A More Mauvy Shade of Pinky Russet

I like American Idol. There, i’ve said it - and I can give it up anytime I want, honest. My wife and I watch it every week but their results show is really testing the limits of how to make an hour of TV out of ten seconds of content (”X, your journey ends tonight”). They now have a segment where they ask questions from the web to the judges - very participatory, very “user generated”, very bloody boring - thank god for TIVO!

A colleague (Mike Betz, Content Manager) recently sent this email:

“You’re on “Let’s Make a Deal.” The host, Monty Hall, shows you 3 doors and tells you that there’s a car behind 1 door, goats behind the other 2. If you choose the door with the car behind it, you get to keep it. The car, not the door.Wikipedia explains the problem in depth.”

You choose door #2. Monty reveals that door #3 has a goat behind it. Then he asks, “Do you want to stay with door # 2, or switch to door #1?” What should you do?

You probably thought, “I had a 1 in 3 chance of choosing the car originally. I still have a 1 in 3 chance. There’s no benefit to switching.”

And you’d be wrong.

Counter-intuitively, you’d double your chances of winning by switching to door #1. The Monty Hall problem baffled statisticians for much of the ’90s, but the salient fact is this: Monty knows where the car is. So no matter which door you choose originally, Monty will always open a door with a goat behind it. Monty’s knowledge, and your awareness of Monty’s knowledge, affect both your odds of winning (i.e., statistics) and your ability to determine where the car really is (your perception of reality).

It struck me as interesting, partly because I too found it difficult to believe until I sat down with paper and pencil and worked it out, but mostly because it later occured to me that we sometimes run into this situation in UX design. We use a “commonly held belief” to convince ourselves that a feature or design element is desired by users - only to (hopefully) realize that - after thinking through the specific scenarios - they don’t want or need it after all.

I took my car into the shop yesterday to have some work done and they gave me a loaner for the day. I was a little upset because I have Sirius satellite radio in my car but the loaner didn’t - and while I was muttering unpleasant thoughts about this it occured to me that Sirius and XM should probably give car dealers complmentary satellite radios and subscriptions for their loan cars - not for the people who already have it - but for those who don’t. You see satellite radio is a bit addictive, once you experience the choice and commercial free music you don’t want to go back … what better way to sell it?

I received a product-pushing email from Amazon yesterday - normally I just delete them, but this time something caught my eye and I clicked. Well, all I can say is “WOW”. Check out the Eye-Fi, its a wireless 2GB SD card. Stick it in your camera like any other SD card and take pictures - then go home and switch your camera on and it magically (and automatically) uploads your pics to your computer or your web photo service of your choice! Just how the hell did they cram 2GB of memory and a wi-fi transceiver into something that small?

Hi. My name is Richard, and I have a problem - i’m a serial diagramist (yes, yes, I know its not a real word). I just can’t help it - I read or talk about something and my brain just starts to draw a diagram of how the parts fit together!

Anyway - here is the latest, its been brewing for a few months since I read PeterMe’s post “Noodling on experience” and recent discussions about “context” at the 2008 IA Summit caused me to dig it out again and finish it.

Its a framework for the different aspects that make up the context of a user experience (8 aspects grouped into 4 groups). I think its useful - but I can’t quite put my finger on how, so I thought i’d throw it out there and see if it knocked anything loose.

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Since I have the honor of chairing the IA Summit this year I should probably attend, right? So I thought i’d take this opportunity to put one of the brand new, hot off Jody’s Illustrator palette “meet me at the summit” badges on my own blog (practice what you preach eh?).

No i’m not being national security conscious all of a sudden. I’m talking about a new (better?) name for Rich Internet Applications - “Contextual Internet Applications”.  At work we’ve been talking about the benefits (and drawbacks) RIAs bring to the table and my contention is that the primary benefit is a “duh inducing” one - “context”.

Hopefully i’ve explored this line of thinking a little more deeply and more meaningfully with this diagram, a work in progress, offered for comments and discussion …

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While talking with Scott Berkun at MX East a couple of weeks ago it occured to me that what I hate most about “innovation” is that people use it in the present or future tense. Glib phrases like ”Oh we’re going to innovate!” or ”Yah, we’re really innovating now!” slip so easily from mouths ….. but HOW DO THEY KNOW? I would like to suggest that it is only after the fact that it can be said with any certainty ”yes, that was an innovation” or “wow they really innovated”. You can set up an environment that tries to foster and encourage creative problem solving but only history will show if an innovation occured.

As I was in my usual, 2 week, “hey I should probably blog this idea” period when most things die on the vine, I read Andrew Hinton’s blog post titled Innovation: tinkering, failing & imagining and got fired up again to rant about it myself. Thanks Andrew

A pattern i’ve seen in my work over the last couple of years when engaged in very early “visioning” work is that of first designing the experience for “stakeholder sellability” to get internal buy-in and then worrying about “usability”. Of course its not as black and white as this - its just not in a UX professional’s genes to ignore usability but I do find myself saying “thats good enough for the stakeholder meeting, lets focus on something else right now - we can figure out a better, more usable way later”. Should I feel dirty?

Jesse James Garrett’s ”planes” diagram is a great tool for explaining user experiences. I have it on the wall of my cube and I use it all the time when giving informationals to people at Vanguard about UX. Its always bothered me a little though that because of its stacked single dimension it could be interpreted to mean that only the planes adjacent to one another have an influence on the ones around them (strategy influencing scope, scope influencing structure, etc).

I’ve been toying with it for a while, trying to show how the strategy plane (both the user and business aspects of it) acts as a force on all of the other planes and what tools and techniques can be used to explore those forces. So here it is, far from complete - offered up as a conversation starter. Oh, and Jesse - apologies for bastardizing your diagram with my brutal Illustrator skills.

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