change my life.

2. Open Fit

The last time I bought hearing aids, I didn’t even consider buying open-fit models. But in the last few years this new style has taken off, and today more than 50% of new hearing aid sales are of this type. Open fit has a couple of advantages. To me, the best part is that it’s a BTE style with a new kind of tubing that doesn’t need to be replaced every 3-4 months. Open fit also sounds less “plugged-up” or occluded, which is probably more important to someone who hasn’t been wearing hearing aids for 27 years. I am hoping that open fit will be more physically comfortable, otherwise I’ll just stick with BTEs.

3. Data Logging

I don’t know much about this new feature, but it sounds great. Apparently newer models will record information about your different listening environments, which gives your audiologist more data to use in customizing your aids. I have always wanted to have my audiologist trail me around, reconfiguring my hearing aid settings for conferences, airplanes, and noisy bars. This might be even better!

4. Rechargeable Batteries

Battery life is a problem for every small, portable electronic device. My 2.5 year old MacBook Pro now gets about 24 minutes of battery life before it squawks and needs a recharge. But hearing aid batteries hold a special place in my heart for their environmentally-unfriendly neediness. Every purse I own holds a packet of hearing aid batteries, lest I get caught out on the town and wind up suddenly deafened. Every year or so I drop off a ziploc baggie filled with tiny batteries at my local recycler, the sight of which makes me relieved that I don’t have toddlers who might swallow them. I know hearing aids are more demanding than the average Bluetooth headset, but, as a society, aren’t we better than this?

5. Invisibility

I really don’t care that anyone knows that I wear hearing aids (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about them.) I just don’t want them looking clunky and ugly next to my jewelry. The kids these days seem to be all into having hearing aids in bright colors with contrasting molds. Call me old-fashioned, but my main goal is for them to be as unobtrustive as possible. There’s nothing I like better than someone I’ve known for years telling me “No way! I didn’t know you wore hearing aids!”

Filed under: Bionic Hearing

• 8:58 pm 5

Bionic Hearing Basics

Wearing hearing aids is just like wearing glasses, except for the part where they cost as much as a used car and you wear them inside your head.

As such, buying hearing aids is complicated and nerve-wracking. I’ve had lots of practice: I’ll be buying my 8th pair of hearing aids sometime this summer. These are the basic features I’m looking for in hearing aids:

1. No Tubing

My primary source of frustration with behind the ear (BTE) hearing aids is the need to have them re-tubed. In older model BTEs, the plastic tubing that runs from the hearing aid to the earmold (the part that sits inside your ear) gets brittle and dried out. When it’s too old, it can crack, separate from the mold, or get stiff and uncomfortable. Usually, BTEs need to be retubed 3 or 4 times per year, which means too many trips to the audiologist for me.

2. Moisture Controlled

The biggest cause of hearing aid repairs is moisture. Humidity can easily build up in the tiny workings of the hearing aid. For my most recent hearing aid purchase, I opted for in the ear (ITE) aids because they wouldn’t need to be re-tubed. However, ITE aids are much more sensitive to moisture because their electronics sit inside the ear, where they’re more exposed to wax, sweat, and other moisture. While having ITE aids did reduce the time I had to spend getting the aids re-tubed, it greatly increased the time my hearing aids spent being serviced by the manufacturer for moisture problems. Moisture will always be a problem, but BTE models are better, and newer hearing aids control moisture buildup.

3. Large Batteries

If I giving advice to anyone on what to consider in purchasing a hearing aid, the first thing I would tell them to consider is battery size. Size is important not just because it determines how often you have to change the batteries, but also because of how physically challenging it is to swap the batteries out. Tiny hearing aids use tiny, tiny batteries, which have to be changed frequently and can easily be dropped. I like to imagine myself as the sort of person who would only change my hearing aid batteries at a table over a soft cloth. In real life my hearing aid will die just as I’m late for a meeting, and I’ll find myself replacing the battery while standing on a street-corner waiting for the light to change. So the battery has to be large enough to be easy to manipulate (and hopefully last longer so I have fewer intersection exchanges.)

4. Wax Guards

Wax guards in my ITE aids changed my life. A previous pair of ITEs was in the shop constantly due to wax buildup in the tubes. Newer hearing aids have little plastic wax baskets that sit in the tubing, and can be flicked out and replaced when they get full of gunk. Genius.

5. Digital

Oh, yeah. The biggest revolution in hearing aids in the past few years is also the last on my list. My current set of hearing aids is my first digital set. The difference was life-altering. New digital hearing aids do a much better job of focusing the sound and filtering out background noise than older analog models. Analog just amplifies everything it hears, while digital focuses on speech and reduces static. I remember getting my first pair of digital hearing aids and going out to a noisy, crowded restaurant for the first time. Imagine what it feels like to go from having to struggle to hear anything in a noisy room to being the person who could hear better than anyone else at the table.

That’s the promise of bionic hearing.

Filed under: Bionic Hearing

April 13, 2009 • 4:23 pm 4

Improving the Drupal Admin Interface

Be careful what you wish for — good advice! In working with various content management systems, I’ve always wanted the chance to improve the user experience. But actually getting the opportunity to do so uncovered much more complexity than I’d even dreamed.

For me, the biggest challenge was in bridging the gap between what the users of Buzzr would expect to do, and how the Drupal admin interface actually works. It’s possible to do so much in Drupal if you’re a trained professional — but is it possible to enable ordinary people to take advantage of what Drupal has to offer?

The three areas of greatest conceptual difficulty for the user (from my perspective) are:

1. Confusing overlap among blocks, pages, templates, and features
For a user (even a relatively experienced user) trying to set up a new site or manage an existing one, configuring “what you want on your website” first starts with deciding what goes in the navigation. But what are those things? Are they features (“blog” or “wiki”) that might have any number of pages associated with them? Are they static pages, or are they dynamic containers? Is it clear what it means to choose a template layout  like “gallery view”? If they choose to show information in the sidebar, do those blocks appear on every page?

2. Confusing overlap between page layout and page design
When a user thinks about “designing” the site or choosing a “theme”, what does she mean? Is it the colors and the typography? Is it the underlying column and grid structure? The placement of the navigation bar? What about the categories and types of pages that go in the navigation? Even though I’ve dealt with these very issues every day at work for nearly 15 years, it’s not always clear to me — and certainly wasn’t clear-cut to our users.

3. Confusing overlap between navigation and views
The ability to create custom views of content is one of Drupal’s strengths. Communicating that capability to a site administrator so she can set up her own filters can be tricky. How do you explain that some navigation elements are views on the same content (products filtered by product type, or posts filtered by location, for example) and some navigation options are to static page templates?

We puzzled through these issues for quite some time, and I know we’ve made good progress. But we’re focusing on the needs of one particular type of user. Solving these issues to meet the needs of the wide range of people who use the Drupal admin interface is vastly more complex.

Filed under: Drupal

• 3:44 pm 0

Introducing Buzzr

I met the team from Lullabot through Ed Sussman, who was our client (jointly) on a project to redesign FastCompany.com. About a year ago we all teamed up to begin working on a new product that we called “Project Codename.”

Lullabot brought their expertise in Drupal, my company Bond Art + Science brought our skills in user experience and interaction design, and Ed brought his experience with managing and monetizing large scale web properties. A kick-ass team, if I’ve ever seen one.

Some of the things that made this complex project really fun for me to work on:

Getting my hands on a CMS interface
Over the years, I’ve worked on products based on many different content management systems, including all kinds of “homegrown,” Vignette, Interwoven, Sharepoint, Fatwire, Movable Type, WordPress, Joomla, and, yes, Drupal. And while I’ve had the opportunity to make changes to some admin interfaces like content entry templates, I’ve never had the chance to redesign an entire administrative interface. But boy, have I wanted to.

Look Ma! No clients!
I’ve been making websites for clients since 1995, and I do love working in client services. That said, it’s been a real delight to work on an in-house project. Having the freedom (and the burden) to make design decisions free from client organizational politics and compromises has been a welcome opportunity.

Iterative design and development process
Working as a hired gun, time to iterate can often be a luxury the client isn’t willing to pay for. Often we’re hired as a user experience team separate from development, which means we focus more on lo-fi or front-end prototypes. And we’re sometimes not around to participate in any experimentation with or changes to designs that happen during development. Being able to go from week to week, trying out different ideas and having them brought to life was my favorite part of the process.

We continue to iterate and develop the product, but we thought it was time to share the product with the community.

Introducing Buzzr.com!

(And I give thanks to the community, specifically Jen Simmons, for helping with the embed code.)

Filed under: Drupal

April 11, 2009 • 1:49 pm 0

Designing for, with, and around advertising

One day in 2005 I woke up and discovered I worked for an advertising agency. This came as kind of a shock to me, particularly since I was working at the same job I’d always had, leading the user experience practice in the New York office of Razorfish. But through various acquisitions we’d become Avenue A | Razorfish, and now we were in the business of making ads and selling ad space.

I had a tough time reconciling this with my focus on delivering the best possible experience for users. In fact, it’s one of the things that led me to leave and start Bond Art + Science in 2006. But in the intervening years, I have had the opportunity to work with many publishers — large and small, print and online-only — and have gained new perspective on advertising as a business model.

This talk, given at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, is my attempt to explain why user experience designers should open their hearts to advertising as a revenue model, and find ways to meet the needs of both users and advertisers.

Filed under: Advertising Business Model, Presentations

• 1:38 pm 0

Content + Commentary

I’ve worked with many publishers over the past few years, and one of the biggest challenges traditional media brands face is in adapting to social media and user generated content. Even opening up articles to comments from readers is a perilous step to some.

Our team at Bond Art + Science decided this was a worthy subject for some research and analysis. This report evaluates the landscape and makes recommendations about how to benefit from the new media landscape.

Content + Commentary: How Media Brands Invite, Manage, and Benefit From 
User Commenting and Participation Online

Filed under: Advertising Business Model, Content Strategy

• 1:15 pm 0

Foundations of Interaction Design

In 2007 I conducted a three-hour session on the history of interaction design for Smart Experience in New York. I’m a big fan of teaching about the historical underpinnings of our field, particularly since so many people working today don’t know the background of the discipline. Learning how the field evolved is an important part of education in other design disciplines like architecture or graphic design, and it should be equally important for students of interaction design.

To that end, I will be teaching a longer version of this course in the new MFA program in interaction design at SVA starting in Fall 2009.

Filed under: Machines with Brains, Presentations

• 1:07 pm 0

From typing to swiping: interaction design has come a long way!

In July of 2008 I presented at the first Ignite NYC event. The Ignite format is demanding for a speaker: 20 slides which auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes. It also takes place in a bar, so the environment can be a bit raucous. Someone told me afterwards “if you can do that, you can perform in the Superbowl half-time show.”

This presentation includes both the actual slides and the bullet point speaking script I memorized.

Filed under: Machines with Brains, Presentations

• 12:53 pm 3

Creating Usable Websites: Do It With Drupal!

Jeff Robbins of Lullabot asked if I’d speak about ways Drupal developers can learn more about user experience and make more usable websites at their Do It With Drupal conference, held in New Orleans in December 2008.

Since “making more usable websites” is a pretty broad topic, I decided to focus the talk on interaction design patterns, and the many libraries that exist to guide people in making design decisions. This got me thinking about a pattern library that could live on Drupal.org, which I think would be a good way for people to share design solutions and code.

Filed under: Drupal, Presentations

• 12:37 pm 0

The Users That Use You

I was invited by the IA Institute to speak as part of a full-day workshop at the 2008 IA Summit in Miami. The workshop topic was leadership, and each of the presenters (Mags Hanley, Harry Max, and Chris Fahey) addressed ways that IAs can be leaders within their organization or within the field.

Josh Rubin and I discussed ways that techniques from user-centered design can help people sell their ideas more effectively within their organizations. By thinking of a personal agenda like a product that needs to be adopted by its users, user experience professionals may discover that they already possess skills and perspectives needed to make their ideas reality.

Filed under: Presentations

April 5, 2009 • 2:16 pm 0

Understanding User Behavior Online

In 2006 I spoke at the eMarketing Association conference in Boston. My talk was a roundup of research and perspectives about how users perceive and interact with what they see on the screen.

Filed under: Presentations

Twitter

Who am I?


Image Credit: Alison Grippo

I'm Karen McGrane. You can view my resume, add me as a professional connection, or be my friend.

My company is called Bond Art + Science. I teach in the new MFA program in Interaction Design at SVA. On top of that, I am working with Lullabot on a new platform called Buzzr, based on Drupal.

You can also follow me on Twitter, psychoanalyze my dreams, ogle my vacation photos, or see what I listen to.