It seems to me that some of the most prolific females in our industry have gotten their status largely down to their gender. This sounds incredibly rude, but many of the female designers and developers who have attained industry fame actually produce relatively low quality work.
An easy response to Dan’s article is to simply point him to this six-year old BBC report that shows how the gendered nature of our work appeals predictably to each gender, or in other words, men like other men’s work while women prefer other women’s work.
Dan’s desire that we should all judge and measure people based on the quality of their work and not exhibit gender-favoritism of any kind is perfectly appropriate. That is how we should judge people’s work. However, as I was reading his piece a more interesting thought struck me. What struck me is the pattern that I see quite often: the most privileged groups often fail to take the perspectives of the less-privileged into consideration.
In the case of Dan, it seems his qualitative judgment is based entirely on his personal view. In other words, what might be seen as relatively low quality work by one gender could actually be considered quite high quality work by the other gender.
The topic of favoritism towards women has been hotly debated in the past, but one thing not as frequently debated is “taste bias”; the implicit bias we might express when we repeatedly define our own gender’s work as “best” or “greatest” simply because it appeals to ourselves the most. This practice merely perpetuates the problem that we like what we like and look no further, never really stopping to consider that others might like something different and that objective quality is not necessarily defined by either side’s perspective.
Thanks to our highly gendered societal constructs, many women grow up being forced to learn far more about male perspectives than men learn about female perspectives (some pop culture examples: overwhelminglymale protagonists, poorly written female characters). Since design revolves, in many ways, around empathy—our ability to understand the perspectives of others—it should come as no surprise that we are seeing more and more women taking prominent roles or awards in design. Women, biologically, are in no way better designers than men. However, our society generally drives women to have a better understanding of men than vice-versa, which can lead to them being better designers.
As we grow as designers, we also become more adept and understanding towards other people, and our work will reflect this. The reverse, however, is also true: the more understanding we become of other people and their differing perspectives, the better and higher quality our work will be.
The message on the poster is blunt. A young woman in red tights and a skimpy black dress is flaked out on the edge of a couch, her head turned away. A few wine bottles are on the floor.
“Just because she isn’t saying no doesn’t mean she is saying yes,” the poster says. “Sex without consent = sexual assault. Don’t Be That Guy.”
We’re not even a week into the new year, but already I can tell you this: 2012 is going to change everything for us. Who’s “us”? Designers, developers, engineers, mobile and native app developers; basically, the people who make the web and the software platforms—native and web—come alive and be valuable for millions of consumers worldwide.
Our world is going to change because their world is going to change. In fact, for consumers the world has already been changing for a while. It’s our industry that has yet to catch on, but enough smart people working at truly game-changing companies have figured this out by now to know where to lead things going forward. The rest of us will either catch on to keep up, or get left behind in stubbornness.
What’s going to be so dramatic about 2012, you say? Allow me to elaborate by use of an example. In this case, the example will be an analysis of the new design that Twitter launched about a month ago, as it illustrates what I’m about to explain perfectly.
A lot of things got shuffled around and changed when Twitter launched their latest major UI overhaul. The previous version, which I’ll refer to as PreviousTwitter, was a dramatic change from what Twitter had been up to that time. PreviousTwitter had taken a simple, single view of tweets that compose your Timeline and turned it into a full-fledged web app that brought new features to life and combined many existing ones into one cohesive whole.
However, PreviousTwitter was mired in complexity and suffered in some ways from the way web browsers behave. While it was very much an improvement for some people—of which I am one—others complained for a long time to get “OldTwitter” back. Twitter allowed users to switch back to OldTwitter for some time, but their new direction had sent a clear signal: Twitter was growing up, and we’d all best get used to that at some point.
NewTwitter brings back a lot of the simplicity of OldTwitter, while retaining the powerful features and interface enhancements of PreviousTwitter. In that sense, it is a fantastic achievement by the team of designers and engineers at Twitter.
The image above shows how Twitter.com’s new menu bar features iconography that matches the shift-key meanings of a typical U.S. keyboard layout’s 1, 2, and 3 keys: !, @ and #. (The birdhouse-icon for Home could well be one of my favorite icons in a while, but I digress) Whether this design was deliberate or not isn’t very relevant; either they were immensely clever or they stumbled upon a fantastic coincidence. The result is a hidden—intentional or otherwise—message that recurs all throughout Twitter’s new interface: Twitter is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Let me explain how. First up:
Home: Your New Timeline Awaits
Two big, obvious changes separate PreviousTwitter from NewTwitter:
The timeline is now on the right instead of the left
There is no secondary pane that holds secondary or selected content
People think both singularly and linearly, which affects interface design in myriad ways. PreviousTwitter had a singular, linear view of the timeline up until the point you selected something. When you selected a tweet, a pane would slide out and show you whatever conversation took place around the selected tweet, or embed content from linked external sources. The latter was so much one of my favorite features that I was delighted when Embed.ly released their Parrotfish browser extension, which took this third-party content embedding to a massive new level. All things considered, PreviousTwitter with that extension was probably my favorite way to use Twitter ever.
But I’m a power user, and even though users like me play a more significant role in creating Twitter than users that primarily read and consume, Twitter has grown well outside the bounds of being a cool, cutting-edge tool for tech-savvy nerds like myself. It’s not just that Twitter has gone mainstream; it now is the mainstream. Radio, TV shows, and movies feature Twitter and sometimes even change their own nature to fit in with how things happen on Twitter.
The hierarchies that give shape to content on the web, as part of the practice of Information Architecture, often conflict when it comes to catering to avid/power users and casual consumers. While I loved the multi-paned nature of PreviousTwitter and the functionality it provided, it suffered from various design– and usability problems which created a disjointed experience for many more people. The simpler timeline view of NewTwitter solves most of these problems, but no longer works very well for extending Twitter with third-party content. I hope Twitter bring this back somehow. Third-party content embedding was a major benefit twitter.com held over native apps, and I’d hate to see it go.
Even though I’m personally not a fan at all of mixing hierarchies of content (ads in the middle of an article are a similar example of this), I have to concede that my mental model of what Twitter is and how it works is more complex and specific than it is for most people. I love to drill down as a separate effort from “reading the stream”, returning to “the flow” once done. To me, Twitter works and behaves like a tree structure, and PreviousTwitter resembled that mental model quite closely.
But while that model may work well on mobile devices with a smaller screen, where drilling down overtakes the interface in its entirety, it requires far more cognitive self-awareness on a desktop-sized screen where you have both sets of content next to each other in two panes. Most people don’t want to think that hard about how they use Twitter; they just want to use it. By now, I’m probably in a minority so small it isn’t even a single-digit percentage of Twitter’s user-base anymore.
Connect: Human Bonds
Some of you reading this may not even know that Twitter originally didn’t use “@” for usernames. @-replies, later dubbed Mentions, were a feature invented by Twitter’s users that became an integral part of how Twitter works.
Back then, any @-reply you would send to someone else would be seen like a normal tweet, i.e. by all of the people that followed you. Twitter eventually changed that, displaying your @-reply tweet only to your followers who also followed the addressee (in the Timeline view that is); this freed people up to talk more frequently to one another without necessarily annoying all of their respective followers, but it came at the cost of you not being able to see potentially interesting conversations take place that could lead to new connections and friends.
With “Connect”—the vapidity of its name aside—Twitter appears to try and bring some of that people-discovering back. It is much welcomed, as I still sometimes miss how I would randomly make new friends just from seeing some other friends talk with a stranger on Twitter.
But Connect is clearly an unfinished aspect of NewTwitter. It is sub-grouped in Interactions and Mentions, except the former is nothing more than “Mentions Plus”: it shows you your Mentions and an ongoing detailing of which people have started following you, favorited your tweets and/or “retweeted” them.
As they are today, Interactions and Mentions share a lot of overlap, and neither really works well to help you connect with new people you might enjoy. Twitter’s “Who to follow” feature, separate from all this, is something that I have personally never used because it seems based on predictive algorithms (“twelve of your friends also follow this person, you might know them!”), whereas I used to discover new people to follow in a far more chaotic pattern, e.g. overseeing a random conversation one of my friends would have with a stranger.
That natural, organic way of discovering people is still missing from Twitter. I don’t know if they plan to bring it back via Connect somehow, or whether we should expect that to become part of…
Discover: A Whole New Side To Twitter
“Discover” is a brand new top-level menu item for Twitter which hosts a wealth of things for you to, er, discover. Sure, it reeks of marketing speak, but set that aside for a moment and give the new area a proper look. It has remarkable potential as a venue for expanding Twitter’s experience; whether that’s what they have planned for it or not is something we’ll find out over time. In the off chance that they’re listening to suggestions, I have some.
Discover would be great if it were to offer me a curated view of everything “popular” in my Timeline throughout the day. Which articles are my friends linking to? What sports game are some people talking about? What cat photo has everyone giggling, and which tweets received the most favorites or RTs today?
These are the kind of things that I would find interesting and valuable to explore through this new Discover page. The current Activity tab makes some great first strides towards some of this functionality, but the main feature, Stories, seems to be an altogether uninspired blend of sponsor-like news and long-text renditions of Trending Topics. Befitting its marketing-heavy feel, I look at Stories and I can’t tell whether I’m on the front page of IMDB, ESPN, Reuters or Youtube. If you’ve ever wanted to see an interface with an identity crisis, Stories is for you.
But I feel Discover is interesting despite all that. It shows that Twitter is going somewhere new and fascinating; “Discover” just needs to figure out what it’s supposed to be. Perhaps a good example is Flickr’s “Interestingness” feature. Whatever the algorithm exactly is, it works to provide a steady stream of photos I find interesting, even if it’s not what I’d seek out on my own.
Frustrations
There are small frustrations I have with some of the new behaviors in Twitter on the website. For instance, mis-clicking on the Reply link in a tweet ends up as a click to select the tweet, which consequently isolates the tweet from the stream and—somewhat inexplicably—moves the Reply link to a different location. You are now forced to move the mouse to a brand new place or click again to re-collapse the tweet only to try again. This is but one of many examples where clickable areas feel too small and precise to me, and where a mis-click ends up costing time that turns into frustration.
The new Messages experience benefits from being accessible on any page as a Lightbox on top, but sacrifices screen real estate and keyboard– and gesture-based navigability in the process. Issues I hope will be improved upon soon.
What’s Really Going On Here
All this analysis of Twitter may seem tangential, but it is strongly emblematic of a larger shift going on; not just for Twitter, but for our industry as a whole.
Our industry is becoming really big, and the market of people we cater to is growing from the millions into the billions. This kind of growth creates new problems (and conflicts), and a noticeable increase in complexity for the kind of work that we do. The smart folks at Twitter, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple… they all know this. But many in our industry don’t, or maybe they do but they don’t get what the implications of this are.
Twitter and Facebook are no longer social networks for people with computers, iPads and landline and 3G connections. They’re also for people in rural areas of countries where broadband doesn’t exist and banking exclusively takes place on the kind of cellphones you and I gleefully tossed to the side when the iPhone came out. Twitter in particular is paving the road to become the undercurrent of the human race; a collective manifestation of our species’ thoughts, interests and emotions. That’s a big deal.
Businesses are growing to a size previously unimaginable for most of us; this demands a dramatic rethinking of everything we do: from designing and developing products and websites to marketing to the entire human race, but also, how our products are going to make a difference to people’s lives.
Our industry has become big, and as individuals we will need to grow our thinking with it. Those of us who don’t will get left behind.
2012 is going to be the year most of us will face that fact.
2011 has come and gone; parts of the world are already tiredly and tirelessly living in 2012, whilst some, like myself, are wrapping up the day in preparation of tonight’s festivities. 2011 has been quite an exciting year for me, but I’m even more excited about the upcoming one.
My 2011 started with a new U.S. work visa permitting me a more permanent return to America, where I started as Product Designer for Apture. Ten months and twobig releases later, Apture was acquired by Google. I left the company shortly beforehand, however, to work on the next big thing for myself. Early next year you’ll see what that’s all about.
This past year I also spoke at various conferences and events, and I hope to do even more of that in 2012. It’s been a fantastic year for the web industry at large, and I thoroughly enjoy helping people understand, as well as learn more myself about, all the new tools, tricks and techniques for building the next generation of websites and applications.
Modernizr
One such tool is the JavaScript library I started over 2,5 years ago: Modernizr. This past year had several major events on the Modernizr front: in January we launched the beta of 2.0; in June Modernizr 2.0 went live along with a complete website redesign, and in November Modernizr won its second .net award for Open Source App of the Year.
We of course aren’t sitting still, but I want to thank the team—Paul Irish, Alex Sexton, Ryan Seddon—and all of our many, many contributors for their great work on making the library better and better. What’s in store for next year is something you’ll find out eventually, but we have awesome plans for taking Modernizr to the next level again!
Equality
Those who follow me on Twitter or read this blog frequently already know that I’ve become very vocal about equality in our industry and society in 2011. I’ve always been passionate about it, but it wasn’t until this past year that I truly got to see how unacceptably unfair our society is structured, and took action.
Acknowledging and, consequently, combating the uncomfortable truths we ignore every day was not just an eye-opening experience. It was a journey that helped me become a significantly better person overall, and though I still have much to learn I consider myself lucky to have come this far already. For 2012, I plan to do even more work in this area, focusing in particular on resources to help our collective field further towards true equality.
Some highlights from my own writing about equality, women in tech and sexism this past year:
In his recent piece entitled “Gamification sucks”, Brent Simmons attempts to break down why “gamification” makes for bad software. He arrives at more or less the right conclusion, but not as a result of the right process. In the spirit of design—understanding the why of a process, and not just the end result—I’d like to elaborate a little on Brent’s piece to hopefully help software designers and developers make better decisions with regard to “gamification”.
First, let's assess what “gamification” entails. Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics to non-game software and interfaces, in order to make them more appealing, memorable, engaging and/or addictive to the end user. In a nutshell, the idea can be summed up as “games are fun, people play games a lot, so let’s make our software more like games.”
Brent writes:
Or you could look at this trend and say, “As software gets simpler, it gets dumbed-down — even toddlers can use iPads. Users are now on the mental level of children, and we should design accordingly. What do children like? Games.”
This is far too simple and big a leap to explain the proliferation of software that is “gamified”. Children like games, sure, but children are not the target audience for the type of software we’re talking about; that audience is adults. Do adults like the kind of games that children like? Not typically, so that would be a poor guiding metric, and would do nothing to explain why gamified software is having so much success. The type of games that adults play tend to be quite complex—sometimes more so than our productivity software.
No, the real science behind gamification is a far more perverse, depressing and manipulative one than Brent theorized. It is all about addictive substances and behaviors, human psychology, and taking advantage of the scientifically-verified knowledge we have of these topics.
Zynga is a great example of a company that has taken gamification to a perverse extreme; they have gamified free time itself, rather than just software. Worse, they have done it so successfully that not only do many of their users mistake time they should spend working, studying or doing otherwise productive things as free time, they have “validated” this entire approach as a viable business plan. Zynga is now just one player in a field of many, all of whom are creating games that survive solely on their gamification principles and completely lack any real gameplay, depth or rewarding satisfaction for the player.
So what is it that they do that is so objectionable? How does one “gamify free time” anyway? Let's look at what gamification really is all about.
Game mechanics
Badges are an easily understandable example of game mechanics that have been taken out of their gaming environments and applied to other software, from social geolocation networks like Foursquare to learning resources like StackOverflow or Treehouse. Badges are both milestone and reward, elements found in many games. They are a common, but not exclusive, example of relatively superficial game mechanics that have been put in a different software context. They have a positive effect on end users because milestones give you a sense of achievement, and rewards are a positive reinforcement that we all know works well to motivate people.
So what is behind those game mechanics in the first place? Why do games have them? Now we’re exploring human psychology and how games have innocently made use of it throughout their history. It’s hard to pinpoint what the first games were that made use of milestones because they come in so many variants—levels, bosses, map areas, weapons, you name them—but what we can reasonably assume is that these early milestones in games were more related to technical limitations than psychological design. It is more likely that somewhere in the 30+ years of video game history that involves milestones, someone noticed that “finishing a level” was a remarkably satisfying and happiness-inducing experience, and began to study it. Now we have games that are built entirely around rewarding almost every individual action somehow, from the significant achievement to the downright minute.
While the video game industry at large continues unabated with complex games full of real challenges the player has to overcome, subsets of the industry are getting mired in analytical psycho-manipulation, producing games that play us more than we play them. We exchange our valuable time for the constant—if minuscule—dopamine* boosts these games offer, willfully ignorant of the long-term loss we feel when we stop playing and realize that we haven’t truly accomplished anything. We didn’t win a race or thwart an evil boss’s plot to take over a fictional world; we clicked or tapped around an interface designed to wear us down until we fork over some more dollars to speed up the process of losing interest in the game. Gameplay depth is as discernible here as morality is in the financial markets. Both Facebook and the Chrome Web App Store are rife with games like this; entire companies have sprouted from the tainted soil left behind from Zynga’s mad dash to its billion-dollar-plus valuation (and subsequent IPO).
Software gamification
It is no wonder that these principles have blown over to the adjacent industry of software development. It was an industry with little movement in terms of its own design, its own nature. Several factors have changed that, and gamification is one of them.
But simply saying “no” to gamification is not a great strategy; the human creature is a feeble one, easily manipulated by competitors less concerned with the implications of taking advantage of our understanding of human psychology and behavior. While a comparison to drug dealers is far too extreme, our obsession with commerce and profits pushes our field towards similar conduct and methodologies. Competing without at least understanding these principles is becoming harder and harder each day, perverse as it may be.
Most gamification sucks because it breaks down our humanity like it is no more than a computer program that needs to be understood and then rewritten for maximum reward—reward for the company behind it, rather than for the player. That's how gamification is disrespectful: because it no longer treats us like people.
Fortunately, we can remain self-aware and apply gamification’s principles without reducing our respect for our users. The aforementioned learning resources—Stack Overflow and Treehouse—are pretty good, if rather obvious, examples of this: they offer rewards for actual achievements as best they can, rather than for the sake of offering rewards. Interfaces and software can embed milestones in ways that correlate with real accomplishments, creating a sense of positive reinforcement that doesn’t disrespect the time or value of the user, but rather respects it and uses these methods to create a stronger bond between itself and the user. An emotional connection that helps us as people remember and appreciate the software we use.
There is no shame in this, as long as we maintain a strong awareness of how we apply these principles and methods. And if you have any doubt: even the company that people like Brent Simmons or JohnGruber would cite as an example that respects its customers the most, Apple, participates in these principles of positive reinforcement:
* Serotonin, as written previously, is not the chemical that deals with rewards. It relates to gamification in other ways. My thanks to Matthew Pennell for the correction.
